The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard (6 page)

Nellie stared silently ahead at the street.

Benson said: “How in the world could a girl as slim and harmless-looking as you pitch two grown men on their backs?”

“They weren’t expecting anything,” said Nellie, abstractedly. “People look at me and don’t expect any fast moves.”

“There must be more to it than that.”

“Well, there is, a little. At Vassar, instead of going out for tennis and basketball, I studied jujitsu, boxing and wrestling. When I got out, I kept on with more advanced studies. I go—went—with dad on his expeditions, so I wanted to keep fit. Also, I happen to like the art of self-defense.”

“You’re a very unusual, and very fine, person,” Benson said. “Now, where would you like me to drive you?”

“As if I had any choice!” said Nellie bleakly.

“But of course you have a free choice.”

She looked somberly at him.

“You’re very clever, Mr. Benson. So I’ll go with you as you suggested.”

Benson’s pale eyes probed into hers.

“But if you still won’t trust me—”

“It’s because I don’t, that I’ll go to your quarters, whatever and wherever they are. If I didn’t, you and your gang would get me anyhow, sooner or later. If I do, I may be able to match wits with you, smart as you are. And I can certainly keep an eye on you.”

Benson turned the car toward Bleek Street, the little block-long section that, to all intents and purposes, he owned.

“You’re splendid,” he said quietly. “I’m more glad than ever that Justice & Co. was led to your help.”

That shook her a little. She kept glancing sideways at him. But the suspicion would not down.

“Who got you started on this?” she said. “Michael Bower, Basil Doolen—who?”

Benson said: “Thank you, my dear. That’s the first constructive thing you’ve said yet.”

Michael Ransom Bower was obviously well-to-do. He owned a narrow-front gray stone house on Sixteenth Street near Fifth Avenue that represented several hundred thousand in real estate value. When Benson pressed at the bell beside the iron-grilled front door, a servant in livery opened the massive panel.

However, the servant had broader shoulders and a more beetling brow than a proper servant should have. His left ear was cauliflowered. His nose was bent. He was either an ex-wrestler or a ham prize fighter.

“Yeah?” he said to Benson.

“I’d like to see Mr. Bower—”

“Beat it, buddy. Nobody’s seeing Mr. Bower.”

The door started to close.

Benson pushed it open, shoving a surprised and furiously straining man along with it. Benson stood in a tiny vestibule, not looking very tall, but not looking any the less impressive for all that. He resembled a limber gray steel bar more than a man. And his pale and deadly eyes made the big ham at the door reach toward his pocket.

“I must see Mr. Bower,” Benson said, with the patient reasonableness of a grown man for a child.

“I told you—” rasped the man. And there was a glint as he got a gun half out of his livery pocket.

Benson apparently didn’t stop to reason it out, as ordinary men might have. There was urgent necessity behind his visit here, and he didn’t intend to give it up. That was all.

The gray steel man’s left hand caught the leveling gun barrel as a hawk catches a bird in mid-flight, and turned it aside. His right hand reached up and around the big fellow’s neck. Thumb and second finger pressed hard there, at the base of the medulla oblongata.

A spectator might have thought the movements slow, so methodically and perfectly completed were they. But they couldn’t have been slow, for the man with the cauliflower ear, trained in a hundred ring bouts, was utterly unable to ward them off.

The man in livery wavered. A sort of hissing exclamation came from stiffening lips. Then he lay on the floor and looked up at Benson with wide eyes that couldn’t see anything. Benson went on through the inner door. The man behind him would lie quiet for half an hour. If Benson hadn’t removed the pressure on the great neck nerve centers, the man might have lain quiet for the rest of time. For that pressure can kill.

Benson went upstairs, moving like a lithe gray fox, and yet seeming to take his time. That was one of the paradoxes of all his motions—he didn’t seem ever to be in a hurry, yet he got from one place to another faster than seemed physically possible.

A man suddenly appeared at the head of the stairs. On him, Benson wasted no words at all. With the same move that bore his body up and over the top step, he whipped forward like a steel rod, with his fist licking out. The second man sagged in three sections, like a swaying Z, and was promptly out of the picture.

There was still another man in front of one of the second-floor doors, about five yards away. Benson, who was in motion again even while the second man was falling, stopped in front of the third guard. He, too, was reaching in alarm for his pocket. But he didn’t complete the move.

He stared almost hypnotically into the pale-gray flames which Benson had for eyes. The deadly penetration of those eyes, the appalling expressionlessness of the white, dead face, made the man’s stomach feel as if somebody were tying it into hard knots.

“I’ll see Mr. Bower, please,” said Benson. His voice had a silky quiet to it.

“Yes,
sir,”
said the man, stepping aside.

Benson opened the door and went in.

At the window, sitting in an easy chair, was a man in dressing gown and pajamas. The man was corpulent, pompous-looking. But he needed a shave and his hand trembled as he raised a glass from a little table on which was also a half-filled-bottle and a bowl, of ice.

The man turned swiftly with an exclamation ripping from pale lips. Benson went toward him. He cowered in the chair.

He was obviously drunk. Equally obviously, he hadn’t been drinking to get drunk, but to drown terror. And he hadn’t succeeded. Naked terror still peered from his muddy-brown eyes.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Benson. “You’re all right. I’m not here to hurt anything.”

Bower tried twice to say something, and closed his trembling lips again without having been able to force out sound.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions, that’s all,” said Benson.

Bower’s gaze went over Benson’s snow-white hair, his white, still face and almost colorless, deadly eyes, and his gray-clad body that made him seem a thing of steel from head to foot.

“You . . . you are from the police?” he croaked.

“No. I’m investigating the affair of the Mexican bricks, but unofficially. I’m working in behalf of Miss Nellie Gray, daughter of—”

“I don’t know anything about bricks or Nellie Gray!” Bower screamed, face convulsed with fear. “I don’t know a thing about anything! Get away from me!”

“You must know something,” said Benson, voice quiet and soothing. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have hired guards with the murder of Professor Gray. You were on that recent archaeological trip to Mexico with him, weren’t you?”

“No!” yelled Bower. “I never heard of the man. I wasn’t on any trip!”

“I think you were,” Benson said. “Now, if you would tell me what you know, I might be able to help you out of the hole you’re obviously in, and help Nellie Gray, too.”

“I have nothing to tell!” cried Bower. “Are you deaf? I’ve already told you that—”

He stopped yelling. His lips writhed and little white flecks appeared at their corners. He slumped in the chair. Benson got to his side, felt for his pulse. It was pounding in a thin and thready discord. Bower was alive, but had fainted.

Something about this had so terrified him that he had gone out cold at the mere thought of telling anybody what he might know.

For an instant Benson stared at the unconscious man. Then he turned to the door. Nothing to be gained here, even if he stayed around till Bower came to. The man would die rather than talk.

“Your employer fainted,” he said to the man outside the door.

The man glared suspiciously, reached tentatively for his gun again, and again decided, on looking into the pale and flaming eyes, that he’d keep his gun in his pocket.

The man at the head of the stairs was sitting up rubbing his jaw. He made no effort to stop the gray steel bar of a man who had knocked him out. The fellow at the door was still lying on the tile floor of the little vestibule.

Benson left the house and went to the address of Basil Doolen, the second of the two names mentioned by Nellie Gray.

There were no guards in Doolen’s big apartment. The only precaution taken was that Doolen’s servant—a bona fide one—held the door on the night chain while Doolen examined Benson’s face in a mirror held at an angle. Then Benson was admitted.

Doolen was afraid, too. But he was a different breed than Bower. He had his fear under control, and he talked—at least a little.

“Yes,” he said, “I was with the unfortunate Professor Gray on his last trip to Mexico. Quite a few like myself were with him. In fact, the members of the expedition consisted entirely of business and professional men who wanted an exciting vacation, had a layman’s interest in archaeology, and could afford to stand the cost of the trip pro rata as payment for their fun.”

“The trip was successful?” said Benson.

“I think, according to Gray, it was highly successful.”

“But you’re not sure?”

Doolen looked thoughtful.

“I’m not. I got the impression, toward the end, that Professor Gray had discovered something colossal—and sinister. But no direct word of such a discovery was ever said.”

“What could it have been?”

“I can’t even guess,” said Doolen. “But whatever it was, it must be the reason why Gray was murdered. I am wondering now if everybody who was on the expedition is in similar danger, for some reason we do not even know.”

“Is there a chance that Professor Gray took out of Mexico the important thing you’ve guessed he discovered?” said Benson, eyes pale wells of flaming concentration.

Doolen was a composed and very shrewd person. He said, staring hard at Benson:

“If I knew about this, I might be talking less to a man whom, after all, I don’t know. But if you are what you seem to be, I’m willing to talk, in case my guesses might help you. If you are here under false pretenses I’m still willing to talk—because it would be to my advantage to reveal how little I know, and hence how little reason there would be for attacking
me.
The only thing I know of that Gray took out of Mexico couldn’t, as far as I can see, excite anyone.”

“And that was?”

“Several bricks from an old temple we discovered. I don’t know exactly how many—half a dozen, perhaps—maybe a few more or a few less. I don’t know what happened to them after we got across the border, but I always assumed the professor had brought them here to his New York home with him.”

“After his murder, it was said that two bricks were missing from his apartment—but only two. Not six or seven.”

“I know,” said Doolen. “I don’t know why they weren’t all taken, if they were the illogical reason for murder—unless only those two had any meaning to the killer.”

“Or unless only those two were in the apartment to be taken,” Benson pointed out.

“That is possible,” said Doolen. “But if that’s so, I don’t know where the rest could be. I’m sure Professor Gray came over the border with more than two of them.”

“Would you mind giving me a list of the members of the expedition?”

“Yes,” said Doolen, “I would mind. If some danger hangs over everyone who was on that expedition, I’m not going to be the one to give that danger direction by naming the men!”

“It would be pretty easy to get the names from another source,” said Benson. “The State Department will have their visa list. The Mexican border officials would know. The information would be in the newspaper morgues from announcement of the trip before it was begun.”