The Avenger 10 - The Smiling Dogs (6 page)

The gray steel bar of a man with the paralyzed face began to pace slowly up and down the room. Even in this unconsidered, leisurely movement, there was revealed a bit of the enormous physical power compacted in that average-sized body.

“Burnside and Cutten, from Montana,” he mused, “have frequented Dr. Fram’s office. So have Senators Hornblow, Wade and Collendar. It just happens that all those men are outstanding in one field of government activity: soil conservation. They are leaders in reforestation projects, dam building, prevention of erosion. It was Burnside and Cutten, in fact, who sponsored the bill, ten years ago, making Bison a national park.”

Mac spoke up then. “We heard something that might interest you, Muster Benson. In Bison Park there are known deposits of helium. Did ye know that?”

“Yes,” said Benson, “I knew that”

Mac subsided. Would he never learn, he asked himself bitterly, that The Avenger apparently knew everything about everything?

Benson went to the phone and called his personal headquarters in New York.

In a tremendous top-floor room there, a diminutive blonde whose eyes were fogged at the moment with sleep took the call. This was Nellie Gray, fifth of Benson’s assistants.

“Nellie,” said Benson, “there is a well-known psychiatrist by the name of Fram maintaining offices in New York. He is in Washington at the moment, but New York is his home. The offices are closed while he is away. I want you to go through them and make a copy of any records having to do with Senators Collendar, Wade, Hornblow, Burnside and Cutten.”

There was no sleep in Nellie Gray’s voice when she snapped back: “And anything else that looks as if it might be important?”

“And anything else that looks important,” agreed The Avenger.

“Do you want me to come down to Washington personally with any information I might pick up?” asked Nellie Gray wistfully. She was pint-sized, but always spoiling for action. And she wasn’t getting any at the moment.

“I’ll talk to you later,” said Benson.

He hung up. From his pocket he drew the folded bit of paper that had been taken from the wallet of Sheriff Aldershot. “Smitty, you’ve dabbled with code. I haven’t been able to get very far with this. See if you can do anything with it.”

“If you haven’t unscrambled it,” said the giant, “I can predict right now what luck
I’ll
have with it. About as much as a herring in a den of cats.”

The Avenger put on his hat, an ordinary-looking felt which was not ordinary at all. Through crown and brim were laced scores of fine wires which would take and hold any shape into which the hat was molded.

“Going out?” said Mac. “Want me to go along with ye, chief?”

Benson shook his head. “I’ll go alone.”

He went out. Smitty began poring over the exasperating code message that looked so simple but was so stubborn about being decoded.

“7 7 6 39 4 7 3 2 7 7 9 0 0 0 7 7 9 82 46 38 10 1 9 47 6 7 7 84 0 1 1 50,” he read aloud. “Now isn’t that a pretty dish to set before a guy at three thirty in the morning?”

Benson went to F Street, to the address of a certain veterinarian.

The Avenger’s mind at times seemed to be a mechanical combination of camera and filing cabinet. This was one of the times. He had had one glimpse of a veterinarian’s bill on the anteroom desk of Dr. Fram. In that glimpse he had noted the name of the vet, Albert Quinn, the address on F Street, and the amount of the bill, ten dollars.

An examination of the phone book had revealed that Quinn had his dog-and-cat hospital out in Chevy Chase. But he maintained this office near the downtown section as his headquarters.

Like a gray shadow, The Avenger drifted to the doorway of the office. There wasn’t a soul around at this dawn hour.

The place was a small store, or had been designed as a store originally. The window had been made opaque, with lettering on it stating Quinn’s profession. Benson looked at the lock for a moment.

There wasn’t a lock made that The Avenger couldn’t pick, given time. This one required hardly any time at all—about a minute and a half. He opened the door soundlessly and stepped in.

There were a few whines and whimpers from cages in tiers along two walls. But not much noise. The animals Quinn kept here were obviously ones too sick to be moved out to Chevy Chase. They were paying little attention to anything themselves.

A door to a rear room showed in the darkness, as Benson’s eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom. He went toward it, still with that remarkable soundlessness. He made so little noise that it was almost as if he floated, wraithlike, an inch or so above the floor.

He tried the rear door. It was unlocked. He opened it and waited a full minute before going in. As he waited, he strained his ears.

Richard Benson had spent years adventuring. His tremendous personal fortune had been acquired in jungle and arctic waste, in dangerous desert and on hazardous mountaintops. His instincts were so acute that he could fairly smell danger, if it lurked near. Those instincts were working overtime, now. However, he could hear nothing and see nothing, so he stepped into Quinn’s back room.

Instantly the darkness seemed to come alive. The men had been clever about it. They had not lurked behind the door, or flattened against the walls. Benson would have seen them if they had. No, they had crouched on top of things, above normal eye level, so that even The Avenger had been thrown off guard for a second or two.

Down from a tier of cages leaped one. From the top of a filing cabinet came another. And from the top of a big crate like a piano box came a third. The three hit Benson in one solid scramble. And Benson went down! Even the giant Smitty would have been bowled over by that unexpected mass impact.

To the three attackers, it must have looked as if it were in the bag. Three against one, and that one taken completely by surprise. But the odds were not quite as uneven as they appeared. Not when the one on the receiving end was The Avenger.

Benson had been jumped by groups before. He now acted with the swift method of long training. First he allowed himself to fall relaxed, when it became plain that he was going to have to fall anyway. That saved broken bones. Then, on the floor, he began to fight!

His steely left hand got hold of a thigh. His fingers sought the hollow just above the kneecap and squeezed.

Nerves as big as pencil leads are near the surface there. His fingers got the right spot with a surgeon’s accuracy, and the owner of the maltreated thigh began to yell like a circus calliope.

His right hand, meanwhile, had not been idle. It jammed up over a chest to rip aside a collar and expose the throat beneath. Here, the inhumanly clever fingers squeezed hard, too.

The third man was frenziedly beating away in the darkness with a blackjack. Some of the blows got home, but never squarely. Benson was moving his head too fast for that. He was dazed, but nowhere near unconsciousness.

The man whose throat he grasped went limp. The man who was screeching with the intolerable agony of his leg was fighting, not to disable Benson, but just to get away. His main ambition in life just then was to say “Uncle.”

He managed to tear loose. And The Avenger’s left fist shot up at a pale blur. The blur was the face of the third man, who had been jabbing viciously at him with the blackjack.

Benson’s fist caught the blur squarely, with the force of a piston. The man coughed and half fell off Benson’s chest.

The Avenger got to his feet. It was all over but the running. The two left conscious realized that pretty enthusiastically. They raced for the rear door and leaped out.

Benson got there almost as fast as they did. But the door did not move to his tug. Cannily, the men had rigged an outer fastening, before entering here, so that they could stop just such a pursuit as this.

The Avenger’s shoulder muscles bulged to pull the door back inward, off its hinges if necessary. Then he relaxed. The sound of a car in rapid motion came to his ears. Too late to do anything about the two.

He turned back to the third man, still out from the pressure against the great nerves of the neck. Benson calmly switched on the light. And then, with better illumination and time to look around, he saw that there were two bodies in the back room. One was that of his attacker, stirring a little now and moaning.

The other body lay near a divan, and did not stir at all. It was a dead man!

Benson, pale eyes like ice in a polar dawn, stepped to the dead man first. He noted that the body was in pajamas. It was that of a small fellow with a bald spot rimmed with gray hair. Spot and hair were a mess where a club had broken the whole dome of the skull.

It was Quinn, proprietor of the place. Sometimes, it appeared, the veterinarian slept here in his downtown office on the divan. Tonight had been one of the times, which was unfortunate because tonight these killers had sneaked in after something.

The Avenger set about discovering what it was the three had been looking for. The room was in a mess from a thorough search. So he decided that if what the three had wanted had been in there, they’d already found it.

He stepped to the man he had rendered unconscious with the delicate precision of his fingers. He went through his pockets. One possession of the dead veterinarian was there. It was a small black book. The blank pages of the book were alternate yellow and white. The doctor’s letterhead was printed at the top of the pages, and lines were ruled in bill form.

It was a fairly new book, with only eight entries in it The entries described pets he had worked on. Benson thumbed through it. There were three entries concerning cats, one for a pet monkey, one for a pony, and three for dogs. The entries regarding the dogs read:

Breed, Airedale. Answers name of Tierre. Distemper.

Breed, Dachshund. Answers name of Bob. Vocal cords cut.

Breed, Dachshund. Answers name of Gordo. Crushed left front paw.

This little case book, it seemed, was what the three men had come here for. Its attempted theft was responsible for the death of the veterinarian, Quinn.

The Avenger pocketed it and went out to phone headquarters and have the unconscious man booked for murder.

In the late afternoon of that day, Nan Stanton, in Dr. Fram’s anteroom, wrote down the name of the latest visitor. It was strictly routine. She listed all who came to see the doctor.

This man was quite well known for his wealth and his power in the business world. He was Tetlow Adams, railroad magnate and mine owner.

Adams was a husky man of sixty, still retaining the straightness of body and wideness of shoulder gained in his youth by hard labor on the roadbed of one of the railroads he now controlled in Wall Street.

He had a hard blue eye, a bluish, close-shaven jaw hinting that he was not a person to trifle with, and a craggy nose twisted a little to one side from having been broken in a fight long ago.

Nan, smiling, went into Fram’s office, and came out again at once.

“You can go right in,” she said. “Dr. Fram is expecting you.”

The railroad and mining man went into the inner office. Nan completed her entry of the visit: time, date and the rest. Purely routine.

It seemed that her routine was to be interrupted for a while. Dr. Fram came out and stood looking down at his pretty brown-haired secretary. His middle finger touched his trim little goatee gently.

“Miss Stanton,” he said, “I’d like you to go back to the New York office, please. Open it again and take charge.”

In Nan’s brown eyes appeared the natural wonder as to why he wanted her in an empty office. Fram continued pleasantly: “I’m thinking of running up to New York every other week or so. I have things well started here in Washington on my sanity test bill. You may make appointments for next week in New York.”

“You want me to go at once?” asked the girl.

“At once, please,” Fram said.

Nan packed some papers for the New York files in a briefcase, checked out of her hotel and took the next train from Washington.

She ate on the train; and then, on arriving in New York, she took a cab for the office instead of the small apartment she maintained in lower Manhattan. Nan was like that. The interests of her employer came first The papers in her briefcase were important. Therefore, she would file them first in the office vault, then go home.

It was an unfortunate act of loyalty.

Fram’s office was near the downtown financial section in a building with so many offices of professional men that it was kept open all night. It was not like the average big building—hard to get into after regular hours.

Nan nodded to the elevator starter, took an elevator to the eighteenth floor and went to where Fram’s suite was located. As she went, she hummed a tune from a recent movie, and thought of the things she wanted to catch up on now that she was back home.

If there was anything she did not think of, it was danger. She saw no one in the eighteenth-floor corridor, but that was not unusual at eleven o’clock at night. She inserted her key in the lock of Fram’s suite, opened the door, shut it behind her as she stepped inside and reached for the light.