The Avenger 22 - The Black Death (4 page)

“Have you identified him, yet?” The Avenger asked the nearest detective.

“Yes, Mr. Benson. His name is Austin Gailord.”

Smitty’s breath hissed out. That was the name given in the occult scene of “the fool who rebelled.” The name of the man who was doomed.

“Where did he think he was going in that car?” Smitty wondered. “And why did he monkey with all those gadgets—cause all that destruction?”

There seemed no possibility of answers to the questions. The lips that might have answered were dead.

“We’ll have a complete checkup on Gailord soon,” said the detective.

The Avenger nodded, expressionless as usual even in the face of unusually grim death.

He said, “When you’re through examining the car, let me know and we’ll pick it up.”

He and Smitty went back to Bleek Street. Almost at the building entrance, in the gutter, they found a thing they had not noticed on the way out. Smitty picked it up.

It looked like a crumpled handful of tissue paper, streakily dipped in black ink. There was a stem to it.

“A black orchid,” said The Avenger.

Again, as Benson’s steely fingers probed at the sinister flower, Smitty was pretty sure the thought in his mind was the same as that in the chief’s.

There had been a black orchid in the devil scene, placed in the lax fingers of a man about to die. This completed the chain of parallels.

Somewhere underground, miles away, a figure representing one Austin Gailord had been given a black orchid as a sentence of death. Back there on Seventh Avenue, Austin Gailord had died at about the same moment. He had died at the wheel of the stolen sedan. And here was a black orchid, dropped from his hand when he got into the car outside the Justice, Inc., entrance.

Smitty felt the flesh crawl clammily at his spine; but The Avenger said only: “Take this to Mac. See if he can detect any signs of poison in it. I will go on upstairs and wait for a police check on Gailord.”

Up in the big top-floor room, Josh was waiting excitedly for Benson’s return.

“I told Smitty I’d heard something about another man working on this same television stunt,” Josh said. “I couldn’t remember just who. But now I’ve placed it. It’s the well-known inventor, John Jay Hannon. There were short items in the science journals about it, months ago.”

Josh would hardly have bothered to report a thing like this to the man who seemed to know everything. Without a word being said, they all took it for granted that The Avenger knew more about the new television achievement than Smitty himself, just as the man with the pale, glacial eyes seemed to know more about every other specialized field than the acknowledged leaders in that field. Certainly, then, the announcement that the famed Hannon was working on a similar device would be known to Benson.

But the invaluable Josh had followed it up.

“I got in touch with Hannon’s home. He isn’t there. He hasn’t been there for weeks. I gathered that he was away on a trip, and the suddenness with which he went away came as a complete surprise to all his friends and employees. No one has any idea where he is.”

It might be very important news. Was a man revered all through the country as one almost capable of stepping into Edison’s shoes the same as the figure with the black hood hiding his features? Was John Jay Hannon the occult murderer they’d seen in a televised scene that might well have come from apparatus no one else but Hannon—and Smitty—was capable of inventing?

“Good work,” said The Avenger.

He told briefly of the carnage on Seventh Avenue; he knew his associates would want to know, and he never withheld from them the facts of present happenings. It was only his deductions of future happenings, or of motives and reasons, that he withheld till the proper time.

He said nothing, now, of anything he might have already deduced from the tie-up of a televised death scene and an actual, duplicating death, miles away. He went to the teletype in the corner.

Soon, the police report on Austin Gailord came through.

He was not a thief—at least, not till he’d gone crazy and taken the Justice, Inc. car. He was a manufacturer of auto parts in Hoboken and, lately, a manufacturer of bomber stabilizers, subcontracting from a big plant near Philadelphia. He was married, had two grown sons and was always, till now, the picture of respectability. It was not known why he had hurriedly come to the vicinity of Bleek Street, but, of course, the unofficial guess was accurate; he had come to see The Avenger.

Why, then, had he given up this idea at the very threshold of the Bleek Street headquarters? Why had he jumped into the car and driven off again instead? There weren’t even unofficial guesses about this.

The teletype message ended with the report that two questioned bystanders had noticed Gailord walking and thought they remembered seeing a younger man catch up with him and try to stop him. That was all. There was no dependable description of the younger man.

The vestibule buzzer sounded, then. Nellie went to the black box.

“A young man, English tweeds, the playboy kind,” she said. Had the giant Smitty been there, she’d have added, just to make him jealous, “He’s handsome, too.”

But Smitty wasn’t there, so she concluded: “He looks excited, but harmless. The photoelectric cell shows no weapons. Shall I let him up?”

The Avenger nodded. In a moment the tall young man came in from the stairs. He had broad shoulders and a lithe body, but he moved with a fashionable stoop and looked almost languidly around the room.

It was the man who had tried to stop Gailord.

He stopped looking so languid upon seeing something in the room. And instantly, without a word of warning, he leaped for Benson.

Anyone else on earth would have been overwhelmed by the suddenness of the attack. But Dick, seeming to melt from point to point rather than move, stepped back and sideways so that the impetuous young visitor plowed on emptily with nothing to stop him. He turned, rushed back, and there was a sticklike crack.

The Avenger, with scientific detachment and precision, had put a fist into his jaw where it would do the maximum amount of good.

Nellie stared at the prone figure in bewilderment.

“He must have come here just to kill you!” said Cole. “I’ll say he’s a good actor. He didn’t look at all threatening when he came in.”

“Maybe he’ll tell us about it when he comes to,” Dick said.

But the young man didn’t.

After a few minutes, he opened his eyes, glared around, then went placid and peaceful as a lamb.

“Hello,” he said pleasantly. “What happened to me? Oh, I know. I must have had one of my fits and you must have been forced to . . . er . . . pacify me. Right?”

Nellie looked at Cole, who shrugged. The lithe, broad-shouldered visitor didn’t look like one who was subject to fits. He looked very healthy indeed.

The young man sat in a deep leather easy-chair. He lounged there in an indolent way, looking languid and harmless and self-possessed. The Avenger’s diamond stare had never left his face.

“You say you are subject to fits,” Benson repeated. “Just what is the nature of these fits?”

“You saw one of them,” the young man shrugged. “I’m all right. Then—
zing!
All of a sudden, I’m not all right. I go off the handle. I light into the nearest person.”

“How long have you suffered from them?”

“Oh, for years,” murmured the young man politely. He was unusually polite, streamlined.

The Avenger seemed to dismiss the subject of fits. He said: “You came here to see us, I believe. What did you want to see us about?”

“About Austin Gailord,” said the man.

Josh and Rosabel, Cole Wilson and Nellie tensed at that. But Benson didn’t change expression. He never did.

“You knew Gailord?”

“Very well,” the young man nodded.

“You know what has happened to him?”

The young fellow looked less streamlined for a moment. In fact, he looked rather sick. “Yes, I know.”

“Who are you, anyhow?” Cole Wilson burst out. Cole was the impulsive member of Justice, Inc. Sometimes, he got into trouble from his impulsiveness. The rest scowled at him for interrupting the chief’s questioning, but Benson himself paid no attention.

“My name is Schuyler Marcy,” said their visitor to Cole. Then he turned his light-brown, pleasant eyes back to The Avenger.

“There is an old Philadelphia family by the name of Marcy, I believe,” said Benson. “Wealthy at one time. Not so wealthy since the depression.”

“Flat broke, to put it bluntly,” said Schuyler Marcy cheerfully. “Which brings me to Austin Gailord. I was trying to get a job with him. I need a job quite badly. I knew him pretty well. I was to meet him here in New York, but when I did meet him, uptown, he suddenly seemed to go crazy and ran away from me. I followed in a cab. He came to within a block of this little street and paid off his cab. I didn’t get to him before he’d walked beyond the entrance of Bleek Street. Then he broke loose and ran to this building. Here, he got into that car and drove off.”

“You say he broke loose,” said Benson. “Why were you holding him? Did you want to keep him from coming here?”

“No,” Schuyler Marcy said, looking very honest about it all. “I simply wanted to take him to a doctor. He was acting so strangely, and he . . . didn’t look well. I thought he’d better see a physician at once.”

“Didn’t look well? You mean he was already turning—black?”

“Yes,” said Marcy, looking ill again. “Black, sort of.”

“This is all you can tell us?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Marcy.

“What do you intend to do, now?”

Marcy hesitated an instant. Then he countered with a question of his own.

“Are you going to investigate the cause of Gailord’s death?”

“After the havoc caused by my special car,” said The Avenger, “I could hardly do otherwise. Though the circumstances of his death are so queer that I would do it anyhow.”

“Then I’d like to stick around and help with the investigation,” said Marcy. “Gailord was my friend. I’d like to help nail whoever was responsible for his dying.”

“You think it was murder, then,” Benson said evenly.

Marcy shrugged. “Dead men don’t turn black naturally. Unless,” he added, “this is a sample of some strange, though natural, disease like the old black plague of Europe. But I suppose you wouldn’t know that.”

Marcy didn’t know, of course, that The Avenger was an outstanding medical authority; that he had written treatises on bubonic and other plagues that were used in most post-graduate courses.

“It is not the Black Death of Europe,” said Benson. “If you want to join us in investigating the cause, I think it can be arranged. You can stay here if you please.”

“Thank you very much,” said Marcy, getting up. He was all friendliness and gratitude. It was hard to remember that, a moment ago, he had flown at Benson’s throat in an effort to take his life.

“Show Mr. Marcy to a suite,” Benson said expressionlessly to Josh.

As he said it, the little finger of his left hand half curled as it hung naturally by his side. That meant: “Don’t let him out of here. Observe everything he does.”

Marcy went cheerfully, politely out in the wake of Josh. The Avenger said to Cole, “Check on him.”

With Wilson gone, Nellie said to their pale-eyed chief, “What in the world made him jump at you the minute he got in here?”

“I think I know,” Rosabel said, her intelligent eyes going to the corner by the rear windows. “He looked around the room. When he saw the big television cabinet, his gaze stopped. Then he went berserk.”

“That is right,” said Benson. “It was the sight of our special television set that made him attack.”

“Oh-ho!”
Nellie said. “Then he’s in with that devil gang and their mumbo-jumbo. He saw that we had a set capable of receiving their ritual, and he wanted to kill you and destroy it.”

The Avenger didn’t answer. Nellie sighed. Then the television screen began to glow, indicating that someone in MacMurdie’s drugstore wanted to communicate with the Bleek Street headquarters.

They went to the cabinet.

MacMurdie’s homely face showed on the screen. His bleak blue eyes stared at them as if he were in the room. The sandy ropes of eyebrows over them were bunched a little in perplexity, and his lips opened.

But no words came out. Just as they were about to come, Nellie and The Avenger heard a faint scream, from somewhere behind the pictured image. They got a glimpse of the back of Mac’s sandy-thatched head as he whirled to see what was wrong. Then the Scot was gone, and the screen glowed blank again.