The Devil’s Horns

CHAPTER XIII The Gray Dragon Breathes Death!

Nellie Gray’s long evening at Sisco’s Gray Dragon was almost done. She had one more number to sing. Then she would be through. She and Rosabel both were very glad of that.

In the meantime, however, she did not slacken her efforts to find out something The Avenger might find useful.

She had circulated among the tables — paying particular attention to those held down by Sisco’s political and underworld friends. She had heard a hundred snatches of talk. But none that seemed important.

She had seen one thing she thought Benson might want to know. That was, coming with a frightened look from Sisco’s office, a violet-eyed girl who had been pointed out to her as the daughter of Oliver Groman.

Sisco himself had been out all the early part of the evening. He had come back just before that exit of Groman’s daughter. He had looked at Nellie several times with cold but unreadable eyes, and, for the rest, left her alone.

There was about fifteen minutes left before her concluding number, when Nellie, at a side table, heard the name, Martineau. At a table nearby, a man who was old enough to know better was making signs urging her to sit down and talk to him for a while.

Suddenly, to the man’s delight, she nodded and smiled. She sat down at the table, opposite the man.

“I’ve been watching you all evening,” the elderly Lothario babbled. “You know, you’re much too nice to be in a place like this—”

Afterward, Nellie could not have told you herself how she managed to seem to listen to the man and to reply now and then — when all the time her whole power of concentration was engaged in hearing the guarded talk at the table behind her. But she did manage it, and she did hear enough to set her heart beating triumphantly.

“—thought the Friday the Thirteenth Club was going to be raided,” one of the men behind her said cautiously. “The old goat was working to shut the joint, you know. He thought he’d finally built enough of a fire under the cops to have the place pinched, so he went there to see it.”

“That’s how they got him into a place like that. He wouldn’t have ordinarily come within a mile of it, otherwise?” the other man mused.

“Yeah! That’s how. But the public don’t know that. The papers cut Martineau out as a guy who sat on the bench in black robes looking like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth during the day — and then played around gambling joints with brunette dancers at night!”

“Seems to me they’d have had to have more than an expected raid to get the judge there.”

“There was more,” said the first man, snarling a laugh. “Martineau thought he was going to meet somebody there he could completely trust. He was going to be on the inside during the raid, with this guy, and see that the place really was closed up.”

“He met this guy?”

“Sure, he did. But there wasn’t a raid, and the guy he met — couldn’t be trusted so well.” The snarling laugh sounded again.

“That sounds as if the guy he met was the guy who bumped him off, and was a—”

“Shut it!” said the other man quickly. “There are some things you don’t want to say out loud. And this is one of them.”

Deliberately and completely he changed the subject. Nellie Gray rose, beautiful in a white gown. She smiled impersonally at the elderly admirer at whose table she had sat long enough to hear the highly interesting words.

“Thank you for being so nice to me,” she said, looking wistful and soft-eyed. “I must go now and change for my next number.”

She left the disappointed elderly Romeo, and went to her tiny dressing room. But she didn’t start to change. She locked the door and got out the vanity case in which was a marvelous little short-wave radio of Smitty’s invention.

Nellie’s quick brain had sifted out that overheard conversation rapidly and thoroughly.

So Judge Martineau had been lured to the Friday the Thirteenth Club by the promise of someone, high in authority in the police department, that the club was to be raided and closed. And he had gone there expecting to meet someone perfectly trustworthy in order to see personally that the raid was carried out as a raid should be.

Who would he have met in connection with a raid? It seemed almost certain that such a person would be of the police force himself. And the inference had been that this man, thought trustworthy, had been the judge’s killer.

Did that mean that the murderer was actually a cop? It certainly could mean that — and Nellie thought Benson should know at once.

However, when she tried to get him on the radio, there was no answer. She frowned, and turned to Rosabel. Rapidly she told what she knew.

“Slip out to the chief, at Groman’s, and tell him,” she ordered in a low tone. “You can be back before it’s time for me to go, and we can leave together as usual.”

Rosabel didn’t waste time talking. There were brains in her darkly pretty head, too. She grabbed her plain cloth winter coat and went out.

Nellie began sliding out of the white dress into a dark green one that enhanced her striking beauty. She was just fastening the side when the dressing room door opened — and Rosabel came back in.

“Why, what on earth—” she began.

Rosabel held her finger to her lips. She came close and whispered breathlessly:

“Sisco! He knows something! He wouldn’t let me leave!”

Nellie slowly sat down on the bench before her triple mirror.

“You’re sure, Rosabel?”

Rosabel nodded her dark head.

“I started to leave by the door from the kitchens. The one that goes out into the alley. I got through the kitchens, to the door, and one of Sisco’s men stepped in front of me. The one called Harry.” Nellie’s lovely blue eyes narrowed. The man called Harry was the worst.

“He didn’t say a word,” Rosabel went on. “He just grinned at me and stood in the doorway, filling it. I went out to the front, but before I could even get to the street door, the big man with the black hair that is with Sisco so much barred me. So I came back here.”

Nellie considered. To say that she was not alarmed, would have been saying something not strictly true. She was alarmed. Plenty! She knew the kind of cutthroats and killers that frequented the Gray Dragon. But she was not so much moved by her personal peril as by the fact that she thought she’d found out something that Benson ought to know.

She tried the radio again, and again drew a blank. Then she slipped on her own wrap.

“I’ll try it myself,” she whispered.

She went out into the narrow corridor leading to all the dressing rooms, and walked softly back to the kitchens. Odorous, not too clean, these were tenanted by only three workers at the moment. She waited till they were busy at the far end, and went on tiptoe to the door.

She thought she was going to make it, going to be able to slip out. But just as she got to the door itself, a form slid out from a narrow pantry and interposed its bulk between herself and the alley.

The form belonged to the man, Harry. And he did to her just what Rosabel had reported. He said nothing at all. He just stood so that Nellie couldn’t get past, grinning at her in a way to send ice down her spine.

“Excuse me,” said Nellie, trying to shove past.

If the man had laid a hand on her, he would have found himself bouncing from the floor with the violence, if not the resilience, of a thrown rubber ball. For Nellie could teach the biggest of assailants some painful jujitsu lessons.

But the man didn’t touch her. He stepped back to keep a distance between them, and whipped out an automatic, still grinning and wordless.

That was more alarming than an attack would be. It seemed to indicate that he knew all about Nellie, knew how dangerous she was. And if her identity were known—

She whirled, went back to the narrow corridor and started down it toward the café room — and the street door. But she didn’t even get to the café room. Sisco came from it, down the corridor, and stood in front of her.

His greenish, deadly eyes were twin pools of murder. His voice was like a dry death-chirp as he said:

“What’s your hurry, Seattle, at this time of night? You haven’t sung your last number yet.”

Nellie knew it was no use, but she played it out.

“I was just going out to the corner drugstore to get some aspirin,” she said.

“I’ll send one of the busboys,” Sisco said.

Nellie started to go into her dressing room.

“Not that room,” said Sisco. “This one. We’re going to give you a nice new dressing room. You’ll like it.”

He had his hand in his pocket. Through the pocket, the muzzle of a gun nudged her back. Like the man at the kitchen door, he was laying no hand on this beautiful little bundle of dynamite.

“But—” Nellie began.

Sisco dropped the stalling.

“So you’re working for this guy, Benson?” he snarled. “And you thought you could get away with it — here — right under my nose. Go on, get in there!”

The door of the dressing room across from Nellie’s opened at the touch of his toe. Nellie stared in. She hadn’t been in there before.

She saw a room with not one stick of furniture in it, a little larger than her own, but still quite small. She saw that the walls were covered with black cloth, and that the door had a double thickness with a two-inch air-space between.

And she saw Rosabel, leaning back, warily, against the draped end wall with her eyes very big.

Then Sisco pushed Nellie in and shut the door. The door sounded like the ponderous portal of a vault as it closed.

Rosabel and Nellie looked at each other. No need to talk. Each knew the whole story.

This dressing room was Sisco’s execution chamber. Walls and the double door were so soundproofed that shots in here couldn’t even be heard in the next room, let alone out in the café room.

To make doubly sure, Sisco was probably going to wait till the café patrons had gone and the place was closed for the night. Then he would attend to the two girls — with slugs.

But whether he waited or sent men in with tommy guns right away, Nellie and Rosabel were all through.