The Avenger 14 - Three Gold Crowns (4 page)

“What do you propose?” asked Cleeves.

“I don’t know what to suggest,” shrugged Salloway. “All I know is that Benson simply must not be allowed to range himself on the side of Markham Farquar. We’re beaten, if that happens. And, gentlemen, you know what will happen to us if we’re defeated in this matter.”

The three of them were silent over that. They knew, all right!

“So?” said Salloway grimly.

“We’d better close down on Markham fast,” said Beall, clenching his hands.

And that, in essence, was all there was to the conference: a resolve on the part of three powerful men that a fourth must not enlist the aid of The Avenger—and that the fourth had better be squeezed hard and fast.

In Dick Benson’s top-floor room was a news teletype, over which all the world’s news constantly flowed.

An item came in at about nine o’clock that night that instantly caught The Avenger’s eye.

The item said briefly that, as yet, there had been no identification of the tramp found ground almost to bits in a Newark freight yard.

That was all, but it was enough to make Benson peruse the items of the previous few days.

He hadn’t seen the announcement of the tramp’s death in the first place. After all, that was a small item; the teletype was filled with vaster news these days. But he found it now.

An unidentified tramp had been found in the freight yard, cut to ribbons by car wheels. He had died, the police thought, in the late night of November 3.

That was three nights ago.

And it was three nights ago, according to Farquar, that his clerk, Smathers, had disappeared. The clerk for whose murder the lawyer was now being threatened.

There was nothing on earth to connect the unidentified tramp with Smathers. In fact, there was nothing to connect the tramp with anything—no labels in clothes, no other marks of identification had been found. But there was just a chance that there might be some connection; so The Avenger prepared to act on the news.

And at the same time, a floor below, the pretty guest they’d put up at Bleek Street earlier in the day was apparently prepared to act on something, too.

She seemed ready to go out somewhere.

But she wasn’t going out because, standing at her door and listening, she could hear Nellie Gray moving about in the next room. And the door of that next room was open so that if Harriet Smith went down the hall, Nellie would be sure to see her.

Then there was a
buzz
from the next room. The signal was to summon Nellie up to The Avenger’s desk. Harriet didn’t know that, but she did know that after the signal there were steps, and Nellie was out of the way.

The coast was clear. Harriet went down the hall to the stairs and down to the street. And Nellie, on the top floor, faced The Avenger.

“Nellie,” Dick Benson said, “I think it might be a good idea if we tried to trace Smathers, Farquar’s clerk, from Farquars office. None of the lines I’ve put out have yielded any information about Smathers after he left the office three nights ago. He may have gone home, and then out, or he may have gone directly to his death somewhere. It’s possible that he left some clue to his destination in Farquar’s office; something that Farquar himself has been unable to turn up, or, if he has uncovered it, something whose meaning he can’t read. You go to Farquar’s office and see.”

“I’m on my way,” answered Nellie, smiling. “But, chief, that girl—Harriet Smith—I’d been sort of keeping an eye on her.”

The Avenger’s pale, icy eyes considered that.

“We have no right to hold her here if she wants to leave. But I’ll set this telltale to inform me if her door opens, and I’ll have Josh trail her if she goes anywhere.”

His steely hand flipped a small switch. The little switch looked like the kind on two-phone systems, but actually it had nothing to do with the phone. It flashed a tiny blue light if the door of Harriet Smith’s room was opened.

This movement was too late, had Dick Benson only known it. Harriet’s door would not open because it already had opened—to let Harriet out into the night. But The Avenger could not know that, being no magician with a crystal ball, even if he was a genius in his way.

He had no way of telling that Harriet Smith, even at that moment, was stepping into a cab at the avenue end of Bleek Street.

“Go to Eighth Avenue,” she said. “Just cruise down it, toward the Battery, till I tell you to stop.”

When Nellie had guessed that Harriet hadn’t told all she knew, when she asked for protection, she had guessed exactly right. Harriet apparently knew lots more.

For one thing, it seemed that she somehow knew where the clerk, Smathers, had gone on that night so fateful for him.

“Stop here,” she said to the driver when the cab was a little more than a block from the door which bore the name A.A. Ismail.

The driver stared. This was not only a swell-looking girl in her own right, but also a well-dressed girl. It was plain that he was wondering why she wanted to stop on a dark street like this one.

But he stopped. And Harriet paid him. And then Harriet stood right where she was until the cab got out of sight. Only then did she go on in the dimness caused by insufficient street lighting.

It took all the courage Harriet had to wait like that. It wouldn’t have taken a psychologist to divine that she would much rather have had the driver wait for her. Or even go with her. For she was almost uncontrollably frightened.

But some vital urge drove her on up the dark and deserted street to the fateful door.

A.A. Ismail.

She looked at the name as if she had known it before, but had located the house by its appearance alone. And then she looked at the house.

Not a light showing. No more than there had been on that night of death for Smathers. Empty and ominous, it loomed before her; a shabby frame shack set between two high brick commercial buildings, waiting to be torn down for a newer, larger building to take its place.

Harriet tried the door, flinching at the noise made when the rusty knob creaked around. The door was locked, naturally. She stepped to a window and tried to look in.

If she’d thought the street was dark, she knew better now. The street blazed with light compared to the pitlike blackness beyond the window.

She shivered again but pried at the window. And it went up.

Anyone practiced in that type of entrance would have paused a long time on finding that window unfastened. Because it shouldn’t have been. Empty houses are locked and shuttered as tightly as possible, normally, to keep out vandals. The fact that Harriet seemed to feel no emotion but relief indicated that she was an amateur at burglary.

She stepped soundlessly into the blackness beyond the window, and she did have sense enough to almost close the sash behind her so that an illegal entrance wouldn’t be guessed by the first person to walk past.

Then she stood there, letting her eyes become accustomed to the darkness. And gradually forms became visible.

There was a great, tattered sofa abandoned by whoever had moved out of here last. There was a double doorway leading, evidently, to the old living room and to the next room toward the rear which, correspondingly, must have been the dining room or library.

There was a smaller door to the hall on which the street opened. And eventually Harriet went for that.

She moved like a frightened rabbit, with feet as light as her fear could make them. She took seconds for each step. But finally she reached the hall. She listened, and then jumped a foot.

From down the hall to the rear, it seemed she could hear a sound.

It was a faint, rasping sound. It might have been made by the dry rustle of scales as a big snake moved. It seemed to have nothing human about it.

Then Harriet decided it was her imagination, because minutes of wary listening didn’t bring any more sound to her straining ears.

There was something frightful about this empty place in the blackness of the night. But she flitted silently across the hall and went up the stairs.

This was a true ordeal. Because half the steps made a squeaking sound under her weight. It was like the squeaking of a flock of bats.

When she reached the top, she took a tiny flashlight out of her purse; and now it became evident that she had come here to search the place where Smathers had died.

There were four small rooms upstairs, and she went over each, foot by foot, with the little light held so that no one outside could catch its glow through a window.

She tiptoed to the low, unfinished attic and looked into that.

Then she stole down the stairs again, with the treads making the little batlike squeakings under her feet.

She turned at the foot of the stairs and went toward the rear of the house on this, the ground floor. And as she drifted noiselessly down the narrow hall, something detached itself from the shadows at the front door.

The thing seemed to be a shadow itself—a human-sized shadow that had leaned back against the closed portal and watched from its cave of blackness while Harriet descended. Now, still like an insubstantial shadow rather than a human, it followed after the girl.

After her, down the hall!

Harriet got to the end door and opened it. Cracked plaster showed in the walls; cracks in the dingy ceiling. The floor was inches deep in dust.

But there was a long smear in the dust, almost like a path, streaking from the center of the room to the threshold where she stood. Her little flash showed that.

Harriet seemed to forget some of her terror in this discovery. She bent low over the line where the dirt had been brushed aside. She went along it inch by inch, with the flash busy every instant.

She saw that, in patches, the floor was actually clean; had been recently scrubbed. And then she saw one ragged round dot in the dirt. And she knew why the other patches had the scrubbed look.

That little dot was the rusty brown of dried blood.

The tiny flash started on. It stopped within a foot of the object that had slid from Smathers’s pocket when his body was dragged through here three nights ago. But the flash never quite reached the object.

Just then she snapped it out!

Harriet held the darkened little tube with ice-cold fingers while her heart pounded in her ears. She thought she’d heard a sound again—behind her.

When she whirled, she could see nothing. Small as the light from the flash was, it had broken that accustomed-to-darkness phase of her eyes, at least temporarily.

She couldn’t see a thing in the direction of the doorway. She couldn’t even see the door itself. Thus, she didn’t see that shadow that was only vaguely of the shape and size of a human being; didn’t see it reaching toward her! Reaching—

If the shadowy figure had gotten her at that moment, she might have had some small chance. Because she was facing toward it, and she might have beaten it off long enough to at least scream.

But at that moment her nerve cracked, and she decided to try a dash for the side window.

She took two steps toward it, and hands got her by the throat!

She did try to scream then—tried wildly, horribly. But the iron fingers choked back sound as well as breath. Her body writhed convulsively, and then she was still.

She could see again, a little, when her eyes opened once more. She didn’t know how long she had been unconscious, but she had an idea it was at least five minutes.

She came back to a full horror of her position, with no merciful seconds in which to wonder where she was or why she was there.

She came to with the realization that she was tightly bound, wrists and ankles, and that the rope smelled of kerosene.

And she realized instantly why she could see a bit now, where she hadn’t been able to before. Now there was light.

It came from little tongues of flame, very small and feeble tongues of flame! They were flickering up from little piles of rags, which also gave off the odor of kerosene; and the little piles were around the walls of the room.

Sound from the doorway drew her gaze. Her eyes turned in that direction just in time to see a kind of shadow drifting out of the room.

Out and down the hall. And then she faintly heard the creaking of the front window, rising and lowering, as the shadow left the building.

She shrieked and heard the sound only as a mumble against her gagged lips. She stared at the flames, leaping high now, about to make an incinerator of the room in which she lay helpless; of the whole house, in fact, in about five minutes.

When Nellie started out to do The Avenger’s bidding and look through the office of Markham Farquar for clues as to Smathers’s destination three nights ago, she had every intention of being quite peaceful and law-abiding about it.

Nellie was always peaceful. At least, that is what she herself always claimed. If you asked anyone else, however, Smitty for example, he’d have told you that Nellie lived for excitement and never was peaceful if she could possibly help it.

Nevertheless, she had every intention of being peaceful in her methods this time.

She started by phoning around to find Farquar and have him meet her at his office and open up for her to make a search.

And she couldn’t find him.

He wasn’t at the office. He wasn’t at his home on Riverside Drive. So she just went to the office building housing the suite in which he worked, intending to have the building watchman admit her.

The building was a small one in the upper Fifties; one of those buildings that had been turned from a tall private home to apartments, then to office suites with a remodeled front. It was too small, she found, to have a night man. There was just the building.

Nellie started to hunt up a pay phone and try again to contact Farquar. But then, as she was turning from the place where she could see across the street to the entrance, she saw a light in the third-floor window.

It was just a glint of light, and it moved. It was as if a big firefly were imprisoned up there. But it was a flashlight.

What was anybody doing prowling in there with a flashlight?