Fortune of Fear Page 29

The Countess then got down a shopping case, a black plastic one, of a kind that had lately come in fashion. She grabbed several items off a shelf so quickly I could not see what they were. And then she did a thing which shot my alarm right up to fascinated horror.

  She got down a hypnohelmet and put it in! Deoxygenated as I was from lack of air in that closet, dizzy from paint fumes and plagued with fleas, I did not gather in the first moments the full import of this action. Then I understood completely because it was exactly what I would do.

  She was going to get Miss Simmons, under hypnosis, to write a suicide note and then she was going to stamp her into the rug!

  My hair stood on end! The Countess Krak was going to commit murder and then get off scot-free! Only if she were caught in the act could the crime be detected! Here was a convicted murderess waltzing about New York, slaughtering at will! And only I knew about it!

  I suddenly realized that I COULD act. That helmet she had wouldn’t operate at all if I were within a mile or two of the place. The relay breaker switch in my head would make it inoperative. I didn’t have to come close to Krak, only within a mile or so. And meanwhile I could call Grafferty and get him there, if not in time to save Simmons, at least in time to catch Krak in the act.

  But that address was more than four miles away from where I was, near Rockecenter Plaza. I must hurry!

  I rose up and thrust against the closet door.

  IT DIDN’T OPEN!

  I pounded on it.

  The awful pounding that was going on in the apartment was drowning all my hammering from within the closet. I pounded louder. They pounded louder. I yelled. They started yelling at each other to be heard above the din.

  I put my shoulder to the door and pushed with all my might. All I got was some wet paint on me. I realized they must have piled all the furniture against the door.

  I was TRAPPED!

  The nausea of claustrophobia gripped me. The only thing I hate worse than space is no space. I got all confused. The naked electric light bulb hanging there began to look like a sun trying to suck me in.

  I covered up my eyes. I knew I would have to get a grip on myself. My world was coming to pieces but that didn’t mean I had to come to pieces, too. Or did it?

  Gradually I managed to choke back the screams rising in my throat until they were only faint yips. That was better.

  Think! I must THINK!

  I peered at her viewer. More time had gone by than I had thought. She was riding on a subway train. It made her seem magical. How had she gotten from the secretary’s boudoir onto a subway train so quick? Then I remembered that the station was right in the basement of the Empire State Building.

  I beat my head with my fist. That helped.

  THE RADIO!

  I had that radio in here! This time I remembered to push the top button.

  Raht answered.

  “Get on the phone at once,” I said. “Call Police Inspector Bulldog Grafferty and tell him there’s going to be a woman murdered in Apartment 21, 352 Bogg Street, Morningside Heights, within the next hour. Tell him to be there!”

  “Is this urgent?”

  Oh, I could have killed him! “You slip up on this and I’ll give your name to Madison as a client!”

  “Who is going to murder whom?” said Raht. “How can you tell all the way out there in Africa?”

  “Are you going to make that phone call or aren’t you?” I seethed. “The assassin pilot is on the way right this minute! The murdered woman will be found stamped into the rug!”

  “You seem a little overwrought, Officer Gris.”

  “Not as overwrought as you’ll be if I put a Colt .44 Magnum through your worthless skull!”

  “Oh, you’re down near Rockecenter Plaza.”

  (Bleep) him! He’d been holding me on the line to be able to read the distance and direction meter on the radio top! “Repeat that message!” I screamed at him.

  He repeated it all back very precisely, the way spies are trained to do.

  “Now listen, you bulge-brained (bleepard), if police don’t appear there to catch that murderer with the corpse within the hour, you’ll be turning in your head.”

  “Oh, I’ll take care of it, Officer Gris. I’m on my way.”

  I hunched down on the floor. I watched Krak’s viewer with horrible fascination as she rode the subway to her appointment with doom. Hers.

  There was every chance that I would soon be rid of that vicious female, the murderous Countess Krak.

  PART FORTY-TWO

  Chapter 4

  The neighborhood in Morningside Heights was not too bad. It was full of winter-dead trees and peopled with rather well-dressed but sullen kids, who watched the Countess Krak go by in total conviction that she was a truant officer in disguise and was about to blow the whistle on them all. And Krak’s purposeful progress could not have done otherwise than give that impression. Gods, I thought, how they would have screamed and run had they known they watched a murderer on the brink of bloody slaughter. Even the streetwise kids of north Manhattan would not have been able to stomach what I was sure was about to occur.

  The grim pound of her boots halted before an apartment house that bore the number 352. It was not a shabby apartment house: Miss Simmons must have some income of her own. There was no doorman, but the brass mailboxes shone. And there it was, right there on number 21, the nameplate:

  Miss Jane Simmons

  It meant she lived alone! Gods, wasn’t anything going to stand between the Countess Krak and this awful crime? Ah, yes, there was. Police Inspector Grafferty would soon be on his way.

  Unsuspecting of the trap I had set for her, the Countess Krak pushed the buzzer. I was torn between hoping Miss Simmons, who must have been at the UN, had not yet returned home and savagely hoping that she was, so Grafferty could catch this Manco devil in the very act of mangling.

  The brass grate spoke up. “Yes?”

  The Countess Krak said, “I am a fellow teacher, from Atalanta University, Manco, and I want to talk to you about a student of yours.”

  The voice came back, “It’s about time somebody listened to me! Come right up!”

  Oh, blind, blind Simmons! You just invited yourself to murder!

  I punched the radio button.

  “Go ahead,” said Raht.

  “Have you done your duty?” I said.

  “Police Inspector Grafferty was quivering like a bloodhound. I talked it up as a private inside tip. He said he could smell the headlines already. Eager. I caught him at the Civic Center and he’s just now locating squad cars. He won’t fail you.”

  “Good,” I said and clicked off. Oh, Countess Krak, you’ve been outsmarted for once and you won’t even be able to trace it to me! Grafferty the glory hound was going to do this one himself! It’s a long ways from the Civic Center to Morningside Heights, but the police drive over everybody.

  The Countess Krak regarded the foyer door. It kept clicking and she didn’t know you were supposed to push it when it clicked. It stopped clicking. She gave it a shove, a very impatient gesture. The lock was faulty. It swung right open.

  She strode past a fountain and between two statues. She saw the elevator was in use and went up the stairs. She turned down a carpeted hall and stopped before Apartment 21.

  The door opened without her even knocking. Never was a woman so anxious to be done in. Simmons was already talking. No hello or who are you. She looked disheveled and very wild of eye. She said, “You know what he did today? He sabotaged the UN bill! He’s got to blow everything up, even women’s rights! He’s a frothing fiend! We teachers must gang together in a solid phalanx of fury and stop him, even before we blow up the UN! Nobody is safe with him on the loose. And the college thinks that just because I was in a psychiatric ward, they don’t have to listen to me. They think I’m paranoid about him. And just to make matters worse, the New York Tactical Police Force is after me again.”

  Miss Simmons was having trouble locating the Countess to talk to h
er. The Countess must have seen that she was speaking to someone who was as blind as a bat.

  “The police!” said the Countess. “Then you need head protection.” She kicked the door shut behind her and right in front of Simmons took the hypnohelmet out of the square shopping bag.

  I suddenly realized that I still had Simmons’ glasses in my pocket. Unwittingly, I had made it very easy for Krak.

  The Countess simply turned the helmet on and dropped it over Simmons’ head! Just like that!

  Krak looked around the rather large and well-furnished living room. Looking for a place to stamp, I thought. A radio seemed to be playing in the next apartment. The Countess Krak saw that a corridor led to a bedroom. She pushed Simmons toward it.

  Like a sleepwalker, my favorite ally went down the hall toward her doom.

  There was a wide bed, a boudoir table and an easy chair, all decorated in frilly white organdy. The Countess Krak closed the bedroom door. She lowered Simmons onto the bed. She arranged the pillow so it would support the helmet properly. She plugged in her microphone and then sat down in the easy chair.

  Simmons had evidently been changing out of her street clothes when the door buzzer went, for they were lying on the floor. She had tossed on a dressing gown. It had opened now as she sprawled there. Not a bad-looking body.

  Krak apparently didn’t care for that. She moved out of the chair again and pulled the dressing gown together to make Simmons decent. Then she laid her sable cape aside and took off her own jacket, the equivalent of rolling up her sleeves to get to work.

  The Countess spoke into her microphone. “Be calm, relax. You are quite safe.” Oh, what a liar, I thought. “Sleep, sleep, pretty sleep. Can you hear me?”

  Muffled, “Yes.”

  “What were those eight men going to do to you in Van Cortlandt Park?” said the Countess, leaning back in her chair.

  Muffled, “Rape me. All eight of them. They were going to rape me hour after hour.”

  The Countess lowered her mike and pushed it into her shoulder. “I thought so,” she muttered in Voltarian. “A real rape-crazy slut. The whole thing has been just a pose to steal Jettero!” She raised the mike and reverted to English. “When was the first time you saw Wister?”

  Miss Simmons flung out her arms, throwing the robe wide open. Her hands extended down, straight out, so rigid they were quivering. Her feet jerked down. She looked like she’d been put on an electric rack. A faint scream came, muffled, from under the helmet.

  “Answer me!” snapped the Countess Krak.

  Simmons said, “Registration Hall last September.” The quivers increased.

  Krak said, “You are there at that moment. You see Wister. What do you really think?”

  Simmons let out a faint scream. The vibrations of her body increased as the rigidity grew.

  “Answer me!”

  Simmons said, “He is too good-looking.”

  The Countess lowered the mike into her shoulder and muttered in Voltarian, “Just as I thought. Love at first sight.” In English she said into the mike, “Anything else?”

  The answer was a muffled scream, “That it was awful that he was a nuclear physicist major and had to be stopped.”

  “Why?” said the Countess.

  Miss Simmons looked to be in torment. She shouted, “THERE MUST BE NO EXPLOSIONS!” Then in lower volume, muffled by the helmet, “My father held the chair of psychology at Brooklyn University. He said explosions were substitutions for sexual (bleepulations) and a girl must be frigid, frigid, frigid to protect herself.” She was stiff, stretched out now like hard marble, totally rigid.

  Krak spoke into the mike, “When did he say that?”

  “When he caught me putting firecrackers in the dog’s (bleep).”

  The Countess dropped the mike. In Voltarian she muttered, “What a weird planet!” She sat there a bit and then picked it up and said in English, “The real incident was different. Your father made a mistake. You get NO pleasure out of hurting animals. You were feeding the dog milk and petting it. That is really what you were doing and what really happened. Your father was totally wrong. Accept it.”

  Simmons suddenly relaxed. She whispered, “I accept it. Oh, I am SO glad that was really what happened. Then my father must have been wrong about everything.”

  “Right,” said the Countess Krak, villainously undoing in a breath what that poor, laboring psychologist-father had devoted his whole life to build up. What a destructive Manco devil that Krak was!

  The Countess took a firmer grip on the microphone. She was obviously through playing around. Now she was going to get down to business. She said, “Now we’re back to the first time you saw Wister. What you really thought was that you were not good enough for him. Correct?”

  Simmons said, under the helmet, “Correct.”

  Krak said, “Now it is the time of the first Nature Appreciation class last fall. You are alone, you are leaving the UN. You do not want Wister to follow you because you know you are not good enough for him. You feel very sad about it, right?”

  Simmons said, “Right.”

  Aha, here it came. I knew that Krak was going to order her, now, to write a suicide note. For that is exactly what I would have done. Simmons was finished!

  The doorbell rang.

  I let out a wheeze of relief for Simmons. She had been saved by the bell. Grafferty! All was not lost. He was just a little early, for there was no corpse there yet. But he would see at once what this was all about: he would find Simmons in a hypnotic trance and know that murder was in the air.

  Krak said into the mike, “You will lie there quietly for the moment and ignore anything you hear until I get back.”

  She put down the mike. She went out of the bedroom and closed its door behind her. She went into the living room. She peeled off her gloves, threw them aside and fluffed her hair. She opened the door.

  DR. KUTZBRAIN!

  He was standing there in a bowler hat and black overcoat. He lifted up his inch-thick glasses and stared at Krak. “Well, well! Lizzie Borden!” Then he smiled like a hungry wolf and pushed his way in and banged the door shut behind him.

  As soon as he was in, he said, “I just stopped by to tear off a little (bleep). I always visit my patients in times of stress, namely mine.”

  In a disgusted voice the Countess Krak said, “Really.”

  Kutzbrain was taking off his overcoat. He said, “Nothing like a little psychiatric therapy to cheer one up.”

  The Countess said, “Do you live with Miss Simmons?”

  “Oh, no, no. I’m Dr. Kutzbrain, her psychiatrist at the University Hospital. But I’m impartial. I spread my professional skills around. I don’t think you’ve been an inmate of my ward yet, Borden, but you’re a real looker so I’ll make sure you soon will be. So just lie down on that sofa and pull up your skirt and we’ll get into the preliminary professional psychiatric examination. If it feels good enough, I can get you into the ward instantly. Those look like nice (bleeps) under your shirt. But they need a (bleep) erection test.”

  My hair rose. The Countess Krak had killed three men just for extending a hand toward her sexually. This dumb (bleepard) was about to be stamped to jelly! And then I really laughed with glee. Grafferty was going to find a real corpse!

  The Countess Krak was reaching into the plastic shopping bag. I knew it was for some lethal weapon. It was a roll of something black. She tore one of the perforated bits from it.

  The doctor’s hand was still reaching. She put the small black square in it. “Hold this,” she said icily.

  He took it and stared at it.

  She reached into the black plastic bag. There was a little dynamo in there. She touched a plunger which started it.

  Dr. Kutzbrain stood straight up. He went utterly rigid. His face went blank. He was fixed in place like an awkward statue!

  Oh, my Gods! One of the Eyes and Ears of Voltar devices she had filched from the Afyon hospital! I remembered it. It was a remote control
rig. When one had one of those black patches planted on him and the device was activated by the tiny dynamo, the person went rigid and blank and stayed that way as long as the dynamo ran, and when it was cut off the person returned to motion without being aware of the halt. According to the directions I had fleetingly seen, they used it to obtain evidence photographs in low-level light conditions. But she was simply using it to immobilize Dr. Kutzbrain.

  Probably she would kill him later. Grafferty still had a chance to get his corpse, so necessary to headlines and to my plans for finally wrecking the Countess Krak. Still, even if Grafferty came early, there was quite enough to cook her goose: a leading psychiatrist of the city standing like a catatonic statue in the middle of the living room and a very pathetic victim hypnotized in the back bedroom. Whichever way the cards fell, the Countess Krak was for it! New York City would give her Hells, to mention nothing of Voltar penalties for Code breaks.

  She made sure that Dr. Kutzbrain was remaining statuized. Then she went back into the bedroom to finish off Simmons, all unaware that the police were howling on their way. I knew that she could never get out of there in time.

  PART FORTY-TWO

  Chapter 5

  The Countess Krak closed the bedroom door behind her. Miss Simmons was sprawled on the bed—breasts, belly and thighs bare. The Countess reached over and pulled the bathrobe closed: I could not figure why she was doing that; I myself thought Simmons’ nakedness pretty stimulating.

  Krak sat down in the chair and again took up the microphone. “It is just after the first Nature Appreciation class last fall. You have left the UN and are now entering Van Cortlandt Park. Where are you?”

  “Just entering Van Cortlandt Park,” said Simmons, very muffled under the helmet. Her body started to stiffen.

  “You see that Wister is following you. You know you are not good enough for him. You plead with him to go away.”

  From under the helmet, “Please go away, Wister.”

  “Good. Now he has gone away. You walk further into the park. You see eight men following you. Look back at them. What do you see?”

  Miss Simmons’ body went more rigid and began to twitch.