“Yeah! And that’s why we get such heavy dough if we manage it,” said the fat man. “Believe me, we’ll have earned it!”
“Aw, we can’t miss, the way Kopell’s planned it,” said Gargantua. “But hadn’t we better get goin’?”
The fat man looked with deadly eyes at his watch.
“Yeah! Take us about fifteen minutes to get out there, and a couple more to fix things for ’em.”
They piled out of the room and down to the street. There, a heavy closed truck waited for them. Two got in the cab, and the other three in the rear. In the closed back of the truck there was a freshly painted detour sign.
The sign read:
ROUTE 232 CLOSED
TURN RIGHT FOR GARFIELD CITY
TEMPORARY 232
The sign was nailed to a sawhorse of the type used by road gangs, ready to be placed.
The truck drove out of town, and four miles along the main route. There it dropped the sign and one of the men.
The truck turned back a quarter of a mile, passing a narrow dirt road to the right as it did so. It went on just a little farther to a lane to the right. The lane was hardly more than a pair of ruts running through woods. But the truck took it for five or six hundred yards, and then stopped. Ahead could barely be seen still another road. Beyond the road was a sheer drop into deep, still water.
“I’ll stick at the wheel,” said the fat man. “You three go on to the point you know about, with the tommy guns. We’ll get ’em comin’ or goin’. Doesn’t matter which.”
The three took up submachine guns and crept through the woods. There was a place where two big dead trees had fallen into a V. Anyhow, they looked as if they had fallen till you examined them carefully. Then it became clear that they had been felled that way, recently.
The three squatted behind the barricade and poked the snouts of their guns out. The section of road the guns covered had suffered a recent washout. There was a gully, littered with stone, over which a car would have to creep at a bare five or six miles an hour.
Gargantua grinned over his gun-sights.
“I don’t care if the white-headed guy is all the things you say he is. Brother, nobody could get out of this!”
“And if they did,” added the man with the narrow jaw, “nobody could get out of the second installment. How deep did you say that lake in the old quarry is?”
“Sixty-eight feet deep, in close to the road,” said the evil-eyed youngster. “Out further, maybe a hundred. Nobody knows.”
“So they go out in a bust of tommy slugs,” grinned Gargantua, “or they feed the fish, seventy feet down. Either way we get our dough from Kopell. Easy!”
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?”