Harrison Knode had made no editorial comment. But The Shadow could foresee the editor’s future action. Once the excitement of the murder had died down, Knode would have his opportunity to link up the past with the present. Now was no time to drag the dead curator’s name through the mire. That would come later.
A laugh was The Shadow’s soft recognition of the policy that he could foresee. Rising, he extinguished the light.
He donned his black garb and descended to the parking space; there he entered a black coupe. The car was one that Harry Vincent had hired and left there after arriving in Latuna. Harry had later registered at the Wilkin Hotel.
THE coupe rolled from the parking space. It came to a highway that curved out of town and kept along until it neared the hill where the museum stood. The Shadow parked his car in a field and alighted.
The boom of a quarry blast came through the might air as The Shadow glided close to the museum. Barred doors and windows at the front; brick walls at sides and rear. These did not deter The Shadow.
From his cloak he drew forth suction cups of rubber, which he attached to hands and feet. He began a precipitous ascent up the side wall of the museum, accompanied by the soft, squidgy noise that he had never been able to eliminate from these concave disks without impairing their necessary efficiency.
Moonlight, trickling through rifted clouds, showed the spectral shape as it reached the roof. The Shadow had arrived at a flat ledge that led to the low, rounded dome above the Sphinx Room. Heavy frames containing frosted-glass, formed the sections of the broad dome.
Scraping sounds came from the spot where The Shadow rested as a shapeless blotch. Then a soft laugh as the slight noise ceased. A glass section moved free in the fashion of a skylight.
The Shadow had found the weak spot of this building which others regarded as impregnable. To him, the dome had offered a mode of access. Sheer walls had been regarded as an insurmountable hazard. Conquering those walls, The Shadow had found access easy.
The Shadow’s task, however, was not ended. As he lowered himself into the museum, The Shadow hung above a forty-foot space. He was poised above the floor of the central room that housed the Blue Sphinx.
Lowering his body in precarious fashion, The Shadow tilted his head and spied the wall close by. Coming in at the edge of the dome, he was close to an ornamental ledge that lined the Sphinx Room.
Clinging by one hand, The Shadow swayed his body like a pendulum. His free hand caught the ledge. He released his upper hand and swung against the wall. Both hands then gripped the ledge. The Shadow began a swinging, sidewise course along the wall.
He reached a space between two half pillars that came up from the floor. Smooth-surfaced, these afforded no grip. But they served The Shadow as a mode of descent. Swinging his body between the block-shaped pillars, The Shadow wedged himself in place as he released his hold upon the ledge.
Braking his descent, he slid straight downward to the floor. Doubling himself for the final jar, he broke the force of the arrival as skillfully as a parachute jumper ending a long drop.
Rising, The Shadow found himself beside the massive shape of the Blue Sphinx.
WITH a soft laugh, the weird intruder turned and went to the doors that led into the anteroom. He found them locked. With tiny flashlight glimmering, he used a blackened pick and gained results. Opening the doors, The Shadow stepped into the anteroom.
More formidable doors lay ahead. The Shadow worked on them with greater care. He knew that patrolling watchers were beyond. He muffled the sounds of his probing pick, until the clicks were almost inaudible.
When the doors opened, The Shadow peered carefully into the front hallway of the museum. The place was dimly lighted. No watcher was in sight. Softly, The Shadow emerged from the anteroom and closed the doors behind him.
Footsteps were clicking from a far corridor. They were coming from the turn beyond the Antiquity Room. The Shadow moved swiftly in the opposite direction. As he neared the Medieval Room, he heard new footsteps coming along the corridor from the curator’s office.
The Shadow swung swiftly into the Medieval Room, which offered a darkened, ghostly harbor. Stealthily, he moved among the huge oddities that furnished this chamber. A bulky object loomed beside him. It was the Iron Maiden.
A flashlight at the door. One policeman was coming in to make a routine inspection. The Shadow swung swiftly behind the opened door of the Maiden and stood between its hiding surface and the wall. The officer made his round and went to the door. The Shadow heard him pause to speak to a second patroller.
“What took you so long, Steve?” came a question. “I finished my side of this morgue five minutes ago.”
“Yeah?” questioned the cop who had just inspected the Medieval Room. “Well, you’ve got a cinch compared to me. I’ve got to look careful through all this junk collection.”
“I’ve got the room with all the statues. I had to look through there.”
“Yeah? Well, who’s going to be hiding in that joint? Nobody could duck out of sight in that gymnasium. This place is different. Say — a guy could even hide in that iron coffin over there, if he wanted to pull the door shut after him.”
“Fat chance anybody would,” scoffed the first cop, turning a flashlight toward the opened interior of the Iron Maiden. “How’d a guy close the door on himself, with all those spikes ready to run him through. Say, Steve — where’s Jerry?”
“In the office, Bill. He’ll join us in the front hall. We can chew the fat for half an hour, then make another round.”
The policemen left. The Shadow emerged and glided toward the door of the room. He waited there until he heard new footsteps coming along the corridor from the curator’s office. Bill passed and went along to join his companions inside the entrance of the museum.
With the way clear, The Shadow strode noiselessly along the deserted corridor and reached the curator’s office. Entering, The Shadow closed the door behind him and turned on the light. He was here to study the scene of crime.
OFTEN, The Shadow, on excursions of this sort, could uncover clues that upset the finest police theories. Tonight, he observed nothing that conflicted with existing conjectures. The Shadow, between the accounts that he had read and the reports that he had received from his agents, was in conformity with the existing opinions.
As he spied the inner filing room, however, The Shadow gained a mental picture that others had failed to view. He turned on the light in that little room. He went to the curator’s desk; arose and strode to the filing room; then across to the outer door. He looked at the spot where the bodies had been found.
A soft laugh. The Shadow was visualizing exactly what had occurred. The murderer had found the curator in the filing room and had shot him down from the outer door. From the filing room, the same killer had clipped Hollis.
There was no day calendar on the desk. It had been removed as evidence. Yet The Shadow knew the details of that memo; how Howard Dunham had chanced to notice it. He also knew that certain papers had been taken from this office.
Obviously, the murderer had overlooked the desk calendar. Its pages closed — as Dunham had first seen them — the killer had not noticed the memo made by the curator. But The Shadow saw a link between that calendar and the murderer’s purpose here.
Joseph Rubal had been going over past dates. He had been looking up documents in the filing room. These papers must certainly have concerned the museum itself. Rubal, long silent and long stalling, had been gathering data that might have caused some one trouble.