The Avenger 18 - Death in Slow Motion (15 page)

So Benson moved fast that early morning.

His first stop was at the Leggitt Building. There, the rental manager of the building looked up at the sound of a soft footfall to see a man with coal-black hair, a handsome, though sternly calm, face and frightening colorless eyes regarding him.

“I beg your pardon,” he gasped. “You wish to see about renting an office?”

“No,” said Benson quietly, but with the authority in his voice impressing this man as it did all men, “I am of the police.” Which was true enough. “I would like to ask a few questions.”

“Yes, sir,” said the man.

“Office 1819,” said Benson, giving the number of the end office in which the secret formula had been left. “I would like to know whatever you can tell about the tenant.”

Whatever the manager could tell was certainly not much. He didn’t know the man’s business.

“He said he was an importer when he came to rent an office, but he didn’t say just what he imported; and it is our policy not to question tenants as long as they are quiet and law-abiding.”

His name was Anton Grish. He had rented the place five weeks before and had paid three months’ rent in advance. He had not been in the rental office again since that time. There were no complaints of any sort against him.

“That’s all you can tell me?” said The Avenger, pale eyes making it practically impossible for the man to lie.

“That’s all,” said the manager.

So The Avenger went to that fount of building information, the elevator starter.

The starter knew Grish by sight. He was young, had a mouth a lot thinner than most and kept his eyes half closed in a narrowed and secretive way. He dressed pretty well and was excessively quiet, not even responding to any of the elevator boys’ greetings, so the starter had never heard his voice.

“Did he come in regularly, every day?” asked Benson.

“Oh, no! I don’t think he was in more than once a week. I guess he traveled a lot.”

“Quite possibly,” murmured The Avenger. He was thinking of Akron, Ohio. “Can you describe him any more closely? Was there anything unusual about him?”

The starter thought a moment.

“There was one thing. A kind of scar, or something, in the middle of his right eyebrow made it look as if it had been parted there by a little comb.”

The Avenger thanked him and went on.

So the man who had rented Office 1819 under the name of Anton Grish was the man who had killed two men at the Manhattan Gasket Company and walked out with the secret formula. Then, it appeared, he had quickly gotten rid of the formula till he was sure he wouldn’t be picked up and have the thing found on him. Finally, it had been taken back to his office again, for him to dispose of as he saw fit.

The man at the Manhattan plant and old Mitch’s black-sheep son!

But now it seemed that he was something more than just a vicious, ungrateful offspring. He was a major criminal, high in the circles responsible for this grim sabotage.

Now, the problem was to lay hands on him.

Up on the eighteenth floor a detective was posted to nail the man if he came to his office. But Benson was pretty sure this wouldn’t happen; pretty sure the woman who left the envelope would have contacted him and warned him by now.

As for that woman, she hadn’t gone back to the rear-house again. Probably never would go back now. So The Avenger would have to find both of them, with little to work on, in the city’s absorbing millions.

It seemed like an impossible job; but this man with the glacier-ice eyes had often done impossible things. All the police in the country had been hunting for Old Mitch’s scape-grace son and couldn’t find him. It was up to Benson to do it single-handed.

He phoned the Newark airfield. The executive in charge there was quite surprised when Dick arranged to charter a fast small plane. He was surprised because he happened to know that The Avenger had a whole fleet of planes and that most of them were better than anything Newark could offer for hire.

Then Benson phoned the city’s most famous columnist, and that person was more than surprised. He almost dropped. As a rule, The Avenger made it so uncomfortable for anyone who insisted on giving him publicity that the unfortunate offender never had the nerve to try it again.

And now, by all that was miraculous, Benson wanted publicity! And on a matter which would have been an exciting scoop even without the addition of Richard Benson’s highly newsworthy name.

So the famous column of this famous columnist was hastily changed in the composing room between the early afternoon edition and the late edition. And at the head of it appeared:

What young man with the frostiest eyes imaginable has time and again solved crime riddles beyond the capacities of even the Federal investigators? We give you three guesses but know you’ll only need one. And now he has done it again. It was not generally known before, but recently a highly important secret formula for the processing of rubber was stolen. This formula has just been recovered by the man in question, who has chartered a plane to fly down to Washington and to the war department with it tonight. But don’t tell him we told you so, because none of this is supposed to come out in the open!

It was about eight o’clock that The Avenger climbed into the small cabin plane they were holding for him at Newark.

The man with the crooked eyebrow had been informed that the formula would be en route to Washington in the hands of his deadliest enemy. And the chartering of a public plane would make it very easy for the man to find out just when, and in what ship, he was leaving. So all was well.

All, that is, from the standpoint of The Avenger.

Any other man would have felt that all was far from well! Because once more in his perilous career, Dick Benson was offering himself as live bait to a ring of killers. If you can’t go to the crook, make the crook come to you. It was an effective maxim—but not one conducive to a peaceful old age.

It was a little more than an hour and a half till sunset when Dick took off. If his trip was uninterrupted—that is, if death refused the practically engraved invitation Benson had offered it—he would land in Washington at late dusk.

But he hadn’t gone far before he saw that this trip was never going to be completed!

It was a beautiful evening, calm, and the light up there was amber and clear. His plane was winging along the shore line with Atlantic City almost in sight.

And then a soft hum sounded from a tiny earphone held by a headpiece to his left ear.

He had slipped that apparatus on immediately after leaving Newark. It was a little like the earphone worn by a deaf person.

The thin wire trailing from it went to one of Dick’s own inventions. It was a sound detector in a case easily fitted into a coat pocket. The detector was so contrived as to be variable in reception. That is, with the turn of a knob, it would become insensitive to any given noise, pick up any other outside noises up to a great distance, amplify them and bring them to that little earphone.

Thus The Avenger had turned the knob till the noise of his own plane motor was tuned out almost to nothing, except, of course, for the direct noise which washed into the cabin from the whirling cylinders. He plastered the earphone tight to his ear and awaited developments.

And here was the sound of another plane motor.

He looked out the side windows and could see nothing. And he was flying fairly low, so it was improbable that the other plane was beneath him.

He rolled a little, and then located the plane, about four thousand feet higher.

Only four thousand feet from him, and his sensitive detector barely caught its two-motored hum. It must be beautifully muffled. And it was gray black so that save in direct daylight it would be very inconspicuous in the heavens.

The Avenger’s eyes were as cold as bits of moonlight as he thought that over. He could picture that sinister ship lurking in this country where it had no business to be, slipping silently and camouflaged through the sky, bearing its agents of destruction.

Bearing them notably from New York to Akron, Ohio, and back, in the recent past!

The hum sounded louder in the tiny earphone. And with it came a shriek that meant only one thing: the plane was diving!

With that sound came the first tracer bullets, ripping into the cabin of Benson’s ship. Two instrument faces on the dash seemed to explode of themselves, showering bits of glass.

Then The Avenger was darting down toward the seashore beneath him, rolling and twisting, performing all the feats known to an expert air fighter.

At this point in the coast, there are long stretches of salt marsh on which there are no buildings, nothing but desolation. One of these bare stretches rushed up to meet Dick, with its long, wiry grass wavering in a slight evening breeze.

There was a faint chatter audible over the road of his motor, and suddenly a ragged pattern of bullet holes wrote itself in the right wing.

The Avenger pulled the nose of his plane straight up. Up he went, in a long loop, and then down at all the diving speed the plane could take, nose to the marsh! The perforated wing quivered in protest like a shivering animal. And then, just as it seemed he must crash, he hauled back on the controls.

The plane’s nose missed the ground by inches, searing the tips of the marsh grass. The plane’s tail did not!

Mud and salt water splashed like a geyser as the tail dragged, with Benson fighting the controls with every atom of power in his incredible body, but with his eyes as cool and calculating as though he were safe in an armchair somewhere.

When it could no longer be prevented, the nose slammed down, too, with another geyser following it. The nose and prop caught, the plane angled up and up, then fell over on its back.

There was a darting tongue of fire that instantly became a flaming red curtain. And away from this deadly fire, gliding low through the marsh grass so that it scarcely rippled above him to mark his progress, went The Avenger.

It had been the most skillfully faked accident imaginable. And swiftly it fulfilled its purpose.

The fast plane came down like a fly for a piece of sugar. Its pilot set her down within a hundred yards of the burning ship as lightly as a falling leaf.

Set her down, but would never be able to take her up again, for this marshy surface was too soft for wheels but not liquid enough for pontoons. Dick wondered about that for a moment. Then he saw four men scramble out of the cabin; and an instant later saw red flame begin to envelope that plane, too.

The plane had served its purpose. Trapped by the marsh, it was deliberately being destroyed so that its identity and secret could never be discovered. It was a commentary on the size of the stakes in this game that a plane, worth many thousands of dollars, would be destroyed with no more thought than the lighting of a match when its function was ended.

The four men from the plane were slogging through the marsh, up to their knees at times, occasionally sinking up to their waists. They made heavy weather of it, but they moved as fast as they could.

And when they reached Benson’s plane, though the gas tanks were due to explode at any second, they wrenched open the bent doors and stared in. Then their faces expressed a frenzy of rage and disappointment as they saw inside neither the pilot of the plane nor the secret formula.

Their faces expressed rage, but none of them expressed anything at all audibly. It was as if they were deaf-mutes.

The Avenger, twenty yards away, probably felt as much disappointment as they, though his impassive face displayed nothing at all. For the man he was after, the man with the crooked eyebrow, was not among those four!

All this preparation and maneuvering, and the quarry had been too clever, or too timorous, to fall for it. He had sent underlings after Benson and the formula. So now it was time to deal with those underlings.

The Avenger carried two of the world’s strangest weapons, holstered at the calf of each leg.

One was a slim, streamlined .22 revolver, equipped with a silencer of his own devising and far superior to the regulation silencers. This small weapon he called, with grim affection, Mike.

The other was a throwing knife with a hollow tube for a handle which made it blade-heavy, and which was as sharp as a razor and keen-pointed as a needle. This was Ike.

Benson drew both weapons, now. They looked absurdly small and mild compared to the service automatics the four by the burning plane had in their hands.

He aimed swiftly with Mike. A bullet whispered from its silenced little muzzle, and a man went down.

The man was not dead. Benson never took life. He was creased; that is, the bullet had been made, with eighth-inch accuracy, to glance from the top of his skull, stunning him, instead of drilling his brain.

The three men left stared at their suddenly felled comrade with gaping mouths. No one around to club him down, no sound of a gun, just this swift and silent fate.

Another fell, as Mike whispered forth another little slug. And then one of the remaining two caught the other’s arm and pointed. He had seen the wave of marsh grass against the wind where The Avenger lay.