[CHAPTER XIX—A FUTILE SEARCH]
Walking with his usual listless and shuffling gait, Lieutenant Culligore mounted the steps in front of police headquarters and entered the office of Inspector Stapleton of the detective bureau. It was late in the afternoon, and Culligore might have quickened his steps and carried himself with more animation if he could have known that at this very moment The Gray Phantom, seated in the secret chamber at Azurecrest, was planning his second move against the redoubtable Mr. Shei.
Stapleton, a huge, thick-necked man with a reddish face and a tendency toward irascibility, looked up with a scowl as the lieutenant walked in.
“Well, what’s new?” he demanded.
“Nothing,” said Culligore patiently and flopped into a chair beside the inspector’s desk, “except that our friend Mr. Shei seems to be getting away with it.”
Stapleton glared at a pile of newspapers he had been reading. His temper was on edge from his perusal of several editorials that chided the bureau for its failure to circumvent Mr. Shei.
“Two of the seven moneybags are already showing the white feather,” Culligore continued, “and two or three of the others are getting wabbly. By the end of the week I guess most of ’em will be ready to pay Mr. Shei’s price. I don’t know how he means to manage the transaction, but I’ll bet a pair of pink socks he’ll figure out a safe way.”
“What are the doctors doing? Still loafing on the job, I suppose?”
“They’re up a tree—every mother’s son of them. They can’t dope out the disease at all. If they had seven months instead of seven days, they might be able to do something, but as it is, they’re at the end of their tether. Their only hope is that one of the seven will be obliging enough to die before the others, so they can perform an autopsy.”
Stapleton jerked his head savagely to one side. “This is the twentieth century and we’re living in a civilized country,” he muttered. “A man can’t put over a thing like that in these times.”