Murder on Wheels

CHAPTER XI The Hidden Note

Nellie Gray entered the hotel suite that had become temporary headquarters for The Avenger, and Smitty said:

“Hey! I thought you were in New York.”

“I was,” shrugged Nellie. “After I told you over the phone that Will Willis had boarded a westbound train, the chief radioed that he’d seen Willis here in Detroit. So I took a plane and here I am.”

“Too bad,” rumbled Smitty. “We weren’t having much luck as it was. Now, with you here to have to be rescued from some jam or other every few hours—”

“Why, you light-brained dinosaur,” said Nellie, for once letting Smitty’s kidding rile her. “You’re the one who is all the time getting in over your head. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve saved your carcass—”

Smitty was grinning. She stopped, and said with dainty dignity: “Where’s the chief?”

“Next room,” said the giant, still grinning. So Nellie flung over her slim shoulder as she walked:

“Remind me to give you the messages of four or five of your brunette friends in New York, when I have time.”

Smitty’s grin changed to a splutter. In the first place, he was very conscious of the fact that he was no lady’s man. In the second, the only girl in his world was not a brunette, she was blonde Nellie Gray. And Nellie knew it.

The Avenger’s pale eyes glinted as Nellie came in. But he only nodded to her, told her to wait in the suite with the rest and hurried out.

There had been more trouble at the Marr factory.

Before an alarmed working staff could stop the rolls, they had been broken by a bloom too hard to be flattened out. That had been in the morning. Now, in the early afternoon, an even more serious thing had occurred. Rather, a lot of more serious things.

Suddenly, trouble broke all over the vast plant.

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?