The Frosted Death

CHAPTER IX The Clouds of Death

Claudette Sangaman was at Bleek Street when Benson got there. She was in one of the big leather chairs in that enormous top-floor room. She was crying hysterically, and Nellie Gray was trying to give her the comfort that only another woman can give to a woman in despair.

When Benson came in, Claudette made a heroic effort and calmed herself a little. But the calm was perhaps worse than the hysterics. White-lipped, she pointed to a copy of the latest paper at her feet. It was this, evidently, that had brought her here.

“Have you read that, Mr. Benson?”

The Avenger nodded, colorless eyes like ice in his white, dead face.

“The lies! The dreadful lies! Why, that paper makes my father out as more than a murderer. If he is ever found now, he will be shot on sight! Oh, what are we going to do?”

Benson’s face, white, terrifying, still, could never express emotion. Only his eyes could show that. The glints in their colorless depths became more pronounced now, in sympathy, as he stared at the stricken girl.

“Has anything been accomplished, yet?” she pleaded. “Anything at all?”

The Avenger nodded, dead face like a wax mask.

“Much has been accomplished,” he said.

Nellie Gray stared quickly at him. She hadn’t known anything important had turned up, yet. For of course she knew nothing of the message Benson had picked out of the recent, bitter newspaper account.

“What?” asked Claudette.

“Mainly, I am morally certain now that your father is innocent of Targill’s murder.”

The words seemed to make ripples in the ensuing silence of the big room, like a heavy stone dropped in a mill pond.

Claudette almost collapsed again.

“You’re sure of that, Mr. Benson?”

“Dead sure!” said The Avenger.

“Why then everything’s all right, and we can go to the police—”

“Not yet,” Benson said regretfully. “I know he is innocent. I expect to prove it. But as yet — there is no scrap of evidence to take to headquarters.”

The girl slumped back in her chair. But her chin was up now, and her shoulders no longer drooped. The Avenger had that effect on people. Because he was such a driving, sure force himself, he made others feel sure.

“I am counting on you,” she said, getting up after a moment. “I must count on you! I have no one else in all the world to turn to.”

“You have no family save for your father?”

“That’s all,” she said, unsteadily. “Just dad. When… if… he dies, I’ll be all alone.”

“Keep your courage up,” Benson said. “I’ll hope to have something soon to tell you.”

She went out. And the Avenger’s icily flaring eyes followed her till the door was shut. Their almost colorless depths were strangely clouded for a moment. Something was trying to fight its way into his mind. Something that disturbed him very much.

It had to do with the meaning he had picked from the newspaper story of Sangaman’s guilt in the Taylor death. He knew that much. And something else. Something the girl had just said—

Benson could move almost faster than the eye could follow. Occasionally there are such men — with a co-ordination of mind and whipcord muscle that makes the motions of others seem slow. The Avenger was like that.

He got to the door almost before Nellie Gray was aware that he had left his chair.

“She mustn’t be allowed to go down this street alone!” he snapped, eyes like flashes of stainless steel. “Of course! I should have known it at once! She is in terrible danger.”

“You want me to—” Nellie began.

“Stay here!” he rapped out. “There may be phone calls—”

He was gone, racing down the stairs with more urgency than Nellie had ever seen him move.

He got to the street door, over which was the small Justice sign, just as Smitty was coming in. In fact they almost bumped.

“Smitty! With me!”

The giant turned and ran after Benson down the short block composing all there was to Bleek Street. He couldn’t quite keep up with the gray fox of a man with the dead face, but he did his best.

They got to the corner, where traffic was thick. Ahead, Benson saw the girl, walking toward a cab stand.

Probably there wasn’t another man in all the great city who could have seen the thing. But those colorless, keen eyes of The Avenger’s had telescopic power. He saw it, inconspicuous as it was.

Claudette was just raising her hand to call a cab from the line when it happened.

From some window near her, something flashed out and down. The Avenger couldn’t see what it was. It was too small. But he knew. The crystalline flash of it told him. He couldn’t see what window it came from, because he was looking down along the street at a thin angle. But he let that problem go till later.

The flashing downward arc of the little thing made Benson spurt forward with even greater speed. He was probably covering ground at a rate of nine seconds flat per hundred yards, when he got to the girl.

His steely arm swept around her before she knew he had approached. She cried out in surprise. As she did so, the little glass capsule whose flash Benson had seen, hit the sidewalk next to both of them.

There wasn’t anything dramatic about it. The thing hit with a soft, harmless-sounding littie plop and broke into a million pieces. That was all.

But that small plop was more terrible to discerning ears than any roar of a bomb explosion would have been.

Benson leaped away with the girl as if she had weighed only a few ounces. He didn’t stop till there was twenty yards between him and the bit of sidewalk where the capsule had broken.

“Why—” gasped Claudette. “What do—”

The Avenger didn’t pay any attention to her. He had a more urgent thing to do, now.

People were beginning to gather, as people always do when something a little out of the ordinary happens. And this had been out of the ordinary: a man with blazing, colorless eyes and snow-white hair, catching up a girl and running twenty yards with her as if he had suddenly gone crazy.

Some of the people were pressing ignorantly toward the spot where the capsule had hit. They didn’t see what Benson saw. And even Benson might not have seen it had he not had an inkling of what to look for.

From the spot on the sidewalk where glass lay in fragments, a kind of gray cloud was rising. It was like a genie rising from a bottle, to solidify later into hideous form. Only this wouldn’t solidify. This would stay that way, faintly shining, a whitish mist, looking innocent and harmless — till flesh and blood were near.

Then—

“Back everybody!” The Avenger’s voice was like the crack of a bullwhip. There was such command in it that everyone in earshot stopped in his tracks as if a hand had been laid on his shoulders.

Then they moved again. People are like that, too. You can’t make them obey a command for any length of time without telling them why. And Benson couldn’t take the precious seconds to try a real explanation.

“Poison gas — around that doorway!” he called in his whiplash voice.

That did it. The crowd shrank hastily back from the doorway near which the dreadful, white mist was hovering in air. A few with extra-good eyes saw the mist, and talked volubly about the spectacle to the rest.

“Smitty!” The Avenger rapped out.

The giant turned from the light gray cloud.

“Nearest butcher shop,” Benson snapped. “Get a side of beef — any big chunk of meat. Bring it here instantly!”

There was a butcher shop on the far corner. The giant raced for it, running as fleetly as a stripling, for all his great size.

“The… frosted death?” whispered Claudette, staring with fearful eyes at the faint, shimmering mist.

“Yes,” said Benson. “Aimed at you! Fortunately it is still, without wind, at this moment. So the stuff stays where it is. If a breeze were to spring up and scatter it before Smitty gets back—”

The giant was on his way back, already, with a quarter of beef, running as lightly with it as if it had been a pork chop. He reached the corner and looked at his chief. Few words were needed between The Avenger and his aides!

Benson nodded toward the gray cloud. Smitty tossed the beef so that it hit at the base of the patch of faintly shining mist.

The result was as weird as it was horrible.

The shining, translucent patch suspended in the still air began to funnel down on the meat like water streaming through a faucet. It was as if the microscopic particles composing the misty patch were little particles of steel, and the beef was a powerful magnet.

In less than half a minute there was no trace of the thin grayish cloud. It was all on the meat.

The crowd couldn’t understand that at all. Poison gas, this man with the emotionless, dead face and icily flaring eyes, had yelled. And some had seen the “gas” cloud. But gas settling like that on meat? It seemed worse than gas. Now that the danger was over, had they but known it, they all got back to an even safer distance than when it had hung by a thread over their unknowing heads.

Benson drew a deep breath, as the crisis passed.

A uniformed patrolman was hurrying toward the crowd. He started to pass Benson, saw the white, still face of The Avenger and his awesome, colorless eyes, and stopped.

“You, Mr. Benson!” he said respectfully. “What’s wrong, sir? It must be important if you’re here.”

“It is,” nodded The Avenger. He put his lips close to the patrolman’s ear, so that the words wouldn’t be overheard by others and start a panic.

“The frosted death!”

The cop’s hands clenched convulsively. He knew more than most about the frosted death. He had been a close friend of the homicide detective who had been unfortunate enough to let the back of his hand brush against the body of John Braun.

“There?” he whispered back. “That stuff?” He pointed to the beef, which was beginning to look as if invisible hands were slowly sifting powdered sugar on it.

“That’s right. Listen, and follow instructions to the letter. Get more men and rope this area off. Then get kerosene — gallons of it — and pour it over that side of meat. Burn it where it is. Don’t try to take it to the city incinerator or anyplace else. Burn it on the spot!”

The patrolman’s face was the color of putty.

“Oh, no!” he said. “Not me! I wouldn’t go that close to it for—”

“It’s all right as long as you don’t actually touch it,” said Benson. “We’ve found that out about it. When it has once settled on something, it fastens there. It doesn’t float off, even for another victim, by itself. Unless a bit of it is actually placed on your hand, you’ll be all right. Just keep from actually touching it.”

“I’ll say I will,” exclaimed the cop, sweat glistening on his forehead.

He blew his whistle for help in keeping the crowd back, and The Avenger and Smitty and Claudette Sangaman moved off. The girl was brave. She was pale, but composed.

Benson saw a cab driver he knew he could trust. He waved him over and held the cab door open.

“Go home,” he said to Claudette, “and pack a few things, then come back to my place at Bleek Street. I don’t want you to show your face outdoors for the next few days.”

“You think there will be more attempts?” faltered the girl.

“I know there will be.” The Avenger turned to the driver, a stalwart young fellow with a twisted nose who looked like a thug but with whom you could have left a thousand in cash, uncounted, and have known you’d get it all back again.

“Mike, go into Miss Sangaman’s apartment with her while she packs. If anyone — servant or friend or anyone else — tries to get near her, knock him into the next room.”

“Yes, Mr. Benson,” said the driver.

The cab rolled off.

Smitty and Benson soon found the window from which the glass capsule had been tossed. But it told them nothing. The window opened onto a long-vacant office in an old building next to an apartment house. Prints in the dust had been smudged. There were no fingerprints or clues of any kind.

Benson called the Sangaman-Veshnir Corp., and got the personnel manager on the phone. He asked if any executive, or anyone connected with the laboratory, was absent at that moment.

There was, it seemed. A chemist named Mickelson, now elevated to Targill’s place with the latter’s death and formerly Targill’s assistant, hadn’t come in that afternoon from his lunch period. All the rest were there.

“Complications?” said Smitty, as The Avenger slowly hung up the receiver.

“I don’t know,” said Benson, eyes icily thoughtful. “A new piece in the puzzle, at least. But we’ll make it fit, before we finish.”