"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 290 - Death has Grey Eyes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

"A good idea. He's coming around here tonight. Wants to talk privately
about something."
Jerry took the hint and with relish. Something was bothering him and Dick
hadn't explained it. The interview between Eric and Dick might be the very
thing that would jog Dick's memory, if it needed jogging at all. There was
much
of the sly in the smile that framed itself on Jerry's sharp face as he turned
out through the hallway.
"Claire is waiting over at the Celebrity Club," spoke Jerry, almost
indifferently, as he paused at the door. "It might be tactful to stop over
later, Dick."
"I suppose so," nodded Dick, turning back to the living room. "I'll be
there - unless I think of something more important."
Outdoors, a steady drizzle was taking on the proportions of a rainstorm.
From his fourth-floor window, Dick Whitlock could see the increasing storm
above the roof of a three-story house opposite. The city lights produced an
unearthly glow above those roof-tops.
Odd, the fantasy that could be produced by the works of nature combined
with those of man. Here was a man-made chasm between a modern apartment house
and an antiquated residence that might been a mountain gorge. Electric lights,
smothered by clouds through which sunlight could never have trickled, were
etching the scene as if in an afterglow.
It was a twilight that Dick remembered, though he thought that he was
simply picturing it. Looking down into the street, Dick wondered if it would
furnish the impression of a bottomless abyss, but it didn't. It was simply a
rain-swept street, where Jerry, who had been unwise enough to go out without a
top-coat, was scooting into a cab that was stopping with the same sharp
tactics
exhibited by the cab that Dick had taken the night before.
Maybe all New York cabs acted like that, unless this happened to be the
same one. Watching it turn the corner, Dick's reflections were covering
another
factor in last night's adventure.
Well did Dick remember a valiant friend in evening clothes whose name he
hadn't learned but whom he hoped to meet again. Nevertheless, it wasn't
Cranston on whom Dick's thoughts were focused. There was someone else, as yet
totally unidentified, a cloaked fighter who had relieved Cranston after the
first stages of the fray.
Looking across the street, Dick wouldn't have been surprised if such a
figure had come scaling from the parapet of the old house opposite. Dick's
recollections of the Swiss mountain gorge with the cloaked adventurer crossing
it by cable, had been subsequently obliterated, much as the abyss itself had
swallowed car, cable, and the traveler in black.
Turning from the window, Dick settled into an easy chair, smiling at his
own imagination. Dick preferred to believe that his mind was cluttered, not
clouded to the point where he accepted the existence of singular creatures
that
could materialize themselves like a chunk of night turning solid.
If Dick had been staring from the window of a place called the Cobalt
Club, he might have changed that opinion. There, entering a waiting limousine,