Stockholders in Death

CHAPTER VI The Warning!

Next night the light burned again in the directors’ room of Town Bank. And that light illuminated very grave and worried faces!

The faces of Grand and Wallach, Rath and Birch, were worried enough tonight. Also, frightened. All, that is, save the thin countenance of Wallach.

The director who looked as bland as a deacon was rubbing his dry thin hands together slowly and smiling a little.

“Maisley was badly scared,” he murmured. “Maisley might have talked. So Maisley was taken care of. You see? We are all quite safe.”

Birch’s choleric, red face was a shade paler than usual. He moistened his lips.

“I wonder how it was made to look so much like an accident?” he mused. “His coupé was found on the rocks beneath Suicide Heights. He was found in it, smashed like a — like a bug in a gear wheel. What made him drive over the edge like that?”

“What do you care?” said Wallach, with his dry smile.

“Oh, I don’t really care,” said Birch hastily, glancing around as if afraid death would hear him.

The four looked at each other covertly; had been doing so all evening. None of them seemed to know just who was responsible for the clueless death of Theodore Maisley. Wallach, with his bland, deacon’s placidity? Birch, the choleric and blustering? Rath, pompous and loud-spoken? Grand, wide-shouldered and arrogant?

“When this started,” said Grand, seeming to feel the unspoken question and hastily to answer it, “I didn’t have any idea there’d be murder involved. I don’t like it, gentlemen.”

“Nor do any of us,” purred Wallach, rubbing thin fingers softly together. “But — what would you do? Crimm had to be put out of the way so that his stock could be kept safely. Maisley had to go, because he might have turned informer on us. Both were attended to. And it has been done so well that no suspicion can ever be attached to any of us. The same with Haskell.”

“But — murder,” whispered Birch.

Grand stuck out his big jaw.

“This Ballandale stock,” he said. “Who’s got it? Which one of us? It isn’t me.”

Wallach smiled dryly.

“Of course, each of us would deny having it. I deny it, myself. So, I am sure, would Birch and Rath. What difference does it make which of us has it? The stock is safe, and we will gain control of the corporation in a few days, when the next meeting is scheduled. You all know how much we stand to make out of the transaction. And, afterward, we can dispose of the stock, a small block at a time, and pocket that money, too—”

Wallach stopped, and stared with a faint look of perplexity at Birch. The blustering, red-faced director was glaring with wide eyes at the door of the conference room. And, now, his face wasn’t even pale; it was a ghostly white.

Wallach turned to the door. Rath and Grand whirled, too. The door was opening.

There was no way for anyone to get into the bank after hours, save the banking officials themselves. Yet, that door was opening, and all the directors were in here. The guard wouldn’t be intruding — he’d had orders to stay on the floor below.

The door swung all the way back. On the threshold stood a man of average height and build, in a gray business suit, looking more like a machine of gray steel than a man.

The man’s face was as white as Birch’s; but fear had nothing to do with pallor in this case.

“Who are you?” boomed Grand, jaw out. “How dare you come in here?”

“How… how did you get in, anyway?” stammered Rath.

Birch tried to talk and couldn’t. Wallach was very still; dry, thin fingers for once not rubbing each other.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” said the chill, deadly figure in the doorway.

There was silence as The Avenger stepped into the conference room and calmly closed the door behind him. Grand’s jaw no longer stuck out. Birch’s face was more bloodless than ever.

“You may have heard of me,” said the white-faced, pale-eyed man. “Richard Benson.”

Birch swallowed audibly. Every one of them had heard that name. Richard Henry Benson! He was the peer of all of them in the realm of high finance. He was wealthier than all of them put together; could have bought and thrown away their bank.

But they’d heard of him in another way, recently, too. And it was this that froze their voices in their throats.

Richard Benson. Man of a Thousand Faces. The Avenger! Wherever crime had been done, that name could terrify. And under the circumstances, it could terrify in this sleek business room as well as in a gangster’s hangout. “I see you are very busy,” said Benson, with deadly irony in his voice. “I won’t take up much of your time. I came here to make a request.”

They stared at the pale, awful eyes like rabbits at a weasel.

“Millions of dollars worth of stock have been stolen,” said The Avenger. “Joseph Crimm’s stock in the Ballandale Glass Corp. Three murders have been committed: Crimm’s, Maisley’s and Haskell’s.”

His face was as dead and emotionless as though he were discussing the best way to serve soup. His eyes were as expressionless as ice under moonlight. His voice was without emphasis. Somehow, that very calm, glacial tone was more horrifying than wild threats.

“Someone among you,” said Benson, “knows who is directly responsible for the murders. Someone among you can produce the stock. So here is my request: Return the stock to Tom and Wayne Crimm and give up the murderer, with a full confession to the law.”

The last two words echoed in the tense room.

“—the law.”

Wallach was the one who finally answered. There was cold nerve in his lanky body; courage of a sort in the brain behind his thin face.

“Mr. Benson, I can only assure you that we don’t know quite what you are talking about. We have read of the tragic deaths of Maisley and Crimm. But Crimm died naturally of a heart attack, and Maisley unfortunately drove his car too near a cliff edge and fell to his death. Neither of them has anything to do with murder, I’d say. As for the stock you mention—”

The icy, pale eyes had become colder and colder. And Wallach finally stopped, words trailing off into silence.

“You will accede to my request,” said Benson, “or I shall declare financial war on you. With your connections in banking and financial matters, you probably know whether or not that declaration would be important to you. I will expect an answer shortly.”

The Avenger turned and went out. And behind him, four frightened men stared at each other. Grand moved first.

“After him! He can’t get away like that! Get him!”

He sprang to the door. The door did not open to his jerking hands. This was for the very simple reason that a chair had been propped under the knob on the other side.

Grand ran from the door to the telephone and put a call through in a hurry to a number that had been listed with the first preparation for the Ballandale plot. An emergency number!

Down at the great bronze door of the bank, the bank guard stood with a queerly empty look on his face, and with eyes that seemed to look at things but not see them.

Benson went unhurriedly to the man. His pale, infallible eyes bored into the guard’s like diamond drills.

“You will open the doors for me,” he said, voice oddly monotonous. “You will lock them after I have gone out. In five minutes you will inject this into your thigh.”

He put a hypodermic needle into the man’s robot-like left hand. The guard opened the door, closed it when Benson went out to the deserted street.

Five minutes later the guard would use the hypodermic needle, blink, look around with a start, and hurry to where banging on a door sounded, from the direction of the conference room. But he wouldn’t be able to say anything about what he had done.

All he would be able to say would be that he had gone to the street door in response to a continued, urgent pounding there — and that he had stared through bullet-proofed glass to see two pale and deadly eyes that seemed to grow and grow till he fell into them and went to sleep.

The directors would know a miracle of hypnotism when they heard about it. But the guard wouldn’t know till he was told.

The Avenger turned the wheel of his car and swung into Sixth Avenue, near Thirty-fourth Street. He drove down Sixth, his face a mask, eyes like stainless steel chips. A car was following his closely. It had picked up the trail eight blocks above, about fifteen minutes after he he had left Town Bank and was on upper Broadway.

The driver of the trailing car was clever. He drove now with regular lights, now with cowl lights, flaring. He drove far behind for a while, then very close. Whenever a truck loomed, going in the same direction, he hung behind the tail of the truck and out of sight.

But The Avenger had faced precisely this sort of danger too often for any man to fool him.

He went on down Sixth Avenue, turned slowly into his own street — Bleek Street.

The car behind was powerful. It had a pickup like an electric locomotive. It screeched around the corner on two wheels, like an animal that had only been waiting for a dark spot from which to spring. It went half over the curb, and its nose rammed the side of Benson’s car.

The Avenger had been driving with the windows down. A touch of his finger, just before the crash, had snapped all windows up.

Four machine guns were suddenly chattering from the big sedan that held Benson’s car rammed against the blank wall of the storage warehouse across from his headquarters.

The glass of Benson’s car was starred in a hundred places, but did not break. The armor of its sides clanged under the leaden hail like a tin roof in a rainstorm, but was not pierced by it.

However, there was a cold efficiency here that went far beyond the usual, murderous gang efficiency. Not one or two machine guns, but four! And when these were found to be ineffective, there was another deadly weapon, brought along for just such an emergency.

One window of the attacking sedan rolled down a foot. It revealed, for just an instant, a little more clearly, the five dark figures within. One of the figures had a round object in his hand. And the round object was thrown forward in a flat, practiced arc so that it came to rest directly under The Avenger’s car.

The round object was a bomb! It contained enough explosive to lift Benson’s car twenty feet and let it fall again in a tangled mass — with The Avenger a shattered, pulped thing at the remnants of a steering wheel.

He had had his answer from Town Bank: A death sentence!