The Avenger 10 - The Smiling Dogs (7 page)

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.

Senator Burnside had lived with horror in his heart for days. It wasn’t a vague horror. It was a very precise one. It was a horror of padded cells and strait jackets, asylums and high gates closing behind him and shutting off the outside world forever.

He knew exactly what he was afraid of. So that, almost at the sound of the men’s voices, he realized at once what was going on.

Burnside was in the living room of his home—that living room in which he had seen something it was impossible for any man to see because it was impossible for it really to have been there: a little bright-red man leading a green, smiling dog on a leash made out of flowers.

The voice sounded at the front door, heavy, arrogant, callously indifferent.

“Is Senator Burnside in?”

The Senator heard his servant answer to the effect that he was in. And Burnside started to get out of the living room.

If he went out the regular door, it would land him in the hall in plain sight of the street door. So he didn’t try to get out that way. He stole toward the dining-room door.

Then he heard steps as somebody, his servant he thought, came to cut that doorway off. So he jumped like a frightened rabbit toward the window.

What he saw out there in the street confirmed his worst fears. There was a sort of ambulance out there, which had grating over the windows. It looked like a cage in which dangerous animals might be borne off.

Or dangerous men. Madmen!

Burnside was tugging at the window, but it wouldn’t go up. Then he heard someone come into the room behind him. He turned with what dignity he could muster. There was only one course, now. Try to bluster it out. The man standing in the hall doorway was broad of shoulder and hairy of hands. He had on white like an interne, but he looked, Burnside thought in terror, more like a butcher.

Beside the big man in white was a little fellow, middle-aged, with a kind of happy smile on his face as if he went around continually with a secret joke in his mind that he didn’t intend to share with the rest of the world.