The Avenger 9 - Tuned for Murder (5 page)

“And you didn’t hear the shots?”

“No!”

“Yet a girl heard ’em through a wall—”

“That partition is thin.” Jenner came to the defense of his secretary. “It could act as a sounding board. It is quite possible to hear a sound through it more easily than through Grace’s door.”

The young man thanked his boss mutely with his eyes. The detective grunted a little.

“Then nobody knows who went near that corridor in the last half-hour!” he snapped.

Stanley Grace shook his head. Jenner said nothing.

Wainwright looked curiously perturbed.

“Nothing out of the way happened, about the time of the shots, that any of you three know about?” persisted the homicide man.

Then Wainwright said, as if he didn’t know whether to bring it up or not: “There was one odd thing, officer.”

“Well? Well, let’s have it.”

“I wouldn’t mention it at all, save that I know the police want all details on such a case. It certainly seems impossible that it makes any significance. Yet—it was strange.”

“What was strange?” snapped the detective, on the verge of forgetting the prestige of millionaire Wainwright.

“Jenner’s dog, Prince.”

All eyes went to the fox terrier on the divan, trained to lie still and silent there when his master was busy. Prince wagged his tail a little and watched them all with bright little eyes.

“Prince howled just before the girl screamed. About five minutes before. It was the weirdest howl I ever heard. No, not quite. I heard much the same thing, once, on a hunting trip in Maine. A dog with one of the party began much the same howling. The guide got up and ran out—and found that man dead. The dog had sensed it in some way, and howled for his dead master.”

The detective pursed his lips, plainly impressed.

“Hey, now! There may be something here. So Prince howled about five minutes before the girl ran to the hall when she heard the shots. Maybe these guys died before any of us know. Anything else happen?”

None of the three said anything.

“Are you guessing at the five minutes?” said the detective to Wainwright.

“No! I looked at the clock about then. I looked because I had an appointment in the center of town at eleven thirty and I wanted to be sure I didn’t rest too long—”

He stopped suddenly.

The homicide man was staring at him, and he went on, his florid face a bit pale.

“I wasn’t feeling well. I proposed to go into the next room and lie down for a few minutes.”

“You mean the little room off this office, that opens onto that corridor? The one where them two guys are lying now, right outside the door?”

“That’s right,” said the financier.

“Hey! If you were right in there, with only a thin door between you, when they were shot—”

“I don’t know that I was,” said Wainwright.

“Huh? What do you mean, you don’t know. You’d know where you went, wouldn’t you?”

Wainwright moved his head as if his collar pinched his thick neck.

“I don’t know,” he said, “because about that time—my mind went blank.”

“Your mind—”

“Went blank,” repeated Wainwright. “I guess I fainted, or something. I didn’t snap out of it till just before you came from headquarters. So I don’t know if I went in that room or not.”

The detective stared at Jenner.

“Were you here with him?”

“Yes,” said Jenner reluctantly.

“Well, then you know. Did he faint or what?”

“He didn’t faint,” said Jenner, after a moment.

The homicide man just stared at him, with red beginning to show in his jowls at the stalling around.

“He went into the room and lay down,” Jenner went on.

“I didn’t know till this minute that he’d felt faint at all, or that he had that—er—mental lapse he mentions now.”

“He walked right in and lay down?”

“Yes!” Jenner glanced apologetically at Wainwright. “I didn’t say anything about that before, because it is so fantastic that Mr. Wainwright could have anything to do with the murders—”

“You heard the dog howl,” the homicide man cut in, speaking to Wainwright again. “You started to go into the next room. Then your mind went blank and that’s all you know.”

“That’s right,” said the financier.

“This mind-a-blank stuff,” said the detective. “Has that happened to you many times?”

“This is the first time it ever happened,” said Wainwright miserably.

“So you don’t have any idea what you did when you went into the next room?”

“No—I don’t.”

“But if the door was open so Mr. Jenner could see you lie down, then he must have seen whether you stayed down or not.”

Wainwright looked at Jenner.

“The door,” Jenner said, dragging the words out, “didn’t stay open. I walked over and closed it, so Mr. Wainwright could get a complete rest for a few minutes. But whatever you’re thinking—”

“I’m thinking,” said the detective, “that anything could happen, even with a man like Mr. Wainwright, while his mind was a blank.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, man!” snapped Jenner.

“He isn’t being ridiculous,” said Wainwright, with a wan smile.

“Glad you take it that way,” said the homicide man. “You won’t mind if I search you, then?”

“Not at all,” said Wainwright. “You’d have to, of course.”

So the homicide man searched him. And found nothing. But in the next room, under the cushions of the chaise-longue where the promotor had lain, he found a silenced .32 revolver with two shots gone and fingerprints all over the butt.

The bullets in the gun matched the slugs that had drilled the skulls of Blandell and Sessel. And the fingerprints matched the fingertips of Allen C. Wainwright.

One of the wealthiest, most respected magnates in the State had killed two men—just after a dog had howled weirdly—while his mind was “a blank.”

It wasn’t possible, but it had been done.

Thus, three eminent men in Garfield City had done mad and violent things in a space of twenty-four hours. Were all the prominent citizens of the ill-starred town to go insane? The humbler citizens began to wonder.

On Route 232, the huge sedan with the white-haired man at the wheel slowed suddenly. It takes eyes like telescopes to drive a car at ninety and ninety-five miles an hour on an open highway and see things far enough ahead to slow for them if necesssary. The Avenger’s colorless, flaring eyes were equal to the task.

About a half mile ahead he saw the sawhorse across the road, and the sign on it. He even read the sign at that distance.

TURN RIGHT FOR GARFIELD CITY

He had the great car rolling slowly by the time the sign was reached. A car and a light van came past them from the opposite direction. From Garfield City.

“Say, maybe the road’s still open,” said Smitty. “Maybe the sign’s just been put up and work hasn’t started, yet. Those cars are coming from town as if things weren’t blocked off.”

Benson turned the wheel, and the sedan angled with a noiseless little drop onto the narrow dirt road leading to the right through thick woods.

“We’ll do as the sign says,” Benson said quietly.

“But—” began Mac uneasily.

He stared at the chief’s profile, and stopped. The dead, white face was like something cast in metal. You didn’t argue with the owner of that awesome countenance.

Mac changed the subject hastily. “Ye say ye got some dope on Cranlowe, as well as Blandell, in your investigations last night?”

“Yes,” said Benson. “Cranlowe is just as eccentric as you’d expect a man to be who would give such a story to the newspapers. He is about sixty, looks like Edgar Allen Poe, and is tyrannical, tempestuous and honest as daylight. His wife is much younger. Second marriage. She lives in a town apartment most of the time. He has a son who is fundamentally all right, according to reports, but inclined to be wild.”

Benson was sending the car along the rutted road at thirty-five. He slowed for a sharp bend to the left.

“Cranlowe has made a great deal of money from his inventions. But he hasn’t kept any of it. He is a fool with money—always spending before taking it in. Thus, he is chronically without a cent, and deeply in debt. That’s where Blandell has come in, in the past. He has financed Cranlowe, and he has taken the perpetual chance that Cranlowe wouldn’t be able to invent anything more, to repay him—”

Ahead was a gully recently washed in the road. Rocks lay in it, forcing a very slow speed. Beyond the gully, a hundred yards or so, the road skirted the edge of an abandoned quarry. There was a rail along the road here that wasn’t very heavy. The quarry had filled with water, as most do, making a small, deep-edged lake.

“It doesn’t look like anybody in his senses would mark this road out for a detour,” Smitty grumbled. “Particularly a detour for a big highway like 232.”

“Chief—
look out!”
yelled Josh.

Dick Benson had made his millions by professional adventuring, in the days when he was a warm, normal human being, before crime’s tragedy had made him into a machine to fight crime.

In his teens he had spotted rubber in South American jungles, led native armies in Java, made aerial maps in the Congo. In his twenties he had mined amethysts in Australia and emeralds in Brazil; found gold in Alaska and diamonds in the Transvaal. He had done these things so successfully that while still a very young man he was very wealthy.

But the point was that Benson had made his life a series of narrow escapes from death. And in a routine like that, you get to such a fine point that almost no danger can approach you without some split-second warning.

The warning yell of Josh Newton was not needed by The Avenger.

About a second and a half before the Negro shouted, Benson had seen all that he needed to know with one quick flash of his colorless eyes.

He had seen three little glints of light on something metallic peeping over two logs that lay in a shallow V at the side of the road. He had seen the glints move ever so little to follow the movement of the car.

And his steely white finger had flashingly pressed a button.

The bulletproofed glass windows of the sedan could be rolled up and down by hand, like ordinary windows. But in time of emergency, they could be flashed into place.

With the press of that button, every open window of the sedan shot up into closed position with the release of powerful springs. And as they thudded into place, there was a sound like the beginning of a young war.

Three submachine guns poured streams of lead at the huge, old-looking car. And the car acted toward the lead pellets much as a duck’s back acts toward drops of rain.

There was a clangor like that of three riveting machines at work on a steel boiler. And the car rolled slowly and steadily along with no damage whatever, save for cloudy patches on the windows where the bullets struck.

The Avenger could have rolled on past with no discomfort. But he didn’t choose to do that.

He turned the wheel hard left, waddled the car up the dry gully like a tank, straight at the felled trees.

There were yells from the unseen gunners behind the tree trunks. They kept on firing at the pointed, armored snout of the car. Then, at the last minute, they broke and ran.

But they didn’t run far!

Benson and Smitty and Josh and Mac could have shot all three of them as easily as you’d shoot clay pigeons on a shooting range. But they didn’t. Benson, himself, never took a human life. His aides did now and then, when absolutely forced into it. But on this occasion they didn’t feel forced.

The Avenger’s white finger pressed another button.

From a small tube opening just under the breather-cap on the radiator, shot a slim little cylinder. It was like a miniature torpedo shooting from the tiny tube of a miniature sub.

The cylinder arced gracefully over the head of the running men, and plopped to the ground before them.

“Lam! Tear gas!” yelled Gargantua.

But the little cylinder didn’t contain anything so prosaic as tear gas. In it was a composition devised by Mac, who was one of the country’s finest chemists in addition to being a brilliant bacteriologist and pharmacist.

The gas in the tiny projectile was so powerful that a whiff knocked a man out for an hour; and so volatile that it could fill a ten-yard space in a little less than a second.