The Smiling Dogs

CHAPTER VI The Black Book

It was about three o’clock in the morning. Smitty and Mac had streaked back from Montana in one of The Avenger’s fastest small planes at a rate that bid fair to beat the official transcontinental record. They had gone straight to their chief.

Three in the morning. But Benson was dressed in his usual unobstrusive gray, and he looked as if sleep were the farthest thing from his mind. As far as anyone could tell, the gray fox of a man seemed able to get along on about three hours’ sleep a day.

He looked at the two objects Smitty and Mac had brought back with them from Bison Park. The little box with the salt and sulphur from the mineral spring and the shabby old handbag Smitty had picked up.

“Go over what happened at the park again,” he said, his voice even and emotionless.

Mac repeated the tale of their morning and half-afternoon at Bison Park and of the shots taken at them.

“Since you’ve never been out here before,” said Benson, “the chances are the marksman is from Washington. He must have seen you here to be able to recognize you — although it is barely possible that descriptions were wired ahead. I have checked the telegraph offices and the phone records and can find no trace of such a warning. Still, it is possible.”

“I haven’t seen anybody such as Phelps described, around here,” said Smitty. “A bony guy with a scar on his forehead.”

“Scar?” repeated Benson quickly, pale eyes like colorless jewels in his dead face.

“Phelps thought it was a scar. But he wasn’t sure. There was just a line down over his temple, he said.”

The Avenger’s eyes took on the brooding look that came when he was co-ordinating past reports. “There was a heavy trash basket thrown at the murderer of Sheriff Aldershot, it is believed. That could have produced a mark on the man’s temple. It is possible that you had a brush with the killer of Aldershot and Sewell. Go on!”

The Scot recalled the sores on the flanks of the jack-rabbit and deer.

The Avenger’s face was as dead as the face of the moon, but his eyes grew colder and more brilliant. He made no comment, but it was plain that he was very much interested in the peculiar disease.

Mac told of Smitty’s picking up the handbag. Benson was looking it over as the Scot spoke. A plain black bag with a gunmetal clasp. There was nothing in it. There was no identifying mark on it.

“And then we saw the little red man leading the green dog,” said Smitty, twisting his huge forefinger uncomfortably between his collar and his columnar neck. Even with the chief, he was afraid of being thought demented when he mentioned that crazy sight. “A little bit of a thing; he was no more than a yard high. And the dog he was leading was smiling. I’ll swear to that.”

“It’s true, Muster Benson,” said Mac seriously. “Even though it sounds mad.”

“You saw the man and dog in the steam column?” The Avenger said.

“Yes! I know nothing could live in that steam. But that’s where we saw them.”

“You saw this vision just after you had picked up the handbag, Smitty?” Benson did not look at the giant as he spoke. He was looking at a long scratch in the gun-metal clasp of the bag.

“Yes, that’s right,” Smitty said.

The Avenger rose, with the box of mineral deposit from Lost Geyser. He went to the traveling laboratory.

Eight minutes later he explained his conclusions. “The scrapings from the sheriff’s shoes reveal thirty percent salt, eight percent sulphur and the rest miscellaneous debris,” he said. “The sample from Lost Geyser has precisely the same percentages. That is where Aldershot went just before hurrying to Washington, all right.”

The gray steel bar of a man with the paralyzed face began to pace slowly up and down the room. Even in this unconsidered, leisurely movement, there was revealed a bit of the enormous physical power compacted in that average-sized body.

“Burnside and Cutten, from Montana,” he mused, “have frequented Dr. Fram’s office. So have Senators Hornblow, Wade and Collendar. It just happens that all those men are outstanding in one field of government activity: soil conservation. They are leaders in reforestation projects, dam building, prevention of erosion. It was Burnside and Cutten, in fact, who sponsored the bill, ten years ago, making Bison a national park.”

Mac spoke up then. “We heard something that might interest you, Muster Benson. In Bison Park there are known deposits of helium. Did ye know that?”

“Yes,” said Benson, “I knew that”

Mac subsided. Would he never learn, he asked himself bitterly, that The Avenger apparently knew everything about everything?

Benson went to the phone and called his personal headquarters in New York.

In a tremendous top-floor room there, a diminutive blonde whose eyes were fogged at the moment with sleep took the call. This was Nellie Gray, fifth of Benson’s assistants.

“Nellie,” said Benson, “there is a well-known psychiatrist by the name of Fram maintaining offices in New York. He is in Washington at the moment, but New York is his home. The offices are closed while he is away. I want you to go through them and make a copy of any records having to do with Senators Collendar, Wade, Hornblow, Burnside and Cutten.”

There was no sleep in Nellie Gray’s voice when she snapped back: “And anything else that looks as if it might be important?”

“And anything else that looks important,” agreed The Avenger.

“Do you want me to come down to Washington personally with any information I might pick up?” asked Nellie Gray wistfully. She was pint-sized, but always spoiling for action. And she wasn’t getting any at the moment.

“I’ll talk to you later,” said Benson.

He hung up. From his pocket he drew the folded bit of paper that had been taken from the wallet of Sheriff Aldershot. “Smitty, you’ve dabbled with code. I haven’t been able to get very far with this. See if you can do anything with it.”

“If you haven’t unscrambled it,” said the giant, “I can predict right now what luck I’ll have with it. About as much as a herring in a den of cats.”

The Avenger put on his hat, an ordinary-looking felt which was not ordinary at all. Through crown and brim were laced scores of fine wires which would take and hold any shape into which the hat was molded.

“Going out?” said Mac. “Want me to go along with ye, chief?”

Benson shook his head. “I’ll go alone.”

He went out. Smitty began poring over the exasperating code message that looked so simple but was so stubborn about being decoded.

“7 7 6 39 4 7 3 2 7 7 9 0 0 0 7 7 9 82 46 38 10 1 9 47 6 7 7 84 0 1 1 50,” he read aloud. “Now isn’t that a pretty dish to set before a guy at three thirty in the morning?”

Benson went to F Street, to the address of a certain veterinarian.

The Avenger’s mind at times seemed to be a mechanical combination of camera and filing cabinet. This was one of the times. He had had one glimpse of a veterinarian’s bill on the anteroom desk of Dr. Fram. In that glimpse he had noted the name of the vet, Albert Quinn, the address on F Street, and the amount of the bill, ten dollars.

An examination of the phone book had revealed that Quinn had his dog-and-cat hospital out in Chevy Chase. But he maintained this office near the downtown section as his headquarters.

Like a gray shadow, The Avenger drifted to the doorway of the office. There wasn’t a soul around at this dawn hour.

The place was a small store, or had been designed as a store originally. The window had been made opaque, with lettering on it stating Quinn’s profession. Benson looked at the lock for a moment.

There wasn’t a lock made that The Avenger couldn’t pick, given time. This one required hardly any time at all — about a minute and a half. He opened the door soundlessly and stepped in.

There were a few whines and whimpers from cages in tiers along two walls. But not much noise. The animals Quinn kept here were obviously ones too sick to be moved out to Chevy Chase. They were paying little attention to anything themselves.

A door to a rear room showed in the darkness, as Benson’s eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom. He went toward it, still with that remarkable soundlessness. He made so little noise that it was almost as if he floated, wraithlike, an inch or so above the floor.

He tried the rear door. It was unlocked. He opened it and waited a full minute before going in. As he waited, he strained his ears.

Richard Benson had spent years adventuring. His tremendous personal fortune had been acquired in jungle and arctic waste, in dangerous desert and on hazardous mountaintops. His instincts were so acute that he could fairly smell danger, if it lurked near. Those instincts were working overtime, now. However, he could hear nothing and see nothing, so he stepped into Quinn’s back room.

Instantly the darkness seemed to come alive. The men had been clever about it. They had not lurked behind the door, or flattened against the walls. Benson would have seen them if they had. No, they had crouched on top of things, above normal eye level, so that even The Avenger had been thrown off guard for a second or two.

Down from a tier of cages leaped one. From the top of a filing cabinet came another. And from the top of a big crate like a piano box came a third. The three hit Benson in one solid scramble. And Benson went down! Even the giant Smitty would have been bowled over by that unexpected mass impact.

To the three attackers, it must have looked as if it were in the bag. Three against one, and that one taken completely by surprise. But the odds were not quite as uneven as they appeared. Not when the one on the receiving end was The Avenger.

Benson had been jumped by groups before. He now acted with the swift method of long training. First he allowed himself to fall relaxed, when it became plain that he was going to have to fall anyway. That saved broken bones. Then, on the floor, he began to fight!

His steely left hand got hold of a thigh. His fingers sought the hollow just above the kneecap and squeezed.

Nerves as big as pencil leads are near the surface there. His fingers got the right spot with a surgeon’s accuracy, and the owner of the maltreated thigh began to yell like a circus calliope.

His right hand, meanwhile, had not been idle. It jammed up over a chest to rip aside a collar and expose the throat beneath. Here, the inhumanly clever fingers squeezed hard, too.

The third man was frenziedly beating away in the darkness with a blackjack. Some of the blows got home, but never squarely. Benson was moving his head too fast for that. He was dazed, but nowhere near unconsciousness.

The man whose throat he grasped went limp. The man who was screeching with the intolerable agony of his leg was fighting, not to disable Benson, but just to get away. His main ambition in life just then was to say “Uncle.”

He managed to tear loose. And The Avenger’s left fist shot up at a pale blur. The blur was the face of the third man, who had been jabbing viciously at him with the blackjack.

Benson’s fist caught the blur squarely, with the force of a piston. The man coughed and half fell off Benson’s chest.

The Avenger got to his feet. It was all over but the running. The two left conscious realized that pretty enthusiastically. They raced for the rear door and leaped out.

Benson got there almost as fast as they did. But the door did not move to his tug. Cannily, the men had rigged an outer fastening, before entering here, so that they could stop just such a pursuit as this.

The Avenger’s shoulder muscles bulged to pull the door back inward, off its hinges if necessary. Then he relaxed. The sound of a car in rapid motion came to his ears. Too late to do anything about the two.

He turned back to the third man, still out from the pressure against the great nerves of the neck. Benson calmly switched on the light. And then, with better illumination and time to look around, he saw that there were two bodies in the back room. One was that of his attacker, stirring a little now and moaning.

The other body lay near a divan, and did not stir at all. It was a dead man!

Benson, pale eyes like ice in a polar dawn, stepped to the dead man first. He noted that the body was in pajamas. It was that of a small fellow with a bald spot rimmed with gray hair. Spot and hair were a mess where a club had broken the whole dome of the skull.

It was Quinn, proprietor of the place. Sometimes, it appeared, the veterinarian slept here in his downtown office on the divan. Tonight had been one of the times, which was unfortunate because tonight these killers had sneaked in after something.

The Avenger set about discovering what it was the three had been looking for. The room was in a mess from a thorough search. So he decided that if what the three had wanted had been in there, they’d already found it.

He stepped to the man he had rendered unconscious with the delicate precision of his fingers. He went through his pockets. One possession of the dead veterinarian was there. It was a small black book. The blank pages of the book were alternate yellow and white. The doctor’s letterhead was printed at the top of the pages, and lines were ruled in bill form.

It was a fairly new book, with only eight entries in it The entries described pets he had worked on. Benson thumbed through it. There were three entries concerning cats, one for a pet monkey, one for a pony, and three for dogs. The entries regarding the dogs read:

This little case book, it seemed, was what the three men had come here for. Its attempted theft was responsible for the death of the veterinarian, Quinn.

The Avenger pocketed it and went out to phone headquarters and have the unconscious man booked for murder.

CHAPTER VII

Two in Trouble

In the late afternoon of that day, Nan Stanton, in Dr. Fram’s anteroom, wrote down the name of the latest visitor. It was strictly routine. She listed all who came to see the doctor.

This man was quite well known for his wealth and his power in the business world. He was Tetlow Adams, railroad magnate and mine owner.

Adams was a husky man of sixty, still retaining the straightness of body and wideness of shoulder gained in his youth by hard labor on the roadbed of one of the railroads he now controlled in Wall Street.

He had a hard blue eye, a bluish, close-shaven jaw hinting that he was not a person to trifle with, and a craggy nose twisted a little to one side from having been broken in a fight long ago.

Nan, smiling, went into Fram’s office, and came out again at once.

“You can go right in,” she said. “Dr. Fram is expecting you.”

The railroad and mining man went into the inner office. Nan completed her entry of the visit: time, date and the rest. Purely routine.

It seemed that her routine was to be interrupted for a while. Dr. Fram came out and stood looking down at his pretty brown-haired secretary. His middle finger touched his trim little goatee gently.

“Miss Stanton,” he said, “I’d like you to go back to the New York office, please. Open it again and take charge.”

In Nan’s brown eyes appeared the natural wonder as to why he wanted her in an empty office. Fram continued pleasantly: “I’m thinking of running up to New York every other week or so. I have things well started here in Washington on my sanity test bill. You may make appointments for next week in New York.”

“You want me to go at once?” asked the girl.

“At once, please,” Fram said.

Nan packed some papers for the New York files in a briefcase, checked out of her hotel and took the next train from Washington.

She ate on the train; and then, on arriving in New York, she took a cab for the office instead of the small apartment she maintained in lower Manhattan. Nan was like that. The interests of her employer came first The papers in her briefcase were important. Therefore, she would file them first in the office vault, then go home.

It was an unfortunate act of loyalty.

Fram’s office was near the downtown financial section in a building with so many offices of professional men that it was kept open all night. It was not like the average big building — hard to get into after regular hours.

Nan nodded to the elevator starter, took an elevator to the eighteenth floor and went to where Fram’s suite was located. As she went, she hummed a tune from a recent movie, and thought of the things she wanted to catch up on now that she was back home.

If there was anything she did not think of, it was danger. She saw no one in the eighteenth-floor corridor, but that was not unusual at eleven o’clock at night. She inserted her key in the lock of Fram’s suite, opened the door, shut it behind her as she stepped inside and reached for the light.

And that was the last Nan Stanton knew about anything for a long, long time! Colored lights burst behind her eyelids as something hard but padded smacked down on her head. Then blackness.

“O.K.,” said the man who had clubbed the girl. He clicked on the lights.

The light revealed him to be a most offensive-looking man, with bony features and a tallow color to his skin. There was a fresh scar running down over his forehead.

The bony man had damned that trash basket a good many times. “Bundle her into the locker,” he said.

He was talking to two men who looked so much like gunmen that they could have stepped into the movies as they stood.

Undersized men with narrowed eyes, weak mouths, and belligerent jaws. They were dressed in clothes that were twice as expensive as the clothes of most men, but still didn’t look right on them.

In the center of the anteroom where they all stood, was a little heap of white, starched dresses of the type Nan wore in Fram’s office.

The heap had come from a steel locker, which now lay empty on the floor beside it. The locker, placed horizontally, looked gruesomely like a coffin with a hinged lid.

Into it, as into a coffin, the two men lifted the unconscious girl.

“Is she dead?” asked one of them, without much curiosity.

“I don’t know,” said the bony man, equally indifferent.

“If she ain’t now, she will be later. Carry her down to the car. You, Joey, drive her to the garage.”

The two men took the locker, one at each end, and went out into the corridor. They headed for the freight elevator, straining to make the steel case seem as light as it would have been had there been no body cramped in it.

Behind them, the bony man reflected that he might as well turn that light out. And with that decision, he let another girl besides Nan Stanton in for a load of grief.

Nellie Gray, stanch aide of The Avenger, was as petite, feminine and fragile-looking as a white porcelain doll. And she was as explosive as a hand grenade when the occasion demanded action.

Nellie, told to prowl through the offices of Dr. Fram, had wandered idly by the door during the day, and looked over the lock. It was not a very good lock. It was of the type that didn’t even need to be picked. A knife blade inserted in the crack, pressed down on the lock-bar with the cutting edge getting a leverage, and waggled back and forth a few times would release it.

However, there were too many people around in the daytime to permit such suspicious actions. So Nellie returned at a little past eleven o’clock, waited till the eighteenth floor was clear — a couple of men carrying a steel locker were the last to occupy the hallway — and then went to Fram’s door.

Three waggles with the knife slid the lock-bar back. Nellie, looking like a little girl getting into mischief rather than the extremely competent aide of a nationally known crime fighter, opened the door and tiptoed into blackness.

She pressed the button of a little pencil flash. Its thin beam quested around inquiringly.

Just a few seconds before, another thin beam had been questing. It had been snapped off when the sound of her knife in the door crack had rasped faintly. But she had no way of knowing that. Nor did the fact that the door of a little washroom was standing open a crack seem particularly suspicious to her.

Go through the files, The Avenger had said, and copy anything concerned with the listed senators. Or anything else looking important.

Nellie went through the anteroom into the inner office — and stopped with a gasp.

Someone else had beaten her to it. Someone else had searched to see if anything important were around. The drawers were out of the desk and filing cabinet, and papers were all over everything. The rugs were scuffed up, where someone had looked under them. Pictures were askew on the walls. The small office vault hung open.

Nellie suddenly held her breach. This room was disrupted from floor to ceiling. But the other room, the anteroom into which she had just come, was not disarranged.

Yet there might be papers in the desk out there just as important as any in here!

Nellie whirled with the swiftness of a coiled silver spring. One room searched, another untouched! It looked very much as if she had come in the middle of a search, not at the end of one. And the washroom door had been open a little bit—

The swiftness with which she had whirled threw the bony man off aim. He had been bringing his hand noiselessly down, with the blackjack in it, when she turned with that lightning suspicion in her brain. The weapon missed its goal completely, and the bony man early fell forward onto his knees.

Nellie dropped her tiny flash. There was blackness in the room. But in the blackness, she remembered just where to grab.

Her dainty small hands reached for the spot where the bony man’s wrist was flailing, caught the wrist. She gave a curious sideways twist and a forward wrench.

Nellie Gray, so little and fragile-looking, knew more about jujitsu than most advanced instructors of the art.

The bony man spun forward and down to crash to the floor like an unloaded ton of bricks. “What the—” he mumbled, sitting up with a loud ringing sound in his ears.

It was too bad he spoke. It gave away his exact location in the darkness. With her soft red lips in a grim line, like a pretty teacher punishing an unruly pupil, Nellie struck again.

The edge of her right hand, little finger first, slashed against the man’s throat like the edge of a board.

The slashing edge caught him squarely on the Adam’s apple; and such a blow is nothing to laugh about. At any rate, the bony man on the floor didn’t do any laughing.

A sound like a squawk coming from a chicken with a ring around its neck split the darkness. Nellie repeated the slash to the all-too-tender Adam’s apple, then turned and started out of the place. It was a little more crowded than she had anticipated.

Her retreat, begun in good order, was destined not to continue so smoothly.

There was a click, and light flooded on! It had been turned on by a man with the stamp of gunman and crook all over him. He stood in the doorway, with an inquiring finger still on the light switch.

Then, as he saw his bony chief on the floor and a very pretty but very determined-looking blonde coming his way, he lunged savagely for the blonde.

That wasn’t bright of him, as it turned out.

Nellie caught his outstretched right arm, twisted it in a way that was going to make it very sore for several days, and jerked him on forward so that he sailed across the room half out the window. The window was closed, so that he had a chance to find out just how much a pair of hands can be cut up when they lunge through glass.

Nellie started a second time to get out of there. But when she had jerked the second man forward and off balance, she had swayed backward a little herself to multiply the power of the move.

She had gone backward just enough to be within reach of the bony man on the floor.

Still getting the loudest sounds possible out through his maltreated Adam’s apple, the man got a grip on one slim, silken ankle. He jerked.

Nellie Gray sat down.

The bony man sprang at her, hands flailing to smash her face in. She ducked, put up a small fist at just the right time and let him break a loosely clinched thumb on it.

But he got her with the other hand. And then she felt warm, sticky stuff smearing her neck as the second man’s bloody hands closed on her throat from behind.

That was all for Nellie.

She knew how the bony man’s Adam’s apple must be feeling, when, after an interval whose length she could not guess had passed, she opened her eyes.

“Awwph,” she said, rubbing at her bruised throat and looking around.

She found herself looking at the bony man. He had been just about to kick her, but he didn’t when he saw her eyes open. She might be able to grab his leg and do more damage if he tried it.

With the bony man was the one with the cut hands.

“She’s a tiger,” this second man snarled. “I’d like to—”

“Let her alone,” growled the bony one. “Shell get hers later. Hellcat! It’s lucky you came back from the car instead of driving out here with Joey and that front-office dope. She’d have gotten away from me.”

The two went out. And Nellie saw someone who, before, had been hidden by their bodies.

The someone was a pretty girl with brown eyes and hair, and with blood on her forehead.

“Who are you?” asked Nellie, rubbing her throat.

“I’m the front-office dope,” replied the girl. “The front office being that of the eminent Dr. Fram. The dope being me — for not realizing that someone crooked was going on. And you?”

“Looking through Fram’s office to see what I could see,” said Nellie huskily. “I got something, too.”

She reached into her dress, smiling bleakly.

“I hit the bony man a couple in the throat. With the first smack, while he was too busy feeling his Adam’s apple to feel me going into his pockets, I got this from him.”

She took out a crumpled ball of paper and opened it.

“Why, that’s a page from my list of routine calls of patients to Dr. Fram,” said Nan Stanton. “I wonder why they took that?”

“I wonder,” said Nellie. “But they did; so it must be important.”

She looked through it, searching for the name of any of the senators Benson had listed. There was no such name.

There was one name on the list, however, important enough to draw her eyes.

“Tetlow Adams!” she said. “So he’s a client of Fram’s. Don’t tell me he needs a psychiatrist!”

“No,” said Nan. “But it seems that his son does. Anyhow, that’s what he said he came to Dr. Fram about. His nineteen-year-old son.”

Nellie put the paper back in her dress, wondering if it could have any significance for The Avenger. She decided, on looking around, that she would probably never live to find out.

She and Nan were in an underground room with only one heavy door breaking its concrete expanse. Now and then she heard a rumble overhead, and she surmised that they were in the basement of a garage.

She wondered if there were any hearses upstairs, handy, among the other vehicles.