A pair of forceps — the next-largest of the line of many forceps, all a little different from the rest for separate purposes. The forceps he had found at the freight-yard fence — and lost again to the men who had thrown him in front of a train to be ground to pieces — had come from this office.
The Avenger had looked particularly for the usual appointment calendar kept by doctors and dentists, in order to see if Smathers’s name was on it. But there had been no such patients’ list. It had been taken by the murderer.
The Avenger dialed police headquarters, his pale eyes meanwhile resting enigmatically on the dead man’s twisted face.
CHAPTER XVI
Meet the Gang
If the Pair-O’-Dice Café was fifty minutes from Times Square, then Smitty, the giant decided, was a monkey’s great-aunt.
It took Smitty, in one of The Avenger’s fastest cars and driving as The Avenger’s aides always drove, fifty-eight minutes to get there. Which meant about an hour and three quarters for the average motorist.
The roadhouse was about sixty miles from town, in a part of New York State curiously wild-looking and sparse of inhabitants when you remembered the metropolis was so comparatively close. There are parts of the State like that — unbelievably back-country, though within driving range of millions of urbanites.
The Pair-O’-Dice was not an impressive-looking place.
It was a three-story structure about as big as a large six-room house, covered with rough slabs on the outside to resemble a log cabin and not doing a very good job of imitating. Woods surrounded it on three sides and picked up again across the smooth highway on which it squatted.
A lot of jalopies around testified that the place was popular for the countrymen around, if not for the city folks. There was a good deal of cheerful noise floating from the barroom, too.
So Smitty and Wilson and Mac didn’t pay any more attention to the bar section. Cheerful noise; innocence. What they were after was a window shaded against light, or whispered secrecy, or stealthy movements.
A powerful sedan was parked in among the jalopies, like a sleek Great Dane among mongrels. Cole looked at the car and then at his two companions, who nodded. It was logical that somebody from New York — from the Gallic Importing Co.’s warehouse, to be exact — had just rolled up in that sleek job.
The three men went around to the back of the place. They looked in a window — the kitchen, with a guy in sloppy whites indifferently frying hamburgers on a big griddle. They looked in another window — storeroom.
There was a shaded window on the second floor. Cole pointed up to it. Smitty knelt down and Cole climbed onto his shoulders. The giant grasped Cole’s ankles in vast hands, and then straightened up. He did it as effortlessly as though there were two pounds of feathers on his back instead of a hundred and eighty-odd pounds of muscle and bone.
Cole could reach the sill from that height. He drew himself up a couple of feet by taut fingertips and looked in. Then he motioned to come down, and Smitty lowered his vast bulk again like a docile elephant.
“It’s all right,” whispered Cole. “Two men in that room, wondering why the four left in the warehouse haven’t reported about the two left to drown in the basement.”
Mac clenched his fists and made low growling noises deep in his throat. Smitty’s gigantic shoulders bulged with cold anger.
“So?” whispered Cole.
“So we meet the gang,” Mac whispered back. “We pay them a little visit. I remember the face of the skurlie who clubbed down the chief. I think he was the leader of the rats. A heavy mon with a paunch and a face like the top of a pail of lard. With luck, he’ll be here.”
There were only two men in that upstairs room, Cole had said. And he told Mac that the man with the lardy face was not one of them. So almost certainly a lot more of the gang must be circulating around down on the main floor.
The three went around to the front, opened the barroom door, and walked in.
There were fifteen or twenty men lined up, with beer, for the main part, in front of them. They were husky men, mostly quite young, with the look of the outdoors that comes to farmhands. They looked indifferently at the door when it was opened, then gaped in awe at Smitty’s enormous bulk.
Mac looked wistfully around for the man who had clubbed the chief but didn’t see him.
“See you at the bar in a minute,” Smitty said to Mac. Then, to the bartender: “Washroom?”
“Right back there, end of the hall,” said the man, jerking a thumb toward the door leading into the central hall of the place. On the other side of this hall was another door, leading into the café. Patrons could come in there, put their feet under tables, and be waited on. Café on one side of the hall; bar on the other.
Out of the corner of his eye, Mac saw Smitty and Wilson pass the other door after a quick stare into the café. The Scot heard the sound of steps down the hall, but he had a hunch that the progress was faked; that Smitty and Wilson were staying right next to that door, out of sight of the folks in the barroom.
“Beer?” said the bartender to Mac.
The Scot reflected sourly. He had to buy something to make it look natural. And beer was the cheapest.
“Yes,” he said reluctantly.
He grudgingly got out a purse with a tight clasp on it, opened the clasp, and drew out a quarter. This he even more grudgingly laid on the bar. There were unlimited funds at the disposal of The Avenger’s men. They could throw it around in thousands, if necessary. But Mac would never get over his hatred of spending a nickel on anything not vitally necessary—
Mac heard a curious little sound from the hall. It was a bit like the squeak of a mouse, and there was a scuffle like that of a frightened mouse; then no more sound.
The whole thing had been so faint that no one in the barroom paid any attention to it — if, indeed, anyone had heard it, save Mac.
The Scot lifted the beer glass to his lips and pretended to drink. Actually, Mac had never touched a drop of anything. There was another sound in the hall.
This time it was not a squeak and a slight scuffle. It was a padded little thud, as if someone, far off, had hit a mattress with a stick. Mac almost grinned, with a bleak, cold light in his baleful eyes.
But that was the end of the odd sounds. A call from the café that drifted in to his ears.
“Mike! Bring some cigarettes back with you.”
Then silence. Then a louder calclass="underline" “Mike!”
So Mac edged along the bar toward the hall door. The caller in the other room was going to see why Mike hadn’t answered. The fact was in his tone.
Mac reached the barroom entrance onto the hall just as the caller got to the café door. And the two looked at each other — the man with the face graying as if he saw a ghost, and Mac with a frightening small smile on his freckled, homely face.
The man tried to turn and race back into the room, but the Scot got a bony hand on his shoulder from behind and jerked him back. And that was the end of the silence.
Two men lying peacefully on the floor at the feet of the giant Smitty showed the meaning of the small sounds. The giant and Cole had waited flat against the wall next to the café door and silently and cheerfully knocked out the men leaving the room, one by one.
But this had torn it!
With all the power of his shoulders and arm, Mac sent a fist into the putty face of the man who had called for Mike. It was the guy who had hit Benson; and all the loyal Scot’s allegiance to his grim master, The Avenger, was in the blow.
“Wow!” said Smitty, as he ran past. He had never seen even Mac strike such a blow. Nose, mouth, and eyes seemed to be blotted out by the big bony fists and then reappeared again, all scrambled, as the man with the paunch sagged without a move to the floor.