The Avenger 17 - Nevlo (11 page)

The handle turned, and the door lifted, and she prepared to follow the old melodrama days and sell her life dearly.

But the door was only lifted an inch, then banged down. The lock shut as a key was turned in it. So then she had plenty to think about.

Had the car’s driver noticed that someone was lurking inside, when he opened the deck door that inch? Had he slammed the thing shut and locked it to keep that somebody a prisoner till a nice murder spot presented itself?

Or had the driver just idly tried the catch, discovered it unlocked, and fastened it again to guard his spare tire from theft?

Nellie would know which of the two theories was correct, of course, with the passage of time. But the uncertainty didn’t tend to make that passage any faster or easier.

And even if she had been easy in her mind and prepared with a radio and a couple of good books, the time would still have seemed long. Because it was long.

She whirled along in that luggage compartment till she lost all track of hours, but she judged it must be at least noon. Then the coupé stopped.

It stayed stopped, while Nellie tried to relax in the cramped quarters and couldn’t. Then it started again.

Through the crack in the bottom she saw the road gradually darken. She was past seeing or feeling, almost, when the coupé stopped again.

“For dinner, I suppose,” she thought resentfully. “And I haven’t even had any breakfast!”

The whole trip had seemed aimless and slow, as if the driver were trying to kill time and not get to his destination till dark. If so, he was successful, for it was full night when the car rolled over gravel somewhere and finally came to a definite halt.

Nellie felt the car sag twice as the two inside got out. She heard wind in trees and men’s voices and the crunch of their steps in the gravel. Then she was left alone.

She could have gotten out of the compartment at any time, but not without noise. The only way she could do it was to take a screwdriver from the tool kit in the compartment, put it under the lockbar—exposed on the inside—and pry. She hadn’t dared try that all during the day, even while the car was in motion. But she had to attempt it, now, noise or no noise. She couldn’t stay in here forever.

She got out the screwdriver, pried, and the belt flew back with a sound like that of a small gun. She pushed the lid up.

Her luck was apparently good. She did not look out into a yawning gun muzzle or even a yawning face. There was no one around. She put the lid down in place again and slid for a big tree, twenty feet to her right, to hide awhile and look things over.

Some of the sound she had thought was wind in the trees was the sound of water. Waves on a rough coast. There was a tang of salt in the air. So she knew she was next to the shore.

All around her were trees. It was like a forest, save that a forest hasn’t velvety, expensively trimmed lawn through it. Not a forest, then. An estate along the ocean.

Far down a dimly seen graveled drive, through many interlacing branches, she caught glimpses of headlights as a car rolled along the winding highway. At about the same time, out from where she heard the waves on rocks, she caught a lighthouse gleam. Its timing placed her, versed as she was, in all the things an air pilot should know.

She was at Bar Harbor, on some great estate. And the knowledge didn’t please her.

Bar Harbor is so exclusive that sometimes it even resents itself. Its estates are set so far back from the main roads, with so many trees intervening between highway and houses, that you could live, raise a family, and die without anyone outside the grounds ever being any wiser.

Nellie didn’t care for such privacy, just now. It meant that no matter what might happen to her, a call for help would be as much ignored as if she were on the Sahara miles from the nearest sheik.

To her right was the big house belonging to the forestlike grounds. It was of gray stone with a red tile roof. It probably contained a modest thirty rooms and an army of servants. It was, Nellie thought, a very strange place indeed for the crippled, mind-blasted Nevlo to have come. And to have come, furthermore, straight from a gang lair.

Drawing a deep breath, Nellie left the kindly shelter of the tree and slipped toward the great bulk of the house.

There was a dog. He was a big dog and looked as if he hated the world. He came around a corner of the house and glared at Nellie with his hackles rising and his muzzle snarling back preparatory to a lot of barking and a mad attack.

Nellie sat down.

Vague curiosity mingled with ferocity in the dog’s glare. He had never seen anybody do that before, when he threatened to rush. He came closer, stiff-legged, and Nellie sighed with relief. She knew her dogs.

In a minute her fingers were cautiously scratching around his ears, and the angry hackles were going down. She got up and began going around the house, with the dog trotting uncertainly after her.

She looked in every window on the ground floor. No sign of Nevlo or the coupé’s driver there. The kitchen door beckoned her. It was early, and there was a chance that the door was unlocked.

She went to it. Fido was getting suspicious again, but his suspicions were laid a second time when Nellie walked boldly, but noiselessly, to the door, opened it, and went in as if she belonged there.

She got through the kitchen and up the back stairs to the second floor. There, she went from room to room, like a lovely little shadow. And still she didn’t see Nevlo or the other man. She saw several servants, heard several more behind closed doors, and saw the master of the house in the second-floor library. But that was all.

The owner of the house had been placed for her by a letter she had seen lying on a table. Jerome Hooley. It was a name to conjure with. Hooley was a utilities magnate with a twenty-two-room penthouse in New York for winters and this big place at Bar Harbor for summers. He was a very wealthy, very influential, man.

Observed unaware by the unseen visitor in his house, Hooley didn’t look impressive. He was small, elderly, with a wizened, fretful look, swathed in a quilted dressing gown as if the cool breeze from the ocean were more than his thin blood could stand.

But Nellie wasn’t there to observe Hooley. She was there to find where Nevlo had gone and what he was up to. And she drew blank on both. She’d thought the two from the coupé had come into the house. Apparently they’d hidden in an outbuilding.

Nellie went downstairs again. At the foot, she stopped suddenly and listened. It seemed to her she had heard a furtive footstep, behind her.

A
dragging
footstep, as if whatever had made it had been crippled.

There was no more sound, though, so she concluded she had imagined it. She went on to the kitchen.

The refrigerator enticed her. Since dinner last night, she had eaten nothing. She opened it and took out a nice chicken leg and a steak tail. The leg was for her, the steak tail for Fido, to keep him silent.

She stepped into the night, munching on the chicken leg. And out of the darkness came arms!

They seemed two yards long and made of steel. One went around her waist like a coil of ship’s cable. The other clamped around her throat, and a big hand slapped over her mouth and nostrils.

Nellie could handle big men with her dexterity in jujitsu. But she had to have
some
sort of warning. This time she had none whatever. Furthermore, she could sense from the way the arms held her that they were versed in jujitsu, too—enough to guard against it a little.

She tried to bite the hand over her lips and was unable to. She tried to squirm loose and couldn’t manage that, either. Meanwhile, she was being carried.

The thing holding her bore her through thickets and between trees, and the salty tang in the air grew stronger.

Nellie was being held so that she could look ahead and see where they were going. She wished she couldn’t, for their destination was the edge of the cliff shooting up from the sea.

They got to the edge. Darkness of night was over her, ahead of her, and, for about a hundred feet,
underneath
her. Down there, she could see frothing white lines now and then as slow surf broke on jagged rock.

She didn’t have much time to muse on rock or surf. The thing holding her swung her far out and released her. She began falling—falling toward rock and sea!

At Bleek Street, after a plane hop from Portland, The Avenger took a two-inch case from his pocket. It was about the size and shape of a girl’s compact. But it was not a compact. It was a camera, with a lens to make any optician mumble with joy.

“Pictures, huh?” said Smitty. “What of?”

“The basement back at the Portland house,” said Dick Benson, taking out the tiny roll of film.

“Pictures of the basement?”

“Yes. One reason why I delayed using Mike on the man aiming at you was that I was taking pictures through the slit you cut in the blanket.”

Smitty wanted to ask what the pictures were of. But he throttled his curiosity. Benson went into the developing room and came back. And then Smitty saw the subject.

The pictures were of the gorilla-like individual whose fumbling attentions to the bound girl in the basement had driven Smitty into charging the mob.

There was one of the men bending near the girl, with clumsy, misshapen hands on her bound arms. There was one of him staring straight toward the camera with lips drawn back from snarling teeth. There was one of him loping toward the window and the camera, with long arms down so that the hands almost scraped the cellar floor. Finally, there was one of him crouching a little, arms out crookedly, as if to gather in an opponent and crack his spine in a bear hug.

“Nice guy,” said Smitty, scowling. “He’d be nicer in a zoo, though. You sure got some good shots of him.”

“I needed some good shots,” said Benson quietly. “You saw the fellow more clearly than I did, perhaps. How would you describe his coloring?”

“Black eyes,” said Smitty. “Dull, reddish complexion, not very healthy-looking. Black hair with a couple of thin gray streaks in it.”

The Avenger nodded. “That is about the way I had it marked down.”

He went into a corner where a great cabinet stood. From the cabinet he got a small case that looked a bit like an overnight bag. And the presence of the case explained to Smitty why Benson had taken such pains to get pictures of the gorilla-man.

In that case was probably the world’s most complete and subtle make-up collection.

In the top lid there was a small but perfect mirror. In the top tray there were dozens of pairs of tissue-thin glass cups designed to fit over The Avenger’s eyeballs. Each pair was just a little different in tint from all the others. Under the top tray were wigs, pigments for achieving all known tints of complexion, substances for changing the flare of the nostrils or the set of the jaw—everything known in the way of disguises, plus a few that The Avenger had thought up himself and which were unknown to others.

Dick Benson was a make-up artist, unsurpassed, and Smitty watched his calm but swift proceedings with the awe he always felt on such an occasion.

Next to the mirror in the lid, The Avenger fastened with thumbtacks an enlargement of the picture showing the crouching man head-on. Twisted ruin of a countenance; dark, bitter eyes; nose smeared to one side—the wreck of a thing that seemed once to have been intelligent.

Then Benson’s expert fingers began applying plastics to his own features, while he stared first into the mirror at himself and then at the picture right next to it.

Smitty shook his head a little, incredulously.

“I thought even you couldn’t make up to resemble Nevlo,” he said.

“The more unique the face,” The Avenger pointed out, “the easier it is to follow its lines. It’s only when a face has little character that it’s hard to simulate it.”

Over the pale and deadly eyeballs went little glass cups with black pupils painted on them. Deftly he lined faint, iron-gray streaks in his own thick black hair.

Benson stood up, almost unconsciously simulating the crouching, gorilla-like posture of the fellow in the pictures.

Josh Newton came into the big room.

“I phoned all the electric-utilities heads you told me to,” he said. “Eight of them, counting Blake of Cleveland. Among them they just about own the public utilities of North America.”

“What did you find out?” said Benson, putting on shoes with inch-and-a-half lifts to give him extra height, which he immediately discounted by his crouching gait.

“Four of them I couldn’t get any information on,” said Josh. “I was simply told that they were out of town, no address. Blake, I found, was in his Cleveland home. The other three had just left, their, secretaries said, for Cleveland.”

“Each of the three of them?”

Josh nodded. “Looks almost as if there were to be a convention of power executives in Cleveland. Anyhow, that’s where they all headed.”

“The others, the ones you couldn’t trace, will be there, too,” Dick said emotionlessly. “I was pretty sure of it before. But I wanted you to check on it. Smitty, we’re going west by plane. You will go to Marville, to Plant 4, and search for a dead man.”