The Wheel of Death/Chapter 1

Dusk was falling and the lights were turned on in Grogan's Restaurant. It was a small, gloomy place, with a dozen round tables and two curtained booths where special customers could eat and talk unseen. At the rear were two still smaller rooms, the kitchen and beside it a tiny cubicle of an office which contained Grogan's battered desk and an old-fashioned iron safe.

It was rumored that things happened in Grogan's Restaurant, things which were best kept hidden from the honest light of day. It was said that narcotics could be bought there, and it was whispered that young girls had entered the place and never again been seen by their friends. The West Side police of Manhattan had visited the place many times. But Grogan made no objection to such visits, and the police found nothing. Yet the rumors and the whispers persisted.

Burly Dan Grogan stood now near the rickety cash register, his yellowed teeth clamped tenaciously about an unlighted cigar. He had only three customers. Two men, hard-eyed and low- voiced, were smoking and drinking in one of the booths. At the back of the restaurant, near the door of the room which contained Grogan's safe and desk, was a man with plastered hair and high-waisted trousers who was consuming his third cup of coffee.

Everything seemed peaceful enough, but Grogan's fat face was a little tense as he watched the third customer with the plastered hair. It would seem that the man must be of the underworld. But Grogan did not know him, and Grogan thought that he knew all the underworld characters of Manhattan.

The bulky proprietor was curious and uneasy. Things often happened in his small restaurant when he became uneasy. And when things did happen they usually happened so fast that he liked to be prepared. The stranger might be an imported gunman, waiting to rub out one of his best customers in some criminal feud. Dan strolled over to the stranger.

"You from Chi?" he asked, complimenting the man by naming the second largest city in America.

"What's it to you?" snapped the stranger, looking up at the proprietor with cold, shrewd eyes.

"Not a thing, my friend." Grogan was accustomed to hard characters and he knew how to handle them, sometimes politely and sometimes brutally. He was being polite to this man who had made him curious and strangely uneasy. "Got a name?" he asked, smiling.

"Any name," was the curt answer. "Try Dick."

Grogan shrugged, rumbled a laugh and moved back to the cash register, to stand chewing his cigar while his eyes wandered continually back to the man who had called himself Dick. The stranger impressed him as a man who might prove useful.

Meanwhile Dick lit a cigarette and, without seeming to do so, strained his ears in the direction of the booth where the other two customers sat drinking and smoking. By listening intently, he was able to catch a few words of their conversation. Perhaps, as they drank more, they might speak more loudly. Dick waited patiently and called for another cup of coffee.

Then the door of the restaurant opened and a girl came in. She was young and slim and pretty. Her face was delicate and indicated that she was not accustomed to such a restaurant, nor to the characters who frequented it.

As she took a seat at a table, Grogan looked at her in frank surprise and one of the men in the booth pulled the curtain aside to peer curiously out at her.

The booth curtains fell hurriedly into place, and the voices behind them became so low that they could not be heard at all. The solitary waiter brought a fourth cup of coffee to the lone stranger. But the man called Dick left it untouched. He sat without motion, a cigarette drooping between his lips, apparently engrossed in deep thought.

The curtains of the booth parted again, and one of the two men came out. He was a little drunk, and he smiled ingratiatingly as he approached the girl at the table.

"Will you join us for a real drink behind the curtains, kid?" he asked, bending over her so that his breath must have been in her face.

The girl looked nervously at the dirty table cloth, as she tried to ignore him. She was not the kind who could handle drunken men in Grogan's Restaurant. The "silly" hat, probably purchased for a dollar and her one effort to be smart, was pathetic upon the side of her head as she looked down, crimsoning.

"Come on, kid," the man insisted, seating himself beside her and rubbing a hand over her shoulder. Then, as an afterthought, he asked hastily: "Waiting for somebody?"

"Waiting for me."

It was the stranger at the far table who had spoken. Perfectly motionless, in face and body, he sent the three words past the cigarette between his lips.

"Is that so?" The slightly drunken man was in a nasty mood. He rose from beside the girl and faced the stranger "And who the hell are you?"

"None of your damned business!" retorted Dick coldly. "Get back in your stall, if you want to keep a whole skin."

The man swayed a little, but reached with a significant motion toward his hip pocket. The stranger sprang to his feet with his hand under his coat. It was a tense moment. In another second death would stalk— not for the first time— in that tawdry little restaurant of evil rumors and whisperings.

"Cut it out, Joe!" The words came in a roar from Dan Grogan, whose big bulk lumbered with surprising speed to a position between the two men. "You're drunk, Joe! Get back to your table."

Joe obeyed sullenly after a moment of hesitation. Dick remained standing with his hand still under his coat.

"And you, stranger, sit down!"

"Go to hell!"

Big Dan Grogan stared at the stranger, shrugged his huge shoulders and broke into a smile. "Drink your coffee standing up if you like it that way," he grinned with seeming good nature. But on returning once more to the cash register, his hand touched a revolver which lay beneath a sheet of paper on a little table beside him. It was well to be prepared. The atmosphere of the restaurant was charged with the possibility of sudden destruction.

Instead of sitting down at his own table the stranger deliberately strolled across to the girl's and sat down beside her. His action was easy and natural and there was no smile or leer upon his face. He had seated himself so that he faced the curtains of the booth, but his back was to Grogan.

"Name's Dick," he said. "What's yours?"

He said it so naturally that, after one glance into his eyes, she answered quite as simply: "Molly."

It was one of those rare, self introductions which are instantaneously genuine. He, flashily costumed, and she, in her cheap but becoming little dress and saucy hat, had become friends during the passage of a few seconds. Probably it was her helplessness and his eyes which worked the friendship. The best in man comes to the surface in response to a woman in need of help; and some men have eyes which women instinctively trust.

"What are you doing here?" he asked in a voice so low that only she could hear.

"It's Grogan," she returned in an equally low voice.

"You know something about him?"

She nodded.

And there their conversation ended. Behind his back Dick heard the deep voice of Dan Grogan.

"I want to talk to you privately," Grogan was saying. "Come back to my office and have a drink."

The man who called himself Dick rose from his chair, touched the girl's hand, reassuringly, as he left the table and with face expressionless followed the proprietor silently into the little back room which contained the battered desk and the iron safe. In continued silence he took a chair and stared up at the pictures of boxers which hung upon the walls while Grogan, seated before his desk, filled two small glasses with whisky from a long-necked bottle.

"Here's how!" exclaimed Grogan, raising his glass.

"I don't drink," resumed Dick, leaving his glass untouched.

Grogan grunted and gulped his own drink without further hesitation. "Never hold that against any man," he commented, wiping his mouth, "Lots of good men killed every year by drink."

There was a silence.

"What's your line?"

"Nearly any line."

Grogan raised his eyebrows. "Dope?"

"Maybe."

"Women?"

Dick did not reply.

"Well," said Grogan, "women are dirty business, but there's money in them."

The proprietor's guest yawned rather insultingly and seemed to be interested in inspecting his slightly pinkened finger nails.

"Look here, Dick, as you call yourself," continued Grogan, "you got guts and you're a quick thinker. I'm interested in you. Can't we get together?"

"Maybe."

Grogan considered. "I've got to know what you can really do."

"I've handled dope— in big lots, nothing small."

Grogan frowned. "I'd have to have some proof of that— names, you know, that I could look up. Got anything on you that I could check on?"

Dick, his face always expressionless, shook his head. "Never carry anything that anybody could check on," he said. "Wait a minute. I might be able to show you something."

He drew a silk handkerchief from his sleeve, brushed his finger tips gently with it for a moment and knelt beside the old-fashioned iron safe. With an ear against the iron door he gently, very gently, touched the dial with his finger tips and began slowly to turn it while Grogan bent forward, intensely interested.

In the incredibly short time of about two minutes the kneeling man seized the handle and pulled open the heavy door.

Grogan lurched swiftly out of his chair and slammed the door closed again. But his fat face was wreathed in smiles. "You've got what it takes, Mister!" he exclaimed. "And how!"

Dick calmly rubbed the dial with his silk handkerchief to remove his finger prints and resumed his chair. "A child could open that box," he remarked contemptuously.

"And can you use soup too?" asked Grogan with much enthusiasm.

"Yeah! But there aren't many boxes I have to blow."

Grogan was so pleased with the man he had found that he poured himself another drink and was in the act of gulping it, when a feminine scream sounded from the restaurant.

Through the door, into the little square room, came Joe, carrying Molly in his arms. He was holding her roughly and had a hand over her mouth to prevent another scream. Behind him came his companion, looking both angry and alarmed.

In language shockingly blasphemous Grogan demanded an explanation as Joe flung the girl into a chair where she huddled, too scared to move or cry out.

Joe's explanation was that the girl had been eavesdropping, listening to their conversation behind the curtains of the booth. He had seen her ankles below the curtain and had peeked over the top of the partition and caught her.

Dick shot a single swift glance at Molly when he heard she had been listening to the two men he himself had been trying to overhear. Then he turned indifferently away and looked at the boxing pictures on the wall as if the affair were none of his business.

"Well, what did she hear?" asked Grogan savagely. But he didn't wait for an answer. "It doesn't matter," he snapped. "She's asked for it, and we can't afford to take chances. I'll get my car. We'll soon put her where she'll do no more snooping."

"I don't care," interrupted Molly in a pitiful voice. "You are killing my father, Dan Grogan! You— you might as well kill me too." But she was after all only a very young girl. Her head fell sidewise as she spoke and she fainted.

Suddenly Grogan turned to Dick. "Stranger, you seem to have butted into something."

"Butted nothing!" retorted Dick sharply, wheeling about from his inspection of the pictures on the wall. "You asked me to come in here."

"Yeah, but now that you're here, you'll stay— till I know you better. Joe, hold him till I get back with the car. And don't forget that he's as sharp as a cop's whistle."

With these words Dan Grogan lumbered out of the back room, and the slamming of the front door indicated that he had left the little eating place.

Dick found himself looking into the muzzle of Joe's revolver from almost half way across the small room, too far for him to reach it swiftly enough with a hand. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the inert form of little Molly, half slipping out of the chair.

Slowly, almost magically, the stranger's bearing began to change, the cheapness of the underworld seeming to fade from him.

"Joe," he said highly, "I'm afraid I cannot comply with Mr. Grogan's request to remain."

"The hell, you can't!" exclaimed Joe savagely. "Try anythin', an' you'll get a bullet through your head."

Joe never spoke again. With the deftness of a French boxer, Dick shot his right foot upward. His toe caught Joe's wrist, and the menacing revolver clattered upon the floor. Simultaneously two blue-black pistols seemed to leap into the strange man's hands from beneath his coat. The two guns roared together, with one sound but with two targets. Joe and his companion were dead before they struck the floor!

Very calmly, without the least trace of concern, the strange man dropped his weapons into their holsters beneath his coat. Then he swung open the safe door which Grogan had neglected to relock. For a few seconds he crammed papers into his pockets, but he did not take some packages of opium, recognizable by their smell. He closed the safe and turned toward the nearest dead man as if he were about to perform some act.

Then, from the restaurant, outside, a heavy step sounded. The man named Dick drew back from the dead man and crept swiftly to the door which was almost closed. He peered through a narrow crack. A policeman had entered the restaurant, no doubt having heard the shots, and was hesitating by the cash register while he looked around.

The peering man crept back into the little room. He had very little time in which to act. Rapidly he took out his cigarette lighter and, from a secret compartment in it, extracted a tiny seal which he pressed upon the foreheads of the dead men in quick succession.

And where he pressed that seal there remained the vermilion outline of a spider. The Spider, the unknown killer of New York, had made another killing.

This audacious act performed, almost in the face of the law, the self-possessed man emerged from the back room, wildly gesticulating toward the kitchen door for the benefit of the policeman who had not been quite sure that the sound which had attracted him had really been a pistol shot.

Ahead of the policeman Dick opened the kitchen door and stuck his head into that room for a moment while he pointed alarmingly toward the open back window for the benefit of the cook and waiter who were already badly frightened.

What followed, followed quickly. The cook and waiter, desperately frightened, struggled through the window, one after the other, in an attempt to escape from whatever danger might be approaching. The policeman charged into the kitchen and continued through the window, thinking that he was pursuing escaping criminals.

Dick darted again into the little back room. He picked up the unconscious Molly as easily as if she had been a kitten and carried her through the empty restaurant into the street, where a girl in a man's arms is soon forgotten by New Yorkers when a taxi spirits the two of them into a New York night. ..