The Avenger 13 - Murder on Wheels (8 page)

“A minute later,” said Smitty, “a couple of guys, who’d hidden in the hangar without my knowing it, came out and got the drop on both of us. I’d have bopped them, but this guy, who says his name is Will Willis, fell against me. I think he did it on purpose.”

Smitty glowered at the man, who only ran his hand through his wild hair and said:

“My inventions. They stole them.”

Benson’s eyes, like pale diamond drills, were on the wide, staring ones.

“What inventions, Willis?” he said.

“They stole them,” Willis said, as if he hadn’t heard The Avenger.

“Who stole them?”

He heard that a little better. “I don’t know. Somebody. Somebody stole them all.”

“You mean, the new features of the mystery car?”

“How do you know that?” The wide eyes dilated even more. “Who are you? What do you know?” The tone dropped again. “Can you tell me where my inventions are?”

“You’re not well,” The Avenger said.

Suddenly his hand went out, and a deft thumb rolled the man’s upper eyelid back. For an instant, before Will Willis jerked away, Benson stared at the exposed eyeball. His own eyes glittered a little more brightly, but he only said again:

“You’re not well. You had better come with us to my place, where we can help you.”

The three went out of the boathouse.

“I was a dumb to get caught last night like I did,” said Smitty sheepishly, as they got into the coupé. “But this old dumbbell was so clumsy he knocked me off balance. If it
was
clumsiness.”

The Avenger said nothing. He hurtled the car toward New York.

They’d gotten clear to Manhattan and were crossing Park Avenue, when Willis, who had been motionless for a long time, suddenly stiffened and went as rigid as a bar of iron. The breath whistled between his clenched jaws, and his eyes rolled up till only the whites could be seen. A kind of animal bleat came from his taut lips, and he began to flop around like a hooked fish.

“Hey! He’s having a fit of some kind,” yelled Smitty. “There’s a drugstore. Stop!”

Benson already had the car stopped. Smitty dragged the flopping body out—and it was suddenly leaping and running down the street.

“Get him—” cried Smitty, starting to run, himself.

There was a line of cabs ahead, several of them with motors running. Will Willis got to the first. Insanely, he dove with his fist at the driver, who had been reading a newspaper and hardly knew what hit him. Then Willis jumped into the cab—and was gone!

The Avenger had not left the coupé. He jerked it forward, slowed for Smitty to leap onto the running board and get in, then started on. But the cab had rounded the next corner; and when they got to it, half over the curb with its nose against a hydrant, it was empty. Willis had leaped out, and Heaven knew where he was, now.

The two went on to Bleek Street, with Smitty shaking his head.

“I
am
dumb! I should have guessed he was pulling an act. And I didn’t. I let him go his crazy way—”

“I don’t think he’s quite as crazy as he acts,” said Benson quietly.

Smitty stared quickly at him.

“I was looking at his eye, closely, back at the boat-house. The pupil was quite normal, not overdilated at all.”

“Then what—” But Smitty stopped. No use asking questions at this stage of the game. Even The Avenger didn’t know the answers.

There was no word at Bleek Street from Mac and Josh in Detroit. So, because they were worried by that, and also because there seemed nothing to do in New York at the moment, Benson and Smitty took one of Benson’s planes, a terrifically fast P-40 type, and hopped off.

But first, Benson had told Nellie in a few words what had happened. Particularly about Will Willis.

“Try to trace Willis,” he told her. “His trail will be lost from the point where he got away. But you might pick him up again at a station or at one of the bridges, if he tries to get away from Manhattan. Get the police to work on it.”

At Detroit, Smitty and The Avenger went directly to the hotel Mac and Josh had said they’d use. It was about seven o’clock by now, and the lobby was crowded.

Dick Benson crossed the large lobby toward the elevators, moving easily, gracefully, but making it difficult for even the giant, Smitty, to keep pace with him.

“Phone Nellie, Smitty,” Benson said. “Find out what success she has had in tracing Willis. Then come up to the room.” He stepped into the waiting elevator as Smitty turned to the phone booths on the other side of the lobby.

At the designated room, Benson tapped the code knock of the little band. The door was opened. But not by Mac. This was a stranger, a young fellow, quite good-looking, with alert black eyes and brown hair that grew straight back from his forehead.

“You’re looking for MacMurdie and Newton?” said this man to Benson. “And you’re Richard Benson, of course. I’m awfully glad you’ve come. Your men are in trouble.”

“Trouble?” asked The Avenger, tone calm but eyes like drills. “Where?”

“At Cass Lake,” said the man. “There’s a summer villa out there that’s boarded up. Belongs to William Wesley, one of the motor crowd. They’re being held there. I waited here to tell you.”

“How is it you know this—and are in this room?”

“I happened to be in the next room, rented by a friend of mine. I heard through the bathroom wall. Heard them call each other MacMurdie and Newton; so I knew their names. Then I heard some men come in after one had knocked and MacMurdie had opened the door. There was a fight, and I heard one of the strangers say they’d take them to Wesley’s boarded-up home at Cass Lake. Just before that, I’d heard Newton mention that you were coming. So I came in here—the door was open—and waited.”

“Why didn’t you come to their aid when you heard the fighting?” said Benson.

The young fellow moistened his lips.

“I . . . I guess I’m kind of a coward. I admit it. I was afraid.”

“Why didn’t you notify the police afterward?”

“I thought you might prefer to handle it in your own way,” said the man. “I’ve heard of you, Mr. Benson, and you are, it seems, a sort of one-man police force all by yourself.”

The Avenger’s face was as expressionless as glacier ice.

“What’s your name and where can we reach you later?”

“I’m Cole Wilson,” said the man. “And I live at the Shelton Arms, on Jefferson Avenue—”

The Avenger’s eyes were cold and piercing, but his dead, white face was as unreadable as always. Without a word, he left the room.

Outside, he met Smitty as the giant stepped from the elevator.

“Mac and Josh are not here,” Benson said. “A man there—he says his name is Wilson—claims he heard some men enter the room, overpower then and say that they would be taken to Cass Lake, outside the city.”

“Then let’s go,” growled Smitty. “We’ll—”

“Wait!” The Avenger said, leading Smitty to the stairs. He seemed to prefer the stairs to the elevator, at the moment. “Stop here. After a few minutes go back to the room and wait. I’ll trail this man, Wilson.”

“Huh?” said Smitty, stopping on the landing, two floors down.

“He overheard Josh and Mac calling each other Newton and MacMurdie, so he knew their names,” said Benson. “But—they never call each other anything but Mac and Josh. Also, there was a disturbed look in parts of the room: Wilson was in there searching the place when I knocked, and he decided it was good policy to open the door frankly—and pull that line. He doesn’t know anything about Mac and Josh, or where they are. He’s a fake. And I want to trail him and see what he does.”

Smitty looked as if it were taking all his self-control to keep from going back to the room and taking this guy, Wilson, apart.

“What did Nellie say,” asked Benson.

“She traced that crackpot, Willis—but too late. She got a report that he’d boarded a train and was headed west.”

The giant spoke as if the words meant a complete blank on the Willis angle. But tiny points of light flared in the depths of Dick Benson’s pale, colorless eyes. From those few words, he had gained a bit of valuable information concerning Will Willis.

Benson went on down the stairs, and out to the street, slipping unobtrusively through the crowded lobby.

In about six minutes he saw Cole Wilson emerge.

Wilson walked in leisurely fashion to a low-priced but excellent sedan and got in. He started off, and Benson followed in a cab.

The Avenger was well acquainted with Detroit as he was with all the principal cities. The sedan ahead hadn’t gone far when he divined where it was bound for—Grosse Pointe, the exclusive suburban section holding the expensive homes of the biggest automobile magnates.

And Benson knew who owned the great house in front of which Wilson’s sedan finally stopped: Sigmund Ormsdale, president of Ormsdale Motors.

Wilson was just going into the door when The Avenger had his driver stop the cab, some distance away. Benson went to the door, too.

He hadn’t a chance to ring the bell. For just as he got there, Wilson showed up again, coming out—and coming out fast.

“Benson!” he exclaimed, looking surprised, but not at all flustered. “I thought you—I told you Cass Lake—”

He stopped and smiled.

“I see. You were suspicious of my story. Well, I can’t say that I blame you. Anyhow, I’m certainly glad to see you here. Something’s happened to Ormsdale. He has been hurt. I tried to phone the police and found that the phone wire was cut; so I came out to get the police, personally.”

“Something happened to Ormsdale?” repeated Benson, colorless eyes unrevealing in his expressionless white face.

“Holdup—or kidnaping attempt,” hazarded Wilson, leading the way into the house. They passed a man in the livery of butler, lying on the floor with a lump on his head.

Benson flicked the swift glance of a skilled diagnostician at him, saw that he would be all right in a few minutes and went on to a library down the hall.

It did look like a holdup. The phone wire had been cut, all right. A chair was overturned and a lamp knocked off the desk. And beside the desk lay Ormsdale, unconscious like his butler, but with the lump on his jaw instead of his head. Apparently, he hadn’t been hit as hard as the servant, either, for his eyelids fluttered as the two went up to him.

Benson bent down, and in a moment Ormsdale was talking, as he lay on a leather divan. He was a heavy man, perhaps fifty, with hard blue eyes under grizzled brows.

“What happened to me?” He stared at Wilson.

“You must have been held up, knocked out by burglars, Mr. Ormsdale,” said Wilson sympathetically. “I was riding past, and stopped off to have a word with you. But I saw the door open and came in and found your butler knocked out. Then I came back here and found you on the floor. I went out for the police, and found Mr. Benson just coming in.”

“We’d better get the police, now,” said The Avenger, voice even. Ormsdale’s hard blue eyes were on him in a way showing that the name was familiar to him,

“Police?” Ormsdale snapped, struggling up on one arm. “Oh, no. No—no! Not at all.”

“But—” began Wilson, looking perplexed.

“Not necessary. Just give me some unwanted publicity,” said Ormsdale. “You can see”—he looked around—“nothing has been taken. No harm done. And I didn’t get a glimpse of whomever it was that knocked me out. So I’d do the police no good—and they’d do me no good.”

The Avenger’s colorless, all-seeing eyes were on the phone. The instrument was off its cradle just a little.

“I see you were phoning when you were attacked,” he said. “Do you mind telling me who?”

“I do, sir,” bristled Ormsdale.

Benson said nothing to that. He went to the phone and spliced the wires. He got a special operator. And the name of Dick Benson was very potent indeed.

“So you were trying to trace a man named Robert Mantis, in New York,” he said to Ormsdale, who was now sitting up and looking angry.

“All right,” he said, “all right. So I was. What business is it of yours?”

“I have reason to think Mantis is in danger,” said Benson.

At that, Ormsdale’s manner changed.

“He is? Oh, my! I’m sorry to hear that. More than sorry.”

“Why?” said Benson.

“Because he’s an employee of mine,” said Ormsdale. “Anyway, he was an employee. Nice young fellow and very capable. I’d like to get in touch with him and ask him to come back. He quit in a huff a few weeks ago.”

He seemed more concerned over Mantis than over his own injuries. And The Avenger watched him with icy, pale eyes, but on his face was no more expression than there is on the frozen face of the moon.

Benson had taken the rooms adjoining the one in the names of Mac and Josh and had them thrown into a suite. These would be temporary headquarters in Detroit. He had just opened the traveling laboratory he always took with him—a marvelously compact and complete set of apparatus in a case about the size of a wardrobe trunk.

And then Mac and Josh came in.

They looked as if they had been run through a meat grinder. Mac had a blue eye and an egg on his forehead. Josh walked with a limp and was dabbing at a cut on his cheek, in addition to having a swollen lip.