The Sting of the Silver Manticore

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The Sting of the Silver Manticore Page 20

by P. J. Lozito

Allred returned the handset to Bako.

  “Trouble, boss?” Bako focused on the road. All these years spent together gave him acute insight into Mr. Brent’s moods.

  “It’s minor,” Allred eyed his old friend. There’s no deceiving him.

  Bako could tell it was not minor by the way his boss looked away and sat uncomfortably. The car nosed uptown and across the Queensboro Bridge. Bako followed white and black enamel painted metal road signs. Their helpful multitude of arrows pointed them to Corrigan’s apartment despite the confusing street names.

  When the cab pulled up to Corrigan’s Bliss St. building in Woodside, Queens, Allred instructed Bako to wait in the car. Allred rang the bell and was buzzed in. Swiftly climbing three flights, he found Corrigan waiting at the open apartment door. Blue terry cloth covered pajamas striped like an old convict’s outfit. That was the Corrigan sense of humor.

  “You look beat, Brent. What’s up?”

  Allred scanned the comfortably disarrayed apartment as he pushed past Corrigan but didn’t answer. The women’s page of the Senty dubbed this arrangement the ‘lived-in look.’

  “How ‘bout some coffee? Or tea? Something stronger, maybe,” offered Corrigan.

  “Nothing for me,” said Allred. “You go ahead.”

  “I was just having a nightcap,” stated Corrigan, going back to a gin and tonic. “Well, whaddya got?”

  “What’s ‘Projet Ultra Soldier’?”

  Corrigan fumbled his glass, “Where did you get that? Never mind, I know where you got it.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “I guess you have the whole business now, huh?”

  “Quit stalling, Corrigan. What exactly is it?”

  “Tell me how much you know about it,” ordered Corrigan. He took up the glass again.

  “Uh-uh, I want to know, now, what kind of wild goose chase you’ve had me on. Or there are going to be problems.”

  “It was that Bishoff broad wasn’t it? Frost blabbed to her,” Corrigan killed his drink and moved to fix another. He never got the chance.

  Allred quickly stepped forward, blocking the way. His hand flashed out and smacked the tumbler from Corrigan’s. It smashed on the floor. “Dammit, I am through letting you string me along,” he grasped Corrigan’s right hand with the poison-holding skull ring.

  “Brent! What’s got into you?”

  “I want answers. Now.”

  “All right, I guess I do owe you some explanation,” sighed Corrigan.

  “All right, I’m waiting,” he released Corrigan’s wrist.

  “What do you think this is--a Jewish wedding? Uncle Sam doesn’t pay for these. I don’t get my house wares on dish night.”

  “You’re stalling.”

  Corrigan sighed and fell into an overstuffed chair. “Project Ultra Soldier,” he began. “When Yarrow Frost enlisted, or I should say ‘re-enlisted,’ we got a blood sample.”

  “Get to the point.”

  “Scientist of ours, Reinstein, found it had some weird characteristics.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “Brent, I couldn’t trust this to just anyone. I had to have someone who’d believe all this elixir mumbo-jumbo was true.”

  “So when Weston pointed you to me, you knew you found your boy? Why not Sir Dennis? He’s been fighting Hanoi Tsin longer. Or Wylie? He’s some kind of genius scientist.”

  Corrigan pawed away sweat from his upper lip, “Sure, Sir Dennis knows about the elixir, but not what can be made from it. I didn’t want a foreigner involved in this classified stuff, ally or not. And Wylie, as a do-gooder scientist, he’d be able to synthesize his own formula.”

  “Yes, before long, he’d be saying mankind needs it,” guessed Allred.

  “You see my position.”

  “That didn’t stop you from manipulating them and me.”

  “Frost’s blood is a cure-all. We have to be very careful concerning this. If it fell into the wrong hands…”

  “Wrong hands? Hanoi Tsin is the wrong hands and he already has it.”

  “Not like this,” Corrigan gestured for lower volume. “We wanted to ask Frost a few questions, run a few more tests.”

  “But he was already shipped out by the time the tests came back?”

  “A simple red tape snafu. Else we wouldn’t be going through this.”

  “By the time you tracked him down he had already transferred to the Greyhawks?”

  “Right.”

  “And his sample?”

  “Reinstein synthesized a serum from his gamma globulin. We got a volunteer, skinny kid, Pfc. Rodgers to test it out on.”

  “All along you used me to track the elixir so you could create some kind of super soldiers. You have plans to beef up our forces with this stuff. But what good would faster, stronger soldiers be? Even Germany’s elite Wolf Packs, hell, the old Flying Circus, never did as much damage as ordinary forces.”

  “That’s just it. Terrorize the enemy, cause more fear than actual damage,” supplied Corrigan.

  “A symbol to rally the troops’ morale,” Allred snapped fingers. “When we were in San Francisco, you let slip our boys were malnourished, unprepared and Uncle Sam had some project. When can I talk to this Rodgers?”

  “Well, eh, he’s pulling T.E.C.”

  “‘T.E.C.’?”

  “Terminal Eternal Care. Arlington National Cemetery, with full captain’s honors.”

  “You don’t mean…?”

  “Oh, he’s dead all right.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE BATTLE OF THE FULLER BUILDING

  During the battle on the Hudson River, Trixie Wylie had noted the bearing of the submarine. Doc Wylie forwarded that to his contact in the Navy, Winslow. But the Navy had not been able to find the mystery boat. Likely she was faster and could go deeper than anything they presently had. Thomas Swift had been dispatched in his own advanced submarine, but also found nothing.

  A woman in Delray Beach, Florida reported to the authorities she saw a sub dropping someone off the next night. That someone fit the description of Siam Khan. The report made its way to Chris Corrigan, who presented it to Doc Wylie. He, in turn, placed a long- distance call to a houseboat-living Florida detective he sometimes employed, Oscar Sale. The tall drink of water worked for Marine Investigations there.

  Sale, in fact, quickly picked up the spoor. The suspect was traced to a local shipping office. He never came out. Sale needed only to mention to the clerks on duty who he was investigating for Doc Wylie. Those clerks, Chick Young and Wilbur Grey by name, decided that no search warrant would be necessary. They allowed the detective to turn the place upside down. There was no trace of Siam Khan.

  Oddly, the clerks could recall no such person of Siam Khan’s description ever having been there. Sale believed them. He had to; they both had been--voluntarily-- hooked up to a lie detector at the time.

  ***

  Siam Khan was damned tired of getting the worst of every physical confrontation with the Silver Manticore. Damned tired. The masked jackal would suffer, Siam Khan plotted. Hanoi Tsin’s sub had continued on, bound for Haiti. A few days in craft’s decompression chamber, lined with lead, kept Siam Khan off the Geiger counters of the Coast Guard.

  A day later, a truck delivered a box to a shop on Pell St. in New York’s Chinatown. That box contained Siam Khan. His trip had been made easy by use of the samadai. Siam Khan knew he was a wanted man with flyers out on him. The police, Doc Wylie and his silver ally would not suspect he was back in New York.

  Although the Silver Manticore remained obscure, Wylie was a public figure with a known address. Unfortunately, that address was 350 Fifth Avenue, New York City: the Empire State Building. There was no way of getting to Wylie. Siam Khan gazed up at the skyscraper like a hick tourist, knowing the impressive structure conformed to a 1916 zoning law requiring it to rise in a series of steps. Too, he knew, no single elevator was allowed to travel up it uninterrupted.

  Numerous circuits
of the famous skyscraper told Siam Khan nothing useful. He had even sprung for a trip to the 86th floor, finding it to be no more than an observatory. So Wylie was headquartered on a different floor.

  Furthermore, he could not discern where Wylie kept his car. More than likely, he deduced, Wylie maintained a secret passageway to another building with an underground car park. Perhaps in the manner of the underground tunnel he knew to run between Penn Station and the New Yorker Hotel.

  Perhaps he could mail himself in a crate to the Empire State Building’s other address, 17 West 33 St., and gain access that way, plotted Siam Khan. It was an old trick; he smiled, but a good one. No, something more was called for. There must be a weak link here; everyone had an Achilles’ heel.

  Hours spent in the New York Public Library had paid off. The Library had been collecting pulps for several years now. Siam Khan though it best to take advantage of that, renting back issues of Doc Wylie Magazine for the princely sum of one cent each. He might as well learn more about the enemy, he knew. Then it dawned on him.

  ***

  Trixie Wylie showed up at her usual time, opening her Park Avenue spa before the rest of the staff arrived. It already looked like it was going to be another nice day, she considered. Then the crunch of a discarded Dixie cup alerted her. Doc had taught Trixie to use reflective surfaces to see discretely behind herself. As she gazed into the glass on the front door of the Park Avenue Beautician, Trixie spied a policeman, accompanied by a woman. Uh-oh, some swell has a complaint about a dye job and called the cops because of our no refund policy. Darn. Trixie looked up, smiling as she fished for her keys.

  “Miss Wylie?” chirped a woman’s voice.

  “Yes? I’m Trixie Wylie.” Her thoughts had been on how best to compete with the facials at Georgette Eckstein’s Madison Avenue salon. The big policeman had her in his hairy hands and thrust her into a waiting touring car. Another man was in the machine. It was the last anyone saw or heard of Miss Wylie that day.

  Her brother was called and he rushed to the scene of the incident immediately. Witnesses mentioned the cop. Doc Wylie searched the façade of the salon, and came up with a brass button. He knew the storefront was cleaned nightly, so it was from this morning. Unfortunately, Trixie had never been given a two-way wrist radio or one of Allred’s crystal-set girasol signal rings. That had been Doc’s way of keeping Trixie out of the adventuring.

  The police, the real police, traced the button to an official uniform maker in Midtown. “Paul Walters” was the name the cadet had left. He was a big bruiser, from the measurements taken. However, another man had picked up the order. The telephone company was able to give them an address in Astoria, Long Island. Commissioner Weston instructed Det. Joe Casey to let Doc take charge of this investigation because of his police commission. Trixie was family, and aside from Levvy being a distant cousin, the last bit of family he had. There would be no arguing with him.

  Calls to Walter’s apartment had gone unanswered. Doc, Chuck and Levvy decided to visit that garden suburbs of Queens, past the site of the Madison Square Garden Bowl, out past the U.S. Army Pictorial Service, in a Liberty Cab early that afternoon. As they chugged past the busy factories of Long Island City, Doc noted its proximity to the Academy of Aeronautics. Convenient place for a felon to just happen to maintain an apartment, he stated. He recalled how it was only some five years ago that Chester Carlson invented xerography out here.

  “Astoria, huh? Them’s your people, Chuck,” observed Levvy, at the wheel.

  “You mean brilliant lawyers from Harvard with ape-like assistants? Yes,” Chuck drawled.

  “Dang it, I‘ll tell you one thing, shyster,” responded the chemist. “I ain’t your assistant.”

  “So you finally admit to being ape-like? I thank you.”

  “Blazes, when we find Trix I’m gonna tear you limb from tailored-limb!”

  Doc decided Chuck would accompany him up to the Walters apartment. Levvy stayed behind in the cab unobtrusively; or as unobtrusively as he could, anyway. Face buried in the new Pep Comics, Levvy’s lips moved as he followed the adventures of a redheaded high school kid. Chuck had admonished the homely chemist for even thinking about such foolishness while Trixie was missing. Levvy responded that it was merely a prop and he was trying to look simple.

  “You wasted ten cents,” concluded Chuck, leaving with Doc.

  “Haw,” Levvy delighted to himself. “They put Sadie’s hometown in this here funny book.”

  ***

  On the stairs of 34-08 32nd St, Chuck’s keen mind worked feverishly, “Doc, did you notice that street door was unlocked?” his question was in Mayan. A ceramic sign bolted to the bottom of the front door warned “No peddlers or beggars.” Nearby, an el train rumbled.

  “So we could gain access? Yes,” responded Doc Wylie in the same language.

  “It’s not like the old days. Apartment buildings are locked up now,” hissed the lawyer.

  “Someone wants us here,” concluded Doc. “Be ready for anything.”

  Doc and Chuck found Walters’ apartment door locked however. Knocks went unanswered. A set of picks from one of Doc’s myriad pockets finally made it yield. He tried the knob. A chain prevented the door from opening no more than an inch.

  “Someone must be in there,” reasoned the lawyer. “Mr. Paul Walters?” called Chuck through the gap, reverting to English. “I’m Charles Charalambides, lawyer for Dr. Richard Wylie, Jr. Perhaps you know his sister, Miss Patricia Wylie? We have reason to believe she is here.”

  He looked back at his chief. Doc gave him a nod. Chuck unscrewed his cane into pieces: a saw, hammer and chisel. He set to work on the chain. The door responded to a gentle push from Wylie. He slowly scanned the place, super-machine pistol at the ready, as Chuck quickly reassembled the cane. Now Chuck held it, ready to swing. But he wished he had taken Le Grandon’s suggestion--switching to a deadly sword cane, illegal or not. Doc checked back at the apartment that mirrored them across the hall but no one seemed to take any notice of them.

  “We’ve come to ask you some questions about the disappearance of Miss Wylie,” called Chuck. Again, there was no response.

  “You don’t have to answer. Talk to us or the cops, it’s all the same. Dr. Wylie holds a police commission.”

  The two advanced. Chuck had his eyes peeled. Suddenly, he caught movement out of the corner of one. Something was descending towards him. Fast. Something that was rapier-like.

  The dapper lawyer commanded “Back” and flicked out with his cane. He parried the object away. Chuck stood in the en garde position, ready to move in for the kill.

  “I seem to have saved you from a killer broom, Doc,” Inwardly, he was relieved to have broken the deadly tension.

  “Practice does make perfect,” reminded Doc Wylie.

  No one else was there. But the exit of the former occupants had been recent. A tin of soup rested on the sideboard, ready to be opened. Nearby, a loaf of Silvercup bread and margarine stood, about to be consumed. Doc prodded and sniffed the loaf. Fresh. Next, he examined a steel coffeepot. A faint line inside it indicated that the urn had been used for making at least four cups of the stuff earlier. It was still drying from a recent cleaning.

  With his cane Chuck flicked through cigarette butts in the living room ashtray with lipstick on them. Trixie didn’t smoke and it wasn’t her shade anyway. A search of the bedroom, however, revealed a whiff of Trixie’s perfume. Doc checked the pillows.

  “Trixie, or someone who uses the same perfume, has been sleeping here.”

  “She gets the stuff mixed at her place,” interjected Chuck. He picked up a book from the floor, Murder for Pleasure. “This is hers. You know, Trixie likes those murder books,” the lawyer stated.

  “Inconclusive. That may belong to the occupant here,” said Doc.

  Chuck flipped pages, searching. The war-time edition was light in his hands, printed on thinner paper.

  “See? She circled this passage,” Chuck pointed it ou
t to Doc:

  SHOULD DASHIELL HAMMETT NEVER WRITE ANOTHER DETECTIVE STORY, IT IS ALREADY SAFE TO SAY THAT NO OTHER AUTHOR OF MODERN TIMES—CERTAINLY NO OTHER AMERICAN—HAS SO BASICALLY CHANGED AND INFLUENCED THE FORM.

  “This kolinsky is hers,” noted Doc, holding up the fox wrap. He went to the pad by the phone, taking up a nearby pencil. Gently Doc rubbed the top sheet, “Chuck, look at this.”

  The lawyer read the ghostly image aloud: “‘Take the broad to the Fuller Building.’ Hmm, there’s a Fuller Building uptown. Doesn’t this seem too easy to you, Doc?”

  In answer, Chuck just got Doc Wylie’s weird trilling. Next Doc examined the contents of the bathroom’s medicine chest. Nothing out of the ordinary was there. But something caught his eye on the mirror. Doc dipped into one his many pockets. He produced a pair of goggles and a queer-looking device that resembled a flashlight. Donning the goggles, Doc switched on the flash. It cast no light, however. No visible light, that is.

  Chuck, guarding from the doorway, knew Doc was examining something invisible in ordinary light. No doubt, it was left by the fake lipstick Trixie carried in her purse at all times, whose mark could be seen only under this black light projector. The trilling sound filled the apartment.

  “What’s it say, Doc?” the lawyer asked impatiently. He had his own super-machine pistol un-holstered now, “Did Trix write that?”

  “This is in Trixie’s hand,” answered Doc.

  “The special crayon she keeps in that gold lipstick?”

  “Yes. But obviously written under duress. It’s says she’s unharmed but I know it’s a warning that her kidnapping is a set-up to get me.”

  “How can you tell?” asked Chuck.

  “It begins with ‘Richard.’ She hasn’t called me that since I got my M.D. in ’26. So I looked more carefully.”

  “And you found…?”

  “A rectangle surrounding a dot,” declared Doc.

  “Hobo symbol for ‘danger,’” breathed the lawyer. “But if that’s the case, why not just booby-trap the door? Kill us on the way in and be done with it.”

 

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