House of Death

CHAPTER II Nemesis

For a man who had never harmed anyone — except, of course, that one who had had the bad taste to resist being robbed and the cop who had insisted upon chasing him — Milky Morley had had very bad luck.

It was due to pursue him, though he did not know that at the moment. In fact, it was due to hand him the worst pill bad luck can hand a man.

Which, it is generally conceded, is death!

Milky lived in an odorous first-floor room in a boardinghouse about a mile from where he had slugged the seedy-looking young fellow with the battered hat.

There was a handy back entrance down a short hall, in case the cops came. And he could leave through the window in front if he wished to depart in that direction in a hurry.

Because he might want to use that out, Milky did not have any window catches or other contraptions to keep people out. After all, burglars don’t get burgled — much.

He went into this room, shoved a dirty shirt off a rickety chair, and sat down. He stared bitterly at the wad of foreign money, then cursed and threw down the wallet. His eyes went from the wallet to a pair of feet that had appeared soundlessly near the window, where no feet should be, and through which they had just come.

Milky didn’t even start to reach for his gun.

He figured that anyone getting in that furtively and standing there staring down at him would be in too strong a strategic position to pull a gun on.

He was right, as he found when his eyes went a little farther up.

Feet, legs in shabby blue serge, then a face with narrow, determined-looking eyes under a shapeless hat brim.

What was more to the point, in a poised right hand there was the shiniest, sharpest-looking knife Milky had ever seen. It appeared positively to yearn for Milky’s throat.

Milky was so impersonal a robber that for a moment he didn’t recognize the fellow. Then he did. It was the shabby-looking owner of the Czech money and the gold medallion.

“You will turn around,” said the man evenly. There was a foreign inflection to his words and hesitations between them which indicated that his English vocabulary was not large.

Milky turned around. He knew shivs and shiv-bearers. The hand holding that murderous blade would be practiced in throwing it.

The man came up behind Milky. Hands went over his frame. Milky cursed as his gun was taken from him, howled when strong fingers ripped a pocket out of his clothes — taking some skin with it — and then shut up as a voice growled, “Silence!”

The man had his knife back in its sheath when Milky next saw him. In its place, he held the gun. Milky’s gun.

“Where is the gold coin?” the man demanded, voice calm but eyes hot.

Milky rather idiotically tried to lie.

“I don’t know nothing about a gold—”

“The one you took from me, you swine! Where is it?”

Milky moistened dry lips.

“I want that coin back. The rest,” the man waved his left hand, “that matters little. But the coin!”

“I ain’t got it any more,” quavered Milky.

The man glared at him.

“Then that other must have it. The one you visited.”

“How’d you know—”

“I got my senses back two, three minutes after you hit me. I was getting up. I look the other way from the one you had been going. At the corner, I see you again.”

Milky was beyond curses. In his chase from the cops, he had eventually doubled back around the block. So this monkey had seen him when he’d completed the circuit!

“I follow you to a place where animals are kept for sale. I could not get in there, so I wait and follow you again, back here to where you live. And you say you have not the coin?”

“I swear it,” said Milky eagerly. “The other guy — I sold it to him.”

“Turn around,” said the man.

Milky turned, reluctantly, hoping for the best. If he had seen the change in weapons the man made behind his back, he’d have gambled everything on a leap. But he did not see it.

The man put the gun in his pocket and took out the knife again. Knives are excellent for one prime reason. They make no noise to speak of.

“What you goin’ to—” began Morley.

That was all he ever said. After the interrupted words, he grunted.

That was when the knife went into his back! It slipped in as if into butter, testifying to its infernal sharpness as well as to the man’s expertness. And Morley sagged. He was as motionless as any man is with a blade squarely through his heart.

Milky would never need a kit of burglar’s implements again.

The man wiped the knife on Milky’s coat and went over his frame once more, this time in an even more thorough search. There was no gold coin.

Snarling under his breath, in a perfect frenzy, he ripped the room apart in a search. Rugs up, bedding off, mattress cut to pieces — all on the chance that Milky had managed to hide the coin in the short time between his entrance through the door and the man’s entrance through the window.

There was no coin anywhere around.

With his face a mask of hate, the man in the battered hat slid out of the window again and into the night.

The man standing before Simon the Grind’s desk was old. But he was one of these tough old men whose gray hair and lined face inspire no respect for age.

He was thin and stooped and wiry, with overlong arms and legs and a small round belly that stuck out of his thinness in a most unexpected way. He looked like a spider.

His features were no more prepossessing than his body.

His eyes were watery blue. His nose had an eagle jut to it, over a mouth that didn’t seem to exist at all till the old man spoke; then words split the invisible lips apart, temporarily, just about enough to wedge a knife blade between them.

“You came fast,” nodded Simon the Grind. His nod was contented. Such speed, he thought, meant a degree of interest that would permit him to charge a high price for the object that had called it forth.

“The medallion,” snapped the old man, lips a sixteenth of an inch apart to get out the words. “You phoned you had it. Where is it?”

Simon the Grind took his time. He had observed that keeping folks waiting sometimes added dollars to an article’s value.

“Where do you come in on this, anyhow? And how did you know a guy like me might some day have it pass into his hands?”

“I made that medallion years ago,” said the spidery old man. “That’s how I happen to know about it. I’m a jeweler and engraver. I knew it might be stolen some day because I know about the history of the medallion.”

“What is the history?” Simon the Grind invited.

“None of your business, my friend,” said the tough elderly man. “If you really have it, name your price.”

“Did you leave your phone number with a lot of other guys?” inquired Simon.

“I left it with about every fence in New York. If such a coin got to them, they were to phone me and get a good reward for it.”

“Fence?” complained Simon the Grind. “I’m a buyer and seller of valuable goods. I’m no—”

“All right, you’re a fine, upstanding, respectable pillar of society. Where’s that medallion?”

Simon the Grind decided there was nothing to be gained by whetting the spidery man’s appetite any more. He dipped into his desk drawer and produced the coin.

The old man practically pounced on it. His eyes were gem-bright as his clawlike fingers turned it over.

He bit it. He rang it gently on the desk. He looked at it through a jeweler’s lens.

“You don’t think I’d try to ring in a phony on you, do you?” said Simon the Grind, in a hurt voice.

“All right, what do you want for it?” said the old man, ignoring the plaintive tone.

“Ten thousand,” said Simon, on a wild guess.

The old man laughed. “You have queer ideas. I want this, yes. But it has no such value as that. I’ll give you five hundred dollars.”

Simon the Grind was a mind-reader when it came to asking prices. He smiled comfortably, serenely.

“Ten thousand dollars. That’s the first word — and the last.”

The spidery old fellow sighed. Then he shrugged.

“You’re a smart man, my friend. And a hard one. All right. You win.”

He put his hand into his breast pocket.

It came out with a gun in it.

“Turn around in your chair,” he said.

“Hey, wait!” bleated Simon the Grind. “You can’t do this to me! Why, you—”

“Are you going to turn around?” said the old man, very softly.

Simon the Grind swiveled around in his chair. He heard a step behind him as the old man reached the desk. Then Simon didn’t hear any more, but he saw a whole constellation of brilliantly colored stars.

That was when the gun cracked down on his head.

He slipped down in the chair, hung over the left arm for a moment, then went on with a thud to the floor as his lax weight overbalanced the thing.

That was the way he lay when the young fellow with the frayed, blue-serge suit and battered felt hat got back from Milky Morley’s room, still on the trail of the gold coin.

The door — that is, the fact that the door was slightly open and offered no difficulty of entrance — gave the man the first warning that all was not well here.

The sight of Simon the Grind, unconscious on the floor, confirmed it.

With his teeth gritting audibly in his rage, the man leaped to Simon’s side. Words chattered from his trembling lips. The words were gibberish to an American, but in the man’s native tongue they meant that some fiend from Hades must certainly have come first and taken that coin.

But the man looked through the place.

The room resembled Morley’s room before he was done — which is to say that it looked like a place where an unfriendly tornado had decided to take over and stay awhile.

But there was no sign of the gold medallion.

Curiously, the man made no effort to steal anything, although there was much of portable value around.

He did come across a bundle of banknotes, and almost absent-mindedly put a dozen or so twenties in his pocket. But he left far more than he took, and altogether his manner was that of a man anticipating a few expenses and abstracting just enough money to cover them.

Simon the Grind was conscious by then. Conscious, and sly as ever. That was too bad for Simon.

There was a gun under his desk, next to the right leg. He had found long ago that a gun in a desk drawer is not much good in emergencies, but that a gun on the floor can often be reached by some subterfuge.

Now, pretending still to be unconscious, he slid his left hand cautiously toward the gun. The man in the battered hat was putting money in his pocket at the moment.

Simon the Grind got the gun. He was transferring it from his left hand to his right when the man whirled and saw him.

With no more compunction than if Simon the Grind had been a horse with a broken leg, the man shot him.

Milky Morley’s gun thundered out; Simon relaxed on the floor with a hole over his heart. And that was that!

The man wiped his prints from Milky’s gun, tossed it to the floor beside Simon’s dead body, and went out.

A man had been slugged and two men had died, in a few short hours, because of that small and not very valuable-looking medallion with the figures 29 32, the letters H H, and the likeness of part of a building on it.