“Baker! Leary! Everybody!” screamed Beall outside. “Man escaping from the breakfast room window! Get him!”
So Wilson didn’t tackle the window. He stepped to it, closed it, and went to the door. The wire did one more service, by picking the lock. He walked into the hall. There was one man there, at the front door, looking out, evidently with orders to guard the house while the rest chased around the side and rear outside.
Wilson went up to him. The man whirled as he finally heard him. Wilson clipped him neatly and the man went down; then Cole walked out the front way with the jewel case.
Fergus MacMurdie, on Cleeves’ trail, was not having such luck.
Cleeves’s art gallery was on upper Fifth Avenue. The man had made enough money out of it, according to report, to be able to retire. But he had not done so. It pleased him, instead, to keep on with the activities of his gallery, although he was now more art collector than vendor.
He was at the gallery whenever he wasn’t at his big apartment in the Seventies. He was there now, and Mac was having a difficult time about it.
In the first place, the street, of course, teemed with people. That made it easy for Mac to hang around and not be spotted in the crowd. But it also made it easy for a person to slip from the doorway of the gallery into the mob without being seen.
In the second place, Mac had methodically found that the big art store had a rear entrance. A nasty one, too — for his purpose.
At the back of the store was a small door, leading to the crowded lobby of a big office building, on the ground floor of which was the gallery. Cleeves could slip out there any time he liked and not be seen by Mac in the street.
In the building lobby, not far from this door, was the usual magazine and newsstand. Mac had given the young fellow in charge a dollar to report to him if Cleeves left that door; but the boy had crowded moments at his stand during which he couldn’t have kept a good watch.
Cole Wilson was just arriving at Bleek Street with the jewel case when Mac got alarmed.
Cleeves had gone into the gallery at nine o’clock that morning; and at nearly three in the afternoon, he hadn’t come out yet — not even for lunch. That is, Mac hadn’t seen him come out, which made the Scot think his man might have left without his knowing it.
“Whoosh!” said Mac to himself. “If I’ve lost him, the chief—”
He pictured himself looking into the pale, inexorable eyes of The Avenger and reporting that he had fallen down on the job. Dick Benson wouldn’t say anything; he never did. He didn’t expect his aides to be supermen. Nevertheless, Mac shrank from the thought of making such a report.
He had to know if Cleeves were still in there; so he went about it openly. He didn’t think Cleeves had spotted him hanging around, or knew him by sight.
He walked into the store. A handsome young man in a cutaway, ascot, and wing collar came up to him.
“I’d like to see Mr. Cleeves, please,” Mac said.
“I’m sorry, sir.” The clerk’s eyes traveled leisurely over Mac’s bony frame, and he made the “sir” into a lazy insult. The Scot never could wear clothes so they looked like anything. “Mr. Cleeves left word that he was not to be disturbed.”
“He’s in, then?” said Mac, feeling relieved.
“Yes, sir. In his private office in the rear. He went in there at eleven o’clock with a new picture — a very rare painting by one of the Flemish masters. I expect he wanted a long, close look to see if it was genuine. That’s why he left such positive orders to let no one or nothing disturb him.”
Mac’s satisfaction suddenly was jolted.
“Whoosh, mon!” he said. “He went in at eleven? But that’s four hours gone. Would he spend four solid hours lookin’ at a picture?”
“It appears that he has,” said the clerk indifferently.
Mac sighed.
“I’ll have to come again,” he said. “There’s a door in back, leadin’ to the lobby, isn’t there?”
“Yes, sir. Right back there.” The clerk pointed, then went toward the street door again, to stand critically inspecting his nails while he waited for a bona fide customer.
Mac reached the lobby door; then, in a soundless leap, he sped from it to the door across the narrow corridor marked: “Iando Cleeves, Private.” The clerk didn’t notice.
Mac tried the door. It was locked. The Scot pulled out a big jackknife, put it in the crack near the lock, and pried. The knife was as ungainly as the man himself, but like the man, it was capable.
There was a creak, the door opened, and Mac slipped in.
He took one long look around, then leaped for the phone on the desk and dialed Bleek Street.
“Hello, Muster Benson? This is Mac. Can ye come to Cleeves’s art gallery at once? There’s a dead mon ye’ll want to see. Yes, ’tis Cleeves. Lyin’ on the floor of his private office with his face as blue as ink an’ his hand swelled up as big as a kid’s football.”
Mac hung up; then his quick eyes spotted something half out of a desk drawer. It was a dispatch case.
Mac opened it. One thing, it held, and one thing only.
A gold crown!
The gold crown looked as if it had not had time to chew much food with the support of the molar beneath it, and it looked as if it had been ripped quite recently from a human jaw.
CHAPTER XIV
Death’s Sting
On The Avenger’s way uptown to the Cleeves Gallery, Mac radioed to him the layout of the shop: small rear door into the lobby, Cleeves’s private office door almost directly across the narrow corridor from that. And Mac knew that Benson would want to get into that office, unobserved, for a good look around before clerks or police discovered what had happened to the employer who had locked himself into his office with strict orders “not to be disturbed.”
Even knowing that The Avenger would come in quietly, Mac was unprepared for his entrance.
The Scot was looking at an oil painting just taken out of its wooden crate — evidently the painting that Cleeves had immured himself to examine in solitude. And a voice spoke at his side.
“Quite a bizarre painting, isn’t it, Mac?”
Mac whirled, and stared into the pale, deadly eyes of his chief. Dick had come into the room so soundlessly, flashing across from lobby door to office door, that the Scot hadn’t heard a thing.
“Whoosh!” Mac said. “Ye’re here five minutes faster than a mon could possibly get here from Bleek Street. An’ ye appeared out of thin air like a ghost.”
“Not quite a ghost, Mac,” said Benson, face as expressionless as his chromium chips of eyes. “I see you’ve turned up a curious mess here.”
The Avenger went ahead to untangle the mess.
He started with the painting.
It was a bizarre thing. The clerk had said Cleeves entered with a painting by a Flemish master. But this had no Flemish touch.
It was a modern painting of a jungle. It was done in violent blues and reds and yellows. Nothing was in scale — birds were as big as trees and insects scattered through the scene were as big as birds. It was a kind of jungle nightmare.
In the lower lefthand corner was a big spider. It looked as lifelike as if it were really there, instead of just painted on. And in the center of the spider there was a wet patch.
Dick Benson touched the wet patch and it came off greenish brown. He wiped the speck of moisture off his finger carefully, and turned to the corpse.
Cleeves lay in a tumbled heap, as if caught in a big hand, crumpled, and thrown away. And his face was literally blue, as Mac had said over the phone. As blue as blue clay.
His right hand was swollen three times the size of a normal hand and was also bluish. The ghastly tint was deepest around two angry-looking little punctures at the base of the thumb.