"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 231 - Garden of Death" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

ARRIVING at the Cobalt Club, The Shadow took on Cranston's strolling gait. He ran into
Commissioner Weston in the foyer. Weston was a brisk chap, usually the first to open a conversation,
but on this occasion, Cranston slipped in a few words first:

"Sorry I can't dine with you, commissioner -"

"You'll have time later," interrupted Weston. "Right now, I'm starting to investigate a most important case.
A serious tragedy, Cranston. I'd like you to come along."

"But I can't," returned Cranston. "I'm trying to tell you that I have a dinner engagement -"

Cranston paused, as Weston showed annoyance at the thought that a trivial dinner engagement could
interfere with something really important. Then, in Cranston's easiest style, The Shadow added the words
that electrified the commissioner.

"A dinner engagement," he repeated, "with Richard Bendleton, at his home on Long Island."

Grabbing Cranston's arm, the commissioner piloted his friend out to the official car, explaining that their
engagement was one and the same. Cranston wouldn't dine with Bendleton, but he was going to the
house, just the same, because it was there that the tragedy had happened.

Bendleton was dead, two others with him, under mysterious circumstances. If he had told Cranston
anything that might solve the puzzle, the commissioner wanted to hear it.
Since Weston put it that way, The Shadow confined himself to matters that had preceded Bendleton's
death.

"Bendleton intended to organize a new company," he told the commissioner. "Not a subsidiary of
Alliance Drug Corp., but an independent corporation, to be capitalized at a million dollars."

"Why?" queried Weston. "To compete with himself?"

"Not at all," was Cranston's response. "Bendleton talked of new drugs, that would benefit humanity.
Discoveries as remarkable as quinine. He specified one in particular, a preparation to be called
Somnotone, entirely harmless, but with sleep-inducing effects that would render it equal to an
anesthetic."

Weston gave his friend a sideward look.

"Bendleton expected to make millions out of the drug, I suppose?"

"On the contrary," returned Cranston," he planned a nonprofit corporation. Otherwise, he would not have
expected me to help finance it."

Coming from anyone but Cranston, the commissioner would have considered the statement
preposterous. It happened that he knew the altruistic tendencies of his friend. It wouldn't be like Cranston
to seek profits from a discovery that would prove a needed boon to the human race.

Evidently, Bendleton was a man with similar ideas, who had found it difficult to interest investors in his
humane proposition, until he had contacted Cranston. It seemed that the human race, in general, stood to
lose much through Bendleton's death. In his turn, Weston had lost something: namely, the theory that