And she realized instantly why she could see a bit now, where she hadn’t been able to before. Now there was light.
It came from little tongues of flame, very small and feeble tongues of flame! They were flickering up from little piles of rags, which also gave off the odor of kerosene; and the little piles were around the walls of the room.
Sound from the doorway drew her gaze. Her eyes turned in that direction just in time to see a kind of shadow drifting out of the room.
Out and down the hall. And then she faintly heard the creaking of the front window, rising and lowering, as the shadow left the building.
She shrieked and heard the sound only as a mumble against her gagged lips. She stared at the flames, leaping high now, about to make an incinerator of the room in which she lay helpless; of the whole house, in fact, in about five minutes.
CHAPTER V
Buried Clue
When Nellie started out to do The Avenger’s bidding and look through the office of Markham Farquar for clues as to Smathers’s destination three nights ago, she had every intention of being quite peaceful and law-abiding about it.
Nellie was always peaceful. At least, that is what she herself always claimed. If you asked anyone else, however, Smitty for example, he’d have told you that Nellie lived for excitement and never was peaceful if she could possibly help it.
Nevertheless, she had every intention of being peaceful in her methods this time.
She started by phoning around to find Farquar and have him meet her at his office and open up for her to make a search.
And she couldn’t find him.
He wasn’t at the office. He wasn’t at his home on Riverside Drive. So she just went to the office building housing the suite in which he worked, intending to have the building watchman admit her.
The building was a small one in the upper Fifties; one of those buildings that had been turned from a tall private home to apartments, then to office suites with a remodeled front. It was too small, she found, to have a night man. There was just the building.
Nellie started to hunt up a pay phone and try again to contact Farquar. But then, as she was turning from the place where she could see across the street to the entrance, she saw a light in the third-floor window.
It was just a glint of light, and it moved. It was as if a big firefly were imprisoned up there. But it was a flashlight.
What was anybody doing prowling in there with a flashlight?
While Nellie was thinking this over and drawing the inevitable conclusions, a man came from the street door. The man wasn’t hurrying or acting suspiciously. The fact that Nellie couldn’t see him very clearly and that he was more an unidentifiable shadow than a man was due to the dimness of the street lighting around that particular entrance.
A hunch tingled along Nellie’s spine that this man ought to be trailed. And the hunch grew when the next few minutes showed no more glints of flashlights in that third-floor window.
But by the time she was sure of it, the man was out of sight. And, anyhow, she had been told to prowl the office of Markham Farquar; she couldn’t do two things at once.
She sighed and went to the building. She didn’t feel like taking time, now, to try to phone Farquar again. So she turned burglar to the extent of picking the lock of the building door and sliding in. Any of The Avenger’s aides could make locks do tricks.
There was a lobby that was really no more than a wide hall, a stairway, and an automatic elevator. Also, next to the elevator, there was a small building directory.
There were only twelve names on it — four tenants for each of the three floors. And Markham Farquar’s office, as she’d surmised, was third floor front.
The office in which that light had showed.
Nellie went up the stairs as soundlessly as a pretty ghost. The lock on Farquar’s door yielded to her touch, too. She went inside, with her own flash working, now. But this time light didn’t show at the window, if anyone had been outside to watch. Nellie was either more careful or more skillful than whoever had been in here before her.
Looking around, she was puzzled. It was almost certain that someone had been in here, searching, just a minute ago. But the place didn’t look it. Everything was perfectly in order.
She began poking around, looking for a possible indication as to the place Smathers had gone three nights ago. The chances were that no such thing was around here to be found. If even Farquar didn’t know where his clerk had gone, it was pretty certain that no hint existed in the office.
There were two rooms to the suite. A big office, the luxurious fittings of which showed that it was Farquar’s own, and a big law-library room with a desk in it that must have belonged to Smathers.
Nellie went to this desk and looked through the drawers. She flipped through names on a phone pad — all names of large, well-known companies. And then she noticed that the big desk blotter was brand-new and clean.
She lifted it, and the old blotter was underneath. She played her light close to it, with a hunch that she was getting warm.
There were many blotted ink lines on it — so many that they were like a bunch of hen tracks. It would have taken all night to decipher them and try to pick one or two full words out. But there was also something that caught the little blonde’s sharp eyes at once.
Slight, regular depressions in the blotter, that crisscrossed over the hen tracks, in a way showing that they had been made later than the tracks.
Nellie took a little tube from her purse, opened the end, and made sprinkling motions. Powdered graphite sprayed over the slight marks. Then she tilted the blotter pad, and the graphite filled them in.
Now she was definitely alert. It began to look as if she’d come out of this with something after all.
Smathers, or someone at Smathers’s desk, had recently penciled an address. The pencil had borne down heavily enough to mark the blotter underneath.
The powder showed a full address, and part of a name. The name was A… I… ail. That was all she could make out—
Nellie suddenly snapped off the light and sank behind the desk. Her quick ears had caught a sound at the hall door. And in a minute, in the gloom, she saw the door opening!
A man came in, so shrouded in darkness that she saw only a big moving blur.
To repeat, Nellie had felt quite peaceful when she set out that evening. But she was annoyed at the popularity of this office. You’d think it was the Grand Central Terminal. This was the third prowler to enter in the space of a half-hour, counting herself.
She waited behind the desk only till the moving shadow was within reach — then she reached it!
Burly gunmen had been reached by Nellie’s small, white hands. And they had regretted it. This man regretted it, too.
A startled grunt came from his unseen lips. He struck out wildly, a blow that would have knocked Nellie’s blonde head half off her shoulders if it had landed.
But it didn’t land. Instead, she caught the wrist behind the clenched hand, bent her shapely back a bit, and hauled forward, and the man made a neat pinwheel over her shoulders. He was so enthusiastic about it that his feet knocked a bulb out of the chandelier on their way.
The building seemed to jar when he hit; and Nellie, who knew the results of that particular throw, turned her back to him calmly and went to the door. There she turned on the lights.
A bulky man in a shapeless gray suit, with a smashed straw hat on his head, sprawled feebly on the floor and looked at her with glazed eyes. Nellie picked up the phone and called the police.
“Hey!” the man said thickly, making an effort to get up and sinking dizzily back again. “This is no place for cops. I’m a private detective. I got a right to be here.”