The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion (11 page)

The fact that, at present indications, the whole rubber industry in the United States might be paralyzed was of less importance to Benson personally than the distress of his two comrades.

“Josh! Rosabel!” he called.

Josh and his pretty wife came to the desk. The Avenger’s colorless, terrible eyes drilled them.

“Josh, Rosabel, Nellie—please go to the rear-house again. Josh, you will follow the pickpocket, Johnny the Dip, if and when he comes out. Learn all you can about him. Rosabel, do the same with that bookkeeper. Nellie, watch the woman living there. Get every detail possible concerning those three and radio me when each leaves the place—if they do leave it. But don’t any of you go inside! It is increasingly certain that Mac and Smitty caught this thing inside. So you three stay clear.”

He didn’t finish his thought. Which was: “If anybody is to go into what seems more and more to be a house of death, it will be I!”

Full night, now. And that alley was as black as the inside of a bomb. And it gave you the same breathless feeling of impending disaster that being inside of a bomb would give.

Nellie Gray was as indomitable as any man; but no man, knowing what The Avenger and his band now knew, could have lurked in that alley unafraid. She felt a tendency to shiver as she stood behind the outthrust corner of a tumble-down garage, up the alley from the rear-house.

Josh and Rosabel had been with her, a while ago. The three had taken that spot, even though it was some distance from the rear-house. From there you could see, silhouetted against dim light from the street, anyone leaving the shabby shack and heading for the alley entrance.

Three had left, in the hour and three quarters since they arrived.

First, Old Mitch himself had trudged out, carrying his ragged bundle with the sticks and string dripping from one end. Nellie had reported it to The Avenger over the tiny radio at her waist.

Then a dapper figure, twenty or twenty-five minutes later, had slid from the door next to Old Mitch’s. Johnny the Dip. Josh had slipped after him, reporting first to Benson.

Finally, long later, a figure, limping from a twisted leg, had emerged and gone up the dark lane to the street. That exit had been radioed to Bleek Street, and Rosabel had gone silently after it.

Now, there was just Nellie in the blackness. And in the rear-house was just the one occupant, the middle-aged, heavy-set woman. Nellie’s quarry.

Time dragged. Nellie looked at the tiny watch on her wrist and saw ten o’clock pass, and then ten thirty. She was about to look at her watch again when, once more, she heard steps from ahead of her. She stared hard, suddenly tense in the darkness.

She heard quite a few steps before she saw anybody, indicating that someone was coming down the flight of stairs in back of the rear-house and was walking down one of the narrow runways between that shabby edifice and one of the apartment buildings next to it.

The indication was right. A figure came into the alley, shown up by the dim street light far ahead. The figure was a heavy-set woman.

The woman Nellie was supposed to track!

From the compact radio at her waist, she drew a microphone no bigger than a quarter and only a little thicker.

“Chief!”

“Yes?” came the cold, calm voice from an equally tiny earphone. It was almost as though the voice sounded inside her own skull.

“This is Nellie. The scrubwoman, or whatever she is, just left the rear-house. I’m going after her. Will report later—”

And off there in Bleek Street, The Avenger turned from the big central radio cabinet which was always kept tuned to the same secret wave length as the small belt radios.

He picked up a small case that resembled an ordinary overnight bag.

Luck, it seemed, was with Benson this night. Four radio reports on all four of the inmates of the rear-house. And then further reports from Josh and Rosabel.

Old Mitch had gone out, and there was no mention of his return by Nellie.

The pickpocket had left and headed for a poolroom where he still was, since Josh had not radioed of any return.

The man with the limp was in a movie. And now the woman was gone. So the place was empty, and that seemed like luck because The Avenger meant to go through that place from one end to the other.

He opened the case that looked like an overnight bag, and instantly the fact that it was not what it seemed to be became apparent.

In that small case was probably the most complete make-up kit in the world.

The lid held a fine, small mirror. The top tray had dozens of pairs of tissue-thin glass eyecups with different tinted pupils, which Benson could slip over his own betrayingly colorless eyeballs. Then there were wigs of every sort; pigments, tints, pads for cheeks and lips.

The Avenger got out the picture which Mac had taken of Johnny the Dip. He clipped it in the rack next to the mirror. Then, with the reflected image of his own face next to the picture of the pickpocket, he went to work.

Dick Benson was a make-up artist without peer and could, in a few minutes, accomplish a character transformation that might take the make-up department of a major movie studio several hours. Now, with the aid of grease paint and putty, complexion tints and pencil, he miraculously adopted the sharp, rattish face of Johnny the Dip. Black brows, a thin, high-bridged nose, the hard jaw and long, thin line of chin.

The eyes of the man were light-colored, either gray or blue. Because of that and because he intended to be in darkness anyhow, Dick did not use any of the eyecups. But as a finishing touch, he stepped to a great wardrobe.

In there were hundreds of suits, old and new, dark and light, shabby and elegant. He put on a dark suit, for the man in the picture was wearing a dark one. He slouched a little, glanced furtively around and seemed actually to be that man.

It was not as good a performance as The Avenger could give in the line of make-up. In the light, it could be seen that he was not Johnny the Dip. But no human eye could tell, in the darkness in which he intended to work, that this was not the pickpocket.

And that, it seemed to The Avenger, was sufficient.

Under the street lamp, after leaving the alley, Nellie could see the woman a little more clearly. And the clearer view made her pretty doubtful about the value of following her.

She had rarely see a more common, average-looking, inoffensive person.

The woman might have been forty-five or she might have been fifty-five. Rather tall, she probably weighed a hundred and forty pounds, and it was a rather shapeless, broad-beamed hundred and forty.

Her clothes were faded and showed a patch here and there. Her shoes were cracked, and there were whitish traces of soap, which confirmed the guess that she was one of the city’s myriad scrubwomen. If so, she might be going to work in some big building, now, though it was a little later than such work is usually commenced.

Her face was thinner than her body warranted, and had only one look on it. A look of tiredness. Altogether, certainly no suspect in this gigantic affair of a whole industry on the verge of being disrupted.

The woman took a downtown subway, getting off at Chambers Street. Nellie followed, staying a safe distance behind while they were both in the train.

The woman walked west, toward the river. And Nellie went after her. And then, in a block containing several shabby dwelling places among the dark buildings of daytime business, the woman suddenly disappeared.

Nellie gritted her teeth and decided that she had lost her. But when she hurried in alarm, she caught sight of the woman again, just closing the outer door of a squat, dingy tenement house.

Nellie lurked across the street.

She was there for a long time, so long that she began to get very worried. Was there a rear entrance to this place, and had she lost her quarry through it? She didn’t know. But she was worried enough to find out.

She went to the building, through the outer doorway, up rickety stairs. Half a dozen doors confronted her, all dark. There would be as many more up the next flight.

Nellie drew out a tiny thermometer with a copper case—copper disperses heat and cold very swiftly—and with an ingenious little clip on the end.

She went soundlessly from door to door, touching the clip to the doorknobs, watching the thermometer with the aid of a diminutive flashlight.

That thermometer would register the heat of a candle thirty feet away. When it went up a fraction of a degree, she would have the door most recently opened in this place: the lingering warmth of a human hand on the knob would make it a trace warmer than the other knobs.

She found her door in the rear, on the second floor.

To her dismay, no light shone from under this door. And as she listened, there was no sound from behind it.

It looked as though she had been cleverly thrown off pursuit, in which case that pursuit must have been justified. For no innocent person would have been watchful enough to know he was trailed, or would have gone to such elaborate extremes to throw the trailer off scent.

Nellie looked at the lock. It was pretty simple. With a hairpin, that tool-of-all-work, and with some of the knowledge gained from her work with The Avenger, she managed to slide the bolt back.

Very slowly she opened the door into a pitch-dark room. Very softly she stepped inside—

And then she should have leaped out again at once. For she got that sure instinct of the hunter that the room was not empty, after all. She could see nothing and hear nothing; but she knew that someone was in there!

However, she had no chance to get out. With no warning, of any kind, something smashed down on her head.

She fell!

Nellie had been roughly treated before in her pursuit of the type of criminal who had murdered her kindly archaeologist father and set her on the trail of the underworld. But this was about as hard as she had ever been slugged, and a full quarter of an hour went by before she was able to get to her shapely knees and then to small, uncertain feet.

She staggered back to the door, felt around. Her fingers found a wall switch and she snapped it.

Light from an unshaded bulb, hanging from the center of the ceiling, revealed bareness, poverty—and murder!

The room had a bed, a cracked washstand, several old chairs and a table. And a corpse!

The corpse lay in the center of the room. It was that of a woman, middle-aged, heavy-set, with a lined face and with cracked old shoes, whitened in streaks from soapy water.

For one wild instant, Nellie thought it was the woman she had followed. But then she saw it was another. Killed, almost certainly by the harmless-looking person she had trailed to this building.

And then that “harmless-looking” person had lurked next to the door till Nellie came in, slugged her with intent to murder and fled.

“Nice, gentle female,” Nellie said grimly. She began looking swiftly around, ignoring her aching head. And in about four minutes she had the dope.

The tenant in this room was a scrubwoman, all right. There was an empty pay envelope in the table drawer with the name LEGGITT BUILDING on it. And a memo: