The Avenger 21 - The Happy Killers by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online Page A

thoughtfully.
    “Seems to me I do remember seeing your friend. I remember because of the hat. This girl comes in here alone, see. She’s a looker, far as I can tell. But I don’t tell very far because I can’t see her face. And because I can’t, I try to. She gets a nickel from me, and I try to look up under the hat brim, and she turns quick. Say, she ain’t hiding from the cops or anything, is she?”
    “The cops didn’t even know she was alive—last night,” Nellie evaded. “You say she got a nickel. For the telephone?”
    “Yeah,” said the barkeeper. “She went to the phone booth over there, stayed about five minutes, and then went out. I think she headed north, but I couldn’t be sure of that.”
    Nellie headed north.
    The trail was spreading out pretty thin now. She was in one of the innumerable suburbs out along the Long Island Railroad. There were probably five thousand homes and other buildings in this one. It seemed impossible to find out which the Brown’s maid had gone to, with the little information Nellie had to work on.
    The smart little blond reasoned it out at the next intersection above the tavern. One street went left, to the crowded shopping section of the suburb; the other, right, to an apartment section. Straight ahead led a street along which were small homes that grew shabbier and poorer as your eye traveled down the vista.
    The shopping section was out. It would be fairly well-lighted even at one o’clock in the morning, and this girl was anxious to keep from being seen and recognized. She wanted only to hide for a few hours and then return to the Brown home as if she’d just come from an evening in the metropolis.
    That left the apartment district and the street of single houses as possibilities. Nellie decided to tackle the street first. She went down it two blocks, and suddenly felt a tingle up and down her shapely little back.
    When death is your constant companion, and fighting murderers your business, you develop a sixth sense that warns you when there is no tangible reason for it. Nellie felt the slight uneasiness now. Trouble around here. Watch yourself.
    She had learned long ago, however, that some physical sign was nearly always the reason for these hunches. Some small thing not quite right; some trifle so little amiss that the seeing eye didn’t spot it, but subconsciously it was noted. She looked around, trying to spot what it might be in this case.
    She was in the middle of a block. On one side, the homes were almost wall to wall. The dining room of each now showed a light, as the evening meal was begun.
    On the other side, the lots were bigger. There weren’t more than a dozen houses on that side of the block. And at the end was a huge, ugly Victorian house, painted a dull brown many years ago, but now almost totally without paint. It explained the scarcity of houses. It was one of those cases in which the owner of a big house and several acres of land had held out long after the rest of the property around was subdivided, and then had sold in large parcels for more money. And, as is so often the case, the big house itself was deserted, waiting to be torn down.
    Nellie’s firm little jaw clicked shut. The trifle that she had seen had impressed itself on her enough to ring the faint bell of instinctive warning. Out of the end chimney of this house, a few specks were rising. Not smoke, just a few specks of ash.
    The place was boarded up and some of the upstairs windows were broken out. There was a “For Sale” sign in front; obviously the house hadn’t been tenanted for a long time.
    But someone had had a fire in one of the fireplaces not too long ago, and specks of ash still floated up with the draft now and then.
    Nellie clicked on her tiny belt radio. This didn’t seem important enough to bother The Avenger with because she had no tangible link between traces of occupancy in a deserted house and the flight of the maid. But just the same, it seemed to her to