really close friend of hers. He had not seen her since the termination of their latest radio assignment. His personal affairs, meanwhile, were quite open to investigation; he had grown weary of ventriloquism, and had retired to live on the income from his investments. Later, he might resume his earlier profession, medicine. He was attending lectures now at the University of California in Los Angeles. And once again, he had no idea of how he was being brought into this case, or of who could have kidnapped Miss Cole.

But, even as he departed, he suddenly got that idea.

"Tom-Tom!"

It took moments to string together the bits of logic which brought that thought into his mind.

Things had happened to people, mostly gangsters, at the hands of a malevolent creature; that is, if the creature had hands—but it must have hands, if it could wield a gun, a slip-cord, a knife! It must also be notably small and nimble, if it really traveled up chimneys, down ventilator shafts, along power-lines and through stovepipe holes. Gascon's imagination, as good as anyone's, toyed with the conception of a wise and wicked monkey, or of a child possessed by evil like the children of old Salem, or a dwarf.

But the point at which he coupled on his theory was the point at which police had paused, or rather begun.

Digs Dilson had been killed with a knife. So had old Bratton.

He, Ben Gascon, had given old Bratton the dummy that people called Tom-Tom. And old Bratton was forthwith murdered. Gascon had meant to go to the funeral, but something had turned up to interfere. What else concerned the janitor? What, for instance, had the younger electricians and engineers teased him about so often? "Electricity is life," that was old Bratton's constant claim. And he was said to have whole clutters of strange machinery at his shabby rooms.

Bratton had taken Tom-Tom. Thereafter Bratton and others had been killed. In the background of their various tragedies had lurked and plotted something small, evil, active, and strange enough to frighten the most hardened of criminals. "Electricity is life"—and Bratton had toiled over some kind of electrical apparatus that might or might not be new and powerful in ways unknown to ordinary electricians.

Gascon left the rationalization half completed in the back of his mind, and sought out the shabby street where the janitor had lodged.

 Prev. P 10/23 next