He was forced to detour twice to avoid meeting the police, but eventually, he gained his room. There, in the light of a lamp, he examined the thing that he had torn from Fay October in that brief struggle. It was a piece of paper and on it was written:
Agent X, if you want your big spy come and get him at the Hoola Club before 11:00.
The Agent’s brow rippled with a frown. Fay October had deliberately given him that. The “big spy” could mean only Harvey Bates. But how had the woman known that he was Agent X? There was only one answer to that question: either some one knew exactly where the real Lizio was or Lizio himself had seen X fighting with the Turney hoods in the alley.
He had accomplished just one thing in his disguise as Lizio. Turney’s crowd lived in deathly fear of Lizio. He looked again at the slip of paper before him. And quite suddenly, he made an astonishing discovery. The handwriting on that slip of paper was easily recognizable. It was identical with the peculiar scrawl in the notebook that Reporter Tip Morgan had dropped in the prison….
A few minutes later, a small roadster stopped in front of the old building where Tip Morgan had his apartment. The girl who got out of the car was small, exquisitely proportioned, and had brilliantly beautiful features. With hesitant, almost fearful steps, she approached the doorway. Her clear-blue eyes darted right and left. Betty Dale saw none of the watchers that Tip Morgan had feared. Still, the very silence of her fellow reporter’s abode was sinister.
She entered the building and walked quietly up the steps. On the second floor, she found Morgan’s door in the dim light of the hall lamp. The door was unlocked. She entered, guided by a small flashlight she had taken from her purse.
The beam of the light pointed out the small table beneath the shelf of books. On the table was a typed manuscript. Betty stepped to the table, jerked up the script. Something clinked. The silvery, flasklike object rolled to the edge of the book shelf, fell….
CHAPTER VI
The Yellow Feather
IN his hideout, X considered the trap prepared for him from every angle. There was the possibility that Bates had not fallen into the enemy’s hands. But he dared not turn the matter aside with this optimistic conjecture. Then there was Tip Morgan to think about. Undoubtedly, Morgan had written the note that was intended to trap X. It was therefore possible that Morgan was responsible for the nefarious work of the terrifying, strangling death.
The best possible defense was a strong offense, he knew. Why not carry the war into the enemy’s camp? Why not strike at Morgan instead of blindly walking into the pitfall arranged for him at the Hoola Club?
So it was that he set out immediately for Tip Morgan’s apartment, two blocks away. The building was dark and silent. The door of Morgan’s second-floor flat was open a little way. Inside, a pale beam of light was darting about. X pushed the door slowly open and stood there for a moment watching the moving light. It was a flashlight in the hands of a woman. It pointed to a small desk and a manuscript thereon. The woman crossed to the table quickly.
X took another step forward. The woman’s hand went out to the manuscript. As she picked it up, X’s keen eyes noticed something that the woman failed to see—a tiny black line of thread that passed from the manuscript up to the book shelf. Something on the shelf moved with a faint metallic clink. Something that gleamed like silver fell from the shelf.
Agent X leaped the eight feet that separated him from the desk. His long arm darted from behind the girl. His grasping fingers caught the falling, silvery thing, dropped it, caught it again when it was but an inch from the top of the table.
The girl uttered a small scream, turned. Her flashlight beam fell across X’s face. “Lizio!” the girl cried.
“Betty!”
“Oh! You—” And for a moment of panting relief, Betty looked as though she was on the point of throwing herself into the Agent’s arms. He sensed the impulse and slowly shook his head. “This little glass bulb is too easily broken. It’s a great wonder I didn’t smash it with my butter-finger antics.” He broke the thread that connected the flask to the manuscript.
“What does it mean?” Betty demanded. “Oh, I knew when I came here I was walking into danger. But poor Tip—”
“Poor Tip,” X told her grimly, “may find himself on a very hot spot for this night’s work. This was a trap. Picking up the manuscript caused the flask to roll from the shelf.”
“But the flask—what is it?”
X LOOKED at the silvery bulb closely. “It appears to be a small edition of a Dewar flask. Invented by a Scotchman for saving gases in a liquid state. Actually, it’s a very superior form of thermos bottle. Just eggshell-like glass formed into a vacuum bottle and coated with mercury. Had the flask burst, the liquid it contains would have been immediately transformed into its true gaseous state because of the sudden rise in the temperature that the gas would undergo when it met the warm air in the room.” X pointed with his flashlight at a vase of cut flowers resting on the shelf above. “They’re something more than a floral offering for funerals yet to come. They act as masks.”
Betty shook her head. “Much too deep.”
“This gas—” indicating the flask in his hand—“is as deadly as cyanogen. Like cyanogen, it has a flowery odor which might warn the victim of its presence. So, whenever possible, the woman in black masks the odor with flowers.”
“And who is the woman in black?” asked Betty.
“It begins to look very much as though she is your good friend, Tip Morgan.”
Betty shook her head vigorously. “That’s impossible. I know Tip. He couldn’t do a thing like this. These horrible deaths are in some way related to the Jonalden affair. Why Tip and I have been engaged in hunting down a new angle of the affair!”
X uttered a short laugh. “Morgan wouldn’t be the first man to investigate his own crime in order to throw off suspicion. But lay that aside. How did you happen to come here?”
“Tip asked me to. He was being watched, he said. He was afraid that if he left here with the manuscript, the manuscript would never reach the editor’s desk. We did get information that would open an entirely new line of police investigation. Do you know that a woman was used as a decoy to get Jonalden away from his bodyguards?”
“That’s believable,” X agreed. “He was susceptible.”
“That’s what this story is about.” Betty pointed to the manuscript. “It says here that Fay October, popular night club entertainer, was seen with Jonalden the night of his disappearance. Tip’s been working for weeks to find the name of that woman.”
“And the manuscript being bait for a trap that was intended to kill you, can’t be believed at all. Unless—” X paused. “Unless the killer doesn’t care at all what happens to Fay October. I hadn’t thought of it in that way, but it’s just possible that the killer is playing a lone hand.” X glanced at his watch. It was ten minutes to eleven. He snapped his fingers.
“What’s the matter?” asked Betty anxiously.
X put down the flask carefully, seized Betty’s arm, and led her from the apartment. “I’ve got a job ahead of me. I’ll have to put you in your car and send you home.” They hurried down the steps and X helped Betty into her car. “Be careful, Betty,” he warned. “Tonight’s attempt may be only the first of many.”
“You—what are you going to do? I know you are going into some terrible danger.”
X knew that, too. He merely laughed, gave Betty’s hand a quick squeeze, and told her to hurry. He stood for a moment on the curb, watching gloom swallow her car. The fingers of his right hand toyed with something soft and fuzzy—a downy, yellow feather. And he had found it on the floor near Tip Morgan’s writing table.
As he hurried across the street, a somber figure stepped from the shadows of the building and followed.
IT WAS four minutes of eleven when X reached the Hoola Club. He had made no attempt to change his disguise. As Lizio, his entrance might create a surprise. If Lizio was really the brains behind t
hese criminals, X might be able to run some sort of a bluff, telling them that he was Lizio and that Lizio was Agent X.
X detoured the gaudy front of the building where couples danced in the front room to the music of a small orchestra. He went around to the back, mounted an ash barrel so that he could reach one of the first-story windows. It required less than a minute for him to jimmy the simple latch. He raised the window, crawled over the sill. When he turned on his flashlight, he found himself in a deserted kitchen.
Three doors led from the kitchen, one into a gambling room that adjoined the dance hall, one into the backyard and a third into the basement. A glance through the keyhole told him that Bates was not in the gambling room. There remained the basement and the upper regions of the house to explore. He decided upon the basement first in as much as it was easily accessible.
He walked down the steps and into damp, clinging darkness. There was no need of walking softly. The band upstairs would have muffled a gunshot. The basement was the perfect place for murder, because of this effective sound shielding. At the foot of the steps, X saw a narrow thread of yellow light that marked the bottom of a door beyond. He went to the door, his gas pistol in his hand.
He tried the latch of the door. It worked easily—too easily. On the other side of that door, death awaited him. He raised the latch and suddenly kicked the door open.
Instantly, the light went out. A gun jabbed into X’s side. A hoarse voice said: “Keep movin’ straight ahead, Mr. X.”
X obeyed. But he retained his gas pistol. If the darkness was a hindrance to him, it was also a disadvantage to the man behind him.
“Stop,” ordered the husky voice. “Turn around.”
Again X obeyed.
“Just want a glimpse of your face before I turn the heat on you, Mr. X. They say nobody’s ever seen your face and lived.”
A flashlight switched on. Reflected rays struck the face of the man with the gun. He was the same who had attacked X in the alley, but his was a face that suddenly went ghastly white. The light in his hand trembled. The gun trembled, too. “Lizio!” he cried. “Killed you once, and by heaven I’ll do it again!”
But in his terror at meeting the man he believed he had killed, the man had taken no notice of the Agent’s gas pistol. As soon as X’s captor had cried out the name of Lizio, bedlam had broken loose in the next room. X heard feet pounding toward the door. He wasted no time. Even before his opponent’s finger could tighten on the trigger of the gun he carried, X’s gas pistol spurted its charge of gas in a straight line to the man’s face.
As the man dropped, his fingers released his automatic. X snatched it up just as the door behind him opened up and men poured into the room. X pivoted and raised up. The first attacker met some of the gas which had not entirely dissipated after X had loosed it from his pistol. The man, half groggy, fairly bumped into X’s flying fist. At the same time, X sent a shot from the automatic he had recovered. The slug whined over the heads of the criminals and crashed out the light-globe in the next room.
He was fighting in total darkness, then. The blows that landed upon him were powerful but panic-driven. Occasionally, a pistol roared and darkness was ripped by an orange-red sliver of flame. Had there been the slightest organization, weight of numbers would have borne X to the ground. As it was, the fight seemed to be a free-for-all and the battle cry was: “Kill Lizio!”
From somewhere, seeming far away, came the wail of a police siren.
“Cops!” somebody cried.
A PLUNGING body struck X, took him off balance, hurled him to the floor. To a man, the criminals made for the door, stumbling over X, falling over each other, in a mad stampede to leave the building. X picked himself up. He was apparently alone. He could little afford to meet the police in the guise he wore. He started for the door. As he did so, gray light from a window fell across his face.
Suddenly, out of the darkness, a man sprung like a black panther. X swung around. Powerful fingers locked on his throat. Sheer weight threw him back against the wall.
“Got you!” a voice chopped triumphantly.
“Bates!” X snapped.
Instantly the fingers released their grip. Harvey Bates uttered a dull groan. X got out his flashlight and turned it on the big man. Bates’ square face was haggard. His eyes were dismal. “Sorry, sir, but you looked—”
“What happened to you?” X asked.
“Trap, sir. I’ve been a fool.”
“Not necessarily,” said X. “They would have trapped me, too, had it not been that they were frightened by my face. You were bait for the trap set for me. Some one in the gang knew that I was masquerading. That some one managed the trap but neglected to tell his henchmen that I might appear as Lizio. And for some reason, all the Turney crowd is scared of Lizio.”
“Good reason,” Bates said. “Lizio is out to kill some one who might have had something to do with framing him. I think that Lizio is the man behind the strangling deaths.”
“Why?” demanded X.
“Because when I walked into Pat Turney’s trap, Lizio followed me in. He accused Turney of framing him. He wanted to kill Turney.”
“Then what?”
“Lights went out. I tried for a getaway and didn’t make it. About all I knew was that somewhere somebody had opened some flowers—”
“Flowers?”
“That’s what it smelled like.”
“Where’s Turney now?”
“Don’t know. He wasn’t in the bunch that was going to bump me off. He was in his apartment above the club, but if Lizio—”
“Where’s Tip Morgan? Who was at the head of the men who were holding you? Morgan?”
“Don’t know. I never heard of Morgan. After what happened up in Turney’s place, I was sure that Lizio was the man we were after. When you came in and some one called out that you were Lizio, they all forgot about me. Then I thought you were Lizio.”
X shook his head. “Things are fogging up pretty fast. I still don’t understand—” X paused and for a moment was in deep thought. “Poison gas used on the plane. Later, the same gas was used by some one, probably Lizio, to get out of prison. The whole thing is beginning to look like another case of dragon’s teeth.”
“What’s that, sir?” asked Bates.
“Oh, a certain Roman gentleman planted a crop of dragon’s teeth. Armed men sprang up. He sicked one armed man on the other until they’d killed each other off. The Roman gentleman, actually the culprit, remained in the background and watched them fight until they were all killed. One thing is certain: this man kills because he fears something. But he is mighty careful to conceal the fact that he is the source of the trouble.”
“Who’s this Morgan?” asked Bates.
“A reporter. He apparently set a trap for Betty Dale. I say apparently, because I can’t be certain. I found a canary feather near the trap. That might indicate that the woman in black set the trap. It might mean that Morgan is the woman in black. It might mean nothing at—”
A dull groan sounded from the next room.
“Been going on for a long time, sir,” Bates told him. “It’s in the furnace room. They’ve been torturing some one.”
X HURRIED to the door of the furnace room and opened it. In the light of a single globe, a man lay on the floor, muscles of his arms and legs working in agony. His feet were bare and there were scars of burns on the soles. Nearby there was an open fountain pen. The man was Tip Morgan.
X walked over to Morgan. Now he understood why the note that had brought him to the Hoola Club had been written in Morgan’s hand. The poor devil had been tortured into doing it.
“What’s this?” Bates asked.
“What’s what?” X was kneeling beside Morgan, attempting to revive him.
“Ice cube. But why here?”
X dropped his pocket medical kit, stood up and whirled around. Bates, hands in his pocket, was idly pushing an ice cube with the toe of his shoe. An ice cube—that was just what it was. But A
gent X nearly knocked Bates over getting to it. He picked it up and sprang across the room. He picked up a piece of coal, threw it through the glass of the basement window, and sent the ice cube following the coal. He turned to Bates, sighed deeply.
“That thing dangerous?” asked Bates.
“I believe it contained the strangling death. That is a gas that is as dangerous as cyanogen, but with different properties. Evidently, the gas can be kept a liquid at temperatures as high as the freezing point of water. That’s exceptionally high for a gas. In the liquid state the gas is harmless, evidently. I believe that it was carried on the plane as the liquid center for hollow ice cubes. I feel certain that somehow the gas was concealed in the ice cream delivered to Lizio’s cell—evidently in small quantities so that Lizio could make several killings. The gas evidently is unstable and dissipates rapidly in the air.”
“If it was in the ice cream, why not hunt up the man who made the ice cream?” Bates suggested.
X nodded. “Your first job on getting out of here.” He returned to Morgan’s side. With a hypodermic needle, he injected a powerful restorative. It was only a matter of moments before Morgan revived.
Morgan groaned, opened his eyes without seeming to see. “The woman in black,” he moaned.
“What about the woman in black?” X asked.
Morgan tried to sit up. “Met me just outside my room. She—she’s no lady. A mauler, stuck a gun in my ribs—” Morgan’s roving eyes flicked across X’s face. He grunted, looked puzzled, tried to grin. “Gave me a start at first. Thought you looked like Tony Lizio, or like Tony would look if he got punched in the face.”
As a matter of fact, the Agent’s makeup had been seriously damaged in the fight.
“What we want to know is how you got here,” X told him.
“The woman in black stuck a gun in my ribs. She brought me over here and locked me in this room. He—the woman in black is a man—said I was going to write a letter. I told him he could go to hell. A girl came in—Fay October. And are the police going to open up on her when I get out of here! You know she was the one who lured Jo—” Morgan stopped. “Guess I’m delirious, shooting off my mouth. You fellows cops?”
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 7 Page 6