The Avenger 24 - Midnight Murder (16 page)

All eyes were riveted on the average-sized but dominating figure of The Avenger. Everyone in there seemed to be holding his breath. Except Grace. The man bound in the chair gasped audibly.

“This man,” said Gerry finally, “is not so smart after all. He’s talking nonsense.”

Both the crooks were clever; but it was evident that the fat man had the edge on brains.

“This man,” he corrected, “is smarter even than we dreamed. Go on, Benson.”

The Avenger’s colorless basilisk stare swept around the narrowing circle of men and back to Merto.

“You are hired hands,” he said. “You were hired by a man who wanted all the members of General Laboratories dead, save one. He hired you to murder them for him.”

“I as much as told you that when you were posing with such devilish cleverness as Gerry,” snapped the fat man. “Go on. Hurry.” He looked at his watch.

“You, for your part, didn’t care whether you killed or not. What you wanted was the detector. You knew how valuable it was. You caught Wight. Instead of killing him as ordered, you held him prisoner, to force him either to tell you where a detector was or to draw a working diagram of one for you. Wight got away. Didn’t it occur to you as odd that your employer didn’t seem to mind that you had not killed him according to his order?”

“It occurred to me!” said Gerry grimly. “I mentioned it to you, Merto—”

The fat man was so angry that he aimed his gun at his partner, then let it drop.

“Go on,” he snarled to Benson.

“Your employer, it seems, didn’t care whether you killed or not. He was quite capable of killing himself. All he wanted was for you and your gang to be on hand at the proper time to take the blame. Then he would be in the clear and would have the detector, alone, with all its profits for himself.”

“It is five minutes to twelve!” snapped Merto. Sweat was in rivulets on his face. “What do you mean—we and our gang were to be on hand at the proper time to take the blame?”

“The proper time is midnight,” said Benson. “Let us suppose the employer you were smart enough to double-cross is even smarter, and means to double-cross you. Let us suppose you and all your crew are killed in this building. Known crooks—known gangsters. A few at least would be identifiable—”

“What do you mean—a few would be identifiable?” said Merto hoarsely. “What is going to happen?”

“The presence of a known gang of crooks here, all dead so none can testify, automatically ‘solves’ the murders for the police,” said Benson.

“All dead?” choked out one of the gunmen. “Police?” He turned wildly. “I’m gettin’ outta here!”

“Wait, damn you!” screamed Merto. “Are you going to let one unarmed man beat twenty armed ones with words? We don’t know—”

“The nature of General Laboratories’ invention is the key to midnight,” The Avenger’s calm voice cut across the tumult.

All stilled, and stared in a sort of paralyzed fascination at him again.

“It is a sonic detector. For some time, we have had an altitude recorder. It is a device that sends radio sound waves downward, and measures the time it takes for them to bounce back. The time, and the known speed of the sound waves, combine in a calculation giving feet of altitude. Such devices also measure ocean depths.”

“Will you get to the point?” yelled Merto.

The Avenger went on exactly as he had before.

“General Laboratories,” he said, “applied the sonic principle in a device that measures distance straight ahead, instead of downward. Waves are sent, of a pitch above human hearing so as to cut through the propeller noise of a plane, for example. The waves bounce back, the ones from dead ahead being caught and recorded by the small end of a cone. And a cliff or other obstacle ahead, unseen in the fog or night, is caught by the detector.”

Grace was squirming rather desperately against his bonds.

“This ‘midnight’ business,” he said, “I am rather interested in that, too. Wouldn’t it be better if we all left?”

“The detector,” Dick continued, “can be set at any range. It is very sensitive, evidently. At a hundred yards zero point—or two thousand if you like—it obviously flashes a warning signal. But that warning—the real villain in this piece happened to reflect—that electrical impulse, could be used for murder.”

“Merto—” Gerry choked out, looking at his watch.

The Avenger said evenly, “Merto, I’d advise that you send a man down to the basement to look around. But under no circumstances is he to touch anything down there!”

Merto stared at the man nearest him and jerked his head. The man fairly ran for the door. They heard him race to the basement stairs.

“In the plane,” said Benson, “the General Laboratories’ mechanic wired the device so that, when it flashed its warning, it cut the current from an electromagnet and let a small steel wedge drop into the controls. I have the wedge. It was slightly magnetized for a short time from the current passed through it. So the detector flashed its warning all right, when Wayne Carroll and Towne and the procurement officers approached that cliff, but at the same time it froze the controls and sent it helplessly on to its doom. Carroll tried to jump with the invention and save it, but didn’t quite make it.’’

Spade spoke up for the first time, with a tremor in his voice that matched his rhythmic, scared trembling.

“I believe I know where that second detector is,” he said. “One was destroyed with Wight. But the other, out here, that I couldn’t find, is sometimes kept in a secret place outdoors. I’ll go out and get it for you murderers and give it to you, if you’ll go away and leave us unharmed. My life is worth more to me than any invention.”

Merto glared at Spade.

“That is most interesting,” he purred silkily. He said to Benson, “And Wight? How was he killed?”

“One of the two detector models was bolted to the window sill of the town laboratory. It was pointed at the river. Rew Wight was told to go there and get it and bring it out here. He went to the town laboratory. In some way, perhaps when he opened the door, he turned the switch, sending current through it. After that, the first boat that came up the river would register on the sensitive distance recorder with funnels or superstructure; the zero impulse would flash, and a charge of explosive would be set off. You were all there when the explosion occurred. You heard the boat toot an instant before.”

“Then he shot these two?” said Merto, nodding to Ryan and Boone.

“Yes. Just before you and your gang got here.”

“Let me out of here!” screamed Robert Spade suddenly. He leaped toward the door, guns or no guns, men or no men. He clawed for the lock. “Let me out of this building!”

Merto plucked him back by the scruff of the neck and held him with one big fat hand around Spade’s windpipe.

The door opened and the man came back from the basement. He could hardly walk on his palsied legs. He gasped two or three times before he could make words come out.

“Basement!” he wheezed. “TNT! Enough of the stuff down there to blow us all to Chicago. Out of here—everybody!”

The rush for the door was a mad stampede. And then, as the first man opened it, sound came from some other room down the hall. Probably from Spade’s luxurious office. The chimes of an electric clock.

One—two—three—four—Twelve!

Midnight!

Most of the men stayed frozen where they were, all shades of gray and white. Some dropped on their knees. Merto stayed with Spade’s neck in his hand, not even realizing the continued grip. Spade didn’t know of it, either.

Nothing happened.

Gerry, shaking like a leaf, squeaked out, “It . . . it’s twelve! The TNT—”

“The second detector,” said The Avenger, voice as even as a phonograph, “is in back of the building. It is pointed down a clear stretch, within a zero point of about seventy yards. A clock was set to raise a screen in the cleared stretch at midnight. It would flash the detector, and set off the explosive in the basement. Spade would be outside. Your dead bodies would clear him when the police arrived.”

“But . . . but it’s after m-midnight, now,” chattered Gerry.

The Avenger looked at Mac, and then at one of the two ceiling lights in the room. He looked at Cole, and at the other light.

“I set the clock two hours ahead,” Dick said without inflection.

Merto went completely mad. The Avenger had been expecting something of the kind, but the fat man moved too fast even for Benson to stop him. Through his pocket, screaming as he did so, he sent four shots into the body of Spade. All the rest whirled to shoot down The Avenger and Mac and Cole Wilson.

Mac threw a heavy glass bowl up at his light. Wilson heaved a small bench up at his. The lights went out as the first red flashes lanced from guns not now shooting blanks.

The three members of Justice, Inc., were on the floor, well below the first fusillade.

There was no second one. Bells began ringing all over the place as gate, fence and everything else in the ground wired for alarms began ringing under many touching hands and feet.

“The cops!” somebody yelled. “They are coming!”

The room emptied. Benson and Cole and Mac got up and walked leisurely to the hall. An empty hall, it was.

Shots began outside the door, mixed with grenades thrown by Smitty and Nellie.

“Phew!” said Cole. “Bit of excitement. You sure smoked out Spade, chief. I never saw a man so anxious to get out of a building as he was when midnight came. Showed conclusively he was the man who put the TNT downstairs and wired it.”

“Spade was ‘smoked out’ without that,” said Dick calmly. “Only someone from here could have wired the detector in the town laboratory. Vogel was dead, murdered to keep him from talking, so one of General Laboratories’ heads would have to do it himself. Also, one of them would have to tell Wight to go to the town lab at just the right time, when a boat was due, or there would be no assurance that Wight wouldn’t simply disconnect the detector and walk out with it unharmed.”

“That theory would take in Grace or Ryan or Boone,” Cole said.

“It would. But something else pointed to Spade. We brought ten prisoners in here. They mysteriously escaped. Only one person could have freed them—the man who yelled that they had escaped. Robert Spade. At the very start, he showed himself up as somehow in with that gang.”

Shots were popping all around the grounds now, as the gang were rounded up.

“Not one will get away,” said Cole contentedly. Then he said, “Grace! Still tied up back there!”

He went back into the dark lab.

“So Spade murdered his partners to get the whole share the sonic detector would bring,” mused Mac. “The guy had his nerve. And he played smart boys like Merto and Gerry for suckers, to take the rap—”

The door opened. Smitty and Nellie came in. Nellie had discovered the hole and reached in and turned the knob.

“Lots of fun,” said Nellie. “Lots of meat for the electric chair. Not one’s getting away. The biggest mob of State troopers you ever saw started climbing in a couple minutes after twelve. I don’t understand it.”

In a minute she did.

A gruff, authoritative voice sounded just outside:

“Where’s Robert Spade? This is Captain Alcot. Spade called and said to come with a lot of men because he’d been tipped off that the gang that killed his partners would all be here at midnight.”

“Ye called it to a hair, Muster Benson,” said Mac. “And ye stalled that gang till the proper time as neat as neat could be.”

He and Cole went with Nellie and Smitty to greet the troopers. The Avenger walked a little behind them.

Chester Grace came from the dark lab, rubbing his wrists. He had stayed to treat his acid burn before emerging. He looked a little ashamedly at Benson.

“My apologies, sir,” he said, stiffly. “I thought, at the plane crash, that you, too, were trying to steal the secret of the detector. I passed my suspicions on to my colleagues, which is why we all acted rather brusque and seemed unduly suspicious of you.”

Benson only nodded, pale eyes seeming to pass through the burly scientist rather than actually see him. He went on to the door.

He walked and acted almost as if he were tired, in spite of the fact that his steel body never knew fatigue. There was no triumph in posture or face.

He had wound up another case with complete success. But already he was thinking only of what the next might be like. One battle was a little thing in the constant war against crime to which he had dedicated himself.

He went out, to disconnect carefully the detector on the box and return it to Grace, now sole owner of the device which would be so valuable to the government.

He went out, a man of flesh and blood like any other, and yet, somehow, more than a man: A crime fighting machine.

The Avenger.

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