The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion (14 page)

The cage went down, with an angry detective still berating a subdued watchman. Benson turned to Nellie.

“The woman from the rear-house is in it up to her ears,” said Nellie. “On top of that, she is a killer. She murdered the real cleaning woman, supposed to take this floor of the Leggitt Building, about an hour ago.”

“You trailed her here?”

“No,” said Nellie. “She slugged me at the other woman’s place, over west of here. I only came here because I thought I might get information on the dead woman from her employer.” Nellie felt tenderly of her head. “And here, big as life, was the woman from the rear-house.”

“She killed the real cleaning” woman and came here herself?” repeated Benson. “She wanted very badly indeed to get into this building and out again without its ever being known, I should say. I wonder why.”

“I think,” said Nellie, “she came here to get this.”

She drew from her dress the plain envelope she had taken from the desk in the end office.

“Came to get it?” said The Avenger. “She was going into the office, then, when you caught her?” he questioned.

“No, she was coming out.”

“Then she must have come to deliver the envelope, not leave it. Though she may have taken something away with her, too.”

The Avenger’s voice halted. He had been opening the envelope calmly as he talked. Now, he held the contents, a large sheet of paper crowded with figures and symbols.

“What is it?” asked Nellie, knowing it must be something pretty important from the glitter in the diamond-bright eyes.

“As far as a swift glance can tell,” said Dick, “this is the missing secret formula for making the tubing gaskets at the Manhattan Gasket plant!”

Nellie stared at him, her own eyes brighter than usual.

“I should say the woman is in the thing!” said The Avenger. “She put this envelope here for the man who rents the office to pick up in the morning.

“And she committed murder so no one could ever trace her visit to the place. Perhaps she merely meant to stun the woman so as to take her place; but, if so, she hit too hard and it’s still murder.”

“Then whoever is the tenant of this office is in on it, too!” exclaimed Nellie. “I wonder who that is.”

“We’ll try to find that out first thing in the morning,” said Dick. “Meantime, we can look around this office for anything that might tell a story.”

Nothing, however, did tell a story.

The office was very much like the rooms The Avenger had looked through at the rear-house, with the exception of Old Mitch’s. That was, it had practically nothing in it to indicate that it was used at all.

There was blank paper in the desk drawers, with a bottle of ink and couple of ordinary pencils and pens. There was a half-smoked pack of a common brand of cigarettes in the top drawer of the other desk, the one with the typewriter on it. The cover of the typewriter was so dusty that it seemed not to have been taken off for weeks.

“The office is just a blind,” decided Benson. “It was used only rarely for the receiving or sending out of such things as this formula, though the formula must be by far the most valuable thing ever to come in here. Just a blind. But there’s still a chance that we can trace the tenant.”

At Bleek Street, Benson put the formula in his finest vault, on the first floor of his headquarters building. Then he went on up to the vast top floor with Nellie.

Josh and Rosabel were there, waiting; and the Negro couple had a sheepish look on their faces.

“That shaky little pickpocket lost me,” Josh admitted. “I followed him to a poolroom, as I reported. I waited outside for what seemed an hour. Then I got uneasy and went in, and he wasn’t there. There was a washroom with a window, and the window was open.”

“The bookkeeper lost me, too,” confessed Rosabel. “I don’t know if it was on purpose or not. He went into this movie, and I couldn’t get in after him fast enough to see where he was seated; so I waited outside till the show was over and another half through. Then I went down the areaway beside the theater. One of the ushers was at an emergency exit sneaking a smoke, and he told me a man with a limp had gone out that door a long time ago.”

They looked so distressed that Nellie almost laughed. She knew the reason they had been so easily lost, though they were such expert trackers. Neither of them had expected that his quarry would know anything about being trailed, and hence had expected no efforts to lose him.

“Don’t worry,” she said soothingly. “The pickpocket and the bookkeeper are cleared, I guess. We know the real crooks, now. One is that cleaning woman living above Old Mitch. The other is a man who has rented a certain office in the Leggitt Building. Isn’t that right, chief?”

But The Avenger seemed not to have heard. The look in his eyes, making them seem as hard and bright as slits in chrome steel, showed that he was deep in thought.

The thought expressed itself in slow, musing words, in a moment.

“How,” he said, “did the men at the rear-house know I wasn’t the man I was supposed to be?”

“Huh?” said Nellie.

“I went there as the pickpocket whose picture Mac took in that alley. I didn’t make up as completely as might have been done, but in poor light that would never have been noticed. And the light at the rear-house was not only poor, it was nonexistent. It was pitch dark in there. Yet, the moment I opened the door, the men in the pickpocket’s room attacked me. They knew, somehow, that I had no business there. Yet, it was utterly impossible for them to see me clearly enough to know that I was not the man who lives there.”

“Maybe Johnny the Dip got back before you,” said Nellie. “Josh admits he lost him at that poolroom. And if Johnny the Dip was in the room, then anyone else coming in couldn’t be Johnny the Dip and would be attacked immediately.

“That’s possible,” said The Avenger. “But I think I saw all the men when we got out in the alley. Very dimly, yet enough to see that they were all big men. None there was taller than I. And Johnny the Dip, Mac said, was only my size or smaller.”

“Maybe they heard you picking the locks and were warned,” suggested Josh.

The Avenger shook his black-crested head.

“I worked in such silence that I could scarcely hear the rasp of metal on metal myself. No, that’s not the answer. It would seem that it was impossible for the men, in the darkness, to know that I wasn’t the rightful tenant of the place. Yet, they did know, the instant I stepped inside.”

To Josh and Rosabel and Nellie, it didn’t seem to be a very important point, after all. But Benson’s eyes indicated that to him it seemed very important indeed.

The phone buzzed softly. There was a battery of telephones on The Avenger’s desk bigger than that on the desks of any big businessman. This one was a direct line to police headquarters.

“Mr. Benson?” came the voice of the commissioner.

“Yes.”

“A report has just been handed to me regarding a raid at a certain back-lot house, which you requested.”

“Good. What did the men find there?”

“Nothing!” said the commissioner.

Benson paused a moment.

“There must have been something in the room,” he said. “Signs of occupancy, at least.”

“Oh, yes, there were the normal things,” the commissioner cut in. “But you asked for a report on anything unusual that might be found. There was nothing of that type.”

“What were these ‘normal’ things?” said Benson.

The commissioner apparently had a careful list and a completely detailed report at hand. He read off what had been found in Johnny the Dip’s room. Just personal stuff—clothing, electric plate for cooking, utensils, a little furniture, a few food staples in a cupboard.

“And that was all?” persisted The Avenger.

“That was all.”

Benson paused again. He had heard something in the room, before being dragged out to the alley, that did not jibe with this innocent report. The smashing of glass. And he had formed the idea, just afterward, that he had been taken out of the place to prevent more breakage of what must have been rare and fragile stuff.

“Was there anything broken in the place?” he asked.

“Why, yes,” said the commissioner, sounding a bit surprised that Benson should know. “There was a broken bottle of ketchup on the floor.”

The Avenger’s pale eyes had that bright-agate look. The thing he had heard break had not been any ketchup bottle.

“The men searched thoroughly?”

“They even sounded the walls and the floor,” said the commissioner. “In fact, they went so far as to rip up a floorboard. There was only bare earth underneath; that shack has no basement, you know.”

“Did the tenant of the place show up before your men left?”

The commissioner said that he had not.

“What is the police record of this Johnny the Dip?”

“He has no record,” was the commissioner’s rather surprising reply. “The man is not a criminal as far as the police know.”

“In the neighborhood,” said The Avenger, “it is whispered around that he’s a pickpocket.”

“Then the neighbors know more about him than the police department does,” retorted the commissioner.

“And nothing was found broken but the ketchup bottle?” said Benson.

“Nothing!” said the commissioner.

The Avenger hung up. Brains here! They’d realized he must have heard, and would remember, the smash of glass; so they had substituted a common glass article to be found in explanation.

But where had they hidden the first fragments? And the other unknown, fragile paraphernalia that he had guessed must be the reason they had not permitted the fight to continue in that room?

The rest looked at him. From the glint in his pale eyes, they judged that he had learned a lot in that talk with the commissioner. But he made no move to impart what he had learned.

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Rosabel.

She was in the corner near the teletype on which constantly was gathered all the news of the world.

They stared at her.

“It’s happened again! Another rubber factory in Akron just closed down because half the plant was stricken with that strange illness!”

First thing in the morning, Benson went out and headed toward the financial section of Manhattan. He moved even more swiftly than usual because he considered this case the most vital that had yet come to his attention.

The first reason for this was the dreadful doom released in the factories. The rubber industry was demoralized by those catastrophes, now covering four plants. If any more happened, there would be a complete stoppage. And they would stay stopped, too! No workman was going to enter a rubber plant if he felt that sure, slow death would be his if he did. They would stay stopped till this thing was logically explained and the plotters of the wholesale crime apprehended. There would be no rubber products pouring out; and rubber is a sinew of war and there was plenty of war going on in the world.

The second reason was far more important to Dick Benson, personally.

Mac and Smitty were ill with a malady that thus far was known to have no cure, and to end eventually in sure death. This affair of an entire industry being sinisterly, inexorably sabotaged had to be cleared up, and soon, on the chance that something beneficial to their health might result from the solution.