The Avenger 21 - The Happy Killers (14 page)

He stopped. And apparently the realization that flooded him was shared in the same instant by Cole. Benson must have known it right along.

“Wait a minute!” the giant said. “Amos Beaker ‘moved out’? Amos Beaker was never in here! No one was ever in here! The new floor tells that. So how come—”

The Avenger had his head down at floor level. From there, the colorless, infallible eyes could see traces of dust in a straight line. The traces led straight to a window. Other, slighter traces, lined toward each door in the living room.

Benson leaped back to the door leading to the corridor. His steely hand caught the knob, turned. He jerked.

The door refused to budge!

He jumped to a living-room door; and, following his lead, though they were still more surprised than startled, Smitty and Cole leaped to the other doors.

They, too, refused to budge.

They were locked in the room so that nothing short of battering a door down would get them out.

Smitty snorted contemptuously. With his great strength and nearly three hundred pounds of brawn, doors were flimsy things. He was used to going through ordinary ones like a tank through an unpropped brick wall.

He rammed his vast shoulder with shattering force against one of the living-room doors.

“Ouch!”
he said, looking surprised. The door had quivered throughout its length, but hadn’t budged. It was heavily barricaded on the other side.

He started for another door, but then a click caught the attention of the three of them. It was a small sound, about the kind made by an alarm clock just before the alarm goes off.

It had come from the window. They stared that way and saw the window slowly and easily sliding up.

“Somebody’s out there!” yelled Cole.

But he had spoken impulsively, as he too often acted, and instantly he realized it. No one could be out there; the building wall dropped sheer for six stories to the street.

He started toward the window, stopped. A small piece of bent tin, like a tiny coal chute, was rising as the window did. It hit about a forty-five-degree slant, and something rolled down it to bounce a little on the floor inside. Then it rolled almost to their feet.

The thing looked like one of the little change cylinders that are snapped from department to department in big stores. It looked also a bit like a tin firecracker, because one end had a fuse that was sputtering gaily.

It was a bomb, and it was going to go off in about two seconds; the fuse had been deliberately shortened so that the thing would explode almost the instant it rolled into the room.

“For the love of—” Smitty mumbled. He thought he yelled it, but the words could hardly be heard.

The giant had been close to death before, but never quite this close, and never to such a violent death. When that thing went off—

He didn’t even grab for it. These thoughts had raced through his mind before he could have moved a step. And Cole was paralyzed to immobility, too, by the sure and instant knowledge that no move could be made in time.

But Benson moved!

Like light he flung himself toward the deadly cylinder. With horrified eyes, Cole and Smitty saw that the fuse was too close to the thing for even fingers like Benson’s to seize.

The Avenger didn’t try to seize it with his fingers. The cold brain behind the pale eyes was like the incredible body that powered it. It worked about three times as fast as a normal one.

With a sweeping movement The Avenger caught up the cylinder and pressed it to his face. The sputtering had stopped as the burning fuse reached the metal wall of the homemade bomb. And the instant arrived when the spark should ignite whatever explosive was in it. But at this instant, The Avenger got a burning shred between his teeth.

No fingers could have gotten a grip on the tiny stub, but teeth could. He pulled it out. There was a terrible fraction of a second when the three waited helplessly on the chance that one spark had gotten through.

Then silence. Harmless silence. The thick, thudding concussion of their own pulses throbbed in their ears.

“Whew!”
gasped Smitty.

“Oh, b-boy!” Cole said weakly. He leaned against the wall and was not ashamed of his trembling knees.

It had been a second and a half to remember.

Almost equally memorable was the sight of The Avenger, now. Dick Benson had had that thing in such a position that his head would have been blown off as cleanly as an executioner’s ax could remove it—if he hadn’t caught the fuse. Now, he was calmly examining the instrument of death, and neither in chill, pale eyes nor masklike face could a spark of emotion be seen.

The little bomb was an ordinary beer can filled with powder with the crimped cover put back on and a fuse leading through a hole in the cover. Crude and simple, but if it had gone off there wouldn’t have been enough pieces of the three men left to fill a bucket.

At the window, down and outside, clockworks were screwed, which had opened the sash and tipped up the chute. A cheap cigarette lighter had flared with the upswing to light the fuse.

But The Avenger didn’t bother for long with the details of the bomb. He set the can carefully on the floor, motioned for Smitty and Cole to wait there, then went down to the vestibule again.

When he came back, he said evenly: “A simple but effective trick. Someone took the Amos Beaker card and put it into the plate of a vacant apartment. This apartment. The card came from the slot belonging to an apartment almost directly under this. A fresh scratch from a knife point, made when the card was removed, gives it away.”

They followed his lead, down the stairs, and to the same part of the building. Again, The Avenger listened; again he shook his head as he heard nothing; again he opened a door and the three stepped cautiously in.

Smitty’s breath whooshed out. They stared.

This apartment was not vacant! There were four men in it, in the living room. And yet, in a sense, it was vacant because there was no life in it.

The four men were dead!

They lay scattered in the room. One had a broken nose; one had wispy gray hair; one was tall and thin; and one had a babyish face that was gray, now, instead of pink. Beak Nailen and his gang.

The laughing killers had been here first, and none of Beak’s unholy crew would ever talk.

The place was further disturbed. It looked as if a cyclone had hit it; looked, in a word, as a place looks when a ruthless and frantic search for something has been made.

“They sure wanted that formula Beak took from Brown’s safe,” Smitty said. “Look. These guys have been clubbed, stabbed and strangled. No noise like gunshots. That’s why no one in the building here seems disturbed.”

Benson only nodded. He stepped to the window. There were screw holes outside.

“Nailen is the twisted one responsible for the clock and bomb contrivance,” he said. “If the police caught up to them here, the bomb was to kill the lot of them and make a getaway possible. The men who came here simply removed it and put it in that other apartment for our benefit, if we, or
you
happened to catch up to them. I, of course, am supposed still to be in a pump pit with Tate.”

Benson put in a call to headquarters. Homicide would want to look this over.

“Think they got that formula?” Cole asked Benson.

“I don’t,” said The Avenger. “I don’t think they were even after it. We’ll go back to Bleek Street. I want a few words with Edna Brown.”

The first thing Benson did when they were up in the vast top-floor room at headquarters was phone the hospital where Dillingham Brown lay. He found that Brown was still in a coma, still lying between life and death.

“No chance to get any information there,” Wilson observed.

“Nellie, please bring Edna Brown up here,” The Avenger said.

The second floor of the building was split into beautifully equipped suites. In one of these was Brown’s daughter. She came obediently to the second floor behind Nellie, but a look at the stubborn line around her pretty mouth showed that the obedience was only skin-deep.

“You won’t get anywhere pumping me!” that line seemed to say.

“Let me get you a chair,” said the susceptible Smitty.

He brought her a big leather easy chair, lifting the ponderous thing as easily as a paper clip, while Nellie glared at him. The pretty ash-blond sat down. Benson stood before her, voice calm and gentle, but pale eyes like diamond drills.

“I believe you know many things that would be helpful to us, Miss Brown,” The Avenger began. “You haven’t been helpful, so far. I think you should try, now. Your father, in the hospital, surely would want you to aid in tracking down those who nearly killed him.”

“I want to help you,” said the girl. “I’d like to, very much.”

Nellie grimaced. It takes a pretty girl to read through a pretty girl. Nellie heard no conviction in Edna’s words.

“Then,” said Benson, “tell us what was really in that wall safe. What was it that upset your father so terribly when it was stolen?”

“The . . . the formula for that awful drug,” Edna said.

“That surely would be a prize any crook would give his head for,” Smitty offered. “Here’s a drug that makes a man a laughing robot, immune to pain, ready to go out and murder anyone he’s told to—”

“Will you shut up, you big ham!” Nellie said.

Benson went on. “All right, it was the loss of the formula that frightened your father. He came to me and asked for help in recovering it, and he also hired a gang of gunmen to find the robbers and wipe them out.”

“Oh, no!” said Edna. “He didn’t do that.”

“Somebody raided the underworld for hired killers. And then doped them up and sent them out to earn their fees.”

“It was the same gang that robbed the safe—”

“Never once, as far as we know, did Nailen or his men laugh. Only the others, the ones who finally killed Nailen and his gang. So if Nailen had the formula, he didn’t use it. The others did. But you say they didn’t have the formula.”

“There was the batch I made up just before I was kidnapped,” Tate cut in. “That would keep them going.”

“We encountered the laughing killers
before
you were kidnapped,” The Avenger said quietly. He continued to stare at Tate. “You said Brown himself had asked you to steal out of the house with a fresh batch of the pills.”

“That’s right,” said Tate.

“Why?”

“I have no idea,” said the young chemist. “I wish Brown was conscious so we could ask him.”

Benson turned back to the girl.

“Apparently, when your father came to us for help, you didn’t approve,” he said.

“I did not,” Edna said.

“So, to keep us out of it, you led MacMurdie and me into that trap out at the tip of Long Island.”

“No,” said Edna. “I mean, I didn’t know there’d be such danger—”

“Why did you lead us there if it wasn’t to trap us?”

“Please!” gasped Edna, closing her eyes. “I can’t tell you any more than I have. I’m . . . afraid to. I don’t
dare!”

She was terrified, for some reason. She shivered on the chair as if some direct death threatened her. The Avenger’s immobile lips came as close to a smile as they ever did.

“Very well,” he said gently. “I think you’re making a mistake in not putting confidence in us, but we’ll go ahead and find out for ourselves—”

There was a buzz from The Avenger’s desk. He went to it, picked up the phone that had that particular note.

“Benson, please,” came a harsh, panting whisper.

“Benson talking.”

“Thank heavens you’re in!” The words were squeezed out with difficulty. The speaker was obviously in terrible distress of some sort. “This is Xenan.”

“Yes?”

“That gang still has me. You’ve got to help me get away. They’re going to kill me! Bring every man you can get. There are at least a dozen of them. Hurry—”

The hoarse, labored words broke off. Then, with appalling clearness:
“Help—”

After that—silence!

They’d all heard that cry, thin but horrible, through the telephone receiver. Edna, pale as fresh snow, gasped. “What can we do? We’ve got to do something. But where is he? We don’t even know where—”

The Avenger already had the operator. Police and Justice, Inc. could trace any call, any time. The operator gave the phone number and then the location of the instrument just used.

“They’ve got him on his own yacht,” Dick said. “Private dock, Long Island shore.”

He went toward the door with that habitual swiftness of movement that had to be seen to be believed.

“Nellie, please stay with Miss Brown. All the rest, come along. You too, Tate.”

Nellie started to wail at being left out of the excitement again, but stopped at the look in Benson’s eyes. Benson, Smitty, Wilson, Mac, Josh and Tate went to the basement garage and got into the biggest, most heavily armored car in Justice, Inc.’s fleet.

It was well after midnight when the big car purred down a narrow, wooded lane. The smell of the sea was strong.

The Avenger had no running lights on the car. He was driving slowly through what, to the rest, was pitch darkness, but his marvelous eyesight could penetrate the night a little. He suddenly swung to the left. The rest gasped. They thought the car was going to smack against trees, since the lane had been solidly tree-lined, as far as they could tell.