Three Gold Crowns

CHAPTER XVIII The Rusty Nail

The men in the basement almost forgot the fumes that clogged their breathing, at that unexpected and ringing statement.

Then the man on the floor whispered, “I… I don’t understand—”

“Smathers went to his death directly from Farquar’s office,” snapped The Avenger, eyes dreadful in his calm, cold face. “That makes it probable that Farquar himself sent him on the fake errand to his death. Why was he killed? Because he had learned that you, Farquar, were blackmailing the three men, not the other way around. But that murder, done to save your hide, was your downfall instead.

“Cleeves had a private detective on your trail. The detective trailed you to an alley, and you had to kill him. While you were doing that, one of the three — Beall, I think — got from your car the three gold crowns you’d yanked from Smathers’s mouth to hide identification. They each took one and held a threat over your head: You and you alone knew he’d gone downstairs to the dentist, Dr. Louis, for the work. Also, the three men probably made you believe that your prints were on the crowns. It would not be impossible.”

“You’re mad!” gasped the man on the floor. “Mad—”

“You killed the dentist to prevent questioning, and you felt safer. But you wouldn’t really be safe till you had those crowns back. You came to me with crocodile tears to fool Justice, Inc., into doing your dirty work and getting the crowns back. But at the same time you kept after them yourself, with a hired gang of killers. You murdered Cleeves and Salloway and didn’t get the crowns. You had Beall’s son kidnaped to exchange for Beall’s crown, and he got away with our help. Did you get the combination of the Beall office vault from him, so you could destroy the envelopes?”

“You’ve got… a direct confession,” panted the man on the floor. “I don’t know what more you want.”

“A confession framing an innocent man,” nodded The Avenger, eyes like pools of doom. “You made some bad slips, Farquar. As a blackmailer, you might have been expert. But as a killer, you’re clumsy. It was careless of you not to see that the envelope — the first one at hand in your office, chancing to have come from Beall some time ago with a memorandum in it — had fallen from Smathers’s pocket. It was equally stupid to pull those crowns. You should have left them in Smathers’s mouth; the law couldn’t have pinned the murder on you if he had been identified, if you’re half as smart as I think you are. And you shouldn’t have come to Justice, Inc., with your lying plea for help. Also, and above all, you shouldn’t have left that ball hanging in the edge of the woods. I suppose you forgot all about it.”

“Ball?” said the man. His tone was slightly different.

His eyes didn’t look quite so glazed. Mac and Wilson and Josh watched the unfolding play breathlessly.

“Remember when two men of mine were shot at near Bleek Street, and nearly killed, with a high-powered rifle from a distance?” said Dick Benson evenly. “That was clever. An attempt on the lives of my aides, just before you showed up and asked for help, would make it seem that your plea was very urgent and genuine, and that death was stalking you and trying to prevent us from helping. But it took fine shooting, to miss that closely from such a distance. However, you’re an expert marksman, and had practiced a lot lately. You’d shot from the house window at a ball hanging three hundred yards away at the edge of the woods, and—”

The man’s eyes were like the eyes of a snake.

“Let’s get that plastic and stuff off your face, Farquar,” said The Avenger, hand going out.

“Keep your hands off me!” snarled the man so venomously that the four stepped back a pace. He stood up, and his hand left his “wounded” abdomen and dropped a red-soaked sponge. It was Farquar, all right. Even before he clawed at the make-up, they could see that.

“All right,” he snarled. “You’ve stumbled onto a few things, and made a few wild guesses that could never be proved in a court of law. All right, it’s true! I was after Cleeves and Beall and Salloway. I got Beall by getting myself retained to look after his interests in the bankruptcy his company is going through any day now. The company is low on cash but rich in assets. I was going to pick it up myself, at about five cents on the dollar.

“Salloway came to me for help against a city clerk who had trumped up a street-paving scandal in a contract of his. I just took that little scheme over myself. Cleeves played into my hands by coming for help on finding a will his great-uncle had made, which left him a million dollars. I found the will, the sole copy, and kept it; so Cleeves would have to pay plenty, or I’d destroy it. But my damned clerk, Smathers, got wind of this and I had to kill him to shut him up. So it was really all Smathers’s fault. Every bit of it; Smathers’s fault.”

Even at that moment, Mac could reflect on the odd psychology of the average criminal. Every crime committed is the fault of someone else. Some other person made it impossible not to commit the crime; so the criminal, in his own mind, is cleared. He wouldn’t have stolen, lied, or murdered if he hadn’t been forced to, would he?

“Well,” said Wilson, drawing a long breath, “it looks to me as if you’d doublecross your own mother if there was a nickel in it. But you’re through now. We’ll turn you over to the police—”

But Farquar was laughing. It brought Cole up short.

“You fools,” said Farquar. “If you’d been stupid enough to believe my yarn about Beall, you could have lived. I’d have let you go, to testify against a man who would later be found dead and clear me. But you were too smart for that. So smart that now you’ll have to die. How about it, men?”

He was looking over their shoulders toward the door. The four hastened to look, too.

There was a compact group of men with guns in the doorway to the garage. They were grinning at their victims.

One of them said, in answer to Farquar’s question: “I’ll say they got to die, boss. But you’d have had a time persuadin’ us to let ’em go even if they had fallen for your line about Beall. Every right guy in the United States would give statues and medals to the ones who rubbed out The Avenger.”

“Why, the skurrrlies—” burred Mac, more outraged than frightened by the sudden trap.

The Avenger said nothing. His calm face and his colorless eyes did not show it, but he must have been less surprised by the sudden closing of the death trap than his men were. Because his ears were keener. Few men on earth had hearing like The Avenger’s.

So he must have heard the slight opening of the big garage door a few minutes ago, and then its slow closing after these men had squeezed in.

“Yes, you’ll have to die,” repeated Farquar, seeming to savor the fact. “All of you! And Beall and his precious son upstairs. Oh, yes, and a couple of others. I saw to it that word reached the blonde girl who works for you and the overgrown clown you call Smitty. They were allowed to ‘discover’ where Beall and his son were; so they came down here in a hurry and got caught. They’re upstairs, too.”

There was a light in Farquar’s venomous eyes that was close to madness. A dangerous animal, forced to kill in self-defense. And finding, under the stress of necessity, that he liked it.

“You may have noticed the cans of gasoline on the floor in the garage,” said Farquar. “And you could hardly have helped noticing the gas fumes in here. Aviation gas, Mr. Benson. Decidedly explosive. I’m going out through the garage, with my men. I’m going to close that iron door. Protected by that, and the double-thick wall I had installed recently for just such emergencies, I am going to throw the light switch in here. There is no bulb in the socket, however; there is a bit of metal instead. It will short-circuit with a nice big spark. This fume-filled room will explode like a bomb — with you in the center! Then, when the fire spreads and gets to the gasoline in the garage, this place will be a pyre for The Avenger and all his gang, and for Beall and Beall’s son.”

It was Wilson who made the fast leap for the stairs. And Farquar laughed again and threw his hand up quickly to stop his men from shooting. It wasn’t necessary, it developed.

“The door to the first floor happens to be of metal too,” the renegade lawyer said. “You can’t get up that way.”

Wilson came slowly back. There was no fear in his face, or in the faces of Josh and Mac.

On the face of The Avenger, far from fear, rode something inexplicably like triumph. A cold and dreadful triumph. It was as if he had sprung a trap, not Farquar.

“I wouldn’t try that little scheme, if I were you,” Dick Benson said to Farquar. His voice was calm, even.

“Any reason why not?” sneered Farquar.

“A very good one,” said Benson. “If you try it, you will only succeed in killing yourself and all of your men.”

“Not a very successful bluff, under the circumstances,” Farquar said, moving toward the doorway but keeping out of the line of the guns so that his men could pour lead at the victims if they made the slightest move.

“It’s not a bluff.” The Avenger shook his head a little. “Strange. It is well known that I never take life. It is well known that I endeavor to trap the smart men who think they are beyond the law, into annihilating themselves if they try to annihilate me. Those things are known; yet never can I save a man by warning him, as I’m trying to save you, now.”

Farquar was even beyond sneers. There was incredulity, amazement, a little amusement, in his eyes.

“You’re phenomenal,” he said. “Without a chance, with death coming surely in a few seconds, you can pull a bluff like that, in a perfectly calm way!”

“Hey, look, boss,” said one of the gangsters at the door nervously, “this guy with the black hair talks awful big. I don’t like it. He acts too certain.”

The others looked uneasy, too. It was not the first time armed men, apparently holding The Avenger absolutely at their mercy, had been disquieted by the man’s utter self-composure; his manner of acting as if an unseen army were behind him to back him up.

There was such an army, of course. The army of pure genius. Often a more effective army than one with guns and tanks.

“He acts as if he has a pineapple up his sleeve,” said one gunman plaintively.

“Don’t parade your ignorance,” said Farquar coldly. “What could he do? The short circuit explodes this fume-jammed room. You are all out of the garage by the time I snap the light switch, and I am protected from the explosion by the concrete wall. Then I’ll have ample time to join you outside before the fire starts. It will be one inferno of a fire, when that gas catches!”

He was at the door by now.

“Back away, keeping your guns lined up,” ordered Farquar.

The men backed into the garage room, which was dimly lit from a small side window — not, of course, by electric light. Farquar smirked at Benson in the doorway, hand on the door to bang it shut.

“Any last words, Benson?” he asked suavely.

“Only one,” said The Avenger. “Good-by.”

Farquar laughed, stepped back two more paces, and slammed the heavy door shut.

It was as though a door had been opened instead of closed; opened into a hell of sound and fury!

There was a roaring explosion like the blasting of a mountainside. The whole house leaped and tilted with it. The solid earth under the basement quivered like jello in the hand of a nervous giant. Part of the floor over the heads of The Avenger and his aides sagged down.

There was a scream from the garage. Just one, which went on and on in a terrible, inhuman way, like a siren.

Only one scream, although Farquar and all his men had been in the garage when the iron door was banged.

“Upstairs quickly,” cried Benson.

Mack and Josh and Wilson picked themselves dazedly off the cement floor. The Avenger’s loudest yell had come to their stunned eardrums only as a whisper, but it was enough.

They leaped for the section of sagging flooring and caught hold of it. The section crumpled downward in their hands, and they passed up through the ragged hole to the first floor.

Smitty and Nellie were in the kitchen, furiously fighting their bonds — lengths of chain in Smitty’s case; the gang had taken no chances with ordinary rope.

Beall and his son, with horror in their eyes as fast flames licked up at them from the shattered floor over the garage, were in the next room.

The Avenger didn’t take time to free these two as he had Smitty and Nellie.

“Out!” he said, with awful urgency in his tone.

Smitty threw the bound body of Beall over his shoulder and galloped out the main door. Wilson followed with the son. They had all gotten about thirty yards when the high-test gas let go.

There was a thundering sheet of flame over a hundred feet high where the house had been. Then there was only a soft roar as the house became the center of petals of fire.

They cut the cords binding Beall and his son. Wilson, newest member of The Avenger’s grim band, couldn’t keep his eyes off the calm face of his young chief.

“I don’t get it,” he said finally, as they walked toward the woods and the parked sedan. Behind them, even the one scream had died with the last explosion. Nothing remained alive back there. “I don’t see how it worked out like it did.”

“The nail,” said Benson.

“The what?” Wilson was almost dazed. He hadn’t seen the man with the deadly, pale eyes at work as often as the rest.

“The rusty nail I wedged next to the door, on the garage side.”

That didn’t mean anything to Cole.

Benson went on: “The trap was pretty obvious. Gasoline and gas fumes — explosion. Where? In the other basement, not the garage, because there was a ventilator in the wall with the blades inverted, which would draw fumes from the garage into the basement instead of, as normally, the other way around. And there was the wall, twice as strong as necessary, to protect anyone in the garage from an explosion in the basement. It was as clear as print what Farquar had in mind when he drew us out here.”

“But the nail—” persisted Wilson.

“The gas-filled air in the garage would explode as readily as the gas-filled air in the basement,” said The Avenger. “It would merely depend on which room produced the necessary sparks. I fixed it so it would be the garage. I wedged the nail next to the door and bent it, so that when the door was shut, its iron edge would strike against it”

“Good heavens! Of course,” said Josh. “But it had me going, too. I’ll admit it.”

Wilson said nothing. He stared with frank awe at the man who could devise such a thing. The cold genius who could trap a supercriminal and destroy his whole gang — with a rusty nail!

Benson said no more. The pale eyes were almost dull, as they always were at the conclusion of a battle. They wouldn’t brighten till the next battle loomed.

For the only thing The Avenger lived for was these deadly bouts with crime. That was the sole reason for his existence: the stamping out, wherever he possibly could, of the slimy creatures who injured society and innocent individuals in their murderous greed for power or wealth not rightfully theirs. He was more of a machine than a man — young and good-looking in spite of his perpetual icy calm, but old in crime-wisdom and resolve.

That was why he was called The Avenger — and would be called that till some day a deadly risk turned against him. And even then, that would be his epitaph—

The Avenger!