The Avenger 2 - The Yellow Hoard Read Online Free PDF

didn’t get angry at a five-foot-eight powerhouse like this white-haired, dead-faced man unless you were incurably reckless.
    “The lipstick,” said Benson.
    “I don’t get you.”
    “You say the lipstick discovered beside the body matched one later found in her purse. Why would the girl be carrying two lipsticks, particularly when she was at home and presumably didn’t care about make-up at the moment?”
    “I didn’t say she was carrying two. One might have been in her purse and the other—” Hogarth stopped.
    “The other—where? Was she carrying it in her hand, intending to rouge her lips artistically after murdering her father?”
    “Well, there’s plenty of other clues,” Hogarth said doggedly.
    “Let’s you and I go and examine those a little further,” Benson said.
    Hogarth opened his mouth to ask who the hell Benson thought he was, anyway. He closed it with the words unsaid. There was an air of quiet authority about Dick Benson that few, in any position, cared to ignore.

    At Gray’s apartment, Hogarth led Benson around to the little back yard first. He pointed up to the library window.
    “See? No possible way to climb up to the window, which means the killer must either be the girl who was in the apartment at the time, or somebody who came in with her knowledge from the street.”
    “Suppose you go up to the apartment, and sit in the chair Gray occupied,” Benson said. “Assume what must have been his position, back to the window.”
    “What for?”
    “Just do it, that’s all.”
    “What happens then?”
    “You’ll see. There’s a man at the apartment door?”
    “Yes.”
    Hogarth went off, frowning. Benson stepped to the next building. This was taller, and had a fire escape. He went up it to the roof, climbed down a floor to the roof of Gray’s building, and went to the back.
    The window of Gray’s library was underneath.
    Sitting in the chair in which the dead man had been found, Hogarth waited, fuming. But he kept his face toward the door as ordered. And in a moment he was startled half out of his skin to hear a voice behind him.
    “I could have killed you pretty easily, Hogarth.”

    Hogarth whirled, with the chair creaking. The man with the white, still face and the pale flames of eyes was standing between him and the window.
    “You said, truly, that no one could climb up to the window,” Dick Benson said. “But you neglected to think whether or not a person could go down to the window. And an active man can do it easily.”
    “Is that so?” Hogarth said triumphantly. “Well, we thought of that and we went over the roof with a magnifying lens—”
    “Come on up with me for a moment.”
    On the roof, Benson pointed to the low parapet in the rear.
    “Here are my prints in the dust and soot. No other marks are there.”
    “Exactly. So no other person climbed down,” snapped Hogarth.
    “But look here,” said Benson, pointing to a space on the flat stone near his handprints. “There is a layer of smooth, seemingly untouched dust. But here and there—in spots about the size of two human hands—the dust is a little thicker than it should be.”
    Hogarth stared hard, scowling.
    “The killer came down from the roof, as I did. He went out the same way, and while he was up here, obliterated all traces by spraying dust back over the prints. But he sprayed a little too much over them.”
    “The girl—” Hogarth said uncertainly.
    “Is it likely a girl would kill so acrobatically? And if it were Miss Gray, would she wipe out the traces on the parapet when she knew that in so doing she would incriminate herself? And now let’s see the lipstick.”
    Hogarth handed it over. Benson pushed the red stick up from its metal sheath. He tested it on his thumb. Red came off, not evenly, but in little blotches and grains.
    “See? It’s old, crumbly. Miss Gray either discarded it or lost it long ago. Or else it was lying in her drawer, in the bedroom next door. In any event, it was