The Avenger 21 - The Happy Killers (6 page)

It was about dusk, with Manhattan’s towers not far ahead, when the car radio broke in on Mac’s perplexed thoughts. The radio was tuned to Justice, Inc.’s own private wave band. The voice of Cole Wilson sounded.

“No sign anywhere of Brown’s stocks and bonds. Maybe the crooks are going to wait awhile before trying to dispose of them. Maybe they’re too smart to do anything with them at all.”

Wilson’s voice snapped off, and the big, shabby-looking sedan rolled on in more silence. Then Mac tried again. He couldn’t get answers from The Avenger on important questions. Maybe he could start him talking with minor matters.

“How did ye know there was someone in the old buildin’?” he asked. “Ye walked in there ready for a fight. Inside, before we saw or heard a thing, ye told me in code, ‘Others are here.’ ”

“Tracks in the sand,” Benson said. “They’d been swept out, but not well enough.”

“What do ye think, Muster Benson? Was the girl in with that gang, or was she really scared of them and kidnapped by them?”

Silence.

Mac sighed and gave it up permanently. The Scot had a hunch that for once The Avenger didn’t know any of the answers. He certainly hadn’t revealed anything to Mac. And that, too, was a source of bitterness.

They’d come all the way out to the end of Long Island; they’d been jumped by a gang of laughing monsters and left to die in a burning building. And from all this they had learned nothing!

Again the car radio broke in on Mac’s pessimistic thoughts. This time it was Josh talking, and this time there was a message of real importance.

“Mr. Benson, news just came from Dillingham Brown’s house. The detective in charge there says that Harry Tate has disappeared.”

With eyes like pale, lambent jewels, The Avenger flipped on the transmitter.

“Go on, Josh. How do you mean, disappeared?”

“According to the detective, he lowered himself from a window and sneaked off the grounds. Headquarters is sore about it. Tate was not actually under arrest for the murder and robbery, but he was very much under suspicion. Orders were to keep an eye on him. But he managed to sneak away. That makes it look as if he had some guilty part in it.”

Benson didn’t comment on this. He said: “Go out there, Josh. See if you can find a clue as to where he went. In particular, see if anything points, not to flight, but to a kidnapping.”

Mac heard Josh gasp a little, and the Scot felt like gasping himself. What on earth made the boss think of kidnapping? Who would kidnap the dreamy-eyed chemist, and why? But Mac knew he’d get no answers to questions, so he didn’t ask them.

The Avenger turned the dial to the regular police band. And in so doing he just missed the voice of a third member of the band, not addressed to him, but to the giant, Smitty.

This was the voice of diminutive Nellie Gray.

Smitty, in an inspired moment, had designed little belt radios for the crime-fighting band. Hardly larger than cigar cases, they were curved to fit the waist and could be worn under a belt so snugly that they hardly caused a perceptible bulge.

Nellie was using her belt radio now, calling Smitty on it. The reason she was calling the giant was that she had uncovered something which she thought she might need help on, but which might not be important enough to transmit to Dick Benson.

Her job had been to try to trace the Browns’ maid from the Great Neck railroad station. She’d started there with the same disappointing lack of results which the police had gotten. The agent didn’t remember what the girl looked like; he hadn’t really seen her face because her mannish hat was pulled so low. She’d gotten on the 12:21 train to town.

Nellie learned that the same train crew would be on the 6:40 train. She waited and took that, then talked to the conductor.

Yes, he remembered the girl who’d gotten on at Great Neck last night. He remembered her because she was the only one at that station. Also, he remembered her because she’d had a ticket for the end of the hne, and had gotten off only three stops down from Great Neck.

“You’re sure?” asked Nellie, hiding her excitement at this.

“I’m sure,” said the conductor. “Say, are you with the police?”

“In a way,” said Nellie. Which was true enough. All the members of the band had police credentials entitling them to police support.

“Good. You tell them, then. I was questioned this morning and forgot about her getting off three stations down. I just remembered it a while ago.”

Nellie got off where the girl had the night before. She had information even the police didn’t have. She hoped it would lead to something.

It was going to lead to something, all right. Something that would curl her silky blond hair for her. But she had no premonition of that.

At the small station which was third down the line from Great Neck, she went to the cab stand. Had any of the drivers seen a girl in a mannish hat, pulled low over her face, come out of the station last night after midnight? Had any of them driven her anywhere?

It looked as if she were going to draw a blank. None knew anything about the girl. But then a cab drew up from a job, and a black-haired, cheerful young fellow jumped out. When Nellie put the question to him, he nodded.

“Yeah, I saw a dame like that. Didn’t drive her; she didn’t take a cab. She started hoofing it up that street, Maple Street. There’s a beer joint up three blocks. See the sign? It’s the only thing open around here after midnight. She may have gone there.”

Nellie went to the beer joint, drawing a lot of admiring glances as she entered. The bartender’s glance was just as admiring. She smiled sweetly at him.

“I’m trying to locate a girl friend of mine,” she said. “I think she came in here last night for a minute. Half-past twelve or one o’clock. Were you on duty then?”

“I’m always on duty,” the bartender complained cheerfully. “I own the joint. What’s your friend look like?”

Nellie gave the description of the maid—rather tall, quite nice-looking, dark hair in a long bob. “She had on a kind of man’s hat,” Nellie finished. “She always wore it low over her face. You might not have seen her face because of the hat.”

That did it, it seemed. The bartender nodded thoughtfully.

“Seems to me I do remember seeing your friend. I remember because of the hat. This girl comes in here alone, see. She’s a looker, far as I can tell. But I don’t tell very far because I can’t see her face. And because I can’t, I try to. She gets a nickel from me, and I try to look up under the hat brim, and she turns quick. Say, she ain’t hiding from the cops or anything, is she?”

“The cops didn’t even know she was alive—last night,” Nellie evaded. “You say she got a nickel. For the telephone?”

“Yeah,” said the barkeeper. “She went to the phone booth over there, stayed about five minutes, and then went out. I think she headed north, but I couldn’t be sure of that.”

Nellie headed north.

The trail was spreading out pretty thin now. She was in one of the innumerable suburbs out along the Long Island Railroad. There were probably five thousand homes and other buildings in this one. It seemed impossible to find out which the Brown’s maid had gone to, with the little information Nellie had to work on.

The smart little blond reasoned it out at the next intersection above the tavern. One street went left, to the crowded shopping section of the suburb; the other, right, to an apartment section. Straight ahead led a street along which were small homes that grew shabbier and poorer as your eye traveled down the vista.

The shopping section was out. It would be fairly well-lighted even at one o’clock in the morning, and this girl was anxious to keep from being seen and recognized. She wanted only to hide for a few hours and then return to the Brown home as if she’d just come from an evening in the metropolis.

That left the apartment district and the street of single houses as possibilities. Nellie decided to tackle the street first. She went down it two blocks, and suddenly felt a tingle up and down her shapely little back.

When death is your constant companion, and fighting murderers your business, you develop a sixth sense that warns you when there is no tangible reason for it. Nellie felt the slight uneasiness now.
Trouble around here. Watch yourself.

She had learned long ago, however, that some physical sign was nearly always the reason for these hunches. Some small thing not quite right; some trifle so little amiss that the seeing eye didn’t spot it, but subconsciously it was noted. She looked around, trying to spot what it might be in this case.

She was in the middle of a block. On one side, the homes were almost wall to wall. The dining room of each now showed a light, as the evening meal was begun.

On the other side, the lots were bigger. There weren’t more than a dozen houses on that side of the block. And at the end was a huge, ugly Victorian house, painted a dull brown many years ago, but now almost totally without paint. It explained the scarcity of houses. It was one of those cases in which the owner of a big house and several acres of land had held out long after the rest of the property around was subdivided, and then had sold in large parcels for more money. And, as is so often the case, the big house itself was deserted, waiting to be torn down.

Nellie’s firm little jaw clicked shut. The trifle that she had seen had impressed itself on her enough to ring the faint bell of instinctive warning. Out of the end chimney of this house, a few specks were rising. Not smoke, just a few specks of ash.

The place was boarded up and some of the upstairs windows were broken out. There was a “For Sale” sign in front; obviously the house hadn’t been tenanted for a long time.

But someone had had a fire in one of the fireplaces not too long ago, and specks of ash still floated up with the draft now and then.

Nellie clicked on her tiny belt radio. This didn’t seem important enough to bother The Avenger with because she had no tangible link between traces of occupancy in a deserted house and the flight of the maid. But just the same, it seemed to her to warrant help in a thorough search.

“Smitty,” she said into the tiny transmitter. “Nellie calling. Smitty, this is Nellie. Smitty—”

“Hello, half-pint,” came the giant’s voice as she held the dime-size receiver to her ear. “In trouble again? O.K. I’ll come and haul you out of it. Where are you?”

“I’m not in trouble!” Nellie snapped indignantly.

It was a standard joke of the giant’s that he always had to trail her around and save her pretty hide when she got into jams. Actually, Nellie had saved his oversized hide plenty of times, too, but the big fellow conveniently forgot that.

“I’m not in trouble at all. But I think I’ve uncovered a possibility on the trail of Brown’s maid, and I think maybe you’d better come out and lend a hand.” She told him where she was. “It’s a big old house with turrets and things on it. Only house like it for blocks around. You can’t miss it. But maybe you’re busy, now?”

“Nope,” said Smitty. “Cole and I just ran out of work. We’ll be up in a shake.”

Nellie put the tiny disks back into her skirt pocket, and settled down, across the street from the big house and down a few doors, to wait till Smitty and Cole came. But waiting was a thing Nellie did very badly.

She bit her smooth red lip in annoyance after ten minutes, looked around and saw that no one was in sight. She hesitated, then decisively started across the street toward the mysterious big house.

Nellie lived for excitement. The little blond positively fed on trouble. More than once her impulsiveness had led her into a horrible mess; but, as Smitty said, she’d probably never learn. She’d always be poking her pretty head into places where it was likely to be knocked off.

But she certainly couldn’t see signs of real trouble outside the house. She felt pretty virtuous about radioing Smitty at all, instead of just going ahead with an investigation.

The front door of the place had no knob and was nailed tight. She left that and went to the back. There was a knob here. And something else.

On the keyhole plate was a tiny, fresh scratch. A key had recently been inserted.

“So what?” she told herself. “Probably the real estate agent showing a prospect the house.”

She took from her bag a tool which each of Benson’s aides carried—a flexible length of steel with a tiny hook at the end. Like a flexible crochet needle. With this, she picked the old-fashioned lock.

She opened the door an inch and listened for a long time. Not one sound came from anywhere in the house. She entered noiselessly and closed the door behind her. She left it open a half inch for a possible fast exit and winced as the spring catch squeaked thinly.

She was in the ruins of a kitchen. A mouse streaked across the floor, and she had a bad moment. Nellie could contact gunmen without a blink, but a
mouse—

The nasty thing went into a hole and left her alone. She drew a ragged breath and went through the next room, a dining room, into a wide, cluttered hall. And there she had her first sign of something wrong.