Scallot reported that he saw a man who closely resembled Oliver Pontius, thought to be a notorious society burglar, running from the Warwick property. Scallot’s sleuthing had uncovered a small nursery block bearing the letter “T” in the hands of Warwick.
Early that morning Scallot had covered another murder in another portion of the city. Once again, the face of a normal human being had been turned into a screaming skull. From the contents of his pocketbook, the man had been identified as Henri Raybon, a well-to-do architect. In Mr. Raybon’s pocket had been found a third nursery block. This one bore the letter “H.”
But then Timothy Scallot had taken a great risk. He had deliberately stolen the two blocks—the only scrap of evidence the police had been able to obtain.
Blocks and information had subsequently fallen into the hands of Secret Agent X. The three wooden, alphabet blocks stood at the present moment on the desk of A.J. Martin, annoying the Agent with their brilliantly decorated surfaces. It was undoubtedly the most baffling puzzle he had ever encountered. “G,” “H” and “T.” Scramble them as he would, they still spelled nothing and signified even less than that.
Agent X paced to his desk, scooped up the wooden blocks, and tossed them into his pocket. Then he picked up the telephone, called the office of the Herald, and asked to speak to Betty Dale.
“Betty,” said X cheerfully in the voice of A.J. Martin which he knew was familiar to her, “I’m about half starved.”
“Really?” Betty’s voice came laughing musically from the transmitter. A smile of pleasure crossed the face of A.J. Martin. “Should I do something about it?” she asked.
“You might,” he suggested. “Suppose you invite me to have a bite of lunch at your apartment. Could you arrange it?”
“I see no reason why I can’t. You—that is, there’s something troubling you, isn’t there?”
“Yes,” he admitted gravely. “I’ll tell you when I see you.”
Later, over coffee and sandwiches which Betty had hurriedly prepared in her kitchenette, X gave a resumé of his investigation on the previous night. Wide, blue eyes fixed on his steely gray ones, Betty listened in silence, though much of the information had already come to her at the Herald office.
“I thought you were working on this epidemic of forgery,” she said when he had finished.
X nodded. “There is a connection, I am certain. That’s why I’ve placed so much emphasis on Haas’ strange actions. Haas may be a chemist now, but he was a forger. Whether he acts so strangely because the fears that his old crimes will be disclosed, or whether it is because he is really guilty of the murders of Jerrico, Warwick and Raybon, I don’t know.”
Betty nibbled at a sandwich. “Seems to me that you’re not sure that the victims are Jerrico, Warwick and Raybon. With their faces all torn up, no one can be certain.”
“We’re certain of Raybon’s death,” X said. “Raybon’s fingerprints are down at police headquarters. They have been there for a decade. He was taken up on the charge of being the accomplice to a mystery robbery years ago. There wasn’t sufficient evidence, and Raybon’s done nothing suspicious since. But we’ve got to stop this forgery and killing.”
“What makes you think there will be more killings?” asked the girl. She peered at this strange man whose true face she had never seen, her beautiful, blonde head tilted quizzically on one side.
AGENT X reached into his pocket and took out three wooden cubes. He rolled them like dice across the table. “What do you make of those?” he asked.
“Blocks,” she said, turning the toys over until the red letters were uppermost.
“Found in the hands of all three murder victims.”
“That didn’t break in the newspaper stories,” she said excitedly, “How—”
X said quietly: “The point is, the letters on those blocks are all consonants.”
Betty’s red lips parted. Then slowly she nodded her head. “So there’s murder yet to come. The killer’s trying to spell something. And there will have to be vowels if it’s a word, or a name either, for that matter.” She drank a little coffee. “Let me see—a name with the letters ‘G,’ ‘H,’ and ‘T’ in it. The city directory must be filled with them.”
Agent X smiled. “We’ve got to play a hunch. We don’t know how many people will have to die before the word or name is spelled out so that we can check up in the city directory.”
“It could be the name of the murderer. It could be the name of some one the murderer is trying to frame.”
“It could be the name of a certain long-haired, long-faced artist down in Greenwich Village. The question is, is it?”
“Ghurst!” Betty fairly pounced on the name. “A.H. Ghurst.”
The Agent nodded. “Now you’ll be doing it, too. The name’s in my mind and I keep repeating it every time I breathe. He’s had opportunity to commit all three of the crimes. He may be artist enough as a forger as well as a sculptor. And only ‘U,’ ‘R,’ and ‘S’ are missing. Well, think about it.”
Betty wiped her lips daintily on her napkin. “Where do I come in?”
“Mimi Clarice, the famous actress, was a friend of Jerrico. When she heard that Warwick was dead, she was frightened. But when she met a drug addict known as Lew Mots, she handed him her entire purse. Strange relations for a woman of the stage—a play-boy like Jerrico, an aristocrat like Warwick, a dope fiend like Mots.” X pushed back from the table and reached for his hat and coat. “Find out all you can about Mimi Clarice and I’ll be sincerely, deeply grateful.”
THAT afternoon a familiar figure entered the door of the Commercial Trust Company. White-haired and wrinkled, he none the less carried himself erect and stepped along briskly, swinging an umbrella that no one had ever seen unfurled. He had shown an atrocious taste in the choice of his garments, but when one bears a name as illustrious as Elisha Pond one need not follow fashion’s dictate in order to gain the respect of fellow men. A club man and philanthropist, Elisha Pond was one of the bank’s heaviest depositors.
Mr. Pond stopped at a center desk and made out a check for five hundred dollars to be drawn from the fund of the Foundation of Mercy. He took it to the teller’s window, greeted the man behind the cage gruffly, and passed over the check. For some inexplicable reason, there was some hesitation on the part of the teller. Mr. Pond tapped the floor with his umbrella and looked around the bank.
At the next window, his handsome face flushed with anger from his chin to his gray temples, was Theodore Mulkin.
“I tell you—” Mulkin’s anger was the sort that brought forth cold and carefully calculated speech—“that never in my life have I overdrawn an account. The balance of my checking account stood at five thousand, four hundred dollars and eighty-five cents last week. I have written one check for fifty dollars since that time and immediately I received a notice stating that my account is overdrawn. I am a tolerant man, but a mistake such as that is enough to exhaust all patience.”
The teller looked worried. “Mr. Mulkin,” he said, “I’m afraid you will have to take the matter up with Mr. Yonge. This worries me.”
“I should think it would no end,” said Mulkin coldly. He stalked across the marble floor to enter the office of Mr. Yonge, vice-president.
“Er—Mr. Pond—”
Elisha Pond turned his head, “Yes?” he said sharply to the teller who held his check in his hand.
“You’re certain there’s no mistake? You really wanted to withdraw this amount?”
“A mistake? No, of course not!” Elisha Pond stamped his umbrella. “The fund is ample to cover the amount of the check. Nearly twenty thousand dollars.”
“Er—I beg your pardon. The Foundation of Mercy account stood at twenty-five thousand this afternoon. That generous donation from Mr. Jerrico brought it up to that amount,”
“Jerrico! Did I hear you say Jerrico?” The voice of Elisha Pond still spoke, but the eyes that bit into the brain of the uneasy teller were those dynamic, pushing eye
s of Secret Agent X.
“Yes, a Mr. George Jerrico. His check for five thousand was accredited to your foundation early this morning. Then you drew out twenty-four thousand, eight hundred this noon.”
“I what?”
“Well, sir, the check hasn’t even gone to the clearing house yet. It bears your signature.”
“It bears a forgery then! Find the check as soon as you can and bring it to Mr. Yonge’s office.” And with a militant swing of his umbrella, Elisha Pond crossed to Mr. Yonge’s office where he entered without knocking.
THE bank vice-president had been listening to Mulkin’s cold wrath so long that his brow was beaded with sweat. He was plainly grateful for Mr. Pond’s appearance. He extended his hand. Pond jerked at the hand, rather than shook it. He nodded at Mulkin, a fellow club member.
“Yonge, you’ve got to tighten down here,” Pond said crisply. “If it was my own personal account, I’d take my loss standing. But this will deprive needy children of milk. That’s something I won’t stand!”
“Do you mean to say you’ve been victimized by this same forger?” demanded Theodore Mulkin.
“Not I,” contradicted Pond, sharply. “The children—thousands of my children.”
A boy entered the office with two checks which he laid on Mr. Yonge’s desk. The banker, Mulkin, and Pond bent over them eagerly. There was a check signed by Mr. Jerrico and made out to The Foundation of Mercy. The endorsement read: “The Foundation of Mercy by Elisha Pond, Treas.”
“Is that your signature, Pond?” asked Mulkin, winking nervously.
“It is,” said Mr. Yonge, without hesitation.
“It isn’t,” contradicted Pond. “It isn’t because I didn’t write it. It looks like it, I’ll admit. But to my knowledge Mr. George Jerrico never gave a cent to any charity unless it would be to buy flowers for ailing actresses.” He looked at the second check. It was made out to the Erwin Dairy and had apparently been signed by Elisha Pond. “You must have thought that a payment for a rather large milk bill,” Pond said acidly.
Yonge squirmed. “Of course, this is the first time I have seen the check. I will speak to—”
Mulkin interrupted with a vigorous nod of his head. “Yes,” he said, “you will speak to some poor devil in the teller’s cage. The responsibility is yours, Yonge. This has happened too frequently of late. Not in your bank, but in others. Surely the matter has come up before the clearing house association. You’ve been warned.”
Yonge spread his hands helplessly. “The matter has me at my wit’s end, gentlemen. But what can I do?”
Mulkin sighed and smoothed his gray temples. He turned to Pond. “Have you anything to suggest?”
Again, the eyes of Secret Agent X asserted themselves in the old face of Mr. Pond. His fist clenched. “Some one will pay!” he said grimly, and promptly left the office.
The forging of the famous signature of Pond was an unexpected blow to Agent X. He had entered the bank for the sole purpose of obtaining money for charitable purposes. Yet the ill wind had established one thing: The murderer of George Jerrico, who had undoubtedly murdered Warwick and Raybon as well, was the same forger who had been filching large amounts from the fattest bank accounts in the city. But it was expensive evidence—twenty thousand dollars that would have bought food for needy children. When he left the bank, X went straight to the office of A.J. Martin and there changed his disguise from that of Pond to Martin. He then procured one of the several cars which he kept in a near-by garage and drove out in the general direction of the sanitarium. Across from the house of Hans Haas, he stopped, got out, and entered the apartment where he had left the unconscious Lew Mots on the night before.
His instructions to Private Detective Jim Hobart had been to guard the dope fiend day and night and attempt to learn all he could about the man and his associates. X knocked on the door of the second floor apartment expecting Jim Hobart to let him in at once.
But his knocking brought no reply. Had the cheerful, redheaded detective disobeyed orders, or had he fallen asleep, or been overpowered by Lew Mots? The idea of Lew Mots overpowering anyone was ridiculous to the Agent. But a moment later, when he had unlocked the door and entered, he found Hobart stretched on the floor, an ugly gash at the back of his head.
AGENT X opened his pocket medical kit and applied a powerful restorative. It was not long before Hobart opened his eyes, tried to grin, and said: “Gee, Mr. Martin!”
X helped Jim to attain a sitting position. The wound, he knew, was not a serious one. Aside from a headache, the husky Hobart would have little to recall the knockout in a few hours.
“How did it happen, Hobart?” asked X after a moment.
“I’m not sure, Mr. Martin. I don’t know what hit me, anyway. You see when I came here, the cokey was lying on the bed unconscious. I sat around waiting for him to sleep it off. It never occurred to me that he might be playing possum.”
“He wasn’t. Not when you came in, anyway,” said X. For he knew that the shot of anesthetizing gas he had given Mots would have kept him oblivious for ten hours anyway.
“Well maybe not, Mr. Martin. But this morning, he was still lying in the same position. I began to think that he was never coming around. I’m afraid I didn’t keep my eyes on him every single minute.”
“Don’t worry,” X said quietly. “No one could sit in a room for twelve or thirteen hours and never take their eyes from the motionless form of an unconscious man. I didn’t expect anything like that. Go on.”
“Well,” Hobart continued. “I looked up suddenly. The sun was just right on the window beside the bed so that the window pane reflected Mots’ face. He was lying, you know, facing the window. I saw that he was wide awake and furthermore, I was certain I saw him making signals with his hands to some one outside. I looked out the window, but could see no one.
“Then I lit into Mots. He was headed for a nervous last round-up, sir. He hadn’t had dope for an age, I guess. But he still kept tight about the signaling from the window. Finally, I said that if he’d tell me who he had been signaling to, I’d get him some dope. He agreed eagerly. And that was all. Some one pounded me on the back of the head while I was bending over Mots. I must have been out for about ten hours. Nearly dark now, isn’t it?”
X nodded. “There’s not a much worse place to get hit than the back of the head, Hobart.” He helped the private detective into a chair. Then he went into the bathroom, drew a glass of water, and added a stimulating powder to it.
When Hobart had drunk the water, he was able to get up on his feet. As soon as he was able to move about, X told him that he might go back to the detective office, there to await further orders.
Alone in the apartment, X went to a closet and took out an elaborate make-up kit and a suit of old clothes. He sat down before a three-way folding mirror, and removed a portion of his make-up. Under his skillful fingers, the face of A.J. Martin seemed to dissolve. Features became thinner, unwholesome looking. He was working entirely from memory, disguising himself as Lew Mots. It was a difficult impersonation because X was a much larger and heavier man than the dope fiend. The suit of shapeless, ill-fitting clothes did much toward completing the disguise. For a moment, X practiced Mots’ shuffling gait and his shrill voice. Then he was ready to go across the street to the house of Hans Haas.
X was determined to enter the chemist’s residence by stealth. The Lew Mots impersonation would arouse no suspicion as to his true motive in case he was seen prowling about the place. Mots was a dope-hungry wreck who would have broken most any law to obtain another shot of cocaine.
Since he was certain that forger and murderer were one and the same, X expected that his investigation would reveal some incriminating evidence within the chemist’s house.
Passing the gate in the hedge in front of Haas’ house, X noticed that there wasn’t a single light in the building. He would consider himself fortunate if the place was deserted. He shuffled up the front walk and on to the porch. He took from his
pocket a bunch of master keys which he was seldom without, inserted one in the lock, and quietly let himself in.
HE went up the steps into the attic. The place was barren and dirty. On the second floor, he searched each bedroom. There was the same heavy richness in the furnishings that he had noted in the lower rooms on the night before. But there was nothing that might have incriminated the chemist in any way. Downstairs, he found that Haas had a small office. Any papers that X found in the desk related to his perfectly legitimate business as a manufacturing chemist. There remained only the basement.
As he crossed the furnace room in the basement, the Agent’s sensitive nostrils became conscious of a potpourri of strange odors that seemed to come from the door of the next room. The place smelled like a hospital and like a chemistry laboratory as well. He pushed back the door of the room cautiously, found the light turned on. The Agent’s breath came quickly. He closed the door and leaned against it for a moment, eyes taking in the scene, brain digesting every significant point.
The shelves about the room were lined with chemicals and drugs. There was another door in one wall, and lying in front of the shelf which flanked it was a body.
It was a slight, short body clad in a ragged suit that was several sizes too big for it. The end of a woman’s expensive purse protruded from an inside pocket of the coat. Fingers of the right hand were clutched over a bottle of white, crystalline powder that had evidently occupied the only vacant place on the shelf above. The other hand was in a tight fist over some small object.
But the face of the corpse was gone. It was a blue-black, eyeless skull, the work of the Faceless Man’s fiendish cruelty. The corrosive acid had completed its work.
Yet there was much to tell the identity of the victim. X bent over the hideous corpse. The purse under the man’s coat had once rested in the slender, gloved fingers of Mimi Clarice. The white, crystalline powder was cocaine. A jimmy in one coat pocket told how Lew Mots had managed to enter the building. His motive had obviously been to steal some dope. But when X peeled back the fingers of the left hand, he found another wooden, alphabet block. This time, the red letter embossed upon the block was “S.” X pocketed it. Four letters were now in his possession: “G,” “H,” “S,” and “T.” Only the “U” and the “R” were wanted to spell the name “Ghurst”.
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 6 Page 37