The Avenger 13 - Murder on Wheels (16 page)

Smitty started to agree, but didn’t get any words out.

The Avenger had suddenly taken the tiny earphone of his belt radio out and was holding it to his ear.

“Chief,” came Nellie’s voice again. “Chief, I just saw Robert Mantis. I was in a store near that garage, watching it like you said. I saw Mantis drive past, and stop down the street. He’s sitting in his car, now, as if waiting for someone. I can see him through the window— No, no! He’s going in.”

“In where?” snapped Benson.

Through the earphone came the answer.

“A grocery store. L. M. Monard is the name—”

“We’ll be there!” said Benson.

When Benson said at once, he meant almost literally that. The spot from which Nellie had radioed was less than two miles from Ormsdale’s mansion.

The three were out of the house, in their car and at the grocery store of L. M. Monard, near Jefferson Avenue, in a shade over five minutes.

Which was not fast enough to intercept Mantis. Not then. That came a very few minutes later.

“A young fellow came in here a moment ago,” said Benson to the grocer, showing his secret-service badge. He described Mantis. “What did he buy?”

“He didn’t buy anything,” said the grocer, sounding kind of sore about it. “He just used that phone. People, they come in a lot to use my phone. They must think I’m a public—”

Benson wasn’t waiting to hear the rest. He was dialing operator.

He traced the call.

Cole Wilson, Shelton Arms Apartments, Jefferson Avenue.

“And now,” said The Avenger, eyes like bits of cold steel, “we may be getting somewhere!”

At least, they got to the Shelton Arms.

The building was small and had no lobby or man in attendance. But there was a little vestibule between street and inner door. There, a locked door barred you from the wide hall leading past first-floor apartments to the automatic elevators.

The vestibule door yielded to The Avenger’s touch with magic swiftness. Then Mac and Smitty and Benson stepped inside.

Dick Benson’s pale, all-seeing eyes swept over the triple row of mailboxes with the tenants’ names under them.

Cole Wilson was on the fourth floor. A Mr. and Mrs. Altmeyer were on his right; a Miss Vole on his left. Over him was a vacant apartment, according to the blank in the name plates.

The three went upstairs to the fourth floor, because the sound of an elevator can be a warning sometimes.

They went noiselessly toward Cole Wilson’s door, and they began hearing voices when they were still several yards away.

They heard a loud, angry voice, then a softer mumble as another voice replied.

They reached the door, and all three could hear. The loud voice was that of Robert Mantis. They hadn’t heard his voice very much, but he was being so emphatic in there that they couldn’t mistake it. The softer voice presumably was Cole Wilson’s.

“Tell me where Jackson is,” the loud voice of Mantis was rapping out, “or I’ll beat your head off.”

The three in the hall looked at each other. This sounded hot.

They could barely catch the response.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Bob.”

“Yes, you do!” snapped Mantis. “You know all about it. Much more than I ever dreamed, I’ll bet. Now—where is Phineas Jackson.”

Wilson laughed. There was perfect self-control and apparent good nature in the sound.

“If you can prove I have anything to do with Jackson,” he said, “you’re a very smart boy, indeed.”

Mantis literally snarled the answer to that.

“I know you’re fiendishly clever, Cole. I know you’d leave no proof behind. I haven’t even looked for proof. I’m working on logic. And logic tells me you know where Jackson is.”

There was another good-natured laugh. And then something not nearly so good-natured. The smack of bone on flesh, and the thud of a body.

It was plain to the three in the hall. They knew what had happened without having to see it.

Wilson, laughing and apparently looking as if he wouldn’t hurt a fly, had suddenly whipped a knockout blow to the jaw of Robert Mantis. And, now, there was another sound. A sound which set Benson at the lock of that door in such a hurry that he paid no attention to opening it deftly, but simply forced it as fast as possible.

But the lock didn’t rasp back fast enough. The three jumped into a room, to see an unconscious man on the floor—and a significantly open window across from him.

The man on the floor was Mantis, right enough. The Avenger leaped over him to the window.

Four feet away was a fire escape. And as Benson stared down, he was just in time to see a form whisk around the corner of the building down there.

Wilson was gone! Wary as an animal, he had somehow sensed more danger in the offing than that presented by Mantis, then had fled!

“The guy’s got a sixth sense or something,” growled Smitty.

But Benson didn’t listen. He was already leading the way to the door again, and upstairs.

His brief study of the mailbox names and their positions was coming in handy now. Apartments occupied to right and left, but the one directly above apparently vacant.

He went to that one and got the door open. The three were suddenly staring at an elderly man who looked a little familiar, yet whom none but The Avenger placed at once.

Then Mac and Smitty got it, too.

The man looked vaguely like Will Willis, with his hair trimmed and combed, without the scraggly whiskers, and without the wild light in his eyes that had made him look like an unkempt wild man. It was the inventor, Phineas Jackson, with his disguise of Will Willis removed.

“Hello,” he said, not seeming very relieved at the entrance of the three. “How did you get here?” He looked befuddled and added: “And where is ‘here,’ anyway?”

“Say, don’t you know where you are?” said Smitty.

Jackson shook his head.

“I was brought here blindfolded and half drugged. I don’t know who brought me, and I’ve never seen my captor. But whoever he was, he has treated me well.”

That statement was borne out by appearances.

There was a slim chain to a small handcuff over each wrist of the inventor. The chain kept his hands from moving more than eight or ten inches apart. The door had been triple-locked, as Benson had noted when he got in. Aside from these two things, there was no sign that Jackson was a prisoner at all.

There was a cot, an easy-chair, magazines and books on a reading table with a box of cigars next to them. There was a tray that had recently held food, and there was a large thermos bottle to keep drinking water cold.

Jackson certainly hadn’t been abused here.

“You are above the apartment,” said Benson, pale eyes like diamond drills on the man’s face, “of Cole Wilson.”

“Cole Wil
—” began Jackson. Then he stopped, looking completely bewildered, but very much on his guard.

“Well,” he said, “I may be above his apartment, but I am quite sure Cole could not have had anything to do with bringing me here. And, in any event, it isn’t the fact that I’m held prisoner that has been bothering me. It is worry over the fate of my—”

He stopped again, looking fearful of saying too much. But he might as well have gone on. Benson finished for him.

“Worry over what has happened to the Marr-Car?” he said.

Jackson looked as if resolving to say no more, then seemed to change his mind.

“Yes,” he said with a sigh. “That’s what I’ve been worrying about. The new-design car. It is mostly my creation, the Marr-Car. And it was stolen, and since then I’ve been running around in a sort of disguise trying to find it again—”

“And now and then taking time off to get your daughter out of trouble,” put in Smitty.

“Yes. Then I was brought here. And the car—”

“The car,” said The Avenger, looking as if he now knew many things, “is safe. And we know where it is. If you like, we’ll take you with us. We’re going to it, now.”

They went out, after Benson had melted the chain, holding Jackson’s wrists together, with the little blowtorch. The handcuffs he would have to wear like bracelets till they had more time.

On the next floor down, they stopped briefly at Cole Wilson’s door. Mantis was sitting up, rubbing his jaw. He scrambled to his feet when Benson entered the room, then he relaxed when he saw it was not Wilson after him again.

“You!” he said, moving his jaw to see if it was in normal working order. “I almost caught the man behind all this monkey business,” he began.

But Benson cut him off. “We know what happened. We are going to where the Marr-Car is hidden, now. Want to come with us?”

Mantis did, emphatically. They all went out and piled in The Avenger’s car—Mantis, Jackson, Smitty, Mac and Dick Benson.

And then to the place where Nellie was still on guard near that garage.

The diminutive blonde stepped from the doorway of a vacant building as the men came up the sidewalk, after parking their car several blocks away.

“That’s the place,” she said, nodding down the street.

There was a garage building there, with a vacant lot on one side and a warehouse on the other. The garage looked almost too small to be a public garage, but too large for a private one. It would hold probably ten or a dozen cars.

It had a window, boarded up, on their side. The big doors, they could see, were apparently nailed shut. It certainly looked as if it had not been used for many months, which would have roused The Avenger’s suspicion even without Nellie pointing the way.

“No one has tried to drive the car out?” he asked.

Nellie shook her head.

“Nobody has been in or out since I last contacted you,” she said.

Benson’s pale eyes narrowed at that.

“You’re sure?”

“I watched every minute,” said Nellie. “Why? Does that surprise you?”

Benson didn’t answer. But there had been a slight tightening of the muscles of that newly expressive face of his that
had
hinted surprise, as if he’d been sure someone had either left or entered.

“We’d better go and get the car at once,” he said, “before something else happens to it.”

“Yes!” exclaimed Jackson emphatically. Obviously, all he could think of was the new product embodying so many of his brain children. Particularly the new steel. “Yes! That is what we must do first!”

They got to the garage door. This street, just off busy Jefferson Avenue, was practically deserted. A small oasis of vacant buildings, weedy lots and storage places, it held no one to watch them.

“The door isn’t boarded up, as it looks to be,” said Nellie. “That boarding is a fake; it moves when the doors are moved.”

She pushed at one, and it rolled easily open, phony bars and all. The Avenger didn’t enter at once. He stood and looked at that door.

“Not even locked?” he said softly. “Open to anyone that wants to push it?”

“That’s the cleverest part about it,” said Nellie. “It isn’t a trap, as it seems to be. Go inside, and you’ll see what I mean.”

So they all went in—with Smitty sliding the door shut behind them again—and they saw.

Ahead of them, as Benson’s flash rayed out, was seemingly nothing but an empty garage space, with a blank wall cutting off their view about thirty feet from the door.

“That’s it, see?” said Nellie.
“Let
anyone come in. There’s nothing to look at, nothing to give the show away.”

“Where’s the car?” said Jackson, anxiety in his eyes.

“Behind that wall—which seems to be the end wall of the garage. I sneaked in hours ago and learned all about the wall.”

Nellie went to it, with the others following. She touched the head of a nail, and a plank about eighteen inches wide suddenly came loose at the top. She lowered it.

There was a six-or seven-foot space between this fake rear wall and the real rear wall. And in there, packed tight with fenders almost touching on each side—was the Marr-Car!

Jackson leaped to it and literally stroked the steel of the thing, as if it were alive. He talked to it; patted it. Benson turned to Smitty.

“Stay on the door, Smitty. We’ll all get in the car and drive it out. When we get to the door, you slide it open for us, and then get in the car with us. There’s just a chance that there may be a guard somewhere around here who has seen us enter, and that there may be trouble. But these windows look pretty thick and shatterproof.”

He turned to Jackson. “Will they stop bullets?”

Jackson nodded, proudly. “They’ll stop anything.”

“Then we can roll out easily, trouble or no trouble.”

Smitty walked back to the street door of the garage, using his flash because of the boarded windows and the closed door, which made the place dark. He walked around a large metal sheet in the middle which looked like a trapdoor, and which he knew in a way was a trapdoor: It covered a greasing pit. Shallow iron runways at each side the iron sheet showed that.

The Avenger prepared to take the car from its closed, dark hiding place. His quick, pale eyes had already seen the way, without words from Nellie.

At the floor could be seen half a dozen heavy hinges. They were not to be seen from the garage side, but no one had bothered to conceal them on this side. They showed that the whole wall could be let down into the garage space, hinged at the bottom and free at the top where it met the ceiling. A heavily counter-weighted rope, attached to the wall at the top, further indicated how it worked.

Benson pulled a bar that fastened the thing, and pushed. The wall tilted away from the mystery car.

Mantis, and Mac, meanwhile, were looking at the unique thing so new in automotive circles. The perfect teardrop design. The lack of hood because the motor was over the rear side. The extra-large tires. Jackson in the meantime had the door open and was sitting behind the wheel.

The wall was flat on the floor, now, ready to be driven over on the way to the sliding street doors—

But suddenly those doors opened. And it was not Smitty who had opened them. The giant yelled: “Chief—”

And then they came in—a score of grinning, murderous-looking thugs with machine guns and automatics. And at their head, openly, triumphantly sure of himself, was a man frequently in the rotogravure section of Detroit newspapers. A man looked up to and respected, worth millions, with homes all over the country and owning one of the country’s biggest automobile plants.