The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard (5 page)

Nellie stared curiously at the man with the dead, white face from which vital, pale eyes flared like beacons. Her gaze went over his prematurely white hair and his explosively powerful body that, even in repose, suggested swift and terrible action.

“What are you going to do now?” she said.

“I’m going to get you out of here,” said Benson.

She laughed again, mirthlessly.

“You evidently don’t know all the things they’ve got against me. You and your gang couldn’t bail me out of here with a million in cash.”

Benson’s dead face couldn’t move, but his eyes seemed to smile a little at that. He went to Lieutenant of Detectives Hogarth.

Hogarth, a square-jawed official afraid of neither man nor beast, knew a little of Benson. He looked curiously at the average-sized, white-faced man who was credited with doing such impossible things.

“About Miss Gray,” Benson said. “Why is she held without bail?”

“Because we’re sure she killed her old man,” said Hogarth. “We haven’t given that out to the papers yet, but we’re sure enough.”

“Why?”

Hogarth ticked off points on his muscular fingers.

“One, Professor Gray was killed in a room that could be entered only by the door. There’s a window, but nothing under it for three floors. No way to climb up to it. And the girl, by her own admission, was alone in the apartment with her father. Anyone coming in the regular front door would have had to pass the room she was in, and she would have seen him. She says she saw no one.

“Two, beside the chair in which was the body, we found a lipstick exactly matching the one in her purse.

“Three, nobody could have got around behind Gray, from which position he was hit, except someone he knew and paid no attention to—like his daughter.

“Four, there’s about a twelve-thousand-dollar inheritance—”

“That’s enough, I think. You’ve proved her innocent already.”

“What?” said Hogarth, not knowing whether to be mad or mystified. He decided to be mystified. You didn’t get angry at a five-foot-eight powerhouse like this white-haired, dead-faced man unless you were incurably reckless.

“The lipstick,” said Benson.

“I don’t get you.”

“You say the lipstick discovered beside the body matched one later found in her purse. Why would the girl be carrying two lipsticks, particularly when she was at home and presumably didn’t care about make-up at the moment?”

“I didn’t say she was carrying two. One might have been in her purse and the other—” Hogarth stopped.

“The other—where? Was she carrying it in her hand, intending to rouge her lips artistically after murdering her father?”

“Well, there’s plenty of other clues,” Hogarth said doggedly.

“Let’s you and I go and examine those a little further,” Benson said.

Hogarth opened his mouth to ask who the hell Benson thought he was, anyway. He closed it with the words unsaid. There was an air of quiet authority about Dick Benson that few, in any position, cared to ignore.

At Gray’s apartment, Hogarth led Benson around to the little back yard first. He pointed up to the library window.

“See? No possible way to climb up to the window, which means the killer must either be the girl who was in the apartment at the time, or somebody who came in with her knowledge from the street.”

“Suppose you go up to the apartment, and sit in the chair Gray occupied,” Benson said. “Assume what must have been his position, back to the window.”

“What for?”

“Just do it, that’s all.”

“What happens then?”

“You’ll see. There’s a man at the apartment door?”

“Yes.”

Hogarth went off, frowning. Benson stepped to the next building. This was taller, and had a fire escape. He went up it to the roof, climbed down a floor to the roof of Gray’s building, and went to the back.

The window of Gray’s library was underneath.

Sitting in the chair in which the dead man had been found, Hogarth waited, fuming. But he kept his face toward the door as ordered. And in a moment he was startled half out of his skin to hear a voice behind him.

“I could have killed you pretty easily, Hogarth.”

Hogarth whirled, with the chair creaking. The man with the white, still face and the pale flames of eyes was standing between him and the window.

“You said, truly, that no one could climb up to the window,” Dick Benson said. “But you neglected to think whether or not a person could go
down
to the window. And an active man can do it easily.”

“Is
that so?” Hogarth said triumphantly. “Well, we thought of that and we went over the roof with a magnifying lens—”

“Come on up with me for a moment.”

On the roof, Benson pointed to the low parapet in the rear.

“Here are my prints in the dust and soot. No other marks are there.”

“Exactly. So no other person climbed down,” snapped Hogarth.

“But look here,” said Benson, pointing to a space on the flat stone near his handprints. “There is a layer of smooth, seemingly untouched dust. But here and there—in spots about the size of two human hands—the dust is a little
thicker
than it should be.”

Hogarth stared hard, scowling.

“The killer came down from the roof, as I did. He went out the same way, and while he was up here, obliterated all traces by spraying dust back over the prints. But he sprayed a little too much over them.”

“The girl—” Hogarth said uncertainly.

“Is it likely a girl would kill so acrobatically? And if it were Miss Gray, would she wipe out the traces on the parapet when she knew that in so doing she would incriminate herself? And now let’s see the lipstick.”

Hogarth handed it over. Benson pushed the red stick up from its metal sheath. He tested it on his thumb. Red came off, not evenly, but in little blotches and grains.

“See? It’s old, crumbly. Miss Gray either discarded it or lost it long ago. Or else it was lying in her drawer, in the bedroom next door. In any event, it was dropped beside the body simply to implicate her. There were no prints on this lipstick, were there?”

“Well, no,” admitted Hogarth reluctantly.

“So she dropped it beside the man she had murdered—but first wiped her prints from it!” Benson said. “I think there’s enough here, without going any farther, to break your charge. Certainly there’s enough doubt to justify letting her out on bail.”

“It’ll cost at least twenty-five thousand, if I know the judge,” growled Hogarth, seeing a perfect, fast murder conviction fading from his grasp.

It cost fifty thousand dollars, put up by Benson in the form of a certified check which scarcely made a dent in the balance he carried in just that one bank. He had deposits in a dozen others.

Free and on the street, Nellie Gray looked at Benson with, if anything, increased bitterness and suspicion.

“You’re even more powerful than I thought,” she said. “You must be the head of the gang himself.”

“I think you’re going to get over at least some of your quite natural suspicion of me very shortly,” Benson said. He took her arm and guided her around the corner.

After them, from the sidewalk crowds, three men, walking fairly close together, followed.

Around the corner Nellie Gray, who had walked with Benson this far because her uncertainty was overbalanced by his impelling manner and his hand under her arm, stopped and jerked free.

“Where are you trying to take me? Is this why you got me free—so you could take me away some place and make me answer questions?”

Benson didn’t answer. He didn’t have time to. The three men were on them then.

It was smoothly done. There were people all around. The plan had been for one man to knife Benson efficiently and unobtrusively in the back and for the other two to get the girl to a waiting car before the people around knew what had happened. But that nice plan went overboard.

With machinelike precision, the two men got Nellie by each arm just as the knife in the hand of the third flashed toward Benson’s back. But the back was no longer there. The man found himself blinking in utter amazement into a white, still face from which pale eyes glared like gray flame. A man couldn’t turn that quickly! But Benson had.

Benson’s hand flashed up and caught the wrist behind the descending knife. The knife stopped descending. Benson’s steely forefinger found a spot a little above the wrist and in the center of the forearm. The finger pressed, and the man shrieked wildly and dropped the knife.

A crowd was already pressing around.

Benson laced out with his right to the man’s jaw, and then turned his back on him, serenely confident that he’d have no more trouble from that source.

He saw a curious thing when he faced the girl.

One of the two men who had grabbed her arms was on the sidewalk, staring at her with pop eyes. The other man executed a back flip over her extended leg as Benson took a step toward her, and crashed beside the first on the sidewalk. Nellie Gray didn’t need help.

Benson steered her forward.

“Into my car,” he said.

It was an odd-looking car for a rich man to have. It was a big, dull sedan at least four years old and of a not very expensive make. That was the story the outside told. But under the exterior there was a motor capable of a hundred and thirty miles an hour. The shabby sides of the car were bulletproofed, and the tires were filled with petroleum jelly instead of air.

Nellie got into the car in order to get away from the gaping crowd in a hurry, regardless of whether or not she was still suspicious of Benson. And that she still was, came out in a moment.

“You knew those men were following us!” she said. “It was all a play, to make me think you were on the level.”

“What makes you think I knew?” said Benson.

“You were walking on the balls of your feet, like a tiger ready to leap,” she said. “You were just waiting for that attack.”

Benson nodded.

“I knew. But I thought if I let it come off, you’d be convinced I’m not in with the gang that killed your father. That failed. So it’s useless now to suggest what I’d intended to.”

“What was that?” said Nellie.

“It is obvious that you’re in danger almost as great as your father was. So I was going to suggest that you stay with me for a time.”