The Avenger 12 - The Flame Breathers (12 page)

Gaffney cleared his throat.

“Yes, Mr. Benson. It is quite true.”

“And the reasons?” inquired Benson.

Gaffney’s large fingers fidgeted nervously with a gold pencil.

“The papers gave the reasons. We stopped producing until a rather dangerous surplus can be taken from our yards. Much more than we usually have on hand.”

“I glanced over your stock statements before coming here,” said The Avenger, voice even but cold. “I notice that you have, in coal yards and oil tanks, about enough fuel to meet average demands for four to five months. I recall that in the past it was your custom to have an eight-to ten-month stock on hand, to guard against strikes. Half the usual reserves on hand do not sound like a dangerous surplus.”

Gaffney colored a little, then went a little pale.

“Those figures—” he rasped. “No one is supposed to have access to those figures—”

“Nevertheless I saw them. And they disprove the surplus claim. The story of closing down for inventory will probably not fool even the average newspaper reader. May I ask the real reason for this sudden decision to produce no more coal and oil for a while?”

“If you would see our production manager—” murmured Gaffney miserably.

“I have no intention of seeing your production manager. You know the answers as well as he does. I would appreciate hearing them.”

“I . . . I can’t say any more than I have, Mr. Benson,” the corporation vice president almost pleaded. “I really can’t. It is . . . er . . . possible that some other reason has influenced the board of directors—some reason having to do with Henderlin’s unfortunate death.”

He drew up his too fleshy shoulders and tried to crawl behind a shell of bluster.

“I refuse to be pilloried, Mr. Benson. No man can come into my office and hector me. No one can . . . can—”

He shriveled again under the calm stare of the pale, deadly eyes. But those eyes calculated the man’s fright-and-nerve shock. And he estimated that Gaffney was, at the moment, too upset—too difficult a subject for a certain experiment Benson had decided upon.

“You are right, of course,” he murmured. “The business of the corporation is its own. Good day.”

The Avenger went out—but not far.

There was a lounge room outside the door of the vice president’s office. Beyond that was a slightly larger room, the office of Gaffney’s secretary.

The secretary was a bony man of middle age with almost as dour a look on his face as that habitually on the freckled face of MacMurdie.

“Mr. Gaffney was too busy to talk to me as extensively as I could wish,” Benson said to the bony man. “So I have come to ask you a few questions.”

The secretary’s thin lips seemed to button themselves like a clasp purse.

“Of course,” said Benson, “anything I ask that is in confidence between you and your employers, you have the right to refuse to answer.”

To the bony secretary, Benson’s voice seemed merely a little more quiet and monotonous—almost musical—than that of most people. But any of Benson’s aides, hearing that vibrant but almost metronomic tone, would know what was in the wind.

“I have read newspaper accounts of the corporation shut down,” said Benson, smoothly, soothingly. “Is that the true version?”

“Of course,” said the bony secretary.

But his lips were relaxing a little, and his eyes seemed unable to leave the icy pools staring at him from the dead, white face.

“Is it because of inventory?”

“Yes.”

“And surplus stocks?”

“Y-yes—”

The cold, colorless pools seemed to be engulfing him. The bony man was staring almost breathlessly now.

“You will answer truthfully, as far as you know, whatever I ask you from this moment on, won’t you?” said Benson in the monotonous, flatly musical tone.

The bony man was done for. Gaffney had been plunged into a state of nerves that would have made hypnotism difficult. The secretary, relaxed when Benson walked up to him, had been quite easy.

He was entirely mesmerized, quiescent, now. Benson spoke.

“What is the real reason for this shut down? You must have talked it over with others in trusted places. And you must have done some guessing.”

The bony man answered almost like a machine.

“I have talked it over, and I’ve thought about it a lot. There is something brewing that I can almost—but not quite—guess at. Something tremendous! Then there is another thing that has been whispered around the office that no reporter has yet learned.”

“And that?” came Benson’s hypnotic voice.

“There is a rumor that the control of the entire corporation is to change hands. Everything sold, lock, stock and barrel for ninety million dollars. That would explain the shut down and the mid-season inventory.”

“Who could swing such a deal? A financial group? Another corporation?”

“No. Just one man. The name that is connected with the rumor is Lorens—”

There was a sharp, harsh
spangggg!
The sound was made by a single bullet when it hit a knob on the door leading from the secretary’s office to the big general office. By then it had already drilled the bony man’s skull, clean, from back to front.

The man sagged at his desk, passed from a hypnotic trance to the permanent trance of death. And The Avenger, leaping into action a tenth of a second after the clang of lead on bronze, was springing for the door he had entered, a few minutes before.

The slug had come from the direction of vice president Gaffney’s office.

The Avenger seemed to flow, rather than run, through the next room and into Gaffney’s place, so swift and smooth was his motion. Not two seconds passed from the time of the shot till he was in the vice president’s office.

But there was no one in there but Gaffney. And Gaffney could not have been responsible for the shot.

Gaffney was dead!

A trace of concluding motion at a side door caught Benson’s pale, flaring eyes as he leaped in. He went on to that door, jerked it open. He was looking into a file room. The door across from it was just closing, and he caught the whisk of a skirt as it smacked shut. The dress was of rust-colored linen.

He reached the door. It was locked.

Incredibly powerful muscles bunched at Benson’s average-sized shoulders. His rather small hands took on the look of steel hooks rather than things of flesh and blood. Knob and lock tore from oak under his pull—which was bad luck. It took nearly thirty seconds of fishing for the lock bolt in the ragged hole before the door came back.

He stared into a corridor, down which the person in the rust-colored linen dress had long since fled to safety and secrecy.

Benson went back to Gaffney.

The vice president had slumped forward till head and shoulders lay on his elaborate walnut desk, with red staining the desk blotter. A hole was in his skull like the one through his secretary’s, to insure against his ever talking too much. This hole went in one side and out the other, instead of from back to front, but that was the only difference.

Some fact of vast import had been about to leak here, either from the vice president or from his secretary. That fact would never come from those lips now!

Richard Benson knew most things superlatively well. On financial matters and set-ups he was particularly well informed.

The rumor given him by the bony secretary, before he was shot, was the truth as the man saw it. Benson knew that. The bony man had been talking from a hypnotic trance, without the wit to withhold things or distort them.

He had said the rumor was that the vast holdings of the Henderlin Corp. were to be sold for ninety million dollars.

That struck a very false note to The Avenger.

Ninety million dollars? The sum was colossal to the average man. A tremendous sum of money. But for the Henderlin holdings it was ridiculous.

Those coal and oil properties, the many refineries and collieries, the distribution system formed all over the world were worth a sum almost beyond calculating. Three hundred million dollars would have been a low price. Why, then, should there be talk of selling the thing for a paltry ninety million?

The bony secretary, just as he had been giving a name, had met his end, the name as far as he had uttered it, had been “Lorens—”

There was only one Lorens in high finance. Lorens Singer.

The Avenger went to see Singer.

With his home blown to atoms, the financier had taken the top floor of a Fiftieth Street hotel which he owned. There was an elevator turned over to his exclusive use. A guard in plain clothes stood next to the door in the lobby, and another stayed next to the top-floor door, constantly. The other elevator doors, on the top floor, had been walled over, and the stairs had been locked off. Singer, after one attack, was taking no chances on another that might be more successful.

The man at the lobby door of the private elevator stood aside as Benson approached. He didn’t ask names or anything else. He was a veteran private detective in New York City and, as such, he knew a great deal about the man with the dead face and stainless steel chips of eyes.

Benson nodded to him and went up. The guard on the top floor went into the barred foyer; came out at once.

“Mr. Singer will see you immediately, sir. If you will step in here, please—”

“Here,” was a small room off the foyer. Benson went into it. In half a minute or so, he heard steps.

There are qualities about footsteps, almost as there are about faces, that tell a great deal to an observant person. These told Benson a lot.

The steps were hurried, and they were furtive. Very furtive! An ordinary person might not have heard them at all.

Benson shot from his chair in a fast, silent move and stood so that he could see into the foyer through a half-inch crack between door and jamb. He saw the man making the fast, secretive steps.

He was a small man, rather smaller than The Avenger himself, with curious ears. They were almost as pointed as the trimmed ears of a show dog.

The Avenger had a memory like a filing cabinet. He had seen this man before. He placed him in a second or two.

He had seen him driving away from the wreck of Lorens Singer’s home, alone in a sedan, with a look of apprehension and anger on his face.

The elevator door softly clanged, and the guard came to the room in which Benson had reseated himself in his chair.

“All right, sir.”

Singer was in the biggest of the suite of rooms. He had a desk there. He sat behind the desk, with papers piled high, taking up his work where the explosion had interrupted the routine.

His stern brown eyes lightened as they rested on The Avenger. He didn’t look as coldly furious, as ruthlessly intent on vengeance as he had that day beside the smoking ruins of his house.

Benson brought up the subject that had brought him here. The sale of the Henderlin holdings. Singer’s mouth opened a little with surprise.

“Me? Buy the Henderlin set-up? For ninety million? It’s ridiculous! It would be a great bargain at that price. But I don’t want it, even at a bargain.”

“There is no truth in the rumor, then?” Benson said evenly.

“Not an ounce of truth.”

“You could easily swing such a deal,” said Benson quietly.

“Oh, yes,” shrugged Singer, “I could swing it. But I don’t care to. I’m over fifty, Mr. Benson. I’m engaged in narrowing my business contacts so that I can go into semi-retirement. I wouldn’t dream of taking on a job like the ownership of the Henderlin Corp.”

The phone on his desk rang. Rather, one of the phones. There was a battery of them all along one end. Singer picked it up, spoke a few words and smiled when he hung up.

“It seems that rumor has been heard by others besides yourself, Mr. Benson. That was Roger Bainbridge, second vice president of Henderlin Corp. I’ll bet a hat he has come to me with the proposition that you just asked about. He had a please buy expression in his voice.”

“But you’re not going to?” inquired The Avenger, tone as expressionless as his dead, white face.

“Not a chance!”

Benson went out. There was no sign of the little man with the pointed ears, either in the foyer or in the hotel lobby downstairs. But he saw Roger Bainbridge as the man got into the elevator.

The Henderlin executive looked badly worried; looked as if he had indeed come to plead with Singer to buy, rather than put it as a straight business deal.

Benson walked out of the hotel—and the first thing his pale eyes rested on was a rust-colored dress!

There are always thousands of rust-red dresses being worn in a great city, at any season of the year. But The Avenger had an eye for color that was like an artist’s color chart. The exact shade of this dress was subtly different from that of most. Without making the move obvious, as if he had intended to go in that direction, anyhow, he walked toward the rust-red garment.

The wearer of the dress was walking quickly toward a roadster parked at the curb between two taxis. She was a pronounced brunette, with deep-black eyes and ink-black hair.

She was the girl who had faced Benson and Mac and Smitty at the Utah salt flat and again in the Salt Lake City garage.

She was also the person who had slammed and locked a door in The Avenger’s face when he raced toward it from the body of a freshly murdered man.

She drove off in the roadster, and Benson followed in a cab.

The girl had been coldly, murderously calm when Benson encountered her before. She did not seem that way now. Her face was paler than it should have been, and her black eyes were wide. She had been biting her red underlip when she got hastily into her car.

She had looked, indeed, as if she were terribly afraid of something; had looked as if she were in trouble.

The roadster went east, nearly to the East River. It was a section of warehouses and storage buildings, with not many people walking around.

The girl’s car stopped in front of a wholesale paper office. The driver of Benson’s cab stopped half a block behind, with a shrewdness indicating that the man had often trailed people.

The Avenger sat very still, eyes like polar ice. The girl had turned and was walking back along the sidewalk, toward his cab.