Benson nodded to him and went up. The guard on the top floor went into the barred foyer; came out at once.
“Mr. Singer will see you immediately, sir. If you will step in here, please—”
“Here,” was a small room off the foyer. Benson went into it. In half a minute or so, he heard steps.
There are qualities about footsteps, almost as there are about faces, that tell a great deal to an observant person. These told Benson a lot.
The steps were hurried, and they were furtive. Very furtive! An ordinary person might not have heard them at all.
Benson shot from his chair in a fast, silent move and stood so that he could see into the foyer through a half-inch crack between door and jamb. He saw the man making the fast, secretive steps.
He was a small man, rather smaller than The Avenger himself, with curious ears. They were almost as pointed as the trimmed ears of a show dog.
The Avenger had a memory like a filing cabinet. He had seen this man before. He placed him in a second or two.
He had seen him driving away from the wreck of Lorens Singer’s home, alone in a sedan, with a look of apprehension and anger on his face.
The elevator door softly clanged, and the guard came to the room in which Benson had reseated himself in his chair.
“All right, sir.”
Singer was in the biggest of the suite of rooms. He had a desk there. He sat behind the desk, with papers piled high, taking up his work where the explosion had interrupted the routine.
His stern brown eyes lightened as they rested on The Avenger. He didn’t look as coldly furious, as ruthlessly intent on vengeance as he had that day beside the smoking ruins of his house.
Benson brought up the subject that had brought him here. The sale of the Henderlin holdings. Singer’s mouth opened a little with surprise.
“Me? Buy the Henderlin set-up? For ninety million? It’s ridiculous! It would be a great bargain at that price. But I don’t want it, even at a bargain.”
“There is no truth in the rumor, then?” Benson said evenly.
“Not an ounce of truth.”
“You could easily swing such a deal,” said Benson quietly.
“Oh, yes,” shrugged Singer, “I could swing it. But I don’t care to. I’m over fifty, Mr. Benson. I’m engaged in narrowing my business contacts so that I can go into semi-retirement. I wouldn’t dream of taking on a job like the ownership of the Henderlin Corp.”
The phone on his desk rang. Rather, one of the phones. There was a battery of them all along one end. Singer picked it up, spoke a few words and smiled when he hung up.
“It seems that rumor has been heard by others besides yourself, Mr. Benson. That was Roger Bainbridge, second vice president of Henderlin Corp. I’ll bet a hat he has come to me with the proposition that you just asked about. He had a please buy expression in his voice.”
“But you’re not going to?” inquired The Avenger, tone as expressionless as his dead, white face.
“Not a chance!”
Benson went out. There was no sign of the little man with the pointed ears, either in the foyer or in the hotel lobby downstairs. But he saw Roger Bainbridge as the man got into the elevator.
The Henderlin executive looked badly worried; looked as if he had indeed come to plead with Singer to buy, rather than put it as a straight business deal.
Benson walked out of the hotel — and the first thing his pale eyes rested on was a rust-colored dress!
There are always thousands of rust-red dresses being worn in a great city, at any season of the year. But The Avenger had an eye for color that was like an artist’s color chart. The exact shade of this dress was subtly different from that of most. Without making the move obvious, as if he had intended to go in that direction, anyhow, he walked toward the rust-red garment.
The wearer of the dress was walking quickly toward a roadster parked at the curb between two taxis. She was a pronounced brunette, with deep-black eyes and ink-black hair.
She was the girl who had faced Benson and Mac and Smitty at the Utah salt flat and again in the Salt Lake City garage.
She was also the person who had slammed and locked a door in The Avenger’s face when he raced toward it from the body of a freshly murdered man.
She drove off in the roadster, and Benson followed in a cab.
The girl had been coldly, murderously calm when Benson encountered her before. She did not seem that way now. Her face was paler than it should have been, and her black eyes were wide. She had been biting her red underlip when she got hastily into her car.
She had looked, indeed, as if she were terribly afraid of something; had looked as if she were in trouble.
The roadster went east, nearly to the East River. It was a section of warehouses and storage buildings, with not many people walking around.
The girl’s car stopped in front of a wholesale paper office. The driver of Benson’s cab stopped half a block behind, with a shrewdness indicating that the man had often trailed people.
The Avenger sat very still, eyes like polar ice. The girl had turned and was walking back along the sidewalk, toward his cab.
The taxi driver turned in the front seat, and grinned back at Benson. But under the grinning face, hidden from passersby by the man’s body, a gun poked over the back of the front seat! And the words that came from the man’s lips had nothing to do with his disarming grin.
“Listen, you, and listen hard, if you want to keep on livin’. Get out of the cab and walk to the nearest doorway, there. The storage building doorway. Don’t try to run away, and don’t try to yell for help or I’ll drill you. I’ll be at the wheel here, and I’ll have this rod on you every second. Understand?”
“I understand,” said Benson evenly.
The driver suddenly looked a great deal less sure of himself. He had seen many men with guns threatening them — death threatening them. The men had looked either scared or angry. Usually scared to death. But this man didn’t show any emotion at all.
His white, awesome countenance was as unmoved as a thing of wax. His eyes were as empty of human emotion as pools of ice water. His voice was even and calm.
The driver began to sweat a little. It was as if the man had some help near at hand — or some hidden source of strength that the driver didn’t know about. To hide his sudden fear, he snarled more savagely:
“Remember, one funny stunt and you get six or eight slugs around the spine!”
“Of course,” said The Avenger, voice seeming almost indifferent.
He got out of the cab and walked across the concrete to the designated doorway. The girl with the black eyes and hair got to him just as he did so. She didn’t look troubled or frightened any more.
She looked triumphant!
“Open the door,” she said, with a sweet smile for the benefit of any pedestrians who might glance their way, “and go in. I have a gun in my purse, and my hand is on the gun. I’ll shoot through the purse in a minute, if I have to.”
Benson only nodded. He opened the door and walked in as commanded. And, smoothly, the girl’s gun covered him as his movements took him out of range of the cab driver’s automatic.
The girl slammed the door. Benson was in the dimness of a huge room with no windows to let in daylight, and with only a few electric bulbs giving illumination.
The room was the receiving chamber of the storehouse. Here, furniture was covered and papered before being sent upstairs to rest in cool darkness till its owners wanted to get it out of storage again. There was a long, low workbench, among other things. Lined along this bench, grinning at the white-haired, dead-faced Avenger, were a dozen men.
Several of the men Benson recognized as among the gang in Utah. Notably the one who seemed to be the leader — a man so thin and tall and smooth-moving that he looked like a snake. He looked so much like a snake that you expected him to hiss instead of talk.