The Face and the Doctor E-Book

Max Brand

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

„The Face and the Doctor” is another short story by Frederick Schiller Faust (1892-1944) who was an American author known primarily for his thoughtful and literary westerns under the pen name Max Brand. This story filled with excitement, suspense, good guys and bad, and plot twists aplenty! Orphaned at an early age, Faust studied at the University of California, Berkeley. He became one of the most prolific writers of our time but abandoned writing at age fifty-one to become a war correspondent in World War II, where he was killed while serving in Italy. Faust wrote more than 500 novels and over 400 short stories & novellas using twenty pseudonyms, including George Owen Baxter, George Challis, Evan Evans, John Frederick, Frederick Frost, David Manning & Peter Morland.

Leseprobe

Contents

CHAPTER I. [UNTITLED]

CHAPTER II. A LIST OF CLUES

CHAPTER III. STRANGE IMPRISONMENT

CHAPTER IV. A LONG SLEEP

CHAPTER V. OLD FRIENDS MEET AGAIN

CHAPTER VI. [UNTITLED]

CHAPTER VII. THE CHILL OF DEATH

CHAPTER VIII. KATE DOES HER PART

CHAPTER IX. A DOCTOR'S HUMAN SCULPTURE

CHAPTER I. [UNTITLED]

WHEN Muir came up to the bar, a Third Avenue elevated train was going by like thunder in a tin heaven and he had to pitch his voice as though he were talking into a high wind in order to ask for a Scotch-and-soda, but by the time he could wrap his long fingers around the glass there was sufficient quiet for him to ask: “Has Everett Franklin been here?”

“Dunno the name,” said the bartender.

“Middle-sized, a good pair of shoulders, and as handsome as Hollywood,” said Muir. “Looks five years younger than I.”

The bartender scanned again the huge, scholarly forehead of Muir and the face half-ugly with pain that was not of the body. He looked forty, though in the morning of the day no doubt he seemed five years younger.

“It’s the reporter that you’re askin’ about,” said the bartender. “He’s been and gone.”

“When?” asked Muir.

“Fifteen, twenty minutes, maybe.”

Muir glanced at the clock on the wall and it was, in fact, a quarter past eleven. Other questions rose in his eyes, but he kept them silent and drew the letter from his pocket again. He read it very slowly, deliberately.

Dear Pete,

You remember when we were riding up-town in the taxi the other day, and I pointed to a house and said I was going to raise a scandal out of that place that would put a bad smell all through New York? Well, tonight is the night for me to do a little looking into the business, and it may be a job that will need your pick-lock, your flashlight, and even that big automatic you like to harness under your left arm.

The fact is that you haven’t had much fun since you were the boy aviator in ’18, playing tag with the enemy over the Western Front, but tonight I may be able to show you enough action to quiet your nerves, for a week or so, and you’ll be able to sleep every night through instead of going the rounds like a silly ass and lapping up all the liquor in New York.

I know you’re only four days back from Central America and you may have meant it when you said that you wanted to rest a bit, but if I know the old Peter Angus Muir, he’ll be on the job with me tonight.

When I say scandal, I don’t mean any dirty man- woman business because I know that’s not up your street. I mean another kind of dynamite that may blow New York wide apart. Till eleven, I’ll be at O’Doyle’s Saloon, on Third Avenue, near Fifty- ninth.

Adieu to the greatest detective outside of books from the greatest reporter that ever covered crime. And I mean it!

B. F.

Muir, refolding the letter, drank half the scotch-and-soda slowly, without taking the glass from his lips. More than ever he could curse, now, that restless habit which kept him roaming the city and which on this night had caused him to miss the telephone call of Franklin at his apartment, for he felt that some great venture lay ahead, and that he might be left hopelessly in the rearward of the event.

He lighted a cigarette and looked into the smoke with the eyes of a crystal-gazer, trying to step back to the hour when he had ridden up-town with Franklin four days before. He could remember first, and most clearly, the grinning face of that malevolent reporter as he had hooked his thumb over his shoulder and said: “One of those houses right there on the corner–I’m going to raise a worse smoke than murder, I think, out of it. The police are going to hate my heart all over again.”

It had been on the East Side, somewhere. Not Fifth, because there had been houses on each side of the street; not Park because the avenue had not been so wide. Not Third because there was no double file of ugly pillars for the elevated. It was Madison or Lexington, then.

MUIR paid for his drink and took a taxi across to Lexington and then up-town, driving slowly. Instead of peering earnestly at every corner, he relaxed in the left side of the seat as he had done when he was with Franklin and kept his eyes forward as in consideration, letting the street-corners drift casually through the widest angle of his vision. They were north of Seventy-second Street when a ghostly finger tapped at his forehead.

He got out at the next corner, paid the taxi, and went back. On the northern side of the block below, three houses of identical aspect, long and narrow as the faces of three fools, rose cheek to cheek. Now that he confronted them, all recollection of having seen them before departed from him, but he would not deny the authority of that electric touch which he had felt as the taxi passed this corner.

He went to the south west street corner and viewed the houses aslant, as he must have done when Franklin called his attention to them. Still nothing returned from his memory, so he came closer to examine them at first hand. The one nearest Lexington was alight from the first floor to the sixth and highest story; music. Young voices crowding together in laughter, told him of the party which was going forward.

It did not have the look of a place where Franklin might have need of a pick-lock, a flashlight, and a gun. The adjoining house carried a “For Rent” sign, so he went past it to the third place where the front windows were equally filled by empty blackness. His confidence in the trail he was following had diminished almost to nothing, but he wandered up onto the porch of the house and took from his inner coat an electric torch hardly larger than a fountain pen. It cast a thin, sharp ray with which he ran rapid pencil strokes of light about the porch.

He saw the doorplate of “Dr. David J. Russo;” he saw the folds of the thick satin drape which hung inside the door-glass; and on the cement floor of the porch lay a cigarette butt that had been stepped on by a foot which afterward twisted over it and left paper and tobacco as an ugly spot, well-ground into the cement. Few men put out their cigarette butts with such care, but Everett Franklin had that ugly habit.

Muir turned from the house and walked straight across the street, where he lounged in the thick shadow between two houses. Franklin had been at the third house before him, and not more than twenty-five minutes ago.

He had come, according to his letter, prepared to go to great lengths to enter the building, and therefore the chances were large that he was in the house at the present moment; for every successful reporter has to have a good deal of the bulldog about him and Franklin had the patience of a hunting beast.

A paved footway ran down the left side of the house but not a glimmer of light came from the windows on that side. If Franklin was inside, he was at work with one of those flashlights of which he had spoken.

If that were the case, it would probably be foolish or even a little dangerous to try to enter the place while the investigation was going on. There came to the eye of Muir a picture of shadowy hands running through the papers of a desk, while an electric torch set them flashing.

A GIRL walked down the farther side of the street and the eye of Muir commenced to follow her because her steps were not checked and stilted by high heels; she moved with the rhythmic lightness of an athletic boy, with a good, free swing. When she reached the house Muir was watching, she turned and ran up the steps, and for some reason he looked up at the bright December stars and laughed, silently.

He could even hear the click of the key in the lock, he thought, as he strained his ears; then the door opened and she went inside. The door glass was illumined only a moment later; then the shades of the double window to the side glowed faintly.

Muir forced himself to wait two minutes; then he crossed the street and rang the house-bell.

He heard a step come into the hall. The door was pulled open by the brisk hand of someone in a hurry, and he saw the girl before him with the fox-fur loosened about her throat. The cold of the winter night was rosy in her face and twinkling in her eyes. She had the glow and the air, if not the exact features, of beauty.

Muir took off his hat. “Dr. Russo in, by any chance?” he asked.

The late hour made her look carefully at him.

“He isn’t in,” she said, “and I’m afraid that he won’t be in tomorrow, either. I’m sorry.”

Muir smiled on her a little.

“After all, this is not an office hour, is it?” he said.

“Hardly,” she answered, and then, looking farther into him: “Are you in pain? Is it something acute?”

“Rather,” nodded Muir.

She glanced instinctively down at a wrist-watch. Then: “Will you come in? I can make a note and perhaps the doctor can get in touch with you later?”

“Thank you,” said Muir, and stepped inside.