The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion (13 page)

An orange crate, used as a bureau, held a few pitiful personal possessions, probably found in some trash can.

There was nothing in Old Mitch’s room to indicate where he might have picked up the slow-motion malady.

Benson went out, around the building, then up the insecure outside stairs to the room above, the one used by the woman who had been trailed by Nellie Gray.

In here, The Avenger moved more cautiously, as there was built up in him a feeling so faint that it had not begun to be apparent till he was just leaving Old Mitch’s room. A feeling that was now growing within him by the second.

A feeling of impending doom!

Dick Benson had made his large personal fortune in the wildest parts of the uncivilized world, much of it when he was still in his teens. He had faced death so often, in such varied forms, that he could almost smell it.

And without one tangible reason for feeling that way, he felt death very close to him, now!

It seemed to walk with him in the darkness, step for step. It seemed to gibber behind him and to jog his elbow whenever he stopped. It seemed to claw out for his throat with shadowy but inescapable fingers.

But with pallid, flaring eyes expressionless, he went on with his searching.

He found so little in the scrubwoman’s room that the very scarcity of it was, if the sudden glint in his colorless eyes meant anything, an important clue.

There was one dress, patched and worn, on a hook. There was a hat on the same hook. And that was all.

No dishes, no eating utensils, no little personal things and no linen, save the pair of torn sheets on the sagging cot. There was practically nothing in here to indicate that it was the home of a human being.

Benson went down the stairs, and up the other flight to the room of the bookkeeper with the twisted leg. And his eyes glittered like moonstones in bright moonlight as he found much the same state of affairs here.

Keeping the chemical-saturated coat lapel over his face, he moved soundlessly about.

There wasn’t as much stuff in the place as you would usually find discarded, in an empty room, after its tenant had moved out. Bare walls, bare floor, curtainless window.

There was just one room of the four unexplored, now. The room belonging to the character The Avenger was impersonating, Johnny the Dip.

He went to that.

First he moved the door gently, or tried to, because even a hard shove did not suffice to make it quiver in its solid jamb. And that was odd, for the panel looked so old and frail that you’d think a breath would split it.

He turned his attention to the locks.

Dick Benson could pick any lock made, just as he could open any safe made. But some of the latest and best are tricky.

These surprising locks, on a door that looked so frail and was solid beyond imagining, were of that sort. And there were three of them.

Even The Avenger had to take time on those locks, over ten concentrated minutes apiece, to be exact. Half an hour, with the feeling of death mounting yet higher in his breast, and with the more practical anticipation that one of the four living here might return at any moment mounting, too.

But none had come back by the time the third lock opened with a click that could not have been heard by any but The Avenger’s sharp ear. He turned the knob and the door, moving so ponderously as to suggest that it might be of wood-sheathed metal instead of plain wood, opened a half inch.

Even the other ground-floor room was not so dark as in here. And even those marvelous pallid eyes, that seemed able to match the sight of an owl in the night, could make out nothing.

As he had done in the other rooms, he stepped inside, shut the door noiselessly behind him and stood a moment with every sense alert, listening.

It was cleverly done.

They must have literally held their breaths when the door started to open, because Dick heard no breathing in that crowded half second of time. They must have had their hands already up, for he heard no sound of clothing rustling.

Not till the upheld arms came down and, with them, a thing like a net that swathed Dick instantly in its paralyzing folds like the tentacles of an octopus!

He heard the preliminary rustling, then, and started to leap ahead.

His whipcord body collided with two other bodies in the blackness, and one of the two went down. But the net went down, too, over Benson more tightly than ever.

He had just one arm free. That was all he had gained by his inhumanly swift leap. But that one arm was worth several ordinary arms.

He made out a dim white blotch which was a face, and his fist laced into it with a force that jolted his arm clear to the shoulder. Another dim blotch showed to the right.

His hand slid around it to the back of a neck, and his fingers pressed the nerves there that induce unconsciousness as easily and smoothly as if an anaesthetic were being administered.

The unseen crew in here were not idle while he was doing this. They were drawing the ends of the net together, precisely as if Benson were some extremely dangerous fish. And through the mesh of the net they were trying to find his head with clubs and blackjacks.

But that one free arm continued to be an amazing menace.

It crashed a blow into another face! It caught the wrist of one of the hands pulling a corner of the net tight, and there was an incoherent, animal-like snarl following the snapping sound of a breaking bone.

Then there was the noise of smashing glass. And right after that, somebody opened the door again. The whole mob, trying to subdue one netted man, squeezed out to the dark alley. The door slammed and the three locks, unhurt by Benson’s work, clicked closed.

Something in that room was too fragile and too valuable to risk being smashed in a fight.

They saved more breakage of mysterious glass, if that was the idea. But otherwise they didn’t seem to do so well by themselves in the maneuver. In squeezing through the doorway, another end of the net had been wrenched loose by hands that were rather small and white and slim, but seemed made out of tool steel.

At first, in spite of the fact that these men acted without a word to each other, you could fairly feel their almost careless self-confidence. One against eight or ten. The outcome was certain!

Now, still without a sound being uttered by any of them, there was an equally perceptible lessening of that confidence.

In the first place, three men had stayed behind in the black chamber, reducing the odds materially. In the second, their dangerous and supposedly securely netted fish had now freed his other fin.

In the darkness of the alley, The Avenger suddenly ducked to the cobbles, grasped a pair of ankles and hauled. The owner crashed to the cobbles, too, and was swiftly drawn forward.

How it happened, no one there could have quite told, save The Avenger himself. But eight seconds later, Dick Benson was sliding down the alley like a gray cougar, while behind him a fight raged on that was just as fierce as it had been before.

The murderous crew still had a fish in its net and clubbed on and on at it without having any way to know that the recipient of the blows was one of its own number, dragged under the net after being tripped by the ankles.

As Benson reached the alley mouth, the savage but subdued sounds behind him stopped. The substitution had finally been discovered.

The Avenger dropped efforts to be unseen and unheard. He drew out a regulation police whistle and blasted the night with it.

The driver of the squad car that came racing in answer stared with disbelief when The Avenger introduced himself as the legendary Richard Benson. Dick was still in the image of another man; but a long look into the pale, icy eyes convinced the cop, and he got more excited than he would have in a fight with bandits.

“Round up any men you find in the alley,” Dick said quietly. “Then break in the door of the rear-house with the three big locks on it.”

“And?” said the cop deferentially.

“There may be men in there, too. Arrest and hold them. Search the place and see if you can find anything at all unusual.”

“You are coming with us?”

The Avenger had intended going with them. But not now. For while the squad car was coming, he had received a message from Nellie. A message not of words, but of light taps in code with her fingertip on the tiny transmitter at her waist—a method of sending messages used by any of them when they were not free to talk.

“Held for police eighteenth floor Leggitt Building. Important developments. Can you come?”

Benson went fast to the Leggitt Building, not because Nellie Gray was in any sort of trouble—she wouldn’t be where police were concerned—but because he had the idea that Nellie had stumbled onto something too big for her to make decisions about. She wanted him to come before she said anything, even to the police, which might better remain unsaid for a while.

The Avenger’s idea that Nellie wasn’t held on anything really serious, like murder, was confirmed at the lobby entrance of the Leggitt Building. There was a cop there, but he leaned negligently against the building, looking placid and uninterested.

“Yes, sir,” he said to Benson. “Eighteenth floor. That’s where she’s held. Dunno what she’s done. Guess she’s a thief or something.”

On the eighteenth floor there was even less interest. The night man of the building was arguing with a bored plain-clothes man.

“But what’d she do?” the plain-clothes man was asking impatiently.

“You say she had a row, maybe with this cleaning woman. And the cleaning woman ran away. So what? Do we turn out all of headquarters when a couple of dames have a row?”

“Search her!” bleated the night man. “She must have stolen something.”

“That’s a job for a police matron, buddy,” said the plain-clothes man. “If she did take anything, it can’t be very big.” His eyes went admiringly over Nellie Gray’s lithe form, to which modish clothes clung very snugly. “O.K., we’ll take her in if you insist—”

The plain-clothes man saw Dick Benson, then. The Avenger, on the way over, had removed his guise of Johnny the Dip.

“Mr. Benson!” he exclaimed.

“I heard that one of my friends was in a little trouble here,” said The Avenger quietly. “Perhaps you will let me vouch for her.”

“Say, any friend of yours—” began the detective. Then he literally gaped at Nellie, and afterward at The Avenger.

Dick Benson’s aides were only a little less known to the police than The Avenger himself. And they had almost as many official privileges.

“This girl—” said the plain-clothes man. “You—why, say! This must be Nellie Gray!”

He whirled to the night man.

“Why, you dope!” he stormed. “Thief! Steal something! I oughta break—”

The watchman retreated back toward the elevator, with the detective right after him.

“We’ll stay up here a moment while Miss Gray catches her breath,” said Benson. “I’ll ring for the elevator when she is all right.”