The Avenger 12 - The Flame Breathers (10 page)

“How,” said Mac bluntly, “d’ye light your house—and heat it—without gas or electricity?”

“Without— Oh, you must be rather mistaken. I have the usual—”

The scream came then!

It was a cry of agony, eerie, sending shivers up and down their spines. It came from near the road; and if it wasn’t the call of a dying man, then Mac would never trust his big, homely ears again.

The three raced out of the house and toward the sound. The maker of the sound could be seen plainly. All too plainly, in the darkness of surrounding night!

He could be seen because something like an intermittent halo of soft white fire surrounded his head where he lay on the ground.

The man was the fellow who had anonymously guided Mac and Josh here, and he was almost dead. He had doubled in the agony of a man poisoned. But from lips and nostrils, with each last breath he drew, came fire!

It steamed out as if the man had been turned into a wick. It hissed in the dew-wet grass. It blackened and curled his lips.

Then it stopped—because his breathing had stopped. The man was dead!

The sound of a car being driven stealthily but rapidly away was heard. Mac started to run toward the sound. The shrill cry of Xisco whirled him back again.

“My house!” the little man screamed. “Look what’s happened! Look at that! My house!”

They had left the place seemingly in perfect shape. But now, so rapidly that it could scarcely be credited, the whole building was being enveloped in flame!

Streamers of fire shot four stories high. It was as if the structure had been soaked with gasoline and ignited in a hundred spots at once.

“My house—fire! Put it out!” wailed Xisco.

Mac and Josh raced toward the line of dense small trees marching in a rather sloppy line across open fields. The line indicated a creek. They got to it, splashed in it, turned to call to Xisco for buckets.

But they saw that water on that flame would be even more futile than it looked at first. A fire brigade could not have handled it.

Then there wasn’t any more flame to fight. There was a soft, roaring bellow, and the house went up in a thousand pieces. It settled down, the flaming fragments darkening soon.

Josh and Mac looked at each other and started back toward the road. Josh tripped, looked down. His exclamation drew Mac’s attention. And Mac, too, went rigid with surprise.

The two went back to pick up Xisco and take him to Bleek Street. The Avenger wanted to talk to the man who had passed the water pitcher in the Montreal hospital.

But Xisco wasn’t anywhere around.

“Wonder where he went?” Mac mused.

“I wonder, too, who was in that car we heard sneak away?” said Josh.

The car that had sneaked away had carried the girl with the ink-black hair and the cold black eyes. But even if they had known that, Mac and Josh wouldn’t have been as impressed as they were by the strange discovery at the creek.

The thing Josh had tripped over had been a half-buried length of half-inch iron pipe. Exactly the kind that had led into the base of the rusty old furnace. And this pipe had seemed to go on and on toward the house.

A pipe leading, not from furnace to oil tank buried in the yard, but to a meandering little creek.

Both decided the pipe was just a loose length that happened to be lying here. That’s all it
could
be.

It began to look, with the second violent attack on a man of great wealth, as if some force had arisen in New York that was determined to wipe out the city’s magnates.

First Lorens Singer, then Pratt Henderlin.

Pratt Henderlin was a heavy-set man with grizzled eyebrows like little cupolas, an oversized jaw and a mole on the left side of his fleshy nose. The domineering, fighting face had often been pictured in the newspapers.

He was almost as wealthy as Singer, being head of the Henderlin Holding Corp. that owned about a third of the nation’s oil fields and the pick of the coal mines.

Henderlin was not in a garden, at a distance, when catastrophe hit his place!

The coal and oil baron lived in a large apartment building that was one of his many real estate holdings, and atop which was his penthouse. That is, he lived there till the evening of the day Singer’s home went up in smoke. At that time, early, because he was tired from an extra-heavy day at the office, the rich man unfortunately decided to take a relaxing bath before going to bed at half-past nine.

That was his last known act. The next thing to occur was a soft but frightening roar, a sheet of white flame! Half the penthouse was blown off the roof and most of the floor beneath destroyed.

Roar and flame came from the bathroom into which Henderlin had gone to relax.

They extinguished the fire pretty fast, but that didn’t enable them to collect any of Henderlin. There just was no trace of the magnate at all among the heaps of debris, in which it seemed all the cops in the word scurried around.

All the cops in the world. And The Avenger.

Many people could be found who would swear that the man with the pale, deadly eyes and the white, still face was the more to be feared!

The whole rooftop was a mess, of course. But the thing most terrifically battered and burst was Henderlin’s bathtub. It was as if that had been the focal point of the whole thing.

If the tub had been filled with high-test gasoline, for instance, the result would have been much the same.

Benson went up to Henderlin’s valet. In this case, the results of the Singer affair had been reversed. There, the master had lived, and the servants died. Here, Henderlin’s quarters had demolished, including the room in which his wife had been sitting, while the servants’ part of the penthouse remained intact.

Henderlin’s man was shivering as if with a chill, and was being kept from collapsing by a hypodermic shot given now and then by the medical examiner. But he managed to talk fairly coherently with Benson.

“You say Henderlin came home exhausted from the office and decided to retire early?” Benson asked, voice quiet but vibrant with power and authority.

“Yes, s-sir,” chattered the valet.

“And he thought a warm bath would help him to get to sleep more quickly?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Was this a usual procedure of his?”

“N-no, sir. Usually Mr. Henderlin took a shower. But now and then he felt his age. He was sixty-seven, sir. It was his habit, sometimes, to soak in a warm tub and go to bed early. Th-that’s the way it was tonight.”

“You drew his bath?” said The Avenger.

When the police had asked the man that, they had barked it out with the plain suspicion that the valet had something to do with the explosion. Flustered and frightened, he hadn’t managed to give very clear responses. This man was different, the valet thought. His eyes were cold as ice, but fair. His face was a thing to haunt your dreams, but it was not suspicious. He opened up to Benson.

“Yes, sir, I drew his bath.”

“Everything seemed perfectly in order?”

“Perfectly. I filled the tub to the usual level, and the water was the exact temperature Mr. Henderlin liked best. I used a bath thermometer to be sure.”

“I’d like to see that thermometer,” Benson said evenly.

The man shook his head.

“The police said the same thing. But they’ve been unable to locate it, sir. I guess it was blown to tiny bits when the place went up.”

“Very well. Henderlin got in his bath. Then what?”

“I went back to my room to read for ten or fifteen minutes. I knew from past experience that Mr. Henderlin wouldn’t be wanting me for at least that length of time. He would be lying there, smoking, perhaps reading a little with a magazine or paper spread above him on the tub rack—”

“Smoking?” said Benson. His face, as always, was as dead as the cold, bare waste of the moon. But his eyes seemed to glint a little like ice under a polar dawn.

“Yes, sir. Mr. Henderlin smoked a great deal. His own brand of cigar. He had smoker’s articles in the bathroom—racks with humidors and so forth.”

“Go on. What next?”

“I had just gone into my own quarters when the lights went off.”

Benson’s pale eyes flared more brilliantly. This thing of the lights going off and been brought out several times in the past half-hour of feverish investigation.

“All the lights in the penthouse went off,” the valet went on. “But none of the lights in the building below. Just the penthouse. I understand the police found that the switch controlling the penthouse lights had been thrown—though they could not be sure if the switch was turned by somebody, or was jarred off circuit when the explosion occurred.”

“I think we can say that it was thrown,” said The Avenger quietly. “It is the only thing that would explain the failure of all the lights in the penthouse and none in the rest of the building below. Then?”

“Then the thing happened, sir. About four minutes after the lights failed.”

It was all the valet knew. Benson nodded permission for him to leave. A captain of detectives came up to The Avenger, face respectful and manner almost subservient.

“What does it look like to you, Mr. Benson?”

“That is easy to answer. What it
looks
like. What actually occurred may not be so simple.”

“Well, sir, what
does
it look like?”

“It looks,” said Benson expressionlessly, “as though Henderlin’s tub had been filled with explosive instead of water. It then looks as if the lights had been turned off deliberately so that Henderlin would light a match in the bathroom to see to get out of the tub. It seems that he kept matches, among other smoker’s articles, in the room; so it was certain that there would be a match at hand. When he lit the match, the explosive in the tub went off.”

“But,” objected the captain, frowning, “if some explosive had been substituted for water, why wouldn’t he have found it out? There’s no explosive that looks so much like plain water that it could fool a man into taking a bath in it.”

“That is correct. There is no such explosive,” said Benson.

“But you said—”

“You asked what it looked like,” The Avenger pointed out, eyes like diamond drills. “So I told you. That seems to be exactly what happened. Yet no sane man would believe that another man could get into a tub filled with explosive and think it was water.”

“In other words,” said the captain of detectives, “this even stumps
you?”

“I have no more provable information than you,” said Benson. Which was a slight evasion. You can know a thing surely and without doubt, even if you can’t prove it at the moment.

The men were searching everywhere, as they had been before, for bits of evidence that might help explain the mystery. But now Benson noticed that their actions seemed to have slightly more purpose than before.

“What are they after, specifically?” he asked.

“That bath thermometer the valet spoke about,” replied the detective captain. “I’ve got an idea on that. Those things have thick wooden cases, you know. There might have been enough explosive in it to do this.”

“There might,” nodded The Avenger.

He went to where Henderlin’s butler shakily smoked a cigarette between police grillings.

The butler was a paunchy man with pouches under his eyes and a gouty look. As often is true, he had more the appearance of the traditional wealthy man than his master had had. The Avenger fixed him with those colorless, icy eyes of his.

“A man came to see Mr. Henderlin a short time before this happened,” Benson said quietly. It was not a question. It was a statement, uttered in a tone of absolute certainty.

The butler’s eyes flickered under The Avenger’s pale, direct gaze. Then his eyes went to his cigarette. The smoke from the cigarette jiggled as his hand twitched.

“Oh, no, sir,” he said. “N-no one called on Mr. Henderlin this evening. His secretary came with him at five o’clock, from the office, and left well before dinner. Save for that, not one soul was in the penthouse except Mr. and Mrs. Henderlin and we servants.”

“The man who came to see Mr. Henderlin,” Benson said, as if not even hearing the denial, “possibly has visited him before. I can’t be sure of that. He is a rather small man with peculiar ears. He has a faintly foreign look. He was here no earlier than an hour, at most, before the explosion.”

“I swear—”

The butler’s voice cracked and broke at the sudden, appalling look over the brilliant, pale eyes. No muscle of The Avenger’s face had moved, naturally; never could the flesh shape itself to an emotion. And yet that countenance was suddenly so dreadfully threatening that the servant almost cried out and flung his hand to shield his eyes from it.

“You saw this man, perhaps?” said Benson, softly. “I . . . I—”

The cigarette had dropped and was smoldering on the carpet. The butler wasn’t even aware that he was no longer holding it. Then he gave a great sigh, like a thing breaking. It was a sigh of cringing surrender.

“Yes. There was such a man. He was under average size. He looked like a foreigner. His ears were peculiar—so flat to his head that it almost looked as if he had no ears at all. He came secretly while Mr. Henderlin was disrobing for his bath; and, to my surprise, the master said he’d see him. I was not to let anyone know he had called.”

“And he has been here before?”

“Once. Several weeks ago. From a conversation I overheard between him and Mr. Henderlin, I gathered that the small man had seen him at least once before that—at the office.”

The butler moistened his dry lips.

“H-how did you know about him, sir?”

Benson said nothing. He was in the habit of asking questions, not answering them. There was a kingly arrogance and air of surety about the man with the dead face and the stainless steel eyes. It was in large measure responsible for the air of complete authority which so few people, from millionaires to busboys, could resist obeying.

He turned and left the scene of disaster. And with him, he carried but one thing. That was a square of blotting paper with which he had blotted up moisture from what remained of the bathroom. An analytical sample from which he could glean a few drops of the fluid that had been in the magnate’s tub.