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

by J. Allan Dunn

  It seemed almost ridiculous to weigh the Griffin’s words so closely, yet Manning knew this should be done, that the Griffin was himself meticulous about his meanings and expressions. Whatever happened, Manning might or might not share the fate destined for Grant, which Manning hoped to offset.

  “I saw a lounge in the outer room,” he said. “If you don’t mind I’ll bring that in here to-night and use it myself. I will try not to disturb you. I need not come up until midnight, if that suits you.”

  “It suits me excellently,” said Grant. “I shall be working and I will let you in. I have no intention of allowing any threat to interfere with my plans. They are important, not only to me but to the nation. We are beginning to work out some notable and practicable solutions as applied to modern living conditions. We are going to have cities that are at once spacious and beautiful and healthy. I’ll see you later then, Manning,” he added, as the secretary appeared with the name of a visitor who had an appointment.

  Manning left the suite, striving to throw off a certain nervous apprehension, a premonition of evil. It was a shadow from previous failures, he knew, and must not be permitted to in the slightest sense demoralize the present occasion. But it persisted. It was with him when the express elevators hurled him up the shaft fifteen minutes before midnight and he found Grant well and cheerful. It remained as he took up his vigil.

  The Griffin had granted them twelve hours.

  The hours passed with Gilman Grant working in intense concentration over his problems, Manning by the window, gazing out across the City that Never Sleeps, his senses alert for any sign of danger. Apparently, aside from a few night employees, he and Grant were the only ones awake in that vast building.

  V

  IT was within a few minutes of noon, the hour that the Griffin had set as deadline. Manning had not slept, had not felt drowsy, and now he was more tense than ever, like a bow drawn back to its limit, ready to discharge the shaft.

  Grant had slept for four hours, between three and seven. He was not tired and told Manning that he often got along with only a few hours of sleep when his brain was actively engaged. He made a simple breakfast which they ate together, Grant talking interestingly of the city of the future. Present ones would be remodeled as much as possible, solving traffic problems of wheel and wing and foot, permitting parks and boulevards between towering buildings; but the vast improvements would come with the proposed concentration of several small towns into one model city.

  He showed Manning some drawings, descanted on the fact that, in this, America would lead the world.

  “We have done it already in building,” he said, “but our streets have been dirty and crowded, our air foul, our waters polluted. We shall change all that.”

  The great city was making holiday, millions out in the country, thronging the beaches.

  Suddenly the telephone rang. Grant turned toward it, but Manning was first.

  “You had better let me answer that,” he said. He felt the strange vibrancy to which he was supersensitive. This was from the Griffin. The deep, mocking tones came plainly.

  “One minute of noon, by my time, Manning. One minute more leeway and then, look out. As I said before, you may be included this time. It is on the knees of the gods. In that case I may make a personal visit. I shall regret our lost encounters and I shall pay fitting tribute to your memory. Fate throws the dice, Manning. My compliments to Gilman Grant. He will be exercising his ingenuity, perhaps, in laying out a new heaven—if there is one.”

  Again there came the faint sound of music blending with the jeering laughter. Manning looked at Grant. The architectural genius was grave but serene.

  “These things are ordered, I imagine,” he said. “At any rate we won’t let them upset our morale. How about a light lunch, Manning? I had some things sent in last night. Chilled soup and cold meats. All in closed cans. This Griffin person cannot possibly have interfered with them.”

  “All right,” said Manning. “I’ll take a little prowl outside in the corridor.”

  The passages were empty. The indicators showed that no elevators were in service for the moment. Manning’s gun was ready, loose in its holster. He had traveled jungle trails before when he knew that there were lurking brutes in the bush, that the trails were trapped, that bushmen had drum-signaled his approach and were watching him with poisoned arrows and blow tube darts they might at any moment discharge. Enemies hidden but felt.

  It was the same now, though emphasized by the empty passage, the locked doors of office suites, the windows through which the daylight streamed. Nothing in sight, nowhere a man might hide. If one came it must be in plain view. Yet that obsession of imminent danger came upon Manning with something like actual pressure, as if he had been suddenly transported to an atmosphere hard to breathe. The feeling of evil.

  But it was not tangible. He shrugged his shoulders, returned to the suite where Grant, acting as host, had already set out the luncheon. Manning locked the outer door. As they sat down to the simple meal he took a chair facing the outer rooms and laid his gun close to his hand. Grant surveyed the grim move without comment.

  “Now,” he said at last. “Will you have a cigar, Manning, or do you prefer that pipe of yours? As for me, I choose a pipe. I can’t keep one alight while I am working, but I enjoy it all the more when I do get at it. You must try my tobacco. I always hold off smoking myself until noon. That, by the way, is a doctor’s prescription. Never smoke before noon and tobacco will never hurt you. The blood is in full circulation by then, your stomach content.”

  He opened a deep drawer in his desk, took out a tobacco jar of lava, brought forth a brass-bound mahogany case that looked as if it might have held duelling pistols, but proved to contain half a dozen pipes, with various instruments for scraping and cleaning bowls.

  Grant took off the lid from the jar, chose a pipe, commenced to fill it, telling Manning to help himself.

  Light broke in on Manning. He saw the devilish ingenuity of the Griffin, the meaning of the respite until noon.

  Because of Gilman Grant’s regular habit, known beyond question to many, of never smoking until noon.

  “Don’t use any of those pipes, or that tobacco,” he said sharply as Grant stared at him. “They may have been tampered with.”

  “Pretty impossible, I think,” said Grant. “No one comes in here when I am out of the room except an occasional trusted employee. Hang it all. Manning, I want my smoke.”

  “Also an occasional janitor, room and window cleaners,” said Manning seriously. “We’ll take no chances, please. I’ll not do you out of your smoke. Take my pipe and my tobacco. I’ve been using them, but you won’t mind that, perhaps. I see you have pipe cleaners.”

  “Always have a supply of those handy,” said Grant. “Miss Allen sees to that. I’ll humor you, Manning.”

  Manning watched him as he closed the case and put it and the jar away. The pipe cleaners in a sealed, unbroken package were in a brass tray on the desk, matches in a safe beside them. He felt relief as Grant took his pipe with a grin, swabbed out the stem with the cleaners of twisted wire and cotton tufts, tossed the stained ones into a wire basket and filled up from Manning’s pouch.

  “Sorry to deprive you of your pipe,” Grant said. “It smokes sweetly. A nice piece of brier. Your tobacco is a mite stronger for me, but….”

  Manning, horror struck, saw the pipe fall from his mouth, his jaws open, stiffen, while his eyeballs became rigid, bulging as if they might burst from their sockets. His flesh took on a leaden hue and Manning saw the veins swell on his forehead until they stood out like cords under some sudden strain of agony, of effort to articulate.

  With a muffled groan Gilman Grant slid to the floor, dead.

  The Griffin had swooped, invisibly, had struck once more. Manning knew there was no hope before he tested pulse and heart and held the inside of his watchcase to the purple lips to find no breath filmed it.

  Not yet could he solve the riddle. The de
ed was done and once more he had failed. Yet he had smoked that pipe and used that tobacco. Grant had even cleaned it. Could there have been some other agency? He glanced round, his hand on the butt of his gun. It seemed a sorry weapon to employ against enemies so intangible. He himself was still alive. How had he escaped?

  If it was the pipe, the knowledge of Grant’s indulgence in the solace of tobacco at a certain hour—then the Griffin would deduce, if he held no surer knowledge, that Grant would lose no time. The Griffin had said just a few minutes since that, if Manning also died, he might make a personal visit.

  Manning knew why. The Griffin loved to set on his victims the seal he used with his letters, oblong cartouches of scarlet paper, embossed with his device. Especially would he like to place this flaunting defiance on Manning.

  No doubt he had some plan to find out when and how his diabolical device had worked, whatever it was. It could not be Manning’s pipe nor his pouch. The Griffin could not have calculated, with all his cunning, that Manning would offer them to Grant. He could not believe it was the food, for he himself was unharmed. Yet it was something he might have well shared with the dead architect.

  If now he played dead, ranged himself on the floor so as to deceive any one coming to see what had happened, but also so that he could get at his gun—he might, after all, get one of the murdering outfit, might even get the Griffin himself.

  It was a lone, long chance but he took it. He even simulated Grant’s fall though he knew no one could look through the walls or the windows, seven hundred feet up.

  VI

  IT seemed hours that he lay there, each second infinitely multiplied by the strain, the hope of getting to grips with the cowardly assassin. His gun was handy though hidden by his body. The sunlight shifted on the floor, touched the rich rug on which Grant lay, moved like the finger of Fate.

  Then Manning heard the faintest of clicks. Some one was entering the outer door. Faint footfalls that his tenseness magnified. His fingers closed about the butt of his gun. The intruder was close to the final partition, the door of Grant’s private room. Manning fancied he could hear his breathing. He watched the handle of the door. It was turning, stealthily. The door was opening. He must let the other get a good look at him, enter—and then….

  There was the sound of expelled breath, a puff of something like dust projected into the room, a tickling, irritating substance that provoked the membranes of the nose and throat. So powerful that all Manning’s will power could not prevent a sneeze.

  Instantly the door closed. There was the sound, plain enough now, of swift footsteps hastening away, knowing, going to report, that one, at least, of the two was alive.

  Manning was up, unable to entirety prevent the convulsions, water streaming from his eyes, checked by the ingenuity of the Griffin’s fantastic mind. He flung open the door, leaped across the next room, which was vacant, through that door, flung wide by the fugitive and caught a glance of a short, active figure that hurled itself through the entrance into the corridor, flinging over its shoulder a handful of the irritant just as Manning pulled trigger and, for once, missed pointblank.

  His face streamed with the fluid from his tear ducts, nostrils seemed afflicted with intense coryza, as did his mouth and throat. He had bounded into the fresh cloud of the stinging dust and he was half blind as he broke out into the corridor.

  The man was by the elevators, but he did not dare to summon one of them. The stairs were to the left, hidden, sixty flights before he reached the bottom. And Manning after him.

  Manning saw him through a haze, but his next bullet went to its mark. The other staggered, wheeled, crouched, snatched a gun from a shoulder holster and started to shoot it out. There was none to watch the duel, slight chance of interference.

  Manning felt a shock as if some one had struck him with a steel rod. There was a slug through his left forearm, but his man was down, he had lost his gun, his right wrist bored through. He tried to get it left-handed as he squirmed, but Manning was on him, kicking the weapon that went sliding down the floor of the corridor.

  The effects of the irritant powder were dying. He had one of the Griffin’s emissaries and the man was alive, not dangerously wounded.

  There would be a notable third degree when the commissioner got hold of him. This was not the first of the Griffin’s agents they had landed, but the others had refused to speak, more fearful of their mad employer than of the law. They would have to be more ingenious in their examination of this one.

  He was a swarthy man who was probably a foreigner though he spoke good enough American, mostly profanity, as Manning yanked him to his feet, none too gently and frog-marched him back to Grant’s offices, through to where the dead man lay.

  “That’s murder, my man,” he said. “You’re in it. You planted it after the Griffin planned it. Sit there. Never mind where you’re plugged. I’m plugged myself. That can wait. The police will fix us up better than we can. They’ll be here, with a surgeon, in a few minutes.”

  “You can’t pin anything on me,” said the man. He was not so much defiant, as sure of himself. The Griffin chose his active agents well, Manning told himself. “What killed him? Nothing you’ll trace to me. Or trace at all.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Manning. “But I’ll promise you this. You’ll be behind bars for the rest of your life, without privileges. It wouldn’t surprise me a lot if they tried to lynch you, right here in New York. But, if you talk, if you tell us where we can find the Griffin; I’ll also promise you some leniency.”

  “Yeah? Well, call your cops. I don’t mind talking—some. I don’t want to be cooped up in stir for the rest of my natural and that lynching idea don’t sound at all good to me. Want to know how he got bumped off? I didn’t do it. I didn’t even plant the pipe cleaners. That was done yesterday by another man. I just came up here to see if you had croaked as well as him.”

  Manning ignored the utter callousness of the man, drug-hardened, in the statement he made. He looked at the package of pipe cleaners.

  The other grinned in his cocaine-inspired bravado, braced also by his dread of the Griffin, chuckled.

  “Sure. It was easy. We find out all about this guy. We know he don’t smoke till noon, ever, and then he goes to the pipe like a Chink hitting the chandu. Know he’s always got cleaners and matches on the desk, handy. So the Griffin gets a pack, opens ’em, dopes ’em up, see. Another guy plants ’em, switches packs.”

  He had picked up the package and taken out a cleaner, twisting it nervously in his fingers, rapidly.

  “Drop that,” said Manning. “Drop it or I’ll….”

  “You’ll what, governor?” asked the man wearily. “Plug me? Aw, this is quicker!”

  Manning was almost swift enough. His wound hindered him, but he caught the other’s wrist. Then the man thrust out his moist tongue, desperate, deliberate.

  The telephone had gone dead. The Griffin’s efficiency had destroyed its synchronization. Manning was forced to ring up an elevator with the operator staring at him as he stood there dripping blood. He showed his badge, was taken down to a building telephone.

  He rang headquarters, got through to the commissioner. His tone was flat and infinitely weary when he got the connection. The official had been waiting.

  “I’ve got two dead men up here,” said Manning. “One of them is Gilman Grant, the other the Griffin’s man. When you send up have the surgeon along with his kit, will you?”

  He returned to the offices, temporarily binding his hurt. The body of Grant, which had lain face down, had been turned over. On the cold forehead was the crimson seal of the Griffin.

  The Hour Appointed

  In a Silent, Barricaded House, Manning Waits for the Arch-Fiend, the Griffin, to Stride

  THE circular chamber of the Griffin was empty. There was the low, sweet sound of exotic music, a strange fragrance that suggested burning amber in the motionless air, kept fresh by some ingenious method of ventilation in that windowless, secret
spot where the being known only as the Griffin, almost as fabulous as that mythical beast—half lion, half eagle—hatched and perfected his diabolical plots against society in general and famous men in particular.

  So far, the Griffin had never included a woman in his machinations, save once to threaten the girl beloved by Gordon Manning, the man selected by the Commissioner of Police of New York to uncover the fiend whose murders were at once the horror and terror of Manhattan; Manning self-sworn to destroy this mysterious menace, this fiend in human shape, this man cursed with the cunning of madness and the ingenuity of Satan.

  There was a weak point in Manning’s armor that gave delight to the warped mentality of the Griffin. Manning dared not court the girl, dared not even see her, for fear the Griffin would carry out some hideous device, some means to torture Manning by getting possession of his sweetheart.

  It pleased the Griffin to consider Manning his opponent in the grisly diversion that the former called a Game. In it he made the first move, planned his campaign, and then declared his intentions, mocking Manning, who had once been the mainstay of Army Secret Service, with the announcement of the name of the victim to be and the actual day of his taking off.

  This amused the Griffin and would continue to do so until Manning came too close to circumventing him. This had happened more than once. “And,” he had told Manning over the telephone, “when you cease to amuse me, I shall remove you.”

  It was a Game that, with the increasing toll of frightful murder, the removal of the finest of men, was bound to tell on even Manning’s superlative nerves, his physical perfection. On the other hand, there was Manning’s profound belief, backed by the opinion of the greatest psychiatrists, that, once the Griffin failed in the horrific programs he announced, in any major detail, his colossal conceit, his grandiose dementia, would collapse, and the man would become a creature without reason, without power to plan; a mere maniac; dangerous to cope with personally, but unable to devise any more major crimes. It began to look to Manning, in his more despondent moods, as if only in such fashion would the Griffin be conquered.