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

uncertain as to where to point. One of the three was all right. Another had a blue swelling on his jaw. The third held a broken right wrist.
    “Keep him covered!” snapped the uninjured one, jerking his head at Smitty. “We came to visit our friend Salloway, and this guy broke in and tried to hold us all up.”
    “Why, you cockeyed liar!” raged Smitty. “You”
    “Don’t you move!” squealed the manager.
    The gun was trembling, and the trigger must have been within a hair of being pulled in the man’s agitated clasp. And the gun was pointing at Smitty’s head, not at his body, where the celluglass garment would stop the bullet.
    “Hold him here,” said the man. “My friends and I will go out and get the police, and then go on to some doctor’s office. That big killer hurt two of us pretty badly.”
    “Surely,” said Smitty to the manager, “you’re not fool enough to believe”
    “You stand perfectly still—and keep your hands up!” squeaked the manager. “All right, you three, get the police here as soon as you can. I’ll keep him covered.”
    “Why, damn it—” bellowed Smitty. Then he stopped. There was no arguing with the man; he was crazy with fear.
    He had to watch, gnashing his teeth in impotent rage, while the three left. And then he relaxed. His chance to capture the three had gone.
    “You’re going to have a lot of fun explaining to the police why you let three murderers get away,” he said.
    “You’re the m-murderer, if there’s been any murdering done.”
    “I think there has been,” said the giant. “There’s a man in that bedroom lying awfully still.”
    “Salloway, you mean?” The manager took a step toward the door, then stopped with a cunning look in his eyes. “You just want me to get near enough so you can jump at me. I’ll wait till the police come.”
    But they didn’t come. Half an hour passed, and still they didn’t show up. Even the manager got it through his head that the men who had left had assuredly not notified the police, and he let his shaking gun sag out of line of Smitty’s skull.
    As it would do no good at that late stage of the game to throttle the dope, Smitty let him alone. He picked up the phone and called Bleek Street Then, after speaking with Benson, who had just returned from Farquar’s office, Smitty telephoned the police.
    And the building manager tried to stutter his way out of his mule-headed mess.

CHAPTER IX

The Curious Key
    The Avenger, as was to be expected, reached the apartment long before the police did. The cops could move fast, but Dick Benson could move faster.
    He came into the place, seeming to glide like a black panther in a hurry rather than a man. He paid absolutely no attention to the numbed building manager; The Avenger had a sort of sixth sense telling him when people did or did not count in the scheme of things.
    He went directly to the other room, with Smitty on his heels.
    This next room was a bedroom. In it there was a double bed, a dresser and highboy, and several chairs.
    And a corpse.
    The body lay next to the dresser, and it was clad in pajamas. It was Salloway, the tenant of the place, all right. The wealthy contractor was sprawled on his face; and from his back, between the shoulder blades, stuck up the handles of a pair of shears.
    Someone had grabbed the shears from dresser or highboy and jammed them into the man’s back. Chances were he never knew what hit him.
    “They must have done it just as I stepped in the door,” said Smitty. “I heard a kind of groan about that time.”
    Dick Benson nodded. That thick black hair of his made his pale eyes seem even more colorless in contrast. They were brilliant agates now, as he looked at the dead man and the room.
    “Almost noon,” he said, “and Salloway was here, in night clothes. It looks as if he had been staying very close to home lately. Afraid of just this, perhaps.”
    He did not mention the thing that both he and the giant Smitty were thinking