The Avenger 5 - The Frosted Death (4 page)

All over the country the various police forces were getting more and more familiar with the work of Richard Henry Benson, The Avenger. There wasn’t a police chief in the United States who didn’t know of him.

But here in New York, where The Avenger had his headquarters, every cop on the force knew about him, from the greenest rookie up. That was why the homicide man had called Benson, without question, a few minutes after looking at the corpse that was so eerily like a snow man.

The doctor was curious. He, like most ordinary citizens, didn’t know about Benson.

“How is it,” he said, “that the police department calls on a private citizen like this? Or is Benson with the Federal law department?”

“No, he’s a private citizen,” said the detective.

“But I don’t—”

The homicide man looked around mechanically to see if any reporters were in earshot. Because if there were, he’d have had to soft-pedal about The Avenger. Not only did the force dislike to go on record as asking help outside itself, but also, Benson hated publicity.

“He’s a private citizen,” the detective said, “but not like any other private citizen you ever saw. He’s an average-sized guy, but he can throw any man on the force. And we got some upward of six feet six and weighing two hundred and fifty. He has pure white hair, but still he’s young. Got it overnight in a nerve shock when his wife and kid were taken away by gangsters. His face was paralyzed at the same time, so he’s always dead pan. Gives you the heebies to look at him. His eyes give you the willies, too. They’re light gray. Anyhow, I guess they’re gray: they’re so light they look almost like colorless holes in his face. He’s something, that guy!”

“But surely he doesn’t have only a peculiar physical appearance to make him so important?” queried the doctor, one eyebrow up.

“I’ll say not! He’s got
everything
on the ball. The guy is a whiz at science in all its branches. He’s a genius at sniffing out crime where no one else can smell it. He has a laboratory that’s twice as good as the big one down in Washington. He—”

A tap at the door interrupted him.

“That’ll be him,” he said, starting toward the door.

“So soon?” said the doctor. “Why, he couldn’t get here this fast—”

“There are no speed laws for
him,”
said the homicide man. “And no red lights— Hello, Mr. Benson. Thanks a lot for coming around.”

The man who stepped into the dark, shabby little room which cupped a dead, white body as a cellar might cup a snow figure, justified everything the detective had said about him. The doctor got that at a glance.

A white, awesome, moveless face turned toward the corpse, then turned around the room to take photographic-mind pictures of it. Colorless eyes, flaming like ice under a polar dawn, came to rest on the physician’s face. The doctor felt something like a physical shock, as if the end of a live wire had brushed him.

The Avenger had no store of small talk. Quiet, invariably polite, he was yet as blunt and direct as a machine. And, figuratively, he was a machine. Crime had ruined his life. It had taken from him the lovely wife and the small daughter from whom he had drawn all his inspiration for living. At the same time it had made him into a machine to fight similar crime.

He nodded in acknowledgement of the doctor’s self-introduction and raked the detective with his colorless, terrible eyes.

“Name of the man?” he asked.

“John Braun. No record in police files as far as I know, Mr. Benson.”

“We’ll check that later. Occupation?”

“He works in a rubber-goods factory—the Laddex Co., up on Eighth Avenue.”

“Trouble?” said The Avenger, eyes turning to the doctor.

The doctor cleared his throat. They were uncanny, those eyes. They made you feel as if they read everything you thought. He knew that in a few seconds, fight against it as he might, they could have hypnotized him.

“The trouble,” he said respectfully, “is a most obscure one. In fact it’s utterly beyond me—unlike anything I have ever seen. The man’s epidermis seems to have been attacked by some swift-growing fungus. On the order, perhaps, of saccharomyces. If you understand the scientific term.”

The detective snorted. “Look, doc, this guy knows everything. You don’t have to pull your punches.”

The Avenger, top-ranking physician himself, though he did not practice, said quietly:

“Hardly everything. But I know a little about saccharomyces. A glance at the body would seem to disprove your idea, doctor. Saccharomyces is yellowish. This stuff is dead-white.”

“It’s only a guess,” shrugged the doctor. “It neither looks nor acts like saccharomyces, but—”

“What,” said the detective plaintively, “is this here saccharomyces?”

“Yeast,” said The Avenger.

He went to the bed, and bent low over the body to study it. But it was noticeable that he didn’t touch the corpse.

His colorless, awe-inspiring eyes studied the dead-white, softly glistening thing that looked like a snow man. So white, so ghastly with its seeming inner light. As dead-white as—as The Avenger’s dead-white hair.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said in a low tone. And for a person who had seen about everything on earth there was to see, that was an admission.

“You know nothing of how the man may have picked it up? Nothing of his previous movements?”

The doctor shook his head.

“Braun was unconscious when I got here. I had to get the janitor to open the door for me. He was dead when this detective from the homicide squad arrived.”

“What did you learn from his employers, the Laddex people?” The Avenger asked the detective.

“They say Braun was all right when he left the shop at midnight, after his four-to-twelve shift. I talked to his foreman.”

“Then something happened between the time he left the shop and the time he arrived home.”

The detective ventured to disagree.

“Maybe it’s something occupational. Rubber shops have funny chemicals, and stuff. I’m going to check on that.”

Benson nodded, and his colorless eyes raked the snow man again. He took a comb from the dresser, and with the back of it, carefully scraped some of the dreadful, white, powdery stuff from the dead man’s skin. He watched the area closely.

It did as it had done when the doctor performed a similar experiment: the skin was clear for half a minute, then it began to fog over as a mirror does when breathed on. It was as if an unseen hand were sifting fine, powdered sugar over the area. In about two and a half minutes, the cleared section of skin was clear no longer. It was as powdered, as frozen and snowy-looking as the rest.

“It’s . . . rather terrible, isn’t it?” breathed the doctor.

“It’s all of that.” The Avenger’s head, with its virile shock of pure-white hair, nodded agreement. “I would suggest that you wash in your strongest disinfectant, doctor, if you have touched this man.”

“I already have.”

“Do it again,” said Benson. “And allow no one else to touch the body, under any circumstances.”

“You think this is—contagious?”

“I have an idea it is. Though we won’t know without exhaustive experiments. Take no chances anyway.”

The Avenger went to the dingy kitchen of the small apartment. He came back with a Mason jar. The jar had had preserves in it. He had emptied it and washed it clean with boiling water.

Carefully he scooped some of the stuff that looked like powdered sugar—but that was dreadfully, incredibly alive—from the dead man’s chest. He put it in the Mason jar and turned the lid, with a rubber sealer between metal and glass. The doctor looked, fascinated, at The Avenger’s hands. They were not large, and the fingers were slim and white. But they had tightened on that lid till only a machine—or the same slim, white fingers—could ever unscrew it again.

“The Laddex Co. is on Eighth Avenue,” mused Benson. “This apartment is on Eighteenth Street between Eighth and Ninth. This man walked home, so—”

“How do you know he walked?” demanded the detective.

“It is rather improbable that anything of so bizarre a nature could occur to him in a subway,” Benson quietly pointed out. “It is possible, but not probable: crowded subways are not the best spots for murder.”

“Then it
is
murder?”

“Of course. Again figuring probabilities against possibilities. It is possible that something like this, entirely new to medicine and science, could suddenly appear full-fledged and kill. But it is not probable. Almost certainly, some human agency produced this for purposes as yet unknown. Therefore, the man’s death will be classed as murder; since a man-made thing killed him.”

“Braun walked home,” Benson resumed. “His path was almost certainly along Eighth Avenue. I would check back the length between here and the Laddex Co., if I were you. See if anything in the least unusual is in evidence over that distance. Also list every building and its tenants, along the route. Particularly the west side of the street: the Laddex Co. is on that side, and Braun’s place is west of Eighth; so it is probable that he walked down that side.”

“Yes, sir,” said the detective, instinctively using the tone usually called from him only by the commissioner, himself.

He went out. The last thing he heard was Benson saying: “Doctor, if I were you, I’d use that disinfectant of yours
again.”

And in The Avenger’s tone was more emotion than you would have thought could , exist behind that cold, immobile face and the icy, impassive eyes.

The homicide man, like a diligent operative, checked the Laddex Co., as well as Eighth Avenue between the firm and Braun’s street.

He found nothing at the company, as Benson’s tone had already indicated. The foreman repeated his statement that Braun had been perfectly well when he left. So did the man’s fellow workers and the night manager.

The homicide man retraced his steps down Eighth Avenue. On his way up he had listed the firms along it. He looked once more for evidence of anything peculiar on the sidewalk, itself, as he went back down.

He did not see the glass fragments beside the Sangaman-Veshnir Building, and he couldn’t be blamed for that. The capsule had literally smashed to dust when it hit. The tiny fragments were thinly scattered. Braun had seen them because he’d been looking for something specific in one restricted area.

Completely puzzled, and with shivers chasing themselves up and down his spine as he thought of the snow man, he went to headquarters to report.

As he went, he unconsciously scratched at the back of his hand.

The drugstore was on Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place. From the outside it looked all right, except that the store part seemed a little small for the space the total business appeared to occupy. But inside, it was very unusual indeed.

The store part took up less than a third of the total floor space. All the rest was occupied by a large rear room.

Along one wall of the room was a workbench on which was as much paraphernalia as could have been seen in the big laboratory of the Sangaman-Veshnir Drug Corp., itself. Beakers and retorts and Bunsen burners were side by side, with glass tubing and jars of mysterious compounds.