The Avenger 34 - The Glass Man (6 page)

“That was no lady.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Recognizing who it was under that wig is what got me into this jam in the first place.”

Cole had awakened a few minutes ago; the girl apparently had been conscious for some time. “You mean kindly old Madame Rosay is not what she seems?”

“She’s actually Werner Konrad. Ever hear of him?”

“I don’t keep up with all the female impersonators.”

“He’s not that. Konrad was one of the leading stage actors in Germany in the 1920s and, even after Hitler came into power, in the early 1930s. He never made any films, but he was an important theatrical figure. Character acting and makeup were his specialties; a sort of Lon Chaney type.”

“And you recognized the chap?”

“I interviewed him in Berlin in 1935. You probably didn’t see the profile when it came out in
Theater Arts.”

“Alas, no,” said Cole. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have walked so innocently into the spider’s parlor.”

“I’ve been working on, besides the invisible-man thing, a feature story for a magazine in New York,” the girl continued. “More or less as a favor, I agreed to do a quick interview with a rising local artist named Ellis Zanes. Zanes had me meet him at the gallery . . . I guess it was yesterday afternoon. I recognized Konrad at once, but I thought he didn’t tumble to me. Later on I came back to the gallery to nose around.”

“And apparently the old boy did remember those carefree bygone days in Berlin.”

“Apparently. He stuck a needle into me and I passed out.”

Cole began pacing around the room. “No windows, one door, and that’s made of metal. Walls look to be pretty solid,” he muttered.

“I’m not quite sure how Konrad fits into things.”

“Has to be a Nazi agent.”

“Obviously, but I mean . . . what’s he here for?”

“No doubt looking for the invisible man.”

Jenny watched his slow circuit of their prison. “That is what they’re working on out there in the desert, isn’t it? Invisibility.”

“I really shouldn’t betray a confidence,” said Cole. “However, since we may spend long years as fellow prisoners, and since you seem to have guessed it anyway, I can give you an affirmative answer.”

“Has Dr. Dean gone nuts? That has to be who the invisible killer is.”

“He’s a logical contender.” Cole stopped at the heavy door. “Except nobody thinks he perfected his invisibility formula before he popped off into obscurity.”

“Oh, come on, Cole. You don’t believe there’s a freelance invisible man running around in Nolansville? He has to be connected with that secret lab.”

“He doesn’t, however, necessarily have to be Dr. Dean.”

Jenny frowned. “Maybe not,” she said. “Now let’s get back to the original question. Is Konrad after the invisibility formula?”

“What else?”

“Then that means he’s got nothing to do with Dr. Dean’s disappearance,” she said. “If he did, he wouldn’t still be hanging around here posing as Madame Rosay.”

“Perhaps he doesn’t think it’s safe to transport the good doctor anywhere else.”

“No. If he’s had him here for a week, by now he’d have been able, knowing the methods Konrad can use, to get all of Dr. Dean’s secrets out of him.”

“Dean could be stubborn.”

“Nobody’s that stubborn.”

Cole crouched, examining the lock on the door. “Going to be a real challenge picking this, even for a Raffles such as I.”

Jenny said, “There’s really nothing we can tell Konrad; nothing much, anyway.”

“The old thespian may not know that.”

“He’ll find out soon enough,” the redhead said. “Then there’s only one thing he can do . . . he’ll kill us.”

“Dynamite, dynamite!” exclaimed the intense young man.

“It’s pretty,” said the platinum-haired girl in the polka-dot dress.

“Pretty? It’s terrific!” Ellis Zanes stepped back from his easel to beam appreciation at the landscape he was at work upon. “It’s absolute dynamite!”

“What’s wrong with pretty?” She moved her canvas chair so that she was once again under the shade of the large beach umbrella which had been pitched in the desert sands.

“An Ellis Zanes painting isn’t pretty, sweetheart! It’s bitter, satiric, shocking! It has impact!”

The platinum blonde shrugged. “So okay.”

Zanes, walking in a hunch, approached her. “Alice, you are a prize nitwit!”

“Can I help it?”

The artist returned to his painting. They were out in the desert beyond Nolansville, about a mile from the pueblo ruins. A venerable pickup truck was parked near the edge of the road. The truck was painted, by Zanes, a glowing orange.

After making a few more swipes at the canvas with his brush Zanes lifted his dark glasses up off his eyes and squinted at what he’d done. “Dynamite! Absolute dynamite! I’m going to give this to that
News
broad! What a cover it’ll make for their mag!”

“They don’t use landscape paintings on their covers, do they?” Alice picked up a thermos and poured herself a highball. “No, they don’t,” she went on. “They have portraits of famous people like Winston Churchill and General MacArthur and Henry Wallace and—”

“They can make an exception! After all, it’s going to be an entire issue devoted to me!”

“I thought you said it was a paragraph in the arts section?”

“Peanut brain!” He lowered his glasses and resumed painting.

A strange chuffing sound became audible.

“What on earth is that?” said Alice.

Down on the roadway a rattling coupé showed up, struggling through the late afternoon.

“It’s a car, dimwit!”

“I can see that now.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t collapse here! It’ll spoil my view!”

The car didn’t collapse for another half mile.

By the time it did, Agent Pike was making almost as much noise as his auto. “Damn car,” he growled. “You’d think a key government employee would . . .”

The motor gasped and the car rattled and drifted to a shivering stop.

“Dead,” observed Nellie.

Pike, muttering, tried the ignition, stomped on the gas pedal, jiggled in his seat.

The auto stayed dead.

“I keep taking it out to those idiot mechanics at the Army camp . . . but all they know about is fixing tanks.”

“Maybe I can do something.”

“No, we’ll leave it sit. Sometimes that helps.” Pike opened his door. “Let’s walk to the ruins. By the time we get back it may decide to go again. Damn car.”

The light of the day was fading, the blue of the sky was thinning.

“Walking,” murmured Pike.

“Good exercise.”

“That’s what they say in the Army, but I don’t believe it.”

They walked along the darkening desert roadway in silence for a few minutes. They could see the jagged outline of the pueblos up ahead now.

“How about telling me what you’ve been digging into?”

“I was following up on the picture I borrowed from Mrs. Price.”

“Went out to the college.”

“Yes, how’d you know?” Nellie seemed surprised.

“I got ways of finding out things.”

“Doesn’t seem to work in the case of Cole Wilson.”

“Since he and that Keaton dame did their vanishing act, I’ve been taking more precautions. Now what’d you find out at the college?”

“I know why the freckle-faced boy looked familiar.” Nellie told the government man what she’d learned from old Mrs. Heimdahl.

He stopped still on the twilight road. “I should have found that out myself.”

“It may have nothing to do with the killings,” Nellie said. “Although I think we’d better talk to the sheriff when we get back to town. The rest of the men in the picture may be in danger.”

“If our killer is going to knock off everybody who had something to do with the death of Rusty, they sure as hell are in danger.”

“I’ve got all their names, and I have current addresses on three of the surviving four. The other one, fellow named Kent Lowney, apparently moved to the East several years ago. The other three still live in and around Nolansville.”

“We better track down the one who went east, too.”

The sun, glaring red, dropped below the horizon. Blackness flooded the desert.

Directly in front of them rose the pueblos.

The sun was dropping toward the desert when Alan Lamont came out of the Quonset hut which masked the entrance to his section of the underground Perseus Project lab.

The guard on the sidewalk outside nodded at him. “First time I’ve seen you come up before sundown.”

“Feeling a little under the weather,” Lamont told him. “May be coming down with a cold.”

“That’s what you ought to be working on down there, a cure for the common cold.”

Sniffling once, Lamont said, “Not in my line.” He strolled away from the hut, passed the facility PX, where a military truck was unloading supplies, and turned onto the road which led to the technical staff’s living area.

A minimal job of landscaping had been done. The road was paved and a strip of narrow sidewalk bordered one side of it. No trees had been attempted.

The cottages were all alike, the same kind defense workers were living in all across the country. Quickly built, quickly in need of repairs. At least he hadn’t paid anything for this one.

Letting himself in, Lamont sat down on the sofa in the small living room. The sofas were, at least in the dozen or so cottages he’d been in, all alike.

He sat for a while, listening. There was no sound of activity anywhere around.

“Let’s get going,” he said to himself.

Rising, he went into the bedroom. After pulling down the shades he knelt and shoved the bed aside. One board in the dusty floor was free of dust. With a penknife he pried it up and took a metal box from the hollow space beneath.

Inside the box was a hypodermic and three small vials of a bluish liquid. Removing the hypo and one of the vials, he closed the box, put it back, and slid the board back into place, then pushed the bed back.

From a plastic box in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom Lamont extracted a sterile needle. He attached it to the syringe and thrust the needle into the rubber lid of the vial. When the hypo was filled Lamont, after squirting a drop into the air, injected the bluish fluid into the upper part of his arm.

He then detached the needle, dropped it down the drain, and washed out the syringe. That and the vial he took back to the bedroom. He shoved aside the bed, pried up the board again, and returned the vial and hypo to the box.

When everything was back in place Lamont undressed and carefully hung up his clothes.

The bones of his fingers were showing now.

“A reminder of my own mortality,” he told himself.

He waited on the edge of the bed. His hands and arms were only ghosts of themselves now.

In three more minutes his torso was invisible.

The feet always went last. When the little toe of his left foot vanished, the young physicist stood up. He crossed to the wall mirror to inspect himself.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” he said, chuckling.

He was completely invisible now.

He didn’t know about the dog.

Lamont climbed quietly over the adobe wall which surrounded Edwin Montez’s estate. He’d been by here twice before in the past week, casing everything.

Montez’s wife was away in California; they had no children. There was a butler and a housemaid, but the butler was old and doddering and the maid was a frail girl of no more than eighteen.

He didn’t know about the dog.

There’d been no dog before.

On the acre of lawn Lamont stopped, watching the large white rancho-style house. It was more like a movie set than anything real.

Montez was the only one of them who’d done well. It was surprising, in a way, since he’d been the dullest one in the group. At least it had seemed that way to Lamont when he was twelve and his brother’s college buddies dropped in at the house.

He could still see Montez as he’d looked then. Small, shy, with those rimless glasses and that apologetic smile. And the college sweater he wore even though he wasn’t on any team.

Montez was a highly successful broker, married to a rich wife, and living better than any of the others.