The Avenger, from this minute on, would probably be followed by death at every moment. But he knew how to foil death.
He sat back in the cab seat so that the driver would not see him in the rear-view mirror — could only see him if he turned squarely around in his seat. Then Benson opened the small, compact suitcase.
A complete master of disguise, The Avenger was going to become another person. And in the suitcase, small as it was, were all the needed accessories.
On the top tray was a compartment holding several dozen tissue-thin, semispherical cups of glass designed to be fitted over the human eyeball. Each pair was painted with a different-colored pupil.
In the case lid itself was a mirror. Next to the mirror was a picture of a man’s face. The man had a neat Vandyke and wore glittering glasses. A tiny light illuminated the mirror and picture so closely that even the cab driver, had he turned, would not have seen there was a light there.
The Avenger slipped two light-brown-pupiled eyecups over his pale, icy eyes. Then he began prodding at the dead substance of his paralyzed face. His fingertips poked and prodded deftly, and a miracle began to take shape.
His face became the face of the man in the picture beside the mirror.
His eyes were already that man’s eyes.
There were rows of different kinds of glasses and spectacles in the top tray next to the eye pupils. He selected a pair like those in the pictured man.
He looked at his face in the mirror, at the picture next to it, and nodded. The Avenger had become Norman Vautry, owner of a large Ashton City newspaper.
But Vautry, that morning in the commissioner’s office, had worn a Homburg hat. The Avenger took off his own hat. There were fine wires laced through the felt of all his hats, and this was no exception. He curled the brim, neatly dented the crown and had a Homburg hat.
The cab was nearing the downtown section. It had stopped twice for lights.
Benson took the top tray from the case and revealed wigs on the second. He slipped a light brown one with gray streaks over his own shock of thick white hair. He closed the case and snapped it. The case itself was capable of disguise. It had a tan slipcover on it. When this was reversed, it became a gray bag with a number of foreign labels on it.
The cab stopped for another light. There were many people on the walks here, and cars lined the curb.
The Avenger softly opened the door of the cab and slid out, leaving a bill on the seat to take care of his fare. He mingled with crowds on the walk as the cab went ahead on the green light.
The car behind the cab suddenly slowed and two men got out. They had seen the shape slide from the stealthily opened cab door, and were looking for it.
But The Avenger had entered that cab as Benson, with a tan bag. He left it as another person, with a gray bag.
He walked right past the two without being identified, and went on.
Back at the Gray Dragon, Nellie Gray had just finished singing her first number. It was a success. The customers applauded till she knew she had a place here — as long as Sisco thought she was a pretty crook from Seattle.
She went back to her dressing room, and Rosabel helped her out of her gown and into a plain white, strapless evening dress that made her as lovely as a flower.
But Rosabel shook her trim black head.
“This man, Sisco, was in trying to pump me,” she said, in a whisper, as her fingers flew with hooks and fastenings. “He kept asking about Seattle. I don’t know anything about Seattle. I’ve never been there.”
“It’s all right,” Nellie whispered back. “The less we tell, the more sure he’ll be that we have things in our past we don’t want to talk about.”
“He’s a bad man,” said Rosabel, pursing her lips.
“That’s why we’re here,” shrugged Nellie.
She put a bright, set smile on her lips, and sallied forth in the white dress. It wasn’t time for her next song, but she had an idea Sisco wouldn’t mind if she circulated among the customers a little.
And if she did that, she might learn something.
She hadn’t gotten out the dressing-room door, past the orchestra dais, when suddenly she stiffened and stood flat against the wall, listening.
She had heard the name — Martineau!
The orchestra was off the dais. There was a table next to the bass fiddle. At this, two men sat over highballs. One was so smooth-skinned and pink-cheeked that he looked almost doll-faced. The other was as fat and soft-looking as a jellyfish. But a jellyfish with hard, cold eyes.
Nellie Gray didn’t know who the soft, fat man was. But she knew the doll-faced man.
He was Buddy Wilson, public enemy, notorious killer.
“Talk’s dying down,” was the next thing Nellie heard after the mention of that name The Avenger had told them was so important. The fat man’s tone was satisfied, smug. “The bumpoff’s on page three now. Pretty soon it’ll be out completely. And that’ll be that.”
The man with the cheeks of a girl and the shallow, vicious eyes of a killer-shark, nodded.
“Hot while it lasted,” he agreed, “but it’s comin’ off all right. That’s because of the way the old guy got it. Smart! When a judge is shot in a joint like the Friday the Thirteenth Club, with a brunette sweetie like Lila Belle beside him, the dear public thinks the judge is too crooked to worry about. We framed him nice!”
“We?” said the fat man sardonically.
The public enemy’s shallow eyes tightened in a way to send shivers down your spine.
“All right,” he growled, “so I wasn’t in on it. But I helped rig it up. We all did. So I guess I can say we if I want—”
There were steps down the narrow corridor off which were the dressing rooms. Nellie instantly went on out the door, smiling brightly and impersonally, as if she had been walking all the time and had not halted at all.
The maker of the steps behind her was Sisco. He had come from one of the other dressing rooms. He emerged into the café room a little after Nellie, stared at her shapely back with a faint frown in his greenish eyes; then he went on to the nearby table where Buddy Wilson and the fat man were.
And Nellie, in a few minutes, returned to her dressing room. She plugged her tiny, short-wave radio, concealed in a make-up box, into the socket designed for a curling iron, and tried to get the Avenger in order to report.
She got no answer, so she carefully hid the little set and started back to the café room.
Sisco stared at her with that dangerous half-frown still in his eyes, as she went to the orchestra dais to sing her next number.
CHAPTER VI
“Shock ’Em to Death!”
The drugstore was a small but immaculate place. The stock was neatly arranged and complete. More to the point, the soda fountain was swell. And the maple-nut sundaes the place put out were masterpieces.
So, at least, thought Joshua Elijah Newton. And Josh should know, he was a connoisseur of maple-nut sundaes.
Whenever the long, thin, gangling colored man had the chance, he went for maple-nut sundaes. Lots of them. Enough every day, you’d have thought, to have made him hog-fat. He sat at the soda fountain of the neat little drugstore, now, over his fourth sundae in an hour and a half or so, with the man behind the counter staring at him with bulging eyes. Such a thin body ought to bulge with that many sundaes. But Josh’s didn’t seem to.
“Gimme ’nuther,” he said, licking the spoon from the last gooey bite of the fourth sundae.