The Avenger 7 - Stockholders in Death (2 page)

Joseph Crimm had two sons; Tom, the elder, and Wayne, the younger. Tom reached the house where his father was held in less than half an hour; Wayne in about an hour and a quarter.

Wayne was about twenty, looking impulsive and emotional with his rough blond hair and intense blue eyes. Tom was twenty-six, though he looked to be thirty. He was as dark as his young brother was fair, and had a disillusioned, cynical expression on his face. In fact the characters of the two were plainly to be read on their countenances.

Wayne was idealistic, generously honest, willing to trust people. Tom was realistic and hard-boiled. He would take nothing for granted, but would examine it from all sides, skeptically, before putting any faith in it. Then his faith would be lukewarm.

Tom and Wayne were bending over their father with stricken faces. The doctor was at a distance. No need to ask him how the patient was. Joseph Crimm was dying. That was plain enough.

The police had come and gone. They’d heard a tale of a car almost running this man down, then of his fainting with a heart attack. No license number of the car, nothing. What could they do? Even if they’d found the car’s driver, they’d have been helpless. According to the dying man’s own admission, the car had never touched him.

But Tom and Wayne were getting a different version and were forming different conclusions.

“I meant to leave you two a fortune,” Crimm whispered to his boys. “Now there is very little to leave. I’m sorry.”

“What’s this talk of leaving us anything?” said Wayne stoutly. “You’re going to stick around for years yet. You—”

His father’s slight smile, twisted suddenly with pain, stopped him.

“There was a large fortune, till a few days ago,” he whispered. “Then, I bought stock in the Ballandale Glass Corp. A great deal of stock. Enough to control the vote at the next meeting—”

A spasm wracked his body and stopped his words.

“Dad—we don’t care anything about money—” began Tom.

Crimm shook his head, just a little, in command for him to keep still and listen.

“Not much time left. Get this clearly. I bought the stock to swing control from the receivers of the Ballandale Corp., which recently went bankrupt. Those receivers, the Town Bank of New York principally, were going to smash the concern, again, to squeeze out minority stockholders. Then they’d buy it back cheap. I wanted to stop that.”

“You mean—the Town Bank where we’ve done most of your business?” said Wayne softly.

“That’s it. Bunch of thieves! I mean it. My stock was delivered to my account there. They stole it. I’d bought the stock secretly, in small lots, so no one would know I was getting control. The stock was still unsigned by me, held in dummy names. So there you have it. Town Bank stole over two million dollars’ worth of my stock—and no one on earth can prove it was my stock and that they took it.”

“But, Dad,” said Tom, “you said you distrusted Town Bank, yet you had your stock delivered to your account there—”

“I did not. There was a misunderstanding. My brokerage house was to deliver it to my home. They made a mistake and sent it to the bank—”

A suppressed scream came from Crimm’s lips, as he had the worst heart seizure of all.

Sweat came to the man’s clay-colored forehead as he stopped the scream and wrenched out a few words.

“Sorry I . . . no fortune for you . . . my own sons—”

Joseph Crimm was still. The supreme pain of angina pectoris was over. He was dead!

Tom and Wayne drew long breaths and stared, white-faced, at each other.

“I’m a murderer,” whispered Tom.

“Don’t say that.” Wayne caught his older brother’s arm. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“If I’d met him with the car, he wouldn’t have been walking. And that drunken fool of a driver he told about would not have had the chance to scare him to death—”

Tom was suddenly silent. He stayed that way for so long that Wayne started to say something. Tom held up his hand, and his face had become a mask of rage.

“Wayne—that driver wasn’t drunk nor crazy. This is deliberate murder!”

“I don’t see—”

“Look! Dad has just been robbed, in the coldest, crudest way robbery can be accomplished, by an unscrupulous bunch of business men. Now Dad is a fighter. He’d have made things hot for that gang; so they put him out of the way. It was well known that he had a very bad heart. All right! Chase him with a car; scare him; make him run and leap as even a well man of sixty-five should never do, let alone a sick one. Then, when he keels over with a heart attack, just drive away. There’s your victim, dead! But there isn’t a mark on your car, and even a witness could never make a charge stick, because you never actually touched him.”

Wayne’s blue eyes were wide and flaming.

“Dad’s death is cold-blooded murder,” said Tom furiously. “It’s up to us to prove it, though I haven’t the faintest idea how. And it’s up to us to get the Crimm fortune back from those highbinders at Town Bank.”

Wayne nodded, looking ten years older in the last ten minutes.

“We get the money back,” he said harshly, “and we pin murder on whoever drove that car. But—how do we do these things?”

“I don’t know, yet.” Tom’s hands went over his face. “If only I’d been able to meet him in the car! But I had a blow-out as I was coming to the office. A piece of glass or something cut a V-shaped lump out of the tire, clear to the fabric. The right rear. Then she blew.”

Wayne’s hand went impulsively to his older brother’s shoulder.

“Don’t feel like that. It wasn’t your fault. Come, let’s get Dad home.”

Joseph Crimm couldn’t have been moved before. He was so close to death that the attempt would have killed him, at once. He could be moved now that death had struck.

In a mournful procession, he was borne on down the block to the Crimm home. After him came Tom and Wayne, with shoulders bowed.

Murder—subtle, deliberate, clueless! They both felt sure that’s what it was. Someone would pay; both vowed that.

Someone would pay! But—by what means could they be brought to justice?

The two brothers, even after they reached home with their sad burden, took a little while to realize just what they’d been told.

They had heard what had been done to their father’s fortune, but it took a while for it to sink in. Banks, on the whole, are as ethical as any other form of business. Now and then, a banking group does arise which is ruthless and shady in its dealings, just as in any other business endeavor. But it’s alway harder to believe it of banks.

At first Tom and Wayne didn’t really believe a bank had stolen over two million dollars of their father’s securities. Then they began to accept this monstrous thing as a fact, and go into action.

“One thing,” said Wayne. “Dad wasn’t in the least out of his head. His mind was clear as a bell at the last. If he said that happened, it happened.”

Tom nodded.

“Far as that goes, I remember Dad mentioning, once, that a bunch of highbinders were after Ballandale Glass, and that he felt like stepping in and blocking the play. So he did it, after all.”

“All that stock,” said Wayne. “Over two million dollars. Surely there’s some sign that it belonged to Dad, even if it was bought secretly and not yet signed over to him.”

“There must be notes on it among his papers,” agreed Tom. “We’ll look.”

They went over the house, particularly Joseph Crimm’s library and home office and his bedroom. But they found no scrap of paper mentioning a transaction in Ballandale stock.

They went to his office, arriving there at gray dawn. And there they found signs that someone had come before them—and had searched for something, too.

The vault was closed; but when they opened it, the contents were found to be disarranged. The desk drawers were in a jumble, unlike the orderliness with which their father usually kept things.

There was no way of telling who had searched that place before them, nor what the mysterious searcher had found. But there was one clear fact:

No hint of Ballandale stock purchases was anywhere among their father’s papers.

Tom’s face was a dark, frozen mask. Wayne’s was openly furious, and his blue eyes flamed.

“All right,” Tom said in a low, trembling voice. “They’ve gotten away with it, so far. They got the stock, and made sure there wasn’t a thing left behind to trace ownership. They killed Dad to shut him up. But, by heaven, we’ll get them for it!”

Wayne nodded.

“We’ll report this right away. Now! The police—”

“The police!” echoed Tom bitterly.

Wayne stared at him, frowning a little.

“Why, yes! Why not the police? This is crime. You call in the police in a criminal matter.”

“Sure, it’s a crime. But on a big scale. On thefts involving millions of dollars, my small brother, the police are about as much good as an air rifle against elephants.”

“But—”

“You know who the Town Bank directors are, don’t you?” said Tom harshly.

“Yes! We’ve met most of them at Dad’s at one time or another. There’s Lucius Grand, Robert Rath, Louis Wallach and Frederick Birch.”

“And Theodore Maisley, president of the bank,” added Tom. “You know their caliber—all powerful, wealthy, influential men. And you’d call the cops against a bunch like that! Why, men of that stripe own the police.”

Wayne chewed his upper lip. He had often been rubbed the wrong way by his older brother’s cynicism. He was now. But he had to admit there was some slight justification for it. It’s hard for the police to get a handle against such men.

Wayne suddenly banged his right fist in his left palm.

“Of course!” he exclaimed. “Just the thing!”

“What’s just the thing?” snapped Tom sourly.

“We’re not the first people to find ourselves in such a predicament. Others, besides ourselves, have been pitted against men too powerful, too subtle, for the regular police. And they’ve still managed to do something about it. They’ve gone to Justice, Inc., to The Avenger, for help.”

“Avenger?” said Tom, scowling. “Who’s that?”

“Don’t you ever read?” said Wayne. “There’s a man named Richard Henry Benson, who mixes in just such cases. He’s young, and tremendously rich. Some time ago his family was lost in a crooked deal, and ever since he has made it his business to fight crime—in revenge!”

“Baloney!”

“It’s true! I’ve heard Dad speak of him.” Wayne’s eyes were shining with a light of hero worship. “He has his headquarters in Bleek Street, in lower Manhattan. He has some helpers, and they all call themselves Justice, Inc. That’s because they see to it that justice is done, no matter how smart the crooks—”

“For how much?” Tom’s voice was a stream of cold water across his brother’s enthusiasm.

“What?” said Wayne, jerked back to earth.

“He sees that justice is done—for how much?”

“He doesn’t work for money,” Wayne protested. “He has all any man needs—”

“Hooey! Show me a man who doesn’t work for money, and you’ll be showing me a corpse. Of course he gets something out of it.”

Wayne’s jaw set. It seemed to have gotten much more mature in the last few hours.

“It’s my vote that we go and see The Avenger and ask him to help us,” he declared quietly.

“Sure! And have him chisel half of Dad’s fortune, if he recovers the stock! Nothing doing.”

“All right, what’s your idea on this?”

“Town Bank stole that stock and killed Dad,” said Tom grimly. “So that makes them thieves and murderers. Yet they are too high for the police to tackle. There’s only one thing to do. That is—get even tougher thieves and murderers after them!”

The puzzled crease deepened between Wayne’s blond brows.

“There is a lad in New York named Nicky Luckow,” Tom said. “A nice boy. Rackets, gang murders, dope, all the rest of it. He’d bump off the mayor for a thousand dollars. That’s the man I want help from, in a case like this.”

“You’re crazy!” gasped Wayne. “Luckow is the most notorious gangster in the East.”

“Right! I’m going to him and tell him about this. I’m going to offer him a quarter of the value of the Ballandale stock—if he and his gang can recover it, and find out which Town Bank official is directly responsible for Dad’s death.”

“But if you did locate the murderer, you couldn’t turn him over to the law when you’d rounded him up with such a crew.”

“There’s no law against it. When Luckow and his crew find our man, he’ll be dealt with at no bother to the courts.”

“Tom!”

“Bunch of racketeers at that bank, huh?” raged Tom. “We’ll see how they like being stacked up against professionals for a change.”

Wayne stared at his brother. Lumps of muscle quivered at the corners of his mouth. Tom’s eyes were cold points of resolve.

“I’m going to The Avenger,” said Wayne.

“I’m going to Nicky Luckow,” grated Tom.

“You damn fool,” said Wayne, glaring.

“You trusting babe in the woods,” sneered Tom. “Go to your chiseling Avenger and see how much he tries to gyp out of you!”