The Avenger 9 - Tuned for Murder (7 page)

Some hours later on the twenty-fourth floor of the Garfield Woolens Institute Building, a girl hurried down the hall to the street window that opened on a fire escape. She was a very pretty girl, about twenty-five, tall and slim, with soft brown eyes.

The eyes, at the moment, however, were oddly vacant-looking. Vacant, and yet glazed with a fixed purpose.

The hall was floored with marble slabs and her little heels made tapping sounds on the stone. Crisp, direct little sounds.
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
Toward the hall window and the fire escape.

At the window, she paused. Then she opened the broad, metal-sashed lower pane. She stepped quickly out onto the escape. So quickly that you’d think she was fleeing from a fire. Only there was no fire in the building behind her; nothing apparent to drive her there.

She stood on the twenty-fourth-floor balcony of the escape and looked down onto Garfield City’s most crowded street. And with that look, the dreadful purpose on her mind became all too plain.

Far below, cars crawled like little beetles, and moving pinpoints were busy people. She stared down at them, down two hundred and fifty feet to the hard sidewalk.

And in her eyes was no sorrow, no rage, no emotion whatever. There was just the empty, glazed look.

She climbed over the waist-high iron railing of the escape balcony. She stood facing forward, hands behind her, loosely clutching the railing. Far below, a woman chanced to look up. She screamed. More people looked, and yelled and shouted.

The girl, calm-faced and empty-eyed, released her hold on the rail and stepped off, as if she intended to walk on empty air and was sure that it would support her.

Strange things happening in Garfield City. Grim things. There seemed no sense to them. Certainly there seemed no central, connecting thread of meaning. But one thing might have been gleaned from all of them, had an observer known all the facts and had wit enough to put them together.

Each occurrence was in some way tied in with Jesse Cranlowe, eccentric, famous inventor.

The old man had driven Cranlowe’s station wagon to deliver his plea for money to Jenner.

Jenner had substituted a freshly tooled die for an old one—to fit the press punching out a part of Cranlowe’s torpedo control.

And the girl who had stepped into thin air, twenty-four floors up, happened to be Cranlowe’s private secretary, on an errand in town for the inventor.

All concerned with Cranlowe.

At about that hour, when the street in front of the Woolens Institute Building was being roped off and cleaned up, a Negro girl and a blonde were reporting to a man with snow-white hair and a dead, waxlike face from which colorless eyes peered forth like chips of ice. That is, they were going to report for duty as soon as the man came into the room. Meanwhile, the blonde stared up at the good-natured moon face of a giant whose torso was so muscled that his arms couldn’t hang straight at his sides.

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Nellie Gray to Smitty. “You mean to say the car was knocked over into seventy feet of water with you four in it?”

“That’s right,” said Smitty. He didn’t grin outwardly as he stared down at her, but he grinned inwardly, enjoying her amazement.

“Well, how in the world is it that you’re alive?”

“We turned mermen,” said Smitty.

Nellie Gray stamped her small foot. “You big, dumb lug—”

“Don’t let him get you down,” smiled the pretty Negress, in a soft-cultured voice. She was Rosabel Newton, Josh’s wife. She, too, was a valued aide of the Avenger.

“How did you get out of that one?” snapped Nellie.

Smitty let his grin show on his lips, then. The tiny blonde usually led him around by the nose like a captive elephant. He enjoyed seeing her at a loss, for once.

“We used the motor fan for a propeller, and the car rose right up to the top,” he said.

A spot of clear red glowed on each of Nellie’s pink-and-white cheeks. “If you don’t—”

Smitty became more serious. “You know the sedan’s windows were made gas-tight, in case anyone tried to kill us that way. Well, it came in handy in the quarry. With the windows up tight, there was air enough in the sedan to keep us going for about two minutes under water. In that time we fastened on the nose clips and the little oxygen tanks the chief kept in the car—again for use in case of gas. But they were just as effective for use under water. We rolled down the sedan’s windows, waited a little while, and then floated up to the top of the quarry. And that was that.”

“Yes, simple!” jeered Nellie. “But it’s a miracle you weren’t killed. My heavens!”

The startled look in her eyes and the pallor of her cheeks was something Smitty liked to see. The giant had a soft spot in his heart for this diminutive blond tornado.

“It’s nice for you to think of me like that,” he said awkwardly.

Nellie turned woman on him.

“I wasn’t thinking of you at all,” she snapped. “I was thinking of the chief and Josh and Mac.”

The hot retort on the giant’s lips was checked by the appearance of the three named.

Smitty and the two girls were in a large office which was one of six in a vacant suite. The Avenger had decided that as long as his foes thought he and the rest were dead, it would be a good idea to have them go on thinking that. He hadn’t wanted to go to a hotel because their presence might be reported. So he had come here, to the office building of an old friend, and secretly arranged to use this vacant suite. He had put cots in. It would be their headquarters in Garfield City.

Benson felt safe because he knew he could trust the building owner. The Avenger had friends in almost every city in the land; and such was his judgment of men that none ever failed him.

Benson’s colorless, icy eyes were not quite so sharp as they turned on Nellie.

He told her and Rosabel what had been discovered to date, in a few, brief words. Very few, and very brief. For there was not much to tell, as yet. A man had invented a super war weapon, and at once a lot of mysterious things had begun to happen. The underworld was somehow mixed into it. That was all that was known.

“So we’ll start at once to learn some more,” Benson concluded. “Mrs. Cranlowe, the inventor’s young wife, is in town. You will take rooms in her building, Nellie, and make her acquaintance. Find out from her what you can. No matter how irrelevant it may seem, what you hear may be valuable. So make a note of everything. You, Rosabel, will be Nellie’s maid. And keep a gun with you.”

The colorless eyes, like ice in a polar dawn, turned on Josh.

“At the Garfield Gear Company, two men had suffered strange mental lapses. Just outside the company yard, another seemed to have suffered one, too. And the first two men were killed—at Garfield Gear. Then there was that fuse casing, which may or may not be significant. You, Josh, will keep an eye on that place and all the executives in it.”

The cold, pale eyes raked the red, freckled face of MacMurdie. “You will interview the psychiatrists who tended Blandell and Sessel, before they were murdered.”

The giant came next.

“Smitty, try to get on the trail of that gang who tried to kill us at the quarry. Yours will be the most dangerous job, not only because you’re going after out-and-out gunmen, but also because you’re apt to be spotted. The rest of us can disguise ourselves a little. You can’t.”

“Whoosh,” chuckled Mac. “I’ll say not! Ye could disguise Pikes Peak as easy as Smitty.”

“You’re not too easy to make into a chorus girl, yourself,” growled the giant, looking at the Scot’s freckled homeliness.

Benson looked at the two, and the byplay stopped.

“All of you,” said The Avenger, “be on the alert as you never have before. We don’t know yet who our enemies are, but we do know they are as clever as Satan himself. Any one of us who relaxes his guard for a moment, will probably die for it.”

Benson had said that Smitty’s was the most dangerous job. It wasn’t. The task The Avenger had in mind to tackle was far more dangerous. But always he excluded himself when talking of peril.

Benson wanted to talk, at once, with Cranlowe. Which meant that he would have to get into a heavily guarded fastness to see a man who, after that defiant ultimatum to a warlike world, would shoot on sight any person he was not acquainted with or sure of.

To accomplish this, The Avenger had thought up a typically fantastic and clever plan.

He would go to see Cranlowe in a dead man’s shoes!

When Benson had come up from the sunken sedan, he had carefully taken along a small case which was nearly always with him. He turned to that, now.

It was about the size of a small overnight bag; but when he opened it, it revealed equipment not usually found in such bags.

There was a top tray filled with tissue-thin glass shells, to fit over his eyeballs. Each pair had a slightly different color. Then there were wigs, the face tints and plastic for building up features. But this latter was seldom used, for the very curious reason that Benson’s face, itself, seemed to be made of a living plastic.

Because of this fact, Benson could mold his face into the likeness of almost any person he chose; and it accounted for the nickname whispered in fear in the underworld, Man of a Thousand Faces.

In the lid of the little case was a mirror. Beside this, Benson pinned a photograph of—John Blandell.

The steely, white fingers prodded at the dead white face, and a miracle was wrought.

Blandell’s face had been heavy, pudgy-featured. With a great deal of manipulation and the use of a very little plastic, Benson’s face became the same way. Blandell’s eyes were brown; Benson slipped two of the ingenious little eye-shells over his eyeballs, and had brown eyes. Blandell’s hair was brown, streaked with gray. There was a wig like that in the case. Blandell’s body was burly, sagging with middle age. Benson’s body became that way with the use of artful rubber forms that could be inflated at waist and thigh, hips and upper arms.

The Avenger went to the corridor door of the empty office suite, and he was not Benson. He even walked like Blandell; in his careful gleaning of information concerning the banker, he had learned all his mannerisms.

The Avenger was not Benson—he was a man shot dead and at that moment in a funeral parlor being prepared for the grave.

He went out of the building, head down to keep from rousing incredulous recognition among chance acquaintances of Blandell, and climbed into a hired car. He drove to the country place of Jesse Cranlowe.

It had seemed insanely foolhardy for any man to dare to announce with all possible publicity that he was the possessor of a secret worth millions to any supercrook who could steal it. But a look at his place showed that he had quite a chance of protecting that secret, at that.

Cranlowe Heights was on a bare hilltop about eighteen miles out of Garfield City. The hilltop had been made bare. There was nothing but close-cropped grass for five hundred yards around the knoll, giving no possible cover for anyone trying to sneak up on it.

Around the base of the hill was an iron fence at least twelve feet high. Along the top ran a single heavy wire; and that wire was charged with voltage enough to kill a man at a touch. Along the top of the fence, floodlights were studded to play over the close-cut grass outside at night.