“So, now ye’re tryin’ to drag Farquar into this!” grated Mac, with no sympathy whatever in his homely, freckled face.
“No,” whispered the man resignedly. “No. I’m dying. Might as well come clean. Farquar knew… the whole thing. He got me in self-defense. Got away.”
The four had to bend closer to hear the faltering words.
“Cleeves and Salloway and I were blackmailing Farquar. Not succeeding. His clerk, Smathers, knew too much. I put blank paper in an envelope… sent him to a phony address. There I met him… killed him. Took him to freight yards so his body would be mangled beyond identification. Pulled three gold crowns from his mouth to keep dental work from identifying corpse… also to hold over Farquar as murder frame. Thought the threat would work this time, but he went to you for help instead of paying.”
“We ought to get him out of here,” said Mac thickly, the fumes making him cough. “Fresh air”
“No,” whispered the man on the floor. “I’ve got to tell quickly. Won’t last long. The envelope slipped from Smathers’s pocket at Ismail’s house; so I had to get all of them from my office or it might be traced to me. Then I got to thinking I could use all the million from Farquar, so I killed Cleeves and Salloway. I did it… All—”
He gasped and began writhing, with the red stream growing and flooding over his clutching hand.
“You’re alone in the house?” asked Mac.
“Yes,” came the whisper. “Farquar got away… my men trying to locate him— Better go to his aid or they’ll kill”
“Quite interesting,” came The Avenger’s cold, calm voice, like an icy stream across the faltering words.
His three aides turned swiftly to look at his face and stared in amazement. For Benson, in spite of his invariable cold control of emotion, was a kindly person. It was certainly not like him to speak in that tone to a dying man.
The dulled eyes of the man on the floor stared at him, too, a bit less dulled.
“Most interesting,” said The Avenger. “Except that it hasn’t a grain of truth in it anywhere. Beall didn’t do these things. Markham Farquar did. And you’re not Beall — you’re Farquar!”
CHAPTER XVIII
The Rusty Nail
The men in the basement almost forgot the fumes that clogged their breathing, at that unexpected and ringing statement.
Then the man on the floor whispered, “I… I don’t understand—”
“Smathers went to his death directly from Farquar’s office,” snapped The Avenger, eyes dreadful in his calm, cold face. “That makes it probable that Farquar himself sent him on the fake errand to his death. Why was he killed? Because he had learned that you, Farquar, were blackmailing the three men, not the other way around. But that murder, done to save your hide, was your downfall instead.
“Cleeves had a private detective on your trail. The detective trailed you to an alley, and you had to kill him. While you were doing that, one of the three — Beall, I think — got from your car the three gold crowns you’d yanked from Smathers’s mouth to hide identification. They each took one and held a threat over your head: You and you alone knew he’d gone downstairs to the dentist, Dr. Louis, for the work. Also, the three men probably made you believe that your prints were on the crowns. It would not be impossible.”
“You’re mad!” gasped the man on the floor. “Mad—”
“You killed the dentist to prevent questioning, and you felt safer. But you wouldn’t really be safe till you had those crowns back. You came to me with crocodile tears to fool Justice, Inc., into doing your dirty work and getting the crowns back. But at the same time you kept after them yourself, with a hired gang of killers. You murdered Cleeves and Salloway and didn’t get the crowns. You had Beall’s son kidnaped to exchange for Beall’s crown, and he got away with our help. Did you get the combination of the Beall office vault from him, so you could destroy the envelopes?”
“You’ve got… a direct confession,” panted the man on the floor. “I don’t know what more you want.”
“A confession framing an innocent man,” nodded The Avenger, eyes like pools of doom. “You made some bad slips, Farquar. As a blackmailer, you might have been expert. But as a killer, you’re clumsy. It was careless of you not to see that the envelope — the first one at hand in your office, chancing to have come from Beall some time ago with a memorandum in it — had fallen from Smathers’s pocket. It was equally stupid to pull those crowns. You should have left them in Smathers’s mouth; the law couldn’t have pinned the murder on you if he had been identified, if you’re half as smart as I think you are. And you shouldn’t have come to Justice, Inc., with your lying plea for help. Also, and above all, you shouldn’t have left that ball hanging in the edge of the woods. I suppose you forgot all about it.”
“Ball?” said the man. His tone was slightly different.
His eyes didn’t look quite so glazed. Mac and Wilson and Josh watched the unfolding play breathlessly.
“Remember when two men of mine were shot at near Bleek Street, and nearly killed, with a high-powered rifle from a distance?” said Dick Benson evenly. “That was clever. An attempt on the lives of my aides, just before you showed up and asked for help, would make it seem that your plea was very urgent and genuine, and that death was stalking you and trying to prevent us from helping. But it took fine shooting, to miss that closely from such a distance. However, you’re an expert marksman, and had practiced a lot lately. You’d shot from the house window at a ball hanging three hundred yards away at the edge of the woods, and—”
The man’s eyes were like the eyes of a snake.
“Let’s get that plastic and stuff off your face, Farquar,” said The Avenger, hand going out.
“Keep your hands off me!” snarled the man so venomously that the four stepped back a pace. He stood up, and his hand left his “wounded” abdomen and dropped a red-soaked sponge. It was Farquar, all right. Even before he clawed at the make-up, they could see that.
“All right,” he snarled. “You’ve stumbled onto a few things, and made a few wild guesses that could never be proved in a court of law. All right, it’s true! I was after Cleeves and Beall and Salloway. I got Beall by getting myself retained to look after his interests in the bankruptcy his company is going through any day now. The company is low on cash but rich in assets. I was going to pick it up myself, at about five cents on the dollar.
“Salloway came to me for help against a city clerk who had trumped up a street-paving scandal in a contract of his. I just took that little scheme over myself. Cleeves played into my hands by coming for help on finding a will his great-uncle had made, which left him a million dollars. I found the will, the sole copy, and kept it; so Cleeves would have to pay plenty, or I’d destroy it. But my damned clerk, Smathers, got wind of this and I had to kill him to shut him up. So it was really all Smathers’s fault. Every bit of it; Smathers’s fault.”
Even at that moment, Mac could reflect on the odd psychology of the average criminal. Every crime committed is the fault of someone else. Some other person made it impossible not to commit the crime; so the criminal, in his own mind, is cleared. He wouldn’t have stolen, lied, or murdered if he hadn’t been forced to, would he?
“Well,” said Wilson, drawing a long breath, “it looks to me as if you’d doublecross your own mother if there was a nickel in it. But you’re through now. We’ll turn you over to the police—”
But Farquar was laughing. It brought Cole up short.
“You fools,” said Farquar. “If you’d been stupid enough to believe my yarn about Beall, you could have lived. I’d have let you go, to testify against a man who would later be found dead and clear me. But you were too smart for that. So smart that now you’ll have to die. How about it, men?”