Benson exchanged phones and after just a moment he said into Nellie’s wire:
“We won’t be out for a little while, at that, Nellie. Stay around there and see if the mystery car is driven out. It probably won’t be. They’d only try to move that, late at night. But if it is, trail it. I’ll get in touch with you quite soon.”
For what Mac had said, that which had decided The Avenger to go to join him first, concerned the fellow who had shut Benson in the ray box.
“I found which mon on the skeleton force in the stock room wasn’t home night before last, Muster Benson,” Mac had said. “I was hangin’ around his roomin’ house and saw him come out, awhile ago. I trailed him, thinkin’ he’d be goin’ to work at the plant. But he didn’t. He went to the Grosse Pointe home of Sigmund Ormsdale, and as far as I can tell he’s in there now.”
An ordinary workman — in working clothes that had led Mac to think he was going to the plant — had called on a multimillionaire and apparently had been admitted freely! Mechanics don’t call much on millionaires. Especially when the mechanic is employed by a rival manufacturer.
It was this inconsistency that had narrowed The Avenger’s colorless but brilliant eyes.
“We’ll be out as soon as we can make it, Mac. Stay where you are and see if the workman leaves.”
“O. K., chief,” said Mac. “But here’s somethin’ funny. It looks like the servants are all gone from the place. I guess Ormsdale, himself, must have let the mon in.”
That was funny. Benson looked very thoughtful about it, all the way out to Grosse Pointe.
Mac stepped from a doorway, sunk in a high stone wall, as they neared the Ormsdale place. Smitty parked the car, and they went on foot from there.
“He’s still in the house?” asked Benson. Smitty looked at the colorless, deadly eyes and found himself glad he was not the man who had locked Benson in the ray box. Not if The Avenger ever got his hands on him.
“As far as I know, he is,” said Mac. “But, of course, it’s hard to watch four sides of a place at once. I think, though, that only one mon came out. A chauffeur drove out in a town car a few minutes ago—”
Benson’s eyes flared. Mac said hastily:
“I think it was a chauffeur. The getup was all right. Should I have traced him?”
“You couldn’t have, Mac,” said Benson. “Not and watch the house at the same time. But I have a hunch we won’t find our man.”
Mac had been right about the servants. There were none in evidence. Benson and Mac and Smitty went to the rear door, where Benson opened the lock in short order. They went in.
Not only were there no servants there. Nobody at all was in the place, including Ormsdale. Yet, just before they had entered, Benson’s quick eyes had seen a trace of life.
A faint plume of smoke came from one of the chimneys.
He set out to find the source of that plume, searching through the basement. They found it by feel — one of several metal cases enclosing such things as furnace and air-conditioning unit and water heater and incinerator.
The one that was hot was the latter. Benson opened the incinerator door, and there still were sparks in its bed. Sparks and ashes and a couple of metallic things.
The ashes had a barely perceptible stripe through a few sections large enough to tell what the burned stuff had been. The thing burned had been striped fabric — such as material from which a shopman’s dungarees are made. And the metallic things were buttons.
“Well!” said Smitty, eyes bulging. “This would seem to tie Ormsdale into the thing! A man from Marr’s plant comes here like he’s an old friend, burns a suit of dungarees in Ormsdale’s furnace, and then takes Ormsdale’s car and drives away in Ormsdale’s chauffeur’s livery to safety.”
“Whoosh!” said Mac. “But Ormsdale’s a big mon.”
“What’s the burned clothes doing here if he isn’t part of it?” snapped Smitty.
But then both looked at Benson, who had said nothing. The Avenger’s eyes, like chromium chips in his face, were brooding, almost veiled.
“Say Ormsdale is mixed up in it,” he said slowly, at last. “Say he has that Marr man in his secret employ. It certainly wouldn’t be smart to let the man come here in broad daylight, and then to let him burn his disguise in his own furnace.”
“Maybe ’tis not smart,” said Mac, “but that’s what seems to have been done. The case is closed, I’d say. Ormsdale is our mon, and he ought to be jailed for life.”
Smitty started to agree, but didn’t get any words out.
The Avenger had suddenly taken the tiny earphone of his belt radio out and was holding it to his ear.
“Chief,” came Nellie’s voice again. “Chief, I just saw Robert Mantis. I was in a store near that garage, watching it like you said. I saw Mantis drive past, and stop down the street. He’s sitting in his car, now, as if waiting for someone. I can see him through the window— No, no! He’s going in.”
“In where?” snapped Benson.
Through the earphone came the answer.
“A grocery store. L. M. Monard is the name—”
“We’ll be there!” said Benson.
CHAPTER XVII
Prisoner’s Base
When Benson said at once, he meant almost literally that. The spot from which Nellie had radioed was less than two miles from Ormsdale’s mansion.
The three were out of the house, in their car and at the grocery store of L. M. Monard, near Jefferson Avenue, in a shade over five minutes.
Which was not fast enough to intercept Mantis. Not then. That came a very few minutes later.
“A young fellow came in here a moment ago,” said Benson to the grocer, showing his secret-service badge. He described Mantis. “What did he buy?”
“He didn’t buy anything,” said the grocer, sounding kind of sore about it. “He just used that phone. People, they come in a lot to use my phone. They must think I’m a public—”
Benson wasn’t waiting to hear the rest. He was dialing operator.
He traced the call.
Cole Wilson, Shelton Arms Apartments, Jefferson Avenue.
“And now,” said The Avenger, eyes like bits of cold steel, “we may be getting somewhere!”
At least, they got to the Shelton Arms.
The building was small and had no lobby or man in attendance. But there was a little vestibule between street and inner door. There, a locked door barred you from the wide hall leading past first-floor apartments to the automatic elevators.
The vestibule door yielded to The Avenger’s touch with magic swiftness. Then Mac and Smitty and Benson stepped inside.
Dick Benson’s pale, all-seeing eyes swept over the triple row of mailboxes with the tenants’ names under them.
Cole Wilson was on the fourth floor. A Mr. and Mrs. Altmeyer were on his right; a Miss Vole on his left. Over him was a vacant apartment, according to the blank in the name plates.
The three went upstairs to the fourth floor, because the sound of an elevator can be a warning sometimes.
They went noiselessly toward Cole Wilson’s door, and they began hearing voices when they were still several yards away.
They heard a loud, angry voice, then a softer mumble as another voice replied.
They reached the door, and all three could hear. The loud voice was that of Robert Mantis. They hadn’t heard his voice very much, but he was being so emphatic in there that they couldn’t mistake it. The softer voice presumably was Cole Wilson’s.
“Tell me where Jackson is,” the loud voice of Mantis was rapping out, “or I’ll beat your head off.”
The three in the hall looked at each other. This sounded hot.