The Shadow - The Golden Dog Murders Part 3

The holes were too small to peer through. There was no sign of wires or any kind of electrical connection. It couldn't be a hookup with a photoelectric eye. Baron was smart enough to be aware of every type of burglar alarm.

Satisfied, Sam Baron whispered grimly to, himself, "Let's go!"

It took him ten minutes to open the lock. It took him another sixty seconds to nerve himself to open the door. Before he did so, he jerked his knife from its scabbard. He didn't know why he did that. All he knew was that his forehead was beaded with cold sweat and the hand that held the knifetrembled.

The safe door swung wide. Baron peered eagerly into the black interior.

The next instant, he gave a terrified scream and flung himself backward.

From the top compartment of the safe a crouched dog launched itself at the burglar!

THE dog uttered neither growl nor bark. Its jaws ripped silently at the throat of the recoiling crook.

Baron felt tearing pain, the warm gush of blood. But the agony was in his forearm, not his throat. The dog's fangs were ripping at the arm Baron had thrust with instinctive terror in front of his face.

Cloth ripped. Baron threw off the dog with a fierce jerk of his arm. The animal flew across the room. It flattened its haunches and prepared to spring again.

Baron squirmed out of his coat, and waited. He could see the wide, slavering mouth of the beast, the yellow fangs in the undershot jaw. The animal was an enormous bulldog.

But it wasn't the appearance of the beast that made the hair crawl on.

Baron's scalp. The dog uttered no sound!

Sam Baron's face was like chalk. He remembered the legend of the nude, golden Dog G.o.ddess of Rajk.u.mana.

The dog sprang again in silent fury. Baron swung his bunched coat upward in the path of those wide jaws. The cloth ripped apart. Weight of the beast threw Baron to his knees. But he was able to duck his head backward and to hurl coat and dog away from him.

Blood streamed down his gashed arm. He rolled over and over toward the dead body of Peter Randolph. As the dog rushed again, Baron's knife slashed a ragged crimson furrow across the beast's flank.

Sight of the blood restored Baron's courage. The beast was bleeding! It could be wounded - killed! It wasn't a ghost, but a living animal!

He grabbed at the corpse of Peter Randolph and jerked the dead millionaire upward into a sitting position. Shielded grotesquely, Baron waited.

His face was invisible behind the body of the dead man. The dog saw only the lifeless features of Peter Randolph. It hesitated. Baron moved his knife gently very gently to a defensive slant, the reddened blade jutting outward like a dagger.

Then his face showed deliberately beneath the armpit of Randolph. He uttered a low, hissing challenge.

The beast sprang!

But the crook's face was shielded behind the dead man's back. The animal's teeth sunk into flesh and closed like a vise. The bulldog jerked fiercely.

Blood drenched Sam Baron and spattered on the rug.

His knife swept downward. It buried itself in the dog's body. Again and again, Baron struck. He staggered backward.

The dog lay in a welter of blood alongside the body of Peter Randolph.

Blood flowed from a half-dozen deep wounds. It tried to rise, but one of the knife thrusts had slashed through its haunches, hamstringing the dog. A shudder pa.s.sed through the beast. It died without uttering a sound.

BARON'S eyes moved from the dog to its dead master. The dog's final attackhad ripped Randolph's dead throat into a red horror. The spot where he lay was a shambles.

Sam Baron swayed weakly to a low table, poured himself a drink from a bottle of Randolph's whisky. The bite of the fiery liquor steadied his nerves.

He gulped another, then laughed harshly.

He was able to pry open the mouth of the dog and to stare down its ugly red gullet without flinching. He realized now why the beast had been unable to bark. An operation had been performed on its throat. Vocal cords had been cut.

Peter Randolph had relied on a silent beast to kill without warning, if anyone tried to rifle his jewel safe. The holes in the top of the safe had been drilled there to provide air for the animal to breathe.

The last ounce of superst.i.tious fear left Sam Baron.

He raced back to the open safe. Gloved hands explored its various compartments until he found what he was after. In the palm of his hand lay an enormous, gleaming sapphire. He held it to the light. In the depths of the gem was a reddish blur like the bright smear of blood.

Baron placed the stolen jewel carefully in his pocket. From another pocket, he drew a second sapphire. It was an exact duplicate of the first.

Baron had stolen it along with eleven others from the chemical research laboratory of Rodney Mason.

He placed the fake stone in the dead fingers of Peter Randolph.

As he bent to do so, the shade on the tall window behind him moved slightly. Eyes were peering into the room. They saw the real sapphire go into Baron's pocket. They watched the fake one being jammed carefully into the stiffened grasp of the millionaire.

That man outside the window was David Frick. Seeing all that he wanted to, he withdrew.

Sam Baron was unaware that he had been under that momentary bit of surveillance. He was staring grimly at a dead bulldog and a corpse with a torn throat.

A sudden idea glowed like flame in the murderer's clever brain.

No one, except possibly Parker, the butler, could have known that a living dog had been kept in the safe to ward off burglars. And Parker was now dead.

Squint and "Turk" had probably already disposed of his body. They'd be racing back in the car to pick up Baron.

All Baron had to do was to get rid of the dog, as he had gotten rid of Parker. The only signs of a burglar's presence were the open safe and the throttling fingerprints on Randolph's throat. The dog's teeth had ripped away those prints. Baron got rid of the other clue by closing the safe with gloved hands and spinning the dials.

He wrapped the bleeding body of the beast in his torn coat. With the dog missing, the whole scene would take on a horrible significance. Police might laugh at the wild theory that a Mohammedan G.o.ddess, in the form of a ghostly dog, had ripped out Randolph's throat. But the newspapers would leap on that angle with black headlines. The public was a sucker for that kind of stuff!

A wave of fear would spread over New York. That was exactly what Sam Baron's unknown boss wanted to happen. Peter Randolph was merely one victim.

There would be others, as soon as Randolph's supernatural death scared other millionaire collectors into the open.

They'd either attempt to dispose of their sapphires through some underworld fence, or try to get police protection under some pretext. In either case, Baron's gang would have leads to the rest of the scattered sapphires.

Ten of the stones were already in the gang's hands. Eleven were still missing. Of these eleven, only one had been definitely located. Murder would take care of that. And fear - the fear of a nude, golden woman with the headof a snarling dog would reveal the whereabouts of the sapphires still missing.

The gang could then do business with a certain Senor Ortega!

SAM BARON tiptoed through the quiet mansion, carrying with him the carca.s.s of the dead bulldog. He waited in the dark front vestibule, keeping the door open a slight crack. He was watching for a black automobile.

Presently, Baron saw it, over the enclosing fence. It rolled to the curb and a man got out. Then the door in the board fence opened. A faint whistle came to the ears of Sam Baron.

Clutching the wrapped dog tightly in his arms, Baron hurried to the sidewalk. An instant later, he was on the back seat of the car with the man called Squint. Turk, the driver, looked back from the wheel.

"What've you got there?" he growled. "A dead mutt?"

"Shut up!" Baron snarled savagely. "Get this heap moving in a hurry! Same place where you buried the butler. Step on it, Turk!"

The car slid away. It gathered speed and vanished into Riverside Drive.

As it did so, a man chuckled coldly. He was hanging to the top of the board fence. Now, he swung his legs over the fence and dropped to the deserted pavement outside.

He drew a small notebook from his pocket and wrote down the license number of the vanished automobile. The man chuckled again as he walked leisurely toward Riverside Drive. His bloodless gray face creased into crafty lines. He beckoned to a pa.s.sing bus and swung aboard.

He was the man who called himself David Frick.

CHAPTER V.

THE MAN IN THE TUB.

ON that same night, Harry Vincent, under orders from The Shadow, was watching the apartment house of Isabel Pyne.

The house rose twenty stories above the pavement of Park Avenue. Lights gleamed in some of the windows. Others were dark. The latter was true of four adjoining windows on the twelfth floor. These were the front windows of Isabel Pyne's apartment.

Harry Vincent was convinced that the girl was not at home. He didn't rely on sight alone. He had disposed of the possibility that Isabel might be asleep in her darkened apartment, by making a telephone call. There had been no answer to that call. Obviously, the girl was out somewhere, and had not yet returned.

Harry's orders were grim. He had been told to make sure that Isabel Pyne suffered no harm. He knew that the girl was socially prominent, that she was a niece of Julius Hankey, Fifth Avenue's most famous jeweler. He knew, also, that she was on very friendly terms with a young research chemist named Rodney Mason.

The house occupied a corner, running back a quarter block from the avenue along the side street. The service alley through which tradesmen delivered goods was located at that end. Harry had already a.s.sured himself that the gate of the alley was unlocked.

But the post where Harry finally stationed himself was on the opposite side of the avenue, from where he could see the canopied entrance of the apartment. Although many cars and taxis pulled up, there was no sign of IsabelPyne. Vincent had been furnished with an excellent description of her. He wondered what sort of a jam a pretty girl like that could get herself into.

ISABEL PYNE was wondering, too. She sat tensely in a speeding taxicab, and there was fear in her heart. Occasionally, she spoke in a nervous whisper to her driver. Isabel was convinced she was being trailed!

She had first noticed the sedan a mile or so uptown, had noted that the sedan's driver seemed to be a swarthy foreigner. And she had been puzzled by a queer ornament on the radiator cap. It looked like the nude figure of a golden girl, with a queer sort of head.

Isabel forgot about it - until she saw the sedan again. It was following her taxi. She spoke to her driver and changed her route. The sedan did the same.

The girl's hackman, however, was a clever driver - and his cleverness was increased by a twenty-dollar bill the frightened girl pa.s.sed to him. He wove a swift, confused pattern through the city street. Somewhere on that dizzy flight, he lost the sedan completely.

Again, Isabel Pyne gave him the address of her Park Avenue home apartment.

But she added low-voiced instructions. The cab didn't stop at the canopied entrance. It proceeded around the block and halted outside the service alley.

The girl hurried down the dark alley and descended stone steps to the bas.e.m.e.nt of the building. She crossed to the service elevator and her heart gave a thud of relief. The elevator was aloft somewhere in its high shaft.

Isabel glided noiselessly up the stairway that boxed in the shaft.

She reached her own floor without being seen. Had she been questioned as to her twelve-story climb, it would have sounded silly to say that she had been frightened by a dark-skinned foreigner in a sleek sedan.

And yet - she was frightened!

She felt quick relief as she unlocked her kitchen door and closed it behind her. She double-locked it on the inside.

Then the handsome face of Rodney Mason glowed in the girl's mind. She could depend on the calm young research chemist to give her advice. She scooped up her telephone and called Mason's suburban home.

A moment later, Isabel was frowning with surprise. Rodney was not at home.

The bell continued to buzz monotonously. Isabel felt sudden anger at Rodney.

He had lied to her! He had stated he was going to be at home all evening working in his laboratory. Why had he told her a deliberate untruth like that?

Isabel felt suddenly tired. She decided to take a warm shower and go to bed. She drew her magnificent evening gown slowly over her head and hung it in a closet. She allowed her gauzy underthings to slide lazily to the floor.

Staring at her slim smoothness in the bedroom mirror, she felt better.

No need to diet yet, she thought with drowsy pleasure. She kicked her bare toes into flat-soled slippers and wrapped a blue satin robe about her body.

Padding softly into the tiled bathroom, she drew back the shower curtain.

Then she uttered a choked scream; but the cry died instantly on her lips.

Isabel stood paralyzed, staring at the black muzzle of an automatic pistol.

The gun was in the hand of a tall, thin man who stood in the tub. His rasping command had silenced the girl's terrified cry. Grim eyes warned her that a second scream would bring flame jetting from the squat barrel of the gun. The man was David Frick.

ISABEL cringed backward, pulling her satin robe tighter about the white sheen of her body.

"Don't kill me," she gasped. "Steal anything you want! I promise not to tell -"

"n.o.body's gonna kill you, baby," Frick said, huskily. "All I want is information. Tell me everything you know about a guy named Rodney Mason."

Isabel's face was very pale. She didn't reply.

"Mason's a chemist, ain't he?" Frick growled. "Has he ever tried to make synthetic sapphires?"

"I don't know."

"You lie!"

"What's your interest in Rodney Mason?"

Frick's laughter was like the sifting of dry dust.

"Maybe David Frick wants to make some use of this smart Mr. Mason. I happen to know he's in love with you. I figure that with a little info, I'll be able to kidnap him without too much fuss. If you don't talk, I'll kidnap you.