RGL e-Book Cover©
RGL e-Book Cover©
The Spider, January 1939, with "Death's Wedding March"
It was a sinister scheme arranged by the men who hoped to garner a fortune by making sweethearts of the rich and the poor. But old Doc Turner knew that oil and water cannot mix, and a killer's recipe is not the right set-up for Cupid!
GARDEN AVENUE and Morris Street run parallel lengthwise of the city and only two blocks apart—but between their denizens is fixed such a gulf as might lie between the inhabitants of separate planets.
Garden Avenue is a thoroughfare of slithering, sleek limousines; of towering cooperative apartments haughtily guarded by giants in gold-braided livery; of furred, silk-rustling women and men of affairs, impeccably attired. Morris Street is the main artery of a slum. Its traffic sounds are the juggernaut rush of overloaded trucks, the thunder of trains on the "El" trestle that bars the sun from its eternally wet cobbles. The elder of those who shamble along its cracked sidewalks are swarthy aliens shawled or overalled; the garments of the younger wistfully ape, in shoddy fabrics, cheaply sewn, the fashions of Garden Avenue.
On Garden Avenue there is a fragrance of greenery and flowers exhaled from the long, narrow park-strips dividing its wide asphalt from the hedges bordering its multiplex mansions—and from its sleek women a redolence of costly, exotic scents. Morris Street reeks with the garbage stench of fruit and vegetables fallen or discarded from the pushcarts lining its curb, with the musty miasma of unwashed bodies and sweat-saturated fabrics that is the odor of poverty.
These neighboring avenues are worlds apart, yet once they were linked by murder—and something even more grisly. If it had not been for Andrew Turner...
THE raucous cries of the hucksters had died into a midnight
rumble of their departing pushcarts, outside Turner's ancient
pharmacy on Morris Street, when the frail and feeble-seeming old
druggist turned to the sound of its opening door. The wizened
woman who entered was hatless, anxious-eyed. Her work-worn
fingers twisted the hem of the apron she wore—they were
trembling as they did so. A pulse fluttered in her corded
throat.
"She's not home yet," spilled from Sonia Tartak's colorless lips before Doc could ask her errand. "My Reba she's always home from the factory by quarter to seven o'clock, and now it's after twelve and she has not come."
A muscle twitched in the old druggist's seamed cheek, and below the faded blue of his eyes a light crawled. But his mustache, white and bushy, moved in a reassuring smile, and his voice was unperturbed. "She's probably working overtime, Sonia. I wouldn't—"
"No," the woman's tone was as unresonant as a whisper. "I go there, and it is all closed up. The watchman says everybody left at half-past six."
From fly-specked ceiling globes a grimy light filtered down over the once-white shelves and showcases, tangled in the silken silver of Doc's hair. His frame was still with a peculiar inner quiet, a hush that had a listening quality, and apprehension settled upon those two, neither daring to voice it.
"Perhaps," the druggist offered, "she went home with one of the other girls?"
"Not her. Not my Reba. She knows I wait—"
"Girls of seventeen are sometimes thoughtless."
Sonia shrugged. "From the factory I went and asked Mary Langry. They work at the same table. Mary told me Reba left as soon as the whistle blew. She said she would finish supper quick and go to a movie. Screeno was there tonight and she wanted to get there early and get a seat. She didn't wait for Becky Cohen and Hannah Winkler—they live in the same house with us. She started home alone—but she not come." The mother's face was still impassive, save for the dread in her eyes. "She's not home, Doc Turner. What can I do now?"
It was not the first time, by far, that he had been asked the question "What can I do?" To the people of Morris Street, Andrew Turner was more than the druggist on the corner. For more years than he cared to recall, he had been friend to these friendless ones, cicerone to these bewildered strangers in a strange land. He was their first resort—and their last—in their need and distress.
"Do?" The kindly hand Doc laid on Sonia Tartak's shoulder was gnarled and acid-stained, its skin translucent over the blue veins ridging it. "There isn't anything you can do. The police won't bother about missing adults till twenty-four hours after they've disappeared, and by that time it will be..." He checked the conclusion that had been in his mind—"too late." The mother finished it for him, her dread, acknowledged now, edging her words with rasping shrillness.
"She will be dead—killed like Gretchen Wunderlich! Like Johnny Marsh! Like..." The invisible clutch of her terror closed on Sonia's throat, throttling speech, but her mouth stayed open in a soundless scream and her pupils dilated till they were black windows to a soul in agony. Her body was rigid in a motionless paroxysm.
"Stop that!" Turner rapped. "Stop it!" His open hand slapped stingingly across the woman's cheek.
The stiffness went out of her at once, the madness left her eyes.
"I'm sorry," Doc said. "I had to do that. It was the only way to make you understand what I've got to say. Listen. There isn't any reason to think the same thing's happened to Reba as happened to those others. No reason at all. She's probably home now, wondering where you are." There was assurance in his voice that the pharmacist did not feel. "You wait a minute while I lock up, and I'll go with you to see."
THE street lamps of Hogbund Lane made only a feeble struggle
against the night's darkness. The Lane, cutting across from
Morris Street to the river, was walled in by the rain-streaked,
slattern facades of decrepit tenements. Dreary enough by day,
they were desolate now, their broken-stepped stoops deserted by
the usual chattering groups, curtainless windows unlighted.
In the minds of both Doc and the woman, at whose side he hurried, was the same unspoken thought. It was late, but ordinarily not too late for strolling young couples or whispering pairs in the vestibules. Yet none of these were in evidence. The young people of Morris Street's environs hastened home early these nights. It was fear that had sent them to their cheerless cubbies in these teeming warrens, fear of the strange fate that lately had stalked the eager-eyed youngsters of the slum. Reba Tartak was not the first to have unaccountably vanished in the past week. The others...
"Here's where I live," Sonia Tartak said, turning to a draggled stoop.
There was reluctance in the way she climbed the broken steps to the unlighted vestibule, as if she dreaded to shatter her last hope that her daughter might have returned. Turner pushed impatiently past her. Something bulky and soft stubbed his toes, tripping him. He went to his knees, and the hand he thrust down, to save himself from the jar of that fall, found cold flesh.
"Sonia," he said quietly. "My wallet dropped out of my pocket. It's down there on the sidewalk. Will you get it for me, please?"
The woman hesitated, started down again. Doc fumbled in his pocket, fished out a box of safety matches, struck one. He shielded the tiny yellow flame with his body—from Sonia Tartak's view that upon which the wan, uncertain light fell... The tumbled brunette hair. The round, high-cheekboned countenance, ageless now with a dreadful pallor, its eyes glazed and sightless, its lips grey-blue and frozen in a grimace of pain that was now ended forever.
Doc's nostrils flared to a faint odor of peach kernels. His look slid along Reba Tartak's crumpled young body.
"Cyanide," the old man murmured. Abruptly he peered more intently at that closed hand, reached for it. He blew out the match, got to his feet, went slowly down the stoop steps.
"Never mind the wallet." Doc's arm slid across the mother's scrawny shoulder. "Listen to me, Sonia. I have something to tell you. Listen, and try to be brave..."
"IT wasn't suicide. There was no container in the vestibule,
or anywhere around. Reba Tartak was murdered like the others,
left for dead. Contrary to popular belief, cyanide does not
always kill instantly. It didn't in her case. She recovered
sufficiently to stagger as far as the stoop of her home, to climb
it. She had not been lying there very long. Her flesh was so cold
when I put my hand on it because of the unique action of cyanide
on the blood, withdrawing it to the stopped heart."
The morning light filtering into Doc Turner's drugstore was harsh, garish. It brought out, cruelly, his every wrinkle. He was an old man. But there was no weakness about him—the look in his eyes was bleak and dangerous.
"She makes the fourth in a week."
The youth who said that was squatly built, wide-shouldered, his hair the reddish orange of a carrot's skin. The freckles dusting his broad-planed countenance, the quirk at the corners of his mouth, spoke of ebullient good nature.
But now there was no humor in his brooding eyes.
Jack Ransom was less than half Doc Turner's age, but he was his only real confidant.
He was the old druggist's fist, his good right hand in countless reprisals against the human buzzards who prey on the helpless poor.
"The fourth." Turner's slender fingers drummed on the edge of the showcase near which the two stood. "Tony Lucano was playing baseball Sunday. On his way home with the team he remembered he'd left his catcher's glove in the playground locker room. He went back to get it—never got there, never came back. Monday afternoon his body was found floating in the river. He'd been drowned—'accident,' the police said."
Doc went on. "That same Monday afternoon Gretchen Wunderlich went down in the cellar to bring up coal for her mother. The pail she had carried turned up in the hallway, but Gretchen was nowhere... Wednesday morning, they found her in another cellar, ten blocks from her home, hanging from a rafter. The police called it suicide. But by that time Johnny Marsh was missing, as mysteriously as the others. It wasn't till Friday that a W. P. A. worker in Eveside Park found his corpse under a bush—"
"Good Lord!" Ransom's exclamation interrupted. "I almost forgot... Look at this." He jerked a newspaper from his pocket, spread it on the showcase top. "I just bought this and was bringing it in to you when your news about Reba Tartak made me forget it."
Huge black letters made a streamer across the top of the page:
SOCIALITE TIED TO KILLING
DISTRICT ATTORNEY QUESTIONS
GARDEN AVENUE DEB
Doc's fingers tightened on the paper's margins.
The mystery of the knifed corpse discovered Thursday in Eveside Park flared into sensation tonight when the driver of a hansom cab recognized a picture of Alicia Wyatt, wealthy debutante, printed on the Reflector's society page, as a portrait of a girl who, in company with the dead young man, rented his hack for a pre-dawn drive into the park shortly before the discovery of the body.
According to the informant, the couple dismissed his vehicle near the murder-spot. Miss Wyatt, summoned to the District Attorney's office for questioning, denied having been in the park, flatly denied knowing John Marsh, the slain youth—but refused to reveal her whereabouts from the time, early the evening before the killing, when she left a downtown studio party, unaccompanied.
Prosecutor Bolton released Miss Wyatt on her own recognizance. When questioned as to his reason for this, he asserted that the unsupported evidence of a senile hack-driver did not justify him in accusing of murder a young woman of Miss Wyatt's position. He asserted, however, that the police are tracing her movements for the rest of the (continued on page eleven)
"'A young woman of Miss Wyatt's position'," Jack quoted bitterly, while the older man riffled pages to the continuation of the story. "That's the payoff. If she was a kid from around here, instead of a 'débutramp' from Garden Avenue, they'd have her locked up."
"Alicia Wyatt's father is the president of the Federal City Bank, son," Doc cut in dryly. "And... where the devil is the...?" He broke off as, looking for the continuation of the article he was reading, a bold-faced subhead in the center of a gossip column caught his eye.
GARDEN AVENITES JUMP JOYFESTS
It was perhaps pure accident that made the old man read the item under that heading—or did the deep-laid instinct of the man-hunter point it out to him? More likely, some glimmering of the weird pattern of crime that linked Garden Avenue to Morris Street already lay at the back of his shrewd brain, though consciously he was not, as yet, aware of it.
Garden Avenue hostesses are perturbed at repeated failures of pet glamour boys and gals to show at must parties. Lloyd Foster is the latest offender. He left a hole in Dowager Vestbilt's Savoy Hotel Jingalee last nite. The socialioness is rabid. No doubt Lloydy will excusephone this morn. But it's ten-to-one he won't say where he was during the wee hours. The others who've pulled the stunt—Rosemarie Lanning, Sabbatheve, Gary Hale on Washday nite—claimed sudden illness. But your correspondent's spies report both wafted home on bosoms of cold grey dawns, dazed and dithering. Gilded pops and moms wery wroth but hush-hushing escapades. Are they epidemic? Will someone skip Debleague's Satnite Terpsitrot at Royal? If you're agog, see morrow's colyum.
Doc looked up at Jack with eyes that did not see him. "It
checks," the old man muttered. "It's impossible—but it
checks."
"What checks?" the youth asked. "What..." The rattle of the store door's brass latch cut him off. The rattle continued, but the door did not stir. Doc went to it, pulled it open.
A knee-length nightgown was the only clothing on the tot who stood outside. The tiny face was wet with tears, the black eyes round and big. A spoon was clutched in one little hand.
"Where's Jinny?" the four-year old demanded. "I'm hungry and Jinny ain't come back." A sob lumped the small throat.
"Hold everything." Jack had the youngster in his arms. "What's all this about your Jenny? Where hasn't she come back from?" Over the boy's clinging brown curls his eyes sought Doc's, and there was consternation in them.
"From the grocery. She went for bread, a long time ago, for breakfast, and she ain't come back. I'm hungry."
"Jen Gaffney lives alone with Pat," Turner said, very quietly. "She leaves her little brother with neighbors while she goes to work in a laundry. It's the other end of town, and she has to get there at seven-thirty, so they have their breakfast at six. It's after nine now. No wonder Pat is hungry."
"You think—"
"I think I'm going to give Pat his breakfast while you go and look for Jen Gaffney. I don't think you'll find her. I think we can now answer the question in this column." Doc tapped the paper on the showcase with a trembling finger. "There will be someone missing from the Debutante League's dance tonight, and it will be a young man."
LITTLE Patsy Gaffney had been fed and delivered to the
neighbors who were accustomed to take care of him while his
sister was at work. Jack Ransom was back in Doc Turner's
store.
"There's no sign of her, anywhere," he reported through white lips. "The janitress saw her go through the backyard, taking a shortcut to Ginsburg's grocery on Hogbund Lane. She never got there. No one has seen her since."
"No one," Doc said slowly, "will see her again, alive—"
"No!" Ransom groaned. "That swell, brave kid—"
"Unless I can do something between now and tonight to save her," the old man continued. He was taking a shabby topcoat from its hook on the wall. "Turner's drugstore is closing for the day." He slipped into the coat, started rubbing a rusty derby with its sleeve.
"Where are you going?"
"To Garden Avenue."
"Tradesmen are required to use the rear entrance."
A huge grey uniform, massive with silver and gold braid, was a wall in front of Doc Turner, who appeared smaller than ever, and shabbier, in the marble splendor of the Vendome Hall's lobby. The owner of the uniform stared over the top of Doc's rusted derby, distaste and hauteur struggling for mastery of the doorman's pinkly shaven face.
"I prefer to use this entrance." Something in the way the druggist said it made the flunky look down at him—and step aside. "Please announce Andrew Turner to Mr. Lloyd Foster. At once."
"Yes, sir. Beg pardon, sir." The Cerberus of the Vendome heaved away to a switchboard set into the sidewall of the lobby, plugged in a phone cord. "What is the name, sir?"
"Andrew Turner."
"Mr. Andrew Turner to see Mr. Lloyd Foster," the doorman said into the telephone's mouthpiece. And then his pink face was turning to Doc.
"Mr. Foster is not seeing anyone this morning," he reported crisply.
"Mr. Foster will see me," the pharmacist replied, speaking very softly. "Just tell him I have something he lost last night, at about ten o'clock."
The flunky repeated the message. There was a wait. Then: "Mr. Foster instructs me to have you go right up."
The bedchamber of the duplex apartment was as big as the drugstore on Morris Street, and its ceiling was higher. Severely masculine though they were, the cost of its furnishings would have purchased five stores like Turner's, lock, stock and barrel.
The man sitting up in the big bed was young, but there was strength in the set of his jaw, intelligence in the width of his forehead. The lines on his face were of weariness, of pain perhaps, but not of dissipation.
The servant who had admitted Doc went out, closing the chamber door. "The thing you lost is a signet ring," the pharmacist said. "It has your initials on it, and it can undoubtedly be proven to be yours."
"Let me have it," young Foster demanded. There was a tautness of desperation in his voice. "I'll pay you what it cost me— and that's plenty."
Doc shook his head. "You don't have to pay me anything. But you can't have it until you tell me where you lost it, and how."
Foster's lips moved, but no sound came from them. His pupils were wide.
"That is little enough to ask," Turner's soft voice said. "Surely you can tell me where you were between seven and twelve, last night."
The youth's hands closed, so tightly the nails seemed to be digging into their palms. "I don't know," he jerked out. "If it meant my life, I couldn't answer that question."
Doc nodded, as though he had expected the amazing response. "It may mean exactly that," he murmured. "The person from whose hand I took the ring is dead, murdered—between seven and twelve, last night."
"Mur... God!" Horror in that whisper. Horror, and a searing terror in the eyes of the young man who muttered, "Heaven help me."
"You'll need His help, I'm thinking, and mine, too. Suppose you tell me the last thing you do recall." Andrew Turner believed the youth. A keen student of human nature could not but believe him, looking into those tortured eyes. "I want to help you, but you've got to help me help you."
Lloyd Foster's brow wrinkled. "I... was coming from the races. My car's laid up, and I took the Long Island special. A fellow sharing my seat got friendly. He had a flask, and I took a couple of drinks. Smooth stuff, but it must have been damned powerful, because by the time we got to Penn Station everything was getting blurred. I've got a hazy remembrance of his getting into a taxi with me... The next thing, I was in the lobby downstairs and Johnson was telling me it was five in the morning. The hours between just weren't."
"Ah," murmured Doc.
"My first thought was, of course, that I'd been drugged and robbed. But my roll—and I'd won plenty—was intact. The only thing missing was my signet ring." Foster hesitated.
"Yes. Go on."
"That—that's all," the young man repeated.
"It is not. You wouldn't be so terrified this morning, if it were—so anxious to get that ring back." There was steel now under the velvet of Doc's tone. "Unless you explain that, I'll turn it over to the police, with a statement of where I found it."
Foster stared at him for a long moment. "You win," he sighed, finally. "My telephone"—he gestured to the instrument on the night table beside him—"rang half an hour after I got into bed. The caller's voice was palpably disguised. He said, 'The trick you pulled tonight will cost you exactly twenty grand to hush up. Get it ready, in cash. We'll let you know in twenty-four hours where and how to pay it over. Meantime, to convince you we've got the goods on you, look over your morning mail.' And then the wire went dead."
"What was in the mail?"
"This." Foster twisted, brought a square of stiff paper out from under his pillow, held it up so that Doc could see it. It was a photograph. It showed Foster in a cheap, garish room, his arm around a half-clad girl. The girl was Reba Tartak. A newspaper lay on the bed, open, and Doc knew by the headlines it was a Friday evening final. It irrevocably placed the young man in the murdered girl's company after she had dropped from sight. In default of an alibi, it would take a very clever lawyer to save the youth from the chair.
"They have the negative, of course," the druggist remarked. "And they probably have even more damning evidence against you than that—perhaps a bottle of cyanide with your fingerprints on it."
"I'll pay," Foster husked. "I'll have to pay them." He thrust down the covers, leaped from bed. "I'll call Dad in Palm Beach and—"
"No," Turner rapped, sharply. "There's time for that. We'll have a try at stopping them. We must—"
"Stopping? But they've got me dead to rights. What can—"
Doc nodded. "They've got you in their net, all right, and they've got Alicia Wyatt. Rosemarie Lanning and Gary Hale have probably already paid them. But they're going on. There will be other youngsters of Garden Avenue who will lose hours out of their lives and wake to find themselves in the coils of their extortionists. There will be other girls and boys from Morris Street killed to make murder-frames.
"There's one girl now—slender, black-haired, dancing-eyed—in their clutches. Her big-eyed little brother, who will have to go to an orphanage if his sister dies. If Jen Gaffney dies, Lloyd Foster, you die too, for the poisoning of Reba Tartak. Your ring will see to that—your ring that is safe in my hands, and cannot be bought from me with all the money in the world."
Foster straightened. He was unshaven, in pajamas, his feet bare on the silky rug. Yet there was a certain dignity about him.
"You do not have to threaten me, Mr. Turner," he said, "now that I understand that I am not alone concerned in this thing. All you have to do is tell me how I can help."
Doc made a sweeping gesture with his hand. "I apologize," he said. "I should have been more frank with you, but I had to be certain that what I suspected was true." He sighed. "If we could only wait till tomorrow—till they contact you again— but that will be too late to save Jennie. Look here. The fact that they've kidnapped her indicates that some young man of your set is booked to disappear sometime today or tonight. Is there any way we can figure who it might be?"
Foster shook his head. "There are so many who've got enough to make it worthwhile. Why, a dozen of the boys who'll be at Connie Peters' dinner tonight, in a private dining room at the Royal, are each good for up to fifty thousand in their own right. They—"
"Wait!" Doc cut in. "I've got an idea."
ONE of the waiters—at the pre-dance dinner Constance
Peters was giving before the Debutante League's big dance—
was terribly slow. He was a little man with white hair, a bushy
white mustache, and faded blue eyes that had an uncomfortable
habit of peering into the faces of the people he served as though
he were trying to read something there. Connie was annoyed by
him, and she was annoyed because the dinner was falling flat.
That wasn't the waiter's fault, of course. It was the fault of Alicia Wyatt, for one. Usually the life of any party, Alicia wasn't saying a word, wasn't drinking anything. She sat there white as a sheet underneath her rouge, just tasting her food.
Of course, with that business in the papers this morning, Alicia might be expected to be upset. But Rosemarie Lanning had no reason to be a wet blanket. Nor did Gary Hale or Lloyd Foster. The three of them might be models for the mummies the Egyptians used to have at their feasts, but really, even the Egyptians had only one mummy at a banquet. Three were too many.
It would be more like a funeral than a banquet, if it weren't for Ken Burton. Connie decided she was going to be very, very nice to the blond-haired, fresh-faced boy from whom was flowing an unceasing stream of jokes and wisecracks. He, for all his money, was considered a trifle gauche, but he was a lifesaver tonight and... Oh, damn! What did that bellboy want, coming in and interrupting Ken just as he was in the middle of one of his best stories?
The conversation around the long table went on, but quite unconsciously it dropped a few notes, and Connie could hear the bellboy clearly. "Telephone call for you, Mr. Burton."
"Okay," Ken said. "Have an instrument plugged in here."
"Sorry, sir, but the caller particularly asked that this not be done. She intimated you would wish the conversation to be private. If you will be so good as to step just outside, to the booth in the reception room—"
"Private, huh?" Burton smirked, rising. "Why won't those gals leave me alone?" He looked around for approval, then followed the bellboy out.
Connie's slipper tapped the floor angrily under the board. This is the last time, she thought, that he will be invited to one of my parties... and the last time I have a party here. Look at that old waiter, wandering out through the main entrance of the room. What is he going out there for, anyway?
Doc Turner didn't go any farther than the screen that was set across the dining room's entrance, to screen Constance Peters' party from the gaze of those who might pass the open door of the antechamber. The screen was longer than the entrance opening, so that he was hidden from the diners at the same time that he was concealed from Kenneth Burton, who was crossing to the telephone booth against a side wall, looking puzzled.
Besides Burton, the anteroom was deserted. It was Doc's turn to look puzzled.
The blond youth reached the booth, pulled open its door. A gurgling exclamation came from him, and Doc saw a hand on his wrists, jerking him into the cubicle. There was brief sound of a scuffle...
Ken Burton came out of the booth again. His yellow hair was a little ruffled, his white tie a bit awry; otherwise there seemed nothing wrong with him—except for the mechanical, slight stiffness in the way he walked. It had taken hold of him in the half-minute he'd been out of the old man's sight. The wine he'd been drinking might account for that, for the curious, unfocused appearance of his eyes. But it could not account for the other man, immaculate in tails, a topcoat over his arm and a black fedora in his hand, who came out of the booth behind Burton.
The latter was not turning back to the dining room. He was going out into the main lobby. He was stopping at the counter of the cloakroom and presenting a check. He was taking his hat and coat from the girl, and the other man, the one who had been in the booth, was waiting for him.
DOC straightened his own black bow-tie, glanced down to make
certain that his borrowed tuxedo showed no soup stains. He was
blessing the powers that be that there is no difference between
the garb of a waiter and that of a gentleman.
Burton and the man from the booth were moving away. Turner pulled a black felt hat out of the waistband of his trousers. It was Foster's, and it had cost twenty-five dollars. And when the old man put it on his head, it showed no signs of crushing. He went across the antechamber's floor and out into the main lobby.
The high-ceilinged, great room was a swirling flower bed of bright-faced, bright-costumed debs and their black-clad escorts, arriving for the league's dance. Burton and his companion were far across it, nearing the revolving doors. Doc moved after them, and he was suddenly aware that someone was walking beside him.
The man said, "Hello!" and grabbed Doc's hand as if to shake it.
Doc felt a sharp sting in the ball of his thumb, and then it felt as though a lump were growing there. He glanced down in time to see the hypodermic syringe, emptied of the clear, white fluid it was injecting into his veins, vanish up the man's sleeve. The man's fingers were holding Doc's wrist in a grip of steel.
"Say, 'Hello, Leland'," the man whispered fiercely. "Say it loud."
"Hello, Leland," Doc Turner said aloud. Now he was walking along beside the man, who was tall and thin-bodied in his tuxedo, thin-faced, with eyes like black needle points. Doc walked stiffly, mechanically, and his eyes stared straight ahead, slightly unfocused. Leland put his hand on Doc's elbow, as if to guide someone who was a little intoxicated. He steered Doc across the lobby and through the revolving doors and out on the sidewalk.
A taxi slid up along the curb. "Get in," Leland commanded. Turner got in, and Leland got in alongside him. The taxi started off without Leland's telling the driver anything.
"It's a good thing I was hanging around to cover Fenton," Leland said, "wasn't it?" His voice rose sharply on the question.
"Yes," Doc mumbled, "it was a good thing."
"For us," the man clarified, chuckling. "But not for you." There was something grim in that chuckle, something coldly ominous.
He wasn't holding a gun against Andrew Turner's side. He wasn't bothering to tie the druggist up, or gag him, or hamper him in any way. He just sat back in his seat and watched the lights of Garden Avenue flick past. The taxi turned a corner and ran east toward the river. Doc must have known what was waiting for him at the end of the taxi's journey. He must have known Leland didn't intend to let him get out of this alive. But he just sat there, quite calmly, staring straight ahead. Even when the cab was stopped by a red light and a police car ranged alongside of it, he didn't cry out, didn't make a move to save himself.
When the cab stopped, in a lightless alley near the waterfront, Leland told Doc to get out, and he did. Leland told him to wait, and he waited, there in the alley, while Leland's footfalls thudded on the wooden porch of one of those decrepit old mansions that moulder away behind the great warehouses that have risen on what once were their lawns, and which slope down to the river.
Leland called to him, and Doc walked up those steps, his legs moving with the stiff jerkiness of an automaton, of a body that no longer had a brain to direct it.
He went through an oblong that was only black against the lighter black of the ancient mansion's wall—into the dusty, damp mustiness of verminous rotten wood. He heard a door close behind him, and then a bolt rattled. Leland's touch on his elbow turned him to the right. A vertical line of yellow brightness sliced the black ahead of Doc, widened at once into blinding light through a doorway. By the time the old man's vision cleared, he was inside the room out of which the light came.
DOC wasn't the only one inside that room. Ken Burton was
there, standing rigid and unseeing at its center, with the man
Fenton, who had taken Burton out of the hotel. Leland was closing
the door through which Doc had just come. And Jennie Gaffney was
there.
She was sitting on a rumpled bed against the wall—the same bed that had been in the photo Lloyd Foster had. Her black hair tumbled over her shoulders, and those shoulders were bare, her waist hanging loosely from them, torn away. Her pert-featured face was utterly still, vacuous. Her eyes were the eyes of someone dead.
But her bosom rose and fell, very slowly. She was not dead... not yet.
Jen Gaffney and Ken Burton and Andrew Turner might have been three wax dummies in that room—from the still way they stood, the glazed unseeing look of their eyes. But the man called Fenton was no dummy. He whirled to Leland, an angry flush mounting in his sallow cheeks.
"Who is this?" he demanded, his black mustached lips lifting in a snarl.
"Just a wise guy who was following you and the boyfriend," Leland replied, grinning. "I picked him up in the lobby of the Royal and brought him along. Thought you might be interested."
Fenton swung to Doc, his eyes narrowing. "I remember him," he muttered. "He's the druggist up there on Morris Street. He's got a rep for mixing into things that don't concern him. Well, this is the last time he'll mix into anything."
A camera stood on a tripod in front of the bed where Jen Gaffney sat. A flash bulb was clipped to one leg of the tripod— the kind that works with dry cells in its handle. Black cloth was nailed over the two windows in the room. The light came from an oil lamp standing on an unpainted kitchen table. On that table were also a bottle with a colorless liquid in it that, even corked, had the smell of peach kernels; a slender, sharp knife; and a blue automatic.
Leland was looking at this array of death. "Which do we use on him?" he asked.
Fenton's lip lifted in what he might have meant for a smile. "We don't use any of them," he muttered. "Not us." He came around to the blond youth. "Burton," he snapped, "grab that gun!"
Ken reached out, angularly. His fingers closed on the automatic's butt. "Now shoot the old man," Fenton commanded.
The gun came up...
"No!" Doc yelled, suddenly alive. "No, Burton! Give it to me." He jumped forward, had the automatic out of the blond boy's hand as it reached toward him, was whirling and covering the two plotters with it. "Get your arms up over your heads," he snapped. And then, as the couple, consternation in their faces, obeyed, he smiled humorlessly. "The trouble with scopolamine, gentlemen, is that while someone under its influence loses his memory, and obeys any direction he's given till its effects wear off— he obeys the last direction given him."
"You... you got..." Leland muttered.
"A big dose of it," Doc finished for him. "That's right. But I'd figured your scheme out beforehand. How you were getting hold of these wealthy youngsters, stealing hours from them with the stuff, framing them in those stolen hours with the murder of other youngsters you were snatching from among my children—the children of Morris Street. How you were blackmailing the Garden Avenue kids. It was a beautiful scheme, and I knew that the ones who'd worked it out would be clever enough to cover themselves.
"So, as a precaution, I took an antidote to the stuff you used just before I started to follow you out of the Royal, an antidote which in itself is a narcotic. Morphine. I wasn't ever under the influence of your drug, Leland. I was just acting that way so you'd lead me here—to the girl I was determined to save, to Jennie Gaffney."
"Yes," Jen's high, set voice said behind Doc, at the mention of her name. "What—"
"The knife, Jen!" Fenton shouted. "Grab it! Stick it into him!"
Doc whirled at the bed-creaking sound—Jennie already had the knife in her hand, was leaping at him. He had a gun, but he couldn't shoot, couldn't kill the girl he'd dared so much to save. The sharp metal sliced for Doc's throat. His gun barrel knocked down the girl's wrist, saved him, but the killers had sprung on him, their weight crashing him to the floor.
Doc was prostrate, and Fenton's knee was digging agonizingly into his chest. Leland was picking up the automatic with a handkerchief-wrapped hand, was turning to give it to Ken Burton, who all this time had been standing motionless, voiceless— at the lack of some command to animate him. He heard that command now. "Take this. Aim at the old man on the floor and put a bullet through his brain."
The blued gun-barrel lifted, in a steady, machine-like hand... then glass crashed and cloth ripped! Doc heaved Fenton from him with all his strength. There was the sound of an explosion and a limp body flattening him. Then a berserk redhead leaped into the room, from the smashed window, lunged across it to hammer Leland down with sledge-hammer fists. Then came sudden silence.
"Doc!" Jack Ransom's anxious cry broke that silence. "Are you all right?"
"Quite, son." The white-haired pharmacist chuckled, pushing the inanimate corpse from him and sitting up. "It was this fine-feathered buzzard who got the bullet intended for me. But how on earth did you turn up here?"
THE youth glowered down at him. "You don't think I was going
to let you go projecting off all by yourself, do you? I've been
on your tail all day. I was riding the back of the taxi that
brought you here, and I was listening outside that window while
you kidded these birds along." He looked around at the two
others, Burton standing statuesque with the automatic limp at his
side, Jennie Gaffney as lifeless, with the knife in her hand.
"What are we going to do about this couple?"
"Nothing," Doc said. "We'll get them home, and they'll wake up tomorrow with no recollection at all of what happened here. What's worrying me is what we're going to do about Leland. We can't turn him over to the police without making a lot of trouble for four youngsters who murdered and do not know it, but we can't let him get away unpunished by the law."
"You don't have to worry about that, Doc," Jack answered, somberly. "He's gone before a greater Judge than any human one. His neck's broken, and that's queer. I don't think I hit him hard enough to do that."
"Perhaps you did," Doc Turner murmured. "Or perhaps, son, that Judge you mentioned decided that he had done harm enough, and added His greater strength to yours."