The Avenger 9 - Tuned for Murder (4 page)

This was not the lounging room Blandell had spoken of. It was the anteroom where Jenner’s secretary sat on guard. Grace was there now, but he was working at something on his desk. The two, one a well-known financier and the other a brilliant scientist and writer, slid past like burglars without the secretary looking up from his desk.

Reaching the door of the next room, they heard voices from the room beyond, Jenner’s office. They stopped there in the corridor, to listen. But the distance was too great. They couldn’t quite make out words.

After several minutes, Sessel reached out his hand to open the lounging-room door and creep into it. He stopped suddenly. From Jenner’s office came the sharp howl of a dog! Jenner’s fox terrier. The howl was weird, like that which dogs sometimes utter when they bay at the moon. Only there was pain in this cry.

They looked at each other. That happened when I was here, was the thought in Blandell’s scared eyes. And Sessel showed his own thought as plainly. That happened when I was here. Now what—

Again, his hand went forward to turn the doorknob. But, again, he never did.

The door banged open suddenly, and a man stood on the threshold. Blandell and Sessel stared at him, started to turn and get away—but stopped dead.

The man had a gun in his hand. It was a silenced gun, which is an out-of-the-ordinary weapon. He was holding it level before him, staring over the sights.

The man grinned, showing teeth in a wolfish snarl, and pressed the trigger twice, after deliberate aim.

A car was skimming the road from New York City to Garfield City in the midmorning sun. It wasn’t an impressive-looking car. It was the large model of a well-known maker, four or five years old. It was rather dull, of enamel and metal trim. You’d look at it and think that it was rolling along exceptionally silent, and rather fast, but that was all.

Actually, the sedan was making ninety-four miles an hour, though the tremendous special motor under the unobtrusive hood was only turning at a rate that would propel the average vehicle at fifty or so.

That dull old car was the favorite automobile of The Avenger, who was rich enough to have ordered Rolls Royces in fleets of a dozen, if he had cared to. It had a top speed of a hundred and thirty miles an hour. It was bulletproofed throughout, and equipped with devices and special little inventions for offense and defense that would have made an army-tank officer gasp.

Benson was speeding to Garfield City in answer to the call of an acquaintance of his, Henry Sessel. With him were the giant, Smitty, and the sleepy-looking Negro, Josh. Also with him was another aide who had not been at Bleek Street when he read the account of Cranlowe’s new war weapon.

This third aide was a tall, bony Scotchman, Fergus MacMurdie.

“Whoosh, mon!” Mac said to Benson. “It seems to me we’re on a mighty queer trip.”

Mac was the soul of pessimism. It always seemed to him, when Benson strapped on his weapons and went out on a job, that they were on a mighty queer, or mighty senseless, or mighty futile mission. And always it was sure to end in failure.

There was only one time the Scot was cheerful. That was in a jam when there seemed no possible way to escape death. In such a situation, when any sensible man would give up all for lost, Mac would chirp that things were going well, and that they’d win out in another minute or two.

“It’s going to be one of the queerest of all our trips, Mac,” The Avenger said. His voice, as ever, was quiet; but the ring of command was strong in it. The man with the dead face and the white, thick hair was a great natural leader.

“Ye think there is a connection between Cranlowe’s war invention and the trouble of this man Blandell, the banker?” probed Mac.

“I don’t know yet,” Benson said, stepping the speed of the mighty sedan up to ninety-eight on a smooth stretch.

“There would seem to be nothin’ but coincidence in it,” persisted Mac. “Just because a mon goes crazy for a minute—”

“If Blandell alone had suffered a temporary lapse, it would be one thing. But Sessel, his nephew, also— No, that’s too much. I know Sessel and have read his works on biology. They don’t agree with some of my own findings, but that’s beside the point. The point being that Sessel is eminently sane. If he, too, had a lapse, it must have been artificially induced.”

“But chief,” said Smitty, “what connection could such things have with Cranlowe’s invention?”

Benson was silent for a moment, while the great car hummed smoothly on its bullet flight.

“I spent most of last night getting information on Blandell,” he said at last, pale eyes glinting like ice under a winter moon. “And I got hold of one bit of knowledge that might hint at the connection. John Blandell is the financial backer of Jesse Cranlowe, and has been from the inventor’s start. What that means—if anything—we’ll have to find out when we get to Garfield City. Which should be”—he glanced at the electric clock in the dash—“in about twenty-five minutes.”

Others were calculating the speed of the huge car. These others had learned when The Avenger left New York, and had timed his speed by clocking him from the big city to Westport, a town halfway to Garfield City.

They had learned of Benson’s intended visit by the simple procedure of tapping the telephone from Blandell’s house when Sessel phoned for help.

“He’ll be here in about twenty-five minutes,” one of the men said, almost like an eerie echo of the white-haired man’s voice miles away.

“Gosh! It just ain’t possible for a guy to roll a car that fast!” exclaimed another. There were five of them. They were in a large, duplex room in the tower apartment of the nineteen-story Garfield Point Hotel. It was a lavishly appointed place, with expensive fittings. The men didn’t go very well with it. The interior decorator who had furnished it evidently hadn’t realized that gunmen would be using the apartment.

There was a slouching, narrow-jawed fellow with a felt hat on the back of his head; a slant-eyed man who had drawn only the worst points from forbears of various nationalities; a youngster with old, savage eyes; a fat man who looked jolly till you stared at his deadly, dope-diminished pupils; and a grinning ape of a man who might appropriately have been named Gargantua.

“The guy’d have to be doin’ better than ninety an hour to come that fast,” argued the narrow-jawed thug.

“Nearly a hundred,” corrected the jolly-looking fat man.

“But, look! Nobody can make that on a public road—”

“You don’t seem to have heard who was doing the driving,” snapped the youngster with the old eyes. “The Avenger. Now, do you get it?”

“No! Who’s The Avenger?”

The other four stared at him open-mouthed.

“Well, I knew you were dumb,” said the fat man, not looking jolly for the moment. “But I didn’t know you were that dumb! ‘Who’s The Avenger?’ he asks.”

“All right, who is he?”

“First you take the Feds at Washington and roll ’em all up in a lump,” said the young fellow with the old eyes. “Then you take all the best detectives in the country and add ’em. Then take a big-shot scientist from about every line you can think of. Bundle ’em all up into one guy and add J. P. Morgan. Then you’ve got The Avenger.”

“Nuts!” said the narrow-jawed man. “Nobody could be that hot.”

The grim looks of the others—almost as if he had uttered some kind of blasphemy—subtly changed his mind.

He cleared his throat.

“That’s why we got such strict orders to knock him off, huh?” he said, in a different tone.

“Yeah! And that’s why we get such heavy dough if we manage it,” said the fat man. “Believe me, we’ll have earned it!”

“Aw, we can’t miss, the way Kopell’s planned it,” said Gargantua. “But hadn’t we better get goin’?”

The fat man looked with deadly eyes at his watch.

“Yeah! Take us about fifteen minutes to get out there, and a couple more to fix things for ’em.”

They piled out of the room and down to the street. There, a heavy closed truck waited for them. Two got in the cab, and the other three in the rear. In the closed back of the truck there was a freshly painted detour sign.

The sign read:

ROUTE 232 CLOSED
TURN RIGHT FOR GARFIELD CITY
TEMPORARY 232

The sign was nailed to a sawhorse of the type used by road gangs, ready to be placed.

The truck drove out of town, and four miles along the main route. There it dropped the sign and one of the men.

The truck turned back a quarter of a mile, passing a narrow dirt road to the right as it did so. It went on just a little farther to a lane to the right. The lane was hardly more than a pair of ruts running through woods. But the truck took it for five or six hundred yards, and then stopped. Ahead could barely be seen still another road. Beyond the road was a sheer drop into deep, still water.

“I’ll stick at the wheel,” said the fat man. “You three go on to the point you know about, with the tommy guns. We’ll get ’em comin’ or goin’. Doesn’t matter which.”

The three took up submachine guns and crept through the woods. There was a place where two big dead trees had fallen into a V. Anyhow, they looked as if they had fallen till you examined them carefully. Then it became clear that they had been felled that way, recently.

The three squatted behind the barricade and poked the snouts of their guns out. The section of road the guns covered had suffered a recent washout. There was a gully, littered with stone, over which a car would have to creep at a bare five or six miles an hour.

Gargantua grinned over his gun-sights.

“I don’t care if the white-headed guy is all the things you say he is. Brother, nobody could get out of this!”

“And if they did,” added the man with the narrow jaw, “nobody could get out of the second installment. How deep did you say that lake in the old quarry is?”

“Sixty-eight feet deep, in close to the road,” said the evil-eyed youngster. “Out further, maybe a hundred. Nobody knows.”

“So they go out in a bust of tommy slugs,” grinned Gargantua, “or they feed the fish, seventy feet down. Either way we get our dough from Kopell. Easy!”

At Garfield Gear Company there was the devil to pay. There always is when two prominent men are murdered. Even when, in the minds of all, those two men were insane.

In the corridor off Jenner’s private lounging room, John Blandell and Henry Sessel lay dead. Each had a bullet hole between his eyes.

A girl clerk in the general office had found them. There had been, she told the police hysterically, a couple of sounds in the corridor like hard handclaps. Then the sounds of two bodies thudding to the floor. She had been at the filing cabinets backed against the corridor partition; so she had heard the sounds no one else had.

She had gone around into the corridor, not sure anything was wrong, and had seen the two bodies. Her screams had aroused the general office and brought the yard detective who had notified the police.

The police had a swell job on their hands!

The two men had been crudely disguised as two other men. A call to the Blandell home had cleared that up: they had gotten away by an insane attack on a couple of doctors, in their clothes and car. Nutty as a pecan orchard, all right. But that didn’t stop the fact that murder had been done!

And it was the murder itself that stymied them.

There were two men dead in the corridor. They had been shot with a silenced gun. But no employees had been in that corridor, to hear them tell it. And neither had anybody else.

“So the guys shot each other and then swallowed the gun,” rapped the harassed homicide man in Jenner’s office.

There were three others in the office with him. They were Ned Jenner; Stanley Grace, Jenner’s secretary; and a man known not only over Garfield City, but all over the State: Allen C. Wainwright, financier, promoter, many times a millionaire.

“You!” the homicide man shot out, glaring at Stanley Grace. “You say the door from your office, opening on the corridor, was partly open. You didn’t see those two go by? Or anybody after them?”

“No,” said Grace, awed by the tone. He moistened his lips nervously.