Hidden Death

CHAPTER IX THE SHADOW TAKES A HAND

THAT same evening, Detective Joe Cardona sat at a desk in headquarters. Before him lay a mass of penciled notes.

At one side was a stack of objects. The detective was puzzling over the intricacies of the three murders which had been perpetrated by some unknown killer.

Since this afternoon’s investigation, Cardona had swung completely to the theory propounded by Professor Arthur Biscayne.

He agreed, now, that the unidentified man who had met death at Harshaw’s was not an intended victim of the master mind behind the three deaths of Harshaw, Glenn, and Sutton.

The telephone rang. Professor Biscayne was on the wire. Cardona spoke.

“Tomorrow night,” he said. “Yes, professor, that will be a crucial time… Another death may be coming… Well, we can prevent it if we catch any one around the Redan Hotel.

“My men are on watch up there… Covering the mail chutes on all floors… Yes, he may drop it somewhere else, if he sends it at all.

“Very good, professor. Thanks. I’ll call you if anything develops.”

Cardona hung up the receiver and resumed his work with paper and pencil. He was studying facts; yet he was not obtaining results.

A long shadow crept across the room and fell upon the desk where Cardona was working.

The detective looked up suddenly; then he smiled indulgently as he saw Fritz, the tall, stoop shouldered janitor. The man had entered the room, armed with bucket and mop.

Fritz made no remark as he gazed dully at the detective. The man was both slow-thinking and taciturn.

“Hello, Fritz,” said the detective. “Thought you’d be gone long ago. You work all hours, don’t you?”

“Yah,” replied the janitor.

“Guess you’ve picked up the habit from the gang around here. How about it?”

“Yah.”

“Always ‘yah,’” said Cardona with a grin. “I don’t know how you’d get along without it, Fritz! Well, don’t mind me, old boy. I’m leaving in a few minutes.”

While the janitor was mopping along the wall, Cardona turned from his notations to the exhibits that lay upon the desk.

First he picked up two cigarette boxes, which he had taken from Glenn’s home. One was identified by a tag that said, “Tuxedo”; the other was marked, “Business Suit.”

Cardona studied these articles that referred to Louis Glenn. He shook his head and tossed the boxes on the desk. One slid off and landed on the floor.

Fritz heard it drop. The janitor turned and stooped slowly. He picked up the cardboard box and carried it back to the desk.

He laid it beside the one that was there, setting the box down carefully as though it were something of value.

“Handle it easy, Fritz,” laughed Cardona. “Those are exhibits. Evidence. Important. Understand?”

“Yah.”

The janitor was scratching his head as he stared at the cigarette boxes as though their very existence was beyond him. The man’s perplexity caused Cardona to chuckle.

“Trying to figure them out, eh, Fritz?” he asked. “Well, old boy, I’ve got nothing on you. I’ll let you have them, later on — in the wastebasket.

“In the meantime, I’m keeping them, even though they don’t seem to mean anything.”

To Cardona, Fritz’s head-scratching showed the man’s dumbness. He did not divine the real purpose of the action.

With his hand at the side of his head, Fritz concealed the fact that he was actually studying the cigarette boxes with keen scrutiny.

Cardona would have been amazed had he seen the sparkle in those eyes.

When Fritz turned away to resume his mopping, his expression was as listless as before. But in that brief inspection, the man had observed something which Cardona had not noticed.

One cigarette box differed slightly from the other.

Cardona spread out four envelopes. Beside each was the message which it had contained. He studied these. They were the messages which had come from the unknown killer.

THE telephone rang. While the detective turned to answer it, Fritz shambled close to the desk. His eyes noted each envelope, while his ears took in what Cardona was saying.

“Yes, Mayhew,” were the detective’s words. “Keep a close watch tonight. The apartment is important, but so is the hotel. See who mails letters — in the chute. Get me? Right.”

Fritz was moving away. Once again his amazingly alert eyes had observed something. On the end of each envelope were two tiny marks. These were details which Joe Cardona had not noticed.

The light was gone from Fritz’s eyes as he took his bucket and mop to the other side of the room.

Ten minutes went by; then came another call. Cardona’s voice showed keen interest.

“Great!” he exclaimed. “St. Louis had the right hunch, eh? Tell their man I’ll be up to see him… In less than half an hour.”

Cardona pressed the hook; then dialed the phone number of Professor Roger Biscayne. He told the psychologist the news that he had just received.

“The dead man is Max Parker,” he said. “You know, the man who was killed up at Harshaw’s… Yes… The St. Louis detective is here and he identified the body at the morgue…

“They don’t know much about Parker… He’s a yegg whom they suspected out there. The town got too hot for him.”

Finishing his conversation, Cardona gathered up the articles on the desk. Fritz had finished his mopping.

Seeing the detective preparing to leave, Fritz hobbled from the room.

“Gute Nacht, Fritz,” called Detective Cardona.

“Yah,” came the janitor’s response.

Fritz continued along the corridor. He turned into a side room and reached a locker. He opened it with a key. He removed his janitor’s attire.

Beneath it was a dark suit. Fritz laughed softly as he took a black object from the shelf of the locker. In another moment he had donned a black cloak, and his head was covered by a slouch hat.

Fritz had become The Shadow!

The man in black reached the corridor. Silently, he gained the street. He became invisible as he went into a narrow alleyway.

The real Fritz had gone home, long ago. When The Shadow wanted information from headquarters, he played the part of the laconic janitor.

Not long afterward, a well-dressed man strolled into the lobby of the Merrimac Club. He stopped at the cigar counter.

The clerk nodded. He recognized the man as Lamont Cranston, a millionaire.

“Good evening, Mr. Cranston.”

The millionaire acknowledged the greeting. He stared toward the rack where packages of cigarettes were stacked.

“What do you have in imported cigarettes?” he questioned.

The clerk brought down several boxes. One was marked with the word, “Istanbul.” It was the same brand as the cigarette which had lain upon Cardona’s desk.

“What are these?” asked Cranston.

“A special brand that Mr. Glenn used to smoke,” said the clerk solemnly. “You remember Mr. Glenn? He died a few days ago.”

“Oh, yes,” said Cranston.

“A detective was here asking me about them,” said the clerk. “He wanted to know who else bought these cigarettes. I told him no one, besides Mr. Glenn.

“A few other persons tried them — a long while ago, when I had the last lot in stock. But that was not recently, and I never noticed who bought them when we first had them.

“Mr. Glenn always insisted on this brand. I don’t think you could get them anywhere else in the city.”

Cranston pushed the Istanbul box aside, and selected a packet of a different brand. A short while later he left the club and entered a limousine that awaited him.

There, in the darkness, Cranston laughed softly as the car rolled northward. It was the same laugh that the pretended Fritz had uttered in the locker room at headquarters.

LOUIS GLENN’S apartment was deserted. It had been closed since the broker’s death. But tonight, less than an hour after Lamont Cranston had left the Merrimac Club, a light appeared in the empty apartment.

The rays of a tiny torch moved through the vacant rooms. They stopped here and there, and at one spot they rested upon an empty cigarette box.

A black-clad hand lifted the box. It was marked, “Istanbul.” It was identical with the box that had borne the tag, “Business Suit.”

The black thumb was beneath a series of Turkish characters. Eyes in the dark were reading them, as plainly as if they had been inscribed in English. Translated, the words declared:

That same statement was on the “Business Suit” cigarette box. It also appeared upon the box that Lamont Cranston had observed at the Merrimac Club.

It was, however, different from the single box that Cardona had labeled with the word, “Tuxedo.” On that one box, the Turkish characters had stated:

A soft laugh. The light went out.

A few minutes later, the mysterious presence had departed from the apartment which had once been occupied by Louis Glenn.

THERE was no one at home in the Sutton house. The lock of the front door clicked, and the door itself opened ominously.

The little light appeared and made its way across the hall to the closet where Thomas Sutton had met his unfortunate end.

There the light remained while an unseen hand opened the door and the rays enabled invisible eyes to scrutinize the interior of the closet.

The light went out. It reappeared in the living room upstairs.

Prying hands found the dead man’s check book. The stubs showed beneath the light. Each stub was considered carefully.

The first inspection finished, a hand reviewed each stub in turn, and stopped on one that bore the amount of ten dollars, with a notation “Med.”

The light was gone; the soft laugh of The Shadow rippled forebodingly through the silent room.

Some time afterward, there was a slight sound in a small, close-walled room. The noise — no more than a soft swish — was followed by the sudden appearance of a lighted lamp. Covered by a shade, the rays of the lamp were focused upon the plain top of a table. There, two white hands appeared.

They seemed to be living things — detached creatures that moved of themselves. Each wrist came from a jet-black sleeve.

The hands were long and slender, but the tapering fingers showed that they possessed great strength. Upon one finger — the third of the left hand — glowed a large, mysterious gem.

Its colors changed beneath the light. One moment it was a deep blue. Then the jewel shimmered and took on a crimson hue. It sparkled and seemed to emit shafts of flame.

The stone was a girasol called the fire opal, because of its resplendency. There was no other jewel like it in all the world.

As the girasol glimmered, the hands produced pencil and paper. The pointed fingers wrote three names: Silas Harshaw, Louis Glenn, Thomas Sutton.

Beneath these a blank space remained. The hand made a check mark beside the name of Thomas Sutton. There, it placed the letters “Med.”

Now a small pamphlet came into view. Opened, it showed a list of the members of the Merrimac Club.

A low laugh echoed as the hand checked off a name in the book. Then the fingers added a check mark beside the written name of Louis Glenn.

Beside the written name of Silas Harshaw, the hand wrote the words:

The hand paused above the written list. Running to the bottom, it inscribed another name, segregated below. The name it wrote was Arthur Wilhelm.

Then the hand drew a circle about the name of Silas Harshaw. It drew another circle about the name of Arthur Wilhelm, and connected the two with a sweeping line.

On the right of the sheet, The Shadow inscribed the names of Max Parker and Homer Briggs.

Evidently there was some connection between the cracksman who had been killed at Harshaw’s, and the servant who had disappeared after leaving the old inventor’s employ.

A phone dial clattered. The light clicked out. A low, hushed voice spoke in the darkness.

“Ready, Burbank,” it said. “Report on H.V.”

The receiver ticked as a voice spoke over the wire. The report was short and definite.

“Tomorrow night,” came the whisper of The Shadow.

The phone call was ended. All was silent in the little room. Then came a shuddering laugh that crept to every corner, and died away in a ghostly echo.

It was the laugh of The Shadow — that ominous laugh that boded ill for men of evil!