Stockholders in Death

CHAPTER XVIII Veiled Lady

Louie Fiume and Nicky Luckow, birds of a feather, were at Beatrice Luckow’s apartment. They had come there, taking separate and circuitous routes, from Bleek Street. They lolled in easy-chairs, with cigarettes and drinks at hand, looking and feeling pretty pleased with themselves.

Beatrice, Luckow’s sister, didn’t show any feeling at all on her dark, pretty face. She was as expressionless as usual. Now and then she looked at Fiume. For the rest, she stared at her crimson-tinted fingernails and said nothing.

She had taken no other maid, after the exposure of Rosabel. The three were alone there.

At least, they thought they were alone.

“I guess we fixed up that Benson guy and his gang,” laughed Luckow, raising whiskey to his lips.

“ ‘We’?” said Fiume, darkly sardonic.

“Well, it was your scheme, of course,” Luckow said hastily. “And a smart one, too, fella. Making up three of the boys to look like Benson and two of his buddies and then popping off a coupla cops was the smartest thing I ever heard of.”

“Thanks,” said Fiume, still sardonic.

“You got the kind of brains this town needs,” Luckow said. “Let’s me and you go into partnership. We’ll run New York in a year.”

“It’s an idea,” said Fiume. “But first we got to get together on this Crimm business.”

“That’s in the bag,” said Luckow. “Benson and his crowd get burned down by the cops, with luck. If not, they will be thrown in the cooler for weeks. Till long after this goofy stockholder’s meeting tomorrow that’s supposed to mean so much. That’ll save the Town Bank pirates. And after that — well, we’re on Easy Street.”

“Yeah?” said Fiume skeptically.

“Why, sure,” said Luckow, looking surprised. “Like this: Wallach and Grand split millions on the stock deal, and more when they sell Crimm’s stock. They don’t know we know that, but we do. And that’s our stake. When they get the dough, we put the squeeze on them. Kick through or go to the chair for murder! Boy, we can bleed ’em of every dime they’ve got.”

“Nope,” said Fiume.

Luckow appeared more surprised than ever. Beatrice looked up from her tinted nails for a moment, too.

“We’ve been dopes,” said Fiume. “So the squeeze is out. Reason why? Because Wallach and Grand aren’t the boys responsible for this. They ain’t got the guts. They’re just stooges for somebody else. Somebody higher up.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m as sure as a guy can ever be when he knows something and can’t prove it. Those guys are dummies. There’s a biggie in the game above them. I don’t know who. But till we can get him, there’s no squeeze—”

Two men and a girl, thinking themselves alone.

But in the window outside, black with the darkness of pre-dawn, a face appeared for just an instant. The face was as cold and dead as the face of the winter moon. In it, two pale eyes rested briefly on Beatrice’s tinted nails.

A gray steel bar of a figure began to inch down a ledge from the Luckow window just after the word “squeeze.”

It was eighty feet to the ground, and the ledge from fire escape to window was less than two inches wide. But The Avenger negotiated it almost without thinking of what he was doing. His steely fingers hooked to slight niches in the tapestry-design brick of the apartment building, while his feet trod the ledge as surely as if it had been a floor.

Benson moved with his abdomen held out from the wall a little. That was because of the delicate apparatus hooked to his belt.

The world’s tiniest dictaphone was there, geared to an equally tiny record that was in tape instead of roll or disk form. On the tape was duly recorded the words that should — unless catastrophe occurred first — clear Benson and his aides with the police:

“Making up three of the boys to look like Benson and his buddies and then popping off a coupla cops was the smartest thing I ever heard of.”

The Avenger descended to the ground. As he left the fire escape, he grudgingly conceded Fiume’s shrewdness. For the clever mobster had deduced precisely what Benson had:

Somebody was over the Town Bank directors. They were merely stooges in this game.

Benson hailed a taxi. He got into it, head down a little so the driver wouldn’t see too clearly his unforgettable face and eyes.

He gave an address half a block from Wallach’s home.

There was one way to check on the bigshot guessed by Fiume. That was through the stooges, Wallach and Grand. And, since it was Wallach who had come with the unseen driver to Bleek Street in a fruitless effort to help Rath, it was Wallach that The Avenger intended to query first.

But it happened that once more the thought processes of a crook paralleled those of a defender of the law. In Beatrice’s apartment, Fiume turned to Luckow.

“Look,” he said. “There’s one way to find out if I’m right. That’s to have a gander first around Wallach’s place and then around Grand’s. We’ll see what we can see.”

“O.K.,” said Luckow.

It’s faster going down an elevator than walking down the fire escape. The two men got to the door just in time to hear somebody give an address to a taxi driver. Fiume’s eyes narrowed a little as he noted that the address happened to be near that of Wallach’s place.

His eyes widened again as the cab passed through light and he saw the man in back. The Avenger had his head up, now, and his face was clear to both Luckow and Fiume.

“How in hell,” breathed Luckow, “did that guy get away from the cops? The—”

“It don’t matter how he lammed,” snapped Fiume. “What matters is that he did — and that he’s going to Wallach’s! Hop the phone in your apartment and get your gang. I’ll get mine. We’ll smash that guy at Wallach’s and be rid of him. This time, with all your rods after him, and all mine, too, there’ll be no way out for him!”

The Avenger couldn’t hear that enlightening conversation, naturally, being two blocks away at the moment and rolling farther every second.

He got out of the cab in Wallach’s block a little later, sent the cab away and walked like a soundless gray shadow to the door.

And there, in front of it, was the car that had been photographed in the picture trap.

Benson’s eyes glittered like ice under a wintry sun. He took a few seconds to go over it, and verify it. Yes, there was the same license plate — made out in some phony name of course. There were the twin foglights, about headlight distance apart, fastened to a bar that seemed to have a hinge pin on one end.

To make doubly sure, he looked at the right rear tire. It had a sharp V-cut in it, so regular and clean as to have surely been made by a knife.

The Avenger went on to Wallach’s door, looked at the lock a moment, and inserted a thin steel loop. A few seconds with the flexible bit of steel turned the bolt.

As noiselessly as a gray fox, The Avenger stepped into a small hall, dimly lighted. And from a room a little ahead and to the right, he heard voices.

There was Wallach’s voice — and the voice of some other man. It was not the voice of Lucius Grand. Benson, whose ear was photographic in the precision of his memory, knew that.

Wallach was justifying Louie Fiume’s statement that the Town Bank directors “ain’t got the guts.” The deaconish-looking man was cracking, and cracking badly, from the whimpering tone of his voice.

“I can’t do it,” he was moaning. “I can’t! There’s too much chance that the police will walk into the stockholders’ meeting and tap me on the shoulder for complicity in murder.”

“You’ll do it,” came the voice of the other man, ruthless, inflexible.

“I tell you, I can’t! It’s all very well for you. You’ve covered your tracks beautifully—”

“You’ll do it. At nine o’clock in the morning you will receive a large manilla envelope with the Crimm stock in it. You will attend the stockholders’ meeting of Ballandale Glass, and vote for the course of action that will smash the concern. If you don’t— Well, remember Maisley and Joseph Crimm and Haskell.”

“You’re made out of stone,” came Wallach’s dry voice. “You—”

The Avenger had been creeping up on that doorway, a step at a time, testing each board before he trod it to be sure no sound would result. Suddenly he froze, and was listening to something in the other direction. The street direction.

From a block or so away came a faint squeal of rubber. An unmistakable sound. A car had whirled around the corner there so fast that it had skidded on dry pavement.

He sprang back toward the street door and wrenched it open.

A car coming this way much faster than most cars travel. It might be just anybody in a hurry, or it might be a squad or gang car — either of which would be bad medicine for The Avenger.

Benson seemed to have thought all this out in a tenth of a second, and to have acted to get away equally fast.

Behind him he heard Wallach’s frenzied yell.

“Somebody in the hall— Somebody listening to us—”

Then Benson was on the sidewalk. And down the block was coming the car that had made the noise. It was full of men! Behind it another appeared, squealing around the same corner and also full of men.

Benson turned the other way.

From that end came two cars — three—

The door of the house he had just left slammed open. Benson got a glimpse of Wallach in the doorway, and of some man who kept hidden behind Wallach. There was a glint of light on metal over Wallach’s shoulder.

Benson heard a sharp little snap, and then heard a slug whisper past his cheek. The man behind Wallach was shooting over Wallach’s shoulder at him with a silenced gun.

The Avenger’s pale eyes flared. Death in the doorway. A dozen men coming from his left. A score coming from his right.

At the curb was the death car with the twin foglights and the V-cut in the tire. Benson sprang to that. He got just a glance at something like a wisp of gray fog trailed on the edge of the front seat. He opened the rear door and sprang in there.

Swiftly he rolled down a window and leaned Mike, his little .22 on the sill.

The car started off with him.

It jammed toward the two cars coming from the corner where Benson had first heard the tire sound.

A dark shape with something like mist around its head had straightened up a little behind the steering wheel of the death car and was guiding the machine while slumped far down out of bullet range.

The two cars with the gangsters in them were charging straight at the death car!

“Left!” snapped Benson to the figure at the wheel.

And Mike’s deadly little whisper sounded out on the heels of the word, almost lost in the whirring of tires.

The little slug hit the left front tire of one of the two cars plunging toward The Avenger. The car sagged on a flat and whirled off before the man at the wheel could wrench it straight.

There was a resultant gap between the two oncoming machines. The death car leaped at the gap. The man in the other oncoming car slapped the wheel over to close the gap, but couldn’t make it in time.

Like an elusive quarterback sliding between two lunging tackles, the death car got through. There was a moment when the two cars poured hasty shots at it broadside, then it was past.

But behind it were the other three cars, that had been traveling in the same direction to start with. They shrieked after the death machine.

“Hurt?” said Benson, to the slumped driver ahead of him.

“No,” came a soft, refined voice. A woman’s voice!

She was a fine driver. She skidded around a corner to the right, around the next to the left and instantly up over the sidewalk and into a blind little areaway.

The car nosed into it like a crab into a hole, bounced a bit as the brakes wouldn’t quite hold enough and the bumper ticked the building wall, then stopped. The lights were flicked out.

Past them on the street the three cars shrieked along the path it was thought their quarry had taken.

“I’ll take the wheel,” said Benson.

He slid over the back of the seat as the woman moved to the right. It was the veiled lady who had once before helped him.

“You knew I was in the car?” she said.

The Avenger nodded.

“I came out of Wallach’s house to take the wheel myself. Then I saw the end of your veil trailing on the front seat. You were hidden clear down below the dash. So I got in back to shoot while you drove.”

As he spoke, Benson glanced sideways at her. Not at her face, which was so hidden by the veil that even his sharp eyes could not make out her features.

The car was doubling and twisting through the streets. Then he headed for the dark dock where the Minerva lay.

At the dash of the death car something was ticking, so faintly that it could scarcely be heard. Or perhaps it was a motor tappet just a bit loose—

“You’d better let me out now,” said the girl beside Benson.

“No,” said The Avenger. “You’ll be safer with me for a while. This time, the mob may guess who is under that veil, and it wouldn’t be so healthy for you.”

“You know who I am?” gasped the girl.

“Yes!”

Benson gave the wheel a last twirl, and sent the car into a dark shed. He helped the girl out, closed the shed door.

“There’s a boat of mine half a block up, at dock,” said Benson. “We will stay on that till daylight, which isn’t far off, now. Then—”

She followed him up a dark gangplank to the deck of the Minerva.

“Then?” she said.

“Then we’re going to turn a lot of folks over to the police,” said Benson. His hand pressed her arm. “I’m sorry. It has to be that way.”

“I’ve known for a long time it would — have to be like that,” said the girl in a low tone.

“It was Tom who finally made you decide to fight the other way?”

“Yes,” said the lips behind the veil, “it was Tom.”

Benson led her to a dark hatchway, and down. He lowered the heavy lid over them as they descended. He opened a steel bulkhead door and light showed.

“Well,” said MacMurdie, speaking for the group that had been waiting in the hold of the Minerva, “we’d begun to worry a little about ye, Muster Benson. Did the skurlies give ye a wee bit o’ trouble?”