“I’d hoped I would know what those damned figures mean by now,” said the chief glumly. “I haven’t got very far with the two murders. I thought maybe the message of the cyptogram would give me a lift.”
“Tell me about those two murders,” said Benson, who had just arrived at headquarters from his call on the government code expert, Drake.
The chief told The Avenger what he had found thus far.
“I agree with your guard as to the probabilities of what happened,” said Benson, voice quiet but authoritative. “Sewell either saw Sheriff Aldershot attacked, or he saw the attacker going through his pockets after murdering him. He charged down the steps, driving the man away before he could get the wallet with the cryptogram. Sewell took the wallet and called a guard. Before one could reach him, the killer struck again, but again didn’t have time to take the wallet. What facts have you on the two dead men?”
“Sheriff Aldershot,” said the chief, “is from the town of Bison, Montana, near Bison National Park. He has no family; he lived alone there. Far as I can get over the wires, no one knew why he came to Washington. But he did come, and with some business he was taking up with Senator Burnside of his home state. In fact, Burnside tells me that he must have been one of the last to see Aldershot alive. He — or Senator Cutten, the other Senator from Montana. Because Aldershot seems to have had a talk with both of them.
“Sewell has a room in a hotel in Washington, Southeast. He lived alone here. Has a mother and sister in Chicago. Burnside says he was an excellent secretary, but quiet about himself. The Senator doesn’t know much about his personal life.”
The Avenger was staring at the chief with pale eyes like diamond drills. Obviously, the eyes were not really on the chief; they were glittering with intense thought. But the chief felt a sort of chill creep through him anyway. They were hard eyes to face.
“You questioned Burnside?”
“Of course. But the Senator can’t seem to help me out.”
“What did Aldershot see him about?”
“That’s a funny thing,” said the chief. “Aldershot didn’t seem to have anything at all important on his mind. At least, that’s what Burnside said. The sheriff came up to him, he says, and muttered something about a reforestation plan that ought to be put into effect in the eastern part of the state. Some hare-brained kind of thing. Burnside’s a great land-conservation exponent, you know. He says he couldn’t make head or tail out of what Aldershot was trying to tell him.”
“You talked to Cutten, too?”
“The other Senator from Montana, yes,” nodded the chief. “He gives the same story. Aldershot approached him about some reforestation plan for a part of the country where trees won’t even grow. Hung on his tail like a leech, Cutten says, till finally he got rid of the guy.”
“Then Aldershot walked outside the Capitol Building, down the long stairs, and was killed,” Benson mused, eyes like ice chips in his dead, white face. “And from his wallet comes a cryptogram that is going to be quite difficult to solve. Did Aldershot go to see Cutten or Burnside about that cryptogram? Or did he get it from one of them? And what did he discover out in Montana so important that he came to Washington concerning it? A reforestation plan? It doesn’t sound convincing.”
The chief nodded. It hadn’t sounded convincing to him, either. But you don’t press United States senators too far in police questionings. Matter of fact, you can’t because such men have senatorial immunity.
Richard Benson came back to a point that had already occurred to the chief. “I wonder what Aldershot found out in Montana that brought him here to Washington.”
But Benson, to answer this question, brought to bear on the problem more ingenuity than the chief had. Which was no reflection against the chief. Only a few men can have genius.
The Avenger got Bison, Montana, on the phone, and asked to speak to one of Aldershot’s deputies. It turned out that there was only one, a man who introduced himself over the phone as Sam Phelps.
“Phelps,” said Benson, “Sheriff Aldershot was found here in Washington in a brownish, worn suit, narrow-brimmed Stetson hat and high-topped hide boots, well shined. Can you tell me if that’s the outfit he left Bison in?”
“Yeah,” came the deputy’s twangy voice over the phone. “Them’s his store clothes, and he was wearin’ ’em when I took him to the train.”
“They are not the clothes he usually wore in Bison?”
“Nope. He only wears ’em to weddin’s and funerals and State occasions.”
“Then he had on no articles of that costume during the few days preceding his trip here?”
There was a slight pause.
“The boots, maybe,” said Phelps. “Yeah, I think he was wearin’ his regular old boots. He didn’t change much. His feet kinda hurt him when he tried store shoes.”
The Avenger thanked him, hung up and turned to a mystified chief. “Is Aldershot’s body still at the morgue?” Benson asked.
“Yes,” said the chief.
“I’d like to look at it,” said Benson.
But when he got to the morgue, he paid little attention to the body itself. Instead, he concentrated on the shoes — the hide boots which the deputy thought were the ones he wore out West, too; had probably worn in the few days before his sudden trip from Montana to confer with Senators Cutten and Burnside.
The Avenger took out a keen-bladed little knife and two small envelopes. He carefully scraped the upper part of the dead sheriff’s left shoe, and put the minute scrapings in one of the envelopes.
Then he inserted the point of the knife along the groove between sole and upper. From this welt he got more fine scrapings which he put into the second envelope.
The chief nodded, at that, with understanding in his eyes. “Going to see if dust from his shoes will tell where he has been recently, huh? It’s a good stunt. But I can tell you that. He came direct from the train to the Capitol Building when he got to Washington. I’ve traced his path from the depot. No side trips.”
Benson wanted to go farther back than that. He wanted to know, not where the sheriff had gone since hitting Washington, but where he might have gone in his own country before ever getting on the eastbound train. However, he didn’t explain that.
“Thanks very much,” he said quietly. “I’ll get in touch with you if anything interesting results from an examination of these scrapings.”
He went from the morgue and to the home of Senator Cutten. Burnside’s fellow senator from Montana lived in a large cottage out in Georgetown. Cutten was a pleasant-looking man of fifty or so, with tired lines bracketing an orator’s mouth. However, there was steel in his blue eyes and granite in the firm line of his jaw. The Senator was a strong man.
In a tastefully decorated living room, Cutten stared expressionlessly at the man with the white, still face and the colorless, deadly eyes. More and more people were hearing of The Avenger. It was obvious that Cutten knew a little about Benson by repute.
“I came to talk to you a little about the death of Senator Burnside’s secretary and of Sheriff Aldershot of Bison, Montana,” said Benson.
Cutten spread strong, thin hands in a frank and open gesture that was not quite matched by his eyes.
“The police have already talked to me about that,” he murmured. “And I’ve told them all I know, which is little enough. But I’ll be glad to go over it again, if you like.”
Benson nodded his thanks. “Aldershot had quite a talk with you — and with Senator Burnside — I understand,” he said. “What did he come to see you about, Senator Cutten?”
“As I’ve told the police, he came to see me about reforestation. An impossible plan. Like many laymen, Sheriff Aldershot seems to think trees will grow wherever they are planted. Take a bare, desert stretch that is arid and ugly and of no use to anyone, plant seedlings — and in ten years you have a beautiful young forest! Only it doesn’t work out that way. The district he had in mind has never known trees and wouldn’t support them if they were planted. I told him so, but he was rather persistent.”