The Avenger 10 - The Smiling Dogs (9 page)

“Yes—fear! And several times some of them, particularly Burnside and Wade, called very late at night. Much later than you’d think men would call in regard to an ordinary bit of proposed legislation.”

“Had Fram entertained this pet idea of his for a long time?” Nellie asked.

Nan shook her head. “I’ve worked for him for about a year. I didn’t hear him mention the thing till about six weeks ago. Then he suddenly began harping on it all the time. Finally, on a moment’s notice, he packed and went to Washington to lobby for the bill.”

Nellie had noticed the same thing that Benson had about the Senators who often visited the psychiatrist. “These men,” she said, “are all well known for one thing: activities in soil conservation. They haven’t anything to do with the type of legislation Fram wants pushed. Why did he pick on
them
?”

“I don’t know,” said Nan.

“Did any other representatives call on Fram?”

“A congressman came once,” said Nan. “Congressman Coolie.”

“Also interested primarily in dams and erosion and reforestation,” nodded Nellie. “He’s the chief leader of bills of that type in the other wing of the Capitol Building. It’s strange.”

She tried another tack. “Tetlow Adams! He’s a power in the land. You say he came to see Fram about his son?”

“That’s what he said,” Nan replied. “I overheard him once or twice when the doctor didn’t shut his inner door tightly. Mr. Adams has a nineteen-year-old boy who is acting strangely.”

“Didn’t he ever bring the son in?”

“No,” said Nan, “he didn’t. He always came and just talked about him. I thought that was queer, though I didn’t think about it very hard.”

“He always talked to the doctor only about his son?”

“I can’t say that,” admitted Nan. “Twice I heard a little, when, as I said, Dr. Fram didn’t shut his inner door tightly. But each time, after I’d heard only a little, he got up and shut the door flush.”

“It could be,” murmured Nellie, “that you were supposed to hear just that much—and no more.”

“It’s hard to believe anything like that. As I say, Dr. Fram isn’t a phony. He’s eminent in his line. And in a whole year of contact with him, I’d say he is a nice, honest, pleasant person.”

“Who set you up to be kidnapped,” Nellie pointed out.

“We don’t
know
that.”

“No, we don’t know it. Perhaps he is innocently surrounded by some sort of crooked work and hasn’t yet suspected it. Perhaps he has been forced into something; an unwilling tool. Perhaps—”

The door opened. In the doorway stood the bony man and the two who had carried Nan Stanton downstairs in the coffinlike steel locker.

The bony man was smiling a little. One glance at the smile made Nellie wish he wouldn’t. She had seen murderous smiles before. This was a perfect example of one.

“My, ain’t they a nice pair?” mocked the bony man, looking the two girls over.

They were a nice pair. Nellie, with her tawny-yellow hair and blue eyes, was a perfect foil in beauty for Nan Stanton’s brunette loveliness.

But the minds of the three kidnappers were obviously on things other than pulchritude. The bony man had just sounded off to be smart.

Nellie felt cold all over. This was it, she thought, in a corner of her brain. The bony fellow had been waiting orders from someone as to the disposition of the two prisoners. Now he had received his orders. Deadly orders!

The wings of death were hovering very low over Nellie Gray and Nan Stanton!

“You’re going to have a little sleep,” said the bony man, smirking. “You’re going to go by-by to slumber land, just like the kids’ programs say on the radio.”

He stopped smiling.

“Out! Come with us. And you”—he glared at Nellie—“any of your panther tricks and you won’t go out the easy way.”

Nellie and Nan went to the door. The men stood back—way back—till they had passed. Then the men fell in behind, herding the two girls along.

Nan was white and scared and mystified. Nellie was not so mystified. The few words of the bony man, and the fact that they weren’t clubbed or shot down at once, had given her the key to the next act.

They were to be killed, but in such a way as to make it seem to be an accident and not murder.

The two went along a narrow corridor and up a greasy flight of stairs. They stepped into a small garage room.

Not a big one. A small room. That was because it was a back room, partitioned off from the main garage. It was a workshop, with a bench along one wall. The partition was flimsy, of planks instead of concrete and cement blocks; but it would do to keep any casual visitor to the garage from knowing what was going on back here.

“Got the sedan ready, Buck?” the bony man called.

A man standing next to a two-year-old black car of moderate price nodded and opened the back of the sedan.

“In there,” rasped the bony man, shoving Nan.

So then Nellie got the rest of it.

Carbon monoxide. The two girls would be killed by the stuff so often responsible for accidental deaths. Then they would be found by the roadside somewhere, in this car or another impossible to trace. And that would be that. The motor of the sedan was running gently. But no exhaust smoke showed at the rear. That was because a hose ran up from the exhaust pipe into the body of the car. The interior of the sedan was already faintly blue and nauseous with gasoline fumes.

“Tie ’em?” said the man called Joey, looking at the two girls.

The bony leader shook his head. “That’d leave marks. You know how a bruise shows up—afterward. No! Just bundle ’em in and—”

Nan screamed and tried to run. Joey caught her, but was careful not to hit her.

Nellie said, voice amazingly calm; “We just won’t get in there. And what do you think of that?”

“You won’t, huh?” snarled the bony man.

“No! And you can’t make us. Before you could shove us in there bodily, we’d have plenty of bruises to give your little show away. And if you club us,
that
will show later and ruin the accident theory. And certainly you can’t shoot us.”

The bony man slowly drew an automatic. He leveled it, not at Nellie’s body, but at her legs.

“If we can’t make it look right,” he said, “we’ll make it very, very wrong. Now this is what I’m going to do if you don’t get into that car. First I’m going to put a slug in your right kneecap. Then I’ll smash the left one into gravel. Then I’ll—”

“I’ll get in,” said Nellie, slumping.

“I thought you would,” nodded the man. “It’s a lot easier to just drift off, than to go through the things we can dish out to you. All right, go on.”

Nellie got into the car. She coughed, and her eyes watered. Nan got in dully, too. All the fight was out of her. The man nearest the sedan slammed the door. Then he did something to the handle. They’d fixed the car so that the two couldn’t possibly get out, once they were in. They had fixed it so there was no chance at all of the girls escaping from the closed deadliness of the interior!

Nan was already choking for breath. In addition to the unobtrusive carbon monoxide fumes were the noxious, raw gas fumes.

But now Nellie was not choking! That had been an act. She was breathing through her handkerchief. The men outside, seeing the two doomed girls only dimly through the inner fog, only grinned at that. Let her breathe through the thing. It couldn’t help.

What they did not know was that the handkerchief held in it a small vial which, when broken, flooded the fabric with a concentrate of oxygen in a volatile solvent. It was a product of MacMurdie’s laboratory, and The Avenger and all his aides carried a few of the glass capsules at all times.

So the men grinned and watched Nellie’s body slacken as Nan’s already had.

But they stopped grinning when, in spite of the blue fog, they saw a lithe body suddenly squirm over the back of the front seat and plump down behind the wheel. And they drew guns and began cursing wildly and shooting about the same way when the purr of the idling motor rose to a scream, and the sedan began to shoot backward like a crab.

The car crashed the partition wall.

Planks flew like straws. The sedan caromed off a truck parked near the partition on the other side, straightened again and shot down a cleared lane between cars in the middle of the main, outer garage room, with the hose jerking off the exhaust pipe.

The sliding door in front was closed, too. And this was heavier. But three thousand pounds of car, made as automobile builders make cars nowadays, is a projectile taking a lot of strength to stop or put out of the running.

The garage door didn’t have that strength.

Still backing, the sedan hit it with a roar like that of a landslide, and the door slammed off its overhead rollers, rode the top of the sedan out into the street, and then dropped off as Nellie tore the wheel around.

The car, banged to bits in the rear, with the gasoline tank pierced and streaming, but able to run miles before all the fluid leaked out, tore down a street toward the East River.

With the little oxygen store in her handkerchief dangerously low, Nellie stopped. She banged at the shatterproof windows with a wrench, till they finally broke out of their frames, and let the fresh air pour in on Nan while she drove still farther away from the garage and the furious gangsters pouring out of it in other cars to follow.

“Boobs,” sniffed Nellie. “Did they expect me to lie still and choke obediently to death with a running motor in front of me?”

But she remembered reading of other carbon-monoxide deaths. Several, now, looked as if they had originated right in that garage. So others
had
choked obediently to death; others without the agile brain and fast, lithe body of Nellie Gray.

The Avenger never wasted energy in getting angry. He occasionally became coldly, glacially furious at a particularly rotten criminal act. But he never became plain angry, as other men do.

Had he indulged in such nerve-wasting emotion, he would have been angry, now, at the Washington police sergeant who had had charge of the wallet from Sheriff Aldershot’s pocket. The wallet in which the cryptogram had been found.

From the start, The Avenger had known that the cryptogram was incomplete. If it hadn’t been, he could have solved it. So, for that matter, could have the government expert, Drake.

But it wasn’t complete. There were a lot more numbers that should have been among the meaningless string on the folded bit of paper.

Benson had gone through that wallet with microscopic care, and found no trace of a key to the thing. Then the hapless sergeant had idly mentioned an odd fact—that three bills out of the several dozen in the wallet had been in a separate compartment.

After mentioning that, the sergeant had felt himself shrivel to pinsize under an icy, colorless stare that seemed to go through him like a couple of diamond drills. But Benson only said quietly, “What three bills?”

So the two, the five and the ten-dollar bills had been handed over to him. And with them, the key to the message. The serial numbers on the bills.

Benson had drawn up the code arrangement he was convinced had been used in the message.

It was one of the easiest of all codes. But it was a senseless scramble if a lot of the figures in a given message were held out.

Smitty was staring over The Avenger’s shoulder.

“You know how the code would work, of course,” said the man with the dead white hair and the pale, icy eyes.
“A
would be 16 or 61;
B,
17 or 71. You can reverse the numbers now and then to mix it up more.
Cat,
for instance, would be 81 61 64. Or 18 61 46, if you preferred it that way. But take out some numbers and make it 1 1 6, or just 1 6, and it isn’t anything. Not till you put the missing numbers in. Which these bills do for this message.”

Benson had arranged the bills in the order that made sense out of their serial numbers.

The numbers on the cryptogram were:

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.

The serial number of the two-dollar bill was 43162993; of the ten-dollar bill, 23132322; of the five-dollar bill, 63133169.

“Now we’ll put them together,” said Benson.

The resultant figures were: 74 73 61 39 46 72 93 92 37 72 39 10 30 02 73 72 29 82 46 38 10 16 39 47 61 73 37 84 10 61 91 50.

The Avenger could read it almost like print. The message was:

SLANTING LINE OF LIGHT MEANS ALL READY.

Smitty growled disgustedly. “So we finally get the thing unscrambled,” he complained “and what do we have? Another cryptogram! Slanting line of light! What line, what light? And what is it that’s ready when the line of light slants?”

The Avenger’s prematurely white head shook a little. “I don’t know yet. But we’ll find out, Smitty. We’ll find out. Two men were killed for this. It must have importance.”

He got up. “Sheriff Aldershot probably intercepted that message. Then he took it, in his wallet, into the Capitol Building. But did he show it to Burnside and Cutten, or tell them anything about it? We’ve got to know.”