The Avenger 24 - Midnight Murder (5 page)

“Go on,” nodded Benson, pale eyes unblinking and enigmatic as they rested on Spade’s amiable face.

“A mechanic in our employ,” said Spade, “looked over the plane to be sure nothing had been tampered with. He also prepared for the installation of the . . . er . . . thing. So, you see, we left nothing to chance; not even the integrity of that pilot. We investigated Wayne Carroll and found that he was supposed to be above suspicion. But I suppose every man has his price.”

“Name and address of that mechanic, please,” said The Avenger.

Spade gave it.

“I understand there were four laboratory heads here,” The Avenger went on evenly. “Boone, Grace, Wight and Towne. Now, with Towne gone, there are three. But a moment ago, I met only Boone and Grace. Who is the man Ryan?”

“He is one of Towne’s assistants who has turned out so brilliantly that we are about to let him in on the General Laboratories profit-sharing plan.”

“Profit-sharing plan?” repeated Benson.

“The four men you mentioned were, and are, more than employees,” said Spade. “A full fifty percent of the net profits of any of their inventions is pro-rated among them. I get the remaining fifty percent.”

“You, a scientist, are a laboratory worker, too?”

Spade smiled.

“I wouldn’t know a Bunsen burner from a cathode. I am the business end of General Laboratories. I put up most of the money to found it. I market the inventions and, in general, see that the monetary end goes well. If I do say so myself, it’s lucky for them that they have a business office here with a businessman in it.”

He put his forefinger next to his head and made circles with it.

“All crazy, these inventors. All crackpots. A bunch of prima donnas. But I know how to handle them. Believe me, I earn my share around here.”

“How is it that everyone is here at this time of night?” asked Benson. “It’s after eleven o’clock.”

“When we are working on something and are nearly done, it’s our custom to stay right at the plant. There are rooms at the side for living purposes. We’re working on that . . . thing . . . now, to see if, by some chance, it was responsible for the plane crash. However, I don’t see how it could have been.”

“Where is Rew Wight? He is the one person not here.”

“Wight’s in town,” said Spade. “He went to New York early this morning and didn’t come back when news of the crash came out. I don’t know where he is, so I haven’t been able to contact him.”

Benson took his dime-sized radio transmitter from his vest pocket.

“Mac,” he said.

The response came in a moment.

“Have you found that girl?” asked The Avenger.

“No, sirrr,” said Mac. “I’m still huntin’. The guarrrds out here have found most of their friends who were slugged and robbed of their uniforms. Still two missin’. Shall I keep on lookin’?”

“Yes,” said Dick. He put the mike back.

Spade’s eyes were round. It must have looked like black magic to him, for there was no evidence whatever of there being a radio anywhere about Benson’s person.

“I’d like to talk to your scientific staff,” The Avenger said.

“Sure,” said Spade.

He went to the hall and down to the door that had banged closed behind the three lab workers a moment ago. He opened it.

There was a huge laboratory room, one of several. In it, were Grace and Ryan and Boone. They were not working at anything. They were sitting near a big bench, talking rapidly to each other. But there was wordlessness as they glared at the doorway.

“This is Mr. Benson,” said Spade, in a tone of reproof to them, as if they’d been children. “He’s trying to help us. In fact, he already has. You saw those men he rounded up before they could do us any damage. Try to co-operate with him in any way he desires.”

He ducked out, and closed the door. The Avenger went to the three. He looked at the apparatus on the way and approved. It wasn’t anything like his own laboratory, which was probably the best in the world on a small scale; but it was a good, competent workshop, obviously planned by people who knew their business.

The three were still glaring at him.

“It seems you were about to be invaded by a small army, awhile ago,” Benson said to the three. “Have you any idea whom they were working for? Or did you recognize any of them?”

Glares from Boone and Grace.

Ray Ryan, a red-haired man of thirty-three or so, who looked as if normally he would be good-natured, growled out:

“Most of our products are wanted by foreign powers. We guard constantly against spies. Maybe these are in the hire of Germany or Japan.”

“Perhaps,” said The Avenger, as if he didn’t quite think so. “Have you had intruders like this before?”

“Never,” said Ryan.

“Grace,” said The Avenger, voice quiet but compelling, “you were at the airport this noon. May I ask—”

What The Avenger was about to ask was never stated. There was a yell from the hall. Then Spade’s urgent voice.

“Mr. Benson! Here! Quick!”

The Avenger got to the hall almost before the three inventors saw him move. When it was necessary, he could move so fast the eye was hard put to follow.

Spade sounded as if it were necessary, now.

When Benson got to the hall, he saw Spade in a position rather incongruous in one of his pompous bulk. Spade was kneeling at the door of the room in which the prisoners had been left, with his eye to the keyhole.

“Come here, quick!” he said, and glistening drops of perspiration could be seen on his face from thirty feet away. “I think they’re gone! The prisoners escaped, somehow! I wanted you to be here before I opened the door—”

The Avenger got to him and swung the door back.

The room was empty.

Dick leaped inside. A few frayed strands of the thin silk cord told that the men’s bonds had been cut. Yet, The Avenger had searched each as he found them and knew that not one had had a knife when he went in here. Not one had even had any glass object in his pocket which he could have broken and used for a knife.

Spade was dancing around ponderously and wringing his hands.

“Oh, my goodness!” he gasped. “Now, they’ll kill us all! They’ll come back in here and—”

There was the sound of shots from the gate. The Avenger sprang out the door and raced down the driveway. From a little beyond the gate came the sounds of cars.

At the end of the drive, Benson came upon the gate guard, lying in the road with a bullet through his stomach. Mac limped up from the right. There was a big welt on his forehead.

“Got away!” he gasped. “Every last one of the skurlies! How did they ever get out of the lab, Muster Benson?”

The Avenger didn’t take the time to answer. He raced through the gate to the public highway.

Down this, a car was picking up speed silently but terrifically. He sped toward it in great distance-devouring bounds, caught the rear bumper with his fingertips and drew himself up on it.

The Avenger unscrewed the gas-tank cap that protruded from the rear fender. He dropped several tablets down the curving intake pipe and waited. It took some minutes for the motor up ahead to use the gas in the pump and line, before the gas from the tank started to feed through. When it did, the motor began to cough. In a minute, it died. It was just about time. Even Dick Benson found it hard to maintain his position on that bumper as the sedan whirled around corners and over bumps.

The car stopped and Dick went around to the front.

“Put your hands up!” the girl said.

She had been clever. She had ducked down in front of the radiator, looked under the car, then popped up like a jack-in-the-box when Benson got near.

She was quite young and extremely pretty. Her hair was light-brown with the light from the headlamps picking out a bit of red. She had dark-blue eyes, was dressed very well and had a figure that could have modeled her chic garb professionally. She looked beautiful—and deadly.

The .38 automatic in her hand was pointed at Benson’s head, not at his body, and it did not waver. The Avenger, like every member of Justice, Inc., wore a bullet-proof garment of his own devising, pliable as silk but tougher than steel, which he called “celluglass.” But this did not, of course, protect his head or limbs.

“You got those men away,” said The Avenger, voice as calm as a summer afternoon. “You drove cars up for them, softly, one after another. Then you jumped into your own car, this car. But since you were the last to leave, you were slow enough for me to catch up with you.”

“Right on all counts,” said the girl defiantly. “But a lot of good your catching up with me will do you. I’m going to—”

“Your name is Molly, isn’t it?” Benson said. It was more statement than question.

Her eyes widened; they were very beautiful eyes.

“Why, how did you . . . I mean, what makes you think my name is—”

The Avenger took the gun away from her.

For half a minute, his right hand, thrust a little up in the air as was his left, had been straying ever so little away from his head. And the girl had been watching it.

In any tense scene, the eye tends to concentrate on the one moving thing. It’s a trick that magician’s use constantly, to perform the real action unobtrusively with one hand while the observer’s attention is riveted on the other, moving hand.

The girl’s eye had kept wavering warily up to that slowly moving right hand. And now, with her slight start of confusion at sound of the name, plus her already divided attention, she was off guard enough for The Avenger’s left hand to dart forward faster than the eye could see and pluck the gun out of her fingers.

Benson dropped the gun in his pocket.

“What is the last name, Molly?” he asked, pale eyes as calm as they’d been when the gun was pointed at his head.

The girl said nothing. Her teeth were set hard. She was furious at herself as well as at this man with the colorless eyes and thick, coal-black hair and masklike face.

“Who employs that gang you’re working with?”

She said nothing to that, either. Her full, red lips were obstinately closed.

“Perhaps you’d better come with me to my headquarters,” The Avenger said evenly. “You may change your mind and decide to talk—there.”

“You can’t do that!” flamed the girl. “If you want to turn me over to the police, go ahead. But you’re just an ordinary person. You haven’t the power to arrest me.”

The Avenger showed her a card in the headlights. It was a card stating that he was an honorary officer of the New York State police. A captain, to be exact. He could have showed her forty-seven other cards like it, if he’d cared to.

He got out his tiny radio microphone.

“Mac! Mac—take the car and go back to Bleek Street. I’ll get there in another car I’ve picked up.”

The girl’s eyes widened as Spade’s had. She saw nothing on Benson’s body indicating that there was a radio at the other end of the tiny wire.

“You certainly have equipment, haven’t you?” she said.

But she said it in a queer way. It was a sneer more than a compliment. It was bitter.

“Get into your car,” The Avenger said. “No, the right side. I’ll drive.”

She got in. The Avenger started. She looked quite resigned and, obedient.

If she had been a man, she could never have got away with what she did. But Benson’s chivalry toward women, his disinclination to cause them the slightest discomfort had more than once handicapped him. It did now.

Her hand darted toward the wheel.

Benson saw the movement start, out of the corners of his colorless, infallible eyes. He caught her wrist, but he tried to be gentle about it, not exert force that, in the interest of efficiency might have broken her wrist. So she managed to keep on the move another three inches before the hand clamped harder.

Her fingers touched the horn button.

The horn sounded like a blackout siren in this quiet countryside! It carried for miles. Then the girl leaned back and smiled pleasantly at Benson.

“We’re going to have company,” she said. “I was to meet the rest at the next crossroad, only a little way farther. Now, they’ll come back to see why I sounded my horn.”

The Avenger already was turning the car rapidly in the rather narrow road, the pellets in the tank having now lost their effectiveness.

Headlights showed suddenly from a lane or something on the side. They swerved into the road and came cautiously toward the car in which was Benson and the girl.

The Avenger stopped.

Two pairs of headlights showed at the road behind them, bearing down rapidly. Three cars bearing, he knew, fifteen men in all—the five who had escaped at first and the ten who had somehow gotten out of the laboratory prison. One was wounded by a bullet fired by a pal in the dark, but only in the arm. He could still handle a gun!

The Avenger turned at right angles in the road and sent the car plunging at the ditch.

The ditch was two feet deep, and by the way the car lurched, he knew at least one spring was broken. But he got across it. The car jounced rapidly over a rough pasture.

There was a farmhouse with out-buildings several hundred yards away. He made for that. Behind him, three cars fanned from the road. They were traveling faster than he was; these cars were evidently bulletproofed, heavier and of better make than the girl’s small sedan.

Benson got to the nearest of the outbuildings, a small barn, and slid to a stop. He got the girl’s wrist and impelled her from the car and into the barn with him.

The three other cars stopped outside.

The Avenger drew from his upper vest pocket a thing like a pencil. He thrust the tip of this through a knothole in the rough wooden siding, pointed it up as high as possible and touched the clip.

The clip looked like an ordinary fountain-pen clip, but it turned out to be some kind of little trigger. From the tip of the tiny tube came a burst of colored fire, like that from a rocket. It shot up a hundred feet, exploded and went out.

“Get him fast,” someone yelled outside. “That’s a signal of some kind.”

“Yeah—but watch it. Molly’s in there.”

“You pick nice friends,” said The Avenger evenly.