Justice, Inc.

CHAPTER X Crime Plans Anew

Three miles from the outskirts of the city, in a ten-acre estate so well kept that it looked more like a public park than a private place, was the home of Mrs. Martineau.

The grounds were so wooded that the big house could not be seen from the road. There was a hundred yards of driveway, curving at the end to stop in a big circle before a front door as elaborate as that of a museum.

At this door three or four reporters tried to get into the house. There were not as many reporters as there would have been if personal tragedy were hinted. This was only a financial business, so financial reporters were here, and were not too tough about entrance.

A white-faced, agitated-looking servant was denying them all chances of an interview.

“Mrs. Martineau won’t see you, gentlemen. She won’t see anyone. She is not well. She hasn’t seen anyone for several days. It seems to me it’s her own business if she wants to sell — or buy — some stock or other on the market. Please go away, gentlemen.”

“We’ll go, as far as the drive,” said the youngest of the men. “There we’ll camp awhile. We want a few words with Mrs. Martineau on Buffalo Tap & Die. If she has any inkling of future movements — it’s news.”

“I’ve told you, Mrs. Martineau won’t talk to anyone—”

Another man came up to the group. The stamp of the reporter was on him, though his face seemed paler than that of most of the boys who hoof it out in rain and sun, and though his eyes were a little colder than most.

The harrassed butler stared at him.

“You, too,” he said. “You can’t come in. No one can. Mrs. Martineau gave strict orders not to be disturbed.”

Benson stared at the servant, at the door, and at the reporters.

“O.K.,” he said, after a moment, with a shrug.

He walked back down the drive — and darted off to the left among concealing shrubbery as soon as he was out of sight of the front door. He doubled back to the house, to the side. He could hear the arguing voices in front as he went up a big maple tree, hand over hand, to a branch almost touching a third-floor window.

He went out on the branch, with the sure-footed tread of a great panther, and in through the window.

At the front door one of the financial reporters said: “Who’s the guy with the poker face? I never saw him before.”

“Don’t work on any of the Buffalo sheets,” another said.

Their voices carried. The words were heard by two men kneeling down low in a small screened summerhouse so that they could not be seen above the waist-high railing. The two had their guns out. They looked at each other significantly as they heard the words.

But Pete and his pal had not needed to hear. They had seen the newcomer double back to the house and climb in the high window, and had already guessed that he wasn’t what he appeared.

Both rested their automatics on the rail of the little summerhouse, with the sights lined up on that window. Like that, with murderous eyes on the entrance which should also be the exit of their intended victim — they waited.

In the house, Benson stole with the silence of a cat toward the stairs, and down to the second floor. He could hear subdued, frantic voices from some room there. He got to the door of the room within which was the talking. He could only hear voices; not words. He soundlessly opened the door an inch, and looked in.

It was a large bedroom, with the western sun streaming in on two occupants. One was an old man with a seamed, anxious face. The other was a young woman whose status in the house was difficult to place. She was better dressed than a servant, and not as well dressed as a guest or relative. Secretary to Mrs. Martineau, Benson judged.

“What are we going to do?” said the girl, voice shaking.

The old man sighed. “I don’t know. But I do know there is one thing we can’t do. That is, to let anyone — above all, newspaper reporters — know that Helen isn’t here.”

‘Where in the world do you suppose Mrs. Martineau is?”

The old man shook his head.

“You know as well as I do that something — terrible has happened to my niece. Ten days, it has been, since we heard from her. She has been… carried away, somewhere, by someone.”

“But what for? Ransom?”

“I don’t know. We’ve had no demands. Perhaps there will be one later. I don’t know.”

Benson turned and left the door. He’d learned all he needed to know — had learned what he had suspected before.

It wasn’t that Mrs. Martineau was ill that she refused to be seen. No one could talk to her — because she wasn’t at this house to be talked to! Like Hickock, and Leon, she had disappeared off the face of the earth.

A third person of wealth and importance! A person, like the others, who the average crook wouldn’t dare to touch!

Benson got to the window he had entered. But after a little pause, he did not go out. He went down more stairs instead.

“When you go into a place where you have the least suspicion of bein’ watched, son, don’t come out the same hole you went in!”

A so-called Arizona bad man, whose “badness” usually resulted in the death of somebody long overripe for death, had tipped Benson to that little piece of advice years ago, when Benson was still in his teens but was taking his place just the same as a grown man in a tough country.

Benson calmly walked down the main hall of the big house to the front door. He opened the portal. The back of the arguing servant was toward him. The reporters gaped.

“Well, what do you know!” exclaimed one.

The servant whirled, saw Benson, and squealed:

“How dare you enter this house against orders? And how did you get in, anyway? If someone let you in the back door, after all the commands—”

His voice was interrupted by a double roar of heavy-caliber automatics, sounding almost as one. A .45 slug spat into stone within three inches of Benson’s head. At the same time one of the reporters gave a scream of pain and sagged to the ground, where he clawed at his leg, from which blood was spouting from a hole above the knee.

Had Benson come out the window, where the two men had their guns trained as accurately as though held in a testing vise, he would have died. As it was, reappearing suddenly and unexpectedly from the point least foreseen by Pete and his pal, their hastily aimed guns had missed. And they got no second shots.

Benson, with the first bark of the heavy automatics, had leaped to one side and was gone, behind a bank of bushes. He whipped Ike, the slim, razorlike throwing dagger from its sheath below his left knee, and slashed off a branch of one of the bushes. He threw the branch. It hit in another clump of bushes thirty feet farther on.

“There he is,” yelled a voice from the door, as the far clump of bushes quivered with the thrown branch.

And in the little summerhouse, Pete and the other gunman jerked their automatics toward that bush. Benson slipped Mike, the tiny, silenced .22 from its leg sheath. He aimed with care, but only for a half-second, and squeezed the trigger.

There was a soft spat, hardly louder than the phutt of an air gun. And Pete, with two inches of head showing above the summerhouse rail, went down. His companion stared at him with his mouth open. What had hit Pete? And from where?

Blood trickled slowly down Pete’s forehead from above the hairline. The other man stared around in terror — then went down himself as there was a second soft spat from Mike.

Benson, with the woodcraft of an Indian, stole from the spot and from the grounds unseen.

“So you killed them both,” said Smitty, back at the hotel. Benson had returned well before the mentioned hour. Smitty’s eyes were wholly approving as he said the words.

“I didn’t kill them,” said Benson, face still and calm as a snow-whitened pond. “I merely left them unconscious, for the police to take for the wounding of that reporter. I creased them, if you know what that means.”

Smitty nodded.

“When a bullet hits a man a glancing blow on the top of his head, instead of drilling the head itself, that man is knocked cold instead of being killed. He is ‘creased.’ I’ve heard of it, but always as a freak accident. I didn’t know anyone was good enough with a gun to shoot that fine on purpose.”

Benson shrugged a little.

“Any man who can hit a dime at fifty paces can do it. It’s not too difficult.”

“It sounds miraculous to me,” said the giant. “But — why didn’t you kill them? They certainly deserved it.”

Benson’s ice-gray eyes narrowed.

“Ever kill a man, Smitty?”

“No.”

“Well, I had to, once. In Tahiti. I swore I’d never kill again, if I could possibly avoid it. And to help avoid it, I practiced with Mike till I could hit that dime at that fifty paces.”

Benson’s eyes changed expression. His face could not change; it was a dead thing. So the gray flame of his pale, deadly eyes seemed to be gaining more expressiveness than eyes ordinarily have, in compensation.

He stared at Smitty.

“Any phone calls while I was gone?”

The giant shook his head. “Were you expecting any?”

“Expecting?” said Benson, tortured words slipping from lips that showed no torture. “No, Smitty. Hoping? Yes. I am still hoping that my wife and girl are alive. I am still hoping I’ll get a demand for money in exchange for their lives. If I do — well, I have several million dollars, and the crooks can have it all, if they give Alicia and Alice back to me. After that — I’ll wind them up or die trying! But first they can have all I’ve got if they’ll return those two, alive.”

“There was no phone call,” said Smitty gently.

The door opened, and MacMurdie came in. The dour Scot was much excited about something.

“Reportin’ from the airport,” he said, with his Scotch burr more pronounced than ever. “There’s things afoot, Muster Benson. New devilry.”

The pale-gray eyes drilled into MacMurdie’s frosty blue ones.

“The crowd that was on the plane with you that night have booked the same plane again tonight — for Montreal,” said Mac.

Benson’s body was as still as his face. Smitty stared at the Scot and then whistled. MacMurdie said:

“Another trip with… something… bound for… somewhere, I’m thinkin’. The plane with the trapdoor. Now what’ll be dropped tonight?”

“A man,” said Benson, voice as even and expressionless as his features. “That’s what will be dropped. And I think the man will be Leon, your ex-employer, Smitty!”