The Avenger. Matthew Blood

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СКАЧАТЬ there. And dropping the phone and hurrying like hell to dry myself and powder myself and dab on just a touch of perfume and going into the bedroom shaky all over and kneeling down to open the bottom bureau drawer and digging all the way down to the bottom and getting out the tissue-wrapped black negligee that Bill Johnson gave me for Christmas five years ago and that I’ve never worn. I’d have worn it for Bill, you can bet, but he was killed in an auto accident two days before Christmas and I haven’t met another man since for whom I wanted to wear it.

      Until I met you.

      That’s what I’ll do tonight, Morgan Wayne. . . .

      The telephone rang at Miss Lois Elling’s right hand. She jumped as though aroused from deep sleep and looked at the instrument in dazed disbelief. It couldn’t be. It wasn’t supposed to ring. It wasn’t a real telephone. Just a stage prop, like Morgan Wayne himself and the typewriter and the unused letterheads.

      It rang again. Just like any other telephone. In a demanding and businesslike way. She turned her chair to lift the instrument and speak into the mouthpiece. She listened intently, frowning in concentration, then slowly replaced the receiver on its prongs and turned back to see Wayne standing beside her.

      He had moved as swiftly and as silently as a stalking tiger, and he stood beside her chair looking down at the typed words in her machine.

      Momentarily Miss Elling’s office training held sway over her mind and she was the crisply efficient secretary she had always been in the past.

      “A message for you, Mr. Wayne. And he hung up. He said . . . Oh, my God!” Realization stabbed at her, brought the breathless exclamation to her lips and flaming color to her cheeks.

      Morgan Wayne was standing there calmly reading what she had written in her bemused state of almost complete unconsciousness. Her hand clawed out at the typewritten page, but Wayne’s fingers closed over her wrist effortlessly, pressed her back into her chair while his eyes raced over the typed words.

      A muscle twitched in the right side of his mouth while Miss Elling moaned in an agony of embarrassment and fought against his strength to reach past him and retrieve the sheet.

      He released her wrist as abruptly as he had grabbed it, shaking his head slowly and turning amused blue eyes on her. She cringed back in her chair away from him, tight-lipped and crimson and panting with anger and humiliation, wilting before the hot flame she saw lurking in the icy depths of his eyes.

      He said, “The message, Miss Elling?”

      She averted her head wildly, flinging both hands up to her face to hide it from him, moaning tremulously through tight lips.

      “Please.” His voice was tolerant and reasonable, yet with an added note of curtness. “You did get the message?”

      She nodded her head slowly, keeping her face turned away and covered with her hands. Her voice was muffled and thin as she forced herself to say, “Tell Wayne they jumped the gun and grabbed Letty ten minutes ago on the Sawmill River Parkway. I lost them headed for town.”

      Wayne stood motionless and silent. Miss Elling held her breath for a long moment, expelled it with a shuddering sigh, and dared to steal a glance at him through outspread fingers.

      He stood close beside her, but his head was lifted and he was looking over her head. His face was taut and hard, and there was a look about him of listening, of waiting tensely for some signal.

      He had forgotten her, she thought. He stood there beside her chair after reading her nymphomaniacal ravings and was as unaware of her as though she did not exist.

      He turned abruptly without a downward glance and strode to his inner office, where he looked searchingly out the window again. Somehow, Wayne’s indolent manner had vanished. There was a sudden impression of terrific leashed power in every movement and in his stance before the window.

      It didn’t mean anything to him, she thought wildly. He doesn’t care what I wrote. I needn’t be ashamed at all. He doesn’t care. She bit her underlip until a drop of blood spurted from it, reached forward listlessly to rip the sheet from her typewriter and tear it into tiny fragments.

      She was standing up with her back to the room, reaching up with trembling fingers for an absurd concoction of feathers and ribbon that hung on the wall when Wayne’s voice sounded immediately behind her with the purring timbre of a jungle cat. “What are you doing, Miss Elling? It isn’t quitting time.”

      She stood with her back turned, her slender body rigid. “Oh, yes, it is.” Her voice trembled and she hated herself for that. “I’m leaving. I’ve had quite enough of this job.”

      She made herself lift the hat from its hook on the wall, and it fell from nerveless fingers to the floor when his fingers lightly touched the right side of her neck where the flesh flowed down smoothly into the shoulder.

      “I need you, Lois.” His voice caressed her. She fought against the weakness, against the flame that crept over her body with the touch of his fingers against her flesh, the sound of his voice only inches from her ear.

      “This is it, darling. Don’t you see?” His fingers put pressure on the side of her neck, turning her head so that she looked into the hot glow from Morgan Wayne’s eyes. “Call this number I’ve left on your desk.” His voice had a hypnotic quality that soothed and embraced her. “Get Julius Hendrixon. He must call me at once. As soon as he gets any word whatever. The moment it comes. Day or night. Don’t leave this phone until six. Then go home fast and stay there for a message. Give Hendrixon your number.”

      “And where . . . can I reach you later?” The words came out flatly and Miss Elling was scarcely conscious of speaking them.

      “Where do you think—after that letter you wrote me?” His eyes held hers and strength flowed out of her body. “Take your hot bath, Lois, and open that bottom bureau drawer . . . and wait for me.”

      He was gone then. And Miss Elling slumped back against the wall and watched him go. Her mouth opened and closed slowly half a dozen times but no words came out.

      She pushed herself erect after a time, pressed the knuckles of doubled fists to her forehead, and shook her head back and forth dazedly. Then, moving like a sleepwalker, she sat at her desk to dial the number he had left for her, and to deliver his cryptic message to a man named Julius Hendrixon.

       Chapter Two

      EXACTLY twenty minutes later, Morgan Wayne’s convertible wheeled up to the curb in front of a cellar joint on Fifty-second Street that said “Gingham Gardens” over the cave door.

      It was too early for the neons, but the life-sized oil painting of a long-stemmed doll in lacy bra and G-string with gingham parasol coyly poised above her head had been wheeled out in front to attract the early suckers. And the doorman was operating his clip. He strolled across the sidewalk with shoulders bursting from his fancy monkey suit, shaking his head sternly under a three-cornered headpiece of gingham.

      “No parking here, sir. You’ll have to . . .”

      Wayne opened the door and got out. He said pleasantly, “Watch my car, will you? And take care of any cops.” Somehow there was a ten-dollar bill in his hand, and somehow it disappeared, and the doorman said, “Certainly, sir,” to his back as he went down three steps to the dim foyer.

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