The Avenger 10 - The Smiling Dogs (2 page)

The guard to whom Sewell had yelled had seen the bony man bending over the other. He was running, drawing his gun as he came.

The murderer swore and clipped a shot at the guard. The shot that came back took a piece of his ear. The guard might have been an elderly man, a retired cop, but he could sure use a rod!

The man swore once more, venomously, and for a second time faded off into the night.

The guard got there, puffing, took a look at Burnside’s dead secretary and blew his whistle.

Half out of Sewell’s pocket was a wallet. Twice a man had killed for that wallet. And twice he had been driven away from his victim before he could quite get it. But it wasn’t till a few minutes later that answering guards found the second dead man. And it wasn’t for half an hour after that, at headquarters, that they found the thing in the wallet.

Then they didn’t know what to do with it.

“The guy at the foot of the steps was Sheriff Will Aldershot, Bison, Montana,” said the chief, looking at the personal possessions of the Westerner on his desk. “This second guy is Spencer Sewell. He has something or other to do with Senator Bailow Burnside. He must have, because he has some correspondence of the Senator’s in that briefcase that was picked up at the head of the stairs.”

The guard who had finally heard Sewell yelling nodded his grizzled head. He had figured out a few things.

“Sewell’s briefcase was at the head of the steps. Aldershot lay at the foot of ’em. Beside Aldershot was a trash basket belonging up near the top of the stairs, and there’s no mark on Aldershot where the thing hit. So it was like this: Sewell saw some guy bean Aldershot. He threw the basket and drove him off. He took the wallet from the sheriff’s pocket and started yelling for me. The other guy got to him and brained him before I could stop it.”

The chief nodded.

“Looks like the guy was after the wallet both times. Let’s see what’s in it that is so important.”

He opened the thing and thumbed through it. There was about three hundred dollars in it. Most of the money was in the main compartment. But in a side flap there were three bills set aside from the rest. They were a two-dollar bill, a five-dollar bill and a ten-dollar bill.

“Mad money,” said a reporter who was in the office.

The chief looked at him, and the reporter cut out the facetiousness. He didn’t want to get kicked out.

The chief, meanwhile, had been looking through the compartment opposite the one in which the three bills were segregated. In here he found a folded bit of paper with several lines of numbers on it.

“Code,” said the reporter, whistling softly.

The chief nodded and stared at it. The numbers 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 chief tossed it to one of his men.

“Take this to Drake. He’s about the best code man in Washington. And now this other guy, Sewell. Got any answer yet from Senator Burnside?”

The Senator had been phoned twice, with no answer. At the chief’s words, one of the men tried a third time.

He gave the Senator’s number and waited. All in the office heard the phone ring in Burnside’s home.

“Did you try the Capitol Building?” asked the chief.

The man nodded. “I tried that, and also the Senate Office Building. They all thought Burnside had gone home. But if he’s home, he’s either dead or too sound asleep to hear the phone.”

Ring, ring, ring. But no answer.

“Better run out there and have a talk with him,” said the chief. “Two guys dead—and now Burnside don’t hear his phone! I don’t like it.”

Out on Massachusetts Avenue there is a luxurious nine-room mansion built by a railroad magnate for his daughter and son-in-law. The daughter separated from the son-in-law almost before the house could be completed, so it had been rented to a succession of political figures ever since.

The present occupant of the house was Senator Burnside. Burnside was in the house at the moment. The telephone was ringing, yet he was not really hearing it. That was because his brain was too occupied with other things. Too horribly occupied!

The Senator from Montana was a tall, heavy-set man with a gray mustache and gray-brown eyes. He was dressed in a creased lounging robe and had felt slippers on his feet. He was ready for bed. But he had decided, before going to bed, to come down to the living room and look once more over a reforestation bill that was to be introduced in the Senate in the morning.

He was in the living room now, with that phone ringing within a yard of him, but not being heard. Senator Burnside was staring at the double door leading from the living room into the large den at the rear of the house.

In the doorway was the thing he was staring at. And it was no wonder that his gray-brown eyes were popping half out of his head and that his gray mustache was quivering on a trembling upper lip like the whiskers of a frightened cat.

In the big double doorway was a man with a dog.

The sight of a strange man leading a dog into your living room at half past twelve at night would give anyone a start. But there was more to it than that. Far, far more.

In the first place, the man was only a miniature human being. He was less than three feet high. In the second place, he was red.

The exposed parts of him—face and hands and wrists—were brilliant carmine. Or, rather, cerise. The brightest, shiniest red attainable by any substance.

The little crimson man was dressed impeccably. He had on striped morning trousers and frock coat and a silk topper. He carried gloves in his left hand; the right was occupied with the dog leash.

The leash was made, apparently, of daisies twined in a chain. On the end of it was the damnedest dog imaginable.

It was a dachshund, small, but looking bigger than it really was when compared with the watchcharm size of the little carmine man.

The dachshund was colored, too. It was bright green. Grass green. Pea green. And it was smiling a little.

Dogs can’t smile. They haven’t the little muscles which make that grimace possible. But this was one dog that smiled. It was a sly, furtive, Mona Lisa kind of smile—as if that dog knew something pretty funny, although pretty terrible, too, and was smiling over it.

A little red man leading a green, smiling dachshund on a leash of braided daisy stems.

Senator Burnside squawked a couple of times, finally got out words. “Who . . . are . . . you?”

The words were so cracked and incoherent that it seemed the little red man could not understand them. So the Senator tried again. “Who are you?”

There was no answer. But then, Burnside thought in a crazed way, he hadn’t really expected one. There hadn’t ever been any answers from the little red man. Neither man nor dog had ever uttered a sound.

Burnside knew that because he had seen them before, yelled at them before, in various, unexpected places.

This time he meant to have some kind of answer, however. He heaved himself to his feet.

Eyes wild, mustache quivering like a cat’s whiskers, robe sailing out behind him, he leaped to a table to the right of the doorway. The little red man and the smiling green dog just watched him. And made no sound.

Burnside ripped open the table drawer and took out a gun. He fired wildly at the apparition in the doorway.

The shots died. The man and the dog weren’t there. They were not lying on the floor, nor running away. They just weren’t there!

Burnside began to run toward the doorway to investigate further. He stopped in his tracks and glared at the other doorway to the room—the one which led out to the hall.

The little red man in the cutaway and striped trousers and ridiculous silk topper was in
that
doorway, now! He was there with his dog, which stood squat and elongated with its green body contentedly held by the daisy-chain leash, and with an impossible smile on its muzzle.

Burnside tried to leap toward that new apparition, but he couldn’t. His legs didn’t seem to work, somehow. They were traitors. They buckled at the knees and let him down on the floor.

At the same time, his eyelids snapped wider open, and the eyes behind them went blank and rigid. Burnside had fainted. The strain on his anguished mind had been too great.

He recovered to find his butler working over him, bathing his forehead with cold towels. The butler was eying him in a funny way.

“I heard shots, sir,” he said. “I ran in to see if you had been attacked by a burglar or something, and I found you on the floor.”

Burnside said nothing. He sat up and stared at the hall doorway, where he had last seen the little crimson man and the pea-green dog.

“Was it a burglar, sir?” the butler persisted.

Burnside’s mouth opened, but closed again with no words having been uttered. He decided he had better not say what he had seen. Or thought he had seen. The Senator had visions of padded cells if he did.

“I was . . . cleaning the gun,” he said lamely. “Guess I’ve been working too hard lately. That will be all. You can go to bed.”

The servant left; but as he went, he looked at his employer with a highly understandable glance.

He thought Burnside was crazy. That was the conviction the Senator read in the man’s eyes. Burnside shivered again, and went to his room.

On the night table was a newspaper folded to an inner page. Once more Burnside read the item of interest contained there.

The newspaper item was a short one. It mentioned the fact that Dr. Augustus Fram, the famous psychiatrist, had come to Washington as a one-man lobbyist for a bill he wanted made into law.

Burnside had met Fram several times. He knew the man and knew about the bill he wanted introduced. But now he was not looking at the bill part. He was simply staring at the name, Fram, and the occupation, psychiatrist.

Psychiatrist. That was a person who knew about brains and the odd quirks they sometimes develop. Burnside got his clothes on in record time and went to Fram.

The well-known psychiatrist was in bed. But he answered the ring at his door promptly. He stared out, a tall, distinguished-looking person with a small goatee on a lean jaw, and with a tiny mustache which looked waxed but wasn’t.

“Senator Burnside!” he said, eyebrows going up in well-bred astonishment. “Isn’t it a bit late for calls?”

Then Fram saw the agitation in the Senator’s face. “Come in,” he said at once. “Here. Into my office. Sit down.”

Burnside relaxed in a chair, looked at charts that took the human brain apart and put it together again with neat numbers for every segment. Fram was economically continuing to practice, while he was in the nation’s capital trying to get his bill introduced.

“I’ve been meaning to come to you for several days,” Burnside mumbled. “I’m very worried—about a friend of mine. I’ve put off talking him over with you. But tonight he had another seizure, so I came in a hurry to you.”

“Seizure?” said Fram. “Friend?”

Burnside cleared his throat. The vision of padded cells and large internes dressed in white had never been stronger than it was right now. So he clung to the “friend” pretense.

“This friend of mine,” he said, moistening his lips, “seems to see something that is impossible to be seen. It’s as silly as seeing pink elephants or purple crocodiles. Yet he insists that he has seen the thing, not once but half a dozen times. Tonight was the last time.”

“Yes?” said Fram. He was a good psychiatrist. He didn’t prod; let the patient tell as much as possible.

“What would you say,” said Burnside, sweating, “if you heard that a man had seen a little fellow about three feet high, bright red in color, dressed in cutaway and topper, leading a bright-green dachshund on a leash made of daisies?”

Fram looked hard at him. “I’d say the thing was some advertising stunt. Someone got a dog and painted it—”

“My friend has never seen it in a public place. It has always been when no one else was around but him. The last time, tonight, not half an hour ago, it was in his own living room.”

“Then I’d say your friend was drunk and on the verge of delirium tremens.”

“I . . . my friend hasn’t touched a drop of liquor in over thirty years.”

Fram walked slowly back and forth in front of Burnside. He stroked his little goatee with his middle finger.

“In that case,” he pronounced at last, “I’d be inclined to say that your friend was—insane. But, of course, we’re very slow to pronounce such a judgment in my profession. I’d like to talk to the man sometime. And soon!”

“I’ll bring him in,” breathed Burnside. He got up. “What would be the treatment recommended for such a case.”

Fram sighed. “The man would have to go to an institution, of course. A private one, where his name would not be known. He would have to retire temporarily from all normal business. And he would have a course of physical treatments that might be rather extreme. But I don’t want to worry you unnecessarily. Bring your friend in and let me examine him. He might be all right.”

But Burnside knew from the doctor’s tone that the friend would not be pronounced all right. He thanked Fram and went to the door. The doctor bowed him out Burnside crossed the sidewalk to his car, and another car drew up behind his.