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The Phantom Detective: 5 Murder Mysteries in One Volume. Robert Wallace
Читать онлайн.Название The Phantom Detective: 5 Murder Mysteries in One Volume
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9788027246076
Автор произведения Robert Wallace
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Bookwire
"Damn!" Jessup exclaimed suddenly. "I'll have to get fresh X-ray plates. Just sit where you are, Kline."
The doctor seemed to have forgotten that he was preparing to examine a criminal convicted of murder and capable of murdering again. He hurried round the screen, out into the main lab. Van could hear his footsteps cross the floor to the third of the three rooms. A door opened and shut.
For almost a minute there was silence.
Then, without warning, a screaming voice shrilled somewhere out in the dimly lighted basement.
The Phantom leaped from the chair, reached the narrow door that opened directly into the basement. As his hand shook the knob, the voice sounded again, screaming words. "You tricked me! I'm making explosives for your brainless empire—I'll expose you—I'll—aaahhh !—"
The frenzied words broke off in a piercing wail of terror that chopped off into abrupt, ominous silence, punctuated by the thud of a falling body.
Van's hand jerked away from the locked door. He swung round the screen, saw one of the guards still standing by the main door, poised, a gun in his hand. The other prison guard was running out into the basement. Dr. Jessup was nowhere in sight.
The Phantom ran into the large laboratory as the second guard snapped out of his paralyzed posture. The two of them rushed out toward the uniformed screw bending over a huddled figure on the basement floor.
"Who is it?" the running guard shouted.
"Don't know," the other called. "Never saw him in my life."
But Van had seen that odd, grotesque form before.
It was Gulliver Vonderkag!
The Phantom stared down with narrowed, unbelieving eyes at that hunchback German scientist. The crippled man was already dead, but as Van and the two excited guards bent over him, no wounds or marks of violence were visible.
Remembering the gas fumes that had knocked him out in Dr. Junes' laboratory, the Phantom stooped suddenly between the guards before they could stop him, smelled Kag's lips, depressing the no longer breathing lungs. But there was no odor of gas, no sign of the purplish discoloration of asphyxiation.
The two guards yanked him back away from the body, and the two of them lifted the dead hunchback, carried him away into Jessup's laboratory.
As they laid the body on one of the operating tables, the prison physician emerged from the smaller room on the left, opposite the X-ray office. Dr. Jessup was carrying a packet of X-ray plates. He stopped, stared at the tableau, hurried over to join them.
Van eyed the doctor covertly, noted that the man's seeming surprise was replaced almost at once by a sharp, professional interest.
"Who is this man?" he demanded. "What happened?"
"We don't know," one of the guards exclaimed. "We heard a screech and some screw hollerin' about explosives—"
"I heard that part of it myself," Jessup declared, shutting off the guard's answer. "Thought it was a patient in a fit, up on the floor above." He glanced sharply at Van. "Where were you?"
"Right where you parked me, Doc!" the Phantom snapped. "What killed him?"
Jessup set down the plate case, started examining the body, while the others watched him. The doctor's fingers moved expertly over the dead cripple, removing the clothing, prodding, probing.
When he'd finished, he glanced up, frowning.
"Not a mark on him," he said. "Not a scratch!"
"A guy don't scream like that just from heart failure," Van remarked and stared keenly at the dead face.
Those wide eyes that had rolled so terribly in Kag's head were fixed now, concentrated straight ahead in glazed contemplation of eternity. Staring down at their vacuous expression, the Phantom's keen gaze caught a tiny fleck of blood that looked like a thread thin blood-vessel on the white eyeball. He bent over the still, agonized face, pushed the wrinkled flesh away from the eye socket.
"Mind, doc?" he asked, but didn't wait for permission.
On the outer corner of the left eye was a minute blood clot covering a needle hole that had penetrated the brain.
Van pointed it out to Dr. Jessup, noticing the worried, lines that appeared on the surgeon's features.
"Maybe the guards can find the needle that made that puncture," the Phantom suggested boldly. "Anyhow, Doctor, it took a medical man to know how to kill a guy that way."
Dr. Jessup looked at Van sharply, startled, but was too slow to stop him as the Phantom stepped back and crossed to the small room from which the doctor had emerged a minute after the murder.
Van reached the open door, stared swiftly through. A man moving fast could have got out of that room through a door, met and killed Kag, and got back into the room again before even the paralyzed guard could have seen him.
He scowled, stared again through that open doorway. A single glance covered the whole of the small room. There was not a door or a window in it, and the walls, like the walls of the other rooms, were of solid concrete.
Dr. Jessup couldn't have got out of there unless there was a trick door. Van had no chance to search for one. He was still Killer Kline.
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