The Avenger 4 - The Devil’s Horns (14 page)

The Avenger went into Groman’s building, and once again stepped into a hornet’s nest.

A hornet’s nest of murder!

The second time a man had been found murdered in Groman’s office. The first time the victim had been Groman’s own secretary, Hawley. This time the dead man seemed known to no one.

The victim lay near the desk, as Hawley had lain. Captain Harrigo was there, with two plain-clothes men. The night nurse was in Groman’s bedroom having hysterics; she had stepped out of that bedroom an hour before, almost to stumble over the body.

This man had not been shot. He had been stabbed in the heart.

Harrigo glared murder at Benson, when The Avenger entered.

“Who
are
you?” he grated. “Ever since you landed here, we’ve been turning up dead men!”

Benson turned his pale, deadly eyes on the man.

“They haven’t been mine,” he said quietly. “Neither is this one. Who is he?”

Harrigo chewed his lip.

“We don’t know yet,” he said, sullenly, suspiciously.

“When was he killed?”

“About an hour and a half ago. And Groman’s son says you left a half hour before that, and the mug guarding the front door says you didn’t come back in—”

“Quite right,” said Benson. “The office door—”

“Locked when we got there,” said Harrigo savagely. “It looks like the man was stabbed while the nurse was right in the next room with Groman. She went out for fresh water and came back, and everything was all right then. But a little later she came out of the old man’s room to see this dead guy.”

“And nobody knows how he got in?”

“No!”

The Avenger’s keen eyes were at work. He had looked first at the floor beside the body. This time there were no words scrawled in blood.

The devil’s horns.

If this man knew anything about that, at least he had not tried to write about it. But then, death seemed to have been swifter with him than with Hawley. That heart wound had almost certainly been instantly fatal.

“Are Miss Groman and Ted Gorman here?” Benson asked.

Harrigo plainly was on the edge of refusing to tell this man with the pale eyes and white hair anything; he was equally plainly considering an attempt to arrest him again. But finally he replied:

“The old man’s son is here—has been in all evening. The girl’s out. I don’t know where.”

Benson stepped into the next room to see the nurse.

The night nurse assigned to the paralyzed hulk that had been Ashton City’s political boss, was about thirty, dark-haired, silent. Ordinarily she was composed. Now she was shuddering and biting at her fingers to keep back the screams.

She calmed a little more under The Avenger’s steady, pale gaze.

“The police say this crime was apparently committed while you were in this room,” he said.

She nodded, shivering.

“You were out for a few minutes before that?”

She pointed a trembling finger to a thermos pitcher on a night stand by Groman’s bed.

“I went out to get fresh water in that.”

“After you came back, you were in this room all the time?”

“Y-yes,” shivered the night nurse. “And I didn’t hear a sound in the other room. Not a sound.”

Well, a knife wound straight to the heart is silent and swift. The soundlessness was understandable. But who was the dead man, and who had killed him?

Benson didn’t even attempt to question Groman at all this time. The helpless bulk on the bed looked too wooden even for the eye blinks. The Avenger went back through the office and to the hall.

Terry Groman came in the front door just as he did so.

The girl was very pale, and her eyes looked wide and hunted. As if she had just come from some kind of trouble.

She staggered under the shock of murder, when Benson told her what had happened.

“We don’t know who the man is,” The Avenger concluded. His pale, icy eyes were drilling into the girl’s violet ones. “Would you recognize him?”

She shook her head. “I’m sure I wouldn’t. I have been away to finishing school most of my life, only recently returning to Ashton City. I wouldn’t know any of my father’s associates.”

“You seem to know Sisco,” Benson said.

She avoided his pale gaze.

“I . . . I met him after coming back home to live.”

Benson went on up the stairs, to Ted Groman’s suite. Ted Groman had talked to the police, he said, and told them all he knew.

Perhaps he had talked to the police, but Benson was sure he had
not
told all he knew. Anyway, when Benson asked about the dead man, Ted Groman’s eyes suddenly shifted. Difficult to lie to those uncompromising, dangerous eyes.

“You’re quite sure you don’t know who the man is?” The Avenger repeated.

“I— Yes!”

Benson’s eyes were diamond drills. His wax-white, immobile face was compelling.

“Ever since I’ve been here,” he said, “your father’s enemies have made one unending effort to get in here. Presumably they want to murder your father. Presumably you are in equal danger. Yet with Sisco and all his men fighting you, you won’t tell me what you know—when I’m here for the sole purpose of helping your father!”

“Oh, the dead man isn’t one of Sisco’s men—” Ted Groman said rapidly. Then he stopped, and slowly paled under that icy, relentless stare.

“So you do know who he is,” Benson challenged.

“No! No I don’t!”

“You at least know he isn’t one of Sisco’s men. You couldn’t possibly know all Sisco’s crew by sight, so you must know the dead man’s identity.”

The man’s narrow-shaped head turned restlessly this way and that.

“Well,” he said, at last, “maybe I could guess. But I didn’t tell the police. I don’t trust some of them.”

“Trust me—and tell me.”

“I think,” said Groman slowly, “the dead man was an employee of dad’s when he was in the contracting business. I seem to remember this man as a foreman.”

“Thank you,” said The Avenger, and left.

There was a jewel-bright glitter in the pale, icy eyes. For a reason still locked only in his brilliant mind, The Avenger treasured that bit of information very highly indeed.

One of old Groman’s former contracting foremen, dead in Groman’s private office!

Benson went back to that office.

For the moment it was empty save for the dead man. Benson stepped to the desk. On it was the silver buffalo head, beautifully carved, with curving horns.

The devil’s horns! Tentatively The Avenger’s steel-strong, white fingers touched the horns of the buffalo head.

And one of them turned a little.

Benson pulled at it, and the little horn came out. It was hollow. In its curving little length was a bit of tightly rolled paper. The Avenger took it out, read it. The paper read:

Third drawer left, full of the moon, devil’s horns.

Swiftly Benson replaced the rolled paper and put the horn back where it belonged. He set the buffalo head back just as Harrigo blustered in with the photographer and print man.

“You still here?” he snapped to Benson.

The Avenger sensed something he had thought before but was not quite sure of: Harrigo was as upset as the very devil about something much more important to him than the murder of an unknown man in the office of an ousted political boss.

“You seem to have too much drag to be hauled to headquarters and questioned like you deserve,” said Harrigo loudly. “But let me tell you one thing—if you try to leave town—”

“I won’t,” said Benson quietly. “There are many things I want to do before I leave Ashton City.”

It was over an hour before Benson had a chance to be alone in the office again. When the chance came, he went back to the big teak desk next to the wall.

“Third drawer left, full of the moon, devil’s horns,” the curious little note in the buffalo horn had read.

Benson started pulling out the desk drawer. All but one of the drawers refused to come all the way out. A stop in the back of the drawer compartment held each.

All but one. The third drawer on the left.

That one could be removed completely.

The strange glitter grew in Benson’s pallid, awful eyes. The Avenger was sure of himself, now. He had the answer to many things that had been riddles when he first arrived here—indeed, when he first got old Groman’s letter through the mails, asking him to come and clean up Ashton City.

Benson went out to the hall again.

It was now very late. Upstairs, Terry Groman would be in bed, even if not sleeping. She could refuse to open her door to him—and probably would. For that violet-eyed young lady seemed to know altogether too much about her father’s bitter enemy, Sisco. And such knowledge would not be readily shared by her.

But when she had come in, she had hung her fur wrap absentmindedly in the hall coat closet. Benson went there now, and took out the coat, on its hanger.

He felt through the pockets. At first there seemed to be nothing at all in them. Then his sensitive fingers felt a tiny object in the left pocket. He drew it out.

The little object was an aluminum disk, the size of a quarter. On it was stamped: “Compliments of the Gray Dragon.” Sisco, it seemed, was enterprising enough to have joined the host of restauranteurs who hand out small novelties—medallions, what not—to advertise their places.

Terry Groman had absently accepted one, and absently put it in her pocket. Had she come from there tonight? Or was the aluminum medallion a token of some other visit? In any case—why should she go to Sisco’s place at all?

Nellie Gray’s long evening at Sisco’s Gray Dragon was almost done. She had one more number to sing. Then she would be through. She and Rosabel both were very glad of that.

In the meantime, however, she did not slacken her efforts to find out something The Avenger might find useful.

She had circulated among the tables—paying particular attention to those held down by Sisco’s political and underworld friends. She had heard a hundred snatches of talk. But none that seemed important.

She had seen one thing she thought Benson might want to know. That was, coming with a frightened look from Sisco’s office, a violet-eyed girl who had been pointed out to her as the daughter of Oliver Groman.

Sisco himself had been out all the early part of the evening. He had come back just before that exit of Groman’s daughter. He had looked at Nellie several times with cold but unreadable eyes, and, for the rest, left her alone.

There was about fifteen minutes left before her concluding number, when Nellie, at a side table, heard the name, Martineau. At a table nearby, a man who was old enough to know better was making signs urging her to sit down and talk to him for a while.

Suddenly, to the man’s delight, she nodded and smiled. She sat down at the table, opposite the man.

“I’ve been watching you all evening,” the elderly Lothario babbled. “You know, you’re much too nice to be in a place like this—”

Afterward, Nellie could not have told you herself how she managed to seem to listen to the man and to reply now and then—when all the time her whole power of concentration was engaged in hearing the guarded talk at the table behind her. But she did manage it, and she did hear enough to set her heart beating triumphantly.

“—thought the Friday the Thirteenth Club was going to be raided,” one of the men behind her said cautiously. “The old goat was working to shut the joint, you know. He thought he’d finally built enough of a fire under the cops to have the place pinched, so he went there to see it.”

“That’s how they got him into a place like that. He wouldn’t have ordinarily come within a mile of it, otherwise?” the other man mused.

“Yeah! That’s how. But the public don’t know that. The papers cut Martineau out as a guy who sat on the bench in black robes looking like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth during the day—and then played around gambling joints with brunette dancers at night!”

“Seems to me they’d have had to have more than an expected raid to get the judge there.”

“There was more,” said the first man, snarling a laugh. “Martineau thought he was going to meet somebody there he could completely trust. He was going to be on the inside during the raid, with this guy, and see that the place really
was
closed up.”