The shot made a bright orange flare, and the eyes were gone. A heavy body kicked and squirmed in the snow. Doan struggled up to his feet, and another dark low form slipped sideways in the whirling darkness, circling him.
Doan leveled the revolver and fired instantly. A shrill ki-yi-ing yip echoed the smash of the shot, and the second dark form went tumbling over and over in the snow, contorting itself into desperate struggling knots.
The third one came in a black streak out of the darkness, up out of the snow in a long lunge, straight at Doan's throat. He fired going over backward. The flat-nosed .38 hit the animal in the chest and turned it clear over in the air. It fell back rigid and still beside the first.
Doan struggled in the snow, heaving himself up, and then Jannen loomed above him, yelling something the wind garbled into an unintelligible, frenzied scream. He had an ax in his hand, and he swung it back up over his shoulder and down at Doan in a full sweep that made its head glitter in a bright, deadly line.
Doan whirled himself sideways, rolling.
"Jannen!" he yelled frantically. "Don't! Don't! I'll shoot--"
The ax-head hissed past is ear, and Jannen caught it on the upswing and chopped back down again with it.
Doan couldn't dodge this time. He didn't try. He shot Jannen just above the grassy gleam of the buckle on the wide web belt around his coat.
Jannen made a queer, choked sound. The ax stopped in midair. Jannen took one step back and then another, trying to get the ax up over his shoulder again.
"Drop it," said Doan.
The ax was going up inch by desperate inch. Jannen's breath made a high whistling sound. He made a clumsy step forward.
"All right, baby," said Doan.
He pulled the trigger of the revolver again. There was a dull, small click--nothing else. Before Doan even had time to grasp what that meant, Jannen reeled queerly sideways and went down full length on his face, as rigid as a log.
"Good God," said Doan in a whisper.
He got up slowly. The thing had happened in split-seconds, and the echos of the gunfire were still rolling lustily ahead of the wind.
Doan stared at his gun. It was bright and deadly in his hand, with the snow moisture gleaming on its thick cylinder, and he remembered now that he hadn't reloaded it. He had fired once at the metal case and once in the snow-shed. There had been four cartridges left in the gun. He had used them all. If he had missed just one of those four shots...
The wind whistled shrilly through bare branches, chuckling in its high, cruel glee.
Doan stumbled forward, leaned down over Jannen. The man was dead, and the snow already was laying a white cold blanket thinly across his distorted face.
Doan plowed back through the drifts and brush, found the hard surface of the path. He felt weak and numb with cold that was more than cold. His legs were stiff, unwieldy sticks under him as he went back down the steep path, across the flat toward the warmly welcoming glow of the windows that watched for him through the whirl of snow.
CHAPTER X.
TOO MANY GUNS
DOAN WENT BLUNDERING across the porch with his head down and ran into the front door. He found the knob, fumbled it with numb fingers, finally turned it. The wind swept the door out of his grasp, banged it back thunderously against the wall.
Doan stamped through into the soft luxurious warmth of the hall, fought the door shut again behind him. Sighing in relief, he wiped snow moisture off his face with the palm of his left hand.
"Drop your gun on the floor."
Doan jerked to attention. Brill was standing in the doorway of the living room. He was wearing a blue dressing gown now over his pajamas. He lounged there, quite at ease, with the big .45 automatic bulking huge and black in his right hand.
"Drop your gun on the floor," he repeated in the same confident, quiet voice.
He looked very theatrical, with the white blaze showing up in his smoothly brushed hair, with his eyes narrowed. He was smiling in a dramatically sinister way.
Doan loosened the stiff fingers of his right hand and the .38 thudded on the carpet.
"It wasn't loaded anyway," he observed.
"Come in here," said Brill.
He backed out of the door, and Doan followed him into the living room. Someone had thrown kindling on the fire, and red flames crackled greedily in it.
"You know Miss Alden, I think," Brill said.
She was sitting on the divan. She was wearing a man's overcoat so big that it almost wrapped around her twice. She had brown hair cut in a long bob, mussed a little now, and the fire found warm glints in it. Her brown eyes were wide and scared, and her soft lower lip trembled. There was a smear of coal dust on the end of her short straight nose.
"Hello, again," said Doan.
She didn't answer, and Brill said:
"You're becoming a nuisance, Doan. What happened to Jannen? I heard you shooting."
"I was just target practicing," Doan said, "but Jannen, that dope, stepped right in front of my gun just when I happened to be pulling the trigger. I expect he's sort of dead."
Kokomo came in from the kitchen. There was a lopsided swollen lump on one side of his jaw, and his eyes glittered malevolently at Doan.
"You tricky little devil! When I get my hands on you--"
"I can hardly wait," Doan told him.
"Later, Kokomo," Brill said. He was watching Doan with gravely speculative eyes. "I suppose you are beginning to understand this now, aren't you?"
"Oh, sure," said Doan. "I figured it out quite a while ago."
"Did you, now?" said Brill sarcastically.
Doan nodded. "Yes. You were next in line for the management of Sheila Alden's trust fund after this gent Dibben. You had all the time in the world to figure things out and get ready for this little play. You saw that an accident happened to Dibben at the right time. You knew Sheila Alden was coming up here--probably suggested the idea yourself--and you made all your arrangements beforehand.
"First you got Leila Adams, Sheila's secretary, to throw in with you by promising to split part of what you got from Sheila with her. Then you got Kokomo to do the muscle-work, promising him a split too. When you were prowling around up here beforehand you found out that Jannen was a crackpot with a grudge against the Aldens.
"Now, there was an ideal fall-guy for you all ready-made. Anything that happened you could always blame on him. But Jannen talks too much, and this poor guy, Boley, the regular station master, got suspicious of what you were cooking up with him, and either you or Kokomo or Jannen--or all three of you--got Boley drunk and probably doped him and left him out in the storm to freeze.
"Leila Adams wasn't going to impersonate Sheila Alden unless it was necessary on account of someone like me coming around. You definitely didn't want anyone around--not with the real Sheila Alden locked in the cellar.
"And so--" Doan paused, ran a hand over his cheek.
"Jannen knew a lot about explosives, and so you got him to fix up that little cigar case present for me. You knew I was going to be on the job because the trust company hired the agency, and Toggery told you he was going to send me up. So you dressed up in a fancy costume and laid for me with your cigar case bomb."
"How did you know I was the one who gave you that case?"
Doan grinned. "I couldn't miss. You spent so much time trying to cover yourself up that you stuck out like a sore thumb. You wanted to be sure that if anything went wrong no one could prove that you had anything to do with the whole business.
"That was the reason for your little fairy tale about the janitor and the cigar case and why you put on that elaborate, nervous and worried act and why you wanted to make sure that I knew you'd just been assigned to handle Sheila Alden's business. You wanted me to think that you were a jittery sort of a dope who couldn't possibly know the score. As a matter of fact, you are a dope."
Brill's lip lifted. "So? And I suppose you can tell me what happened tonight, too?"
"Easy," Doan agreed.
"When you found out you hadn't put me away and that I was coming up here, you had to get a girl to act as secretary to the phoney Sheila Alden because you knew I'd expect to find a secretary.
"You hired the first girl you could find--Joan Greg. She wasn't in on the impersonation business. She thought Leila Adams was actually Sheila Alden--and, more important, so did her boy friend, Crowley.
"Crowley just messed the whole works up for you. He started impressing his personality on Leila Adams. He's a slick worker. She fell for him. She was a scrawny, homely dame, and she'd never had anybody like Crowley tell her how beautiful, breath-taking, marvelous and generally all-around wonderful she was before.
"She liked it fine. She liked it so well she began to get out of hand, and you knew that if Crowley worked much more of his sex appeal, she'd spill something to him. You killed her.
"Joan Greg was crazy jealous of Crowley, and she gave you the idea by trying it herself. You knew, then, that you could put Leila Adams away and blame it on Joan Greg.
"You had a master key. You could get into her bedroom. You cut Leila Adams' throat and then went in and planted the knife on Joan Greg and bloodied up her hands. When she woke up she actually didn't know whether or not she had killed the phoney Sheila Alden. As soon as I left you alone with her and Crowley, you told them to beat it. You planned to lay all the blame on them, knowing they'd keep under cover.
"Jannen was prowling around the place, and you tipped him off and then sent me out, thinking Jannen and his damned wolves would take care of me. You tipped your hand twice then. First by that phoney entrance coming downstairs. Nobody who actually got banged with a chair ever acted so screwy as you did. And then you weren't even interested when I told you there was a girl down cellar. As an actor, you stink. What crackpot notion have you got up your sleeve now?"
Brill said smoothly: "I've had to alter my plans slightly, Doan, but I don't think it will really matter--certainly not to you. You see, at first all I wanted to do was to force Sheila to give me her power of attorney for a week or so after she got control of the trust fund. If I could have done that, as I planned, I would have made a fortune."
"Sure. By selling her a few million shares of phoney stock."
Brill looked contemptuous. "Nothing so crude. Merely by forcing the market up and down by alternately selling and buying the huge blocks of stock she owns in several corporations and being on the right side of the market myself each time.
"There would have been nothing criminal in that, and no way for her to prove afterward that she hadn't given the power of attorney voluntarily, because it would have been her word against myself, Kokomo and Leila Adams. But due to the way things have happened, I've been forced--not very reluctantly, I must admit--to ask Miss Alden to do me the honor of becoming my wife."
Sheila Alden spoke for the first time. "No," she said in a small, clear voice.
Brill paid no attention to her. "You see, Doan? Even if my original plan did go on the rocks, I can still pull things together. I'll have control over Miss Alden's money if she's my wife--you can be sure of that. And more important, she can't testify against me."
Sheila Alden said: "I am not going to marry you--now or any other time."
"I think you will," Brill said. "It's really quite essential. Kokomo, will you take Miss Alden into the other room and see if you can--ah--reason with her?"
CHAPTER XI.
GOOD BYE NOW
SHIELA ALDEN DREW in her breath with a little gasp. Kokomo was grinning at her meaningly out of the side of his mouth that wasn't swollen. He came nearer the divan.
"It's warm in there," Brill said. "She won't need that coat."
Sheila Alden wrapped the coat tighter around her, clutching the lapels with fingers that were white with strain.
"No! You can't--"
"Brill," said Doan.
He hadn't made any noticeable move, but now he was holding a flat metal case on the palm of his right hand, looking down at it thoughtfully.
"That's mine!" Brill exclaimed.
"No," said Doan. "No, Brill. Not yours. It's the one you gave me."
Silence stretched over the room like a thin black veil, with the crackle of the flames in the hearth coming through it faint and distant.
"Foolish," Doan said, still staring at the case thoughtfully. "Foolish trying to alibi yourself by carrying one like it and pretending some mysterious Mr. Smith gave it to you and that the cigars in it subsequently blew the janitor to smithereens. There aren't any cigars--explosive or otherwise--in this case. It's packed with explosive."
"Brill said stiffly: "How--how--"
"You're a dope," Doan told him. "Don't you know that the bomb squad on any city police force has equipment--black light, X-ray, fluoroscope---so they can look into suspicious packages without opening them? I took this case down to a pal of mine on the Bay City bomb squad. He squinted into it and told me it was a very neat little hand-grenade, so I kept it for a souvenir. Here. Catch it."
He tossed the case in a spinning, glittering arc. Brill yelled in a choked, horrified voice. He dropped the automatic and grabbed frantically with both hands at the case.
Doan dived for him in a lunging expert tackle. He smashed against Brill's pipe-stem legs. The case was knocked whirling up in the air, and Brill spun around and fell headlong. His head cracked sickeningly against the edge of the hearth, and he stiffened, his whole body quivering, and then was still.
Doan rolled over and sat up and looked down the thick black barrel of the automatic at Kokomo's scared, sagging face.
"Hi, Kokomo," Doan said softly.
Kokomo held both big hands in front of him, fingers spread wide, as though he were trying to push back the expected bullet.
"Don't," he whispered. "Don't shoot."
"Oh, I think I will," Doan said.
Kokomo believed him. He had already had a demonstration of what Doan could and would do. His thick lips opened and shut soundlessly, little sticky threads of saliva glinting at their corners.
Doan got up. "Turn around, Kokomo."
Kokomo turned slowly and stiffly, like a mechanical doll that had almost run down. Doan stepped close to him and slammed him on the head with the barrel of the automatic.
"I'll bet even your cement knob will ache tomorrow after that," Doan said amiably. He winked at Sheila Alden, who was staring with wide unbelieving brown eyes.
"Weren't scared, were you? They never had a chance. They're amateurs. I'm a professional. That case was really Brill's--not the one he gave me. I picked it out of his pocket last night. Wanted to look at it more closely."
She continued to stare.
He went over to the door into the hall and picked up the telephone. It was a French type handset with a long cord attached to it. Stringing out the cord behind him, Doan brought the phone back to the divan and sat down on it beside Sheila Alden. He held the receiver against his ear.
"The dopes," he said to Sheila. "They didn't even cut the line."
She turned her head stiffly, little by little, and looked from Brill to Kokomo. "Are they--are they--"
"Dead?" Doan finished. "Oh, no." He was still listening at the receiver, and now he said:
"Hello. Hello, operator? Get me the J. S. Toggery residence in Bay City. I don't know the number. I'll hold the line."
He waited, smiling at Sheila Alden in a speculative way. She had begun to breathe more evenly now, and there was a little color in her cheeks.
"But--but you did it so easily--so quickly. I mean, it all happened before I knew what--"
"The hand is quicker than the eye," said Doan. "At least mine was quicker than theirs."
"I--I've never met anyone like you before."
"There's only one of us," Doan said.
The receiver crackled against his ear, and then J. S. Toggery's voice said:
"What? What? Who's this?"
"Doan--the forgotten man. How are you, Mr. Toggery? How is Carstairs?"
"You! That damned gho
ulish giraffe! He pulled all my wife's new drapes down! He broke a vase that cost me a hundred and fifty dollars! He crawled under the dinner table and then stood up and dumped the dinner on the floor! I've got him chained in the garage, and let me tell you, Doan, if he pulls just one more trick, I'll get an elephant gun and so help me I'll pulverize him! You hear me?"
"He's young and exuberant. He probably misses me. You'll have to excuse him. Goodbye now."
"Wait! Wait, you fool! Are you up at the Alden lodge where you're supposed to be? Is everything all right up there?"
The Essential Works of Norbert Davis Page 6