“All right,” I exclaimed, a little nettled that he should have anticipated me even so much in the case. “But you haven’t heard the latest.”
“What is it?” he asked with provoking calmness,
“Taylor Dodge,” I blurted out, “has the clue. To-morrow he will track down the man!”
Kennedy fairly jumped as I repeated the news.
“How long has he known?” he demanded eagerly.
“Perhaps three or four hours,” I hazarded.
Kennedy gazed at me fixedly.
“Then Taylor Dodge is dead!” he exclaimed, throwing off his acid-stained laboratory smock and hurrying into his street clothes.
“Impossible!” I ejaculated.
Kennedy paid no attention to the objection. “Come, Walter,” he urged. “We must hurry, before the trail gets cold.”
There was something positively uncanny about Kennedy’s assurance.
I doubted—yet I feared.
It was well past the middle of the night when we pulled up in a night-hawk taxicab before the Dodge house, mounted the steps and rang the bell.
Jennings answered sleepily, but not so much so that he did not recognize me. He was about to bang the door shut when Kennedy interposed his foot.
“Where is Mr. Dodge?” asked Kennedy. “Is he all right?”
“Of course he is—in bed,” replied the butler.
Just then we heard a faint cry, like nothing exactly human. Or was it our heightened imaginations, under the spell of the darkness?
“Listen!” cautioned Kennedy.
We did, standing there now in the hall. Kennedy was the only one of us who was cool. Jennings’ face blanched, then he turned tremblingly and went down to the library door whence the sounds had seemed to come.
He called but there was no answer. He turned the knob and opened the door. The Dodge library was a large room. In the center stood a big flat-topped desk of heavy mahogany. It was brilliantly lighted.
At one end of the desk was a telephone. Taylor Dodge was lying on the floor at that end of the desk—perfectly rigid—his face distorted—a ghastly figure. A pet dog ran over, sniffed frantically at his master’s legs and suddenly began to howl dismally.
Dodge was dead!
“Help!” shouted Jennings.
Others of the servants came rushing in. There was for the moment the greatest excitement and confusion.
Suddenly a wild figure in flying garments flitted down the stairs and into the library, dropping beside the dead man, without seeming to notice us at all.
“Father!” shrieked a woman’s voice, heart broken. “Father! Oh—my God—he—he is dead!”
It was Elaine Dodge.
With a mighty effort, the heroic girl seemed to pull herself together.
“Jennings,” she cried, “Call Mr. Bennett—immediately!”
From the one-sided, excited conversation of the butler over the telephone, I gathered that Bennett had been in the process of disrobing in his own apartment uptown and would be right down.
Together, Kennedy, Elaine and myself lifted Dodge to a sofa and Elaine’s aunt, Josephine, with whom she lived, appeared on the scene, trying to quiet the sobbing girl.
Kennedy and I withdrew a little way and he looked about curiously.
“What was it?” I whispered. “Was it natural, an accident, or—or murder?”
The word seemed to stick in my throat. If it was a murder, what was the motive? Could it have been to get the evidence which Dodge had that would incriminate the master criminal?
Kennedy moved over quietly and examined the body of Dodge. When he rose, his face had a peculiar look.
“Terrible!” he whispered to me. “Apparently he had been working at his accustomed place at the desk when the telephone rang. He rose and crossed over to it. See! That brought his feet on this register let into the floor. As he took the telephone receiver down a flash of light must have shot from it to his ear. It shows the characteristic electric burn.”
“The motive?” I queried.
“Evidently his pockets had been gone through, though none of the valuables were missing. Things on his desk show that a hasty search has been made.”
Just then the door opened and Bennett burst in.
As he stood over the body, gazing down at it, repressing the emotions of a strong man, he turned to Elaine and in a low voice, exclaimed, “The Clutching Hand did this! I shall consecrate my life to bring this man to justice!”
He spoke tensely and Elaine, looking up into his face, as if imploring his help in her hour of need, unable to speak, merely grasped his hand.
Kennedy, who in the meantime had stood apart from the rest of us, was examining the telephone carefully.
“A clever crook,” I heard him mutter between his teeth. “He must have worn gloves. Not a finger print—at least here.”
Perhaps I can do no better than to reconstruct the crime as Kennedy later pieced these startling events together.
Long after I had left and even after Bennett left, Dodge continued working in his library, for he was known as a prodigious worker.
Had he taken the trouble, however, to pause and peer out into the moonlight that flooded the back of his house, he might have seen the figures of two stealthy crooks crouching in the half shadows of one of the cellar windows.
One crook was masked by a handkerchief drawn tightly about his lower face, leaving only his eyes visible beneath the cap with visor pulled down over his forehead. He had a peculiar stoop of the shoulders and wore his coat collar turned up. One hand, the right, seemed almost deformed. It was that which gave him his name in the underworld—the Clutching Hand.
The masked crook held carefully the ends of two wires attached to an electric feed, and sending his pal to keep watch outside, he entered the cellar of the Dodge house through a window whose pane they had carefully removed. As he came through the window he dragged the wires with him, and, alter a moment’s reconnoitering attached them to the furnace pipe of the old-fashioned hot-air heater where the pipe ran up through the floor to the library above. The other wire was quickly attached to the telephone where its wires entered.
Upstairs, Dodge, evidently uneasy in his mind about the precious “Limpy Red” letter, took it from the safe along with most of the other correspondence and, pressing a hidden spring in the wall, opened a secret panel, placed most of the important documents in this hiding place. Then he put some blank sheets of paper in an envelope and
