The Crime Master: The Complete Battles of Gordon Manning & The Griffin, Volume 1 (Gordon Manning and The Griffin) (4 page)

There was no such reason and they knew it, all of them, standing about the riven body.

“Damnable!” said one of them. “Damnable! No doubt as to who did it. That fiend must be found.”

“I agree with you,” said Manning.

“We are much indebted to you,” said the specialist. “ I wish I knew more of you. Your name.”

“I am afraid,” said Manning dryly, “that that pleasure, my pleasure, surely will have to be deferred, doctor. I am known only by my finger whorls. You gentlemen need me no longer. You will bring in your findings without me.”

“Those findings are indefinite enough to be losings,” said the official surgeon ruefully. “Convincing enough to us. But—”

He shrugged his shoulders. Manning bowed to them and went out with his slow, assumed walk.

“You’d almost think he knew what to look for,” an assistant ventured.

“That’s nonsense, Edwards,” snapped the specialist. “We don’t know who he is, but his credentials are irreproachable. But, my God, what a devilish device! And advertising his crime with that red seal!”

“The Griffin, if it ever existed,” said his colleague, “is extinct. I only trust this one will be soon exterminated. They ought to set this man who was here to-night, whoever he is, on his trail. He might cope with him.”

VII

MANNING saw that the key to Sesnon’s new room in his new hotel, under the name of Sievers, was in the box and he, presumably, in his room.

Manning had already heard Ordway’s secretary, in a calmer mood, confirm the arrival of a man with a brief case, giving the name of Sesnon, who had an appointment with Ordway.

That appointment must have been gained through excellent credentials, which may have been manufactured. The main bait had been what he could offer Ordway. Of that, save that it had something to do with an asbestos mine near the Pennsylvania-New Jersey line, the secretary knew little. Ordway kept such profitable matters to himself until he was ready to use them. Long-fibered asbestos in any place easily reached was a thing men had long looked for.

A second appointment had been granted in which, presumably, Ordway would have the tests of the asbestos. Sesnon would give out the exact details, and an expert would be sent secretly to investigate. It was all a blind, and Ordway, trying to make money with himself on the big end, had lost his life.

With his death the pool that he was manipulating was drained dry. His own estate suffered, but many, forewarned, henchmen of the Griffin, made money. Money was the cold-blooded motive for the Griffin’s selection of Ordway, coupled with the fact that the “first move” since Manning had taken hold, took place beneath the latter’s nose. If anything could have urged Manning on, this semiresponsibility did so.

So far Sesnon was tied up with his arrival in the lobby after the murder. Manning’s intuition, his judgment, had been correct. Now the trail led to the Hotel Clarence, and Manning followed it, alone.

The case was far from complete. That trace of stearine in cloth and flesh was not conclusive. The poison had been assimilated. But, if Sesnon—alias Sievers—could be found with poison pellets in his possession, with the air pistol that fired them, they had him. With the vision of the chair facing him he might well talk about the Griffin.

Manning had arrived in a cab, with a kit bag. He registered, looked at Sievers’s signature casually, got his own room and followed the boy with his kit bag. He was not on the same floor as Sievers, but that did not matter. He knew the number of the latter’s room. It was a sweltering night and the heat suggested a plan, not too novel, but efficient.

He got Sesnon’s phone through the hotel exchange. The answer brought a grim smile to Manning’s face. He had run the quarry to earth. Sesnon was clever, but Manning did not think he believed himself in any danger, though he had taken precautions of changing appearance, shifting his hotel, taking another name. The rub came in the question as to whether he had got rid of his lethal weapon and ammunition. That would soon be known.

“Did you want a fan?” Manning asked the man at the other end of the wire. “This is the engineer. I can have one sent up right away.”

“I didn’t order one,” the answer came back, “but I could sure use one. You must have got the wrong room.”

“Sorry, sir. I’ll shoot one up to you.”

Two minutes later Manning knocked on the door. As it was opening he spoke his piece.

“Here’s your fan, sir.” Then he was inside. He had no fan. He had no gun. But he wore his hat, and he carried his cane. He had sprung a surprise, but he had one given to him. There were two men in the room, both with their coats off. There was a whisky bottle on the table, with ice and soda water. Both rose to their feet as Manning strolled in. And both evidently knew him.

The amazing thing was that they might have been twins. Hair cut, general features, coloring, height, weight, and make-up were startlingly similar. Suits and ties were similar.

One was Sesnon, one his “ghost.” His appearance was probably brought about for use in drawing off a “tail,” if there was any. In all likelihood routine instructions, rather than alarm, for Sesnon regarded Manning coolly enough. It showed the quality of the Crime Master’s brain, the action of the expert player, looking moves ahead for all possible plays and contingencies.

Again Manning acknowledged the Griffin’s resourcefulness. The man’s methods were bold and subtle. He was like a slippery eel that, even when seemingly caught, slides through the hand and leaves only slime behind.

Manning knew which was which.

“What do you want?” asked Sesnon. The presence of his seeming twin did not actually involve him. He might or might not admit that he had called on Ordway. It was not necessarily criminal to share or shift his hotel. He knew nothing of the results of the autopsy though he might now suspect he had been trailed. He was still confident.

“I want you, Sievers, or Sesnon, for the murder of Ordway. I myself traced you from his office. Also I know how he was killed.”

Sievers did not flinch. His eyes narrowed slightly.

“Which of us are you talking to?” he asked.

“You. When you made your changes, Sesnon, you forgot to put in different sleeve links. There will be no question about your identity. I’m taking you both. I have two men in the lobby to take you down. Stand still, the pair of you.”

He saw their glances meet, shift quickly and obliquely to the window. It gave out to a narrow alley. Not the best room in the hotel, but it had one advantage for their kind. It was a fire exit.

Sesnon’s double moved silently and swiftly. His right hand swung up—inside his partly open vest. The wrist halted, his fingers clutching for a gun. There would be a good tale for the Griffin. The latter had impressed them with the cleverness of Manning, and here they had him. The gun was muffled. There was nothing to it. Let the two dicks stay in the lobby. They would get clear.

Then he grunted—and then he gasped.

The steel ferrule, with a flick of Manning’s wrist, had hit and paralyzed his own, as the end of the snaky, but heavy cane struck a carpal bone where the radius joined it.

The cane circled, shot forward, stabbed him in the belly. It lifted in a
sabreur’s
sweep and tapped him over the ear. He lost all interest in the proceedings. It took but a second.

But, in that second Sesnon had hurled himself upon Manning, striving to throw him, to knock him out. He had no weapon on him, from sheer precaution, a carefulness overdone in this case. He was powerful, trained, and imagined easy conquest, astounded to find himself grasping a body that was sheathed in muscle and hard flesh, that turned his attack to defense.

He had grasped Manning’s right wrist and Manning let his cane fall. He held a private satisfaction in tackling this murderer with his bare hands.

He tied Sesnon in the fierce clinch, held him, and flung him loose, bewildered at the expert handling—loose for a moment—then Manning’s upper-cut traveled from his hip and connected.

It was all over. Sesnon fell like a length of chain, his coördination unlinked.

Manning went over him, went over the “ghost” and found little of value, save money, with which both were plentifully supplied. Then he called the office, spoke crisply to the clerk:

“Two men there in the lounge. They’re from headquarters. Send them up here, right away.”

He had two of Griffin’s men in the toils, but there was not much to hold them on, save suspicion and limited circumstantial evidence for Sesnon, a Sullivan act charge for his “ghost.” No jury was going to convict them of murder. There was no positive evidence that Ordway had died of anything administered externally. Only opinion, and a scanty showing of grease that an expert lawyer would laugh off. They would undoubtedly have the best legal advice. Unless Manning found the stearine pellets and the gun, found them soon, in Sesnon’s room they would be out on bail.

Yet he could hardly have arrested Sesnon on his first hunch that he was the murderer. Now he almost took the room apart and found nothing. The pair were taken away. They would get a good sweating, a rousing third degree. Sesnon, nursing a sore jaw, affected to be jaunty. The “ghost” was still feeling too sick from the jabs and strokes of Manning’s cane to say anything.

“We won’t be there long,” Sesnon boasted.

Manning relayed through to Centre Street, asking to have the two held as long as possible, but he did not doubt that the Griffin would soon get busy. Because of his minute examination he should be certain the poison pellets and gun were not in the room, but he was not satisfied.

He went over the search again. Then he retained the room for himself. It was midnight when he once more got through to the commissioner. He had found his evidence. Sesnon had hidden the pistol with a cunning worthy of the Griffin himself.

He had wrapped it in black cloth, a small parcel, for the gun could rest in the palm of the hand. He had wired it underneath the grating of the fire escape, close to the building. It was practically invisible and might have stayed there for months, though no doubt some stranger would have visited that room later, another of the Griffin’s emissaries, and removed it. It was a marvelous piece of mechanism, loaded with a tiny capsule of wax, ready for deadly action.

If Sesnon had been able to use it on Manning, the duel for crime mastery would have ended then and there. He had evidently found Sesnon almost ready to leave, not wishing to destroy the gun, not caring to chance carrying it with him any longer.

Strenuous efforts had been made to admit them to bail. Big Jake himself, most famous—and infamous—of mouthpieces, had left guests and tried to spring them. Politicians had been busy. Any amount would have been put up. The Griffin had scored heavily in the falling market. Bail money would be negligible compared to his profits.

But they were still held. Sesnon would have to stand trial for murder. Yet they were faithful. What hold the Griffin held on them could not be shaken. Promises, bullying, long hours of “degree” got nothing out of them. They knew nothing of the Griffin. Nothing. Then or afterward.

Manning drove home to Pelham Manor in the small hours, well satisfied though tired. He ran the car into the garage, went, patent key in hand, to his front door. The inlet of the lock was covered with a scarlet cartouche, red as blood, the head of a Griffin stamped upon it.

The Crime Invisible

The Red Griffin, Master of Crime, Strikes Again, and a Grisly Form is Left In a Millionaire’s Bedroom

A GONG sounded, sonorous but mellow. The faint strains of music ceased. Perfume of amber drifted through the big room, with its curved walls that showed neither door nor window. A voice came clearly from the brazen disk that was suspended on the elaborately carved desk between two smaller ones.

The Griffin, the mysterious malefactor whose crimes baffled and alarmed the police, the press and public of the greatest city in the world, listened intently, his hand curved beneath his chin. His face held a half sneer of malevolence, of contempt.

It was his habitual expression. The outward semblance of a man who hated much, loved nothing, a man bereft of humanity, waging war against humanity, against society, and law and order.

In a letter, nothing short of a challenge, to Gordon Manning, special and volunteer investigator, late of the Secret Service, youngest major in the American Expeditionary Force, the Griffin, who was otherwise nameless, had styled himself the
Crime Master.

He had admitted the possibility, though not the probability, of Manning twisting the meaning of the phrase, of proving himself the
master of crime.
There was a subtle distinction there, like a chuckle. It was just a jest to the Griffin. Manning took it seriously.

The Griffin’s brain was askew. It was possessed by a diabolical urge of revenge against the world. It nursed a grudge and nurtured it in an intellect that was keen beyond the ordinary imagination. His hate was archaic, primitive, possessed of monstrous ego, but his methods were modern.

As the voice continued, his sneer changed to a slight smile of satisfaction. He gave a few crisp orders in return. Then lit a Turkish hookah pipe, in the bowl of which hasheesh was mixed with the tobacco, a stimulant rather than a drug to the Griffin.

Manning termed his attitude grandaisse dementia. That was the nearest medical term. What madness lurked in the brain cells had not rotted them, but stimulated them for evil to the
n
th degree. Some day, perhaps, this excitation would destroy him. Now it destroyed others.

He was like the monster Frankenstein, let loose on the earth in the shape of a man, lacking a soul. One might imagine him having sold it to the devil, or think him some true Satanic spawn set free to engender wickedness and wreak wanton destruction.

For a while the rose water bubbled in the container of the hookah, the outblown smoke-twists were drawn away by the perfect ventilation of this room that was like a fortress, its walls of chilled steel, back of the rich brocades in blending shades of gold, the pattern woven like the visions in the Griffin’s brain.