Circle of Death

CHAPTER I LIGHTS OF DOOM

IT was evening in Manhattan. The blazing illumination of the Times Square district showed teeming throngs amid the man-made chasms. Blocked traffic was noisy with the sound of tooting horns.

A taxi twisted out of line. It negotiated a difficult right turn while pedestrians scrambled out of its path. The cab reached the clear stretch of a side street, shot along for a block, turned left through close but broken traffic, and followed an avenue a block.

Another quick left turn; the cab pulled up at the entrance to one of Manhattan’s popular low-priced hostelries — the Hotel Zenith. A pale-faced occupant alighted. He seemed nervous as he paid the driver. He puffed at a cigarette, then tossed it, half-smoked, to the sidewalk.

A big doorman in gorgeous uniform was superintending the unloading of the arrival’s luggage. A porter had stepped up to take the bags. The door of the taxi closed. The car pulled away while the man who had occupied it turned to enter the hotel.

The prospective guest of the Hotel Zenith was a man of about forty-five years. His haggard features indicated worry. His shrewd eyes looked about; his thin lips twitched nervously. Then, with an apparent effort, the man threw back his shoulders and drew himself up to his full height of nearly six feet. He paced toward the hotel lobby.

Had this man feared spying eyes? His actions indicated it. He had shown a hunted look as he had gazed about. Yet in his quick glances, he had totally ignored the person who was standing closest to him.

THE hotel doorman, bulky in his gold-braid uniform, had been watching the change of expression upon the arrival’s face. As the man from the taxi walked into the lobby, the doorman stalked behind him. Stopping as he reached a niche at the entrance of the hotel, the doorman watched the worried man cross the lobby toward the desk.

A sour grin appeared upon the doorman’s bluff face. Turning to his left, the doorman picked up a telephone with his right hand. Referring to a card that lay beneath the telephone, he put in a call to the hotel garage.

While thus engaged on regular routine work, the doorman replaced the instrument upon the ledge which it occupied. He still held the receiver in his left hand; his right, however, crept beneath the ledge. There, the doorman’s fingers encountered a little switch. They pressed it once.

His signal given, the doorman strode back to the curb to meet another arriving cab. He shouted angrily to the driver of a car who was blocking curb space reserved in front of the hotel. Routine was again the doorman’s duty, but as he went about his work, the big fellow kept casting occasional glances toward a huge electric sign that showed running, resplendent lights from atop a distant building.

That sign had clusters of white lights at each of its four corners. These lights, like the thin lines of white borders between them, were motionless. Only the wording that occupied the center of the sign showed running, changing designs and colors.

But, as the doorman watched, the corners of the sign altered their condition. White lights faded; green replaced them. The doorman, as he dispatched the cab, continued to keep his eye upon the altered sign.

Half a block away, a sandwich-board man stopped in his slow pacing. He let the painted boards sag from his shoulders while he watched the green lights in the corners of the electric sign.

Further on — by the next avenue — a taxi driver leaned from his parked cab and studied those lights intently. The cashier in a restaurant on another side street was watching the same green glow. So were others in that immediate neighborhood.

These were not chance observers. Their actions were unnoticed by the throngs that moved by them. These men — isolated individuals amid the thousands who teemed the streets about Times Square — were the only ones who showed a knowledge of the change that had occurred in the corners of the electric sign.

Lights of clustered green! A signal that kept all eyes on watch. Then came the next pronouncement from the sign. The steady border lights blinked: once — then again, again and again.

Four flashes.

The doorman grinned as he walked back to his post. The sandwich-board man turned abruptly and shambled slowly in the direction of the Hotel Zenith. The cab driver by the avenue snapped his fingers as though in response to a prospective passenger. A man with a suitcase approached the cab and entered it. The taxi pulled away.

IN the lobby of the Hotel Zenith, the nervous man who had just arrived was lighting a cigarette while he waited beside the desk. Another guest had registered; the waiting man stepped up, threw his cigarette into a receptacle, and scrawled his name upon the registration card.

“Mr. Dustin Cruett?” read the clerk.

The man nodded.

“A room high up?” inquired the clerk. “I can give you—”

“Hold it for a minute,” interrupted Cruett, in an irritable tone. “I have a telephone call to make. My bags are over there” — he nudged his thumb toward a pillar — “and I’ll be back shortly.”

The clerk turned to register another guest while Cruett strode across the lobby to a row of telephones. Reaching a booth, Cruett dropped a coin in the box and dialed a number. While his left hand held the receiver, his right was producing another cigarette from his pocket.

A busy signal. Cruett scowled. He remained in the booth, his face displaying impatience. Reaching in his right vest pocket, he produced a packet of paper matches. He struck a match and lighted his cigarette. A few puffs — Cruett reclaimed his returned coin and put in a new call.

His face gleamed as an answer came through the receiver. Cruett stamped out his cigarette and became intent as he talked across the wire.

“Hello…” Cruett’s tone was anxious. “Is Mr. Bewkel there?… No?… How soon?… I see… Yes… This is Dustin Cruett…

“He wants me to come to the house? Very well, I shall start at once. Half an hour. Mr. Bewkel will probably be back before I arrive… Yes, tell him I am on the way…”

With a confident expression on his face, Dustin Cruett left the booth and went back to the desk. There he found that the clerk had assigned him to a room on the fourteenth floor. This was satisfactory. Cruett waited while the clerk called a bell boy and handed him a key.

It was at that moment that another arrival came striding into the lobby. Like Cruett, this new guest had evidently come by taxi, for he had entered through the door from the side street. He was carrying a single bag. A bell boy approached to take it. The man waved him aside.

Shrewd-eyed and sallow, this arrival glimpsed Dustin Cruett standing by the desk. A quick shift and his gaze fell upon the suitcases by the pillar. Stepping in that direction, the sallow man deposited his own bag beside Cruett’s. He turned toward the desk just as Cruett and the bell boy headed in his direction.

OUTSIDE the Hotel Zenith, the distant sign still showed its corners of clustered green. The change, unnoticed by ordinary observers, still stood as a signal for those who knew its meaning.

The doorman watched it every now and then. So did others. To twenty pairs of eyes, those green lights were a signal that must be heeded. They were lights of doom!

Shining with ghoulish gleam, green bulbs had begun a man hunt in the most thickly thronged district of Manhattan. The four blinks of the border lights had designated the spot where the quarry was located — the Hotel Zenith.

Dustin Cruett’s nervousness had ended. The man who had registered at the Hotel Zenith did not know that lights of doom were blazing. He felt secure in the center of Manhattan, unaware of the fate that was awaiting him!