The Avenger 23 - The Wilder Curse (3 page)

Smitty passed under the small sign, “Justice, Inc.,” over the doorway. He went into a vestibule, waved his hand twice in front of a certain spot in the tiled wall that looked like any other spot, and the inner door opened.

Smitty knew all about that photo-electric-cell opener. An electrical and radio wizard, he had installed it himself.

He went up to the huge third floor, walked in, and was greeted by an insult. The insult came from another of The Avenger’s aides—one of his most valued, in fact, though you’d never think so to look at her.

Nellie Gray was a bare five feet high, weighed about one hundred pounds and looked as fragile as a Dresden china doll. She was so pink and white and dainty in appearance that you’d feel sure the sight of a spider would make her scream.

Little Nellie Gray, however, was a dead shot, an expert at boxing, wrestling, and jujitsu and had made more than one two-hundred-pound thug sorry he’d underestimated her abilities.

“Hello, amateur,” she said to the giant Smitty.

“Amateur what?” snapped Smitty.

“Amateur electrician,” Nellie snapped back.

Smitty was justifiably suspicious of brickbats. Tiny Nellie and the giant Smitty were more than associates. Either would have let himself be cut to ribbons for the other. Nellie had a soft place in her heart for the giant. But she never let this be apparent. She was all prickles, it seemed, where Smitty could see.

“Amateur electrician?” roared Smitty. He could take a lot, but aspersions cast on his vast electrical ability stung hard. “You half-pint—” He calmed down. He concluded resignedly, “What’s wrong now?”

“The electric-robot thing you designed to answer the phone when nobody’s here,” said Nellie. “The gadget that talks and records messages. That’s what’s wrong. Look at this.”

Smitty dutifully looked at the thin recording tape, a length of which Nellie held in her fragile-seeming little hands.

The tape had a hairline, regularly broken by tiny hills and valleys like the circular lines of phonograph recordings. Then this went off into an irregular line.

“Now, listen,” said Nellie, playing the tape.

Smitty heard a man’s voice say, “Justice, Inc.?”

There was a metallic, “Yes,” as his robot phonograph voice caught the “Justice” vibrations and responded. Smitty swelled with pride. In all the world, there was only one apparatus like this, and it was his own child.

“I want to talk to Mr. Benson,” came the man’s voice. “I want—” That was when the sputter occurred.

There was a sort of thud, a splintering noise, then silence.

Smitty played the tape again, with distress on his vast moonface.

“Say—it does sound as if it’s busted,” he admitted, chewing his lip.

“Sure,” said Nellie. “Just another of your thumb-handed jobs—”

“But maybe it’s something else,” Smitty interrupted, sore again. “The trouble could be on the other end of the line. Did you trace the call?”

“What for?” shrugged Nellie maliciously. “Your precious dingbat didn’t work, so—”

“Somebody calls here—probably in trouble—and you didn’t trace the call right away?” It was Smitty’s turn to jeer. “What a swell stunt that is!” He was getting the telephone operator as he berated her. “You can’t tell what that call might have meant. It might be that a life was lost because you didn’t trace it,” he went on. “Why, before I’d do a thing like that—”

He got his information then.

“That was a Thornton Heights number,” the operator said. They moved fast when Justice, Inc. called. “It was Thornton Heights 9-2243.”

Smitty muttered, “Sounds like that Scotman, Fergus MacMurdie, burring into the phone.”

The operator went on, “That number is out of order.”

Smitty whirled to Nellie, who was looking a bit crestfallen.

“See?” he exulted. “It was the phone, and not—”

The buzzer sounded, and a tiny red light showed that it was the street-door buzzer. Smitty went to a small black box on a huge desk.

The black box, its top screened, was his, too. It was, in effect, a little television radio that constantly showed the vestibule downstairs—and anyone in it.

Smitty saw a girl in the small screen.

“Oh, boy! Something!” he said. And Nellie’s pretty blue eyes began to get small green lights in them. She was really pretty crazy about the oversized guy, and he could always get her goat by pretending more interest in other girls than he really felt.

“Some designing little female, I suppose?” she snapped, reading Smitty’s tone correctly.

“I’ll bet she’s not designing,” Smitty said, pressing the button that opened the door downstairs. “Poor little thing! She looks as if she needs help.”

“To you, any female under sixty that isn’t in a side show,” said Nellie, “is a ‘poor little thing that needs help.’ You are a sucker, my over-grown friend.”

The girl came into the huge room, and Nellie’s look, and tone, changed at once. For Nellie had a warm and generous heart and plenty of sympathy for those in trouble.

This girl looked troubled, all right. She was very pale and was so agitated that her nose wasn’t even powdered. A very extreme case, Nellie knew.

Then, after the girl gave her name, Nellie knew there was something distinctly interesting here.

“I’m Myra Horton,” the girl said. “I want to see Mr. Benson as soon as possible. I want to tell him about a murder—a dreadful thing—in Thornton Heights.”

Thornton Heights! Smitty and Nellie stared at each other. It was a Thornton Heights number that had tried, about an hour ago, to contact Justice, Inc. A number now “out of order.”

“What about this murder? And why is it so dreadful?” said Nellie. She added: “We’re associates of Mr. Benson’s. You can talk to us.”

“It’s the murder of a man named Timothy Phelan,” said this tall, pretty girl, who had come in out of the night. “He was assistant engineer of the Thornton Heights development. He was killed by something, something that—” She shivered. “I just saw up to his knee. It looked as if he’d been run through a corn cutter.”

Smitty’s ingenuous-looking blue eyes were narrowed and still. Very still and very intent.

“Thornton Heights,” he said. “Murder. And the body is badly mangled. There was a man named Carl Foley killed out in Thornton Heights a few days ago, wasn’t there?”

“Yes,” said Myra Horton. “He was one of the officers of the corporation that owns the property.”

“And wasn’t his body badly treated, too?”

“Yes. He was—I guess he must have looked like this man Phelan does. That’s why I thought The Avenger ought to be told about it. Mr. Moran—a good friend of mine who works in the Thornton Heights office—called the police. But I came here to tell Mr. Benson, too. I thought he might be interested.”

“I think he’ll be very interested, indeed,” said the giant Smitty grimly. “We’ll get him and hustle out to Thornton Heights at once.”

The Avenger
was
interested. Very much so. In an incredibly short time after Smitty got in touch with him, he was at the Thornton Heights central building, in the basement office, with two of the plain-clothesmen who guarded Phelan’s body.

Dick Benson, better known as The Avenger, was not the kind of man you’d expect to see after hearing such fantastic tales about him. You’d expect a giant, someone as big as Smitty himself. You’d expect someone with great bunches of muscle sticking out in all directions.

The Avenger didn’t look like that at all. He was only of average height, about five feet eight. His weight was average, too, about a hundred and sixty-five pounds. His body was rather slim, if anything. But when you watched him move, you saw that he got around like lightning, and soon you realized the truth. A few rare individuals seem to have muscle of a special quality, so that it is thrice as strong as ordinary muscle. And The Avenger was one of these few.

He entered the little office with his cat’s tread, with Nellie and Smitty close behind. Myra Horton stayed outside. She didn’t want to see any more of that body than she already had.

“Mr. Benson!” said one of the detectives respectfully, seeing the pale, enigmatic eyes and the close-cropped cap of virile black hair. “Glad you’re interesting yourself in this. It’s sure a funny-looking corpse we got here.”

Smitty thought the use of the word “funny” was pretty far out of line. But The Avenger said nothing; he never said anything unless he had something important to say.

The glacial eyes of the famous crime fighter rested inscrutably on the body.

Tim Phelan did indeed look as if he had been run through a corn cutter. The clothes were two thirds ripped off of him, as if by many fangs. His body was as torn up as if a pack of starving wolves had had access to it.

“What have you found out about this murder?” asked The Avenger.

“Nothing,” said the detective, with dismal honesty. He would later tell the press that the case was developing satisfactorily, but he wouldn’t try to pull that kind of line with someone like Dick Benson.

“A Mr. Carl Foley, one of the executives of this real-estate development, was murdered in this neighborhood recently, I believe,” said The Avenger.

“Yes, sir,” said the detective. “I was on that little job, too. Foley’s body looked just like this. Enough to haunt your dreams.”

“By now, you’ve got a complete dossier on Foley?”

“Yes, sir. Pretty complete,” said the detective.

“You think, too, that maybe the two murders tie in together?”

The Avenger didn’t give an opinion. He said, “In the records on Foley, is there any account of his having been, at some time or other, in the Orient?”

Smitty and little Nellie looked at each other. The question seemed odd to them. Apparently, it did to the detective, too. He looked puzzled as he answered:

“Nope. From all accounts, Foley was never out of New York State. Lived around here all his life. One of our few real New Yorkers. Why?”

Benson didn’t say why. His steely, slender fingers were deftly separating the dead man’s shirt over the chest. In a moment, a picture was exposed on the skin there. It was a tattooed picture of a snake coiled up a pole. Beside this was a ship’s anchor, with a bit of hawser twined around it.

“Looks as if this man
has
been to the Orient,” Smitty said, hopeful of getting at what Benson had in mind. “Looks as if he’d been a sailor before he got this assistant engineer’s job.”

The Avenger said nothing to that.

“Who discovered this murder?” he asked the detective.

“Dame by the name of Mead, upstairs,” said the man. “She called a guy named Dan Moran, who works here. She knows nothing about anything.”

“Does Moran work here on a night shift of some sort?”

“Nope,” said the detective. “He says he just happened to be in his office. Pretty late for that.”

“Myra Horton explained his lateness,” Nellie Gray spoke up. “I gather that Dan Moran is the boy friend.”

“We’ll have a few words with Moran,” said The Avenger, voice as even and inscrutable as his pale, icy eyes. “With Miss Horton, too. Moran’s office will be a good place.”

Over the double doorway to the general office was an oil portrait of some elderly man, evidently the founder of Thornton Heights. The man had a wide, high forehead, a luxurious beard and a long, strong nose. The plate on it was inscribed: “Samuel Kepper.”

Benson walked under this, across the office and into Moran’s private cubicle. They sat down there—Myra Horton, Dan Moran, Benson, Nellie and Smitty.

Moran blurted thankfully, “You used your head, Myra. when you got in touch with Mr. Benson about this. Two men killed in the same way in the same district within a week. There may be more murders, unless there’s quick action. And Mr. Benson is famous for that.”

The Avenger sat motionless, like a relaxed panther. He wasn’t looking at Moran; he was looking at a window pole, slanted against the wall. It was of standard length, with a metal hook on the end.

“About this Carl Foley—he was one of the heads of this company, wasn’t he?”

Moran nodded and reached out with his square, capable-looking hand to cover Myra’s hand.

“Tell me a little about the business set-up,” Dick said.

“There are four partners in the corporation,” Moran explained. “Or there
were
four: Andrew Sillers, Thomas Marsden, Amos Jones and Carl Foley. Now, without Foley, there are three. They are pretty wealthy: the development has been profitable from the beginning.”

“And what was that beginning?”

“Well, I don’t know much about it,” said Moran. “I’m just head bookkeeper here. I’ve only had the job a couple of years. There was this tract, held as vacant land long after buildings had gone up all around it. The owner was Sam Kepper. He and these four formed the original Thornton Heights development. Then Kepper died. That was years ago.”

Smitty and Nellie shifted restlessly, unable for the life of them to guess what all this dry business history might have to do with the hideously mangled corpse lying downstairs.

“You and Miss Horton were here in the office when Mrs. Mead found Phelan dead?” said Benson evenly, looking at the window pole.

Moran nodded, pressing Myra’s hand tighter. “I’d been doing some overtime work, and she said she’d meet me here at twelve; then I’d take her home.”