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:
The Police Commissioner was working on the list of guests. None seemed even to suggest suspicion, but the Griffin was wealthy. Aside from the society end there would be athletes, male and female. The game was none too lucrative professionally, expensive from a purely amateur standpoint. The Griffin had unlimited funds. He had bought his way out of Dannemora. He might buy an assistant murderer. There would be plenty of men in plainclothes to look out for everyone who might be doubted. The employees were checked. Evans Cooke vouched for them.
During the late night of the eighteenth the trained, picked men of the Police Commissioner came quietly to Ludonia to take up their vigil. At midnight the place was dark. Evans Cooke believed in moderation, his entertainments were never carousals. The sound body needed sleep and he set the example and not merely expected his guests to follow it, but had all lights switched off at twelve. The estate, with neighboring ones and the village, was served by a subsidiary power line from high tension wires of the main power plant, reduced through a transformer.
Manning had a battery lamp. He had also a powerful electric torch. He had been there, day and night, for a week, and he was convinced that he had built up a good defense.
Now the zero period had commenced, he had little fear that the Griffin, for all his deviltry, could pass the cordon established about the grounds and the house. Inside, Cooke slept in the room next to Manning’s. Close by there were vigilant protectors, eager and alert.
The Griffin was certainly not within the grounds. He would strike later, devise some means of delivering the blow in the open. It would fall like a bolt from the blue, it would be spectacular.
More than once the Griffin had boasted to Manning that, in order successfully to murder a man, one had only to study his habits to find the weak spot.
Manning had bestowed a week’s extensive research upon the habits of Cooke, feeling sure the Griffin had done the same.
Now, prepared for twenty-four hours of tireless vigil, he went over his notes, his deductions, instructions he had issued and was yet to issue, working like a field marshal on the eve of a decisive battle by the light of his battery lamp.
The Police Commissioner would arrive in the morning. The guests would begin to appear shortly before noon. An elaborate luncheon was to be served and the waiters would be chosen members of both civic and private detective forces.
He went over once more the roster of the guests. Their records were flawless. Yet Manning believed that someone would be on the spot who was prepared to carry out the Griffin’s diabolical plot.
At two in the morning he made his grand rounds. The one exception to Cooke’s ukase of “lights out” was by the pool, where they were testing the globes that, underwater, lighted the pool after dark with colors that could be combined, changed into varying effects. The switches were in a small cement building, an addition to the dressing pavilion, where also the valves for the intake and outflow of the pool were controlled.
At the pool the program of the day would center. Three girl champions, two of them Olympic winners, with two male stars, would display their speed and grace. Cooke himself would try to repeat his record. Manning believed he could, having seen him try it the day before, marveling at his host’s prowess.
V
The pool was empty now and a corps of men was busy under the brisk direction of a gaunt New Englander who had undertaken the contract and was, Cooke said, a genius in the rough. He lacked education so far as books went, but Cooke proclaimed him another of those talented products of the northeastern seaboard who begin as tinkers and wind up as Edisons or Fords.
Sentinels had challenged, and then saluted Manning in his inspection. It was inevitable that these workmen must know that special precautions were being taken for some purpose. But the master electrician seemed concentrated on his job and its success, and on that alone.
He answered Manning curtly but not rudely and showed him how the work had been planned and carried out both for the illumination and the purification violet rays. Manning saw the purple rays flash on and off. He noted the inlets and outlets for the current, inspected the switchboard. Much of the work was completed, underground. Manning was not a practical electrician, but he knew the general theory and he could see nothing wrong. Yet he suspected that tank; he dreaded the moment of Cooke’s underwater dive.
Still, it seemed as if the barricade was invincible. He could find no flaw in it as he returned to the house and sat on the terrace beneath Cooke’s window, smoking pipe after pipe until the dawn came.
The water flowed into the pool. Final tests were made, the lights were shut off. The workmen left, checked out at the gate, the contractor remaining to see his work approved, collect his money.
“I wish,” Manning told himself, “that Cooke hadn’t made that gesture and used that quotation.”
He meant the “te morituri salutamus,” the “I, who am about to die, salute thee,” phrase that Manning had explained to the Commissioner.
Half a dozen times, as he tapped out his briar, refilled it and sent the aromatic smoke into the still air, Manning deplored that little speech. “Confound him,” Manning muttered. “I wish that had not come into his head.”
The sun rose, the day wore on without sign of trouble. Vigilance was maintained. The forenoon passed, the guests arrived and were entertained, unconscious of the keen-eyed sleuths who served them deftly but watched everything, waiting for any sign of the unusual.
Manning sauntered about, introduced by Cooke as amateur handball champion. The strain was terrific, but Cooke appeared serene.
The attempt at tragedy, Manning told himself, would happen before sunset. At three in the afternoon, after the elaborate luncheon and some speechmaking, the guests assembled about the pool. Manning kept close to his host, a service gun holstered under one shoulder, his leather-covered steel cane in his hand.
Now, with a sudden quickening of inner alarm, he felt that the supreme moment of the Griffin’s would-be fatal move upon this animated chessboard was imminent. But there was no sign of it. There was no unaccredited person upon the estate. The guards were all upon the qui vive. The waiters, relieved of their pseudo duties, added to the ranks of the protectors. Manning saw the Commissioner himself, vigilant, experienced. The only outside employee, if the man could be so styled, was the electrician who had installed the lighting.
A shadow drifted over the sparkling pool as the first of the guest exhibitors came from the dressing rooms and started to climb to a diving platform. Manning looked up and saw an autogyro hovering overhead. He remembered the Griffin’s hint that he might be present. But there were other planes close by. They had passed in circling patrol ever since sunrise. Two of them came racing up now. Police planes, armed with quickfirers, far speedier than an autogyro, if that turned out to be anything but the machine of a casual spectator out for a flight and attracted by the crowd. Someone was looking out of the gyro’s cockpit. Manning caught the gleam of binoculars. If they were merely looking on, they had a commanding position.
The body of the girl Olympic champion leaped, poised in the air with exquisite grace, making a perfect swan dive as the spectators applauded heartily. The others followed.
Cooke had gone to the dressing pavilion. Manning watched for his appearance, with his pulse gone up, his blood tingling, his tension strained to the limit. He could not foretell what would happen, but he knew it was imminent. Yet he was sure there was nothing connected with the pool, with the lighting, that was out of the ordinary, that was harmful.
He looked about him and caught the eye of the Commissioner, grimly watchful. He did not notice the electrician in the crowd about the pool. After all, the man was a mechanician, not a guest. He glanced up and saw the autogyro still hovering. The two police planes were close by.