“He moves, he moves,” old Bratton cackled excitedly. “His wheels are going round, all right. Now, if only—”
Abruptly he shut off the current. The machinery fell dead silent.
“Sit up, Tom-Tom!” commanded old Bratton harshly.
And Tom-Tom sat up, his fingers tugging at the clamps that imprisoned him.
The Los Angeles papers made little enough fuss over the death of old Bratton. True, he was murdered—they found him stabbed, lying face down across the threshold of his rear room that was jammed full of strange mechanical junk—but the murder of a janitor is not really big crime news in a city the size of Los Angeles.
The police were baffled, more so because none of them could guess what the great mass of machinery could be, if indeed it were anything. But they forgot their concern the following week, when they had a more important murder to consider, that of one Digs Dilson.
Digs Dilson was high in the scale of local gang authority. He had long occupied a gaudy apartment in that expensive Los Angeles hotel which has prospered by catering to wealthy criminals. He was prudent enough to have a bedroom with no fire escape. He feared climbing assassins from without more than flames from within. In front of his locked room slept two bodyguards on cots, and his own bedside window was tightly wedged in such a fashion that no more than five inches of opening showed between sill and sash. The electric power-line that was clamped along the brickwork just outside could hardly have supported a greater weight than thirty or forty pounds.
Yet Digs Dilson had been killed at close range, by a stab with an ordinary kitchen knife, as he slept. The knife still remained in the wound, as if defying investigators to trace fingerprints that weren’t there. And the bodyguards had not been wakened and the door had remained locked on the inside.
The blade of the knife, had anyone troubled to compare wounds, could have been demonstrated to be the exact size and shape as the one that had killed old Bratton. His landlord might have been able to testify that it came from old Bratton’s little store of kitchen utensils. But nobody at police headquarters bothered to connect the murders of a friendless janitor and a grand duke of gangdom. After considerable discussion and publicity, the investigators called the case one of suicide. How else could Digs Dilson have received a knife in his body?
Hope was expressed that the Dilson mob, formerly active and successful in meddling with film extras’ organizations and the sea food racket, would now dissolve. But the hope was short-lived.
A spruce lieutenant of the dead chief, a man by the name of Juney Saltz, was reputed to have taken command. He appeared briefly at the auction of old Bratton’s effects, buying all the mysterious machinery at junk prices and carting it away. After that, the organization, now called the Salters, blossomed out into the grim but well-paid professions of kidnapping, alien-running and counterfeiting.
The first important kidnapping they achieved, that of a very frightened film director, gained them a ransom of ninety thousand dollars and the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The victim, once released, told of imprisonment in a dank cellar, blindfolded and shackled. Once, fleetingly, he saw a captor who looked like the rogue’s gallery photographs of Juney Saltz, but that person was plainly not the one in authority. In fact, he seemed to listen with supple respect to a high but masterful voice that gave orders. And the owner of that high voice once came close to the chair where the prisoner sat bound; the point from which the voice seemed to issue was very, very close to the cellar floor, as though the speaker was no more than two feet high.
An individual short and shrill! Did a child rule that desperate band? The sages of the law were more apt to consider this a clever simulation, with the order-giver crouching low and squeaking high lest he be identified. A judicious drag-netting of several unsavory drinking places brought in one of the old Dilson crowd, who was skilfully, if roughly, induced to talk.
He admitted a part in the kidnapping and ransom collection. He described the cellar hideout as being located in a shabby suburb. He implicated several of his comrades by name, including Juney Saltz. But he shut up with a snap when his interrogators touched on the subject of the Salters’ real chief. No, it wasn’t Juney Saltz—Juney was only a front. No, nobody on the police records but, he insisted pallidly, he wouldn’t say any more. Let them kill him if they wanted to, he was through talking.
“I’d rather die in the chair this minute than get my turn with the boss,” he vowed hysterically. “Don’t tell me you’ll take care of me, either. There’s things can get between bars, through keyholes even, into the deepest hole you got. And you can smack me around all week before I’ll pipe up with another word.”
His captors shut him in an inside cell generally reserved for psychopathic cases—a solidly plated cubicle, with no window, grating, or other opening save a narrow ventilator in the ceiling that gave upon a ten-inch shaft leading to the roof. Then they gathered reinforcements and weapons and descended on the house with the cellar where the kidnapped director had been held for ransom.
Stealthily surrounding that house, they shouted the customary invitation to surrender. Silence for a few seconds, then a fainthearted member of the Salters appeared at the front door with his hands up. He took
