patience—and taking, also, a dangerously large amount of live skin.
Van pulled the white sheet all the way off the nude figure, examined the body carefully from shoulders to feet for scars of skin removal. He found none, and slid the sheet back up over the corpse slowly, his grey eyes moody and thoughtful.
Some other person had provided the live skin for this facial operation. And from the amount of skin grafted, it had been a dangerous venture for the donor.
Snakey Willow was not a type to have sacrificing friends. And prison hospitals didn't provide such donations for convicts. Somebody had been paid a big sum for the skin used. Or else force had been used to take it.
Before Jim Doran replaced the magnifying glass in his pocket, he examined the dead man's fingertips. They had been tampered with, showed the marks of acid burns, but the tell-tale whorls had not been eradicated.
Even skin grafting could not stop those true fingerprints from growing back again to identify their owner. Snakey Willow had, it seemed, tried to polish off for criminally practical purposes a job the prison surgeon had done to save his life.
Van Loan left the Bellevue morgue with three convictions:
The prison surgeon who had repaired Snakey Willow's face had performed one of the finest technical and artistic operations the Phantom had ever seen. The skin grafting job had taken more live epidermis than any one donor could safely give. And the entire operation had cost far more money than Snakey Willow could ever have paid.
Beyond those three conclusions the Phantom refused to confuse his mind with speculation. He made a phone call from a drug store booth to his garage, asking that his coupe be picked up near the Clarion Building.
A second telephone message got Wild Jerry Lannigan at the mid-town apartment where the Phantom kept sanctuary quarters under Lannigan's name.
"Holmes Airport at eight this evening, Champ," he said curtly when the big red-headed man's voice boomed over the wire. "We're flying the Beechcraft to Buffalo."
At the other end of the line he could hear Jerry Lannigan's explosive exclamation of enthusiasm. "Champ" was the familiar name that only the Phantom used for the beefy, reckless ex-army mechanic and pilot. It served as a confidential and friendly identification, for not even Lannigan knew the Phantom was Richard Van Loan.
"Okay, Skipper!" Lannigan was too close to Van personally to use The Phantom appellation, and too smart to bandy it over a public phone. "The ship'll be gassed and oiled. It's about time something happened. I heard that guy with the screwy voice break in on the President's radio broadcast—"
Van cut him off with a cryptic, "So did too many other people, Champ. The man at the airport will be Professor Bendix," and hung up.
The Jim Doran disguise had sufficed for the hurried Phantom appearance at the Clarion, but a character of far more ponderance would be needed for the difficult interview Van planned. And there was some special technical information he wanted before he visited Dr. Waldo Junes at the General Electric Experimental Laboratory at Niagara Falls.
The place to effect both of these needs was in the seclusion of that sound- and explosion-proof lab in the old abandoned river-front building up on the East Side.
There was nothing of the scientist in the appearance of the slouching figure of Jim Doran as he swung off a First Avenue bus at Ninetieth Street and ambled with wary carelessness toward the East River.
At the dock end of the street a deserted red brick warehouse loomed on the left, its dirty windows staring vacuously through the still drizzling rain of the late summer afternoon. Jim Doran paused as he reached the corner of the decrepit building, glanced furtively about him.
The next instant he had faded into the darker shadows beneath the dilapidated loading platform.
A gaping, broken coal-chute window let him drop through into the darkness of the warehouse basement. He crossed the musty concrete floor with quick, familiar steps, produced a small brass key from a hidden crevice in the masonry at the opposite end of the silent cellar.
A moment later and he'd unlocked and pulled open a heavy counter-balanced steel and concrete trap door in the floor.
The Phantom lowered himself down a metal ladder, closed the trap above him, locked it and snapped on a light switch. He stood in the large steel-walled sub-cellar laboratory of Professor Paul Bendix.
Three-quarters of the long, low-ceilinged chamber was equipped with indestructible work tables upon which were an array of glass jars, racks of test tubes, Bunsen burners, heat-resisting crocks. A large electric arc furnace filled one corner of the modern lab. And along two walls were rows of compactly stacked shelves of chemical supplies.
The remaining quarter of the long room was a well stocked scientific library of modern chemistry, physics and crime literature in bound volumes, in professional technical magazines, and in those privately printed abstruse brochures published by the more learned scientific societies for purposes of research. The library represented seven languages.
There were no windows in the room, but a hidden ventilation system operating through a disused chimney in the warehouse tended to the air and chemical fumes when Professor Bendix used the laboratory. Behind a screen in a corner of the library was a couch, a dressing table, a shower and a large steel wardrobe case with a combination lock.
Jim Doran stepped over to that wardrobe, unlocked and opened it with four deft turns of the dial.
Inside hung an array of clothes—the rough garments of Gunner McGlone, a Chinatown character as mysterious as he was tough; the loud-checked suit of Lucky Luke Lamar, the swaggering gambler; the tuxedo and dinner clothes of Maxie Herman the Hermit, a unique Broadway figure who emerged bat-like from some undiscovered seclusion to frequent the night clubs, cabarets and expensive gambling and vice dens of Manhattan after dark.
There, too, hung the greenish, antique frock coat, the wing-collared shirt and the baggy striped trousers of that strange, erratically brilliant scientist, Professor Paul Bendix, the owner of this underground laboratory.
A brief smile of appreciation curved Dick Van Loan's lips as his grey eyes slid over that array of garments.
He touched the sleeve of Maxie the Hermit's tuxedo reminiscently.
The last time he'd worn that disguise, the Hermit had exchanged hot lead with Trigger Dwyer, now dead, across the crooked roulette table of the extinct Gold Casino Club.
The Phantom's smile faded, shutting out the past. This was a grimmer case he was facing. The tough disguise of Gunner McGlone might prove more appropriate in combating the murderer of Lester Gimble. But right now Professor Paul Bendix was needed.
He took down the faded, greenish frock coat and the rest of the professor's eccentric, old-fashioned clothes. From the bottom of the steel wardrobe cabinet he lifted a metal make-up box, opened it on the mirror-backed dressing table.
Sitting before the triple mirror, with a strong electric light focusing his reflection, the Phantom's trained fingers went to work. Jim Doran disappeared, became Richard Curtis Van Loan again.
Then the lean, tanned face of the Park Avenue clubman faded rapidly beneath the squarish, bearded features of Professor Bendix.
Fifteen minutes later the Phantom closed and locked the steel cabinet and adjusted the worn frock coat on his padded shoulders.
