"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 180 - Wizard of Crime" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

WIZARD OF CRIME
by Walter Gibson

As originally published in "The Shadow Magazine," February 15, 1943.

Money was his power, men his pawns. He was King Kauger, mystery man of
murder and death. Could The Shadow match his wizardry?


CHAPTER I

MURDER BAIT

THIN, sharp, the flashlight beam stabbed through the darkness. Small but
powerful, the concentrated ray licked along the wall like a probing eye, to
focus on a door with a panel of frosted glass.
Spotted in the disk of light was the name:

CHEMICANA INC.

There came a laugh, seemingly imparted by the darkness itself. A
whispered
laugh, uncanny even to its echoes, which persisted through the corridor
outside
the frosted door. A tone that could be heard only by the being who uttered it,
for there was no one else in this tenth-floor corridor.
No one else!
It seemed more that there was no one at all. The flashlight was moving of
its own accord; the walls themselves were producing the sibilant mirth. These
were ghostly manifestations, rather than human. For no further sound nor stir
came from the void of blackness; nothing to prove that such inky space
contained a living figure!
The light crept downward, sideward, and wrapped itself around a doorknob,
where a heavy lock showed beneath. Odd how the glow gathered itself in a
smaller circle when it found this new objective. Actually, the flashlight
itself was approaching the door, thus accounting for the behavior of the
glowing spot. But that fact was not apparent until something more phenomenal
occurred.
Into the tiny glow came a gloved hand. It was black, like the void from
which it emerged, and the glove was very thin, so silken that it did not
conceal the movement of the supple fingers within. Momentarily, the hand
merged
with the encroaching fringe of blackness; then, with a deft flip, the fingers
reappeared, dangling a ring of keys gained by some swift trick.
Brought from blackness behind the spotted light, those keys did not
jangle. The hand itself prevented any telltale sound. Any of those keys might
have fitted the lock in question, for all looked shaped to it. But the magic
hand dealt in fine discriminations, for after a momentary pause, it let all
the
keys save one go sliding silently to the bottom of the ring.