Free The Avenger 21 - The Happy Killers by Kenneth Robeson

of life, and, seemingly, everywhere on earth. This time it was the head of a real-estate firm he sought out.
    The man’s name was Warbough. He was about sixty and shrewd-looking. He was overjoyed to see Benson.
    “Dick! Come in! What can I do for you?”
    “I want to know who owns a certain piece of property out near the end of Long Island,” Benson said. He pored over real-estate-subdivision maps which Warbough spread out for him and located the plot on which was the ancient building where he and Mac had nearly been fried.
    “That one,” he said.
    Warbough looked up in a book the number printed on the plot. “It belongs to an amusement corporation,” he said. Then he laughed. “That is, if anyone on earth but you asked the question, that would be the answer. And it’s true. But the amusement corporation is one man—a very big shot indeed. William Xenan, to be exact.”
    “Xenan!” exclaimed Mac. “Why, that’s Brown’s ex-partner.”
    “Yes,” said Warbough. “The famous Mr. Xenan. I guess he bought the property intending to expand it. But now he’s worth twenty or thirty million dollars, and it’s too small to bother with. I guess he’s even forgotten he owns it, by now.”
    The Avenger didn’t say anything, but the look in his ice-pale eyes seemed to indicate a wonder as to whether or not the wealthy Mr. Xenan really had forgotten it.
    It was a few minutes later that Josh’s guarded words came over The Avenger’s belt radio.
    “I followed Brown. He left a few minutes after you did, and went to Westchester. Great big home. Makes his own house look like somebody’s garage. The name of the man who owns the house is Xenan. I’m going to try to find out what goes on.”
    The radio went dead.

CHAPTER IX

Blond Ingrate
    Brown had been in a hurry when he left his house. He’d gone like the wind to the great home from which Josh furtively reported. Josh had had the devil of a time keeping him in sight. Brown’s stop in Xenan’s gravel driveway was so abrupt that the tires of his car had slid a dozen yards.
    Josh left his car half a block down and went toward the Xenan grounds like a black shadow in the black night. He reached the hedge just in time to see Brown hurrying in the doorway, and passing a surprised-looking servant. It was then that he’d radioed Benson.
    After that, Josh squeezed through the hedge and went toward the house.
    Halfway there, he stopped, and his head went back in a strained, listening way. He thought for a minute that he had heard something that he distinctly did not want to hear. A high, thin laugh from somewhere in the blackness beyond the house.
    He listened for a full minute, with sweat cold on the palms of his hands. But he didn’t hear it again. He decided that he hadn’t heard it in the first place. It had been so faint, it must have been his imagination.
    He went on to the house.
    Xenan’s house was a mansion. It must have had forty rooms in it, Josh decided. He wanted to overhear what Brown and Xenan were talking about; but he didn’t see how he was going to know which of the many chambers they were in without getting into the house himself.
    That looked harder than getting into the Bank of England.
    Then Josh saw light blaze in a series of windows on the first floor and to the left. He went there and looked in a window that had countless small panes, leaded, like the windows of a church.
    He was looking into a sort of lounging room. Probably it was considered small in this place of vast drawing rooms and reception halls; but it was big enough to effectively dwarf the two men in it.
    These two men were Brown and a fellow a bit younger, with iron-gray streaks in dark, bushy hair, and with a hawk nose and ruthless jaw that proclaimed him as the mansion’s owner, William Xenan. You could look at that powerfully chiseled face and see how the man had risen in six short years from being Dillingham Brown’s well-to-do partner to being one of the richest men in