The Avenger 19 - Pictures of Death (10 page)

Mac’s first conscious sensation as he struggled back from oblivion was freezing cold from the knees down. And steadily and rather swiftly, the chill was creeping upward.

He blinked and opened his eyes. It took a few seconds to focus them; but when he really did begin to see, he tried at once to yell and he tried to struggle.

He couldn’t do either.

He was gagged so that he could scarcely breathe, let alone yell. Also he was bound at ankles, waist and wrists. But his bonds seemed to give a little, queerly, when he tried to break free.

The reason for that was soon apparent. Another figure was lashed to his the same way—arms, waist and ankles.

“Muster Benson,” the Scot tried to say. The result, through the gag, was kind of a croak.

The Avenger’s eyelids were opening.

Benson was one of those men who woke from sleep instantly, clearly, in possession of all his powers. Unconsciousness is an artificial sleep. He snapped out of this in almost the same way, and his pale eyes took in the situation.

It was some situation!

The two men were bound rigidly together, wedged upright, in the glass-and-chromium shower cabinet in the master bathroom. They were standing in a rising flood. Over their heads, water poured. The shower had been turned on full force—the cold water, mercifully. If the hot had been used, they’d have died slowly and dreadfully.

They could thank the dark chap for at least this favor, though it was certainly little of a favor because they were going to die slowly and dreadfully anyway.

The water was up to their waists, now. Some trickled out around the tight-fitting door, but not enough to relieve the flood within the cabinet.

Mac fought his bonds again, but stopped at a pressure from The Avenger. Benson’s eyes, showing no emotion even in this crisis, went to the spouting nozzle, overhead. The stream would easily fill the plate-glass cabinet from floor to the air vent at the top of the door, far above their heads, in four or five minutes.

The water was up to their chests, now!

Mac glared at the place where the handles should have been. The hot water knob was there all right. The cold water knob was gone, leaving only a little metal nub, so that the flood couldn’t have been turned off with anything less than a pipe wrench.

Mac gave himself up for lost.

“Downed in my bath,” he thought with grisly humor. “Weel, I’ve always said too many baths were weakenin’.”

The water was up to his chin, which meant that The Avenger would be keeping his nostrils above it only by standing on tiptoe, for Mac was inches taller than Dick.

Mac could feel Benson doing something or other with his feet.

“Ye’ll make a soggy angel, Fergus MacMurdie,” he told himself. It was one of the dour Scot’s crazy traits that when things were at their worst a mad streak of optimism cropped up in his otherwise pessimistic philosophy. “That is—if ye’re slated for heaven. Because the chief’s wigglin’ his feet mighty funny, and I canna’ believe he’d take to wings and a harp in any confounded shower cabinet.”

The water went over his chin, which means that the chief by now would be holding his breath with his face submerged.

Then Mac caught the meaning of Benson’s foot moving.

“The drain!”

And even as he thought it, he felt current around his ankles, and the water level began to recede rapidly, though the flood continued to pour from the overhead nozzle.

There was a porcelain hand grip waist high in the wall of the cabinet. The Avenger tapped with fingertips to MacMurdie’s palm, “Kneel down with me.”

They couldn’t exactly kneel. The space of the cabinet was too cramped. But they could sag straight down with hinged legs, now that the water was almost out of the cabinet that had so nearly proved to be their coffin. Benson got his face to the hand grip and managed to slide his gag off.

“They stuffed a towel down the drain to stop it up,” Dick said, voice as emotionless as if he were talking about an electric-light bill. “However, they didn’t think to screw the metal grill back in place. I got a shoe off and managed to fish the towel out with my toes.”

Mac croaked into his gag. What he wanted to say, and couldn’t, was: “Sure. Just like that. As if just anybody who tried it could reach down two or three inches and clamp onto a bit of cloth hard enough to draw it up, after the way that gang must have jammed it down to make it a water-tight plug! And all with just the strength in his toes!”

There might be another man living whose steel muscles were so trained, even to the sinew of his feet, that he could perform a miracle like that. But Mac would have to see this other man to believe it.

The Avenger’s arms and hands were working, now, and the Scot knew they’d soon be free.

Benson’s hands were of the slim, rarely supple type that could be so held as to be but a fraction of an inch larger than the wrists above. Therefore, he could work out of almost any rope bonds if given time—which he was now given because death by drowning no longer threatened.

Mac felt Benson’s arms suddenly move free, and after that he himself was untied. The Avenger broke the plate-glass cabinet door because that handle, too, had been taken off by the methodical killers, so it couldn’t be opened from inside.

“The murderin’ skurlies!” were Mac’s words. “The cold-blooded torturers! The murrr—”

“Good way to kill us noiselessly and meanwhile have plenty of time to escape,” Dick said, almost approvingly.

His tone was as calm as ever. Would anything ever break this man’s iron repression? Mac wondered. But it left a man ice-cold to reason clearly in an emergency.

Benson started toward the door to the outer stairs, and he started fast.

“Connecticut,” he said over his shoulder. But that was enough for Mac.

The “Diabolo” had not been in Vaughan’s office vault. It had not been here. There was one other likely place for it, and that was Vaughan’s Connecticut home.

The sleek, dark man and his gang would have the sense to figure that out in a hurry and must, even now, be on their way up there. And in the Connecticut place this crew—eight of them—would find Smitty and Nellie, unwarned, ripe for the trap!

It was a very nice afternoon for a drive to the country. Nellie and Smitty were not expecting any trouble. So they made a jaunt of it, though they let no grass grow under the wheels.

Vaughan’s country place looked peaceful and inviting in the warm afternoon sun. There was a big L-shaped house. There was a garage and also a small barn, for the place had been a working farm.

Smitty pressed the front doorbell with a ponderous finger. They both heard the bell ring inside, but there was no answer to the summons.

“There must be somebody here,” said Nellie.

“Well, if there is, he’s in a coma,” retorted Smitty, jabbing the bell again. “Maybe Vaughan came out so seldom that he saved expenses by not keeping servants here.”

“Goof,” said Nellie.

“What do you mean, goof? If a guy only comes to a place one or two days a month, he might shut it up between times and bring a servant or two with him.”

“Look at the lawn,” Nellie said. “Nicely cut. Look at the flower-beds. Well-tended. It’s a full-time job for at least one man to take care of all this. There must be a caretaker around.”

“Well, he’s not here now.” Smitty tried the door.

It was unlocked.

The giant and the half-pint blonde entered the house warily. Unlocked doors, they had long ago discovered, were something to be careful about.

The first thing they saw was the blood on the floor.

The door opened into a large hall that was furnished more as an auxiliary sitting room than an entrance hall. There were a few rugs, but mainly the polished floor was bare. And right next to the door, the dark surface was messed up with a small sticky puddle, not yet coagulated.

They looked at each other. Then they looked around some more.

The place had been turned upside down.

Pictures were askew on the walls; and, of course, there were many pictures, since that had been the owner’s business. Cushions were off divan and padded chairs. Drapes were half yanked down over the end window.

They stepped to a side door and looked into a large living room. This was in the same state of upheaval.

“So,” said Nellie, “there is a caretaker. Or was one.”

Smitty nodded soberly. The wrecked place, and the pool of blood, told a plain story.

Some gang had come here, pressed the bell, slugged the caretaker when he opened the door, and then searched the house with a destructive thoroughness.

There could have been only one thing for which such a search would be made. That was the picture “Diabolo.”

“We’re too late,” mourned the giant. “They must have gotten the thing, if it was here to get. No painting that big could stay hidden after such a combing.”

“I wonder,” Nellie said.

She was looking at the wall near the front door. Looking at a large picture there, the first your eyes rested on when you stepped inside the house.

“Now who’s the goof?” demanded Smitty. “As if a painting as big as ‘Diabolo’ could stay hidden after—”

He stopped. Nellie had stepped to the picture and was looking at it more thoughtfully than ever. It was a landscape, just fairly well done; nothing to draw a second glance. There was a good, but not expensive, frame around it.

“That’s queer,” said the tiny blonde.

“What’s queer about it?” said Smitty.

“What do you think of that as a work of art?”

“It’s nothing to write home about,” Smitty began. Then he started to get the idea, too.

“Here’s a man whose business is buying and selling pictures,” mused Nellie. “Presumably, he is a connoisseur. He would want only the best for his own home. Yet, he hangs this half-baked thing, of a kind you could get by the dozen, in a prominent place in his hall.”

Her small hand went out, and she flipped the picture around on its hook so that it presented its back to their gaze and its front to the wall.

Smitty sighed. For a moment he’d entertain the imaginative notion that Vaughan had hidden the “Diabolo” by having another picture painted on the back of the famous canvas and hanging it so that the new picture seemed the regular one. But the back of this mediocre landscape wasn’t “Diabolo.” It was just blank canvas.

Nellie, however, wasn’t sighing. She touched that blank fabric.

“Looks awfully clean for an old canvas,” she said.

And then Smitty breathed again. His first idea had hit the mark. The back of the canvas was not canvas. It was cheesecloth. And when this was ripped away, the object of their trip up here was revealed.

The “Diabolo.”

“By gosh,” said Smitty. “You do have a fairly lucid moment, now and then—”

Both turned to listen. And the sound that had stopped Smitty came again.

A faint, desperate cry from the direction of the barn.

Nellie dropped the picture. Smitty ran out the door and toward the barn, with the little blonde on his heels.

“Get back in the house, will you?” Smitty rasped. “There might be trouble out here.”

“So what?” Nellie panted. “If there is, you’ll probably need a nurse to—”