The Avenger 23 - The Wilder Curse (5 page)

Marsden was a tall, thin individual, plainly about as old as the other two, but with coal-black hair. Maybe the hair was dyed, and maybe it wasn’t; but its presence on a head that had seen at least sixty summers gave a preserved, unhealthy look.

Jones always looked bland and good-natured. Marsden always looked gloomy and sad. He looked sadder than ever, now, as he blurted, “You two hear about Phelan?”

Amos Jones nodded. Sillers barked. “What
is
this about Phelan? You said he was dead, Amos. All right, he’s dead. What’s the rest of it?”

“The rest,” said Marsden sadly, “is that he seems to have died just as Carl Foley died.”

Andrew Sillers’s clawlike hand went to his lips and trembled there, then slowly came down again as he achieved a hard-won self-control. The other two stared curiously at his greenish color.

“The news upset me, too,” Marsden said slowly. “And I suppose it upset Amos. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have come here at dawn, as I did. But I don’t think it hit either of us as hard as it seems to be hitting you. Why, Andrew?”

“Yes,” said Jones. “Why? Do you know something about this stuff that we don’t? Are you holding something back?”

“I d-don’t know anything that you don’t,” stuttered Sillers.

“We know nothing at all,” Jones said. “Carl was murdered, and we naturally felt that there was a slight possibility of danger to others in the Thornton Heights set-up. Then an engineer is murdered, the same as Carl, and naturally we are pretty disturbed. Now, it’s a certainty that something pretty bad is hanging around Thornton Heights. And who knows where it will stop? Maybe another partner or two might be . . . er . . . eliminated. But as for
knowing
anything—no, we don’t know any more than the police.”

“But
you
seem to,” said Marsden. “Come on—out with it. What does this business mean to you that it doesn’t to us?”

Sillers stared at them without seeing them. And near the bathroom, for just an instant, he seemed to hear that damned noise again.

This time, however, it was
surely
imagination, because neither Jones nor Marsden gave any indication of hearing it.

Sillers tried evading a direct issue.

“Look,” he said, after clearing his throat, “do you suppose anyone around here could be keeping . . . pigs?”

“Pigs?”
echoed Jones.

“Pigs!”
exploded Marsden. “In Thornton Heights? Or anywhere around Thornton Heights? You’re mad, Andrew!”

“I just asked,” said Sillers hastily. “I’ve heard that sometimes people keep chickens in city backyards, or pigeons in city attics. I just wondered—”

“What do you think this is?” said Marsden. “A farm—or a city sub-division?”

At a strangled sound from beside him, Marsden whirled quickly.

“What on earth’s wrong with
you?”
he snapped to Jones.

The bland, pink man had his mouth open, and his face was paler than the other two partners had ever seen it. His eyes were wide and sightless for a moment, and his hand went to his lips as Sillers’s had done a moment ago.

“What’s
wrong
with you?” Marsden repeated.

“Eh?” said Jones, in a high falsetto. Then he laughed a little, eyes still wide. “Wrong with me? Nothing. Why?”

“You certainly look like something’s wrong. Did I say something to upset you?”

“Upset me?” parrotted Jones. He laughed again. “No. Of course not. I . . . I felt queer for a minute. I think my heart’s not what it ought to be. I think I’d better see a doctor about it. Have a little spell once in a while.”

Marsden looked in a puzzled way at Sillers, then impatiently looked away. There were two terrified men here, now, where there’d been but one before. And the expression on Marsden’s face was one of bewilderment that there should be any terror at all.

Fear, yes. Two men had been murdered in this exclusive seven-block square. But not naked terror such as had ridden in Sillers’s eyes and now showed also in Jones’s.

Sillers, for his part, didn’t notice Marsden’s glance at all. He was staring at Jones.

Amos Jones had a heart as sound as a new dollar watch. Sillers knew that. There was nothing the matter with his heart. Therefore, he had been seized that way because of something Marsden had said.

Sillers knew what that was!

Marsden jerked the attention of his two partners back to the matter in hand.

“There have been two particularly nasty murders here in Thornton Heights,” he said tartly. “This has always been a most respectable neighborhood. We have a high grade of tenants. They won’t like this. One more such occurrence, and some will start moving out.”

He sounded like a schoolteacher scolding a bad child. Murder, it seemed, was most annoying to Marsden.

“The question is, what can we do to prevent more trouble? That’s what I came here to talk about, Andrew. I suppose that is what Amos came for, too.”

Jones nodded his head.

“So—what do we do?”

They talked it over at length, and finally, at Marsden’s suggestion, it was decided to hire fifty men out of a well-known private-detective agency as special police.

Sillers gave the matter his approval, but in his eyes was a look of somber skepticism. He looked, in brief, as if he believed that fifty thousand special police would not be able to prevent more trouble.

Amos Jones looked the same way. Sillers kept glancing at him out of the corners of his eyes. Had he heard that noise, too, when he turned so pale? Sounds that might have been made by pigs?

Sillers decided he had not. Even in Sillers’s imagination, the noise had not sounded at that particular moment. No, it was what Marsden had said that had drained the blood from Jones’s face, though Marsden himself hadn’t seemed to be affected by its significance.

Josh Newton was another of The Avenger’s aides. He was a tall, gangling, sleepy-eyed Negro. He looked as if he didn’t have wit enough to come in out of the rain. Actually, he had a brain as sharp as a scalpel and was an honor graduate of Tuskegee Institute.

His voice was crisp and incisive as he picked up the phone at the big desk in Bleek Street and dialed a number.

“Acme Exterminator Co.?” he said. Then: “I would like to speak to the representative of your company who takes care of Thornton Heights.”

Nellie and Smitty were in the vast top-floor room, too. They looked at each other.

“Calling exterminator companies now, Josh?” said Smitty. “What you got—ants in the belfry?”

But at this moment, someone must have come to the phone on the other end and must have said his name was Fowler.

“You call on Thornton Heights, Mr. Fowler? . . . You do. I am calling for Mr. Richard Benson, and I would like to ask if Mr. Timothy Phelan, assistant engineer at Thornton Heights, got in touch with you yesterday at any time . . . He didn’t? . . . No call from Thornton Heights in the last month? . . . Thank you.”

“What,” said Nellie, as Josh hung up, “goes on?” The tiny blonde had a curiosity large enough for Smitty, and it was all too seldom satisfied around here.

Josh grinned at her. “I don’t know. The chief said he saw a notation at Thornton Heights last night to get in touch with the Acme Exterminator Co. It was on the desk of the murdered man, Tim Phelan. It was in Phelan’s handwriting; he knew that because there was a boiler report next to it in the same hand and signed by Phelan. So the chief told me to get in touch with the company and see what he had to say to them.”

Smitty shook his head wonderingly.

“I was in that office, too. I didn’t notice any such notation. And I don’t remember that the chief looked around the desk much.”

“You wouldn’t notice a two-headed pony if it didn’t kick you,” jeered little Nellie. “The chief has eyes all around his head and a memory like a roll of film.”

The Avenger came into the huge room in time to prevent an explosive retort on the part of the giant. He came from the direction of his private laboratory, which was one of the world’s finest, so Smitty guessed he had been studying the slug he’d dug out of the wall of Moran’s office before leaving. The bullet that had torn through the chair instead of through Dick.

The Avenger’s colorless, icy eyes flicked toward Josh.

“No call from Phelan,” Josh reported.

Dick Benson sat down behind the big desk. At first, the rest thought they’d get no hint of why the call had been made. But, for once, The Avenger thought audibly. And after he had done so, Smitty and Nellie realized they should have had the same thoughts—
if
they’d had the concentration to notice the notation on Phelan’s desk in the first place.

“Then Phelan had just made note of it,” mused Benson, “meaning to call, first thing in the morning. He must have jotted it down very shortly before he was murdered. Why? He must have seen or heard vermin.”

He dialed the Thornton Heights office. The others heard a feminine voice answer.

“Are the Thornton Heights buildings much troubled by insect pests?” Dick asked.

“Why, of course not!” the girl said indignantly. “You won’t find a single—”

“This is an official call,” Dick said evenly.

There was a pause, then a change in the girl’s tone.

“Every large building in every city has a few roaches and silverfish,” said the girl. “We have our share. No more.”

“Have you had more than the usual number of complaints from your central building, the one in which your offices are located?”

“No, sir,” said the girl. “This building is exceptionally free at the moment.”

“How about mice or rats?”

“There we have a clean slate,” said the girl. “These buildings are of the best construction. There hasn’t been a complaint of that nature for years. Three years, to be exact.”

The Avenger hung up.

“It wasn’t insect vermin he wanted to report,” he mused. “There aren’t any to speak of. So it wasn’t anything he saw. It must have been something he heard—like a sound of mice or rats. But there are none of those, either.”

He said no more, but it wasn’t necessary to say more. The others understood plainly enough.

What Phelan had heard just before he was killed was a sound made by his approaching murderer. A sound, probably, like that made by rats.

An animal sound.

And his body looked as if wolves or something had worked on it.

Fergus MacMurdie and Cole Wilson came in, obviously in answer to a recent summons to headquarters.

MacMurdie was as tall as Josh Newton and almost as thin. He had feet almost as big. His ears were bigger, sticking out like sails from his sandy-haired head. He had bleak, bitter blue eyes under sandy ropes of eyebrows and a raw, freckled skin. But while he would never win a beauty prize, he had won all sorts of reprieves from death with his strength, quickness and general fighting ability.

“Raring to go, chief,” said Wilson impulsively. “What’s the job you want done?”

It would be Cole Wilson who blurted out something. He was the latest member of the little band and the most impulsive. He lived for action, looked it and could move like chain lightning. He had the sharp features and slanting forehead of an Indian, and his hair was heavy and dark and had never known a hat.

“Have you read up on the Foley murder?” Dick Benson asked them.

“We’ve read what there was to rrread,” burred Mac. “It wasn’t much. Partner in Thornton Heights killed late one night in his own office. Murderer must be some 1942 Jack the Ripper, from the way the body looked. Leaves a widow—second wife—and a nephew.”

The Avenger nodded.

“Better have a talk with the widow and the nephew,” he said to them.

The unfortunate Carl Foley had not lived in his own development. His home, a big gray stone house with newly installed iron bars over the basement and first-floor windows, was a mile from Thornton Heights.

Wilson looked at those bars as the two men approached the front door. They were an inch thick, and the cement and lead in which they were set still gleamed pale and fresh.

“Foley was certainly scared of something, just before he died,” Wilson observed.

Then the door was opening for them. A trim maid said she’d tell Mrs. Foley they wanted to see her.

Mrs. Foley came immediately into the rather musty drawing room of the house. She looked inquiringly at them. She was under thirty and wore a most attractive gray negligée which set off her dark hair. She had beautiful greenish eyes which instantly gave MacMurdie, who was completely woman-proof, the conviction that she wasn’t to be trusted as far as he could throw a locomotive.

“You are special police, or something?” she asked, in a wan, sad voice. Instinctively, she addressed her words to Cole Wilson, who was as darkly presentable as Mac was homely.

“Special police,” said Wilson. Which was the truth. All the members of Justice, Inc. held special cards from the police departments of a dozen big cities. “We wanted to ask you a few questions about Mr. Foley, if you can take them.”

She waved a limp and beautiful hand to indicate that she would manage to bear up under questioning.

“We noticed thick steel bars, newly installed at the lower windows,” said Wilson. “Was Mr. Foley afraid he would meet some untimely end?”