The Avenger 21 - The Happy Killers (11 page)

“Did he say he was going away in a hurry?”

“No,” said Edna Brown.

The Avenger got to his feet, lithe as a tiger, moving with incredible rapidity.

“I think we’ll pay a visit to Xenan’s house,” he said evenly. “Miss Brown, you stay here, please. Mac, Smitty, Cole, please come with me.”

The four left the headquarters room. Nellie looked at Josh with blue eyes full of disappointment at being left out of the arrangements and anticipation of action soon to come.

“Looks like they’re expecting trouble,” she said.

Josh nodded. “Yes. Otherwise the chief wouldn’t have had all three go with him. Well, it’ll take an army to make a dent in those four!”

There, just about, was an army, in the end.

Smitty stared at the vast stone pile which was Xenan’s house, as they drove up toward it along a quarter-mile gravel lane. The shades were drawn and the place looked alone and bleak.

“Servants dismissed too,” the giant mused aloud. “Otherwise somebody would have answered our phone call. Fast work, to pack, let the servants go and beat it to Florida in an hour’s time.”

The Avenger said nothing. He stopped the car openly in front of the big door, and the four got out. It was queer. Even in broad daylight, the place had a dangerous feel.

“Cole,” he said to Wilson, “maybe you’d better go back to the garage and servants’ quarters and make sure no one is there.”

Wilson nodded, bare-headed as usual, with his straight-featured face alert and eager. He went along the side of the house toward the back, and Benson opened the door.

It was almost that fast and easy. The Avenger knew every type of lock and how to open it. And the lock on this door was massive, but not complicated. About twenty seconds sufficed to feel for the catch with a flexible steel rod and throw the bolt.

The three stepped into a hallway so deserted that their steps seemed to echo from four places at once. The anteroom of the house was as big as a baronial hall, with marble balustrades and great pieces of antique oak furniture all over the place. An army could have hidden. But it seems there wasn’t any army; a methodical search revealed that.

“What are we lookin’ for, Muster Benson?” ventured Mac.

The pale, basilisk eyes roved around the hall.

“This house was cleared of servants and master very suddenly,” The Avenger said. “It is just possible that someone cleared it because, for some reason, he wanted to use it, and did not want any observers around. We’ll see if we can find such a reason.”

For the first time Mac realized that there didn’t even seem to be a caretaker here. And that was odd. People didn’t usually leave such elaborate homes completely vacant.

They separated and went through the upstairs floors fast. After about ten minutes the three met in the hall again. They’d found nothing suspicious or out of the ordinary.

“Basement,” said Benson. Then: “Cole should be back by now.”

They listened but couldn’t hear Wilson’s footsteps. Smitty went to a rear window and looked out toward the garage. No sign of Cole.

“Wonder if anything’s happened to him?” the giant said uneasily. “Maybe I’d better go and see.”

The Avenger nodded. He and Mac went down the stairs to the spacious basement. Benson told Mac to stay by the stairs as guard, in case someone tried to come down.

The cellar had several doors, Benson saw as he got to the center of it. He tried them. One led to a laundry room, which was empty. Another opened on a playroom, also empty.

The Avenger’s pale eyes were narrowed to steely slits, as they usually were when the uncanny sixth sense of the man whispered of trouble nearby. But there was absolutely no tangible sign of danger.

Two more doors opened off the basement. One was different from the other three. It was a solid slab and was obviously very heavy. The Avenger stepped to this one.

A ponderous staple was in this door, and there was a big padlock to secure it. The padlock hung open, however. Benson opened this door.

The other rooms he’d looked in on were lighted by sun from windows. This one had no windows, and it was pitch-dark—so dark that even the pale, infallible eyes of The Avenger could not make out objects for a few seconds.

Benson, as a precautionary measure, took the padlock out of the hasp and slipped it into his pocket so it couldn’t be used to lock him in. Then he went into the room.

It was a wine cellar. The smell told him that before he had gone a foot. A searching hand touched bottles in racks and confirmed it. Then he heard a groan.

Groping ahead with hands outstretched, The Avenger touched a light bulb. He snapped it on. Cold light illuminated the narrow, windowless room with the heavy oak door. It lighted up the racks of bottles—and something else.

Two bodies.

The Avenger’s hunch that there was something in this house needing investigation had been right, as were most of his hunches. Cleared it out to use it criminally? Right! The two men in here proved that.

One was Xenan, and the other was Brown.

Brown, of course, Benson knew from meeting the man. Xenan he knew from pictures seen many times in newspaper pages. Brown was the one who had moaned. He lay on his back, limp, deadly pale, with matted hair where blood had oozed from a heavy blow. From his breathing, Benson guessed that he had a fractured skull.

Xenan was breathing heavily, but not moaning. He had crouched in a corner when the light went on, but when he saw who had snapped the switch he gasped with relief and sprang upright.

“Thank heavens,” he said devoutly. “I recognize you, sir. I’ve seen your face in enough publications. You’re Richard Benson, aren’t you? I heard steps and heard the door open and was afraid it was
them.”

“Them?” said Benson.

“The ones who attacked us last night,” said Xenan, voice high and hysterical. “The ones who broke Brown’s head, if his long unconsciousness means anything. The ones who threw me in here with him and barred the door.”

The Avenger felt the padlock in his pocket. It had not been locked, but its shank in the staple would bar the door, from the inside, as efficiently as if it had been snapped shut.

“I’ve been in here I don’t know how many hours,” Xenan growled. “I’ve yelled till I was blue in the face. In the meantime, these crooks have telephoned around in my name. I heard them talk enough to know that. But where are they now? Are they gone from here?”

“We didn’t see anyone around,” said Benson.

“We’d better get out of here just the same and take Brown with us,” said Xenan, “before they slam that door on us again.”

“A man of mine is out there,” said Benson, bending over Brown. Concussion, all right. It was doubtful if Brown would live, along in years and soft from an office life as he was. “He is posted at the stairs so that no one can come down without his knowing it.”

The Avenger was probably the greatest crime-fighting machine that had ever lived. But, after all, he was made out of flesh and blood and was human enough to overlook something once in a while.

He had overlooked something this time.

Four doors opened around the big basement room he had first entered: one to the playroom, one to the laundry room, a third to this wine cellar, and to a fourth room, which he hadn’t time to explore. It just happened that this was the most important, as far as Dick was concerned.

Many elaborate homes have underground corridors connecting the house with the servants’ quarters. This was one of them. There was a tunnel from house to garage, and it was this tunnel to which the fourth door led.

Mac didn’t know about this, either. He stayed at the stairs and watched The Avenger. He saw Benson go into the third doorway, knew from the length of time he stayed inside that something important was in there. He listened for sounds indicating that the pale-eyed man needed help, and didn’t hear any. So then he relaxed and watched the stairs again.

And while he watched the stairs, that fourth door opened, very slowly, and murderous eyes looked at his back.

It might have been coincidence or it might have been by deliberate arrangement, but at that instant something happened to take the Scot’s attention even further from the basement he was in.

Mac heard a faint laugh from somewhere upstairs.

His teeth set hard. He crouched instinctively, for this laugh spelled peril. It was faint, as if suppressed, but it was drawn out, repeated.

He glared up the stairs, too intent to know that the owner of the murderous eyes in the fourth doorway was creeping soundlessly toward him. He heard that maniacal laugh again.

Mac whirled to shout a warning to The Avenger in the wine cellar. He never made the noise.

The figure from the garage tunnel was on him by then; and before Mac could even get his arms up to defend himself, a gun cracked down on his head. The attacker then sped to the heavy door of the wine cellar, slammed it shut, and dropped a thick iron bolt through the staple loop.

That door would have to be broken down, now, before anyone could get out. And no human being without a battering ram, not even The Avenger, could break the massive oak.

The man began to laugh. He stared down at Mac’s bony, unconscious length and wheezed with laughter. Laughing, he picked up the bony body and started with it up the stairs.

Like a crazy echo, laughter sounded from the head of the stairs, too. And another man appeared, carrying another body. This was the body of Cole Wilson.

He dumped Wilson in the hall. And half over Wilson’s body, Mac was dropped.

“The big fellow?” said the one who’d carried Mac.

“Ha-ha-ha! He’s in the garage. Chained him to the wall.”

The second man sputtered this out between chuckles and then, shaking with laughter, went to a closet and came back with a vacuum cleaner. He put the hose on the reverse end of this, put a flat attachment on the end of the hose and stuck this next to the crack under the wine-cellar door.

He turned on the motor and the thing began shooting air under the door into the almost-airtight wine closet. Then he poured a colorless liquid, that began to evaporate in misty white fumes almost at once, into the air stream.

“Hee-hee! When they get a couple whiffs of that gas—”

With murderous eyes intent in his laugh-twisted face, the man emptied the small bottle he had tipped over the air stream. The whitish fumes snaked under the door as if pulled by strings.

The man stared at his watch, twitching with laughter, till ten minutes had passed. Then he opened the door.

There were three bodies inside, now, instead of two. All three were limp and still. The man stepped inside, holding his breath as well as he could between chuckles, then caught Xenan by the shoulders. He dragged him out, leaving the wounded man, Brown, and the still body of The Avenger where they lay.

“Ho-ho!” laughed the man, glaring at Benson. “So you’re the guy everybody’s scared of. Haw-haw-haw!”

He pulled a gun and leveled it at The Avenger’s head. His finger flexed on the trigger. But not quite enough. Not quite. For twenty seconds that seemed like twenty years, he stood there, with Benson only a half-ounce pull from death. Then he put the gun up, put his other arm around Xenan’s flaccid body, and went out, trailing laughter behind him like Satan’s plumes.

Xenan was the only one they took from the house.

There was a big sedan in the garage, and when they’d all met there, it was revealed that there were six of them. They crowded into the car.

Hanging limply from one of the garage walls was the enormous form of Smitty, The giant had a deep gash on his head and was still unconscious. Laughing as if nothing had ever been funnier than the sight of the huge fellow spread-eagled against the wall with two pairs of skid chains, the six drove out, taking the wealthy, famous William Xenan with them.

Cole Wilson was the first to recover in the mammoth, baronial front hall. He stirred and blinked. “What—”

His hand drew back from what it had touched, and then he recognized the moveless object.

“Hey, Mac!”

Wilson found a first-floor bathroom, staggered back with a towel soaked in cold water and slapped this against Mac’s face. The Scot spluttered and came to.

“Cole! Where’s— What happened?”

“You tell me,” said Wilson, his handsome face grim. “I went back to the garage and took one step inside. Thought I was being pretty cautious. I heard a laugh, turned, and a house fell on me. That’s all I know.”

“ ’Tis about what happened to me,” said Mac. Then: “Say! Smitty went back to find you. Didn’t you see him?”

“I saw nothing but stars. Where’s the chief?”

Mac answered with a blank look. They ran to the garage.

Smitty was just stirring, with dawning realization and fury, against the wall. He roared as he saw the two.

“They hit me with a four-by-four. Or maybe a six-by-six. I didn’t have a chance. If I get my hands on them—”

He flexed great fingers in throttling motions. He began fighting the chains.

“Wait a minute,” said Wilson, more composedly.

Smitty could have broken loose, all right; few bonds could restrain his gigantic strength. But it was quicker to unfasten him. With this done, the three ran back to the main house with dread in the heart of each.