The Avenger 14 - Three Gold Crowns (13 page)

Mac opened it. One thing, it held, and one thing only.

A gold crown!

The gold crown looked as if it had not had time to chew much food with the support of the molar beneath it, and it looked as if it had been ripped quite recently from a human jaw.

On The Avenger’s way uptown to the Cleeves Gallery, Mac radioed to him the layout of the shop: small rear door into the lobby, Cleeves’s private office door almost directly across the narrow corridor from that. And Mac knew that Benson would want to get into that office, unobserved, for a good look around before clerks or police discovered what had happened to the employer who had locked himself into his office with strict orders “not to be disturbed.”

Even knowing that The Avenger would come in quietly, Mac was unprepared for his entrance.

The Scot was looking at an oil painting just taken out of its wooden crate—evidently the painting that Cleeves had immured himself to examine in solitude. And a voice spoke at his side.

“Quite a bizarre painting, isn’t it, Mac?”

Mac whirled, and stared into the pale, deadly eyes of his chief. Dick had come into the room so soundlessly, flashing across from lobby door to office door, that the Scot hadn’t heard a thing.

“Whoosh!”
Mac said. “Ye’re here five minutes faster than a mon could possibly get here from Bleek Street. An’ ye appeared out of thin air like a ghost.”

“Not quite a ghost, Mac,” said Benson, face as expressionless as his chromium chips of eyes. “I see you’ve turned up a curious mess here.”

The Avenger went ahead to untangle the mess.

He started with the painting.

It was a bizarre thing. The clerk had said Cleeves entered with a painting by a Flemish master. But this had no Flemish touch.

It was a modern painting of a jungle. It was done in violent blues and reds and yellows. Nothing was in scale—birds were as big as trees and insects scattered through the scene were as big as birds. It was a kind of jungle nightmare.

In the lower lefthand corner was a big spider. It looked as lifelike as if it were really there, instead of just painted on. And in the center of the spider there was a wet patch.

Dick Benson touched the wet patch and it came off greenish brown. He wiped the speck of moisture off his finger carefully, and turned to the corpse.

Cleeves lay in a tumbled heap, as if caught in a big hand, crumpled, and thrown away. And his face was literally blue, as Mac had said over the phone. As blue as blue clay.

His right hand was swollen three times the size of a normal hand and was also bluish. The ghastly tint was deepest around two angry-looking little punctures at the base of the thumb.

Dick’s pale, all-seeing eyes swept over the floor and saw a moist patch near one of the dead man’s feet. So Dick looked at the soles of Cleeves’s shoes.

On the right sole was a queer thing. It looked as if the man, just before he died, had stamped on a wet mustache, and strands of the mustache adhered.

“About as sly and nasty a piece of killing as we have bumped into,” said The Avenger. “Someone sent this exotic painting of birds and trees and jungle insects to Cleeves. He locked himself in here to examine it. But over one of the painted insects was a real one, numbed by being chilled, probably, and lightly glued to the picture. Cleeves put his hand on it, the spider bit—and death came! But before he died, Cleeves had stamped the thing to death after his touch brushed it from the canvas.”

Mac nodded somberly.

“Death must have come within a few seconds,” he said. “Otherwise Cleeves would have had a chance to get help in here. As it is, even the clerks don’t know their boss is in here dead.”

“Two of the three men pitted against Farquar—dead,” mused Dick, pale eyes like slits of stainless steel in their hard, cold brilliance.

“Leavin’ just the one—Beall—to collect the whole million in blackmail from Farquar,” said Mac.

But The Avenger shook his head.

“Not any more. Not if he relied on those clues, one of which was held by Cleeves, one by Salloway, and the third by himself. We have them now—all three of the bits of evidence which Farquar thought could put him in the chair for the murder of his clerk.”

He laid the gold crowns taken from Beall and Salloway beside the gold crown Mac had found in Cleeves’s dispatch case. Three gold crowns.

“How would those three things prove murder on anybody?” asked Mac, puzzled.

The Avenger didn’t say anything. He was looking at the crowns, as he had looked before. On each were the marks of the forceps that had pulled them. Possibly those forceps had been intended to pull tooth and all; but a yank on a crowned tooth will practically always take the crown before the tooth comes. Then a second extraction must be made.

“Say they were in the mouth of the murdered clerk, Smathers,” went on MacMurdie, more puzzled than ever. “That would be likely, since ye found forceps near the place where Smathers’s dead body had been laid on the tracks. So what? All that’d prove would be that the dead man was Smathers. It wouldn’t point out a killer, unless there are prints on them to show who pulled them.”

The Avenger’s head, with its heavy, close-cropped black hair, shook a little.

“There are no prints. They must have rubbed around loose in someone’s pocket before they were put away so carefully in a dispatch box, a jewel box, and a cigar case. Anyhow, there are no prints.”

“Then—” Mac stopped. This was no time to chase up blind alleys.

He looked expectantly at Benson. He himself hadn’t the faintest idea what ought to be done next. But he was sure the chief would know. Dick did know; and it was so simple that Mac almost blushed for not thinking of it himself.

“The crate around this picture,” said The Avenger calmly, “is marked as coming from Warehouse Nine of the Gallic Importing Company. That may mean something, it may mean nothing. We’ll go to the warehouse and have a look.”

“Whoever put the bug on the picture,” said Mac sourly, “might have done so anywhere along the road.” Dour Mac! Always pessimistic, unless he was in a jam where death seemed absolutely certain. Then, for no known reason, it was his habit to turn brightly optimistic and insist that all was bound to end well.

“Of course,” said Benson, “there’s only one chance in ten that the warehouse will provide any information. But it wouldn’t be sensible to overlook that chance.”

The Avenger dialed police headquarters on Cleeves’s phone, eyes as steady and calm as his voice.

“Benson talking, commissioner. There has been a murder at Cleeves’s Fifth Avenue Art Gallery. Yes, Cleeves himself; bitten by a poisonous spider placed on a new canvas. Yes, I have looked around all I need to. I have disturbed nothing.”

Which was a slight indication of the high regard with which The Avenger was viewed by the New York police force. If anyone else had dared to look around a corpse before calling the cops, he’d have been behind bars so fast it would have given him spots before the eyes. But Benson could investigate, and the fact was conveniently forgotten on later reports. That was because The Avenger had solved so many crime cases for the police that no one in the department could quite remember them all.

Mac and Dick went to the door, and there was a scurrying sound in the narrow shop corridor outside.

It had sounded like a rat—a rat of human size, say, walking on its hind legs.

Mac had the door open and was glaring up and down the corridor. But he saw nothing. To the rear was only dimness. Toward the front, against the big plate-glass show windows, he could see two clerks, moving indolently, still unaware of the hours-old murder in the private office. Either might have been eavesdropping—or neither.

“Come along,” The Avenger said quietly.

It was much more sensible to go at once to that warehouse than to monkey around trying to find out what clerk had been at that door, and what he had heard.

The Gallic Importing Co. didn’t have nine warehouses. It looked more imposing on a letterhead or a crate to print nine than one. For all they had was one warehouse, and that one wasn’t very big, and it was in an unhandy location near the East River.

However, the company didn’t need more than one storage space. Their business was bringing paintings, jewelry, antiques, and relics, in questionable ways, from war-torn Europe. Those things don’t bulk large, nor are many employees necessary to handle them. In fact, the fewer the better.

There didn’t seem to be anyone at all around the shabby brick building, with its windowless facade, when Mac and The Avenger reached it. And when Benson softly tried the door, leading into a little office, he found it was locked.

There was a steady rumbling of trucks and cars in the street along here, for this was a loading section. But there were few pedestrians on the narrow sidewalk. The Avenger drew Mike, the little streamlined silenced .22 revolver, from its leg holster.

With his body hiding the gun from those behind him, Dick emptied the gun at the lock. There were only four slugs in the cylinder, which had been kept small to streamline the gun. But after Mike had whispered four times, in just the right spots, the door opened with no further trouble.

Mac and Benson entered a place as cool and dim and high-arched as a cave; for even a comparatively small warehouse, if it consists of one big space without floors from street level to roof, looks as big as a cathedral.

The two got past the bulk of the little front office, which was like a small box set within a big one, when Mac, just as he was getting out his flashlight to look more easily into the gloom, almost stepped on a hand!

He rayed the light down at it, bleak blue eyes coldly angry. Murder of innocent people could still make MacMurdie icily furious, even with all the examples of it he had seen since joining The Avenger.

Here was an obviously cold-blooded killing!

The man attached to the dead hand was a middle-aged fellow in blue overalls, with wide-open gray eyes and a gentle face, relaxed in death so that it looked almost restful. And precisely over the man’s heart was a narrow slit.

There were blood stains in the rumpled slack of the blue overalls, showing that his murderer had callously drawn the knife from the man’s heart and wiped the bloody blade on his victim’s own clothing.

“The warehouse mon here,” said Mac. “Why, the murderin’ skurlies—”

There was a series of thuds, like the simultaneous dropping of windblown ripe fruit from a tree. But this was strange and evil fruit!

The ceiling of the little office was about nine feet high, and above that extended empty space to the roof of the warehouse building itself. The men had been on this office top section. They were the fruit that had thudded to the floor.

Seven or eight of them— With blackjacks and clubbed guns!

“Chief!” yelled Mac.

But there had been no need to yell. Benson had heard the slight sounds the men had made in squirming to the edge to drop over. Less than a second of warning. But it was enough.

In The Avenger’s right hand was Mike, reloaded after shooting the lock out. In his left was the almost as deadly Ike, the throwing knife. Two of the world’s queerest weapons.

Mike whispered and one of the men went down with a little hole in his shoulder, again conforming to Benson’s refusal to take life, for he could have hit the heart just as well.

Mac wasn’t fighting for the moment. With men clawing for him, his hands were fiddling with his belt, as if he had an arsenal there. One man had a blackjack lifted over the Scot’s head.

Benson’s left hand flashed out. The Avenger was able to use either hand at all forms of fighting. Ike flashed from his fingers, sliced agonizingly across the back of the hand that held the sap, and went on to fall in shadow. Mike spat again, and a man went down with a gash on the exact top of his head, stunned but not killed. And then the rest were on Mac and Dick.

Mac’s hands weren’t at his waist any more. They were clenched into bone mallets of fists, and they began to do excellent work. Two men went down. Another yelled as The Avenger, unable to use the gun at close range, got a nerve pressure on the fellow’s thigh that made him think his leg was coming off at the hip.

This second time, Mac had no chance to yell to his chief, as he’d done when men thudded from above the office. He didn’t see the newcomers himself till a gun was swinging at his skull.

They’d come from behind a pile of crated furniture and sneaked up behind Mac and Dick. And they turned the odds into something unbeatable.

Mac went down from that clubbing gun. And the last thing that registered on his consciousness was the sight of another man clubbing down with a gun at the head of The Avenger.

It is advantageous to have buildings on rivers, but their basements are usually a drawback because water seeps in. There are two ways to overcome this: spend some money and make the walls watertight, or spend a little less for a pump to pump out the seepage.

The basement of the Gallic Importing Co.’s warehouse was armored against the seepage from the East River by the pump method.

But the pump was not working now. It had been switched off, and the water was rising in the basement.

It was the cold water, up to Mac’s ankles, that finally brought consciousness back to him. He opened his eyes, batted them in bewilderment, then realized all that had happened.

“Chief!” he barked in sudden apprehension.

There was no answer. In anguish, Mac tried to get up, and found he was tied hand and foot. He looked around the place. In the light of a couple of little twenty-five-watt bulbs, he saw Dick Benson.

The Avenger was still unconscious, slumped against the wall. Blood was matted in his close-cut, thick black hair from that crack on the head. Mac felt a gripping fear, but then the pale, deadly eyes opened.

Benson had a wild animal’s ability to regain consciousness fully alert. When he woke, no matter how sound the sleep, he woke all over, at once. It was the same on coming out of unconsciousness.

The colorless, composed eyes turned toward Mac’s anxious face.