The Wheel of Death

Front matter

Mysterious death, suicide, and madness took uncanny toll of New York's most prominent citizens. Only the Spider sensed the presence of the criminal genius whose tentacles were strangling the city— and the Spider was next on the crime monster's death list!

Contents

The Vermilion Seal

Dusk was falling and the lights were turned on in Grogan's Restaurant. It was a small, gloomy place, with a dozen round tables and two curtained booths where special customers could eat and talk unseen. At the rear were two still smaller rooms, the kitchen and beside it a tiny cubicle of an office which contained Grogan's battered desk and an old-fashioned iron safe.

It was rumored that things happened in Grogan's Restaurant, things which were best kept hidden from the honest light of day. It was said that narcotics could be bought there, and it was whispered that young girls had entered the place and never again been seen by their friends. The West Side police of Manhattan had visited the place many times. But Grogan made no objection to such visits, and the police found nothing. Yet the rumors and the whispers persisted.

Burly Dan Grogan stood now near the rickety cash register, his yellowed teeth clamped tenaciously about an unlighted cigar. He had only three customers. Two men, hard-eyed and low- voiced, were smoking and drinking in one of the booths. At the back of the restaurant, near the door of the room which contained Grogan's safe and desk, was a man with plastered hair and high-waisted trousers who was consuming his third cup of coffee.

Everything seemed peaceful enough, but Grogan's fat face was a little tense as he watched the third customer with the plastered hair. It would seem that the man must be of the underworld. But Grogan did not know him, and Grogan thought that he knew all the underworld characters of Manhattan.

The bulky proprietor was curious and uneasy. Things often happened in his small restaurant when he became uneasy. And when things did happen they usually happened so fast that he liked to be prepared. The stranger might be an imported gunman, waiting to rub out one of his best customers in some criminal feud. Dan strolled over to the stranger.

"You from Chi?" he asked, complimenting the man by naming the second largest city in America.

"What's it to you?" snapped the stranger, looking up at the proprietor with cold, shrewd eyes.

"Not a thing, my friend." Grogan was accustomed to hard characters and he knew how to handle them, sometimes politely and sometimes brutally. He was being polite to this man who had made him curious and strangely uneasy. "Got a name?" he asked, smiling.

"Any name," was the curt answer. "Try Dick."

Grogan shrugged, rumbled a laugh and moved back to the cash register, to stand chewing his cigar while his eyes wandered continually back to the man who had called himself Dick. The stranger impressed him as a man who might prove useful.

Meanwhile Dick lit a cigarette and, without seeming to do so, strained his ears in the direction of the booth where the other two customers sat drinking and smoking. By listening intently, he was able to catch a few words of their conversation. Perhaps, as they drank more, they might speak more loudly. Dick waited patiently and called for another cup of coffee.

Then the door of the restaurant opened and a girl came in. She was young and slim and pretty. Her face was delicate and indicated that she was not accustomed to such a restaurant, nor to the characters who frequented it.

As she took a seat at a table, Grogan looked at her in frank surprise and one of the men in the booth pulled the curtain aside to peer curiously out at her.

The booth curtains fell hurriedly into place, and the voices behind them became so low that they could not be heard at all. The solitary waiter brought a fourth cup of coffee to the lone stranger. But the man called Dick left it untouched. He sat without motion, a cigarette drooping between his lips, apparently engrossed in deep thought.

The curtains of the booth parted again, and one of the two men came out. He was a little drunk, and he smiled ingratiatingly as he approached the girl at the table.

"Will you join us for a real drink behind the curtains, kid?" he asked, bending over her so that his breath must have been in her face.

The girl looked nervously at the dirty table cloth, as she tried to ignore him. She was not the kind who could handle drunken men in Grogan's Restaurant. The "silly" hat, probably purchased for a dollar and her one effort to be smart, was pathetic upon the side of her head as she looked down, crimsoning.

"Come on, kid," the man insisted, seating himself beside her and rubbing a hand over her shoulder. Then, as an afterthought, he asked hastily: "Waiting for somebody?"

"Waiting for me."

It was the stranger at the far table who had spoken. Perfectly motionless, in face and body, he sent the three words past the cigarette between his lips.

"Is that so?" The slightly drunken man was in a nasty mood. He rose from beside the girl and faced the stranger "And who the hell are you?"

"None of your damned business!" retorted Dick coldly. "Get back in your stall, if you want to keep a whole skin."

The man swayed a little, but reached with a significant motion toward his hip pocket. The stranger sprang to his feet with his hand under his coat. It was a tense moment. In another second death would stalk— not for the first time— in that tawdry little restaurant of evil rumors and whisperings.

"Cut it out, Joe!" The words came in a roar from Dan Grogan, whose big bulk lumbered with surprising speed to a position between the two men. "You're drunk, Joe! Get back to your table."

Joe obeyed sullenly after a moment of hesitation. Dick remained standing with his hand still under his coat.

"And you, stranger, sit down!"

"Go to hell!"

Big Dan Grogan stared at the stranger, shrugged his huge shoulders and broke into a smile. "Drink your coffee standing up if you like it that way," he grinned with seeming good nature. But on returning once more to the cash register, his hand touched a revolver which lay beneath a sheet of paper on a little table beside him. It was well to be prepared. The atmosphere of the restaurant was charged with the possibility of sudden destruction.

Instead of sitting down at his own table the stranger deliberately strolled across to the girl's and sat down beside her. His action was easy and natural and there was no smile or leer upon his face. He had seated himself so that he faced the curtains of the booth, but his back was to Grogan.

"Name's Dick," he said. "What's yours?"

He said it so naturally that, after one glance into his eyes, she answered quite as simply: "Molly."

It was one of those rare, self introductions which are instantaneously genuine. He, flashily costumed, and she, in her cheap but becoming little dress and saucy hat, had become friends during the passage of a few seconds. Probably it was her helplessness and his eyes which worked the friendship. The best in man comes to the surface in response to a woman in need of help; and some men have eyes which women instinctively trust.

"What are you doing here?" he asked in a voice so low that only she could hear.

"It's Grogan," she returned in an equally low voice.

"You know something about him?"

She nodded.

And there their conversation ended. Behind his back Dick heard the deep voice of Dan Grogan.

"I want to talk to you privately," Grogan was saying. "Come back to my office and have a drink."

The man who called himself Dick rose from his chair, touched the girl's hand, reassuringly, as he left the table and with face expressionless followed the proprietor silently into the little back room which contained the battered desk and the iron safe. In continued silence he took a chair and stared up at the pictures of boxers which hung upon the walls while Grogan, seated before his desk, filled two small glasses with whisky from a long-necked bottle.

"Here's how!" exclaimed Grogan, raising his glass.

"I don't drink," resumed Dick, leaving his glass untouched.

Grogan grunted and gulped his own drink without further hesitation. "Never hold that against any man," he commented, wiping his mouth, "Lots of good men killed every year by drink."

There was a silence.

"What's your line?"

"Nearly any line."

Grogan raised his eyebrows. "Dope?"

"Maybe."

"Women?"

Dick did not reply.

"Well," said Grogan, "women are dirty business, but there's money in them."

The proprietor's guest yawned rather insultingly and seemed to be interested in inspecting his slightly pinkened finger nails.

"Look here, Dick, as you call yourself," continued Grogan, "you got guts and you're a quick thinker. I'm interested in you. Can't we get together?"

"Maybe."

Grogan considered. "I've got to know what you can really do."

"I've handled dope— in big lots, nothing small."

Grogan frowned. "I'd have to have some proof of that— names, you know, that I could look up. Got anything on you that I could check on?"

Dick, his face always expressionless, shook his head. "Never carry anything that anybody could check on," he said. "Wait a minute. I might be able to show you something."

He drew a silk handkerchief from his sleeve, brushed his finger tips gently with it for a moment and knelt beside the old-fashioned iron safe. With an ear against the iron door he gently, very gently, touched the dial with his finger tips and began slowly to turn it while Grogan bent forward, intensely interested.

In the incredibly short time of about two minutes the kneeling man seized the handle and pulled open the heavy door.

Grogan lurched swiftly out of his chair and slammed the door closed again. But his fat face was wreathed in smiles. "You've got what it takes, Mister!" he exclaimed. "And how!"

Dick calmly rubbed the dial with his silk handkerchief to remove his finger prints and resumed his chair. "A child could open that box," he remarked contemptuously.

"And can you use soup too?" asked Grogan with much enthusiasm.

"Yeah! But there aren't many boxes I have to blow."

Grogan was so pleased with the man he had found that he poured himself another drink and was in the act of gulping it, when a feminine scream sounded from the restaurant.

Through the door, into the little square room, came Joe, carrying Molly in his arms. He was holding her roughly and had a hand over her mouth to prevent another scream. Behind him came his companion, looking both angry and alarmed.

In language shockingly blasphemous Grogan demanded an explanation as Joe flung the girl into a chair where she huddled, too scared to move or cry out.

Joe's explanation was that the girl had been eavesdropping, listening to their conversation behind the curtains of the booth. He had seen her ankles below the curtain and had peeked over the top of the partition and caught her.

Dick shot a single swift glance at Molly when he heard she had been listening to the two men he himself had been trying to overhear. Then he turned indifferently away and looked at the boxing pictures on the wall as if the affair were none of his business.

"Well, what did she hear?" asked Grogan savagely. But he didn't wait for an answer. "It doesn't matter," he snapped. "She's asked for it, and we can't afford to take chances. I'll get my car. We'll soon put her where she'll do no more snooping."

"I don't care," interrupted Molly in a pitiful voice. "You are killing my father, Dan Grogan! You— you might as well kill me too." But she was after all only a very young girl. Her head fell sidewise as she spoke and she fainted.

Suddenly Grogan turned to Dick. "Stranger, you seem to have butted into something."

"Butted nothing!" retorted Dick sharply, wheeling about from his inspection of the pictures on the wall. "You asked me to come in here."

"Yeah, but now that you're here, you'll stay— till I know you better. Joe, hold him till I get back with the car. And don't forget that he's as sharp as a cop's whistle."

With these words Dan Grogan lumbered out of the back room, and the slamming of the front door indicated that he had left the little eating place.

Dick found himself looking into the muzzle of Joe's revolver from almost half way across the small room, too far for him to reach it swiftly enough with a hand. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the inert form of little Molly, half slipping out of the chair.

Slowly, almost magically, the stranger's bearing began to change, the cheapness of the underworld seeming to fade from him.

"Joe," he said highly, "I'm afraid I cannot comply with Mr. Grogan's request to remain."

"The hell, you can't!" exclaimed Joe savagely. "Try anythin', an' you'll get a bullet through your head."

Joe never spoke again. With the deftness of a French boxer, Dick shot his right foot upward. His toe caught Joe's wrist, and the menacing revolver clattered upon the floor. Simultaneously two blue-black pistols seemed to leap into the strange man's hands from beneath his coat. The two guns roared together, with one sound but with two targets. Joe and his companion were dead before they struck the floor!

Very calmly, without the least trace of concern, the strange man dropped his weapons into their holsters beneath his coat. Then he swung open the safe door which Grogan had neglected to relock. For a few seconds he crammed papers into his pockets, but he did not take some packages of opium, recognizable by their smell. He closed the safe and turned toward the nearest dead man as if he were about to perform some act.

Then, from the restaurant, outside, a heavy step sounded. The man named Dick drew back from the dead man and crept swiftly to the door which was almost closed. He peered through a narrow crack. A policeman had entered the restaurant, no doubt having heard the shots, and was hesitating by the cash register while he looked around.

The peering man crept back into the little room. He had very little time in which to act. Rapidly he took out his cigarette lighter and, from a secret compartment in it, extracted a tiny seal which he pressed upon the foreheads of the dead men in quick succession.

And where he pressed that seal there remained the vermilion outline of a spider. The Spider, the unknown killer of New York, had made another killing.

This audacious act performed, almost in the face of the law, the self-possessed man emerged from the back room, wildly gesticulating toward the kitchen door for the benefit of the policeman who had not been quite sure that the sound which had attracted him had really been a pistol shot.

Ahead of the policeman Dick opened the kitchen door and stuck his head into that room for a moment while he pointed alarmingly toward the open back window for the benefit of the cook and waiter who were already badly frightened.

What followed, followed quickly. The cook and waiter, desperately frightened, struggled through the window, one after the other, in an attempt to escape from whatever danger might be approaching. The policeman charged into the kitchen and continued through the window, thinking that he was pursuing escaping criminals.

Dick darted again into the little back room. He picked up the unconscious Molly as easily as if she had been a kitten and carried her through the empty restaurant into the street, where a girl in a man's arms is soon forgotten by New Yorkers when a taxi spirits the two of them into a New York night . . .

Pursuit

Strange things happen in New York taxis, especially after dark. There are horrid things and disgusting things which occur in the semi-seclusion of these cabs as they whirl through the lighted streets of the city. Young girls have their lives wrecked, and old men are made foolish by the clinging playthings of Broadway. There are robberies, murders and even more ugly crimes committed behind the backs of the drivers. A passer-by catches but a glimpse, and the driver is often too bored to look into the little mirror which reveals what is going on behind him when the blinds are not drawn to cut off his view.

As the taxi sped away from Grogan's Restaurant with the man and the unconscious girl, the driver suspected that something was wrong. But he had seized the crumpled bank note which had been thrust into his hand and he had opened it sufficiently to see that it was a fifty-dollar bill. And he had heard the magic words: "There's another one coming."

In his little apartment uptown he had a wife and five kids to feed. Also he knew that a driver sometimes received a bullet in the back when he did not do what he was told to do. So he drove on, turning into the stream of traffic flowing north upon an avenue.

And behind the driver's back the man who called himself Dick supported the girl with his left arm while, with his right hand, he extracted another fifty-dollar bill from a well-filled pocketbook. Through a glazed window of the pocketbook was exposed a New York Police Department pistol permit. The name on the permit was Richard Wentworth, and the address was one of the most fashionable sections of Park Avenue.

It was evident that the man with the plastered hair had not lied when he had intimated that his name was Dick. But not one of his fashionable friends would have believed it possible for the fashionable Richard Wentworth to carry away a young lady in a fainting condition, from so tawdry an eating place as Grogan's Restaurant. His friends would not even have recognized him if they had passed him on the street in his present disguise.

But few of his friends really knew much about Richard Wentworth. Occasionally he flashed into public view upon the polo field. At times he was reported to be engaged in adventurous enterprises in far-away countries. At other times his name was connected with police investigations of criminal activities. In his clubs and in the drawing-rooms of New York he was seldom seen. It was usually where danger and excitement dwelt that Richard Wentworth might be found.

It was this liking for danger which had brought him, that night, to Grogan's restaurant whose sinister secret, if uncovered in time, would, he believed mean the saving of many lives and much misery.

As the taxi rolled northward, Wentworth lit a cigarette with his free hand and watched Molly as she began to recover consciousness. He was, he knew, in a difficult situation. No man can tell how a strange woman will come out of a faint. Some women snap back to full life very quickly; others are slow and sometimes very sick. Molly might be hysterical and attract police attention by screaming. And police attention was the last thing that Wentworth desired. The Spider would undoubtedly be sent to the electric chair, if he were ever apprehended. And the Spiders death seal was upon the foreheads of the two men in Grogan's Restaurant. Certainly the two men had deserved the death penalty, but the law does not permit private individuals to become agents of justice— even when the law fails, itself, to bring deserved punishment.

Molly moved her head, with its short, fair curls, upon Wentworth's shoulder. Her blue eyes fluttered open and closed again. She really had very pretty hair, Wentworth observed, and her skin was clear and almost without make-up. Dressed fashionably, she might have been beautiful. Yet the driver, who was shooting glances into his little mirror, wondered why a man would spend as much as fifty dollars for such a girl when he might easily have one quite wide awake for a fraction of that amount.

"Turn into Central Park," directed Wentworth as they came to 59th Street, "and keep going."

The spoken words roused Molly to complete consciousness. She lifted her head from Wentworth's shoulder and stared wildly around her. It was a tense moment. If she became hysterical or lost control of herself through fright, Wentworth might have a very difficult situation to face. It would be almost impossible for him to explain his position to a policeman. But awkward problems and difficult situations, especially if accompanied by danger, were the wine of life to Richard Wentworth. He waited. A few moments would tell the story.

"Hey, mister!" It was the driver speaking as they swung into Central Park. "Do you know that we are being followed? There's a blue, closed car just behind us. I've been watching it for the last half mile."

Wentworth glanced back and saw the car. There were two men in the tonneau beside the driver. Certainly it was not a police car, which meant that it must belong to some member of the underworld. Wentworth had another problem upon his hands, a problem that might be far more dangerous than the problem of Molly.

"Keep on going," he ordered the taxi driver quietly. "Ill tell you what to do in a few minutes."

The driver did as he was told, but he was nervous. He suspected that they were being followed by some members of the criminal world which infested the great city in which he worked. And he knew that disagreements among criminals often ended in a hail of bullets. He edged out to the left and shot his car ahead of the slower traffic. But the blue car followed closely.

Meanwhile Molly did the unexpected thing by leaning back in her corner of the cab and commencing to cry and sob as if her heart would break. She had looked at Wentworth and recognized him as the man who had sat, uninvited, at her table. But she showed no fear. Her sobbing was obviously the expression of heartbreaking grief— not of terror.

Wentworth knew women. He let Molly cry briefly while he glanced back and saw that the blue car was still following them. He saw something more. One of the men in the tonneau seemed to be lifting a bulky object from the floor and adjusting it. He could not be certain, but the man seemed to be handling a machine gun. In the shadows of the tonneau the other man appeared to be very large and to resemble Grogan.

The situation was becoming complicated. Central Park offers many stretches of road where, at night, traffic is slight and where a burst of machine-gun fire can be delivered with impunity by bold criminals.

Wentworth turned to the girl. "There is nothing to be afraid of, Molly," he said.

"I'm not afraid," she replied, sobbing. "I just don't care any more. It— it's too late to care now!"

Wentworth considered this reply, but could not understand it. However, there was the blue car to think about. He felt that he had to think about that car, if he and Molly were to go on living. He had been watching the following car guardedly through the rear window of the taxi and once, under a road lamp, he had recognized big Dan Grogan beyond any chance of mistake.

Grogan could have no reason for the pursuit except to bring death to the two occupants of the taxi.

The taxi driver also had been studying the pursuing car by means of his rear-view mirror, and he was becoming more and more nervous. He knew his New York, and he thought that his wife and kids needed him more than he needed the second fifty.

"I don't like it, mister," he said, beginning to slow his taxi. "You'll have to get out and walk."

Wentworth said nothing, but he partly exposed a pistol from under his coat. Molly did not see the weapon. The driver, however, saw it in his little mirror, and the taxi shot ahead again.

"You are a good girl not to be afraid, Molly," Wentworth said, speaking pleasantly and easily. "But why is it too late to care now?"

"You wouldn't care much about anything if your father was going to die tonight, would you?" she asked.

Wentworth caught his breath in surprise. He had been very fond of his father, who had been killed in the war— in the same battle in which he, himself, had been seriously wounded.

"What made you ask that question?" he inquired, looking at her gravely.

"Because my father is going to be electrocuted at ten o'clock tonight."

Wentworth flipped his wrist over and glanced at the watch which was strapped upon it. It was half past eight. He looked down at the little girl beside him and saw that her eyes were flooded with tears.

Behind them Grogan's blue car was creeping up and was turning out to pass them. It would be in passing, while the two cars were traveling at almost the same speed, that the stream of machine gun bullets would sweep into the taxi.

"Jam on your brakes!" barked Wentworth at the driver.

"Hard, man! If you want to live!"

The brakes of the taxi screamed as the car came to such a sudden stop that Wentworth had to hold Molly to prevent her from being hurled forward off the seat. At the same time the blue car shot past them too fast for any marksman to take aim and fire. As the other car disappeared around a bend in the road, the taxi driver looked back at Wentworth and positively refused to go on. Since it was a one-way road there was nothing to do except stay where they were at the side of the road. To go back against the traffic would mean running foul of a traffic policeman. And policemen were almost as dangerous to Wentworth as were the criminals who were after his scalp.

"All right," he said quietly to the driver. "Smoke a cigarette and get back your nerve."

"It isn't a case of nerve, Mister," the driver argued. "It's a case of common sense. I saw what they had in that blue car, and I'm not paid to get my head blown off."

As the taxi stood by the roadside Wentworth turned again to Molly. "What is your father's name?" he asked.

"Arnold Dennis."

Then Wentworth understood. Arnold Dennis had been a bookkeeper for the Mack Syndicate, a wealthy corporation which handled a great deal of contract work for the city, chiefly the supplying of materials for construction work. Dennis had been convicted of the murder of a junior partner of the company while working overtime very late at night.

At the trial evidence was given that the junior partner had caught Dennis falsifying the books and had been shot by the elderly bookkeeper in an endeavor to cover up his crime. The pistol had been exhibited, bearing Dennis' finger prints.

Molly Dennis had at last stopped crying. But there was hopeless misery upon her young face. Her father had an hour and a half to live, and the tragedy of it was more than she could bear.

"But what were you doing in Grogan's Restaurant, Molly?" asked Wentworth.

"Father was framed," she answered. "He described the real murderer to me, but he didn't know his name. He also told me that the Mack Syndicate had some dealings with Dan Grogan, entered in a secret ledger which Mortimer Mack, President of the Mack Syndicate, kept in his private safe at home."

Wentworth looked at her sharply. If this were true, he had not been far wrong in his assumptions concerning Grogan's restaurant. He was on the trail of one of the greatest scandals in the history of New York! For if the Mack Syndicate, famed for its large business deals with the city, had any kind of commerce with a man like Dan Grogan, it could only mean one thing— that the seeming respectability of the syndicate cloaked shocking corruption of the most sinister sort.

Yet Wentworth, for the moment at least, was more interested in the human story of Molly and her father than he was in the possibility of some great crime in the making.

"But what were you doing in Grogan's Restaurant, Molly?" he persisted.

She told him that she had been looking for the real murderer; and that Grogan closely resembled the description given her by her father. That night, in desperation, she had risked an open visit to the restaurant, praying that she might gather some new evidence to free her father. And she had overheard sufficient of the conversation in the curtained booth to make it evident that Grogan was known in the underworld as the real murderer of the junior partner of the Mack Syndicate!

There was no doubt regarding Molly's truthfulness. Wentworth had only to look at her to know that she was sincere. It was possible, even probable, that her father was innocent. Nothing was too hideous to be possible if such a firm as the Mack Syndicate had undercover dealings with Dan Grogan.

Such a condition of corruption was the kind of thing which, above all else, Richard Wentworth loved to fight. And, when the happiness of a young girl was also at stake, he asked for nothing better.

But he wondered grimly whether in this case the odds against him were not too great to overcome. A man must die in less than one hour and a half. Could he stop the execution? He was in a taxi in Central Park. His clothes were such that his friends would be shocked if they saw him. Only the Governor of the State of New York could reprieve the man who was to be executed so soon. Governors are difficult people to reach quickly, and they are not easy to influence. In the case of Arnold Dennis, condemned to death, Wentworth had no new evidence which would be accepted in a court of law.