Deliberately exposing himself even more to the terrible pressure, he twisted enough to get his left arm loose, and brought his hand up to the back of the giant’s neck. There, with blackness fogging his brain and with his final reserve of strength almost gone, he pressed deep on either side of the spinal column with thumb and second finger.
For a full five seconds the giant made no sound, and there was no slackening of his terrific grip. Benson, with the black fog almost overwhelming him, and with his own muscles failing perceptibly, wondered in a dim corner of his brain at the giant’s resistance to that deadly grip. Was that vast bulk made of metal? Were there no ropes of nerves there, as in other men, to cut off consciousness as they were pressed?
Then, all at once, like a falling tree, the big fellow sagged. His arms slid from their hold, and he slumped to his knees, shaking his head like a stricken bull to clear his vision.
Benson reeled to the town car and leaned against a fender to get his own strength back. And in the silence, the screams of the woman from the house were apparent to the ears of both once more.
“Police! Police!”
The big fellow spoke, kneeling in the gravel, staring with utter unbelief at the comparatively small man who had beaten him, staring with something like awe at the white, set face which even now expressed no emotion whatever.
“You’re the only man,” he said hoarsely, “who ever got away from me, once I got my hands on him!”
Panting, Benson didn’t answer. It had been the nearest thing in his life. He concentrated on getting his strength back.
“All right,” the big fellow said, getting to legs that shook under him like uncertain tree trunks. “You can take me in. Any cop that can do that to me—”
“I’m not a cop,” said Benson.
“You’re not?” said the giant. “Why, I thought you’d trailed me here to arrest me because my boss, Leon, disappeared from the house where I’d driven him—”
“Leon gone?” Benson snapped, straightening. “Your employer, too? Is every influential person in the city menaced by this thing? Tell me what you can—”
“All right. But make it some place else, fast,” said the giant, “before the cops do come in answer to Miss Leon’s screaming. Because if they come, they’ll get me for the boss’ disappearance — and they’ll make it stick!”
CHAPTER IX
Smitty Joins Up
The giant was bursting out of the largest ready-made suit Benson had been able to get in Buffalo. But it would have to do till a tailor could make up a suit to order.
“Or maybe ’tis a tent maker we’ll have to call in for ye,” said MacMurdie, frosty blue eyes traveling over the great body.
The three were in Benson’s hotel suite. Benson was staring with gray gimlet eyes at the giant’s mild-seeming china-blue ones.
“Your employer just walked into that house, belonging to John Lansing, and didn’t come out again?” Benson repeated.
The big fellow nodded.
“And you came back in a hurry and reported it to his daughter, and she hysterically discharged you, and indicated that she was going to hand you over to the police.”
“Yes,” said the giant, voice too high for his bulk.
“Why was she so sure you had something to do with the kidnaping? For kidnapping’s what it must have been.”
The big fellow reddened. “Because I’ve been in jail,” he said defiantly.
Benson’s gray eyes probed deep. He didn’t see the sly shrewdness of the criminal in the china-blue eyes. All he saw was a huge fellow, a lot smarter than he appeared to be, who would be as decent a citizen as anyone else — unless he were roused.
“Care to explain the jail sentence?” he said.
“I was framed,” said the giant. “It was with a big electrical-equipment corporation. I’m an electrical engineer. Graduated from Massachusetts Tech. I was working on television, and some platinum disappeared from the laboratory. Eight thousand dollars’ worth. They nailed me for it, and I got a year in the pen. I’d have gotten ten, only the evidence was so clouded the conviction wasn’t clear. I couldn’t get a regular job after that. All I could get was a job as chauffeur to Mr. Leon, who overlooked my past. Then something has to go and happen to him! If I’m ever tagged as the last man to see him alive, with my jail record, I’ll go up for kidnaping as sure as there’s a ceiling over our heads.”
“That’s why you charged at me the minute I opened my mouth to ask you a question?”
“That’s why. I thought you were a cop and I didn’t dare let a cop take me.”
“What’s your name?”
The giant stared at the pale-gray eyes with his ears slowly reddening.
“Algernon Heathcote Smith,” he said in a stifled voice.
MacMurdie stared at the almost three hundred pounds of brawn with his frosty blue eyes widening. Then for the first time Benson heard him laugh.
“Algie!” the Scot hooted. “Algie! Heathcote! Why—”
The giant’s body rippled toward him, and MacMurdie became discreetly silent. The big fellow faced Benson again.
“The name’s Smitty to my friends,” he said. And he added dangerously, “Most people try to be friends with me.
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” said Benson, ice-gray eyes traveling over the unbelievable mountain of sinew. “So you’re out of a job, Smitty. And you can drive, and you’re an electrical engineer with enough technical training to be working on television. Would you like to work for me? I think I could use you.”
“I’d like it very much.”
“Whoosh, chief!” exclaimed MacMurdie. “We don’t need the help of little boys. You and I can—”
Smitty’s ingenuous blue eyes went his way again, and MacMurdie once more relapsed into thoughtful silence.
“What work is it you want me to do?” Smitty asked the gray man with the immobile white face.
“Dangerous work,” said Benson. “I wouldn’t blame you if you decided against taking it when you’ve heard about it. We’re fighting against some organized gang of criminals so daring that men like your employer, Leon, and like Lawrence Hickock, seem menaced — along with Heaven knows how many lesser lives. A gang so powerful that the police seem helpless to hold any of the lesser killers turned in to them. A gang so clever that even now, after strenuous efforts, we hardly know more concerning their eventual murderous goal than we did when we started out. Quite possibly one or all of us may be killed before we’re through. That’s the work, Smitty. Care to take it on?”
The giant’s moon-full face with the china-blue eyes, for once, expressed the keen intelligence and firm will that dwelt behind the not-very-bright-looking exterior.
“I’d count it a rare privilege to help you in such work, sir,” he said. “And now, if you wouldn’t mind telling me more—”
Benson told the story from the start, eyes like tortured gray steel in a face that could not move a muscle to express the agony of recounting that dreadful starting episode in the plane. And Smitty listened with fury and sympathy to the clipped words of his new chief.
Mystery can work in opposite directions. If Benson had been unable to get far, as yet, toward the core of the grim mystery that had been exploded into his life with the disappearance of wife and child, so, too, had the men against whom he was fighting been unable to penetrate the mystery of who was beginning to get so close to their mongrel heels.
Pete, from the light truck that had borne Leon away to an unknown destination, and the slack-lipped driver of that truck, still with his inevitable cigarette drooping from the corner of his loose mouth, talked it over a bit.
They were in a cheap boardinghouse room kept in Pete’s name.