The Avenger 4 - The Devil’s Horns (21 page)

And then they stopped.

The odor of chlorine was strong in the nostrils of Benson and his aides, seeping through the niche in the wall where the pipe entered.

“We’d better break out of here,” came The Avenger’s calm, inhuman voice.

There were shots and yells from outside as the gunmen under the command of the four next door tried to break in.

Mac said, “One more smack on that door—”

But the final smack or two never came. There were more distant shots from up above. The noise in the basement outside suddenly died down. Then there was an avalanche toward the stairs.

“Cattridge must have got here,” said Benson.

“Cattridge!” Smitty exclaimed.

“But Sisco said you’d never talked to Cattridge. He said that—”

“Sisco,” came The Avenger’s quiet, even voice, “trusted a little too much to his cleverness. I called headquarters and asked to speak to Cattridge through the regular switchboard. But it was only elementary precaution, since many on the force are the gang’s men, to call again five minutes later over Cattridge’s private line and repeat the invitation to meet us here for a clean-up.”

Smitty’s vast shoulder had broken down the door, smashed half from its hinges by the infuriated gangsters drawn by their leaders’ cries. Benson stepped to the next door.

“Cattridge’s clean-up, however,” he went calmly on, “will make work only for the morgue. This beam ought to do the trick, Smitty.”

The giant picked up an indicated twelve-by-twelve beam and slammed it twice against the locked door. The second terrific impact burst it open.

The four men, three still masked, Sisco with his mask torn off by his frenzied hands, lay in the greenish, horrible fog of gas. It was minutes before entrance was possible. Cattridge had just about finished mopping up the crew upstairs when Benson and Smitty and Mac went in, handkerchiefs over noses.

“Sisco,” said Mac, nodding at the dead nightclub owner. “Wilson and Singell,” he added, taking the masks from the faces of each.

The fourth man was left. Leader of the leaders. The big shot, unknown to anyone. Mac took off that mask.

For seconds he and Smitty stood staring as if made of stone. They simply couldn’t believe their eyes. They closed them and opened them a couple of times to be sure they weren’t playing tricks on them.

“It’s na’ possible!” gasped Mac, with his brogue thickening on him as it did in moments of extreme stress. “I do na’ believe it!”

The fourth man, not even known to the others, seemed to glare up at them in deathless hatred and anger.

“Groman!” breathed Smitty.
“Oliver Groman!”

“Of course—Groman,” said Benson. The dead leader’s face was contorted in a death grimace such as no genuinely paralyzed face could ever have achieved. “It had to be Groman, to explain things otherwise unexplainable.”

“But he had two strokes—” fumbled Smitty.

“He had no strokes at all. There are four books on paralysis in his library. What for? So he could read what his ‘fate’ was to be when a foretold stroke hit him? No! With those four text books he studied the symptoms of paralysis till he could fool even his doctors and nurses. At least, I think he fooled them. Later questioning may reveal one or more of them in his secret pay.

“Groman’s paralysis was a fine blind for the things he had to do. It let him kill his secretary, when Hawley became too inquisitive about the devil’s horns, with no one to dream of suspecting a paralytic as the murderer. It let him kill his former foreman without suspicion when the man came to try to rob the safe he’d helped install. It threw Sisco and the others off their guard.

“Meanwhile, he kept right on being their leader, under a mask, as an unknown but powerful business man of the city. It kept him in the driver’s seat constantly. He could help us kill or send to the chair all his enemies. Then he could help the remnants of the gang put
us
out of the way after we had acted as his tools in ‘cleaning up Ashton City.’ ”

Smitty sighed.

“Then it was Groman, supposedly lying in the next room, a helpless hulk, who trapped us in the vault!”

“Either Groman, or his night nurse. She, at least, is on his payroll. That’s proved by her spying trips around the house to get fresh water for a thermos pitcher—when there’s a bath right off Groman’s bedroom with plenty of water in it. Not very smart of her.”

“Why dinna Groman kill us in the vault?” burred Mac.

“Look at his situation,” said Benson quietly. “All the underworld, and half the crooked elements of the police force are after him. His building is watched day and night, what with the vast fortune in it. Suppose he had killed us. He couldn’t have left us in the vault because corpses have a rather horrible way of making their presence known after a while. He couldn’t have taken six bodies out of the watched building without being caught at it. Also, he had heard from Sisco that we would come here to our deaths, if let alone. He trapped us in the vault only to be able to sneak out of his invalid’s bed unseen.”

There were heavy steps outside. A man came into the still odorous room. The man was Cattridge.

“Benson!” He looked as if he thought the man with the flaming eyes was some kind of a god. “I can never thank you enough. Neither can Ashton City. We’ve collared the whole lot of them, and with the evidence you’ve previously turned in— Good heavens!”

He was looking at the dead face of old Groman.

“Why, I thought—Groman—I thought he was paralyzed—”

“So did a lot of other people,” said The Avenger grimly.

The expression in the eyes of Mac and Smitty and Cattridge was identical. The man with the wax-white mask of a face had given a city of half a million people release from an iron-tight criminal ring—a fresh start—a decent government.

The expression in the pale, commanding eyes of The Avenger himself was hardly human. Like ice in a polar dawn, they flared, seemingly seeing into the past.

The Avenger had helped a multitude to have a better place to live in. Himself he could not help. Nothing could help him, or relieve the clamps of grief constricting around his heart since the death of all he had lived for—his wife and child.

But he could alleviate that vast grief a little by the destruction of the type of criminals who had taken them from him. And in the icy, colorless eyes was the renewed resolve that criminals everywhere would continue to pay for that outrage. They would pay, and pay.

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