Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 75, No. 4, April 15, 1933
- Автор: Day Stanley, Dunn J. Allan
- Год: 1933
- Язык: английский
- Год: Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 75, No. 4, April 15, 1933». Краткое содержание книги:
“It wasn’t there, professor, when I went into his study the first time.”
“Then if I were you, I’d thoroughly investigate this man from Hongkong. Doesn’t the garroting wire — and also the opium — point to someone out of the Far East?”
Flash acknowledged the logic of this; thanked him and took his departure. Reaching the Milltown Turnpike, he did not proceed immediately to Skull Knob, but stopped at his own house. Fortunately Margy’s room was upstairs and his was downstairs, so that, if he moved quietly, he would not wake her. He wanted a gun and he wanted a change of clothes. So he took a shower, got into dry clothing, and dropped his automatic pistol into his coat pocket. He wanted no questions asked about his bedraggled appearance.
He reached the entrance gates to Skull Knob with no greater adventure than a boiling radiator. He passed his roadster, in the ditch, and saw that it would have to be towed out. He would have it attended to in the morning.
By the time he was half-way up the long grade to the Africa mansion, the radiator’s boiling had become a serious matter. He shifted to low gear. The old engine protested with such clamorous hammerings that he realized he could not reach the hilltop. Steam was spouting from the radiator cap in clouds.
With perhaps an eighth of a mile to go, he pulled off the road. Leaving the mechanical antique under a tree, he walked the rest of the way.
The old house came out of the darkness, a dull mass relieved by the stripes of orange light which were windows.
His thoughts went back to the pill of opium — and Lotus Africa. Inexorably the net seemed to be closing in about, her. Something in him protested that it must be checked — protested that the girl was innocent.
But why had Benjamin Africa been killed! Here, Flash felt instinctively, lay the solution of the mystery. If he could discover why, he would know who. For what reason had that great, booming savage of a man been slain?
Flash took a short cut through shrubbery. He was within a hundred yards of the house when there occurred suddenly, off to his right, the sound of a whistle. It was a faint, eerie whistle — a veritable ghost of thin sound. It was as thin, as high as the notes of a Chinese flute — a curiously shrill, melancholy, Oriental sound.
From the rear of the house — in the opposite direction — a man appeared. As he passed a window, his profile was for a moment silhouetted. It was Jim Freeman, the deputy sheriff. He looked grim and wary, as if he, too, had heard the sound. As he passed the window Flash saw that there was a gun in his hand.
As Flash hesitated, the ghostly whistle was repeated. Cautiously, Flash advanced under the trees in the direction of the deputy sheriff. He presently heard his cautious footsteps in the dry grass and whispered, “Jim!”
A whisper answered, “Who is it?”
“Dan Horton.”
He made his way to where the deputy sheriff was standing. Jim Freeman grasped his elbow. “You hear that whistle?”
“Yes. Wait. It sounded like a signal of some kind.”
They presently saw a dark shadow detach itself from a bush near the house. As this shadow neared the house, the two men saw that it was long and slender — a tall man. He was looking up at an upstairs window. A white shade was drawn down to the sill. The light shining against this shade was as bright, as white as electric light. It was, Flash guessed, produced by a gasoline lamp with welsbach burner.
As the two men waited, a sharp silhouette was cast against the shade. It was the head, as cleanly defined as a cameo, of Lotus Africa.
Her crisp, lovely profile moved swiftly across the shade. Her head bent down. Then the shade went up.
Lotus Africa placed her hands on the sill and looked out and down. The brilliant white light, somewhere behind her, streamed about her head and struck gleams of fire from the red silk gown, and silver-blue glints from her ebony-black hair.
The shadow under the window moved. The girl softly whispered. Flash clearly heard the whisper, but the words were in some foreign tongue, presumably Chinese. The shadowy man below the window whispered an answer in the same tongue. The girl in red slowly nodded her little head and gestured with one finger.
Flash and the deputy sheriff watched the man approach the side of the house. They saw him grasp a gutter pipe and test it with his weight. And they watched him pull himself, hand over hand, with the agility of a monkey, up the pipe to the window out of which the beautiful Eurasian girl leaned.
Chapter XV
The Figures in the Window
It was, to Flash, so unexpected, so mysterious, so completely Oriental from beginning to end, that he felt he must be dreaming. It was incredible, as if he had suddenly opened his eyes upon some scene from the “Arabian Nights.”
But there were other surprises. As the Chinese swung in over the windowsill, Flash caught a fleeting glimpse of washed-out blue, and garish red. The washed-out blue was his clothing — a loose, strange jacket, and loose, baggy pants. Around his middle was a red sash. Was it a shred from this sash that Flash had found on the bush near his roadster just before he started for Professor Zimmerman’s?
Flash heard the deputy sheriff beside him giving little grunts of astonishment.
This strange visitor was not dressed as Orientals in America dress, but in the costume of his country, the loose, washed-out blue garments, the sash about his waist.
His hair was close-cropped and black. His mustache was of the drooping mandarin type.
Flash now glanced sharply at the girl. She had extended a slim white hand to help the young Chinaman over the sill and into her room. The climax of this swift succession of surprises was the look in her eyes. Unmasked — a look of venomous hatred!
Flash emitted a soft gasp of despair. He sensed, in this meeting, a flavor so mysterious, so Oriental, that it disheartened him. How could he hope to cope with an intrigue so dark and so intricate, with a situation so perplexing in its fantastic design!
His doubts of Lotus Africa’s innocence were wavering again. Certainly, she had so far furnished not one atom of evidence to support his hope that she was innocent of her husband’s killing.
The shade went swiftly down. The shadows on the shade of the girl and her mysterious visitor vanished, then reappeared. They were sinking down, facing each other, not more than two feet apart. Presumably, they were sitting in chairs. And, from their postures, Flash gathered that some sort of small, low table was standing between them.
The silhouettes of their faces and bodies to their waists was clean-cut, perfect. He could even see, very clearly, the mandarin mustache the young man wore, and the soft, delicate curve of the girl’s breast.
The man’s lips were moving rapidly. Then the girl’s lips began to move more rapidly. The faint murmur of their voices made a low, soft humming.
Then something appeared in the girl’s hand. It appeared to be a cylindrical object. The man’s hand came up and removed the object from the girl’s hand.
There was more rapid fire talk. Then the man’s shoulders and arms began moving in strange jerks, and the girl was bending toward him. Flash guessed that the man was searching in his pockets for something, or giving something to the girl.
Then here was an exciting new development. A long thin wire in the girl’s hand was now casting its shadow on the white shade. On the end of the wire was a small lump. The girl was spinning the wire in her hands and holding the small lump over something on the table.
Flash knew what the girl was doing. She was heating a pill of opium over a flame of some sort.
Suddenly, verifying his guess, the clear black silhouette of an opium pipe appeared. The girl was thrusting the sizzling wad of gum into the pipe. She pressed it down, twirling the wire. Quickly, she placed the bit of the pipe between her lips. A puff of smoke from her lips threw its shadow on the white shade.