The Avenger 10 - The Smiling Dogs (3 page)

From it came a man that he knew. The man was Senator Wade, of Nevada.

“Burnside!” exclaimed Wade, who was small and spare and quick-moving. His political enemies described him as being like an angry sparrow.

Wade glanced covertly at the door from which Burnside had just come, then back at the Senator. Burnside looked at the ground.

“What are you doing here at this time of night?” he mumbled.

“Coming to have a word or two with Fram on his pet bill,” said Wade. “You know—the one that would make a sanity test obligatory to all young couples about to marry. Splendid idea. Fram was telling me the other day that about one and a half percent of couples of marriageable age have an insanity history in their families that should prevent them ever from marrying. If we could pass that bill, we might stop the births of a lot of imbeciles. What are
you
doing here?”

“Oh, I came to see him about his bill, too,” said Burnside hastily. Never would he have admitted to his colleague from Nevada the true reason for his late-night visit to a psychiatrist.

As it happened, Wade had lied, too. He wasn’t going in to talk about a bill making it mandatory for young folks to take a sanity test before getting married. He was going to talk to Fram about a mad, impossible hallucination he had been suffering from recently. He kept thinking he saw a little crimson man leading a bright-green dog—a smiling dog—on a leash made of the braided stems of daisies.

But naturally Wade would never tell Senator Burnside such a thing. Burnside might think what Wade himself was agonizedly beginning to suspect: that he was insane.

Yet Wade was sure he had seen the fantastic thing. In fact, not half an hour ago, he had seen the little red fellow lead the green, smiling dog through his bedroom.

The man was about the most awe-inspiring person it had ever been the fate of the police chief of Washington to look at.

Dressed in gray, he looked more like a gray steel bar than a human being. His face was dead, like something dug out of a cemetery. The muscles were paralyzed so that never, under any circumstances, could they move in an expression. This dead, weird face was as white as snow—as white, in a word, as you’d expect any dead flesh to be.

In the white glacial expanse of the face were set eyes so light-gray as to seem absolutely colorless. They were like deep, slitted holes into which you could peer and get a half glimpse of a world of fog and ice and personal despair.

“You got the cryptogram from Drake?” the chief asked this awesome personage, whom he—and the nation’s underworld—knew as The Avenger.

“Yes,” said The Avenger, whose full name was Richard Henry Benson.

“It must be a tough one to figure out, if even Drake can’t decode it,” said the chief.

“Drake’s idea is that the code is basically a simple one, but incomplete,” said Benson. His voice was quiet, low, but vibrant with power. “I have an idea he is right. Any code can be figured out, particularly by such an expert as Drake, if the message is all there to work on.”

“I’d hoped I would know what those damned figures mean by now,” said the chief glumly. “I haven’t got very far with the two murders. I thought maybe the message of the cyptogram would give me a lift.”

“Tell me about those two murders,” said Benson, who had just arrived at headquarters from his call on the government code expert, Drake.

The chief told The Avenger what he had found thus far.

“I agree with your guard as to the probabilities of what happened,” said Benson, voice quiet but authoritative. “Sewell either saw Sheriff Aldershot attacked, or he saw the attacker going through his pockets after murdering him. He charged down the steps, driving the man away before he could get the wallet with the cryptogram. Sewell took the wallet and called a guard. Before one could reach him, the killer struck again, but again didn’t have time to take the wallet. What facts have you on the two dead men?”

“Sheriff Aldershot,” said the chief, “is from the town of Bison, Montana, near Bison National Park. He has no family; he lived alone there. Far as I can get over the wires, no one knew why he came to Washington. But he did come, and with some business he was taking up with Senator Burnside of his home state. In fact, Burnside tells me that he must have been one of the last to see Aldershot alive. He—or Senator Cutten, the other Senator from Montana. Because Aldershot seems to have had a talk with both of them.

“Sewell has a room in a hotel in Washington, Southeast. He lived alone here. Has a mother and sister in Chicago. Burnside says he was an excellent secretary, but quiet about himself. The Senator doesn’t know much about his personal life.”

The Avenger was staring at the chief with pale eyes like diamond drills. Obviously, the eyes were not really on the chief; they were glittering with intense thought. But the chief felt a sort of chill creep through him anyway. They were hard eyes to face.

“You questioned Burnside?”

“Of course. But the Senator can’t seem to help me out.”

“What did Aldershot see him about?”

“That’s a funny thing,” said the chief. “Aldershot didn’t seem to have anything at all important on his mind. At least, that’s what Burnside said. The sheriff came up to him, he says, and muttered something about a reforestation plan that ought to be put into effect in the eastern part of the state. Some hare-brained kind of thing. Burnside’s a great land-conservation exponent, you know. He says he couldn’t make head or tail out of what Aldershot was trying to tell him.”

“You talked to Cutten, too?”

“The other Senator from Montana, yes,” nodded the chief. “He gives the same story. Aldershot approached him about some reforestation plan for a part of the country where trees won’t even grow. Hung on his tail like a leech, Cutten says, till finally he got rid of the guy.”

“Then Aldershot walked outside the Capitol Building, down the long stairs, and was killed,” Benson mused, eyes like ice chips in his dead, white face. “And from his wallet comes a cryptogram that is going to be quite difficult to solve. Did Aldershot go to see Cutten or Burnside about that cryptogram? Or did he get it from one of them? And what did he discover out in Montana so important that he came to Washington concerning it? A reforestation plan? It doesn’t sound convincing.”

The chief nodded. It hadn’t sounded convincing to him, either. But you don’t press United States senators too far in police questionings. Matter of fact, you can’t because such men have senatorial immunity.

Richard Benson came back to a point that had already occurred to the chief. “I wonder what Aldershot found out in Montana that brought him here to Washington.”

But Benson, to answer this question, brought to bear on the problem more ingenuity than the chief had. Which was no reflection against the chief. Only a few men can have genius.

The Avenger got Bison, Montana, on the phone, and asked to speak to one of Aldershot’s deputies. It turned out that there was only one, a man who introduced himself over the phone as Sam Phelps.

“Phelps,” said Benson, “Sheriff Aldershot was found here in Washington in a brownish, worn suit, narrow-brimmed Stetson hat and high-topped hide boots, well shined. Can you tell me if that’s the outfit he left Bison in?”

“Yeah,” came the deputy’s twangy voice over the phone. “Them’s his store clothes, and he was wearin’ ’em when I took him to the train.”

“They are not the clothes he usually wore in Bison?”

“Nope. He only wears ’em to weddin’s and funerals and State occasions.”

“Then he had on no articles of that costume during the few days preceding his trip here?”

There was a slight pause.

“The boots, maybe,” said Phelps. “Yeah, I think he was wearin’ his regular old boots. He didn’t change much. His feet kinda hurt him when he tried store shoes.”

The Avenger thanked him, hung up and turned to a mystified chief. “Is Aldershot’s body still at the morgue?” Benson asked.

“Yes,” said the chief.

“I’d like to look at it,” said Benson.

But when he got to the morgue, he paid little attention to the body itself. Instead, he concentrated on the shoes—the hide boots which the deputy thought were the ones he wore out West, too; had probably worn in the few days before his sudden trip from Montana to confer with Senators Cutten and Burnside.

The Avenger took out a keen-bladed little knife and two small envelopes. He carefully scraped the upper part of the dead sheriff’s left shoe, and put the minute scrapings in one of the envelopes.

Then he inserted the point of the knife along the groove between sole and upper. From this welt he got more fine scrapings which he put into the second envelope.

The chief nodded, at that, with understanding in his eyes. “Going to see if dust from his shoes will tell where he has been recently, huh? It’s a good stunt. But I can tell you that. He came direct from the train to the Capitol Building when he got to Washington. I’ve traced his path from the depot. No side trips.”

Benson wanted to go farther back than that. He wanted to know, not where the sheriff had gone since hitting Washington, but where he might have gone in his own country before ever getting on the eastbound train. However, he didn’t explain that.

“Thanks very much,” he said quietly. “I’ll get in touch with you if anything interesting results from an examination of these scrapings.”

He went from the morgue and to the home of Senator Cutten. Burnside’s fellow senator from Montana lived in a large cottage out in Georgetown. Cutten was a pleasant-looking man of fifty or so, with tired lines bracketing an orator’s mouth. However, there was steel in his blue eyes and granite in the firm line of his jaw. The Senator was a strong man.

In a tastefully decorated living room, Cutten stared expressionlessly at the man with the white, still face and the colorless, deadly eyes. More and more people were hearing of The Avenger. It was obvious that Cutten knew a little about Benson by repute.

“I came to talk to you a little about the death of Senator Burnside’s secretary and of Sheriff Aldershot of Bison, Montana,” said Benson.

Cutten spread strong, thin hands in a frank and open gesture that was not quite matched by his eyes.

“The police have already talked to me about that,” he murmured. “And I’ve told them all I know, which is little enough. But I’ll be glad to go over it again, if you like.”

Benson nodded his thanks. “Aldershot had quite a talk with you—and with Senator Burnside—I understand,” he said. “What did he come to see you about, Senator Cutten?”

“As I’ve told the police, he came to see me about reforestation. An impossible plan. Like many laymen, Sheriff Aldershot seems to think trees will grow wherever they are planted. Take a bare, desert stretch that is arid and ugly and of no use to anyone, plant seedlings—and in ten years you have a beautiful young forest! Only it doesn’t work out that way. The district he had in mind has never known trees and wouldn’t support them if they were planted. I told him so, but he was rather persistent.”

“Doesn’t it seem strange,” said Benson, pale eyes like diamond drills, “that the sheriff should have packed in a great hurry, dropped everything and traveled to Washington just to talk about planting a certain bare area with trees?”

Cutten’s eyes continued pleasant—and expressionless. “Aldershot is an enthusiast about the West. He has approached me before, and Burnside, too, about projects designed to beautify our section.”

The Avenger’s colorless eyes were like stainless steel chips in his dead face. “Did the sheriff, by any chance, mention a crytogram to you?”

On Cutten’s face was a fleeting expression of utter perplexity. “Cryptogram? No! He said nothing about cryptograms.”

“He neither showed you one—nor got one from you?”

Cutten frowned a little. “I have said there was no talk of such things. As for getting one from me, there are implications in that question that I don’t quite like. I know you by reputation, Mr. Benson, and know that your integrity is not to be questioned. But I don’t think that gives you the right to doubt my assertions.”

The Avenger stared for a long time into the blue eyes of Cutten. Benson saw an iron will there, a determination not to be lightly shaken. But he also thought he saw fear. No, something deeper than fear—horror! As if the man stared through his questioner and saw ghosts.

“Thank you, Senator Cutten,” Benson said smoothly. “Good night.”

He went out, and the blue eyes followed his straight steely back with the fear growing in their haggard depths.

Benson went back to the hotel suite he had engaged on coming to Washington a few hours before. His assistants were there, waiting for him.

The Avenger’s aides were almost as remarkable, and as capable, as The Avenger himself. Four of them were with him on this trip.

There was the huge giant, Smitty; the dour Scotchman, Fergus MacMurdie; the sleepy-looking but extremely intelligent Negro, Josh Newton; and Josh’s pretty wife, Rosabel.

MacMurdie started fuming when Benson came in.
“Whoosh
, Muster Benson,” he greeted The Avenger gloomily. “I’m thinkin’ by now ye’ve probably found we’ve had a trip for nothin’. A couple of murders. ’Tis bad, of course, and I’m sorry for the lads that got killed. But ’tis not as important as the crrrooks we usually go after.”