The Flame Breathers

CHAPTER X Bath of Fire

It began to look, with the second violent attack on a man of great wealth, as if some force had arisen in New York that was determined to wipe out the city’s magnates.

First Lorens Singer, then Pratt Henderlin.

Pratt Henderlin was a heavy-set man with grizzled eyebrows like little cupolas, an oversized jaw and a mole on the left side of his fleshy nose. The domineering, fighting face had often been pictured in the newspapers.

He was almost as wealthy as Singer, being head of the Henderlin Holding Corp. that owned about a third of the nation’s oil fields and the pick of the coal mines.

Henderlin was not in a garden, at a distance, when catastrophe hit his place!

The coal and oil baron lived in a large apartment building that was one of his many real estate holdings, and atop which was his penthouse. That is, he lived there till the evening of the day Singer’s home went up in smoke. At that time, early, because he was tired from an extra-heavy day at the office, the rich man unfortunately decided to take a relaxing bath before going to bed at half-past nine.

That was his last known act. The next thing to occur was a soft but frightening roar, a sheet of white flame! Half the penthouse was blown off the roof and most of the floor beneath destroyed.

Roar and flame came from the bathroom into which Henderlin had gone to relax.

They extinguished the fire pretty fast, but that didn’t enable them to collect any of Henderlin. There just was no trace of the magnate at all among the heaps of debris, in which it seemed all the cops in the word scurried around.

All the cops in the world. And The Avenger.

Many people could be found who would swear that the man with the pale, deadly eyes and the white, still face was the more to be feared!

The whole rooftop was a mess, of course. But the thing most terrifically battered and burst was Henderlin’s bathtub. It was as if that had been the focal point of the whole thing.

If the tub had been filled with high-test gasoline, for instance, the result would have been much the same.

Benson went up to Henderlin’s valet. In this case, the results of the Singer affair had been reversed. There, the master had lived, and the servants died. Here, Henderlin’s quarters had demolished, including the room in which his wife had been sitting, while the servants’ part of the penthouse remained intact.

Henderlin’s man was shivering as if with a chill, and was being kept from collapsing by a hypodermic shot given now and then by the medical examiner. But he managed to talk fairly coherently with Benson.

“You say Henderlin came home exhausted from the office and decided to retire early?” Benson asked, voice quiet but vibrant with power and authority.

“Yes, s-sir,” chattered the valet.

“And he thought a warm bath would help him to get to sleep more quickly?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Was this a usual procedure of his?”

“N-no, sir. Usually Mr. Henderlin took a shower. But now and then he felt his age. He was sixty-seven, sir. It was his habit, sometimes, to soak in a warm tub and go to bed early. Th-that’s the way it was tonight.”

“You drew his bath?” said The Avenger.

When the police had asked the man that, they had barked it out with the plain suspicion that the valet had something to do with the explosion. Flustered and frightened, he hadn’t managed to give very clear responses. This man was different, the valet thought. His eyes were cold as ice, but fair. His face was a thing to haunt your dreams, but it was not suspicious. He opened up to Benson.

“Yes, sir, I drew his bath.”

“Everything seemed perfectly in order?”

“Perfectly. I filled the tub to the usual level, and the water was the exact temperature Mr. Henderlin liked best. I used a bath thermometer to be sure.”

“I’d like to see that thermometer,” Benson said evenly.

The man shook his head.

“The police said the same thing. But they’ve been unable to locate it, sir. I guess it was blown to tiny bits when the place went up.”

“Very well. Henderlin got in his bath. Then what?”

“I went back to my room to read for ten or fifteen minutes. I knew from past experience that Mr. Henderlin wouldn’t be wanting me for at least that length of time. He would be lying there, smoking, perhaps reading a little with a magazine or paper spread above him on the tub rack—”

“Smoking?” said Benson. His face, as always, was as dead as the cold, bare waste of the moon. But his eyes seemed to glint a little like ice under a polar dawn.

“Yes, sir. Mr. Henderlin smoked a great deal. His own brand of cigar. He had smoker’s articles in the bathroom — racks with humidors and so forth.”

“Go on. What next?”

“I had just gone into my own quarters when the lights went off.”

Benson’s pale eyes flared more brilliantly. This thing of the lights going off and been brought out several times in the past half-hour of feverish investigation.

“All the lights in the penthouse went off,” the valet went on. “But none of the lights in the building below. Just the penthouse. I understand the police found that the switch controlling the penthouse lights had been thrown — though they could not be sure if the switch was turned by somebody, or was jarred off circuit when the explosion occurred.”

“I think we can say that it was thrown,” said The Avenger quietly. “It is the only thing that would explain the failure of all the lights in the penthouse and none in the rest of the building below. Then?”

“Then the thing happened, sir. About four minutes after the lights failed.”

It was all the valet knew. Benson nodded permission for him to leave. A captain of detectives came up to The Avenger, face respectful and manner almost subservient.

“What does it look like to you, Mr. Benson?”

“That is easy to answer. What it looks like. What actually occurred may not be so simple.”

“Well, sir, what does it look like?”

“It looks,” said Benson expressionlessly, “as though Henderlin’s tub had been filled with explosive instead of water. It then looks as if the lights had been turned off deliberately so that Henderlin would light a match in the bathroom to see to get out of the tub. It seems that he kept matches, among other smoker’s articles, in the room; so it was certain that there would be a match at hand. When he lit the match, the explosive in the tub went off.”

“But,” objected the captain, frowning, “if some explosive had been substituted for water, why wouldn’t he have found it out? There’s no explosive that looks so much like plain water that it could fool a man into taking a bath in it.”

“That is correct. There is no such explosive,” said Benson.

“But you said—”

“You asked what it looked like,” The Avenger pointed out, eyes like diamond drills. “So I told you. That seems to be exactly what happened. Yet no sane man would believe that another man could get into a tub filled with explosive and think it was water.”

“In other words,” said the captain of detectives, “this even stumps you?”

“I have no more provable information than you,” said Benson. Which was a slight evasion. You can know a thing surely and without doubt, even if you can’t prove it at the moment.

The men were searching everywhere, as they had been before, for bits of evidence that might help explain the mystery. But now Benson noticed that their actions seemed to have slightly more purpose than before.

“What are they after, specifically?” he asked.

“That bath thermometer the valet spoke about,” replied the detective captain. “I’ve got an idea on that. Those things have thick wooden cases, you know. There might have been enough explosive in it to do this.”

“There might,” nodded The Avenger.

He went to where Henderlin’s butler shakily smoked a cigarette between police grillings.

The butler was a paunchy man with pouches under his eyes and a gouty look. As often is true, he had more the appearance of the traditional wealthy man than his master had had. The Avenger fixed him with those colorless, icy eyes of his.

“A man came to see Mr. Henderlin a short time before this happened,” Benson said quietly. It was not a question. It was a statement, uttered in a tone of absolute certainty.

The butler’s eyes flickered under The Avenger’s pale, direct gaze. Then his eyes went to his cigarette. The smoke from the cigarette jiggled as his hand twitched.

“Oh, no, sir,” he said. “N-no one called on Mr. Henderlin this evening. His secretary came with him at five o’clock, from the office, and left well before dinner. Save for that, not one soul was in the penthouse except Mr. and Mrs. Henderlin and we servants.”

“The man who came to see Mr. Henderlin,” Benson said, as if not even hearing the denial, “possibly has visited him before. I can’t be sure of that. He is a rather small man with peculiar ears. He has a faintly foreign look. He was here no earlier than an hour, at most, before the explosion.”

“I swear—”

The butler’s voice cracked and broke at the sudden, appalling look over the brilliant, pale eyes. No muscle of The Avenger’s face had moved, naturally; never could the flesh shape itself to an emotion. And yet that countenance was suddenly so dreadfully threatening that the servant almost cried out and flung his hand to shield his eyes from it.

“You saw this man, perhaps?” said Benson, softly. “I… I—”

The cigarette had dropped and was smoldering on the carpet. The butler wasn’t even aware that he was no longer holding it. Then he gave a great sigh, like a thing breaking. It was a sigh of cringing surrender.

“Yes. There was such a man. He was under average size. He looked like a foreigner. His ears were peculiar — so flat to his head that it almost looked as if he had no ears at all. He came secretly while Mr. Henderlin was disrobing for his bath; and, to my surprise, the master said he’d see him. I was not to let anyone know he had called.”

“And he has been here before?”

“Once. Several weeks ago. From a conversation I overheard between him and Mr. Henderlin, I gathered that the small man had seen him at least once before that — at the office.”

The butler moistened his dry lips.

“H-how did you know about him, sir?”

Benson said nothing. He was in the habit of asking questions, not answering them. There was a kingly arrogance and air of surety about the man with the dead face and the stainless steel eyes. It was in large measure responsible for the air of complete authority which so few people, from millionaires to busboys, could resist obeying.

He turned and left the scene of disaster. And with him, he carried but one thing. That was a square of blotting paper with which he had blotted up moisture from what remained of the bathroom. An analytical sample from which he could glean a few drops of the fluid that had been in the magnate’s tub.