The Smiling Dogs

CHAPTER XV Catch a Nightmare

Josh and Rosabel had located the pet store from which, about a month ago, had been sold the dachshund answering to the name of Bob.

The pet store proprietor couldn’t remember the purchaser very well.

“He was a bony fellow, well-dressed and, yet, not looking right, somehow. His skin had an unhealthy color. And that’s about all I can tell you.”

It was enough for Josh and Rosabel.

A bony man with a skin like tallow had tried to kill Smitty and Mac at Bison Park. A bony man with a new scar across his forehead which, The Avenger had surmised, was made by the heavy end of a trash basket thrown at him by Spencer Sewell.

Which meant that he was the murderer of Sewell and Sheriff Aldershot.

Now this character was turned up as the purchaser of a dachshund.

“You have his address?” Josh asked. Ordinarily he talked and looked as sleepy as a worthless houn’ dog from his own South. But now the Negro was using his best and most precise English. He had to appear authoritative or he wouldn’t have gotten any information at all. As it was, the pet-store owner was talking with a great deal of reluctance.

“Of course I have the address of the buyer,” said the man. “But I don’t see why it should concern you—”

“I’ve already said,” Josh retorted, stretching the truth a little, “that we want to know because we found such a dog and would like to return it to its owner.”

The pet-shop man shrugged and opened an account book.

“Name of the buyer: Job Petrie. Address: 2232 K Street, Georgetown,” he said ungraciously. “I doubt if you’ll get a reward from Mr. Petrie. He didn’t strike me as a man who liked dogs very much. He probably bought it for a friend.”

“Then he can tell us where to find the friend,” said Josh.

He thanked the man and left, with Rosabel. But outside the pet shop they looked at each other and shrugged.

It looked as though they had struck a hot scent — but a short one. For, of course, the bony man wouldn’t have given a real address.

There was no such number as 2232 K Street in Georgetown. Where it would have been, along a well-to-do residential street, was only a vacant lot.

“Stuck!” said Josh.

But Rosabel shook her head slowly, soft dark eyes intent. Rosabel had plenty of brains, and she kept them polished by frequent and efficient use.

“There’s only this one vacant lot for blocks along here,” she observed. “All the rest is built up.”

“Well?” said Josh.

“Well, the man who bought the dog could hardly give the first number that came into his head — and have it just happen to be this vacant lot. The chances are a hundred to one against such a coincidence.”

Josh’s quick brain was getting into step. “Of course!” he said. “The purchaser gave this address because he knew it was a vacant lot. He did it to throw off all possible investigation. But to know that, he must be very familiar with the neighborhood. In fact, it’s a safe bet that his real address is near here. Let’s get a city directory. An old one, if possible.”

They went to the next street, where a few stores were mingled among houses not quite so pretentious as those on K Street. In a drugstore, they found a directory about three years old.

House by house they checked the block they were in and the block on either side.

They were in an old section; and the people there were home owners and not transient. They were looking for a recent buyer or renter in the neighborhood; but they didn’t find one.

But almost behind the vacant lot, on the next street, there was a vacant store.

Josh and Rosabel looked at each other. It was the one possible location for monkey business that showed anywhere around there. They went back down the street and through an alley to the rear of the vacant store.

There was a cluttered back yard and a general air of desolation, as if no one had been around the place in years. The two went to the rear door anyway.

Josh didn’t need to point to the lock. He and Rosabel worked so closely together that she had seen it as soon as he.

There was a shiny scratch on the lock where a key had recently been used.

Rosabel took a bobby-pin from her jet-black hair and handed it wordlessly to Josh. Josh bent it, inserted it in the lock experimentally, bent it a little more, and opened the door.

They stepped in.

There was a large back room, one side of which had been partitioned off and had a frosted-glass door in the partition. Then there was an open door to the front room of the store. A little light came from that one. Not much. The store front was shuttered.

They started toward that door, and then stopped. A noise had sounded within the small, narrow space partitioned off as an office. Josh took a step toward that, to throw the frosted-glass door open. But it was opened before they got there.

As silently as if swinging of its own volition, with no hand touching it, it opened back. And Josh and Rosabel croaked out exclamations and stared with rings of white showing clear around the pupils in their rolling eyeballs.

A little man, bright-red in color, stood in the doorway. The impossible little fellow was in frock coat and topper. At the end of a leash of braided flowers he had a dog. The dog was grass-green, and was smiling.

“For the love of—” breathed Josh.

A sound came from the door to the front room of the store. They turned.

There, on that threshold, was a little red man and a smiling green dog.

Rosabel checked a scream. She and Josh stared first at the one unbelievable apparition and then at the other, identical one. And after that they acted.

When in doubt, jump.

Rosabel sprang like a black tigress for the little man in the office doorway. Josh jumped at the little man in the store doorway.

And both found their hands clutching tangible substance.

These things looked like nightmares, more than anything that could really exist. But if so, each of The Avenger’s assistants caught a nightmare.

Rosabel’s little red man spoke first.

“Stop twisting my arm, will you?” he said peevishly. “You’re about three times as big as me. You don’t have to break me all up.”

Josh’s small red captive was yelling at the top of his voice.

The green dachshunds were apparently barking like mad — but no sound came from them. Then Josh caught on to the entry in the veterinarian’s book:

“Vocal cords cut.”

And also he caught on to a lot of other things.

“What’s you going to with us?” squalled one of the little men. They were quite unremarkable midgets, dyed red, when you examined them closely. And the dogs were quite ordinary dachshunds, dyed green, with lines cleverly painted at the corners of their mouths, thus making them appear to be smiling.

“What’re you going to do to us?” the little red man repeated sulkily. “We ain’t done nothin’. We just worked for a guy a coupla times who wanted to play a practical joke on some friends. And we posed for a coupla pictures. And that’s all.”

Josh knew, now, what The Avenger, it was apparent, had known for some time.

“Practical joke?” he burst out. “Why, say! This is the threat that was held over the Senators! This is the thing that’s making them willing to put over the Bison Park steal, even though it means their finish politically.”

Rosabel nodded, dark eyes bright.

“They’d see this impossible sight,” she said, “and be convinced they were going crazy. They wouldn’t dare tell anyone about it. They wouldn’t dare even talk to each other about it. They’d be too afraid of being put in padded cells.”

“And then,” added Josh, “they’d be horrified to find that someone, probably this psychiatrist, Fram, had ‘discovered’ their secret. They could be threatened with a lifetime in an asylum if they didn’t do just as they were told!”

One of the almost identical little red midgets spoke up, jerking at Josh’s viselike hand.

“I tell you, it was all done for a joke! The guy who hired us said so. He wanted to play tricks on a couple of senators and a congressman; so we paraded in front of ’em at odd times when nobody else was around. One of ’em, Burnside, shot at me,” he added angrily. “Almost winged me. Then my pal walked into another doorway and drew his attention away from me.”

Josh was puzzling over something.

“How can you live in steam?” he said.

“Live in steam? You’re nuts,” his captive snapped. For a miniature, he was certainly bad-tempered.

“In Bison Park,” exclaimed Josh, remembering Mac’s and Smitty’s account of seeing a little red man and a green dog in the heart of the steam column from lost Geyser.

“Bison Park? We were never in Bison Park in our lives,” snarled the little man.

“You had the dogs’ vocal cords cut, so they couldn’t bark, and make your victim realize that he was seeing something real instead of the fantasy of a disordered mind.”

“We didn’t have the dogs fixed,” protested the little fellow writhing in Rosabel’s resolute grasp. “The guy who hired us must have. Because the dogs never barked when we had ’em. So what? Lots of folks have the bark cut out of a dog, so they won’t keep the neighbors awake at night.”

Josh returned to one of the midgets’ statements.

“You say one of the men you paraded in front of was a congressman.”

“Yeah!”

“Was it Congressman Coolie?”

“Yeah. That’s the one. Congressman Coolie.” The little man scratched his bright-red chin with his bright-red hand. “The one that got bumped off by somebody just last night. He didn’t fall for the joke at all. Just asked us who the devil we were and what the devil we were doing in his house. He threw a chair at me and nearly got me. He wasn’t scared a bit.”

Josh thought he knew the answer to that one, too.

“I looked over that short biographical sketch of Coolie, that I got for Mr. Benson,” he said to Rosabel. “It said the Congressman was color blind. You see? Coolie didn’t see what the rest did. All he saw was a little man with a dog, without the crazy coloring. It wasn’t quite enough to plant the insanity scare in his mind. He held out on the Bison Park deal, therefore, because he wasn’t properly subdued. So they had to kill him to get him out of their way.”

“I think you’re right,” nodded his pretty wife. “But Josh — who are,’they’?”

Josh turned to his diminutive captive. “Who hired you for these practical jokes, to assume for the moment that you aren’t lying?”

“I’m not lying. The guy who hired us was a bony man with a pale face, as if he had been sick a long time. Said his name was Petrie. Just lately he showed up with a cut down his forehead. That’s all we know about him.”

“Josh—” began Rosabel.

But he held his hand quickly to stop her, and she didn’t say whatever it was she’d had in mind.

The upraised hand was not necessary to halt her. She had felt the same thing he had — the thing that had brought the intent look into his black eyes.

A slight tingling at her waist.

That tingling was the vibrating little signal of their belt radios that same other member wanted to contact them. Josh took his radio out with his free hand.

“Hey, that’s a cute little dingbat,” said his midget. “Where do you buy—”

“Shut up!” snapped Josh.

And a tiny but sweet voice came from the little set. An urgent voice. The voice of Nellie Gray.

“Mac — Smitty — Josh — Chief. Nellie Gray talking. If any of you hear this, come to the aid of Nan Stanton and myself. We are being held for death. Come as soon as you can. We are being held in a cell in a tunnel under the Potomac River. The entrance to the tunnel is through a vacant warehouse. Part of the sign over the warehouse is — RAIN CO. Probably some grain company. In the basement, a concealed manhole leads to the tunnel. Watch for a lever about fifty yards from the tunnel entrance. If there is anyone at the lever, get him before he can pull it down. It operates a floodgate which will flood the whole tube. I will repeat. We are held in an abandoned tunnel under the Potomac River. The entrance is through a vacant warehouse with the sign—”

Josh laid his little radio down so as to have both hands free. He grabbed Rosabel’s midget, and held both.

“The dog leashes,” he said. “Get them free, and we’ll tie these two back to back.”

Rosabel’s slim dark hands were flying before he had finished the sentence. The leashes were really of leather thong, with the flowers braided over the outside. Rosabel used one to bind the midgets’ ankles securely together, and the other to pass first around their chests and then in a deft loop over the wrists of each small man.

“Hey!” snarled one of the midgets. “You can’t do this to us. Leave us loose. We ain’t done a thing—”

“We’ll see later just how much you’re guilty of,” said Josh. “Meantime, you’ll stay here, on ice, for a more thorough questioning.”

They left the raging little men and the soundlessly barking dachshunds and piled into their car to seek for a warehouse on the river with the sign — RAIN CO.

Several miles away, Mac and Smitty were racing on the same mission in their car.

SOS! Nellie Gray! She didn’t have to call twice.