House of Death

CHAPTER III Death in Her Hair!

She was an extraordinarily beautiful girl.

Her hair was raven-black, but with lustrous highlights in it like the burnished feathers of a blackbird’s wing. It was rolled at the sides, presenting a look not unlike that of a coronet on her head. And, indeed, she was of the stuff from which princesses are made.

Her features were small and regular and regal, and her smooth skin had an olive tint. Her figure was slim but flawless in line and curve. A proud, fiery aristocrat from some Mediterranean country, you would have said. And that would have been correct.

The girl was from Spain. Her name on the register of the quiet little East Side hotel was Carol Haynes. But that was not the name she had been given at birth.

At the moment the girl was looking at a small gold medallion, about the size of a quarter but a shade thicker.

Since this was the night after the man had been slugged and robbed and then had killed two men in an unsuccessful attempt to get his medal back, it might have been assumed that this was that medal.

However, it was not. A close examination would have revealed that.

The gold medallion that had been taken from the man in the battered hat had the letters H H on it. This had the letters F H. That other had the numbers 29 32. This had 19 33. Both had likenesses of parts of a building; but that medal showed a larger section of wall than this one.

Otherwise, they were identical.

On impulse, the girl jumped up from the table at which she had been sitting and went to the door. The door was already locked as well as the standard hotel arrangement allowed: night-bolt thrown and regular lock secure.

In addition, tugging and hauling because of its weight, she dragged a bureau in front of the door and wedged it there.

Then she went back to the coin.

That gold medallion was beginning to represent death to her! Some powerful force wanted it; wanted it so badly that her life was of small consequence.

Carefully she put it in the coronet-like roll of her hair.

Four times in two days she had been attacked for it. Once it had been a simple purse-snatching; but, of course, she didn’t keep it in a place that could be easily rifled. Twice her room had been gone over while she was out. Last night two men had waited for her at the hotel entrance; she had barely escaped by leaping back and running, deer-fleet, down the avenue, to return with a policeman.

She caught her red lower lip in white, even teeth.

Four attempts. There would be more. And sooner or later, one would be successful.

Unless she had help.

She had no friends in New York City that she dared contact; there was too much chance that one of them might be secretly in with the crooks after her. But there was one source of help, she had heard, that was accessible to anyone in dire danger.

She reached for the telephone.

On lower Manhattan there is a street that, till a few years ago, was unknown to most native New Yorkers. That was because it was so short — only a block in length — and because there were so few addresses on it: a couple of stores, a warehouse, and three narrow three-story brick apartment buildings.

Then the street leaped into such prominence that few in the great city hadn’t heard of it. That happened because of the caliber of the man who took over the block.

The man’s name was Richard Henry Benson. But to an increasingly alarmed underworld he was better known as The Avenger.

Dick Benson took over this block, Bleek Street, by buying the three old buildings and leasing the warehouse and the stores under other names. The north side of the square was entirely taken up by the windowless back of a great storage warehouse, fronting on the next street.

The three old buildings, behind their unimposing facades, were thrown into one, which was outfitted with the quiet elegance of a very wealthy man. The entire top floor was one vast room. And it was in there that The Avenger and the little band who worked for him were usually to be found when not engaged in fighting crime.

They were in there now. At least, four of them were.

At a big desk near the rear sat The Avenger, himself, a figure calculated to give more and better nightmares to more and more criminals as the months went on and the results of his constant unpaid battles against the underworld piled up.

Benson was not a large man, no more than average size, but he seemed to own a rare quality of muscle that more than made up for quantity. He was as fast as light, as powerful as a cougar, and as deft in movement as a gray fox. You sensed this even on seeing his body in repose.

Dick Benson sat at his desk now, with his colorless, awesome eyes intent on a police report.

In one corner of the room was a teletype. All the world’s news flowed over this, and in addition there were complete police reports from the major cities. The report that held The Avenger’s interest right now had to do with events of last night.

A policeman, shot by a fleeing man, had gained consciousness hours later in a hospital to hazard the guess that he had been drilled by a second-story expert known as Milky Morley.

But Morley couldn’t be questioned because police, at his room, found him dead. He had been stabbed in the back, straight through the heart.

Morley, if indeed he was the one who had shot the cop, had slugged a fellow down the avenue. There was a wallet with Czechoslovakian currency in Morley’s room, which, it would seem, had been taken from this man.

Then, after that, police had found a suspected fence named Simon Hertziff, better known as Simon the Grind, dead in his room with a gun beside him that was later traced to Morley. There were no prints on the gun.

Four of Dick Benson’s six aides were here at headquarters. Fergus MacMurdie, the eminent Scotch chemist, was probably tending his Waverly Place drugstore. Probably. Most likely, he was to be found in the rear of the very same drugstore, in The Avenger’s crime laboratory, busily creating some advanced lethal gas or a new anesthetic, as yet unheard-of.

Another aide, Cole Wilson, the newest member of Justice, Inc., was in Detroit, acting as consultant on an important engineering task with which he had been associated before joining The Avenger’s crew of crime-fighters.

Beside The Avenger, as his pale, icy eyes studied the composite report, stood one of his aides.

This man was christened Algernon Heathcote Smith. But few people attempted to call him that because they knew it annoyed him, and he was a poor person to annoy.

Smitty, as the world called him, was a giant. He looked like something out of a heroic world of thousands of years ago.

He was six feet nine inches tall and weighed nearly three hundred pounds. The barrel of his torso was so muscled that his arms couldn’t hang straight, but hung crooked from his vast chest like the arms of a gorilla.

A keen brain resided in that huge bulk; Smitty was one of this world’s best electrical engineers.

“See any connection in those reports, chief?” the giant respectfully asked The Avenger.

“I don’t know,” said Benson slowly.

“Morley’s gun, found at Simon the Grind’s shop after Morley was discovered dead, would seem to be a connection.”

“But Morley’s gun had no prints on it,” a third speaker put in. “Morley wouldn’t have shot Simon dead, wiped his gun, and then left it there beside the body for the police to find.”

This third speaker was Nellie Gray.

Nellie was as valued an aide of The Avenger as Smitty himself. But at first glance a person would be apt to wonder why.

She was as slim and dainty-looking as a Dresden doll. Actually, she had been known to throw large men around like Indian clubs. She was past mistress of jujitsu, skilled at boxing and wrestling, and an expert marksman. Furthermore, she had more cold nerve than most men.

The Avenger’s black head was nodding at her words.

“It would look more as if the man who had killed Morley had also killed Simon,” Dick said, voice quiet but vibrant.

“It might have been this way,” mused Nellie. “Milky Morley robbed a man. He got something pretty valuable, and took it to this fence, Simon the Grind — shooting a policeman in his getaway. We’ll say he was followed. The follower broke into Simon’s after Morley had gone, killed the fence, and hunted for whatever it was Morley had taken. He didn’t find it; so he went to Morley’s place and killed him, too. Maybe he got the thing he was after there, maybe not.”

“Except for one nice big hole, that might be the way of it,” said Smitty, his tone condescending.

The giant held the diminutive blonde in very high esteem. It was suspected, indeed, that he was pretty crazy about her. To disguise it, he usually spoke to her as if she were a dull child of twelve.

In return, Nellie, who often gave indications of having a secret soft spot in her heart for the mountainous Smitty, addressed him as if he were an overgrown babe with only half a brain.

“What,” demanded Nellie, “is the hole?”

“Morley’s gun,” said Smitty, still condescending about it. “If the same guy killed them both, he must have killed Simon last, not Morley. Because he probably got hold of the gun off Morley’s dead body.”

Nellie shrugged alluring shoulders. “Morley first, Simon first — what difference does it make?”

The Avenger’s calm, compelling voice stopped the incipient argument as a window shade, suddenly drawn down, stops a glare of fight.

“Phone headquarters, Josh. See if there are any developments not yet put on the teletype. I have an idea this business might conceal something interesting.”

Josh Newton was the fourth of the little band at present in the huge room. Josh was the longest, lankiest, sleepiest-looking Negro in New York City.

When among friends, Josh talked as crisply and precisely as any college professor. An honor graduate of Tuskegee Institute, as was his attractive wife, Rosabel, Josh was as alert and quick as a steel trap.

Josh was over near a desk on which sat a battery of telephones. He picked one up, started to dial headquarters, then set it down as a soft buzz and a little light showed that somebody was trying to get them on another phone.

Josh picked up this phone.

Over the doorway downstairs was a small black sign with faded gilt lettering on it. The sign said:

A small sign, inconspicuously lettered, but mighty in its import. Justice, Inc. Here, ye who are in need may receive help. Here, ye who are in peril may apply for safeguarding.

Josh quoted the sign: “Justice, Inc.” into the phone, as a telephone switchboard operator might have said, “A. B. Richardson Co. To whom do you wish to speak?”

A girl’s voice came over the phone, agitated and tense, yet cultured and pleasant.

“I would like to speak to Mr. Richard Benson. Is he there?”

“Yes,” said Josh pleasantly. “Just a minute, and he—”

There was a scream over the phone! It ripped into the transmitter at the other end with such frightened, horrible shrillness that Smitty and Nellie and Benson heard it twenty feet away.

Then there was silence. Josh jiggled the receiver. The line was dead; only the dial sound could be heard.

Without one word spoken, the four went into action.

Josh got the location of the phone over which the call had been made: a small hotel over near Gramercy Park. Nellie called headquarters to have a squad car rush there and place a man at front and back to guard the place and see that no one got away. Smitty and The Avenger raced for the automatic elevator and went to the basement.

A fleet of fifteen or twenty cars was there, each designed for a different, specific use. They got into a coupé that could do a hundred and twenty miles an hour and shot up a ramp and over the sidewalk.

The dark beauty, registered as Carol Haynes in the small hotel near Gramercy Park, had dragged her bureau across the door before phoning The Avenger. She had forgotten the window.

It is a common thing for people to forget windows when they are on the third floor or higher. And yet more windows than not have ledges or ornamental brickwork under them which make it quite easy to climb in, whether they are on the third floor or the thirtieth.

A man had climbed in the girl’s window while she was at the phone!

The man moved with a skill that would have been admirable in any other line of endeavor. He slunk up behind the girl at the phone with a silence unbroken even by the rustle of his clothes; he took good care that there was no such rustle. He even watched his breathing, making it slow and even, to avoid giving his presence away.

If it hadn’t been for just one thing that he forgot to watch, the girl would never have known what struck her.

That one thing was his shadow.

There was a lamp on the table near the window. It was by its rays that the girl had been studying the gold coin. That lamp, behind the skulking man, gave him away.

The girl saw a moving shadow, screamed wildly, and tried to turn. His hand snaked down with a blackjack, and she fell! The man picked up the phone and set it in place. Then he went to the door, rolled the bureau back, shouldered the girl, and went to the freight elevator.

Not for six minutes did the squad car, summoned by Nellie, get to the hotel. By that time, the man was four minutes gone, driving off with another man in a dimly lighted black sedan with the limp body of the girl in the rear.

And by that time Dick Benson had reached there, after a faster trip than any ambulance or police car could have made.

“Find out who called from what room,” he said to the giant. “By this time, whoever she screamed at is gone. Find out what you can.”

Smitty went into the hotel. Benson went to the curb east of the entrance. There was no doorman at this hotel, but a cab sat there at the curb with a driver in it.

“A car may have come out of this driveway, after picking up something brought down in the freight elevator back there,” he said.

The man looked at the small police insignia on The Avenger’s car, and then stared into the glacial depths of those colorless eyes. He was an intelligent man, and he promptly decided that this was a time to come clean.

“Yes, sir,” he nodded, “four or five minutes ago a car came out. Black sedan, Connecticut license, not going very fast. It went over to Fifth Avenue, and I just happened to see that it turned north. Two men in front, nobody in the rear as far as I could see. Right rear fender dented.”

The man earned a twenty-dollar bill for his fast description.

Dick Benson stepped to the man at the wheel of the squad car.

“Phone the bridges. Stop any black sedans with two men riding, Connecticut license, dented right rear fender.”

“Yes, sir,” said the man. But it is doubtful if Dick heard him. He was already stepping into the coupé. And at seventy miles an hour he headed north.

He had reserved for himself the most probable way out of the city to be taken by any car with a Connecticut license. That was via the Henry Hudson Parkway, which was reached at the north end of the Express Highway.

There is a toll bridge up there. Benson got to it in eighteen minutes. Not for another five did a black sedan, as described, show up. The driver handed out his dime and slowly, innocently, drove on with doom behind him in the guise of The Avenger!