Smitty, without a word, followed. It was still not quite six o’clock in the morning. Strange hour for a young fellow to be making a hurry call.
Harold didn’t go far. There was a big new apartment building, of the type put up by the score for modestly paid government employees, about eight blocks away. Harold jammed on the roadster’s brakes in front of this, and hurried in.
Smitty and Benson followed.
Harold went to the floor below the top floor and rang a bell there. From the stairwell, Benson and Smitty watched. There was a long pause; then a girl opened the door a foot.
And Smitty clenched his hands hard.
The girl was tall and slender but well-rounded. She had dark-brown hair. Her face was of an exotic type: from the widow’s peak at the forehead down in an absolutely straight line went the slope of forehead and nose. It gave her the look of having stepped off an Egyptian frieze.
The ordinary, flimsy nightgown she wore had much the transparent effect of the high-priestess’ robe, and this clinched the memory for Smitty.
“Chief!” he gasped. “That’s the girl I saw with old Taros last night! The priestess. And Gunther Caine’s son is calling on her!”
Benson didn’t say anything in reply. He watched Harold talk to her, saw her frown first in a bewildered, then in an angered fashion. He could see Harold’s face for just a glimpse, long enough to read his lips as he said: “last night.” Then Harold had his back turned again and he saw no more.
But he could see the girl’s face, and he saw that she was giving Harold scant satisfaction in whatever matter had brought him here at such an hour.
She didn’t look like an Egyptian priestess now. She looked like just a normal girl, with a slightly exotic cast of countenance, who was resentful at being awakened by an acquaintance at six o’clock in the morning.
Harold left, finally, shaking his head and looking as if he’d like to wring his hands, too.
Benson went to the door the instant the elevator had shut on Caine’s son, and knocked. Again the door was opened.
“I told you—” began the girl, obviously thinking it was Harold back again. Then she got a good look at the awesome, dead face and the chill, colorless eyes.
She tried to shut the door. Benson held it open, and walked in, followed by the giant Smitty.
The girl jumped to a table with its drawer partly open. She turned swiftly, with a little gun in her hand.
“Get out of here, both of you!” she panted.
Smitty tensed for a leap at her, to get the gun. An almost imperceptible movement of The Avenger stopped him.
The pale eyes were boring into the girl’s frightened brown ones.
“We don’t intend any harm,” he said, voice peculiarly monotonous and smooth. “We would merely like to talk to you for a few minutes.”
“I don’t know you. I refuse to talk to you. Get out!”
The girl gestured with the gun. Benson took a slow step back, eyes still intent on hers.
Smitty nodded to himself. The tone of the chief’s voice had told him what was up.
“If you are disturbed about the way you’re dressed,” Benson said, voice metronomic in its measured cadence, “we can step outside for a few minutes and return.”
“That’s not it. I won’t talk to you at all. You—”
The girl frowned a little, blinked.
“Leave… at… once,” she said. But there wasn’t the sharpness in the tone that there had been. And it seemed to Smitty that the gun wavered. Though it would have been pretty suicidal to wager a jump on that hunch!
“We only want to ask about Harold Caine, and the amulets and the ring and the high priest Taros,” said The Avenger, voice still as monotonous and level as a single sustained note on a harp string. “That is all. And you will answer to the best of your ability, won’t you?”
“I—” faltered the girl. “I—”
The gun was definitely sagging, now.
Benson’s icy eyes seemed twice as large as usual in the white death mask of his face. Wide, and flaring — and hypnotic.
“Give it to me,” he said softly.
Slowly he stretched forth his steel-strong hand. And slowly, in a sort of unseeing blindness, the girl gave him the gun.
Smitty sighed deeply. He had just seen a miracle. Rare eyes like The Avenger’s are strongly hypnotic. The time taken to hypnotize this girl wasn’t particularly short if applied to a willing subject. But to hypnotize a person that briefly, when the person was agitated and rebellious, was breathtaking!
“Your name?” said Benson.
The girls’ eyes were wide and staring, like a sleepwalker’s. And her gauzy night-attire carried out the effect. Like a sleepwalker, she would go where deftly led. And like one she would answer to the best of her knowledge any question put to her. There is no evasion possible in hypnosis.
“My name is Anna Lees,” she said, voice empty and docile.
“You have known Harold Caine long?”
“Only for several weeks.”
“He is infatuated with you.” It was a statement more than a question.
“Yes,” said the girl simply.
“You saw him last night?”
“No!” Anna’s voice was positive. “I saw no one last night, after nine o’clock. I was in bed.”
“You were seen near Gunther Caine’s home. How could you say you were in bed from nine on?”
“I was in bed. I saw no one, and went nowhere. I went to bed early because I had a headache.”
The Avenger’s eyes were like ice in a polar dawn.
“A headache! Do you often have headaches?”
“No,” said Anna. “Very rarely.”
“What was this one like?”
“It was odd. I felt as if my brain were on fire, and then I went into a deep sleep.”
“You say you saw no one after nine o’clock. Did you see anyone just before that hour?”
“Yes! I saw an old friend of the family. A lawyer by the name of Farnum Shaw.”
The Avenger’s hands came together with a sharp clap. Anna Lees blinked, looked at him perplexedly, then fearfully. She saw her gun in his hand, and her fingers went up to her lips to hold back a scream as she got an inkling of what had happened.
“You get out of her!” she said hoarsely. “What have you done to me? What did I say? Leave here or I’ll call the police!”
Threatening to call the police against Benson was funny. But Benson only nodded, handed the gun back to her, and left.
“Lawyer Farnum Shaw,” he mused. “Mentioned also by Caine, as an example of a collector who would give any amount for the Taros relics. I think we’ll have a talk with Shaw.”
Smitty had gasped when he saw the tall, exotic girl, Anna Lees, in the filmy nightgown so like the priestess’ robe she had worn the night before. He was stunned beyond gasping when he saw the lawyer, Farnum Shaw.
Shaw, corporation lawyer, lobbyist, stock dabbler, was over six feet tall and as thin as a skeleton. He had practically no eyebrows or eyelashes. He was lantern-jawed and lank of countenance. There wasn’t a hair on his high-domed skull, from nape of the neck to forehead. His head looked like a billiard ball, with an eagle beak of a nose sticking out on the face side.
The corporation lawyer was dressed in riding breeches and checked coat for an early-morning horseback ride in Rock Creek Park when Benson and Smitty reached his home. He talked as dully as he acted. If this was the individual who had been doing an appearing and disappearing act last night, his manner concealed it well.
“I have heard of you,” he nodded pleasantly at the self-introduction of the man with the icy-slits of eyes and the white, still face. “What can I do for you?”
“I came to see you about the Taros relics,” said The Avenger, eyes as expressionless as his paralyzed face.
Shaw jerked his bald, vulture head.
“Ah, yes, Mr. Benson. Wonderful pieces, those! The amulets are the finest of their kind in existence, I believe. And the Ring of Power, with its incredible past and its niche in history—” He sighed. “I collect Egyptiana myself, as it happens, in a modest way.”