The Devil’s Horns

CHAPTER IX The Masked Men!

Every one of The Avenger’s aides had suffered from the murderous greed of criminals.

Nellie’s kindly professor father had been murdered for the secret, which he held, of the hiding place of the great lost gold hoard of the Aztecs. Nellie and Benson knew where that gold hoard was, now, and could draw on it whenever they pleased, as on a tremendous bank account. But that didn’t give Nellie back her father, so Nellie was a little fury against all murderers everywhere.

Josh and Rosabel had seen two of the kindliest men who ever lived, their inventor-employers, shot down to get from them inventions valuable to crime. So Josh and Rosabel counted that day lost when they could not strike a blow against the underworld in general.

Smitty, as has been said, had spent a year in prison and had his future blasted because of the frame of a thief.

But none of them, save Richard Henry Benson himself, had suffered such horror from organized crime as had the dour Scotchman, Fergus MacMurdie.

Benson had lost his wife and small daughter to crime. But MacMurdie had lost equally as much. His wife and small son had been blown to bits by a racket bomb. So MacMurdie lived only when he was fighting some criminal syndicate. As he was doing now.

The Avenger had ordered him to get what he could on the two-weeks-old murder of Judge Martineau. Then Benson had radioed Mac the tip Nellie had gotten at the nightclub: Judge Martineau had been shot down in the Friday the Thirteenth Club, by the side of the pretty but unscrupulous brunette dancer, Lila Belle.

Mac had circulated around the Friday the Thirteenth Club, with his thrifty Scotch soul outraged at seeing such wads of money recklessly badgered about on roulette tables and other gaming devices. He hadn’t picked up anything. So shortly after two o’clock in the morning, he decided to work on the Lila Belle angle.

He took a bus, opening an old-fashioned little snap-purse when the conductor came around, and grudgingly taking out a dime. Mac could have the money he wanted from The Avenger, any time he desired it. But it went against his grain to waste even a penny.

He got off the bus at the street number listed as Miss Belle’s. That number belonged to a towering apartment building not far from Groman’s. It was Ashton City’s newest and tallest — fifteen stories high.

The dour Scot considered. There was a lobby. There were people in it. And he wanted to get into the dancer’s place unseen.

A phone call to her apartment had revealed that she was never home till after her turn at a nightclub competing with Sisco’s Gray Dragon. It had also revealed that her apartment number was 1414.

Mac’s eyes went to the fire escape at the side of the building. In a minute he had followed his eyes and was on it. He paddled up fourteen floors on his enormous feet.

There was a steel door from the hallway to escape. He took out a stout, old-fashioned jackknife. The door was fastened, as customary, by a bolt worked by a pushbar on the inside. He inserted the knife blade between door jamb and door, lifted the bolt by main force, flipping down the bar inside as he did so, and then was in the hall.

Any one of The Avenger’s aides could handle any lock not specially built. Mac got Lila Belle’s door open in about four minutes, and stepped into an ornate living room, bristling with nightclub dolls and artificial flowers and pink, long window drapes and such other spinach.

Mac got swiftly to work. He wanted to get out of there fast. If he were picked up for breaking and entering, in this town, it would be bad.

He went first to a spindle-legged desk and worked deftly through it, not disturbing the contents enough so that evidence of a search would remain. He was looking for something, anything, relevant to the night Judge Martineau was shot.

He found a bale of letters from indiscreet rich men of the town. He found a deadly-looking little .25 automatic, which he took the precaution of unloading. And then he found a bank book.

The book showed a deposit, just two weeks ago, of one thousand dollars.

Payment for her part in smearing Martineau’s good name on the night of the murder? It looked like it. Mac finished with the desk and went to the bedroom.

This place was even more cloying in its over-feminine fanciness. He grimaced, and searched with big, bony hands through frills and furbelows. He found one more thing.

In the dressing case, in the bottom of a jewel box with a lock that a child could have picked, was a folded paper. The paper said:

Sometimes shrewd, ruthless men are betrayed by habit. It apparently was John M. Singell’s habit to initial things leaving his desk. So he had initialed this, without thinking. And Lila Belle, like a good, careful crook, had saved the little note for future emergencies.

Mac put the note in his pocket — and heard voices.

The next instant, he heard a door open — the door leading from the hallway into the apartment, here. So Lila Belle never got home before three! Well, this was one night she was breaking the rules. And with her was some gentleman friend.

Mac, lips taut, flattened against the bedroom wall, near the door. But the bedroom would be the first place the girl would come on arriving home.

The two hadn’t turned the lights on yet. Mac, unbelievably silent and fast on his Gargantuan feet, slid back into the living room and to one of the windows. There was no way out there, but the drapes—

He stood behind one of the heavy, pink things — and the light went on.

Between drape and wall there was an inch crack. Mac peered through this. He saw a girl of twenty-four or so, but looking older by reason of the hard line bracketing her mouth. In spite of the line, however, she was very pretty, with creamy shoulders rising bare from a low-cut gown revealed when she took her fur coat off.

With her was a man with cheeks as pink and smooth as a girl’s, but with the flat, hard eyes of a killer-shark. So Mac knew both of them. Lila Belle — and Buddy Wilson, the deadliest gunman in Ashton City.

Lila said something, with a low laugh, and justified Mac’s forethought by going straight to the bedroom. She threw her coat on the bed, glanced at her face in the vanity-table mirror, and came back out. Wilson had put a cigarette between his lips, flicked a lighter and sunk into a big easy chair.

She sat on its arm.

“There’s money in what you told me,” she said. “I’ll bet anything on it.”

“Aw, look, now,” protested Wilson. “We’re gettin’ along all right. Why take a chance on upsetting things?”

“But look at the set-up,” said the girl. “We might bleed this guy for a million — if we could find out who he is. And you ought to be able to do that.”

“Pretty hard,” grumbled Wilson.

“So since Pop Groman passed out of the picture,” the girl mused, “you five run things. Five men meeting masked, at the warehouse, to rule Ashton City! It sounds like something out of a movie. And four of the five are you and Sisco and Norman Vautry and Johhny Singell.”

“I didn’t say those were the guys,” said Wilson, looking uncomfortable.

“You don’t have to, sugar. It’s a natural that they are. But, anyhow, it’s the fifth one I’m interested in. You say he’s a real big shot. Somebody high in business and money circles. The rest of you four know each other, under the masks. But none of you know who the fifth is. Some big business man, meeting with you crooks—”

“Hey, whadda you mean?” said Wilson, scowling.

“Come off it, sugar. You are crooks, aren’t you?”

“Well,” said Wilson, twisting.

“Don’t you see?” the girl went on. “It’s perfect! If we can find out who’s under that fifth mask, we can blackmail him for the rest of our lives. It’ll make the money we take from the regular stuff look like a kid’s penny-bank.”

Wilson chewed his lip and looked vacantly toward the window.

“Maybe there’s somethin’ in what you say,” he mumbled.

Then he became still, and looked very hard indeed. But Mac, behind the curtain, couldn’t see his face. The girl’s brunette head was between.

“We could think it over, anyhow,” said Wilson.

Mac saw him get up out of the easy chair, and saw him begin to pace thoughtfully back and forth across the room, coming all too close to the drapes that hid the Scotchman. He could see Wilson’s face now, but the girlish-looking countenance told him nothing.

“The question is,” said Wilson, pacing, “how to get a peek under that mask without havin’ everybody else cut down on you. That’s—”

His pacing had brought him so near that Mac had to move so he wouldn’t risk being seen in the narrow crack between drape and window.

And then the drape was whisked aside so fast the end snapped, and Mac’s bitter blue eyes stared into a gun muzzle.

“Anybody with feet like yours,” said Buddy Wilson, public enemy, “shouldn’t stand behind drapes. Your toes stuck out six inches.”

It is a common characteristic of professional, long-experienced killers to be chillingly impersonal about their work. They’ve taken lots of lives. It means little.

Buddy Wilson was like that now. He trained his gun on MacMurdie with the calm of any workman handling a long-accustomed, common tool. And his voice was emotionless, almost indifferent.

The girl had kept her back to the drape while Wilson’s clever pacing brought him gradually within striking distance. Probably she didn’t feel that she could control her features after Wilson’s warning wink. Now she whirled, and glared like a tigress at the intruder.

“Buddy! Do you suppose he heard—”

“He did if he ain’t deaf. And I don’t think he is.”

The gun prodded Mac out of the window niche and to the center of the living room floor. Wilson’s girlish face was a horrible thing, with the flat, shark eyes.

“Who are you, buddy?” he said. His nickname had come from the fact that that was what he called everyone else: “Buddy.”

Mac said nothing. There wasn’t much to say.

“Speak up,” cracked Wilson. “Are you one of Cattridge’s men? Or some stooge for the Civic League under that glass-eyed bank president, Willis? Or what?”

“I’m the gas-meter reader,” said MacMurdie, who had his moments of doleful humor. They usually occurred when he was in an impossibly deadly spot. When things went well he had no jokes and was the most pessimistic soul alive.

“You’re going to be a dead gas meter reader in about thirty seconds,” began Wilson, “if you don’t talk.”

“He’s got to be anyway,” said the brunette dancer, shaking with rage and fear. “After what he’s heard? Buddy — you know what you’ve got to do.”

“Sure! You’re right. So it don’t make any difference if he talks. I’ll walk him out of here—”

“There’s a better way,” said Lila Belle hoarsely. “He was in a good place a minute ago.”

Buddy Wilson frowned, then got it.

“Sure! — The window! If a guy jumps out of a window, nobody can tell what floor he jumped from, and the guy himself would never tell. Not from the fourteenth story! You got brains, lady.”

“Don’t ye think ye’re a little loose with the term lady?” said MacMurdie, hands obediently in the air. He hadn’t a chance with that expert gun so relentlessly on him.

“Why, you—” screeched Lila Belle, clawing for him.

Buddy Wilson batted her back with his left hand, at the same time keeping eye and gun rigidly on the Scot.

“Keep out of the line of fire, dummy,” he snapped. “And you, with the map of Scotland on your homely face, back up to the window again.”

Lila ran ahead of the two and opened the window wide. Nice girl, Lila.

Mac slowly backed to it, bleak blue eyes colder than Wilson’s own. He felt the window sill hit him just above the knee, and stopped. Wilson came on till the gun almost touched his abdomen. Then, grinning, Wilson reached out his left hand to give Mac a shove.

It was a necessary move — and just the one MacMurdie had been waiting for.

The Scot’s knee flashed up as he tilted back, and his hands flashed out. The knee caught Wilson’s gun so that it whipped up and exploded a slug past Mac’s ear instead of into his stomach. The bony left hand caught the barrel after that, and the equally bony right grabbed Wilson’s left wrist.

The gun fell to the floor. A moment later Public Enemy Buddy Wilson staggered backward and followed suit, with a white welt on his jaw where the bone mallet of the Scotchman’s fist had landed.

Screeching again, the dancer leaped for Mac. He pushed her out of his way and stepped up to Wilson just as the raging gunman got to his feet, with another automatic in his hand.

The toe of Mac’s big foot sent that one flying, before it could be used, and then, in a leisurely way, Mac planted a right fist wrist-deep into Wilson’s stomach, and lashed him in the mouth with a straight left.

“I don’t like rats who masquerade as men,” remarked MacMurdie. So he belted the public enemy three times more.

He deliberately pulled his punches so that unconsciousness wouldn’t result too soon. He wanted the gunman on his feet for a little while longer.

The girl was off his hands for a moment. She had flown to the desk and clawed out the .25 automatic. She was snapping it again and again at MacMurdie, cocking it and pulling the trigger and sliding back the barrel again, waiting for a slug to work up from a clip she’d supposed was full.

Mac smashed the killer’s girlish nose, split his lips again. Then, as the dancer screamed and threw the empty gun at him, he shrugged and ended it with a sock to Wilson’s groggy jaw that seemed to have broken his neck.

“He’ll get you for this!” screamed Lila Belle, trying again to scratch MacMurdie’s eyes out. “Nobody can do that to Buddy Wilson. You’re a dead man right now! He’ll get you! And if he don’t, I will.”

MacMurdie was scrupulous even in a pinch. He didn’t hit women, even of Lila Belle’s sort. He held her clawing hands till he could get to the door. Then he pushed her back away from it, leaped out, and went to the fire escape.

And with him went the most valuable secret picked up so far. Knowledge that five masked men, taking over Groman’s robes of leadership, met to rule Ashton City.