The Avenger 22 - The Black Death (11 page)

The girl said nothing. Still in the damning robes of a Black Wings priestess, she stood there, not looking at anyone, not speaking to anyone. Josh was staring at her. He nodded vigorously to say that she was the one who had broadcast the death sentence on Edwin Maller.

The Avenger’s colorless, deadly eyes went to her face. It was still a pretty face, though very pale.

“Miss Hannon,” Benson said, with a vibrancy that stirred every hearer deeply, “your father is either dead or in danger of death; held by murderers. You know this. We are trying to help him, and hence you. You should know this, too, by now. Yet, consistently you have refused to help us. Have you anything to say, now?”

Alicia shook her head and tried to avoid the diamond stare of the pale, calm eyes.

“You broadcasted the death sentence on Edwin Maller from the crypt under your tool house. Don’t you think that needs some explaining?”

Alicia didn’t even bother to shake her head this time.

Miller said doggedly, “Just the same, there must be an explanation. I’ve known Alicia a long time. She wouldn’t work with the very people who hurt her father without some good reason.”

Hannon’s daughter didn’t even look at her defender.

“So you refuse to say anything at all?” Dick said.

The girl nodded.

The Avenger turned to Dan Miller. “And you, Miller?”

Miller shrugged. “I’d talk all day if I had anything to talk about. I’m convinced you’re on the right side. But I don’t seem to know much of value.”

“You said Hannon had not completed the television scrambler experiment,” Benson reminded the big young man with the forceful jaw. “But it seemed that Hannon did complete the work. He turned out a set the equal even of our own, which we thought was without parallel.”

Miller shrugged again.

“I’ve been out of Hannon’s employ, in business for myself, for some time. He hadn’t completed the thing when I left and I assumed he never had done so. Now—well, it seems that he did.”

“And also,” said The Avenger quietly, “he completed experiments on some drug or gas that turns dead bodies black.”

Miller’s eyes went wide. “You mean that black death stuff is Hannon’s invention, too?”

“It looks like it,” Dick said. “We found the body of a guinea pig, turned black, from a recent experiment, at Hannon’s place.”

He saw that Josh had more to say. “Well, Josh?”

“We have a report on this Schuyler Marcy,” the Negro said. “He told us he was trying to get a job with Austin Gailord. Said he’d met Gailord here in New York to talk it over. We find that Marcy
had
a job with Gailord. He has been on Gailord’s payroll for over a year.”

“Bring him up here,” The Avenger said.

Schuyler Marcy joined them.

Marcy looked his usual indolent, elegant self, in fresh-pressed tweeds showing Josh’s valet proficiency. But Marcy’s eyes were glittering with an anger that he kept from tone and face.

“You said I could help in this affair of the black death,” he began. “So I accepted what I thought was an invitation to stay at your headquarters. But I have been given no chance to help. And when I wanted to go out, I found out I couldn’t. I’m not a guest, I’m a prisoner. And I won’t stand for it.”

“You are a guest,” The Avenger said. “As are Mr. Miller and Miss Hannon. I believe you said you were trying to get a job with Gailord, Marcy.”

“That’s right.”

“But you already had a job with Gailord, Marcy.”

Marcy was silent for a moment.

“In other words,” The Avenger said evenly, “you lied.”

“All right,” said Marcy. “I had a job with him. What of it?”

“Gailord, dying on his feet, hurried to Bleek Street to ask our help. And you tried to stop him. Why?”

“How do you know he was coming here to ask your help?” Marcy countered.

“It’s a certainty. Gailord reached our very door, realized he hadn’t the strength to tell what he knew, then saw our car. He got in the car deliberately and deliberately raised all the commotion he could with it, to involve Justice, Inc. so deeply in his death that we would
have
to help with an investigation. His plan was successful. But you tried to prevent it.”

Marcy said nothing.

“What was your job with Gailord?”

No answer.

“Why did you enter this place, at first, with the intent to kill me?”

“Fits,” said Marcy equably. “I told you I was subject to fits.”

“I think,” said the giant Smitty very softly and very ominously, “that this is a case where our special ways of getting truth would be valuable.”

Miller exploded, “Oh, no, you don’t. You aren’t going to feed
me
any drugs, or hypnotize me or anything. I demand to be released. You’re not the police. We’re not criminals. You can’t hold any one of the three of us here a moment longer.”

Benson rather surprised the members of his little band, here. The Avenger had superpolice powers. No pressure these three could have brought could have coerced him. Yet, the man with the colorless, infallible eyes, said, “I called you guests. That is what I meant. If you want to walk out of here, if you persist in refusing to help justice to be done, you are free to do so.”

It startled them for an instant. Then they took him up on it. Miller was plainly speaking for all three when he said, “Fine. I’m going at once. You can reach me at my office if you want to.”

“I’m going back home to Philadelphia,” said Marcy.

Alicia, in the priestess robes, still kept silent.

“You came here in a car that belongs to Alicia,” Miller said, “now that her father can’t be found. If it’s all right with you, well use Alicia’s car to get to our destinations.”

“Of course,” The Avenger said expressionlessly. “Josh, please open the garage doors for them.”

While Smitty and Nellie, Rosabel and Cole Wilson gaped at their leader, the three “guests” went to the door. Then it began to make a little sense.

The Avenger’s little finger was half curled as his hand hung naturally by his side. It gave the code message.

“Follow them!”

Smitty, Nellie and Cole stepped to a panel in the side wall. Smoothly it swung out to reveal narrow stairs down to the rear of the basement. Stairs known to no one but them.

Benson went to the laboratory.

Through all the violence at the Hannon home, he had preserved the safety of various little bottles and an envelope.

The bottles contained the samples of the dead guinea pig’s blood, lungs and flesh. The envelope held the minute particles scraped from the beaker in Hannon’s laboratory.

He was in there for hours. Time ceased to have meaning. The Avenger on the trail of a scientific or criminal mystery seemed to be made of more than flesh and blood. He seemed not to need sleep or food or rest.

Josh and Rosabel took care of headquarters routine. Josh watched the teletype and the big television cabinet. Rosabel took care of phone calls and shielded Benson from interruption.

Still, their chief stayed in the laboratory.

Smitty reported, voice but not image coming from the big cabinet.

Smitty had perfected tiny belt radios that each member of Justice, Inc. carried. These could be picked up on the big set—just sound, of course, not image. A transmitter hardly as large as a slim cigar case can’t transmit television images.

Smitty said, “Following Miller. He has gone to his office, late as the hour is. He has been there ever since— Wait a minute. He’s leaving, now. I’ll report again.”

Then came word from Cole Wilson.

“Schuyler Marcy has done just one thing since he left Bleek Street. That is, trail Alicia Hannon. He has stayed with her like a shadow. He doesn’t seem to like the idea of Nellie being on the girl’s trail, too. Yes, he spotted Nellie. Once he tried to get Nellie out of it by hiring a cab to crash the one she was in. But she got another in a second or two and went on. Report later—if there’s anything to report.”

Finally, Nellie’s clear voice sounded.

“Alicia’s in her car alone, now. A long time ago she let Miller and Marcy out. She seems to be going to some definite destination, a long way off. We’re out past the Newark Airport on Route 1, going south and west. I’m having trouble following because a cab is conspicuous outside the city. And I believe someone is following
me.
A cab crashed into me in town, and I think someone hired it to do so. Also, a little while ago, I saw a car behind me that I’ve seen half a dozen times in the last half-hour. I think the man at the wheel is Miller.”

Miller!

But Cole had said it was Marcy who was following the girl.

A moment later, though, Nellie was confirmed.

“Miller is following Alicia Hannon,” Smitty’s voice sounded from the big set. “Ring around the rosy. I follow Miller, Cole follows Marcy, and both follow Alicia, who is also trailed by Nellie. It’s a mess. I wonder where it will end.”

That was all. The hours passed. Benson worked on in the laboratory, flaming brain concentrating on the tangible evidences left by the black death.

The papers were full of the death of Edwin Maller.

Austin Gailord was a fairly important man, a factory owner, and his death hadn’t created nearly the stir that had been roused by the death of this obscure factory foreman, Maller. But this was because Maller was the second to go the same way.

Two
black deaths began to set imaginations aflame and tongues wagging.

What was this queer scourge that, in forty-eight hours, took the lives of two men? Was it some grim new disease? If so, it appeared to be hideously scattered. The doctors were wondering if some epidemic was upon them.

All the metropolitan papers sent first-run copies in a rush to Bleek Street. Josh and Rosabel looked up from these to see The Avenger coming out of the laboratory.

Benson hadn’t slept for a long time, but the fact did not show in his face or actions. He seemed literally to be an iron man. The pale eyes were as clear as though he’d just risen from a rest; the pantherish tread was as firm and elastic as ever.

You couldn’t tell from the colorless, basilisk eyes whether he had been successful with his test tubes and retorts or not.

“Have you heard from Nellie or Cole or Smitty?” he asked the gangling Negro.

Josh gave their reports.

“But that was hours ago,” he added. “There have been no reports for a long time. I wonder if they’re in some kind of trouble.”

“If you do hear from them,” said The Avenger, “contact me at once. I will be in Wilmington, Delaware.”

He went to the roof, moving with that uncanny speed that seemed so effortless, but which left the eye baffled.

There was a facade above the top floor of the building. Hidden by this, except from the eyes of observers in distant, higher buildings, was a small autogiro that Benson had recently purchased.

The Avenger was probably the world’s best pilot. With his great skill, plus the addition of a few refinements on the machine that even the manufacturers hadn’t thought of, he could land and take off from even his small rooftop.* He rose in a perfect jump-start, now, with the motor roaring full on. He leveled off toward La Guardia Field, where he had a hangar of his own with half a dozen various types of planes.

* (
The Philadelphia post office, of course, has maintained a roof-to-airport mail service for some time, but with a much larger rooftop for landing.
)

There, he chose a bullet of a thing, all motor and, seemingly, no wings. He sped for Wilmington.

The Avenger had done more in the laboratory than work on the puzzle of the black death. He had recalled every detail of the televised scene he had witnessed over the cameraman’s shoulder in Hannon’s underground crypt.

That scene had showed two men in white coats, working in a distant laboratory. By piecing together all he had seen and heard, Dick thought he knew where that lab was.

“—tensile strength . . . acetate . . . viscosity—” were some of the scattered words he had heard the men say.

A part of a window had showed, reflected in a downward angle from the side of a glass tank. And in this had reared a building tower, far off, which Benson had seen once before and filed perfectly in his marvelous memory.