River of Ice

CHAPTER IX Four Into Three

Benson moved fast when he was out of the building. “Mac,” he snapped, pale eyes like ice in a polar dawn, “go at once to Wittwar’s office. Find out if he has been there during the last hour. Make sure of it! Smitty, do the same thing on Mallory. I’ll check up on Werner, and from there I’ll go to Conroy’s. If any of the four Foundation directors has been away some place during the time we were trapped in the cold room and can’t account fully for his whereabouts, I want to know about it.”

The three took The Avenger’s car back through the tunnel and separated at Canal Street, Smitty to go to Mallory’s office, Mac to Wittwar’s, and Benson to Werner’s.

At Werner’s office Benson found nothing out of order. The man with the pink, cherubic countenance and the steel-trap jaw had his printing establishment near Houston Street. He was in his office when The Avenger got there, and had been there since nine o’clock that morning. He hadn’t even gone out for lunch. A dozen people around the place, deftly questioned by the man with the colorless, indomitable eyes, confirmed that.

Benson sped from there to Conroy’s office, was told that he had stayed home that morning, and raced to the man’s big apartment on lower Fifth Avenue near Washington Square. The Avenger rang the buzzer under Conroy’s name in the vestibule. There was no answer. He rang again; then he took out a slim length of flexible steel and inserted it in the vestibule lock.

Smitty came in before Benson started picking the lock. “No soap with Mallory,” said the giant. “He was in his office from nine o’clock till a little after twelve. Then he went next door to lunch. I checked that with half the guys working around his office, and three quarters of the waiters in the restaurant. He’s still in the restaurant.”

Mac came in. He had a similar story about Wittwar. The Avenger said nothing, cold eyes as unreadable as glacier ice. The fact that these men had alibis was not too important. If one of them was the employer of murderers, he could quite easily have left the details of trapping Benson in the warehouse to others. Meanwhile, he could have sat safe and respectable in his own office. But checking on their whereabouts was common sense; and The Avenger’s genius was always methodical.

He turned back to the lock, and the thin steel length snapped the bar back. The three went up heavily carpeted stairs to Conroy’s top-floor apartment. The Avenger rang, pressing the buzzer beside the apartment door. He stood for a moment listening. Then he deftly opened that door too. There wasn’t a lock on earth that Benson couldn’t open in record time.

The three men stepped into a beautiful big living room. Wealth and taste had furnished it. It was about twenty-five feet by thirty, with overhead beams exposed. They saw that the beams were exposed in the hallway in the same decorative manner. But there wasn’t a soul around, and that, the glances of the three men said, was odd. There should have been servants in the house. They went down the hall and began looking through the apartment room by room. Ten of them. In the last, they found the tenants of this elaborate but deserted place. And they found that Conroy had the best alibi of all.

Conroy was dead! The room in which he lay, at the rear of the hall cutting through the apartment like a main artery, was a library. There were many books, several tables, leather chairs, a leather divan. The beams showed in here too in imitation of an ancient feudal castle. Around the walls were the heads of animals, a zebra, two lions, a tiger and an elk. Benson recalled that his investigations of the four directors had revealed that Conroy had been quite a big game hunter up till a few years ago.

Conroy lay on the divan. He seemed only asleep, with his hands folded across his chest and his eyes peacefully closed. But there is something about death that proclaims itself from afar, to those accustomed to it, as were the little group aiding The Avenger in his crime battles.

“Well,” said Smitty, towering in the room, “he isn’t to blame for any of our recent troubles. Wonder what killed him?” It took a lot of searching to find that out.

The Avenger took out a small bit of what seemed to be dark violet paper. But the paper was coated with a special methyl stain of MacMurdie’s concoction to detect gunfire. Hours after a gun had been fired in a room, this stain would pick up the faint remaining fumes and turn to bluish-green. The paper retained its color, showing that no gun had been fired in this room, at least not for a long time.

Conroy’s body, on examination, seemed to be completely unmarked. You’d have thought the man had simply lain down on the divan and peacefully died of a heart attack. Or perhaps he had committed suicide in some subtle way, since it was apparent that his servants had been sent away from the place.

Then The Avenger’s sensitive, steel-strong fingers found something. They had been searching Conroy’s scalp, through the thick, reddish hair. There was a tiny projection above the left ear, not quite as far from the ear as from a point at the exact top of the skull. Benson stared closer. Something like the end of a needle was just barely seen in the scalp — with the other end far down in the brain beneath.

Into the stainless steel chips of eyes came the diamond glitter that meant The Avenger had suddenly discovered a great deal. He straightened up and stared at the curiously staring giant and the equally curious Scot. “From the mists of the past,” said Benson, pale lips scarcely moving in his paralyzed face, “the ruthless ancients teach the modern crook. But not, it would seem, too well.”

“Huh?” said Smitty.

The colorless, terrible eyes turned on him; and the giant experienced a funny feeling at the pit of his stomach, as even friends did when those pale-agate orbs rested on them. Benson’s lips barely moved in his paralyzed face. “I told you about the sample manuscript, the ancient bundle of hides, Lini Waller brought to New York as an example of the archaeological wonders of those caves,” he said. “I told you that the ancient record they chanced to pick at random was a volume dealing with the medicinal and surgical skill of that lost race. Well, among other things, it is told in the record how they made slaves by a brain operation that robbed the victim of conscious will, turned him into a robot that moved and talked as its master commanded. But it was hardly complicated enough to be called an operation. It consisted of very simply, and diabolically, driving a slim metal wedge into the brain at precisely the right area to paralyze the seat of will. Whoever we are after, has learned this trick from a study of the manuscript.”

The pale, clear eyes narrowed. “I think this was done to Lini Waller. It would explain the way she is apparently working against her own interests. She’s an automation docilely working toward her own destruction. And that would explain why I was unable to hypnotize her. There was no conscious will there to hypnotize.”

Smitty jabbed a colossal thumb in the direction of the divan. “But Conroy wasn’t turned into a robot. Conroy was turned into a corpse.”

The Avenger nodded. “By accident,” his calm, cold voice came in reply. “I have said the ancients seem to have taught the modern crook the robot trick — but not too well. This is a delicate operation, simple as the actual penetration of the brain appears to be. The metal must go into the exact segment of the brain. If it strays to right or left, even a fraction of an inch, the victim dies — as Conroy did. It would appear that someone wanted Conroy to become an automation obeying crooked orders, perhaps wanted him to be a scapegoat in case trouble developed. But the needle didn’t go exactly where it should have gone; so Conroy died!”

Mac was staring at the bizarre picture presented by the dead man and his immediate surroundings. The divan on which the corpse lay was covered with dark-red leather, so that it looked like a sacrificial slab coated with crusted, long-dried blood. And right over the body, like the head of some sort of vile god, was the mounted head of a North Woods moose. “Sacrifice to the beast,” muttered Mac. “Only beasts don’t come as rotten as the man who did this.”

Smitty had an objection to one of Benson’s points. It was so seldom that he could see even a small hole in the reasoning of the ice-eyed man that he felt sneakingly proud of the fact. “You said this may have been done to Lini Waller,” he said. “But if that were true, how could the girl give away the place where she’d been held prisoner? You remember her babble to you of ice caves was what let us find that cold-room at the refrigerating warehouse. If she were a robot, doing someone else’s bidding, how is it she would let that slip out?”

Benson had the answer, as Smitty should have known he would. “She was operated on in that room,” The Avenger said, voice absent as he stared at Conroy. “The hairs on the bench indicate that. The bench was a crude operating table. But just before the needle was driven into her brain, she was still herself, and observed the appearance of the room. Later, that memory, lingering in her subconscious mind, came out as she was talking to me. Only her sense of timing was wrong. She said she was held in the ice cave last night; but, actually, it must have been the night before last.”

Mac nodded. “And even a very intelligent mon,” he added, “as intelligent as our head skurlie in this affair must be, would hardly foresee a trap like that. If he had told the girl to say nothing of where she had been held, she wouldn’t have done so.”

“That’s right,” said Benson.

“I don’t know that our discovery of the cold-room did any good,” said Smitty gloomily. “Where’d it get us, I’d like to know?”

“Now who’s croakin’ disaster?” demanded Mac, at whom the giant was always jeering as being a Scotch raven croaking of failure.

Smitty grimaced, then grinned sheepishly. But The Avenger seemed not even to hear the byplay. He was staring at the corpse, but obviously not seeing it. His pale eyes were like twin swirling pits of fog as, in the brain behind them, cold facts began to marshal themselves into an orderly arrangement.