Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 1, September 17, 1927
- Автор: Valentine, Corley H. W.
- Год: 1927
- Язык: английский
- Год: The Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 1, September 17, 1927». Краткое содержание книги:
Ruggles said that he had been trying to get Dr. Spaulding on the wire, but had not succeeded and now wanted me to go at once to Spaulding’s office, the address of which he gave me, and tell Spaulding that Stanhope was under arrest. To this, Ruggles added:
“Stanhope is ill. Tell Spaulding that and say I want him to prescribe for Stanhope; I’ll have Stanhope at our apartment by a quarter of eleven. I want Spaulding to see him before I surrender Stanhope to the police — tell Spaulding that, too.
“Now jump into a taxi and beat it down to Spaulding’s apartment, tell him, then beat it out to the taxi and have him rush you to 61 West Seventy-Sixth Street — 61 West Seventy-Sixth Street. Write down the number. Now step on it!”
Sure that I had received Ruggles’s extraordinary statement correctly, and yet scarcely able to believe it, I took a taxi at once to Dr. Spaulding’s apartment, the address of which Ruggles had given me.
The family doctor heard me through without a word. Then he said, looking at me with that concentrated intentness which had impressed me so disagreeably at our first meeting:
“I have nothing to say, Mr. Crane. I have no reason to attempt to pass judgment on the wisdom or the unwisdom of what Mr. Ruggles and you have done. Do not call me to the witness stand, when Mr. Stanhope is tried for this terrible crime.
“Do not call me, that is, if you can in any way avoid it. My position is delicate. And, for Mr. Stanhope’s sake, though I owe him nothing in this world, do not manufacture evidence to support a conclusion you have jumped at!”
“You do not know Ruggles,” I said a little impatiently.
“That is true,” Dr. Spaulding said with what seemed to me to be just a trace of mockery. “He is said to be the cleverest detective in New York City, but he is a detective for all that, and they’re much alike. Tell Mr. Ruggles, when you report to him, that I shall visit Mr. Stanhope, this evening, at your rooms, in my professional capacity.”
The family doctor walked with me through the doorway, and as I went down the steps thanked me for coming.
I could not make him out, and I knew it. Great capacity, there was in him, for both good and ill — it was just a question which would be uppermost. I had believed him guilty of the murder of Richard Grew. I now believed him capable of anything.
I walked along until I could stop a taxi, then told the driver to make his best speed to 61 West Seventy-Sixth Street, arriving in a few moments.
Ruggles had told me he would be waiting for me, and he was, dragging me through the open front door of the house, closing and locking it after him, then saying guardedly:
“Now up those stairs quickly. He’ll be here any moment! We’ve no time to lose!” Ruggles turned on his flash light and bounded up the stairs past me.
I followed him, finding myself soon in what seemed to be a small storeroom at the back of the house. Then I knew where we were: in the laboratory of Cyril Stanhope, the bacteriologist, who had used his scientific knowledge to such desperate ends.
For, all about, neatly arranged and carefully labeled were glass jars of bacteria and cultures — enough, it seemed, to sweep the great city about us with a thousand different devastating plagues.
“See this one?” Ruggles asked, pointing to the label. “Amazon fever germs.” Tapping it, Ruggles said evenly: “Probably a thousand of them, Dan, kept in the best health and ready to be started on their errand of death at any time.”
I stepped back from that terrible jar, saying huskily: “Whose private inferno is this? Stanhope’s?”
“Of course. But don’t look at that door; we’re not going away yet. Get behind those portières over there!” He thrust me swiftly behind them, saying: “I’ve cut holes for us to look through.” Then, as he followed me behind them: “Now don’t move or make a sound!” He turned off his flash light.
In that jetty darkness we waited... waited... waited, scarcely breathing. The atmosphere had the moist, disagreeable warmth of a greenhouse, and I shuddered at the thought of the innumerable deadly agents with which that silent room was tenanted.
Then, when it seemed to me that my nerves must snap under the ever-increasing tension, I heard the sound of swift feet on the stairs up which Ruggles and I had come, the door was thrown open, there was the hard, dazzling glare of a flash light which slit the inky blackness, and some one came swiftly in.
It was a man, from the weight of his step, and the sound was that of a man’s hard breathing. Through the holes Ruggles had cut in the portières which now hid us, I saw the flash light sweep the row of jars nearest us, then come to a stop on the one labeled “Amazon fever germs.”
The man laid the flash light on the table at such an angle that its light played full on that jar; next he took off the cover of the jar, and poured some of its contents into a bottle. Then he replaced the cover of the jar, put it back in its place and snatched up the flash light.
As he did so, there was a crisp click, and the electric glare from a single, high-powered bulb near the door showed clear as day every detail of the room and Dr. Spaulding standing there motionless, in one hand his flash light and in the other the small bottle which he had just filled from the jar.
For one instant he stood there like a man turned to stone, then, so swiftly that my eyes could hardly follow it, he shattered the electric bulb with the first jar he could reach. Darkness fell like a pall, and we heard his desperate rush down the stairs toward the street.
“Out of this room on the double-quick,” Ruggles whispered, “for there’s no knowing what was in that jar. All of them are open, as a matter of fact, for they are alive and must have air to live; but the germs are kept in by the thinnest of gauze; this jar he has broken is all over the place now, though. Here’s the window!”
In a moment, Ruggles had it up and we were drawing in deep breaths of the sweet night air.
“No fire escape,” Ruggles said; “but we’re only on the second floor. Catch my feet.” We were sitting on the window sill. “And I’ll lower myself until I’m hanging by my hands, then you can drop, and here’s hoping you find something soft to land on!”
I did — soft turf, for a wonder; the house was one of the very old ones with a fringe of grass still there along the side — turf softer than ever for the recent rain. I called guardedly up to Ruggles, and in a moment he was standing by my side.
“Now to our rooms,” he said. “Spaulding will go there at once, and we must beat him to it lest he be suspicious of us.”
Chapter VIII
Grim Moments
Ruggles led the way swiftly to where he had parked our car, round the next corner. “He has only a moment’s start of us and hasn’t had time yet to catch a taxicab; I’ll bet he’s hurrying along the sidewalk cursing like a wild man, under that cold, collected exterior of his.
“I phoned Mrs. Watts not to let any one in, even the President of the United States, until you and I had got in through the back of the house, so we’re O. K.”
As he drove swiftly along, Ruggles went on with the exclamation I had hoped was coming: “Spaulding is wild with anxiety now and will suspect any one of turning on that electric bulb, there by the door — may even suspect you or me of doing it.”
“As a matter of fact, you did do it, didn’t you?” I asked.
“Yes,” Ruggles said. “That was one of the things I had to do, when I went out, this evening: connect up, with Stanhope’s help, that electric light bulb with a wire and a switch I could turn on from behind the portières.
“Here’s our street. We’ll run the car round to the tradesmen’s entrance at the back, and in that way.”