The Avenger 14 - Three Gold Crowns (5 page)

While Nellie was thinking this over and drawing the inevitable conclusions, a man came from the street door. The man wasn’t hurrying or acting suspiciously. The fact that Nellie couldn’t see him very clearly and that he was more an unidentifiable shadow than a man was due to the dimness of the street lighting around that particular entrance.

A hunch tingled along Nellie’s spine that this man ought to be trailed. And the hunch grew when the next few minutes showed no more glints of flashlights in that third-floor window.

But by the time she was sure of it, the man was out of sight. And, anyhow, she had been told to prowl the office of Markham Farquar; she couldn’t do two things at once.

She sighed and went to the building. She didn’t feel like taking time, now, to try to phone Farquar again. So she turned burglar to the extent of picking the lock of the building door and sliding in. Any of The Avenger’s aides could make locks do tricks.

There was a lobby that was really no more than a wide hall, a stairway, and an automatic elevator. Also, next to the elevator, there was a small building directory.

There were only twelve names on it—four tenants for each of the three floors. And Markham Farquar’s office, as she’d surmised, was third floor front.

The office in which that light had showed.

Nellie went up the stairs as soundlessly as a pretty ghost. The lock on Farquar’s door yielded to her touch, too. She went inside, with her own flash working, now. But this time light didn’t show at the window, if anyone had been outside to watch. Nellie was either more careful or more skillful than whoever had been in here before her.

Looking around, she was puzzled. It was almost certain that
someone
had been in here, searching, just a minute ago. But the place didn’t look it. Everything was perfectly in order.

She began poking around, looking for a possible indication as to the place Smathers had gone three nights ago. The chances were that no such thing was around here to be found. If even Farquar didn’t know where his clerk had gone, it was pretty certain that no hint existed in the office.

There were two rooms to the suite. A big office, the luxurious fittings of which showed that it was Farquar’s own, and a big law-library room with a desk in it that must have belonged to Smathers.

Nellie went to this desk and looked through the drawers. She flipped through names on a phone pad—all names of large, well-known companies. And then she noticed that the big desk blotter was brand-new and clean.

She lifted it, and the old blotter was underneath. She played her light close to it, with a hunch that she was getting warm.

There were many blotted ink lines on it—so many that they were like a bunch of hen tracks. It would have taken all night to decipher them and try to pick one or two full words out. But there was also something that caught the little blonde’s sharp eyes at once.

Slight, regular depressions in the blotter, that crisscrossed over the hen tracks, in a way showing that they had been made later than the tracks.

Nellie took a little tube from her purse, opened the end, and made sprinkling motions. Powdered graphite sprayed over the slight marks. Then she tilted the blotter pad, and the graphite filled them in.

Now she was definitely alert. It began to look as if she’d come out of this with something after all.

Smathers, or someone at Smathers’s desk, had recently penciled an address. The pencil had borne down heavily enough to mark the blotter underneath.

The powder showed a full address, and part of a name. The name was A . . . I . . . ail. That was all she could make out—

Nellie suddenly snapped off the light and sank behind the desk. Her quick ears had caught a sound at the hall door. And in a minute, in the gloom, she saw the door opening!

A man came in, so shrouded in darkness that she saw only a big moving blur.

To repeat, Nellie had felt quite peaceful when she set out that evening. But she was annoyed at the popularity of this office. You’d think it was the Grand Central Terminal. This was the third prowler to enter in the space of a half-hour, counting herself.

She waited behind the desk only till the moving shadow was within reach—then she reached it!

Burly gunmen had been reached by Nellie’s small, white hands. And they had regretted it. This man regretted it, too.

A startled grunt came from his unseen lips. He struck out wildly, a blow that would have knocked Nellie’s blonde head half off her shoulders if it had landed.

But it didn’t land. Instead, she caught the wrist behind the clenched hand, bent her shapely back a bit, and hauled forward, and the man made a neat pinwheel over her shoulders. He was so enthusiastic about it that his feet knocked a bulb out of the chandelier on their way.

The building seemed to jar when he hit; and Nellie, who knew the results of that particular throw, turned her back to him calmly and went to the door. There she turned on the lights.

A bulky man in a shapeless gray suit, with a smashed straw hat on his head, sprawled feebly on the floor and looked at her with glazed eyes. Nellie picked up the phone and called the police.

“Hey!” the man said thickly, making an effort to get up and sinking dizzily back again. “This is no place for cops. I’m a private detective. I got a right to be here.”

“You have a search warrant, of course?” said Nellie.

The man bit his lip and glowered. His hand darted for his shoulder, and sank back again as Nellie came up with a trim, small automatic.

“All right, so you call the cops,” he grunted. “What are you doing here? Are you Farquar’s sister or something?”

“You never can tell,” said Nellie sweetly.

And then the police came. And, surprisingly, the man had told the truth. He was a private detective. One of the cops knew him. The cops knew Nellie, too, when she identified herself as working for Dick Benson. And it was a commentary on The Avenger’s power that they hauled the private dick off, for being where he had no apparent business to be, but not Nellie.

The man reverted to silence as he went. He refused to tell who he was working for or why he was here. He just went along with the police, glaring murder at Nellie on the way. So Nellie decided to follow at once the possible lead from the blotter rather than look around for more traces.

The address might mean nothing at all. It might have been pressed in there weeks ago—though Nellie didn’t think so, because the marks were too perfect. Anyway, she thought she’d look into it before searching further.

There was no way for her to know that the decision was a life-and-death matter; she just made it.

A dingy, apparently long-vacant frame house almost in pitch darkness between two bigger, newer buildings. The name could be filled out now! A.A. Ismail.

Nellie looked at the place and shivered. It was murderous-looking, all right; easy to believe that this was the last place Smathers had visited alive. Though, of course, the mention of it on his blotter in reversed letters didn’t prove definitely that he had come here—

Nellie gasped suddenly. Through a front window she had suddenly seen a warm, pinkish glow. Rather beautiful, in its way; but it sent her fingers flying at the door lock in double-quick time.

For that pinkish glow was the reflection of a beginning fire in the frame house. Fire! The place would go up like a matchbox if a fire got started.

She jammed the door open and leaped into the hall. No need to use her flash here. The fire was leaping incredibly high and fast. From a rear room. She ran there.

Great, frantic eyes glaring at her over a gag; bound wrists and ankles of a writhing body—a girl’s body.

Harriet Smith’s body!

And around the walls of the room, an almost solid ring of fire was crackling and sending off thick black smoke indicating kerosene.

Nellie’s hand ripped into her purse and came out with a half-dozen small gelatin pellets. She tossed these at the ring of fire, one at a time, as if tossing pennies at a crack.

The gelatin melted almost instantly in the heat, and the pellets released their contents: a new kind of smother gas turned out by the eminent chemical genius, MacMurdie, in his drugstore-laboratory. The fire turned a sick yellow, sputtered and went out.

Nellie unbound Harriet, and ripped the adhesive tape from her lips.

“You’ve saved my life,” gasped Harriet.

“Looks like it,” said Nellie. “What on earth are
you
doing here?”

But she didn’t wait for Harriet to answer. In the rosy glow from the fire, when she first leaped into the room, she had seen something that remained printed on her memory.

She went to it and picked it up. A long envelope, bulky with paper contents. She put it in the front of her dress—

Nellie was almost caught off guard.

She had assumed that whoever had started this fire had gone away from here as far and fast as possible, before the blaze should draw crowds and the fire department. But it seemed this was the wrong assumption. The fire starter had waited a block away for flame to billow up. When it hadn’t, he had returned to investigate, and he had brought a pal with him!

Harriet’s swift scream as she saw twin shadows glide through the doorway whirled Nellie around in time to get her hands up.

Her small arms were rigid as bars. The charging shape couldn’t change direction. The blur that was its face banged into the heels of her pretty palms. It was a notable straight-arm, and the shadow sat down with a most unshadowlike thump.

“Harriet!” Nellie called. “The door! Run!”

But Harriet couldn’t run because the other shadow had her in a fierce grip. So Nellie tended to that, too. Just a little maid of all work, she thought grimly, as she leaped.

She was on the back of this second man like a panther. He released Harriet, who streaked for the door, and turned his attention to Nellie.

He got her by the throat! But first her trained fingers had caught folds of flesh under his arms, high up.

It became an endurance test. But the man weakened first. The hold Nellie had found was excruciating torture.

Just as stars were beginning to explode behind her popping eyeballs, Nellie heard him groan and felt his grip slacken. Her hands drove up between his wrists, breaking his hold. Then she was at the door, moving like an uncoiling spring. She had felt a key in the lock when she entered. She flipped this around, heard banging on the locked door, and joined Harriet on the street.

“I won’t be able to swallow with comfort for a week,” she mused, feeling her sore throat and at the same time slipping a hand under Harriet’s shaky arm.

But she was well content. They’d be gone from there in her car before the men could break out. And they hadn’t gotten that envelope from her. It crackled reassuringly in the front of her dress.

Robert Beall had a rather magnificent home out on Long Island. It was set on an acre of ground, and the acre was mostly shrubbery and rare plants.

Which made it tough for Cole Wilson.

Wilson had picked up Beall’s trail at Salloway’s office on Mac’s radioed information of the conference there. He had followed Beall to his home, and lurked around here ever since.

Wilson had done an excellent job of trailing. In fact, it looked as if Wilson could do an excellent job with most anything. That was why he had been invited to join Benson’s little crime-fighting band.

Wilson was so fast with his compact muscles and so swift of brain that he had almost beaten The Avenger himself. So Benson had welcomed him as an aide.

But Cole Wilson was to find that all his powers were needed on this job!

It was just about dusk, and the thickly covered ground of the estate made his investigation difficult. A young army could slink around between those bushes, in this light, without being seen.

So Wilson decided to get closer.

He was sitting in his car a block away, under a drooping willow. He was leaning far back with his blazing black eyes almost closed. Anyone passing would think he had merely pulled up for a nap. Now he abandoned those tactics.

He got out of the car, moving swiftly, almost as compact and powerful a figure as The Avenger. He went toward the Beall place.

He pulled himself up and over the high iron fence, as quickly and easily as an athlete scaling parallel bars, and dropped on the other side.

He went toward the house.

Twice since he had been parked back there, he had done this. He had prowled the bushes; had even peered in cautiously through the windows. He had seen nothing. Beall had apparently just gone in—and buried himself. There hadn’t been a sign of the man, of a servant or anyone else.

Cole went through the procedure again, looking in all reachable windows, prowling through the shrubbery. It was nearly dark when he got around the house to the rear. And there he swiftly slunk back out of sight as he saw his first sign of life.

There was a four-car garage back there. And a man was at one of the doors.

The door was open. The man, in chauffeur’s rig, was bending over the hood with a watercan in his hand, filling the radiator. He didn’t see Wilson. And Wilson got out of there fast, back to his car.

It looked very much as if Beall, or somebody, was about to drive out, and his job was to follow if it was Beall.

Down the line was a big house with a “For Rent” sign on it. Wilson started his motor and rolled the car toward the driveway of that house. He intended to back in, and from there he could follow no matter which way a car from Beall’s place went. Where he’d been, he’d have had to take time to turn around, if the chauffeur had driven by him instead of away from him.

A methodical man, Wilson. And a good watcher. He could be morally sure that no one had entered the Beall estate since he’d been there.

What he couldn’t know, of course, was that there had been visitors
before
he got there. And that these visitors had heliographed a message to others, over four blocks away, before the sun went down.

Just before Wilson got to the driveway, he saw a light go on in an upper window, and then wink out again. His wary black eyes narrowed.