The Avenger 13 - Murder on Wheels (11 page)

Drills snapped, as plates were put into the drill presses too hard to be drilled. Punch presses buckled, or the dies in them broke, with metal too hard to be machined. Cutting bars screamed and blunted; milling machines jammed out of line. There was hell to pay!

In every process of making an automobile, now and then a part cropped up that looked just like all the other parts, but it proved mysteriously to be too finely tempered and too hard to handle. So Benson’s friend at the plant had phoned in a hurry. The entire gigantic enterprise was shut down—at a standstill!

So The Avenger went to see Marr once more.

This time the magnate was not at his office. He had been driven to the plant, his secretary said when Benson phoned. He had looked over the rolls, and then, saying nothing, had gone home.

The Avenger went to Grosse Pointe, which was where Marr had his Detroit mansion. It was not far from Ormsdale’s palatial place.

This time Marr wasn’t going to see even Benson. But The Avenger disposed of those orders to the servants in a hurry. He had anticipated that.

The moment a man—not a servant, evidently another of the magnate’s secretaries—opened the front door, Benson’s hand shot out and his thumb and second finger moved. It was as if he were merely snapping them under the man’s nose.

But the snapping motion broke a little glass pill, and from that came an anaesthetic gas of MacMurdie’s invention.

The man said: “Uh—” and slumped to the hall floor as if he had been slugged.

As a precaution, the door had been opened on a heavy chain, which kept it from swinging back more than about six inches. But the chain wasn’t much of a problem, either.

The Avenger got out the tiny blowtorch with which he had burned an almost instantaneous way through the wooden wall of the hangar at Clagget’s field. Tiny but incredibly hot flame played over the chain, and it parted.

Benson opened the door and walked in. He heard fast steps and saw another man coming toward him down the hall. This was one of the regular servants, and he glared at The Avenger.

“You want trouble?” said Benson softly, voice as calm and even as if he were asking for a sandwich.

The glare left the servant’s eyes as he looked into the pale eyes of The Avenger. The man towered over Benson, but he moistened his lips and said: “No, sir. I don’t.”

“Where is Mr. Marr?”

“In the music room—there,” said the man.

Benson went to the door pointed out. He opened it.

“I told you, Peters, that nothing was to disturb me,” Marr began.

Then he turned from where he was standing next to a window, and his right hand went swiftly behind him.

“You again!”

“Yes, me again,” said Benson, voice as cold as his colorless eyes. “This time you’re going to tell me a few things. You understand?”

“My dear sir,” said Marr, “do you think you’re talking to an office boy? Do you realize who I am?”

To that The Avenger made no reply at all. And after a moment of regarding that white, moveless mask of a face in silence, Marr cleared his throat uneasily.

His hand, held so carefully behind him, relaxed, and came innocently out into sight in front of him. He made a slight movement with his foot, backward, and then advanced toward Benson.

But what he had been about to say, if anything, was never said.

There was a phone in the room, one of many in the house. And it
burred
softly. Marr went to it and picked it up.

“Yes?” he said.

There was the faint sound of a voice from the receiver, which Marr held close to his ear.

Very few could have made out the words, but Benson had ears as keen as his marvelous eyes; and he could just catch what was being said on the other end of the line, in spite of Marr’s precautions. Though Marr had every reason to believe he couldn’t.

It was the factory calling. Someone in authority, and someone in great agitation.

“Mr. Marr, an order has come through that I felt I should check with you. Is it true that you want every car part, in every storage bin in the plant, scrapped at once?”

“Yes,” said the motor magnate.

“But, Mr. Marr, that will cost millions of dollars!”

“That is right.”

“I know why it’s being done, of course. It is to save the machinery that is being ruined. But surely we can inspect the parts and give them metallurgical tests for hardness—”

“There is no way,” said Marr, who was handicapped by not wanting to say anything from which this man with the moveless white face and the pale, expressionless eyes could read a message.

“But—”

“You have your order,” snapped Marr.

“And you,” he said to Benson, who had walked toward the window and now stood where Marr had been a moment ago, “have yours. I will say nothing to anyone, even to you. I want no help. Any emergencies that may be arising, I will handle myself.”

And strangely, The Avenger took the dismissal. He had come there to get information from the motor millionaire regardless. He was certainly equipped to force it. Yet he didn’t.

Without a word, he walked to the door. But with him, on the sole of his shoe, went something he had an idea would be more revealing than anything the magnate might have chosen to say.

A folded bit of paper.

That, a small note, was what Marr had jerked behind him, when Benson had first entered unexpectedly. The Avenger’s quick eyes had just barely caught it. And that was what Marr had nudged with his foot backward—under the trailing end of the window drape.

Benson had put his foot over it, and twisted. The move had protruded several tiny, barbed needle points from the special double sole in the instep of his shoe, and on these points the paper had caught and held.

He closed the door of the music room on Marr’s coldly angry stare, bent and took the paper from its precarious place, put it in his pocket and calmly left the house.

In his car, he opened it. It was important, all right. It was an extortion note!

The letters were crudely printed with blue indelible pencil on a scrap of cheap, lined note paper.

Pay the million to the party named or continue to take the consequences.

Blackmail! On a huge scale! Being attempted by someone who had the power to wreck a mammoth automotive plant.

The Avenger drove slowly and the tense glitter in his colorless eyes indicated that he was thinking of the weird factors in this growing mystery of the automobile world.

There was a new steel process belonging to the Marr Co. With it, automotive parts were tempered to a hitherto unknown toughness after being machined.

With this, the blackmailer was threatening Marr’s business existence; he had somehow managed to subject various parts to this tempering process
before
the finishing machining. And as a result the tempered parts were ruining the tool machinery, less resistant than the steel it was trying to work.

In addition to plant troubles, Marr had had his finished mystery car—practically ready to be released on the market—stolen from him, and there was no telling where it might be, now.

Besides blackmail, there was murder in this affair. Men had died to permit the theft of that car—though as yet there had been no violence in connection with the factory damage.

So Marr was to pay a million or “continue to take the consequences.” Who, inside the Marr plant, was smart enough and unsuspected enough to cause that damage?

The man in charge of the stock room in the motor department of the Marr plant was a close friend of the toolroom superintendent who knew Benson so well. So when the tool-room man told the stock-room man to put himself under The Avenger’s directions and tell no one, the stock-room head did so.

Though the directions given him by Benson were pretty simple.

He was just to sit still as if posing for a picture.

He was doing that now, in one of the rooms at the hotel where The Avenger and his aides were staying. And with him was Benson. The man was staring in awe at The Avenger.

Benson had a small grip like a standard overnight bag open before him. But it was not an overnight bag. It was a most complete make-up kit.

There were scores of pairs of tissue-thin eyecups, with various colored pupils on them, which Benson could slide on over his own almost colorless eyeballs. There were waxes and pigments, pads for the cheeks, false scars, wigs.

Everything a man could need for making himself look like someone else.

And Benson was now in the process of making himself look like the stock-room head.

He had slipped brown-pupiled cups over his eyeballs, and then put on a brown wig streaked with gray. Now, he was making his features resemble the man’s features, and it was this process that was making the stock-room head almost shiver.

The nerve shock that had paralyzed Benson’s face had made the flesh completely lifeless. Dick Benson worked and manipulated the flesh of his cheeks downward into heavy jowls, and the dead flesh stayed that way. Then The Avenger worked with his own temples till there were heavy ridges over his eyes.

His countenance was a plastic mask that could be shaped any way at all. And he was thus shaping it till he was a close twin of the stock-room employee.

But, though The Avenger did not know it, this was the
last
time he was going to be able to do that!

“Now, the clothes,” said Benson.

The man took off his shop clothes. He was a shade taller than Benson; so The Avenger put three-quarter-inch lifts in his shoes. When he put on the shop clothes, it would have taken a long inspection by trained eyes under bright lights to show that he was not the person he was supposed to be.

“You have just about time to get to the plant,” said the stock-room employee. “It’s seven ten. It’ll take you about forty-five minutes to get out there from here, and you’re supposed to report at eight o’clock.”

Benson nodded, and went out a Marr workman reporting to his job.

In the great plant there was unaccustomed quiet. For the place was almost entirely shut down. There were only several score men in the various stock rooms checking over the stored parts, for no machines were running after old Marr’s orders had been received.

All made-up parts had to be taken from storage bins and scrapped lest they further break the costly machinery! But among the parts were many that had been completely finished and were ready only for assembly. These could be saved, while the parts waiting for a last finishing touch would have to go.

That was why Benson had gone as a stock-room man. These men were kept busy sorting.

For about half an hour Benson went slowly, till he found his way around. Then he worked along with the rest, and talked when he could.

“Certainly a shame to discard all this stuff,” he said. “Can’t they test it for hardness?”

“Seems not,” said the man next to him at the moment. They were dumping wrist pins—complete save for the tiny oil holes—into a truck, to be wheeled to the scrap-iron heap. “Analysis doesn’t show anything wrong. Carbon’s all right—everything. But it’s just too tough. That is, a few pieces are too tough.”

“Couldn’t they find out by touching each piece with a file or something?”

“I guess not, or they’d be doing it. Wonder where old Jackson is?”

“Yeah,” said Benson. “We could sure use him.”

“I guess they’ll be taking the box off the trial assembly line, if he doesn’t show up,” said the man.

Benson didn’t say anything to that. Obviously, he was supposed to know what “the box” was. And he didn’t. So at lunch time he went to look for it.

It wasn’t hard to find.

In the finishing plant there were three assembly lines. In normal times, from the end of each line was rolled, every few minutes, a completed Marr automobile, ready to run when oiled and gassed.

At the end one of these three lines was—the box.

In fact, at first glance, that was all it looked like. Just a great big chamber, or case, almost as big as a box car, through which the assembly belt ran.

The thing was big enough to let a completed car on the line slide right through it; and at each end was a great door designed to permit just that.

At each side of the big oblong case was a sort of window. At least, it was an aperture about four feet square going right into the interior.

Resting on a tripod a yard or so from each aperture, was what might have been called the window, itself, which just fitted into these apertures: four-foot slabs about two feet thick. Only, there were wrist-thick cables trailing from the slabs, which indicated that they were not solid, but had some sort of mechanism within them.

So the steel-processing business began to make sense!

Phineas Jackson, this arrangement hinted, had not discovered a new version of the old methods of tempering steel. The Marr process of tempering had nothing to do with oil or heat or acid. It was a brand-new process. Ray tempering, in some form or other. It was immensely superior to standard tempering. For this could be done when the car was all assembled, processing every bit of steel in relation to every other bit, instead of part by part in the older manner.