The Avenger 22 - The Black Death (6 page)

“We wanted to see you about Mr. John Hannon,” Nellie replied, with a sweetness that brought a black look to the giant Smitty’s moonface. “We’ve been trying to get in touch with Mr. Hannon on a rather urgent matter, and no one seems to know where he is. We heard you knew him well, and we thought you might be able to tell us how to contact him.”

Miller looked distressed. Also, he looked suspicious.

“I do know him well,” he admitted. “I worked for him for years. He’s one of the world’s finest. But I can’t tell you where he is, because I don’t know. I’ve tried to find out, too. No one seems to know where he has gone. I don’t like the look of it. But,” he said suddenly, “why are you trying to find him? What’s your interest in him?”

Nellie decided to come clean.

“We’re with Richard Benson,” she said. “I don’t know if the name is familiar to you, but—”

“I’ll say it’s familiar!” exclaimed Miller. He grew instantly more cordial. “As a mechanical engineer I know the name very well indeed. His new tin-reclamation process was introduced just as I was designing some new-type assembly lines for can factories. So you’re working with Benson. But why is
he
interested in Mr. Hannon?”

“We want to know if his disappearance could have anything to do with a television-scrambling device he was working on.”

Miller sighed in a sort of patiently exasperated way.

“That television scrambler!” he said. “It’s been the bane of the old man’s life. Ever since a reporter got wind of it and published a short item about it, Hannon’s had the life deviled out of him by all sorts of people. And the crazy part is he never succeeded with it, anyway.”

“He didn’t?” said Smitty in amazement. “You mean, he never perfected it?”

“He hadn’t while I was with him,” said Miller. “If he succeeded later, I haven’t heard about it.”

Smitty and Nellie stared at each other. If the inventor hadn’t completed the television scrambler, then the only apparent motive for violence against him had been removed.

They talked to the young mechanical engineer a little more. He told them what they’d already discovered: No one of all his friends and associates had any idea where he was; several important business deals were waiting his signature; all anyone knew was that the elderly man had gone away for a complete rest and told no one where.

“Well, his daughter will know if anybody does,” said Smitty. “On our way, Nellie.”

But Dan Miller got up as well as Nellie.

“You’re going to talk to Miss Hannon? Sounds like an excellent idea. But suppose I come along. I’ve known Alicia for years. She might tell me things she wouldn’t want to confide to strangers. That is, if there is anything to tell.”

“Good enough,” said Nellie. “We’ll be glad to have you with us.”

The Hannon’s apartment was in a building on the East River. It was a big building, pretty fancy. The Hannons, it appeared, had an extra-large apartment—two standard ones thrown into one—on the top floor on the river side.

Nellie and Dan Miller and Smitty rode up in an automatic elevator unannounced. Nellie pressed the buzzer outside the door.

Smitty didn’t know quite what pleasant words of entrance the tiny blonde had cooked up. Whatever they were, they were never used, because the giant spoke first when the door was opened by a tall, pretty girl with dark-brown hair and lovely dark-brown eyes.

“It’s
her!”
he exploded.

The girl glared at him and tried to shut the door. He had his capacious foot in the way. He pushed it open and the three went in. Miller was staring in astonishment at the big fellow, but Nellie was not. Nellie knew why he had galvanized to this sudden action.

The girl, Alicia Hannon, was the pretty bandit who had taken the black orchid from Mac’s drugstore.

Alicia Hannon stopped glaring, after a minute, and began to smile. The effect was charming, in spite of the circumstances.

“Hello,” she said to Smitty. “I feel all right now. The help I got from you in that drugstore fixed me right up. What can I do for you?”

Smitty was bewildered. He’d heard of Schuyler Marcy’s ferocious attack on The Avenger in the Bleek Street room, and his subsequent change to a polite, pleasant person. Now, this girl acted first like a wounded tigress, then like any polite hostess. The world seemed suddenly full of polite maniacs.

“For one thing,” said Nellie, answering the question for the giant, “you can tell us why you wanted that black orchid so badly. For another, you can tell us where your father is.”

“Telling about my father will take quite awhile,” said Alicia, looking distressed. “I’ll answer your question about the orchid. Will you step into the next room with me? It’s a sort of town workshop my father fixed in the apartment. The black orchid is in there on a workbench.”

She went across the room onto which the outer door had opened—a huge living room, richly furnished. She opened a door on the other side.

Nellie was quite properly suspicious of this girl. Being feminine herself, she wasn’t so easily fooled by an engaging surface manner. She looked into this second room pretty carefully before entering.

The room showed itself to be a quite innocent place. It was almost bare. At one side was a leather chair and a desk. Along the other side was a teak-wood slab, forming a kind of deluxe workbench. On this was a handful of blackish badly wilted stuff that might or might not be the remains of the black orchid. They couldn’t quite see from the doorway.

Nellie shrugged a little and followed the girl over to the teakwood slab. Dan Miller and Smitty went, too.

“You see,” Alicia Hannon said apologetically, “I wanted this flower because—”

Smitty had seen her move in a hurry at the drugstore when she flashed to that metal rear door and through. She moved the same way now—only, it seemed, even faster.

With the last word seeming to float in the air after her like the wake of a fast boat, she darted to this door. But she did not leap out of the room nor did she slam the door shut as she had at the store.

She pressed a button next to the door. It looked like an ordinary electric-light switch.

Almost as fast as Alicia, Nellie Gray moved. But it was not quite fast enough. There was a six-foot gap between Nellie and Alicia when the latter jabbed at that button.

There was a jarring thud as a heavy metal screen fell between the two girls. The thing came so close to Nellie that it almost cut her small nose off, and she banged into it so hard that she bounced back and nearly fell. She started to charge at it again, with Miller and Smitty now beside her.

“Don’t!” warned Alicia. Her tone was not at all pleasant, now. Indeed, at something in it, the three stopped as though barricaded by it quite as much as by the screen.

“That screen is electrically charged, now,” said Alicia. “If you touch it again,” she said to Nellie, “you’ll do more than bounce back. If your heart is in excellent condition, the voltage might not kill you. But you would find it very uncomfortable.”

“Why, you—” gasped the little blonde.

Alicia Hannon went out, not bothering to shut the door.

The three looked angrily at the screen.

It was of very heavy mesh. It divided the room lengthways, with the three cooped up in a long, narrow cell on the workbench side, and with the chair and desk and the doorway on the other side. The screen was not too heavy for muscles like Smitty’s to twist and wrench into an opening. But there was that electrical charge—

Smitty’s huge forefinger poked experimentally toward the screen, as you might poke an unbelieving finger toward a gleaming surface labeled “Fresh Paint.” You know, just to be sure.

Alicia Hannon appeared in the doorway again. She had on a crazy little wisp of a hat and was calmly drawing on her gloves. She was all ready to leave.

“Believe me,” she said, with not much interest, to the big fellow, “you won’t like it if you touch that screen. The walls inside the screened-in half, the half of the room you are in, are of metal. They’re electrified, too. Your best move will be no move at all. Just sit on the floor there.”

“You’re going to be pretty sorry about this,” said tiny Nellie in a grim tone.

“Look here,” Dan Miller said. “Why do you do a thing like this to
me?
You know me, Alicia. I’m your friend.”

“You seem to be on the side of people who are not my friends, now,” snapped Alicia. “Goodbye. I won’t see any of you again, I hope.”

“Wait a minute,” Smitty yelped. “How long are we to be held here?”

Alicia looked at a competent watch on her slim white wrist.

“A clockwork mechanism will shut off the current at midnight, tonight.”

“That’s nearly seven hours!” Smitty said. “You cant—”

Alicia Hannon was no longer in the doorway. She had calmly left them.

Smitty poked with that big forefinger at the screen again. Then he went into a kind of shaky dance, wrenched his finger away and howled.

There was enough current in the mesh to knock an ordinary man cold!

There was just one consolation in this humiliating situation for Smitty. Nellie had kidded the life out of him for being fooled by the good-looking daughter of the well-known inventor.

Now, Nellie had been fooled, too, right down to the ground.

“It’s amazing how a man can be fooled by a pretty face,” he said guilelessly. “That is, men are fooled. Other girls, of course, are too smart for that.”

“Shut up!” said Nellie waspishly. She whirled to Dan Miller. “You didn’t do so well, did you? You said you were an old friend; that she might talk to you when she wouldn’t talk to strangers. She didn’t seem to treat you much as a friend.”

“I’ve never seen her act like this before,” said Miller apologetically. “She has always been sweet and gentle—”

“Hummmmph!” snorted Nellie. “Come on, Smitty. Get us out of here.”

“Just like that, huh?” growled Smitty.

“What’s a little wire?” Nellie goaded him. “Come on, crash it. If you hit it hard enough—”

“No thanks!”

Nellie turned from him and went to the bench. She did not experiment by touching the wall. Looked at closely, you could see that it was of metal, all right, with dull paint hiding that fact from all but a searching glance.

“I remember about this, now,” said Miller suddenly. “The old man, Hannon, had this room fixed just after I left his employ. Twice, he was threatened by foreign agents after some of his inventions. Then he fixed this trap for anyone else who might break in and try to steal his secrets. I guess that’s why he had such a heavy current run to it—he didn’t care whether he killed a spy or not.”

“Couldn’t you have remembered this just a little sooner?” said Nellie over her shoulder. She was too sore to be very good company at the moment.

She picked up the blackish shreds on the bench. Then her tone changed.

“It’s that black orchid, all right. But, Smitty, did Mac tear it up as much as this in his experiments?”

The giant looked. “No, I don’t think so. Looks as if Alicia Hannon got mad at it or something and chopped it up in a vegetable grinder.”

It certainly did. The wilted, already-decaying flower was in bits. One more puzzle.

The giant turned from it and bent to the floor. He flipped back a rug. The floor showed sleek and polished under the thick Oriental, and Smitty grunted.

“Good. Hardwood strips. I was afraid the floor might be parquet, or even some composition like smooth cement.”

“So it’s in strips,” said Miller, who wasn’t very good company either, with a seven-hour wait ahead of him. “So what?”

Smitty didn’t answer. From an inner pocket, he took a very handy tool he always carried. It was like a very small pinchbar; but the hooked end was pointed instead of flat, and the straight end had a chisel edge that was sharper than most knives.

Smitty jammed the chisel edge into the hairline crack between two of the narrow hardwood strips and pried. A good deal of splintering followed the action.

After half a dozen tries, he removed a strip from wall to screen, about nine feet long.

“Oh,” said Nellie.

Smitty rammed the end of the strip at the screen, near the wall in which the doorway was set. Sparks licked around the thin strip and it smoldered and fumed, but he got it through a widened hole before it burned through. The end of it touched the electric button next to the doorway, then pressed.

The tiny blue sparks stopped playing around the short-circuiting wood, and the screen began rising up into the ceiling again, taking the wood with it and snapping it off as the metal frame disappeared into the ceiling slot.

“So we’ll be here till midnight,” said Smitty. “That’s what
she—”

“Let’s cut the self-praise,” snapped Nellie, “and get along out to Hannon’s country place.”

“You think Alicia will be there?” said Miller.

“Maybe,” Nellie retorted. “But whether she is or not, that’s where The Avenger will be, unless we get out there too late to catch him. He said he was going there, before we left Bleek Street.”

“I’ll go along,” said Miller. “I haven’t met Mr. Benson; I’ve just heard about him. I’d like very much to meet him.”