The Avenger. Matthew Blood

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      Copyright 1952 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.

      All Rights Reserved, Including the Right to Reproduce This Book, or Portions Thereof.

      THE AVENGER

       Chapter One

      IT WAS precisely four o’clock in the afternoon when Miss Lois Elling heard her employer returning from lunch. There was a solid wooden door at her left, and slightly behind her a side entrance to the old house that opened onto a small concrete porch and six concrete steps leading down to the driveway.

      The door opened and Morgan Wayne entered the small room that had been turned into an office by setting up a typewriter desk in the center of it and a telephone stand beside the desk. There was also a straight chair for Miss Elling to sit in, and nothing else.

      Wayne was bareheaded and immaculate in a creamy suit of heavy Irish linen, white-and-tan sports shoes, white shirt, and solid black four-in-hand tie. This seemed to be a sort of uniform with him. There had been no deviation in a single article of clothing since Miss Elling had come to work for him, though the white shirt was fresh each morning, the suit neatly creased and spotless.

      In many ways Morgan Wayne appeared to be a man of definite and undeviating habit. He entered the door at precisely nine-thirty each morning and said, “Good morning,” passing through the open door to the larger inner room, where he seated himself in the comfortable swivel chair behind the clean oak desk and laid the morning Times out in front of him. He sat directly in Miss Elling’s line of vision through the open connecting door with his left profile toward her. For a matter of five or ten minutes each morning he sat perfectly motionless, looking fixedly out the single, uncurtained window in the room. At the end of that period he lit a cigarette and began reading the paper. He appeared to read it carefully and with great interest from the first page to the last—a task that required exactly two hours, with no more than a few minutes’ leeway in either direction.

      Thus, each morning it was approximately eleven-forty by Miss Elling’s watch when he laid aside his paper and opened the top right-hand drawer of his desk and lifted out a leather-covered pint flask and unscrewed the large silver cap. He poured this to the brim with good bourbon (Miss Elling knew it was good bourbon because she had helped herself to a snifter from the flask during his luncheon absence on her third day in his employ) and spent ten minutes sipping the drink. The cap was then returned to the flask and the flask to the drawer, and Morgan Wayne would push back his swivel chair and get up. Moving casually through the door to her office, he would pause beside her desk and remark, “I think I’ll go out to lunch now, Miss Elling. You have yours, so you will be here to take any messages?”

      “Oh, yes, Mr. Wayne,” she would tell him brightly, “I’ll be right here to take any messages.”

      Then Morgan Wayne would go out, and Miss Elling would be alone until four o’clock, when he returned. As he was doing now. Pausing beside her desk to ask, “Nothing, Miss Elling?”

      She shook her head and said, “Nothing, Mr. Wayne,” and watched him go through the door to the swivel chair, where she knew he would sit until five o’clock, when he would turn his head and tell her pleasantly, “You may as well go along now, Miss Elling. Good night,” and she would get up from her desk and say, “Good night, Mr. Wayne,” and go out the door and down the concrete steps and out the driveway past his Cadillac convertible to the front of the old mansion on the height overlooking the parkway and the Flushing yacht basin, to walk the short distance to the subway station.

      This was Thursday afternoon. Her fourth day on the job. During those four days, Morgan Wayne’s routine had not varied. Thus far, he had spoken to Lois Elling exactly fifteen times since the first brief talk on Monday morning when she arrived with her card from the agency and he had explained that in the future he would expect her to bring a lunch she could eat in the office because there were no restaurants nearby and it would be necessary for her to be on hand in case there was a telephone call.

      For four days now, the telephone had not rung once. There had been no callers at the two-room suite securely locked off from the rest of the seemingly deserted house.

      There had been no dictation for Miss Elling to take, no letters for her to write. That first morning Wayne had gravely explained to her that she would be on trial for the first week, a sort of probationary period to see ”how she worked out,” as he had expressed it.

      Well, she wondered viciously now, just how had she worked out? She glared at Morgan Wayne’s profile through the open door as he seated himself in the swivel chair and asked herself for the thousandth time what in hell this rigmarole was all about.

      In the beginning—that first day, at least—it had been sort of exciting and fun to wonder about her new job and her new employer. To wait for him to do something, or give her something to do. To wonder what his business was, and why he had this queer sort of office set up in the two front rooms of this old deserted house overlooking the parkway. To wonder with a little tingle of frightened anticipation whether that closed door on the other side of his inner office opened into a luxuriously furnished love nest into which she would be initiated later.

      After four days she still had vague ideas about the love nest beyond the closed door, but she knew it to be securely locked and had just about given up hopes of being invited inside.

      And she knew no more about the nature of his business or why he required the services of a secretary than she had in the beginning. In the right-hand drawer of her typewriter desk reposed a full ream of printed letterheads. They said “Morgan Wayne” across the top. No address. No telephone number. No nothing. She knew it was a full, untouched ream, because the wide paper band encircling the sheets had not been broken.

      In the left-hand drawer of her desk were five hundred large envelopes to match the printed stationery. On the back flap of each was the printed address of the house in which the office was located.

      His name on the letterheads and an address on the envelopes.

      There was also the bare, flat-topped desk in the inner room, with three drawers on each side and a shallow center drawer. Five of the side drawers were completely empty; the sixth held the leather-covered flask of good bourbon.

      There was a checkbook in the shallow center drawer. Nothing else. A large, three-checks-to-the-page book with the name Morgan Wayne printed neatly at the top of each check. Three checks had been used, and the stubs were carefully filled in. The first check was dated less than a month previously, and the two following checks were each dated precisely one week later, on a Friday in each case (Miss Elling had checked the calendar with the dates to turn her first suspicion into a practical certainty).

      She was thinking about those three checks as she sat rigidly at her desk a few minutes after four o’clock on Thursday afternoon and glared through the connecting door at her employer.

      Morgan Wayne had seated himself comfortably in the swivel chair and was leaning back with both hands indolently clasped behind his head. From experience, Miss Elling knew he would hold that pose without moving for half an hour at least.

      Her eyes were slightly glazed as she watched him across her typewriter, and she was thinking about those three checks—and СКАЧАТЬ