The Avenger 31 - The Cartoon Crimes (7 page)

When they were alone in the big room, Nellie said, “Is this my old chum, calm and stoical Smitty?”

The giant said, “You’re starting to sound like Cole, always wisecracking.”

“Nerts.” Nellie made a brief sour face at him. “I’ve been wisecracking since I was a little bitty thing with long golden curls, Smitty. The dubious influence of Mr. Cole Wilson has nothing to do with it.”

“You sure like the guy, though.”

“I like you all equally well,” the little blonde said. “When you’re part of a team, you can’t afford to—”

“Okay, excuse it.” The big man rubbed a foot over the rug and watched it. “There must be something about this place. Been here a few hours and I feel jumpy.”

Hopping to the floor, Nellie suggested, “You ought to turn in yourself. You know where your guest room is, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but I’m going to stay up till I hear from Mac and the gang.”

“Okay, Smitty. Come fetch me if I’m needed. Night.”

“Sure. Good night, Nellie.”

Smitty remained seated tensely in his chair. “Now, if I was a smooth guy like Cole,” he told himself after a moment, “I wouldn’t have talked so clumsy to her. I’d have told her what I . . . Naw, I’m calm and stoic Smitty. So let’s skip it.”

A small sound awakened him.

Smitty blinked and sat up in his chair. “Geeze, after one
A.M.
I must have snoozed.” He got up, yawning prodigiously. He stood, slightly hunched, and listened.

Silence now. The whole house filled with silence, the darkness outside silent.

Frowning, the giant moved to the doorway. “What did I hear that woke me up?” he asked himself. “Not a great big sound . . . a door. Yeah a door closing someplace around the back of this joint.”

Easing a flashlight out of his pocket, Smitty hurried down the dark hallway to the rear of the house. The back door opened off the huge kitchen. Smitty clicked on his flash and scanned the room. Nothing, nobody.

“Maybe nobody came in, maybe somebody went out.”

He turned the flash off and let himself silently out of the house.

The sound of the black surf pounding, but nothing else.

After a few seconds he saw lights—down through the woods, lights that appeared to float at the edge of the cliff.

“Lewing’s studio.” He headed into the trees. “Could be it’s only him, drawing his funny papers or whatnot. But I better get me a look.”

Before Smitty reached the studio he saw the flying man.

He wasn’t difficult to spot, since he was glowing faintly. A masked man, dressed all in scarlet. A cape fluttering out from his shoulders. He was circling in the darkness out over the cliff side.

“Holy moley,” said Smitty. “Now I’m seeing guys in trick suits.”

He commenced trotting for the studio.

Gil was down there. The studio door flapped open, and he came bounding out. “When are you guys going to give up?” he shouted out at the darkness. “I’m not crazy. You’re not going to drive me crazy with your cheap tricks!” He started to work his way through the black trees, making for the edge of the cliff and the seemingly flying man.

“They must know they can’t drive him cuckoo,” reflected Smitty as he trotted nearer. “Then why— Hey!”

He saw something else, only for a second when the moonlight caught it just right. A wire. A wire strung across the edge of the cliff. If Gil didn’t see it when he went running for the flying man, he’d trip. Trip and go falling straight down two hundred feet to the rocky beach below.

“Hey!” shouted the giant. “Stay put, Gil! Don’t move!”

Gil ignored him. He was in the clear now, running across the scrubby grass, only a few hundred feet from the drop. “I don’t need any help,” he called out. “I can handle these guys.”

“A wire!” yelled Smitty. “A trip wire!” He put on the speed and cut down the distance between him and the cartoonist.

Gil didn’t stop. “That’s not even a real man up there,” he was saying. “Just a dummy on wires. You’ll have to do better than that. Hell, I can grab it right out of the—”

“Geeze, you’re a tough bird to convince.” Smitty hit him in the side with his big shoulder and deflected him away from the edge and the drop.

“Damn you, Smith. I want to—”

“Look here, hothead.” Smitty reached out and caught hold of the trip wire. “Did you happen to notice that?”

Gil was on one knee. He sat all the way down now. “No,” he said in a small voice.

“They didn’t want to scare you this time, pal. This was a trick for keeps.”

Gil let out his breath slowly. “Well . . . thanks. I feel sort of stupid,” he said. “I came down to try to work, couldn’t sleep at all.”

“Yeah, they probably counted on that.” Smitty had been watching the woods all around them. He squinted up at the circling dummy now. “They set up this thing and took off. I don’t see no sign of them in the vicinity.”

“This is all beyond me,” said Gil. “In a way it made more sense when I thought I was seeing things.” He poked a finger in the direction of the caped dummy. “That guy’s the villain from the next issue of the Wonderman magazine, the bimonthly. I flatly don’t get this.”

Smitty helped him up. “They wanted to make you goofy,” he said. “When that didn’t work, they changed their play. Figured to goad you into taking a fall. If it had worked, there wouldn’t have been no sign of wires or dummies when you were found down on the rocks tomorrow morning.”

“Guess I’ll go back up to the house,” said Gil. “I don’t much feel like drawing, after all. I’ve heard that success is tough on some people, but I never expected anything this rough.”

“I’ll see you get up there okay,” said the big man. “Then I want to do some more snooping back here.” He patted the new tracking device that rested in his pocket.

The bald-headed man kicked MacMurdie.

Mac went right on sleeping, sprawled on the stone floor where they’d dumped him.

“The simplest thing,” said the bald man, kicking the unconscious Scot once more, “is to dispose of him in the Sound.”

There were two other men in the room beneath the Yellow Rose. Middle-aged men in quiet suits, looking like moderately successful doctors or dentists.

The one named Kohler said, “It will be much more sensible, Geiss, to wait until he awakens and then question him.”

The bald man shook his head. “I doubt he knows enough to justify the risks involved,” he said. “Sooner or later the Avenger is going to come looking for him. No, I say we get him out of here now.”

“When and if this Avenger comes here,” said the other middle-aged man, whose name was Gruber, “he can be handled in the same way this one was.”

Geiss said, “You underestimate him, perhaps.”

“Such a pessimist, Geiss,” said Kobler.

“What reason have I to be an optimist? The entire scheme with Lewing is going badly. Now we have Justice, Inc., to contend with.”

“The scheme with Lewing has been working quite well,” said Gruber. “Certainly the information has been reaching our agents, and the damage done to the aircraft industry has been immense.”

“There has been some damage,” granted Geiss. “I don’t believe I’d characterize it as immense.”

“Your pessimism is getting the better of you again.”

“Even the foolish killing of old Walling hasn’t given us the control of—”

A phone resting on a wooden stool had begun to ring.

Gruber moved to answer it. “Yes? I see. That is not very fortunate, no. Don’t worry, we’ll have to try again. Goodbye.”

“Another failure,” said Geiss. “What misfired this time, the attempt to get rid of Lewing?”

“Yes, it was not as successful as we had hoped.”

“Not successful at all, you mean. Was he hurt at all?”

“Apparently not,” said Gruber. “One of the Avenger’s lackeys, the oaf called Smitty, showed up on the scene.”

“An oaf, perhaps, yet clever enough to outwit us.”

“I’ve a mind,” said Kobler, making a clucking sound, “to talk to the homeland about your negative attitudes.”

“Listen, you soft-spoken imbecile, I am a professional in this business,” said Geiss. “I don’t live in a dream world the way you amateurs do.”

“Nevertheless,” reminded Gruber, “our homeland has seen fit to put me and not you in charge of this particular operation. We’ll have no more bickering. This MacMurdie will remain here. When he awakens, I will question him.”

“Torture him, you mean,” said Geiss.

Gruber only smiled.

The Avenger pushed at the padded door of the Yellow Rose. It did not budge, remained tight shut.

“Okay, men,” he ordered over his shoulder, “go to work.”

Cole and Josh, who each now hefted a fire ax, stepped forward and went to work on the door.

Shreds and tatters of imitation leather went flying, along with tufts of padding and little brass tacks.

Then the wood beneath began to splinter.

“What the hell? What the hell?” came a voice from within the club.

Cole lowered his ax and bowed toward the nearly ruined door. “I venture to say one more whack will do it,” he said. “Care to take the last lick, Joshua?”

“Oh, no, Cole. I insist on your doing the honors.”

“Hey! Hey!” said the one-armed bartender, peering through the rents in the door. “What are you blokes up to?”

“You didn’t answer our knock,” explained Cole.

“We’re closed.”

“Please admit us at once,” said the Avenger. “This is a raid.”

“A raid? What kind of a raid?”

“We suspect you’re operating an illegal gambling establishment on the premises,” said Benson, in a drab official voice. “Stand aside so my men can finish demolishing your door.”

The bartender swung out his only arm and pulled the door open. “Somebody’s going to pay for this, brother. Somebody in city hall.”

The Avenger pushed by the man and stopped amidst the tables. Hands on hips, he said, “Chop down that wall first.”

“Here, now,” said the bartender. “You can’t go putting an ax to a man’s walls.”

“You’d save us all a lot of trouble if you’d take us right to the roulette wheels,” said Cole.

“Roulette? You’re daft. We got not so much as a punchboard in this place.”

“Very well, then we’ll have to do some exploring,” said Benson. “Start on the wall, boys.”

A peculiar look touched the bartender’s face. “Hey, you’re not a cop,” he said slowly. “I recognize you now. You’re the Av—”

The Avenger reached out and touched the man’s neck, a touch on a nerve that caused him to close his eyes and drop to the floor.

“I was looking forward to chopping that wall,” said Josh, resting the blade of his ax on the toe of his shoe.

“We’ll try that door over there,” said Benson, nodding across the room.

“You’ll try nothing of the sort,” said Gruber. He rose up from behind the bar with a .45 automatic in his hand.

Smitty leaped, caught the hanging dummy, tugged it free of its wires, and stretched it out on the grass. Squatting beside it, he fished out his palm-fitting trailing device. “Okay, gizmo, take a whiff of this character.”

When the gadget had sniffed the dummy, Smitty got upright. “Now lead me to the guys who set up this little booby trap.” He pushed a button and flicked a switch.

The directional needle pointed not to the woods beyond the studio or the beach below, as the giant had anticipated. It pointed back toward the main house.

“Geeze, don’t tell me that goofy idea of Josh’s is going to turn out to be true,” he said to himself as he let the softly ticking mechanism guide him back along the way he’d come. “Naw, Jeanne can’t be mixed up in this.”

Through the trees he went, heading for the house. Then the direction changed, veered to the left.

“Huh, the garage.”

Whoever had strung up the phosphorescent-glowing dummy and strung the wire had come this way, along the gravel drive and up to the four-car garage.

“That’s some garage, bigger than a lot of people’s houses, and with gables and a weathervane on top. I guess this is what they mean by living in style.”

The tracker was urging him away from the garage now, pointing up the drive.

“That’s kind of funny,” thought the giant. “Somebody parked right here, plain as the nose on your face, while rigging up that little surprise for Gil. Then they calmly drove away.”