The Avenger 23 - The Wilder Curse (9 page)

“What’s that stuff? What’re you gonna
do
to me? I won’t swallow that stuff, if that’s the idea you got in your bonnet.”

The Avenger walked toward the man, holding the sinister-looking beaker. The man backed from him till the edge of a chair caught the backs of his legs.

He fell into it and leaned way back, still staring at the red liquid.

“This won’t taste bad at all,” came The Avenger’s voice, on a strange dead level.

Mac looked at Smitty with a grin just twitching the edge of his dour Scotch mouth. Smitty nodded, ever so little, as he got the significance of it.

“I won’t swallow that! I won’t, I tell you!” The man’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. He licked dry lips, staring—staring at the vial. “You turn me over to the cops.”

“Not bad at all,” said The Avenger in the level monotonous tone. “Come, now. Not—bad—at—all”

“You got no right,” the man began. His eyes had a glassy look. “You got no—”

He stopped talking. He was sitting as still as if dead, eyes wide and unblinking, like a mechanical thing rather than a human being.

It had been as simple as it was ingenious.

The Avenger, with those glittering, colorless eyes of his, was one of the world’s greatest hypnotists. But you can hypnotize a person by having him stare at an inanimate object, if he stares hard enough, just as well as you can hypnotize him by forcing him to stare into your eyes.

By tricking the man into staring hard at the vial of red liquid, The Avenger had induced him to hypnotize himself. He sat there now in a deep trance.

Dick set the unused beaker down on a table and faced the gunman.

“You allowed us to follow that van to get us into a trap, didn’t you?” Benson said.

“Yeah,” said the man.

“How did you know we’d follow?”

“We saw the guy with the big ears tap on his little trick radio,” said the man. Mac glared at the reference to his outstanding organs of hearing.

“We let him tap,” the man went on. “Then we dropped one of them little sleep pills of his—whatever they are—every so often, so you could get a line on us.”

“The van was stolen, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” said the man.

“The garage? Did you overpower the regular garage men so you could use the place?”

“No. They helped us,” said the man. “They seemed to be in on it.”

“Who owns it?”

“Guy named Sliver, or Silver, or somethin’ like that. I’ve never seen him.”

“Is he the head of your gang? Is he the man you’re working for?”

“I don’t know who we work for.”

“Who pays you off?”

“Some big guy from the West Coast,” said the man. “I’d never seen him before.”

“Was he the one who directed operations at the garage?”

“Yeah,” said the man.

Smitty said in a low tone, “That’s the one who tried to shoot you in Dan Moran’s office last night. I thought his voice was familiar; after a while, I placed it.”

The Avenger nodded so mechanically that Smitty suddenly realized Dick had recognized that voice all along. The giant subsided. Benson went on.

“The idea was to blow up the truck and let it burn, then say a careless driver had lit a cigarette near the open gas tank, wasn’t it?” he said to the man.

“Somethin’ like that,” the man replied. “An accident. Get rid of the lot of you and no kickbacks.”

“But who,” persisted Benson, “wants all this done?”

The man simply didn’t know. He was a small cog in a large and deadly machine, the nature of which was still deeply shrouded in mystery.

The Avenger looked at Cole Wilson.

“Might as well take him to headquarters,” he said.

He clapped his hands sharply. The gangster woke with a jerk. He stared wildly at them.

“What’d you do to me?” he yelled. “You . . . you— That red stuff! Did you make me take it? You got no right—”

Wilson walked him out of the room. Mac, pacing up and down thoughtfully, said, “This Clarence Beck—Carl Foley’s nephew—I keep thinkin’ of him, Muster Benson. He may be the reason Cole and I got trapped, back at the Foley house.”

The Scot scowled dourly.

“He left us at the front door and said he wanted to make a phone call. But maybe the young mon made his call before, to these skurlies, tellin’ ’em to back their van up to the Foley place and take us for a ride. Then maybe he faked the phone call, so he wouldn’t be with us when we were snatched.”

“It’s possible,” said The Avenger expressionlessly.

“And look how he ran out on us,” said Smitty. “He didn’t call the cops. Instead, after we’d got into the garage, he beat it off some place.”

“Far as that goes,” Mac picked it up, “he might even be the mon behind his uncle’s murder. No doubt, he gets quite an inheritance. And he’s bubble-brained enough to try almost anythin’—”

The Scot’s voice trailed off as he saw that Benson was deep in thoughts of his own. Out of this abstraction, after a moment, two words came.

“Silver,” said The Avenger slowly, pale eyes like diamond probes in their concentration. “Silver.”

“Eh?” said Mac. Then: “Oh!”

Their hoodlum guest had said that garage was owned by someone named Silver, or Sliver.

“Could that name be Sillers?” said The Avenger. “Andrew Sillers of Thornton Heights?”

The colorless, baneful eyes lost their tense look.

“You and I will visit Sillers, Mac,” Benson said. “I was on my way to see him when I learned that you and Cole were in trouble. Smitty, please look up all available data on Sillers. See if there is anything in his background that might indicate that a supposed pillar of wealthy respectability would hire gunmen to do wholesale murder.”

A phone call had told Benson and Mac that Andrew Sillers had changed his mind. Earlier, they’d been told that no one of the partners would be at the office today. Afraid to leave their homes? Perhaps so.

But now a precautionary call at Sillers’s big apartment revealed that he’d changed his mind and had gone over to the central building to the office.

He had gone alone, said the servant answering the phone. And he had gone in a hurry.

The Avenger and Mac entered the Thornton Heights office, and the receptionist told them that Mr. Sillers was
not
in the office. In fact, she seemed surprised that anyone had thought he was. She said she thought he’d planned to stay home that day.

Mac noted that Benson’s icy, pale eyes were like moonstones in their slitted clarity. The Avenger went to the office of the head bookkeeper, young Dan Moran.

“Well!” said Moran, as they entered. He got up and came toward them, hand outstretched to shake theirs.

He seemed glad to see them and very pleasant; but under this, Mac thought he sensed a strained and anxious attitude, not, however, connected in any way with their visit.

He, too, looked surprised when Benson said he had come to have a talk with Andrew Sillers.

“I talked to him first thing this morning,” Moran said. “He told me then he was going to stay home today.”

“Perhaps he will come in in a few minutes,” The Avenger said, face as expressionless as his colorless, inscrutable eyes. Then he said, evenly, “Do you happen to know a young man named Clarence Beck?”

Dan Moran’s face was normally a pleasant one. He was a big, healthy young fellow with, it seemed, a healthy and even disposition. But he didn’t look quite so pleasant at mention of that name.

“Beck?” he said. “Yes, I know him. Carl Foley’s nephew. For a while, he pretended to work here in the office. But he got tired of that and just loafs now. I guess he got quite a piece of change when Foley died.”

“He knows a girl named Myra,” said Mac. “Would that be Myra Horton, your friend?”

“It would,” said Moran, tensing his husky shoulders. “He has known her almost as long as I have.”

“You don’t seem to like Beck,” Dick said. His tone indicated that Moran could answer or not, as he chose.

It looked, at first, as though Moran chose not to talk about anything as personal as his relation with Myra Horton. But people had a habit of saying things to the owner of the cold, impersonal eyes that they wouldn’t have said to any regular human being.

“Not a little bit, I don’t like him,” he snapped. “I’d like to marry Myra, I’ve wanted to for a long time, and I think she’d accept me—if it wasn’t for Beck.”

His face darkened.

“He seems to want her, too, though I don’t think he has ever asked her to marry him. Anyhow, he keeps hanging around. And he has all the breaks—money, attendance in the best of schools, polish from trips abroad before the war, swell cars, everything. I don’t have any of that. I had to quit school to support my folks when I was sixteen. All I have, I make here. It isn’t fair.”

“I see,” was all Benson said.

Mac put in, “Do ye know where Clarence Beck is?”

“You mean—this minute?”

“Yes.”

Moran shook his head. He’d drawn a veil over his feelings again and was his normal self.

“Haven’t the faintest idea,” he said.

Mac sighed. “I wish we could get hold of him for about a minute,” he said to Benson. “Ye know, before we . . . er . . . parted earlier today, he mentioned that he knew who had made the phone call to Foley that drew him here to the office. The last call he made before he was murdered. Maybe the call that brought him to his death.”

“Phone call to Foley?” said Moran. “I can tell you who phoned him that night. Not that the call meant anything, I’m sure, considering who made it.”

Benson’s agate-pale eyes swung to him. Mac’s bleak blue ones did, too.

“Mr. Sillers phoned him,” said Moran. “From the office here. I happened to be working late that night and overheard him.” He looked at Benson. “Myra mentioned to you
why
I have been working late, recently.”

“Ye heard this mon, Sillers, tell Foley to come to the office the night he was murdered here?” snapped Mac, in a good deal of excitement.

Moran shook his head.

“I didn’t hear any of Mr. Sillers’s conversation with Mr. Foley. I don’t know if he asked him to come to the office. All I heard was his greeting. I was out in the big office and saw Mr. Sillers working the switchboard himself to get a line. I heard him say, ‘Carl?’ Then I came in here, into my own office.”

Mac saw Dick Benson’s head tilt a fraction to one side, as if those keen ears of his heard someone do something outside in the big office where men and girls were working. Mac himself heard nothing but the cheerful, routine hum of a big establishment.

The Avenger said to Moran, “Does Mr. Sillers own a garage, outside of those connected with Thornton Heights?”

Moran nodded. “He has a small garage quite a way north of here. I’ve done bookkeeping on it for him. I think it just about breaks even. He doesn’t pay much attention to it—”

There was a scream in the general office! It was a blood-curdling one! And, as if in answer, many other shrieks and yells sounded.

In a single bound, it seemed, The Avenger was at the door. Mac padded at his heels. After them, came Moran, face pale and questioning.

Benson threw the door open.

They all saw the thing that had caused the commotion, as soon as they came into the big office. It was a man at the outer door.

The man was swaying as if he must crash to the floor at any moment. His clothes, blue working garments, were slashed and bloody. Blood came from his lips and nostrils, and his head was gashed.

He glared unseeingly at those in the office, took a step forward, swayed more wildly.

“Basement!” he croaked. “Thing down there—”

The three men sped toward the man. He fell before they reached him.

“I heard the outer door open,” said Benson, “and thought perhaps it was Sillers coming. But this is not Sillers.”

“No,” said Moran, bending over the man. “This is our head engineer, Carter.”

He jumped for a phone to get a doctor. Everyone else in the place seemed too paralyzed at sight of the bloody figure to do it. But Mac, a fine physician as well as pharmacist, knew a doctor could do no good.

The glassy eyes took on a more terrible glaze even as he stared. And Benson shook his head.

Carter, head engineer, was dead! Dying, he had gotten to the office. The last of his strength had gone in the effort.

“He was hurt some little time ago,” said The Avenger.

Mac saw what the pale, infallible eyes had instantly noted. There was a lot of coagulated blood around the hideous wounds on the man’s body. He had lain for some time with the wounds bleeding, then had had a last flare of consciousness and had summoned the will power to drag himself up from the basement.

Since there was nothing to be done for Carter, the two raced for the place where he had apparently been hurt. They got to the iron stairs leading down and sped to the basement.

Everything seemed all right in here.

The vast space, as clean and spare as the engine room of a battleship, was empty of life. The banks of furnaces, supplying thousands of people with hot water and occasional heat to take the edge off the night chill, roared softly like sleeping lions.

Benson went swiftly to the small office in which Tim Phelan had met his end. The little space had been cleaned after that tragedy, and it had taken a lot of cleaning, too.

Now, it would have to be cleaned again, for it was in here that Carter had also been caught by death. There was blood all over the place, and the desk and chair were overturned in the wildest disorder.

From the door, blood spatters extended in a tortuous line. These, Mac assumed, had been left in Carter’s trail as he toiled toward the stairs. But The Avenger wanted to make sure of that.

He followed the trail of anguish. It went
past
the door, and then, a little nearer the wall, came back to it. Benson followed the rust-red spots to see what Carter had visited before making his way upstairs.

The thing he had visited was a companion in death; a companion with whom his soul was probably, even now, communing.

Another dead man lay at the end of the basement, behind the farthest of the big boilers. This one obviously had not gone anywhere. He hadn’t been killed lingeringly as Carter had.