Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 258 - The Murdering Ghost

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THE MURDERING GHOST
Maxwell Grant
This page copyright © 2002 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? CHAPTER I. OUT OF THE VOID
? CHAPTER II. THE OUTER TRAIL
? CHAPTER III. CRIME'S RIDDLE
? CHAPTER IV. THOSE WHO BELIEVED
? CHAPTER V. CRIME'S GREATER GOAL
? CHAPTER VI. BIRDS OF A KIND
? CHAPTER VII. THE SHADOW'S INTERVIEW
? CHAPTER VIII. THE TRIPLE TRAP
? CHAPTER IX. DEATH GOES ASTRAY
? CHAPTER X. THE QUEST TO COME
? CHAPTER XI. DEATH'S SEANCE
? CHAPTER XII. THE CLOAKED GHOST
? CHAPTER XIII. THE BARREN TRAIL
? CHAPTER XIV. THE SECOND CLAIMANT
? CHAPTER XV. HOUR OF DOOM
? CHAPTER XVI. THE RIGHT CAMP
? CHAPTER XVII. THE MUTUAL CHOICE
? CHAPTER XVIII. THE CHALLENGE FROM BEYOND
? CHAPTER XIX. THE SHADOW'S ROUNDUP
? CHAPTER XX. THE FINAL PROOF
? CHAPTER XXI. CRIME'S AWARD
CHAPTER I. OUT OF THE VOID
IT was a silent group that sat in the square-walled room, and the circled throng was almost as singular as
the room itself. Men and women formed a hand-linked circle around an oblong table upon which stood
two silver spheres, each mounted on an insulated base.
Those silver globes were not the only peculiar equipment in the room. Elsewhere, and outside the circle,
stood a large cabinet some five feet high and proportionately square, that kept up a steady hum from
within itself. There were tall cylinders in a row along a wall shelf; in a corner, an odd-shaped board was
mounted on a fulcrum with a pair of scales attached to one tilted end.
These pieces of apparatus and many more were part and parcel of the psychic laboratory conducted by
Professor Hayne, a very dapper man who stood outside the circle looking anxiously about the group to
see that all were settled for the test to come.
Hayne wasn't the only man who was free of the linking hands. Within the ring itself was a solitary chair
which contained a stoop-shouldered gentleman who sat with folded arms. His face was thin, his watery
eyes gave him a morose expression, which made people feel sorry for him at first glance. His white thin
hair, dangling about his forehead, added to the call for sympathy—until those who met him learned who
he was.
No one could feel very sorry for old Leander Hobgood.
Defaulter, embezzler, swindler—he'd been called by all such terms, only to deny the implications. But
matters had reached the point where they demanded more than mere denial. Leander Hobgood, who
termed himself an inventor, nothing more, was seeking vindication. And he was hoping to find it in, of all
places, a seance room!
These astounding facts were under present renew by a young man named Clyde Burke, who as a
member of the press was attending the singular seance. Gripping hands with a portly millionaire on one
side and an elderly lady on the other, Clyde was alternately glancing across his shoulder at fluttery
Professor Hayne and turning a steady stare toward the bowed figure of the inventor, Hobgood.
For it was Hayne, a sincere but rather irrational individual, who had proposed the way to Hobgood's
vindication. And Clyde was forced to admit that Hayne's theories regarding Hobgood were no more
startling than the facts themselves.
Briefly, Leander Hobgood was the inventor of many queer devices that resembled perpetual-motion
machines except that they worked. That was, they worked whenever Hobgood was around, but they
had a way of bogging down when other people bought and took them over.
Curious, indeed, were Hobgood's statements as to the origin of his machines. He said that the ideas came
to him from thin air, which was somewhat plausible, because that was where Hobgood's stock
certificates and promissory notes vanished after he gave them to persons who invested in the inventions
that wouldn't work.
Which greatly distressed Hobgood. Indeed, it worried him. He felt that he was under the control of an
invisible creature called a daemon, that forced him into these strange ventures purely to experience
devilish glee—as only a daemon could—when Hobgood found himself misunderstood because of his
mentor's pranks.
Professor Hayne held a different theory. He believed that poor Hobgood was the victim of a force called
psychodynamics. In simpler terms, Hayne believed that Hobgood unwittingly produced an astral energy
which made the motors run when he was present and accounted for their failure whenever he was absent.
As for the vanished stock certificates and notes, Hayne hoped that their disappearance would prove the
existence of the fourth dimension, since they had obviously been projected into space. But for the
present, Hayne was concentrating on the subject of psychodynamics.
THE silver globes upon the center table were a special apparatus that Hayne had rigged for a
psychodynamic test. They were the positive and negative poles of an electromagnetic current so feeble
that it couldn't be observed unless a further flow of electricity were injected.
Should the added current be sufficient, sparks would issue from the sensitized spheres. So the sitters in
the circle were here to see if Hobgood could make the apparatus function.
If the test succeeded, Hobgood, according to Hayne, would constitute a human dynamo quite capable of
supplying the necessary energy to operate the intricate contrivances that he had invented.
Except for Clyde Burke, all the sitters were persons who had invested in Hobgood's machines and
therefore interested parties in the coming experiment. Clyde was interested, too, ostensibly as a
representative of the New York Classic, a sensational tabloid newspaper. But Clyde had another
mission, a secret one.
Clyde Burke was here in the service of The Shadow!
Behind the weird career of Leander Hobgood, The Shadow scented crime, deeper, perhaps, than the
swindles blamed on the inventor. Unlike Professor Hayne, The Shadow was chiefly interested in the tales
of vanished securities which Hobgood had placed in other hands.
Those cases indicated hands that didn't necessarily issue from the fourth dimension. Should they depend
upon unknown methods of untraceable theft, what a prize the knowledge of such systems would prove to
certain figures of the underworld.
So Clyde, pinch-hitting until his chief arrived, was beginning to forget Hayne and Hobgood in order to
watch the door instead, in the hope that The Shadow would soon appear.
Not that Clyde expected The Shadow to enter the seance laboratory cloaked in black, a visitor more
ghostly than any spook that Hayne had ever managed to commander. He was watching the door for a
certain gentleman named Lamont Cranston, who happened to be The Shadow's other self.
As Cranston, The Shadow was a friend of the New York police commissioner, who had unfortunately
detained him this evening. They were dining together at the Cobalt Club and Commissioner Weston
wasn't coming to the seance. The commissioner had no use for spooks; he believed them to be myths, an
opinion that he also expressed regarding The Shadow!
The sitters who formed the circle in the dimly lighted room were startled by a sudden rap.
It was Professor Hayne who calmed them, when he chirped the simple announcement:
"The electrician."
Opening the connecting door, Hayne admitted a man who wore a heavy Mackinaw and a pair of thick
gloves. The electrician was turned half about as he uncoiled a wire which Hayne told him to connect to a
transformer that supplied the current to the silver globes.
While the electrician stooped to perform the task, Clyde watched him, a bit puzzled.
There was something familiar about the fellow's actions, the way he bent to one knee, then brushed his
rough trousers in fastidious style.
So interested was Clyde that he no longer watched the main door of the room. There, a real
phenomenon was in occurrence. A key in the lock was turning of its own accord. As the key halted, the
doorknob began a slow twist. Clyde would have known those symptoms had he observed them.
They symbolized The Shadow!
He was coming to the lab in his own guise rather than Cranston's, for such manipulation of key and
doorknob was one of The Shadow's specialties.
Unnoticed, the door inched inward; an eye gazed through the crack. Yet no one could have possibly
discerned the owner of that eye, for he was a shape of total blackness!
THE SHADOW saw the departing electrician slouch through the door to the connecting room. He
moved his own door a trifle farther, for no one could have possibly noted it. All eyes, Clyde's included,
were focused upon Professor Hayne, who had placed one hand upon a light switch while he raised the
other to command attention.
"And now," announced Hayne in his brisk chirp, "we shall darken the room except for the red light
customary in seances. Let me caution everyone to remain seated. Should anyone attempt to leave the
circle, the fact will be immediately detected."
Hayne pressed the switch. As the ordinary lights went off, a red bulb glowed automatically beneath the
central table. In that ruddy gleam all seemed weird and unreal.
"We are ready," declared Hayne from outside the human circle. "The subject will approach the
dynamograph with both his hands extended -"
Hayne meant Hobgood, not the cloaked being in black who had entered by the main door, to close it
silently behind him the moment the red light replaced the other illumination. But no one was aware of The
Shadow's invisible presence; even Hayne's measures of detection had so far failed to record it.
Furthermore, Hobgood had responded to Hayne's order. In the vague crimson light, the members of the
circle could see the inventor's crouched form rising from its chair, his hands extended as the professor
requested. For this was a vital moment to Leander Hobgood. The slightest response, the tiniest of sparks
from those sensitized silver globes, and Hobgood would be on the road to vindication, provided the
skeptics would accept the verdict of Hayne's dynamograph.
There was power in those hands of Leander Hobgood, the skillful hands that had dealt in intricate work.
Power enough to produce the unexplainable, but certainly not the impossible result that happened as they
came within range of the sensitized spheres.
Only out of the void could the stroke have come, a thing so titanic that it shattered the tension and the
nerves of the witnesses as well.
Hobgood's hands were at the table. They gave a slow thrust forward. Like a maestro's hands directing a
huge orchestra, they brought a crash that rocked the entire room. A crash like a tremendous thunderclap,
which indeed it was. For with it came a huge burst of jagged lightning, leaping from one silver sphere to
the other, forking to include old Hobgood in its path!
With the terrific jolt of blinding electricity, Leander Hobgood crumpled. The dazzle was supplanted by a
cloud of bluish smoke that filled the laboratory with the odor of ozone, stifling in its strength. Women's
shrieks drowned the shouts of startled men as chairs went tumbling backward, breaking the human circle.
Such was the stroke from the void that stretched Leander Hobgood on the floor beside the crimson light
that gleamed like a welcoming eye of doom for the victim who had dared to seek his vindication by
meddling with the mighty forces from the great beyond!
CHAPTER II. THE OUTER TRAIL
STRANGEST of all the sights that came with the crackling glare was the black-clad apparition beyond
the seance circle. A sight that no one saw amid the vivid light, for eyes were far too dazzled.
At the moment of the stunning bolt of electricity, The Shadow seemed to swallow himself into darkness.
What he actually did was fling his cloak folds across his eyes to ward off the blinding effect of the
lightning burst.
Despite shrieks from the seance circle, The Shadow caught a sound that had significance. It was the
scurry of footsteps beyond the door to the adjoining section of the lab. The electrician hadn't been able to
close that door tight because of the wire that he had carried through. Therefore the footsteps were
his—and they were hurrying the other way!
The man's flight indicated that he held himself responsible; and that in turn implied that such responsibility
could have been designed.
So The Shadow, without a moment's more delay, sprang across the side wall of the seance room to
reach the connecting doorway.
Something howled as The Shadow passed it. The thing was the big contrivance that looked like a radio
cabinet. Its strident wail drowned the convulsive screams that still came from the sitters, and the siren
sound brought a cry from Hayne.
"Stay where you are!" shrilled the professor. "Someone is trying to leave this room! The detector is
announcing it! Stay here, everybody, and don't let anyone else leave!"
By then, the whine of the detector cabinet had dwindled, for The Shadow was beyond its range and at
the very door he wanted. As for Hayne blocking off The Shadow, the very thought was ludicrous. The
professor didn't get far enough even to make the detector register his approach. His own orders were the
cause.
Blindly, men among the seance circle sprang to stop any person who might leave their midst, and the first
person they encountered was Hayne himself. His yells were too excited too incoherent to be understood
and the dapper professor was flattened beneath the general pile-up, the rest thinking him the captive that
Hayne wanted grabbed.
From the doorway, The Shadow heard the melee as it shifted to a corner of the room, but the only face
he saw was Hobgood's, staring motionless from the floor, its wrinkly features reddened by the glow from
beneath the table. Sight of a countenance so lifeless spurred The Shadow to the chase he had
undertaken.
THE next room was dimly lit, and in the gloom The Shadow saw the man he wanted. The electrician had
done a peculiar thing. Instead of darting straight through to a doorway on the other side, he'd rushed to a
far corner of the room. From there, he was making toward the exit on the other side.
So The Shadow sped a halting challenge after the fugitive. He issued the challenge in the form of a sinister
laugh as eerie as any a ghost might have uttered in this realm where spooks were reputed to dwell.
Hearing that creepy tone, the man in the Mackinaw faltered, throwing a quick look toward The
Shadow's door. He saw The Shadow mostly as a blur of blackness, but he must have caught the burn of
glowing eyes, and either sensed or seen the muzzle of an automatic that The Shadow had whipped from
beneath his cloak.
In his turn, The Shadow saw only a rough-clad figure with a V of whiteness to represent a face between
the sides of the upturned Mackinaw collar.
The man made a wild dodge, as though fearing recognition quite as much as capture. Then, amid a
sudden clatter, he was gone from sight. He'd ducked beyond a table stacked with odd equipment, right
into a pile of packing boxes between the table and the wall.
With a quick drive, The Shadow crossed the room, intending to trap the fugitive where he had fallen. A
yard short of his goal, The Shadow was met by a great lurch of the table, driven his direction by the fallen
man's heaving feet.
Warding off the hurtling table, The Shadow was showered with portable apparatus, including glassware.
He wheeled to escape the deluge, and before he could drive anew a packing case came flying at him.
Side-stepping the new missile, The Shadow saw the fugitive electrician making another dive through the
exit. The fellow didn't wait to slam the door. He was across a hallway, dashing down the steps of an
inclosed fire tower when The Shadow picked up the pursuit.
Near the bottom of the staircase, The Shadow managed to clutch the man's shoulder. The fugitive pulled
free from the avenging clasp, but in a way that should have added to his own undoing. For in that lurch,
the fellow stumbled. He was tripping headlong across the low step from the exit doorway, pitching to the
sidewalk, where he would become The Shadow's easy prey.
As he went his arms flung wide, but with one hand the man managed a frantic gesture back across his
shoulder. The Shadow saw the wave and wheeled instinctively from the middle of the sidewalk just as the
fugitive spilled over the curb.
As timely as the man's gesture was The Shadow's spin. Without it, the undoing would have been his own.
From lurking spots on each side of the doorway sprang two thuggish fighters, brought by their comrade's
wild appeal for aid. Drawn revolvers were in their fists, and the mad gesture of the fugitive had shown
them right where to aim. They saw The Shadow stopping short, one hand reaching empty, the other
holding an automatic doubled close against his cloak.
The pair blazed shots at blackness.
At blackness—nothing more.
Where The Shadow had been, he was no longer. It was blank blackness, this target, empty space which
The Shadow had vacated by turning what seemed a halt into a full roundabout fling!
But the gaping dark exit from the fire tower told too well that it must be The Shadow's refuge. These
gunners had courage, and they surged into the doorway to get him.
They met The Shadow coming out. He didn't waste any time in gunfire. One hand was warding, the other
swinging, bearing its automatic in its sweep. There was a clash as the big gun met uplifted revolvers and
knocked them aside; groans as the sledging weapon glanced from heads and reeled the two attackers
from the doorway.
Staggering dumbly, blindly, these thugs were even better prey than the man who had stumbled across the
curb. For the fugitive was prey no longer; quite the opposite. On his feet, he'd gotten across the street to
beckon in the direction of the corner.
From that spot came the rising whine of a car in low gear, cutting across the one-way street, making
straight for the doorway from which The Shadow had issued for the second time. Turning, The Shadow
saw the lines of a low-built, rakish sedan; then, as someone pulled a switch on the dash, the occupants of
the car saw The Shadow.
For the cloaked fighter was flooded with the full glare of a pair of powerful headlamps that revealed him
like a mammoth moth in the path of brilliant flame!
THE headlights caught The Shadow only because his first move wasn't quite complete. It didn't matter,
because the move was far enough along to escape the next thing that came—the bark of guns. This time,
they blasted into light instead of darkness; but that fire from the car was useless.
The Shadow was gone again, finishing a fading dive that he had timed to the car's approach, delaying just
long enough to pick the exact direction that he needed.
With The Shadow gone from the swath of light, the men in the car did the expected thing: they swung
their guns around to rake the sidewalks, giving special attention to any doorways or basement steps
where The Shadow might have gone. It didn't occur to them that The Shadow would reject such fox
holes when they themselves had provided him with a better barricade—their own car!
Up sprang The Shadow almost in their very midst, actually at the elbows of the astonished men who
were seeking him at longer range. He was within the fringe of guns that jutted from his side of the car, and
the things he did to those guns and their owners were more than plenty! His sweeping strokes drove
revolvers over the heads of the men who gripped them, stopping at the heads themselves with solid
thuds.
He was on the right side of the car, The Shadow, and before men from the left could swing around to
reach him, he made provision for them.
The laugh The Shadow gave, the sudden gesture of his aiming gun were both directed toward the driver,
who was looking scared across his shoulder. The driver did the thing to be expected. He lurched the car
anew, and with the lift it gave across the curb The Shadow was gone from the running board on the right.
Gone while men stared blankly, all save the driver, who couldn't quite pass the building wall, and
therefore had to give the car a quick reverse jog from its slanted position half across the sidewalk.
That backward jolt fitted right into The Shadow's planning. Before the sedan could spurt ahead again, his
laugh shuddered anew, this time from the running board on the left.
Squarely into The Shadow's snare had men of crime reversed themselves, and this time the men who still
could use their guns were turned the other way!
Thus was The Shadow set to complete his victory, suppressing crime at its very outset, when from the
corner ahead swung another car, bearing a searchlight that picked out The Shadow on the running board
of the beleaguered sedan, spotting his position for the benefit of the very foemen whose helpless plight
was based solely on their inability to find The Shadow for themselves.
Again The Shadow acted on the instant. With a whirl from the running board, he was gone from that
blinding glare, hurling back a chilling laugh as a reminder that his foemen still would hear from him when
this menace of the moment had passed!
CHAPTER III. CRIME'S RIDDLE
IT was a police car, of course. Nothing else would have come the wrong way on a one-way street using
a searchlight in such open, idiotic fashion. Crooks would have been too cagey to throw a spotlight on
members of their own clan.
Away from the glaring light, The Shadow still had opportunity to carry the tide of battle the way that he
had turned it. All in all, the thugs were in a sorry plight, which would have put them in an utter dilemma if
the breaks hadn't come their way.
The reason was that other men in this vicinity were quite as desperate as the crooks in the sedan. These
others were the pair that The Shadow had staggered when he came from the fire tower. Reasonably
recuperated, those two asserted themselves again, and their new declaration came in the form of gunfire
aimed hit or miss at the patrol car.
Spotting the gun spurts, The Shadow jabbed quick shots in their direction. He didn't need to drop the
two men who fired from the sidewalk; close shots were good enough to make them quit and thus save
the police from any chance of harm.
But the whole thing worked to the advantage of the crew in the fugitive sedan. The patrolmen mistook
that crew for innocent men, intended victims of the gunfire from the sidewalk. So they let the sedan surge
by and promptly sprang from the patrol car to go after the pair who had started shooting.
By then, those two weren't anywhere to be found. The Shadow's shots had completely discouraged them
and they were on the run. All the police had to go by was the clatter of feet making off through an alley.
So the officers took up the chase in a blundery fashion that gave the runners as good a start as the sedan.
The Shadow wasn't greatly disappointed by the way the opposition scattered. He had another score to
settle, one that he hadn't forgotten during the chaos. The Shadow's score lay with the man who wore the
Mackinaw, the fellow who had posed as an electrician to produce havoc in Hayne's seance room.
Whoever he was, wherever he had gone, that unknown was the man The Shadow wanted.
There was no sign of the wanted man. He had ducked somewhere during the fray. He couldn't have
chosen the alley through which two of his pals had run, for he would have had to pass The Shadow to
reach it. So The Shadow looked for the next likely place, and saw an immediate prospect.
Back across the street was a narrow passage leading in beside the building where the psychic lab was
located. How far that passage went, was a question; but if it reached to the next street, it would be a
perfect outlet for a smart fugitive to use, doubling his trail to throw off pursuers.
So The Shadow cut across the street and sped into the passage.
Blocked by a building wall, the passage turned at right angles and brought The Shadow into a blind
courtyard. It was an inlet, not an outlet, and the fugitive hadn't come this way. For when The Shadow
probed for signs of a lurker, his tiny flashlight disclosed no one.
As for the walls about the court, they reared sheer for two stories. The nearest window that The Shadow
saw was a dim-lit opening on the third floor, which represented a side room of the extensive psychic
laboratory. Its location proved the window as belonging to the lab, and the fact that no sounds were
issuing from it indicated that it must be elsewhere than the seance room.
Satisfied that the man with the Mackinaw couldn't have chosen this route, The Shadow turned to retrace
his course. He hadn't left the courtyard before he heard footsteps and voices coming along the passage
and saw flashlights burnish the brick-red wall that marked the turn.
These weren't the hunted; they were the hunters, the cops from the patrol car!
Looking for crooks, they would find The Shadow instead, should he allow them.
BUT it wasn't the cloaked fighter's way to complicate matters, particularly where the law was concerned.
Speeding back across the darkened court, The Shadow thrust his gun beneath his cloak and stooped
beside a cellar grating.
His cause seemed hopeless. The Shadow was removing a circular object from his cloak, but he could
hardly hope to bomb his way into the cellar before the police appeared. Seemingly things went even
worse when the circular object came apart in fours. But that was the thing it was supposed to do, as The
Shadow promptly demonstrated.
Just as the flashlights began to probe in from the passage, The Shadow left the courtyard. His course led
straight upward, as though the law of gravity had repealed itself at his mere wish. As a flashlight beamed
along the ground and reached the courtyard wall, The Shadow climbed above its rising circle. A
patrolman caught a glimpse of him but took the cloaked figure only for the fringe of darkness that was
lifting from the flashlight's beam!
The most incredible feature of The Shadow's climb was its smooth, even speed. The thing that explained
his system was a repeated sound, a squidgy noise that had the precision of clockwork. Those sounds
came from the rounded objects which The Shadow operated with perfect precision. They were concave
rubber disks that he had attached to his hands and feet!
Remarkable devices, those suction cups. Whenever The Shadow pressed their oiled edges home, they
gripped the wall tightly. The release was quite as efficient; a mere twist of hand or foot opened a tiny hole
that served as valve, admitting air to the interior of the disk. The vacuum gone, the cup came free, only to
take hold again when The Shadow pressed it farther up the wall.
By the time the searching patrolmen turned their lights up the wall, The Shadow had merged with the
window of the psychic lab. The cops saw only darkness there, and when it faded, they supposed that
someone had turned on a light. It didn't occur to them that they had witnessed the passage of a cloaked
climber from the outside wall into the room three floors above the courtyard!
Once inside the window, The Shadow detached the suction cups and nested them into a compact stack
that took up comparatively little room beneath his cloak. He removed the cloak itself and wrapped it
around the grippers, including his slouch hat in the bundle. There was a high bookcase, with ornamental
frame, in the corner of the room, for this was Professor Hayne's library, where he kept his many volumes
of psychic lore. The top of the bookcase afforded an excellent hiding place for the bundled cloak and its
contents, so The Shadow planted his burden there.
The Shadow's transformation was indeed complete. No longer a shrouded creature of darkness, he had
become a man in evening clothes; a calm-faced individual whose face showed just a trace of a hawkish
profile. No longer The Shadow, he was now that most complacent and leisurely clubman, Lamont
Cranston.
To a degree, he reverted to The Shadow's style when he opened the door from the little library, inching it
at the start, then drawing it more steadily after seeing if the way happened to be clear.
The way was quite clear. Hayne had cut off the current from the silver globes and everyone was grouped
about Hobgood, where one member of the circle, a physician, was trying his best to revive the hapless
inventor. Even Clyde Burke had become an anxious onlooker and failed to witness Cranston's silent, yet
very open, entry into the room.
With the first forward steps that Cranston took, the scene shifted as completely as though his arrival were
the cause. From a scene that held the melancholy atmosphere of death, it became an occasion of sudden
joy.
Leander Hobgood stirred. His eyes opened and his lips moved, and though they didn't utter sounds they
were another symbol of revival. Pressing his hands against the floor, the inventor tried to rise, but failed
until people helped him. He still couldn't speak and his manner seemed quite numb, but he was very much
alive.
Persons gazed aghast, as though viewing a man from the dead. So amazed, so overjoyed were they
because of Hobgood's return to the living, that they forgot all else. It didn't occur to them that a tall,
calm-faced gentleman who was just joining the group had returned in a style quite as astonishing as
Hobgood's—or more so.
He was a being from the past; The Shadow, here in the guise of Cranston to probe crime's riddle and its
relation to Leander Hobgood, the man who had defeated death!
CHAPTER IV. THOSE WHO BELIEVED
CLYDE BURKE was turning toward the telephone in the corner of the laboratory when he paused,
blank-faced, at sight of Lamont Cranston. Sensing that Clyde had something to tell him, Cranston drew
the reporter aside and gestured for him to speak in an undertone.
As Clyde started to relate the events in the lab, Cranston supplied another gesture, which carried Clyde
beyond that portion of his tale.
"Right after it happened," said Clyde, recognizing that his chief must have been present, "I called the
Cobalt Club to see if you were there. You weren't, but the police commissioner was."
Cranston undertoned the query: "He is on his way here?"
Clyde nodded. Then:
"I told him you said you'd be here," the reporter added. "So he was going to leave a message for you.
Only -"
"Only, I didn't get it," smiled Cranston, "because I happened to be coming here instead of going to the
club—as you expected."
That was the way it stood, and when Commissioner Weston arrived he wasn't much surprised to learn
that Cranston had reached the lab soon after Clyde's call to the club. Weston had too many things to
think about.
He'd come here to investigate a murder that wasn't even a death, since Leander Hobgood was still alive.
Outside, he had met his ace inspector, swarthy-faced Joe Cardona, who had come to investigate
something else—an attempted holdup of an automobile by two crooks who had slipped the patrolmen
who prevented the crime.
Details on the attempted holdup were very scanty, but Weston couldn't do much criticizing, considering
that the murder case was nonexistent. But when Weston pointed out the man who wasn't a victim and
named him as Leander Hobgood, keen interest displayed itself in Cardona's dark, sharp eyes.
There had been much talk about Hobgood lately, the sort that called for close attention to the inventor's
case. The law had simply been waiting for any of a dozen persons to come through with charges that
would warrant Hobgood's arrest. So far, no one had delivered, because all were hopeful of regaining lost
funds from Hobgood personally. And here, together in one room, was the man reputed to be a swindler,
surrounded by all his dupes!
What it was all about, Hobgood couldn't tell them, for he hadn't recovered his voice. Hayne was equally
useless; the professor could only talk about psychodynamic, astral forces, and the fourth dimension. The
man who finally undertook to explain was the portly millionaire who had been holding hands with Clyde
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THEMURDERINGGHOSTMaxwellGrantThispagecopyright©2002BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?CHAPTERI.OUTOFTHEVOID?CHAPTERII.THEOUTERTRAIL?CHAPTERIII.CRIME'SRIDDLE?CHAPTERIV.THOSEWHOBELIEVED?CHAPTERV.CRIME'SGREATERGOAL?CHAPTERVI.BIRDSOFAKIND?CHAPTERVII.THESHADOW'SINTERVIEW?CHAPTERVIII.THETRIPLETRAP?C...

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