Tuned for Murder

CHAPTER V Mind a Blank

At Garfield Gear Company there was the devil to pay. There always is when two prominent men are murdered. Even when, in the minds of all, those two men were insane.

In the corridor off Jenner’s private lounging room, John Blandell and Henry Sessel lay dead. Each had a bullet hole between his eyes.

A girl clerk in the general office had found them. There had been, she told the police hysterically, a couple of sounds in the corridor like hard handclaps. Then the sounds of two bodies thudding to the floor. She had been at the filing cabinets backed against the corridor partition; so she had heard the sounds no one else had.

She had gone around into the corridor, not sure anything was wrong, and had seen the two bodies. Her screams had aroused the general office and brought the yard detective who had notified the police.

The police had a swell job on their hands!

The two men had been crudely disguised as two other men. A call to the Blandell home had cleared that up: they had gotten away by an insane attack on a couple of doctors, in their clothes and car. Nutty as a pecan orchard, all right. But that didn’t stop the fact that murder had been done!

And it was the murder itself that stymied them.

There were two men dead in the corridor. They had been shot with a silenced gun. But no employees had been in that corridor, to hear them tell it. And neither had anybody else.

“So the guys shot each other and then swallowed the gun,” rapped the harassed homicide man in Jenner’s office.

There were three others in the office with him. They were Ned Jenner; Stanley Grace, Jenner’s secretary; and a man known not only over Garfield City, but all over the State: Allen C. Wainwright, financier, promoter, many times a millionaire.

“You!” the homicide man shot out, glaring at Stanley Grace. “You say the door from your office, opening on the corridor, was partly open. You didn’t see those two go by? Or anybody after them?”

“No,” said Grace, awed by the tone. He moistened his lips nervously.

“And you didn’t hear the shots?”

“No!”

“Yet a girl heard ’em through a wall—”

“That partition is thin.” Jenner came to the defense of his secretary. “It could act as a sounding board. It is quite possible to hear a sound through it more easily than through Grace’s door.”

The young man thanked his boss mutely with his eyes. The detective grunted a little.

“Then nobody knows who went near that corridor in the last half-hour!” he snapped.

Stanley Grace shook his head. Jenner said nothing.

Wainwright looked curiously perturbed.

“Nothing out of the way happened, about the time of the shots, that any of you three know about?” persisted the homicide man.

Then Wainwright said, as if he didn’t know whether to bring it up or not: “There was one odd thing, officer.”

“Well? Well, let’s have it.”

“I wouldn’t mention it at all, save that I know the police want all details on such a case. It certainly seems impossible that it makes any significance. Yet — it was strange.”

“What was strange?” snapped the detective, on the verge of forgetting the prestige of millionaire Wainwright.

“Jenner’s dog, Prince.”

All eyes went to the fox terrier on the divan, trained to lie still and silent there when his master was busy. Prince wagged his tail a little and watched them all with bright little eyes.

“Prince howled just before the girl screamed. About five minutes before. It was the weirdest howl I ever heard. No, not quite. I heard much the same thing, once, on a hunting trip in Maine. A dog with one of the party began much the same howling. The guide got up and ran out — and found that man dead. The dog had sensed it in some way, and howled for his dead master.”

The detective pursed his lips, plainly impressed.

“Hey, now! There may be something here. So Prince howled about five minutes before the girl ran to the hall when she heard the shots. Maybe these guys died before any of us know. Anything else happen?”

None of the three said anything.

“Are you guessing at the five minutes?” said the detective to Wainwright.

“No! I looked at the clock about then. I looked because I had an appointment in the center of town at eleven thirty and I wanted to be sure I didn’t rest too long—”

He stopped suddenly.

The homicide man was staring at him, and he went on, his florid face a bit pale.

“I wasn’t feeling well. I proposed to go into the next room and lie down for a few minutes.”

“You mean the little room off this office, that opens onto that corridor? The one where them two guys are lying now, right outside the door?”

“That’s right,” said the financier.

“Hey! If you were right in there, with only a thin door between you, when they were shot—”

“I don’t know that I was,” said Wainwright.

“Huh? What do you mean, you don’t know. You’d know where you went, wouldn’t you?”

Wainwright moved his head as if his collar pinched his thick neck.

“I don’t know,” he said, “because about that time — my mind went blank.”

“Your mind—”

“Went blank,” repeated Wainwright. “I guess I fainted, or something. I didn’t snap out of it till just before you came from headquarters. So I don’t know if I went in that room or not.”

The detective stared at Jenner.

“Were you here with him?”

“Yes,” said Jenner reluctantly.

“Well, then you know. Did he faint or what?”

“He didn’t faint,” said Jenner, after a moment.

The homicide man just stared at him, with red beginning to show in his jowls at the stalling around.

“He went into the room and lay down,” Jenner went on.

“I didn’t know till this minute that he’d felt faint at all, or that he had that — er — mental lapse he mentions now.”

“He walked right in and lay down?”

“Yes!” Jenner glanced apologetically at Wainwright. “I didn’t say anything about that before, because it is so fantastic that Mr. Wainwright could have anything to do with the murders—”

“You heard the dog howl,” the homicide man cut in, speaking to Wainwright again. “You started to go into the next room. Then your mind went blank and that’s all you know.”

“That’s right,” said the financier.

“This mind-a-blank stuff,” said the detective. “Has that happened to you many times?”

“This is the first time it ever happened,” said Wainwright miserably.

“So you don’t have any idea what you did when you went into the next room?”

“No — I don’t.”

“But if the door was open so Mr. Jenner could see you lie down, then he must have seen whether you stayed down or not.”

Wainwright looked at Jenner.

“The door,” Jenner said, dragging the words out, “didn’t stay open. I walked over and closed it, so Mr. Wainwright could get a complete rest for a few minutes. But whatever you’re thinking—”

“I’m thinking,” said the detective, “that anything could happen, even with a man like Mr. Wainwright, while his mind was a blank.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, man!” snapped Jenner.

“He isn’t being ridiculous,” said Wainwright, with a wan smile.

“Glad you take it that way,” said the homicide man. “You won’t mind if I search you, then?”

“Not at all,” said Wainwright. “You’d have to, of course.”

So the homicide man searched him. And found nothing. But in the next room, under the cushions of the chaise-longue where the promotor had lain, he found a silenced .32 revolver with two shots gone and fingerprints all over the butt.

The bullets in the gun matched the slugs that had drilled the skulls of Blandell and Sessel. And the fingerprints matched the fingertips of Allen C. Wainwright.

One of the wealthiest, most respected magnates in the State had killed two men — just after a dog had howled weirdly — while his mind was “a blank.”

It wasn’t possible, but it had been done.

Thus, three eminent men in Garfield City had done mad and violent things in a space of twenty-four hours. Were all the prominent citizens of the ill-starred town to go insane? The humbler citizens began to wonder.

On Route 232, the huge sedan with the white-haired man at the wheel slowed suddenly. It takes eyes like telescopes to drive a car at ninety and ninety-five miles an hour on an open highway and see things far enough ahead to slow for them if necesssary. The Avenger’s colorless, flaring eyes were equal to the task.

About a half mile ahead he saw the sawhorse across the road, and the sign on it. He even read the sign at that distance.

He had the great car rolling slowly by the time the sign was reached. A car and a light van came past them from the opposite direction. From Garfield City.

“Say, maybe the road’s still open,” said Smitty. “Maybe the sign’s just been put up and work hasn’t started, yet. Those cars are coming from town as if things weren’t blocked off.”

Benson turned the wheel, and the sedan angled with a noiseless little drop onto the narrow dirt road leading to the right through thick woods.

“We’ll do as the sign says,” Benson said quietly.

“But—” began Mac uneasily.

He stared at the chief’s profile, and stopped. The dead, white face was like something cast in metal. You didn’t argue with the owner of that awesome countenance.

Mac changed the subject hastily. “Ye say ye got some dope on Cranlowe, as well as Blandell, in your investigations last night?”

“Yes,” said Benson. “Cranlowe is just as eccentric as you’d expect a man to be who would give such a story to the newspapers. He is about sixty, looks like Edgar Allen Poe, and is tyrannical, tempestuous and honest as daylight. His wife is much younger. Second marriage. She lives in a town apartment most of the time. He has a son who is fundamentally all right, according to reports, but inclined to be wild.”

Benson was sending the car along the rutted road at thirty-five. He slowed for a sharp bend to the left.

“Cranlowe has made a great deal of money from his inventions. But he hasn’t kept any of it. He is a fool with money — always spending before taking it in. Thus, he is chronically without a cent, and deeply in debt. That’s where Blandell has come in, in the past. He has financed Cranlowe, and he has taken the perpetual chance that Cranlowe wouldn’t be able to invent anything more, to repay him—”

Ahead was a gully recently washed in the road. Rocks lay in it, forcing a very slow speed. Beyond the gully, a hundred yards or so, the road skirted the edge of an abandoned quarry. There was a rail along the road here that wasn’t very heavy. The quarry had filled with water, as most do, making a small, deep-edged lake.

“It doesn’t look like anybody in his senses would mark this road out for a detour,” Smitty grumbled. “Particularly a detour for a big highway like 232.”

“Chief—look out!” yelled Josh.