The Avenger 24 - Midnight Murder (10 page)

Benson’s fingers were working a little as he stood with body motionless and arms rigid, half bent at his sides.

“Stop that!” said the fat man, voice like a knife. “Don’t move a muscle. Not one muscle, Mr. Benson.”

The Avenger stood absolutely motionless. The younger man called Gerry stepped to him, carefully out of the line of possible fire.

“Now, let’s see,” he drawled easily. “We want to secure our famous friend, so that, afterward, there will be no indications that he was in here against his will. We might use the little trick you thought up in Vienna, Merto.”

“As good as any,” said the fat man, in his wheezed, indifferent voice.

“You mean the trick of the closet door?” said Benson, voice as calm as though he were ordering breakfast eggs.

The fat man started a trifle, and the young and elegantly garbed one stared with narrowed eyes. Then his eyebrows went up lazily.

“You’ve placed us, then?” he said.

“Oh, yes,” said The Avenger. “The mention of Vienna did it. You are Gerald Holfax, and your obese friend is Merto Constaldi. Holfax originally of Edinburgh; Constaldi originally of Sicily. Catania, I believe. You have sold munitions to Iranian rebels, stolen military secrets from the English and sold to the Germans, and from the Germans and sold to the Russians. You are international freelance thieves of a high order. This is your first appearance in the United States, I believe. Unfortunately for you, it will be your last!”

“He has a good memory, at least,” said Merto. “And the trick of the closet door, in Vienna? How did you know of that? Even the Viennese police did not guess.”

“It was enough to read the police account,” said Benson. “A description of the death spot, and of the way the French Military attaché was found dead after the fire, clearly showed the only way he could have been held in that room, without bonds, without a mark of violence on his body except for the deep bruises at his wrists.”

Benson moved toward the closet door of the little bedroom as he spoke. He was careful to keep his hands and arms motionless.

“You want me to put my hands like this?” he said calmly.

He raised his arms slowly till they were about chest high, then laid his wrists against the jamb of the closet doorway, hands inside the closet.

Merto’s eyes were narrowed to slits, and they were rather worried slits. Gerry took a small, thoughtful puff on his cigarette.

“There is something about this that I don’t like,” said Merto.

“It is odd for any man, even an intelligent one in a hopeless position, to be so obedient,” agreed Gerry. Then he shrugged. “The answer, of course, is that he does not realize how foolproof the little arrangement is.”

He went out of the room, and came back in a moment with hammer and nails. The nails were long, heavy spikes.

The Avenger stood as before, wrists against the closet door jamb. With a swift move, anticipating a possible struggle on Benson’s part, Gerry closed the door on The Avenger’s wrists.

Then he nailed the door shut.

It was as ruthless, cold-blooded and cruel a thing as could be conceived. At top and bottom the door bent in so that it was almost closed. In the center the stout panel was curved out where Benson’s wrists kept it from closing.

The Avenger was held as though in a vise.

A drop of blood slowly slid down the sharp edge of the door from his right wrist, stained the skin of his left, which was below, and then dropped on the closet doorknob.

Gerry examined his work carefully and nodded.

“Excellent. No man could get loose, with spikes that big, and a door that sound. Afterward, the door, like everything else, will be so mashed and splintered that the nail holes will never be noticed.”

“It is still odd,” said the fat man, “that he took this so docilely. It does not measure up to his reputation. But then,” he smiled philosophically, “few famous men do measure up to their reputations, in the flesh.”

They went to the bedroom door. Gerry waved his long cigarette holder airily. “Good-bye,” he said.

They went out. Dick Benson could hear their steps as they went down the porch stairs.

About six minutes elapsed. Then there was a roar like that of a misplaced Niagara! Ten yards of the hillside came loose, at the crest. Men yelled up there, and two of the three big trucks, fully loaded, began to tip sideways as the hillside collapsed.

Slowly at first, then with rushing speed, an avalanche of loose gravel, thousands of tons, slid and tumbled down toward Vogel’s house! The two bucks rolled over and over with it.

With hardly an appreciable increase in sound, the vast mass struck the house, overwhelmed it, split it to matchwood. It rolled on for forty or fifty yards, bearing the disintegrating house with it, and finally stopped.

A fragment of rock stuck out of a great heap of stone. The rest of what had been a house was scattered all through the mass, with here a timber and there an article of furniture showing a bit.

Dust settled slowly down on the unsightly hummocks of the gravel slide. And on The Avenger’s car.

Molly was not in the car.

Josh said anxiously, “It seems to me that we should have heard from Mr. Benson by now.”

It was seven o’clock in the evening. Hours had passed since The Avenger had left Bleek Street to talk to the General Laboratories mechanic over in the outskirts of Newark.

Cole Wilson said suddenly, “I think we ought to find out if anything has happened to him.”

“Muster Benson did not say anythin’ of followin’ him,” protested MacMurdie.

“Just the same, I’m going to that mechanic’s place and see if everything is all right,” said Cole. He was always impulsive, always jumping into things, with or without orders.

Sometimes, his initiative turned out to be extremely helpful. Sometimes, it only got him into trouble. Plenty of trouble.

“If ye’re set on goin’,” said Mac with a sigh, “I’ll go with ye. Just to keep ye out of trouble.”

“It’s that girl!” said Nellie. She and Smitty had come back after The Avenger had set forth so they didn’t know all the details. But Nellie knew that The Avenger had driven off with Molly Carroll beside him. That was enough for her. “She tricked the chief somehow. She’s the trickiest little—”

“She’s certainly pretty, though,” said Smitty solemnly.

Nellie threw a book at him.

In the basement, Cole Wilson and Fergus MacMurdie got into a sedan of much the type The Avenger had taken—long, powerful, heavy. They went under the Hudson River and then through Newark to Vogel’s address.

Wilson’s face went pale, and Mac’s face went stony as they pulled up in front of the ruin where a house had been. Men were swarming around, probing into fresh hillocks of gravel. There were lights all around the place, so that, even in the dusk, Mac and Cole could surmise what had happened. Several thousand cubic yards of gravel had slid from the hill over there and completely mashed a house in its way. It had carried two ten-ton trucks with it.

Mac moistened his lips and said to a man they saw with a long-handled shovel, “Anyone in the house when this happened?”

“What do you think we’re diggin’ around for?” growled the man. “We don’t know. We’re trying’ to find out.”

“When did it happen?”

“What are you? Reporters? Beat it! Orders are to talk to no one.”

There was a uniformed patrolman with another probing group. Wilson and Mac went to him, and Mac showed the police cards carried by all members of Justice, Inc.

“When did this slide happen?” Mac repeated his question.

The cop named an hour that made the two shiver. It was just about an hour after The Avenger had left Bleek Street.

“How did it happen?”

“Must have been a dynamite charge left in the hillside when the gravel company first shut down,” said the cop. “It must have been in there for years. Now, they’re reworking it some, and we figure the old charge was disturbed and let go. Killed a man up at the top and took two valuable trucks when it slid down.”

Mac knew something about explosives, and the probability of a dynamite charge remaining in good enough shape to explode, after being forgotten in the ground for years, struck him as being remote. It sounded pretty phony.

“A man down there said he had orders not to talk. Particularly to reporters,” said Cole. “How is that?”

The patrolman looked secretive. Then he said, “Well, you are part of the organization, so I guess I can tell you. We all have orders to work with you. And when we got here and found Mr. Benson’s car nearby, we saw at once that he was already working on this. We know he wants to keep out of the papers, so we gave strict orders for no one to talk.”

MacMurdie was feeling more and more as if he had been kicked in the stomach.

“So that’s how it is we didn’t see anything in any newspaper,” Wilson said.

“That’s how,” nodded the cop.

“You haven’t seen Mr. Benson around?”

“No,” said the cop. He grinned. “If it was anybody else but him, I’d think maybe he’d been caught by this slide. But a guy like that would never be caught by a thing as simple as a gravel slide; he’d have heard it coming if he was here. So I doped out that he saw the slide, left his car to investigate, and maybe tailed somebody from here on foot or on the back of the guy’s car. If so, he wouldn’t want information splashed around the newspapers. So—nobody talks. See?”

“I see,” said Wilson. “Where’s his car.”

The cop pointed.

Mac and Wilson went to where it was parked, down the road and drawn up into bushes. They looked at it, and both men went white to the lips.

They saw something that either the patrol hadn’t noticed, or which had spelled no message to him if he had seen it.

That was the thick rock dust on the machine.

“This car was here durin’ the slide,” said Mac. “It was not left here after it.”

They ran back to the cop.

“You’ve found nothin’?”

The cop shook his head and scowled. “What’s more,” he said, “it’ll be a long time before we do find anything. Or anybody. Under all these tons of stuff. Fellow by the name of Vogel lived in the house that used to be here. Haven’t run across his body yet—or anybody else’s. Haven’t even found but a few hunks of the house— Say, you don’t think Mr. Benson was in the joint when it happened, do you?”

Mac moistened his lips again. They felt dry as cork.

“Of course not!” he said stoutly. “Didn’t ye say yersel’ he’d have heard it and would’ve been able to get away?”

But as they went to their car they avoided looking at each other.

“Do you suppose he’s down under . . . all that stuff?” Cole muttered at length.

“Of course not!” snapped Mac. “Ye ought to know better than that!”

But the Scotchman felt like sitting down somewhere and putting his face in his hands. The dust on the car proved that The Avenger had at least been in this vicinity when the slide occurred. If he had gotten clear of it—why hadn’t he contacted Bleek Street long before now?

Mac got in touch with headquarters on the car radio. It was Rosabel Newton, Josh’s pretty wife, who answered. The rest, she said, were gone; she was holding the place alone.

“Has Muster Benson phoned or radioed in since we left?” asked Mac.

Rosabel said no.

“Where is everybody?” Mac asked.

Rosabel said that somebody named Spade, from General Laboratories, had phoned awhile ago and suggested that someone keep watch on the company’s little New York laboratory and see if Rew Wight called around. Josh had volunteered to go to the place and wait.

Then, just a few minutes ago, Nellie and Smitty had decided to go and join Josh in his vigil. They were still fuming, because they’d actually had Wight in their hands and the man had gotten away. They wanted to see if they could pick him up again.

To say that Nellie and Smitty. were fuming, because Rew Wight had given them the slip, was an understatement. They were good and sore about it. That is, Nellie was, because she insisted it was all her fault. Because she felt so keenly about it, the giant for once refrained from ribbing her.

The half-pint blonde got pink with shame every time she remembered the incident of the potato sack.

“The way I let him pull an old trick like that!” she kept mourning.

Neither of them even bothered to remember the notable things they’d done in trailing Wight in the first place, then in escaping from an exceptionally tight spot. That was no more than they should have done, they reasoned. What they should not have done was go back to Bleek Street without Rew Wight.

So they were going to General Laboratories’ town shop to join Josh, who was watching to see if Wight showed up there.

“But he’ll be scared of his life,” said the giant Smitty. “He’s had one close shave. Do you think he’d be goofy enough to go openly to the General Laboratories’ auxiliary shop, which is listed in his name in the phone book? Isn’t it more likely that he’d hide somewhere?”

“Mr. Spade seems to think he might go to the town place,” Nellie shrugged.

“Wonder what he said to Josh about it?”

“Let’s ask Josh,” suggested Nellie.

They got to the place.