Dr. Satan Part 9

Ivor bit his lips.

"That much you have read. But there are two things you haven't read - which no one knows about yet."

"One is that I paid the ransom money today, just before my girl was pushed from the blue sedan. The other - -"

Ivor mopped his forehead with a trembling hand.

"I didn't have a million in cash where I could get to it. That's a terrific sum, Mr. Keane. I could only get half a million. So, I wrapped that up in newspaper, and gave it to the man who came to my town car for it.

"Half a million, Mr. Keane. And the kidnappers gave me back my daughter - half of the pair they kidnapped!

He started beseechingly, fearfully at Keane.

"No one knew I was going to pay only half the ransom. Yet they came in the sedan with only my girl - somehow knowing in advance that I hadn't the full sum with me!"

He paced the library, while Keane watched him.

"If that were all there was to it, I might think the return of half what I lost, in trade for half the sum demanded, was a coincidence. I might think that the kidnappers were playing the usual double-crossing game - expecting the full million but hoping to get still more by returning only my daughter. But there is more. I found this note in my pocket, thrust there by someone in the crowd, a little while after we'd got to the hospital."

He handed a crumpled bit of paper to Keane, who read: John Ivor: When you deliver the other half-million, you shall get your son back. Meanwhile, your daughter's madness shall be your punishment for not giving the full sum in the first place.

The note was unsigned.

"You see?" Ivor said almost pleadingly. "Days ago, the kidnappers knew I was going to give only half the ransom, though not a soul on earth but myself knew that!" He jerked around. "Have you any explanation for that?"

Keane's long fingers touched softly.

"An excellent one," he said. "You wouldn't understand, however. All I will say is that it only confirms my knowledge of the kidnapper.

Ivor gasped. "You know who he is?"

Keane nodded.

"Then - my G.o.d, man! - the police---"

"Can do nothing, if it's the person I think it is. Think! Know! The kidnapper is Doctor Satan himself. The huge sum asked made me think so in the first place, which is why I came to Louisville from New York when I first read of the affair. The diabolically induced madness was another indication. 'The Devil is my master. I serve Satan.' I knew who had inspired that delusion, all right! Now, the apparent magic by which the kidnapper knew you were going to pay only half the demand. Doctor Satan read your mind, my friend."

"Doctor Satan?"

"So the name means nothing to you! I wish it didn't to me." Keane sighed wearily. "He is a man who performs crime for the sheer, icy love of it - a devil if ever there was one. Your daughter in her delusion about having been in contact with Satan himself, was not so far wrong, my friend!"

He strode toward the door.

"Don't tell the police or anyone else my name or my connection with this," he warned. "I want to work alone. Give me twenty-four hours to try to track this man down and rescue your boy."

He nodded and was gone; a man, Ivor thought, like a steel blade; a man to inspire hope when all hope was lost, as he had inspired it in that bizarre and still inexplicable cure of Jane Ivor . . .

"But of course it was apparent at once what had happened," said Keane a few minutes later.

He was talking to a tall, lovely girl with deep blue eyes and reddish hair, in her hotel suite. The girl was Beatrice Dale, secretary, companion, right-hand man.

"Knowing that Doctor Satan was behind this, we could guess at the source of the girl's madness. Doctor Satan was seen by her only in his crimson costume, of course, in that costume he subtly and deliberately induced madness in her. Therefore, her cure suggested itself: Dress as Satan did, and unmask before her, letting her see that the being she thought the Devil incarnate was only a man after all."

Beatrice was frowning a little. She nodded impatiently.

"Yes, I see how the cure would suggest itself. But why did Doctor Satan drive her mad in the first place?"

Keane sighed. "It was in line with his usual process: A reign of terror among wealthy citizens - then demands for money. Satan kidnapped Jane and Harold Ivor intending from the first to send them back to society incurably and horribly mad. With that as a precedent, no other father would hesitate a minute to part with a fortune to spare madness in his own child!"

Keane's icily calm gray eyes grew colder yet with bitter anger.

"No one knows it yet, including the police - but eight rich men in the city have received notes from Doctor Satan. Each note demands a sum varying from two hundred thousand to five hundred thousand dollars. Each note threatens kidnapping and induced insanity for the child of that man if the money is not paid on demand! Jane and Harold Ivor are but the first of many victims - if we can't stop that red-robed devil!"

Beatrice Dale faced him, cheeks a little pale, a light in her eyes that Keane had never yet really observed.

"So again you go after this man," she murmured. "Ascott, be careful. I feel - this time - that you may not come back - - -"

Keane's rare smile flashed out.

"Save your sympathies for Satan, Beatrice. This time, he will be killed, and our work completed!"

3. Road to h.e.l.l At ten o'clock of the night when Jane Ivor had amazed and then horrified Louisville by doing her mad dance in the open street, a tall man in an enveloping topcoat approached the unfinished building where Ivor had delivered half a million dollars from his town car.

The man had his coat b.u.t.toned and the rim of his hat down over his face, though the night was warm. He carried a bundle under his arm.

At the building, on the deserted walk, the man paused. Light from across the street shone on his ice-gray eyes for an instant. Ascott Keane.

Across the street were many people. Before the building there were none. Back from the empty sidewalk yawned the cavernous entrance of the brick sh.e.l.l.

Steps sounded from down the walk. Keane tensed a little and looked at his watch. It was three minutes after ten. In his pocket was a note - one of the eight extortion notes sent to the city's eight leading citizens. The note read: If you do not want your son kidnapped and returned a hopeless lunatic, you will deliver four hundred thousand dollars at five minutes after ten tonight at the address given below.

The given address was that of the unfinished building. The signer of the note was Doctor Satan.

Four minutes after ten. The approaching footsteps, slow, leisurely, came yet closer. Keane looked toward them.

For an instant Keane was startled and disappointed. For the maker of the steps was a uniformed policeman. He had expected anything but that; had expected an accomplice of Satan, perhaps disguised as a tramp, perhaps dressed as a sleek and respectable citizen....

"Disguise," breathed Keane. "But that doesn't necessarily mean as tramp of business man . . . ."

Eyes wide with the thought, he stared harder at the approaching policeman. And then his eyes narrowed and his jaw tensed.

The policeman's eyes were glazed, drugged-looking. He was walking like something moved by a spring - or like a person moving in his sleep. His wide, staring eyes were fixed on Keane as though they didn't really see him.

"My G.o.d!" whispered Keane, as the full extent of Doctor Satan's scheme burst home to him. "He's using the police as his messengers now! This man is hypnotized - perhaps drugged first! But what more efficient way of collecting extortion money could he devise than to have a patrolman in full uniform, apparently only walking his beat, pick it up?"

The policeman came nearer, glazed eyes fixed on Keane's face. He slowed as he got to Keane, as if waiting for something.

Keane extended the bundle he carried.

"Have you come here for this?" he said, staring at the man's drugged, vacant eyes.

"Perhaps," the policeman spoke. His voice was thick and pitched in a monotone. "What is in the package?"

"That which will keep Malcolm Tibbet's boy from sharing the fate of Jane Ivor," said Keane.

"The word?" said the policeman.

Keane was staring into those drugged eyes with all the power of his will, now. And, as a result of his concentrated gaze, those eyes were flickering a bit.

"The word is 'immunity'," said Keane, quoting the pa.s.sword given in the letter.

For a moment the policeman hesitated. And Keane knew that his brain was struggling to catch the message of the master mind that had hypnotized him. Where was that message coming from? Keane had to find out, and do it through this man.

"'Immunity' is the correct word," the man said monotonously. "Give me the package . . . ."

His voice trailed off as Keane continued to stare at him, hypnotically, powerfully. His eyes widened and grew perplexed. Slowly but surely Keane's brain was hammering down the wall of hypnosis induced by Doctor Satan previously. Keane realized, when the man was free of Satan's spell and not entirely under his own!

"The package - - -" the policeman reiterated vaguely. And then his eyes, clearing more and more, blinked as he stared around him, for an instant in full possession of his faculties.

"Hey, what the h.e.l.l! What am I doing here? Who are you? What's this package you got?"

He stepped a swift pace back from Keane, hand driving for his gun.

"This is the joint where Ivor was to have handed over the kidnap dough! Now you're here with a bundle! By G.o.d, you must be one of the guys - - -"

His gun was half drawn before Keane's eyes completed their work. He stood rigidly still in that att.i.tude, gun half out of its holster, face hostile, staring at Keane.

Keane spoke.

"You will do what I command," he said.

The man's breathing had become regular again. His eyes were glazed once more; but not, this time, from the hypnosis of Doctor Satan!

"I will do what you command."

"You were sent here for this package. Who sent you?"

"A man in red, with a red mask."

"Where did you meet him?"

"He was in a blue sedan. He stepped out of it as I came near. He looked at me a long time, and then told me what to do."

"Where were you to deliver the bundle you got from the man who brought it to this building?"

"To the blue sedan, at the same corner."

He named an Intersection toward the eastern limit of the town. Keane's fists clenched. Would Doctor Satan be in that sedan again? If so, he was going to meet him in less than fifteen minutes! And this time - - - Keane felt of a small, egg-shaped thing he carried gingerly in his coat pocket. Bullets, knife-blades, clubs - these ordinarily lethal weapons could not be used on Doctor Satan. He had means of protecting himself against such crude weapons. But this thing he had in his pocket! That, Keane thought, spelled death for the man!

"We'll go to the blue sedan," he said to the policeman. "My car is down a block. Come with me to it."

A dark intersection, with an abandoned factory on one corner throwing black shadow. In the shadow, a blue sedan - the car from which Jane Ivor had been pushed that afternoon.

Keane gripped the egg-shaped thing in his pocket. Then he cursed in his heart as he drew near the sedan with the cop. For there was only one person in the car, and that one was a man on whose face was stupid cruelty, who sat at the steering wheel.

Doctor Satan himself had not come; he had merely sent a casual accomplice to get the money. Keane's quest of the red-garbed devil who engaged in crime for the love of it as some men hung big game in Africa, was not to be so easily ended.

The man at the wheel of the sedan eyed the two doubtfully as they drew near. Obviously he had been expecting only the uniformed patrolman; his fingers clutched the gear-s.h.i.+ft lever uncertainly then he saw Keane too. But he waited till Keane got to the car. And that was his mistake.

Keane's eyes bored into his as they had drilled into the cop's. The man blinked uneasily, tried to turn his head as instinct warned him of some danger he could not understand.

"You were to receive a package from this man," said Keane, indicating the policeman. His voice was level, quiet, soothing.

"Yeah." said the driver of the sedan. "But where did you come from?"

"I'm the one who took it to the building. I'm to go with you to your master with it."

The man's lips tightened.

"Oh, no, you're not. You - - -"

He stopped. His eyes were helplessly held by Keane's.

"You can't - - -" he mumbled.

His face became stony, his eyes unwinking. Keane got into the car beside him. Then he turned to the policeman, and made a pa.s.s with his hand before the other's heavy face.

"Drive!" he snapped to the man at the wheel.

The command was given none too soon. With the pa.s.sing of Keane's hand across his face, the cop came out of his trance. He saw Keane, really, instead of through a hypnotic mist. He remembered seeing him before, in connection with some suspicious place or happening that he couldn't quite spot at the moment.

"Halt!" he roared, as the car Jumped forward.

"Faster," said Keane to the staring driver.

Gun shots sounded from behind. The policeman was trying to shoot the tires of the blue sedan. But they left him behind and sped on, toward the city limits.

"You will drive me to your master," Keane said to the man he had enslaved momentarily to his will.

"I will drive you to my master," the man repeated.