The Avenger 14 - Three Gold Crowns (10 page)

“The vault the office things are kept in,” Harriet whispered softly. “I guess he’s going to get the envelopes in there, too.”

Nellie pressed her arm to remind her against unnecessary words. But she was thinking triumphant thoughts.

Vault! Oh, boy! Steel walls; steel door—better than any prison cell!

She stole after the figure. Harriet hesitated, then crept after her, scared to death of the wraithlike figure, but even more frightened to stay alone. The two saw the man working at the vault door. It was so dark, and the figure was so perfectly blended with the darkness, that they wouldn’t have seen it if they hadn’t known just where to look.

Nellie was wondering how he expected to open the vault. How would he know the combination?

Then she heard a slight creak as the door swung open, and she figured she had the answer. And at the same time, an almost certain answer for the blackmailing case.

This must be Beall himself. No one else could get the door open so easily and quickly. It was a regular safe door. An outsider would have to blow or drill it.

Beall himself, suddenly worried about the envelope; Beall, who had sent Smathers to that house of Death with an envelope containing only blank papers—

This thought ran against a wall of uncertainty. Why would Beall, in blackmailing Farquar, feel that he had to get rid of Farquar’s veteran clerk?

While she was thinking so furiously, Nellie was still moving toward the vault where the office supplies were kept. She could see the white blur of the package of envelopes the shadow-figure had set down outside the vault. She could see the door, half open.

The plan was as simple as it was certain. All she had to do was bang that door shut on the man inside. That solid steel door.

Then they had the murderer of Smathers and the key to the whole affair they were working on. And Nellie, singlehanded, would have wound it all up.

They reached the wall near the door. Nellie crept along that. She could hear the man inside the vault, rustling through papers. There were probably many boxes of the envelopes. But, methodically, he meant to collect them all.

She got to the door. Harriet was right behind her. Nellie could feel her trembling, and she felt like trembling a little herself.

Everything seemed to be going well. In a second they’d have their villain trapped. Nothing could possibly happen to upset the plan. Yet she felt cold chills running up and down her back. The vast, black expanse of the general office seemed like a great tomb in its desertion and eerie silence.

Nellie’s hand went to the door to slam it—

It was as if she had thrust it into a bear trap that suddenly clamped shut on her wrist!

Crushing fingers gripped her. A powerful arm jerked her forward. She half fell the length of the little steel room and smashed against steel filing cabinets. She had half turned when she was smashed back again by Harriet’s hurtling body. There was an almost animal snarl of triumph from the door.

The shadow-figure! The killer! He had known they were there, after all; had known and baited a trap by letting them think they had him bottled in that same trap.

Nellie’s little gun spat once, twice. But the bullets only flattened on steel as the vault door swung ponderously on them. It clanged shut. And then there was the silence of death in their ears!

Nellie’s tiny flashlight rayed out. She flipped an electric switch and a single unshaded globe bathed the vault in yellow light. They could hear no sound from outside, but Nellie knew the shadowy figure was well on his way to escape, with all the incriminating envelopes in his possession.

The vault was crowded. There were filing cases in which the more valuable of the firm’s correspondence was kept; there were boxes of paper and carbon paper; there were quart bottles of ink—all the paraphernalia needed to run a big office.

Terribly crowded. There was hardly room for the two girls, even though Harriet wasn’t taking up much room at the moment. She was flattened back against the filing cases with her eyes as big as saucers and her face white with fear.

She tried to talk big.

“All we have to d-do is wait till morning and someone will open the vault. They open it at eight thirty, as soon as the office is filled.”

But Nellie shook her head.

“No use kidding ourselves,” she said. “They’ll open it in the morning, all right. But they won’t find us. They’ll just find a couple of bodies! We’ll suffocate in here in an hour or less.”

For Nellie knew something about the cubic feet of air necessary to sustain life in a human for a given length of time. And there were precious few cubic feet in here.

“We’ve got to get out right away,” she said.

“How?”

“You would ask that,” said Nellie. “I don’t know how. I only know we have to.” She stared tensely around the vault. “Say, they use a lot of sulphuric acid in making paper, don’t they?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Harriet. “Why?”

“Sulphuric eats through metal. If we could pour some around the combination knob of—”

“There’s no acid in here,” said Harriet. “They keep only office stuff in here. The acid would be down in the plant.”

Nellie relaxed. It had been a good thought, but it didn’t mean anything. Then she brightened up again.

“The watchman. Do you happen to know when he makes his rounds?”

“Yes,” said Harriet. “Every hour on the half-hour. He takes about thirty minutes to do it and just stays on the first floor the other thirty minutes. He is due on the top floor at about ten forty.”

Nellie looked at her watch, and then her hand jerked to a metal desk lamp that someone had put in here because it wasn’t being used for the moment. It was ten forty-four.

“He may be out already!” she exclaimed. “Why didn’t I think of it at once! He may—”

She was unscrewing the single light bulb.

“He turns on the lights at each floor as he makes his rounds, doesn’t he?” she snapped.

“Why, yes,” said Harriet. She was making a great effort to keep from hysteria, because already it was hard to breathe. “He turns on the lights while he goes over the floor, then turns them out when he—”

Darkness in the vault. Nellie had unscrewed the light bulb. A flash of blue. She had shorted the socket with the metal desk lamp. Then there was deafening thunder in the vault as she battered on the door with the lamp’s heavy base.

And the door opened.

“Come out with your hands up!” barked a truculent voice. “Why—it’s only a couple of girls—”

The watchman, an elderly fellow with stooped shoulders and a drooping mustache—and with a large gun held menacingly in his competent hand—gaped at the two, then stared hardest at Harriet.

“What are
you
doing—” he began, stupefied. But he stopped. “What are you two doing here, I mean?”

Nellie’s quick eye went from him to Harriet, and she was just in time to see Harriet’s finger come from her lips in a gesture of silence.

“We got locked in, Mr. Harris,” Harriet said.

“You’ve been in there from five o’clock to now? And you ain’t dead of suffocation?” he said. Then he shrugged. “Well, it’s no business of mine. I came onto the fifth floor, turned the lights on, and half of ’em shorted out. Then I heard a banging from inside the vault. That’s all I know, Miss—I mean, that’s all I know. Can I do anything for you now?”

“No,” said Harriet, teeth chattering. “We . . . we just want to get out as fast as possible.”

Nellie said nothing till they were in the coupé. Then: “That watchman certainly acted like you were the queen of the May,” she declared. “Just who are you, anyhow?”

“Harriet Smith. I worked there, as I said. So the watchman knew me.”

“You don’t happen to know Mr. Beall, the owner, himself, do you?”

“Of c-course not. I’m a girl— You aren’t going toward Bleek Street.”

“No,” said Nellie. “I’m not. I’m going toward Long Island. To Beall’s home. I want to see if Mr. Beall has been there all evening, or if he has been sneaking around his own office stealing his own envelopes and locking girls in his office vault!”

“I’ve told you before,” said Harriet hotly, “that it just isn’t possible for Mr. Beall to be mixed up in anything criminal.”

“We’ll see,” said Nellie. “If he has been at home all the time, all he has to do is say so.” They sped out the Long Island pike. “After that, we’ll go to Bleek Street and get some rest. We’ve had enough danger for one night.”

But if Nellie thought that, fate, it seemed, thought differently. There was to be still more danger before they hit the pillows.

Nellie kept an eye out for Cole Wilson’s car as they neared the Beall estate. Cole was on Beall’s trail. She saw no sign of him, and that looked bad for Beall: It looked as if Beall had indeed been out, and was now being followed at a distance by Cole.

Nellie didn’t attempt to sneak up on the house. She drove openly up the lane from the suburban street and stopped openly in front of the door. She and Harriet got out. Nellie rang the doorbell. The door was opened and Nellie stepped in.

And twenty-eight men fell all over her!

At least it seemed like twenty-eight. Actually, afterward, it came out that there were only four. But Nellie decided each must have had as many arms and legs as a hundred-legged worm.

The diminutive blonde went down under that rush. And the men separated, two grabbing Harriet and two continuing to maul Nellie. Which was a mistake. The separation, that is.

Anyone, of course, would have thought two men could handle a one hundred-pound slip of a girl. But this was not just another girl. This was Nellie Gray.

Nellie’s pink little right hand got a grip on an arm just above the elbow. Thumb and middle finger pressed hard there. The owner of the arm yelled and tumbled clear backward in an effort to get away from the resulting blaze of pain.

Nellie let him go and turned her scientific attention on the other. She was on one knee now, with the man locked close to her because he had his right arm crooked around her dainty neck.

It was a bad hold, but she knew all about what to do with it. She caught the wrist of the choking arm, turned sharply in a kind of unwinding movement, and then the man was sliding on the floor a yard away on his face. His own weight, expertly aided by Nellie’s move, had dislocated his arm at the shoulder.

“Well, for—” snarled one of the two men with Harriet, as he saw the girl knock the spots out of two thugs. He charged toward Nellie, leaving Harriet with just the one guardian. At the same moment, in a doorway down the hall, a man appeared.

The man looked pale and dizzy. He was in slippers and robe, proving that he belonged here. A lump on his forehead testified to recent violence. He tottered toward the group in the hall.

The man who had left Harriet had a gun in his hand. He wasn’t going to monkey around any more. He was going to club that gun down on Nellie’s head! He raised it high—

Nellie was watching the two men she had downed, and didn’t know about the man behind her. She’d have been cracked on the head by the gun barrel, only the man in slippers and robe acted.

He had an inkwell in his hand. He threw it, and luck favored the throw. The heavy glass cube hit the man behind Nellie in the biceps on the right arm. The man gasped and his arm sagged.

“Scram!” snapped the man with the dislocated shoulder, suiting the word with action by running for the door.

Then Harriet and Nellie and the man in slippers had the hall to themselves. Nellie cried out in angry disappointment and chased after the men. She wanted them prisoner. But they were too fast.

She heard car doors slam, the whine of a motor from the rear near the garage and the shriek of a motor going thirty or thirty-five in low gear. A fender clanged on the gatepost at the street, and car and men were gone.

Nellie drew a deep breath and looked at the man in the dressing robe. He was young, and his features seemed just a little familiar.

“Thanks,” she said. “That fellow would have conked me if you hadn’t thrown the inkwell.”

The young fellow waved his hand vaguely to dismiss the thanks. He was staring at Harriet, and staring quite angrily.

“Sis!” he said. “What the devil have you been doing lately? Where have you been?”

Nellie whirled on Harriet. Once more the girl had a finger to her lips for silence, but it hadn’t worked this time as it had with the watchman.

“Sis, huh?” said Nellie slowly. “So she is Beall’s daughter.”

“Sure!” said the young man sourly. “Who was she supposed to be?”

Harriet was biting her lips and looking frustrated and angry.

“She said her name was Harriet Smith,” Nellie said.

“So it is,” the man replied. “Harriet Smythe Beall. I’m Johnson Barr Beall; she’s my sister. And Dad and I have been hunting all over for her. We thought she’d been kidnaped, too.”

“Too?” said Nellie. Then she remembered Cole’s report of a man being driven from this house with adhesive tape over his mouth. A man who had later got away in a scrimmage and never had been identified.

“You’re the one the gang took to the junkyard,” she said.

He nodded, still glaring at Harriet.