The Avenger 9 - Tuned for Murder (10 page)

It jammed into the iron fence beside the gate with a
whanggg
that could have been heard for half a mile. Jammed into it, rolled through with a sound like tearing paper magnified a thousand times, and then sagged at the front end and stopped like a tired rhinoceros coming to its knees. Both front wheels had been jammed sideways and back, putting the car out of commission.

So many men were running down the driveway after him that it looked like a young army. Ahead of them were loping the dogs.

Benson got out of Cranlowe’s car and jumped into the rented one that he had left at the gate, seeming to be a whisking streak of light rather than a man. He started away from the gate.

Not bulletproofed, this car. Just an ordinary automobile, He took a long look at the straight road ahead, noting that there was a ditch at each side not deep enough to wreck a car but quite pronounced enough to let you know if you hit it. Then he slid out from behind the wheel, and down.

Crouched on the floor between gear-shift lever and right front door, he drove with a hand stretched up to the wheel. Drove blind, with the car dipping into the shallow ditch first on one side and then the other and being brought back to the unseen road again by the deft steely hand.

The back window of the sedan flashed out. The windshield seemed to explode and disappear! Holes ripped into back and front cushions. Then there was neither sound nor violence. He had gotten out of range.

He raised back up to the driver’s seat just in time to avoid a head-on collision with another car in which women were screaming at sight of an apparently driverless machine rocketing toward them. He roared on till the shot-riddled gas tank was empty; then he left the car and went back to town in an obliging farmer’s produce truck.

In a grim, dark cellar, the face of death grinned fiendishly from a deep, black chasm which led to an underground river. But death has many faces. It showed another the next afternoon, at a place where its grimacing features had been seen before.

At the Garfield Gear plant.

Josh Newton had been told to look around the plant, and keep an eye on the executives. On the face of it, that would seem to be an impossible job. The place was guarded and fenced because of the war orders it handled. How could a Negro get in and watch the officials? But Josh handled it very simply.

He picked up a shoe-shine stand in the morning; the kind of portable box in which are polishes, brushes and rags, and on which is a foot-standard. He showed up at the plant gate at noon. He asked humbly for permission to take care of the shines within the office—and got it.

So now he was in the general office, at work. He had shined the shoes of the superintendent, a young hard-jawed driver who barked orders to underlings while he shifted his feet for Josh to work on. He had taken care of the black high-tops of the old office manager. And now he was in the office of the president, Mr. Jenner.

There were three men in the office—Jenner, Josh and the anemic-looking secretary. And Jenner was dictating a letter while Josh began on the right foot.

“Testing Laboratories

“United States Government

“Washington, D.C.

“Gentlemen:

“We are at a loss to understand the complaints regarding the Cranlowe torpedo controls sent to you over the past five weeks. The release-pin holes were inspected as usual here, along with other general inspection, and each checked for accuracy before being shipped. Each was carefully gauged, as were the release pins themselves. We cannot, therefore, understand why any of the pins should stick and fail to function. We can only assume that a mistake has been made in your testing laboratory, and hope that it will be straightened out very soon. Mr. Cranlowe extends the same hope, through us, as he is being badly embarrassed financially by the withholding of the usual royalty payments.

Sincerely yours,
Ned Jenner.”

Josh tapped the right foot, to indicate that he was through with that. Jenner raised it, and then the left, while Josh slid the stand under it. And with the move, the plant president seemed, for the first time, to become really conscious of the Negro’s presence.

“Are you a newcomer to Garfield City?” he asked pleasantly.

“Yas, suh,” replied Josh, with a wide grin.

Though an honor grad of Tuskeegee and as intelligent as most professors, Josh always acted as people expect a Negro to act—when he was with strangers. Good protective coloration, he called it.

“You seem to be the first with initiative enough to think of working up a little business out here. It’s a nice idea, too. We’re on the edge of town, and it’s hard to get in for a shine.”

“Ah hopes to give full sat’sfaction, suh,” said Josh, polishing industriously.

“Is there anything else, Mr. Jenner?” asked Grace, the president’s secretary.

“No, that’s all,” Jenner said.

Stanley Grace went out to type the letter to Washington.

“I’m sure you’ll give satisfaction,” said Jenner to Josh. “And I hope you will come regularly—be, in a way, one of the plant employees.”

“Thank you, suh.”

Jenner’s smile deepened a little.

“It might not be a bad idea for you to look over some of the plant you’ll be visiting regularly,” he said. “I have a little time. Would you like to see it?”

“Very much, suh,” said Josh, who was thoroughly bewildered behind his sleepy-looking face, but naturally didn’t want to refuse such a thing.

It all seemed extremely kindly and democratic.

Jenner led the way through departments where gears were being stamped, ground or cut, depending on precision required and temper of alloy used. He went leisurely on into the plant’s big foundry.

“We make all our own castings,” the president said genially to the increasingly perplexed Negro. “See—there’s a cauldron that will handle forty tons of molten steel.”

The huge kettle in question was being swung by a crane at the moment. It came toward a row of forms where the metal was to be poured into molds. Next to the forms was a stairway, up an end wall, with a catwalk about ten feet up.

“We can see them pour from the catwalk,” said Jenner pleasantly. “It’s quite a sight. Come on up.”

Josh decided it was the most peculiar thing that had ever happened to him. But he went up, with Jenner beside him, talking, as if piloting any regular plant visitor around.

They got to the catwalk as the swinging cauldron of molten metal stopped over the forms. It was terrifically hot on the catwalk; the cauldron was very near. Josh stared down into its white-hot incandescence.

Jenner smiled beside him. And then his arms shot out.

“Look out! Don’t fall!” he screamed.

And he pushed Josh powerfully off the catwalk, straight toward the terrible cauldron a little below and beyond!

It was the last thing in the world Josh was expecting. It caught him completely off guard. It was simply impossible that any man, high or low, would have the ruthless nerve to try murder in a shop full of men. Impossible-—but it had happened.

The only thing that saved Josh, where it looked as if nothing could possibly have saved him, was the fact that tons of molten metal in a ponderous pot need suspension. A great chain, in this case, stretched taut and quivering by the weight it bore.

Josh’s body shot out and down toward the white-hot, molten surface. And it seemed as if he must plummet into it. But Josh had the strength and quickness of a black panther.

In midair, his body, like a cat’s body, turned a little so that he was facing in the direction of his wild fall. His arms snapped out and his hands clawed for the chain.

There was an instant of searing heat and reeking gas as he shot over the cauldron. There was an instant of blinding pain as his hands gripped the chain, almost red-hot itself. Then he had swung himself beyond, twenty feet past the waiting forms on the foundry floor.

He lit running like a black streak, but with his face taking on a grayish tinge as he realized just what he had almost come to. He kept on running, out of the foundry, through the plant and out the gate.

This face of death—where death seemed utterly fantastic and out of picture—had worn so fiendish a look that Josh knew he’d be a long time getting over it. But that knowledge didn’t slow him any as he sped to report to the man with the white hair and blazing, colorless eyes that was to Josh like some kind of God.

Benson’s pale eyes in his dead, white face were like little ice chips in a glacial sea. He seemed to stare right through Josh, such was his concentration on the report.

“That’s a thing no one would believe if it hadn’t actually happened,” he said at length. “The cold openness of it! And yet, it wasn’t as reckless as it seems. If he had succeeded in killing you, no one in the shop could have proved that you did not fall. All would have thought you had, because of his warning yell. So he would have gotten away with it. But it was mad. Insane! You say not one trace of his purpose was in his face?”

“No,” said Josh. “He was smiling and pleasant. No one could have guessed there was anything in his mind.”

“He must be a clever actor.”

Josh said, after a moment: “I can swear to that because I was watching his face closely. It was most unusual for a high executive to decide suddenly to take a shoe-shining Negro through the plant. I was sure something was wrong. So I kept watching his face, and now I realize there was one peculiar thing about him. He didn’t show any trace of dangerous intentions, but he did look just a little as if he were listening.”

“Listening?” said Benson.

“Yes! Almost as if some voice a long way off were trying to tell him something.”

The Avenger’s eyes glinted. Something about that last statement had set the flaming genius of his brain to moving in a new direction. But he didn’t put any of it into words.

“Stay in for a while, Josh,” he said. “And when you go out again, change your appearance a bit. Murder may strike at you again if you’re too easily recognized.”

Josh went out to one of the other vacant offices of the suite. And Benson turned to his small radio as the call signal of one of his aides sounded.

It was Smitty.

“Chief,” came the giant’s voice, in guarded accents, “I think I’ve stumbled onto something; so I thought I’d call and tell you about it.”

“Listening,” said The Avenger, voice quiet and crisp.

“You wanted me to get on the trail of the guys who tried to kill us. I didn’t have any definite lead on it; so I just began nosing around the crooks’ haunts, picking up what I could. Garfield City isn’t so big, but it seems it has a very well organized underworld. There’s a gang here as deadly and efficient as anything in Chicago. Run by a guy named Kopell, who is open for any job from murder down, for a few hundred bucks. Kopell lives openly and in style at the Garfield Point Hotel; has the whole top floor. So I went there, and I’ve been nosing since noon.”

“You’re there now?” said Benson.

“Yes!”

“Where are you speaking from? Your voice is barely audible.”

“I have to talk low,” explained Smitty. “I’m in a closet on Kopell’s floor. When he rented the floor, he didn’t rearrange any. The regular corridor is still there, with linen closet and all. I’m in the linen closet, now.”

“You said you’d stumbled onto something,” said Benson.

“Yes! Just a thing I happened to overhear. It was a mention of a guy at Garfield Gear. That’s the way it was put. “The guy at Garfield Gear.’ That’s all I heard, but to my mind it ties the company in with Garfield City’s underworld quite neatly.”

“Yes,” said Benson grimly, thinking of Josh’s terrible experience at the plant, “it does! Meanwhile, I have heard from Nellie Gray something that may help you. She has reported on two men who seem to be quite active in keeping tabs on Cranlowe’s wife. One is a young fellow whose eyes look much too old for him. The other is a jolly-looking fat man.”

“Check!” said Smitty. “Those are two of the guys that have been coming in and out of Kopell’s floor all afternoon. Signing off, chief. I’ll look around some more.”

The little radio went dead. And The Avenger turned from it. The glittering intensity of his colorless eyes showed that he was methodically tabulating what he had learned to date. More pieces all the time. With the proper places for them and more clearly indicated.