The Avenger 10 - The Smiling Dogs (4 page)

“You Scotch raven,” snapped the giant, Smitty, “is it up to us to judge whether or not a case is important enough to work on?”

“Ye couldn’t judge, anyway, Algernon,” retorted Mac. “Yer head’s a long way up from the ground, but there’s nothin’ in it to make judgments possible.”

The Scot was one of a few rare souls who could call the giant by his true name, Algernon, and not be instantly annihilated. But even from Mac, Smitty didn’t like it.

“I’ll show you—” he growled, starting toward Mac.

The Avenger paid no attention. His two men were always bickering back and forth, but Benson knew that such bickering stopped in a hurry and changed into efficient cooperation when there was work to be done.

Something in his colorless eyes and the set of his gray steel bar of a body stopped the two. They watched him while he went to a case like a small wardrobe trunk and opened it.

The big case was the most complete traveling laboratory imaginable. And Benson was probably the world’s finest chemist. Put the two together and you got results that any of the big commercial laboratories might have envied.

Benson analyzed the scrapings from the left shoe of dead Sheriff Aldershot. In silence, the four watched him while his deft hands performed their miracles with microscope, acids, and retorts. At last, The Avenger straightened up from his meticulous task.

“Sulphur and salt,” he said.

“Eh?” gaped Mac. “What about sulphur and—”

“From the welt of Aldershot’s shoe. What do you know about Bison National Park, Mac?”

The Scot wrinkled his reddish, coarse-skinned forehead and his bleak blue eyes narrowed in thought. “ ’Tis a rather small one, as national parks go, and doesn’t get the tourists that the big ones do. It’s in Montana, near the city of Bison. There are the usual freak stone formations, several miniature grand canyons, a couple of geysers, mineral springs—”

“And from mineral springs,” nodded Benson, “some such mixture of salt and sulphur deposit might be lying around. Go out to Bison and find it, Mac. Go with him, Smitty. Take the plane. I want to know just where Aldershot was in Bison Park, before he came in such a hurry to Washington.”

The eminent psychiatrist Dr. Fram had his office on the first floor of the home he had rented while in Washington. The office took up most of the first floor. There was a large anteroom, which was normally the living room of the place. A heavy double door led to Fram’s private office, formerly a paneled dining room.

In the big anteroom was Fram’s secretary and assistant. And a glance at her suggested that Fram had excellent taste in secretaries.

She was rather small, with a figure that could have gone into any floor show, and with dark eyes and soft brown hair, and lips to make a man go around talking to himself. Her name was Nan Stanton, and she had been working for Fram for about a year.

Because she had worked for him that long, she was frowning perplexedly over a bill that had just come in the doctor’s regular mail. The bill was from a veterinarian’s office. It was for ten dollars but didn’t specify what the ten dollars was to pay for. It was just a bill for ten dollars from a veterinarian.

That was why Nan Stanton’s soft brown eyes expressed such perplexity. She had worked for Fram for a full year; and to the best of her knowledge, he had no pets of any kind. Certainly he had brought none to Washington with him from his regular New York office. Why, then, a bill for ten dollars from a vet?

She laid it aside, to ask Fram about it later, as a man came out of her boss’ private office. She smiled at the man as he nodded a farewell to her, and he smiled back.

The man was Senator Cutten.

Nan began slitting open other envelopes, and sorting their contents for Dr. Fram. She didn’t know quite how long she was engaged at this routine task, when suddenly she was aware of someone else in the anteroom.

She looked up—and gasped.

She was staring into eyes that had so little color as to seem to be pale crystal. And they were as hard as any crystal, too. The eyes were set in a white, dead face that gave you the shivers.

For an instant, the pale eyes were not meeting hers. Then they flickered up to her face from the thing they had rested on before.

That thing was the bill from the veterinarian.

“Good morning,” said the owner of the colorless, deadly eyes and the mask of a face. “My name is Richard Benson. I would like to see Dr. Fram.”

“I’ll take your name in,” said Nan, staring more curiously than ever. This man was one of the most memorable she had ever seen. But in his remarkable appearance, at least one thing was missing that usually appeared in the eyes of visitors here.

That was—fear. The people who came here were usually driven by fear! Of a nervous breakdown. Of their mental balance. Of the brain troubles of near and dear ones. That was what good psychiatrists were for—to be visited by people in such trouble.

But there was no fear in those pale eyes. No fear of anything on this green earth. And if ever she had seen an icy, unconquerable clarity of logic and sanity, she saw it in those eyes.

She came out in a minute. “Dr. Fram will be glad to see you,” she smiled.

The Avenger went into the psychiatrist’s office. Fram got up politely from his desk and offered a slim, capable hand to the white-faced man’s steel grip. Then he touched his trim, small goatee with his middle finger and smilingly came to the conclusion that his secretary had reached.

“You don’t appear to be in need of my professional services, Mr. Benson. You are here on the behalf of someone else?”

“Yes,” said Benson quietly. “I am here to ask about someone else. That is, Senator Cutten.”

The psychiatrist’s eyebrows went up a little. He was silent, studying his visitor’s paralyzed, dead face.

“I happen to know that Senator Cutten was just in here.” The Avenger didn’t bother to explain that he knew because he had trailed Cutten to Fram’s door. “His visits to you have worried me a little. I have wondered what he came here about. People who come to you are usually in trouble of some sort.”

Fram laughed. It was a pleasant, honest sound. He waved a well-kept hand reassuringly. “Your worry is needless, Mr. Benson. Your friend is no more in need of professional advice than you are. He came about the matter that brought me to Washington—my proposed new bill. Have you heard of it?”

Fram hitched his chair forward, and his eyes began to glow as do the eyes of an enthusiast launched on his pet subject. “Do you know that one and a half percent of all the people in the land are doomed to insanity through heredity? That means that we have two million potential lunatics at large in the United States. Now, these people can be put in institutions when their affliction gets dangerous to the public in general. But as matters stand, there is nothing on earth to stop them from marrying and bringing more children of doubtful mental capacity into the world. I have come to Washington to urge a simple law on the land. That is, that every couple be obliged to take a rudimentary sanity test before they are allowed to marry. Think of the suffering that would prevent; the expense and the terror that would be avoided!”

“It sounds like a good bill, but a dangerous one politically,” commented Benson evenly. His eyes were as steady as steel on the psychiatrist’s eager face.

“Senator Cutten is politically a brave man,” retorted Fram. “He is willing to think over my idea, even though it might have a dubious effect on the voters. It was about this bill that he came to see me a few minutes ago.”

Fram laughed again, softly, pleasantly, and moved back in his chair. “When I get on my favorite subject,” he said, “I am apt to become a bore. But now you know why Cutten was in here. His visit has nothing to do with himself. You can dismiss any worries along that line.”

“This is a relief,” said Benson. He took the slim, well-manicured fingers in his grip again, and went out.

As he left the private office, with seeming absent-mindedness, he slid the double doors shut behind him. They were thick. A voice could not be heard through them if it were not pitched too loud.

The Avenger asked a question of pretty Nan Stanton in a tone that did not seem furtive, yet was controlled so that it had little carrying power.

“I suppose other representatives come to see Dr. Fram about his proposed bill?”

“Oh, yes,” said Nan. “Others have come here frequently. Besides Senator Cutten, Senators Hornblow, Burnside, Wade and Collendar have visited Dr. Fram. Quite a bit of interest has been roused in that sanity test idea.”

“It would seem so,” murmured Benson, pale eyes like polished agate.

He left and went to the Senate Office Building. He found Senator Burnside there. Burnside did not know of The Avenger. But it didn’t matter. The deathly still face, the colorless, indomitable eyes, won respect—and something more than respect—for Benson everywhere.

“I understand you have called on Dr. Fram several times,” Benson said.

Burnside had been smiling. The smile stayed in place, but abruptly it was not repeated in his eyes.

“Yes, that is right,” he nodded. “I have seen him about his suggested sanity test bill.”

“Isn’t that apt to arouse political repercussions?” said Benson. “I should think such a bill might be very unpopular with the voters. A lot of people would be very angry, indeed, at the announcement that they couldn’t marry, or their children couldn’t marry, unless they took some test that would seem silly to them. And if the test turned against anyone, the whole family would be furious at the implications of the thing. Isn’t such a bill political dynamite to handle?”

On the forehead of Senator Burnside were tiny drops of moisture. The Senator dabbed at them with a handkerchief, but his automatic smile stayed firmly in place.

“There are times,” he said pompously, “when a man has to forget political expediency and do as his conscience dictates, even if the voters don’t like it. I am about convinced that this is such a time.”

“That is the only thing you have seen Fram about?” The Avenger asked evenly.

Burnside was literally in a cold sweat, for some reason.

He took refuge in bluster. “See here,” he said suddenly. “By what right to do you come into my office and question me? You’re not one of my constituents; your card says your home is in New York. Are you some sort of investigator? And if you are, why are you here?”

“I have no official right to ask you any questions,” Benson replied. “I am here merely from personal curiosity.” Which was true enough. “It occurred to me that a proposed sanity test of this kind would be a tricky thing for a man in public life to touch, and I wondered why you did it.”

“You can keep right on wondering,” snapped Burnside. “My reasons are my own. Good day to you, sir.”

He opened the door for Benson to leave, the perfect picture of an authoritative man in a towering rage. But something about the picture didn’t ring quite true.

Benson had noted many times that usually a man talks that loud only when he is desperately afraid of something.

The town of Bison consisted of two big hotels, four or five livery stables where horses could be rented, half a dozen houses and a store.

Sheriff Aldershot had had his office over the store. The first thing Mac and Smitty did when they got into the little town was hunt up that office.

Deputy Phelps, the man who had talked to Benson over the long-distance phone, greeted them by squirting tobacco juice five feet into the top of a milk bottle which he used for a spittoon. He didn’t wet the sides of the milk bottle.

“Yeah, I’m Phelps. Glad to know yuh. Damn shame about what happened to the sheriff in Washington. That must be a right tough town.”

“It was tough for Aldershot, at least,” agreed Smitty.

“Got any dope on his killers yet?”

“None,” admitted Smitty. “We’re out here, now, trying to pick up a few loose ends. Specifically, we want to know what Aldershot did just before going to Washington. Why he went there, in other words.”

“The police chief in Washington asked me that,” sighed Phelps. “A guy named Benson also asked me. A couple of detectives phoned and asked me. Now you come and ask me. I don’t know. Nobody knows.”

“Surely ye have some idea where the mon went and what he did in the forty-eight hours before he left Bison,” remonstrated Mac.

Phelps shrugged lank shoulders. “Aldershot went away from here two days before going East,” he said. “He headed toward the park. That’s all I know.”

“That’s something,” said Smitty hopefully.

Phelps fixed him with a sour stare. “Got any idea how big that park is, mister?” he said. “A guy could wander in it for weeks and never see the same thing twice.”

“The sheriff was riding?”

“Sure! We don’t walk around here, much.”

Mac’s bleak blue eyes followed a squirt of tobacco juice on its accurate way from Phelps’ lips to the milk bottle.

“Lots of mineral springs in the park, aren’t there?” he said.

“Uh-huh,” said Phelps. “Lots of other things, too. Among ’em, a nice-size helium deposit. But I suppose you know that.”

Mac and Smitty hadn’t known. They made a careful note of it.

“Any mineral springs in the park where you find both salt and sulphur?”

Phelps shrugged again. “I ain’t no chemist,” he said, “but I can say there are a couple dozen with salt and sulphur. They call ’em mineral springs, don’t they? And mineral springs have minerals in ’em, don’t they?”

Smitty’s face didn’t change expression, but his vast hands curled a little. Phelps added hastily: “There’s about six have more deposits around ’em than most.”

“Do a lot of tourists visit them?” asked Mac.

“Tourists crawl around five of ’em,” said Phelps. “The sixth ain’t easy to get at, so only a few but the rangers ever see it. That’s a hot spring called Lost Geyser.”

“How would you get to Lost Geyser?”

The deputy produced a map, somewhat fly-specked and tattered but still readable. “Here’s the main road into the park, just outside town. See? Take this left fork, into the center of the park. Them’s the Rooney Hills. See? When yuh get to ’em, branch right. Yuh’ll end up in a box canyon with a dead end. Only it ain’t a dead end. Climb the blank wall, and yuh’ll find yoreself lookin’ down into a kinda big cup. It used to be a volcano crater, I reckon. The Lost Geyser is down in there.”