The Avenger 7 - Stockholders in Death (5 page)

Luckow pressed a buzzer on his desk.

“I think we have something there, kid,” he said softly. “This guy, Haskell, may have a few things he’d like to talk about—if he’s approached the right way.”

Tim, the man who looked like a mean cat with a grouch against the whole world, padded in in answer to the desk buzzer.

“Tim, get Blinky and go with Tom here. Tom’ll show you where. There’s a guy he knows who may have something to say that we’d like to hear. Tom’ll do the questioning. You and Blinky will do the work of loosening his tongue.”

For an instant, faint apprehension came over Tom’s face. He had tied in with a tough gang just because they were tough; he had tough work ahead of him. But the sinister overtones in Luckow’s voice as he spoke of “loosening” Haskell’s tongue sent a chill to Tom’s spine.

He snapped out of that momentary weakness, though. His father had been robbed of his fortune and murdered. Anything that happened to men who could do things like that—anything—would be better than they deserved.

“You’re going with us, aren’t you?” he said to Nick Luckow.

The mob leader smiled a little, softly, dangerously. It had been some time since he went with his boys on a job. He preferred to let others take their chances with New York’s excellent cops.

“I’ll stay here,” he said. “I got some thinking to do. Luck to you, kid.”

Tom and the two called Tim and Blinky went out to a sedan parked in front of the hotel.

“So?” said Tim softly, at the wheel.

Tom gave the address of Harry Haskell, his father’s broker.

Haskell lived in a rather small penthouse on Riverside Drive. When the car pulled up to the building, Tim and Blinky hung back at the door.

“You go in, kid,” said Tim smoothly. “You know the ropes in these joints and you look slicker than we do. Get the guy in the lobby to look another way and we’ll catch up to you at the elevators.”

Tom went in. No one so easy to fool as a wise guy.

“To see Mr. Haskell,” he said, at the lobby desk.

“Just a moment, please,” the night man said.

He turned to a house phone. And as he turned, like twin shadows, the two Luckow men left the doorway and slid past his back to the automatic elevators.

The night man turned back to Tom.

“Mr. Haskell says it’s too late to see anybody. He is ready to retire.”

“Say it’s about Ballandale,” said Tom.

The night man nodded as he turned from the instrument a second time. “He’ll see you. Twenty-first floor. Penthouse.”

Tom got in the cage where Blinky and Tim were pressed to one side, out of the night man’s sight. He pushed the button for the 21st floor.

Tom’s heart was thudding hard as they went up. He was leaving the straight road entirely, now. No one knew that any better than he did. Haskell wouldn’t talk short of torture.

Well, let it come. The end justified the means. If he could turn up his father’s murderer this way—

The door was opened the instant Tom knocked. A wary, slightly frightened face peered out. The face of Haskell, himself, not a servant. The mention of Ballandale had upset him and made him secretive, all right.

“Crimm! I don’t understand, this is—”

Haskell tried to shut the door when he saw the two men behind Tom Crimm. But Blinky shouldered it open and took a gun carelessly from his pocket as he entered.

“This the guy, kid?” he asked, staring at the broker, a shivering, scrawny man in a violet dressing robe.

“That’s him,” said Tom.

Blinky’s fist flashed out. It got Haskell on the point of the jaw.

Blinky lowered the man to the carpet. Then, methodically, he went from door to door of the living room and locked each. No telling where the servants were.

He went back to Haskell, picked him up and deposited him in an easy-chair. Then he tied him to the chair, and slapped his face, hard. Tom watched with burning eyes. This man knew something of that stock.

Haskell’s eyelids fluttered under the slapping. He opened his eyes and cowered in the chair as much as his bonds would allow.

“Crimm!” he said. “What is the meaning of this? You, the son of my old friend, actually allow this brutality to be inflicted on—”

“That ain’t all he’ll allow, if you don’t sing,” said Blinky, lighting a cigarette.

“Sing?” repeated Haskell, seeming to withdraw into the loose folds of his violet bathrobe.

“Squeal, blow your top, talk,” explained Blinky.

“Talk? But about what?”

“Listen,” said Tom, voice edged like a knife. “You know all about Dad’s purchase of Ballandale stock, don’t you?”

Haskell was suddenly very still. His eyes seemed to retreat far back into his head, on the run from two terrors: this that confronted him and some other fear.

“You had that stock delivered to Dad’s bank instead of to his house, didn’t you?” Tom rapped out. “And yet, he ordered the home delivery. Now, you’ll tell us why you did that. Whose order were you obeying?”

Haskell looked at Blinky as if for help. Blinky grinned almost happily, and took the glowing cigarette from his lips.

“You ain’t got any idea how these things can hurt,” he said, eyes glittering in anticipation.

“Crimm!” moaned the broker. “For heaven’s sake—”

“Speak up!” said Tom grimly. “Who told you to send that stock to Dad’s bank instead—”

Haskell coughed and sagged forward in his bonds. His head rolled on his chest and his tongue hung out a little.

From his chest, a thin stream of red suddenly appeared! It was like magic. Horrible magic!

“Haskell,” said Tom almost stupidly. “Haskell—” Blinky grabbed Tom by the shoulder. “Come on! Scram! Quick!”

“But Haskell—” faltered Tom.

“The guy’s dead! Don’t you know a dead man when you see one? Some ape got him from the door. Silenced gun.”

“Then we ought to get the one who—”

“To hell with the one who got him. We got us to think about. Scram outta here, I tell you! We’ll take it if the cops—”

He and Tim were pulling young Crimm with them as he spoke. Into the elevator. Down to the lobby.

As they stepped into the cage, they heard a door click smoothly shut, far below. The man who had killed Haskell with a silenced gun had made good his escape in another elevator. He’d been so fast, they couldn’t have caught up with him even if Blinky and Tim had wanted to try. Which they hadn’t.

They emerged into the lobby. There was a big urn by the elevator shafts with sand in the top for cigar and cigarette butts.

Blinky picked this up and threw it! The night man, just starting to turn at the sound of the cage door, was on the receiving end. The urn caught him in the face. He went down like a felled ox.

They got to the car unseen. But that fact ceased to comfort Tom a little later, at Luckow’s headquarters.

The police band was tuned in on the mobster’s radio. A voice announced:

“Calling all cars. Wanted, Thomas Crimm. Age, twenty-six. Height, five feet nine and a half. Complexion, dark. Dressed in brown suit and brown felt hat. Last seen near the Trimore Palace Apartments. All cars. Wanted, Thomas Crimm, Age, twenty-six. Height—”

Shivering, Tom snapped off the thing. He hadn’t quite realized how definitely the night man at the building could identify him.

Just him. Not Blinky and Tim. For he had done all the talking. And, of course, he hadn’t anticipated the intrusion of another party with a silenced gun.

Wanted, Thomas Crimm. Wanted for murder, of course. The police don’t delineate murder any more on the air; too many people can listen and speed excitedly to whatever address is given. But that’s what they wanted him for, all right. Murder!

Luckow’s hand touched Tom’s shoulder for an instant.

“Tough, kid. But you stick with us. We’ll keep you under blankets.”

Blinky and Tim left the room to hide their smirks. They were clear out of this, due to a speck of foresight in having Tom do the entering. They’d done that just in case. Just in case—

Others heard that police broadcast. One was Theodore Maisley, president of Town Bank.

Maisley was driving home in his big coupé. He lived out of New York, on the Jersey side, up along the Palisades. He scarcely saw the familiar road along the cliff edge, with the Hudson far below. The car almost drove itself.

He was listening to the broadcast with terror that was actually a pain in his chest. He seldom had the police wave length tuned in. But of late he’d had it on a lot, listening in a sort of fearful fascination. Wasn’t he, too, a criminal?

Maisley was not of the stripe that makes a good crook. He had too many scruples left. He wanted a lot of money, greedily. But after the prospect of ill-gained millions was presented, the crooked part of it appalled him.

“Young Crimm, wanted for murder,” he whispered to himself, swinging the coupé around a curve in the winding cliff road. The address, Trimore Palace Apartments, had given it all away to Maisley. That was where Haskell lived.

“He went there to make Haskell talk,” Maisley whispered on. “It must have been that way. And Haskell was dead when he came, probably. Or killed right after. To keep him quiet. First Crimm, then Haskell. Two murders!”

He braked a little as he approached an exceptionally sharp curve. It was a very bad one. The cliff, there, was rather grimly called Suicide Heights because of its sheer long drop to sharp rocks, below.

“I don’t believe Tom Crimm did it,” Maisley whispered. “I don’t think he killed Haskell. But he’ll burn for it just the same. They framed him! Two men dead and a third framed for murder.”

He stared blindly at the approaching curve.

“I can’t stand that kind of thing. I won’t stand it. I’m going to police headquarters first thing in the morning and tell everything I know. I don’t care what they do to me—”

Maisley swung his coupé halfway around the curve—and screamed!

Two cars abreast were thundering toward him around the far side of the curve. He could see the two sets of headlights, horrifyingly close, coming at mad speed.

There was a pair of ordinary headlights and beside it, to the right, a pair of yellow, moonlike foglights whose amber glare many people prefer to the standard beam of regular lamps.

Some fool was passing another car on that sharp curve! And now two cars swept toward Maisley’s coupé at fifty miles an hour or better!

The bank president screamed again and swerved the coupé hard right. He might, just possibly, miss the two cars roaring toward him.

He wrenched left, but it was too late!

There was a railing along the roadside, but the coupé had nosed through with that hard right swing. A front wheel dropped over. A giant couldn’t have swung the car back onto the road, now.

The coupé kept on going all the way over the edge, falling end over end in thin air.

The two sets of headlights swept callously on toward the George Washington Bridge, with no attempt to stop and see what had happened to the man in the coupé. Though of course you’d know what would happen at the end of that long fall.

The Avenger had heard that grim police broadcast, too. But even before the broadcast, he had seen the news of the murder of Haskell and suspicion against Tom Crimm flash on his private teletype. And so, for the second time in only a few hours, he moved to help Tom.

He had to get the young fellow out of the clutches of Nicky Luckow. It was more necessary, now, with the police after him, than ever.

This time The Avenger didn’t go to the Jeff Hotel. That was Luckow’s known hangout. And there was just a chance that Tom might be connected with Luckow, and the hotel searched by the police. Luckow would figure it that way, too; so he’d have Tom lying low somewhere else.

The most logical place, thought The Avenger, whose brain was a great filing cabinet of all the crooks in New York and their habits and haunts, would be the Brooklyn Bird.

That semi-fashionable night club was owned by Luckow, though very few knew it. Luckow went in for night stuff. He owned the Bird outright, had a half interest with another racketeer in several roadhouses and had money in several burlesque theaters.

But the Bird was the best bet. So Benson went to Brooklyn.