Ted Groman was doing a thing that looked completely meaningless and mad.
He had a little celluloid desk ruler with him. He had his father’s nerveless right hand in his grip. As Benson watched, he extended the old man’s first and little finger, straight out from his palm, parallel.
Then he measured, very carefully, the distance between fingertips.
After that, as softly and noiselessly as he had come, he turned from the bed and stole away again.
The Avenger stood at the foot of the stairs, white-faced and enigmatic-looking, when young Groman got there. Ted stared at him suspiciously, then started on.
“How’s your father?” Benson asked quietly.
Ted said, in a strained tone, “Asleep — as nearly as you can tell. The nurse is dozing, too; so I didn’t go in. No reason to wake her. I looked at Dad from the doorway and turned back.”
“You didn’t go into the bedroom at all?” said Benson.
“No, not at all,” said young Groman. “Goodnight.”
He went on up the stairs. The Avenger’s pale, brilliant eyes stared after him and at the slight bulge of his coat pocket where the six-inch celluloid ruler stuck out the cloth.
Why measure the span between a paralytic’s forefinger and little finger when stretched parallel? The Avenger thought he knew.
CHAPTER XVI
False Steer!
The Avenger and his aides were all at Groman’s. Each was known to the gang; so there was no further use in hiding out at separate addresses. The only one unable to walk freely at Groman’s was Smitty. The giant was still being hunted by the police. If any came, he had to get out of sight till they left again.
The Avenger, a deadly human machine against murder and crime, was still with an explosive stillness. In his pale, icy eyes was the glitter that came when he had his quarry backed into a blind canyon ready for the finishing blow.
The battle to clean up a city was about to come to a head.
The papers Josh had gotten away with at Broadbough’s would convict an army of thugs in a decent court. There was proof of a dozen racket murders, with half Ashton City’s underworld named and documented as responsible. There were damning facts about the crooks on the police force and their tieups with such gambling houses as the Friday the Thirteenth Club. The rank and file of Ashton City’s criminal regiment would be all through when Broadbough’s hoarded evidence was marshaled against them.
But, save for a few vague references, there was nothing definite against the real leaders. Sisco, Singell, Wilson, and the unidentified leader of the masked heads were not indicated by the secret documents as clearly as Benson would have liked.
There was the note, initialed J.M.S., which Mac had taken from Lila Belle’s apartment, but that wasn’t very conclusive in linking the politician to Martineau’s murder. It was a valuable clue, but not hard-and-fast evidence.
From Broadbough’s papers, incidentally, the fact could be pieced out that Martineau had been shot by a police official. And the inference could be followed further. The killer was that blustering, officious, red-faced captain of detectives—
Harrigo!
Aside from the tale told by the papers that Josh had so courageously taken, there were other bits that had been gleaned.
Daily, as if their lives had depended on it, the gang had tried frantically to get at old Groman. That very morning two bombs had been tossed from a speeding car at the office window of the building. Mac had fixed them. He had been just going out the entrance. Like a flash the Scot had gotten to the window, pitched the pineapples out into the street, and fallen on his face.
Men were working at the craters in the solid paving now. Glaziers had just left from replacing half the windows on that side of the building. Mac, temporarily a little deafened, was otherwise all right.
Two men had been found dead in Groman’s office, with absolutely no clue as to who had killed them. Groman had blinked the message that one of Sisco’s men had downed the secretary. But even he couldn’t give anything on the murder of his former foreman.
Since the death of that foreman, the gang had gone wild. Somehow the man’s presence there worried them badly.
There was still no tangible key to the words written in blood: “The devil’s horns.”
The Avenger had these thin pieces in the nearly completed picture of his task. These, and the papers from Judge Broadbough. He was sorting them again and again in his mind.
Meanwhile, Smitty was pacing around the office, restless with confinement, like a caged gorilla. He stared at the books along the walls.
“Bet old Groman hasn’t read any of these. He’s been too busy—”
His eyes lit on the books that had formerly attracted Benson’s pale, concentrated glare. The four books on paralysis. Smitty voiced the logical conclusion.
“Hello! Looks as if the old boy’s doctor warned him that a stroke or two was coming. Groman probably bought these books on the subject to try and figure out, as a layman, just what his fate was going to be.”
“Yes,” said Benson, tone far off. Then his gray steel figure straightened a little, and his pale and terrible eyes fastened on the giant’s face.
“What did you say?” he snapped, voice vibrant and crystal-hard.
Smitty moistened dry lips. That pale and glacial gaze of The Avenger’s was difficult to face even when you knew it was not directed at you.
“I just said,” he fumbled, “that the old boy had warning of what was going to happen to him and wanted to find out just what to expect.”
“Yes,” whispered The Avenger, through set teeth. “Yes! Of course! That’s the last link! All that’s needed!”
Swiftly Benson dialed a number. It was the phone number of the Ashton City collector of internal revenue. The name, Richard Henry Benson, worked its usual miracles with high officials. He was told things no other man could have demanded, to know. He set the phone down with tense, steel-white hands clenching.
He had just gotten some tax information that he had thought very valuable.
The head of the Civic League, Arthur Willis, in casting around for a means to prosecute the criminal elements of Ashton City, had called the Department of Justice to see if any of the racketeers or suspected crime leaders could be hauled to justice via the income-tax-evasion route.
And it seemed that none could be.
Checks on Wilson, Sisco, Singell, and all the rest of the vaguely suspected leaders had shown that they had paid on every dollar of income that banks, investment companies and bond houses could report. And the income had been much smaller than thought. Very much smaller!
“Smitty,” said Benson, voice crackling like an electric arc, “get the rest in here.”
Josh and Rosabel, Nellie and Mac and the giant, faced their chief at the desk. The dead, white face and the cold, colorless eyes were a picture of vengeance and steely triumph.
“Nellie,” said Benson, “what do the words, devil’s horns, mean to you?”
The diminutive blond bombshell thought a moment, small, straight nose wrinkled up. Finally she shook her head.
“Nothing at all,” she admitted.
Mac and Smitty gave the same answer. But Josh Newton had a variant.
“Down where Rosabel and I come from,” he said slowly, “superstitious people make what they call devil’s horns with their fingers to ward off the evil eye. They do it whenever they see anybody coming toward them who has the reputation of being a witch or a voodoo doctor. They do it like this:”
He held out his right hand, doubled into a fist, knuckles up. Then he extended his forefinger and little finger, straight out from the fist, parallel, making two little horns.