Free The Avenger 23 - The Wilder Curse by Kenneth Robeson Page A

Heights?”
    The colorless, baneful eyes lost their tense look.
    “You and I will visit Sillers, Mac,” Benson said. “I was on my way to see him when I learned that you and Cole were in trouble. Smitty, please look up all available data on Sillers. See if there is anything in his background that might indicate that a supposed pillar of wealthy respectability would hire gunmen to do wholesale murder.”

CHAPTER IX

The Impossible Murders
    A phone call had told Benson and Mac that Andrew Sillers had changed his mind. Earlier, they’d been told that no one of the partners would be at the office today. Afraid to leave their homes? Perhaps so.
    But now a precautionary call at Sillers’s big apartment revealed that he’d changed his mind and had gone over to the central building to the office.
    He had gone alone, said the servant answering the phone. And he had gone in a hurry.
    The Avenger and Mac entered the Thornton Heights office, and the receptionist told them that Mr. Sillers was not in the office. In fact, she seemed surprised that anyone had thought he was. She said she thought he’d planned to stay home that day.
    Mac noted that Benson’s icy, pale eyes were like moonstones in their slitted clarity. The Avenger went to the office of the head bookkeeper, young Dan Moran.
    “Well!” said Moran, as they entered. He got up and came toward them, hand outstretched to shake theirs.
    He seemed glad to see them and very pleasant; but under this, Mac thought he sensed a strained and anxious attitude, not, however, connected in any way with their visit.
    He, too, looked surprised when Benson said he had come to have a talk with Andrew Sillers.
    “I talked to him first thing this morning,” Moran said. “He told me then he was going to stay home today.”
    “Perhaps he will come in in a few minutes,” The Avenger said, face as expressionless as his colorless, inscrutable eyes. Then he said, evenly, “Do you happen to know a young man named Clarence Beck?”
    Dan Moran’s face was normally a pleasant one. He was a big, healthy young fellow with, it seemed, a healthy and even disposition. But he didn’t look quite so pleasant at mention of that name.
    “Beck?” he said. “Yes, I know him. Carl Foley’s nephew. For a while, he pretended to work here in the office. But he got tired of that and just loafs now. I guess he got quite a piece of change when Foley died.”
    “He knows a girl named Myra,” said Mac. “Would that be Myra Horton, your friend?”
    “It would,” said Moran, tensing his husky shoulders. “He has known her almost as long as I have.”
    “You don’t seem to like Beck,” Dick said. His tone indicated that Moran could answer or not, as he chose.
    It looked, at first, as though Moran chose not to talk about anything as personal as his relation with Myra Horton. But people had a habit of saying things to the owner of the cold, impersonal eyes that they wouldn’t have said to any regular human being.
    “Not a little bit, I don’t like him,” he snapped. “I’d like to marry Myra, I’ve wanted to for a long time, and I think she’d accept me—if it wasn’t for Beck.”
    His face darkened.
    “He seems to want her, too, though I don’t think he has ever asked her to marry him. Anyhow, he keeps hanging around. And he has all the breaks—money, attendance in the best of schools, polish from trips abroad before the war, swell cars, everything. I don’t have any of that. I had to quit school to support my folks when I was sixteen. All I have, I make here. It isn’t fair.”
    “I see,” was all Benson said.
    Mac put in, “Do ye know where Clarence Beck is?”
    “You mean—this minute?”
    “Yes.”
    Moran shook his head. He’d drawn a veil over his feelings again and was his normal self.
    “Haven’t the faintest idea,” he said.
    Mac sighed. “I wish we could get hold of him for about a minute,” he said to Benson. “Ye know, before we . . . er . . . parted earlier today,