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“This fat man Cole described—”
    “Has nothing to do with Teebo,” Nellie finished with a snap. “Dry up, will you? There are lots of fat men.”
    Under Mac’s dour blue eyes, they both shut up. Cole’s gaze went back to the strangely calibrated ruler.
    “What do you suppose that is?” he asked Benson.
    “I’m afraid the answer is the same as to the other questions,” said Benson. “I don’t know.”
    “All we know, then, is that something big is in the wind that has to do with fake paintings. And the death of the man Cole captured leaves us absolutely without a lead.”
    “That’s right,” said The Avenger. “So we will make a lead.”
    They looked inquiringly at him.
    “Almost certainly, Teebo’s crowd has sold, or tried to sell, other phony masterpieces to other wealthy collectors,” Dick said. “We’ll check and find out. One of the wealthiest and best-known in New York is Clay Marsden. Cole, you might pay Marsden a visit. See if he has recently bought a famous European picture and find out if he has had any trouble since the purchase.”
    Cole’s thought showed on his good-looking face, and The Avenger answered it without Cole’s having to speak.
    “Yes, I know it will be difficult to get a man to admit that he has bought stolen goods, which is what any masterpiece from Europe would be today. I’ll leave it to your ingenuity to ferret out the information. Meanwhile, we may short-cut the personal-investigation method on other collectors.”
    His steely forefinger pressed a button on his desk. The stair door of the big top-floor room opened, and Josh and Rosabel Newton came in from their second-floor apartment.

    Josh was a Negro, gangling, stooped, with feet even bigger than MacMurdie’s, and with a look of being about to go to sleep on his feet. Actually, he was an honor graduate of Tuskegee Institute with a brain like a steel trap, and could fight like a black panther in an emergency.
    Rosabel, his wife, was quite pretty. The two were caretakers of Justice, Inc., in peaceful times, and doughty fighters when trouble came.
    “Josh,” said Dick, “I want you and Rosabel to go over the news reports of the last six months. Note any disturbance, particularly burglary or assault, that may have happened in connection with any person known to be a collector of famous paintings.”
    “Yes, sir,” said the Negro. “Anything else?”
    “Yes. One other thing. Every time you find such an incident, look over the general news in that same time period and see if you find any curious coincidences.”
    “You mean,” asked Rosabel, “that a collector may have something happen to him and, following that, there may be an apparently unrelated crime, like a murder? Another collector is attacked, and a little later perhaps there’s another and similar murder?”
    “That’s the stuff,” said Benson. “Search for news events that may possibly be similar in character after raids on collectors.”
    “Right,” said Josh.
    The two left, to go down to the first floor.
    Benson had a news teletype in his headquarters which gave constant ticker tape reports on all news. The tapes were filed in chronological order on the first floor. The Avenger had given Josh and Rosabel a complicated and lengthy task, but he knew they’d come up with something—if there was anything to come up with.

CHAPTER VI

Loot of War
    As in this affair of the fake Gauguin, it was Dick Benson’s practice to make a lead when no natural ones developed.
    In this case, after he had set Josh and Rosabel onto past news and sent Cole Wilson to the Marsden home, a natural lead occurred.
    The Avenger was once more checking the painting. He was making sure, once again, that there was no message under the oils—nothing in either visible or invisible ink, printed on the canvas before that canvas was covered with paint by the clever copyist who had reproduced “The Dock.”
    There was no such message. That was positive.
    His pale eyes had