Croy's body had shrunk—or, rather, melted —to half its normal size. His features were indistinguishable, like the features of a wax head with a fire under it. His clothes were smoldering. The heat was such that it was hard to stand within a yard of him.
The big, horn-rimmed glasses slid from his face. His body diminished, diminished. . . .
A stage hand came racing back. Behind him trotted a plump man in black with rimless spectacles over his eyes.
"I got a doctor," the stage hand gasped. "From the audience."
He stopped. And the doctor stared at the place where Cray had lain, and then gazed around at the faces of the others.
"Well?" he said. "Where is Croy? I was told he was dangerously ill."
No one answered. One after another stared back into his face with the eyes of maniacs.
"Where is he, I say?" snapped the doctor. "I was told"
He stopped, aware at last that something far worse than ordinary illness was afoot back here.
The manager's lips moved. Words finally came.
"Cray is—was—there."
His pointing finger leveled tremulously at a spot on the stage. Then he fell, pitching forward on his face like a dead man.
And the point on the stage he had designated was empty. Only a blackened patch was there, with a little smoke drifting up from it. A blackened patch—with a pair of comedy horn-rimmed glasses beside it.
2. Lucifex Insurance Co.
In the elevator control room of the Northern State Building, a man in the coveralls of an electrician bent over the great switchboard. He was examining the automatic control switch of the elevator in which Varley had ridden down from his top-floor office for the last time in life; had ridden down—but never reached the bottom!
Grease smeared the man's face and hands. But an especially keen observer would have noted several things about the seeming electrician that did not match his profession.
He would have noticed that the man's body was as lithe and muscular as that of a dancer; that his hands were only superficially smeared with grease, and were without calluses; that his fingers were the long, steely strong ones of a great surgeon or musician. Then, if he were one of the very few in New York capable of making the identity, he might have gone further and glanced into the man's steely eyes under coal-black eyebrows, and stared at his patrician nose and strong chin and firm, large mouth—and have named him as Ascott Keane.
The building manager stood beside Keane. He had treated Keane as an ordinary electrician while the building engineer was near by. Now he gave him the deference due one of the greatest criminal investigators of all time.
"Well, Mr. Keane?” he said.
"It's about as I thought," Keane said. "A device on the order of a big rheostat was placed on the switch circuit. In that way the descent of the elevator could be slowed as much as the person manipulating the switch desired."
"But why was the elevator Mr. Varley rode down in made to go slower? Did the slowness have anything to do with his death?"
"No. It had to do only with the spectacle of his death!" Keane's face was very grim. His jaw was a hard square. "The man who killed Varley wanted to
