The Avenger 6 - The Blood Ring (11 page)

The figure appeared again.

This time it was much nearer the patrolman. So near, indeed, that the cop gave a smothered squawk and leaped back. But the leap didn’t save him.

Slowly the emaciated, hairless specter raised its gaunt arms. It was as if it were bringing down a curse on the patrolman’s head, though no word was spoken.

Arms extended straight toward him, the shape approached. It seemed to float rather than walk. That was all the cop noticed. Next instant he felt as if he’d fallen into a vat of acid that was burning and prickling him all over.

After that he didn’t feel anything at all.

The Avenger was sitting in the study of his temporary residence when the message came from headquarters. Nellie and Mac, Smitty and Josh and Rosabel were being very careful not to interrupt. When the chief sat, silent and still, like that, he was coordinating in the icy aloofness of his brain the things he had picked up to date on a case. He might speak, or he might not. But they knew that many facts—either unknown or without significance to anyone else—were falling into place behind the colorless eyes.

But when the Washington police chief called, Josh deemed it best to interrupt the glacial revery.

Benson took up the phone before him. He listened with scarcely a word.

“I will be there shortly,” he said, at the end, in his cold, vibrant tone.

He hung up, and looked at his aides. He spoke, more to himself than to them.

“Old Taros has just been seen again, according to a police report. An officer tried to charge him near the home of Senator Blessing. The officer says the man’s arms went slowly up, in his direction, and then he fell unconscious.”

Smitty grunted as if he had been kicked. The giant recognized those symptoms, all right!

The Avenger’s pale eyes were suddenly ablaze with the light of comprehension.

“Senator Blessing,” he said slowly. “Politician—
Chief!
Our unconscious friend upstairs kept saying, ‘Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief.’ Snead is a merchant. Shaw is a lawyer. Now a chief is dragged into this in the person of Senator Blessing. These three are apparently mixed up in the thing. And the doctor? Perhaps the one Anna Lees went to see. That is a guess, of course—”

Again the phone rang. The Avenger picked it up.

Gunther Caine’s agitated voice came from the instrument.

“Mr. Benson? You know who this is. Are you doing anything about the Taros relics?”

“Yes,” said Benson, pale eyes like diamond drills.

“Well, nothing more needs to be done in the matter.”

Benson’s steely hand tightened on the phone for an Instant, but his voice was calm as he said:

“You mean, they have been recovered?”

“Not—not exactly,” stammered Caine. “Nevertheless, please take my word for it that no further efforts need to be made.”

“You’re calling me off the trail?”

“Well, yes, in a sense. Thank you very much for what you have done, and forgive me for the unnecessary expense and the loss of time it has caused you—”

“You have heard from the new watchman at Braintree?” asked Benson evenly.

His aides stared at each other. What was behind
that
question? In these circumstances, they couldn’t guess.

There was a pause, as if Caine were deciding what reply to give.

“I am about to get in touch with him,” Benson said, as if warning that anything Caine said could easily be checked up.

“Why, yes, I have heard from the man,” came Caine’s reply. “He said something about the son of Taros talking, just as Casey did. Incredible, of course—”

“Yet Casey is dead,” The Avenger pointed out.

“His death could not have had anything to do with words from a mummy,” Caine snapped. “Again, forgive me for starting you on something that need not be finished.”

“Quite all right,” said the man with the dead face and the stainless steel chips of eyes.

He hung up, and everyone in the room with him knew that he had no intention, whatever, of dropping the affair of the talking mummy and the Ring of Power. If anything, he was more set than ever on following it through.

He turned to them, an awesome figure, a gray steel bar of a man.

“Nellie, get all the information you can concerning Doctor Cornelius Marlowe. Rosabel, check on the movements in the Caine household—father’s and son’s. Josh, you will spend the rest of the night in the Egyptian room at the museum, watching. Mac, dig up everything possible on Senator Blessing.”

Benson went out to the big car with the giant Smitty. They went to the scene of the cop’s defeat at hands from the tomb.

The last call from headquarters had contained something more important than a mere tale of a cop’s defeat. There had been murder, too. That was what The Avenger was coming to investigate.

Senator Blessing’s groundsman lay in the arbor near the garage, at the rear of the rented house. A little after the cop had recovered and called for help, he and another patrolman had found the corpse.

A man of early middle age, foreign-looking, in worn but clean corduroy, he had met his death precisely as Bill Casey had met his in the museum.

There was a slim, neat incision in the man’s back, where a knife blade had reached his heart. And in addition the throat had been deeply, hideously cut.

Benson stared long at the throat wound.

Dead flesh has not the resilience of living substance. When it is pressed out of shape it stays that way. Some of this dead flesh, at the very edge of the deep throat wound, had been so pressed.

Something oval and small, like a copper penny stretched sideways, had been pressed there for a moment and pressed hard. But The Avenger knew it wasn’t a distorted penny. He knew precisely what the small oval was that had made the mark.

The cornelian seal of the Ring of Power. The ghastly thing had had its powers renewed in the life blood of Senator Blessing’s gardener.

Had the Senator, with a name revered from coast to coast for honesty and independence, anything to do with this repulsive act? The Avenger’s dead face and icy eyes gave no hint of his thoughts on the subject.

He went back to his temporary headquarters. Even this inhuman personage needed sleep occasionally. Also, in this case, The Avenger needed time for his aides to correlate their reports and bring them in.

On this night, the next after the murder of Senator Blessing’s man, Anna Lees did not show up at Doctor Marlowe’s office.

Nellie Gray knew that, because she had watched the doctor’s home since dusk, at seven-thirty in the evening. She had been watching the movements of the doctor himself, this time, but incidentally had noted the absence of Anna Lees, too. Evidently the girl didn’t habitually frequent the place.

There had been no suspicious activity around Marlowe’s office and home. Furthermore, a fund of information collected by Nellie during the day had seemed to absolve him of guilt in anything mysterious or sinister.

Doctor Marlowe had the reputaton of being a splendid and ethical physician. He paid his bills and was looked up to in his neighborhood. There was no scandal in his life. He seemed a kindly, open, sincere man.

Nellie was beginning to be pretty sure that the visit to his office of Anna Lees was pure coincidence and did not in any manner implicate him in the crazy affair of the Taros relics.

It was now ten o’clock. His office hours were over. A dozen or more patients—all good, ordinary citizens—had gone into the house and come out again. Nellie stayed in shadow till she saw a final form emerge.

That was the figure of Doctor Marlowe’s attendant, who had stayed at the door and with patients in the anteroom. Now, with the day done, the attendant was going home, leaving the doctor alone.

Nellie went to the door. It was, as she had confidently expected, unlocked. It was kept off the latch constantly during office hours, with so many people coming and going. When the attendant had left, she hadn’t bothered to lock it because the doctor could do that, whenever he pleased, later, before going to bed.

Nellie opened the door and stepped soundlessly into the anteroom.

Marlowe didn’t know her. So an open visit, at this stage of the game, wouldn’t excite any suspicion in him.

Without sound, yet walking naturally so that if she were suddenly seen her appearance wouldn’t be furtive, she crossed the anteroom to the office door. It was open a few inches. She looked in and saw the doctor.

This glimpse of him off-guard and alone resulted in nothing more suspicious than her previous watching had revealed. Marlow was sitting in a swivel chair at his desk. There was nothing on the desk before him. He was passing his hand over his broad, low forehead and frowning a bit. That was all.

Feeling eyes on him, he looked up. Nellie was ready for that. Instantly, before he could grasp the fact that she had stood watching him, she came into the office.

“Your hours are over, I know,” she said with a smile. “But I’d like to consult you anyway, if you don’t mind. The door was open. I just walked in—”

“Certainly,” said Marlowe. “What seems to be wrong?”

“I have been having queer headaches lately,” said Nellie, calmly. “I’ve never had anything like them before. There’s a feeling of burning, inside my head.”

Doctor Marlowe was no longer impersonally pleasant and indifferent. His expression did not change a line. But suddenly it seemed to have a frozen quality. The effort made to conceal his agitation was so desperate that it almost—but not quite—succeeded.

Nellie duly made a mental note of that agitation.

“Any other symptoms?” Marlowe said.

“Well, the headaches come usually just before I go to sleep. Then when I do fall asleep, it seems to me the sleep is much heavier than normal.”

Marlowe cleared his throat.

“Do you happen to know a girl named Anna Lees?”

“Why, no, I never met any such person,” said Nellie truthfully. “Why do you ask?”

Marlowe waved his hand evasively.

“No matter,” he said. “Now as these headaches—”

He stopped. A look of strain, almost of terror, appeared in his eyes, strive as he would to conceal it. His hand went up, like a thing with will of its own. It pressed hard against his forehead.

Nellie remembered that he had been rubbing his forehead when she first saw him. She realized now that it was the gesture of a man with a headache. And this—this anguished prodding of the temples—was the move of a man with such a pain in his head that he could hardly bear it.

That was odd, Nellie thought. That was—

Abruptly she straightened up in the visitor’s chair she had taken on coming in here.

She was beginning to have a headache herself!

There was a dim sensation of heat in her head. It increased rapidly till it seemed as if her brain were being seared. Her sight began to fail. She heard herself crying out, then felt as if deep sleep were tugging at her eyelids.

The tendency to sleep didn’t seem to help the terrific headache any. Between the two, she sagged in the chair, and was still, almost unconscious—but not quite.

Dimly she saw Doctor Marlowe’s hand come down from his skull, as if the pain there had ceased. She saw him get up from the swivel chair and walk toward a large, old-fashioned wardrobe in a corner.