The Avenger 21 - The Happy Killers (2 page)

He didn’t say any more and his steps hastened toward the end and became carelessly loud. The steps told the whole story to men like the crouching four. The servant—butler, house man, whatever he might be—had thought he saw movement. But he was not sure. When there was no answering noise to his hail, he believed he’d been mistaken.

He was walking quite openly when he got to the front door, and he could be seen quite plainly in the faint light coming through the glass upper panel. He reached for the doorknob to make sure the lock was on.

The man with the drawn gun swung, and swung hard. There was a sickening crunch at the end of the swing, and the fellow who had been reaching for the knob fell to the floor and did not move. He would never move again.

The man with the scar put his gun back in its holster. He straightened up so that he could be seen in the light from the panel. He spat into the palm of his right hand and pounded it with his left.

“Bad luck to bump a guy,” he explained briefly. “That takes the edge off.”

“It’s only bad luck if you get nailed for it,” the man with the twisted nose said coldly. “Did you have to sock him so hard?”

The one with the scar shrugged. “Why not? Say! I thought you said the servants slept over the garage. What’s this guy doing in the house?”

“How do I know? Maybe he came in for a glass of water. Anyhow, he won’t bother us now.”

As if the leader had cracked some marvelously funny joke, someone laughed in the house.

It was startling. It was, with the dead man lying there at their feet, a grisly, eerie sound. The laughter mounted, as if murder was a most comical thing.

The tall, skinny man, Trigger, grasped the nearest arm.

“
Now
what?” he rasped. “Say, I want to get outta here!”

“Keep your shirt on.” The man with the twisted nose went to the library doorway. “The dame told me about that. Brown’s got some nut here he’s boarding. A sort of second cousin, or something. The guy goes around laughing all the time.”

The weird laughter rose again, from somewhere upstairs. The man with the gray hair shivered and hunched-in his chest.

“Won’t he wake up old Brown?” he quavered. “We don’t want to knock off a big shot like
him.”

“Brown won’t wake up,” said the leader. “He’s used to this bird’s cackling.”

He was working at a certain section of the book-lined wall as he spoke. There were hundreds of books in the place. This one section, at the right touch, swung smoothly open and revealed what the four wanted to see:

A large wall safe set solidly into the special wall behind the books.

“Boy, she’s a honey,” breathed the man with the scar.

“You said it, Nick,” Trigger whispered back. “We’d never crack that can without enough soup to sound off from here to Times Square. Lucky that Nailen’s got the combination.”

The man with the twisted nose, referred to as Nailen, paid no attention to the whispers. He was whirling the knob according to the figures the girl had given him. The figures she’d spotted with the aid of a small glass through the keyhole when the owner of the house had opened his safe.

There was a smooth click, and the ponderous little door swung open. Nailen pulled a sack from under his belt.

He didn’t take time to pick and choose. He simply emptied the contents of the vault into the sack—packages of money, boxes that held jewelry or other small valuables, papers, stocks and bonds, whatever was in the thing.

His eyes glinted as he did so. There was a lot of cash here. They had known there would be, or they wouldn’t have taken on this job in the first place. And there was a lot of jewelry; old Brown kept all his dead wife’s jewels out of sentiment.

The papers, Nailen didn’t know anything about. He just took them to make a clean sweep.

The sack bulged when he was done. He clicked the safe door shut again, wiped the knob with his handkerchief, and nodded to the others. They filed toward the front door.

It was very dark in the hall. Too dark to see anything. Trigger almost fell over something soft, yet firm. His startled oath snapped out in something more than a whisper.

It was the dead man’s arm that had nearly sent him sprawling.

“Ho-ho-ho!” came the laughter from upstairs. “Ha-ha-ha-ha!”

“Let’s get
outta
here!” whispered the one called Nick, with a hysterical note in his voice.

They fled, with the cackling laughter pursuing them.

The street was only a short block in length, near Greenwich Village, in Manhattan.

The north side of the short block was entirely taken up by the windowless wall of an immense storage building. The south side had three narrow red-brick buildings in the center, with small warehouses and stores on each side. All the buildings on the south side were owned or leased by Richard Benson, better known as The Avenger, so that, in effect, he owned the block.

Benson’s headquarters were in those three shabby-appearing buildings that looked so desolate and unkempt from the outside. Over the middle doorway was the small sign, “Justice, Inc.” The other two doors were bricked-up because, inside, the three buildings had been thrown into one. A quite palatial one.

On the morning after four men had stolen into the rich home at Great Neck, a man in late middle age got out of a cab at the entrance of the little street. He paid the driver, waited till the cab had swung up the street out of sight, then glanced at the street sign and nodded. Bleek Street, it said. That was the street he wanted.

He went toward the shabby doorway over which gently swung the inconspicuous sign, “Justice, Inc.” As he walked he kept looking around to see if he were being observed. When he got to the doorway he almost ran in, as if fearing a bullet out of nowhere.

The vestibule of the building was perfectly plain, stone-lined, with one bell in the east wall. The man pressed the bell.

There was a hesitation, then the inner door swung open. The man jumped, and stared to see who had opened it. No one had. It was apparent that some hidden mechanism had swung it back for him, after some other hidden mechanism had examined him.

He went up a flight of stairs. A small frosted-glass panel glowed, with letters in its center. “Another flight up, please.”

He obeyed the command jerkily, staring around, nervous as a cat. At the top of the second flight a door opened noiselessly. “Come in,” said a vibrant voice.

The entire top floor of the converted building had been made into one vast room, and it was this room which was the real headquarters of Justice, Inc. The richness of the room’s furnishings was an indication of the wealth the band had at its command—a wealth that was incalculable.

Near one of the windows was a great desk with a battery of telephones on it, such as might be found on the desk of a big-business executive. Behind the desk was Dick Benson.

People viewing The Avenger for the first time were always struck by two things. One was his youth. This man who was known to nearly every law-enforcing officer in the United States, and to all the police heads of the world, who was hated and feared so by the underworld that any one of a thousand big-time criminals would have given all they owned to be able to kill him, was still in his twenties.

The other noticeable factor about The Avenger was the immobility of his face. His features were regular and powerful and, as many women had noticed, quite good-looking. But they were as motionless, as expressionless, as a mask.

In this expressionlessness, his eyes, pale and clear and cold as ice, peered out with an inhuman calm. When you stared into them you could believe the incredible accounts of what The Avenger had done, in spite of his youth.

Benson looked coolly at the middle-aged man who had come to see him. The man had white hair over a smooth pink face, and was heavyset. He was dressed in good clothes, but looked as if he’d thrown them on in a hurry, or else had slept in them all night.

“Mr. Benson?” he said, with agitation in his voice.

The Avenger nodded.

“My name is Brown,” said the heavyset man. “Dillingham Brown.”

His eyes left the compelling, pale stare of Benson’s light orbs, and centered on The Avenger’s head, where the thick, coal-black hair grew close and virile.

“I . . . I was robbed last night,” said Brown.

Dick nodded again. “I know.”

Brown was startled out of his next intended sentence.

“You know? The papers don’t have it yet. Nobody knows but the police—”

Benson nodded toward a far corner of the great room. Brown turned to look, and then comprehended. In the slight silence after his words, a faint clicking sounded out from the corner.

There was a teletype there, and over it flowed, day and night, all the news of all the crime worth mentioning in the United States. What the police got, Benson got—which was fair enough. The Avenger worked with the police, was known to and respected by the police; and they were only too glad to have him know what they knew.

“Announcement of the robbery at your house in Great Neck last night came in about one o’clock,” Dick said. “But from the nature of the announcement, I hardly expected to see you or have anything to do with the case.”

“Why not?” said Brown, looking anxious. “I understand you always helped anyone who needed it.”

The Avenger didn’t answer directly. “What was taken from your wall safe?” he asked.

Brown became more agitated than before.

“The thieves got a tremendous haul,” he said. “There was nearly a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry, conservatively estimated. My wife’s things, kept by me since she died. There was about the same amount in cash.” Brown looked a bit embarrassed. “Times are so uncertain,” he mumbled. “Good idea to have some money at hand, outside of banks. And there were stocks and bonds, papers that I can’t replace—books on trust funds which I administer, some accounts of stocks and bond transfers for clients— It was a great blow to me.”

“Exactly,” said The Avenger, patiently.

“Eh?” said Brown, looking bewildered. “Exactly what? How do you mean, ‘exactly’?”

“You suffered a large but quite ordinary loss. Jewelry, money, financial papers. That is not in my province, Mr. Brown.”

The Avenger leaned back at his huge desk.

“Justice, Inc.,” he said, “is in existence to help people who are in trouble of a nature which prevents the police from assisting them. Crime of a nature so fantastic that the police are unequipped to handle it, persecution of a type that is above the law, rather than beyond it—these are the things we take on. But your case is just ordinary robbery. The police are the ones to handle that.”

“But the police are already working on it,” protested Brown. “And they’re getting nowhere.”

“Sorry,” Dick said politely. “We don’t mix into routine police jobs.”

“Then you won’t—” Brown began, looking crushed with disappointment.

He stopped. Then he came forward as if very tired and sat in the chair beside The Avenger’s desk. He slumped into it and put his head in his hands.

“There was more taken than mere valuables,” he said in a different tone. “Something among the papers the thieves got when they emptied the safe—”

He looked up at Benson in a defeated, terrified way.

“I didn’t tell the police about it. I didn’t want to tell even you about it. I just hoped the loot would be recovered and the thing would be there with the rest of it, and I’d never have to say a word. The contents of my safe must be recovered, Mr. Benson. Because among the papers there is a . . . a chemical formula that is a dreadful thing.”

He lowered his voice to a whisper, as if fearing that the very walls would listen and repeat the story.

“It’s for a drug that turns a man into a laughing killer!”

The Avenger’s face remained as masklike as before. The pale and icy eyes were as inhumanly calm. But their colorless glitter increased till they were like diamond probes.

Brown went on. “The money and jewelry—forget them. The private account books of the trust-funds I administer—the loss is serious but not ruinous. But that drug—” He shuddered, as if very ill.

“Just what is the drug?” asked Benson.

“It’s a form of laughing gas. That’s as near as I can describe it. A young cousin of mine, Harry Tate, invented it. The boy is living with me. I put him through school. Years ago he got the idea that if some anaesthetic could be discovered that could be administered orally, in pill form, it would be a wonderful thing on a battlefield. No complicated apparatus such as is now needed, no sterilizing equipment for the use of local anaesthetics; just take a wounded man, have him swallow a pill, and then operate painlessly.

“Harry has worked on that idea for a long time. He tried it with ether and chloroform compounds, and got nowhere. Then he began experimenting with ordinary laughing gas, in use in most dentists’ offices. His work and experiments backfired. Instead of coming up with a harmless anaesthetic to be administered quickly and easily in pill form, he got a monstrous kind of drug that could turn life in this country into a nightmare if some underworld leader got hold of it. Or it could change the course of history if foreign dictators found it out.”

Brown put his head in his hands again and moaned.

“Harry stumbled onto a concoction that makes a person insensible to pain but does not anaesthetize. That is, the conscious will, the power to move around and think and act, is untouched. You could be stabbed or shot and not know it till you fell over, later, for lack of blood. But worse, the drug stimulates the savage instincts in some way that even Harry can’t explain, so that it turns a normally peaceful person into a raging killer. A killer who
laughs!”

“Laughs?” said The Avenger.

“Yes. Remember, the base of this formula is similar in character to the ordinary laughing gas that dentists use. Anyone taking it suffers from the same symptom—helpless, prolonged laughter. At the same time, he is stirred to murderous rage against almost every moving thing he sees.”

Brown drew a long, ragged breath.

“Picture it, Mr. Benson: An unscrupulous gang leader feeds these pills to half a dozen gunmen and turns them loose on a bank or payroll holdup. Insensitive to pain, so that they must be wounded mortally to be stopped, they charge ahead, savagely murdering anyone who gets in their way. And, at the same time, screaming with laughter. Horrible! Or picture an entire army treated the same way, laughing maniacally as they advance on the enemy, living only to kill, not feeling wounds, like machine men from Mars.”