Free The Avenger 11 - River of Ice by Kenneth Robeson Page A

pale eyes like ice in a polar dawn, “go at once to Wittwar’s office. Find out if he has been there during the last hour. Make sure of it! Smitty, do the same thing on Mallory. I’ll check up on Werner, and from there I’ll go to Conroy’s. If any of the four Foundation directors has been away some place during the time we were trapped in the cold room and can’t account fully for his whereabouts, I want to know about it.”
    The three took The Avenger’s car back through the tunnel and separated at Canal Street, Smitty to go to Mallory’s office, Mac to Wittwar’s, and Benson to Werner’s.
    At Werner’s office Benson found nothing out of order. The man with the pink, cherubic countenance and the steel-trap jaw had his printing establishment near Houston Street. He was in his office when The Avenger got there, and had been there since nine o’clock that morning. He hadn’t even gone out for lunch. A dozen people around the place, deftly questioned by the man with the colorless, indomitable eyes, confirmed that.
    Benson sped from there to Conroy’s office, was told that he had stayed home that morning, and raced to the man’s big apartment on lower Fifth Avenue near Washington Square. The Avenger rang the buzzer under Conroy’s name in the vestibule. There was no answer. He rang again; then he took out a slim length of flexible steel and inserted it in the vestibule lock.
    Smitty came in before Benson started picking the lock. “No soap with Mallory,” said the giant. “He was in his office from nine o’clock till a little after twelve. Then he went next door to lunch. I checked that with half the guys working around his office, and three quarters of the waiters in the restaurant. He’s still in the restaurant.”
    Mac came in. He had a similar story about Wittwar. The Avenger said nothing, cold eyes as unreadable as glacier ice. The fact that these men had alibis was not too important. If one of them was the employer of murderers, he could quite easily have left the details of trapping Benson in the warehouse to others. Meanwhile, he could have sat safe and respectable in his own office. But checking on their whereabouts was common sense; and The Avenger’s genius was always methodical.
    He turned back to the lock, and the thin steel length snapped the bar back. The three went up heavily carpeted stairs to Conroy’s top-floor apartment. The Avenger rang, pressing the buzzer beside the apartment door. He stood for a moment listening. Then he deftly opened that door too. There wasn’t a lock on earth that Benson couldn’t open in record time.
    The three men stepped into a beautiful big living room. Wealth and taste had furnished it. It was about twenty-five feet by thirty, with overhead beams exposed. They saw that the beams were exposed in the hallway in the same decorative manner. But there wasn’t a soul around, and that, the glances of the three men said, was odd. There should have been servants in the house. They went down the hall and began looking through the apartment room by room. Ten of them. In the last, they found the tenants of this elaborate but deserted place. And they found that Conroy had the best alibi of all.
    Conroy was dead! The room in which he lay, at the rear of the hall cutting through the apartment like a main artery, was a library. There were many books, several tables, leather chairs, a leather divan. The beams showed in here too in imitation of an ancient feudal castle. Around the walls were the heads of animals, a zebra, two lions, a tiger and an elk. Benson recalled that his investigations of the four directors had revealed that Conroy had been quite a big game hunter up till a few years ago.
    Conroy lay on the divan. He seemed only asleep, with his hands folded across his chest and his eyes peacefully closed. But there is something about death that proclaims itself from afar, to those accustomed to it, as were the little group aiding The Avenger in his crime