The Avenger 19 - Pictures of Death (6 page)

He cursed some more on his way back to Bleek Street with the dead man. With no inkling of what the chief had headed him into, Cole sensed that Benson would have given a lot to have this man alive in order to question him.

There’d be no questions answered now. And that fact, though of course no one of Justice, Inc., could guess that, was to result in tragedy.

But Cole Wilson had another thing to gnaw at his angry brain as he drove back to Manhattan and to Bleek Street. That was something he thought he had heard just before the shot had finished off his prisoner.

In fact, he was sure he had heard it.

Quite distinctly, he had heard the marksman say, “Sorry, my friend.”

Then the fatal shot.

It was almost as if the man had, incredibly, been apologizing for murder. But then the man himself had been rather incredible, too. Cole had seen him quite clearly.

He was a monstrously fat man. He must have weighed nearly three hundred pounds.

The morning sun poured in through the steel slats that protected the windows of the Bleek Street headquarters from bullets. It had been a hectic night, climaxed by Cole Wilson’s chase after the blond man who had called himself Harris.

They were all in the vast top-floor room now, talking over the affair of the fake painting. By now, it was crystal clear that something tremendous lay behind it.

On The Avenger’s desk were objects from the dead man’s pockets. The man himself now lay on a slab at the morgue, after an examination of his person that told nothing at all.

Nellie, Smitty, MacMurdie and Wilson all stared at one thing above all that had come from the man’s clothes.

This, at first glance, seemed to be a folding ruler. But if so, it was calibrated as no ruler ever was. It didn’t have inches marked on it. It didn’t have anything marked on it but lines. That was all right; some rulers have the inches marked off but the figures omitted. However, these lines didn’t represent inches. They were spread all over the place.

Benson had measured them a moment ago. There were five lines marked on the ruler. The first was an inch and seven eighths from the end; the second, three inches; the third, five and a half; the fourth, nine and a quarter inches; the fifth, and last, fourteen and three quarters. There was also a single mark on the other side.

What possible sense could be made out of that?

Furthermore, very faintly, there were traces of many previous markings, which had been rubbed out when new ones were added. It was as if this ruler had been used many times to measure many queer distances.

“Cole,” said The Avenger, his voice calm but full of that command which made him a born leader of men, “you are sure you heard the killer apologize before he shot?”

“Dead sure,” said Cole. “He said, ‘Sorry, my friend,’ and then he let him have it.” He ran his hand through his thick dark hair. “He’d have let me have the slug instead, of course, but he was standing at an angle where he could get the man but not me.”

“So he killed his own friend and co-worker, rather than risk having him taken prisoner and made to talk,” mused Dick Benson.

“That’s what it looks like, chief.” Cole, in his anxiety to give every detail that might be helpful, brought one up now that he hadn’t thought of before. “The guy was very fat.”

Smitty and Nellie whirled on him in unison.

“He was what?”

“I said he was very fat. The killer, I mean,” Cole repeated, looking surprised at their consternation. “He must have weighed nearly three hundred pounds. His face was heavy-jowled, and he looked like the kind of fellow who’d need a shave an hour after he had one.”

Smitty stared at Nellie, who slowly shook her head.

“I know what you’re thinking, and it simply can’t be.”

“That’s the exact description of Teebo,” said Smitty stubbornly.

“Teebo jumped forty-four stories to hard sidewalk,” said Nellie. “Don’t be dumb.”

“I know. Teebo’s dead. We saw his . . . er . . . what was left of him. Just the same, this guy that Cole describes sounds like Teebo.”

“Look, you mountain of ignorance, the dead don’t walk! Particularly when they’ve been mashed as flat as a—”

The Avenger spoke suddenly. As usual, his concentration on the problem at hand was so intense that he had heard nothing irrelevant to the job.

“If there’s one thing certain by now,” he said, “it is that this is not an ordinary fake-masterpiece racket.”

“Teebo acted as if it were,” retorted Nellie. “He acted as if his sole business was to sell a phony for as much money as he could get for it.”

“I believe Teebo thought that was all there was to it,” Dick agreed. “Perhaps he had associates who believed the same way; that it was only a racket. Honest crooks, you might call them.”

“Then where does the man fit in who came here for the painting?” asked Smitty.

“I don’t know,” said Benson.

“And the gang I ran into at the five corners, one of whom shot the blond guy?” said Cole.

The Avenger shook his head. “I don’t know their place in this, either. But the fact that Teebo was murdered to prevent the sale of the fake Gauguin to me indicates that there are two separate gangs. As Nellie pointed out, members of Teebo’s own gang wouldn’t have had to kill him to prevent the sale of a fake to an organization they knew was dangerous to them. All they’d have had to do was tip Teebo off to leave the Pink Room without seeing Smitty or Nellie again.”

“Was Teebo murdered?” Smitty murmured, looking at the ceiling. “This fat man Cole described—”

“Has nothing to do with Teebo,” Nellie finished with a snap. “Dry up, will you? There are lots of fat men.”

Under Mac’s dour blue eyes, they both shut up. Cole’s gaze went back to the strangely calibrated ruler.

“What do you suppose that is?” he asked Benson.

“I’m afraid the answer is the same as to the other questions,” said Benson. “I don’t know.”

“All we know, then, is that something big is in the wind that has to do with fake paintings. And the death of the man Cole captured leaves us absolutely without a lead.”

“That’s right,” said The Avenger. “So we will make a lead.”

They looked inquiringly at him.

“Almost certainly, Teebo’s crowd has sold, or tried to sell, other phony masterpieces to other wealthy collectors,” Dick said. “We’ll check and find out. One of the wealthiest and best-known in New York is Clay Marsden. Cole, you might pay Marsden a visit. See if he has recently bought a famous European picture and find out if he has had any trouble since the purchase.”

Cole’s thought showed on his good-looking face, and The Avenger answered it without Cole’s having to speak.

“Yes, I know it will be difficult to get a man to admit that he has bought stolen goods, which is what any masterpiece from Europe would be today. I’ll leave it to your ingenuity to ferret out the information. Meanwhile, we may short-cut the personal-investigation method on other collectors.”

His steely forefinger pressed a button on his desk. The stair door of the big top-floor room opened, and Josh and Rosabel Newton came in from their second-floor apartment.

Josh was a Negro, gangling, stooped, with feet even bigger than MacMurdie’s, and with a look of being about to go to sleep on his feet. Actually, he was an honor graduate of Tuskegee Institute with a brain like a steel trap, and could fight like a black panther in an emergency.

Rosabel, his wife, was quite pretty. The two were caretakers of Justice, Inc., in peaceful times, and doughty fighters when trouble came.

“Josh,” said Dick, “I want you and Rosabel to go over the news reports of the last six months. Note any disturbance, particularly burglary or assault, that may have happened in connection with any person known to be a collector of famous paintings.”

“Yes, sir,” said the Negro. “Anything else?”

“Yes. One other thing. Every time you find such an incident, look over the general news in that same time period and see if you find any curious coincidences.”

“You mean,” asked Rosabel, “that a collector may have something happen to him and, following that, there may be an apparently unrelated crime, like a murder? Another collector is attacked, and a little later perhaps there’s another and similar murder?”

“That’s the stuff,” said Benson. “Search for news events that may possibly be similar in character after raids on collectors.”

“Right,” said Josh.

The two left, to go down to the first floor.

Benson had a news teletype in his headquarters which gave constant ticker tape reports on all news. The tapes were filed in chronological order on the first floor. The Avenger had given Josh and Rosabel a complicated and lengthy task, but he knew they’d come up with something—if there was anything to come up with.

As in this affair of the fake Gauguin, it was Dick Benson’s practice to make a lead when no natural ones developed.

In this case, after he had set Josh and Rosabel onto past news and sent Cole Wilson to the Marsden home, a natural lead occurred.

The Avenger was once more checking the painting. He was making sure, once again, that there was no message under the oils—nothing in either visible or invisible ink, printed on the canvas before that canvas was covered with paint by the clever copyist who had reproduced “The Dock.”

There was no such message. That was positive.

His pale eyes had gone over the composition of the painting. Could the grouping of subjects, or the arrangement of lines, have presented a message? Or a map or something?

But this wasn’t probable, either. Gauguin had painted a picture just to be painting a picture. It would be impossible to distort a copy into spelling out some message without so altering the lines that a glance would tell that it wasn’t an original.

Nellie was at the news ticker, watching the unreeling tape.

“We’re sure on a hot trail, chief,” said the little blonde. “About seeing if other collectors have had some kind of troubles. Listen to this:

“ ‘Durban Vaughan, well-known artists’ agent and owner of the Manhattan Art Gallery, has just been reported murdered. His body was found in his office at 2
P.M.
by an employee returning from a late lunch. Police are now investigating.’ ”

“We’ll join them in the investigation,” Dick said. “Mac!”

The two went out—the tall Scot with the dour blue eyes and the lithe, chilled-steel bar of a man called The Avenger.

“Leaving me to rot here doing nothing,” Nellie said resentfully to Smitty.

“Leaving both of us,” mourned the giant. “I can’t understand it in my case. In yours, I can. The chief is on important business. It wouldn’t help any to have you go and get in a jam so that a couple of us had to drop the main job and go to your rescue—”

He ducked just in time to keep an angrily flung book from bouncing off his head.

It didn’t look as if they were going to miss any excitement, however. Benson and Mac were simply on a routine murder investigation.

At least that was what it started out to be.

The Manhattan Gallery is on upper Fifth Avenue. Crowds stream past all day, and there are usually several people in the gallery. It is about the last place anyone would choose for a daylight murder; but murder had been done, nevertheless. And just a glance at the locale told how it could have been committed with no one the wiser.