“So we have,” he said to Nellie. “And what do you suggest doing with him?”
“Turn him over to the police, of course,” flamed the girl. “I don’t understand you. You claim you’re interested in helping the cause of justice, but you won’t co-operate with the most powerful weapon justice has on its side — the police force.”
No flicker showed in the deadly, colorless eyes. No emotion was displayed in the quiet voice.
“Quite so, my dear,” Benson said. “We’ll turn him over to the police.”
There was a cracked mirror in the hall. Calmly, as though there were no such thing as a fire within many blocks, Benson turned to it. He took off the brown wig, disclosing his own silver-white shock. He worked at his face. The dead flesh stayed where it was prodded, like putty. And in a moment it had reassumed the features of Benson, instead of imitating the features of Pinkie Huer.
The steel-gray man was himself again.
A squad car was with the fire engines. As Benson and Nellie came from the door of the burning house, a Long Island detective jumped from the car. He raced toward them.
“In there,” said Benson, nodding to the hallway, “is a criminal. He participated in the kidnapping of this girl who is with me. He no doubt has a long record. It’s the chair for kidnapping in this State. I’d suggest that you arrest him and hold him without bail.”
The detective could see the prone body in the hall, through the open door. But his gaze snapped back to Benson’s expressionless, dead face.
“O.K. We take him. But we take you two, also, for a thorough investigation—”
“We haven’t time for that,” said Benson smoothly.
The detective glared at him. Benson was a little over-height because of the lifts in his shoes to give him some of Huer’s bulk, but still not a big man.
“So you haven’t got time!” he said sarcastically. “Who do you think you are?”
“Is there a two-way radio in your squad car?” said Benson smoothly.
“Yeah.”
Benson walked toward the car. The detective took an uncertain step toward him, then went on to retrieve the unconscious man in the thickening smoke of the hall. Benson got New York headquarters on the radio.
“The white-haired guy’s okay,” said the uniformed driver of the car when the detective came out with the unconscious man in his arms. “New York says so. And they say if he says to hold anybody, we better hold ’em.”
The detective glared, then shrugged.
“All right. You win. Must have a pull like the governor himself—”
He stopped, with the icily flaming eyes on him.
“I would suggest,” said Benson, “that you take extra-good care to guard this man.”
“Guard him?” said the detective, staring. “What could possibly happen to him in jail? Or on the way to jail?”
“That’s all I have to say,” Benson said smoothly. “Watch him as you’ve never guarded a prisoner before.”
The big black car that looked so old and innocent but had such a tremendous motor under its hood was nearly six blocks away. Benson had taken no chances on its being spotted by a lookout when he drove up as Pinkie Huer. He walked Nellie to it, and they drove to Bleek Street. On the way, she was silent, but glanced often with puzzled gray eyes at the enigmatic, powerful person beside her.
Up in the huge third-floor room, Smitty hurried toward them. His vast size made Benson look like a pygmy. Yet the gray steel man seemed, impossibly, to tower over the giant, such was the vitality expressed in his average-sized body.
“Chief! They’ve been calling from Long Island. And from New York headquarters.”
“Yes?” said Benson.
“Yes,” said the giant, words coming in a rush. “You turned some fellow over to the Long Island police, didn’t you?”
Nellie’s eyes widened. Benson only nodded.
“Well, the guy was shot. He was right in the police car, in front of the local jail. Somebody drilled him dead as a doornail — and they haven’t found out who.”
Benson glanced at Nellie Gray. She was biting her lips.
“To keep him from talking,” she said, gray-faced for a moment. “They knew they couldn’t get him out on bail, so they killed him for fear he’d talk.”
“Yes,” said Benson. “You see how much good it did to turn the man over to the police.”
Nellie was silent, shivering a little.
“That kind of thing,” said Benson in his silken voice, dead lips barely moving with the words, “is why Justice & Co. was formed. There are some things beyond the power of the police to handle. And from the start, it has been plain that the affair that cost your father his life is one of those things.”
Smitty was bursting with curiosity. Looking, with his ingenuous moon-face and china-blue eyes, like a slow-witted huge child, he stood literally on one foot and then the other.
“Did you find out anything, chief? Did your one-man raid on that gang do any good?”
Nellie had recovered her spirited composure. Her gray eyes rested distastefully on the giant.
“He got me out of there before I could get my silly self killed. That’s doing some good, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” said Smitty, with a twinkle in his deceptively dumb-looking blue eyes not matching the carelessness of his voice. “Seems to me when a person asks for a sock, she ought to be left to take it — and like it.”
“The trip out there resulted in very little, Smitty,” Benson said. “Just one thing, which Miss Gray overheard. The crowd is planning to blow up another building. This time by design, and not by accident.”
Smitty’s eyes lost their levity at once.
“Another—” His huge hands clenched. “Then there’ll be more deaths! More people blown to pieces as there were in Washington Square!”
“I’m afraid so,” said Benson somberly. “The worst of it is that no hint was dropped as to just what building figured in their plans. So it is impossible to move to forestall them. You can’t put a precautionary guard around every building in New York City!”
CHAPTER XII
Metal Peanuts
Upper Broadway, near Riverside Drive, is usually crowded at six in the evening. This particular section, this evening, was not.
There was a bank on the corner, several haberdashery and clothing stores that were open but without customers at the dinner hour, and then some apartment buildings. Only a handful of passers-by were on the sidewalk.
The handful was swelled by two men, who got out of a car down the block a hundred yards and walked to the bank. One of the men was about fifty, heavy-set, with a rather pale face. He had on a derby and a dark-blue business suit.
The other man had jet-black eyes, black hair that grew down in a widow’s peak on his forehead, and wore dark clothes.
They walked side by side, quite close together. The black-eyed man said something to the older man and smiled jovially. The older man smiled back with his lips, but his eyes seemed worried. More than worried, indeed.
The bank was small. It was a branch of a downtown bank. It occupied the ground floor of hall the building it was in. The floors above the bank were turned over to sales agencies and doctors’ offices. All the building above the bank was dark, except the windows just above, on the second floor. Here, where a sign proclaimed that Dr. Phelps, a dentist, worked, were lights.
The older man tapped at the door of the bank branch, which was of glass with ponderous bronze bars over it. The black-eyed man stood a little behind him, hands carelessly in his coat pockets.
Inside the bank, a figure suddenly appeared. The watchman. He stared out. In the older man tapping at the door, the watchman recognized the branch manager. He looked puzzled, and his eyes went swiftly over the man behind the manager.