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:
Joel made his decision. Better an immediate operation than a corroding cancer. He visited Scotland Yard and told his tale. There was joy in the Yard.
Three days later the two men faced each other again.
“Well?” asked von Veltheim.
“I agree,” replied the other. The money passed hands. Then Joel tapped his fingers on the desk. “Now we’ve got you,” he said quietly. The blackmailer looked up. Several Yard men had quietly surrounded him, guns in hand. He shrugged his shoulders and rose.
“When I get out of this I will pay you,” he said venomously to his Nemesis. And, in spite of his success, the millionaire looked grave.
While he lay in prison awaiting trial, von Veltheim spent his time inventing a complete history of his life to present before the court. He never doubted his ability to put it over.
London was thrilled. Old Bailey, the famous criminal court, was the Mecca for society, magnates, novelists, playwrights, princes. The fame of his career, the promise of piquant revelations, brought them crowding into its gloomy precincts.
As a king into his throne room von Veltheim strode to the bar. Stern, erect, splendid, his firm mouth, cold gray eyes and calm bearing spoke for him strongly. People began to doubt their knowledge. That man could not be a criminal, a blackmailer. It was impossible that such a noble appearance could comport with the tale of his indictment.
The record of his life was read. Crime after crime, against men, against women, against government, stripped in their telling the nature of this man. And still they could not believe.
He made his defense. He parried, evaded, denied. But ruthlessly the past marched against him. His own words, uttered a decade before at the Johannesburg trial, testified by their contradictions.
Sir Charles Gill, the prosecutor, was a man of ice and facts. The figure of romance, the effective pose of the man in the dock touched him not at all. Like a surgeon with his scalpel he cut with his questions, he stabbed with his facts. The other felt the wounds, but he smiled at them. Once he was pierced to wincing.
“A cruel and purposeless crime,” Sir Gill called the killing of Joel.
“It is a lie!” shouted the prisoner. “It was my life or his. He was a fool!”
A stern word from the judge silenced him. Then he became a statue and said no more. The verdict of guilty came as expected, but still some shook their heads.
The solemn voice of Justice Phillimore intoned the words: “Twenty years at penal servitude.”
A moment of impassivity and then the man finally broke. “That means life,” he gasped. And with four warders supporting his bulk he staggered away.
But it was not life. Six years later came the Great War, and an internment camp. Four years later the armistice, and the parole of all the German prisoners in England. And von Veltheim — Germany felt him, South Africa saw him again, and then — he disappeared, still free, still the elusive giant.
Not
by Frank Price
“NOT A WORD,” WARNED THE MASKED INTRUDER TO THE TWO SERVANTS, “OR I’LL BLOW YOU TO HELL AND BACK. I’VE NOTHING TO LIVE FOR, ANYWAY”
Chapter I
Beneath a City
Barrow shifted uneasily in the chair he had occupied since early afternoon and watched with misgiving the dignified approach of the Mother Superior of St. Vincent’s Hospital, who was walking down the corridor toward him.
He was in the reception room on the main floor and for hours had been awaiting, hoping against hope, for an opportunity to question one of the patients.
The star investigator of the Citadel Life Insurance Company sensed impending disappointment in the slow and deliberate pace of the nun and she immediately verified his fear.
He arose as she entered the room.
“I am sorry, Mr. Barrow,” she whispered, “but Mr. Gulliver passed away without a word.”
Plainly Barrow’s face reflected the discouragement he felt at this intelligence.
“Thank you for your trouble, mother,” he acknowledged with a bow. And as he noted her sympathetic gesture he added:
“I am not one of Mr. Gulliver’s family, but I did know him quite well.”
A quiet word of consolation from the nun and he left the hospital for the Citadel’s Home Office.
“This,” he thought as he started for the subway station, “is the toughest kind of break. Wonder what Gresham will do about this?”
There was ample cause for the concern Barrow felt over the death of Dave Gulliver, leading fiction writer of his time and, more significant to the Citadel, one of that company’s most heavily covered policyholders.
There had been no hesitancy in issuing whatever insurance Gulliver had asked. He was in his early thirties, vigorous and a man of temperate habits. All this the company’s investigators had learned during the check-up of his application for insurance protection of one hundred thousand dollars.
What was of almost as equal importance, his income justified such coverage. He had plenty of money to carry the load.
The disturbing angle of this tragic end of the young writer from the viewpoint of Barrow’s chief, Andrew Gresham, was that Gresham himself had taken Gulliver’s application and had seen it through until the protection was in force.
That was a little less than a year ago, and the effort Gresham was now making to solve the mysterious death was motivated not so much by a desire to save the Citadel money as it was by a wish to vindicate his own judgment in putting the policy through.
It had all happened that morning in the subway crush at the Fourteenth Street station of the Seventh Avenue subway. Gulliver, in the midst of the surging crowd that milled about on the narrow platform, had, without warning, thrown up his hands and screamed.
Volunteers had carried him across the street to St. Vincent’s and within five minutes of his attack he was on the operating table.
Gulliver was the victim of an attempt at assassination. That was certain. Under his left shoulder blade the surgeons found a tiny wound, apparently made by an unusually slender stiletto, and it had been necessary to perform the most delicate of operations — to stitch the heart.
“Will he live?” Barrow had asked the surgeon who operated.
“Men have been known to,” the specialist had replied, “but it isn’t common. Frankly, I don’t think he will.”
But Barrow, who had hastened to the hospital when news of the attack on Gulliver reached the Citadel offices, waited around for hours in the hope that he could get a word with the wounded man. And he was not alone, for police headquarters had assigned two detectives to the same task.
The writer, however, had died without a word that could give the authorities even a slight clew to his assailant or the motive for the murder.
It was an agitated Gresham that greeted Barrow when the investigator returned to the Citadel from the hospital. He knew before his visitor spoke that there had been nothing learned.
“You heard nothing, of course?” The old chief eyed Barrow closely.
Barrow was sorry for Gresham. He knew the rugged honesty of the man and what this meant to him.
“No.” He slowly shook his head. “I’m mighty sorry about this, chief.”
“Well,” Gresham was resigned to the inevitable, “there’s nothing we can do about it, of course. There is no question, is there, about it being a clear cut case of murder?”
The investigator agreed.
“As far as we’ve gone,” he observed, “we have found nothing in the way of a clew. But it seems to me that when a man is struck down in a crowded subway station — stabbed in the back — it can be nothing else.”