The Laugh of Death: A Doc Savage Adventure Read online

  Doc bought a country newspaper. It was in a small town two hundred miles from New York, and it was not much of a thing from an investment standpoint, judging from the rather pitiful effort of the owner to make it seem enticing.

  He bought the paper sight unseen.

  He made one provision: that the present owner would not publish news of the sale and would at once obtain a press-wire franchise; or, if that proved impossible, he would obtain leased-wire service from one of the big news agencies. It did not make much difference which.

  Doc then bought an air-raid siren.

  He had some difficulty with this because air-raid sirens were in demand and were scarce. He had to take an old-fashioned one, with which he seemed satisfied.

  He loaded the siren into a truck and took it to a machine shop where he left it with instructions and fairly detailed drawings of what he wanted.

  The town where Doc had bought the newspaper was named Bogueville.

  He went there by train.

  The ex-owner of the Bogueville Times was an elderly man who had sold out because he wished to retire. For some years he had been inactive in the newspaper’s activities, the work having been carried on by an earnest young man named Fred Holmes. It was obvious to Doc Savage that the Bogueville Times meant a great deal to Fred Holmes, and also that the young man was very worried about being released by the new owner.

  “With the new leased-wire service,” Fred Holmes said, “the Times will show a nice profit on the investment.”

  From other sources Doc learned that Fred had saved money for years to buy the Times himself, but that his savings had been wiped out by a series of illnesses in the family. With them had gone Fred’s hopes.

  Doc Savage put Fred Holmes in charge of the paper and gave him a half interest in it, with option of purchasing the remainder at an arbitrated price. The half interest and the option to purchase were to be held in escrow, to become effective in one year if the Times was operated legitimately and at a profit.

  “Now,” Doc said, “I want you to get me four hunters.”

  “What kind of hunters?” asked Fred Holmes, puzzled.

  “What is there to hunt around here?”

  “Not much except rabbits and crows and woodchucks. Now and then, a deer, but it is out of deer season now. Same for duck and quail.”

  “Find me rabbit hunters,” Doc said. “Four of them. Be sure that they can be trusted. Also, they should know the value of a dollar and not have too many of them.”

  “Rabbit hunters without too many dollars are the easiest things you could find around here,” said Fred Holmes.

  The young man was almost tearful with gratitude because of his deal on the newspaper.

  The truck from New York arrived that afternoon and the driver asked, “Where did you want us to take this gadget?”

  The man was the proprietor of the small machine shop in the city where Doc had left his air-raid siren.

  Doc asked, “How did the job turn out?”

  “Fine. The siren, made over to work the way you indicated, makes a laughing sound that sure is a hell of a noise. It may not be good, but it is at least loud.”

  “Good,” Doc said. “You will take it back in the hills to this spot.” He handed them a map of which he had made two copies. “Take it to the spot marked with a cross on the map. At nine o’clock tomorrow morning, or thereabouts, you will probably hear some men approaching. They will be hunters. As soon as you see or hear them, turn on the laughing siren, let it run for a few moments, then switch it off.”

  “That all?”

  “That is all,” Doc said.

  The machine-shop man nodded, but it was a baffled nod.

  The rabbit hunters were young men who looked honest enough, although they probably were on the lazy side. One of them had a repeating shotgun, another a double-barreled one, and the remaining two carried cheap .22-caliber rifles.

  Doc gave them a copy of the map which he had given the driver of the truck. He indicated the spot marked with a cross.

  “There are some rabbits there which need hunting,” he said.

  One of the rabbit hunters scratched his head. “What would make a rabbit need hunting.”

  “This five-dollar bonus on each rabbit,” Doc said. He handed Fred Holmes a packet of five-dollar bills to be distributed to the rabbit hunters.

  “And all we’ve got to do is hunt the rabbits around the place marked on this map?” asked a hunter.

  “There is one other thing,” Doc said. “You may hear a strange laughing noise. If you do, you will at once take these pills.”

  He gave them each a box containing one pill.

  “Take the pill as soon as you hear the laughing,” he said. “And run away from there. Come straight here and tell the editor of the Times what has happened—omitting one point. Do not tell anyone that you were hired to hunt rabbits there, or that you knew you would hear the laughing, or that you took the pills, or that you have met me. Do you understand?”

  They understood.

  They went away, pleased with the bargain.

  “I don’t get this,” said Fred Holmes. “What are we going to do about the story when they tell it to me?”

  “Put it on the news-association wire,” Doc said, “in such a dramatic way that it will be published in the city newspapers.”

  Headline in a New York evening paper:

  STRANGE LAUGHING MYSTERY

  APPEARS IN RURAL SECTION

  Headline in a Washington paper:

  WASHINGTON LAUGHING DEATH

  IN SMALL NEW YORK TOWN

  With both stories appeared identical news-association dispatches about a strange laughing which had been heard by some rabbit hunters near the little upstate New York town of Bogueville. The laughing seemed to have affected some of the hunters, because they had become dizzy and had taken flight.

  In the editorial office of the Bogueville Times, Fred Holmes looked at Doc Savage and asked, “What made the hunters dizzy?”

  “The pills I gave them,” Doc explained. “But what you want to do now is forget you know anything about the underhanded part of this.”

  “I presume this is not finished,” Fred Holmes said. “Is there anything else you want me to do?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “Give your assistance,” Doc Savage explained, “in checking up on the men who come to investigate the affair.”

  Fred Holmes nodded. “The New York and Washington newspapers are both sending staff men out here to look into it. I already have telegrams to that effect.”

  “Good,” Doc said. “It is the ones who are not newspapermen in whom we are interested.”

  “Oh, I see!” said Fred Holmes. “It is a sure thing that any newspaper staff man coming out here to cover the affair will drop in here. They always drop in at the local newspaper in a small town like this.”

  “And as they drop in,” Doc said, “you check on them. Wire the newspaper each man says he represents and be sure it is a legitimate newspaper. Better still, get the information by telephone and charge the calls to me.”

  Doc then got on the telephone and called the army intelligence in Washington. While he was waiting for the call to be completed, he indicated to Fred Holmes that he preferred for the conversation to be private. Fred nodded and stepped outside.

  To the army intelligence in Washington, Doc said, “Do not send any of your operatives to investigate this affair of a laughing in Bogueville, New York.”

  He telephoned the same information to the New York and Washington police.

  When Doc Savage walked past Fred Holmes on the way outside, the young man looked at Doc intently. “Tell me something.”

  “What is it?”

  “You bought this newspaper only so you could do what you have just done?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are spending a devil of a lot of money to do something that does not quite make sense.”

  “I would spend every
cent I have in the world to accomplish what I am trying to accomplish,” Doc Savage told him.

  Doc did not explain to Fred that there was nothing he would not do in order to safely rescue his aides and his cousin, Pat.

  The man in the pin-striped suit came into the Bogueville Times and said he was a special staff writer named Phil Kendricks, from the Washington Courier, and that he wanted to get what information he could on the laughing matter before he went out in the hills to see for himself.

  Fred Holmes talked to him politely and gave the same information he had given the other reporters. Then, when the man had gone, Fred got on the telephone about the fellow.

  Later, he told Doc Savage, “The Washington Courier has a reporter named Kendricks. But Kendricks is a short, fat man with freckles. This fellow is tall and rather thin. He is an impostor.”

  “Good,” Doc Savage said.

  Doc made sure the man in the pin-striped suit was eating dinner in the Owl Café; then he retired quickly to the small hotel where he was staying.

  He made himself as completely as possible into an elderly fellow with white hair, a white mustache, glasses, pale skin that was rather unhealthy looking, but not enough so as to draw attention. Overalls and blue shirt made him as inconspicuous among the rural citizens of Bogueville as a man could readily become. In this guise he followed the owner of the pin-striped suit.

  The man registered at the hotel under the name of Robert Clark. This, it proved later, was his real name. It was one of the few times in recent years that he had used his real name, probably.

  Robert Clark hired a car and driver, explaining that he was a newspaperman. He made a visit to the hilly section where the rabbit hunters had had their experience.

  He made only a casual search, then returned to town where he dispatched a message from the telegraph office.

  It was then late afternoon, and the man named Robert Clark retired to his hotel room for the night.

  Doc Savage resorted to breaking and entering to get the telegram which Clark had sent. He took the original message, but he left a carefully copied duplicate in its place. It was doubtful if anyone could tell that the telegraph office had been entered.

  The message looked innocent, being a report about what to do with a piece of property in Noank, Connecticut, which was in dispute as to title with a person who seemed to be a relative by marriage. It was lengthy.

  Doc Savage worked on it almost an hour with a pencil, found out it was a very cunning code and translated it to his satisfaction.

  The message advised that investigation had shown there had actually been a laughing affair and that nothing seemed to have developed that had not appeared in the newspapers. The sender of the message would investigate further during the daylight hours of the following day, the telegram read.

  Doc Savage went to the hotel and got six hours of sound, satisfied sleep.

  Chapter VIII

  A STICKING OF PINS

  The man in the pin-striped suit was actually named Robert Clark. Doc Savage believed him after he had said it the sixth time.

  The bronze man’s trust in the truth of the insistence did not stem from any faith in the Gibraltar character of the man but from the efficiency of the truth serum he was using.

  He had administered the truth serum back in the hills where he had caught the man, near where the laughing episode had occurred. The truth-serum treatment was not a gentle affair because it completely unbalanced the victim, so that he was to all intents and purposes temporarily demented, without any control whatever over what he said or did. By the same token, the lack of control prevented him from withholding the truth from his statements.

  The New York machinist with the laughing gadget had long since gone back to New York with his siren, which he had been instructed to store and keep for future use.

  Doc caught Robert Clark—he was still attired in a pinstripe, although not the same one he had worn yesterday—shortly after eight o’clock in the morning.

  Doc worked on the man all that morning, all that afternoon. They became wrecks, both of them.

  The general summary of truth collected:

  Someone was hiring crooks—petty and otherwise—to do something they did not understand and was paying them exorbitant fees to do so.

  The organization was divided into groups, and no one group knew specifically where any of the others were located or were operating, or what duties they would be called upon to perform.

  The operation under way was enormous evidently, judging from the expenses being incurred.

  Whoever headed it was an organizing genius, possessed of no consideration where human life was involved.

  The groups received orders by radio on a short-wave length, and sometimes on phonographic recordings which they were ordered immediately to destroy. The records were always ones made with a disguised voice, and probably not the same voice was used on all occasions.

  Doc Savage’s five associates—Monk Mayfair, Ham Brooks, Long Tom Roberts, Johnny Littlejohn and Renny Renwick—had been seized in a series of skillfully executed strokes.

  They had been seized because it was believed, apparently, that they had been given some tremendously valuable object to guard. It was thought that they had this in their possession or knew its hiding place.

  Patricia Savage had been seized for the same reason.

  If any of them were now alive it was only because it was still believed that they knew the whereabouts of the object which was so in demand.

  Clark did not know what the laughing was. It was connected somehow with the affair. But how, he didn’t know. He wished he did know, and he had tried unsuccessfully to find out, Robert Clark insisted.

  That was about all Robert Clark seemed to know, or all that could be pumped out of him under the effects of the truth serum. Except the additional point that he had been assigned to come to Bogueville and ascertain if there actually had been a laughing affair and, if so, to ascertain exactly where it had occurred and what appeared to have caused it.

  Doc Savage gave him an overdose of hypnotic which would keep him helpless for nearly two days.

  An ambulance arrived in response to a telephone call from Doc Savage, and the attendants loaded Robert Clark into it and departed. The attendants said very little—although they greeted Doc warmly—until they were loaded.

  “Give him the usual treatment we give criminals,” Doc directed.

  One of the men who had come in the ambulance said, “How about trying the new technique we discussed some time ago. Trying it on this man, I mean. I’m sure it will wipe out his memory of the past as effectively as the other one, and he should recover more quickly. If it works we should save at least a month of the time the patients usually take to convalesce before we start the course of training that teaches them a trade and to hate crime and criminal ways. That means we could graduate them from the place a month quicker.”

  Doc Savage gave the thing some thought. “Try it,” he said. “But keep a close check on the man during training, and see that he is checked on after he leaves. If his memory should happen to return to any extent at all, or if he should revert to criminal tendencies, we would want to know about it.”

  “Very well,” said the attendant. “I would hate for that to happen. We’ve put a lot of crooks you have caught through the ‘college,’ and not one of them has returned to his old ways. I’d hate to be responsible for the first failure.”

  Doc nodded. “Be sure this man does not learn where he is being taken, or where the institution is located. If he should escape, and the public get wind of the place, it might cause us some trouble.”

  “I bet it would. In a hundred years criminals will probably be given treatment like this by the law, instead of being electrocuted or sent to the penitentiary. But right now it’s a little too drastic and advanced for the public to accept.”[2]

  * * *

  [2] Somewhere in upstate New York is Doc Savage’s sanitarium, known as the “college.” Here
, trained surgeons perform a delicate brain operation—developed by Doc—which removes all memory of a criminal’s past. He is then taught a respectable trade and returned to civil life.

  * * *

  The ambulance left with its burden.

  Doc Savage went to the local telegraph office and composed a message:

  I HAVE LEARNED WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT. NOW, YOU CAN GIVE ME A FIFTY-PERCENT CUT OR TAKE THE CONSEQUENCES.

  He carefully translated this into the code and signed the name of Robert Clark. Then he dispatched the message to the same address as the one to which Clark had sent the report concerning the property in Noank, Connecticut.

  The addressee of the message was Daniel Wallace, care of the Summit Trailer Park, in a small New Jersey station across the river from New York City.

  The fastest local conveyance was a light plane owned by the local druggist, and Doc chartered this, reaching New York by noon the following day.

  He went at once to a cheap Broadway establishment which specialized in making phonographic recordings. There was a private booth which you could enter and, by inserting a fifty-cent piece, pulling a lever and picking up a hand microphone into which you then spoke, obtain the recording. The recordings were not of high quality, but Doc was not seeking quality.

  He made half a dozen recordings, the gist of all of which was about the same.

  He took these, obtained a car which he kept in an uptown garage, for use when he did not wish to go near his headquarters, and headed for New Jersey.

  “Now,” he said, half aloud, “we will try sticking the first pin into this strange animal.”

  Peace surrounded the trailer camp in New Jersey. The three trailers were occupied, one of them by the pilot of the plane which had hauled the gang to and from Washington, another by the fake taxi driver who had hauled them about. These two men were sleeping, and there was a card game in progress in the third trailer. Dan, Briggs, Phillips, and two other men were playing blackjack. They were playing for big stakes.