Free The Avenger 9 - Tuned for Murder by Kenneth Robeson

gaily to the table where the two women sat. Mrs. Cranlowe introduced Nellie.
    “Oh, yes, I noticed Miss Lang this afternoon!” Robert Cranlowe said easily. It took a minute for Nellie to remember that that was her pseudonym. “It is a real pleasure to meet you, Miss Lang. I hope you’ll be in Garfield City for quite a while. You are staying at the same building as Mrs. Cranlowe?”
    Nellie assured him that she was. She was very nice about it, too. She might get information from the inventor’s son as well as the inventor’s wife, though she already was sure the information would be innocently given. She was quite sure neither the woman nor young man had any crookedness in them.
    “Can we take you anywhere in my car?” asked Robert Cranlowe.
    Nellie smilingly shook her head. The two bade her a pleasant farewell, and drove away. Nellie watched them from the curb for a moment, then turned to walk back to the building. It was only a short distance, so she went along with no haste. Once in her room she would communicate with the chief over the marvelously effective little radio Smitty had devised, and with which each aide of The Avenger’s was always equipped.
    A long way behind her, and very cleverly, a man stalked her as a hunter stalks an animal.
    He was the young fellow with the old eyes. In those eyes, now, was speculation—and murder. He trailed her to the building entrance, then hurried to a phone booth from which he could still see the building and make sure Nellie didn’t get out again without his knowledge.
    “Kopell?” he muttered into the phone. “Something new on this, I think.”
    “You mean on the Cranlowe dame?”
    “Yeah! She’s got a new friend awful fast. A swell-looking little blonde. She checked into the building just before dinner, and got talking to the Cranlowe dame. I thought it was pretty fast, and I thought it was pretty smooth. But I wasn’t sure it meant anything, till a while ago. Then I saw the two of ’em go out to put on the feed bag together.”
    “So?” said the smooth, oily voice at the other end of the wire.
    “Well, look,” said the young fellow. “The blonde could be with some other mob that we don’t know about, couldn’t she? She could be shining up to Cranlowe’s wife on a new angle we ain’t hep to yet, couldn’t she?”
    The logic of this was admitted, too.
    “So, maybe—” said the young man with the old eyes, reaching mechanically a little way toward his automatic.
    “Be on the lookout,” said the oily voice. “Don’t take the chance, yet. But be ready to with one funny move.”
    The young man with the ancient eyes patted his shoulder holster.
    “You bet,” he said, mouth like a thin gash in his flinty countenance.

CHAPTER X

Two Faces of Death!
    Death’s face loomed close in that dark basement under the left wing of the Cranlowe castle.
    There was the cellar room, perhaps forty by sixty feet, illuminated only by an unshaded electric bulb at each end. There was the curious chasm running through the center, lengthwise; beginning with a mere crack in the earth at one end of the basement, broadening to ten-foot width in the center, and narrowing to a crack again at the other end.
    And there, on the brink, was the man pretending to be John Blandell, with two men gripping each arm.
    “Have you anything to say before you’re thrown in there?” snapped Cranlowe.
    “Just this,” said Benson quietly. “I’m a friend, not an enemy. I came out here to help you.”
    “You sneaked out, made up as an old friend of mine and worked your way in here like a snake into a hole—because you wanted to ‘help’ me?” jeered Cranlowe. “That’s a good one! You came out here to steal my secret. And now you’re going to pay for it with your life. But I’ll take last messages, if you like.”
    “There are no last messages,” said Benson steadily.
    The cold wind from the river, far below, was dank on his made-up, paralyzed face. The four men looked at