Day of Doom: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 2 (11 page)

Manning had all he wanted to know. He released the window latch and stepped in and down. Under one arm he carried his steel cane. His right hand was in his side pocket.

Zerah whirled. The Thing was still crawling from its cage, intent upon a feast.

Zerah rapped out a crisp command. He felt in his belt and from it a
tulwar
flashed, a curving knife of steel, inlaid with gold. But he left the first attack to his two servants. Manning had entered through the window. Zerah knew well enough what that meant. His appraisal of Manning was now definite. Here was an enemy—and he meant to destroy him before he himself was destroyed.

The two men leaped simultaneously, weapons snatched from their sashes. Manning struck out twice, right and left, with his cane, left-handed. He hit one man on the shin, midway, and the other just below the knee. They howled with the nerve-shock and his stick swung in the rapid moulinet of a saber expert. The steel tip struck one on the temple, the second on the base of his skull. Both rolled over, no longer howling, and Manning faced Zerah.

The mystic was back of the altar. He had shouted another order. The fluting music changed. It became irritant, high-pitched, and the Thing on the altar gathered itself, lifted, rearing high, and leaped at Manning.

His hand came out of his pocket for the first time. It held something that ended in a tube and jetted out vapor. The terrific, furry monster seemed to crumple in mid-leap. It fell, folding in upon itself, with slender, hairy legs, with eyes that dulled.

Manning swung on Zerah.

“Some of the same?” he asked. “Or this?”

In his right hand was the weapon that ended in a tube. In his left his cane.

For answer Zerah flung his
tulwar
and followed it.

Manning struck the shining steel aside with his cane. As Zerah hurtled forward, he thrust at him, and the mystic yelled with anguish as the rod pierced his body.

Manning surveyed him grimly. The man would not die of that. He had withheld his wrist. Zerah would go to the chair, these other two….

He whirled, just as a cloth flicked about his neck. For a moment he had forgotten the third man, the musician. A Thug, a devotee of Kali! Before the muslin tightened Manning got his hold, beneath the other’s thigh, with one arm, while the other hand gripped for a Goorka hold at the spot where the collar bones protect the windpipe.

He was just in time. The Thuggee choker almost had him. But Manning’s fingers dug in and shut off his assailant’s wind, sent out his tongue between his lips. He collapsed and Manning stepped back.

Now he drew a gun. He surveyed his late opponents. He stepped to the only modern thing in the room—a telephone.

When he hung up he tilted the cage over the crumpled, furry Thing, slid the door beneath its limp body.

“We’ll be needing you, later,” he said.

IX

Chief Commissioner Melleny and the district attorney sat in conference with Manning. Their eyes were wide.

“I’ve seen spider’s webs in New Guinea,” said Manning, “that were used for fishing nets by the natives. They talked of these big insects and I tried to get one. They are nocturnal. Light blinds them, frightens them. When Power turned on the switch this one was scared. They have eight eyes, but they are useful only after dark. Eight legs, also. Tall legs, so that when the thing reared up it looked tremendous. It is tremendous, for a spider. You’ve got it upstairs. Take a good look at it. Furry, like a tarantula. The natives of New Guinea say it can kill a cassowary, or a tree-wallaby. I agree with them. It killed Mrs. Power—and Pelota.”

“How?” asked the district attorney.

“Zerah brought the thing in. He might have thought only to use it as a sort of fetich. You’ll never find out, from him. But, in the end, he used it to kill. Got Mrs. Power to shift her bedroom to one that looked east. Probably linked that up with sun worship. But it was right under his own window. He lowered the cage, as soon as he knew she had made over the policy. Lowered it outside the window he knew she always had open—or he told her to keep open—lowered it until its bottom legs hit the flower bed. I’ve got the measurements to prove that, and the dirt on the bottom of the cage.

“He’d starved it until it was crazy for blood. It had leaped in and out, unsatisfied. He had lifted the lid, raised the cage. Even if they found the thing they couldn’t trace it to him, who had brought it over probably as an egg and hatched it out.

“But it was still hungry. When the light startled it, it went up the wall of the house as only a spider can. There was Pelota, on the terrace, underneath the place the thing considered home. He paid the penalty.

“Some spiders have vertical fangs, some have horizontal. This one is of the latter kind. I’ve got the answer. Henley can prove it. That’s why I didn’t want to kill the beast.”

“But how did you stupefy it?” asked Melleny.

“Buhach! Vaporized it. Got the vapor into a container. Squeeze it, and it emits. Kill off any ordinary insect. Choked this brute. It’s recovering slowly. By the way, don’t forget to credit Doherty. He mentioned the ants. They give off formic acid. So do other insects. Doherty didn’t know that—neither did Henley. But Doherty gave me the tip. And, believe me, that spider stunk of formic acid when I gave it the shot.”

The Way the Wind Blew

There Were Plenty of People Who Hated Amos Willoughby, but It Took Manning and Heaven to Unmask the Murderer

“You’re looking fit,” said the police commissioner as he accepted appreciatively the imported cigar offered him in the humidor Manning slid across the table. He clipped it with an outmoded but eminently practical gold cigar-cutter, lit it at the standing lighter on the table, and leaned back in the big club chair with the air of a comparatively casual and thoroughly contented visitor.

Tanaka, Manning’s Japanese butler, entered silently, with ice, charged water and two kinds of whisky in square decanters.

Belden, the commissioner, selected rye. Manning chose the Scotch. Highballs were skillfully compounded by Tanaka.

The guest pledged his host.

“Good luck to you! Hope you’ll always look as well as you do now.”

“Thanks,” Manning answered. “I’m feeling fairly fit, but I’ll be fitter after I’ve had my vacation. King’s invited me for a Caribbean cruise.”

He knew then, in his bones, that the cruise was off, so far as he was concerned. He knew that the police commissioner had not come out to Manning’s house at Pelham Manor, driving himself, and using a private car, to make complimentary remarks about Manning’s appearance. There was something in the wind and it was not an ordinary thing, or the commissioner would have telephoned. He knew Manning’s strictly unlisted number. But Manning waited for the commissioner to unburden himself.

“Manning,” said Belden, “you’ve got a holiday coming to you, if any man ever had, after your bout with the Griffin. We’ve got that mad devil out of the way, but there are other things going on that disrupt the public morale almost as much as his crimes. I mean the recent kidnapings and blackmailings.”

“The snatch racket,” said Manning, beginning to see what was coming. “Who is it now, man, woman or child?”

“It hasn’t happened yet,” replied Belden. “I want to stop it. I want you to stop it. You’re the one man for the job,” he added. “Your special commission still stands, Manning. Do this for me and you can turn it in and trade your shield for a gold medal with diamonds in it.”

“Thanks,” said Manning. “Just what would I do with it? Shoot, Belden. What is it?”

Belden was silent for a few seconds, regarding the lean figure, the tanned, hawklike face of Gordon Manning, ex-Secret Service man with the A.E.F., explorer, scientist, and now, by avowed profession, a consulting attorney. There were fine, deep lines in his face that had not come from the weather or from age. Lines engraved there during Manning’s weeks and months of mortal combat against the insane genius and homicide named the Griffin, safely corralled at last in a State institution. Lines that would never entirely disappear.

“You know Willoughby? Amos Willoughby the tool manufacturer?” Belden finally asked.

“Know him? I’ve met him. He’s not a friend of mine.”

“I doubt very much if he’s got a friend,” said the commissioner judicially. “And I’m sure he’s got plenty of enemies. He’s a man who trusts nobody but himself, and he came up fast, from nowhere. His last merger practically gives him complete control of the tool making industry. It’s a monopoly, or about to be. ‘Ten-Per-Cent’ Willoughby, his workers call him, always the first to cut ten per cent off his employee’s wages, and the last to restore it. They had another demonstration outside his Erie plant again yesterday. Papers haven’t said much about it—and they won’t. He’d make it too interesting for their advertising departments. But his social side and his business methods have nothing to do with this. He’s a big man and he rates protection. He’s asked for it. He’s staying on his place in Delaware County, where he was born. That’s where he goes when he wants privacy and is planning a new coup.”

“Fairtrees,” said Manning. “He’s invited me up there. Bought up a whole village and demolished it to include it in his estate, so that his birthplace is actually inside his own fences though not the cottage. His father was the village postmaster and ran a small general store. His mother was a seamstress. He’s frank about those matters, principally because it helps to show what a big man he is. About the only human thing I know of him is his hobby for trees. He has transplanted any amount and variety of them, and they say he has succeeded in developing chestnuts immune to the blight. If he has, it’s the first thing he’s ever done for the cause of humanity.

“I always understood that Fairtrees was always well guarded. There’s a fine trout stream there. He tried to tempt me with it. He doesn’t fish himself, and no one outside his guests are allowed to. Hence the keepers. Also for preservation of the trees and shrubbery, and the wild game. The place is a natural preserve. If it belonged to any one else you might call it a Bird and Deer Sanctuary. With him it’s plain selfishness. But he never struck me as a man to be lightly alarmed.”

He lit his pipe, seeing in the smoke the sturdy, dominant figure of Amos Willoughby, tool magnate, ruthless absorber of smaller plants, of larger ones also. A shortish man, though he carried his square, solid body erectly. A man who looked a great deal like Andrew Carnegie, with trimmed beard that was gray, like his hair; with gray eyes that were always cold as ice.

“He may be forearmed and now he’s forewarned,” said the commissioner, “I don’t think he’s actually frightened, I don’t believe the man has any more emotions than a shark. You can’t actually scare him, mentally or physically. He’s overcome a lot of stiff opposition in his time. There are still plenty who consider him a menace to general prosperity, but they’re leaving him alone. He’s the sort of man who battens on depression. He has no more patriotism than a newly landed Armenian immigrant. He doesn’t give a whoop in Hades about the common people, but right now he’s afraid he may get wiped out.”

“By whom?” asked Manning. “The proletariat?”

Belden shrugged his shoulders.

“It’s the mystery of it that has got Willoughby’s goat,” he said. “He has a private wire, an operator in his own house. He lives like a Nabob. But he plugged in himself this time and got through to me. He’s been threatened plenty of times, but now he’s had three letters, mailed from the General Post Offices in New York, Albany and Philadelphia, all typed on the same machine, with the same ribbon. He checked that up. They all said the same thing.
You’ve been warned enough. This time you go.
Brief and to the point.

“I don’t know if he told me everything, but he believes these communications are authentic and mean business. He wants protection. He’s a potentate and I’m a policeman—you, too, Manning. We’ve got to give protection, or, for one thing, I may lose my job and, for another, if anything breaks like the elimination of Amos Willoughby, right now, people are going to get hysteria.”

“Did he ask for me?” suggested Manning. Belden grunted.

“He did,” he confessed, “and he gave reasons that are just what I would have advanced. He wants the prevention, the investigation kept perfectly private. He doesn’t want a stranger coming to Fairtrees whose presence might be suspected as out of the ordinary. He said he had invited you. You can go fishing. One hint sneaking out that he was taking precautions against kidnaping, or killing, or blackmail, and the place would be surrounded with State Police, County Police, reporters, cameramen, newsreel operators and amateur detectives. You know what they did in the case of Major Olstrom’s child. He doesn’t want any publicity.

“He doesn’t think himself in any immediate danger so long as he is at Fairtrees, but I think he figures that something may start there and be culminated the minute he leaves the place. It’s surrounded with steel wire, with barbed slantbacks; steel grids go into the stream bed and it can all be charged with enormous voltage from the power lines. Probably is, nowadays. That fence cost him plenty of money. He wants you to nose out the direction his danger is coming from. Of course, Manning, our appropriations can’t begin to pay you your proper fees. You took on the Griffin in a sporting way, largely from a sense of public duty. Willoughby realizes you are not professionally connected with the force. He is willing to pay any amount you care to charge.”

“I’ll care to charge him plenty,” said Manning grimly. “Half of it goes into the Unemployment Fund, a quarter of it to the Police Benefit Association. The rest I’ll find use for myself. What did you tell him?”

“I told him I’d see you. Manning, except that the Griffin always named the date on which he meant to kill—and the fact that I called Dannemora this afternoon to find out he was still in the hospital, I’d think he had a finger in the pastry of this pie.”

“The Griffin only went after men who were public benefactors,” said Manning. “But you’re right. And it’ll be a public benefit to check anything happening to him. There’s been too much of that sort of thing. But I can’t go until the day after to-morrow. I have certain matters that must be attended to.”