The Rape.
A young girl lay on her back in a tangle of tall weeds. She lay with her head back, her mouth twisted in anguish, her long blonde hair flowing into the surrounding sea of weeds. Half a black brassiere had been ripped away to expose one small soft breast. Her dress had been torn off, though tattered remnants still clung around her tiny waist. She wore panties, torn at the crotch, and a garter belt with broad black straps leading down to torn stockings. Her white legs were flung wide, one knee raised, and there were bloody smears on the inside of her thighs. Near her feet, nearly out of the picture, was a single high-heeled red slipper lying on its side.
Nick Carter whistled softly. Hawk was standing back in the shadows, saying nothing. Nick said: "Bennett do this?"
"I think so. His hobby was painting."
Carter nodded. "Not bad. Raw, but with power. Graphic enough. A psychiatrist could get a lot out of this picture — too bad I'm not one."
Hawk merely grunted. "You don't have to be a head shrinker to know that Raymond Lee Bennett was, or is, a real character. Go ahead. Look around and draw your own conclusions. That's why we came here. I want you to get it firsthand. I'll keep out of it until you're finished."
Killmaster, with a skill born of long practice, began to go over the room. To a casual onlooker, one who did not know Nick Carter, his methods might have appeared indolent, even slovenly. But he missed nothing. He seldom touched anything, but his eyes — strange eyes that could change color like a chameleon — roved incessantly and fed back a constant stream of information to the brain behind the high forehead.
Bookshelves formed one entire wall of the little room. Nick cast a knowing eye past the spines of scores of paperback and hard-cover books. "Bennett was a mystery fan," he told the silent Hawk. "Also a spy buff — that figures in a way, I think. There is everything here from Anna Katherine Green through Gaboriau and Doyle to Ambler and LeCarré. The best and the worst Maybe the guy used them as handbooks for his profession."
"Keep going," Hawk muttered. "You haven't seen anything yet. The FBI brought in a psychologist and let him roam around. He didn't seem to get far — acted a little put out because Bennett wasn't around to take a Rorschach test".
Nick pulled open the top drawer of the desk. "Hummmm — this is pretty good pornography. Expensive, too. Maybe that's where his money went."
"Pornography? The FBI didn't tell me anything about any pornography!" Hawk came out of the shadows to gaze over Nick's shoulder.
Nick chuckled. "Better watch it, sir. You're a little old for this high-voltage stuff. And weren't you going to the doctor for blood pressure a little while back?"
"Hah!" Hawk reached to take one of the glossy prints from Nick. He studied it with a frown. He shook his head. "It can't be done. Not like that. It's physically impossible."
The print in question involved three women, a man, and a dog. Nick gently took the picture from Hawk and reversed it. "You had it upside down, sir."
"The hell I did!" Hawk studied the picture again. "Damned if I didn't, at that. Hummm — this way it's just possible." He scaled the print back into the drawer and nodded at a steel cabinet standing in one corner of the room. "Take a look in that." He went back into the shadows near the wall.
Nick opened the cabinet. The contents were intriguing, to say the least. Nick lit a cigarette and studied them with a half smile and half frown. Maybe Raymond Lee Bennett wasn't very bright, or too well endowed physically, but he was certainly a chap of many facets. Most of them on the oddball side.
On hooks in one corner of the cabinet was a collection of women's girdles, corsets, and garter belts. Some of the garments had long stockings attached to them. On the floor of the cabinet were women's shoes with extremely high spike heels and one pair of high-heeled patent leather boots that buttoned to the knee.
Nick whistled again, softly. "Our boy was a fetishist from way back, it seems."
Hawk was sour. "That's what the FBI psychologist said in his report. So where does that get us?"
Nick was cheerful. He was thoroughly enjoying himself. More important, he was beginning to get an inkling, some faint foreshadowing, of what Raymond Lee Bennett was really like.
He took a collection of dog whips from a shelf in the steel cabinet. Also a slender quirt of braided leather. "Bennett liked to whip people. Probably women. Without doubt women. Hmmm — but where could he find any women to whip? Living in a place like this, and looking the way he did? Not that his looks would work against him in the sort of sexual underworld he obviously wanted, liked, to move in. Did move in — or did he? Maybe he didn't. Couldn't. In Baltimore, sure. Maybe even in Washington, these days. But that would have been risky as hell — sooner or later he would have gotten caught, in trouble, and his cover would have been blown. But he was never blown. This neat little suburban fraud of his was never penetrated until he blew it himself."
Nick dropped his cigarette to the floor and stepped on the stub. As he did so he noticed the chalked outline on the drab brown linoleum. The chalk was scuffed and partially erased in places, but the outline still denoted a corpse of considerable heft.
Nick pointed to the chalk marks. "His wife, Hawk!" For once he forgot the "sir" with which he habitually addressed the older man.
Hawk shook his head doubtfully. "You think she did know about this room, then? That she was his companion in the fun and games that went on down here? But that means that she must have known he was working for the Russians, or been working for them herself. And that I won't buy! Two people couldn't have kept that secret for thirty years. One, just maybe. It looks like Bennett did. But not his wife, too."
Nick lit a fresh cigarette. He ran strong fingers through his crisp brown hair. "I agree with you on that, sir. I don't think she knew about the spying bit. She wouldn't have to know. No real reason why she should. But I think she was his sexual companion, if you want to call it that, in the nutty sex games Bennett liked to play. I would bet on it. We won't find them now, because Bennett either destroyed them or took them with him, but I'll bet there was a Polaroid camera around here with a lot of exposed film. Probably he had a timer on it so he could join the lady and take his own pictures."
Hawk, his hands in his pockets, was staring moodily at the desk. "Maybe you're right, Nick. One thing I do know — there's no secret drawer in that desk. The FBI did everything but tear it apart. I trust them on that. They didn't flub it."
"Yes," said Nick. "Bennett probably has them with him. They'll be some consolation on long cold nights when he's hiding out."
"You think the man is a real psycho, Nick?"
"Definitely," said Killmaster. "Though not in any legal sense. I'm beginning to get a pretty clear picture of our Mr. Bennett, and it's a little frightening and a little funny and more than a little pitiful. Look at this."
From another hook in the cabinet Nick took a trenchcoat and a pearl gray snapbrim hat with a large welt. Both looked new. Nick glanced at the maker's tag in the fawn-colored trenchcoat. "Abercrombie & Fitch. The hat is Dobbs. Both expensive and new, hardly worn at all." He hefted the coat. "Something heavy in the pockets."
Hawk took a typed flimsy from his pocket and glanced at it. "Yes. The FBI listed it. Pipe and tobacco, never opened, pipe never used, and a revolver. Banker's Special, never fired."
Nick took the articles in question from the pockets of the trenchcoat and examined them. The pipe tobacco was Douwe Egberts, a Dutch cavendish. The pouch was still sealed. He ran his finger around the inside of the pipe bowl. Shiny clean.
The revolver was a Smith & Wesson with a stubby two-inch barrel — a .38. It would pack a hell of a wallop at very short range. A light film of oil glistened on the weapon. Some of it adhered to Nick's fingers and he wiped them on his trousers.