The Laugh of Death: A Doc Savage Adventure Read online

  “What about the telephone?”

  “They just reported finding the receiver off a telephone in a booth in a drugstore. They never got any description of anybody who had been using the telephone because they thought somebody had just dashed off and left the receiver hanging, because of the excitement.”

  “Can you get a description of anyone who might have used the telephone?”

  “Can try. Don’t know, though. It’s a cold trail.”

  “Will you try, then call me?”

  “Sure!”

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank you,” said the policeman, “and don’t forget that you recently promised to keep the police department notified of these things you get mixed up in. For a couple of months we had a lot of trouble, and some people got suspicious of you. It got so bad we had to lock you up. I hope you haven’t forgotten that.”

  Doc said pleasantly that he had not forgotten, and that he would make full reports, as opportunity presented.

  He hung up and began examining the holes in his office. The holes were about a quarter of an inch in diameter. It did not require more than a second look to conclude that they had been made with a drill bit—probably the work of an electric drill, and a very good one.

  There seemed to be a hole in everything in headquarters that was larger than a sparrow.

  Nothing else in the way of damage—though this was damage enough to many objects—had been committed.

  However, the big safe in the reception room had been neatly and thoroughly blown. This was not much of a feat because it was a quite elderly safe which had belonged to Doc Savage’s father.

  The headquarters consisted of three rooms: the smaller outer reception room in which the safe stood, a much larger library filled with scientific books, and a still greater expanse of laboratory crowded with scientific paraphernalia. Everything in the three rooms had been drilled full of holes. Doc measured some of the holes and found them all the same size. A steel bit with a diamond point had been used, because he found one that had been badly worn and tossed into a wastebasket.

  The gentleman attired in the green hat now arrived.

  He arrived politely. He even telephoned in advance for an appointment, explaining, “I do wish you would see me, and I think it is to your interest to do so. It concerns a matter of something that has happened to your assistants.”

  “Do come up,” Doc Savage said warmly.

  Besides the green hat the man had a round barrel of a chest that was probably full of endurance, with attachments of long legs and arms, a rectangular face that was about as weak as a piece of armor steel and an affable manner. He also had a way of saying and acting everything as if he did not mean what he was saying or doing, so it was almost impossible to catch him in a lie.

  He held his hat in his hand and made a little speech.

  “I do not wish to be asked questions,” he said. “You will doubtlessly not obey this wish. Therefore I shall ignore all questions. I want the object which was placed in the secret safe. You do not need to give me the object; you have merely to produce it. Once you have produced it and we have examined it, I will be able to tell you what has become of your friends and associates. You will then be able to act accordingly.”

  Doc Savage said nothing. This seemed to surprise the man. It was placidly still in the reception room. The office was high enough above the street that the traffic noise was more like the sound of a sea than the noise of vehicles. Several pigeons were having a halfhearted quarrel on the window sill.

  The man repeated part of his speech, changing it a little.

  “Get the object from the secret safe and I will be able to tell you what happened to your friends. What could be more fair than that? However, if you do not do as I suggest, I am afraid you will not see your friends again. No one will see them. This is unfortunate, but true.”

  Doc continued to say nothing.

  “Are you deaf?” the man asked.

  “Yes—to talk like you are making,” Doc said.

  “I am sorry.”

  “Sorry about what?”

  “That I cannot say more than I have said. Sorry that you do not have a higher opinion of your friends—more of a desire to save them.”

  There had been no expression on Doc Savage’s metallic-looking features to this point, but now there was a flicker of emotion. He thought a great deal of his aides and of Pat. He had risked his life for them so many times that he had stopped counting. And they had done—if anything, more often—the same thing for him.

  But there was no secret vault.

  He asked, “How much of an opinion have you of my veracity?”

  “Veracity? You mean truth? If you told me something, would I believe it? Is that what you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “The answer is that I would believe you.”

  The telephone rang and Doc picked up the instrument. He noted that the visitor quickly put on his green hat, but showed no other emotion. “Yes?” Doc said into the telephone.

  It was the police officer, and he said, “I have that information you wanted about who talked over that telephone—the one the patrolman found with the receiver off the hook. It was a girl. Five feet seven, slender, nice form, tan, golden eyes, hair sort of like dark copper. The fellow who got the description noticed her hair particularly. That help you any?”

  “It settles a point,” Doc said.

  “Don’t you have a cousin, Patricia Savage, who runs a beauty place on Park Avenue, and who answers a description something like that?” asked the officer.

  “Yes,” Doc said.

  “Anything else we can do for you?”

  “Not right now.”

  “Holler if there is,” the officer said, and hung up.

  Doc Savage slowly replaced the receiver on the cradle. He seemed lost in thought. The pigeons on the window sill had stopped scrapping and were all cooing at each other like doves.

  The man took off his green hat again, said, “We were discussing truth.”

  “Yes,” Doc admitted, “we were.”

  “Was it some truth you intended to tell me?” asked the man.

  “There is no secret vault.”

  “That is the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  The man turned his green hat so that Doc could see inside the crown. There was a metal object the size of a small woman’s fist fastened in there with adhesive tape. A short string with a loop on the end dangled from this, and the man had a finger in the loop.

  He made another of his speeches.

  He said, “This is an old, old trick, of course. It is a hand grenade in the hat. One tug of my finger pulls the pin, and the explosion will be almost instantaneous. I pull the string if you try to stop my leaving this place.”

  Doc Savage examined the man’s fluidly dramatic face that made everything he did or said seem a pretense, without in any way revealing what he would do or wouldn’t do, actually.

  “If you are familiar with grenades,” Doc said quietly, “you will know that the grenade will probably kill you, but only wound me.”

  The other nodded.

  “Are you familiar with strychnine? You would be, of course, for I understand you are a surgeon and physician. Well, this grenade is well coated with a sticky paste containing concentrated strychnine. Should a fragment of this grenade penetrate your body, you would, within perhaps twenty minutes, begin with convulsions and other difficulties, death occurring within a short time.”

  “Drastic!” Doc Savage said.

  “I am in a drastic mood,” the man said. “You will stand still. I am leaving.”

  He took slow, cautious backward steps toward the door.

  Doc said, “There are other hiding places besides a secret vault.”

  The man stopped. He stood there. Then, without saying anything, he continued backing to the door. He had all he wanted of the place. For the first time Doc Savage knew that he was scared, and that the man must have been driven by a grea
t emotion to come here as he had. Whatever the emotion was—suffering, greed, revenge, hate, or what it might be—it was powerful, stronger than fear and caution.

  Doc stood still and let the man go.

  The elevator door slid shut behind the man. There was a sighing sound as the elevator sank. Doc Savage whirled instantly, raced into the laboratory, yanked back a concealed panel, jumped through it, ran across a hall and worked with a square pillar which looked solid, as if it supported much of the roof. There was a small private lift inside the pillar. The device was a recent installation for emergencies such as this. The bronze man jumped inside, punched buttons, and seemed to start falling, such was the descending speed of the lift.

  He hit the street level and took a side door to the sidewalk. He was sitting in a cab when the man came out on the street.

  The man walked away and Doc followed him in the cab. The green hat was distinctive enough so that keeping track of it was a simple matter.

  Doc wondered again if it was the green hat which Pat had mentioned in her interrupted telephone report.

  The man walked rapidly two blocks north, a block west, a block north, one south, one west, another south, and went into a large restaurant which had a front and a side door. He had an order of beans and milk and rye bread, the beans Boston style.

  While he was eating, two other men came into the cafeteria and took the adjoining table. There was no indication that they knew the first man or that he knew them. They were two young men who were alike enough to be fraternity brothers out of the same college, if the college was pretty tough. They had coffee and rolls.

  The man with the green hat left.

  The other two men left.

  Doc Savage entered the restaurant and made off with the glass which the man with the green hat had drunk his milk out of, and the water glasses of the other two men, having noted that both of the latter had tasted their water. No one witnessed Doc committing this thievery, and he wasted little enough time at it. He was able to get back on the trail of his quarry without trouble.

  The man with the green hat, having tarried at the restaurant to satisfy himself that Doc Savage was not following him, walked three blocks straight south.

  The two men came up behind him quickly. One of them hit him on the back of the head, using an object he brought out of a pocket. The blow knocked the green hat flying.

  The heaviness with which the green hat hit and rolled aroused the interest of one of the footpads, and he picked it up.

  “Ye-e-e-e!” he yelled, and almost fainted.

  The second man was searching the owner of the green hat. He said, “Help me do this!” angrily to the first man. They both searched.

  During most of the search the man they had struck down squirmed and made mumblings, but they did not hit him again.

  They seemed disgusted with the results. They looked at each other, then simultaneously shrugged and spread empty hands, palms uppermost.

  “He didn’t get it,” one of them said.

  “There is no use standing around here until we turn to stone,” the other one said.

  They sauntered away. Because it was a deserted street, their performance had not been noticed by anyone.

  Doc Savage, having witnessed the meeting, and having gotten a general idea of what had been said by lipreading—at which he had put in hundreds of hours of very painstaking practice—decided to grab both the owner of the green hat and the other two men.

  The other alternative was to keep tracing them and hope they would lead him to Monk, Ham and his other associates. The latter system was not very dependable.

  Doc wore a bulletproof vest. He also had a helmet affair which was made of transparent plastic and was impervious to bullets that would be likely to come from any gun the footpads would be carrying in their pockets. Doc’s pockets contained grenades—gas, smoke, demolition—which would serve any emergency.

  So he took the bold course and rushed the men as they were parting. He was not far from them when he popped into view, and he ran swiftly.

  He called, “Stop! Stand where you are! And stand still.”

  He hauled out the helmet of plastic—the plastic had basic similarities with the plastic on which he had been conducting experiments in the arctic—and hauled it down over his eyes.

  The two footpads whirled. They drew guns. That was to be expected.

  The man who owned the green hat sat up on the sidewalk. He made a vague, meaningless gesture with both arms, as if he was trying to get hold of a dizzy world as it went past.

  The two men who held their guns lifted them.

  Doc stopped running, not suddenly, but slackening his pace slowly until he was at a halt, as if his interest in the men had been supplanted by a much greater interest.

  The two men lowered their guns, then dropped them. They seemed to have had previous experience with the laughing.

  The laughing had come, and there was nothing to show from where. But it was horrible, and not loud at first; then it was loud, suddenly and violently!

  It was not a rapid thing like a giggle, but more of a fully rounded and extended thing. Each peal of it, each note of it, began to bring you up on your toes. Then it started lifting your hair. Then it made something explode inside your head!

  The cycle of the thing, from its gentle beginning to its awful blood-curdling climax, was fast. There was not much more than enough time to recognize the changing cadence, volume, character and effect of the phenomenon. Then the brain went into a blackout. Rather, it went into a hell torment of agony.

  The effect on the brain was like nothing Doc Savage had ever experienced. It was like a horrendous pain which flooded and drowned every other sensation and experience, drove away desire to act, cramped and paralyzed capacity to act.

  Wheeling and running away from the spot was one of the hardest things Doc Savage ever had done. Not that he did not want to run; he did. Getting away from there was what every nerve in his body wanted more than anything.

  He went across the sidewalk. It was almost impossible to get coordination. Every move was like pulling splinters. He reached a door, and there was glass in the door. He knew he could never manage the doorknob, although he could see it. He turned one shoulder and stumbled through the glass panel of the door.

  It was the door of a bank. A small branch bank, but they would have a vault. He went straight ahead, kept going as fast as he possibly could, which was, at best, a slow walk. He got to the vault and, shoving and twisting—having as much difficulty as a half-paralyzed child would ordinarily have had—he got the heavy steel door shut behind him.

  He sank down on the floor.

  He was scared—so scared that it was strange! He had gone along as other men do in the matter of fear, feeling that he probably had the normal amount of reaction to fear stimuli that other man had. But now, in the grip of this fear that held him, he realized it had been years since he was really scared.

  Greatest of all, probably, was his horror over what had conceivably happened to his five aides and Pat Savage.

  Chapter III

  AFFAIR IN WASHINGTON

  The laughing stopped, and it was quiet in the street.

  It was quiet about a minute and a half—a very, very long time under the circumstances—before the first frightened man appeared in the street. He appeared in a way that was perfectly natural under the circumstances—running as if the devil’s hot breath was on his neck. He wanted to get away from there.

  Other terrified people came out of the buildings, and soon the street was full of confused activity. The police came, then the fire department.

  In the course of the excitement a banker came out of the bank and accosted a police official, saying, “I beg pardon—”

  “Don’t bother me!” snapped the cop. “This crazy thing—”

  “I beg pardon, but there is a man in our vault,” said the banker sharply. “As nearly as we can make out, he says his name is Doc Savage.”

  The cop star
ted to walk away, realized what he had been told, was shocked up onto his tiptoes, then jumped back. “Savage!” he barked. “Well, what the blazes you waiting for? Let him out of the vault!”

  “There is a time lock,” the other explained patiently. “Letting him out is not so simple.”

  “You can’t let him out?”

  “No, the time lock will only open at a certain hour.”

  The policeman rubbed his jaw. “I think we have a safe expert in one of our emergency squads,” he said. “I’ll call headquarters and see about it. You can hear Savage in the vault, I presume.”

  “Oh, yes! The vault is equipped with telephone,” the banker explained. “There is good ventilation. You see, sometimes bandits lock the personnel of a bank in—”

  “I know.” The cop frowned. “Does Savage want out?”

  “He says so. Immediately!”

  “How did he get in there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There’s a lot I don’t know about this, too,” the policeman complained.

  The owner of the green hat—he had the hat tucked under an arm—went away quietly and inconspicuously. He had been near enough to hear what was said but had kept in the crowd so that the two footpads who had waylaid him would not see him. He had noticed the two footpads standing near the banker and the policeman, listening to what was said.

  The man watched the two footpads nervously until he lost them from sight; then he put on his green hat and began to walk very fast, almost running.

  The two footpads exchanged understanding looks and also moved away. One said, “Hear what that guy from the bank said? Savage is in the vault.” He rubbed both palms against his trouser legs. “Funny way for it to turn out, wasn’t it?”

  The other man said, “There was nothing funny about it, and there ain’t going to be anything funny from now on. We came so near to getting caught by Savage that it was in no part humorous.”

  They left then. They walked two blocks and met a cab which obviously had been keeping track of them, because the driver asked out of a mouth corner, “Get it?”