The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard (4 page)

Nellie Gray sat in the living room by the radio.

The living room was at the other end of the apartment from the little library. The radio, though she turned it low, drowned any noise which might have come from there. She listened to some concert music.

In the library, Professor Gray turned on his desk lamp as gray dusk faded to black autumn night. The lamp made a pool of bright light on the bricks, with darkness rimming the pool as an overhanging bank rims a pond.

In the darkness came silent-footed terror.

The window opening onto the back yard was open a few inches. A hand, in a black glove, slid into the opening and lifted. Slowly, without sound, the window raised. The professor turned over one of the bricks.

A figure slid over the window sill. Draping the figure and causing it to melt into the shadows was a dark suit, a black felt hat and a dark gray shirt. Even the face could not be seen; in lieu of a mask, the man kept his left hand over all his features but the eyes. The eyes burned murderously at the unconscious back of the engrossed professor.

“Soon,” Gray murmured to himself, smiling, “we’ll get them all together again. Then—”

The black, dim figure crept toward the seated man. In one black-gloved hand was a short, metallic object that glinted a little as light struck it.

Down the hall, Nellie Gray turned from classical music to swing. With the change in rhythm, the black shape from the night paused, hand upraised. Then the hand swept down. The hand with the metallic thing in it.

A sort of sigh came from Gray’s lips. Then, as if he were suddenly very tired, his body slumped forward on the desk. From the top of his head a thin red trickle welled from the point where metal had crushed bone.

Down the hall, Nellie went back to concert music—

In another part of New York, at one end of the block-long street, was a big warehouse standing vacant and boarded up. At the other end were a loft building and a couple of stores, also empty and unused. In between were three dingy old three-story brick buildings standing wall-to-wall, of the residence type.

Each building had its own entrance. But the entrances on the right and on the left were never used. They were triple-locked, with the inner doors bricked over. Only the center entrance was used.

Behind the innocent-looking exterior, the three buildings had been made over into one. Dick Benson owned them. Also, he owned the vacant warehouse next door on the right. Also, he had the vacant loft building and the stores to his left under long lease.

Across the street, from corner to corner, the window-less back of a half-block-square storage building loomed in front of Benson’s windows like the Great Wall of China.

Which meant that, as far as privacy went, Dick Benson owned the entire block.

Over the central door of the three buildings that had been thrown into one was an inconspicuous little sign in dull gilt letters. The sign simply said “Justice.”

Nine out of ten of the few people who entered a block where no one but Benson had a real excuse for entrance didn’t even see the sign. The tenth was apt to glance at it, decide that some stuffy legal firm was housed within, and pass carelessly on.

The justice meted out in that place, however, was beyond the law.

Dick Benson had made his permanent quarters in this block, which was a curious, quiet back bay in New York’s crowdedness, when he decided to devote all his energies to fighting the crime which had blasted his life.

Those quarters housed facilities for helping people whom the regular police could not help. And there are many such unfortunates. Usually they are threatened more terribly than folks over whom hangs the standard threat of ordinary crime. For it takes extraordinary crime to be beyond the powers of a police force which is, on the whole, very good indeed.

On the morning after 25 Washington Square North went up in a cloud of dust and chips, Dick Benson was in the top floor of his peculiar residence. The room was tremendous—sixty by a hundred and five. It looked like a combination of club lounging room, workshop and laboratory. It was the back room of MacMurdie’s drugstore multiplied by ten.

Near a rear window, in a shaft of morning sun, Dick Benson himself sat at a long table on which were morning papers from half a dozen large cities. The shaft of sunlight was striped from passing through what seemed to be a Venetian blind at the window. But it was not a Venetian blind.

The slats of the “blind” were fastened in the masonry of the window at each side. They were slanted at a forty-five degree angle to catch daylight, but were made of nickel steel to keep out bullets. All the windows were similarly equipped.

On Benson’s face the sun surprised no expression. No expression was possible there, ever. The tragic loss that had killed Dick Benson’s soul had killed his face, too; the facial muscles were paralyzed, dead. The flesh there could move only when his manipulating fingers moved it. Then it stayed wherever it was put. It made him a man of a thousand faces, but it made him a terrible thing to see, too. An engine of deadly destruction wearing a mask of dead flesh that could never express a thought.

Across the big table from Benson was the giant, Smitty. He had a paper in his vast hands, and was staring at a picture on the front page. The picture was of Nellie Gray, the girl he had seen at the school yesterday afternoon.

Benson spoke, words coming from lips that barely moved in the steely calm of his face. “Read it, Smitty.” Smitty read:

“Held without bail. Miss Nellie Gray!” That was the line under the picture. The news item itself read:

“Last night at approximately nine o’clock, Professor Archer Gray was found murdered in his den by his daughter, Nellie Gray. Death had been caused by some blunt instrument, possibly a gun barrel, though no gun was found in the apartment by police called by Miss Gray.

“Professor Gray recently returned from an expedition into Mexico on which he was accompanied by several business and professional men who financed the expedition for the pleasure of going along as amateur archaeologist. The expedition was for the purpose of studying Aztec ruins which Professor Gray had discovered, but not investigated, on a former trip.

“No valuables were taken from Professor Gray’s apartment. However, Mrs. Linda Veinecke, who cleans for the professor mornings, has noted the absence of two clay bricks brought back by the professor from his recent trip. Miss Gray, who at first denied the loss of the bricks, later admitted that they had disappeared. But since they were valueless to any but an archaeologist, they do not seem sufficient motive for murder—”

Smitty stopped reading. Dick Benson said, in his quiet but compelling voice:

“That’s clear enough. They suspect the daughter, Miss Gray. She’ll go to the chair if the police can’t find the real killer.”

“What a fool I was when I didn’t follow her yesterday!” growled Smitty. “We might have guarded her and prevented this.”

“You had no reason to suspect anything of this nature,” Benson said. “Circumstantial evidence pointed overwhelmingly to the little boy as the kidnap victim.”

“Instead of which, it was Nellie Gray the crooks were after.”

Benson nodded. He opened a drawer of the long table. From it he took two things absolutely unique of their kind. One was a slim, double-edged throwing knife with a light hollow tube for a handle, with which Benson could split a pea at thirty feet. The other was a .22-caliber revolver. The cylinder, to streamline the gun, was small and held only four cartridges. The butt slanted so little that it was almost in a straight line with the barrel. It was almost like a slightly curved piece of blued steel tubing with a little bulge for a cylinder.

Benson rolled up his trouser legs. To the inside of his left calf he strapped a slim sheath for the razor-sharp throwing knife. To the inside of the right calf was strapped the almost-as-slim holster for the tiny gun.

Smitty eyed the deadly little weapons respectfully. Mike and Ike, Benson called them, with sinister humor. Mike was the gun, Ike the knife.

“You’re going out, chief?” Smitty said.

“Yes,” said Benson quietly. “In preparation for obtaining ‘Mexican bricks,’ there was an accidental explosion yesterday, killing eleven people and wrecking a building. Now there is a murder, apparently over Mexican bricks. And a minor crook, who was tied in with the explosion, tried to kidnap the daughter of the murdered man. The whole thing is hooked together, Smitty, the result being that a girl who is almost surely innocent is apt to be railroaded to the chair for the murder of her father. It’s a case for Justice & Co., I think.”

“So?” said Smitty.

Benson got up. It was noticeable then that he was not a big man. He was not more than five feet eight inches tall and weighed no more than a hundred and sixty pounds. Yet he was a person to command profound respect. Very rarely do you see a man move with the lightning co-ordination and flaming vitality owned by Dick Benson. Power was in every motion of his steel-wire body. Smitty was a giant such as seldom is seen among men; but Dick Benson had beaten him to his knees one time before Smitty had known who the man with the snow-white hair and the deadly pale eyes was.

“So?” Smitty repeated, as Benson moved like a gray tiger toward the door.

“So I’ll have a little talk with the girl. And from that we may get a course of procedure against the cold-blooded insects whose ‘accident’ killed eleven people, and one of whom murdered the twelfth—for a couple of bricks!”

Nellie Gray’s eyes were reddened with crying. Her face was white with the shock of her father’s death. Fate had given her a terrible pushing around, and she showed it.

Dick Benson’s pale, deadly eyes, usually glittering like pale steel, were sympathetic as they rested on her. But Nellie Gray’s gaze was not kindly as it rested on him!

“I’m asking you—who are you, and how is it you’re pushing into this?” she flamed, eyes keen with suspicion.

“I’ve told you,” said Benson quietly. “My name is Richard Benson. I’m a kind of unofficial investigator who helps people now and then when they’re in a jam—as you decidedly are.”

The girl laughed. It was not a pleasant laugh.

“I see. Just a knight-errant going to the rescue of innocent damsel’s. That’s a likely story.”

“What do you think is the reason for my call here?” said Benson patiently.

“You’re one of the crooks,” Nellie Gray jerked out. “Your crowd has killed my father—and made it look as if I did it. You got the two bricks he had. Now you want the rest. And you think you’ll get them through me.”

She stared around the small cell, gazing bitterly at the barred door.

“You must have some influence, too,” she said, “to be able to come in here and talk to me.”

Benson didn’t explain that he knew the district attorney, and that a phone call from headquarters had been all he needed to walk into her cell. He didn’t blame the girl for being suspicious of his call. But he had to beat that suspicion down somehow.

“Strange as it may seem,” he said, “I’m just what I appear to be—a person interested in helping you because I know injustice is being done. Also, I’m interested because I want to save possible future victims of this gang that killed your father.”

“How splendid!” said Nellie witheringly.

“But to do that, I must have more information. And so far you have refused to give me any—”

“I’m going to keep right on refusing.”

“I can bring some pretty responsible citizens to vouch for me.”

“I don’t care if you bring the mayor. You’re playing for big stakes, and you’d naturally be a large-caliber crook.”

“Then you won’t tell me about the Mexican bricks?”

Nellie Gray’s lips tightened and she was silent.

“Do you know anything about the exploding peanuts?”

“Exploding peanuts!” That took her out of her stubborn silence. “Are you crazy?”

“Evidently you don’t know anything about them,” sighed Benson. “And equally evidently you aren’t going to tell me what you do know. I can’t blame you.”

He started toward the cell door. A guard outside began unlocking it.