The Diamond Bullet Murder Case Part 6

"Oh, I'll go. But it strikes me as being a waste of time and emotion. I hate dead men."

But he accompanied Gillian to Vollmer's Undertaking Parlors.

Two men were lounging in the entrancea"two large, tough, grim looking men with police clubs. One of them said, gruffly, "No one's allowed in here."

"But," Seth Peters protested, "we are Jim Truman's lawyers. We want to inspect Amos Grundle's body."

"Nothing doing. The coroner's inquest was held this mornin'. No one's allowed in here."

"Whose orders?" Gillian asked.

"The county prosecutor's."

Gillian looked past him into the dimly lighted interior of the undertaking establishment. He saw four men lounging in there, armed as were these two, with clubs.

The watchdog growled: "Yeah and there's four more lookin' after the back door."

"Amos Grundle, up there in heaven," Gillian said dryly, "strumming away on his golden harp, must feel very much flattered at such protection."

"Yeaha"and maybe you two guys can mooch."

Out of the guards' earshot, Gillian said, in perplexed tones, "Now, just what is there so precious about the mortal remains of Amos Grundle?"

"I think the diamond is locked up in the coroner's safe," the young lawyer answered. "It's had a lot of publicity. Dawbridge is probably afraid some yegg will take it."

"A four and a half carat diamond would interest no yegg," Gillian pointed out.

"Then he may be afraid we'll steal it, to rob him of evidence."

"I'd question that," Gillian said. "If the diamond is so precious, why hasn't he stored it in a bank vault? Peters," he went on briskly, "I'm going back to Greenfield to look up a couple of my friends. While I'm gone, drop in at the jail and tell Nellie and Jim that I am going to do all I can for them, and that they are under no conditions to say a word about the murder to any onea"not even to you. Dawbridge will move heaven and earth to get a confession out of them. So far, neither of them has admitted the slightest knowledge of the murder. Tell them I said to keep mum."

"Yes, sir. Will you be back tonight?"

"As fast as I can burn up the roads. When you have delivered my message to Nellie and Jim, go to your office and stay there. Don't let any excitement which may occur on the street attract you out. Understand?"

"No, sir; but I'll do what you say."

They parted at Gillian's car. The rain had stopped. Gillian climbed in and raised the side windows of his coupe, although the night was not cold.

He drove under the covered bridge. A black Packard roadster followed him. It was without lights. It tailed him for five miles, along winding roads up through the hills. When Gillian reached the wider, straight concrete stretch which went through bogs and thickets to the village of Chester, he opened the throttle.

So did the driver of the black roadster. At a four corners, the roadster swept up beside him. He had no warning of its presence until headlights flashed along the road beside him. Then it was abreast.

He saw dimly a man bending over the wheel; another man crouching down in the rumble seat.

There was a spurting of blue-red flame. A savage shattering sound occurred at the window beside which Gillian sat. The coupe slewed away, and the roadster swerved off into the left branch of the intersecting road. Its ruby taillight dwindled, vanished completely.

Gillian drove on. A glance had told him that the bulletproof window was ruined. He was angry. Bulletproof windows were expensive. But he was relieved, too. Elton Dawbridge had fired the opening shot in the war, and missed. Gillian only hoped that the following ones would leave him unscathed. At all events, the fight was ona"and it was Gillian's next move.

CHAPTER 11. OUTSIDE THE LAW.

WITH his accelerator flat on the floor, except for curves, crossings and villages, Gillian drove the forty miles in less than fifty minutes. It was midnight when he reached Greenfield.

He drove past his own house and along the exclusive residential parkway above the Sangamo, to turn with shrieking tires into a crushed-stone driveway. He stopped under the Porte-cochere of a s.p.a.cious colonial house in which one window alone was alight. He ran up the steps and pressed the bell.

His summons was answered presently by a tall, middle-aged man with iron-gray hair, a pair of cool, steady blue eyes, who wore a black dressing gown over pajamas. There was a book under his arm and a pipe in his mouth.

"Good evening, Hank," Gillian said. "It's a shame to disturb you, but how would you like to do me a great favor?"

Dr. Henry Hoffman's cool, steady blue eyes narrowed. Then he smiled whimsically.

"It's nice of you to put it that way," he said. "When you snap your fingers, I jumpa"as who doesn't?"

Gillian looked displeased. "Let's not put things on that basis," he said. "You make it sound like blackmaila"a word I particularly detest."

"Very well, Gillian. What can I do?"

"Take some X-ray photographs of a corpse. Have you a portable X-ray outfit here or will we have to go to your laboratory?"

"I have one here. Tell me, how long has this corpse been a corpse?"

"About a week."

"Hm. What are the circ.u.mstances?"

"I'll tell you as we drive along. Don't bother changing your clothes. There will be no ladies."

The Roentgenologist, despite his eyes, made no objections to this informal suggestion. But his mouth tightened peculiarly. The X-ray expert did not know whether Gillian had made that reference to ladies pointedly or not. Ladies had been responsible for a certain painful predicament from which Gillian had extricated Dr. Hoffman and earned his lifelong grat.i.tudea"and obedience.

The two men loaded several heavy black boxes into the rear deck of Gillian's coupes and started off.

"This corpse," Gillian explained, as, he headed the car toward the business section, "reached its present distressing condition because of a murderous attack by an a.s.sailant or a.s.sailants unknown."

"Where is it, Gillian?"

"Clinton."

"Ah! Not the farmer the papers have been so full about!"

"Yep. Amos Grundle."

"He was killed in an amazing way, wasn't he? A diamond in the heart. It stirs the imagination."

"An odor of rats has been detected," Gillian informed him. "The diamond did not reach his heart. It was found embedded in the third rib from the topa"above the heart."

"The shock might have caused death."

"How do I know," Gillian inquired, "that a ruby, sapphire, emerald or even a pearl does not exist in some other part of the anatomy?"

"Each of those stones shows up nicely on a fluoroscopic screen," the doctor said.

"My dear Hank," Gillian laughed, "one of the delightful things about you is your ability to grasp any idea with a minimum of explanation. You have that rare quality, intuition. No wonder women are mad about you."

"I have taken some remarkably sharp photographs of bullets lodged in backbones," the doctor grimly retorted. "A farmer named Truman, I understand, is charged with sowing diamonds not wisely but too well. Is there another suspect?"

"A black-bearded stranger."

"John Doe?"

"In my simple lexicon, he is the bogey man."

"The bogey man exists," Dr. Hoffman said gravely. "I have encountered him under beds."

Gillian laughed. "Do all husbands wear black beards?" He quickly added: "Our corpse is to be cremated to-morrow morning."

"That explains the urgency. Am I to take the stand for the defense?"

Gillian sighed. "If I only knew who would take the witness stand for the defense! A case like this is similar to opening a safe. You can try hundreds of combinations, but only one will work. I am still looking for the right combination."

They had drawn up before a poolroom which masked one of Greenfield's most notorious speakeasies.

"I'll be back in minutes," Gillian said, and went in.

He walked to the rear end of the poolroom, which was full of men and thick with smoke, opened a door and walked down a hall to another door. On this he rapped three times, then twice.

He waited, knowing that he was being inspected by an ingenious system of mirrors.

The door opened. A sallow-faced man of forty grinned nervously.

"Good evening, Mr. Hazeltine. Something up?"

"Where's Silky?"

"He's right here, Mr. Hazeltine."

Gillian found Silky Davis at the bar, nursing a highball: a slim, elegant, white-faced young man with black marbles for eyes.

"Busy?" Gillian asked him.

"Not too busy to do anything I can for you, Mr. Hazeltine. What's up?"

"Come outside."

The elegant young man followed Gillian out to the street. With his thumb, Gillian indicated the splintered bulletproof window.

Silky Davis whistled softly. "Browning," he said. "Where'd that happen?"

"This side of Clinton."

"Oh, yeah? You mixin' into that mess, Mr. Hazeltine?"

Gillian nodded. The elegant young man shook his head.

"They've got a hard mob up there, Mr. Hazeltine. It's a small town, but it's a halfway point, as you know, for a lot of Canadian boozea"a kind of a bottleneck, you might say. They don't care who they shoot."

"Afraid of 'em?" Gillian quietly asked.

"Who? Me? Say, listen, Mr. Hazeltine, if you have a little job you want my boys to do for you up in Clinton, say it, Mr. Hazeltine, and the job is done."

"This has to be done immediately."

"Sure thing! We do everything immediately, and sometimes even sooner. Now, just what is this job?"

Gillian told him briefly. Silky made no comments. All he said was, "K. O., Mr. Hazeltine, K. O. You know where the bridge is by that green roadhouse five miles outside of town?"

"Yes."

"We'll be there three minutes after you are. Just leave it to me. Leave all the details to me. See you in church, Mr. Hazeltine."

That was the way Silky Davis did business. Gillian drove out of town on the road toward Clinton and waited at the bridge by the green roadhouse. He had not waited five minutes when three expensive sedans rolled up. Silky, behind the wheel of the foremost, was smoking an opulent cigar. He leaned out and called: "Trail us, Mr. Hazeltine. When you get to Clinton, the job will be done and everything will be ready for you."

A sputtering on the right became louder, and a motorcycle policeman came up and stopped between Gillian's coupe and Silky's sedan. He looked from, one to the other; touched his cap to Gillian and said: "What's goin' on here, Silky?"

"Why, We're going out and kill a lot o' guys, Mike. Want to come long?"

Mike glanced, puzzled, at Gillian. "What is going on here, Mr. Hazleton?"

"Just what Silky says, Mike. We may kill a lot of guys. Want to come along?"

"Where?"

"Clinton."

"No, thanks," Mike said fervently.

He wheeled about and sputtered off. Silky started down the road for Clinton. The other two sedans fell into line at approximately seventy miles an hour. Gillian tried to keep up.

Mr. Hoffman said nervously: "Gillian, this is dangerous business, isn't it?"

And Gillian, laughing, answered: "Not if we slow down for intersections."

They shot across the covered bridge into Clinton five minutes after the arrival of Silky Davis's expedition.