The Avenger 9 - Tuned for Murder by Kenneth Robeson Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    Strange things happening in Garfield City. Grim things. There seemed no sense to them. Certainly there seemed no central, connecting thread of meaning. But one thing might have been gleaned from all of them, had an observer known all the facts and had wit enough to put them together.
    Each occurrence was in some way tied in with Jesse Cranlowe, eccentric, famous inventor.
    The old man had driven Cranlowe’s station wagon to deliver his plea for money to Jenner.
    Jenner had substituted a freshly tooled die for an old one—to fit the press punching out a part of Cranlowe’s torpedo control.
    And the girl who had stepped into thin air, twenty-four floors up, happened to be Cranlowe’s private secretary, on an errand in town for the inventor.
    All concerned with Cranlowe.

    At about that hour, when the street in front of the Woolens Institute Building was being roped off and cleaned up, a Negro girl and a blonde were reporting to a man with snow-white hair and a dead, waxlike face from which colorless eyes peered forth like chips of ice. That is, they were going to report for duty as soon as the man came into the room. Meanwhile, the blonde stared up at the good-natured moon face of a giant whose torso was so muscled that his arms couldn’t hang straight at his sides.
    “Good heavens!” exclaimed Nellie Gray to Smitty. “You mean to say the car was knocked over into seventy feet of water with you four in it?”
    “That’s right,” said Smitty. He didn’t grin outwardly as he stared down at her, but he grinned inwardly, enjoying her amazement.
    “Well, how in the world is it that you’re alive?”
    “We turned mermen,” said Smitty.
    Nellie Gray stamped her small foot. “You big, dumb lug—”
    “Don’t let him get you down,” smiled the pretty Negress, in a soft-cultured voice. She was Rosabel Newton, Josh’s wife. She, too, was a valued aide of the Avenger.
    “How did you get out of that one?” snapped Nellie.
    Smitty let his grin show on his lips, then. The tiny blonde usually led him around by the nose like a captive elephant. He enjoyed