The Avenger 10 - The Smiling Dogs (12 page)

Another voice sounded out. A voice that came from none of them there, but from the small radio The Avenger carried always with him. The radio was tuned to the police band.

“Calling Car 29,” came the monotonous voice of the announcer. “Calling Car 29. Signal Q. Rocker Building. Car 29. Signal Q. Rocker Building.”

Smitty and Mac looked at each other. Signal Q. That was—murder!

Nan Stanton didn’t know what Signal Q meant, but the address had significance for her. “Rocker Building!” she gasped. “That’s on Pennsylvania Avenue. And it’s the business address of Tetlow Adams. His office is in the Rocker Building.”

The pale, cold eyes of The Avenger looked at and through her. Then the man with the dead face was gone, with Mac and Smitty right after him, exerting themselves to keep up with their chief.

The Washington police had been given orders to treat the man with the white, death-mask face and colorless, awe-inspiring eyes as if he were the chief, himself. They let him into the lobby of the Rocker Building after just a glance at his unforgettable countenance.

“Who is it?” asked Benson of one of the men. “Adams?”

“Adams?” repeated the man. “Nope. Nobody by that name is mixed up in this, far as we know. A guy named Gottlieb was the one who got bumped off. Toy salesman. Tenth floor. The building watchman saw a trickle of blood comin’ from under his door and busted in. He saw the guy dead on the floor and phoned headquarters.”

“A toy salesman!” exclaimed Smitty. Mac shook his sandy-thatched head, with perplexity large on his homely Scotch features.

The Avenger strode to the big board on the lobby wall. The directory for the building. He looked up Gottlieb, Knox Toy & Novelty Co. It was 1019. He looked for the name of the mining magnate, and found it. Tetlow Adams, 910 to 919. That would bring his suite almost directly under the office of the dead toy salesman.

Benson went up to the tenth floor to the office where murder had been committed.

Gottlieb lay beside the chair from which he had slumped, next to his desk. His head was a gory ruin. But it seemed otherwise untouched. His clothes were not in the disarray that should have resulted from a search. And as far as could be seen, not one thing in the office had been touched.

Two detectives and the coroner were in the office. One of the detectives caught that swift, all-embracing glance of The Avenger and read it.

“Not one thing was touched or taken, as far as we can tell,” he said to Benson. Meanwhile he stared in awe at this legendary person. “There don’t seem to have been a motive for murder at all. Unless some enemy of the guy killed him because he was sore at him. Anyhow, all we know is that somebody sneaked in here, killed Gottlieb, turned the lights out, and sneaked away again.”

“You mean he just came in, killed, turned off the lights, and left?” said the giant Smitty. “Nothing else?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

The Avenger was saying nothing. But the pale, cold eyes were like shiny, stainless steel chips.

“I think that will be all that this murder can tell us,” he said to Mac and Smitty. And he started away.

Outside the building, the Scot couldn’t contain himself any longer. “And the murrrder of the toy man does tell ye something, Muster Benson?” he burred.

The Avenger nodded. “The slanting line of light,” he quoted the decoded cryptogram.

“I don’t—” began Mac uncertainly.

“The line of light referred to in the message in Aldershot’s pocket must mean a slanting line of lighted windows in a certain building—the Rocker Building—at a certain time. That was to be the signal to someone that ‘all is ready.’ I’ve thought that was the way of it, for some time. This proves it.

“That someone is the man we’re after; the instigator of this gigantic criminal plot. But like so many other criminal minds, he has directed his plans—his murders—from behind the scenes; unknown even to those doing his bidding. He is probably in a window of one of these neighboring buildings or many blocks away reading the message, ‘all is ready,’ with binoculars.”

“I get it,” Smitty said, understanding The Avenger’s implication. “Protection against blackmail. The head of this steal doesn’t want his own men to know who he is for fear they’ll put the squeeze on him later.”

Benson’s head nodded agreement to the giant’s deduction. “Gottlieb was murdered by someone who didn’t touch a thing on his person or in his office. The killer simply came in, murdered,
turned the lights off
and left. There is your motive. Gottlieb’s lighted windows would ruin the slanting light signal planned in the cryptogram. He had to be gotten out of here and his windows darkened by a certain hour. Probably the man wanting to give the signal tried several tricks to get Gottlieb out of his office peaceably. Gottlieb didn’t fall for them. The time of the signal was at hand. The man had to kill Gottlieb to give it.”

“So,” rumbled Smitty, “the signal now has been given that ‘all is ready.’ And that means that the thing that is ready is the steal of Bison Park. I wonder where the next act takes place?”

“On the Senate floor in the morning,” said The Avenger quietly. “The last act would have to be there. Which means we will have to move fast or the government will lose valuable Bison Park with its helium deposits—a loss that might mean the difference between victory and defeat in time of war.”

It was the wee small hour of the morning again. But again The Avenger was not in the least concerned with sleep.

He was slowly pacing the room at the office suite which had been rented secretly by him for his Washington visits. And his pale eyes were jewel-like in their concentrated brilliance.

Congressman Coolie had been slain at a few minutes past ten. An hour or so after that—so soon afterward as to indicate a clear connection between the two acts—the unfortunate toy salesman had been slain so as to get his disruptive office lights out.

First the death of Coolie, then the signal of the slanting lights.

It looked very much as if Coolie had been a stumbling block in the Bison Park plans. As soon as he had been put out of the way, the “go-ahead” signal had been flashed.

The Avenger had sent Josh Newton for a short history of Congressman Coolie. Biographical facts on all the representatives of the nation are available if you know where to go for them.

He pored over the short biography now.

Congressman Coolie. Twice elected representative from Montana. Mild liberal record. Interested in soil conservation and reforestration. Sponsor of nine such bills into the House. Fifty-four years old, married and divorced, three children. Color blind—

The Avenger stopped right there.

So Congressman Coolie was color blind. Benson’s icy, brilliant eyes half closed. It was as if little, shining moons were being partially eclipsed. That fact seemed to strike him as one of the most important things he had found out to date.

He turned from Coolie’s short description to reports on the phychiatrist, Dr. Fram.

Fram was in
Who’s Who
as eminent in his profession. He was the author of a small book on psychiatry as applied to wayward girls. His reputation was excellent. There was no hint of an interest, however, in pressing through a law forcing couples to take a sanity test before being given marriage licenses. Not a mention of that had been made, till about six weeks ago.

Then, abruptly, the distinguished doctor had begun to live, seemingly, for nothing else. He had suddenly packed and gone to Washington to lobby for the bill.

His trip had occurred the day after Tetlow Adams had come to see him—ostensibly about his son—for the third time.

Did the psychiatrist’s sudden trip have anything to do with Adams’ last call? Or was it sheer coincidence?

The Avenger went to the big home of Tetlow Adams, out near Wardman Park.

There was a half acre of ground around the house. It was enclosed by a high spiked iron fence. There was a heavy gate—and the gate was barred. That would seem to indicate that Adams carefully guarded himself and that he was afraid of something.

It was after two o’clock in the morning, a very suspicious time to call. The Avenger didn’t even attempt to explain to the guard, who came to the gate when he pressed the night bell, what his reasons were for wanting to see Adams. He knew his entrance would be refused.

The guard stared through heavy iron bars. His right hand was at his belt, and Benson saw a holster there.

“What you want at this time of night, bud?” he demanded truculently.

Benson didn’t say anything. He just stared at the man.

“Well? What’s the matter?” the guard said. “Can’t y’u talk?”

Benson stared into the man’s eyes, with his pale orbs like misty crystal.

“Beat it,” said the man. But his voice was uncertain, and
his
face was
getting a
queer blank look. “You can’t
get
in . . . get in here—” He stopped, jerkily, like a rundown clock.

Benson stared a moment longer, with eyes like naked steel blades. The man was profoundly hypnotized.

“You will open the gate for me,” said The Avenger, voice quiet but vibrant with power.

The man opened the gate, moving like something that acted only when a button was pressed. The Avenger went in; then he shut the gate himself.

He left the man there, standing as erect as a sentry, but standing like a wooden thing, too, carved only to resemble a sentry.

Benson went down a driveway. There were bushes lining it. He heard a stealthy movement a little ahead and to his right but kept on walking.

A figure catapulted over the line of bushes and straight at Benson’s body. That figure would have instantly bowled over anyone not warned of its coming. A short, murderous club in its right hand told what would happen after that.

But The Avenger had been warned by his marvelously acute sense of hearing. So he was prepared.

He side-stepped a foot, seeming to move slowly. But there are men whose actions are so fast that they make the maneuvers of ordinary men seem to have been done in slow motion. Benson was one of those rare few.

The man crashed to the driveway, got up snarling and leaped again.

The Avenger’s right fist flicked out. It caught the man on the side of the jaw, and the fellow went down. He would be out, The Avenger calculated from the impact, between twenty minutes and a half hour.

Benson went on.

He tapped on the door, two knocks, and then two more. It wouldn’t matter what the code knock was to get into the guarded house, or even if there were no code at all. Whoever was at the portal would be almost certain to figure that it was one of the guards wanting to get in.

The man at the door, a husky butler, opened it all right. But he opened with a gun in his hand, taking no chances. At least he thought he was taking no chances. But it developed that the gun might just as well have been a toy.

With the first movement inward of the door, Benson caught the glint of light on steel, and his hand snapped forth. It caught the gun in a vise-like grip and swirled it around in the man’s hand till it pointed at his own body.

Then the butler’s main concern was
not
to pull the trigger. Then The Avenger got second finger and thumb of his left hand at the back of the man’s neck in that swift pressure which could bring unconsciousness, or, if not released in time, even death.

The butler sagged, and Benson leaped over his body and reached the stairs just as three more men in servants’ livery appeared at doors down the first-floor hall.

The Avenger sped up the stairs. At the front room near the head of them, a healthy-looking man of sixty in rumpled pajamas had his head poked out the door, gazing sleepily into the hall.

Benson wrenched that door back and stepped in. “You are Adams? Sorry I had to come in this way. I hadn’t time to wait till morning and—”

“Who are you, sir?” snapped Adams, purpling with anger. “Get out! I’m not seeing anyone!”

“It was because I thought it wouldn’t do any good to send in my name that I entered in this manner,” Benson said quietly. “I wanted to talk with you, at once.”

“I told you to get out of here! If you don’t—”