“Huh, but—”
“Sure, I sent him out to call the cops. But do you think he has any intention of doing it? I’m going to trail him now. Flo, I want you to call the cops!”
I hurried on down the corridor for an elevator before she could give me an argument. My heart was racing. At last I was in the groove. Before many minutes I’d again be face to face with the killer—or killers—Vic Right had faced in City Hall park.
Luckily, in spite of the downpour, a cab was waiting downstairs. I started for it.
“Perry!” a voice called.
I turned to a black coupe parked at the curb. A familiar-looking face confronted me, then quickly withdrew inside the cab. I choked for want of breath.
“You—?” I gasped.
In that cab was big, blond Vic Right—alive!
CHAPTER IV
Vic right nodded, motioned me inside his car. A second man who’d been standing outside along the building got in the other door, wedging me between Vic and himself as I slid onto the seat. The car’s motor was running.
“I got away—luckily—from that bomb.” The big, blond prankster’s face was serious. “But I figured I’d be safe only if I lay low. I’ve been working on the case. I heard you broadcast. I don’t have to ask to guess you caught on to the tip-off, too?”
The car started up, headed downtown at a fast clip.
“I was heading for Staten Island now,” I admitted.
Right grinned tightly.
“Just as I figured.” He moved his hand. I suddenly felt something sharp prod my kidney. “You would be the only one smart enough to catch it.”
I twisted away from the weapon prodding my lower lumbar.
“What’s the idea?” I asked.
“You’ll find out,” sneered the savagely browed driver at the wheel.
It was the first time he’d spoken. I was amazed at his voice. It was exactly like Vic Right’s.
It suddenly began to come clear.
“Skinny Simms was working with the F.B.I. on the case of a Nazi war prisoner who escaped,” I said, allowing myself to think out loud. “He was a bomb expert. That’s you. Vic Right. Back in Germany you developed that super explosive, pentolite, for rocket projectiles. Simms was breathing too hotly down your neck, so you had to get out of the way. You did a quick fadeout yourself before anyone else caught on.”
Right’s mouth was tight with silence.
I saw it all now. It had been Right, wearing a mask, who had invaded Mr. Button’s apartment, looking for the script. In had been Right who’d attacked me in my bedroom, knocked me out. It had been Right who’d tied Flo up, found the script in her bag, and made the tip-off changes in it.
We pulled in at the South Ferry slip. We drove onto a boat. Vic Right had figured it cleverly. But what was at Masefield and Old Dorp—that address I’d read off my script? Why had it been necessary to broadcast that address over the air?
On Staten Island side, the car drove out of St. George’s short-hugging business section into dark country. It pulled up finally on a deserted, wooded hill. The rain had stopped.
“Ready, Hugo?” said Right to his companion. Hugo trained a gun on me.
We got out of the car. Now was getting to be the time for me to act. I expected the police here. They would be here any moment.
“It was you,” I said, “who broke into that apartment below me, killed a man there.”
“I didn’t intend to hurt anybody. I thought it was you, anyway. I just meant to put you to sleep for a bit.”
“And you got the radio script you were looking for at my girlfriend’s.”
“Do we blast him now?” Hugo asked.
“We get our work done first.” Right stepped around to the rumble seat of the coupe, ignoring me. “We want to take no chance on attracting attention to ourselves—yet.”
That was a laugh. He was going to have the surprise of his big, flat head before long.
He opened the rumble seat on the coupe. Only it wasn’t a rumble seat. It was a tilted platform on which was mounted a device that looked strangely like a huge Fourth-of-July rocket!
I turned in the direction the rocket pointed. Scattered buildings of what had once been a mental hospital were off in the valley below. It was now, I knew, the home of more than two thousand German prisoners of war.
So that was it! With the war’s end, it would perhaps not be long before these prisoners were sent back to their homeland. But for plenty of them that was the last place on earth they would wish to see again in defeat. They wanted to be in America to start life anew. A defeated country was no place in which to wish to live. And their presence in America would be an ever-sinister peril. An underground army!
The radio tip-off I had broadcast had said northwest corner. Would a rocket-blasted wall touch off a wholesale break?
Right observed my studying the rocket, the weapon that seemed a part of it.
“That’s a Tommy-gun hooked to my little baby.” He grinned. “My friends, my Landsmann, are waiting below. With it—”
Vic Right, rocket expert, was making the final adjustments in sighting before he sent that deadly device into the hands of two thousand hate-mad killers!
It was time for me to strike terror in his heart.
“The police have been notified,” I said. “They’re coming here.”
“To Masefield and Old Dorp, perhaps?” Vic Right grinned smugly. “They’ll find it only a barren lot on the other side of the island from here.”
I felt sweat spring to my spine. “You mean this isn’t that address?”
Right wagged his head.
“That was a decoy—just for an eventuality like this.”
The prop I’d relied on had been knocked from under me. But I had to stop that rocket before it was touched off.
“Do you think the police won’t see that rocket when you set it off? It’ll be your finish, Right.”
“They won’t see it—not with the flashless fuel I use.” Right’s eyes flickered briefly to a coiled cord, piled for quick use. “And if they should pull up here before we’re done—we’ll get rid of all the evidence all right.”
That rope could be attached to the fuse of a bomb—a bomb that would probably destroy me, the car and all evidence of the rocket, in one obliteration blast. Otherwise why had his eyes darted unconsciously to that coiled cord?
I gauged my chance. If I dived at Right, Hugo would shoot. But if I was fast enough to tangle with Right, Hugo might not be able to shoot for fear of striking Right.
Who-o-osh!
With a cry meant to bewilder, I leapt. My grasping arms caught Vic Right about the middle, bore him backwards. I’d get Right helpless, use him as a shield.
“Release it!” the big blond man shouted. “Release the rocket, Hugo!”
Hugo wasn’t shooting. Instead he was to set off the rocket—the one act I wanted to prevent!
I glimpsed the flare of a match. The quick sputter of a fuse. Then, like a monster interplanetary ship, the rocket exploded into flight.
A brief sparking glow traced a high, arcing orbit. Then, accurately, the rocket plunged toward the Prison Hospital.
I pounded my fist in despairing anger at Right’s jaw. The blond man’s head snapped back. His hold loosened.
I leaped up as fast as my pouchy build would allow, darted for the coiled rope. It might be too late to stop the rocket, but I would—
I heard Hugo’s cry of alarm.
Right staggered up, but there was no stopping me now. With the end of the trip-rope in my fist, I plunged away from the car.
Hugo and Right saw the deadly peril. They scattered like rats for holes.
Boom!
The earth heaved in a mighty blast of white fire. The explosion rumbled like a heavy truck on a wooden bridge.
A violent vacuum of air smashed me to the ground.
I staggered up. Where the car had stood was not even a crater. The force of the bomb had been a horizontal one. Like the bombs the Nazis had used to flatten English cities.
I saw Hugo and then Right. They had been far enough away to escape the blast. They started to run at a limping gait. White faces constricted in pain, terror, and anger, they saw me come.
Neither of them had escaped unscathed. Blood poured from a gash just below Hugo’s hairline. But he still had his gun. He leveled it.
A shot blasted, but it wasn’t from Hugo’s pistol. It was from the gun of a blue-coated figure running from a police car. Now another, and another car was pulling up!
Police swarmed onto Hugo and Right. Somebody grabbed me as I lurched.
“Good fellow,” Lieutenant Sol O’Malley boomed. “The blast guided us here, Whiskers. We was about a half mile away.”
“The hospital.” I pointed off to the flat below. “Get down to that German hoosegow hospital fast. A Tommy-gun’s just been rocketed into it. A general break’s probably already started.”
“That’s been taken care of,” said a voice.
“What,” I blinked in amazement. “Flo!”
The little blonde smiled sweetly.
“I remembered about that Prison Hospital out this way,” she said. “I didn’t know any place else anyone might want to attack. When you told me to call the police, I figured that was the real place to have alerted.”
Vic Right jerked a hideout gun, tried to use it. Not to escape, but to beat the fate sure to be his for the murders of Skinny Simms, old Mr. Button, and nobody knew how many others.
He was disarmed.
“He was the kingpin of the plot,” I said. “He and his brother must have lived in this country for many years before they went back to Germany to fight for Hitler. Skinny Simms was after a rocket bomb expert named Richtig when he was killed. Right is just Richtig translated, if I remember my German. Richtig’s brother, Hugo here—”
“His brother?” Sol O’Malley gasped, looking from the blond Vic Right to dark-browed Hugo.
Les Warren, the little fly-eared detective, leapt from a still rolling squad car at that moment.
“That rocket ship and the Tommy-gun came in to a perfect three-point landing inside the prison compound,” he announced. “If we hadn’t been there—” He shook his head dubiously.
“Yes, this Hugo here’s his brother.” I went on to O’Malley. “They may not look alike, but listen to them talk. It’s the give-away. You wouldn’t know which of them was talking unless you looked. War prisoners are permitted to listen to radios. That radio was probably the vital, underground link for all German war prisoners in this section of the country. But things got too hot for brother Vic to continue on the Murder Clinic after he’d powdered Simms. So he sneaked away my copy of the program script and altered it to give the final details of the plotted mass break!”
It was another couple hours before the affair was all wound up, with signed confessions from the two brothers. There was a little celebration then. It was quite late before I had tucked little Flo safely in her apartment and made homeport myself.
I turned on my radio to see if the news had anything to say about the goings on. Boy, this adventure had really furnished me with authentic material for a dozen thriller stories! With all this excitement—on top of my insomnia—I knew I’d hardly sleep now. Besides, I had slept the clock around the day before.
My idle eyes caught the can with the cork in it—the can I had picked up in Mr. Button’s apartment below. Vic Right had said he’d not intended to commit murder, but merely to put me out for a while.
That can was one unexplained clue.
I took out the cork and inhaled a whiff. It smelled sweet and cool, and it made little, giddy, green circles go round and round in my brain. I took another whiff—a deeper one. Then I read the label on the can.
Ether!
I should have read that at the start!
I sagged down on my bed. The fumes were rising out of the can, tantalizing the end of my nose. Right had planned to use ether to render me helpless, while he changed the script. I forced the cork back in the top, but I could hardly feel my fingers for numbness. It was no use shaking my head to try to clear it.
“Turn that radio down!” somebody shouted. They meant me this time.
But I knew I’d have to snooze a few hours before I could comply.
I turned over, and did!
THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF LUTHER TRANT, by Edwin Balmer & William MacHarg
FOREWORD
Except for its characters and plot, this book is not a work of the imagination.
The methods which the fictitious Trant—one time assistant in a psychological laboratory, now turned detective—here uses to solve the mysteries which present themselves to him, are real methods; the tests he employs are real tests. Though little known to the general public, they are precisely such as are being used daily in the psychological laboratories of the great universities—both in America and Europe—by means of which modern men of science are at last disclosing and denning the workings of that oldest of world-mysteries—the human mind.
The facts which Trant uses are in no way debatable facts; nor do they rest on evidence of untrained, imaginative observers. Innumerable experiments in our university laboratories have established beyond question that, for instance, the resistance of the human body to a weak electric current varies when the subject is frightened or undergoes emotion; and the consequent variation in the strength of the current, depending directly upon the amount of emotional disturbance, can be registered by the galvanometer for all to see. The hand resting upon an automatograph will travel toward an object which excites emotion, however capable its possessor may be of restraining all other evidence of what he feels. If these facts are not used as yet except in the academic experiments of the psychological laboratories and the very real and useful purpose to which they have been put in the diagnosis of insanities, it is not because they are incapable of wider use. The results of the “new psychology” are coming every day closer to an exact interpretation. The hour is close at hand when they will be used not merely in the determination of guilt and innocence, but to establish in the courts the credibility of witnesses and the impartiality of jurors, and by employers to ascertain the fitness and particular abilities of their employees. Luther Trant, therefore, nowhere in this book needs to invent or devise an experiment or an instrument for any of the results he here attains; he has merely to adapt a part of the tried and accepted experiments of modern, scientific psychology. He himself is a character of fiction; but his methods are matters of fact.
THE AUTHORS.
I
THE MAN IN THE ROOM
“Amazing, Trant.”
“More than merely amazing! Face the fact, Dr. Reiland, and it is astounding, incredible, disgraceful, that after five thousand years of civilization, our police and court procedures recognize no higher knowledge of men than the first Pharaoh put into practice in Egypt before the pyramids!”
Young Luther Trant ground his heel impatiently into the hoar frost on the campus walk. His queerly mismated eyes—one more gray than blue, the other more blue than gray—flashed at his older companion earnestly. Then, with the same rebellious impatience, he caught step once more with Reiland, as he went on in his intentness:
“You saw the paper this morning, Dr. Reiland? ‘A man’s body found in Jackson Park’; six suspects seen near the spot have been arrested. ‘The Schlaack’s abduction or murder’; three men under arrest for that since last Wednesday. ‘The Lawton trial progressing’; with the likelihood that young Lawton will be declared innocent; eighteen months he has been in confinement—eighteen months of indelible association with criminals! And then the big one: ‘Sixteen men held as suspected of complicity in the murder of Brons
on, the prosecuting attorney.’ Did you ever hear of such a carnival of arrest? And put beside that the fact that for ninety-three out of every one hundred homicides no one is ever punished!”
The old professor turned his ruddy face, glowing with the frosty, early-morning air, patiently and questioningly toward his young companion. For some time Dr. Reiland had noted uneasily the growing restlessness of his brilliant but hotheaded young aid, without being able to tell what it portended.
“Well, Trant,” he asked now, “what is it?”
“Just that, professor! Five thousand years of being civilized,” Trant burst on, “and we still have the ‘third degree’! We still confront a suspect with his crime, hoping he will ‘flush’ or ‘lose color,’ ‘gasp’ or ‘stammer.’ And if in the face of this crude test we find him prepared or hardened so that he can prevent the blood from suffusing his face, or too noticeably leaving it; if he inflates his lungs properly and controls his tongue when he speaks, we are ready to call him innocent. Is it not so, sir?”
“Yes,” the old man nodded, patiently. “It is so, I fear. What then, Trant?”
“What, Dr. Reiland? Why, you and I and every psychologist in every psychological laboratory in this country and abroad have been playing with the answer for years! For years we have been measuring the effect of every thought, impulse and act in the human being. Daily I have been proving, as mere laboratory experiments to astonish a row of staring sophomores, that which—applied in courts and jails—would conclusively prove a man innocent in five minutes, or condemn him as a criminal on the evidence of his own uncontrollable reactions. And more than that, Dr. Reiland! Teach any detective what you have taught to me, and if he has half the persistence in looking for the marks of crime on men that he had in tracing its marks on things, he can clear up half the cases that fill the jail in three days.”
“And the other half within the week, I suppose, Trant?”
The older man smiled at the other’s enthusiasm.
The Mystery & Suspense Novella Page 17