The Avenger 14 - Three Gold Crowns (12 page)

It was broad daylight, of course, but so deftly did Cole slide from bush to tree bole, and then to the yews next to the house wall, that he had every reason to believe that no one in or near the house could have observed him.

He crouched among bushes near a window. Then he pulled a trick The Avenger had taught him. He drew a slim length of wire from an inner pocket. It is amazing what a complete kit of tools a ten-inch length of wire can be.

He bent the two ends in opposite directions till the wire looked like a tiny periscope. Then he raised the wire till one end pressed against the bottom of the windowpane and put the other solidly between his teeth.

For a long time he stayed like that. Any sound in the room would subtly vibrate the windowpane, which would in turn impart tiny vibrations to his jaws.

There was no sound; so Wilson raised his head and looked in.

There was a glimpse of a fireplace flanked by books, several leather chairs almost like club chairs, a small table on wheels with luncheon things on it—scraps of food told that lunch had just been completed—and paneling around the walls.

There was no one in the room.

Wilson bent his wire again and thrust it between the sashes in the middle, first on one side and then the other. That there would be a burglar catch on this first-floor window, he assumed.

His wire caught the tiny obstruction, turned in his hand as he slowly raised the lower sash, and held the catch while the window slid by.

He stepped into the room, thanking his stars that there wasn’t a burglar alarm as well as a catch; or, if there was one, that it was turned off in the daytime.

He started toward the door opposite the window, and then stopped, motionless. There were steps out there, and they were nearing that door!

Wilson could have gotten to the window and out, but he didn’t want to do that. He stared swiftly around.

The fireplace would just about hold him, and it had a fancy tip-screen in front of it of inlaid wood. He raced to it, crammed himself in with the andirons, and drew the big wooden plaque back in front of the fender.

He’d just gotten his hand away from the base of the screen when the door opened and a servant came in. He went to the wheeled table, obviously having come in to get the luncheon things.

He was a middle-aged man of the professional-servant type, looking rather sour of face. He started to wheel the table toward the door, when it opened again and another man poked his head in.

This was not a servant. At least, if he was, he did not look it. He looked like an old-time rumrunner. Or perhaps a modern one; since rumrunning is a long way from being stopped, in spite of the death of prohibition.

The man had a gun in his hand, and his not-too-intelligent face was viciously pugnacious. He handled the gun quite expertly.

“Oh!” he said, and the gun disappeared. “It’s you, huh? I heard a noise in here, and that dimwit cook said she thought she’d got a gander at some guy comin’ over the fence; so I shoved in to investigate.”

“Yes, it is I,” said the servant with dignity. “That dimwit cook happens to be my wife.” The servant’s face twisted with fury. “How much longer are you, and the rest like you, going to stay in this house? And why are you here, anyhow?”

The gunman shrugged, grinning.

“I wouldn’t know, pal. Your boss is playin’ some kind of a game where he thinks he needs guys like us. Ask him the questions you just asked me. It might get you more dope than I can give you.”

He went out, swaggering. The servant, still fuming, took the wheeled table away. And Wilson came from the fireplace, with his pants pretty laden with ashes.

Wilson had noted the servant’s voice particularly, for he had an experiment in mind that might require the man’s intonation.

He resumed his interrupted journey to the front hall, on which this room was located. He peered from the crack between door and jamb, saw the coast was clear, and started along the hall toward stairs. And he had another bad break.

There was a phone on a small table near the stairs. And it began to ring.

Wilson looked around for another hiding place, and didn’t see any save the partly opened doorway from which he had just come. He ducked back to it, but first lifted the phone off its cradle. The ringing stopped.

For quite a while there was silence. Wilson’s luck was in. He had gambled on the fact that in a house with many around, everyone waits for someone else to answer a phone. And he had won.

He went out, put the phone back on its cradle, and jumped as a voice came from the head of the stairs.

“What was the call, Baker?”

Wilson kept the voice of the servant firmly in mind.

“I don’t know, sir.” It was quite a creditable imitation. “The connection was broken almost as soon as I took up the phone, sir.”

“Oh!”

Sweat stood out a little on Cole’s high forehead. He thought this was Beall himself; he had heard the man talk several times in his trailing. If Beall stepped close enough to the head of the stairs to see who was impersonating the servant, Baker, and if he then called his tough-looking bodyguard—

But tight as the squeeze was, Wilson couldn’t resist trying an experiment that popped into his mind.

“I think, sir, it might have been Mr. Farquar,” he called. “It sounded a bit like his voice—the few words I heard.”

“Oh!”
This was a different “Oh” from the first.

Wilson made sounds with his feet as if he were going down the hall toward the kitchen in the rear. Instead, he went back to the room he first entered. And he got a bite from his clever bait-casting.

Quite a while passed; then there were furtive steps on the stairs. There was a dialing sound, then Beall’s voice out there at the phone.

“Hello. Farquar? You know who this is, I think. I called to tell you something, and I’m going to tell you just once, so don’t interrupt and don’t miss any of it.”

Beall’s voice was as harsh as sandstone, though like his steps, it was made furtive so no one in the house would hear.

“You have gotten the aid of the man called Richard Benson. I want you to stop that. Do you understand? I want you to call off all investigation instantly. If you do not, I will at once turn over to the police the evidence I have against you on a certain matter very relevant to your safety.”

There was a click as Beall hung up. And Wilson’s black eyes blazed. After
that
threatening little conversation, there was no longer much doubt as to Beall’s guilt! And now for the second trick—the one Cole had had in mind when he made such a careful note of the servant’s voice.

He went swiftly to the window.

“Mr. Beall!” he called, in Baker’s tone. “Quick! Men are coming up the drive! A lot of them! I . . .”

He let his voice die as he leaped out of the window. Then he crouched just under the sill.

There were pounding, frantic steps in the room. He ventured to peer in. Beall had galloped in there and was fussing frenziedly with a section of paneling. It was that paneling that had given Wilson the hunch that this would be the room where things would be hidden. Nothing like paneling for concealing things. And again he had been right.

Beall fairly ripped a hidden door out from the paneling, with the false alarm still ringing in his ears. He took something out of a wall safe with trembling fingers. And Wilson’s black eyes took on even greater brightness as he saw what it was.

A small woman’s jewel case. And it was in a jewel case that Farquar had thought Beall held the blackmailing murder-frame evidence.

Beall started to run for the door with it, and Cole said: “Stand where you are. Don’t turn around.”

Beall’s back showed such trembling agitation that it seemed the man must be ready to drop in his tracks. He stood still.

“Drop that jewel case,” said Wilson, as if he had six guns pointing at Beall instead of none at all.

A sort of croaking sound came from Beall, but he dropped the case.

“Just stand there,” said Wilson, getting back in the room.

He took the jewel case and started backing to the window.

Sheer animal terror did for Beall what courage could not do. He leaped galvanically for the door and out. He slammed it as he passed, and Wilson heard a key turn.

“Baker! Leary! Everybody!” screamed Beall outside. “Man escaping from the breakfast room window!
Get him!”

So Wilson didn’t tackle the window. He stepped to it, closed it, and went to the door. The wire did one more service, by picking the lock. He walked into the hall. There was one man there, at the front door, looking out, evidently with orders to guard the house while the rest chased around the side and rear outside.

Wilson went up to him. The man whirled as he finally heard him. Wilson clipped him neatly and the man went down; then Cole walked out the front way with the jewel case.

Fergus MacMurdie, on Cleeves’ trail, was not having such luck.

Cleeves’s art gallery was on upper Fifth Avenue. The man had made enough money out of it, according to report, to be able to retire. But he had not done so. It pleased him, instead, to keep on with the activities of his gallery, although he was now more art collector than vendor.

He was at the gallery whenever he wasn’t at his big apartment in the Seventies. He was there now, and Mac was having a difficult time about it.

In the first place, the street, of course, teemed with people. That made it easy for Mac to hang around and not be spotted in the crowd. But it also made it easy for a person to slip from the doorway of the gallery into the mob without being seen.

In the second place, Mac had methodically found that the big art store had a rear entrance. A nasty one, too—for his purpose.

At the back of the store was a small door, leading to the crowded lobby of a big office building, on the ground floor of which was the gallery. Cleeves could slip out there any time he liked and not be seen by Mac in the street.

In the building lobby, not far from this door, was the usual magazine and newsstand. Mac had given the young fellow in charge a dollar to report to him if Cleeves left that door; but the boy had crowded moments at his stand during which he couldn’t have kept a good watch.

Cole Wilson was just arriving at Bleek Street with the jewel case when Mac got alarmed.

Cleeves had gone into the gallery at nine o’clock that morning; and at nearly three in the afternoon, he hadn’t come out yet—not even for lunch. That is, Mac hadn’t seen him come out, which made the Scot think his man might have left without his knowing it.

“Whoosh!”
said Mac to himself. “If I’ve lost him, the chief—”

He pictured himself looking into the pale, inexorable eyes of The Avenger and reporting that he had fallen down on the job. Dick Benson wouldn’t say anything; he never did. He didn’t expect his aides to be supermen. Nevertheless, Mac shrank from the thought of making such a report.

He had to know if Cleeves were still in there; so he went about it openly. He didn’t think Cleeves had spotted him hanging around, or knew him by sight.

He walked into the store. A handsome young man in a cutaway, ascot, and wing collar came up to him.

“I’d like to see Mr. Cleeves, please,” Mac said.

“I’m sorry, sir.” The clerk’s eyes traveled leisurely over Mac’s bony frame, and he made the “sir” into a lazy insult. The Scot never could wear clothes so they looked like anything. “Mr. Cleeves left word that he was not to be disturbed.”

“He’s in, then?” said Mac, feeling relieved.

“Yes, sir. In his private office in the rear. He went in there at eleven o’clock with a new picture—a very rare painting by one of the Flemish masters. I expect he wanted a long, close look to see if it was genuine. That’s why he left such positive orders to let no one or nothing disturb him.”

Mac’s satisfaction suddenly was jolted.

“Whoosh,
mon!” he said. “He went in at eleven? But that’s four hours gone. Would he spend four solid hours lookin’ at a picture?”

“It appears that he has,” said the clerk indifferently.

Mac sighed.

“I’ll have to come again,” he said. “There’s a door in back, leadin’ to the lobby, isn’t there?”

“Yes, sir. Right back there.” The clerk pointed, then went toward the street door again, to stand critically inspecting his nails while he waited for a bona fide customer.

Mac reached the lobby door; then, in a soundless leap, he sped from it to the door across the narrow corridor marked: “Iando Cleeves, Private.” The clerk didn’t notice.

Mac tried the door. It was locked. The Scot pulled out a big jackknife, put it in the crack near the lock, and pried. The knife was as ungainly as the man himself, but like the man, it was capable.

There was a creak, the door opened, and Mac slipped in.

He took one long look around, then leaped for the phone on the desk and dialed Bleek Street.

“Hello, Muster Benson? This is Mac. Can ye come to Cleeves’s art gallery at once? There’s a dead mon ye’ll want to see. Yes, ’tis Cleeves. Lyin’ on the floor of his private office with his face as blue as ink an’ his hand swelled up as big as a kid’s football.”

Mac hung up; then his quick eyes spotted something half out of a desk drawer. It was a dispatch case.