Murder on Wheels

CHAPTER XV The Man With the Pencil

The man was the fellow who had been shot through the arm by Will Willis. It was a clean hole. It was disinfected and treated by Dick Benson, himself, which was much more of an honor than the man deserved. For The Avenger was probably the world’s finest surgeon.

However, the wound, plus the loss of blood, plus the effects of that gassing back at the scow combined to put the leader out of this world for a while. Until next morning, in fact.

He was delirious part of the time, and so deeply asleep as to be almost unconscious the rest. Then, at about ten o’clock, some twenty hours after the scow episode, he opened his eyes, took some food and was all right. It was no longer inhumane to think of firing questions at him.

The Avenger prepared to do so.

Another strange thing had happened to Benson in that eerie ray chamber in the Marr plant. A thing that was just beginning to show up, now.

He had almost died under the excruciatingly painful effect of those rays designed to temper metal. His facial nerves had been shocked and revitalized with the bath of agony so that at last they were normal, alive again. And his thick white hair had fallen out.

Now, thirty-six hours after the terrible experience, his hair was growing in again; so at least it had not been a permanent injury to the hair follicles.

Benson’s scalp looked like the cheeks of a man with a heavy beard and in need of a shave. The scalp was bristly with close, virile new growth as the hair came back.

And it was coming out black!

A little earlier, Nellie had murmured to Smitty:

“I knew he must have been good-looking, once. Now — with his hair black and his face like a real face, again, instead of a mask — oh, boy!”

“Awww, look,” Smitty had mumbled. Then he had grinned at himself, realizing that he had actually started to be jealous. “But he’s the same chief,” he said.

And Benson was. Iron self-control kept his features almost as unrevealing as when they had been paralyzed. And there were still the pale, icy, deadly eyes, and the unswerving, unrelenting concentration on just one thing — the fighting of crime.

As he was doing now, in questioning this leader, whose forehead was made repulsive by the enlarged vein that squirmed there with his mental agitation.

“I’m not talking!” he said, as Benson came in, and before The Avenger had even opened his mouth. “I’m not saying a thing. I don’t know anything about anything!”

The colorless, grim eyes regarded him. He was still in some pain from his wound. He was greatly excited, and all the will in him was bent on refusing to talk.

The Avenger was the world’s greatest hypnotist. But with such a subject, even he could not hypnotize unaided.

“The ball, Smitty,” he said. “And Mac’s partial anaesthetic.”

Smitty went to the marvelously equipped portable laboratory and came back with the two things.

The ball was a sphere, about a foot in diameter, so covered with little round mirrors, like the facets of a great jewel, that all you could see was mirror when you looked at it.

The anaesthetic was one of Mac’s latest chemical concoctions. It was a bit like twilight sleep; it partially cut the brain from sensations of the body, and also sent the mind into a half-sleep where everything seemed dreamy and unimportant.

Benson suspended the ball in front of the leader’s face where he lay propped in bed. He twirled it, and it slowly revolved in front of the man’s eyes, casting little circles of reflected light dancing over walls and floor and ceiling.

“What’s that thing for, anyhow?” the man said fearfully. “What’re you going to do to me? You want me to look at that thing, don’t you? Well, I won’t! I tell you, I—”

Benson gave him a shot of the new anaesthetic, before the man had time to jerk his good arm away from the needle. His voice got less strenuous in about thirty seconds.

“I won’t look at the thing. I—”

His eyes were not wild and staring. They were getting sort of sleepy, and contented. And — they were looking at the slowly revolving ball. It was pretty hard for him to look at anything else.

The Avenger stood just behind the ball so that his pale, icy eyes peered down over it and into the man’s eyes. About five minutes passed, and then Benson judged the man was ripe.

“You will answer questions, now,” he said, voice level and calm.

“I will answer questions,” said the man, staring with vacant, contented eyes at the ball.

“Why have you made such efforts to hold the girl, Doris Jackson?” asked Benson.

“We were to get her father, through her.”

“The inventor? Phineas Jackson?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you want to get him?”

“To kill him,” said the man, staring at the ball.

“You and your gang stole the mystery Marr-Car, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“For yourselves?”

“No.”

“Whom did you steal it for? Whom did you turn it over to?”

“I don’t know who it is that wanted it,” said the man. “And we didn’t turn it over to anybody. Somebody stole it from us, just awhile ago.”

This was certainly surprising. The Avenger thought it over for a moment, eyes as pale and cold as the polar sea. Then he went on.

“Having stolen the Marr-Car, you wanted to kill the inventor, Jackson, so he couldn’t duplicate it for Marr again?”

“Yes. So we took his daughter, thinking we could get him into our mitts with her as bait. But he didn’t show up. Some old guy named Willis, maybe a friend of Jackson’s, came to help her, but that was all.”

“What do you know about Marr?”

“The guy that made the Marr-Car? Nothin’—except he’s the guy that made the Marr-Car.”

“You say you don’t know him; yet you wrote him that extortion note.”

“Who? Me? I never wrote anything to Marr in my life.”

Benson held out the note he had taken from the floor in Marr’s music room.

“You wrote this?”

“Never saw it before,” said the man.

Benson held out the stub of indelible pencil he had taken from the gang leader’s pocket.

“This is your pencil?”

“Well, I had it for a while. But it ain’t mine.”

“It wrote the note.”

“Did it?”

“What do you mean,” said Benson, “you had the pencil for a while but it isn’t yours?”

“Somebody sent it to me.”

“Sent it to you?”

“Yeah. In the mail. Day before yesterday. It was in a heavy envelope, addressed to me with no return address or name on it. I thought, at first, maybe it was some kind of little trick bomb. I got enemies, you see. So I soaked it and looked it over and saw it was just a pencil, all right. But that didn’t make sense. I just slipped it in my pocket, thinking maybe whoever had sent it would write another note sayin’ why. It seemed like it ought to be important, but I couldn’t figure out how. See?”

“That,” said Smitty, “is about the thinnest yarn I have ever heard.”

Yet, the man was under profound hypnosis, and, all were sure, was telling the truth so far as he knew it, without reservation.

“You don’t know who is behind the theft of the Marr-Car, and the sabotage at the Marr plant?”

“No.”

Benson had apparently gotten from the man all there was to get. He left him, and went to the next room. There, as he sometimes did on a case, he summed up what he had both learned and deduced, to date, speaking in a low tone.

“It’s puzzling. Somebody managed to steal the Marr-Car to get the trade secrets incorporated in it — particularly some hint as to how the steel was processed — because those secrets are immensely valuable. Now, that person wants the inventor out of the way, so he can’t put out another Marr-Car and make the theft of the first useless. That’s clear.

“But the extortion note to Marr, the expensive destruction of his plant for the sake of blackmail — that doesn’t tie in at all. The mystery car is worth so much that it makes a million look like small change. Therefore, the sabotage at the Marr plant to make Marr pay out a million to ‘the party named’ would seem to have no connection whatever with the theft.

“On the one hand, the plotter murdered for the car was holding Doris to get the father and kill him, and all through has shown ruthless willingness to kill and do anything else necessary to his plan. Among others, they have tried to kill us, when it began to look as if we might find out something. Yet, on the other hand, last night, all the plotter had to do to kill me was to leave me in the ray chamber just a little longer. And he didn’t! He carefully turned the ray off and carried me from the box — saved my life.

“On the one side there is straight theft of a priceless industrial secret and willingness to murder. On the other, sabotage and blackmail and an unwillingness to take life. It would almost seem as if not one plot were involved here — but two”

Smitty spoke, softly, so as not to break the thread of thought too abruptly.

“Yet the pencil that wrote the extortion note was in the pocket of one of the men who stole the car and planned the murders.”

“That’s right,” nodded Benson. “With the explanation that the pencil simply came to him in the mail from an unknown sender. A ridiculous-sounding explanation, but one that I’m inclined to think is true.”

His eyes glinted and he stopped his musing aloud. It told that he had speculated about as much as the facts warranted, and was ready for action again.

“Nellie, please bring Miss Jackson in.”

In a moment Nellie Gray came from another of the rooms in the suite, with Doris Jackson in tow. Doris, beautiful and slim and tall, tried to look dumb, grateful for what The Avenger had done for her and outwardly willing to help, all at one time.

Benson’s pale, infallible eyes stared at her face for a full moment, studying jaw line, set of ears, shape of nose and chin. Then he said evenly:

“Will Willis is your father, isn’t he?”

The rest gasped, and Doris’s pretense at being dumb and willing to help but unable to supply real information crumbled like sand.

Her hand went to her throat and her eyes went wide.

“Why… no—” she faltered. “He isn’t — he is just an old friend of—”

“He is your father. The cast of your countenance shows it. Though I got it back at the river when you held a gun on us so he could get away.”

Doris stood breathless before him.

“He disguised himself a little and took another name,” said Benson, “so he could work at tracing his mystery car and not be recognized by the gang as the inventor. Also, it allowed him more leeway in trying to help you out of a jam after they caught you. That’s right, isn’t it?”

The defiance went out of Doris’s face.

“Yes — that’s right,” she admitted slowly.

“Where is he, now?”

“I don’t know,” said Doris. And her voice rang true.

“You don’t know where he went after leaving Dock 13?”

“No.”

“Why did you keep me from taking him with me and guarding him here?”

Doris caught her lip between her teeth.

“His life is in such danger from so many people,” she admitted finally, “that we didn’t think it wise for even you to have him at your mercy. There was one chance in a thousand that you might sell him out. I think, now, that probably that was a foolish mistake. But it didn’t seem so, then.”

“You don’t know where to reach him, now?” persisted The Avenger.

“No, I don’t. All through this, I haven’t known where he was or been able to contact him. He went away from home several weeks ago; just disappeared. I guess later, when I heard the Marr-Car was stolen, that he was on the trail of it. But at first I didn’t know. And I tried every way I knew to find him. I learned when and where the mystery car was to be tried out and hid there to see if he would be among the men with it. He wasn’t. Later, in New York, on my way to your place, I went toward Marr’s house to see if he knew where dad was. I never got there, I was kidnaped.”

“Apparently you don’t think he has much chance of getting the car back by himself.”

“Heavens, no,” said Doris. “He’s an absent-minded, dreamy, brilliant, impractical man. He has no more business chasing after gangsters than a baby.”

“You have told me all you know of this?” The Avenger demanded.

Doris hesitated a moment, then said steadily, “Yes, that is all I know.”

At the door, Smitty made silent lip-motions which Benson read as easily as print:

“Josh is back. I think he has some dope on young Cole Wilson.”