The Avenger 7 - Stockholders in Death (4 page)

“Hey—” began the rat-eyed boy at the controls.

He stopped as the pale and awful eyes bored into his own.

“Luckow’s floor,” The Avenger said to the elevator operator.

“It’s f-five,” said the boy.

He stopped. There was something about the icy glare in those eyes that robbed his will of the ability to lie. Anyhow, Luckow had enough rodmen around to take care of any one man—even one like this. So he didn’t see why he should risk his skin to conceal the floor on which the mob leader had his office.

“Two!” he corrected himself, sending the cage upward as he spoke.

He was almost smiling when he opened the elevator door on the second floor. Luckow’s men would take care of this smart ape with the snow-white hair and the dead pan and the white-steel eyes.

As Benson came out of the cage, a man in the hall turned idly; then he stiffened as he saw a stranger. His gun came out with a swiftness of draw that would have compared with the draw of the old Western gun-fighters.

But it wasn’t fast enough.

The Avenger had taken one step from the cage door. It was an easy, flowing motion, but it was actually so swift that it made the moves of the hall guard seem like those in a moving picture retarded ten times.

Benson’s fist flashed up. It caught the wrist behind the gun. The automatic spun up, butt over muzzle, while the man watched with gaping jaws.

The Avenger caught the gun expertly, while the guard rubbed his wrist and wondered if the bone were broken. Benson whirled toward the cage.

The operator had his hand at the back of his neck, where a knife was snuggled under his collar. At the glare in the pale eyes, he slowly took his hand away, trying unconvincingly to smile. And with a shaky whistle to show that he was really the most harmless fellow alive, he shut the cage door and started back toward the lobby.

“I want to see Luckow,” said Benson.

His voice was quiet. There was no more emotion in it than there was in his dead, still face. The guard stopped rubbing his wrist as he began to realize who this man was. He had heard tales, too. He was willing to believe all of them, now. Any guy with guts enough to come here, alone—

He did not realize, of course, nor did the world at large, that the guts of Richard Henry Benson came not from ordinary courage, but from a sort of supercourage springing from the fact that he didn’t care whether he lived or not.

Some day, he knew, he was going to die in a brush with professional killers. But he was entirely indifferent to that prospect. The sooner he died, the sooner he would be united with wife and daughter again.

A man who genuinely doesn’t care whether he dies or lives, can do almost impossible things.

“Well,” Benson said, still not raising his voice and yet getting a whiplash effect from it, “show me to Luckow.”

“O.K., pal,” said the man.

He started down the hall.

The office was at the front end. The path lay past several open doors; one of them was No. 236. As The Avenger went past this, his quick eyes noticed that it was open an inch and also noted a man within.

The man was walking slowly up and down the room, face twisted with rage and anger. He did not look like the type usually to be found here.

Benson stopped, and swung the door farther open.

“On second thought,” he said to the man with the injured wrist, “I won’t see Luckow. Not yet, anyway. I’ll stop in here first.”

“Want me to come in, too?” said the man, resigned to being held a prisoner so that he couldn’t give the alarm.

“No! Stay out.”

The man’s mouth hung open in surprise. This human hurricane with the steely eyes and the white hair was, in effect, giving him a free hand to call as many pals as he pleased.

He acted in a hurry, running toward the front of the hall where Luckow sat in his office.

Benson shut the door and turned to Tom, who was staring in surprise. The Avenger knew that a lot of alarms had already been given. One more, by the hall guard, wouldn’t matter much.

“You’re Tom Crimm, of course,” he said smoothly, eyes cold and calm and impersonal.

“Yes. I—”

“And you have come to this gang for help in your father’s death. I don’t blame you. The idea, on the surface, would seem to have merit. But, believe me, it is the wrong way to go about it. There is danger that—”

“I get you now,” said Tom, staring fixedly. “You’re this Avenger guy Wayne talked about.”

“Some call me that,” said Benson. “Please, there is little time—”

“And Wayne sent you to pick me up,” said Tom, getting louder of tone. “Sent you out like a nursemaid, to take me home and wipe my little nose for me. Well, I can wipe my own nose.”

The chill, pale eyes daunted Tom; but he kept on, working himself up into a fury.

“What’s your racket, anyhow? Everybody’s got one. So what’s yours? Think you can get all my father’s money, if you recover it? This stuff of working just to help people in distress is the bunk. I don’t believe it for a minute.”

“I knew you had sense, the first time I saw you,” a voice purred from the doorway.

Tom and The Avenger turned. Nicky Luckow was coming in on padded, soundless feet, like a great cat. His dull eyes turned on Benson.

“I’ve heard of you,” he said. “I have the same ideas as Tom, here. What’s your racket, pal? Why the sympathy for the underdog?”

“I don’t believe you’d care to hear about that,” said Benson, eyes like ice chips, face as emotionless as the face of the moon. He had lost! He’d known it the moment he looked into Tom’s cynical, dark eyes, and noted the wise sneer on his lips when he spoke of rackets.

There were steps in the hall. A lot of steps. Nicky Luckow’s hand slid from his coat pocket. There was a belly gun in it—a squat, small thing designed to blow a man’s abdomen into a streaming red crater.

“The boys will be glad to hear anything you’d care to say about anything,” purred Luckow. “They’ll be glad—”

There were at least a dozen men in the corridor. The many steps told that. And there the mob leader stood, to hold The Avenger at gunpoint till the gang could get in here. Benson shrugged. His stainless steel chips of eyes reflected on the odds coming to face him, and in their cold depths was a calm decision that it was too much trouble to deal with them.

Benson’s foot flashed up and out.

The Avenger had learned about all the arts of fighting, both officially and defensively, that there were. One was
la savate,
originating in Paris among the Apaches.

Luckow had been warily watching the pale and deadly eyes; so the movement of Benson’s foot didn’t catch his vision till it was almost to his waist. And then there wasn’t time to do anything about it.

The toe of Benson’s shoe cracked on his wrist, and the runt weapon spanged against the far wall. Luckow snarled, and leaped.

Benson’s fist went out. It didn’t seem to travel more than four or five inches. But Luckow stopped as if he had banged into a stone wall. Stopped, and sagged to the floor.

The Avenger went to the window.

“I’d appreciate it if you would visit me. Bleek Street is the address,” he said to Tom Crimm.

Tom’s sneer was shaken, but it was still in place on his lips. And the skepticism was undiminished in his eyes.

Benson opened the window. Down in the street, a few people stared up at the sound of the window’s opening. More stared swiftly, when a man with a white, dead face and snow-white but virile hair dropped from that window like a trained acrobat, lighting like a feather on the sidewalk.

The Avenger drove away with his pale eyes somber. He lived only to fight crime—and to help people threatened by crime’s clutches. But it’s difficult to help a person who refuses to be helped.

Benson had a stop to make before going back to Bleek Street. He went to the Crimm home, near the East River. He located the scene where a mad car had charged again and again at a sick, elderly man.

There were only few faint traces of tire tracks around there. Walking people had obliterated most of them. But one short length provided something interesting.

It would seem that the automobile that had chased Joseph Crimm had a distinctive peculiarity about its right rear tire.

There was a deep V-cut in that tire, according to the bit of track left.

CHAPTER IV
Wanted—For Murder

The night after Joseph Crimm died, at almost the same late hour there was a light in the solid stone building of the Town Bank, on upper Broadway.

The light was in the small conference room. It illuminated five men, huddled around a big oval table at one end. The men talked in whispers to be sure the night guard—even though he was a floor below and many feet to the rear—could not catch even a syllable.

“We’ve got to give this thing up!” insisted one man. He almost whimpered it. He was horribly frightened and did not trouble to hide it. Fear rode high in his spectacled blue eyes. Fear distorted his lean, long-nosed face and made his pudgy body tremble.

The man was Theodore Maisley, president of the bank. The person he was addressing most directly was Lucius Grand, one of the directors.

Lucius Grand was tall and broad-shouldered, and had a jaw like a snowplow. He had stony eyes, too, which were not being softened any as they turned on Maisley.

“Get hold of yourself, Maisley,” he said, with contempt in his voice. “Everything is going fine. There’s nothing to worry about.”

The three other directors nodded agreement with Grand.

The three were Robert Rath, Louis Wallach and Frederick Birch. Rath was pompous and plump and loud-spoken. Wallach was thin and a little stooped, with the face of a deacon and a voice so soft it was almost a whisper. Birch was choleric and red-faced, but with a sort of emptiness in his blurry gray eyes which indicated that behind all the bluster was a wide streak of yellow.

“I tell you we’re heading into terrible trouble,” bleated Maisley, the president. “We’ve got to give it up.”

“What would you suggest that we do, Maisley?” asked Wallach in his soft, near-whisper. He rubbed his thin, dry hands together like a bishop about to pronounce benediction.

Maisley fearfully outlined his ideas of what they should do.

“We ought to burn that damned stock. If it’s ever found in our possession we’ll get jail for life. Maybe the electric chair! Don’t forget Joe Crimm.”

“Burn the stock?” It was a maddened bellow from Grand.

“Ssh,” said Wallach quickly. “Ssh! The bank guard—”

“Burn the stock?” Grand said in a lower tone. “Are you crazy?”

“But Crimm—”

“Is dead,” said choleric, red-faced Birch, voice as blustering in its carefully low-pitched tone as if he had shouted. “And he died naturally. Don’t forget that. A heart attack. They don’t put people in the electric chair for a heart attack.”

“The stolen stock, though,” Maisley persisted, wiping sweat from his forehead. “That’s grand larceny. Damned grand—$2,380,000 worth.”

“That will be taken care of,” said plump and pompous Rath. “Joseph Crimm was taken care of, wasn’t he? Well, this will be taken care of, too. All we have to do is—”

“You all seem to forget that there is a very weak point,” interrupted Maisley. “Crimm ordered the stock delivered to his home. You know that, don’t you? He was specific about it. Sent a note in his own handwriting to his broker. Instead of that, the broker, Haskell, deliberately delivered the stock to the bank, as we had ordered. Now, Haskell is a weak spot. If he ever talks—”

“He won’t talk,” whispered Wallach, rubbing his thin hands together. “That, also, will be attended to. You’ll see.”

“I’m against this,” persisted Maisley. “My vote is to drop the whole matter. Millions from the eventual sale of the stock? More millions from voting control of Ballandale Glass? What of it? The millions won’t do you any good if we get tripped up. Out-and-out crime like this—”

His voice died uncertainly at the look in the eyes of Grand and Wallach and Rath.

Maisley, with shreds of honesty still clinging to his petty soul, was in a bad spot. He was afraid of what might grow out of all this. But he was afraid of his associates, too.

Theodore Maisley, president of Town Bank, was not the only one to whom the weak spot in the crime plan was apparent. There were others thinking along that line. Right at the moment, in fact.

The Avenger had said that Nicky Luckow, Public Enemy No. 1 in the East, was smart in an animal sort of way. And he was correct.

Luckow’s eyes, like dully polished stones, were duller than usual as, for the fourth time, he went over what Tom Crimm had told him.

“Funny,” he said, “that your dad would have the stock sent to the bank when it was the bank he was thinking of fighting. If he didn’t trust ’em why’d he let the stuff get near enough for ’em to sink their hooks in it?”

“He says he didn’t,” said Tom. “He says he ordered the stock delivered to his home.”

“And it was sent to the bank instead,” mused Luckow. “Who’d be the guy to send it out?”

“Dad did business through the firm of Haskell, Lampert & Klein, on the New York Exchange. Particularly through Haskell, I guess. Probably it was Haskell who sent out the Ballandale Corp. stock.”

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