The Shadow - 147 - The Crimson Phoenix by Maxwell Grant

Author:Maxwell Grant
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Street & Smith
Published: 1938-03-31T22:00:00+00:00

The Shadow drew down the shade and prepared to make a thorough search. He found the light switch and turned it on.

With the click of the switch, he froze into immobility. He stood for a long

time perfectly rigid. His gaze remained intently on the floor at a spot near the

foot of the bed.

A man was huddled there in ghastly death. Death had come to Leo Barry in exactly the same way it had come to Duke Duncan. Scattering lead pellets from a shotgun had all but torn off the blackmailer’s head.

He lay twisted in a pool of blood. Evidently, he had realized his doom a second too late. He must have thrown up his arms to protect his face, for wrists and hands were terribly mangled by the charge from the shotgun. They hung in red

shreds of flesh. The Shadow made an instant deduction. The murder could not possibly have happened in this hotel room. The noise of the shotgun blast would have been terrific. Guests would have heard it; an alarm would have been instantly given. Yet the hotel was drowsy and calm.

The killing had been done at some other spot. The dead man had been brought

to this room inside a conveyance of some sort; probably a trunk.

But where was the bloody trunk now concealed?

THE SHADOW had not attempted, as yet, to figure who might have killed Barry. A glance at the paper on the wall near the corner where the lavatory was built provided a partial answer to that question.

It was a grim, boastful answer that plunged the case into deeper mystery than ever. Death had exonerated Leo Barry from guilt. The real criminal was self-exposed in the red-scrawled signature of a peculiar name “The Phoenix.”

Such was the name the burning eyes of The Shadow saw on the papered wall.

The message above it was a challenge to The Shadow himself! He read the two lengthy sentences with rigid attention: It has become necessary to my safety to remove Leo Barry as I have already removed Duke Duncan. This is to announce to the police and the newspapers that my third and final victim will be that very annoying personage who calls himself The Shadow.

THE PHOENIX.

The message was proof to The Shadow of what he already suspected. He was warring with a conceited supercriminal!

Marsley was the name that first occurred to The Shadow, because of a small

object he found wedged in the dusty crack at the edge of the bedroom rug. It was

a stickpin with a tiny emerald. It had evidently fallen there from the shaking hands of a man who had washed his hands at the lavatory sink and rearranged his tie.

The gray fluff adhering to the edge of the rug had hidden the telltale flare of the emerald. It glowed like cold green fire in The Shadow’s palm. He himself had seen that stickpin ornament in Marsley’s tie, on the night of Duncan’s murder in the New Jersey cottage.

Was this clue a real one? Or was it

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