The Avenger 14 - Three Gold Crowns Read Online Free PDF Page B

watchman admit her.
    The building was a small one in the upper Fifties; one of those buildings that had been turned from a tall private home to apartments, then to office suites with a remodeled front. It was too small, she found, to have a night man. There was just the building.
    Nellie started to hunt up a pay phone and try again to contact Farquar. But then, as she was turning from the place where she could see across the street to the entrance, she saw a light in the third-floor window.
    It was just a glint of light, and it moved. It was as if a big firefly were imprisoned up there. But it was a flashlight.
    What was anybody doing prowling in there with a flashlight?
    While Nellie was thinking this over and drawing the inevitable conclusions, a man came from the street door. The man wasn’t hurrying or acting suspiciously. The fact that Nellie couldn’t see him very clearly and that he was more an unidentifiable shadow than a man was due to the dimness of the street lighting around that particular entrance.
    A hunch tingled along Nellie’s spine that this man ought to be trailed. And the hunch grew when the next few minutes showed no more glints of flashlights in that third-floor window.
    But by the time she was sure of it, the man was out of sight. And, anyhow, she had been told to prowl the office of Markham Farquar; she couldn’t do two things at once.
    She sighed and went to the building. She didn’t feel like taking time, now, to try to phone Farquar again. So she turned burglar to the extent of picking the lock of the building door and sliding in. Any of The Avenger’s aides could make locks do tricks.
    There was a lobby that was really no more than a wide hall, a stairway, and an automatic elevator. Also, next to the elevator, there was a small building directory.
    There were only twelve names on it—four tenants for each of the three floors. And Markham Farquar’s office, as she’d surmised, was third floor front.
    The office in which that light had showed.
    Nellie went up the stairs as soundlessly as a pretty ghost. The lock on Farquar’s door yielded to her touch, too. She went inside, with her own flash working, now. But this time light didn’t show at the window, if anyone had been outside to watch. Nellie was either more careful or more skillful than whoever had been in here before her.
    Looking around, she was puzzled. It was almost certain that someone had been in here, searching, just a minute ago. But the place didn’t look it. Everything was perfectly in order.
    She began poking around, looking for a possible indication as to the place Smathers had gone three nights ago. The chances were that no such thing was around here to be found. If even Farquar didn’t know where his clerk had gone, it was pretty certain that no hint existed in the office.
    There were two rooms to the suite. A big office, the luxurious fittings of which showed that it was Farquar’s own, and a big law-library room with a desk in it that must have belonged to Smathers.
    Nellie went to this desk and looked through the drawers. She flipped through names on a phone pad—all names of large, well-known companies. And then she noticed that the big desk blotter was brand-new and clean.
    She lifted it, and the old blotter was underneath. She played her light close to it, with a hunch that she was getting warm.
    There were many blotted ink lines on it—so many that they were like a bunch of hen tracks. It would have taken all night to decipher them and try to pick one or two full words out. But there was also something that caught the little blonde’s sharp eyes at once.
    Slight, regular depressions in the blotter, that crisscrossed over the hen tracks, in a way showing that they had been made later than the tracks.
    Nellie took a little tube from her purse, opened the end, and made sprinkling motions. Powdered graphite sprayed over the slight marks. Then she tilted the blotter pad, and the graphite filled them in.
    Now she