Free The Avenger 19 - Pictures of Death by Kenneth Robeson Page B

Vaughan came out so seldom that he saved expenses by not keeping servants here.”
    “Goof,” said Nellie.
    “What do you mean, goof? If a guy only comes to a place one or two days a month, he might shut it up between times and bring a servant or two with him.”
    “Look at the lawn,” Nellie said. “Nicely cut. Look at the flower-beds. Well-tended. It’s a full-time job for at least one man to take care of all this. There must be a caretaker around.”
    “Well, he’s not here now.” Smitty tried the door.
    It was unlocked.
    The giant and the half-pint blonde entered the house warily. Unlocked doors, they had long ago discovered, were something to be careful about.
    The first thing they saw was the blood on the floor.
    The door opened into a large hall that was furnished more as an auxiliary sitting room than an entrance hall. There were a few rugs, but mainly the polished floor was bare. And right next to the door, the dark surface was messed up with a small sticky puddle, not yet coagulated.
    They looked at each other. Then they looked around some more.
    The place had been turned upside down.
    Pictures were askew on the walls; and, of course, there were many pictures, since that had been the owner’s business. Cushions were off divan and padded chairs. Drapes were half yanked down over the end window.
    They stepped to a side door and looked into a large living room. This was in the same state of upheaval.
    “So,” said Nellie, “there is a caretaker. Or was one.”
    Smitty nodded soberly. The wrecked place, and the pool of blood, told a plain story.
    Some gang had come here, pressed the bell, slugged the caretaker when he opened the door, and then searched the house with a destructive thoroughness.
    There could have been only one thing for which such a search would be made. That was the picture “Diabolo.”
    “We’re too late,” mourned the giant. “They must have gotten the thing, if it was here to get. No painting that big could stay hidden after such a combing.”
    “I wonder,” Nellie said.
    She was looking at the wall near the front door. Looking at a large picture there, the first your eyes rested on when you stepped inside the house.
    “Now who’s the goof?” demanded Smitty. “As if a painting as big as ‘Diabolo’ could stay hidden after—”
    He stopped. Nellie had stepped to the picture and was looking at it more thoughtfully than ever. It was a landscape, just fairly well done; nothing to draw a second glance. There was a good, but not expensive, frame around it.
    “That’s queer,” said the tiny blonde.
    “What’s queer about it?” said Smitty.
    “What do you think of that as a work of art?”
    “It’s nothing to write home about,” Smitty began. Then he started to get the idea, too.
    “Here’s a man whose business is buying and selling pictures,” mused Nellie. “Presumably, he is a connoisseur. He would want only the best for his own home. Yet, he hangs this half-baked thing, of a kind you could get by the dozen, in a prominent place in his hall.”
    Her small hand went out, and she flipped the picture around on its hook so that it presented its back to their gaze and its front to the wall.
    Smitty sighed. For a moment he’d entertain the imaginative notion that Vaughan had hidden the “Diabolo” by having another picture painted on the back of the famous canvas and hanging it so that the new picture seemed the regular one. But the back of this mediocre landscape wasn’t “Diabolo.” It was just blank canvas.
    Nellie, however, wasn’t sighing. She touched that blank fabric.
    “Looks awfully clean for an old canvas,” she said.
    And then Smitty breathed again. His first idea had hit the mark. The back of the canvas was not canvas. It was cheesecloth. And when this was ripped away, the object of their trip up here was revealed.
    The “Diabolo.”
    “By gosh,” said Smitty. “You do have a fairly lucid moment, now and then—”
    Both turned to listen. And