The Avenger 21 - The Happy Killers (10 page)

Josh catapulted toward him like a black streak. The man had just gotten the gun clear of its holster when a swinging handcuff smashed his right wrist, and he dropped the weapon. A dangling handcuff can be a terrible thing, as more than one law officer has found out.

The man yelled. There were answering shouts upstairs. More men were in this place than Josh had dreamed. Whatever number there was, crowded for the stairs.

Josh swung again with the cuff, and the man went down to join his friend in slumber on the floor.

A gun roared like thunder in the confined space. Josh heard plaster crack in the wall near his head, heard the girl scream. There was another shot, covering the descent of four men into the basement. Then there wasn’t any more shooting: Josh was shuttling around among them so fast it would have been like trying to hit a shadow.

That tall, sleepy-looking Negro was everywhere! He got a man on the head with the cuff, ducked, danced right and left while guns sought to line on him, hit another man, darted back. In a space of about eight seconds three men were on the floor and the fourth, with a swollen, dislocated jaw, was running frantically for the stairs.

He didn’t reach them. Josh caught him in a flying tackle, and he went down. Josh bumped the man’s head once against the floor, and he stayed down.

A large stillness filled the basement. In it, the girl’s fast breathing sounded loud. Josh looked with a not unjustifiable pride at all the figures littering the new floor, and then stepped briskly to the man at the pipe. His first victim.

He got the little key and removed the second handcuff. He looked around for a moment.

“Say, didn’t this guy drop a blackjack?” he said.

He didn’t see it, so he went to the girl.

“I’ll untie you now. This crew will have a car somewhere near and we can get away in that. I wonder where we are.”

He got her hands loose, and bent to untie her ankles. The telephone wire was stiff and it took him a moment.

“I wonder where that blackjack is—” he began.

Then he found out.

There was a padded crack on his long-suffering skull that seemed to force his eyeballs right out of their sockets. He pitched forward, and the girl got up and ran! She’d had the little sap hidden under her skirt, and to express her deep appreciation of Josh’s bravery in laying the gang low, and her profound gratitude for being set free by him, she had hit him over the head with all her lithe strength.

Josh moaned and wobbled to his feet in a few seconds. He got to the stairs with a great deal of difficulty, and staggered up them. He teetered through new and vacant rooms toward a door.

There was the sound of a racing motor, then the hum of gears. He opened the door and got out to the street in time to see a car speed off to his left. He gritted his teeth on his opinion of the ash-blond ingrate and looked around.

Nothing but new and untenanted houses, vacant lots and skyline. He had no notion where he was, but he guessed it would be a long, long walk to transportation of some kind.

It was.

Smitty thought this was about the weirdest affair, this business of the laughing killers, that they’d worked on yet. They went here; they hurried there. They fought a gang of rats that sometimes laughed like maniacs and sometimes didn’t.

There was no logic to it. Weird was a mild word for it. Yet, the giant had an uneasy hunch that it wasn’t at all weird to The Avenger. He felt that behind the pale, glacial eyes, in the appalling brain, a pattern was already clearly forming.

They were all up in the big Bleek Street headquarters room. Josh had just finished reporting, being pretty resentful about it when he came to the ingratitude of the blond, whom Dick Benson had identified for him as Edna Brown.

The Avenger turned to the door. None of the rest had heard any sound, but his quick ears had caught one. The door opened and Mac came in. He wore a lab coat over his bony frame.

“Did you analyze the sample from the beaker in Tate’s laboratory?” Dick asked.

Mac nodded. “And found nothin’ to get excited about, Muster Benson. Unless there’s somethin’ there that I haven’t the knowledge to locate.”

“If you can’t locate it, it isn’t there,” Dick said quietly. The Scot reddened with pleasure. “What did you find?”

Mac shrugged. “Laughing gas. To be more specific, the scrapings from Tate’s beaker seem to be nitrous oxide, obtained by mixing solutions of hydroxylamine hydrochloride and sodium nitrite in the usual manner. Then it was cooled under presseure to a liquid, boiled, then evaporated to form a white solid. Which would be yer laughin’ gas pills.”

Benson said, “Just nitrous oxide. Laughing gas solidified into pills. That would produce a mild form of intoxication, a semi-immunity to pain, and perhaps increased physical strength for a short time. Cases of that have been known. But it would not account for amplifying the murder lust that lies in all men. There was no trace of any other drug, Mac?”

“If there was, I missed it.” The bony Scot shrugged.

The Avenger paced slowly up and down one end of the enormous room, eyes like frozen jewels in his mask-like face.

“I think I begin to get some of this,” Nellie said hopefully. “Beak Nailen and his gang robbed Brown just for the money and jewels they knew were in the safe. Then they saw the formula that came with the loot and realized that they had something big. They had something they could feed to gunmen that would make them brave as lions, immune to pain, and would deaden their conscious wills enough so that when they were told to kill someone, they’d go out and do it without question.”

She looked at The Avenger, but Dick was still pacing and she didn’t know if he was listening or not.

“Nailen trailed Brown the next day and saw that he came here for help. He fed some of the pills to a man of his, and sent him to the drugstore to kill Mac and Wilson before they could start fighting his gang. Then Nailen had Edna Brown lead the chief and Mac to a hideout to kill them, too. A preventive war, you might call it. Only both tries failed. And the attempt on Josh’s life failed.”

Smitty shook his head, also looking sideways at Benson.

“You don’t explain enough,” he said to the diminutive blond bombshell. “If Edna was in with the gang, why did they snatch her and stuff her down a cellar, bound hand and foot? And how did Nailen make up a sample from Tate’s formula so fast? He got it at midnight and had pills ready the next morning.”

“Maybe there were sample pills with the formula in the safe,” Nellie said.

Then they both gave up. The Avenger was paying no attention at all. He couldn’t be made to talk, which showed that there were still too many unsolved riddles in his mind. Too many for discussion.

He did say a few words at last, but it was with an air of talking to himself rather than to them. And he didn’t answer questions; he asked them.

“Brown insisted he knew his daughter was safe because he had ‘just talked to her.’ But he couldn’t have talked to her, since she was held prisoner in a basement at that time. So he lied. Why?

“The moment he could, he hurried out of his house and went to the home of his ex-partner, Xenan. He pulled a gun on Xenan; he was furiously angry. Why?

“At just the wrong moment for us, the laughing killers caught Josh and took him away. How did they know he was at Xenan’s? They couldn’t have trailed him from Brown’s house. If they’d been hanging around Brown’s place, the police, in searching for Tate, would have discovered them.

“Tate fled though he knew it would make him look guilty. Why?

“Just before, he made up a large batch of his sinister pills. What for?”

Smitty wished Dick could answer these things. If he could, the case would be broken. But he couldn’t.

There was a soft buzz. It came from a table near the center of the room. On the table was a small black box that was far more complicated than it looked. It was another product of Smitty’s radio genius—a small television set that showed anyone in the vestibule downstairs. The buzzer showed that someone had rung their bell.

The giant went to the set.

“Did you say Edna Brown was an ash-blond?” he said.

Benson nodded.

“Amber-colored eyes, extremely good-looking?”

Nellie sniffed jealously. Dick nodded again.

“Then it looks as if she’s downstairs, now. In which case, maybe we’ll get the answers to a few of our questions.”

Edna Brown was quite pale, and there were smudges of exhaustion under her pretty eyes. Her hands trembled in her lap, in spite of all her efforts to hold them steady. But she was quite self-composed as she faced the members of Justice, Inc. She looked at Josh as if she’d never seen him before, though she must have remembered the man who had freed her.

“I came to you for help,” she said steadily.

“Well! You’ve got a nerve,” Nellie gasped. “After leading Mr. Benson and Mr. McMurdie into a trap that almost cost them their lives!”

“And after hitting my Josh on the head!” Rosabel added vindictively. Where her Josh was concerned, she was a savage.

“I’m not asking for help for myself,” Edna said. “I’m asking for my father. He has been taken away somewhere. I’m afraid they’ll kill him.”

“Who are ‘they’?” The Avenger shot at her.

She paused for an appreciable instant. Then: “I don’t know,” she said.

“What makes you think anyone has taken him anywhere?”

“I can’t find him,” said the girl. “I’ve tried everywhere. I learned that he went to Mr. Xenan’s place last night. It seems he was talking with Mr. Xenan about some matter, and men broke in. They knocked Mr. Xenan out—he has a big lump on his forehead—and they took Dad away. That’s all I know.”

“That’s not very much,” Mac said sourly. Mac was a pretty tough nut for the charms of women to crack. Smitty was not so impervious.

The giant smiled nicely at the ash-blond while Nellie glared daggers at him.

“Apparently the same gang that caught you at Long Island and then caught Josh at Xenan’s now have your father.”

“Apparently,” was all that Edna said.

“I don’t understand why you come here for help,” Nellie persisted. “You’ve been pretty rough with Justice, Inc., so far.”

“I didn’t want help, then,” Edna said. “I wanted you all to keep out. I was afraid—” She stopped.

“But now you do want help?”

She nodded. “Now my father’s life is in danger. That makes everything different.”

The Avenger’s eyes were like colorless holes in his calm countenance.

“Will you please tell me exactly what was in your father’s wall safe?” he asked.

“My mother’s jewels,” Edna said steadily, “quite a lot of cash, and, according to Dad, Harry Tate’s formula.”

The Avenger indicated a box on his desk.

“In there are ashes,” he said. “They are the ashes of papers burned by Nailen and his gang, the men who robbed the safe. There are ashes of stocks and bonds, which Nailen must have decided he didn’t dare risk disposing of. There are ashes of insurance policies. There are ashes of several letters, which were readable enough to tell us that they were important but quite regular—nothing a crook could use. There are ashes of a formula.”

“They . . . burned the formula?” Edna gasped. Then she nodded. “I see. They must have copied it, so the paper itself, Harry’s regular letterhead, wouldn’t be incriminating.”

“Possibly,” said Benson. “That was all we found, anyhow.”

“If you know who robbed the safe,” Edna said hopefully, “then you know who kidnapped my father and knocked Mr. Xenan out. Please—let’s go after them at once!”

“Sure,” growled Mac. “Go after the skurrlies, but where?”

Benson went to his desk and picked up a phone. “Perhaps Xenan can help us out. He must have seen the men who attacked him and Brown.”

The Avenger called Xenan’s home. They all heard the phone ring and ring and ring. No answer. That was odd, when you considered that a dozen servants should have been around to answer.

“Must have a wrong number,” said Smitty.

The Avenger dialed again, but it was not a repeat on Xenan’s house phone. It was his office number.

A sleek secretarial voice stated that Mr. Xenan was not available. In fact, he was out of town. He had left an hour ago for Florida, where he intended to stay for at least a month.

“What part of Florida?” Benson asked.

The secretary didn’t know. Xenan wanted a complete vacation—no telegrams, letters, phone calls—so he hadn’t said where he was going.

“How did he go? By train?”

“I think it was by plane,” the secretary said vaguely. “But I’m not sure.”

It was certainly out of the ordinary for an extremely wealthy man, with all sorts of pressing business interests, to go off at a moment’s notice to some far place where he couldn’t be reached.

“Did Xenan come to the office to tell you this?” The Avenger asked.

“No, sir. He phoned.”

“You’re sure it was Xenan who phoned? Sure it was his voice?”

The secretary gasped in astonishment. “Why, of course, I’m sure!”

Benson hung up. He faced Edna Brown. “Did you talk to Xenan personally?” he asked.

“No. When I heard that my father, the last anyone had seen of him, had gone to Mr. Xenan’s house, I telephoned there. It was quicker than going personally. I talked to Mr. Xenan. I’m sure it was he. He told me about the attack last night and the bump on his head.”