The jolly-looking fat man at the wheel of the truck chuckled a little. Then he backed the truck, heavy iron bumper-guard bent like a pretzel, from the water’s edge.
He ran back up the road to the gully, to see what had happened to the three men there; and, arriving, picked up their unconscious forms and put them in the truck. He went to the main highway and gathered up the false detour sign and the thug who had hidden it in the woods as soon as it had performed its task of turning Benson onto the side road.
Then, with all loose ends neatly gathered up, the fat man drove back to the penthouse apartment in Garfield City to collect the huge sum offered for killing The Avenger and his helpers.
Bit money! Easy money! The fat man chuckled as he thought just how easy it had been.
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.