The Avenger 1 - Justice, Inc. (13 page)

The men Smitty was after, and over whom, though they didn’t yet realize it, the looming dead face of a man whose soul was as lifeless as his features drew ever closer, were on their way to the Buffalo airport.

That is, four of them were. The four were in an ordinary taxi. They were the big fellow with the black pads of hair on the backs of his hands, who had been a passenger the night Benson went to the men’s lavatory, two of the three ordinary-looking men who had also been along, and a newcomer—a dapper, slim man of forty, who was continually smiling with his lips but not with his eyes.

“Rena has the trunk?” the smiling man said.

“Yeah,” replied the big fellow with the hairy hands.

“The plane is booked solid?”

“You dummy! of course. Think we’d have other passengers?”

“You did, one night, I hear.”

The big man snapped out an oath.

“They didn’t stay aboard long! And a thing like that can’t happen again. We got it fixed so it can’t.”

The cab dumped them at the airport—four men who were dressed and who acted like any other four businessmen on the verge of a fast trip by plane. Each had a suitcase, of airplane weight. They walked toward the runway.

There, on the flat stretch, a transport stood with idling props. On its nose was painted S402. But it was the S404, all right—the one with the trapdoor. Somebody had decided that the switching of numbers was such a good idea that they’d make it permanent.

The four walked slowly; and in a moment, three other people from another cab caught up to them. There was a light trunk strapped to the back of the cab. The driver and an airport man got the trunk and carried it over the level field to the plane. They stowed it in the tail.

The three from the second cab were two men, average and unremarkable-looking as were the ones in the first taxi, and a woman. The woman was rather pretty, save for a hard line around the mouth. These, too, had innocent-looking airplane luggage with them in addition to the trunk. No one would have any suspicions about them, merely on looking them over. Seven people bound for Montreal by plane. One with a trunk. So what?

They climbed aboard. The props idled a little faster. A third cab drew up at the gate with a scream of brakes. From this cab leaped a figure that looked nine feet tall and five broad.

The giant lit running and raced toward the plane. He was a bizarre figure. For all his size, he had a hump on his back. It made you wonder how tall the tremendous hunchback would have grown if his spine had stayed straight.

“Hold that plane!” he yelled. “I’ve got to get aboard. Got to get to Montreal in a hurry!”

Aboard, the big fellow with the black pads of hair leaped to the door of the pilot’s compartment.

“Get going!” he snapped. “Some fool is trying to get on. Hurry!”

“I can’t get away till they take the chocks from under the wheels,” said the pilot. He waved wildly to the men on the ground to remove the blocks.

Near the steps still in place up to the plane door, the humpbacked giant who had ran from the cab was gesticulating and arguing with a field attendant.

“I don’t care if the plane is full! I’ve got to get aboard. I’ll sit in the aisle. And don’t try to tell me a ship like this one can’t get off the ground with just one passenger over capacity! These boats can take an extra half-ton overload and walk off with it.”

The attendant still barred the way. The humpbacked giant simply plucked him up by the collar, held him kicking two feet off the ground in one hand, and then set him aside a yard to the right.

They were closing the plane door. The giant got it, and forced it out against the pull of three men with seeming effortlessness. Then he was inside, beaming good nature and stupidity on the passengers.

“Sorry to cause a disturbance, folks, but I had to get aboard.”

The big fellow with the hairy hands was still at the pilot’s compartment. The pilot had heard the giant enter.

“Do I stall here till you can throw him off?” he said in a low tone.

“Yes!” the big man answered savagely. Then: “No. Here comes a couple of airport guys not on our payroll. We can’t stick around and have a brawl that’ll end with the cops sticking their bills in. That flat-faced, over-grown cripple! Well . . . nothing for it but to pull away fast.”

The door was slammed and secured. The pilot gave her the gun. The big ship flashed along the runway and majestically rose.

And in one of the seats always so curiously vacant when this crowd booked the plane, sat Smitty, beaming good nature with all his vast face and staring with amiable lack of intelligence at the others.

The pilot said just one word to the man with the black pads of hair.

“Where?”

“Just before we drop the other,” snapped the big fellow. “East end of the lake, as soon as you pick up the beacon light in the distance. We’ll fix the big dope like we fixed that other dummy who was fool enough to force his way on board. This guy got on at Buffalo—but he’ll never get off at Montreal.”

A trip in a big transport plane, particularly at night, is not very exciting. The motion is smooth, there is nothing to see out of the windows, and the subdued roar of the motors is lulling. Passengers feel more like dozing than anything else.

The seven in the Montreal plane acted as dull and sleepy as any normal passengers would. Now and then, the big fellow with the hairy hands would lean forward and say something to the man who was always smiling with his lips but not the rest of his face. But that was about the only sign of life any of them gave.

Only the tremendous fellow with the hump on his back seemed excited. He looked as if this were his first plane trip. He stared out the window and down, trying to see something in the June dark, and then grinned at his fellow passengers. He looked like a huge kid with a new red sled. But it wasn’t fooling the fellow with the perpetual, meaningless smile.

“I make the guy now,” this man said to the big fellow across the aisle from him, voice low enough to be drowned from other ears by the motor hum. “He drove Leon’s car.”

The big fellow whistled soundlessly.

“So he’s not the dope he looks to be! Leon’s chauffeur, huh? I suppose he thinks he’s disguised, with that hump on his back. Might as well try to disguise Pikes Peak!”

“He must be hired by this Benson guy,” said the smiling man. But his smile was a little worried. “So now what?”

The other shrugged. “You know what. It woudn’t make any difference if he was as harmless as he’s tryin’ to look. Any way it lays, he goes out the trapdoor just the same.”

“He’s awful big. And did you see him lift the monkey at the field in one hand?”

“The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Got that stuff in your suitcase?”

“Sure.”

“Go and get it.”

The smiling man got up, after a moment, and went to the tail of the plane. The stewardess, the same rather pretty girl with the slightly shifty eyes who was always on these runs, got him his bag. The man took from it an innocent-looking handkerchief, and blew his nose loudly. But when he shut the bag, and put the handkerchief in his pocket, there was a small vial of colorless stuff in the linen folds.

The man came back, stared out the window of his side, and then crossed over to Smitty’s side. With an apologetic look, he sat in the seat just ahead of Smitty’s, and stared out the window there, as though searching for some spot not to be seen from his own seat.

Smitty settled more comfortably against the hump on his back—and waited.

He had told Benson he had an idea how they could find the criminals’ headquarters. He had explained in eight words:

“I’ll force my way into the plane, too.”

Then after he had deliberately placed himself in the position which had spelled such tragedy for his boss, a month ago, Smitty would wait and see what happened.
If
he could out-smart the gang and stay alive!

The first part of the scheme had worked all right. He was aboard the plane, and they were getting close to the Thousand Islands region. But that first part was a cinch compared to the second—staying alive.

Smitty grinned like a pleased kid and watched every move of the others. Particularly he kept his eyes on the man who had just sat in front of him, and who had gone to the rear and gotten a handkerchief from his bag. It was from this source that Smitty expected danger.

Because he was looking ahead so hard, he didn’t hear or sense the man
behind
him move a little. This one, a slim, dapper fellow with no chin, stealthily reached to his armpit and got out a gun. He leaned suddenly forward.

Smitty, with all his attention on the man ahead, felt a gun muzzle bore into the back of his neck. He froze. One small move, and he’d have his head nearly blown off. He didn’t try to make a move. With one easy maneuver, they had him cold. It might have been expected where the odds were seven to one.

No one said anything. No one moved hastily, now that the huge fellow with the futile hump on his back was caught.

Very leisurely, the smiling man in front of Smitty turned with the handkerchief in his clenched fist. The girl with the hard line around her mouth looked on with wide eyes, but with no protest. The other man just grinned.

The smiling man squeezed hard. The vial in the handkerchief broke, and the sickish smell of chloroform filled the cabin.

“Pilot!” yelled Smitty suddenly. Yelling was all he could do. He could no more disregard the gun at the base of his skull by a physical move than he could fly without wings. “Somebody! Help—”

The chloroform-soaked handkerchief was jammed over his mouth and nose. He did struggle then. But the struggle rapidly grew weaker, then died. The handkerchief was jammed tighter.

The giant slumped in the seat.

Two of the other men were opening the trapdoor. Cool air breezed up from the vacuum formed. They slanted the limp giant toward the oblong.

Two thousand feet below, the ebony-black water of Lake Ontario presented a pavement-hard surface to anything dropped from such a height. Hitting water from there is like hitting granite.

They dropped the big man through. He slid down the backward-slanting door like coal down a chute, and was gone.

The big plane roared steadily on.

The gray fox of a man for whom Smitty had made this supreme sacrifice—in vain, as these killers could have testified—had left the hotel only a few minutes after the giant’s departure.

He went to the brokerage firm of Carney & Buell, who handled Buffalo Tap & Die locally and whose New York affiliate had floated the stock issue in the first place. Smitty had said that Leon had had him drive here just before his visit to John Lansing’s deserted house.

When the flesh of Benson’s countenance had gone dead, it had removed him at a stroke from the world of normal men. But it had done something else, too. It had made him a man of a thousand faces.

A few touches of his steely, sensitive fingers—and he was someone else, with the flesh staying in the place into which it was prodded.

He walked into Carney & Buell’s place with his countenance sober and squarish and his hat on the exact center of his head. He was an impressive figure. When he asked to see one of the partners, Wallace Buell came out at once.

“I am Mrs. Martineau’s legal adviser,” Benson said. “I came to inquire a little about her financial affairs.”

Buell’s gimlet black eyes widened a little.

“I don’t understand. We know Mrs. Martineau, and have had direct dealings with her. But I was not aware that she had retained a legal adviser.”

“She hasn’t, exactly,” Benson said, the perfect picture of a sober, humorless corporation lawyer. “I did work for Robert Martineau before he died. When I read of his widow disposing of her Buffalo Tap & Die stock, which I regard as sound, I decided to investigate a little on my own. Why did she sell that stock, do you suppose, Mr. Buell?”

Buell looked harrassed.

“A dozen people, mainly reporters, have asked me that. Good Heavens, I don’t know why! We’re only Mrs. Martineau’s brokers, not her guardians. Why don’t you ask her?”

“I’ve tried to. I can’t get in touch with her.” Benson’s pale and icy eyes were studying this man, turning him inside out. Was the agitation that of anyone hounded by reporters, or was it caused by fear?