Read Online The Avenger 14 - Three Gold Crowns by Kenneth Robeson - Free Book Online

blank all around.”
    “Smathers’s friends or family know nothing?”
    “Smathers, it seems, didn’t have either family or close friends,” replied Farquar irritably. “The man was practically a hermit. I finally located the employer for whom he worked before I hired him, years ago. That man had never heard of any relatives either.”
    “Where did Smathers live?” asked Benson, eyes like ice in a polar dawn.
    “In a boardinghouse up near Columbia University,” Farquar said. “I’ve been there twice, checking on things. He didn’t show up there before he disappeared. He left the boardinghouse at eight o’clock in the morning, as he always did, and that was the last anyone saw of him. He never came back.”
    “And he had no friends there?”
    “No. The landlady said he didn’t do more than nod to the rest, although he’d lived there for years. I tell you, the man was a hermit. We’ll never find out anything through his past. And we don’t even know if he’s alive or dead.”
    “We know that, all right,” said Dick Benson, face as moveless as a mask. He was many years younger than Farquar, but he looked twice as calm and three times as competent. “He’s dead.”
    “He— How do you know?” gasped Farquar.
    “There was a tramp ground to bits in the Newark freight yard. That unidentified tramp was Smathers, I’m sure.”
    “What in the world was he doing in a freight yard?” exclaimed Farquar. Then he shrugged resignedly. “But no matter why he was there. He was there, and he was killed. I’ve felt right along that he was dead. And now there is a definite murder charge against me any time those three blackmailers want to press it. Did you find out anything else?”
    “Nothing of importance,” said The Avenger.
    Farquar’s shoulders slumped.
    “I guess I’d better just bite the bullet and pay the blackmail demand,” he said slowly. “I’m as sure as I am of sitting here that the clues those three men hold will really put me in the chair. And they’re getting impatient. Look.”
    He tossed a sheet of paper over to Benson. The Avenger stared at it. Crudely printed words leaped out at him.
    IT IS THE MONEY OR THE CHAIR.
MAKE UP YOUR MIND. AND QUICK.
    The note was unsigned.
    “If we could only get something on the three,” Farquar said. “Something to tie them in with this.”
    “One fact about Beall has come out, in the short time we’ve been trying to help you,” said Benson. His eyes were basilisk on the short printed note. “His paper company is in financial difficulties.”
    “Of course!” said Farquar with an explosive breath. “There we have the motive, anyway— Say, did you know someone was in my office last night?”
    “Several people were in your office last night.” Dick told what had happened to Nellie Gray. But in line with his usual reticence when he hadn’t yet gathered all the facts, he did not dwell on Nellie’s discovery. He didn’t describe the place where, it was pretty positive, Smathers had died.
    “We ought to have something more on Cleeves or Salloway or Beall soon,” was all he said. “My men are working on them right now.”

    But they were not going to get anything on Salloway.
    Smitty was on Salloway, trailing him if he went anywhere, watching what he did and to whom he talked.
    Above all, he was trying to get his hands on the cigar case Salloway was said always to have on his person, in which it was said he carried the trumped-up murder clue against Farquar.
    Smitty had had no luck so far. He’d found out nothing suspicious about the well-known contractor.
    He was in a stairway at the moment.
    Salloway lived on the fourteenth floor of an East River apartment building. He had a home in Connecticut, where his family and servants stayed; he himself used this four-room bachelor apartment when he was in New York.
    All last night Smitty had lurked on the stairway just the other side of the fourteenth-floor door, ready to trail Salloway if he came out,