The Avenger 19 - Pictures of Death (14 page)

But he couldn’t seem to get Benson with the call signal.

Emily Brace’s home was less than nine miles from Bleek Street. That is, if it was her home—and not just a fake number.

But it was bona fide. The name stared at them from a card over a bell.

Benson rang the buzzer. There was no answer.

“Out,” commented Nellie. She looked around at the modest vestibule. “This isn’t an expensive building. Probably she has a job, living in a place like this, and is out working, now.”

The Avenger said nothing. He started up the stairs—it was a walk-up building—with Nellie beside him.

They passed a door on the second landing where a radio was blaring.

Nellie grimaced. They could still hear the thing after starting up the third flight of stairs. This was that kind of building; you didn’t need a radio yourself, you could hear at least six through walls and doors at any moment of the day or evening.

Dick stopped as if he had run into a wall. So did Nellie. They listened to the news item from the blaring radio, then stared at each other.

“Late flash. A Brooklyn power plant, supplying current to thousands of homes and dozens of Brooklyn factories which are working on day-and-night shifts with defense orders, has just been disabled by a boiler explosion. At least, special police insist that the plant was wrecked by a boiler explosion. No evidence has yet been unearthed that it might have been sabotage—”

“The ‘Diabolo,’ ” breathed Nellie. “They got it just in time to receive its instructions. In only a few hours that power plant has been ruined.”

Benson nodded, his eyes like icy pools.

They went on to Emily Brace’s door on the fourth floor. There was one more flight of steps above them; the building was five stories high.

The Avenger opened the door with a key formed from one of his plastic blanks. He stood a moment on the threshold, then shut the door behind him with a grim hand.

Nellie said: “Good heavens!”

Emily Brace was not working on some job. She was here. But she hadn’t heard them ring. She would never hear anything anymore.

She was dead!

Dick Benson and Nellie bent gently down over the dead woman. She looked appealingly attractive, even in death. She had been shot in the back, and there was no anguish or strain on her face. It was as peaceful as if she were merely asleep.

She was still warm, so her death had been very recent. Another hint of time of death was that she was in a negligée, as though getting ready to go out for the evening. And this was just about the time for such dressing.

“She doesn’t look like a criminal,” said Nellie. “And this isn’t a criminal’s room. It’s a place lived in by an average, decent person who made her own living and asked nothing of anyone. You can fairly feel that.”

The Avenger didn’t work on hunches. He preferred cold logic. But in this case he nodded agreement.

“I think she had nothing to do with this,” he said. “I think she was the proverbial innocent bystander. On the night she was with Richard Addington, she learned something—or had a chance to learn something—that was dangerous to him. So he killed her.”

“In that case we’re too late and there’s nothing to learn here—” Nellie began.

But The Avenger was acting as if there were plenty to learn. His pale eyes were searching over the room like twin microscopes.

“Perhaps she felt her danger,” he mused, more to himself than to Nellie. “She may have left some word for—”

He was looking for articles not quite exactly in place. He saw that a little powder on the dressing case had spilled from a large box. He opened the box and explored. But there was nothing in the box but powder.

A lampshade was slightly crooked. He examined the lamp, standard, base and shade. Nothing concealed there. He opened a door and saw a dressing room with a bureau. On the bureau was a picture.

It showed a sleek, dark, rather good-looking man with a playboy’s face, but with strength around the jaw.

Richard Addington.

But that was not the important thing. The thing was that the picture was not quite straight in the frame.

Benson took the picture out of the frame, and then his colorless, infallible eyes glowed glacially. There was a long strip of paper in the backing, folded a half dozen times. And there was a sheet of note paper.

He came back out of the dressing closet with these, and Nellie read with him over his shoulder:

In case anything happens to me, investigate Richard Addington, of whom this is a photograph. I am sure he is a criminal of some sort, though I still cannot guess what he does. The color chart is also important, though I don’t know why. I only know that my life has been in danger since—

That was all there was to it. The words ended in a sprawl of pencil. The note had been hastily put behind the photograph before being completed.

The Avenger unfolded the strip of paper and found that this was the mentioned color chart. The strip was about four feet long, and on it were fifty or sixty colors in little shiny oblongs. It was like the color chart every painter carries, except that Dick had never seen such a chart all in one row on a long strip of paper before. Usually, they are on big oblong cards in five or six rows.

“Emily Brace was right,” said Benson. “How right, she never knew. This is important—”

“Quite,” came a cultured, even voice from the window. “So important that lives mean nothing in comparison. Don’t move, either of you.”

Nellie could see the window by turning her head. She saw a man coming through. The man was Richard Addington!

Addington’s weapon did not match his sleek appearance and his cultured voice. The weapon was a sawed-off shotgun, about the deadliest thing there is at short range. This was leveled at The Avenger and Nellie in such a way that both would have died if the two barrels were discharged.

Addington stood beside the window, and Nellie saw a rope dangling.

Three more men came in, one after another. The window was four floors up, with nothing under it, so Benson and Nellie had paid it too little attention. The penalty was this soundless invasion from the rooftop.

The four came slowly toward Nellie and Benson. They stopped well out of reach, however, so there was no possibility of The Avenger grabbing one of them as a shield.

“I’ll have that color chart,” said Addington.

Nellie wondered why he simply hadn’t let loose with both barrels of the shotgun, and then taken the chart from Dick’s dead body. But glancing sideways at The Avenger, she got the grisly answer.

Dick had thought of that, too. He held the color chart next to his cheek. If Addington pulled the trigger, he would blow the chart as well as Benson’s head into tatters.

“The chart,” said Addington more sharply. “Drop it.”

The Avenger didn’t move.

Addington smiled. “One of you men,” he said to his friends, “approach him from the side and get the chart.”

They were all waiting for The Avenger to try something when this man was in reach. They were so sure that would be the moment when he’d try resistance that they didn’t notice a slight move he made just as the men started their catlike advance.

The move was simply to press his right arm hard against his body.

Every suit The Avenger owned had a dozen or more intricate gadgets concealed in it. In this one, at the armpit, was a little sac with a tube running down to his wrist. The sac held a concentrated, inky vapor. When it was squeezed and with the tube nozzle opened by the twitch of a finger at the same time, the vapor poured forth and instantly expanded.

It did so now!

The man had taken two steps for the chart when the room suddenly hazed.

There were yells. “Give it to him! Kill him!” And Richard Addington’s crisp reply: “I can’t blow that chart to pieces.”

Then there was a rush for Nellie and Dick Benson. And that was a mistake, because there were only four of the men.

The Avenger found a throat with his steely fingers. He pressed at a section at the base of the skull. The man fought frantically for thirty seconds and then slumped. The anaesthetizing pressure on the big nerve center would keep him out for some minutes.

There was a thud as Nellie found someone in the black pall and threw him.

Then there was an unforeseen disturbance that testified to Addington’s cautious generalship. Just as he’d done at Vaughan’s penthouse, he had split his forces here and made entrance from two directions.