“It was smart figuring on Demmy’s part. By knocking off her husband Jessie could come into a half million or so. Then Lois happened to see Jessie with Demetros and questioned her. That made Lois next on her list. I didn’t know the reason when I went after Lois and Jessie today, but I knew Jessie was desperate and I wasn’t taking chances on Lois being the next victim.”
“That all sounds pretty straight,” said Boston. “But where’d this guy Renfrew fit into the picture?”
“Renfrew finally figured out Wes Peters’ soft thing, or maybe he didn’t see it until after we told him about it. Anyway, he suddenly got the bright idea of taking up where Wes left off, not knowing that Demetros had shuffled a new deal. Renfrew phoned Jessie to put the squeeze on her. Which signed his death warrant. Demetros got to him and told him a few things and then Renfrew got panicky and wanted to come to me, to blow up the thing and save his life. So Demmy killed him.”
“Uh-huh,” said Boston. “What about Lois’ romance you busted up?”
Quade’s ears turned red. “Why, she gave me an invitation to come out some time — What the hell you grinning about, you big ape?”
“Nothing,” said Boston, his face as sober as a Kansas prohibitionist’s.
Death Sits Down
It was dark in the stock room. The murderer pulled on a string that dangled before him and a bulb overhead bathed him with yellow, malignant light. The murderer wanted his victim to see his face before he struck.
The murderer said, “Do you know who I am, John Hocker?”
John Hocker lifted his scared face from the rifle that was pressing into his stomach and looked into the face of the murderer. He gasped. “You! How did you get here?”
“That’s too long a story to tell,” replied the murderer. “In about ten minutes things are going to happen in the plant of the Bartlett Cash Register Company and my presence will be required to play an active part in those things. I thought, though, that I’d kill you first.”
John Hocker trembled even more than he had when the murderer had stepped out of the deeper gloom of an aisle a moment ago and thrust the gun into his middle. “You can’t kill me!” he cried, hysterically. “I’ve never done anything to you. There’s no reason—”
“There are half a million reasons,” said the murderer. “All of them dollars.”
Then he pulled the trigger and the steel-jacketed slug tore into John Hocker’s entrails, smashed his spine and thudded into a packing case behind, where it hit a cash register and made a metallic “ting.”
Hocker was dead before his body thudded to the concrete floor. But, just to make sure, the murderer put the rifle to the dead man’s head and pulled the trigger a second time.
Then he walked coolly to another aisle. He lifted a board from a packing case and stuck the rifle into the box. He then peeled off a cheap pair of canvas gloves and tossed them in on top of the rifle. After that he replaced the board on the case.
He moved unhurriedly. The two rifle shots had made plenty of noise but the doors of the stock room were thick. And the murderer knew that no one should be in adjoining rooms. Everyone in the great plant of the Bartlett Cash Register Company should be elsewhere at this moment. For the reason the murderer had hinted to John Hocker before he had blasted him into eternity.
The joke was really on Oliver Quade. Only he didn’t know it. He thought it was on the employees of the Bartlett Cash Register Company. A couple of hundred of them were gathered in the big plant recreation room.
Quade chuckled as he climbed up on a bench and looked out over a sea of faces. They thought he was going to entertain them. Well, he was, but they were going to pay for it. He didn’t know what these two hundred men knew.
He began talking in his normal speaking voice. It was like the roar of an angry surf.
“I’m Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia,” Quade boomed. “I have the greatest brain in the country. I know the answers to all questions. I know physics as well as Einstein, I know history better than Ridpath and I know more about economics than Professor Lemo.
“What? You don’t believe it? Try me out. Ask me a question, someone. On any subject. History, science, mathematics, sports… You!” He stabbed a forefinger at an open-mouthed worker. “Ask me any question, sir — about the cash register business, if you like.”
The man flushed at being singled out of the crowd, but he attempted a swagger. “Uh, all right, who invented the cash register?”
“James Ritty, of Ohio,” Quade shot back. “He received a patent for it in 1879. Someone else now, ask me any question.”
“Who was Robert Raikes?” someone yelled.
Quade grinned. “The father of the Sunday School. He started the first one in Gloucester, England, in 1780… Next!”
“What is aphasia?” someone asked.
“Speechlessness.”
Then came a good one. “What is althing?”
Quade threw up his hands. “I defy anyone but the asker to answer that one. Is althing something to eat, wear, ride, or is it a city, river or mountain?”
Three or four persons made guesses but Quade shook his head each time.
“Althing is the name for the parliament of the Kingdom of Iceland. It was formed in the year 930 and has been in existence ever since except for a short period from 1798 to 1874.”
The questions came fast and furious after that. And Quade shot back the answers. The working men asked the distance to the sun and moon, the batting averages of different baseball players; historical dates and scientific questions. Quade answered them all. Then suddenly he called a dramatic halt.
“That’ll be all the questions for the moment. Now, I’ll show you how you can all learn for yourselves the answers to questions anyone can put to you.” He stopped and opened a valise. He brought out a thick volume and waved it aloft. “It’s all here, the knowledge of the ages, condensed, classified. The Compendium of Human Knowledge, the greatest, most authoritative—”
Then a bell drowned out Oliver Quade’s voice. It roared its stentorian metallic clangor in the recreation room and in every room and building of the huge Bartlett Cash Register Company plant.
Quade scowled and waited for the noise to subside. It didn’t for a full thirty seconds. By then Quade had lost his audience. The two-hundred-odd men in the room had gathered into clumps and when the bell stopped they all seemed to be talking at once, loudly.
Quade caught two words. He leaped down and caught a man’s arm. “What do you mean—‘sit down’?”
“That bell,” the man replied. “We been waitin’ for it. It’s the signal for our strike. We’re sitting down now — until we win!”
Quade gasped. “Sit-down strike! You mean everyone here’s going to sit down?”
“You bet; three hundred of us. And a thousand outside, to make sure no damn strike breakers get in here.”
“Excuse me,” said Quade. “I just remembered I’ve got to see a dog about a man.” He tossed the book into his valise, caught it up and left the building hurriedly.
Then he saw the reason for the throngs that had been on the street outside, a half hour ago, when he’d entered the plant of the Bartlett Cash Register Company. They were strikers. They carried placards now, all reading:
BARTLETT CASH REGISTER COMPANY
ON STRIKE
There were plenty of men inside the grounds. None molested Quade. Not until he got near the front gate. He found it closed, locked with a padlock. “Hey,” he said to a man standing nearby. “I’ve got to get outside.”