Free The Avenger 4 - The Devil’s Horns by Kenneth Robeson Page B

little fury against all murderers everywhere.
    Josh and Rosabel had seen two of the kindliest men who ever lived, their inventor-employers, shot down to get from them inventions valuable to crime. So Josh and Rosabel counted that day lost when they could not strike a blow against the underworld in general.
    Smitty, as has been said, had spent a year in prison and had his future blasted because of the frame of a thief.
    But none of them, save Richard Henry Benson himself, had suffered such horror from organized crime as had the dour Scotchman, Fergus MacMurdie.
    Benson had lost his wife and small daughter to crime. But MacMurdie had lost equally as much. His wife and small son had been blown to bits by a racket bomb. So MacMurdie lived only when he was fighting some criminal syndicate. As he was doing now.
    The Avenger had ordered him to get what he could on the two-weeks-old murder of Judge Martineau. Then Benson had radioed Mac the tip Nellie had gotten at the nightclub: Judge Martineau had been shot down in the Friday the Thirteenth Club, by the side of the pretty but unscrupulous brunette dancer, Lila Belle.

    Mac had circulated around the Friday the Thirteenth Club, with his thrifty Scotch soul outraged at seeing such wads of money recklessly badgered about on roulette tables and other gaming devices. He hadn’t picked up anything. So shortly after two o’clock in the morning, he decided to work on the Lila Belle angle.
    He took a bus, opening an old-fashioned little snap-purse when the conductor came around, and grudgingly taking out a dime. Mac could have the money he wanted from The Avenger, any time he desired it. But it went against his grain to waste even a penny.
    He got off the bus at the street number listed as Miss Belle’s. That number belonged to a towering apartment building not far from Groman’s. It was Ashton City’s newest and tallest—fifteen stories high.
    The dour Scot considered. There was a lobby. There were people in it. And he wanted to get into the dancer’s place unseen.
    A phone call to her apartment had revealed that she was never home till after her turn at a nightclub competing with Sisco’s Gray Dragon. It had also revealed that her apartment number was 1414.
    Mac’s eyes went to the fire escape at the side of the building. In a minute he had followed his eyes and was on it. He paddled up fourteen floors on his enormous feet.
    There was a steel door from the hallway to escape. He took out a stout, old-fashioned jackknife. The door was fastened, as customary, by a bolt worked by a pushbar on the inside. He inserted the knife blade between door jamb and door, lifted the bolt by main force, flipping down the bar inside as he did so, and then was in the hall.
    Any one of The Avenger’s aides could handle any lock not specially built. Mac got Lila Belle’s door open in about four minutes, and stepped into an ornate living room, bristling with nightclub dolls and artificial flowers and pink, long window drapes and such other spinach.
    Mac got swiftly to work. He wanted to get out of there fast. If he were picked up for breaking and entering, in this town, it would be bad.
    He went first to a spindle-legged desk and worked deftly through it, not disturbing the contents enough so that evidence of a search would remain. He was looking for something, anything, relevant to the night Judge Martineau was shot.
    He found a bale of letters from indiscreet rich men of the town. He found a deadly-looking little .25 automatic, which he took the precaution of unloading. And then he found a bank book.
    The book showed a deposit, just two weeks ago, of one thousand dollars.
    Payment for her part in smearing Martineau’s good name on the night of the murder? It looked like it. Mac finished with the desk and went to the bedroom.
    This place was even more cloying in its over-feminine fanciness. He grimaced, and searched with big, bony hands through frills and furbelows. He found one more thing.
    In the