Fingers of Death

CHAPTER XXII. FOES FROM THE CRYPT

THE Bartram mansion seemed deserted when the coupe pulled up on the street before it. Not a light gleamed from any window.

Hurley Adams was unperturbed. He led the way up the walk, and turned the knob of the front door. The door opened, and the old lawyer entered the hall, with Harry and Saybrook following.

Familiar with the place, Adams needed no light. He went directly to the back of the hall, turned into the passage, and stopped at the top of the little steps that led to the old workroom.

“You will wait here,” he suggested. “I am to enter alone. Stay in the darkness. I shall leave the door ajar. I must be fair to all concerned.”

Both Harry and Saybrook expressed their agreement. Hurley Adams went down the steps. He opened the door, which was unlocked.

True to his word, the lawyer left the door ajar. The room within was lighted, and those outside could see the old lawyer as he walked to the table, which was now set at the side of the room.

There was a box on the table. It bore an electric push button. Hurley Adams pressed three times. He went to a chair, seated himself, and waited with quiet dignity.

Minutes drifted by. Harry Vincent watched with unconcern. Willard Saybrook was tense.

At last there came an answer to the strange summons. The trapdoor opened in the floor. A stooped form emerged and turned to close the trap behind him. The man stood erect and swung to face Hurley Adams.

Willard Saybrook barely repressed a cry of horrified amazement as he clutched Harry Vincent’s arm.

There, in the center of the room, stood the living form of a man who had been buried as dead. Josiah Bartram, in the flesh!

With yellowish skin, long-fingered hands and face that resembled parchment, the old contractor had the appearance of a resurrected corpse. His face gleamed with an evil smile of insidious triumph as it turned toward Hurley Adams. The lawyer, however, was calm.

“YOU are not surprised to see me, Hurley?” questioned the old contractor, in a crackling voice.

“Not since I received your message,” responded Adams. “The situation began to lighten then.”

“You must have been surprised when you read it,” leered Bartram. “Telling you to come to this room; to ring the bell for me. Telling you that, dead or alive, I would respond to your summons.”

“Where have you been, Josiah?” questioned Adams.

“In my grave!” crackled Bartram. “In a very pleasant grave. A mausoleum makes excellent sleeping quarters, Hurley. Particularly when one has a servant so capable and so faithful as Mahinda. He is in my abode at present. I had not expected you tonight; nevertheless, I had prepared for your visit.”

“I found the hiding place before the historical sketch was made public,” declared Adams. “Somehow, Josiah, I had no fear of coming here. Once I knew the truth, I could see no cause for worry on my part.”

“A bit worried, though, because I have turned murderer? Well, Hurley, you are still my attorney. One can discuss murders with attorneys. I knew what your response would be.”

“Where is the money?”

“In my bedroom. Namely, in the mausoleum. Ah, Hurley, I planned well. I nearly planned to kill you, but I desisted. Why? Because I do not fear one man alone; because I knew how you would act; because I knew that you wanted no share of the millions; and, finally, because I wanted one person to remain and learn the cleverness of my scheme.”

Hurley Adams settled back in his chair. He looked at Josiah Bartram in wonderment as the self-admitted murderer went into the details of his fiendish work.

“Four million and a half is the total, Hurley,” announced Josiah Bartram. “Better for one than for six. I was ready for that when they announced that the bank building was to be torn down. But I had thought of it before!

“How fine it would be, I thought, if one eliminated five! To do that would mean murder — for none had died during twenty-odd years. But I saw the danger. As men were killed one by one, the others would suspect. They might band together in a common cause for protection.

“The further it went, the more the suspicion would narrow down. Then came my inspiration. Suppose that one of the murdered men — particularly the first — should be the murderer!

“So I planned. I built my mausoleum. It is connected by an underground passage to a secret vault beneath this room. The passage was made as a pipe line long before the mausoleum. Its existence was forgotten.

“I had to find a way to die. I found it through Doctor Felton Shores. I told him that I wanted to die — yet live. Shores thought I wanted to watch the management of my estate. He prepared a poison first, but decided it was too virulent. He made a solution for hypodermic injection. Too much would kill — the right quantity would make a man seemingly dead.

“We arranged it so that I would supposedly die and be quickly buried after my illness. Between you and Shores — you following the terms of my will, and Shores superintending my burial — the scheme worked to perfection.

“I took it upon myself to kill the others. How easy, and what pleasant occupation! I knew their habits, their homes, and their ways.

“On special nights I stole from my tomb — through this room, and out the side exit of the house. A dead man among the living, I struck and returned to my grave. Ha, ha, ha—”

Josiah Bartram paused to cackle his fiendish laugh. Then, with relish, he resumed his account.

“Pettigrew was the first. I used some of the poison that Doctor Shores had discarded. Maurice Pettigrew died. Arthur Preston came next. His curio room was an ideal place for murder. I planned that well, with his own weapon. A better system than the one I used with Pettigrew, in whose home I planted evidence that he had kept the poison.

“When I went to Ernest Risbey’s home, I heard him say that he was going to the Elite Hotel. Muffled, I went there and found his car. I waited in it and gave him a hypodermic — Shores had given me a syringe and the fluid, that I could test it for myself, with animals.

“Julius Selwick was more difficult. I shot him dead when I saw the opportunity, and I was forced to kill Chief Detective Grady also. There, Hurley, was the way it worked. You, alone, I spared, for the reasons I have stated.”

Josiah Bartram’s face showed its elation as the old man paused in his discourse. Hurley Adams was filled with horror as he listened to the fiendish details of these crimes. But the lawyer refrained from comment.

“There were problems, Hurley,” continued Bartram, in a reflective tone. “The most pressing one was Doctor Shores. I had paid him well to help me. He had promise of more money. He had acted illegally when he declared me dead and had me buried.

“I arranged to have him come here to see me nearly every night. Mahinda gave him the signal when he paid his calls. Shores and I talked in this room. I feigned weakness, and thus dispelled any belief that he might be apt to have concerning my part in murder.

“But I made mistakes. Using that poison on Pettigrew was a bad start. Even then, Shores did not suspect. But when I jabbed Risbey with the hypodermic, he knew. He realized then that I was killing regularly and with method. He protested about it, the night that I slew Selwick and Grady. I managed to keep him doubtful; but the next evening, he was greatly distressed.

“When he failed to come back; when Mahinda told me he had been hearing him advise Grace by telephone, I knew that there was but one course; to deal with Felton Shores as I had dealt with the others.

“I surprised him writing his confession. It was so worded that it did no harm until he was about to insert my name as a living man. I stopped him then and killed him. He had a loaded hypodermic, Hurley; but it contained a sample of the quantity that produced only temporary lifelessness — not the complete injection that I had used to kill Risbey.

“I jabbed him with his needle, then turned on the gas to let death follow. That, Hurley, completed my campaign of murder.”

“I did not know,” observed Adams, in a matter-of-fact tone, “that Shores left a confession.”

“He did,” grinned Josiah Bartram, “but some one of his family probably hid it. In its incomplete form, it was not at all complimentary to Doctor Shores. He felt that he was almost a murderer himself, because he had made the plan possible.”

“How did you obtain the hidden millions?” queried Hurley Adams suddenly.

“The money?” Bartram’s face took on a gloating leer of triumph. “Ah, Hurley, you will admire that. I knew where the money was before I began these crimes! I had it stored in my hidden vault before I began my pretended illness. I moved it to my mausoleum after I had presumably died.”

“You — had — the money?” questioned Adams.

“Yes,” said Bartram. “When I knew that the bank building was about to be torn down; when I had already decided upon my murderous career, I began to wonder if the money was really hidden in Holmsford. I tried to put myself in Malcolm Warthrop’s place.

“Somewhere in Holmsford. That hiding spot must have been chosen carefully by Warthrop. Secluded, so the wealth could be easily taken there, yet near at hand. Secluded, also, so it could have been previously arranged and so that the money could be easily regained. A large enough place to hide millions, a permanent place that would not be accidentally uncovered; and, last of all, a place that would be of some importance — for it was mentioned in the sketch within the cornerstone!

“I chose the Spanish War Monument as the most likely spot. Mahinda and I went there. We loosened the plate. We found the cavity. We removed the millions at night. I left that message for you.

“Perhaps you ask why I continued with my plan? I liked it too well to desist; moreover, I feared the consequences when the others came together. Had I been living quietly in Holmsford, pretending to be one of the disappointed conspirators, they might have detected me as the one who had taken all.

“No; they were better gone. As for me, I shall soon leave Holmsford. A mausoleum will remain in my memory — but it will not be empty.”

JOSIAH BARTRAM paused to chuckle. Harry Vincent, in the hallway, understood now, the part that The Shadow had played. He, like Josiah Bartram, had deduced the hiding spot of the millions; but where Bartram had mulled over the matter for years, The Shadow had spotted the monument as soon as he had come to Holmsford. Once conversant with the secret of the cornerstone, The Shadow must have gone there — only to find it empty!

It was evident that The Shadow knew all about Josiah Bartram’s crimes. For The Shadow must have found the letter to Hurley Adams! Yes, The Shadow had surely opened that letter, resealed it, and left it beneath the monolith!

Fully, Harry realized, The Shadow had suspected the truth early in his investigation of these crimes.

Where was The Shadow now? What would be the denouement of the strange situation that now existed?

The answer came more quickly than Harry had anticipated. Josiah Bartram, gloating, was about to bring on a startling climax.

“A mausoleum,” the murderer was repeating. “Not an empty one, however. One other man died, Hurley — a troublemaker whom I let Mahinda handle. Willard Saybrook, my niece’s fiance, entered here. Mahinda overpowered him. He put him in my old vault. There Saybrook lies dead.

“Before I leave, I shall have Mahinda transfer his body to the mausoleum. I am going far away, Hurley, leaving for a foreign clime as Malcolm Warthrop planned to leave, more than twenty years ago. But Mahinda and I shall be safe — and very wealthy — while Warthrop and his secretary were taking long chances with less return.

“Yes, my mausoleum will contain a body; that of Willard Saybrook. He lies dead beneath our feet. He can never harm me. Not unless” — Bartram smiled fiendishly — “he, like myself, has the power of rising from his grave!”

The words were too much for Willard Saybrook. With a cry of anger, the young man broke away from Harry Vincent and leaped into the room where Josiah Bartram stood.

A gleam of amazed dread swept over the murderer’s face. He who had risen from the grave was confronted by an enemy who had also come from the tomb!

Foes from the crypt! They faced each other now!