The Phantom Detective: 5 Murder Mysteries in One Volume - Robert Wallace

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is correct. Not in intent, anyway, sir. I remember Willow—I should, because he had an accident in the prison foundry and I operated to save his life. His face was very badly burned, so I did my best to patch it up. If that's what you refer to, Captain."

      "Well," Walters said grudgingly, "that's different!"

      Harry Arnold, the ex-congressman from Pennsylvania, broke in with, "It's a mistake that Willow was able to escape at all! Mr. Havens, you can see the state things are in at Alleghany Prison. If there's any more adverse publicity, we're apt to have a prison riot or an organized jailbreak. If you'll give us some help, by stopping advertising the conditions, I'll guarantee the prison is cleaned up!"

      "You're right, Mr. Arnold," Havens said determinedly. "I'll do my best to keep this escape quiet. But see that the prison is reorganized at once, or I'll have to expose the whole situation, and you're apt to have the Federal Prison authorities step in!"

      Jim Doran's slatey eyes had become the color of muddy marble. He nodded abruptly to the men in the office. "The police can handle this. I'll get the details later from them," he announced curtly, and strode out of the room.

      But only Frank Havens caught and appreciated the determined, eager gleam that had crept into Jim Doran's sardonic gaze.

      Several police officials, two internes and a man from the medical examiner's office were waiting in the bulletproof glass cubicle down on the eleventh floor when Van got out of the elevator. The editorial room was still a bedlam of cyclonic confusion.

      Out on Eighth Avenue a persistent rain was wetting the shouted Clarion extras:

      TITANIC EXPLOSIONS WRECK

       HUGE FEDERAL PROJECT

      Weird Radio Voice Threatens Further Disasters

      Chapter Four.

       Dread Snatch

       Table of Contents

      Snakey Willow's body lay flat and deflated on the cold morgue slab when Van pulled back the disinfected white sheet and bent close over the dead killer's wax-like face. Even in death, the escaped murderer's features were menacing and evil.

      Special attention had evidently been given Snakey Willow's face-lifting operation by the Bellevue Hospital medicos, for the recently healed incisions under the tight-skinned jowls and along the high cheekbones had been slit open again by the autopsy scalpels.

      Studying those freshly reopened incisions keenly the Phantom smiled thinly to himself.

      He was no M.D., but mechanized crime hunts had led him deeply into the study of modern drugs, hypnosis and medicine. He recognized here, in Snakey Willow's now mutilated features, the sensitive hand of an exceptionally fine surgeon.

      The criminal's nose had been remoulded, shortened and widened in a manner that tended to broaden the appearance of the unchangeable bone structure of the narrow head. No wonder the sharp eyes of the New York City police had failed to recognize that revamped face.

      But it was the deft, startlingly liberal application of skin grafting that held the Phantom's concentrated attention. He fingered a small, powerful magnifying glass from his vest pocket, focused it upon those hundreds of individual skin grafts that had covered the incisions of the original plastic surgery operation.

      Each graft, he knew, had been a separate detail taking time and infinite patience—and taking, also, a dangerously large amount of live skin.

      Van pulled the white sheet all the way off the nude figure, examined the body carefully from shoulders to feet for scars of skin removal. He found none, and slid the sheet back up over the corpse slowly, his grey eyes moody and thoughtful.

      Some other person had provided the live skin for this facial operation. And from the amount of skin grafted, it had been a dangerous venture for the donor.

      Snakey Willow was not a type to have sacrificing friends. And prison hospitals didn't provide such donations for convicts. Somebody had been paid a big sum for the skin used. Or else force had been used to take it.

      Before Jim Doran replaced the magnifying glass in his pocket, he examined the dead man's fingertips. They had been tampered with, showed the marks of acid burns, but the tell-tale whorls had not been eradicated.

      Even skin grafting could not stop those true fingerprints from growing back again to identify their owner. Snakey Willow had, it seemed, tried to polish off for criminally practical purposes a job the prison surgeon had done to save his life.

      Van Loan left the Bellevue morgue with three convictions:

      The prison surgeon who had repaired Snakey Willow's face had performed one of the finest technical and artistic operations the Phantom had ever seen. The skin grafting job had taken more live epidermis than any one donor could safely give. And the entire operation had cost far more money than Snakey Willow could ever have paid.

      Beyond those three conclusions the Phantom refused to confuse his mind with speculation. He made a phone call from a drug store booth to his garage, asking that his coupe be picked up near the Clarion Building.

      A second telephone message got Wild Jerry Lannigan at the mid-town apartment where the Phantom kept sanctuary quarters under Lannigan's name.

      "Holmes Airport at eight this evening, Champ," he said curtly when the big red-headed man's voice boomed over the wire. "We're flying the Beechcraft to Buffalo."

      At the other end of the line he could hear Jerry Lannigan's explosive exclamation of enthusiasm. "Champ" was the familiar name that only the Phantom used for the beefy, reckless ex-army mechanic and pilot. It served as a confidential and friendly identification, for not even Lannigan knew the Phantom was Richard Van Loan.

      "Okay, Skipper!" Lannigan was too close to Van personally to use The Phantom appellation, and too smart to bandy it over a public phone. "The ship'll be gassed and oiled. It's about time something happened. I heard that guy with the screwy voice break in on the President's radio broadcast—"

      Van cut him off with a cryptic, "So did too many other people, Champ. The man at the airport will be Professor Bendix," and hung up.

      The Jim Doran disguise had sufficed for the hurried Phantom appearance at the Clarion, but a character of far more ponderance would be needed for the difficult interview Van planned. And there was some special technical information he wanted before he visited Dr. Waldo Junes at the General Electric Experimental Laboratory at Niagara Falls.

      The place to effect both of these needs was in the seclusion of that sound- and explosion-proof lab in the old abandoned river-front building up on the East Side.

      There was nothing of the scientist in the appearance of the slouching figure of Jim Doran as he swung off a First Avenue bus at Ninetieth Street and ambled with wary carelessness toward the East River.

      At the dock end of the street a deserted red brick warehouse loomed on the left, its dirty windows staring vacuously through the still drizzling rain of the late summer afternoon. Jim Doran paused as he reached the corner of the decrepit building, glanced furtively about him.

      The next instant he had faded into the darker shadows beneath the dilapidated loading platform.

      A gaping, broken coal-chute window let him drop through into the darkness of the warehouse basement. He crossed the musty concrete floor with quick, familiar steps, produced a small brass key from a hidden crevice in the masonry at the opposite end of the silent cellar.

      A moment later and he'd unlocked and pulled open a heavy counter-balanced steel and concrete trap door in the floor.

      The Phantom lowered himself down a metal ladder, closed the trap above him, locked it and snapped on a light switch. He stood in the large steel-walled sub-cellar laboratory of Professor Paul Bendix.

      Three-quarters of the long, low-ceilinged chamber was equipped with indestructible work tables upon which were an

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