The Avenger 23 - The Wilder Curse (4 page)

Moran told in complete detail of Mrs. Mead’s dramatic entrance into the office and of what he’d found when he ran downstairs. Then Myra Horton spoke up.

“Dan,” she said. “I think you’d better tell Mr. Benson
why
you were working late on the books tonight.”

There was a short silence while all eyes went to Moran’s face. Moran looked distressed. He shook his head a little at Myra, then shrugged uncertainly.

“I wasn’t going to mention that,” he said. “With two murders here, it might throw suspicion on innocent parties. Also, I’m not at all sure, as I told you, Myra.”

But it was out, now, and Moran shrugged again.

“For weeks, I’ve had a suspicion that some one of the four partners was taking money that didn’t belong to him and doctoring the books to hide it. That one of the four was an embezzler, to put it in a word. So, two or three nights a week, I’ve been going over the books for years back, trying to get proof. To be honest—I haven’t any, as yet. Not a speck. But I’m still sure there’s crooked work somewhere.”

Smitty’s giant hand smacked his equally vast knee.

“That begins to look like something’” he exclaimed. “If one’s a crook, maybe Carl Foley suspected, too, and got killed for his pains. And maybe this Tim Phelan found out something by accident and was killed, too, as he was trying to get in touch with Justice, Inc.”

Moran shook his head. “You see?” he said to Benson. “This is why I wasn’t going to mention the matter. I have no proof—and, meanwhile, it puts an ugly light on the murders.”

“Do you think that any of the partners suspect that you are checking up on them?” asked Benson.

“I’m sure they don’t,” replied Moran. He grinned a bit, one-sidedly. “There’d be plenty of fireworks if that were the case.”

It was then that the lights went out. They went out, not only in this office, but all over the building. There were some lights hung on wall brackets outside the entrance, and from the office window, you could see that these had gone out too.

The blackout was complete, and it was also pretty creepy.

“Dan—” Myra Horton cried in the darkness.

The office door opened.

“Don’t move, any of you,” a voice advised from the doorway. It was a level voice, and its calmness indicated an all-too-deadly self-control on the part of its owner.

The Avenger heard it first—a soft hissing sound like a slow leak. His hands flashed out in the dark to the remembered positions of Nellie and Smitty. His fingers touched the wrist of each, almost as a physician takes a pulse.

In the desperate work of Justice, Inc. there were many times when messages must be given but when it was inadvisable to speak them aloud. So by many code methods, the members talked to each other silently. One was by pressures of hand to wrist.

The Avenger’s fingertips gave the wrists of Smitty and Nellie a long and a short pressure. The message was plain.

“Gas!”

Instantly, in the blackness, Nellie whipped out a handkerchief and pressed it to her little nose. Smitty, putting the lapel of his coat to his nostrils, inhaled through this. The fabrics of lapel and handkerchief had been saturated with a chemical of Fergus MacMurdie’s concoction—MacMurdie was another of The Avenger’s aides—so that it would counteract, for a few minutes, the effects of any known gas.

Nellie and Smitty sensed that their chief was moving toward the door. “Sensed” was the word. It was too black to see a thing in here; and when Dick Benson wanted to move silently, no ears could hear him. More by a movement of air around him than in any other way, Smitty and Nellie were informed that he was near the doorway.

They heard a soft movement near the chair where Dick had been sitting when the lights went out. They caught the faintest possible blur of movement as The Avenger whirled in the doorway.

Then four shots crashed out in the small space.

The first shot was directed at the chair where Benson had sat; the lancing stab of fire from the gun muzzle pointed that way.

The next three shots were aimed at random toward the form charging toward the chair from the doorway. Smitty and Nellie heard Myra Horton scream and Dan Moran swear. Also, they heard a light thudding sound and the scrape of a shoe.

Then the door banged shut, and the lock clicked. An instant later there was the ping of glass broken in a thousand shards, and the opening of the door again. They heard the light, racing tread of feet that could belong only to one person—Dick Benson.

Smitty bounced from his chair.

“Go back,” The Avenger’s voice snapped, from just beyond the doorway.

The giant subsided impatiently. There was silence which was not so much silence as a complete suspension of time and animation for several minutes.

Then, without their having heard a sound of returning footsteps, the blackness was split by a white flare. The Avenger’s face, expressionless as a mask, showed in the light.

The white light came from a small disc, looking somewhat like a stomach pill, that would burn whitely for ten minutes. All the members of Justice, Inc. carried them around with them.

In its pale light, Smitty and Nellie saw Dick open the window. And they saw the limp forms of Moran and Myra Horton, sagging in their chairs. The gas had gotten them.

“Lights, Smitty,” Dick said.

The giant went out of the office and to the basement. He found the main fuse that had been pulled from its clip and replaced it.

When Smitty went back, the office was cleared of gas. Benson was working to revive Moran, and Nellie was bringing Myra back to consciousness.

“So somebody does suspect that Moran was checking up on them,” Smitty said. “And Moran was to be killed just as Foley and Tim Phelan were—to shut his mouth.”

The Avenger, not looking up, said, “The gas used is harmless. It was meant only to give the intruder a chance to do what he came here for; what he turned out the lights for.”

His colorless, icy eyes flicked toward the chair he had occupied.

Following the pale gaze, Smitty saw the jagged hole through the chair’s back, heart high, and remembered the first shot, aimed straight at where Benson was supposed to have been sitting.

“Then the whole act was pulled just so you could be killed?” exclaimed Smitty.

“It would seem so,” said The Avenger, without a trace of emotion in his tone. “Moran wasn’t harmed, so it would appear that the murderer was not interested in him. Nor was there any attempt to take the books Moran was working on. I guess I was the one wanted.”

Moran stirred a little under the skillful fingers.

“The gunman heard me leap at him from the doorway—where I supposed he still was,” The Avenger went on. “His next three shots caught me squarely in the chest. They knocked me to one knee. By moving fast and locking the door as he went out, he gave himself just enough time to escape.”

Another might have asked how it was that three heavy bullets, catching Benson in the chest, had not killed him instead of merely knocking him down. But Smitty, of course, knew the answer to that.

The Avenger and each of his aides constantly wore an undergarment of marvelous, pliant stuff which was Benson’s invention and which he called celluglass. This was bulletproof but did not, naturally, kill the hard impact of a slug against it—an impact something like the kick of a mule, if a .45 were used.

“You’ve just started an investigation out here,” Nellie said. “You’ve barely had time to get to the place. And an all-out effort has been made to kill you. Somebody certainly is anxious not to have the Foley-Phelan murders looked into too deeply.”

“It would seem so,” said The Avenger, pale eyes and masklike face as expressionless as though made of marble.

At four o’clock in the morning the streets of Thornton Heights—and of the other blocks around it—are as quiet as a graveyard. The trash collectors have already gone, so there is no banging of big cans. The other morning life has not begun.

At four o’clock everyone in Thornton Heights is usually asleep; but on this morning, four hours after a scrawny little assistant engineer has been killed, several were awake.

One was another scrawny little man, quite a bit older than Tim Phelan, and quite a bit wealthier.

The home of this one was the entire top floor of one of the northwest buildings of the development. It held ten rooms, each seeming more luxuriously furnished than the last, till you got to the master bedroom.

This room was hung with valuable tapestries and had an onyx mantelpiece that had come right out of a European palace. The great four-poster bed had also come from a palace. Kings had used it.

Maybe kings had even cowered in it, as the present occupant was now doing.

The occupant was Andrew Sillers, one of the fortunate partners of the Thornton Heights Development Corp. That is, everyone considered him fortunate. He himself didn’t think he was fortunate at all, right now.

Andrew Sillers was a little over sixty and should have weighed forty pounds more than he did. His neck was like a fluted rake handle, with the cords standing out sharply. His hair was lank and dry-looking. His hands were like claws as they alternately pulled the bed clothes over his terrified head and then pulled them down again.

They pulled the covers up because he didn’t want to hear that noise that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Then they pulled them down so he
could
hear—to discover if they were still making it. Whoever “they” could be.

The noise was still coming, all right. Anyhow, he thought it was, though he couldn’t swear it was not his imagination.

It sounded like some restless animal in his bathroom. Then it seemed to be near the window, only to jump to the door an instant later.

It was a snuffling sound. A majority of people would have recognized it instantly and said it was a homey and cheerful thing. As a matter of fact, Andrew Sillers had recognized it. But the associations it carried just now made it very far from homey or cheerful to him.

Now the sound seemed to be coming right toward his bed. Sillers whimpered, barely audibly, and flopped the covers up over his head again.

There was a discreet tap at his closed door; then the door was opened. This could be seen plainly enough because Andrew Sillers had a night lamp on a low stand. That lamp was never out, these nights.

In the doorway stood a stalwart servant with a gun making a bulge at his shoulder. He’d have made three of little Sillers, and just the sight of him—stolidly chewing gum—should have reassured the thin little man.

But, somehow, it didn’t.

“Did you call, sir?” said the big fellow. He stumbled over the “sir.” Obviously, he wasn’t used to using the word; obviously he was no regular servant.

“No,” said Sillers.

“I was sure I heard you.”

“I just cleared my throat,” snapped Sillers.

“Oh! Everything O.K., then?”

Andrew Sillers was tremendously impelled to tell the man of that sound. But he dared not. The man would have thought he was crazy. So would everyone else, if they knew.

Because the sound, Sillers would have sworn, was made by a pig. Or pigs.

Pigs on the top floor of a building in a congested metropolitan area!

“Everything is all right,” Sillers said waspishly to his burly guard.

“O.K.” The man went phlegmatically out.

Sillers glared after him. If he had heard that sound, and if he could associate it with the things that Sillers was fearsomely able to, he wouldn’t be so confoundedly calm.

A mellow tinkle chimed out. It was a chime from a Spanish church, originally, stolen and sold to Sillers on a trip abroad. It now meant that visitors were at Sillers’s door.

The big man popped back in.

“Somebody to see you, sir,” he said. “Do I let him in?”

Sillers looked at a clock. Ten minutes after four. Terror showed on his face. It was no hour for honest men to come ringing doorbells.

“No,” he squalled. “That is, not unless it’s somebody I know very well.”

However, it was someone he knew well.

Peering through a freshly contrived peephole in Sillers’s outer door, the guard saw the face of Amos Jones.

Amos Jones was another of the corporation’s partners. It seemed funny that he’d be calling at such an hour, but he fell into Sillers’s category of “somebody I know very well,” so the guard opened the door.

Amos Jones came in. Right after him came three guys whose appearance made Sillers’s guard dive for his gun. They looked even tougher than he did.

“It’s all right,” said Jones blandly. “These are employees of mine.”

Jones was the kind of man who would do most things smoothly. He was of average height, but he was twice as heavy and twice as pink as most men. His face was set in a broad smile, which was not matched by his watchful—but bland—little gray eyes.

He waddled toward Sillers’s bedroom door, knowing his way very well indeed. At the door, he jerked his head for his three “employees” to stay outside. He went on into the bedroom.

“Amos!” said Sillers. Wrought up by terror of who could be calling at such an hour, Sillers was a bit vexed when he found the call was innocent. “What in the world are you doing here at four o’clock in the morning? Waking a man out of a sound sleep—”

“Were you sleeping?” Jones interrupted, with his wide, beaming smile.

Sillers’s eyes missed his. “Of course.”

“All right—you were sleeping,” Jones said blandly. “But something has just happened—rather, it happened a few hours ago—that I thought you ought to know about. It’s about Phelan.”

“Phelan?” Sillers said. “Who’s Phelan?”

“Timothy Phelan.”

“I don’t know any Tim—”

“You ought to,” said Jones, not quite so suave for an instant. “You’re the one who hired him. Phelan, assistant engineer.”

“Oh! Oh, yes! What about him?”

“Nothing,” said Jones sardonically, “except he’s dead.”

Sillers stared with squinted, alarmed eyes.

The door chime tinkled again. Both Jones and Sillers whirled toward the door.

Again, a face showed in the peephole that fulfilled Sillers’s description of who he would allow in here. The guard opened the door an instant later and into the bedroom came the third partner, Thomas Marsden.