Three Gold Crowns

CHAPTER VIII Money or the Chair

“I’m certainly glad to see you.”

Markham Farquar’s face showed that he meant the words with all sincerity. The lawyer had leaped from his chair when The Avenger entered his office and had caught Dick Benson’s hand in both of his.

“I haven’t been able to find out a thing about the frame they’re holding over me, Mr. Benson. Not a thing. Have you turned anything up?”

The lawyer ran a hand distractedly through his thick gray hair, and there was something like frenzy in his gray eyes. But Benson didn’t answer that latter question for a moment.

“You say you haven’t been able to find out anything,” he repeated. “You’ve been trying?”

“Yes,” said Farquar. “I’ve been all over the lot, trying to find out where Beall and Cleeves and Salloway keep those fake clues of theirs. Also, I’ve been trying to trace any previous connections of my clerk, Smathers, to see if I can find a hint of what happened to him.” He sighed. “I’ve drawn a blank all around.”

“Smathers’s friends or family know nothing?”

“Smathers, it seems, didn’t have either family or close friends,” replied Farquar irritably. “The man was practically a hermit. I finally located the employer for whom he worked before I hired him, years ago. That man had never heard of any relatives either.”

“Where did Smathers live?” asked Benson, eyes like ice in a polar dawn.

“In a boardinghouse up near Columbia University,” Farquar said. “I’ve been there twice, checking on things. He didn’t show up there before he disappeared. He left the boardinghouse at eight o’clock in the morning, as he always did, and that was the last anyone saw of him. He never came back.”

“And he had no friends there?”

“No. The landlady said he didn’t do more than nod to the rest, although he’d lived there for years. I tell you, the man was a hermit. We’ll never find out anything through his past. And we don’t even know if he’s alive or dead.”

“We know that, all right,” said Dick Benson, face as moveless as a mask. He was many years younger than Farquar, but he looked twice as calm and three times as competent. “He’s dead.”

“He— How do you know?” gasped Farquar.

“There was a tramp ground to bits in the Newark freight yard. That unidentified tramp was Smathers, I’m sure.”

“What in the world was he doing in a freight yard?” exclaimed Farquar. Then he shrugged resignedly. “But no matter why he was there. He was there, and he was killed. I’ve felt right along that he was dead. And now there is a definite murder charge against me any time those three blackmailers want to press it. Did you find out anything else?”

“Nothing of importance,” said The Avenger.

Farquar’s shoulders slumped.

“I guess I’d better just bite the bullet and pay the blackmail demand,” he said slowly. “I’m as sure as I am of sitting here that the clues those three men hold will really put me in the chair. And they’re getting impatient. Look.”

He tossed a sheet of paper over to Benson. The Avenger stared at it. Crudely printed words leaped out at him.

The note was unsigned.

“If we could only get something on the three,” Farquar said. “Something to tie them in with this.”

“One fact about Beall has come out, in the short time we’ve been trying to help you,” said Benson. His eyes were basilisk on the short printed note. “His paper company is in financial difficulties.”

“Of course!” said Farquar with an explosive breath. “There we have the motive, anyway— Say, did you know someone was in my office last night?”

“Several people were in your office last night.” Dick told what had happened to Nellie Gray. But in line with his usual reticence when he hadn’t yet gathered all the facts, he did not dwell on Nellie’s discovery. He didn’t describe the place where, it was pretty positive, Smathers had died.

“We ought to have something more on Cleeves or Salloway or Beall soon,” was all he said. “My men are working on them right now.”

But they were not going to get anything on Salloway.

Smitty was on Salloway, trailing him if he went anywhere, watching what he did and to whom he talked.

Above all, he was trying to get his hands on the cigar case Salloway was said always to have on his person, in which it was said he carried the trumped-up murder clue against Farquar.

Smitty had had no luck so far. He’d found out nothing suspicious about the well-known contractor.

He was in a stairway at the moment.

Salloway lived on the fourteenth floor of an East River apartment building. He had a home in Connecticut, where his family and servants stayed; he himself used this four-room bachelor apartment when he was in New York.

All last night Smitty had lurked on the stairway just the other side of the fourteenth-floor door, ready to trail Salloway if he came out, ready to eavesdrop if anyone went in. But neither had happened.

The giant was sleepy. He had taken several cat naps in early morning, propped against a stair, trusting to his hearing to wake him if sounds of steps down the hall indicated movement at Salloway’s door. But that was all. Now, in the middle of the morning, he was having a hard time keeping his eyes open.

Throughout, he had stood ready to step into the four-teenth-floor corridor on the rare occasions when anyone used the stairs. He was pretty sure no one knew of his all-night vigil.

But he was so sleepy—

Smitty’s head jerked up on his drooping neck muscles. There had been a step outside the stair door, in the hall.

There had been frequent steps there as tenants of other apartments came and went. He opened the door a crack to see if this was just another.

He just caught the movement of a door closing down the line. And it was Salloway’s door.

Smitty went to the door. The mountain of a man moved as silently, almost, as the wraithlike Avenger himself.

Yet he moved fast. The door hadn’t been closed more than thirty seconds when he reached it.

He listened. He heard a voice call out something but couldn’t catch what was said. He tried the knob.

The door was not locked. It had not been closed tightly enough for the automatic latch to catch.

The giant’s eyes looked puzzled — and more than that. It didn’t take much of a slam to close doors of this type. The fact that the door had been closed so lightly that the catch hadn’t worked hinted that whoever had entered had tried very hard to avoid the slightest noise.

Smitty pushed open the door, ready to duck or fight. But he opened the door on an empty room.

It was a large living room, expensively furnished, bare of occupants. Smitty crossed the room toward another door, and midway he heard a groan!

It was more a hard exhalation of breath than an actual groan. But it acted like a knife stuck in him.

He crossed to the door in two long jumps, swung that open — and went to his knees as three men in a group slammed into him!

A fourth man lay on the floor.

A hard grin formed on Smitty’s lips. The giant had been framed into a jail sentence, once, by a crook. It was that episode which had made him devote his life to other criminals, working under the genius of The Avenger. Now he lived to get his hands on the rats in human form who make up the world’s underworld element.

And here were three of them confidently barging in to give him just such an opportunity. It was, Smitty decided, perfect.

He had been knocked to his knees. Gun butts and barrels were clubbing at him from all directions, it seemed. But they were only lighting glancingly on his ponderous left forearm, thrown up to protect head and face.

His right arm contracted and lashed forward.

His fist clubbed past the jaw of one of the three men glancingly, or it would have broken the neck behind the jaw. But that touch of power was enough. The jaw’s owner went back four steps and tripped over the body on the floor.

Then Smitty got a wrist behind a swinging gun. He twisted, not much, and the man dropped the gun and screamed. That was after there had been a muffled snap as bone gave way. The third man wanted to run, but there was no place to run. Smitty was in the doorway.

Smitty started for him — and a voice behind him said: “Put your hands up! And keep ’em up!”

Smitty turned, raging. He’d had things so completely his own way, till now.

A well-dressed man stood in the middle of the living room. He held a gun on Smitty, and the gun was trembling in his excited hands till the giant felt cold chills constrict his stomach.

“Who are you?” he rasped.

“The building manager,” said the man. “No, you don’t! Keep those hands up!”

“Turn your gun the other way,” said Smitty. “Keep it on these three men behind me. They broke in here and—”

The three men filed past him into the living room, with the manager uncertain as to where to point. One of the three was all right. Another had a blue swelling on his jaw. The third held a broken right wrist.

“Keep him covered!” snapped the uninjured one, jerking his head at Smitty. “We came to visit our friend Salloway, and this guy broke in and tried to hold us all up.”

“Why, you cockeyed liar!” raged Smitty. “You”

“Don’t you move!” squealed the manager.

The gun was trembling, and the trigger must have been within a hair of being pulled in the man’s agitated clasp. And the gun was pointing at Smitty’s head, not at his body, where the celluglass garment would stop the bullet.

“Hold him here,” said the man. “My friends and I will go out and get the police, and then go on to some doctor’s office. That big killer hurt two of us pretty badly.”

“Surely,” said Smitty to the manager, “you’re not fool enough to believe”

“You stand perfectly still — and keep your hands up!” squeaked the manager. “All right, you three, get the police here as soon as you can. I’ll keep him covered.”

“Why, damn it—” bellowed Smitty. Then he stopped. There was no arguing with the man; he was crazy with fear.

He had to watch, gnashing his teeth in impotent rage, while the three left. And then he relaxed. His chance to capture the three had gone.

“You’re going to have a lot of fun explaining to the police why you let three murderers get away,” he said.

“You’re the m-murderer, if there’s been any murdering done.”

“I think there has been,” said the giant. “There’s a man in that bedroom lying awfully still.”

“Salloway, you mean?” The manager took a step toward the door, then stopped with a cunning look in his eyes. “You just want me to get near enough so you can jump at me. I’ll wait till the police come.”

But they didn’t come. Half an hour passed, and still they didn’t show up. Even the manager got it through his head that the men who had left had assuredly not notified the police, and he let his shaking gun sag out of line of Smitty’s skull.

As it would do no good at that late stage of the game to throttle the dope, Smitty let him alone. He picked up the phone and called Bleek Street Then, after speaking with Benson, who had just returned from Farquar’s office, Smitty telephoned the police.

And the building manager tried to stutter his way out of his mule-headed mess.