Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 105 - The Invisible-Box Murders

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The Invisible-Box Murders
A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson
This page copyright © 2002 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
Scanned and Proofed by
Tom Stephens
? Chapter I. FEAR OF BOXES
? Chapter II. GIRL BRINGING TROUBLE
? Chapter III. WHAT THE GIRL BROUGHT
? Chapter IV. CONVINCING BLOSSER
? Chapter V. SLEEPER, MINER AND MONKEY
? Chapter VI. DANGER FOR DAVID
? Chapter VII. ONE MAN LOOSE
? Chapter VIII. ACTION IN BRONZE
? Chapter IX. TRAILS
? Chapter X. TRAIL TURNS
? Chapter XI. MAN DANGER
? Chapter XII. THE VAGUE MR. RENSANCE
? Chapter XIII. THE PIGEON
? Chapter XIV. THE SKEPTIC
? Chapter XV. WATCH
Chapter I. FEAR OF BOXES
IT was a cellophane box, so it was not invisible.
Being made of fairly good cellophane—ten cents a sheet in the dime stores—it was transparent. Not as
transparent, perhaps, as good window glass, but you could see through it without trouble.
It was approximately half the size of a shoe box; as wide and as high as a shoe box, but only half as long.
Otherwise, it bore no resemblance to a shoe box. The lid was not the same. This lid was a kind of flap.
It looked, as nearly as Doc Savage had been able to make it look, exactly like the newspaper
photographs, and the police photographs, of the other boxes.
So it looked like the invisible boxes. Not like the invisible boxes, exactly. But at least like the invisible
boxes looked before they became invisible. Those that had been photographed.
It was a little complicated. Or more specifically, baffling. Baffling was the word.
Doc Savage was putting the box on a man’s doorstep.
It was a little more complicated than that, of course. Getting into the building had not been entirely simple.
It was an office building, the time was near the noon hour, and the place was crowded with people who
might recognize Doc Savage. He knew this. The people were not personal acquaintances and no one he
had met, but there just might be someone who might recognize his picture from the newspapers. So he
had come in through the freight entrance and walked up eleven flights of stairs.
He had stood on the eleventh floor, in the hall, for twenty minutes. Rather, he had occupied a broom
closet, with the door opened a crack, for that long.
J. P. MORGAN
Investments
That was what it said on the door.
It was not the J. P. Morgan, however. This one’s name was not Pierpont, and he was not an
international banker, or a private banker at all. He was just a buyer and seller of cheap securities of the
type called cats and dogs. And he was not very prosperous.
Some detective work by Andrew Blodgett Monk Mayfair, associate of Doc Savage, had unearthed that
much about this J. P. Morgan.
Finally, the secretary had gone out to lunch.
Monk Mayfair had explained that the secretary wasn’t very pretty. That undoubtedly meant she was as
homely as a mud fence with the hide of an octopus tacked on it. Monk Mayfair was easily affected by
women; and when he thought one was homely, she was homely indeed.
This was right. The secretary wasn’t attractive. She looked hungry and in a hurry. She hadn’t locked the
office door behind her, which indicated that J. P. Morgan was in.
Doc Savage had wanted Mr. Morgan to be in. He walked to the door, opened it and entered, careful to
make no sound.
The reception room was furnished with a desk, an uncomfortable chair, a telephone—these for the
secretary—and a seedy and once-luxurious divan for clients.
Doc put the cellophane box on the desk. He picked up the telephone, connected it to the inner room,
pressed the key and got a man’s voice in answer. Presuming this was Mr. Morgan, Doc Savage spoke
rapidly. Doc was a man of many unusual capabilities, and one of these was the ability to imitate voices,
even a woman’s voice after a fashion.
Because, being quite masculine, he could not exactly duplicate the secretary’s voice exactly, he used a
whisper instead.
He said, whispering, "A package just came for you, Mr. Morgan."
The voice said, "Bring it in."
"You better come out and get it," Doc said.
Then he got out of the office, closed the door to a half-inch aperture and waited to see what would
happen.
He had put the cellophane box on the stenographer’s desk; so he hadn’t literally left the box on the man’s
doorstep.
J. P. MORGAN came out of the inner office almost immediately.
In looks, Mr. Morgan was an old gentleman of surprising benevolence. He was of less than average
height, more than average width. His hair was very white, his whiskers very silky and as white as his hair.
He had fawnlike brown eyes with little crinkles at the corners.
Peace and good will; I love my brother. That was Mr. Morgan.
Mr. Morgan looked around the office, then saw the cellophane box.
He proceeded—if one should want to put it humorously—to have kittens.
His eyes seemed to be trying to get out of his skull. That was the first thing, as he looked at the box. Then
he made a noise. It was the noise of a man caught under a freight train.
He jumped backward wildly. His eyes hunted for a weapon. He snatched a fire extinguisher off the wall
and squirted the extinguisher contents at the box.
He did not go near the box, or try to put it on the floor. He just squirted the extinguisher stream at it. The
pencil of tetrachloride—or whatever was in the extinguisher—knocked the cellophane box off the desk,
and it fell to the floor.
The scared Mr. Morgan kept squirting until the extinguisher was empty. He threw the extinguisher at the
box, missing it.
Then he proceeded to try to burn the box. He dumped the contents of the wastebasket on it, struck a
match and applied it to the paper. He didn’t seem to give a hoot about whether the shabby rug got a hole
burned in it or not.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the stream of fluid from the extinguisher had soaked the contents of the
wastebasket, so the paper wouldn’t burn.
First he had tried to extinguish it; now he was trying to burn it. This was rather silly. It showed only one
thing: Mr. Morgan was so scared he didn’t know whether he was standing on his head or on his feet.
Then it dawned on him that the cellophane box was empty. He bent over, staring at the box. He looked
utterly relieved. He sank back in the stenographer’s chair so loosely and so helplessly that the chair
upset, scooting out from under him and depositing him on the floor. He sat there on the floor like a man
who had been nearly knocked out.
Doc Savage walked into the office.
"It might be advisable for you to tell me why seeing that box excited you so," Doc said.
MORGAN stood up so straight that he seemed to lift an inch off the floor. He looked at the window as if
he wanted to jump out of it.
"Oh, hello," he said vaguely.
Doc Savage moved toward him, saying, "Mr. Morgan, I presume."
This was purely a conversational statement because Monk Mayfair had described Mr. Morgan, and this
was he.
The old gentleman looked at the doors as if he wanted to dash out through them, and at the
stenographer’s desk as if he wished to crawl under it.
"I . . . er . . . beg your pardon," he said.
Doc Savage took him by the arm. He did not resist. Doc led him into the inner office. The place was
furnished with a desk, filing cabinet, an uncomfortable chair behind the desk for Mr. Morgan, and a less
comfortable one in front of the desk—exactly the reverse, in comfort degree, of the arrangement in the
outer office. Doc sat him down in the chair.
The bronze man went to the outer office, then returned with what was left of the cellophane box. He put
this on the desk in front of Mr. Morgan.
"Why did it excite you?" he asked.
Morgan swallowed, and the ends of his fingers twitched as if they were in cold water.
He was not going to talk.
Doc Savage was a big man, so big that his real size was startlingly apparent whenever he stood close to
an ordinary object, such as a chair or a desk. His skin was deeply bronzed, and his eyes like liquid gold
under narrowed lids. He was, in whole, a striking figure. Strength seemed to flow like molten metal under
every square inch of his skin.
Doc said, "Four men have died. Four that the police know of, and there have been many others."
Morgan began turning white.
Doc continued, "The deaths have mystified the police. There seemed to be no reason for any of them and
no connection between the four deaths."
Morgan started trembling.
"They were not natural deaths," added Doc Savage. "Each one was mysterious, unexplained—and are
still unexplained. The leading scientists of the police department were baffled, and the consulting experts
called in on the cases are baffled."
The white-haired man’s breathing now became audible. It was a sound like cloth tearing deep within him,
a soft and low sound, but disturbing.
Doc said, "A box was found near each dead man. In each case, it was a box, presumably made of
cellophane."
Morgan opened and closed his mouth.
"The boxes later vanished," Doc said. "They disappeared completely and inexplicably, and no one seems
to be able to explain just what did happen to them. It is very mystifying to the police."
Morgan took hold of his lip with his teeth, very tightly.
"The newspapers are referring to them as invisible boxes," Doc added.
Morgan’s paleness, trembling and strained breathing had all combined until he now looked and acted like
a man about to fall into fragments.
Doc Savage made what was obviously his final statement in his summary.
"All of the mysteriously dead men," he said, "happened to be acquaintances of yours, Mr. Morgan. That
is a matter which the police were not fortunate enough to discover."
The white-haired man broke.
FOR something more than five minutes, he alternately sobbed, clenched and unclenched his fists, or
pounded wildly on the desk in front of him. He jumped up, or attempted to do so several times, as if he
wanted to run screaming from the place. In each case, Doc Savage restrained him.
But finally, he said, "I am only Uncle Joe Morgan. Why should anyone want to do such things to me?"
Doc Savage took a chair, the uncomfortable one. His eyes, which had been narrowed, seemed to relax,
so that the lids widened. His eyes were like pools of flake gold stirred by tiny winds.
"So you do know something about the affair," he said.
Uncle Joe Morgan shuddered. It was the fifteenth time, at least, that he had shuddered. But this time he
did it violently.
"I am a gentle man," he said.
"I have no enemies because I am not an ambitious man." He moved a hand vaguely, indicating his office.
"I make a very modest living, dealing in low-priced, but sound, stocks, bonds and commodities. I have
no bad habits. My only hobby is boating, and practically my only piece of property is a small schooner
which I own."
Doc Savage studied him.
"Which is all preliminary to your saying what?" he asked.
Uncle Joe Morgan swallowed with great difficulty. "I have realized the coincidence of each of those men
being an acquaintance of mine," he said. "And it has frightened me. As far as I know, those men who
have died have had no connection with each other, except that they knew me!"
"Which means?"
"I . . . I would give everything to know. All I own." Uncle Joe Morgan clenched his hands. "I mean that."
Doc Savage indicated the cellophane box. "Seeing that box disturbed you a great deal."
The other man bowed his white head. "I know. I have just told you why."
Doc Savage said nothing. His metallic features, rugged and well-molded so that they were handsome
without being in any sense pretty-pretty, showed no expression. His face gave an impression of
controlled power.
"You seemed very scared," he said.
The other straightened. "You do not believe me?"
"You were unusually disturbed," Doc said.
Uncle Joe Morgan took out a handkerchief, wiped his face.
"I give you my word I know nothing about this," he said. "I am just unnerved by those deaths. Those men
were not extremely close to me, but I knew them quite well. They have died one after another, in that
weird fashion, and it has terrified me. Just the men I know are dying? Why is that?"
"You cannot explain it?"
"No."
"You might try to think of something."
Uncle Joe Morgan’s lips were paper-white and his breathing had, all during their talk, become more and
more like cloth tearing. The tearing had started, seemingly, deep in his lungs, so that it was barely audible;
now, it was up in his throat, and loud.
"I have thought about it," he said, "for four straight days and nights. I have not slept."
Doc Savage arose. There had been no sound audible to normal ears. But the bronze man went to the
reception room door, opened it; and the homely secretary was there. She looked up curiously at Doc
Savage and then, fascinated by the unusual power which the bronze man radiated, as people always
were, kept staring at him.
He closed the door and went back to the desk. He put both hands on the desk. The sinews in the backs
of the hands stood out like steel pencils.
"What about Ted Parks?" he asked. Then, when the old man seemed to melt in his chair: "So you’ve
thought of that, too?"
"You mean—Ted Parks also knew the men who have died?"
"Yes."
"I . . . I knew that."
"We had better talk to Ted Parks," Doc Savage said.
"He . . . he has disappeared."
"Yes," Doc said. "So we discovered."
"Look." Uncle Joe Morgan reached into his desk and brought out an envelope. From the envelope he
took a paper, which he spread on the desk. "Look," he repeated.
It read:
I am coming to see you at four o’clock Friday. You better be there, and you better not tell anybody I am
coming. AND I MEAN NOBODY.
Bughide.
"Ted Parks wrote that. Today is Friday. So he is coming at four o’clock today." Uncle Joe Morgan drew
in a deep breath. "That name he signed to it, Bughide, is a nickname I called Ted one time. I think he has
always resented it. I called him the name because he is so easily offended. I think I referred to him having
a hide no thicker than a bug, at the time."
Doc Savage looked at the note in silence for a while.
He asked, "Have you any objections to my being present at four o’clock this afternoon when Ted Parks
pays you this call?"
The white-haired man sat up straight.
"I would be delighted," he said.
"Have you any idea why the note has this violent tone?" Doc asked. "The reference, in particular, that you
had better not tell anyone."
"I have no idea."
"Expect me shortly before four o’clock," Doc Savage said.
DOC SAVAGE left the office building and stepped into a nearby restaurant. He took a seat in a booth in
the rear, a booth with high wooden partitions in front and behind.
A man was already seated in the booth. He was a short, wide man covered with rusty-red hair. He had
sloping shoulders, no forehead worth mentioning and a face that was something to start dogs barking.
This pleasantly apish fellow had a pig under the table. The pig was sitting there in comfort, one eye on the
proprietor of the restaurant, who did not look happy.
"Well, did he admit getting the note from Parks?" asked the man.
"Yes, Monk, he admitted that," Doc Savage said. "But he admitted to very little else."
Monk Mayfair grinned. "That’s a point in his favor. I don’t reckon he could have known I went through
his mail and gave that letter a go-over with Long Tom’s pet portable X-ray machine."
Doc Savage asked, "Is Long Tom on the job?"
"Yes," Monk said. "He has tapped Uncle Joe Morgan’s telephone line and put a recording instrument on
it."
"And Renny?"
"Renny has rented an office across the street. He is sitting there with a pair of binoculars, watching the
inside of Uncle Joe’s office."
"Ham?"
Monk sniffed, as if he did not care for Ham. Ham was Brigadier General Theodore Marley "Ham"
Brooks, noted lawyer, one of Doc Savage’s five assistants. Monk’s sniffing about Ham was misleading.
They were like brothers, and they never let a day pass—and seldom an hour—without a quarrel.
"Ham," said Monk, "has gone to hire a good, trustworthy lip reader to sit in the office with Renny and
read the lips of Uncle Joe Morgan, or any visitors he has, with the binoculars."
"The situation seems to be taken care of," Doc Savage said.
"From this end, it is."
The bronze man arose. "Contact me at headquarters if necessary."
Monk nodded. "O. K. By radio. Right."
Doc Savage left. The restaurant proprietor was wiping his hands on his apron and glaring at the pig under
Monk’s table.
It was then one o’clock.
Chapter II. GIRL BRINGING TROUBLE
AT two o’clock, the frantic girl came to Doc Savage.
He was, at the time, on the eighty-sixth floor of a midtown skyscraper. The floor was divided into three
rooms—a reception room, a library and a laboratory. Doc was engaged in preparing plates of nutrient
media for a bacteriological research he was conducting.
One of his assistants was presiding over the reception room. The assistant was Brigadier General
Theodore Marley Brooks, called Ham by everyone because he hated pork, hogs, and anything swine,
wild or tame. Ham was an eminent lawyer. The Harvard legal alumni were very proud of him. He was
considered one of the great legal minds.
He was not engaged in a deep legal problem at the moment, however.
He was teaching his pet chimpanzee, named Chemistry, to tie one end of a string to an object, then tie the
other end of the same string to a different object. Ham was getting a great deal of glee out of this
teaching, chuckling as if he had something devilish in mind.
The frantic girl arrived suddenly. She began beating on the door and screaming!
Like that. Suddenly. One moment Doc was tinkering with nutrient media and Ham was teaching his
chimp to tie strings and there was an amiable silence. Then the screeching; the pounding of fists on the
door.
Ham bolted to his feet. Chemistry, the chimp, made a brown streak to safety under the nearest desk. In
the lab, Doc Savage put the slide of nutrient media in a temperature-controlled vacuum case as if nothing
had happened.
The girl’s words were mostly garbled.
But she was telling someone to, "Get away from me!"
Ham Brooks had been associated with Doc Savage long enough to know better than to take chances.
He leaped to an inlaid desk, jammed a finger against an inlay which was a concealed button and caused a
sheet of bulletproof glass, as clear as any plate glass, to drop between himself and the door. He punched
another button which opened the door.
Wasted precaution. The girl was actually in trouble. If not, it was a very real imitation because the man
who was fighting her seemed to be doing his best to get his knife into her throat! The knife had a blade
the size of a razor, somewhat the same shape.
Had he been a larger man, the girl’s yelling and struggling would have ended by now. He was not large.
The two were, in fact, about a match in strength, and the girl had hold of the knife arm with both hands.
Ham leaped forward. In his chivalrous haste, he forgot all about just lowering the glass panel. He got his
nose flattened. He went around the glass, pain twisting his face, and charged.
The small man saw Ham coming. He dropped his knife, so the girl would release his arm. She did so.
The man ran. Ham galloped after him.
The man realized he would be overtaken. As soon as he understood that, he whirled, drawing a gun. It
was an automatic, huge and flat, with dark bulk.
He aimed the gun at Ham and fired. And part of the top came off his head, not off Ham’s head.
THE girl—she was not bad to look at, at first glance, and she improved on acquaintance—made a
mewing sound and closed her eyes from the bottom up. She fell loosely and lay on the floor, beside the
knife.
Doc Savage came out of the reception room into the hall. He took one glance. Then he went back inside
the reception room, leaped to the inlaid desk and pressed several curlicues of inlay which were buttons.
As a result of the buttons he pressed, all elevators in the building stopped, the stairways were flooded
with a gas—not tear gas, but one that would produce unconsciousness through its ability to be absorbed
by the skin pores—and the armed elevator starters in the ornate lobby received a warning flash of signal
light.
Then Doc returned to the hall.
Ham was bending over the body of the small man. He had picked up the gun, what was left of it.
"Really," he remarked.
Doc Savage took the weapon. He picked up several fragments which had blown off it and examined
these.
"The gun was fixed to kill the man," he said.
Then he sank to a knee beside the small man.
"Dead?" Ham asked.
Doc nodded. He went to the girl.
"Just fainted, didn’t she?" Ham asked.
Again Doc nodded.
"I never saw either one of them before," Ham said. He got down and went through the pockets of the
dead man. They were empty. He looked inside the clothing for labels. There were no labels. He searched
for laundry marks. None of those, either.
"That’s strange," Ham remarked. "You hear of murderers taking the labels out of their victims’ pockets
so they can’t be identified. But I never heard of a guy walking around with the labels out of his clothes.
He sure didn’t want to be identified in case we caught him."
A purse lay near the girl. Doc picked it up, went through the contents. There was the usual woman stuff.
No name, however, on anything.
The girl had brown hair, brown eyes, nice mouth, a turned-up nose. Faces of women who have fainted
are usually loose, colorless and unlovely. But this face was firm, composed, even beautiful.
There was no question but that she was in a genuine faint, not faking. Doc made sure of that.
"Certainly strange, these labels missing," Ham said again.
Doc Savage indicated the remains of the gun.
"This weapon," he said, "had been deliberately tampered with so that it would kill anyone who fired it."
Ham’s eyes widened.
"Say, Doc, that makes it look as if someone gave him the gun so that, if he got in a jam and tried to use it,
he would kill himself. Kind of an automatic elimination, as it were."
The bronze man nodded.
They carried the girl inside, and Doc worked over her with resuscitating materials.
Ham went to the big inlaid desk, pulled out a drawer and examined an array of signal lights. He used a
telephone which connected with the elevators and the elevator starters on the ground floor.
"This fellow doesn’t seem to have had anyone with him," Ham reported. "At least, we caught nobody."
The girl opened her eyes.
"I don’t know why they took my brother," she said.
Ham Brooks was aware that he jumped and that Doc Savage showed no emotion. Doc’s self-control
always amazed Ham, although he had known the bronze man a long time.
"Who took your brother?" Doc asked.
"They will kill him!" she said.
Her voice was charged with horror.
Patiently, Doc inquired, "Who?"
She got hold of herself. "I am . . . my name is Jeanette Bridges. Jen, they call me. You are Doc Savage.
You were pointed out to me, once, from a distance. I was told at the time that you follow the rather
strange career of righting wrongs and punishing evildoers; that you help people who are in trouble. I need
your help."
She did not say this in one breath, but it had that effect.
"Who was the man outside?" Doc Savage asked.
She closed her eyes and shuddered tremendously. "That man—he was the one who warned me. You
see, I am an artist. I do fashion layouts for department stores. I take orders in the morning and work in
the afternoons. Today I came back to my home a little after one o’clock, and four men were taking my
brother away. I realized something was wrong. I confronted them with a demand to know what was
going on." She stopped. Her hands trembled. "My brother suddenly burst out in a wild rush of words."
摘要：

TheInvisible-BoxMurdersADocSavageAdventureByKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2002BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.comScannedandProofedbyTomStephens?ChapterI.FEAROFBOXES?ChapterII.GIRLBRINGINGTROUBLE?ChapterIII.WHATTHEGIRLBROUGHT?ChapterIV.CONVINCINGBLOSSER?ChapterV.SLEEPER,MINERANDMONKEY?ChapterV...

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