“You’re not Ed Keenan,” she said. “Your eyes—”
Benson put the florist’s box on the vanity case, and in doing so, allowed the girl to spring behind him and out the door again.
He had gotten in here smoothly and without fuss. Next thing was to locate Luckow and Tom Crimm.
He thought the girl might be the guide.
He was correct. She flew up the hall again, and into an unmarked door. Benson followed, not letting her see that he was coming after her. She was intent on giving a warning.
She went through this room, through a door covered by an innocent-looking drape, and up narrow stairs. At the top, she knocked four times on a heavy door.
The door was opened. Down the stairs and out of sight, The Avenger heard her say a few words. Then she stepped into a room, and the door was shut again.
He went up and knocked four times.
The door opened six inches, and was hastily pushed as the man behind it saw pale, deadly eyes and a deadpan face. But The Avenger had hand and arm through the crack, now. The hand closed on the guard’s windpipe.
After a moment, Benson lowered him to the floor and went on. There was a small suite here. He heard the girl’s voice in the next room; so he opened that door and stood on the threshold.
Tom Crimm, Nick Luckow and the excited girl stared at him. Luckow’s hand flashed for his gun.
In Benson’s hands was no weapon of any sort. But such was The Avenger’s air of calm certainty, as he stood there, that Luckow’s hand came away from his holster empty. Benson acted as if an army were at his back; and it shook Luckow’s nerve.
“You again!” said Tom.
The young fellow was white and nervous. His fear was plain in his eyes. He’d thought the cops were bursting in to take him off for murder when the door opened so unceremoniously.
“Me again,” nodded Benson quietly. Luckow said nothing. He simply glared at Benson with murder in his dull eyes. His jaw was blue where The Avenger’s fist had contacted it at the Jeff Hotel.
“I suppose the police are right behind you?” said Tom.
“No,” said Benson, voice quiet but vibrant. “Why should they be?”
“If you turned me in, you’d get in good with the cops, wouldn’t you?”
“I have no idea of turning you in,” said The Avenger. “The idea I have in mind is strictly the opposite. I’d like to see that you don’t get taken for a little while. You’d have a hard time of it, right now, with the murder charge so definite and recent against you. I can put you in a place where no one will ever find you.”
Tom’s eyes, suspicious, keen, wary, played over the face of this man who had rearranged his features to resemble another man, but whose dead countenance and pale eyes were unmistakable when you knew who it was.
“No one will find me here,” Tom said. “You’ve got more than that in mind. You’re just trying to get me away from Luckow, again, and get your own hooks on me.”
“I want you to leave Luckow,” nodded Benson. “This rat is dynamite for you — or for anyone else impulsive enough to trust him.”
It had been a long time since anyone had called Nicky Luckow a rat to his face. The mobster’s eyes glinted and his jowls darkened.
He turned to Tom Crimm.
“Want to leave, kid?” he said.
Tom shook his head, angry eyes on The Avenger.
“You’ll hang with us?” persisted Luckow.
“Yes,” said Tom.
“O.K.!” Luckow’s face suddenly became impassive. “You run along to the next room, now. I want to ask this guy a coupla things.”
Tom went out. The girl went with him, after a swift glance had swept between her and the mob leader. Benson saw that glance, though he seemed not to have seen it.
Luckow turned toward him.
“When any guy sticks his nose into my business the way you have,” he said, “that guy dies! And when any guy messes up gang business like you have a dozen times in the past, he oughta get burnt by anybody getting his hands on him. Get me?”
“Certainly,” said The Avenger. “You mean that, on two counts. You intend to carry me out of here feet first; you mean that you didn’t send Tom out of here so that you could question me — but just so that he wouldn’t witness a killing.”
‘That’s right,” said Luckow in his soft, dangerous voice.
Downstairs, eight men came after the girl. Luckow’s swift glance had told her to come back with all the help she could. The eight men came up the stairs with drawn guns.
They went into the first room behind the concealed door at the top of the narrow stairs.
From the inner room, Luckow’s room, a familiar figure was emerging as they entered. The figure closed that door, turned, and faced them.
“Nick,” said one of the eight, “the girl said—”
The man addressed as their leader rubbed his right fist suggestively.
“He’ll keep for a while,” he growled. “You guys stick around here, though, and be sure he doesn’t try to get out. I’ll be back in a minute.”
He walked through their ranks, down the stairs, and through the café room. From all sides were little nods of recognition. To some he nodded back; to others he paid no attention.
He went out the street door, got in the car The Avenger had come in and drove to Bleek Street.
And up in Nicky Luckow’s suite the eight gunmen finally went into the room to see why the Benson guy was so quiet. Benson wasn’t there!
Instead — they found Nicky Luckow, in shorts, with a tuxedo lying beside him, bound and maniacal with rage.
No detective in New York could twice have invaded the mobster’s den single-handed. But The Avenger, who could fool his way into places by making his face over to look like others, had; and he had twice walked out with ease. But he had failed twice, in the final analysis.
He had failed to make Tom Crimm see reason. The son of Joseph Crimm was still in a wolves’ den — thinking it to be a safe fold — with doom hanging over him every moment of the day and night.
CHAPTER VI
The Warning!
Next night the light burned again in the directors’ room of Town Bank. And that light illuminated very grave and worried faces!
The faces of Grand and Wallach, Rath and Birch, were worried enough tonight. Also, frightened. All, that is, save the thin countenance of Wallach.
The director who looked as bland as a deacon was rubbing his dry thin hands together slowly and smiling a little.
“Maisley was badly scared,” he murmured. “Maisley might have talked. So Maisley was taken care of. You see? We are all quite safe.”
Birch’s choleric, red face was a shade paler than usual. He moistened his lips.
“I wonder how it was made to look so much like an accident?” he mused. “His coupé was found on the rocks beneath Suicide Heights. He was found in it, smashed like a — like a bug in a gear wheel. What made him drive over the edge like that?”
“What do you care?” said Wallach, with his dry smile.
“Oh, I don’t really care,” said Birch hastily, glancing around as if afraid death would hear him.
The four looked at each other covertly; had been doing so all evening. None of them seemed to know just who was responsible for the clueless death of Theodore Maisley. Wallach, with his bland, deacon’s placidity? Birch, the choleric and blustering? Rath, pompous and loud-spoken? Grand, wide-shouldered and arrogant?
“When this started,” said Grand, seeming to feel the unspoken question and hastily to answer it, “I didn’t have any idea there’d be murder involved. I don’t like it, gentlemen.”
“Nor do any of us,” purred Wallach, rubbing thin fingers softly together. “But — what would you do? Crimm had to be put out of the way so that his stock could be kept safely. Maisley had to go, because he might have turned informer on us. Both were attended to. And it has been done so well that no suspicion can ever be attached to any of us. The same with Haskell.”