The Avenger 24 - Midnight Murder (3 page)

“You can’t touch this. Nobody can touch it. Nobody can see it!”

Smitty was outraged.

“Look here,” he growled to Grace. “You know who you’re talking to? This is Richard Benson. Get it? No doubt your precious hunk of tin is a very wonderful and very secret gadget, but anything can be intrusted to Mr. Benson. Ask the head of the Secret Service, or army intelligence. Ask—”

“Nobody,” yelled Grace, “can examine this!”

And he started back to the smoking wreckage, then to his own car.

The crash men had gotten here, now. They stared at the dead man. Practically every bone in his body must have been smashed, from the way he was lying.

“Wayne Carroll,” shivered one of the men. “Best pilot in the army. And look!”

“He was the pilot?” The Avenger said evenly.

“Yes, sir.”

Benson was probably no older than the man, but it was typical that the young fellow said “sir” as deferentially as he would have to the gray-haired president of the airport. He’d never seen The Avenger and know nothing about him; there was simply that in his masklike face and his bearing that elicited utter respect.

“Who were the rest in the plane? Do you know?”

The young fellow didn’t, but one of the others did. This one was older, blocky, capable-looking. He had sand-red hair and a florid face.

“There was a guy named Aldrich Towne in it. He’s got something to do with this Chester Grace guy, who just dove and took that ding-bat out from under your hand. Then there were two army procurement officers. Pretty high ranks, too. This will make a big splash in the papers.”

“So Towne was showing off to the army, trying to sell it to them,” ventured Smitty.

“Looks like it,” said the florid-faced man.

The Avenger had gone a little ahead, as they made their way back from the pilot’s body to the wreck. Benson was examining that wreckage again. Now, he bent forward, and his hand darted in and out of fragments.

Smitty, as he came up, saw that, in the average-sized but steel-strong fingers, The Avenger held a small piece of metal. It was steel, Smitty thought, and was about the size and shape of the little piece of cheese usually served with a slice of pie in a restaurant.

Grace was in his car and had backed around to get to the road. The Avenger’s voice vibrated to him.

“Is this part of your invention?”

That stopped the scientist, all right! He’d been rolling forward. He locked his brakes so the car skidded a couple of feet and stared at the tiny metal piece in The Avenger’s hand as Dick Benson approached him.

When Dick was about ten feet from the car Grace snapped abruptly, and apparently in enormous relief: “No! That has nothing to do with it.”

Starting so fast that his wheels skidded on the bare, dry earth, he shot the car forward. He went down the road as fast as he had come up it, with never a backward glance.

“Pleasant, polite guy,” growled Smitty.

But The Avenger didn’t seem to hear. His colorless, inscrutable eyes were examining very carefully the little slab of metal. Smitty couldn’t, for the life of him, see why. It was just a few ounces of iron or mild steel.

Justice, Inc., had its headquarters on a dead-end street, one short block long, called Bleek Street. All the buildings on the south side were leased or owned by Dick Benson. The north side was taken up by the windowless back of a huge warehouse. Literally, The Avenger owned the whole block.

Three old narrow brick buildings, three stories high, on the south side, had been thrown into one behind their dingy facades. The mammoth room thus made out of the top floor was the real meeting spot, the “board room” of Justice, Inc.

Fergus MacMurdie, Nellie Gray, Cole Wilson, and Josh and Rosabel Newton were there when the giant Smitty walked in.

MacMurdie was a dour Scot, tall and gangling and bony, with sandy hair, bitter blue eyes, sandpaper skin, and most outstanding ears.

Nellie was a half pint: a tiny, lovely blonde, weighing a hundred pounds wringing wet and was just an even five feet high.

Cole Wilson, impulsive new member of the band, was good-looking, husky as a fullback, with heavy dark hair and dark eyes. He never wore a hat and had an Indian cast to his face.

Josh and Rosabel Newton were a Negro couple, devoted to each other and ready to die for The Avenger. Josh was a tall, thin fellow, with a sleepy, aimless look. Actually, he was smarter than most professors. Both he and Rosabel had graduated with high honors from Tuskegee.

Nellie greeted Smitty when the big fellow came into the room.

“Hello, big, strong and clumsy. How’d the little test come out?”

“Little test!” rumbled Smitty. “If that isn’t like a dumb female. We put the final O.K. on a ship that’s the ultimate answer to aviation—a combination gyro-and-conventional design—and she asks how the ‘little test’ went!”

“All right,” said Nellie equably. “It’s wonderful. It’s the invention of the age. I’m prepared to admit that, since you had nothing to do with it. Anyway, how did it go?”

“I said we put the O.K. on it, didn’t I?”

“I thought you did, but you say so many goofy things—” murmured Nellie.

The miniature blonde was ferociously fond of Smitty; and the giant thought the sun rose and set at the personal command of the attractive, golden-haired mite. But neither would have admitted it openly for anything on earth.

A single note on a small, musical chime announced that the latest newspaper had been put in the tube down at the street and shot by compressed air up to the headquarters room. Josh went to the receiving end of the tube, opened it, and took out the latest edition.

It was still ink-damp, right from the press. All the papers were specially rushed to Justice, Inc., this way.

Smitty grabbed it and turned to a second-page account of the Pennsylvania accident. He read it soberly and nodded. The official theories checked with his own.

A plane with army officers and an inventor in it had crashed while testing a device whose nature was a military secret. The pilot, Captain Wayne Carroll, had been tossed clear of the wreck.

The paper didn’t come right out and charge Carroll with anything, but the inference was there to read, plain as glass: Carroll had seen the crash was inevitable—perhaps had even deliberately engineered it—and seized the opportunity to get away with a valuable secret while the rest died. But he had miscalculated by a fraction of time and had been killed, too, before he could jump clear and escape with the secret device.

“The traitorous so-and-so!” rumbled Smitty.

He told of the crash, while the others read the item. They agreed with him in his ideas of an army captain who would cold-bloodedly sell out like that.

Dick Benson came into the room from the direction of the laboratory. He held a small compass in one hand and the small bit of steel from the plane wreck in the other.

Smitty watched him as he brought the steel near the compass. The compass needle wavered a very little.

“So?” said Smitty. “The piece of steel is very slightly magnetized. What do you think that means, chief? Any magnetized chunk of iron will stay that way for a little while.”

The Avenger didn’t say what he thought it meant. He put compass and steel fragment on his great flat desk and looked at them with the pale and terrifying eyes that could make even his own associates feel uneasy sometimes.

“Do any of you know anything of an Aldrich Towne?” he asked evenly.

Josh nodded. “I do. A little. He is a well-known inventor—or was, till he died in that crash. Has improved the gyroscope-robot plane control. Invented the first sonic altitude recorder. Associated with General Laboratories, which is a small place staffed only by four well-known scientists—this Aldrich Towne, Chester Grace, Frank Boone, Rew Wight—and their assistants.”

“Why,” complained Nellie, “do we bother to have four different encyclopedias around here when we have Josh?”

“Mac, you and I will visit General Laboratories,” Dick said. “That plane crash was an extraordinary thing. Perhaps we can learn something at the place of business of Aldrich Towne and Chester Grace.”

Perhaps Dick thought one aide would be all the help he needed. But the tiny blonde and the gigantic Smitty took it hard.

“You mean, you don’t want us to go along?” Nellie said disappointedly. Tiny, fragile-looking, the sort of girl you’d think would shriek at sight of a spider, the diminutive blonde lived for excitement.

Smitty’s look at their chief was as forlorn as hers.

“I don’t think it’s necessary,” said Benson. “Josh, while we’re gone you might get in touch with the war department and see what the nature of this jealously guarded invention is.”

There were, it seemed, two laboratories. The main one was a long, low, factorylike place, forty miles straight north in New York State, set in the center of a two-hundred-acre wooded tract also held by the company.

The other was in a tacky old building on the East River. It was also listed under the names, Aldrich Towne, Chester Grace, Rew Wight and Frank Boone.

A call to this one revealed that no one was in. It also revealed that the place was small enough so that it didn’t even have a switchboard or minor employees. There was no answer at all to the ring of the phone.

“Looks like ’tis just a small place where only the four partners come to work in secrrret on things,” MacMurdie burred thoughtfully. “Or maybe ’tis just a hole in the wall from which General Laboratories does its New York business. Easier than commutin’ in and out all the time from the main plant.”

The main plant, forty miles away, was not easy to get into.

Around the entire plot of woodland in which it was situated, was a high mesh fence with steel poles and with barbed wire strands at the top. Probably it was electrified. The two didn’t have to find out by trying to climb it.

At the stout steel gate, a guard looked at The Avenger’s card proclaiming him to be an honorary-member of the F.B.I. Even with this, the man was doubtful.

“I’ll ride along in with you, if you don’t mind,” he said. “People could forge these things.”

He whistled. Another man stepped from a place of concealment very near; yet it was so perfect that few eyes except The Avenger’s would have detected it.

This man took the guard duty at the gate, and the first one rode with Mac and The Avenger to the plant building.

The low building was ultra-modern, of brick and concrete, with not one outside window to emit light. It was ten o’clock at night, now, and you wouldn’t have seen the big low bulk among the trees if the car’s headlights hadn’t picked it out.

And yet, for all the precautions, Mac saw that Dick’s colorless eyes were narrowed a trifle with disapproval. The dour Scotchman knew why.

This layout seemed beautifully designed for secrecy, safety and blackout necessities. Actually, save for the latter, it was phony! Any one of Justice, Inc., veteran campaigners all, would have known this at sight.

You don’t want darkness around important buildings. You want light. Lots of light—floodlights, searchlights, strings of lights. Easy enough to switch them out for blackouts; otherwise, you wanted all the light you could get, to make sure no one was sneaking around who had no business there.

Also, you don’t want trees around such a place, no matter how cool and charming and sheltering you think they are. You want a naked, unlovely plain—flat, treeless, almost grassless—again so you can see at a glance if anyone is around who has no right to be.

The Scot was thinking this when he felt The Avenger’s arm tighten and saw that the pale, all-seeing eyes had turned just a little to stare into the woods to the left of the lab building.

To Mac, there was nothing to be seen in that direction but complete, pitch-blackness. But he knew that Dick had the rare quality of being able to see in the dark. Something about the pale, infallible eyes placed them in the category with the eyes of cat, bat and owl.

Dick had stopped the car at the door of the building, at the command of the guard with them. The guard got out and, even though he was slightly suspicious of his visitors, he walked in front of The Avenger with his back turned for an instant.

Benson’s hand flashed out and caught the fellow’s gun wrist; his other hand went over the man’s mouth to strangle an outcry. Dick twisted the guard’s gun from his hand; then his fingers pressed at the base of the skull.

In a moment, the man sagged, rendered unconscious by the scientific pressure exerted against the great nerve centers by Dick’s deft fingers. Dick caught him in his arms and turned to the amazed MacMurdie.

“Take him into the laboratory,” he said in a low tone. “He seems to have a brown suit on under this blue uniform of a General Laboratories guard. Maybe that’s all right, but maybe it isn’t. Find out.”

Mac’s curiosity was so violent that he couldn’t wait till he’d got inside the building. He drew his tiny flash and sent its rays briefly over the unconscious man’s ankles. Then he saw what The Avenger had alertly noted in one instant in the car’s headlights while the man was approaching at the gate.

The blue uniform pants were over other pants-brown tweed pants. The brown pants legs had been rolled up to hide their presence, but one had unrolled so that a fraction of an inch showed under the blue cuff.