But he only went as far as the corner.
There, he took out a small mirror and altered the lines of the dead flesh of his face. He had come as himself. Now he became a man with lean cheeks and heavy jowls, lips straight and a little cruel over a jaw with a bulbous tip. He turned the brim of his hat down in front, up high at sides and rear, so that it looked like something a fisherman ashore on a vacation might wear. He slipped into the topcoat wrong side out and presented a gaudy check to the world.
He went back to the Hickock grounds, and passed by the house. A groundsman was working at a flower plot near the garage. He went up to the man. At the rear window, the servant who had admitted Benson to see Mrs. Hickock looked out and saw him, but didn’t recognize him at all as the fellow who had just left.
The groundsman glanced at him, eyes curious at the interruption to his work.
“Well?” he said.
Benson said: “I came out here to get a little more information, if I can, about your employer, Mr. Hickock.”
The man just stared at him, face secretive. It was plain that he could keep his own counsel, and that of his employer.
“They tell me,” Benson went on, “that you were one of the last around here to see Mr. Hickock before he left the other day — and didn’t come back.”
“Who told you?” said the man suspiciously.
Benson jerked his head toward the big house. The man drew the natural conclusion. His face lost its guarded secretiveness. Something like relief came into his eyes.
“Oh! So they’ve decided at last to tell the cops, and you were sent out! That’s good. I don’t think people ought to keep these things quiet.”
“Very dangerous to,” agreed Benson. “Tell me what you know of the disappearance, will you?”
“I suppose they’ve told you most of it in the house,” the man said, shrugging his shoulders. “Three mornings ago, Mr. Hickock left for the office. But on the way he was going to stop off at the home of Mr. John Lansing. Mr. Lansing called at breakfast and asked him to. Anyhow, that’s what the second maid says. Mr. Hickock left, driving his own car, and that was the last of him.”
“He didn’t get to the office after the call to Mr. Lansing?”
“Nope. He left here — and disappeared, that’s all. But the call from Mr. Lansing must have been a stall. I hear they’ve called there a dozen times. There’s nobody home. Mr. Lansing himself is down in Florida, and has been for three months. His house seems to be all shut up.”
“They certainly delayed about calling the police,” said Benson expressionlessly.
The man shrugged again.
“You know how it is. His family’s wild. His friends and the guys who work for him are nuts. But everybody’s afraid to say a word to the cops for fear it’ll go hard with Old Ironsides. They’re just sittin’ around waiting for a ransom demand, I guess. Far’s I know, none has come yet.”
“So he went to John Lansing’s home,” Benson repeated.
He left, to go there himself.
He arrived just as a big town car with a giant of a man in chauffeur’s livery at the wheel, swirled out of the drive and began going like a comet away from the place. He took the car’s number.
Five minutes later, after observing the wrecked front door of Lansing’s place and confirming the report that the place was closed and tenantless, he phoned the motor bureau and found that the town car belonged to Arnold Leon.
Fifteen minutes later his car, a fast roadster he’d bought early that morning, slid to a stop in front of the Leon residence. He saw the town car in front of the garage and as he went toward it, he saw the huge chauffeur hurrying from the rear door of the house, shedding his livery coat as he walked.
Benson stopped in front of him. “Just a minute,” he said.
The man stopped and stared down at him.
Thirteen years before, in Alaska, Benson had known a man called Bull Red. He was just under seven feet tall, with a leonine mane of red hair, and bent crowbars with his bare hands without bothering to brace them over his knee. Not since the days of Bull Red had Benson seen such size as he saw now, in this chauffeur.
“All right, what do you want?” snapped the huge fellow, holding his coat over his arm.
“You’re the chauffeur for Mr. Leon?” Benson said.
There was black fury in the giant’s eyes. And something else. The ordinary person would see in the big fellow a moon-faced guy with mild china-blue eyes who was as stupid as he was enormous. But Benson saw deeper. He saw a fast brain concealed under the phlegmatic, full face, and plenty of intelligence in the far depths of the china-blue eyes.
“I was the driver for Mr. Leon,” the man snapped. “I was just fired!”
“Oh?” said Benson. “You mean, when you got back from Lansing’s house?”
The giant glared. “How do you know I was there? And what’s it to you?”
“I know you were there because I saw you,” said Benson calmly. “And it’s this to me: there’s a mystery about that house and I want to solve it.”
The giant crouched a little, as if the words had been blows.
“So!” he said. “You’re a cop! Well, you won’t get me for the boss’ disappearance!”
He leaped at Benson as he spoke.
Benson had been sure, on eyeing all that vast bulk, that the man would be so muscle-bound that he’d have about the agility of a snowplow. Bull Red had been slowed by being muscle-bound. But this man jumped at him as swiftly and certainly as if he’d been a flyweight boxer!
Fast as Benson was himself, he had time only to get his right hand up, and jerk his head to one side as a fist like a side of beef swept by. It was lucky he got the hand up for the giant’s vast hand caught his left shoulder.
The big fellow had time for only one short press of his huge fingers, but that almost did for the fast gray fox of a man with the dead, still face. Then Benson’s free right hand got a fold of flesh and muscle under the giant’s extended left armpit in a police grip that is warranted to make any man howl. He twisted with his steel-wire fingers.
The big fellow gasped and let go. Benson’s hand shot up from the armpit to the column of a throat. He bent his back like a fast gray cat, and the giant rolled over it like an avalanche and crashed to the graveled drive.
It would have done for most, but this man got up as lithely as if he’d weighed a third what he actually did. He flashed for Benson again, less recklessly this time, with the black fury higher in his eyes — but with something like respect there, too.
From the house behind them some woman was screaming.
“Police! Get the police! He kidnapped my father! Now he’s murdering somebody! Police!”
Benson feinted from the tremendous arms that were reaching for him; but fast as he was, the big fellow was almost as fast. He got Benson’s right wrist in a bone-crushing grip, and twisted his arm up behind him.
Then he put his right arm, as huge as a flexible tree trunk, around Benson with his doubled fist in the middle of his back and began breaking the gray man with the dead, white face in two.
Quality in muscle, as well as quantity! The giant weighed nearly twice as much as Benson, and he was putting forth his full strength in an effort to crack Benson’s spine. But into the gray man’s steel cables of sinew surged the explosive, mysterious power that makes the muscle fiber of a rare few far superior, ounce for ounce, to that of ordinary men.
For a few seconds he actually stopped that appalling pressure on his back. Like a steel bar, bending thus far and no farther, he quivered there in the big man’s crushing grip. But it could only last a few seconds, and Benson knew it. So he risked everything on a single throw.