The Avenger 31 - The Cartoon Crimes (4 page)

“And a crew over at the newspaper syndicate,” added Cole, pointing a foot at the
Wonderman
page opened on the floor.

Smitty scowled. “So maybe a dozen guys could take a gander at this junk before it ever gets printed?”

“At least,” said Josh. “And since the Walling offices occupy two floors in the Seuling Building, it’s possible that somebody who occupies one of the fourteen other floors could get a look at Lewing’s original drawings.”

“Okay,” said Smitty. “Maybe the guy ain’t a screwball after all. But tell me this . . . why?”

“I kin think of several motives, mon,” said Mac.

“Like what?”

Josh answered the big man’s question. “Gil Lewing is one of the few guys in the comic-book business who owns his own feature. It’s now worth several million bucks a year, is
Wonderman.
Let’s say that his wife had a boyfriend she liked better than her husband. Okay, drive him nuts and put him away someplace. Now she controls the
Wonderman
property. She gets his assistant to turn it out for a few bucks a week, and all those millions belong to her and the boyfriend. And she hasn’t killed anybody.”

“Naw, she’s a friend of Nellie’s,” said the giant. “A nice girl, from what Nellie said.”

“Nice girls have done a lot of un-nice things,” said Cole.

“There are several other possibilities,” said Benson. “What we have to do now is gather some information. Then we can work toward a solution.”

Cole said, “Is Gil Lewing still missing?”

“Yes,” said the Avenger. “I told Nellie to phone as soon as she had any idea where he might be. Since she hasn’t, I assume he is still at large.”

“Nobody saw what happened in that room when he was in there with old Walling,” said Josh. “Lewing maybe isn’t at large at all.”

“Meaning?” said Smitty.

“Meaning that someone else may have been there, someone who did the actual killing,” answered the Negro. “They may have grabbed Lewing and taken him along with them, to make it seem he’d knocked off his boss.”

“We have to find Lewing,” said the Avenger. “And there are several other things that have to be done.”

He told them what they were.

The walls didn’t stop the wind. It came brushing across the room, chill and sharp.

The room was white. All white. The walls, laced with thin cracks that let the wind in, were painted white. A thin worn white rug covered the floor. The swayback table was white. The chair Gil Lewing was tied to was white.

Not a very big room. Hard to tell what it had originally been used for. Lewing had a rough idea where he was, though, even with all the windows boarded up.

The wind had a salty feel. This was someplace close to the Sound.

“Yeah, that’s the surf I hear.”

He remembered there was an abandoned yacht club at Ferman Point, roughly halfway between the Walling place and his own home. This white room might be in one of the yacht club buildings.

“No way to be certain, but that’s a pretty good guess.”

He was gagged. There was no possibility of his calling for help. And he’d had no luck at all in loosening the ropes that bound him.

It was morning outside, enough light got through the boarded windows to tell him that.

“So I lost about . . . maybe ten hours or more.”

The Green Archer had pressed something to his face, a pad with something soaked through it.

“Chloroform, maybe? We’ve had enough crooks use it in
Wonderman,
but I’ve never really encountered the stuff.”

Whatever it was, it’d knocked him out for the night.

When he woke up, about ten minutes ago, he was in the white room.

“I know something now,” he said to himself. “Something I wasn’t quite sure of before. I’m not cracking up. That guy was real last night, and this is real now.”

What was it all about, then? Somebody was trying to make him think he was having another breakdown.

“And you played right along with them, like an idiot. Running out of Walling’s last night.”

There was still a chance, though. A chance—if he could get himself out of here.

He gritted his teeth against the gag and struggled again with the ropes. He tried to rock from side to side in the wooden chair.

Something fell out of his coat pocket.

It was the gun that had killed Walling.

Lieutenant Allen was very soft-spoken.

“What?” said Jeanne Lewing.

The tall, mustached policeman repeated, “I’d like, if you could, to have you give me a list of your friends in this area.”

The red-haired girl left the living room sofa and took a chair nearer to the one the plainclothes lieutenant was sitting on. “I’m sorry, I still can’t hear you.”

“He wants,” said Nellie, “a list of your local friends.”

Jeanne shook her head. “We . . . really don’t have any, Lieutenant Allen. We haven’t lived here very long, and Gil is always so busy.”

“Nobody around here he might drop in on?”

“What?”

“No one around here your husband might visit?”

“Walling is . . . Walling was the only person in this part of Long Island that Gil really knew. And his assistant, of course.”

“We have Wayne Harmon’s address.”

“Beg pardon . . . you say you want Wayne’s address?”

“We have it.”

“Walling was not a beloved man,” put in Nellie. “I’d think you must have more suspects than you can use.”

“Only one who was in the room with Walling when he was killed,” said the policeman in his quiet voice.

“Far as you know,” said Nellie.

Lieutenant Allen rubbed at his mustache with his thumb knuckle. “Do you know something you’re keeping back, Miss Gray?”

The little blonde made her eyes go wide. “Heavens, no.”

“Now, Mrs. Lewing, I’d—” Frowns appeared on his forehead. He swung around in his chair until he was looking directly at Nellie. “Nellie Gray,” he said. “You’re Nellie Gray.”

“Golly, you make it sound like an accusation,” she said, smiling. “I already told you I was.”

“The
Nellie Gray, I mean.”

“I suppose, though it’s a fairly common name. There are probably Nellie Grays in every little town and hamlet across—”

“You’re the one who works for Justice, Inc.”

Nellie agreed that she was.

“Does that mean,” asked Lieutenant Allen, “that the Avenger is going to be butting in on this murder?”

“That’s a pretty safe assumption,” said Nellie.

After giving his mustache a more vigorous rubbing, Allen said, “Yeah, Don Early told me about you people. But I never thought it could happen to—”

“Is that
the
Don Early?” Nellie asked demurely.

“The government agent, yeah. The stories he’s—”

“Is he around here now?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Agent Early isn’t the vacationing type, so I imagine he must be working on a case,” said Nellie. “Is he?”

Lieutenant Allen cleared his throat and got up. “I don’t have any further questions for you, Mrs. Lewing. Not at this time.”

“Beg pardon?”

“I said I’ll be going now.”

Jeanne rose. “Gil didn’t kill anybody, Lieutenant,” she said. “He hasn’t come home, but I think that’s because someone won’t let him.”

“We’re also considering that possibility, ma’am.” The lieutenant headed for the doorway. One step from the threshold he turned to take a final look at Nellie.

She gave him one of her sweetest smiles.

The long green corridor was full of shadows and silence. A dusty rectangle of sunlight showed beneath the half-down blind at the corridor’s end. There were cigarette butts, maybe a dozen, scattered on the cracked linoleum. A large cardboard box stuffed full of torn-up pages of used artwork sat beside a stairwell. “Art Garbage” was lettered on the box side.

“This is where they’re making millions of dollars?” said Josh.

“The Walling outfit is a bit more cheerful on weekdays,” said Cole, leading his companion toward a doorway. “On top of which, they may be in mourning for their fallen leader.”

“Junk! Junk!” roared someone inside the room they were approaching. “Is that a muscle? Is that a punch in the nose?”

“This isn’t Maximus, Joel. Here we’re a little more subtle about—”

“Don’t give me any of that baloney like Walling used to dish out. Subtle don’t sell funny books. Also . . . have this guy’s teeth fall out when he gets smacked.”

“A punch in the snoot, it doesn’t cause your teeth to—”

“Artistic license. I want you to use some artistic license, Leo. Captain Dynamite’s got to look alive from now on. Those sales figures have got to start climb— Who the hell are you bums?”

“Pilgrims,” grinned Cole, “come to visit the shrine.”

“What kind of funny talk is that?” demanded the squat bald man. He was in his shirtsleeves, chewing on an unlit cigar. “You some kind of—”

“Far from it,” said Cole. “I am, more or less, a life-long friend of Leo McQuinn here, the lad you’ve been unjustly berating. And I might—”

“It’s okay, Cole,” put in Leo, a small round-shouldered young man with the sad, weary look of a retired bank clerk. “We yell a lot here at Walling, but it’s all in fun.” He moved his swivel chair back from his drawing board. “Joel Oppenheim, this is Cole Wilson, and . . . ?”

“Josh Newton,” supplied the Negro.

“Kibitzers I don’t encourage,” said Oppenheim, biting hard on the dead cigar, ignoring Cole’s extended hand.

“We’re going to grab a bite to eat,” explained Leo. “I don’t mind working on Sundays now and then, but I’m not going to give up lunch.”

“You ain’t going noplace until you put more oomph into that
Captain Dynamite
page.”

Cole strolled over to look at the penciled comic-book page. “Why, Oppenheim, that page is practically overflowing with oomph. Wouldn’t you agree, Joshua?”

Ambling to a position where he could scan the drawing, Josh said, “Oh, yeah. If there’s one thing it’s got, it is oomph.”

“Wise guys,” muttered Oppenheim around his cigar. “What do you know from oomph? You ain’t funny-book readers.”

“On the contrary,” said Cole, “I am a loyal follower of both Wonderman and Captain Dynamite. In fact, I recall a yarn which I believe you yourself wrote, Oppenheim. In it the good captain saves the citizens of a rural New England village from all turning into shaggy apes due to some gorilla serum which has been dumped in the local reservoir. A classic.”

Oppenheim removed his cigar to make a sound which might have been a chuckle. “I used to write more, till I climbed up to being managing editor of the whole shebang here.”

“It’s a pity, and I speak as one of your most dedicated fans, you have to set aside your pen.”

Oppenheim chuckled again. “You can let that job go till after lunch, Leo,” he said. “Nice to have met you guys.”

After the managing editor had departed, Leo shook his head. “You sure have a gift for handling people, Cole.”

“Ever since I took that Dale Carnegie course there’s been no stopping me.” He crossed over and shut the door. “Did you find out what I asked you about on the phone?”

“Nothing much to find out, I already knew,” replied Leo. “Just a matter of thinking and then making a list.” He took a sheet of paper off the top of a pile on the rickety table next to his drawing board. “Here, I wrote them down.”

Cole took the list and counted the names on it. “Twelve people,” he said. “And that’s all . . . nobody else sees Gil Lewing’s
Wonderman
pages as they come in?”

“No, that’s . . . wait, I forgot somebody.” He grabbed back the list. “Not important, maybe. But Swifty’s Messenger Service takes the comic strips from here over to the syndicate. Walling and Oppenheim wanted to see all the
Wonderman
art, so Gil sends everything here first.” He returned the list to Cole. “Those messengers, now that everybody’s getting drafted they’re all old doddering guys. Swifty, I hear, is in the Pacific someplace.”

Beside each name Leo had written the person’s function within the comic-book publishing company. “How does Gil get the drawings here?” asked Cole. “By way of the postman?”

“Oh, no,” said Leo. “We lost a batch in the mail once, and Walling screamed and hollered for two days. So now Gil has his assistant, that guy Harmon, bring everything in on the train from out on Long Island.”

Josh had been admiring the color proofs of comic-book covers that graced the green walls. “Who’s going to run things now that Walling is dead?”

“Well, I think Mrs. Walling inherits the controlling interest,” answered. Leo. “But with both her sons in the service, well, Joel Oppenheim is really going to be in charge.” His brow clouded, and he looked across at the black man. “You’re looking for . . . motives, huh? I draw
Tough Dan MacDuff—Master Detective,
too. He’s always out to fix on the motive for the crime, but I’ve never seen anybody do that in real life.”

Folding the list and sliding it into his jacket pocket, Cole said, “Any ideas about motives, Leo?”

“Huh? You mean do I know anybody who might have a reason to kill the old man?”

“You’ve been with the company almost five years. Plenty of time to know who would like to do what to whom.”