Tuned for Murder

CHAPTER VII Strange Doom!

With the temporary mental lapse of the well-known banker, John Blandell, Garfield City seemed to have been let in for a series of lunatic occurrences.

There was Blandell’s weird act of giving away crisp one-dollar bills, in front of the bank.

There was the equally weird attempt of Henry Sessel to do a tap dance in the general office of the Garfield Gear Company.

There was the wholly incredible murder of the two men by Allen Wainwright — which was as outlandish as it would be for a Cabinet member to murder the President.

But the things didn’t stop there. They kept right on happening, only to less well-known personages.

The first succeeding thing was the utterly fantastic performance of an old man in a station wagon.

The old man was parked at the gate of the Garfield Gear Company yard. He was just sitting there in the station wagon. There were letters on the wagon’s side. They read:

CRANLOWE HEIGHTS

The old driver, a sturdy, rugged, gray-haired figure in livery, was staring unseeingly into space. But a glance at his face would have told you that he was neither simple-minded nor a woolgatherer. He was just relaxed, that was all, as a person tends to be when he is waiting for another person or for an answer to a message.

It was the latter the old man was waiting for. He had turned over to the gate guard an urgent letter. The letter had been taken to Mr. Jenner. Now the old man waited for a reply to it.

Near the straight, heavy wire of the fence, a mongrel dog happened to be prowling. The dog yawned, scratched at a flea, started to trot past the station wagon.

A bone, in the last stages of decomposition, attracted the dog, and he started toward it. Then he stopped.

He began to howl! It was a strange sound. It was the way a dog often bays at the moon, or in answer to shrill music.

Or it was like the dread sound a dog makes when there is death in the air.

The dog howled and scratched frantically at its ears. And the unseeing gaze of the old man at the wheel of the station wagon suddenly became really unseeing — and blank! It was as if the soul in him had abruptly died, leaving only the husk of him sitting there.

Down the street rolled a van. It was one of these things that travel coast to coast and look as big as a boxcar. A ten-wheeler. Garfield City, being on a big State highway, attracted a lot of vans like that; and they rolled past the Garfield plant because that was on the edge of the four-lane concrete strip.

The van rumbled forward at about twenty miles an hour over the local speed limit, which was thirty. And the old man in the station wagon stepped dreamily on the starter. The motor came to life. The man shoved into gear.

After that, no two versions agreed.

The gate guard said that the man simply rolled the station wagon right in front of the van, like a little boy darting from behind a parked car into the path of another speeding one.

But that wasn’t credible, of course; so other versions, sounding more natural, were considered and the guard’s view ignored. The emergency brake of the station wagon had come off, rolling the car in front of the van before the van driver could stop. The old man had shoved into second instead of reverse, when he meant to back around and swing into the gate. He had—

Oh, there were a lot of plausible-sounding theories. But they didn’t change the fact that the station-wagon driver had deliberately started his car and, open-eyed, driven it into the path of the grinding, roaring van.

Inside the Garfield plant, at the moment, something else was happening that might be looked on as equally odd, considering the man who was doing it and the implications of the act.

Jenner wasn’t reading the letter the old man had brought. He wasn’t in his office to read it. He was in the company stockroom.

He had walked in the doorway with a sober greeting to the stock clerk, and gone to the racks containing jigs and dies — master tools for stamping or drilling precision parts in quantity.

The stock clerk hung around till a call from a foreman for a drill rod drew him to the front. Then Jenner acted fast.

Looking around to be sure he was unobserved, the president of the company dipped into the pigeonhole containing a male and female die for one of the punch presses. They were small dies. He put them into his hip pockets where they wouldn’t sag enough to be noticeable. But first he took identical parts from the hip pockets and slid these new ones into the rack to replace the older, worn ones.

He turned around before the clerk had come back. No one in the vast plant could dream of the transfer. The finished hole punched in beryllium alloy by that press could be inspected as much as you pleased and found correct — because the precision gauge used for the measuring was not quite right either. Jenner had changed the gauges over a month ago.

The company president smiled pleasantly at the stock clerk, complimented him on the neatness and system with which he kept his stock, and left.

He went up to his office and was handed the letter delivered by the station-wagon driver.

The letter was from Jesse Cranlowe, and it asked what in the name of thunder had happened to the last royalty payment on torpedo parts made for the United States Government. Cranlowe wanted it, and wanted it badly.

Jenner called in Grace, and dictated smoothly to the pale, partially bald young man.

Some hours later on the twenty-fourth floor of the Garfield Woolens Institute Building, a girl hurried down the hall to the street window that opened on a fire escape. She was a very pretty girl, about twenty-five, tall and slim, with soft brown eyes.

The eyes, at the moment, however, were oddly vacant-looking. Vacant, and yet glazed with a fixed purpose.

The hall was floored with marble slabs and her little heels made tapping sounds on the stone. Crisp, direct little sounds. Tap, tap, tap, tap. Toward the hall window and the fire escape.

At the window, she paused. Then she opened the broad, metal-sashed lower pane. She stepped quickly out onto the escape. So quickly that you’d think she was fleeing from a fire. Only there was no fire in the building behind her; nothing apparent to drive her there.

She stood on the twenty-fourth-floor balcony of the escape and looked down onto Garfield City’s most crowded street. And with that look, the dreadful purpose on her mind became all too plain.

Far below, cars crawled like little beetles, and moving pinpoints were busy people. She stared down at them, down two hundred and fifty feet to the hard sidewalk.

And in her eyes was no sorrow, no rage, no emotion whatever. There was just the empty, glazed look.

She climbed over the waist-high iron railing of the escape balcony. She stood facing forward, hands behind her, loosely clutching the railing. Far below, a woman chanced to look up. She screamed. More people looked, and yelled and shouted.

The girl, calm-faced and empty-eyed, released her hold on the rail and stepped off, as if she intended to walk on empty air and was sure that it would support her.

Strange things happening in Garfield City. Grim things. There seemed no sense to them. Certainly there seemed no central, connecting thread of meaning. But one thing might have been gleaned from all of them, had an observer known all the facts and had wit enough to put them together.

Each occurrence was in some way tied in with Jesse Cranlowe, eccentric, famous inventor.

The old man had driven Cranlowe’s station wagon to deliver his plea for money to Jenner.

Jenner had substituted a freshly tooled die for an old one — to fit the press punching out a part of Cranlowe’s torpedo control.

And the girl who had stepped into thin air, twenty-four floors up, happened to be Cranlowe’s private secretary, on an errand in town for the inventor.

All concerned with Cranlowe.

At about that hour, when the street in front of the Woolens Institute Building was being roped off and cleaned up, a Negro girl and a blonde were reporting to a man with snow-white hair and a dead, waxlike face from which colorless eyes peered forth like chips of ice. That is, they were going to report for duty as soon as the man came into the room. Meanwhile, the blonde stared up at the good-natured moon face of a giant whose torso was so muscled that his arms couldn’t hang straight at his sides.

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Nellie Gray to Smitty. “You mean to say the car was knocked over into seventy feet of water with you four in it?”

“That’s right,” said Smitty. He didn’t grin outwardly as he stared down at her, but he grinned inwardly, enjoying her amazement.

“Well, how in the world is it that you’re alive?”

“We turned mermen,” said Smitty.

Nellie Gray stamped her small foot. “You big, dumb lug—”

“Don’t let him get you down,” smiled the pretty Negress, in a soft-cultured voice. She was Rosabel Newton, Josh’s wife. She, too, was a valued aide of the Avenger.

“How did you get out of that one?” snapped Nellie.

Smitty let his grin show on his lips, then. The tiny blonde usually led him around by the nose like a captive elephant. He enjoyed seeing her at a loss, for once.

“We used the motor fan for a propeller, and the car rose right up to the top,” he said.

A spot of clear red glowed on each of Nellie’s pink-and-white cheeks. “If you don’t—”

Smitty became more serious. “You know the sedan’s windows were made gas-tight, in case anyone tried to kill us that way. Well, it came in handy in the quarry. With the windows up tight, there was air enough in the sedan to keep us going for about two minutes under water. In that time we fastened on the nose clips and the little oxygen tanks the chief kept in the car — again for use in case of gas. But they were just as effective for use under water. We rolled down the sedan’s windows, waited a little while, and then floated up to the top of the quarry. And that was that.”

“Yes, simple!” jeered Nellie. “But it’s a miracle you weren’t killed. My heavens!”

The startled look in her eyes and the pallor of her cheeks was something Smitty liked to see. The giant had a soft spot in his heart for this diminutive blond tornado.

“It’s nice for you to think of me like that,” he said awkwardly.

Nellie turned woman on him.

“I wasn’t thinking of you at all,” she snapped. “I was thinking of the chief and Josh and Mac.”

The hot retort on the giant’s lips was checked by the appearance of the three named.

Smitty and the two girls were in a large office which was one of six in a vacant suite. The Avenger had decided that as long as his foes thought he and the rest were dead, it would be a good idea to have them go on thinking that. He hadn’t wanted to go to a hotel because their presence might be reported. So he had come here, to the office building of an old friend, and secretly arranged to use this vacant suite. He had put cots in. It would be their headquarters in Garfield City.

Benson felt safe because he knew he could trust the building owner. The Avenger had friends in almost every city in the land; and such was his judgment of men that none ever failed him.

Benson’s colorless, icy eyes were not quite so sharp as they turned on Nellie.

He told her and Rosabel what had been discovered to date, in a few, brief words. Very few, and very brief. For there was not much to tell, as yet. A man had invented a super war weapon, and at once a lot of mysterious things had begun to happen. The underworld was somehow mixed into it. That was all that was known.

“So we’ll start at once to learn some more,” Benson concluded. “Mrs. Cranlowe, the inventor’s young wife, is in town. You will take rooms in her building, Nellie, and make her acquaintance. Find out from her what you can. No matter how irrelevant it may seem, what you hear may be valuable. So make a note of everything. You, Rosabel, will be Nellie’s maid. And keep a gun with you.”

The colorless eyes, like ice in a polar dawn, turned on Josh.

“At the Garfield Gear Company, two men had suffered strange mental lapses. Just outside the company yard, another seemed to have suffered one, too. And the first two men were killed — at Garfield Gear. Then there was that fuse casing, which may or may not be significant. You, Josh, will keep an eye on that place and all the executives in it.”

The cold, pale eyes raked the red, freckled face of MacMurdie. “You will interview the psychiatrists who tended Blandell and Sessel, before they were murdered.”

The giant came next.

“Smitty, try to get on the trail of that gang who tried to kill us at the quarry. Yours will be the most dangerous job, not only because you’re going after out-and-out gunmen, but also because you’re apt to be spotted. The rest of us can disguise ourselves a little. You can’t.”

“Whoosh,” chuckled Mac. “I’ll say not! Ye could disguise Pikes Peak as easy as Smitty.”

“You’re not too easy to make into a chorus girl, yourself,” growled the giant, looking at the Scot’s freckled homeliness.

Benson looked at the two, and the byplay stopped.

“All of you,” said The Avenger, “be on the alert as you never have before. We don’t know yet who our enemies are, but we do know they are as clever as Satan himself. Any one of us who relaxes his guard for a moment, will probably die for it.”