"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 210 - The Devil's Paymaster" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

tongue-lashing.
But he was not angry enough to, overlook an important fact. Something
queer had happened to his private phone. There was no wire hum in his ear. The
phone was dead.
Weston proved the correctness of his hearing by trying to establish
contact with police headquarters. Nothing happened.
It puzzled him. How in the name of common sense could a phone bell ring,
if the line was dead? Weston began to wonder if he could have imagined that
bell-sound that had stopped ringing an instant before his sleepy eyes had
opened to the flashing of lightning and the pelting of rain.
He snapped on the bedroom light and looked at the clock. Then he chuckled
at his own foolishness.
The hands of the clock pointed to one minute after midnight. The chimes
of
the striking clock had telegraphed a wrong message to Weston's sleeping brain.
The echo of the last chime had been in his ears when he had sat up with a jerk
on the edge of his bed. There had been no phone call at all.
But why was the instrument dead? Another flash of lightning filled the
room with daylight brilliance. To Weston, the flash provided a plausible
answer. Lightning had struck a feed cable somewhere. It had put a whole
section
of phone lines temporarily out of commission, his own included.
He went back to bed and closed his eyes. He felt better, knowing his
window was now shut against the wet lash of the storm. He was drifting back
into slumber, when he heard the bell again!


THIS time, Weston was out of bed with a leap. It was a curiously muffled
ring. It sounded more like a ghost bell than the normal ring of a telephone.
He
ran to the instrument and clapped it to his ear.
The phone was still dead!
Commissioner Weston felt a queer chill. The hair prickled on his scalp.
He
listened intently. Then he heard the faint bell again.
The sound came from the closed door of his wardrobe closet. A closet was
a
place where no normal person kept a telephone - certainly not Commissioner
Weston.
And yet, he found one there.
It was on the floor at the back of the closet, almost hidden by the
trailing garments on the hangers above it. It was the latest type handset
phone. Instead of being connected with a bell box screwed onto the wall, the
signal apparatus was contained within the base of the telephone itself.
Weston had no idea how this mystery phone could have gotten into his
bedroom closet. He picked it up. The wire was alive and throbbing.
"Hello! Who the devil are you?" Weston barked.
"Is this Ralph Weston, police commissioner of the city of New York?"
The voice was a curious one. It was high-pitched and tinny in quality. It
could easily have been a woman's. And just as easily, it could have been the