The Avenger 9 - Tuned for Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

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