Stockholders in Death

CHAPTER VIII Cement Coffin!

The sleek, streamlined little gang of killers that had been called into action by Grand, after The Avenger burst into the conference room, were dead sure that Benson, in his ruined sedan, was as good as a mangled corpse right now.

Why shouldn’t they be? His car had been rammed so hard and so deftly that it couldn’t possibly move under its own power. Under it was the bomb, with the fuse terribly close to the detonation point. If the man with the white hair and the steely eyes tried to flee from the sedan, they could cut down on him with their machine guns.

The man at the wheel of the killer car slid into reverse and tried to whirl back away from the doomed car.

And couldn’t!

From The Avenger’s sedan slid four steel bars with hooks at the ends. One of the four found the front bumper of the gangster’s car. There were yells from the car.

“Pike! Get going! That thing’ll go up in a second!”

“Break loose from the guy’s can!”

“Get going!”

The man at the wheel charged forward with a clang against the disabled sedan, and backed up furiously. The steel hook held.

They’d set a trap under an enemy’s car and, due to this damned gadget sliding from under his chassis, were firmly hooked to death, themselves.

All five of the men in the murder car were screaming. Pike, at the wheel, dared not monkey around any more. He gave her the gun, in reverse. The car sped backward, away from the bomb.

It dragged The Avenger’s car back from the bomb, too.

The thing went off with a terrific roar. Both cars bucked and jumped.

And then the five saw that the car they’d been helplessly coupled to was empty.

The man with the deadpan face was gone. The death trap that had been so sure — was sprung.

“He got away while we were shakin’ around in the pineapple blast,” snarled Pike. “Where is he? Where’d he go?”

But he could ask that question till he was blue in the face, and get no answer. Not on Bleek Street.

As has been said, The Avenger figuratively owned the street. And in the buildings lining his side of it, there were more trick exits and entrances than anyone could ever dream of, unless he were a member of the little band calling itself Justice, Inc.

Benson had slid into one of these entrances.

Calmly, he made his way to the central cluster of buildings and up to his third-floor headquarters, leaving the band outside to slink off with a damaged car, before police came in answer to that blast.

Josh was up in the big room. Nellie had been there, too. She wasn’t there now. Nor was young Wayne Crimm, who had been staying there.

“Nellie left, after Mr. Crimm,” said Josh, when The Avenger inquired about them. “Mr. Crimm insisted on going out, late as it was, and in a little while Nellie went out, too.”

Wayne Crimm had been thinking a lot, while he was up in The Avenger’s safe headquarters. One of the things he had been thinking hardest about was a man named Ballandale.

Arthur Ballandale was president of the glass corporation that bore his name. It had occurred to Wayne that, quite possibly, he might know of his father’s secret purchase of Ballandale stock and be able to shed some light on the riddle of its theft.

So he went out to see Arthur Ballandale, even though it was after midnight. He couldn’t wait till morning. He was too excited with his hunch.

He had had to argue a little with Josh and Nellie about getting out. But they had no orders to hold him there; so they’d had to let him go.

At the corner of Bleek Street, he took a cab.

“Madison Avenue at Fifty-fourth Street,” he told the driver “And step on it.”

The cab went away fast. But not too fast for another cab, always at that corner for The Avenger or his aides if they needed it in an emergency, to follow.

At the same time, a man who had been lounging near the corner went into a drugstore and phoned.

He gave the address he’d overheard Wayne give.

Arthur Ballandale, in his big apartment near the intersection given by Wayne to the cab driver, was a late retirer. Wayne had remembered that when deciding to go impulsively to see him at this hour.

He met Wayne at the door, himself. He was a man of sixty or so, with clear health in his cheeks. He was well-kept and looked much younger in dress trousers and smoking jacket.

“Glad to see you, Wayne,” he said cordially. He had known Wayne’s father well. “It’s a little late, but I’m pleased by your visit. I judge something important brings you here?”

“It does,” said Wayne earnestly. “It’s a matter concerning Dad, and Ballandale stock. Did you know that, just before he died, Dad had bought millions of dollars’ worth of stock in your corporation?”

He told of the transactions, in secret names, and of the delivery of the stock to the wrong place — and of its theft.

Ballandale’s face grew more and more puzzled and incredulous.

“That’s a serious charge, Wayne,” he said finally. “Do you realize what it would mean to accuse the directors of a respectable bank of out-and-out theft?”

“Nevertheless, that’s what I do accuse them of,” said Wayne. “And I came to you for help. We can’t trace the stock transactions because Dad was all too successful in buying up blocks of it so that no one would find out who the purchaser was. But surely you, as president of the firm that bears your name, would know of such transactions? Surely you can prove that Dad did buy the stock?”

Ballandale shook his head slowly.

“I’m sorrier than I can say,” he replied, “but I’m not in a position to know anything about it. I’m president of the corporation, yes. I started the old Ballandale Co., and have headed it ever since. But I became a minority stockholder when it was merged with other small companies to become the Ballandale Corp. Now, as the president, I’m only a hired hand, like any other employee. And the stock transactions are in another world. They are in the world of Wall Street and have nothing to do with the actual functioning of the concern. Wayne, I’m a blank to you, I’m afraid.”

Wayne’s shoulders drooped. He was very young and very impulsive. And he’d been very sure he was on a hot trail. He left, after a few more words with Ballandale, and went down to the street again.

He was too depressed to notice that the cab he’d left now sagged on its springs just a little more than it should have done if empty. He gave the driver orders to go back to Bleek Street, and opened the cab door.

A man pointed a gun at him from the cab floor.

“Get in, buddy.”

Wayne got in. The cab drove smoothly off.

Nellie Gray had gone after Wayne, not to spy on him, but to keep guard over him. She hadn’t seen, from a block away, the gunman creep into the street side of Wayne’s waiting cab.

But when she saw the cab turn north instead of south toward Bleek Street, she knew instantly that something had gone wrong and that her trailing was justified.

She followed in her own cab.

The trailing extended for a period of nearly an hour. Then, far out on Long Island, the cab she was after stopped in front of a small factory with a high, gray tower.

The driver of the perpetually chartered taxi was a trusted man directly employed by The Avenger.

“I’ll go in with you,” he said.

Nellie Gray was hardly more than five feet high, and looked as fragile as a pink-and-white statuette of fine porcelain. But she was a little blond bombshell who asked no help from any man.

“No, Bill,” she said. “You stay out here. I may come out of that place fast and need you with motor running to get me away.”

Bill, husky cabby, didn’t like that. But he chewed his lips over it in silent worry as Nellie slipped from the rear and went to the gate of the place.

“Gailord Cement Co.,” she read over the closed gate. She saw a man stalking back and forth through the gate’s pickets, knew she couldn’t get in that way.

But she had to get in there, somehow. Wayne Crimm was in there. And he had been entrusted to her capable hands when Benson left headquarters.

She saw three other men in the small plant yard. And at sight of all those odds, her hand went to her slender waist.

At his belt, each member of The Avenger’s little crew carried a transmitting and receiving radio set hardly larger than a good-sized metal cigar case.

Nellie got hers out, now.

“Smitty,” she whispered into it, when she had tuned to their own special wavelength. “Mac. It’s Nellie. I need help. Come at once. Gailord Cement Plant, beyond Jackson Heights. Mac, Smitty, come at once. Gailord Cement Plant—”

“Better walk around outside the fence,” one of the three in the yard growled to the man at the gate. “See that nobody trailed that guy.”

Nellie crouched low. She was in a dark dress and blended with the night. She saw the gate open, saw the man come out.

When the gate closed again, Nellie was on the inside. There was a truck at the gate, under shelter, loaded with bags of cement to go out first thing in the morning.

With a courage few men would have displayed, Nellie had managed to slide almost between the legs of the man coming out and get under the truck before he or the other three could see her.

She could see the dim columns of their legs, in the darkness, where they stood at the side of the truck within a yard of her.

“We’ll keep on prowlin’ the yard,” one of the three said. “This is important. Luckow said so.”

The three separated. One went right, one left, and one straight ahead toward the shadowy outlines of the cement plant itself.

On the theory that the safest place to be when someone is hunting for you is right behind him, Nellie followed that third man. Toward the building.

She kept within ten feet of him, like a lovely little wraith in the blackness. She didn’t veer till he had gotten to the factory wall.

There she slipped to the side, through a small door.

Down through a great, piled room, she saw a glint of light. She went toward it and found herself looking into a small office, probably that of the plant superintendent. There were three men in there.

Two were sitting far back in swivel-chairs, with their feet on the desk. The third huddled in a corner with a gag over his lips and with so many ropes around arms and legs and body that he looked like a mummy.

That third man was young Wayne Crimm.

“Do we give him the usual?” said one of the men, jerking his head toward Wayne. “Cement coffin?”

The words were all too graphic. He meant, would they put Wayne in a barrel, pour cement around him and then sink him in the Atlantic some night.

“I guess so, after a while,” the other man said. “But not right away. We hold him on ice, for now.”

Nellie started a little in the darkness outside the door. But that was all she did do — just start a bit. She knew that any further move would mean her death.

For a gun had suddenly, without warning, been thrust against her side!

“Havin’ a good time, kid?” snarled a voice above her.

She looked up. She hadn’t been as smart as she’d thought. The man from the gate was there, with a .38 in his hand. He must have spotted her taxi, slugged the driver and rolled him off into an alley; then he had returned to see who had come here in the cab. At least, she hoped that the driver had only been slugged—

“Hey!” yelled one of the men in the office, feet slapping to the floor in alarm. “Who’s out there?”

“Me,” sung out the man. “Just caught up with a visitor. In there, you!”

Nellie marched into the office with the gun prodding her shapely back.

But the other one stared at Nellie’s blond loveliness with no spark of anything but lust for murder in his cold eyes. There was going to be immediate use for a cement coffin, after all.

Unless, Nellie thought frantically, that brief radio S.O.S. of hers had been heard.