The Yellow Hoard

CHAPTER V Temple Bricks

Michael Ransom Bower was obviously well-to-do. He owned a narrow-front gray stone house on Sixteenth Street near Fifth Avenue that represented several hundred thousand in real estate value. When Benson pressed at the bell beside the iron-grilled front door, a servant in livery opened the massive panel.

However, the servant had broader shoulders and a more beetling brow than a proper servant should have. His left ear was cauliflowered. His nose was bent. He was either an ex-wrestler or a ham prize fighter.

“Yeah?” he said to Benson.

“I’d like to see Mr. Bower—”

“Beat it, buddy. Nobody’s seeing Mr. Bower.”

The door started to close.

Benson pushed it open, shoving a surprised and furiously straining man along with it. Benson stood in a tiny vestibule, not looking very tall, but not looking any the less impressive for all that. He resembled a limber gray steel bar more than a man. And his pale and deadly eyes made the big ham at the door reach toward his pocket.

“I must see Mr. Bower,” Benson said, with the patient reasonableness of a grown man for a child.

“I told you—” rasped the man. And there was a glint as he got a gun half out of his livery pocket.

Benson apparently didn’t stop to reason it out, as ordinary men might have. There was urgent necessity behind his visit here, and he didn’t intend to give it up. That was all.

The gray steel man’s left hand caught the leveling gun barrel as a hawk catches a bird in mid-flight, and turned it aside. His right hand reached up and around the big fellow’s neck. Thumb and second finger pressed hard there, at the base of the medulla oblongata.

A spectator might have thought the movements slow, so methodically and perfectly completed were they. But they couldn’t have been slow, for the man with the cauliflower ear, trained in a hundred ring bouts, was utterly unable to ward them off.

The man in livery wavered. A sort of hissing exclamation came from stiffening lips. Then he lay on the floor and looked up at Benson with wide eyes that couldn’t see anything. Benson went on through the inner door. The man behind him would lie quiet for half an hour. If Benson hadn’t removed the pressure on the great neck nerve centers, the man might have lain quiet for the rest of time. For that pressure can kill.

Benson went upstairs, moving like a lithe gray fox, and yet seeming to take his time. That was one of the paradoxes of all his motions — he didn’t seem ever to be in a hurry, yet he got from one place to another faster than seemed physically possible.

A man suddenly appeared at the head of the stairs. On him, Benson wasted no words at all. With the same move that bore his body up and over the top step, he whipped forward like a steel rod, with his fist licking out. The second man sagged in three sections, like a swaying Z, and was promptly out of the picture.

There was still another man in front of one of the second-floor doors, about five yards away. Benson, who was in motion again even while the second man was falling, stopped in front of the third guard. He, too, was reaching in alarm for his pocket. But he didn’t complete the move.

He stared almost hypnotically into the pale-gray flames which Benson had for eyes. The deadly penetration of those eyes, the appalling expressionlessness of the white, dead face, made the man’s stomach feel as if somebody were tying it into hard knots.

“I’ll see Mr. Bower, please,” said Benson. His voice had a silky quiet to it.

“Yes, sir,” said the man, stepping aside.

Benson opened the door and went in.

At the window, sitting in an easy chair, was a man in dressing gown and pajamas. The man was corpulent, pompous-looking. But he needed a shave and his hand trembled as he raised a glass from a little table on which was also a half-filled-bottle and a bowl, of ice.

The man turned swiftly with an exclamation ripping from pale lips. Benson went toward him. He cowered in the chair.

He was obviously drunk. Equally obviously, he hadn’t been drinking to get drunk, but to drown terror. And he hadn’t succeeded. Naked terror still peered from his muddy-brown eyes.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Benson. “You’re all right. I’m not here to hurt anything.”

Bower tried twice to say something, and closed his trembling lips again without having been able to force out sound.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions, that’s all,” said Benson.

Bower’s gaze went over Benson’s snow-white hair, his white, still face and almost colorless, deadly eyes, and his gray-clad body that made him seem a thing of steel from head to foot.

“You… you are from the police?” he croaked.

“No. I’m investigating the affair of the Mexican bricks, but unofficially. I’m working in behalf of Miss Nellie Gray, daughter of—”

“I don’t know anything about bricks or Nellie Gray!” Bower screamed, face convulsed with fear. “I don’t know a thing about anything! Get away from me!”

“You must know something,” said Benson, voice quiet and soothing. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have hired guards with the murder of Professor Gray. You were on that recent archaeological trip to Mexico with him, weren’t you?”

“No!” yelled Bower. “I never heard of the man. I wasn’t on any trip!”

“I think you were,” Benson said. “Now, if you would tell me what you know, I might be able to help you out of the hole you’re obviously in, and help Nellie Gray, too.”

“I have nothing to tell!” cried Bower. “Are you deaf? I’ve already told you that—”

He stopped yelling. His lips writhed and little white flecks appeared at their corners. He slumped in the chair. Benson got to his side, felt for his pulse. It was pounding in a thin and thready discord. Bower was alive, but had fainted.

Something about this had so terrified him that he had gone out cold at the mere thought of telling anybody what he might know.

For an instant Benson stared at the unconscious man. Then he turned to the door. Nothing to be gained here, even if he stayed around till Bower came to. The man would die rather than talk.

“Your employer fainted,” he said to the man outside the door.

The man glared suspiciously, reached tentatively for his gun again, and again decided, on looking into the pale and flaming eyes, that he’d keep his gun in his pocket.

The man at the head of the stairs was sitting up rubbing his jaw. He made no effort to stop the gray steel bar of a man who had knocked him out. The fellow at the door was still lying on the tile floor of the little vestibule.

Benson left the house and went to the address of Basil Doolen, the second of the two names mentioned by Nellie Gray.

There were no guards in Doolen’s big apartment. The only precaution taken was that Doolen’s servant — a bona fide one — held the door on the night chain while Doolen examined Benson’s face in a mirror held at an angle. Then Benson was admitted.

Doolen was afraid, too. But he was a different breed than Bower. He had his fear under control, and he talked — at least a little.

“Yes,” he said, “I was with the unfortunate Professor Gray on his last trip to Mexico. Quite a few like myself were with him. In fact, the members of the expedition consisted entirely of business and professional men who wanted an exciting vacation, had a layman’s interest in archaeology, and could afford to stand the cost of the trip pro rata as payment for their fun.”

“The trip was successful?” said Benson.

“I think, according to Gray, it was highly successful.”

“But you’re not sure?”

Doolen looked thoughtful.

“I’m not. I got the impression, toward the end, that Professor Gray had discovered something colossal — and sinister. But no direct word of such a discovery was ever said.”

“What could it have been?”

“I can’t even guess,” said Doolen. “But whatever it was, it must be the reason why Gray was murdered. I am wondering now if everybody who was on the expedition is in similar danger, for some reason we do not even know.”

“Is there a chance that Professor Gray took out of Mexico the important thing you’ve guessed he discovered?” said Benson, eyes pale wells of flaming concentration.

Doolen was a composed and very shrewd person. He said, staring hard at Benson:

“If I knew about this, I might be talking less to a man whom, after all, I don’t know. But if you are what you seem to be, I’m willing to talk, in case my guesses might help you. If you are here under false pretenses I’m still willing to talk — because it would be to my advantage to reveal how little I know, and hence how little reason there would be for attacking me. The only thing I know of that Gray took out of Mexico couldn’t, as far as I can see, excite anyone.”

“And that was?”

“Several bricks from an old temple we discovered. I don’t know exactly how many — half a dozen, perhaps — maybe a few more or a few less. I don’t know what happened to them after we got across the border, but I always assumed the professor had brought them here to his New York home with him.”

“After his murder, it was said that two bricks were missing from his apartment — but only two. Not six or seven.”

“I know,” said Doolen. “I don’t know why they weren’t all taken, if they were the illogical reason for murder — unless only those two had any meaning to the killer.”

“Or unless only those two were in the apartment to be taken,” Benson pointed out.

“That is possible,” said Doolen. “But if that’s so, I don’t know where the rest could be. I’m sure Professor Gray came over the border with more than two of them.”

“Would you mind giving me a list of the members of the expedition?”

“Yes,” said Doolen, “I would mind. If some danger hangs over everyone who was on that expedition, I’m not going to be the one to give that danger direction by naming the men!”

“It would be pretty easy to get the names from another source,” said Benson. “The State Department will have their visa list. The Mexican border officials would know. The information would be in the newspaper morgues from announcement of the trip before it was begun.”

Doolen chewed his lip for a while, then shrugged. “I suppose you’re right. Well, here’s the list.” He wrote rapidly on a sheet of paper, and handed it to Benson.

Benson took it, thanked Doolen, and left. He stepped out of the apartment building door, a limber steel bar of a man — and instantly leaped sideways a dozen yards and back into an areaway with the explosive swiftness of a rocket projectile.

He was protected there from the explosion.

Probably any other man alive would have been killed on Doolen’s doorstep. But Benson’s almost colorless eyes had saved him more than once by their instantaneous grasp of separate pictures and their equally instantaneous fitting of them together into a clear and significant whole.

He had seen the coupé twenty yards from the door and noted that though it was empty the motor was idling. He had seen a man in a brown cap standing just beyond the coupé, near the radiator, and had noted that the man was a little crouched as if ready to duck down behind the bulk of the car. He had seen the man’s hand start up and back the instant he, Benson, appeared on the walk. Up and back in a throwing gesture.

As the man’s hand had flashed forward, Benson had made his unbelievably swift dash.

Toward the thrower — not away from him.

Over his head, as he darted forward, Benson had seen a queer object sail on its flight toward the doorway. He had seen that it was small, longer than thick, and rounded at the ends. It was a dull-gray color. It looked like a large peanut, complete with shell.

Then, as he whipped around the building recess into the areaway, there was a terrific explosion. The “peanut” had struck the walk in front of the door.

Windows tinkled down in pieces for many feet around. A crater appeared in the solid cement of the walk. The entire doorway of the apartment building was blown back, leaving only a great jagged hole. All this from a small gray thing, hardly larger than a man’s thumb.

Benson leaped out of the areaway. Again his eyes caught, in a twentieth of a second, a complete picture. But this was not a picture of danger. It was one of tragedy and horror. And at the same instant his eardrums recovered from the violence of the blast and pathetic sounds came to him.

There had been a woman and child, and an elderly man, on the walk not far from the doorway. The man was down — and he had no face! The woman was down, too, and the child, by some freak spared from death, was trying to reach her hands and was crying for her to answer. She would never answer anyone again, and she had no hands to reach.

These people hadn’t seen the move of the man in the brown cap in time to take shelter, as Benson had. Probably they hadn’t seen him at all.

Benson was streaking for the coupé, eyes awful in his white and moveless face. Death rode in those almost colorless wells.

The man in the brown cap was behind the wheel. The motor was roaring under his frantic foot, and gears clashed. The back of the coupé was dented in as if by a gigantic hammer, from the explosion, but the car would run enough to get him away from there. And that was what he was devoting every energy to doing, right now.

The car slid away from the curb. But Benson was on the running board. He got the door open. The frenzied driver had a gun on his knees as he drove. He whipped it toward the man with the flaming pale eyes, and fired. The slug ripped the side of Benson’s dark-gray coat, but his lithe twist saved further damage. He caught the man’s arm and yanked him bodily out of the car. The coupé, driverless, crashed into the rear of a parked truck. Benson and the man rolled in the street.

The man got up, dazed, and leaped for Benson. And Benson struck.

At the last moment, the gray fox of a man pulled his punch a little. If he hadn’t, he would have broken the neck of the killer in the brown cap.

He wanted to break the man’s neck. If ever a man had deserved death — but, dead, he’d be no good to anyone. Alive — he might be.

Benson scooped up the man’s limp body, and ran with it to his old car with the mighty, special motor under the shabby hood. He got away as police sirens sounded at the far end of the street.