The Yellow Hoard

CHAPTER III Mexican Bricks — And Murder

The girl, fifteen minutes later, turned into the vestibule of a neat but inexpensive apartment building near the East River, uptown. She pressed a buzzer there. Over the button was the name Archer S. Gray.

Archer Gray was a retired professor of archaeology, Columbia University. He was, moreover, the girls father. Her name was Nellie Gray.

Professor Gray opened the door for her, and she kissed him. He was a tired-looking man of sixty, stoop-shouldered but wiry, with iron-gray hair. He was in a faded blue robe and had spectacles pushed up on his forehead.

“Dad! At it again?”

“I can’t help looking at them, Nellie. They’re the most important thing that ever happened in my life. And I think it’s safe to get the others pretty soon.”

“I’d give it another month,” said Nellie Gray.

She went back into the apartment with him, to a small room lined solidly with books save where the door and a window made open spaces. There was a flat-topped desk in the center of the room. The window, opening onto a tiny back yard, let in the afternoon sun.

On the desk were two oblongs of dingy brownish-gray.

They were of dried mud, or clay, or some such stuff, and looked quite commonplace — except that there were strange markings on them.

The markings were the ideograph writing of ancient Indians — Aztec Indians, to be precise.

Gray patted the two crude clay bricks.

“If the university knew what I had here—” he said.

Nellie’s pink-and-white cheeks were a little more white than pink as she stared at the two lumps of dirt.

“If anyone knew what you had there, your life wouldn’t be worth a moment’s notice! Dad, why don’t you put them in a safe-deposit box?”

The distinguished archaeologist smiled sheepishly.

“The miser has to have his gold where he can count it,” he said. “I have to have my archaeological pets where I can see them and gloat over them.”

“But—”

“I’ll put them in a bank tomorrow,” promised Gray. “Did you say there was vegetable stew for dinner? Cooked as only you can cook it?”

The girl got dinner. She cooked as attractively as she looked. Which was enough to whet any appetite. Father and daughter ate, and then Professor Gray went back to the little library and closed his door. He wanted to be alone with his precious bricks again.

Nellie Gray sat in the living room by the radio.

The living room was at the other end of the apartment from the little library. The radio, though she turned it low, drowned any noise which might have come from there. She listened to some concert music.

In the library, Professor Gray turned on his desk lamp as gray dusk faded to black autumn night. The lamp made a pool of bright light on the bricks, with darkness rimming the pool as an overhanging bank rims a pond.

In the darkness came silent-footed terror.

The window opening onto the back yard was open a few inches. A hand, in a black glove, slid into the opening and lifted. Slowly, without sound, the window raised. The professor turned over one of the bricks.

A figure slid over the window sill. Draping the figure and causing it to melt into the shadows was a dark suit, a black felt hat and a dark gray shirt. Even the face could not be seen; in lieu of a mask, the man kept his left hand over all his features but the eyes. The eyes burned murderously at the unconscious back of the engrossed professor.

“Soon,” Gray murmured to himself, smiling, “we’ll get them all together again. Then—”

The black, dim figure crept toward the seated man. In one black-gloved hand was a short, metallic object that glinted a little as light struck it.

Down the hall, Nellie Gray turned from classical music to swing. With the change in rhythm, the black shape from the night paused, hand upraised. Then the hand swept down. The hand with the metallic thing in it.

A sort of sigh came from Gray’s lips. Then, as if he were suddenly very tired, his body slumped forward on the desk. From the top of his head a thin red trickle welled from the point where metal had crushed bone.

Down the hall, Nellie went back to concert music—

In another part of New York, at one end of the block-long street, was a big warehouse standing vacant and boarded up. At the other end were a loft building and a couple of stores, also empty and unused. In between were three dingy old three-story brick buildings standing wall-to-wall, of the residence type.

Each building had its own entrance. But the entrances on the right and on the left were never used. They were triple-locked, with the inner doors bricked over. Only the center entrance was used.

Behind the innocent-looking exterior, the three buildings had been made over into one. Dick Benson owned them. Also, he owned the vacant warehouse next door on the right. Also, he had the vacant loft building and the stores to his left under long lease.

Across the street, from corner to corner, the window-less back of a half-block-square storage building loomed in front of Benson’s windows like the Great Wall of China.

Which meant that, as far as privacy went, Dick Benson owned the entire block.

Over the central door of the three buildings that had been thrown into one was an inconspicuous little sign in dull gilt letters. The sign simply said “Justice.”

Nine out of ten of the few people who entered a block where no one but Benson had a real excuse for entrance didn’t even see the sign. The tenth was apt to glance at it, decide that some stuffy legal firm was housed within, and pass carelessly on.

The justice meted out in that place, however, was beyond the law.

Dick Benson had made his permanent quarters in this block, which was a curious, quiet back bay in New York’s crowdedness, when he decided to devote all his energies to fighting the crime which had blasted his life.

Those quarters housed facilities for helping people whom the regular police could not help. And there are many such unfortunates. Usually they are threatened more terribly than folks over whom hangs the standard threat of ordinary crime. For it takes extraordinary crime to be beyond the powers of a police force which is, on the whole, very good indeed.

On the morning after 25 Washington Square North went up in a cloud of dust and chips, Dick Benson was in the top floor of his peculiar residence. The room was tremendous — sixty by a hundred and five. It looked like a combination of club lounging room, workshop and laboratory. It was the back room of MacMurdie’s drugstore multiplied by ten.

Near a rear window, in a shaft of morning sun, Dick Benson himself sat at a long table on which were morning papers from half a dozen large cities. The shaft of sunlight was striped from passing through what seemed to be a Venetian blind at the window. But it was not a Venetian blind.

The slats of the “blind” were fastened in the masonry of the window at each side. They were slanted at a forty-five degree angle to catch daylight, but were made of nickel steel to keep out bullets. All the windows were similarly equipped.

On Benson’s face the sun surprised no expression. No expression was possible there, ever. The tragic loss that had killed Dick Benson’s soul had killed his face, too; the facial muscles were paralyzed, dead. The flesh there could move only when his manipulating fingers moved it. Then it stayed wherever it was put. It made him a man of a thousand faces, but it made him a terrible thing to see, too. An engine of deadly destruction wearing a mask of dead flesh that could never express a thought.

Across the big table from Benson was the giant, Smitty. He had a paper in his vast hands, and was staring at a picture on the front page. The picture was of Nellie Gray, the girl he had seen at the school yesterday afternoon.

Benson spoke, words coming from lips that barely moved in the steely calm of his face. “Read it, Smitty.” Smitty read:

“Held without bail. Miss Nellie Gray!” That was the line under the picture. The news item itself read:

“Last night at approximately nine o’clock, Professor Archer Gray was found murdered in his den by his daughter, Nellie Gray. Death had been caused by some blunt instrument, possibly a gun barrel, though no gun was found in the apartment by police called by Miss Gray.

“Professor Gray recently returned from an expedition into Mexico on which he was accompanied by several business and professional men who financed the expedition for the pleasure of going along as amateur archaeologist. The expedition was for the purpose of studying Aztec ruins which Professor Gray had discovered, but not investigated, on a former trip.

“No valuables were taken from Professor Gray’s apartment. However, Mrs. Linda Veinecke, who cleans for the professor mornings, has noted the absence of two clay bricks brought back by the professor from his recent trip. Miss Gray, who at first denied the loss of the bricks, later admitted that they had disappeared. But since they were valueless to any but an archaeologist, they do not seem sufficient motive for murder—”

Smitty stopped reading. Dick Benson said, in his quiet but compelling voice:

“That’s clear enough. They suspect the daughter, Miss Gray. She’ll go to the chair if the police can’t find the real killer.”

“What a fool I was when I didn’t follow her yesterday!” growled Smitty. “We might have guarded her and prevented this.”

“You had no reason to suspect anything of this nature,” Benson said. “Circumstantial evidence pointed overwhelmingly to the little boy as the kidnap victim.”

“Instead of which, it was Nellie Gray the crooks were after.”

Benson nodded. He opened a drawer of the long table. From it he took two things absolutely unique of their kind. One was a slim, double-edged throwing knife with a light hollow tube for a handle, with which Benson could split a pea at thirty feet. The other was a .22-caliber revolver. The cylinder, to streamline the gun, was small and held only four cartridges. The butt slanted so little that it was almost in a straight line with the barrel. It was almost like a slightly curved piece of blued steel tubing with a little bulge for a cylinder.

Benson rolled up his trouser legs. To the inside of his left calf he strapped a slim sheath for the razor-sharp throwing knife. To the inside of the right calf was strapped the almost-as-slim holster for the tiny gun.

Smitty eyed the deadly little weapons respectfully. Mike and Ike, Benson called them, with sinister humor. Mike was the gun, Ike the knife.

“You’re going out, chief?” Smitty said.

“Yes,” said Benson quietly. “In preparation for obtaining ‘Mexican bricks,’ there was an accidental explosion yesterday, killing eleven people and wrecking a building. Now there is a murder, apparently over Mexican bricks. And a minor crook, who was tied in with the explosion, tried to kidnap the daughter of the murdered man. The whole thing is hooked together, Smitty, the result being that a girl who is almost surely innocent is apt to be railroaded to the chair for the murder of her father. It’s a case for Justice & Co., I think.”

“So?” said Smitty.

Benson got up. It was noticeable then that he was not a big man. He was not more than five feet eight inches tall and weighed no more than a hundred and sixty pounds. Yet he was a person to command profound respect. Very rarely do you see a man move with the lightning co-ordination and flaming vitality owned by Dick Benson. Power was in every motion of his steel-wire body. Smitty was a giant such as seldom is seen among men; but Dick Benson had beaten him to his knees one time before Smitty had known who the man with the snow-white hair and the deadly pale eyes was.

“So?” Smitty repeated, as Benson moved like a gray tiger toward the door.

“So I’ll have a little talk with the girl. And from that we may get a course of procedure against the cold-blooded insects whose ‘accident’ killed eleven people, and one of whom murdered the twelfth — for a couple of bricks!”