Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 317 - Ten Glass Eyes

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TEN GLASS EYES

Maxwell Grant

http://www.blackmask.com

? CHAPTER I

? CHAPTER II

? CHAPTER III

? CHAPTER IV

? CHAPTER V

? CHAPTER VI

? CHAPTER VII

? CHAPTER VIII

? CHAPTER IX

? CHAPTER X

? CHAPTER XI

? CHAPTER XII

? CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER I

IT began, if these things ever have a beginning, when a man darted across a street in broad daylight.

Dashing through the traffic like a mad moth bent on immolating itself in a flame, he made his way through

the tangle of juggernauts. Broken field running, he was thinking, was never like this.

Is there any stop, he wondered, once you begin to run? Is there any escape? But there was no time for

thought. Behind him, tenacious as death, came that tall, thin man whose face kept popping up so often

that it had become a day nightmare.

The man who was running chanced a glance behind him. Had the traffic lost the... no, there was that

aquiline face. Persistent as death.

Into a department store. The man knew he should not run, but it was hard to slow down to a walk with

that menacing presence so close. Through shoppers, mostly female, past counters that offered the

treasures of Araby at ten percent off, he made his way.

That elevator there... could he duck in just as the doors came to a close? He wandered around as though

there was not a thought in his head. Then, just as the doors started to close, he darted within the cubicle.

He sighed. He was alone. Alone but for the twenty or thirty people in the car. The elevator operator

intoned in a voice laden with the weariness of all time, "Second floor, gents furnishings, ties, shirts, suits,

outdoor furniture, anyone out?"

There was no answer. The man who was running from his fate edged his way back as far as he could

when the car door opened at the third floor. A bevy of women left the car. Ahead through the open door

he could see girdles, slips, and various other completely female appurtenances.

He scrunched back into the now slightly more empty car. He had no plans now. Where were those

careful plans he had made? He smiled a sour grin. Where are the snows of yesteryear? The careful plans

had vanished as if they had never been, when that other man had appeared in the background. What use

was a new identity, a mustache, colored glasses, a stooped walk, the new name, when all the time that

harsh face was somewhere in the environs?

It had all seemed so simple at first. Maybe it always looked simple. Perhaps the Greeks were right,

perhaps you did carry your fate inside you.

The door opened on the fifth floor. The car was now almost empty. He walked out of it just as if he were

a carefree shopper. Ahead lay what? Materially there was a floor full of phonographs and radios. Two

record players were going full blast as though in competition. One was playing Beethoven's Ninth... and

the other? The young man scowled as he tried to get the beat of it.

What was it? "Get out of Town"... That was too apt. It was like a corny clue in a bad play.

If only he could get out of town. If he could vanish off the face of the earth for a while it would help. If he

could... his brain stopped working. Coming up the escalator, face set, eyes incurious, was the face of his

fate.

The man had been trailing him for... it seemed like forever. Really it was only two days. Forty-eight

hours. Two days in which he had neither slept, nor barely eaten.

The harsh-faced man seemed not even to notice his quarry. He looked around. He made a small grimace

at the warring sounds that came from the rival phonographs. To the naked eye he could have been a

shopper.

The young man, looking around desperately for some kind of exit, caught a distorted reflection of his own

face in a highly polished piano top. Could that be his face? That gaunt, lined thing?

He was young, barely twenty-eight, but the face that leered at him looked like a middle-aged, haggard

man with the worries of the world on his shoulders.

It was time for a showdown. The whole thing would not be half as nerve-wracking if he could be sure

that his trailer was a detective. But would a detective have given him so much leeway? Why had he not

been arrested two days back? Why was the man just following him?

His face lightened. He looked younger. He'd call the bluff of the other man! He darted forward right past

the tall thin man. He jumped on to the handrail of the escalator.

All his life he had wanted to slide down a long banister. Here was his opportunity. He smiled a gay,

devil-may-care grin and slid out of view of his nemesis.

It caused quite a sensation. He came rocketing down the banister from the radio phonograph floor down

to the floor which was devoted to baby things. Young mothers and old looked up as the kiting figure

came crashing into view. He landed on his feet and darted for a closing elevator door.

Ah, he thought, this was the way to do it. He was having some fun for his money. He ran into the elevator

and smiled as the doors came together. Let his trailer top that!

But a sudden thought wiped the smile off his face. He had gambled with the fates. Gambled to see if the

man would call for help, blow a police whistle, show in one way or another whether or not he was a

detective.

The slide for life had not brought a whistle or a command to stop. The man was not a detective, then!

That made it worse! When the elevator stopped at the ground floor, a badly frightened young man, all

gaiety gone, eeled his way through the maddening crush of shoppers.

He wanted to get out into the air, out where there was some elbow room. As he walked as fast as he

could without looking as if he were running, he kept looking behind him. His head turned for a glance

backward so often that it looked as if he had a nervous tic.

Here on the street, the sunlight bathing everything with a hard brassy glare, he felt a bit better. After all,

he thought, with all this melodrama it should either be a dark black night, or there should be a bitter storm

brewing.

The sunlight washed away some of the fear. He couldn't be too frightened with all these people around.

Why, not fifteen feet away a big burly traffic cop was busily unsnarling a traffic jam.

His mercurial mood shifted again when one of his backward glances showed standing out from the crowd

of anonymous faces the gaunt harsh face of... This was too much. How had the other man followed him?

It was uncanny. Go into no matter what crowd he would, let him dash into a swirling pool of mankind,

still that face arose to haunt him.

Forty-eight hours. He shook his head. Maybe he was getting a bit punchy. Maybe some sleep would

make a bit of difference. If he could sleep... he yawned. Just a nap would help. This way it seemed like

black magic. Perhaps if he were rested, things would look differently.

But where could he go? Where to escape, if only for an hour? He walked on through the streets of the

strange city. He'd never been here before. All his life had been spent on different levels. He was

accustomed to being taken care of. Ordinarily, one of the servants bought his train tickets, the chauffeur

drove him to the station, guided him to the proper track, and practically put him on the train.

Going it blind this way, he could see how much his father's money had coddled him. Maybe if his heart

hadn't had that murmur, if he'd been in the army, he might have become more self-reliant. But if he'd been

in the army, he probably wouldn't have been in this scrape.

He shrugged. He had come to a part of the city where wealth and poverty were sisters in arms. Most big

cities have these strange areas where the poor are being usurped by the rich, where the process has not

come to an end.

In New York, he thought, there was Sutton Place, where a distance of twenty feet could take you from

an elevator apartment to a tenement, and the rent for the apartment for a month could pay the tenement

rent for more than a year.

This was such an area. He could not go toward the expensive looking section. There was no surcease for

him there. Perhaps... he turned to the left. If he had gone to the right? That would have been another

story. Looking back on it, an hour later, he could not help but wonder what his fate would have held for

him had he gone to the right.

TO the left, past garages, past tumble-down wooden fronted houses, past garbage cans whose covers

lay to one side, pushed there by gaunt alley cats, allowing the contents of the cans to fester in the hot

sun.

He walked slowly now. He had lost his second wind, or whatever it was that had sustained him this long.

Ahead was a group of men. Ordinarily, in that other life he had left behind, he would have avoided such a

group. You can see them anywhere. Their social club is the street corner, their reason to be questionable,

their means of livelihood invisible. They were, in short, street hoodlums.

There were four of them. Here was another chance for the fates. If he had crossed the street and avoided

them, then Charley Bates would not have been arrested, and...

But he did not cross the street.

As he walked up to them, one of them who wore glasses said, "Pipe the suit. Costs big bucks. Take him,

Charley."

Charley said, "Well, I got this here date with Mingus, but..."

As the pursued man came abreast of them, the one with the glasses said, "Now."

The one with glasses stepped out and bumped into the man. Charley stepped forward and said out of the

corner of his mouth, "Whyncha watch where ya goin'?"

That was all.

All, except that across the street, a cruising dolly car saw what had happened. A cop in the dolly car

said, "Charley just dipped that character."

The other cop said, "You'd think these crumbs'd learn they can't work in daylight, wouldn't ya?" He

sighed. They got out of the car. The four street loungers saw the cops too late. They started to split. But

one of the cops grabbed Bates.

He grabbed him before he could ditch the leather. This is a fatal mistake for a pickpocket. The cop

shook him the way you would a bad puppy. He ran his hands down Bates body. He found the stolen

wallet.

Holding on to Bates with one hand, he flipped the wallet open. Only then, when he saw the name that

was under the celluloid of the identification card, did he look up and see that the man whose wallet had

been stolen had disappeared.

The cop said, "What a break! There's a three state alarm out for that lad!"

Bates said, "Of all the lousy breaks... I have to lift into a deal like that!"

Through a dirty window two flights up, the man whose wallet had been stolen looked down at the tableau

on the street. He saw the cop look up from his wallet. He saw Bates point at the house into which he had

run.

This really tied it. Now he was lost. His money gone, hidden in a house which he had never seen before,

in a city in which he had never been, with the cops outside, and his trailer... he looked further out the

window. There, perhaps a hundred feet away, was his implacable trailer.

All around him myriad cooking smells smashed in. Garlic and the ghost of eaten garlic was like a live

thing. The peeling plaster on the walls looked like something you would see upon turning up a stone.

The stairs were rickety, and noisy as the smells that pushed at him. He took another look out the

window. His trailer was easing around the little huddle where one policeman talked to Bates and the

other was holding on to another of the four who had been leaning against the lamp post when he walked

up.

Two of them had run away. They had made a getaway. Why couldn't he? But then they didn't have the

tall, lean man after them. There, he was coming up the stoop of the house.

The man in the hallway looked around. This was the dead end, unless... he looked up the narrow stair

well. Some of those old houses, he had read somewhere, had stairs leading up to the roof. If he could get

to the roof, run across a couple of buildings and come down into a completely different house, perhaps

he could still...

But as he started up the stairs, he could hear only a floor below him the steady determined footsteps

which were getting to be the only reality in the all encompassing nightmare that tore at his sanity.

Only a floor separated hunted from hunter. There would not be time to make the roof. His frantic eyes

lighted on a door near him. There was a sliver of light stabbing out into the darkness that hung in this hall

even in the day time.

The door must be slightly ajar to allow all that light to escape. He reached for the door knob. If he could

throw himself on the mercy of whoever occupied these rooms...

He slid the door open quietly. He stepped into the room. That was all. Time came to a halt. It was as

though he had stepped from one universe into nothingness.

CHAPTER II

HE opened his eyes. Lines. Wavy lines that shimmered off into the distance. His eyes couldn't focus on

whatever it was that he was staring at. He blinked them.

Nothing happened. The same brown dirty lines wavered off out of the range of his vision. He moved his

head. Something was wrong with it. The lines wavered then came together. He thought suddenly,

stupidly, parallel lines extended into infinity do not meet.

He pressed his hands down. They met resistance. He moved. His hands were pressed flat on the floor.

The reason he had not been able to make out the lines was that his eyes were too close to the lines.

He was lying full length on the floor. The lines were the demarcations between splintered boards that

made up the floor. He lifted his head which felt mushy. There was no pain, not yet, but it felt as though his

brains had been cooked over a slow fire. He sat up.

He was in a tenement kitchen. That seemed a little bizarre, but then, so did everything else. There, not far

away, was a stove. It was greasy and grimy. There was a pot of something on the front burner. He

twitched his nostrils. Whatever was on the stove was burning.

He tilted forward as he got to his knees. Only then did he realize that he had something in his hand. He

looked at it dully. It was a knife. A bread knife with a serrated edge that looked something like the Malay

kriss his father had hanging on the wall in his study.

He dropped the knife. It made the only sound in the room but that of the spluttering pot on the stove. By

some freak of chance it stuck point first in the wooden floor. It quivered. The quivering put into motion a

red fluid. It seemed to be the wrong color for blood.

Blood? That set off an alarm bell in the confused brain that was the only sentient thing in the room. He

thought. Blood? Somebody been carving a roast?

He staggered to the stove and turned the gas off. That made the room completely still. Now all he could

hear was his own rasping breath.

His staggering, wobbling progression carried him to a doorway that separated the kitchen from another

room. There was no door, he noted, with an unused section of his brain. Just a doorway where there

must once have been a door.

Standing in the doorway, he took some deep gulps of breath. He was trying to get some sanity into his

brain. He stood there and looked back at the room.

The stove, the bare floor, the dingy ceiling, the fly specked bulb that hung from a snake-like wire from the

ceiling. The smells, claustrophobic lack of height to the room. The walls that seemed to press in like a

torture device. He gasped again.

How could people live this way? Suddenly, and for the first time in his life, he could understand a bit, the

mechanisms that drive poverty stricken people to crime.

He knuckled his eyes. He shook his head. Not even a door to separate the odorous kitchen from the

next room. In the center of the tiny room, the knife sticking up at right angles from the floor, was a

magnet that kept pulling his eyes back, no matter how he tried to avoid it.

What had happened since he opened the outside door expecting, hoping, praying, to find an exit?

Violence, certainly. He turned away from the kitchen toward the other room. The answer seemed to be

in there... the answer to be, too, that there was no exit.

He started toward the doorway without a door twice, before he finally managed to make his muscles

answer the commands his brain sent to them.

He saw his fate when he got into the other room. On the only chair in the room sat a man. He was so

dead that it seemed unlikely that he had ever been alive.

His clenched hands were pressed into his stomach. His fingers had not been enough to dam up that which

welled between his fingers. The chair with its burden, an unmade bed with soiled bed clothes, a picture of

September Morn that hung aslant on the wall, a jacket, worn and torn, hanging from a nail that had

shattered the plaster around it, a worn and greasy looking felt hat... was there anything else?

A bag of tobacco and some crumpled pieces of cigarette paper lay on the floor in front of the chair. The

living man went closer to the dead man. The dead man's hands suddenly dropped from his stomach.

Something hard and round dropped from the red gloved hands.

The man who could still breathe stopped breathing as he bent over and looked closely at the thing that

lay on the floor. It looked like a marble.

He looked from the marble up at the dead man's face and then wished that he hadn't. The man in life had

worn a glass eye. Minus the eye, the gaping wound was obscene.

Not really knowing what he was doing, the live man picked up the glass eye and dropped it into his

pocket. He whirled. There had been a sound behind him.

The sound was made by the door opening. Only then did the young man in any way come out of the fog

that surrounded him. He felt his head. There was a small lump over his ear. He had been slugged... that

was clear.

In the short time it took the door to open all the way, he saw that he was a goner. Here he was the only

human in a room with a corpse. On the floor outside was the murder weapon with his fingerprints on it.

In the other room was that which would send him to his death. It was too much. He began to giggle.

The door was all the way open now. A tall man with a gaunt strong face came into the room. His profile

was hatchet shaped. It was the man who had been trailing him, the giggling man saw.

His giggles got so loud now that they drowned all sounds out. He did not even hear what his trailer said.

The hunter had caught the hunted.

The older man slapped the younger's face. The sound was like that of a seal applauding itself. Sharp and

clear, it gradually drowned out the hysterical sound of laughter that was making the room hideous with

sound.

"Did you do it," the older man repeated.

The younger man said, "No... I don't think so."

"You don't think so? Don't you know?"

"I don't know. I was trying to get away from you... I opened this door... and that's all I know. I came to

with a knife in my hand and death in the other room." The younger man began to laugh again. "I ran from

you to meet my fate. No matter how fast I ran, I couldn't get here any later or earlier. The fates must be

screaming with laughter!"

"I'm afraid the fates have other things to do besides laughing at you. Shut up!" The man's face was as

harsh as his voice. "Stop giggling or I'll leave you to your fate!"

"But you are my fate. If I hadn't been running from you, I could not have made it here! You drove me

into this!"

"You drove yourself here! You forged the check, not me! You make your own fate!"

"How true. How prosaically, how horribly true. But I forged the check because my father doesn't

approve of the way I live! Maybe it was my father who made my fate."

"We haven't time for idle chitchat." The tall, older man walked into the other room.

There was a banging at the door. A loud voice called, "Hey, Ally! I ain't gonna wait out here all day!

Come on. Open up!"

The tall man came running out of the deathly still bedroom. "You," he said, "the closet. Quick!"

The young man quivered his nostrils as he forced his way into a filthy, smelly closet. The door closed on

him. Through the thin wooden panel, he could hear the door open.

"Who the hell are you?" the strange voice asked in surly tones.

"Lamont Cranston," was the answer. "Who are you, as long as we are swapping identities?"

"Brett Dane." There was a silence. "Mean anything to you?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Here. Look at my rozzer." That meant nothing to the strained ears in the closet.

In the room with the bread-knife still stuck in the floor, with the single yellow twenty-five watt bulb trying

to send some light through the fly specks that defaced it, the two men stood and took each other's

measure.

Cranston was looking at the wallet that the man held out. It identified him as a private detective. Cranston

looked from this to the man. He was about six feet tall, a broken nose instead of making him look tough,

gave him rather agreeably pugnacious air. His broad, high cheek-boned face was impassive.

"What are you doing here?"

"Don't see that it's much of your business, but Ally sent me a frantic wire to come here."

"I see. Ally what?"

"Ally rat to his enemies, I suppose," the man said, with a crooked smile. "Albert Mingus is the name."

"Was the name," Cranston said. "He's in the other room."

"I figured that, with the knife staring me in the puss. Who carved him up?"

Cranston shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine."

"Only about half the town would have liked to twist a knife into Ally. He was a shylock, you know. It

doesn't make for popularity."

"I see. Why did he call on you?"

"Sheer modesty keeps me from giving you the proper answer." Dane grinned. "I'm the best private

operator in town. I guess that's why."

Cranston said, "He's in the other room if you want to take a look. I want to look in the closet and see if

there's any clue. There is nothing else of any help here."

For a long, long moment, Dane stood stock still. Cranston wondered if he could have any idea that hiding

in the closet was Roger Stanton... But Dane finally said. "You look familiar. Do I know you from

anywhere?"

"Not that I know of." Cranston smiled so it wouldn't sound vain, "You may have seen my picture in the

papers some time or other."

"Could be," Dane said. He looked all around the kitchen. "No sign of anyone here."

"None at all," Cranston said.

Finally, still looking all around him, Dane walked toward the doorway that led into the room where

Mingus sat, still in death.

Cranston stood with his back to the closet, making sure that Dane wasn't going to change his mind and

turn around again. There, he was walking through the doorway.

Waiting till the private detective went into the other room, Cranston opened the closet door. His body

shielded the inside of the room from any glance. He whispered, "Out the door. Hide out in the Alexis

Hotel. Register under the name of John Barrel."

The man in the closet said. "Money."

Cranston gave him ten dollars. There was no sound from the other room. The open door of the closet cut

off a view of the kitchen. Perhaps with some luck...

"Now..." Cranston said. "Beat it, Roger."

The younger man tiptoed out of the kitchen. It didn't seem possible that he could make it. Dane's voice

roared out of the other room, "Hey, Cranston! Where's Ally's glass eye?"

Cranston walked into the bedroom as Roger Stanton left the kitchen. Cranston's body cut off any view

that Dane might have had of Roger.

"Glass eye?" Cranston sounded surprised.

"Guess you wouldn't dig that. Say, why were the boys in blue huddled around this joint when I made my

entrance?" Dane asked, coming back into the kitchen.

"Pickpocket caught. Wallet he stole was that belonging to a youngster named Roger Stanton."

"Stanton... where've I heard that name? Wanted poster, that's it. He's on the loose and wanted in New

York, isn't he?"

"That's right. He forged a check."

Cranston and Dane looked at each other. Dane said. "Guess we better let the cops know about this."

Nodding, Cranston said, "I'm rather surprised they haven't been in to see us already. They were looking

over all the houses in the neighborhood. Stanton ran into this house."

"Probably took it on the lam over the roof..." Dane's face scowled. "Unless..." He turned and looked

back at the bedroom in which a money lender lay dead. "Say," he burst out, "you don't think Stanton ran

in here do you?"

Cranston shrugged noncommittally.

"If he did, and Ally recognized him as somebody that the cops wanted, he woulda tried to hold him. That

boy didn't love money any more than a cat loves catnip. Is there a reward out for Stanton?"

Cranston nodded. "A thousand dollars."

"That does it. Seven to five the kid bounced in here and was spotted by Ally who tried to put the arm on

him." The private detective looked thoughtfully at the knife which was still stuck in the floor. He crouched

down on his heels in a deep knee bend. "Hmmm... you see the prints on the handle here?"

"Uh huh," Cranston said.

"Lucky for the cops this is an open and shut case. There's a bill up before the state legislature about a rise

in pay for the Gestapo. Anything that smears up the works is not going to go good with the politicos. The

cops will want to clear this up but fast."

"I see," Cranston said.

Dane looked out a dirty window. He saw some policemen on the street. He raised the creaking window.

"Hey, Butler! Up here! It's me, Dane. I got a kill for you!"

The policeman looked up at Dane and said, "When don't you have a kill? You ought to travel around

with a meat wagon!"

"Cut the comedy," Dane said, "and come on up. This is bad!"

"They're always bad," the cop said, off-handedly.

"Not like this! Ally Mingus got his!"

"They ought to make it a holiday," the cop said. "If anyone ever asked to get boffed, that character did!"

"Well, come on up and feast your eyes on the cadaver, then!" Dane said.

"Yeah, just a minute." The policeman turned to two quiet men in plain clothes. He spoke to them. The

two men looked up at Dane's head which stuck out the window like a Punch and Judy show.

One of the plainly dressed men waved at Dane. "Be right up."

The men on the street talked together for a moment. Dane said to Cranston, "If they ever finish with their

knitting, they'll be up. We're in luck. Some homicide men are down there talking to the boys."

"Good," Cranston said.

"I been giving myself a good case of ear strain, but I can't make out what the boys in blue are brooding

about down there," Dane said.

"Probably talking about the weather," Cranston said.

"No doubt." Dane shrugged. "Funny, how callous you can get to anything, including death."

"It's their business. I suppose they have to be callous."

"Sure." Dane still looked down at the street.

"Know anything more about Mingus?" Cranston asked Dane.

He eased the window back down. "You know, I don't get what happened to Ally's glass eye. He was

vain about that. It was his only vanity. He was never seen without it."

"Curious," Cranston agreed.

Dane shrugged. "Doesn't matter, of course. If the prints on the knife belong to Stanton, that'll be the end

of the whole thing, eye or no eye."

The door burst open. Two uniformed policemen came in. One said, "I called the homicide boys.

Whatcha got, Dane?"

"Ally got shivved." Dane said.

The cops exchanged secret glances. One said, "Oh oh... that does it!"

"Why?" Dane asked.

"Didn't you know? He was backing John, good old Honest John Dorran, the ward heeler. He put up the

green stuff to put John in the state legislature. Wonder if this is gonna be a political mess?"

Before anything more could be said, the door opened again. A man's voice said. "If it ain't the demon

detective! Ready to go to work on the force again, Dane?"

Dane grinned, "Hi, Hogan. No, not yet. Make a buck or two more my way."

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TENGLASSEYESMaxwellGrantThispagecopyright©2001BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?CHAPTERI?CHAPTERII?CHAPTERIII?CHAPTERIV?CHAPTERV?CHAPTERVI?CHAPTERVII?CHAPTERVIII?CHAPTERIX?CHAPTERX?CHAPTERXI?CHAPTERXII?CHAPTERXIIICHAPTERIITbegan,ifthesethingseverhaveabeginning,whenamandartedacrossastreetinbro...

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