The Avenger 5 - The Frosted Death (8 page)

“Yes, they are,” said Benson, icily colorless eyes fastening on the man’s kindly face like diamond drills. “Especially the frosted death!”

“Frosted death?” repeated Veshnir. Then he nodded. “Oh, yes. The thing the papers have been hinting at. But—what is it, precisely, Mr. Benson?”

In a few words, Benson told him what it was. Veshnir’s face paled.

“But why do you connect that dreadful thing with this place? Surely you don’t mean—”

“It is almost certain that it originated here. In your laboratories.”

“Good heavens! But what makes you think that? What proof have you?”

The Avenger told him that, too, eyes like drills on Veshnir’s benevolent face.

“It simply doesn’t seem believable,” Veshnir breathed, after a moment of silence.

“You know nothing of such experiments, then?” Benson said quietly. “I had hoped you could shed some light on the white mold.”

Veshnir spread his hands. “I never even heard of it before. But that’s not so odd. I am in the sales and personal-contact end of the company. I have little to do with the laboratory—sometimes don’t go into the place for months at a time, even though it is right next door. So I wouldn’t necessarily know of their experiments. Sangaman—”

He stopped abruptly and looked confused.

“Your partner?” said Benson. “What about him?”

Veshnir slowly took a cigar out of a box, lit it, and exhaled a thin puff of smoke.

“I was about to say that Sangaman was in and out of the laboratory all the time. He did quite a bit of work in there himself, personally. He came up from the ranks—was a fine pharmacist. But I can’t believe he had anything to do with the horror you describe.”

“Could the murdered man, Targill, have perfected such a thing without its being known by you or Sangaman?”

“All things are possible, of course,” Veshnir said oracularly. “But I doubt it.”

“It is conceivable, wouldn’t you say, that Sangaman suddenly found out the terrible nature of Targill’s latest experiment, and killed him to prevent its ever leaving the laboratory—but killed him too late?”

Veshnir swung his chair till he was looking out the window. He stared out at the sky, smoking thoughtfully. Then he stared into the icy, dangerous eyes again.

“I have never believed that my partner murdered Targill,” he said firmly. “I don’t believe it now. But if he did it—and I say
if
—it would only have been for some such compelling motive as that.”

“Sangaman’s reputation in business circles is good,” Benson said evenly. “How is it with you—his partner?”

“I don’t like to say anything about that,” Veshnir replied, with a look of distress on his kindly face.

“I would much appreciate an answer.”

Few people could defy that tone in The Avenger’s voice. Veshnir didn’t try to.

“Well,” he said reluctantly, “Sangaman has always been inclined to practice . . . er . . . sharp dealing. I’ve covered for him several times. Nothing illegal, you understand. Just things that are slightly unethical. I’ve been going over the books since all this stuff has come out, and I’ve found quite a few traces of such dealings. There was one item about ‘crude drugs’ to a foreign power that can only have meant the shipment of war goods to that nation. I hadn’t known about that before.”

He shook his head a little.

“But when it comes to murder—and to a guilty knowledge of an experiment as destructive and awful as this frosted-death thing—I simply can’t believe it of him!”

Veshnir, it seemed, was outside the whole affair. There appeared to be nothing to get from him. The Avenger thanked him, in his even, quiet voice, and left.

Late papers were on the street as he came out of the building. The three-o’clock edition, with streaming headlines, announced:

MURDER ON LONG ISLAND
FROSTED DEATH APPEARS AGAIN

Benson got a paper and skimmed the account with about three glances of his photographic eyes.

The newspapers, it seemed, did not share Veshnir’s firm refusal to believe in Sangaman’s guilt.

The police, in searching through the home of the dead man, August Taylor, had found one thing that did not belong there. That was a pair of rubber gloves. They had turned the gloves carefully inside out and found prints of the extreme tips of the fingers last in them.

The prints were those of Thomas Sangaman!

So there the authorities had it cold. Sure evidence on a human being who was beginning to show up as a fiend from hell.

He had been only a murderer with the first crime: for he had killed Targill more or less normally. But when he murdered Taylor, the accounts ran on, he revealed himself as a demon. Because he killed deliberately with the frosted death as a weapon!

These things were now clear:

Thomas Sangaman
had
killed Targill. There could no longer be doubt about that.

Sangaman had killed him, almost certainly, to get hold of the result of an experiment—the deadly whitish stuff.

With that as a lethal weapon, Sangaman had sneaked into Taylor’s home. Handling the stuff with rubber gloves, he had put some of it on the old man, and then fled.

Why?

The motive was crystal-clear, too.

August Taylor was a silent partner in the firm of Sangaman-Veshnir. That corporation, it had recently been revealed, was on the verge of bankruptcy. A partnership insurance policy of Taylor’s would now save the firm. That was why Sangaman had committed the second murder. It proved him to be either mad or stupid, as well as criminal. For if the murder could be proved against him, of course, the policy would never be paid out.

More significant than the news content, was the
tone
of the account. Never had Benson read in a newspaper such bitter, cold fury. Sangaman was a monster! He had helped invent a thing that might turn into an epidemic such as had never been seen in modern times. He had murdered to get sole possession of the secret of it. Then, with it, he had committed a second murder.

Sangaman was a cold-blooded beast. He didn’t even deserve the formality of a court trial. If he were ever caught, he should be taken out and lynched.

Looking at that account, The Avenger knew that everybody reading it would be infuriated to the point of insanity. If Sangaman ever were found, he would be torn to pieces by the first people who saw and recognized him.

Benson rolled the newspaper and tapped it reflectively as he went toward Bleek Street. In the lurid columns he had read one very significant thing. It gave meaning and clarity to the whole bizarre performance. It told him almost everything he needed to know.

Claudette Sangaman was at Bleek Street when Benson got there. She was in one of the big leather chairs in that enormous top-floor room. She was crying hysterically, and Nellie Gray was trying to give her the comfort that only another woman can give to a woman in despair.

When Benson came in, Claudette made a heroic effort and calmed herself a little. But the calm was perhaps worse than the hysterics. White-lipped, she pointed to a copy of the latest paper at her feet. It was this, evidently, that had brought her here.

“Have you read that, Mr. Benson?”

The Avenger nodded, colorless eyes like ice in his white, dead face.

“The lies! The dreadful lies! Why, that paper makes my father out as
more
than a murderer. If he is ever found now, he will be shot on sight! Oh, what are we going to do?”

Benson’s face, white, terrifying, still, could never express emotion. Only his eyes could show that. The glints in their colorless depths became more pronounced now, in sympathy, as he stared at the stricken girl.

“Has anything been accomplished, yet?” she pleaded. “Anything at all?”

The Avenger nodded, dead face like a wax mask.

“Much has been accomplished,” he said.

Nellie Gray stared quickly at him. She hadn’t known anything important had turned up, yet. For of course she knew nothing of the message Benson had picked out of the recent, bitter newspaper account.

“What?” asked Claudette.

“Mainly, I am morally certain now that your father is innocent of Targill’s murder.”

The words seemed to make ripples in the ensuing silence of the big room, like a heavy stone dropped in a mill pond.

Claudette almost collapsed again.

“You’re sure of that, Mr. Benson?”

“Dead sure!” said The Avenger.

“Why then everything’s all right, and we can go to the police—”

“Not yet,” Benson said regretfully. “I know he is innocent. I expect to prove it. But as yet—there is no scrap of evidence to take to headquarters.”

The girl slumped back in her chair. But her chin was up now, and her shoulders no longer drooped. The Avenger had that effect on people. Because he was such a driving, sure force himself, he made others feel sure.

“I am counting on you,” she said, getting up after a moment. “I
must
count on you! I have no one else in all the world to turn to.”

“You have no family save for your father?”

“That’s all,” she said, unsteadily. “Just dad. When . . . if . . . he dies, I’ll be all alone.”

“Keep your courage up,” Benson said. “I’ll hope to have something soon to tell you.”

She went out. And the Avenger’s icily flaring eyes followed her till the door was shut. Their almost colorless depths were strangely clouded for a moment. Something was trying to fight its way into his mind. Something that disturbed him very much.

It had to do with the meaning he had picked from the newspaper story of Sangaman’s guilt in the Taylor death. He knew that much. And something else. Something the girl had just said—

Benson could move almost faster than the eye could follow. Occasionally there are such men—with a co-ordination of mind and whipcord muscle that makes the motions of others seem slow. The Avenger was like that.

He got to the door almost before Nellie Gray was aware that he had left his chair.

“She mustn’t be allowed to go down this street alone!” he snapped, eyes like flashes of stainless steel. “Of course! I should have known it at once! She is in terrible danger.”

“You want me to—” Nellie began.

“Stay here!” he rapped out. “There may be phone calls—”

He was gone, racing down the stairs with more urgency than Nellie had ever seen him move.

He got to the street door, over which was the small Justice sign, just as Smitty was coming in. In fact they almost bumped.

“Smitty! With me!”

The giant turned and ran after Benson down the short block composing all there was to Bleek Street. He couldn’t quite keep up with the gray fox of a man with the dead face, but he did his best.

They got to the corner, where traffic was thick. Ahead, Benson saw the girl, walking toward a cab stand.

Probably there wasn’t another man in all the great city who could have seen the thing. But those colorless, keen eyes of The Avenger’s had telescopic power. He saw it, inconspicuous as it was.

Claudette was just raising her hand to call a cab from the line when it happened.

From some window near her, something flashed out and down. The Avenger couldn’t see what it was. It was too small. But he knew. The crystalline flash of it told him. He couldn’t see what window it came from, because he was looking down along the street at a thin angle. But he let that problem go till later.

The flashing downward arc of the little thing made Benson spurt forward with even greater speed. He was probably covering ground at a rate of nine seconds flat per hundred yards, when he got to the girl.

His steely arm swept around her before she knew he had approached. She cried out in surprise. As she did so, the little glass capsule whose flash Benson had seen, hit the sidewalk next to both of them.

There wasn’t anything dramatic about it. The thing hit with a soft, harmless-sounding littie
plop
and broke into a million pieces. That was all.

But that small
plop
was more terrible to discerning ears than any roar of a bomb explosion would have been.

Benson leaped away with the girl as if she had weighed only a few ounces. He didn’t stop till there was twenty yards between him and the bit of sidewalk where the capsule had broken.

“Why—” gasped Claudette. “What do—”

The Avenger didn’t pay any attention to her. He had a more urgent thing to do, now.

People were beginning to gather, as people always do when something a little out of the ordinary happens. And this had been out of the ordinary: a man with blazing, colorless eyes and snow-white hair, catching up a girl and running twenty yards with her as if he had suddenly gone crazy.

Some of the people were pressing ignorantly toward the spot where the capsule had hit. They didn’t see what Benson saw. And even Benson might not have seen it had he not had an inkling of what to look for.

From the spot on the sidewalk where glass lay in fragments, a kind of gray cloud was rising. It was like a genie rising from a bottle, to solidify later into hideous form. Only this wouldn’t solidify. This would stay that way, faintly shining, a whitish mist, looking innocent and harmless—till flesh and blood were near.