The Avenger 15 - House of Death (7 page)

He did this easily because of a simple precaution he had taken on the way down. He had put part of a match folder in the apartment door and again in the vestibule door, to keep the locks from clicking completely closed when the doors were shut.

They opened now for him at a touch.

Shan took the glove and placed it near the dead man’s body, so that the bloody coat half hid it. Then he left the building a second time, speedily, quietly. And this time he didn’t bother to keep the locks from closing.

Shan had had a coldly logical thought a few hours ago.

He wanted a gold medallion that was in the possession of another. The old boy who owned it was a tough customer. Therefore, he would get the aid of an even tougher one. It ought to be a cinch to go to The Avenger—known as a person who gave help to those in need—misrepresent a few facts, and have him be the cat’s-paw who got the gold coin.

The Avenger was unsurpassed when it came to handling tough guys and was without parallel in searching premises. The old fellow calling himself Harlik Haygar would come through with the medallion, all right.

Well, he’d enlisted Benson’s powerful aid with almost ridiculous ease and then gone with him to find the old guy dead. Which ended that.

So then Shan Haygar had had another coldly logical thought.

The Avenger’s abilities as an investigator, were of no further use to him in a search for the medal. But Benson might want to go on in the business of the gold disk and get to be a dangerous nuisance. Or he might insist that Shan give himself up to the police for long and exhaustive questioning. Either was not to Shan’s liking. So it had occurred to him to put the lid on The Avenger at once!

If Benson could be linked definitely to murder, even his reputation would not save him from detention, if not actually from a murder trial. He would be nicely out of the way for quite a while.

The linking, Shan thought, had now been done. At least, it would be as soon as he took the final, easy step.

He entered a phone booth and called police headquarters.

“A man named Harlik Haygar has just been murdered in Apartment 4b—” he gave the address, talking in a disguised tone. “I have reason to believe he was murdered by Richard Benson, known to many as The Avenger. I say this because I saw Mr. Benson drive up in his coupé, saw the light in Harlik Haygar’s apartment go off after something that sounded like a gunshot, and then went up to find the man dead. Benson drove rapidly away in spite of the fact that I called after him.”

“Wait a minute!” came the voice of the police sergeant at the other end of the line. “Who is this? Anybody accusing a man like Benson—”

Shan hung up, with a thin smile on his lips.

Benson had hardly gotten down the ramp at Bleek Street and into the basement garage when Smitty ran up to him.

“Chief! I’ve been waiting for you. We just got a call that you were to be held for murder. The tip came from Sergeant Marcy at headquarters.”

The Avenger’s pale eyes were as expressionless as glacial ice, and with much the same sheen.

“Mark Marcy down for compensation,” he said quietly. “A friend with such implicit faith as Marcy seems to have in me is worth rewarding.”

“But what’s this goofy murder charge about?” insisted Smitty.

“The man Shan Haygar and I went to call on is dead,” said Benson. “Shot through the head.”

“So you’re accused of it! But that’s ridiculous. It just doesn’t make sense.”

“Yes, it does,” said Benson, colorless eyes glinting. “Just a minute. I saw Shan fumbling at the pocket of the car—”

His hand, not large but powerful as steel, dipped into the pocket. It came out with a glove. One glove.

“I see,” said The Avenger.

“Where’s the other glove?” demanded the giant anxiously.

“Probably,” said The Avenger calmly, “it is near the corpse of Harlik Haygar. I was a little puzzled by the actions of Shan, but it becomes clearer, now.”

The pale eyes regarded the glove.

“Shan wanted us to help him get a gold medallion that was not his—”

“How do you know that?”

“The gold disk Carmella has is lettered F H. Probably for Francisco Haygar, her father. Shan said the disk he wanted back had H H on it. He insisted that the letters had no meaning. But it seems they have. A very simple one. They’re the initials of the person who really owns the disk in question. H H would stand for Harlik Haygar—not Shan Haygar. So the man came here to get us to help him lay his hands on property not belonging to him. Then it developed that his victim was dead and the coin already taken when we got there.”

“So Shan tried to play you for a sucker,” snapped the giant. “But why try to frame you on top of it?”

“To keep me out of the rest of the play. He must have figured—which was correct—that I wouldn’t drop the matter there, but would try to follow it up. I couldn’t follow it very far in a jail cell.”

“Oh, well,” shrugged Smitty, “it won’t get far. Just a glove. The way you’re known at headquarters, that’s pretty unimportant—”

“There will be more than a glove to incriminate me,” said Benson. “Just what, I don’t know yet. In addition, the name of Haygar is still one to make news. When it comes out that a Harlik Haygar, ostensibly of that famous family, has been murdered, it will be on the front pages of all the papers. There will be heavy pressure on the police to arrest somebody.”

“It won’t be you,” said Smitty. “I’ll just take this glove and put it where no one will ever find it—”

“You will leave it in the coupé for the police to find when they come,” contradicted Benson.

“But they’ll pick you up!” protested the giant. “They might hold you for days!”

“I won’t wait to be picked up.” The Avenger’s pale eyes had lambent glints in them. “I’ll go down to headquarters myself.”

“For heaven’s sake—why?”

“Shan wants me in a jail cell out of the way. All right. When Benson is behind bars, and Shan is perfectly free to come and go as he pleases, he may do something very interesting.”

“You want Mac or me to trail him—”

“No! I’ll take care of that.”

It was beyond Smitty. He shook his big head helplessly when The Avenger went back out, in another car. That glove connection with murder wasn’t so good. Now if something else, even more incriminating, turned up to link Benson with the murder, even the chief might find himself in very hot water, indeed.

And he was going right to headquarters instead of lying low for a few days! Well, perhaps he had an ace in the hole somewhere that Smitty didn’t know about . . .

But it would seem that there was no ace in the hole.

About an hour later the commissioner looked up from his desk with a little grunt of surprise as a man with thick, coal-black hair and pale, dangerous eyes came in.

The man was escorted by a cop at each side.

“Well, Benson,” said the commissioner, after an awkward throat-clearing, “I see the boys got hold of you promptly.”

“He came in under his own steam,” confessed the cop on the prisoner’s left. Both were watching The Avenger closely.

“He did?” exclaimed the commissioner. Then he stared almost regretfully at Benson. “I’m almost sorry you did that, Benson, because the charge against you is pretty thick. You know what it is, of course?”

Dick nodded.

“Yes, I know. Murder! But naturally it is a charge that can’t be made to stick. That’s why I came to see you and to straighten it out—”

“I’m afraid it can be made to stick,” sighed the commissioner. “If only you hadn’t been a known enemy of Harlik Haygar, it wouldn’t be so bad.”

“Known enemy?”

“Yes! The dead man’s cousin, Shan Haygar, has told us that. He told, before reporters, how you had threatened that man. And, of course, many people know by now that your life is a violent one, and that it’s quite in the cards that you should . . . er . . . liquidate a man if he gets in your way.”

“The Avenger never takes life,” was the quiet answer. “You know that.”

“I don’t know anything of the kind,” said the commissioner. “I know that you’ve
said
you never take life. But I don’t know that it’s true; nor do I know that you wouldn’t, in some personal emergency, even if it had been true so far.”

There was silence for a moment, colorless eyes staring deep into determined brown ones.

“Do you want to tell us your side of it, Benson?”

The head crowned by the thick, black hair shook a calm negative.

“Perhaps I’d better say nothing till I’ve talked to one of my lawyers.”

“Maybe you’re wise,” grunted the commissioner. “In the meantime I’m sorry, but—” He nodded to the two cops. “Lock him up!”

The two went off with the pale-eyed man, being very wary about it because they knew the almost legendary prowess of The Avenger.

They had scarcely gotten through the ponderous wall of bars off the jail anteroom on their way to a cell when the reporters were swarming in.

Hot news, here! Haygar was a great man. So was Benson. And Benson was being held for the murder of a Haygar!

“They can’t hold a guy like Benson long,” said one of the reporters confidently. “Hell, it’d be like holding the governor of the state. Only, if anything, Benson has more pull. And he has all the money in the world.”

They buzzed around.

“Have you any statement, Mr. Benson?”

“Was that really your glove they found next to the dead man?”

“Did you know they are to hold you without bail?”

“Give us a few words, Mr. Benson—”

The pale, infallible eyes stared calmly through the bars at the reporters. They scarcely blinked when the flashlights went off. There were photographers there, too.

A commotion in back of them made all turn. Two men were coming through. One was the commissioner; the other was a dark man who seemed to have come to civilization straight from desert spaces. He was Shan Haygar.

“Yes, that is the man my cousin, Harlik Haygar, feared,” Shan said, nodding to the commissioner, after a long stare at the virile black hair and pale eyes—a stare in which his own eyes rested on the accused man absolutely devoid of recognition.

“You say there were threats?” said the commissioner, scowling. Plainly, he didn’t like this at all; but equally plainly, it was beyond his power to do other than hold The Avenger.

“Yes, there were threats,” said Shan. “I can swear to that, with witnesses, if necessary. I can also swear that this man was the last to see Cousin Harlik alive, and there was the sound of a gunshot from the apartment while Benson was with him!”

The dubious reporter shook his head, wide-eyed.

“Well!” he breathed to the photographer next to him. “I guess they can hold even Benson on that!”

The photographer nodded and took one more exposure. Then he turned and walked toward the exit, head down, fooling with his camera as he went.

The other photographers and reporters crowded past ahead of him at the street door. They galloped for their home offices to amplify the news already phoned in. Richard Henry Benson, famous in almost every field of human endeavor, held for murder of one of the internationally known Haygar family.

Quite a while later, Shan Haygar came out.

The man with the keen, squinted eyes was highly satisfied with himself.

He had perhaps been a bit reckless in attempting to enlist the aid of a man like Benson in the effort to get that gold medallion from the old boy who looked like a spider—an effort that had turned out so disappointingly. If so, the recklessness was more than made up for now.

By giving up just a few minutes of his time to hammer home the murder frame started by the glove, he had put The Avenger on ice for an indefinite number of days. Certainly for a time amply long enough for him to do what he pleased in the affair of the golden disks.

He would be untroubled now by any apprehensions of interference by Benson. The police? He scarcely thought twice about them.

He walked in a leisurely fashion toward a cheap rented car, parked half a block away.

The photographer who had been fooling with his camera, head down, as he made his exit, threw flashlight kit and camera into a trash box and followed.

Camera and kit were dummies, stage props.

The eyes of this man, as his head went up a little, were seen to be pale, deadly. His hair was thick and black.

The Avenger had thousands of friends in all walks of life. Among them were many actor friends.

Now, one of those friends, with thin colorless eye-cups over his own blue eyes, and with a heavy black wig pulled over his own brown hair, and with a face made up with putty and grease paint, was in a jail cell being addressed as Richard Benson.

In the meantime Benson, himself, trailed Shan Haygar, having by this somewhat elaborate process thrown the man completely off his guard.

Shan didn’t seem to be in any hurry. In fact, he gave the impression of a man killing time. He drove slowly south and east till he came to a hotel that was little more than a flophouse. He went in, and Benson waited in the cab he had picked up a little way from police headquarters.