The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion (12 page)

On and after the fifteenth of August the cleaning women will please report for duty at midnight instead of eight o’clock due to requests by many of our tenants who are required to work late.

The woman had her coat on, and her hat was on the scarred table. She had been just about to go out when death struck her.

The woman’s name, according to the torn pay envelope, was Abigail Ort. Nellie went out, hailed a cab and hurried to the Leggitt Building.

She had lost the person she was assigned to trail, and she burned to make that up. Also, she had found that the woman was in it up to her neck; so if she could locate her and haul her in for murder, many things might be solved.

She thought the locating might be done if she got a list of people connected with Abigail Ort and checked over them; and it was quite possible that her employers, the Leggitt Building, might know of near relatives or friends.

The night man in the brightly lighted lobby of the thirty-story building looked at Nellie with a good deal of approval. She drew that sort of look from any male under eighty. And the night man was only a little over fifty.

“Abigail Ort?” he said, giving Nellie no time to finish the question she had started to ask. “Oh, yes. She works here. She’s up on the eighteenth floor now. If you want to see her, I’ll run you up.”

“She’s up there—now?” gasped Nellie.

“Yeah. Came in about ten minutes ago, a little late.”

Nellie crammed back more exclamations. It would seem, remembering that corpse in the tenement, that if Abigail Ort were up there, now, it must be the ghost of Abigail Ort walking.

But then the other answer struck her, and her blue eyes went lighter with anticipated action.

She had struck a hotter trail than she’d dreamed of, in coming here. The other woman, apparently, had killed Abigail Ort in order to take her place this night in the Leggitt Building!

Why? Well, that’s what she wanted to find out.

“I would like to see her a minute,” she said demurely. “If it isn’t against the rules.”

The night man would have preened his mustache, if he had had a mustache.

“Rules are made to be broken—for certain people,” he said roguishly. Then he took her up to the eighteenth floor in the one elevator kept running all night.

The corridor was fairly well lighted, but it was so quiet and deserted that it gave Nellie a sense of being in a tomb.

“She’s probably near the back end,” said the guard. “She usually starts there and works front.”

Nellie nodded and walked toward the rear of the corridor. She walked slowly, wanting the night man to close the elevator door and leave her alone. But he stayed where he was, looking out the open cage after her.

Then she heard the door clang reluctantly shut. Someone had rung for the cage from the lobby or from another floor. She was left by herself in the glistening tunnel of marble slabs.

There was a sound from the end of the hall, and the last door on the right began to open.

Nellie sped forward like a dainty cat, without sound. Light shone out on the bare hall floor from the office.

A woman backed out, taking her time, not acting as though afraid or in a hurry at all. The light clicked off in the office as the woman’s hand found the switch, and the office door almost snapped shut.

But then the woman heard Nellie and whirled. And on her face was no longer the weary, vacant look of a person who has worked too hard for too long.

That look had been sponged off and in its place was the snarl of a tiger.

Nellie charged!

The little blond’s rush on this woman, who used her muscles for a living and was at least thirty-five pounds heavier than she, was made without a thought of failure. After all, she could handle most large men with her knowledge of wrestling and jujitsu. Certainly no woman could get the better of her!

So she charged the scrubwoman—and she got the surprise of her life.

The woman threw Nellie!

Nellie slid and sprawled half a dozen feet on the slippery marble floor, and then got up with white rage burning in her slim body. This was intolerable! This—

The woman’s hand clubbed out at her, clenched, in a terrific blow. That was the opening Nellie wanted.

She caught the wrist behind the clenched hand and half-turned and half-pulled at the same time. This was to have the heavier woman throw herself by her own momentum.

But that didn’t happen, either.

The woman wove off-balance, snatched at Nellie’s arm, caught it, then steadied herself and closed ferociously with Nellie at the same time.

Nellie concentrated on getting away. She was barely over five feet tall, weighed very little over a hundred pounds. She was not built for give-and-take, close work. And this raging female who grabbed her was built like a barrel, only harder to dent.

The woman’s reddened hands got Nellie’s throat. Nellie drove her hands up between the woman’s wrists, spread them hard and broke the hold.

The woman crashed Nellie over backward, landing on her with a force that made the little blond see stars. And Nellie got her right hand on the back of the woman’s neck in the thumb-and-finger nerve press The Avenger had taught her; she squeezed hard.

But even this didn’t do the trick. The woman was wary. With the first feel of those strong little fingers, she squirmed hard. The chance of numbing her with the expert pressure went glimmering and, an instant later, so did Nellie’s senses.

For once again, the woman slugged her.

A professional-looking sap appeared in her roughened right hand as if by magic. Nellie’s head jerked frantically to the left so that the first blow missed. But not the second.

The second got her glancingly on the temple, and a warm black ocean poured over Nellie, with faint sounds piercing it.

Sounds of running steps, and then a change in tempo of the steps as they fled down the stairs. And, finally, a silence more complete, as the black ocean waved back from over her again.

Nellie reeled into the office, clutching her lovely but much-abused head in her two hands. There would be a phone in there. She had to waste precious seconds looking up the official Leggitt Building number, as if it were an address totally outside this place. And then, when she rang the lobby phone, there was no answer. The night man had taken this moment to be somewhere else in the building.

Nellie heard the clang of the elevator door down the corridor outside. She turned to run to the door and halted just a moment.

In this office there were two desks, two chairs, a water cooler and a big filing cabinet. That was all. The tops of the two desks were bare, save for an envelope that lay conspicuously on the one nearest the window.

The envelope was blank, with no writing on it at all, but was carefully sealed and bore something within.

So Nellie took it.

Then she ran to the elevator.

The night man beamed at her in fatherly fashion, but with just a hint of that mustache-preening look and said:

“Did you find her, miss? Did you—”

Then he stopped, because then he saw what had happened to his pretty passenger.

Nellie’s pancake hat was over one ear, her hair was disheveled, her clothes were ripped, and her left leg showed a streak of ivory white through a stocking that had an inch-wide run in it.

“Down!” snapped Nellie. “Quick! She took the stairs. She might not have reached the lobby yet. Take me down, quick!”

She started to get into the elevator and found an arm suddenly barring her progress.

“Oh, no!” said the night man, with no fatherly kindness in his voice, now. “No, you don’t. I’m not giving you a chance to pull no tricks and get away.”

“That scrubwoman,” said Nellie urgently. “She isn’t Abigail Ort. You didn’t look closely enough when she came in. She murdered the real Abigail Ort and almost murdered me. Down to the lobby, I tell you—”

She stopped. The look on his face told her that nothing she could say would move him.

Nellie was in such an urgent hurry that she would not have turned a hair at taking the obstinate man’s elevator away from him and going down herself. But she didn’t try that, either.

There was suddenly a gun in the night watchman’s fist.

“You’ll stay right here till I call the cops. No telling how many offices you’ve busted into and robbed.”

“But—”

In the man’s not-too-keen wits were stirring accounts of bobbed-hair bandits and beautiful lady murderers and other melodramatic perils.

“You stay till I phone the cops,” he repeated. “If you try to get away, I’ll plug you, miss. And I ain’t kidding!”

He took her, wild but helpless, back to the end office whose door was open, then called headquarters.

When The Avenger had delegated Nellie and Josh and Rosabel to check on the movements of the occupants of the rear-house, he had ordered strictly that none of them go inside. That was because of the probability that lingering death, in some mysterious form, lurked in the shabby place.

Dick never let his assistants take chances if it could be avoided. He felt solely responsible for them, and fear for their safety was the only fear he knew.

Fear for his own safety, he didn’t know at all. In fact, as has been said, he acted as if death would be a thing to welcome rather than avoid.

So none of his aides was to enter that place of slow death. It had to be entered, but the entering was to be done by The Avenger himself.

He went to the place swiftly after Nellie’s report that the woman had left. That report had meant that all four occupants were out, and he could have the place to himself.

Like a shadow, or a silent gray fox, Dick got to the alley mouth unobserved by any pedestrian. It was an almost eerie trick of his. He could go down a fairly crowded street in such an unobtrusive manner that no soul could later recall that such a person had passed among them.

And certainly none could recall what doorway or areaway he chose to enter. On this street were only a few people, so the task was even easier.

He went down the dark alley like a wraith, losing himself in darkness so thick that even his colorless eyes, as fine in darkness as a feral animal’s, could barely pick the way. And if he had been seen, what of that?

He wasn’t The Avenger; he was Johnny the Dip, with a right to be slinking down this alley.

Continuing with that thought, it wouldn’t be out of character at all for him, as a reputed pickpocket, to look stealthily around before entering his door, so Dick Benson did that, too.

Catlike, he went past the rear-house, listened, looked into every place in the stubby blind thoroughfare where a person might hide, and satisfied himself that no soul was around to observe him.

Then he went more openly to the rear-house.

The locks on the door of Johnny the Dip were going to take time, so Dick went past them and to Old Mitch’s door. The lock there was so easy that he opened it almost as readily as if he had used a key.

He stepped into blackness and shut the door behind him, holding the lapel of his coat over mouth and nostrils as he did so.

His coat lapels, as always, were saturated with an odorless chemical of MacMurdie’s devising that absorbed, for a time, the lethal effects of almost every gas known.

Whether the hideous, slow-motion death was in the very air or not, even The Avenger didn’t know. But he took no chances. He breathed through the protective lapel.

His flash bit into the darkness of the room.

The first thing Dick looked for was a possible old doorway, boarded over or nailed, perhaps, that might lead into the room next door. In that way, he could avoid time spent on those massive locks of Johnny the Dip.

But there was no such opening; so he went on to the rest of the room and found exactly nothing to rouse any investigator’s interest.

There was nothing in the old stove but a few ashes, still warm, where Old Mitch had cooked his dinner with the wood he gleaned from the streets. There was nothing in a cracked and drafty closet but some clothes too near the ragbag properly to be called clothes.

The battered table had a drawer, and in this were some tin knives, forks, spoons and a can opener.