Doc Savage: Glare of the Gorgon (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 19) (46 page)

Long Tom said breathlessly, “She got away from us all right. But not in the way you think. Hurry!”

Chapter XLIII

THE DEATH NOTE

LONG TOM ROBERTS had left the door of Janet Falcon’s hotel room slightly ajar. Doc Savage rushed to it, flung the door open, stepped in and then his trilling commenced keening.

The sound of it was unexpectedly harsh, wild. As it sank in register, it became doleful and disappointed.

When the bronze man entered the room, it was with a marked deference, as if he were entering a church or cemetery.

Crowding behind them, Monk and Ham stuck curious heads in, not knowing what to expect.

What they beheld stayed with them forever.

The others saw the shadow of the woman before they noticed the mortal form casting it.

The shadow was weird in that it floated in midair. Their eyes veered to its source, became fixed. The first thing they noticed was Janet Falcon’s feet. She wore only one shoe; the other had fallen to the carpet beneath her bare toes.

That told them that they need not look any higher.

Long Tom said it first: “She hanged herself.”

It was true, for the dead woman hung suspended from the ceiling fixture. She had used one of her own stockings. Her forlorn form twisted slightly, impelled by the rush of air created by their arrival.

The chair on which she had stood in her last minutes had tipped over, knocked aside by her flailing out during the final moments of mortal existence.

Righting it, Doc Savage stepped up, removed a clasp knife from his vest and cut the woman down, catching her with one cabled arm.

Laying the body on the divan, the bronze man sliced away the hose wound around her neck, felt of her wrist and throat, but failed to detect a pulse. A pocket mirror was held to her pale, parted lips. No condensation from respiration was produced.

Congested purple features combined with the coolness of the woman’s flesh told that medical intervention would avail no one in this case. Most unnerving of all were Janet Falcon’s eyes. Even in death, they had remained open. The blood vessels in the whites of her eyes had turned blood red due to hemorrhage. The contrast with her emerald irises made for a stare that was ghastly.

Closing them with his fingertips, Doc Savage went in search of a sheet to cover the body.

As his observant eyes swept about the room, Ham noticed the envelope on the night table. It was addressed:
To Whomever It Concerns
.

Snapping this up, he opened the envelope, read the short note contained within.

“She left a suicide note,” Ham announced. “It says simply ‘I cannot live with what I have done.’ ”

Long Tom mumbled, “So she admitted her guilt.”

Ham murmured, “This note is signed ‘Medusa.’ ”

This statement seemed to hit Monk Mayfair hardest. “Guilty! Who woulda believed it?”

Doc Savage had by now returned with a fresh sheet. As he prepared to cover the cooling form, he rearranged her head on the divan. One hand brushed the longish hair at the back of the dead woman’s head, and encountered something unexpected.

When his hand came away, it was holding a small automatic pistol. A .22 caliber make.

“Where did
that
come from?” Ham wondered.

“Evidently, Miss Falcon was in the habit of carrying this weapon for protection,” supplied Doc. “It appears to have been gathered up in her hair, and held in place by rubber bands and bobby pins.”

Jacking back the slide caused a bullet to pop up. Doc caught it. Removing the magazine, he saw that it held only one additional bullet, although there was room for seven cartridges.

“Five shots have been fired recently,” he revealed.

Long Tom shouted, “Want to bet those bullets will match the slugs in Duke Grogan’s corpse!”

There were no takers.

Pocketing the pistol, Doc gave the room a quick going over with his active orbs. They alighted on one window shade, which was the wrong color.

Reaching up, Doc pulled this down, revealing for all to see one of the unpleasantly serpentine silhouettes that had previously been found at many but not all of the petrified-brain slayings.

“Jove!” Ham exclaimed. “That is the shade stolen from our hotel suite.”

“Unquestionably,” said Doc Savage, taking down the thing and studying the image. “It is the identical silhouette.”

“Janet Falcon is the Medusa,” said Ham in a husky voice. “How is this possible?”

“It is not,” said Doc Savage. “This is a ruse. The blind is a clumsy plant, calculated to make it appear that Miss Falcon was the author of all these mysterious slayings.”

“Are you suggesting she didn’t commit suicide?” wondered Ham.

“Tomorrow is Ned Gamble’s funeral,” reminded Doc Savage. “It is entirely possible that Miss Falcon, overcome by guilt over her fiancé’s demise, might have succumbed to grief and committed this deed of self-destruction. But it was not Janet Falcon who hung that blind in such a way as to cause whoever found her body to pull it down and discover the Medusa silhouette. This is designed to throw us off the track.”

“So we’re back to the beginning?” Long Tom muttered.

Doc nodded. “We will inform the police and the coroner’s office of our discovery; they can handle the details. We have our work cut out for us.”

The bronze giant and his assistants filed silently out of the death room, Doc closing the door behind him. They repaired to their suite of rooms, where the telephones got a busy workout.

AN HOUR later, Doc Savage was consulting with the coroner in the hotel corridor as the sheeted body of Janet Falcon was being removed from the hotel room, and taken down by the back stairs so as not to create a commotion which might upset guests.

“Sure looks like suicide,” the coroner was saying.

“It may well prove to be so,” said Doc Savage. “But do not jump to conclusions. This is a complicated case.”

“You’re telling me?” the medical examiner grunted. “Should I check her brain to see if it’s turned into a rock?”

“I took the liberty of doing that for you. Miss Falcon’s brain is normal. She is not a victim of the Medusa murderer.”

“Good,” grunted the medical examiner. “I wasn’t looking forward to opening up her skull. Now I don’t have to.”

With that settled, the body was taken away and Doc Savage returned to his hotel suite.

There, Ham Brooks had fresh news.

“Both Malcolm McLean and Marvin Lucian Linden have recently secured patents, or have patents pending on new inventions.”

“What are these inventions?” inquired Doc.

“Linden took out one for a device called a photophone.”

Long Tom looked suddenly interested. “Photophone!”

“Yes, that is what it is called, but it does not seem to be a photographic device.”

“That’s because it’s not,” snapped Long Tom. “The first photophone was constructed by Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. He believed it would replace the telephone and telegraph one day. Didn’t work out, though.”

“What exactly is a photophone?” demanded Ham, impatient for Long Tom to get to the point.

Doc Savage answered that. “A photophone is a device to transmit sound and voice in a wireless manner.”

“Like radio?”

Doc Savage went to the window where light was streaming through the glass and said, “No, the means of transmission is modulated light, not electricity, acting upon a special mirror, which in turn reflects the light to the receiver.”

It hit them then.

“That creepy voice!” howled Monk. “It seemed to be coming out of nowhere. But every time we heard it, bright sunlight was streamin’ in through a window.”

Doc nodded. “No doubt. The window glass served as a receiver. The voice of the speaker was coming from a not-considerable distance, possibly only a few hundred feet. Someone setting up a photophone transmitter on a rooftop or in the room of a nearby building could transmit his voice across a busy street in a focused manner, provided weather conditions were favorable.”

Long Tom—who might be expected to know of such things—inserted, “Atmospheric interference was the main reason the photophone never caught on. But this gimmick is a clever new wrinkle, as far as the receiving apparatus goes. A parabolic mirror set with selenium cells was the original method. Replacing that with ordinary window glass means that anyone operating this new-type photophone doesn’t have to install a receiver anywhere. He can point it at just about any window and be heard clear as day.”

“So who was transmitting the voice we heard earlier?” wondered Ham.

“It was not Janet Falcon,” Doc Savage pointed out. “She had been dead for several hours. In New York, the voice we heard in that hotel room could only have been Duke Grogan, secretly operating a photophone. I suspected as much then, but it was not possible to cross the street in time to intercept the speaker, since his face was entirely unknown at that time.”

“That means Marvin Lucian Linden is the culprit behind this?” Long Tom said slowly.

“I am not yet done making my report,” Ham interjected. “Malcolm McLean had also patented an interesting gimmick. Its application is not clear to me, except perhaps as a trick valuable to professional magicians, but it was an arrangement by which one could treat any flat surface, such as a wall, with an invisible chemical which could only be revealed by the ignition of photographic flash powder, which activates its true colors. This could be applied with something as simple as a child’s water gun, employing a paper form cut into the desired shape or outline.”

Doc Savage lifted the blind with the Medusa silhouette imprinted on it and said, “No doubt that is how the threatening silhouettes were produced in New York and here in Chicago. In each case, it was not an ordinary flash powder but the combustion of the deadly matter that generates the vapors which, when inhaled, calcifies the human brain.”

Ham mused, “Such a complicated set-up requires advance planning and no witnesses, which explains why the man felled at the scientific exposition was found with that Latin warning inscription, and not another green silhouette.”

“Recall the trio of Medusa silhouettes found at Malcolm McLean’s attic,” reminded the bronze man. “One of those exactly matched the pose imprinted in Ned Gamble’s hotel hallway, while another was identical to the one which discolored the corridor marble at our headquarters.”

Ham snapped two fingers sharply. “No doubt the application of the transparent chemical solution was facilitated by use of a cardboard form shaped to resemble a serpentine figure.”

Monk grunted, “This is startin’ to add up to somethin’ interestin’….”

“All except who the three Gorgons are,” grumbled Long Tom.

The hairy chemist counted off his fingers, “Malcolm McLean is one. Marvin Lucian Linden is the other, and maybe Duke Grogan was the third.”

“He
had
to be the third!” Ham insisted. “He was the first suspect in this entire maddening chain of murders.”

Monk’s grin became fierce. “It’s time to round up Marvin Lucian Linden, since Malcolm McLean was probably the one who died in that cave-in.” He looked to Doc Savage, saying, “Ain’t that right, Doc?”

The bronze giant surprised them all when he remarked, “We have not as yet assembled all the facts in this case.”

“In that case,” said Monk, “let’s start assemblin’ Marvin Lucian Linden, and maybe take him apart while we’re doin’ that. He has a lot to answer for.”

FINDING the missing electrical inventor did not prove to be as simple a task as Doc Savage and his men had supposed.

The bronze man made a phone call to the Superintendent of Chicago Police and asked that a prowl car be dispatched to the home of Malcolm McLean, in the hope that Marvin Lucian Linden was still camped out there.

It took less than a dozen minutes for the police official to call back and report that, “Linden is not at the McLean residence. Nor is his automobile. I have dispatched a radio car to his own residence, and will have a report shortly. You might wish to keep the line open.”

“Thank you,” said Doc.

That report was not long in coming, for the police official’s voice was soon back on the wire, saying, “The Linden residence appears to be empty. There is no sign of the man. Why is it you believe he is culpable in the wave of criminal slayings?”

“This is merely a suspicion,” clarified Doc. “Proof must come from Linden’s own lips.”

“Well, we have the dragnet out for him. Have you any other thoughts as to his whereabouts?”

“It is possible that Linden is attending the scientific exposition. But I thought it best to check on those residences before seeking him there.”

“Do you think he will bolt?”

“Marvin Lucian Linden does not know he is a suspect. It is doubtful that he will run. We should know shortly,” added Doc, hanging up.

Addressing the others, the bronze man said, “Marvin Lucian Linden most likely returned to the exposition. We will take him there.”

“Now you’re talkin’!” barked Monk. “That’s what I wanted to do in the first place.”

“Linden cannot cause any great mischief at the exposition, but should he be at large in the city, it is imperative to have him taken into custody as soon as possible.”

As they rode the elevator down, Long Tom remarked, “It would have been as easy as pie for Linden to slip out of the exposition, set up his photophone gimmick across the street, make his threat, and repair back to the exhibition booth. No one would be the wiser.”

“In which case,” supplied Ham, “we will catch him red-handed with the invention.”

Mayfair blew on his rusty knuckles. “I’m hopin’ he puts up a fight.”

“Endeavor to take Linden without any violence,” asserted Doc Savage. “We need his complete story in all its ramifications. There is a great deal that needs to be divulged about this case yet.”

They stepped off the elevator into the lobby. There, they were immediately greeted by a great press of reporters clamoring to speak with Doc Savage.

One waved the late edition extra and yelled, “Savage! What have you got to say about this?”