The Avenger 14 - Three Gold Crowns (14 page)

“So they trapped us,” Dick said quietly.

“It looks like it,” said Mac. “The skurlies! If I ever get my hands on them—”

“Water from the river?” said Benson, staring at the rising flood in the basement.

“Yes,” said Mac. “Risin’ pretty fast. But I guess it’ll be a couple of hours before we have trouble. And long before that we’ll get out.” Mac’s cockeyed philosophy of being a shining optimist when trouble was worst was coming to the fore.

This time, however, Mac had a real basis for it.

Benson was trying to get the trick sawing-wire in the edge of his vest working. But, by chance, the gang had bound him so that he couldn’t quite get his fingers on the end loop.

“The rats—to leave the lights on, so we could see the water risin’, said Mac bitterly. “The skurlies! The—”

There was sound above. There was commotion, as of heavy things being thrown down violently. There were yells and a shot or two!

Benson looked quickly at Mac. And the dour Scot displayed one of his rare grins.

“That,” Mac said contentedly, “will be young Cole Wilson. And it sounds like he’s as good a scrapper as I had an idea he’d be! A bonny boy, Muster Benson.”

“Wilson?” echoed Dick.

“While you were shootin’ the lock out with little Mike, I was tappin’ the street address of this warehouse to Cole. When the men jumped us, I had just time to tap one SOS.”

And Mac had just time to finish that, too, when the racket upstairs suddenly died down.

There was the creak of a door, fast steps on stairs, the splash of hurried feet through almost knee-deep water, and then Cole Wilson’s blazing black eyes took in the spectacle.

“Good!” Wilson said, running his powerful hand through his dark hair. “I don’t feel so bad about that one with the red mustache.”

He sliced ropes from Benson and Mac and helped them up. Mac had a shrewd idea that the chief would never have been drowned down there; that he would have come out somehow without aid. But it would have been unkind to mention it in Wilson’s hearing. Cole was too tickled with himself for having come to the aid of The Avenger.

“Thanks, Cole,” said Dick. And Wilson flushed with pleasure. This was rare praise, just the thanks.

“What are ye talking about—one with a red mustache?” said Mac, stumbling through the water to the stairs with the circulation slowly coming back to his cramped limbs.

“Some of the gang who put you down here were on duty up above,” said Wilson. “Guess they were going to make sure the water got you, and then float your bodies down the river so it would look like natural death from drowning. I had to tangle with them. I hit one too hard—a fellow with a red mustache and a scar under his left ear. I was kind of sorry about it till I saw what they’d done to you.”

Wilson looked rather apprehensively at The Avenger, but Dick Benson said nothing. He himself never took life if it could be avoided; but if an aide, in the thick of battle, happened to strike too hard, that was one crook less and it couldn’t be helped.

“How many of them were there?” said Mac.

“Only four,” said Cole with a shrug.

“Child’s play,” said Mac solemnly.

Meanwhile, Dick was looking around with those pale, clear eyes of his. Those eyes were like microscopes when the occasion demanded, or as telescopic as a hawk’s eyes when there was distance to pry into. He picked something up off the water.

It was a match folder, empty, crumpled in an impatient hand when the owner of the hand started to light a cigarette and found no matches there. On the folder was an advertisement for the Pair-O’-Dice Café. The folder claimed it to be fifty minutes from Times Square, dine and dance, fine food, fine music.

“Someone in the gang searched us carefuly,” said The Avenger, his calm, pale gaze on the sodden folder. “They got the three gold crowns from me.”

Mac exclaimed in dismay and anger.

“We must get them back,” said Dick. He held out the folder. “Whoever dropped this folder might have gotten it at the café mentioned, and hence be able to be traced through it. Or he may have picked it up somewhere else, in which case it would be a blind alley. But I want you two, and Smitty, to try it and see. Go to the Pair-O’-Dice Café and look around. I have another job to do.”

Obedience without question to command. That was the watchword of The Avenger’s compact little crime-fighting crew. No word on the subject was ever mentioned; the obedience was simply there. Dick Benson was a born leader.

The two went out of the warehouse with Benson, called the nearest cop, and put him in charge of the four men who had been surprised up in the warehouse by Cole. One dead; three still unconscious.

It was a move that The Avenger felt somberly was useless. He had long ago learned that the hirelings in the battles he waged against supercrime had a curious immunity. Jail them, and almost invariably their powerful, hidden leaders had them sprung.

Often, Dick didn’t even bother to turn the underlings over to the law. He vanquished them in the pursuit of whatever object he had in mind at the moment, and went on till the leader was found and bottled up.
Then
the underlings found themselves abruptly in a trap from which there was no escape, and they paid the penalty.

Benson had said he had a job to do. The job was to have a little talk with one of New York’s thousands of dentists.

A look through the city directory had disclosed to The Avenger that there was a dentist in the small building in which was also Markham Farquar’s office. The dentist’s name was Dr. Alonzo Louis. Dick wanted to ask him if he knew anything about three gold crowns that had apparently been in Smathers’s mouth.

As it was after regular office hours, Dick first phoned the residence number under Louis’s name in the phone book. It was a hotel, he discovered, on dialing that number.

“Dr. Alonzo Louis? No, sir. He isn’t in.”

“When do you expect him back?” asked The Avenger. Even over the phone, his voice had such authority that it roused the receiver to extra activity.

“Just a moment, please.”

There was silence, then the almost mechanical voice of the hotel switchboard operator. “Dr. Louis left no word at the desk, but he is away on a trip. He has not been in for two days.”

“He left a forwarding address?” asked The Avenger.

“No, sir. Do you wish to leave a message?”

Dick said he didn’t and hung up. Louis, away on a trip. It had an ominous sound. Either the man had fled guiltily or else—

Benson rolled the powerful coupé that was his personal car toward the building in the Fifties where Farquar had his office. He stopped down the block; The Avenger rarely went directly to a goal, even when he had no reason to think danger might lurk nearby.

A bit of his marvelous blending with shadows, people, and objects, and he was at the building door. And no one not watching hard for it would have noticed his approach.

He jammed the lock with a hard twist of his tremendously powerful fingers, heard a strained click, and opened the door. It had taken no more time than opening it with a key; a watcher would have been sure he belonged in the place and had an office there.

Dr. Louis’s office was on the first floor in the rear, to the right, down the hall. The Avenger walked toward it.

Dick Benson had made his first fortune in the wilds of back-country Australia. He had made more fortunes in Borneo, China, South America, and Africa. Always in the wild places; the deadly places.

He had trained his reflexes and instincts till he could fairly smell danger.

Now, in the dark hall, with his body outlined dimly against the glass in the street door behind him, Dick suddenly leaped to the left and forward, sliding like a ball player for home.

He couldn’t have said why. He really didn’t know why.

He suddenly knew there was danger and acted! That was all.

The move saved his life.

Before he had quite hit the floor in his long slide, there was the muffled report of a shot from a silenced weapon, and then a
spang
as the bullet hit the bronze frame around the glass of the street door.

The slide took Benson fifteen feet down the smooth marble of the floor, and he was up before the momentum had stopped. Up and leaping along the hall toward a rear window, high up from the floor. He could see that the window was open and could also see a human form scrambling frantically to get through it and out.

The Avenger got there just in time to catch the tail of the figure’s coat as it slid outside. That would have been enough if the coat had held. But it didn’t.

There was a sharp ripping of fabric, and Benson staggered backward from the force of his pull. There was a whole side of a coat in his steely hands—but there was nothing in the window.

He jumped to it and started to swing over. A bullet smacked the brickwork within two inches of his head. There were running steps as he ducked back in, and then the sound of a car.

With no emotion on his face, Benson turned from the window. The chase was over, with the sound of the car. He turned his flashlight on the piece of coat.

It was the left side of the garment, containing the inner pocket. And in this inner pocket something crackled. Benson took it out.

It was a plain envelope, empty, of the size to take a standard letterhead, folded lengthwise.

It was an envelope similar to that from the Beall Paper Co. which Smathers had taken to his death.

Benson didn’t go to the door of Dr. Louis then. He went up to Farquar’s office first. And he took the stairs three at a time.

He opened the door, pale eyes glittering at the discovery that it was not locked. He stepped in and took just one look at the floor in front of the entrance. Then he stepped to the phone.

On the floor were ragged spots of dried blood.

He called the lawyer’s home. A worried-sounding servant said that Mr. Farquar hadn’t been home since he left for the office that morning. And the man’s tone implied that the household had tried to reach Farquar at various places and couldn’t locate him.

Benson went back to the door, looking at the spots of grim reddish-brown, and returned to the first floor and the door of Dr. Louis.

This was not unlocked. It was barred securely. So securely that it took him about six minutes to pick the double barrier. Then he walked in, his flashlight ray stabbing the darkness.

The first thing the beam spotlighted was a face. A face, however, on the floor, instead of being up where a face should be.

The face was hideously contorted, dark, like a mask of horror. The lips were slackly open and the eyes glared. But the eyes did not see anything, for they were dead eyes in a dead face.

The corpse was clad in the white of a professional man. It was Louis; fixed so that no one would ever interview him.

Beside the dead dentist lay a small, oddly shaped hammer with blood on it where it had bitten through the skull. It was the type of little mallet used in oral surgery with a bone-cutting chisel, in major operations.

The Avenger looked at the desk clock. It had run down. He examined the coagulated blood on the skull. Long dried. He tentatively flexed a dead leg. It moved easily; had already reached rigor mortis and passed into limpness again, hours ago.

Dr. Louis had been dead several days.

Benson searched the place. His deftness made a thorough search of a room possible in a few minutes. At the end of this particular few minutes he had found no tangible clue.

He had failed to find something that should have been there and wasn’t.

Benson was, perhaps, as brilliant in oral surgery and advanced dentistry as he was in general medical practice. So a glance at the cabinet in which Louis had kept his equipment had told his trained brain what was missing.

A pair of forceps—the next-largest of the line of many forceps, all a little different from the rest for separate purposes. The forceps he had found at the freight-yard fence—and lost again to the men who had thrown him in front of a train to be ground to pieces—had come from this office.

The Avenger had looked particularly for the usual appointment calendar kept by doctors and dentists, in order to see if Smathers’s name was on it. But there had been no such patients’ list. It had been taken by the murderer.

The Avenger dialed police headquarters, his pale eyes meanwhile resting enigmatically on the dead man’s twisted face.

If the Pair-O’-Dice Café was fifty minutes from Times Square, then Smitty, the giant decided, was a monkey’s great-aunt.

It took Smitty, in one of The Avenger’s fastest cars and driving as The Avenger’s aides always drove, fifty-eight minutes to get there. Which meant about an hour and three quarters for the average motorist.

The roadhouse was about sixty miles from town, in a part of New York State curiously wild-looking and sparse of inhabitants when you remembered the metropolis was so comparatively close. There are parts of the State like that—unbelievably back-country, though within driving range of millions of urbanites.

The Pair-O’-Dice was not an impressive-looking place.

It was a three-story structure about as big as a large six-room house, covered with rough slabs on the outside to resemble a log cabin and not doing a very good job of imitating. Woods surrounded it on three sides and picked up again across the smooth highway on which it squatted.