The Flame Breathers

CHAPTER XII Company Shutdown

There was quite a little bustle and activity in the offices of the Henderlin Corp. — offices which took up four and a half floors in the Henderlin Building, down in New York’s financial section. But even a man unfamiliar with offices would soon have sensed that there wasn’t as much routine commotion as there should have been.

Even up here on the top floor, where the big offices of the corporation executives were maintained in a discreet hush, you could soon ascertain that only a skeleton force of clerks and secretaries was present.

The first guess, of course, would be that the place had shut down because of the death of its president, Pratt Henderlin. But that first guess would have been wrong.

A battery of afternoon newspapers on the anteroom table told the story.

A man passed the huge anteroom table and approached the girl at the information desk.

“Mr. Richard Benson to see Mr. Walter Gaffney,” the man said quietly.

That was all. Manner and tone were as quiet as could possibly be. But the information girl, glancing up at the caller’s face, could not suppress a start that was born half of fear and half of something like awe.

The girl was well informed. Girls at information desks of large corporations have to be. She knew the other, whispered name of this Richard Benson.

The Avenger!

She phoned instantly to the office of the vice president, Gaffney. And the vice president, figuratively speaking, threw from his office at once a person in his estimation far less important than the almost fabulous individual waiting in the anteroom.

The person leaving Gaffney’s office was a raven-tressed girl. She had jet-black eyes that would have been lovely if it were not for their almost metallic hardness.

“Yes, Mr. Benson?” said Gaffney, rising respectfully from his ornate walnut desk as The Avenger strode into his office. “What can I do for you?”

The diamond-drill eyes stared down at him with basilisk lack of expression till Gaffney swallowed nervously. He was a person who looked as important as he was — a big man with aggressive paunch. He seemed to shrivel a little under Benson’s quiet stare.

“I came to see you,” said Benson, “about this shutdown of yours. I find it very interesting in view of certain other circumstances. The news story is true?”

Gaffney cleared his throat.

“Yes, Mr. Benson. It is quite true.”

“And the reasons?” inquired Benson.

Gaffney’s large fingers fidgeted nervously with a gold pencil.

“The papers gave the reasons. We stopped producing until a rather dangerous surplus can be taken from our yards. Much more than we usually have on hand.”

“I glanced over your stock statements before coming here,” said The Avenger, voice even but cold. “I notice that you have, in coal yards and oil tanks, about enough fuel to meet average demands for four to five months. I recall that in the past it was your custom to have an eight-to ten-month stock on hand, to guard against strikes. Half the usual reserves on hand do not sound like a dangerous surplus.”

Gaffney colored a little, then went a little pale.

“Those figures—” he rasped. “No one is supposed to have access to those figures—”

“Nevertheless I saw them. And they disprove the surplus claim. The story of closing down for inventory will probably not fool even the average newspaper reader. May I ask the real reason for this sudden decision to produce no more coal and oil for a while?”

“If you would see our production manager—” murmured Gaffney miserably.

“I have no intention of seeing your production manager. You know the answers as well as he does. I would appreciate hearing them.”

“I… I can’t say any more than I have, Mr. Benson,” the corporation vice president almost pleaded. “I really can’t. It is… er… possible that some other reason has influenced the board of directors — some reason having to do with Henderlin’s unfortunate death.”

He drew up his too fleshy shoulders and tried to crawl behind a shell of bluster.

“I refuse to be pilloried, Mr. Benson. No man can come into my office and hector me. No one can… can—”

He shriveled again under the calm stare of the pale, deadly eyes. But those eyes calculated the man’s fright-and-nerve shock. And he estimated that Gaffney was, at the moment, too upset — too difficult a subject for a certain experiment Benson had decided upon.

“You are right, of course,” he murmured. “The business of the corporation is its own. Good day.”

The Avenger went out — but not far.

There was a lounge room outside the door of the vice president’s office. Beyond that was a slightly larger room, the office of Gaffney’s secretary.

The secretary was a bony man of middle age with almost as dour a look on his face as that habitually on the freckled face of MacMurdie.

“Mr. Gaffney was too busy to talk to me as extensively as I could wish,” Benson said to the bony man. “So I have come to ask you a few questions.”

The secretary’s thin lips seemed to button themselves like a clasp purse.

“Of course,” said Benson, “anything I ask that is in confidence between you and your employers, you have the right to refuse to answer.”

To the bony secretary, Benson’s voice seemed merely a little more quiet and monotonous — almost musical — than that of most people. But any of Benson’s aides, hearing that vibrant but almost metronomic tone, would know what was in the wind.

“I have read newspaper accounts of the corporation shut down,” said Benson, smoothly, soothingly. “Is that the true version?”

“Of course,” said the bony secretary.

But his lips were relaxing a little, and his eyes seemed unable to leave the icy pools staring at him from the dead, white face.

“Is it because of inventory?”

“Yes.”

“And surplus stocks?”

“Y-yes—”

The cold, colorless pools seemed to be engulfing him. The bony man was staring almost breathlessly now.

“You will answer truthfully, as far as you know, whatever I ask you from this moment on, won’t you?” said Benson in the monotonous, flatly musical tone.

The bony man was done for. Gaffney had been plunged into a state of nerves that would have made hypnotism difficult. The secretary, relaxed when Benson walked up to him, had been quite easy.

He was entirely mesmerized, quiescent, now. Benson spoke.

“What is the real reason for this shut down? You must have talked it over with others in trusted places. And you must have done some guessing.”

The bony man answered almost like a machine.

“I have talked it over, and I’ve thought about it a lot. There is something brewing that I can almost — but not quite — guess at. Something tremendous! Then there is another thing that has been whispered around the office that no reporter has yet learned.”

“And that?” came Benson’s hypnotic voice.

“There is a rumor that the control of the entire corporation is to change hands. Everything sold, lock, stock and barrel for ninety million dollars. That would explain the shut down and the mid-season inventory.”

“Who could swing such a deal? A financial group? Another corporation?”

“No. Just one man. The name that is connected with the rumor is Lorens—”

There was a sharp, harsh spangggg! The sound was made by a single bullet when it hit a knob on the door leading from the secretary’s office to the big general office. By then it had already drilled the bony man’s skull, clean, from back to front.

The man sagged at his desk, passed from a hypnotic trance to the permanent trance of death. And The Avenger, leaping into action a tenth of a second after the clang of lead on bronze, was springing for the door he had entered, a few minutes before.

The slug had come from the direction of vice president Gaffney’s office.

The Avenger seemed to flow, rather than run, through the next room and into Gaffney’s place, so swift and smooth was his motion. Not two seconds passed from the time of the shot till he was in the vice president’s office.

But there was no one in there but Gaffney. And Gaffney could not have been responsible for the shot.

Gaffney was dead!

A trace of concluding motion at a side door caught Benson’s pale, flaring eyes as he leaped in. He went on to that door, jerked it open. He was looking into a file room. The door across from it was just closing, and he caught the whisk of a skirt as it smacked shut. The dress was of rust-colored linen.

He reached the door. It was locked.

Incredibly powerful muscles bunched at Benson’s average-sized shoulders. His rather small hands took on the look of steel hooks rather than things of flesh and blood. Knob and lock tore from oak under his pull — which was bad luck. It took nearly thirty seconds of fishing for the lock bolt in the ragged hole before the door came back.

He stared into a corridor, down which the person in the rust-colored linen dress had long since fled to safety and secrecy.

Benson went back to Gaffney.

The vice president had slumped forward till head and shoulders lay on his elaborate walnut desk, with red staining the desk blotter. A hole was in his skull like the one through his secretary’s, to insure against his ever talking too much. This hole went in one side and out the other, instead of from back to front, but that was the only difference.

Some fact of vast import had been about to leak here, either from the vice president or from his secretary. That fact would never come from those lips now!