The Phantom Detective: 5 Murder Mysteries in One Volume. Robert Wallace
In fact, we've got a couple of detectives hanging around as close to Dr. Junes as they can get. Which isn't very close, in that lab of his. He's a touchy old codger." The officer studied Dr. Bendix warily.
"What could that have to do with me, sir?" Professor Bendix shrugged, turned toward the cab. "I am concerned with science, not with crime. Thank you for directing me, officer."
He climbed into the taxi with Jerry, ordered the driver to take him to Dr. Junes' laboratory. As the cab pulled away, he turned sideways in the seat, watched narrowly through the rear window.
In the vague darkness behind, he caught a glimpse of the police lieutenant and the two reporters darting across the sidewalk toward Dr. Junes' cottage, evidently intent on using the phone.
"Checking on us," he said quietly to Lannigan. "Perhaps warning the detectives to watch us, or let us go through. We'll soon see."
"If we're going in, we're going in, dick or no dicks," Jerry declared flatly.
Van's eyes clouded, then became sharply alert, determinedly alive again as the taxi stopped in front of a long, squatty low building of bleak stone that stood apart from other dark buildings on a black private lane near the rumbling falls. He got out, paid off the driver, and stood for a minute with Lannigan as the taxi turned and rolled away.
A high iron picket fence surrounded the tree-shaded grounds. The large vehicle gate was locked, but a narrow pedestrian passage beside the empty watchman's booth let them through onto a winding cinder path leading to the dark laboratory.
Van led the way, making no attempt at caution. There was no sign of the detectives the police lieutenant had mentioned.
At the arched main entrance to the squat building he tried the door, found it locked, and rapped resoundingly with his knuckles.
There was no answer for fully two minutes. Then the door opened a few inches and a flashlight gleamed blindingly in their faces.
"Yeah?" a harsh voice demanded suspiciously. "What'd ya want?"
The Phantom ignored the gun visible in the hand of the man with the torch.
"Professor Paul Bendix to see Doctor Hugo Junes," he announced impatiently.
"I'll have to know more than that," the man inside growled.
"Tell the doctor," Van ordered, "that Professor Bendix has arrived from New York City and is to see the doctor in behalf of Mr. Frank Havens, the publisher."
"Wait here." The door shammed shut on them.
"I should have shoved in while he was arguin'," Jerry exclaimed.
Van shook his head. There were other means of getting inside that laboratory, if this direct method failed. If possible, he wanted Dr. Junes to connect Professor Bendix with the murdered Lester Gimble before they met, so the General Electric scientist could be prepared to give him, unobserved, the information Gimble had carried to his death. But he didn't want to use Havens' name unnecessarily.
There was another wait of several minutes before the door opened once more and the torch gleamed at them.
"Come on in," the harsh voice directed.
They shoved into the blackness anteroom. The door shut and the smell of a thousand chemicals assailed their nostrils. Van recognized the predominant odor of fulminated sulphur which increased as they followed the stocky figure who motioned them along with the revolver he held.
Ahead of them the beam of his flashlight outlined the bare walls of a concrete corridor, and steps going down. They descended, their footsteps echoing hollowly.
Another corridor turned off at right angles behind a heavy steel door which the stocky man opened and closed behind them. Van got one good look at his hard features before he padded on ahead again. There was another left turn, a second stairway going down, steeper and longer than the first.
At the bottom they stopped before a massive circular steel vault-like door cut into what appeared to be no longer concrete but solid rock. Their guide could not have come this far and returned during the short few moments they had waited outside the front entrance of the building. He must have phoned down here.
As the man swung open the heavy round door, Van said to him:
"How do you know I'm Professor Bendix?"
The fellow eyed him belligerently. "That'll be up to the doctor. He's down there." The stocky man stood aside, waiting.
Van looked through the circular doorway. A ladder disappeared into the well-like shaft, but light showed at the bottom some twenty feet below as he peered down. Except for a rangy shadow that moved momentarily across the light at the bottom, the hole had every appearance of a death trap.
The Phantom glanced warningly at Jerry Lannigan, nodded swiftly, and stepped onto the steel rungs of the ladder fastened into the circular stone wall. Above him, as he lowered himself, Lannigan's descending bulk blotted out the light of the electric torch above.
A moment later the Phantom stood at the bottom of the hole. He stepped away from the ladder, turned and moved into the queer octagonal laboratory of Dr. Hugo Junes.
One whole side of the laboratory was a wreck. An electric arc oven was blasted apart, and a slab of the rock wall behind it had been blown off. The debris-burnt metal, ore and scorched, blackened stone had been brushed into a heap and partly covered by a collapsed iron screen tipped over it.
The compact but barren-looking equipment across the room that had not been demolished by the explosion was now in use.
Dr. Junes himself—Van recognized the man from his pictures in several of the metallurgical journals he'd studied—was standing tall, gaunt and frightened beside a shelflike high-voltage electric oven which was already glowing whitely beneath the plates covering its heat producing arcs.
Two men, wearing heavy welder's goggles covering their eyes and faces, were watching him alertly, and a third stood back of them at a large rheostat in the wall. He, too, wore similar heavy glasses and face protector.
There was no other equipment in the room except, on a stone slab that made a workbench jutting from the wall opposite the rheostat, a heavy twenty-four-pound sledge hammer, a chisel and a steel handsaw. Beside the hammer was a small chip of silver colored ore the size of a silver dollar.
The tall, gaunt man nearest the furnace looked across at Van with an almost beseeching gleam of hope in his heat-moistened eyes. His gaze shifted a moment to Lannigan, who now stood behind the Phantom, then settled helplessly upon Van again.
"I am told," the unsteady voice of the gaunt, frightened man said with an attempt at formality, "that you are Professor Paul Bendix, of New York City. I believe I have had the pleasure of reading several of your scientific brochures. I am Dr. Hugo Junes."
The Phantom nodded gravely, and his grey eyes veiled their wary alertness beneath the drooping lids of Professor Paul Bendix.
"Excellent, Doctor," he said austerely. "And I am familiar with your remarkable work." He glanced at the glowing furnace. "I observe your experiment is already in process, despite an unfortunate explosion."
"What you observe," Junes stated with suppressed passion, "is the ultimate defeat of all my experiments with aluminum and calbite. I have returned here only to burn up what the attempted fusion reaction did not completely destroy."
The eyes of the others in the room were inscrutable behind their heavy goggles. For the moment, at least, they seemed content to listen and dart quick glances at the furnace.
"I understand your experiments are designed to fuse calbite and aluminum," Van said appreciatively. "But the explosion—"
Dr. Junes' gaze shifted to the others, then to the oven, and back to the Phantom, blinking confusedly. "I have refused to continue, or to leave any trace of my work, because of that revealing accident this afternoon. I am unable to understand what was the real cause of it, sir, but only a few grains of the composite metals, not quite fused, suddenly exploded—with the result you can see for