Nellie Gray was as fragile-looking as a porcelain doll. Dainty and small, slim and pink and white, she looked as though life owed her a satin pillow on which to sit and dream in sheltered seclusion. No one could look at her and guess the amazing deftness and strength there was in her slimly rounded body.
And no one at this moment could have guessed the desperate thing she was turning over in her quick brain.
She sat on one of the divans in the Bleek Street headquarters. She sat on one foot, like a little girl, and she tapped her red underlip with the tip of a slim and fragile-looking finger in deep thought.
The gigantic Smitty was there, in the big room. MacMurdie was back at his store. He and Smitty had seen the other members of the expedition assigned to them by Dick Benson, and had turned in their reports.
Reports that told no more than had been found out before they were interviewed.
Nellie spoke to Smitty. “Mr. Benson has said several times that I’m not being held here. That I’m free to come and go as I choose.”
“That’s right,” said Smitty, eyes blue and ingenuous in his good-natured, full-moon face. “Say, you aren’t still suspicious of us?”
“No. Not any more.”
“Then why,” said Smitty, “did you ask if you could go out?”
“Because that’s what I want to do,” said Nellie. “And I wasn’t sure you wouldn’t try to stop me.”
“You want to go out!” gasped Smitty.
“Yes.”
“But you know the situation. It would be very dangerous for you to go roaming around alone! We’re up against a gang of killers. They’ve already tried twice to get you — once at the school, once when you were leaving police headquarters with the chief. And you’d go out and expose yourself to a third attempt!”
“I don’t think there’d be so much danger,” said Nellie pensively.
Smitty snorted explosively.
“Anyway, I want to go out. Will you let me?”
Smitty came and stood over her, gigantic, so muscled that his arms hung crooked at his sides like the arms of a gorilla. He made her appear smaller and daintier than ever.
“You put me in a spot,” he complained. “Sure, you’re free. I haven’t any orders to keep you from leaving. But hanged if I’d allow you to go out and maybe get snatched or knocked off before you’d gone two blocks. There’s a healthy chance this gang knows where our headquarters is and are watching it. They know the chief’s interest by now — and tried to bomb him.” Smitty’s eyes went venomously to the big canary cage in the corner where the bomber was sitting dejectedly on a wooden stool and peering through the bars.
“Then I’m not free!” said Nellie.
“I didn’t say that,” Smitty mumbled, with a harassed look.
“If you won’t let me go out, I’m not free. And if I’m being held a prisoner—”
“Oh, for gosh sake!” said Smitty. “Can’t you understand I’m just trying to keep you in for your own good?”
Nellie stood up. She could have walked under the giant’s outstretched arm and had plenty of room to spare. But she was in thorough, feminine command of the situation.
“Since you haven’t orders to keep me in, I’ll go out,” she said.
“But look here—” Smitty began hoarsely.
“I think my things are on the floor below. Goodbye.”
She went to the stairs leading down from the third floor headquarters.
“But—”
Smitty took a step toward her. Stopped. Started. Stopped.
She smiled sweetly at the giant, and went on down.
On the street, her smile became set and fixed on her full red lips. For her plan was indeed a desperate one.
Police, Benson, everyone, seemed to have made no real progress in finding her father’s murderer. And she burned to have that man found — and electrocuted! So she was going to try a little investigating on her own hook.
This gang wanted her. That was proven. They wanted her, probably, to wring information from her about the bricks. All right, let them catch her! Let them take her to wherever they hung out. There, she’d see just who were in the gang, so she could later identify them. She’d escape, and lead police back to wherever they’d taken her. They could capture the whole lot of them in one stroke.
Of course, it might not be quite as easy as that, to escape from them. But she was willing to gamble on that recklessly slim chance. She might look like a Dresden doll, but she had the will of a man as big as Smitty himself, and she was r’arin’ for action.
She thought the fact that the gang wanted her so badly would insure it. And — she was right.
She had gone three blocks, toward a cab stand, when she saw a man seem to detach himself from a doorway in which he had been leaning. She went on, got into a cab, and saw in the rear-view mirror that a long, dark sedan had slid to a stop a block in her wake. It was too far to see if the man was in it, but he probably was. And in addition, she could see the heads and hats of three others.
Four men against one girl. That should give them odds enough, Nellie thought, with a bitter quirk of her red lips.
“Where you want to go, miss?” the driver said.
Nellie didn’t think it mattered much. She didn’t think she’d be allowed to get to any address she wanted to mention. But she had to act natural.
“Drive north on Ninth Avenue,” she said. “To Forty-second Street.”
The cab started off. The sedan behind crept closer, almost at once. There’d never be a better spot for trouble than the warehouse and wholesale district they were in right now.
Nellie saw it coming.
“Look out!” she screamed to the driver, taking a firm grip on the seat herself. “From the left—”
With a motor scream like that of a charging animal, the sedan had shot abreast of them and veered powerfully to the right.
“Hey—” flared the taxi driver.
That was all. The sedan had his cab pinned against the curb like a bug under a student’s thumb. And the man was hanging over the wheel, knocked out when his head hit the window upright on the left.
Nellie wrenched at the door, screaming. But in the midst of a lot of wild acting, her eyes were cool and calculating. She had to act as if this were terrifying and unexpected, so the men would not suspect a trap. That was all.
They got her and dragged her from the cab, pulling her clutching fingers loose from the door handle. People were beginning to run up. They got her into the sedan. It screamed off, with the right front fender scraping the tire, crumpled down by the accident.
Nellie Gray fainted, and lay in the back of the speeding sedan like a mishandled doll. She lay with her eyes partly opened, veiled by thick, dark lashes. That wasn’t unusual. Many times when people faint, their eyes remain partly open.
What was unusual in a person who had “fainted” was that Nellie was seeing perfectly through her lashes. She burned the faces she saw deep in her memory.
A dark-complexioned man with black eyes and hair who wore a black suit.
A fellow with sandy-red hair much like MacMurdie’s, but whose eyes were vicious and slitted, instead of honest, like the bitter Scotsman’s.
Two men who might have been brothers in their thin, stoop-shouldered build, with yellow-stained fingers and dull brown eyes and mouse-brown hair.
She knew she’d never forget those savage faces.
Back at Bleek Street, Benson didn’t waste time rebuking Smitty for letting Nellie Gray go out.
“I see how it is,” he said in his strong but silken-quiet voice. “You had little choice, Smitty. You had to let her be a fool, I guess, if she insisted on it.”
Strangely, Benson seemed to waste little time on trying to check up on Nellie’s path from the building, too. He seemed to dismiss her utterly from his mind. He went to the big canary cage.
The man inside crouched back as far as the bars would permit.
“You let me out of here!” he squalled. “I demand to be turned over to the cops!”
“Do you?” said Smitty, grinning.
The giant opened the barred door and brought the man out. He plumped him down in a chair.
“You lemme alone!” wailed the big bad man who hadn’t hesitated to take the life of an elderly man and a young mother in an attempt to murder Benson. “What are you goin’ to do to me? I want a lawyer!”
He was still yelling for a lawyer five minutes later when his eyes began to go blank. That was from the stuff Benson had injected into his arm. The drug perfected by MacMurdie, which produced a refined and improved kind of “twilight sleep.”
A little later, with the mirrored ball twirling dizzily before his blank eyes, and with his conscious mind held in thrall by the drug and his subconscious released to speak the truth as demanded, the man talked.
His name was Pinkie Huer. He had been brought to New York from Toledo several months ago to do odd jobs in crime for an underworld big shot named Frank Borg. Yesterday, Borg had given him one of those queer little peanut bombs and told him to trail a white-haired guy named Benson till he had a chance to blow him to pieces. The blowing had been unsuccessful.
No, Pinkie Huer didn’t know what the bomb was, nor where Borg had gotten it. No, he didn’t know anything about a larger plan in which Borg seemed to be acting, nor did he know if Borg had some superior over him who was unsuspected even by the rest of the underworld.
Borg put up at an old house near Sunset Boulevard on Long Island. Borg was an average-sized guy dark of skin and hair, with black eyes. Yes, his hair grew down a little on his forehead in a kind of a point. Yes, he wore dark suits and shirts a lot.
Benson’s pale eyes glittered into Smitty’s china-blue ones.
“That’s the man!”
Smitty nodded. “Know anything about him, chief?”
“Some,” said Benson in his deadly, smooth voice. “He is a sort of mercenary for hire in crime. He has a small gang and he hires out, gang and all, to anyone who wants a crooked job pulled. Anything. Including murder. Besides that, he is sort of armorer to the underworld. He supplies the gangs with guns and ammunition. Everything, from sub-machine guns to tear-gas bombs. No one knows where he picks the stuff up, but it’s always the latest thing in equipment.”
Benson turned to the man. He had a pudgy face, with lips a little too thick and nose a little too thin. His eyes were gray-brown, muddy-looking, and his hair was about the same.
Benson stood a mirror in front of the vacant-eyed crook’s chair, sat beside him so their two faces showed next to each other in the glass. Smitty brought him things as he crisply ordered them. Benson’s white, steely hands moved expertly.
And a miracle was accomplished.
Man of a thousand faces! Made that way by the terrific loss of his beloved wife and daughter that overnight had turned his black hair snow-white and paralyzed his facial muscles!
Benson deftly manipulated the dead flesh of his face. Where his fingers moved that flesh — it stayed. His countenance subtly altered under Smitty’s fascinated gaze. It became the face of the man named Pinkie Huer. The features became pudgy, formless. The lips were too thick and the nostrils too thin.
Benson selected two little glass shells only a few thousandths of an inch thick. On them were glazed pupils of about the same muddy brown as Huer’s. He slipped them over his flaming, pale eyeballs, and those eyes became blurry gray-brown. Hair was next. Nondescript brown hair, which Benson pulled on over his own shock of white hair.
Then shoes, with inch-and-a-half lifts in them; inflated rubber pads at shoulders and waist. Benson stood up. And Smitty whistled aloud. For it seemed that you were seeing double and one Pinkie Huer was sitting with blank, wide eyes while another was standing with taut erectness and purposeful jaw.
Benson relaxed his straight carriage, slouched a little, receded the square of his chin — and was a hundred-percent perfect.
“I’m going to the Long Island house. I’ll have to go it alone, of course, Smitty. If I’m not back within three hours, better get MacMurdie, and Hogarth from headquarters and come for investigation.”
“Can’t I go along now and maybe hide down the block from the house?” pleaded Smitty. “You’re going singlehanded into a whole nest of these rats. That’s not so good.”
“Investigate when I’ve been gone more than three hours, but not before,” said Benson.
And Smitty nodded regretful obedience. You didn’t argue with the gray steel man. At least not more than once!