"032 (B032) - Dust of Death (1935-10) - Harold Davis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

"No, no, senor, I will clean it," the male nurse gasped. "Only a few moments will be required."
Long Tom grinned and removed his coat.
"Sure, sure," he smiled, "if it'll make you happy."
The nurse took the coat, still bubbling over with apologiesЧpossibly the presence of the president's daughter had helped unnerve himЧand, backing to the door, used one hand behind him to open it. He stood there bowing again and again, half in the room and half out.
No one noticed that the arm over which he had draped Long Tom's coat was extended into the corridor while the rest of his person was in the hospital room.
"I am so sorry, seёor," he told Long Tom again.
"Forget it," Long Tom repeated. "Accidents happen."
The nurse backed into the corridor and shut the door.
Seёorita Anita Carcetas said: "Poor fellow, he is doubtless overworked."
Long Tom asked Ace Jackson: "Now, what were you about to tellЧ"
A sound came from the corridor outside the door, an unpleasant sound, obviously a body falling. And there was one shriek, brief but hideous, in a man's voice.
Long Tom swung to the door and wrenched it open. Seёorita Anita Carcetas made a shrill sound, expressive of utter horror. Ace Jackson got out of his cot, could not stand, and slumped to the floor.
Long Tom looked up and down the corridor. No one was in sight. Then the electrical wizard bent over the body of the man on the hallway floor.
The man on the floor was on his back, dead, with his eyes open and a terrible agony reflected in their still depths. It was the nurse. Long Tom's soiled coat was still draped over his arm.
But it was the dead man's face that held Long Tom's gaze. The face was gray, almost white. Long Tom looked more closely to ascertain what made the dead man's face gray.
What looked like gray dust coated the fellow's features.
Long Tom fanned with his hand close to the visage of the corpse and the gray stuff was stirred like dust in a little cloud.
"Get away from it!" Ace Jackson screamed.
Chapter 3. SUBSTITUTED MESSAGE
WITHOUT TURNING, Long Tom rapped: "Why not touch it?"
"That man was killed by the Inca in Gray!" Ace Jackson shouted.
Long Tom spun around. "What?"
"The gray dust," Ace Jackson snapped, "is always on his victims."
Seёorita Anita Carcetas said: "The death was meant for you, Seёor Long Tom."
"I know it," Long Tom growled. "Only the coat on his arm was visible when he stood in the door. The killer thought it was me with my coat over my arm."
The word exchange had taken but a moment. Long Tom whipped glances up and down the corridor. He decided the fleeing killer would have gone to the right toward the exit. Long Tom ran in that direction.
He reached the entrance and saw a uniformed military guard there, rifle alert. The fellow must have heard the death sound.
"Did any one pass?" Long Tom demanded in Spanish. The sentry said no one had passed and Long Tom turned back, trying doors to the right and to the left. There were cries, running footsteps from other parts of the hospital, these no doubt made by persons coming to see what the excitement was about.
It was in a big white operating room, banked with instruments, that Long Tom came upon an object of interest.
The object was a man; a rather small man who was attired in immaculate blue serge. He had Latin handsomeness and a mustache that was a dark neat line on his upper lip.
There was a distinct smear of gray dust on the right sleeve of his blue serge suit.
Long Tom rushed to the small man's side. The fellow was struggling to get up, his writhing lips bending and unbending his black line of a mustache.
"A fiendЧcloaked, masked," he gulped. "He struck me down and fled."
He pointed to an open window.
Long Tom whipped to the window. There was no one in sight. The ground below was sun baked enough not to hold footprints, and there was shrubbery enough about to have concealed a small army.
Long Tom shouted an alarm and a soldier appeared, began searching the grounds.
Going back to the neat little man with the mustache, Long Tom studied the fellow narrowly. Abruptly, Long Tom seized the man's arm.
"Free me!" the other sputtered. "What is the meaning?"
"You were attacked," Long Tom told him dryly. "But that's you story. You haven't got a mark on you."
The man tried to speak. But Long Tom shook him, then marched him, angrily incoherent, back to the room where Ace Jackson had gotten back on his cot.
Ace Jackson's eyes flew wide and he said: "Don't mind who you manhandle, do you?"
"What do you mean?" Long Tom growled.
Ace Jackson pointed at the mustached prisoner. "No idea who this is?"
"I don't get you," Long Tom said.
"He is Seёor Junio Serrato," Ace Jackson advised.
"For the love of mud," said Long Tom.
"Exactly," Ace Jackson agreed. "Seёor Serrato is war minister of this nation!"
LONG TOM hurriedly released his captive. One did not drag war ministers around as if they were common culprits. For, in these South American countries, war ministers usually had more actual power than the president.
"I deeply regret my tremendous error, Seёor Serrato," Long Tom murmured.
That was diplomacy. Regardless of what one thought, one did not accuse war ministers of crimes which there might be difficulty in proving they had committed.