The Avenger 14 - Three Gold Crowns (16 page)

“—got me!” Mac heard Farquar’s frantic whisper. “I’ve been a prisoner since last night. Two men came to my office. They shoved in, and before I could realize what was happening, one clubbed me down. A gash on my head has been bleeding a lot—”

But that wasn’t a patch on what Farquar really had to say.

“The two men were Beall and his son! So you see, I knew already that you’d somehow got hold of the three gold crowns again. Oh, yes, Beall told me what they were, when they had me prisoner. And told me my life would be worthless if I didn’t see to it that he got them back again.”

“Yes, yes,” said Benson urgently. “But where are you being held?”

“My own home,” said Farquar. “My country place in New—”

He gasped then, and the phone was clicked down at his end. Something had happened to prevent him from talking any more.

Mac was wild. Farquar’s country home—where? He had said in New— Might mean New Jersey. But that’s a large state. It would take time to look it up.

He had forgotten The Avenger’s method.

“We’ll go to him at once,” Dick said, voice as calm and cold as his icy eyes. “His country home is near Remington. I looked it up several days ago.”

Josh went with them; there might be trouble and Dick needed all the brawn he could muster, and Josh was an excellent fighter. Gangling, looking as if a breath would blow him over, he was in reality as tough as a goat and could battle like an infuriated tiger.

On the drive out from New York, The Avenger had placed the lawyer’s secluded country home on a real-estate map. There was a great stack of maps in each of Dick’s cars—maps showing, section by section, the property locations of the states fringing the great city.

“Turn here.”

Mac was at the wheel of the armored sedan. He looked in doubt at the turn indicated by The Avenger after his map study. The side road was little more than a grassy lane, and it had a sign:

PRIVATE
PROPERTY OF ARTHUR C. WALLACE

Josh and Wilson looked puzzled, too.

“There is no Wallace on the real-estate map,” said The Avenger, divining Mac’s thought. “This is Farquar’s place, all right. He must have put up another name to protect his seclusion. Or perhaps in the last few days, to help keep unwelcome trespassers away.”

Mac turned into the lane. The lane wound through a belt of woods along the road a hundred yards deep; then at the fringe of the woods they could look ahead and see glades and meadows and, about three hundred yards off, the old house and barn, remodeled.

“He’s got a huge acreage,” commented Mac. “Do we stop here?”

“Yes, of course,” said Dick.

Mac nosed the sedan into a thicket, and the three men got out. They went to that woods fringe again, and Josh said, suddenly:

“Look out! Wasps’ nest!”

But the icy, colorless eyes of The Avenger had already seen the thing that had drawn Josh’s exclamation. And Dick went slowly up to it, instead of avoiding it.

For it was not a wasps’ nest.

The thing was a large rubber ball, a little bigger than an indoor baseball, of the type used on beaches. What had made Josh think it was a wasps’ nest was that it had a lot of holes drilled in it.

There were at least twenty holes in the ball, small toward the house, larger on the side away from the house. And in addition the sides of the ball were all notched up till the circumference had a queer, saw-toothed look.

“What in the worrrld—” breathed Mac.

The ball had been there, hanging by a few inches of wire, for some time. The rusted condition of the wire and the weathered look of the ball told that. Several weeks at least, the signs said.

Benson turned away from the ball with just the remark: “I see.”

The Scot, wild with curiosity, ventured to say, “Ye see what, Muster Benson?” But the answer wasn’t very revealing.

“Many things, Mac. Come on to the house. We’ll go along the edge of the woods to that big beech tree, and then get to the side of the place from there. That line of trees, along with the fact that it’s such a gloomy day, should keep us from being seen.”

A barn, in good shape but unused. A house that was small, considering the size of the farm, but well kept. Just those two buildings.

The house was on a hillside. The lower end of the basement had been remade into the garage space, leaving six or seven rooms of actual living space. A humble but comfortable layout.

“The garage?” whispered Cole, black eyes like burnished jet.

Benson nodded.

The garage door was open a foot. There would doubtless be a doorway from it into the house proper. The four slid to the corner of the garage like four shadows. They went inside, convinced they were unseen.

“Phew!”
muttered Mac. The rest felt like holding their noses, and they could only breathe with difficulty.

The garage was commodious, with no car in it. The smell came from a pile of five-gallon cans along the end wall. They were gasoline cans, and one of them had sprung a leak, it seemed, and lost all its contents on the floor.

It was lucky that none of the four had had a cigarette in his mouth; a spark would have been enough to blow them all off the earth, so terrific were the fumes.

“ ’Tis verra high-test stuff,” said Mac, sniffing and making a face about it. Mac was a great chemist. He had once worked on a radically new petroleum-refining process; so he knew petroleum products inside and out. “The mon must have a private plane. Ye don’t need gas like that for a car.”

The Avenger did not reply. He was swinging back a little steel door high up in the wall between the garage and the basement. Behind the door was a fan. Dick shut and secured the little steel cover very carefully.

Then he looked at the partition wall.

The wall was double-thick, of concrete block. And the door, leading from garage to basement proper, was of heavy iron. The place would have satisfied the fire insurance underwriters’ idea of garage safety, all right, though of course they’d have turned thumbs down on that supply of gas stored loose in the garage.

The iron door was open a crack. Benson went toward it. Next moment, Wilson and Josh and Mac were crowding on his heels.

A groan had sounded from in there.

Mac and Wilson and Josh got in first because, at the very doorway, Benson paused.

Paused and did an odd thing.

There was a rusted nail sticking out of a beam overhead, in the garage, to hang a chain or whatnot on. Benson reached up to it.

His fingers, as steely-strong as pliers, turned the nail twice and then drew it out with a slight creaking sound. Then he put the nail in a crack between two concrete blocks at the side of the iron door, bending the end of the nail around a little toward the door itself.

Then he followed his three men into the basement.

The fumes in here were, if anything, worse than in the garage. All four gasped in them. Benson went to where Mac and Josh and Wilson ringed around something on the floor. Mac’s flashlight was playing on it.

They wouldn’t have to search for Beall any longer, it seemed. Here he was, eyes dull, face white; red streaming from between the fingers of the hand clutched to his abdomen.

“He got me,” Beall panted, words hardly audible. “Farquar. Stabbed me with shears.”

“So, now ye’re tryin’ to drag Farquar into this!” grated Mac, with no sympathy whatever in his homely, freckled face.

“No,” whispered the man resignedly. “No. I’m dying. Might as well come clean. Farquar knew . . . the whole thing. He got me in self-defense. Got away.”

The four had to bend closer to hear the faltering words.

“Cleeves and Salloway and I were blackmailing Farquar. Not succeeding. His clerk, Smathers, knew too much. I put blank paper in an envelope . . . sent him to a phony address. There I met him . . . killed him. Took him to freight yards so his body would be mangled beyond identification. Pulled three gold crowns from his mouth to keep dental work from identifying corpse . . . also to hold over Farquar as murder frame. Thought the threat would work this time, but he went to you for help instead of paying.”

“We ought to get him out of here,” said Mac thickly, the fumes making him cough. “Fresh air”

“No,” whispered the man on the floor. “I’ve got to tell quickly. Won’t last long. The envelope slipped from Smathers’s pocket at Ismail’s house; so I had to get all of them from my office or it might be traced to me. Then I got to thinking I could use all the million from Farquar, so I killed Cleeves and Salloway. I did it . . . All—”

He gasped and began writhing, with the red stream growing and flooding over his clutching hand.

“You’re alone in the house?” asked Mac.

“Yes,” came the whisper. “Farquar got away . . . my men trying to locate him— Better go to his aid or they’ll kill”

“Quite interesting,” came The Avenger’s cold, calm voice, like an icy stream across the faltering words.

His three aides turned swiftly to look at his face and stared in amazement. For Benson, in spite of his invariable cold control of emotion, was a kindly person. It was certainly not like him to speak in that tone to a dying man.

The dulled eyes of the man on the floor stared at him, too, a bit less dulled.

“Most interesting,” said The Avenger. “Except that it hasn’t a grain of truth in it anywhere. Beall didn’t do these things. Markham Farquar did. And you’re not Beall—you’re Farquar!”

The men in the basement almost forgot the fumes that clogged their breathing, at that unexpected and ringing statement.

Then the man on the floor whispered, “I . . . I don’t understand—”

“Smathers went to his death directly from Farquar’s office,” snapped The Avenger, eyes dreadful in his calm, cold face. “That makes it probable that Farquar himself sent him on the fake errand to his death. Why was he killed? Because he had learned that you, Farquar, were blackmailing the three men, not the other way around. But that murder, done to save your hide, was your downfall instead.

“Cleeves had a private detective on your trail. The detective trailed you to an alley, and you had to kill him. While you were doing that, one of the three—Beall, I think—got from your car the three gold crowns you’d yanked from Smathers’s mouth to hide identification. They each took one and held a threat over your head: You and you alone knew he’d gone downstairs to the dentist, Dr. Louis, for the work. Also, the three men probably made you believe that your prints were on the crowns. It would not be impossible.”

“You’re mad!” gasped the man on the floor. “Mad—”

“You killed the dentist to prevent questioning, and you felt safer. But you wouldn’t really be safe till you had those crowns back. You came to me with crocodile tears to fool Justice, Inc., into doing your dirty work and getting the crowns back. But at the same time you kept after them yourself, with a hired gang of killers. You murdered Cleeves and Salloway and didn’t get the crowns. You had Beall’s son kidnaped to exchange for Beall’s crown, and he got away with our help. Did you get the combination of the Beall office vault from him, so you could destroy the envelopes?”

“You’ve got . . . a direct confession,” panted the man on the floor. “I don’t know what more you want.”

“A confession framing an innocent man,” nodded The Avenger, eyes like pools of doom. “You made some bad slips, Farquar. As a blackmailer, you might have been expert. But as a killer, you’re clumsy. It was careless of you not to see that the envelope—the first one at hand in your office, chancing to have come from Beall some time ago with a memorandum in it—had fallen from Smathers’s pocket. It was equally stupid to pull those crowns. You should have left them in Smathers’s mouth; the law couldn’t have pinned the murder on you if he
had
been identified, if you’re half as smart as I think you are. And you shouldn’t have come to Justice, Inc., with your lying plea for help. Also, and above all, you shouldn’t have left that ball hanging in the edge of the woods. I suppose you forgot all about it.”

“Ball?” said the man. His tone was slightly different.

His eyes didn’t look quite so glazed. Mac and Wilson and Josh watched the unfolding play breathlessly.

“Remember when two men of mine were shot at near Bleek Street, and nearly killed, with a high-powered rifle from a distance?” said Dick Benson evenly. “That was clever. An attempt on the lives of my aides, just before you showed up and asked for help, would make it seem that your plea was very urgent and genuine, and that death was stalking you and trying to prevent us from helping. But it took fine shooting, to miss that closely from such a distance. However, you’re an expert marksman, and had practiced a lot lately. You’d shot from the house window at a ball hanging three hundred yards away at the edge of the woods, and—”

The man’s eyes were like the eyes of a snake.

“Let’s get that plastic and stuff off your face, Farquar,” said The Avenger, hand going out.

“Keep your hands off me!” snarled the man so venomously that the four stepped back a pace. He stood up, and his hand left his “wounded” abdomen and dropped a red-soaked sponge. It was Farquar, all right. Even before he clawed at the make-up, they could see that.

“All right,” he snarled. “You’ve stumbled onto a few things, and made a few wild guesses that could never be proved in a court of law. All right, it’s true! I was after Cleeves and Beall and Salloway. I got Beall by getting myself retained to look after his interests in the bankruptcy his company is going through any day now. The company is low on cash but rich in assets. I was going to pick it up myself, at about five cents on the dollar.

“Salloway came to me for help against a city clerk who had trumped up a street-paving scandal in a contract of his. I just took that little scheme over myself. Cleeves played into my hands by coming for help on finding a will his great-uncle had made, which left him a million dollars. I found the will, the sole copy, and kept it; so Cleeves would have to pay plenty, or I’d destroy it. But my damned clerk, Smathers, got wind of this and I had to kill him to shut him up. So it was really all Smathers’s fault. Every bit of it; Smathers’s fault.”