The Avenger 21 - The Happy Killers (8 page)

And in that instant, the three he’d scattered got into the car on the opposite side and slammed the door.

Too late, Smitty jumped for the car to open it. They’d thrown the lock by then. He started to race around the car.

Baby-face leaned out the other side. He brought the butt of his gun down hard on Wilson’s head.

Wilson slumped. Nailen staggered to his feet, shook up but still quite lively. He got into the car and slammed the door just as Smitty got around to
that
side. He started the motor, while Smitty banged at the window, and gunned it back over the beam.

It turned sharply, smashed through a section of the high board fence, and through the next yard to the street. The unholy four had gotten away.

“You big idiot!” raged Nellie, when the gag was off. “You overgrown numbskull! You—”

“Aw, Nellie,” said Smitty sheepishly. “When I saw you there all tied up—”

“Why didn’t you leave me tied up? Why didn’t you nail those four before you started monkeying with my bonds? That’s the gang that robbed Brown and killed his servant. They murdered the maid, too; you’ll find her up on the second floor in the house. Oh, what I could do to you!”

She stopped. While she was talking she’d been looking anxiously at Smitty’s vast moon face to see if he’d been hurt. Where the giant was concerned, her bark was always much worse than her bite.

A point occurred to her.

“How on earth did you get out here on Long Island so soon?”

Smitty looked sheepish again. “To tell the truth, we were already on our way when you contacted us. We were all done with our job, checking for Brown’s bonds and stocks. So I said to Cole: ‘Look, Nellie’s always getting into a jam. Maybe she’s getting in one now. Let’s start out toward Long Island, where she’s checking railroad stations, and—’ ”

“Why, you . . . you—” Nellie spluttered. “Always getting in jams! So you start after me! You might at least have waited till I yelled for help!”

“If we had this time?” said Cole, rubbing his battered head. He looked at the garage floor where Nellie had lain while a two-ton sedan rolled toward her.

“Well,” said Nellie weakly. She changed the subject.

“We know at least a little something now,” she said. “I can identify the gang that broke into Brown’s place. I know a little of what they did. The leader, called Nailen—”

“Beak Nailen, eh?” said Wilson. “That helps.”

“Nailen played up to the pretty maid at Brown’s,” Nellie went on. “He got her to open the house to him after she’d somehow learned the combination of the wall safe. After she had opened it, she went to the station and got a ticket for Manhattan. But she got off here, proving that she was an amateur, because she thus gave the conductor a chance to remember her.

“She’d intended to go back to Brown’s later, but she got scared. She phoned from a tavern down the line, probably to Nailen’s hang-out, and left word to meet her here at this vacant house. Nailen met her, all right; and he was so angry at her for not following orders, and so scared she’d lose her head and give them away, that he murdered her. That must have been during the day, in broad light, or he’d have driven her body away to hide it at once. As it was, he had to leave it, and come back tonight after dark. In the meantime, he burned the financial papers from Brown’s safe. Then I got in the way and received the full attentions of the gentlemen.”

“Did they laugh?” Smitty said suddenly.

“Huh?” said Nellie, staring.

“They tried to murder you. Did they laugh while they were doing it? You know—had they had any of that dope?”

“I’ll be darned!” said Nellie. “I didn’t think of that. No, they didn’t, Smitty. There wasn’t a laugh in the crowd. No laughing-murder stuff here!”

“Guess we’d better report all this to the chief,” said Wilson. He tuned in to Bleek Street. Rosabel’s soft voice answered.

“Mr. Benson and Mac are at Mr. Brown’s house again, with Josh,” Rosabel told them.

Smitty headed the car that way.

As The Avenger and Mac approached Brown’s house for a second time that day, all the lights showed in the black of night. The whole place blazed, from cellar to attic, giving an indication of the tension and confusion within.

A detective yanked open the door and, with a gun in his hand, confronted the two when they rang the doorbell.

“Oh, it’s you, Mr. Benson,” he said when he saw the masklike face with the pale and terrible eyes. He put the gun up. “There’s been some trouble out here since you left.”

It was the same man who had been left in charge earlier. His eyes were angry, baffled and apprehensive.

“This guy, Tate, did a disappearing act. Right out from under my nose! They’ll give me a ride at headquarters for that.”

“Were you keeping a close watch on him?” asked Benson.

The man stared sharply at him to determine if he were being bawled out. Then he saw that The Avenger was merely asking a question.

“Well, pretty sharp,” he said. “Tate wasn’t under arrest, you know. At the same time, there was enough chance that he was mixed up in this to keep the commissioner interested. He wasn’t to leave here, and any phone calls he made were to be traced.”

He bit his lip exasperatedly.

“I watched the doors and thought that was enough. When Tate went up to the attic, I thought no more about it. Had a hunch he wasn’t in on any part of this, so I didn’t even have a small notion he’d pull a sneak out a window. Just goes to show—always believe a guy’s guilty till he’s proved innocent.”

Benson didn’t bother to point out that this was directly opposite to American legal practice. He asked: “There was no sign that Tate wanted to get away?”

“None,” said the man. “He went up to the attic. Your man, Newton, came and said he wanted to see him. I sent him up to the attic. Tate wasn’t there. That’s all there is to it. Boy, will I get taken for a ride over this!”

Josh, it appeared, was still up in the attic. Dick and Mac went up there.

Harry Tate had converted Brown’s attic into a fairly efficient little laboratory. You could picture him up there under the eaves, striving to perfect an anaesthetic pill that could be administered orally and swiftly in a battlefield operating tent. And never quite getting the result he wanted. Coming up, instead, with the bizarre laughing-murder drug described at Bleek Street.

Josh greeted The Avenger and had, as might be expected, more to offer than the detective.

“Mr. Tate must have gotten away just before I got here,” he said. “He went out this window.” He pointed to a dormer window against which a great branch of a tree almost leaned. It would be easy to get down that tree from the top floor of the house. “There are bits of bark scraped off.”

“How do you know he got away just before you came?” Mac asked.

“The plainclothesman downstairs had talked to Tate less than an hour before I got here,” Josh said. “But there is another hint as to the time. Tate made up a batch of some kind of stuff a very short time ago. This beaker proves it.”

Josh handed a thin glass vessel with a pouring lip to The Avenger. There was a whitish film in the bottom, and the film was still just a little moist. The film went two thirds of the way up the side, proving that quite a large batch of the stuff—whatever it was—had been made.

The Avenger took a small vial from a pocket, to scrape a sample of the film into it for future analysis. Josh smiled and gave him a vial already prepared.

“Would that be a batch of this laughing stuff he’d made up and gone away with?” wondered Mac.

“Probably,” Benson said. “But what seems to be completely without explanation is—why he made it up at all.”

Mac didn’t see where this made any difference, but he didn’t say so. The Avenger was intensely interested in the fact—the glow of his pale, icy eyes revealed that—and that was enough for the Scotchman.

There was a commotion outside, and Mac looked out the dormer window through which Tate had climbed to escape. It faced the street, and he could see the lights of a car coming up the drive. Then there was the sound of the downstairs door being opened, and the sound of voices.

“That’s Brown,” said The Avenger.

He went out and downstairs.

In the hall, Brown was talking to the detective and looking surprised, confused and a little angry.

“I was stopped at my gate,” he said. “Three men out there searched my car. There seem to be men all over the grounds looking for something. What’s the idea?”

The detective opened his mouth to tell Brown what the men were searching for, but The Avenger cut in smoothly.

“Do you mind? I’d like to have a few words with Mr. Brown.”

The detective nodded, and Benson preceded Brown into the fateful library from which the equally fateful contents of that safe had been taken.

“There are men around,” he began, “because Tate has left here, secretly, and without police permission. They’re trying to pick up his trail.”

“Tate left?” said Brown. “The young idiot! That will make him look guilty of this.”

“Are you quite sure he had no hand in this robbery?”

“I
know
he didn’t!” Brown checked himself. “Of course, I’m sure. He . . . he just wouldn’t do a thing like that,” he concluded lamely.

The Avenger looked satisfied with the answer. “You have no idea where he would go?”

“None at all,” Brown said quickly.

Dick’s colorless, glacial eyes looked deep into Brown’s, to the latter’s obvious discomfort. The pupils of Brown’s eyes didn’t seem quite normal.

“Well,” The Avenger said quietly, “it wasn’t about Tate that I really wanted to see you. I wanted to speak about your daughter. I have reason to believe she is in deadly danger.”

He told in a few words about the trip out to Long Island. Edna had said she could lead them to the hiding place of the loot. There had been trouble, no loot, and the girl seemed to have been kidnapped.

Brown’s face slowly drained of all blood. It got as white as paper. He moistened his lips, and when he spoke his voice had a dry, croaking sound. But his words were astounding.

“I don’t know what silly idea she had in her head when she led you out there, Mr. Benson. And I don’t know whom she went away with, but she’s safe now.”

“You’re sure?” said Benson.

“Yes. I . . . I just talked to her. Just before I came home. She is perfectly all right.”

The Avenger nodded. “Thank you,” he said.

Brown went up to his room, and Benson got Mac and Josh.

“Josh,” he said, “I believe Brown may leave here in a few minutes. I want to have him trailed. He may be in a hurry. Don’t lose him!”

The Avenger turned to Mac. “I think we’ve gotten about all we can here.”

They got into the car again, and The Avenger went to the home of a friend of his about ten miles away. The man with the awesome, pale eyes had thousands of friends, in all walks of life, and, seemingly, everywhere on earth. This time it was the head of a real-estate firm he sought out.

The man’s name was Warbough. He was about sixty and shrewd-looking. He was overjoyed to see Benson.

“Dick! Come in! What can I do for you?”

“I want to know who owns a certain piece of property out near the end of Long Island,” Benson said. He pored over real-estate-subdivision maps which Warbough spread out for him and located the plot on which was the ancient building where he and Mac had nearly been fried.

“That one,” he said.

Warbough looked up in a book the number printed on the plot. “It belongs to an amusement corporation,” he said. Then he laughed. “That is, if anyone on earth but you asked the question, that would be the answer. And it’s true. But the amusement corporation is one man—a very big shot indeed. William Xenan, to be exact.”

“Xenan!” exclaimed Mac. “Why, that’s Brown’s ex-partner.”

“Yes,” said Warbough. “The famous Mr. Xenan. I guess he bought the property intending to expand it. But now he’s worth twenty or thirty million dollars, and it’s too small to bother with. I guess he’s even forgotten he owns it, by now.”

The Avenger didn’t say anything, but the look in his ice-pale eyes seemed to indicate a wonder as to whether or not the wealthy Mr. Xenan really had forgotten it.