The Avenger 4 - The Devil’s Horns (6 page)

“No, I haven’t.” Her eyes met his squarely.

“There is a silver buffalo-head on the desk, used for an inkwell. It has horns. Could those be the horns meant?”

“I don’t know!”

Benson was left with two riddles on his hands.

Why did Terry Groman lie—or seem to lie—to protect one of her father’s enemies?

Why had Hawley, dying, traced those words in blood?

“The devil’s horns!” What possible meaning could that have?

At three in the afternoon, there weren’t many people in Sisco’s nightclub, the Gray Dragon. It was a little early for the cocktail hour. A small orchestra was tuning up, but about two-thirds of the tables were vacant.

Sisco was in his office, however. He usually was. He made the club his headquarters. With many other irons in the fire, he handled them all from the nightclub desk; so you could find him there at most hours.

Sisco was a dried-up-looking man of forty, with dead, greenish eyes and a partially bald head. He looked like a spider, with dead-looking, dry, long hands as tentacles. He stared with sharp, cold eyes across his desk at the girl who had come in for a singer’s job.

She was a very good-looking girl. She was small, dainty and as fragile-looking as a thing of porcelain. She had big blue eyes that appeared soft and helpless, and bright-gold hair, and pink-and-white skin.

“You’ve heard me sing a try-out,” she said, in her soft, appealing voice. “You know I can do it. I’ve had experience—have been in a dozen places like this.” She had, indeed, been in nightclubs, but not as entertainer. However, she didn’t enlarge on this.

“I need a job, and you could take me on for nothing for a night or two, to see how I go over with the customers.”

“I’ve got a couple good singers.” Sisco’s voice was as dry and dead as the rest of him. Dead and dangerous and evil.

“You could use another.”

Sisco shook his head indifferently. Nellie Gray, posing here as Nelle Gleason, bit her soft red lip. The Avenger wanted her to land this job and be near Sisco for a while. She hated to fall down on Benson. She never had before.

She shrugged, and smiled a little. “All right! It’s no soap, then. I’ll go somewhere else.”

She went to the door, walked out—and in two seconds was back in with her eyes wide and hunted. She shut the door swiftly but softly. Sisco frowned at her.

“What’s wrong with you, sister?”

“Is there a back way out of this place?” Nellie Gray asked, voice low and urgent.

“Why?”

“I’m asking. Is there a way out beside the street door?”

In Sisco’s evil, dead eyes was suddenly a small spark of interest.

“Somebody after you?”

“Yes. There’s a—” Nellie Gray stared doubtfully at Sisco, then went on hesitantly. “There’s a private detective out there. From Seattle. He . . . he thinks I’ve done something. I really haven’t, but I don’t want to get into his hands. Now, about that back way—”

“What’d you do in Seattle to get a private dick on your trail?” Sisco was very much interested, now. You could fairly see him working it out in his mind.

Here was a beautiful girl. If she were straight, the hell with her. If she were crooked—that was something else again. Any organization could use a girl with her looks, if she didn’t care how she made a living.

“I didn’t do anything!” Nellie shot out. “I told you he’d made a mistake.”

Sisco smiled and leaned back in his chair.

“There is a way out beside the street door,” he said. “But I wouldn’t want to tell about it to girls who won’t answer questions.”

Nellie let the hounded look grow more plain in her appealing blue eyes. The stage had lost a fine actress when she decided to throw in her lot with The Avenger and fight crime.

“It’s none of your business!” she flared.

“Well, then the back exit out of here is none of
your
business,” Sisco said.

Nellie opened the door a crack, looked out into the café room, and quickly shut the door again.

“So he’s still there,” Sisco said, cruel glints in his greenish eyes. “That’s swell. I think I’ll do the law a good turn by taking you out and handing you over—”

“No!”

“What did you do in Seattle?”

“There was a ring. A ten-carat diamond. The woman thought I took it. I didn’t! I wouldn’t do a thing like that. Now let me go!”

Sisco put his dry, long fingers together.

“You’re hired,” he said.

“I . . . what?”

“I said, you’re hired. As singer. Starting tonight.”

“But you said a minute ago—”

“I’ve changed my mind,” said Sisco smoothly. “Come at eight o’clock. I’ll have a dressing room for you. I’ll show you the back way out myself.” His eyes rested on her, dull and greenish and evil. “Be sure you come back at eight, too. It wouldn’t be healthy for you to try to duck out on me. You’ll like working for me. I can find lots of jobs for you; and, in the meantime, I can see to it that you’re never dragged back to Seattle.”

Now that she’d accomplished her purpose, Nellie seemed very doubtful about wanting the job. But it was all an act. She had done so well that Sisco, shrewd as he was, didn’t even think to look out into his nightclub rooms to see if a private detective really was there.

She was back at eight, all right. In the meantime, she was conscious of having been trailed. Sisco had had her followed to make sure she was on the up and up. Dangerous, indeed, keeping up a pretense with those fishy green eyes on her!

Nellie had hardly gotten in the nighclub door that evening, with Rosabel, when she bumped into Sisco. He didn’t seem to have been waiting for her entrance, but she sensed that he had been, just the same.

“So you decided to come, as you said,” Sisco grunted, peering through the smoke of a cigarette hanging from his lower lip.

“You knew I would,” said Nellie, acting herself half admiring and half angry. “You had a man watching me all afternoon.”

A crooked smile touched the nightclub owner’s hard lips for a fleeting instant.

“You’re smart. You can spot a tail pretty well if you tumbled to that man of mine. He’s good.”

Nellie shrugged lovely shoulders.

“This is Rosy, my maid,” she said, turning to the dusky Rosabel. “Where I go, she goes.”

Sisco didn’t look too pleased, but he didn’t say anything.

“Where’s my dressing room?” asked Nellie.

Sisco led her and the darkly pretty Rosabel to a tiny cubicle in a hallway with several other such cubicles.

Nellie, who hadn’t a professionally trained voice but was serenely confident that it was good enough to get by in a place like this, began to slide into a sequin evening gown for her first number, helped by Rosabel.

Across town, in Groman’s apartment, Benson was in Groman’s office.

The body of Hawley had been removed. The words in blood on the floor had been cleaned up after being photographed. There were no signs of the murder left.

Save for Groman himself.

Paralyzed by the shock, he lay in his bed, a helpless hulk waiting for death. A second stroke is a bad thing. His seemed worse than usual. There was a day and night nurse assigned to him. The night nurse had just come.

The Avenger was in the office with a small suitcase on the teak desk. He had just phoned for a cab, and had hat and overcoat on.

One of Groman’s grim-faced gunman-guards stepped to the office door. All had been instructed to obey Benson as they would their own boss.

“Cab’s here,” the man said.

Benson went out into the winter evening. As he got into the taxi, he saw, out of the corners of his eyes, a car start slowly into motion a block away. It followed his cab. He nodded. Police in the car, under orders from the blustering Harrigo, who wasn’t satisfied with his alibi? Professional, hired killers in the car? It didn’t matter.

The Avenger, from this minute on, would probably be followed by death at every moment. But he knew how to foil death.

He sat back in the cab seat so that the driver would not see him in the rear-view mirror—could only see him if he turned squarely around in his seat. Then Benson opened the small, compact suitcase.

A complete master of disguise, The Avenger was going to become another person. And in the suitcase, small as it was, were all the needed accessories.

On the top tray was a compartment holding several dozen tissue-thin, semispherical cups of glass designed to be fitted over the human eyeball. Each pair was painted with a different-colored pupil.

In the case lid itself was a mirror. Next to the mirror was a picture of a man’s face. The man had a neat Vandyke and wore glittering glasses. A tiny light illuminated the mirror and picture so closely that even the cab driver, had he turned, would not have seen there was a light there.

The Avenger slipped two light-brown-pupiled eyecups over his pale, icy eyes. Then he began prodding at the dead substance of his paralyzed face. His fingertips poked and prodded deftly, and a miracle began to take shape.

His face became the face of the man in the picture beside the mirror.

His eyes were already that man’s eyes.

There were rows of different kinds of glasses and spectacles in the top tray next to the eye pupils. He selected a pair like those in the pictured man.

He looked at his face in the mirror, at the picture next to it, and nodded. The Avenger had become Norman Vautry, owner of a large Ashton City newspaper.

But Vautry, that morning in the commissioner’s office, had worn a Homburg hat. The Avenger took off his own hat. There were fine wires laced through the felt of all his hats, and this was no exception. He curled the brim, neatly dented the crown and had a Homburg hat.

The cab was nearing the downtown section. It had stopped twice for lights.

Benson took the top tray from the case and revealed wigs on the second. He slipped a light brown one with gray streaks over his own shock of thick white hair. He closed the case and snapped it. The case itself was capable of disguise. It had a tan slipcover on it. When this was reversed, it became a gray bag with a number of foreign labels on it.

The cab stopped for another light. There were many people on the walks here, and cars lined the curb.

The Avenger softly opened the door of the cab and slid out, leaving a bill on the seat to take care of his fare. He mingled with crowds on the walk as the cab went ahead on the green light.

The car behind the cab suddenly slowed and two men got out. They had seen the shape slide from the stealthily opened cab door, and were looking for it.

But The Avenger had entered that cab as Benson, with a tan bag. He left it as another person, with a gray bag.

He walked right past the two without being identified, and went on.

Back at the Gray Dragon, Nellie Gray had just finished singing her first number. It was a success. The customers applauded till she knew she had a place here—as long as Sisco thought she was a pretty crook from Seattle.

She went back to her dressing room, and Rosabel helped her out of her gown and into a plain white, strapless evening dress that made her as lovely as a flower.

But Rosabel shook her trim black head.

“This man, Sisco, was in trying to pump me,” she said, in a whisper, as her fingers flew with hooks and fastenings. “He kept asking about Seattle. I don’t know anything about Seattle. I’ve never been there.”