Stockholders in Death

CHAPTER XIII Desperate Call

Wayne Crimm was young enough to take things at their face value. He was young enough to believe what a man’s lips said without looking into his eyes to check the truth of the statement. Also, he was still impressed by a man’s worldly position more than he, himself, realized.

Wayne was alone at Bleek Street when the buzzer announced someone in the vestibule downstairs. He had seen the aides of The Avenger work the release lever, after observing whoever rang the bell on their special television set. He went through the same motions and saw Robert Rath, downstairs. So he let him up.

Wayne met Rath at the second floor. And Wayne met Rath with a gun in his hand and fury and wariness in his blue eyes. This man was one of the little set who was responsible for his father’s death and the loss of his father’s fortune. If he tried just one trick—

But Rath tried no tricks.

The bank director was only a shadow of his normal, loud-spoken, plump self. He was shivering and pale, and in his eyes was fear and contrition. It was the sight of these things in his face that had impelled Wayne to let him up from the vestibule.

“Wayne,” Rath said, glancing around as if afraid of being overheard even in this sanctum, “I’ve got to see Mr. Benson. Is he in?”

“What do you want to see him about?” snapped Wayne.

Rath swallowed. Then he broke completely. Shuddering, he clutched wildly at Wayne’s arm.

“I’ve got to get out of all this,” he chattered. “Murder, robbery, crime — I can’t stand it anymore. I want to throw in with you and Benson. I want to right some of the wrong I’ve done.”

Wayne felt fierce triumph fill him. The break they had all been hoping for! If this man, one of the insiders in the nasty mess of the Ballandale Glass stock, should talk, all would be well.

“How do I know you’re on the level about this?” he demanded, keeping a little wariness to the last.

“When you all hear what I have to say,” Rath replied, “you’ll know. But I want to speak to Benson. Where is he?”

“He isn’t in right now,” said Wayne. “Nobody is here but me.”

In the wall at his elbow, a little glass dot was glowing deep red. He didn’t see it, and wouldn’t have known what it meant if he had. But any of The Avenger’s aides would have known.

That tiny red signal meant danger; meant that the visitor standing next to it was armed.

Rath looked desperate at the statement that The Avenger was not in.

“When will he be back? I haven’t much time. If any of the others should find out I’m here”—he shivered again—“I’d get what Maisley got.”

“He ought to be back soon,” said Wayne.

“I’ll wait awhile for him. As long as I dare. Where can I wait?”

Wayne was not entirely a fool. He still had his gun drawn and was still covering the bank man with it.

“There’s a small office on this floor. You can wait in there. And you’d better be telling the truth. Because if you try to lie to a man like Mr. Benson—”

“I wouldn’t think of it,” said Rath earnestly. “Where is this office?”

Wayne led him to a small room in the rear. There were books from floor to ceiling. There was a big desk with three phones on it and a swivel chair behind it.

“I’ll tell him you’re here as soon as he comes in,” said Wayne.

He went out. The door locked automatically as he swung it shut. The lock, a ponderous one, would keep Rath a prisoner, he knew. He thought he was being pretty smart in this whole affair. And he was jubilant at the prospect of getting the lowdown from Rath.

He went up to the third floor, to the great room where The Avenger and his aides spent most of their time while at headquarters. He would wait for Benson there—

Quite a naïve young man, Wayne Crimm. Young enough to believe Rath. Young enough to assume that, of course, when Benson returned to the Bleek Street place he would go at once to the top floor.

But it happened that Benson didn’t.

Pale eyes intent in his white, dead face, The Avenger went to the second floor instead of the third. He walked with his silent, catlike tread to the little rear office. There was some dope there he wanted to get. Some information on nail polish, with particular regard to the various colors of the stuff.

He opened the door without warning of any kind of what waited inside.

He opened the door — and stood on the threshold looking into the muzzle of a .38 revolver that seemed to laugh grimly at him under the frantic, deadly eyes of Rath.

For the space of a heartbeat, Benson considered action. But in the same fraction of a second he dismissed the idea.

The gun was pointed, not at his chest, which was protected by the marvelous celluglass plastic, but at his head. And a shot there would kill him just as surely as if he had been an ordinary police rookie, instead of The Avenger.

Also, that shot would be forthcoming without hesitation if he moved.

It was going to come anyway. His pale eyes told him that, as they peered into Rath’s frenzied, desperate ones. But if Benson were utterly still, it would take Rath a little while to work himself up to the point of doing murder in cold blood.

“So,” said Rath finally, with a deep, hissing sigh, “the simple methods sometimes succeed where the elaborate ones fail.”

Benson said nothing. Face as still as the frozen face of the moon on a winter night, he stared at Rath with his pale eyes like ice.

“We have set complicated traps to get you,” Rath went on, injecting fury and triumph into his voice as he lashed his courage to the point where he could pull the trigger. “They failed. Finally it occurred to me that it might be possible to come here openly, face you as I’m facing you now, and shoot you down. With your organization, you are prepared to beat complicated traps. But it might not occur to you that death could be this simple. It looks as though I win.”

“It does,” nodded The Avenger.

His tone was as calm, as cold as his dead face. And into Rath’s eyes began to creep a shade of uncertainty. This man with the death-mask countenance acted as if he had a machine gun under each arm. Rath longed for him to make some little move of attack so that he could fire at him.

But Benson continued to stand still.

“Come into the room. Shut the door behind you,” Rath said harshly.

Benson did so. The click of the lock sounded like the tick of doom.

The Avenger spoke then, voice measured and glacial.

“You are determined to kill me?”

“Yes,” said Rath. His finger was tightening a bit on the trigger. He was almost at the point where he could twitch it.

“Suppose,” said Benson, “I call off the war against you and your institution, Town Bank?”

Rath stared.

“That doesn’t sound like you, Benson,” he said suspiciously. “All I’ve heard about you is to the effect that once you have started on something, you don’t stop till it is finished, no matter what threatens you.”

“Perhaps,” said Benson, “I have never been in such a dangerous position before.”

Rath could agree with that. He knew this man was going to die; knew that lead from this gun of his was going to smash into the dead face and through Benson’s brain.

“You are killing me,” said Benson, “to keep me from exposing the murders and theft of your little crew. Isn’t that right? But if I gave up my war against you — then you wouldn’t have to kill me.”

“How could I trust your word in a thing like that?” snapped Rath.

Benson took a slow step toward the desk.

“Suppose I stop the wheels of Justice, Inc., right now, in your presence. Then you’d know I was acting in good faith. In other words, suppose I act before the threat of your gun is taken from me instead of after?”

In Rath’s eyes was a blazing thought. Heavy lids drooped hastily to hide it. The thought was very comforting.

Let this man go ahead and call off the dogs. Then, with that done — kill him as intended before.

Rath nodded.

“All right, Benson. Your life in return for our safety. First, call up your friends who withdrew all that cash from our bank. We need it badly. Tell them to deposit that much with us, again, at once. They’d do it if you insisted.”

“Yes,” said The Avenger tonelessly, “they’d do it for me.”

He went on to the desk, careful to move slowly and not alarm Rath into firing. A nervous man with a gun is more dangerous than a couple of polished killers.

He sat down at the desk. His right hand went for one of the phones. His left unobtrusively touched the desk edge.

He picked up the phone and leaned back in the swivel chair. Rigidly, Rath’s gun moved to keep absolutely in line on The Avenger’s head, muzzle yawning toward the thick white hair over the paralyzed, glacial countenance.

“Mr. James Bard,” The Avenger said, to whoever answered the phone. Rath knew that name, all right. It was the name of a great financier. The bank director had heard of Benson’s host of friends among financiers as well as longshoremen, mechanics and others in the humbler walks of life. Here was proof.

And here was the first step in the tearing down of the wall the pale-eyed man had been building inexorably around the Town Bank crew.

“Jim,” said The Avenger steadily, after a moment. “Benson talking. You remember I asked you to withdraw whatever funds you might have on deposit in Town Bank, a few days ago? I’d like to ask you to do something else, now. I want you to request every person you know with large funds in that bank to draw them out, too—”

“Damn you!” screamed Rath, as he saw his whole new hope being dashed to the ground by the man behind the desk. “Damn you—”

He pressed the trigger three times, in such quick succession that the three shots sounded like one long explosion.

Three slugs banged straight at the skull of The Avenger! At that range they couldn’t miss. They went straight into the pale forehead under the thick white hair.

And instead of the spurt of life blood from the brain behind that spot — there was a round of bursting glass.

The Avenger’s eyes smiled grimly even though his lips could not.

Rath screamed again, incoherently, and staggered a little. He noticed that Benson was breathing through his coat lapel, but his numbing brain couldn’t gather the reason for it.

The bank man tried to fire again, and couldn’t force his hand to line the gun. Then he tottered and fell prone.

The Avenger hung up the phone, over which at no time had he really talked to anyone. He got up and went to a little switch in the wall.

So easy just to walk in here and shoot down The Avenger. Rath could have been pardoned for thinking that. Because Rath couldn’t know of the thing at the desk which Benson had been so careful to reach.

When The Avenger’s finger had touched the desk edge, a thin, non-reflecting sheet of glass had slid between him and Rath. The glass was curved a little. That curve had showed Benson’s head as being a foot higher than it really was. So that when The Avenger slid down low in his chair, the curve of the glass gave a false target. Rath had drilled a forehead nearly twelve inches over the target he’d thought to shoot at, hitting glass instead of flesh.

Then the vibration of the shots had released a gas of MacMurdie’s devising that promptly put the man to sleep.

Benson turned the wall switch stopping the gas flow, opened windows to air out, and left the room. Rath would be unconscious for a quarter of an hour.

Meanwhile, Benson wanted to talk to Wayne and find how it was that the fellow had gotten in in the first place.

But Wayne Crimm was not there.

Wayne’s hat lay on a table in the big top-floor room. There would seem to be no reason for his dangerous desertion of Benson’s safe hideout.

Yet he had obviously dashed away, shortly before, in such a hurry that he hadn’t even thought to take his hat.