He turned back to the third man, still out from the pressure against the great nerves of the neck. Benson calmly switched on the light. And then, with better illumination and time to look around, he saw that there were two bodies in the back room. One was that of his attacker, stirring a little now and moaning.
The other body lay near a divan, and did not stir at all. It was a dead man!
Benson, pale eyes like ice in a polar dawn, stepped to the dead man first. He noted that the body was in pajamas. It was that of a small fellow with a bald spot rimmed with gray hair. Spot and hair were a mess where a club had broken the whole dome of the skull.
It was Quinn, proprietor of the place. Sometimes, it appeared, the veterinarian slept here in his downtown office on the divan. Tonight had been one of the times, which was unfortunate because tonight these killers had sneaked in after something.
The Avenger set about discovering what it was the three had been looking for. The room was in a mess from a thorough search. So he decided that if what the three had wanted had been in there, they’d already found it.
He stepped to the man he had rendered unconscious with the delicate precision of his fingers. He went through his pockets. One possession of the dead veterinarian was there. It was a small black book. The blank pages of the book were alternate yellow and white. The doctor’s letterhead was printed at the top of the pages, and lines were ruled in bill form.
It was a fairly new book, with only eight entries in it The entries described pets he had worked on. Benson thumbed through it. There were three entries concerning cats, one for a pet monkey, one for a pony, and three for dogs. The entries regarding the dogs read:
Breed, Airedale. Answers name of Tierre. Distemper.
Breed, Dachshund. Answers name of Bob. Vocal cords cut.
Breed, Dachshund. Answers name of Gordo. Crushed left front paw.
This little case book, it seemed, was what the three men had come here for. Its attempted theft was responsible for the death of the veterinarian, Quinn.
The Avenger pocketed it and went out to phone headquarters and have the unconscious man booked for murder.
CHAPTER VII
Two in Trouble
In the late afternoon of that day, Nan Stanton, in Dr. Fram’s anteroom, wrote down the name of the latest visitor. It was strictly routine. She listed all who came to see the doctor.
This man was quite well known for his wealth and his power in the business world. He was Tetlow Adams, railroad magnate and mine owner.
Adams was a husky man of sixty, still retaining the straightness of body and wideness of shoulder gained in his youth by hard labor on the roadbed of one of the railroads he now controlled in Wall Street.
He had a hard blue eye, a bluish, close-shaven jaw hinting that he was not a person to trifle with, and a craggy nose twisted a little to one side from having been broken in a fight long ago.
Nan, smiling, went into Fram’s office, and came out again at once.
“You can go right in,” she said. “Dr. Fram is expecting you.”
The railroad and mining man went into the inner office. Nan completed her entry of the visit: time, date and the rest. Purely routine.
It seemed that her routine was to be interrupted for a while. Dr. Fram came out and stood looking down at his pretty brown-haired secretary. His middle finger touched his trim little goatee gently.
“Miss Stanton,” he said, “I’d like you to go back to the New York office, please. Open it again and take charge.”
In Nan’s brown eyes appeared the natural wonder as to why he wanted her in an empty office. Fram continued pleasantly: “I’m thinking of running up to New York every other week or so. I have things well started here in Washington on my sanity test bill. You may make appointments for next week in New York.”
“You want me to go at once?” asked the girl.
“At once, please,” Fram said.
Nan packed some papers for the New York files in a briefcase, checked out of her hotel and took the next train from Washington.
She ate on the train; and then, on arriving in New York, she took a cab for the office instead of the small apartment she maintained in lower Manhattan. Nan was like that. The interests of her employer came first The papers in her briefcase were important. Therefore, she would file them first in the office vault, then go home.
It was an unfortunate act of loyalty.
Fram’s office was near the downtown financial section in a building with so many offices of professional men that it was kept open all night. It was not like the average big building — hard to get into after regular hours.
Nan nodded to the elevator starter, took an elevator to the eighteenth floor and went to where Fram’s suite was located. As she went, she hummed a tune from a recent movie, and thought of the things she wanted to catch up on now that she was back home.
If there was anything she did not think of, it was danger. She saw no one in the eighteenth-floor corridor, but that was not unusual at eleven o’clock at night. She inserted her key in the lock of Fram’s suite, opened the door, shut it behind her as she stepped inside and reached for the light.
And that was the last Nan Stanton knew about anything for a long, long time! Colored lights burst behind her eyelids as something hard but padded smacked down on her head. Then blackness.
“O.K.,” said the man who had clubbed the girl. He clicked on the lights.
The light revealed him to be a most offensive-looking man, with bony features and a tallow color to his skin. There was a fresh scar running down over his forehead.
The bony man had damned that trash basket a good many times. “Bundle her into the locker,” he said.
He was talking to two men who looked so much like gunmen that they could have stepped into the movies as they stood.
Undersized men with narrowed eyes, weak mouths, and belligerent jaws. They were dressed in clothes that were twice as expensive as the clothes of most men, but still didn’t look right on them.
In the center of the anteroom where they all stood, was a little heap of white, starched dresses of the type Nan wore in Fram’s office.
The heap had come from a steel locker, which now lay empty on the floor beside it. The locker, placed horizontally, looked gruesomely like a coffin with a hinged lid.
Into it, as into a coffin, the two men lifted the unconscious girl.
“Is she dead?” asked one of them, without much curiosity.
“I don’t know,” said the bony man, equally indifferent.
“If she ain’t now, she will be later. Carry her down to the car. You, Joey, drive her to the garage.”
The two men took the locker, one at each end, and went out into the corridor. They headed for the freight elevator, straining to make the steel case seem as light as it would have been had there been no body cramped in it.
Behind them, the bony man reflected that he might as well turn that light out. And with that decision, he let another girl besides Nan Stanton in for a load of grief.
Nellie Gray, stanch aide of The Avenger, was as petite, feminine and fragile-looking as a white porcelain doll. And she was as explosive as a hand grenade when the occasion demanded action.
Nellie, told to prowl through the offices of Dr. Fram, had wandered idly by the door during the day, and looked over the lock. It was not a very good lock. It was of the type that didn’t even need to be picked. A knife blade inserted in the crack, pressed down on the lock-bar with the cutting edge getting a leverage, and waggled back and forth a few times would release it.