Read Online The Avenger 19 - Pictures of Death by Kenneth Robeson - Free Book Online Page A

Avenger figured that he and Mac would be able to work undisturbed at Durban Vaughan’s penthouse apartment. The police were still busy checking the actual murder site.
    Dick and Mac went up an elevator to the top floor, then took the stairway to the penthouse. Dick rang the bell there, and there was no answer. It was odd that a place as big as he knew the penthouse to be would have no servant in it to answer the bell.
    What he did not know at the time, and was to learn later, was that Vaughan, like Marsden, had had so much trouble with people trying to bribe his servants to get in that he had dismissed them all. Dick did know, however, that no one was opening the door, so he opened it himself.
    Benson was probably the world’s foremost authority on locks. And in his constant study of them, he had recently invented a master-key arrangement that would have given lockmakers nightmares if they’d known of it.
    He carried with him a dozen key blanks, of the common, standard forms and sizes, which were stamped out of plastic. The plastic was of about the consistency of semi-hard rubber but did not have the elasticity of rubber. When a dent was made in the stuff, the dent stayed.
    Benson had only to thrust the proper blank into a given lock, turn a little and draw the blank out. Then he cut notches where the dents showed, marked by the tumblers that did not give under pressure. He put the quickly made key back into the lock, turned gently and opened it.
    They got into the murdered man’s penthouse in about two minutes, this way; and after he had closed the door, Benson cut the notches off the plastic shank so that no one else could ever use it as a key.
    Then they looked around for the “Diabolo.”

    “Diabolo” is a painting of a man and a woman dreamily approaching each other in late afternoon sun while the shadows of trees in the background form vaguely into the head of an approving devil.
    And it didn’t seem to be in Vaughan’s penthouse.
    “It wouldn’t be under floor boards or in hollow places in the wall,” commented Mac. “ ’Tis a much bigger paintin’ than ‘The Dock,’ which was rolled and stuck under a floor board at that vacant building. In fact, Muster Benson, I don’t see how so big a picture could be hidden at all.”
    “It will be hidden in plain sight,” said The Avenger.
    They went over the living room. It was huge, elaborate, hung with many pictures. And Benson examined these paintings even though each depicted nothing like “Diabolo.” He pulled each from the wall and looked behind it, and he sniffed at the face of each. It is possible to paint over a picture with soluble colors so that it looks like another picture entirely. Then the covering can be carefully washed off, revealing the original, unharmed, again.
    But none of these pictures had the smell of fresh oils.
    They split, then, and Mac took four rooms while Benson took four on the opposite side of the central corridor.
    A microscopic search failed to reveal the painting.
    There were four baths in the big apartment. They met at the end of the corridor, in the master’s bath, where a glance was enough to show that no picture could be concealed there.
    Dutifully, however, Mac’s bleak blue eyes examined tile walls and floor. Then he opened the shower case, which was a very elaborate thing of plate glass and chromium, from floor to ceiling. It even had rubber stripping around the door, like the door of a refrigerator, so that no water got out while a bather sprayed himself. It looked like an upended coffin with a nozzle at the top.
    “Vaughan did himself well, I’m thinkin’,” said the Scot disapprovingly. Mac spent a nickel like he parted with a toe; and this glistening shower cabinet had cost an awful lot of nickels. “Why a mon can’t take a shower with only shower currrtains around him is more than I know.”
    Dick went out to the corridor, pale eyes narrowed in thought.
    “Well, the ‘Diabolo’ is not here. That is