The Avenger 19 - Pictures of Death (8 page)

“That’s a beautiful Corot,” said Cole, staring at a famous picture on the wall. “Is it an original—”

He stopped. He still stared at the picture but, now, without seeing it. He didn’t move a finger.

This was because he knew that the thing pressing coldly against the back of his neck was a gun!

“Don’t try anything,” said the smiling girl it had been such a pleasure to meet, “or I’ll blow your head right off.”

To say that Cole was amazed at the pressure of that gun in his neck would have been a magnificent understatement. He was not only amazed, he was completely burned to a crisp. Here he had come to this place in the kindliest spirit, to see if anything had happened to Marsden and to offer his help if something had occurred, and he was met with the point of a gun.

“All right,” he snapped angrily, “what am I supposed to do now?”

“You’re supposed to keep a civil tongue in your head, for one thing,” Jessica Marsden snapped back. That reddish-brown hair indicated a temper.

“Would you kindly tell me, please,” Cole retorted sarcastically, “what is the big idea, if you don’t mind?”

“The idea is that Dad and I are sick of all this. Your gang has tried to break in here; they have tried to bribe our servants to let them in, till finally we had to dismiss the servants. They have tried to kidnap me and kidnap Dad. We’re not going to stand it any more.”

Cole instantly lost his anger, and became intensely alert. So something hot was going on here at the Marsden home! For the thousandth time, Cole marveled at the way The Avenger could smell out trouble.

He considered telling who he was and asking particulars. Then he had the second thought that if he didn’t identify himself, if he let the girl keep on thinking he was a crook, he might learn more from her.

Sober thought might have hinted that this was a foolish tiling to do, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

“I’m not part of any gang,” he protested. But he managed to look as guilty as a captured pickpocket as he said it.

“Oh, no?” Jessica could be sarcastic, too. Her slim right hand went lightly over Cole’s shoulders and sides. She came up with a pet weapon of his—a compressed air gun that would shoot a .22 pellet in which was some anaesthetic of MacMurdie’s invention. It could snap one of the pellets accurately up to eighty feet, there to crash the glass globule and release a gas that put a victim to sleep almost immediately.

“I suppose you came here to sell us a vacuum cleaner,” said Jessica, hefting the gun. “I suppose you get your signatures on the dotted line by the use of a revolver.”

“That’s not a real gun,” said Cole. “Here, I’ll show you how it works—”

“Keep your hands still!” Cole was abruptly silent as he felt the steel prod deeper into his neck. “Come on. We’ll go and see Dad. You wanted to see him, didn’t you?”

“Well—” mumbled Cole, still keeping up the guilty act.

He was marched to the stairs, up them and to a front bedroom. There he was confronted by a middle-aged man in a dressing gown who didn’t look well.

“Jess!” the man said. His similarity of features told that he was Marsden, her father. “What in the world—”

“Another of them, Dad,” said the girl bitterly. “So I thought we’d entertain this one. Show him real hospitality.”

Marsden’s dark eyes turned coldly on Cole. “You’ll never get it,” he said. “You understand? You and your band of cutthroats might as well understand that right now.”

“Get what?” fished Cole, keeping up the play by looking sullen.

“I think you know. ‘The Princess.’ Even if your gang overpowered my daughter and me and had this house to yourselves, you wouldn’t get it.”

Now Cole was arriving somewhere. So Marsden had bought a masterpiece, too. And he had been bothered after the purchase. Also, the painting—Cole had an idea that it might be Veriner’s portrait of the Russian Katrina, now known simply as Veriner’s “Princess”—was not in this house. Marsden had told him in so many words that it was concealed elsewhere.

Jessica seemed to realize that slip, too. She looked at her father sideways and said, “Careful, Dad.”

Marsden bit his lip. Then he looked inquiringly at his daughter. “Now that you have this bandit, what do you intend to do with him?”

“Keep him here,” said the girl.

“Keep him?”

“Yes. Here’s our position: We can’t go to the police about these attempted burglaries. We can’t shut ourselves in this house forever. So we’ll keep this man as hostage. If anything happens to either of us, or to the picture, it will be very, very bad for him.”

“Hey, that’s breaking the law,” said Cole.

“And what are you racketeers doing, I’d like to know?” demanded Jessica.

Cole thought it was time to quit the pretense. He smiled as ingratiatingly as possible, and said, “Look here, I’m no thug. I’m a member of Justice, Inc.,”

“Never heard of it,” said Jessica. But Marsden looked thoughtful.

“Justice, Inc.,” explained Cole, “is a small band that tries to help people who are in trouble in such a way that the normal police help is cut off from them. The man at the head of it is Richard Benson, often called The Avenger.”

“Never heard of him, either,” said Jessica indifferently.

But now Marsden stopped looking thoughtful and looked enraged.

“That settles it,” he ground out. “I’ve heard of Benson and of Justice, Inc. The Avenger heads a fine body of public-spirited citizens. When a hired killer like you tries to identify himself with a band like that, he deserves anything he gets. Take him to the wine cellar, Jess. He’ll not get out of there in a hurry.”

“Wait a minute!” said Cole. “I’m not kidding. I really am—”

“Shut up!” said the girl. “Turn around and go down the stairs again.”

“Look—that gun’ll go off if you don’t stop—”

“I’ll say it will go off. March!”

The wine cellar looked to Cole’s eyes like something designed to hold another Prisoner of Zenda. It was a basement room, concrete-walled, with one tiny barred window and with a door that would have resisted the battering of a tank. The lock could have ornamented a bank vault.

It was maddeningly humiliating. Cole was going to have to call for help on his tiny belt radio. Trapped by a girl and a middle-aged man in a dressing gown! Mac and Smitty and Nellie would kid him for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, he’d have to yell for aid—

“Wonder if you have any more weapons on you,” Jessica said, as he halted in the wine-cellar doorway.

With the gun trembling against his neck, Cole didn’t dare do more than breathe gently. The girl’s calm hand touched the hard small shield made by the radio.

“I don’t know what this is,” she said evenly, “but I’ll take no chances.”

“It’s nothing to hurt anybody,” said Cole, beginning to sweat. “It’s perfectly harmless—”

“Maybe so. Take it off and pass it back to me.”

“Now look here—”

The gun prodded harder. Cole felt the girl’s whole hand trembling from the strain of the moment. One tremble can twitch a trigger; and a man experienced with firearms is more terrified by an amateur’s trembling fingers than the steady hand of a veteran.

He dragged out the little radio. It was taken from his grudging hand. Then the door was slammed solidly on him, and he was alone with a lot of wine bottles and some very bitter and helpless thoughts.

“Gee, she’s a honey, though,” he said after a minute. “She has almost as much nerve as she has good looks. Which is quite some.”

Then he dismissed the thought of the girl and concentrated on trying to get out of his embarrassing predicament.

It was shortly to become a lot more than embarrassing.

At two o’clock in the afternoon Jessica Marsden brought Cole a tray of food, deftly balanced on her left hand, while she carried the gun in her right.

“It’s about time you fed a guy,” Cole grumbled. Then he grinned. He had a nice grin and knew it. He was handsome and knew that, too.

Neither did him any good.

“You’re lucky to get any food at all,” the girl said coldly. “I’m the cook, right now, and I don’t like to work for cutthroats.”

She started out, backing, her gun making a leap impossible on Cole’s part.

“Wait a minute, Miss Marsden. What’s your hurry? It’s lonesome down here.”

“That’s too bad.” Jessica started to shut the door.

“How long are you going to keep me here?”

“As long as your rotten crew molests my father,” she said stonily. “Months, if necessary. Though I hope not. We don’t like you.”

“I’ll get prison fever down here,” Cole complained. “These cold, damp concrete walls—”

She didn’t follow his gesture to the walls with her eyes. If she had, he would have risked a jump for the gun. The walls, incidentally, were quite dry and warm.

“Phone Richard Benson,” pleaded Cole. “That isn’t much to ask, is it? About two minutes could check my story that I work for The Avenger.”

Jess Marsden was silent a moment. Then she reluctantly admitted, “We did phone Mr. Benson. There was no answer.”

“Try him again and— What are you looking at?”

Her eyes snapped back to him. She’d been looking over his shoulder—which was still too much in his direction for him to try a break—and her face had lost some color.

Cole turned to look, too. The tiny barred window was behind him. He looked through the thick glass panes and saw what she had seen.

The legs of men on the lawn outside!

There were a lot of legs. Cole sorted them into eleven pairs. One pair was so thick they looked like twin tree trunks. A very heavy man owned those.

Jessica gasped and started to slam the door.

“So your friends have come,” she said angrily.

“They’re not my friends. Believe me!” Cole was beside himself with impatience at the thought of being cooped up here when trouble threatened.

“There are nearly a dozen men out there,” he snapped. “Don’t be a little dope, you little dope. Let me out of here. I’ll help you.”

“Sure! You’ll help us—by pulling dirty work from the inside while they attack from the outside.”

The door clicked shut. He sprang to it; put his ear to it. He could barely hear her quick footsteps as she ran up the basement stairs, though the steps must have been quite loud. That door was thick.

Cole jumped back to the window. It was too small to get through, even if there had been no bars. But, at least, he could hear through it. He smashed the glass out and listened.

He heard more glass breaking, down the house wall and overhead. The gang was breaking openly into the place this time. Tricks had failed. Now, they were smashing into the house!

Cole heard a shot over his head, muffled, then another. That would be the girl’s gun. And he was all too sure that it wouldn’t be heard outside that thick-walled house, even with a window broken open, so that help would come. He himself heard the shots through the floor, not through the window.

The shots were followed by a scream; and Cole, swearing impotently, flung himself against the door to get out. Of all the rotten breaks! To be shut in here while disaster occurred overhead.