The Avenger 10 - The Smiling Dogs
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Authors: Kenneth Robeson
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By Kenneth Robeson
#1: J
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WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY
WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION
F
IRST
P
RINTING
: M
ARCH
, 1973
C
OPYRIGHT
© 1940
BY
S
TREET
& S
MITH
P
UBLICATIONS
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NC
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C
OPYRIGHT
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1969
BY
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UBLICATIONS
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OVER
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EORGE
G
ROSS
W
ARNER
P
APERBACK
L
IBRARY
IS A
D
IVISION
OF
W
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B
OOKS,
75 R
OCKERFELLER
P
LAZA
, N.Y. 10019.
A Warner Communications Company
ISBN: 0-446-74-142-6
Printed in the United States of America
CHAPTER IV: Senatorial Interest
CHAPTER XII: Angry Congressman
CHAPTER XVI: Terror in the Senate
CHAPTER XVIII: Death by Flood!
THE
SMILING DOGS
The Smiling Dogs
The setting for the scene was a little like the setting for a nightmare. It was about the time to have nightmares, too—almost twelve o’clock at night.
You know how, in nightmares, you sometimes seem to see long vistas, with horror at the other end? Or endless lines of walls around you, shutting you in with fear? Or interminable flights of stairs with some devil coming up them a step at a time after you?
Well, it was the latter with Spencer Sewell.
Sewell was looking down the endless stairs, straight at terror. It took Sewell a minute to realize that this was not a nightmare, and that the stairs really existed.
They were the long, long stone steps leading down from the Capitol Building into Capitol Park.
And it also took Sewell a minute to realize that he was not having nightmares, even though he was practically asleep on his feet.
Sewell had been in the Capitol Building, in a cloakroom near the Senate wing, since ten o’clock that morning. He had been there with Senator Burnside. Sewell was Burnside’s secretary; and when Burnside was busy, which he had been that day, seeing countless people and working on several plans, then Sewell was busy, too.
Sewell had worked himself into a frazzle all day long. He had almost staggered out of the domed building to go home and get some sleep.
Then, at the top of the long, nightmare stairs, he had stared down at—death! Or approaching death, at least, unless he could do something about it.
There were two men down there near the bottom step. But one of the two men didn’t know the other was around. This one man was slowly descending, a step at a time, with his face blank with intense thought. He had his hands in his pockets. The pockets bagged a little because the coat they were in had seldom known a press. Yet his clothes did not look shabby. They were the clothes of an outdoor man with tan on the back of his neck and a leathery skin.
The second man was at the right and a bit behind the first. The second man was stealing slowly, soundlessly after him. His hand was upraised for a blow, and in the upraised hand something glistened. You could tell clear from the top step that the something was a gun.
These things Sewell had seen in about a second and a half, with time seeming to stand still just as it does in nightmares. Then, just as he began to make his work-tired brain click a little bit, the second man struck the first.
Probably Sewell didn’t actually hear the blow, so far away. But he thought he did: a sickening crunch as steel broke bone. And he knew that the man whose back had been turned was done for.
Sewell yelled. Then he acted!
The man who had struck, still oblivious of the fact that the murderous blow had been witnessed by a third party, was stooping over the body of his victim with his hands darting into the baggy pockets.
The yell made him jerk his head up, his face a mask of fear and rage.
There was a trash basket at Sewell’s elbow, placed on one of the level stone parapets flanking the interminable stairs. Sewell picked this up, hardly knowing what he was doing. He slammed it down and out, toward the killer.
The trash basket weighed about fifteen pounds, and was aimed more truly than perhaps Sewell, not an athlete by any means, might otherwise have aimed it.
The thing hit the stairs just before it got to the two men. But it hit with a bounce like that of a golf ball and went on to slam, heavy end first, against the temple of the fellow with the gun in his hand. The man grunted, staggered back, fell to his knees.
Sewell was leaping down the stairs by now. This, too, was an instinctive act. The secretary was not very husky. He weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds, wore glasses and was soft from lack of exercise. Had he had time to think it over, he would have been too afraid to have acted so impulsively.
But he didn’t have time to think; so he lammed right at a murderer, in an instinct to help the victim.
The man who had struck faded off into the night.
Sewell bent over the victim. A glance told him that he couldn’t help there. The man with the baggy clothes and outdoor look was dead!
Sewell recognized him. The dead man was Sheriff Aldershot. Sewell knew because Aldershot had been one of the many visitors pestering Senator Burnside all day. Aldershot had been the last visitor of all. In fact, he had left the cloakroom just before Sewell himself.
Burnside had been agitated after that visit, Sewell remembered, though the Senator hadn’t explained his agitation to his secretary.
Sheriff Aldershot, Sewell knew, was from Bison, Montana, which was not far from the section where Burnside, one of Montana’s two senators, had his home. Now Aldershot, after talking in great secrecy with Burnside, was dead!
Sewell suddenly saw something beside the body. He reached down and picked it up. It was a wallet. The killer had gotten it from the dead man’s pocket, fumbled and dropped it, and hadn’t had time to pick it up again before that trash basket hit him.
Sewell pocketed the wallet with a feeling almost of disappointment. He had thought all sorts of things about the attack, but he hadn’t thought the motive for murder was such a simple one as common theft.
He began to yell for one of the Capitol guards.
No guard appeared; so Sewell, forced to abandon the dead man for a moment, went down the last few steps and into the park.
He kept calling, but he didn’t see any guards.
“Hang it,” he said peevishly to himself. “The only time you see any guards around here at night is when you’ve got a girl with you and want a little privacy under a tree.”
He was moving to the right, toward the down-curving drive at that side of the slant. And as he moved, another figure moved, too, in the same direction and a little faster! The other figure moved in a way that would bring him behind Sewell in about a minute. But Sewell didn’t see that.
This other figure was that of a bony man with a face a bit paler than normal. Down one pale cheek was a red trickle of blood. The trickle originated on the left temple, where the heavy end of a trash basket had struck.
It was the man who had killed Aldershot, slinking batlike in the night.
Sewell, far off, saw a uniform. He yelled again, and this time got some attention.
“Retired cops from the regular force,” Sewell muttered. “Instead of pensioning them, they give them jobs as Capitol guards. I suppose the old guy is half deaf—”
That was all that Sewell muttered or thought—forever! Because the man with the bleeding forehead got to him just then. For a second time a gun barrel raised up and flashed down. And for a second time a man fell and didn’t move again.
The killer began to go rapidly through the pockets of his second victim. But once more he was balked.
