The Avenger 22 - The Black Death (5 page)

Mac was puttering around his laboratory behind the store part when Smitty entered with the black orchid. In front, tending the counters, was the clever, close-mouthed youngster Mac employed. The giant nodded to the boy and went into the rear laboratory, closing the heavy iron door that shut laboratory from story.

Mac looked at the black orchid.

“An exotic posy,” he commented. “One of yer many admirers sent it to ye, no doubt?”

Smitty reddened. “It came from a dead man,” he growled. “The chief wants it analyzed to see if there’s any poison on it. Maybe this is the thing that caused death.”

He brought Mac up to date on events, and the bony Scot whistled. “‘Tis queerrr enough,” he burred. “Well, let’s see if the posy can tell anythin’.”

It was a pleasure to watch the man with the big feet and big, sail-like ears work. But in this case it was an empty pleasure.

Mac, in a series of tests such as few men alive were capable of making, figuratively and literally tore apart the bloom with the blackish petals that shaded into gray-white down near the stem. And he found nothing murderous.

“If ’tis poisoned,” said Mac, “then somethin’ has been used that evaporates without trace in a few hours. And I don’t believe there is such a poison.”

“Then you exonerate the black orchid?” said Smitty.

“Yes. Somethin’ else must have killed the mon—and turned him black. And I can’t guess what would have done
that,
either!”

He went to the television cabinet to report to The Avenger. He switched it on, opened his mouth to begin—

And then that scream sounded!

Mac whirled from the cabinet. Again the scream came, faint but unmistakable through the iron door. It seemed to be laden with fear, with hopelessness. It was a ghostly, deathly scream.

The giant Smitty was already leaping for the door. Mac jumped after him. Smitty got the door open.

“Mr. MacMurdie! Mr. Smith!” the boy in the store was calling. “Hurry! Here! Please! A lady—”

He didn’t go on because, by then, Smitty and Mac were in the store, too, and could see for themselves.

Stretched out cold on the floor was a girl. “She st-staggered in here like she was d-drunk,” the frightened boy stammered. “She yelled. I guess you heard it. She looked all around, kind of wild. And then she went limp. I didn’t have time to catch her. I think she bumped her head when she fell. You don’t think she was d-drunk, d-do you? She looks too nice to get like that.”

She did look nice. Smitty, always susceptible to feminine beauty, could testify to that. He stared admiringly at her.

She was young, little more than twenty. She was rather tall and had on a silk dress under a spring coat that revealed all the expected curves. Her hair was dark-brown, and you felt that the eyes, closed now, would be of the same color.

“Water!” yelled Smitty gallantly. “Spirits of ammonia. Whiskey! Do something for her. You’re supposed to be a doctor.”

But Mac hadn’t time or need to do anything, because the girl stirred.

She opened her eyes, and they were dark-brown. Also, they were engagingly beautiful, even though they didn’t have a very intelligent expression at the moment.

She didn’t say a word. No “Where am I?” or “What place is this?”

She stared at Smitty without much expression, then looked the same way at Mac. Then, before they could move to help her, she got up.

“Feeling better, now?” said Smitty, with his hand under her arm.

She didn’t say anything. She moved her arm away and started for the soda fountain. She reached over it and touched the spigots there. She looked at them like a child who has never seen such things as soda fountain spigots. She opened one, closed it again.

Smitty looked his perplexity as he watched. He looked at Mac, who shrugged as if to say: “See what she does. Let her alone.”

“She’s been socked on the knob or something. She’s wacky,” breathed the boy clerk.

Smitty and Mac felt the same way, too. But they wanted to help; and they thought that just by watching they could get a clue to her trouble.

“Maybe she lost something very valuable that drove her out of her mind,” whispered Smitty to Mac. “Maybe she’s subconsciously searching for it here.”

Full of the spirit of helpfulness, they let her alone.

She certainly seemed to be searching for something.

Vacant of eye, she went from the fountain to a counter where alarm clocks were stacked in their square boxes. She opened a box, took out a clock, put it back. She went on toward the rear to a counter where talcum powders were arrayed. She looked at one of these.

Then she jumped.

Lithe as a deer, with nothing vacant whatever about her lovely eyes now, she flashed to the rear door, flashed through and shut the thing.

The ponderous bang of the metal portal seemed to echo out the store and along the block. It snapped shut like Mac’s surprise-parted jaws. As one, he and Smitty raced for that door.

It was bolted from the inside. And no one knew better than they did how heavy that bolt was.

“Hey!” Smitty yelped. “Hey!” It was about all he had in him.

“We’ve got to get her out of there!” moaned Mac. “Our equipment! All the lovely, delicate things! A crazy girl in there—”

They banged futilely at the door. And then Mac said abruptly: “Perrrhaps she was not so crazy. Did ye see her eyes when she raced in? They seemed to clear remarkably.”

Smitty nodded glumly. The giant was beginning to feel that something was very sour about the actions of their beautiful and “helpless” visitor. He began to smell a rat as big as a cathedral.

“We’ll have to torch that door down,” he said. “We can’t break it in.”

“Maybe,” conceded Mac, hurrying for the front door. “But we’ll try the rear firrrst.”

They galloped around the corner to the narrow areaway leading to the rear of the store. The door back there was even heavier than the other. It had even more locks on it. An army couldn’t have gotten in from outside. But from the
inside,
where all the catches were, a slip of a girl could get out very easily.

And had!

While they were wasting seconds in the store, the girl had calmly walked out the back door and was now safely away from there.

“The play-actin’, worthless little Jezebel!” raged Mac. “The— Anythin’ gone, Smitty? The little baggage went through all that act to line us out of here, then get back herself and take somethin’. But what?”

“The orchid,” came in a girl’s voice.

They fell over themselves to look around, thinking for an instant that the girl was not gone, but that she was hiding and had spoken.

Then Smitty realized that this was Nellie’s voice and that it came from the television screen. He hurried there.

Nellie’s blue eyes, sparkling with glee, stared at him.

“You big dope. She took you in nicely, didn’t she? Will you ever learn not to fall for a pretty face?”

“Why . . . er . . . I only wanted to help,” mumbled Smitty, red to the roots of his hair.

“Mac left the current on, so we saw most of what she did,” Nellie said. “She took the orchid and ran. I think that’s all she took.”

They checked. That did seem to be all. It was more than enough! They’d been taken in like a couple of children.

“You’d better come over here while you’re still clothed,” said Nellie. “First, you let somebody steal your car; then you let somebody walk out with a subject of laboratory experiment. Better come here before some little boy steals your undershirt.”

“You—” Smitty began hotly. But he couldn’t think of a suitable retort. He tried so hard that it wasn’t till later that the real puzzle of the thing loomed in his mind.

Who was the girl? How had she known they had the black orchid in the back room? Why had she gone to such lengths to get it, when there was nothing incriminating about it? Or didn’t she know it was not incriminating?

Smitty wished he could get hold of her again.

“She must have been hanging around Bleek Street, drawn by the report of Gailord’s death and the confusion,” Nellie said, back at Bleek Street. “She must have seen Smitty pick up the orchid, then followed him to Mac’s store. There,” she added to the giant, “she realized she didn’t have to do much to lull
your
suspicions, so she simply took the orchid away with her.”

“Lay off, will you?” pleaded Smitty. “We pulled a boner. All right. It could have happened to anybody. The question is, now what?”

The Avenger supplied this. As usual, he paid no attention to the interplay of diminutive blonde Nellie and gigantic Smitty. He spoke out of a study of papers on his desk.

“We have a report on Schuyler Marcy. What he told us is true as far as it goes: He is a son of wealth which has disappeared, leaving him practically penniless. He has been at Gailord’s Hoboken plant quite a few times, and that may have been on the quest of a job, as he said. Also, he has been around the Bristal Airplane Co.’s plant, North Philadelphia, many times. He didn’t touch on that. And the report makes no effort to explain.”

“Gailord is working on airplane parts, now, isn’t he—wasn’t he?” said Smitty.

“Yes,” said The Avenger.

“Then it looks like Marcy is singularly interested in bombers. The Bristal plant turns out bombers, doesn’t it?”

“It does. In fact, it is the plant that subcontracted stabilizers from Gailord’s smaller factory.”

“That seems to tie something up in the same bundle,” frowned Nellie. “But I don’t know what.”

The Avenger went on “We have a report on John Jay Hannon, too. Or, rather, we have a lack of report that is almost as significant as a full report would be.

“For nearly eight weeks, no single person, as far as is known, has set eyes on him. He has vanished.

“John Jay Hannon,” Benson added, “is the inventor who has also, besides Smitty, been working on a television-scrambling device.”

“It looks as if he found the answer,” said Cole Wilson. “Then it looks as if he took the answer, sneaked off and hid, and has been using it ever since to organize this cult.”

“His disappearance could be accounted for by his hiding out somewhere,” said The Avenger calmly. “Or it could be accounted for by his being taken away by force, or by his murder and the disposal of his body. I think Hannon is our next subject in this affair of the black death.”

He looked at Smitty and Nellie.

“Two people are listed as closest to Hannon. One is a daughter—all the family he has—who lives in his apartment with him when he is in town and at his Long Island home when he is not actively engaged in some business deal. The other is a young man named Daniel Miller, who was his assistant for years and left about eighteen months ago to set up in business for himself as a free-lance mechanical engineer. I’d suggest that you two see what you can learn from them.”

The pale, deadly eyes went to Cole Wilson’s face.

“Cole, you and I might go out to his Long Island home. His workshop and laboratory are out there. We may find out something by a look around.”

Outside, Smitty looked solemnly, at Nellie and said: “Maybe we’d better split up in the interests of efficiency. You interview this Daniel Miller, and I’ll take on the daughter, Alicia Hannon.”

“Oh, no, you won’t,” snapped Nellie. “She may be young and good-looking. If so, you’d be so busy gawking, you wouldn’t have time to ask questions. We’ll work together.”

The giant grinned. He’d only been working to fluster the little blonde. Both knew that he hadn’t room for anyone else but her. But that didn’t keep her from getting jealous of others.

They looked up Miller first.

Daniel Miller, it appeared, had done very well by himself, since, leaving Hannon’s employ. He had a suite of four offices on the top floor of a Forty-third Street building. The suite was knee-deep in Oriental rugs, and the furniture was walnut. There were two very eye-filling girls they had to pass before they could get into the private office. When they did, they found the proprietor as impressive as his layout.

Dan Miller was twenty-eight or so but looked older because he was so large. He was over six feet and solidly built. He had a big blunt jaw and incisive dark eyes. He shook your hand in a steam-shovel grip and asked in a deep rumble what you wanted to see him about.