The Crime Master: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 1 (Gordon Manning and The Griffin)

by J. Allan Dunn

  Manning got his right hand free, his left still grasped the other’s wrist above the pistol, the muzzle jerking here and there. He stepped a little to one side, devoting all his attention to the butler’s right arm. Thumb and two fingers sought and found a spot close to the biceps, viced down in a jujutsu grip. He stepped back. The gun had fallen. Manning shifted holds a little. His left arm went back of the murderer’s elbow, his right now at the wrist. He put out pressure, there was the crack of snapping bone, and Jennings went down in a writhing heap.

  Instantly, the detectives swarmed over him, jerked him to his feet, regardless of his broken arm.

  “No sense in beating him up,” said Manning. “He isn’t the Griffin. We’ve got him for murder, anyway.”

  “You haven’t proved it yet,” gasped the prisoner.

  “I think we will. We haven’t searched you yet, or your quarters. And there’s the ladder. You came here under false presentations, to begin with. You overplayed the game. I rather think that cord was your own idea. Ah! You should have got rid of those, Jennings. That was clumsy.”

  The butler wore a chain of heavy gold links. A watch on one end, on the other the little contrivance known in England as a sovereign purse. There were none there, but there were two of the Griffin’s scarlet seals.

  “That takes you to the chair, my lad,” said the sergeant. “Now, what did you do with the gems?”

  VIII

  JENNINGS, like a true bulldog, refused to aid them. It was Manning who found the package at last, in a false bottom of the butler’s suitcase. He did not need now to see if there were finger-prints on the ladder.

  But, with the evaporation of the chemical—the death invisible—the case might have been incomplete. There was the cord, but the condition of the flesh beneath it showed it was not the cause of death; that it had been applied long after life had fled and the blood had ceased to circulate.

  They could get nothing out of him.

  “I can’t tell you about the man you call the Griffin,” he said. “I have never seen him. I don’t know where he lives. I don’t know anything.”

  “If he ever actually interviewed him,” said Manning, “he might have been taken there blindfolded. What were you going to do with the jewels? How were you going to deliver them?”

  “You’ve got me,” said the butler. “I suppose you’ll burn me. I tell you I wanted them for myself.”

  His head rolled from side to side. He was in pain, and the inquisition had not been a light one. That end of it was not Manning’s affair.

  Manning hid his chagrin. Again the Griffin had eluded him. Hastings was dead.

  The recovery of the jewels was a hollow victory. The tool would die, but the Crime Master was still free.

  They could not promise Jennings any immunity. He must pay the full penalty. And Manning believed him when he vowed he could not tell them anything to lead them to the Griffin. That diabolical assassin still lurked in his secret den, plotting fresh horror.

  “Better set that arm of his,” he suggested to the police surgeon. “You might examine that ladder for prints to tie up the case. You’ll find it in the orchard, under some grass, in a little ditch. It was not, after all, a perfect crime. But he may have overstepped instructions at that.”

  He picked up his cane, which he had dropped in the fight, got his hat and went out to his car. In his ears he seemed to still hear those faint strains of music, an echo of the Griffin’s mocking laugh. Once more he had failed—and he felt depressed.

  He stepped into his car, started to switch on the ignition, and went rigid. The control button of his horn was in the center of his wheel, and on it, neatly affixed, was the crimson cartouche, the red seal, red as blood, with the head of a griffin embossed upon it.

  Tuned Out

  The Griffin Strikes Again, and a Blaze of Green Flame Leaves a Baffling Riddle for Inspector Manning

  THE mysterious individual known as the Griffin, to the police, the press and public of New York; his ill fame swiftly spreading nation-wise; the man who mockingly announced himself as the Crime Master; sat in his thronelike chair in the strange room with curving walls.

  Music, rare music, not the chance selection of a radio program, sounded faintly and melodiously in that curious chamber with its bizarre appointments. The scent of burning amber permeated it. There were no signs of ventilation, no windows, no visible entrance. The walls were of steel, back of the tapestries of woven gold, the floor of steel beneath the priceless rugs.

  The Griffin wore a robe of heavy silk brocade. He had just set aside the jade mouthpiece of a hookah pipe. On the desk were a gazing globe of crystal, three suspended bronze discs, the central much larger than the others, a vase of Ming dynasty in which there was a single golden-flecked orchid of deepest violet, looking like a poised butterfly, an inkstand of rare onyx, whose lid was a griffin’s head, in gold.

  Immediately before him was an astrological chart, a list of names, names prominently known, each with a date of birth beside it. Two names had been scored through with a crimson pencil. There was also a pad on which the Griffin had been figuring.

  His was an almost perfect face, from the sculptor’s standpoint, yet it was marred with an expression of evil, the face of a fallen angel. The cranium was that of a person of high intelligence, but it was perverted. Here was a man who might have achieved the heights but had deliberately preferred the depths. His profile was falconlike, the brow high above the outstanding, finely chiseled nose. The well-shaped lips, a trifle thin, yet sensuous, were set in a mocking curve. The eyes were cruel, cruel as those of a tiger waiting for its prey to pass, as those of a boa expectant of a victim.

  He studied the chart. His intention was to find a name whose birth stars now showed conjunction with the evil sidereal influences. He did not believe in astrology, he did not believe in god or man or devil. The stars decorating his dome were set there from a whim of fantasy, largely for effect on those who served him. His present occupation was, for him, a means of choosing his next victim. He held no doubt of the result. His strike was deadly. That it accorded with the predictions of the chart was his own doing. He would use the coincidence for his own ends: to cater to the superstitions of his underlings, to give himself in their eyes the mystery and awe of supreme wisdom, of infallibility.

  A madman who was not a maniac. A brilliant brain gone astray, its intent set to a revenge multiplied and distorted by the malignant growth of his insanity, his grandiose dementia. A genius, with the instincts of a fiend, without humanity.

  He chuckled as he made his final selection, ticked a mark with a crimson crayon against the name. He rolled up the chart, the list of names about it, tore off the leaf of calculations and set fire to the fragments in a bowl of bronze, putting away the roll in a deep drawer.

  He renewed the tobacco in the bowl of the hookah, lit it, drew it to a glow and settled back to smoke, musing as the rose water in the container bubbled, cooling the smoke that passed through it. The music rose and fell, exotic, modern, yet infinitely primitive. Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un faune. It was seductive, sexual; but, to the Griffin, there was another interpretation. He had nothing to do with women.

  Presently he touched a button.

  A section of the curving wall slid noiselessly aside. Out of the opening appeared a strange creature, more like ape than man, an ape with the mange. The figure was naked save for a loin-kilt of red cloth, a high turban of the same. His skin was black as ebony and black hair grew on his chest, and on his misshapen shoulders. The lower part of his arms was so long that his hands reached below his knees. They too were hairy. But his face, distorted, set in a leering grimace, was without whiskers. The low brow was furrowed, deep lines ran from nostril to mouth on either side; the eyes were small, like jet, monkey’s eyes, shallow, shifting perpetually.

  Between his shoulders there rose a great hump. He was a dwarf, a kobold, sub-intelligent but shrewd; voodoo-bound, brought from Haiti, worshipping the Griffin, his do
g. He fawned like a dog. He looked like a page in Hades, sent from the infernal regions to become the familiar of the Griffin.

  The face of the Griffin was now covered with a mask that gleamed like goldbeaters’ skin, plastic, molded to his features but changing them. Through it gleamed his pitiless eyes.

  The dwarf bowed until his turban touched the ground, remained so, crouching. The Griffin took a lump of translucent Turkish sweetmeat from a cloisonné casket and tossed it to him, as he might have tossed a scrap of meat to a favorite hound. The hunchback retrieved it, sucked it greedily, squatting, his beady eyes fixed on his master.

  “Quantro,” said the Griffin, speaking the Creole of Haiti, “Who is God, the Supreme? The Lord of Life and of Death?”

  “You, O my worshipful Master.”

  “You would die for me?”

  “Willingly.”

  “You are prepared, always, to protect me?”

  The misshapen being gobbled the last of the sweetmeat, stood up. The glow in the room, that seemed like daylight but could not be, heightened the plum-black of his skin. From his kilt there flashed a curving blade out of a scabbard of sharkskin. He held it aloft. Its shining steel showed dark along the edge, rimmed with deadly venom that also stained the point.

  “Those who would harm you kill me first,” he cried.

  The Griffin gave him a nod and a grim smile. The greeting and its answer was a formula but he knew the value of its repetition. The dwarf was his, body and what soul he possessed, but his mind was shallow, his memory deficient.

  “Quantro, the stars proclaim the time for another vengeance. Let us verify it. You have a white cock ready? Then you shall guard me later while I speak with others whom I do not trust as well as I do you.”

  The dwarf’s eyes glowed like polished obsidian reflecting fire. He chuckled horribly, gibbering.

  “Ready, O Mighty One.”

  To the pressure of another button, a new section of the wall responded. Master and man stepped into an automatic elevator that bore them swiftly down a steel shaft, landed them in a cellar hewn out of the rock foundations, squared, laid with cement. In the middle of the chamber there was a block of stone, dark-veined with red in the purple matrix. Light glowed from some invisible source.

  The dwarf disappeared through a vaulted exit. The Griffin took the only seat. The divination did not touch him, save that he was sadist enough to like to see the flow of fresh blood, the struggles of the victim. It was an ancient rite—Hebrew, Greek, Egyptian, almost universal, one of the occult “mysteries.”

  The Griffin realized that some day he might well need the devotion of a bodyguard like this. Quantro was as strong and active as a chimpanzee, for all his hump. His loyalty was fanatic. He returned bearing by its legs a white cock, squawking abortively, sensing its fate.

  With incredible swiftness and dexterity Quantro slit the fowl’s throat, cut the sinews of the flopping wings and split the struggling body with his keen blade. The sign was favorable.

  “It is well,” the Griffin said. “Wait here for me.”

  He disappeared through a second arch, down a passage where the murmur of a dynamo sounded, where green lights flickered and there was the sound of hammering on metal.

  II

  GORDON MANNING flexed and reflexed his lean, strong body under the tingling spurt of needle shower in the down town gymnasium where he kept himself fit with handball, once a day. His body glowed, his eyes sparkled with health as he went mechanically through his rubdown and the donning of his clothes. His mind was occupied with an ever-present problem, the capture or destruction of the Griffin. It was open war between them.

  Manning had been the youngest major in the A.E.F. Ostensibly a brass-hat of the staff, he had actually been in the secret service. Now he had volunteered as a special agent of the New York Police Force, with secret appointment from the Chief Commissioner, baffled and worried with the failure of the department to get rid of the man who, for months, had committed a series of terrible, far-reaching crimes.

  Manning’s ostensible profession was that of advisory attorney. It brought him sufficient income without use of more than half of his time or energy. The balance he devoted to coping with the Griffin. Twice he had partly thwarted him, not in time to save life, but to capture the tools of the Crime Master. Nor could any confession be extracted from these men to implicate the Griffin, to give a hint of his whereabouts.

  To Manning, the Griffin had issued open challenge. Though Manning’s appointment was supposedly secret the Griffin had learned of it, greeted the other in congratulatory terms that were tinged with sardonic scorn, styling him a worthy adversary while he warned Manning that he was handicapped, since the Griffin would always make the first move in the game they played, alluding to that contest in chess terms.

  His comparative failures, the knowledge that the Crime Master, as he had first named himself in his letter to Manning, was plotting other diabolical coups, undermining society, commercial industry, mocking the law, was beginning to wear on the special agent. At any hour the mail might deliver a letter in the characteristic writing of the arch-criminal, the telephone ring and his mocking voice come over it to announce his latest deed, timed so that Manning could take up the scent while it was fresh, but after the act had been accomplished.

  There were times when he questioned his own capacity, but he knew that, like a highbred hound, he would pursue to the bitter end; he believed that some day he would come to grips with this inhuman monster.

  Always the Griffin’s coups were marked, as his letters were sealed, by the presence in some conspicuous place of a cartouche of scarlet, an oval of heavy paper embossed with a griffin’s head. Red, the color of blood, was the symbol of the Crime Master, grim and significant.

  What next, when, where would the strike come, out of the unknown? At moments Manning could have believed that the Griffin was as fabulous as the mythical creature whose head he used for crest; save for the warnings, the evident fact that none of the men he had captured, the first ever caught in connection with the Griffin’s crimes, could have plotted such coups. The voice of the Griffin, as he had heard it, educated, refined but infinitely and subtly evil, was always in his ears. Some day he would come face to face with the owner of that voice. That he was assured of, even, in his most despondent moments.

  The Griffin had promised him that, if he sufficiently interfered with the Griffin’s affairs. He could force him out of cover at last, if he annoyed him enough. Meantime, the Crime Master was free to go ahead with his diabolical schemes of what he called reprisal against a rotten condition of social and civic affairs.

  Manning walked to his office, swinging his cane of leather rings shrunk on a rod of steel, a weapon he had often used to prime advantage. He was a good fencer. With a turn of his wrist he could cripple a man, and had.

  Arrived, he attended to the matters prepared for him, then swung his chair toward the window, gazing out on the tall buildings, hearing vaguely the busy noise of street and river. It was the very foundation of all this that the Crime Master threatened.

  Already the conservative papers had reached the point where they could not ignore the matter in their editorials, counseling against panic. The tabloids and the sensational press made the most of the tragedies while they clamored for the capture of the Griffin.

  There was only one thing that held Manning in his offices. He had a premonition that the afternoon delivery of mail would bring him a communication from the Griffin. It was not nervousness, not apprehension, but the outlet of some sixth sense, or that of his subconscious brain, constantly digesting that vexing problem, tuned-in to the evil vibrations emanating from the Crime Master. Such things were fantastic to the precise scientist, but they had happened before.

  In this very building the Griffin had struck, and notified Manning over his own telephone of the murder before the body was cold. It was uncanny because the man was uncanny, abnormal.

  His secretary brought in the mail. Mannin
g did not need the look on her face to tell him that his hunch was right. He knew it was there, had known it was on the way, that envelope of heavy paper, the bold writing in violet ink, the scarlet cartouche sealing it. The girl knew that seal. All of Manhattan knew it. Manning could trust her, trust all his employees, including the red-headed lad in the outer office. He knew they must fear for him, perhaps for themselves.

  He held up the letter.

  “This is extremely confidential, Miss Reynolds,” he said. “And entirely personal.”

  “Very well, sir.

  She was not a pretty girl, but she was very efficient, not to be stampeded. Manning respected her abilities. He had a heart affair of his own, not too forward but promising. The girl he hoped some day to marry had been abroad but was now on the way home, the ship due in a few days. He had been glad she was away. She would not, he thought, have understood his volunteered adventure, appreciated it from his standpoint. But, until he had gone through with it, until the duel between him and the Griffin came to the final issue, he must put all thoughts of that kind from him; he must try to make her understand that, without divulging his mission and his risks.

  He slit open the envelope with his desk paper knife, took out the sheet enclosed. Despite himself, his hand trembled, slightly. It was the same eager tremor that a thoroughbred hunting dog shows in the blinds before the ducks come in; but Manning frowned. Then his pulses dropped to normal and he read:

  Dear Manning:

  It will be some time in the near future. I am concluding the necessary preliminaries and I shall advise you at the crucial moment.

  You have somewhat annoyed me. You made away with my spoils, my legitimate loot, on the last occasion. And took another of my pawns. The hoard is reset. This time there are no spoils, only, to me, the satisfaction that the world is rid of a supreme charlatan.

  Your discovery of my previous methods marks you as the man I hoped you were. This time the modus operandi will be purely automatic. The victim—I believe you call them victims—will coöperate. A semi-suicide. That is hint and stimulus enough for you. This time there will be no pawns for you to capture, but I know you will be interested in solving what you describe as crime, and I call a beneficent vengeance. For the man I have marked is a liar, a rogue, a cheat!