But first, before opening the valve and scuttling the fast launch, Smitty had to disconnect an automatic safety device that The Avenger had installed on all his boats, large and small.
That was a hook-up between sea valves and bulkheads which snapped the latter closed whenever the former were opened. Thus, if a valve were opened by mistake, or developed a defect, it would not inadvertently result in disaster.
It was just one more little example of how large a part methodical foresight played in The Avenger’s “luck.”
Smitty disconnected the safety-bulkhead device and opened the valve. The launch settled silently and swiftly under the surface. Smitty joined the rest on the Minerva’s deck.
They all went below, where a light could be turned on without its showing through any crevices outside. In the raw illumination of a single bulb their faces were strained.
Tom Crimm stared at them with lackluster eyes. He was pretty low; even lower than his remorse over the insanity of joining forces with a mobster like Luckow would tend to drive him.
“All of us have worked for days on this,” he burst out suddenly. “And what has been the result? No one has found out anything. We’re as far as ever from knowing who killed Dad, and the others. And tomorrow, in only a few hours, the Town Bank crowd will be saved by that meeting of Ballandale Glass stockholders. We’re beaten—”
Mac looked at Tom with a little sympathy deep under the bleakness in his blue eyes.
“Whoosh!” he said. “Ye’re too pessimistic, Tom. We know a lot about this, right now.”
Tom stopped, and bit his lips.
“Sorry. I know everything possible is being done to help Wayne and me.”
Nellie Gray smiled at him to show there were no hard feelings. She said to Mac:
“Some gang spy must have reported that all of us were gone from Bleek Street. Otherwise Wallach, and whoever was driving that death car, wouldn’t have dared come openly to the door to see if they could help Rath.”
Mac nodded.
“It’s my bet,” he mused, “that the skurlie drivin’ that car for Wallach is the man we want to get our hooks on. And it’s also my bet that the chief knows all about him right now.”
CHAPTER XVIII
Veiled Lady
Louie Fiume and Nicky Luckow, birds of a feather, were at Beatrice Luckow’s apartment. They had come there, taking separate and circuitous routes, from Bleek Street. They lolled in easy-chairs, with cigarettes and drinks at hand, looking and feeling pretty pleased with themselves.
Beatrice, Luckow’s sister, didn’t show any feeling at all on her dark, pretty face. She was as expressionless as usual. Now and then she looked at Fiume. For the rest, she stared at her crimson-tinted fingernails and said nothing.
She had taken no other maid, after the exposure of Rosabel. The three were alone there.
At least, they thought they were alone.
“I guess we fixed up that Benson guy and his gang,” laughed Luckow, raising whiskey to his lips.
“ ‘We’?” said Fiume, darkly sardonic.
“Well, it was your scheme, of course,” Luckow said hastily. “And a smart one, too, fella. Making up three of the boys to look like Benson and two of his buddies and then popping off a coupla cops was the smartest thing I ever heard of.”
“Thanks,” said Fiume, still sardonic.
“You got the kind of brains this town needs,” Luckow said. “Let’s me and you go into partnership. We’ll run New York in a year.”
“It’s an idea,” said Fiume. “But first we got to get together on this Crimm business.”
“That’s in the bag,” said Luckow. “Benson and his crowd get burned down by the cops, with luck. If not, they will be thrown in the cooler for weeks. Till long after this goofy stockholder’s meeting tomorrow that’s supposed to mean so much. That’ll save the Town Bank pirates. And after that — well, we’re on Easy Street.”
“Yeah?” said Fiume skeptically.
“Why, sure,” said Luckow, looking surprised. “Like this: Wallach and Grand split millions on the stock deal, and more when they sell Crimm’s stock. They don’t know we know that, but we do. And that’s our stake. When they get the dough, we put the squeeze on them. Kick through or go to the chair for murder! Boy, we can bleed ’em of every dime they’ve got.”
“Nope,” said Fiume.
Luckow appeared more surprised than ever. Beatrice looked up from her tinted nails for a moment, too.
“We’ve been dopes,” said Fiume. “So the squeeze is out. Reason why? Because Wallach and Grand aren’t the boys responsible for this. They ain’t got the guts. They’re just stooges for somebody else. Somebody higher up.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m as sure as a guy can ever be when he knows something and can’t prove it. Those guys are dummies. There’s a biggie in the game above them. I don’t know who. But till we can get him, there’s no squeeze—”
Two men and a girl, thinking themselves alone.
But in the window outside, black with the darkness of pre-dawn, a face appeared for just an instant. The face was as cold and dead as the face of the winter moon. In it, two pale eyes rested briefly on Beatrice’s tinted nails.
A gray steel bar of a figure began to inch down a ledge from the Luckow window just after the word “squeeze.”
It was eighty feet to the ground, and the ledge from fire escape to window was less than two inches wide. But The Avenger negotiated it almost without thinking of what he was doing. His steely fingers hooked to slight niches in the tapestry-design brick of the apartment building, while his feet trod the ledge as surely as if it had been a floor.
Benson moved with his abdomen held out from the wall a little. That was because of the delicate apparatus hooked to his belt.
The world’s tiniest dictaphone was there, geared to an equally tiny record that was in tape instead of roll or disk form. On the tape was duly recorded the words that should — unless catastrophe occurred first — clear Benson and his aides with the police:
“Making up three of the boys to look like Benson and his buddies and then popping off a coupla cops was the smartest thing I ever heard of.”
The Avenger descended to the ground. As he left the fire escape, he grudgingly conceded Fiume’s shrewdness. For the clever mobster had deduced precisely what Benson had:
Somebody was over the Town Bank directors. They were merely stooges in this game.
Benson hailed a taxi. He got into it, head down a little so the driver wouldn’t see too clearly his unforgettable face and eyes.
He gave an address half a block from Wallach’s home.
There was one way to check on the bigshot guessed by Fiume. That was through the stooges, Wallach and Grand. And, since it was Wallach who had come with the unseen driver to Bleek Street in a fruitless effort to help Rath, it was Wallach that The Avenger intended to query first.
But it happened that once more the thought processes of a crook paralleled those of a defender of the law. In Beatrice’s apartment, Fiume turned to Luckow.
“Look,” he said. “There’s one way to find out if I’m right. That’s to have a gander first around Wallach’s place and then around Grand’s. We’ll see what we can see.”
“O.K.,” said Luckow.
It’s faster going down an elevator than walking down the fire escape. The two men got to the door just in time to hear somebody give an address to a taxi driver. Fiume’s eyes narrowed a little as he noted that the address happened to be near that of Wallach’s place.