The Avenger 9 - Tuned for Murder (14 page)

There was a shot, sounding like a cannon roar in the close confines of the barn. But the shot didn’t hit anything. It had been aimed at Nellie, but Rosabel had found the loose plank in her hands at the moment and had lunged with it. When thrust powerfully under a man’s chin, a plank can be an excellent weapon. Kopell went down again.

“Run!” cried Nellie at the door. “You, too, Robert!”

Rosabel was out almost as quickly as Nellie. The car Kopell had come in was just ahead.

“Robert!” called Nellie. “Hurry up—”

“Get away!” she heard young Cranlowe’s muffled voice. “I— They’ve got me! I can’t—”

Rosabel had the door open. She got into the car, and Nellie dove in after her. The men were at the barn door, having recovered their weapons. They still had blank, incredulous looks on their faces that a girl could do these things to them. They began to shoot. Then they stopped, knowing it was useless. Kopell’s car had been shot at before. It stopped bullets.

Nellie and Rosabel streaked for the road—two girls who, unaided, had gotten away from four armed gangsters.

The speedometer read eighty.

“We don’t have to go so fast,” said Rosabel. “We’re out of range, now.”

“Yes, we do have to go fast,” Nellie retorted. “You heard what that man said when he came in. That we had been gotten away from
her
so there wouldn’t be any trouble at that end.”

“Yes,” said Rosabel, comprehension dawning in her eyes.

“ ‘Her,’ ” said Nellie, tramping on the accelerator, “must mean Mrs. Cranlowe. The gang must be going to do something to her. If we can just get there in time to stop it—”

It was not the gang, however, that was with Mrs. Cranlowe just then. At least it was not the gang, proper. With her in her apartment was Jenner, or Garfield Gear. He was looking at her pet dog.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with Toby,” Mrs. Cranlowe was saying to the friend of her husband, who had kindly droppped in to see her for a few minutes.

Toby was howling, as dogs howl at the moon—or after a death. He was howling, and pawing at his ears!

“I really don’t know,” began Mrs. Cranlowe again.

Her voice faded to silence, and her eyes got oddly blank. Jenner peered keenly into them, and smiled. He reached into his pocket.

Out of his pocket he took a little black, thick, smooth disk. It was a thing about the size of an old-fashioned key-wind watch. There was a purse of Mrs. Cranlowe’s on a nearby table. He opened the purse, put in the thick black disk, and handed it to her.

“You will not let this purse out of your hands,” he said to the woman.

“I will not . . . let this purse . . . out of my hands,” Mrs. Cranlowe parroted.

“You will go to your husband, at Cranlowe Heights, and get from him the secret formula of his war invention.”

“I will go to my husband . . . and get from him the secret formula . . . of his war invention,” Mrs. Cranlowe repeated.

“Good! He’ll give it to you if you ask it very nicely, as a loving wife knows how to do.” Jenner went to the door with her, and down in an elevator. He talked pleasantly and inconsequentially for the operator’s benefit, but on the street, his manner changed. It was commanding again.

“Drive out at once,” he said. “Bring the formula to my office at Garfield Gear Company, no matter how late it is. I’ll be waiting there.”

Mrs. Cranlowe got into her car, a blue coupé, with no one seeing her. That was because Nellie and Rosabel and Robert Cranlowe had been “gotten out of the way.” But not, it developed, out of the way enough.

Mrs. Cranlowe was driving slowly, as she always drove. She got around the next corner just as Nellie and Rosabel were about to run a red light in their hurry to get back to the building. Mrs. Cranlowe stopped mechanically for the light.

Nellie saw her. She looked for a car of thugs trailing her, and there wasn’t any. She looked for a man in the coupé with her, but she was alone. Nellie was nonplused. She had expected Mrs. Cranlowe to be in mortal danger, and here she was, driving calmly alone.

She got out of Kopell’s car and ran to Mrs. Cranlowe. The light was changing to yellow.

“Mrs. Cranlowe!” she called, tapping at the door glass. “Mrs. Cranlowe!”

Surely her voice was loud enough to be heard. But the inventor’s wife gave no sign of hearing it. She started to drive on. Nellie was left standing in the street, but not for long.

This all seemed mad, and futile. But on impulse, still convinced from what Kopell had said that something threatened this woman, Nellie took three fast steps and caught the rear bumper of the moving car. She hauled herself up on the trunk rack of the coupé, and felt for the rear-deck handle. The compartment was unlocked. She opened it, gazed at Mrs. Cranlowe through the rear window and saw that she was looking straight ahead, apparently unmindful of her new passenger.

Nellie got into the compartment and closed the lid down over her, all but a crack.

Time is exaggerated when you are in a cramped position and can’t see anything. It seemed hours to Nellie before that car stopped again. Actually, Mrs. Cranlowe had reached Cranlowe Heights in about a half-hour.

Nellie, of course, didn’t know they were at Cranlowe Heights. In her dark cubbyhole, she only knew the car had stopped, that a man’s voice had sounded, and then Mrs. Cranlowe’s. After that she felt the car sway as Mrs. Cranlowe got out, and sway again as someone else got in. This was followed by another short drive, up a lane that rattled gravel under the tires. Then the car stopped. Nellie heard the person in it get out and walk away, and, giving herself five minutes, she opened the rear deck of the coupé.

She was in a garage. The rolling front door was splintered as if from a recent accident. There was a shiny, new station wagon and another car in the garage beside the coupé. In front, to one side of the drive, she could see a heavy sedan with the front smashed in. She knew about that wrecked car. The chief had wrecked it. It told Nellie where she was.

Mrs. Cranlowe, supposedly in the shadow of grave danger, had driven out here to her husband’s house. Had she, knowingly or unknowingly, given Kopell’s men the slip? Or was there in her seemingly natural and harmless visit to her husband, some obscure peril to justify Kopell’s words?

Nellie got out of the coupé to find out.

There was a side door to the garage, leading into the house. She stole through that, and was in a long, narrow hall. At the far end was a man with guns in a belt around his waist. She flattened against the wall till he had gone past the open end of the hall. Then she went forward, as soundless as a pink-and-white blond wraith.

She heard the voices long before she had reached the big front hall from which this narrow passage stemmed. Mrs. Cranlowe’s voice, and a man’s. Mrs. Cranlowe had evidently stopped her car at the gate and come into the house on foot, while a man drove the coupé around to the garage.

Nellie got to the front hall. She heard the woman’s voice, languorous and persuasive; heard the man say: “But I don’t understand. Why this sudden solicitude for my invention? And why do you think it would be safer with you than with me?”

Edging closer to the door from which the voices were coming, Nellie heard Mrs. Cranlowe’s reply.

“Because everyone knows I am not familiar with your work, Jesse. I’m afraid I have a reputation for being a little—flighty and frivolous-minded. No one would dream I had the formula. It would be utterly safe with me.”

“I have said I’d never set it down on paper.”

“But, Jesse, suppose something happened to you? Then all your plans for stopping war would be exploded, because everyone would know there was no longer the terrible weapon in existence that would frighten aggressor nations into staying within their own territory. But if you gave me a copy of the formula, your plans could go right on. I could follow out your last wishes.”

“Seems to me you’ve already got me dead and in my grave, all in a space of ten minutes,” grumbled the man. There was a pause, then a sentence that made Nellie’s small fists clench.

“There may be something in what you say—give me pen and paper.”

This must be Cranlowe himself talking. And the pen and paper must be for the purpose of at last actually writing out that formula that was so priceless.

Nellie found her heart thudding rapidly. Something was very wrong here. She felt it, knew it!

But it seemed she was not the only one who suddenly gained that knowledge.

What small word of inflection gave Mrs. Cranlowe away to the inventor, Nellie couldn’t guess, of course. But something certainly did.

“Summers! Come here!” Cranlowe’s voice came screaming from the room. It went on in a tirade compounded of fury and despair. “You! My own wife—a traitor! I wish to heaven I’d never made that discovery! My own wife, coming out here and treacherously trying to get that formula! Summers!”

Nellie was in a slant-ceilinged little closet under the hall stairs when she heard the man she’d seen with the guns at his belt run past in the hall. But the hall closet wasn’t much of a hiding place.

She got out of it and to a door in the rear of the hall. She opened that. It went downstairs. She started down slowly—then began running, as steps in the main hall came straight toward it.

She got to the basement, and jumped for the shelter of some laundry tubs, getting behind them just as the man and Cranlowe came down the stairs with Mrs. Cranlowe between them. For a moment, such was the desperate frenzy in Cranlowe’s deep-set eyes, Nellie thought they were going to kill the woman right there. But they didn’t. They took her to a heavy side door and opened it.

Nellie got a glimpse of a man in there, white-faced but distinguished-looking. It was Dr. Markham, psychiatrist, had she known it. Then they put Mrs. Cranlowe in the prison room, too, and banged the door.

For hours Benson had sat in the private lounging room of Jenner’s office. He had sat there while Jenner went out for an hour or so, and sat there when Jenner returned. He sat there while Jenner waited the results of his dispatching of Mrs. Cranlowe to Cranlowe Heights to tackle the inventor. It was eleven o’clock when a phone call was sent through the deserted plant on a private wire to the president’s office.

“Mr. Jenner? This is Al calling.” The voice was low, guarded. “At the Heights. Can you hear me? I can’t speak any louder. Someone might hear me at this end.”

“I can hear you, all right,” Jenner said.

The man phoning was the fellow named Trillo, who had managed to get himself hired as Cranlowe’s chauffeur after the old man had driven the station wagon into the path of the van.

“It’s no go on Mrs. Cranlowe,” said Trillo, at Cranlowe Heights. “Something slipped. Anyhow, Cranlowe caught on there was something wrong. He tossed her into a cell in the basement.”

Jenner exclaimed sharply. “You’re sure?”

“Yes! It happened quite a little while ago. But this is the first chance I’ve had to call you about it.”

Jenner thought for a moment, then said: “Very well. Stay on out there and keep your eyes open.”

Trillo laughed harshly. “No doubt about my staying out here! You can’t get out of the place. Or in, either.”

“We’ll see about that. About getting in, I mean,” said Jenner.

He made a phone call himself, then went in to where Benson sat.

“Come in here, you,” he said.

Benson got up and came to him. His pale eyes had that blank look in them. It was about the look that had been in Blandell’s eyes when he gave away the dollar bills, and in Cranlowe’s secretary’s eyes when she stepped off the twenty-fourth-floor fire-escape balcony into thin air.

“We are going out to Cranlowe Heights, you and I,” Jenner said to him. “When we get there, you are to try to persuade Cranlowe to give you that formula. You understand?”

“I understand,” said Benson dully.

Jenner’s hand went to Benson’s inner coat pocket. Without resistance it came out again, bearing a thick little leather case. In the case were letters and documents to The Avenger from governors of several states, from the head of the department of justice and from many police chiefs. It was his portfolio of identification.

“Fine,” said Jenner. “Anyone looking over these things would trust you implicitly. Also, Cranlowe has probably heard of you. You will pose as a government emissary and persuade him to ‘sell’ the formula to the war department.”

“Yes,” said The Avenger, in dull obedience.

Jenner took from his pocket a thick black disk of the type he had given Mrs. Cranlowe. About the size of an old-fashioned dollar watch.

“Put this in your pocket. Keep it there.”

Benson put the disk in his pocket and followed Jenner out to the street. He got in Jenner’s car with him and was driven to Cranlowe Heights.

There was a delay at the gate.

“Richard Benson?” came Cranlowe’s voice over the house phone. “Yes, I’ve heard of him. But I don’t know him by sight, and I don’t see what business he has with me.”

“Won’t you take my word for it that this
is
Mr. Benson with me, and that he must see you?” said Jenner. “He has come from Washington to see you secretly. He knew I was a good friend of yours; so he came to see me first and asked me to get him in to you.”