The Avenger 19 - Pictures of Death (9 page)

He heard no more sound from above, now. Minutes passed. He kept on jamming against the door; there was nothing else to do. He had just banged against it for the dozenth time when it opened suddenly and he sprawled through the doorway onto the basement floor.

As he sprawled on the cement, he saw the legs of the man who had noiselessly and abruptly opened the door. They were incredibly thick legs, like tree trunks. He looked up. Then his spine seemed to freeze.

The legs belonged to the enormously fat man with the blue-black jowls who had shot the blond fellow at the crossroads. The man who had murdered his friend with the apologetic words: “Sorry, friend.”

The fat man had a gun aimed at Cole’s head and his forefinger was pressed hard against the trigger. He had been about to drill Cole. But then he recognized him.

“Well, shoot him,” snarled a man next to the fat one. There were half a dozen in the basement. “If you don’t, I will.”

His gun, a foreign-looking automatic, swung into line.

“Wait!” said the fat man.

“What for? We can’t stay here all day.”

“This man—he was the one who trailed Harris that night. He’s the one who got away with Harris’ body and made me kill Harris so he couldn’t talk.”

His fat lips jerked with rage, then were calm again. Menacingly calm.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

Cole said nothing.

“He was helping the girl and her father, of course,” said the man who held the foreign-looking gun. “That’s the way his crowd operates. They help people. Even if they risk their stupid necks to do it—”

“He was locked in there,” the fat man pointed out. “And he wouldn’t have been locked up if he’d been considered as a friend.”

“So?”

“So we’ll take him along—”

Two more men piled downstairs. Cole stayed where he was, on hands and knees, not attempting to move or get up. His life hung by a very thin thread and he knew it.

“No trace of the picture,” said one of the two, with an oath more feeling than interesting.

The fat man swore steadily for half a minute. “You’re sure?”

“Of course, I’m sure. We took the place apart. The picture isn’t in this house.”

“Now I know we’ll take this dog along,” snarled the fat man, prodding Cole with his toe.

It was almost his last prod. Cole got the ankle behind the toe with a move so fast it almost defied the eye. Equally swiftly, he pulled. The fat man crashed down, and Cole got behind his bulk.

It was a fruitless move, because he had no gun, thanks to Jessica; and all the others were armed. Two covered him, while a third bound him with phone wire ripped from the basement ceiling.

They carried him out to the driveway and piled him into a car there.

He saw Marsden and his daughter in another car. Both were unconscious. There was a red welt on the girl’s forehead.

The two cars started, swung out to the road and headed for the thinly inhabited tip of Long Island lying to the east.

The Avenger figured that he and Mac would be able to work undisturbed at Durban Vaughan’s penthouse apartment. The police were still busy checking the actual murder site.

Dick and Mac went up an elevator to the top floor, then took the stairway to the penthouse. Dick rang the bell there, and there was no answer. It was odd that a place as big as he knew the penthouse to be would have no servant in it to answer the bell.

What he did not know at the time, and was to learn later, was that Vaughan, like Marsden, had had so much trouble with people trying to bribe his servants to get in that he had dismissed them all. Dick did know, however, that no one was opening the door, so he opened it himself.

Benson was probably the world’s foremost authority on locks. And in his constant study of them, he had recently invented a master-key arrangement that would have given lockmakers nightmares if they’d known of it.

He carried with him a dozen key blanks, of the common, standard forms and sizes, which were stamped out of plastic. The plastic was of about the consistency of semi-hard rubber but did not have the elasticity of rubber. When a dent was made in the stuff, the dent stayed.

Benson had only to thrust the proper blank into a given lock, turn a little and draw the blank out. Then he cut notches where the dents showed, marked by the tumblers that did not give under pressure. He put the quickly made key back into the lock, turned gently and opened it.

They got into the murdered man’s penthouse in about two minutes, this way; and after he had closed the door, Benson cut the notches off the plastic shank so that no one else could ever use it as a key.

Then they looked around for the “Diabolo.”

“Diabolo” is a painting of a man and a woman dreamily approaching each other in late afternoon sun while the shadows of trees in the background form vaguely into the head of an approving devil.

And it didn’t seem to be in Vaughan’s penthouse.

“It wouldn’t be under floor boards or in hollow places in the wall,” commented Mac. “ ’Tis a much bigger paintin’ than ‘The Dock,’ which was rolled and stuck under a floor board at that vacant building. In fact, Muster Benson, I don’t see how so big a picture could be hidden at all.”

“It will be hidden in plain sight,” said The Avenger.

They went over the living room. It was huge, elaborate, hung with many pictures. And Benson examined these paintings even though each depicted nothing like “Diabolo.” He pulled each from the wall and looked behind it, and he sniffed at the face of each. It is possible to paint over a picture with soluble colors so that it looks like another picture entirely. Then the covering can be carefully washed off, revealing the original, unharmed, again.

But none of these pictures had the smell of fresh oils.

They split, then, and Mac took four rooms while Benson took four on the opposite side of the central corridor.

A microscopic search failed to reveal the painting.

There were four baths in the big apartment. They met at the end of the corridor, in the master’s bath, where a glance was enough to show that no picture could be concealed there.

Dutifully, however, Mac’s bleak blue eyes examined tile walls and floor. Then he opened the shower case, which was a very elaborate thing of plate glass and chromium, from floor to ceiling. It even had rubber stripping around the door, like the door of a refrigerator, so that no water got out while a bather sprayed himself. It looked like an upended coffin with a nozzle at the top.

“Vaughan did himself well, I’m thinkin’,” said the Scot disapprovingly. Mac spent a nickel like he parted with a toe; and this glistening shower cabinet had cost an awful lot of nickels. “Why a mon can’t take a shower with only shower currrtains around him is more than I know.”

Dick went out to the corridor, pale eyes narrowed in thought.

“Well, the ‘Diabolo’ is not here. That is certain. So it is either up in Vaughan’s Connecticut home or hidden where no one can ever find it.”

“Whoosh!” said Mac. “I’d admire to see the skurlie that could hide anything where you couldn’t find—”

He stopped. Benson’s hand was on his forearm, and Mac shut his teeth hard on the yelp at what The Avenger must have thought was no finger pressure at all.

Benson nodded down the corridor toward the door. Someone was trying a key in it.

“Visitors, huh?” whispered Mac. “Do ye think it may be the gang that—”

He didn’t finish it. There were voices outside, careless and rather loud, not the voices of anyone trying to sneak in. Also, the key had turned the lock bolt smoothly, leading Dick and Mac to believe that it must be the regular key to this place.

“Police,” nodded Mac. “It’s all right, chief.”

The Avenger said nothing. His eyes were like pale holes in his calm face as he stared at the entering men.

Two were in police uniform, two were in plain clothes, and there was a sleek-looking, jauntily authoritative fellow at their head who appeared to have come from the district attorney’s office.

“What the—” exclaimed the sleek-looking man, staring at the two in the corridor. He had very dark hair and eyes, was quite the playboy type at first glance; yet he handled himself with the air of a man who always knows just what he is doing.

“Oh!” he said suddenly. His dark eyes went friendly. “You must be Richard Benson. There’s only one man with eyes that light under hair that black, who might be found in a dead man’s rooms. Did you turn up any clues, Mr. Benson?”

The Avenger’s face was like that of a sphinx as he watched the five come down the hall toward him. His eyes were unreadable.

“No clues,” he said quietly. “I don’t seem to place you, Mr.—”

“The name is Add—Addfield. I’m in the D.A.’s office. New there. But I’ve heard about you, sir.”

“So have we,” said one of the plain-clothes men. “It’s a pleasure to have you work with us, sir.”

“You have come here as a matter of routine,” said The Avenger. “But have you anything in particular in mind to look for in your regular searching?”

The sleek, dark chap nodded pleasantly.

“Vaughan’s private records, as I suppose you know, sir, disclose that he recently bought Dubois’ ‘Diabolo.’ We’d like a look at it, among other things. If you’d show us where you had searched, it might save duplication of effort.”

He was moving easily toward the two, with his men behind him, when The Avenger’s voice stopped them.

Benson’s voice didn’t seem to change a note, but suddenly it was as deadly as the thrust of a bushmaster.

“Stay where you are!”

The five stopped. In The Avenger’s hands had appeared the two seemingly toy weapons which were all he ever armed himself with. In his right hand was a slim little throwing knife with a hollow tube for a handle. He called it, with glacial affection, Ike. In the left hand, he held an equally slim, streamlined revolver that had a special silencer and a .22 slug. This, he had named Mike.

These were all Dick held against five men. But MacMurdie knew that they were plenty! And the five must have heard something of Mike and Ike, too, because none moved and none tried for his own weapon.

“But Muster Benson,” began Mac, bewildered at the shift.

“These are the men we’re after, Mac,” said Benson evenly. “Look at that ‘patrolman’s’ shoes. Black, but decidedly not regulation. Look at the cut of the other’s coat.”

“All right,” snarled the sleek dark man suddenly and loudly. “You win. We’re not cops. So what are you planning to do about it? You and that hatpin and pea shooter—”

It was well done and well timed. The snarling, loud voice hid all sound of the stealthy footsteps behind Mac and Benson!

Just at the last instant, The Avenger’s quick brain sensed something wrong, and his sharp ears caught a ghost of a sound in spite of the dark fellow’s clever camouflage of noise.

But it wasn’t soon enough. Benson whirled like light, staggered as a gun barrel slapped down on his head, then fell as a second terrific blow descended!

Mac whirled, too, ducking at the same time as a veteran rough-and-tumble fighter should. He got a glimpse of three men grinning at him without humor, then was slugged by the dark, sleek chap to whom he’d been forced to present his back.

He went down, too.

For once, The Avenger, being human after all and not quite a perfect machine, had overlooked something. That was the French windows in the penthouse which led to a terrace. A careful leader could send three men along a ledge to that terrace to enter at the rear, while he and four followers came openly in the front door. He could thus completely surprise even a smart enemy, perhaps to be encountered in the penthouse.

The sleek dark man had been smart; and Justice, Inc., had been surprised.