Death Sleep

CHAPTER III THE SHADOW DEDUCTS

CLARK DORING and his wife proved to be an excellent pair of witnesses. Despite the fact that they had been beyond a closed door, their description of events within this apartment was both graphic and illuminating. It was Doring who told the story in accurate detail, while Mrs. Doring affirmed the truth of her husband’s statements.

“An odd fact about the commotion,” remarked Doring, as he finished the preliminary details. “The noise stopped after I had pounded rather heavily. It ended with uncanny suddenness.”

“So you believe someone heard you?” questioned Barth.

“That is what I thought at the time,” replied Doring. “But afterward, I changed my opinion. The noise did not stop while I was hammering at the door. It finished just as I was about to beat away again.”

“Ah!” interjected Barth.

“From then on there was silence,” resumed Doring. “I rapped after an interval of about one minute; then I waited another minute and pounded. After another pause, I was about to knock again when the telephone commenced to ring.”

“Then you waited?”

“Yes. To see if someone answered. I thought for a moment that someone had done so. There was an intermission in the ringing; but it resumed again.”

“There’s a point, commissioner,” put in Cardona. “Someone could have answered that phone. Picked up the receiver and let it down again.”

“But I would have heard footsteps,” insisted Doring.

“How do you know?” demanded Cardona, sharply.

“There is no rug in the entry,” explained Doring. “I have visited here before; whenever Tanning has answered the door, his approach has been quite audible. The telephone is almost at the door.”

“Proceed,” ordered Barth. “The pause in the ringing is not an important point, Cardona. It requires no explanation. What happened next, Mr. Doring?”

“The ringing continued,” replied the witness.

“With another pause,” added his wife. “Like the first one — quite brief.”

“You see?” Barth turned to Cardona. “That proves my opinion. Proceed, Mr. Doring.”

“When the ringing suddenly ceased,” stated Doring, “I told Mabel — my wife — to summon the elevator operator. When the elevator arrived, Mr. Brooks stepped off. We told him and the operator about the mystery. I went to the front apartment with Mr. Brooks and called detective headquarters.”

“Very well.” Barth began to pace back and forth across the room. He paused to study the card table, cocking his head as he did so. He adjusted his spectacles and turned to Cardona.

“Everything is as you found it?” inquired the commissioner, sharply.

“Yes,” replied Cardona, “except for the victims. The window was open, commissioner.”

Barth turned in the direction indicated. He could see the outline of the balcony rail against the sky that showed above the parapet of the warehouse.

“A balcony,” observed the commissioner. “Did you inspect there, Cardona?”

“Yes. No sign of anybody. We made an inspection up from the bottom — using a man that the sergeant posted down there — and we didn’t find a trace of any intruder.”

“Hm-m-m.” Barth removed his spectacles and polished them, blinking owlishly as he did so. “Well, the evening has been quite warm for this season. An opened window would be expected. Have you searched the other apartments on this floor?”

“Yes,” responded Cardona. “There are four, altogether. Two have no occupants; the superintendent has the keys and he let us in. Nothing wrong in any of them.”

“This one and two others,” observed Barth, wisely, as he put on his pince-nez. “That makes only three. What about the fourth?”

“Mr. Brooks lives there. We looked around thoroughly. Nobody hiding. I don’t see how any outsider could have been in this, commissioner — and yet I—”

“Yet what?”

“The telephone. It must have been a dialed call, the way Mr. and Mrs. Doring describe it. I can’t see why it made those two breaks. No one could have been responsible—”

“Preposterous!” interjected Barth. “Every iota of testimony points to the contrary, Cardona. Someone must have approached the telephone to touch it. Mr. Doring would have heard him.”

“Someone could have been there to begin with.”

“Then Mr. Doring would have heard him move away.”

Cardona was silent. Barth’s testy comment damaged the detective’s theory.

CONVINCED that no one had been in the room — except, of course, the victims — Cardona began to realize that he was only complicating matters. Having squelched the detective, Barth raised his head imposingly.

“We are dealing,” he declared, “with a remarkable mystery that must be solved by science; not by the law. We have encountered the phenomenon of four persons suddenly struck by an unknown ailment which Cardona has aptly described as a ‘death sleep.’ The victims of this amazing malady are receiving medical attention.

“We shall examine the contents of these glasses here upon the table. Possibly some toxic substance was surreptitiously introduced. A chemical analysis will answer that question. But I feel certain, in advance, that the liquids will show nothing extraordinary.

“I base this assumption upon the fact that the victims were overcome simultaneously. As you can observe, all were not drinking. There are only two glasses upon the table at present. Were this an ordinary case of foul play, the persons would have succumbed one by one. It remains a strange case; and we must depend upon the medical authorities for their answer.”

Finished with his statements, Wainwright Barth reached for the notations that Cardona had prepared. The commissioner read them aloud. The notes consisted of statements by witnesses, in which the time of the peculiar occurrence had been established as precisely midnight. Barth checked on other details. The party had apparently been in progress since eight o’clock. Doring and his wife, leaving for the theater at that hour, had received a call from Tanning asking them to stop in when the show was over.

“The death sleep,” commented Barth, as he dismissed the witnesses and prepared to leave. “An apt title, Cardona. I believe that I shall go to the Talleyrand Hospital and view the victims. Let me state again, however, that we are dealing with a malady. This mystery has naught to do with crime.

“Motive seems absent. This apartment is isolated; no one could have gained access and departed unobserved. The presence of persons in the hallway — people who heard sounds of life; then silence — is proof that crime has no connection.”

A few minutes later, the apartment was deserted. The bridge lamp had been turned off. Darkness was broken only by the dull glow of the skyline beyond the warehouse. It was then that blackness obscured a portion of the window. The form of The Shadow moved into the apartment.

THE SHADOW had heard all the statements. The probing ray of a tiny flashlight was his means of checking on the details. Gloved fingers touched the surface of the card table. They lifted; the cloth seemed to restrain them slightly.

The same effect resulted when The Shadow stooped to the floor and examined a rug just beyond the table. The bare floor, however, produced no such effect. It was only in the vicinity of the table that The Shadow discovered this slight trace of stickiness.

Yet as he traced, The Shadow discovered that the area formed a wide circle. Its center was not the table itself, but a spot just to one side and beyond. The wall at the right of the room, looking in from the window, was a trifle sticky to a point three feet above the floor.

When The Shadow stood at the center point of this odd circle, he found himself facing directly toward the window. The card table was a slight space away from that line. A soft laugh came from The Shadow’s hidden lips. The cloaked form moved to the window, through the opening and to the balcony.

The patrol had been ended below. Yet The Shadow did not descend. Instead, he rose upon the rail, grasped the bottom of a balcony above and swung up to the next floor. Outside the window of a darkened apartment, he stared across the alleyway.

The roof of the warehouse was visible from here. The Shadow spied a trapdoor opening that showed beneath the glare from the sky. Again the laugh as The Shadow looked beyond the parapet. It was less than twenty feet from warehouse to apartment building.

The Shadow descended. He resorted to the suction cups after he had passed the third-floor balcony. He merged with the darkness of the paved space between the buildings. From then on, The Shadow’s course was untraceable.

A CLICK in a darkened room. Bluish light shone upon a polished table. The Shadow was in his sanctum. A white hand began to move from the darkness; holding a pen, it inscribed words upon a sheet of paper. Written inscriptions faded as the blue ink dried. Such was the way with the special fluid that The Shadow used when putting his deductions on paper.

The first jotted words were notations of the testimony that The Shadow had heard. Then came agreement that no one had entered Tanning’s apartment. After that, The Shadow marked down the result of his own findings.

Outside factor.

The Shadow was thinking of the warehouse roof. He was visualizing a lurker there. The opened window was an easy target for the projection of some substance from the parapet. The Shadow knew that this alone could account for the simultaneous effect that had been produced upon the victims.

Gaseous substance.

This was a logical assumption. The stickiness had indicated a wide range. A disintegrating bomb, loaded with poisonous gas, could well have overpowered the people at the card table. The interval between that occurrence and the arrival of rescuers had given the atmosphere time to clear.

A soft laugh from The Shadow’s lips. Visualizing the person upon the roof, The Shadow could see two reasons why he had chosen to attack from that range. First, because it made entry into the apartment unnecessary; second, because it kept the attacker free from the effects of the gas itself. The Shadow’s next statement was a follow-up.

Choice of victims.

Nothing indicated any reason for an enemy to overpower the four persons who had been in the apartment. It followed, therefore, that the deed had been of an experimental nature. This fitted with The Shadow’s deductions. No better spot could have been chosen for a test.

The attacker had evidently found it necessary to keep out of range of the gas. That meant the tossing of a bomb. Why had he picked this one apartment? The answer was simple — to The Shadow. Only apartments on the fifth floor of the Vanderpool were accessible to the bomb-tosser. Only two of those apartments were tenanted; and of the two, only Tanning’s had been occupied this evening. Handley Brooks had not returned until after midnight.

The telephone calls.

Again, the whispered laugh. The Shadow had correctly analyzed the ringing that Doring had heard. Cardona had been right, the bell should not have made its pauses. But the detective had failed to guess the truth.

Those calls had been prearranged to follow the zero hour at which a lurker had tossed his projectile, namely, at midnight. There had been three calls — not one — but all by the same person. The man on the roof had not waited to see the effects of his work. Instead, he had relied upon some other worker.

That person had dialed Tanning’s number, probably from a pay station. Receiving no response, he had hung up, waited a few seconds, then put in another call, perhaps from a different booth. He had again hung up; then repeated the procedure.

In this manner, he had assured himself that the victims had succumbed. He had used three calls to be positive that he was ringing the correct number. Thus the effect of the experiment had been learned. The Shadow laughed as he wrote down the name of Handley Brooks and crossed it out.

The arrival of Brooks might have meant complicity. Brooks could have come to see if the scheme had worked. But the telephone calls cleared him. They proved that a simpler and less dangerous system had been used to check up on results.

The location.

With these words, The Shadow linked his thoughts to his first written statement. Why had Tanning and his guests been overpowered? Why had these four been chosen? The accessibility of the apartment did not account entirely for it. There were many other places in New York where victims could have been found.

WAS it random choice; or did it have a meaning? The fact that the Vanderpool Apartments were located close to a hospital had resulted in a prompt and definite removal of the victims. This was a point that impressed The Shadow. His soft laugh indicated that he intended to observe events at the Talleyrand Hospital.

Motive. Crime.

There were the final words. They disagreed with the decision of Commissioner Wainwright Barth. The Shadow had found a motive where Barth had failed. For the commissioner had been considering the present; while The Shadow was looking toward the future.

The Shadow saw purpose behind the loosing of the death sleep. Some evildoer had gained possession of a formidable instrument that could mysteriously overpower those who might oppose him. Not only that: the method, itself, had baffling features.

Seth Tanning and his guests had been chosen as victims for various reasons. The accessibility of the apartment, its location were two points. The fact that the bridge players had been persons of some social consequence was another factor. The apparent absence of a criminal motive was a feeler to learn what the reaction of the law might be.

So far, the law was baffled. That would please the perpetrators of the outrage. Somewhere in New York, men of crime would be sitting back, watching and waiting. They knew that the appearance of the death sleep would crash the front pages of the newspapers. Posted, these evildoers would be ready for new action.

A grim laugh sounded in the sanctum. The Shadow was planning a counterstroke against impending events. He knew that the death sleep would be delivered to new victims. More than that, when it again appeared, crime would follow in its wake.

A tiny light appeared upon the wall beyond the table as The Shadow reached for a pair of earphones. Burbank’s voice came over the wire. The Shadow’s whisper sounded. Through Burbank, the master who battled crime was giving orders to his agents. Those relayed messages would reach capable operatives.

The Shadow, too, would be active. Foreseeing unparalleled crime, The Shadow was launching his campaign. Evil would be due. It might strike, despite The Shadow. But the perpetrators of crime would meet opposition other than that of the baffled police. Before their schemes were completed, they would face the power of The Shadow.

Whispered orders ended. The tiny light went out. The earphones clattered to the wall. Then came a click; the sanctum was plunged in darkness. From the Stygian gloom came a sardonic laugh that cleaved the blackness. Shuddering echoes answered.

When the last sounds had died, the sanctum was empty. Deductions ended, orders given, The Shadow had fared forth from his secret abode.