The Avenger 5 - The Frosted Death (6 page)

The first must be discounted because Veshnir had vehemently maintained that he had seen Sangaman attack Targill.

The latter appealed most to logic.

But there was no sense in Veshnir’s killing Targill. There was, it seemed, no motive. Also, if Veshnir had done it, and framed it on him, why wouldn’t he turn Sangaman over to the police instead of hiding him up here in this wilderness? That didn’t make sense, either.

Guiltless or guilty, Veshnir had hidden him. And hidden he would remain till something, somehow, broke on the Targill case. In police custody, he was doomed. Free, he still had a chance.

Back in New York, in a fine Park Avenue apartment, a girl was reading about Sangaman. The girl was tall and slender and had chestnut hair. Her face, though youthful and feminine, was slightly like Sangaman’s sensitive face. And that was natural enough, for she was Sangaman’s daughter, Claudette.

She read with horror: Targill, head chemist at the Sangaman-Veshnir Drug Corp., murdered. Thomas Sangaman missing. His partner Veshnir, loyally denying that Sangaman was in the building that night, although the building employees stated otherwise. Sangaman’s fingerprints found on the murder weapon.

A little moan came from Claudette’s lips. This was her father they were talking about! Her father—a killer! It was impossible! She must prove otherwise. But how? The police were no aid. They had already judged her father guilty. Who, then, could she go to?

Claudette Sangaman was one of the rare few in private life who knew of The Avenger, and she knew that he specialized in giving just that kind of help: aid that the regular police could not or would not give.

Twenty-five minutes later she stood before the center door of The Avenger’s huge headquarters on Bleek Street. Over the door was a small sign in black and faded gilt. The sign had but one word on it:

JUSTICE

She went in, and up to the top floor after being passed by a small, lovely blond girl with sympathetic eyes. Claudette Sangaman gasped, as most people did, when they saw The Avenger.

The white, dead face was like a mask under her gaze. The icily flaming, colorless eyes bored into hers like diamond drills as she stumbled forth on her plea for help. Help to clear her father.

She was precisely the kind of person The Avenger lived to help. But this time she had come to him at a very unfortunate moment. The Avenger was deeply sympathetic, but his flashing brain was occupied to the exclusion of everything else by the case of John Braun.

The case of the snow man.

That, he feared, would take every ounce of his energy for an indefinite number of days—

There, Benson stopped short. His eyes took on the pale glitter that touched their depths when his genius found a small, significant point to fasten on.

Thomas Sangaman. Sangaman-Veshnir Drug Corp. And a chemist had been murdered.

“Nellie,” Benson called in his quiet but vibrant voice.

Nellie Gray came to him. She was the small and lovely blonde who had first met Claudette.

Small and pretty, she was just a shade over five feet tall and slim for her height. She had bronze-gold hair and gray eyes, and a complexion that made her look like a pink-and-white doll.

Dainty and tiny and soft appealing looking—but Nellie Gray was an expert in jujitsu and wrestling, and could even box pretty well. She could fight like a little tigress, and had belied her fragile appearance more than once in her work for The Avenger. Furthermore, she was almost as uncanny a marksman with rifle and automatic as The Avenger, himself. She had picked that up from her archeologist-explorer father—murdered by criminals of the type Nellie helped Benson work against, now.

“Nellie,” said Benson, eyes stabbing in her direction with their pale glitter, “please bring me the list of firms on Eighth Avenue made up by the detective who died this morning.”

Nellie brought the list. The Avenger glanced at it and read aloud:

“Sangaman-Veshnir Co., lower Eighth Avenue.”

“That’s right,” said Claudette, hope lifting at this renewed interest after his refusal. “That’s the address of dad’s company.”

“That’s on the west side of the street.”

“Yes,” said Claudette.

“About four blocks from the Laddex Co.,” Benson mused, “and fourteen or fifteen block from Braun’s street.”

Claudette didn’t know what he was talking about, now; so she said nothing.

“Is the laboratory, in the Sangaman-Veshnir Building, on the Eighth Avenue side?” Benson asked.

Claudette nodded. “On the top floor,” she added.

The Avenger’s machinelike brain clicked the pieces into correlation with each other, and formed a plausible whole.

John Braun had died of a mysterious thing that The Avenger was sure was man-created. The kind of thing that must have come from some laboratory. It was logical to suppose that John Braun had passed under the high window of such a laboratory on his way home—to death! And in that laboratory a highly expert chemist had been murdered, for some reason or other, that same night.

It looked as if the trails crossed. One was the path up which you might toil to rescue Sangaman, if innocent. The other the trail to the origination of that dreadful white stuff that turned its victims into snow figures.

Here, the paths intersected and became one. “I’ll help you!” said Benson.

The Sangaman-Veshnir laboratory and top-floor offices had hummed with police and reporters all day. The man who had been murdered in there was not so important; but the man who had done the murdering was. Thomas Sangaman! That was a big name; so the police were appropriately busy.

At eleven o’clock the night after the murder, however, the activities had simmered down. Examinations and visits by news correspondents were completed. The place was officially sealed and was empty. So was the building, save for the night watchman and an assistant engineer—just as it had been the night before, when the head chemist was killed.

At a little after eleven o’clock there was movement on the roof of the building adjoining the Sangaman-Veshnir place. That building was seventeen stories high, just two lower than the Sangaman-Veshnir Building.

Two men crept through the night from the fire escape to the opposite edge of the roof. One loomed noiselessly along like a great ship sliding through a black harbor; that was Smitty. The other trod like a soundless gray fox; that was The Avenger.

At the edge of the roof, The Avenger drew a length of fine cable, made of specially treated silk, from under his coat, fixed a small, tool-steel grappling hook to it, and threw the hook up twenty feet so that it caught over the cornice of the Sangaman-Veshnir Building.

The two men drew themselves up hand over hand, then unhooked the special little grapple. At the front edge of the nineteen-story roof, Benson fastened the grapple again, and without turning a white hair at the thought of the two-hundred-foot drop to the sidewalk below, he lowered himself to one of the Sangaman-Veshnir laboratory windows.

The window opened under his slight tug. You don’t lock windows nineteen floors up. Next moment both men were in the laboratory where Targill had been murdered.

The mode of entrance was typical of The Avenger. He had a magic name. He could have entered any place, police-sealed or not, by the mere mention of wanting to. But if he entered a place with police permission, he had quickly learned, the fact he was working on that case instantly got out to the papers. Every police reporter has a friend at headquarters.

So The Avenger worked habitually without police knowledge.

Inside the laboratory, behind the sealed door, Benson snapped on a powerful little flashlight.

The laboratory didn’t look as it had when Targill died the night before. Then, there had been several flat trays, carefully glass-covered, with the stuff in them that looked like snow. Now, there were no such trays. Last night there had been a small rack of the snow in glass capsules near the bench at the front window. Now, there was no such rack.

There was, as The Avenger swiftly found out, nothing whatever to indicate that the stuff which turned corpses into snow men came from this laboratory. He had hardly expected to find open traces of the white stuff. Yet there should be some key to it.

There was a huge refrigerator in one corner. He went to it. Half a hundred little vials and jars were in there—stuff that had to be kept cold to be preserved. And there was also a large piece of fresh liver.

The colorless, awe-inspiring eyes examined the bit of meat intently. The presence of the liver might mean a mere experiment with the pancreas in an effort to perfect a diabetes cure.

Or it might have something to do with the meat-attacking white stuff.

One thing The Avenger always searched thoroughly when he went through a suspected place was wastebaskets. People, even cautious ones, are prone to throw the most damaging scraps into them either absent-mindedly or because they may be pressed for time.

The equivalent of a wastebasket in a laboratory is the white, metal-covered waste can. So Benson went to that. He opened the lid.

The can was empty.

Near it was an enameled door in the inside wall of the lab. On this were the large, raised letters: Incinerator. The laboratory, being very modern, had a special chute direct to the basement, and the fire. It looked like the end of that trail. But The Avenger was methodical.

Just on the chance, he opened the chute door and played his flashlight down.

“Smitty,” his quiet, vibrant voice sounded in the dimness.

The giant came to him, wondering why an empty incinerator chute could be interesting. But the chute was not empty.

Following the beam of the light down a few feet, Smitty saw what seemed to be a lump of fine white snow as big as a small child. Something had been thrown into the chute that was a bit too large for it, and had stuck in the first bend.

“Those tongs, over there,” Benson said, nodding his virile white shock of hair toward a tool rack.

The giant stepped to it, came back with the tongs. They were like fire tongs, only not quite so big.

Very carefully Benson drew out the thing that had stuck in the chute and deposited it on the floor. And Smitty checked a sudden exclamation of surprise.

The thing was a small pig, covered with the terrible whitish mold he had seen in the Mason jar on MacMurdie’s workbench. But there was more than that to make the little animal remarkable.

It wore pants.

Over porcine middle, and covering the small hams, was a garment made roughly of bath-toweling that was unmistakably a pair of trousers.

“Why in the world,” breathed the giant, “would anybody put a pig in pants?”

“To be methodical,” answered The Avenger. “Terribly, murderously thorough and methodical.”

“But—”

With the tongs, careful not to touch the whitish stuff with his hands, The Avenger took the pants off the pig.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s the answer. The pants were put on before the animal was exposed to the mold.”

He pointed with the tongs. Where the toweling had been taken from the dead pig, the white stuff was tightly molded to the constriction of the fabric.

“The experimenters in this laboratory,” Benson said, face as emotionless as ice, “presumably Targill and Sangaman, wanted to find out whether the mold spores would penetrate normal clothing. They put the garment on the pig to experiment. And the spores
do
sift through fabric. They are dust-fine, as Mac reported. You see what that means? Whether a person is naked or clothed, all his body will be reached by the fine spores if any of this stuff is around. Clothes are no protection at all.”

Smitty whistled softly.

“In that case,” he began, “a pinch of it in a crowd of—”