The Chief! Van felt a sense of disappointment. Even this mysterious man, Blackie, then, wasn’t the murder gang’s head. There was more behind the thing than appeared, angles that steadily grew more puzzling. But whoever the Chief was, Blackie seemed to be the contact man. He was in a position to give orders to Bowers. He gave them now, after Bowers had told him the details of what had happened at the garage.
“There’s only one thing you can do, Bowers. Take your damn mugs and go to the other place I told you about. You’ve got a key. Lay low there. We don’t know how many of our heels the Phantom may have spotted. Until he’s dead you won’t any of you be safe. But go ahead with the job tomorrow evening. Call me back if anything more turns up. I’ll see you when I come to talk to the Chief tomorrow night.”
Blackie hung up. Dick Van Loan stood in tense silence. He had heard just enough to complicate still further the sinister riddle. He was getting closer, but the man called Blackie hadn’t given the location of the gang’s new hideout.
And he hadn’t said what the “job” was tomorrow evening. Van could guess that – another hideous murder! The links in the chain of death were not yet complete. Blackie had said that he would come to the hideout tomorrow night to speak to the chief.
That interested Dick Van Loan most of all. But to learn the identity of the Chief he must first get acquainted with Blackie. There was only one possible way to accomplish that. He’d have to trace that extension.
CHAPTER IX
AMBUSH
VAN LOAN began at once, while Hog-face still lay punch-drunk on the floor.
It would be getting light in an hour or two. He must make an examination of the immediate house before dawn came, before people were astir. He’d been lucky that his battle hadn’t disturbed other occupants of the building.
Or maybe there were none? Van didn’t know. But he was cautious as he commenced tracing down the wire.
Behind the wall shelf where the phone stood and where the plug-in socket had been fastened was a closet. A quick examination of this showed the extension wire leading down to the floor alongside the regular phone wire. Both disappeared through a hole which apparently led to the basement.
That disappointed Van. He had hoped and rather expected that the extension would be upstairs in another room of the same building. But he was dealing with crafty, desperate criminals, actors in a detailed plot who took pains to keep their tracks well covered.
He was certain he had a long job ahead of him when he found a trapdoor and a flight of stairs in the rear of the candy store and got down to the cellar. The regular telephone wire led outside to the yard, then off to a mainline conduit.
But the extension wire took a crazy course, doubling back on itself toward the front of the candy store. Here a hole had been bored into a galvanized leader pipe that came in from outside. The wire disappeared into this. Van reasoned that it wouldn’t be likely to lead into the city’s sewer system and must, therefore, lead up.
He went out into the street again, stared aloft, and could see the leader pipe ascending all the way to the roof. He couldn’t make out any wire branching off from it to any windows on other floors of the building.
Using a skeleton key, he let himself into a doorway beside the stone entrance, one that opened into a hall with stairs beyond. He climbed them on tiptoe, silent as a shadow, stopping to listen at every floor. No one was up yet, but already there were milk trucks rattling in the street below. The killers’ contact man might be in some one of these apartments. A hole for the wire might have been drilled through the leader pipe from the inside. There was no way to check that now.
But Van ascended all the way to a skylight, climbed a steep flight of steps, and eased himself out on the roof. He crossed to the top of the leader pipe quickly, and saw the wire snaking up. He traced it to what appeared to be a radio antenna pole, saw the wire stretch across space over a courtyard in the guise of an aerial.
Here was more evidence of the criminals’ cleverness. No one climbing the roof and seeing that wire leading out from it would suspect there was anything unusual about it. Van realized now that there was no telling where the extension might be. There were perhaps many hours of work ahead of him. But the trail was hot!
Already the eastern sky showed a dim glint of dawn. Van hurried down the stairs again, went into the candy store. There he stuffed a gag in Hog-face’s big mouth, tied it securely, and proceeded to bind the man hand and foot. Then he propped him up in a clothes closet, made sure there was ventilation, and locked the door. He could not have the man interfering with the dangerous work that lay ahead.
For Van was determined to trace down that extension. With dawn almost at hand he would have to prepare himself in a way that would arouse the least attention. People would see him. He must fix things so he could work unmolested right under their eyes.
Hurrying into the street he took a taxi to the laboratory of Dr. Paul Bendix. Here he made up as a boyish, freckle-faced young man. He slipped into a rather official looking but soiled suit of covert cloth. He stuck a visored cap on his head with a celluloid plate attached that said in large letters: “Licensed Radio Repairman.” It was a simple disguise that he had had occasion to use before.
He got out a kit of repairman’s tools and slung it across his shoulder. Other implements were in the bottom of the bag – a light, case-hardened steel jimmy for opening windows and an assortment of steel lock-picks and skeleton keys. Also a collapsible telephone receiver in case he saw fit to cut in on the extension wire.
He rode back to the neighborhood of the candy store, went around the block, and entered the other building on top of which he had made sure the extension wire disguised as an aerial was fastened. He climbed four stairways and went out on a roof again.
But here was another disappointment. The wire was attached to a pole, yet it did not end on this house either. It led to the under side of the coping, then continued as far as Van could see down the whole row of houses along the block.
Patiently, cautiously, he went on tracing it, taking time out now and then to act the part of radio repairman. He examined glass insulators, appeared to repair aerials; but all the while he was following that elusive wire. He progressed slowly.
At the end of the block the wire cut back through the attic of a house and gave him serious trouble. The skylight was bolted on the inside. It was daylight now, and much argument and explanation were necessary before the landlady would let him in.
IT wasn’t until along in the middle of the afternoon, when he was six blocks away from the starting point, that Van neared the end of his quest. The neighborhood was much better here. Old houses had been reconditioned into swanky small apartments. There was an air of Bohemian glamour about the section. Brass knockers on the doors, colored tiles, brightly curtained windows. And the wire appeared to terminate in the roof of a big studio apartment in one of the most luxurious buildings on the block.
Van reasoned that the mysterious Blackie who had had his wire strung so far, using other people’s property for his own ends, would hardly be apt to take liberties with such a building as that.
He went to the street. Then, still as a repairman, he announced to the janitor of the studio apartments that the gent on the top floor had asked him to inspect a radio. The janitor, seeing Van’s businesslike look, grunted and let him in. In the foyer, Van looked around.
“Mr. Warburton you mean,” the janitor said. “Haven’t seen him around this morning.”
Tense with excitement, Van rode up in a small automatic elevator. He knocked at the door of the top-floor studio, cap tipped over one eye rakishly, ready to give a breezy excuse of having been given the wrong address when the occupant complained that he hadn’t called a repairman. At all costs he wanted to get a look at the man, Blackie, who lived here under the name of “Warburton.” His progress in the case depended on that.
But there was no answer. He tried the door then, and to his surprise found it was unlocked, An inner voice
at that moment warned him of deadly danger. There was something about the stillness of the big studio apartment that seemed heavy with menace, the threat of death.
The fact that the door was unlocked made him suspicious, His left hand gripped his tool kit with seeming negligence, His right was thrust in his pocket, toying with the butt of his.38.
“Radio man!” he called nasally. But still there was no answer. Heavy tapestries around the walls of the big apartment hung down with a funereal stillness. Light from the huge north window filled the room with sunless illumination. Artists had lived here in times gone by, but the most recent occupant, Van believed, was an artist of murder.
There were signs of luxury in the room’s furnishings. Antique chairs and tables, Akbar, Sarouk, and Hamadan rugs worth many hundreds of dollars. The place had apparently been rented furnished by a man who didn’t mind flinging cash around.
And then Van caught his breath. For suddenly he saw evidence that some one had beaten a hasty departure. All the drawers of a small writing desk near one wall were opened and empty. On the hearth were the black ashes of a pile of freshly burned papers. The someone who had left quickly had taken pains not to leave any evidence behind.
Van’s scalp went tight at that. It meant that “Blackie” who had rented this place had somehow got onto the fact that the incognito which he’d taken such pains to protect was in danger of being exposed. Either he had a secret signal device of which Van didn’t know, or else he had tried to use the wire and when Hog-face hadn’t answered he had become suspicious.
Dick Van Loan’s gaze became riveted suddenly on a black walnut secretary. It was over at the other side of the room, half hidden in shadow. He walked toward it – and then it seemed as if the blood was being squeezed out of his heart by constricting fingers of excitement, For there was something propped up against the front ledge of the secretary – a tiny figure, a doll, of a type Van had seen before!
He went straight to it. Breath caught in his throat. That doll, one of the small musical manikins of German make, had because of the strange and hideous developments of the past twenty-four hours, come to be associated in Van’s mind with – murder. And something else held him spellbound. The doll wore the black mask of the Phantom!
There was no mistaking the symbolic meaning of that dark strip of cloth which had been cut from an old stocking. The original features of the doll hadn’t been tampered with this time. The killers hadn’t tried to reproduce one of the Phantom’s thousand or more disguises. They didn’t know how his real face looked. So the doll’s own painted wax features were in evidence, blank, innocent, staring.
But the black mask was sufficient to indicate who they meant. Its portent was clear also. Death to the Phantom!
Even as Van saw and understood, a faint, spine-chilling click sounded directly behind him. Van’s body went rigid. He recognized that sound as the safety catch of some sort of gun being released. And a voice spoke immediately after it in tones so deadly that even Dick Van Loan’s coolly trained nerves jumped.
“Move an inch, Phantom, and you’ll be on your way to Hell! Stand still and you’ve got a couple more seconds to live!”
It wasn’t Blackie’s voice. It was another’s, that of some underworld henchman of Blackie’s, there to do murder.
“Sure.” the voice continued, “this is your fade-out, Phantom! That rig of yours doesn’t fool me. You walked right up to that doll there – and gave yourself away. You’re the mug I’m after, an’ you’re gonna get it!” The unseen gunman gave the quavering, hyena-like laugh of one who takes a perverted joy in murder. “Raise your mitts, Phantom! Turn around so I can see you – and take it in the belly like a gent!” Van Loan raised his arms slowly, fingers digging into the black-masked doll. Terror appeared to have frozen him. He seemed to be acting in palsied obedience to the gunman’s harsh command.
But his ears, trained in the science of acoustics, were tracing the direction of the killer’s voice. He had determined, before the man finished speaking, the exact spot where he stood. And the hand that held the manikin moved with desperate, spring-like swiftness.
UP and over his shoulder, Van’s fingers spread. He tossed the doll fiercely, jackknifing his body at the same instant, executing a quick right-about face, using the masked manikin that symbolized his murder as the only possible means of escaping death.
For its torso, weighted with the music-box mechanism, made a usable missile. It struck the mobster’s chest. The gun blared loudly. But the first burst of bullets passed over Van’s head. Glass shivered in the secretary and fell in a tinkling cascade.
Van crouched. There wasn’t time to consider consequences nor to weigh issues now. Life and death hung in the balance. Death was in the black muzzle of the mobster’s machine-gun, already swinging down. Never had Van’s life depended so utterly on the lightning swiftness of his draw. It was kill or be killed.
His.38 became a gleaming streak of metal gripped in one clawlike hand. He fired from the hip, not seeming to aim. But a grey hole appeared above the gunman’s left eyebrow, As he sagged forward the back of his head was a bloody horror. His fingers contracted on the trigger spasmodically The machine-gun’s muzzle stitched a line of uneven dots in the white ceiling. But the man was lifeless when he struck the floor.
Van straightened, wiped away the thin beads of sweat that dampened his forehead. He never liked to kill if he could help it. His job was tracking down criminals, outwitting them. How and when they were punished was up to the courts. But this time there had been no choice. He’d been forced to shoot a man he would have preferred to question. By killing the man he might have blocked his own progress in this baffling, sinister case.
For another quick survey of the apartment convinced him that its former occupant had taken pains to leave behind nothing identifying. He crossed to the shattered secretary, pulled open a drawer, and saw that it, too, had been emptied. He examined the desk more closely. Every scrap of printed matter in it had been destroyed.
Hurrying into the bedroom, he jerked open the door of a clothes closet, and had no better luck. Blackie had taken all his personal belongings with him. He must, thought Van, have packed up and got out some time before dawn, stationing his rodman in the apartment to slay the Phantom. That would have been before the janitor was up, and so the janitor hadn’t heard the one come nor the other leave.
The janitor’s feet sounded in the corridor now. He pounded excitedly on the door and Van let him in.
“Wha-what’s all the racket?” the man gasped breathlessly. He froze the next second, eyes bulging at sight of the sprawled-out corpse. Then his gaze swung to Van in sudden horror. “You – killed him!”
Van jerked his thumb toward the bullet holes in the ceiling and the tommy-gun on the floor. “Self-defense. He tried to get me first.”
Words tumbled from the janitor’s twitching mouth. “Who is he?” What was he doing here? Where’s Mr. Warburton?”
For answer Van barked an order. “Call the police. Ask for Inspector Farragut, Homicide Bureau, and tell him there’s been a fresh killing connected with the dancing doll murders.”
He shoved the janitor toward the door; and, when he’d left, Van hurriedly bent over the man he’d slain. There was a wallet with the name “Joe Vanzanni” in it. A few bills. A half dozen policy slips. A couple of sweepstakes tickets. That was all.
Even most patient examination of the corpse couldn’t help him trace down Blackie. Death had deepened the dark curtain of mystery over the case.
CHAPTER X
HIDDEN CLUE
BUT Van had ten minutes in which to work before the police arrived. He left the body, began to search every inch of the apartment with a patient thoroughness that was characteristic. Blackie, for all his care, might have left some overlooked evidence behind. For it had been Van’s experience that even the most crafty criminals slip up.
He looked under the rugs, under the desk and secretary. Then his eyes fastened on a handsome, silk-cov
ered couch against one wall. He went to it, stood staring down for a moment, rocking on his heels. He tried to visualize the possible habits of Blackie. The man had a taste for good living assuredly, or he wouldn’t have rented a place like this. There were many other spots that might have served as well as a clearing house for murder.
Van moved the couch, stared behind it, and suddenly reached down. A withered, crinkled flower lay on the dust of the floor. It had been dropped carelessly, or had fallen from the clothes or hand of someone using the couch. It was an orchid. There was a faint trace of limberness in the short stem still, showing that it wasn’t many days old.
Its petals were so shriveled that Van, a connoisseur of orchids himself, couldn’t make out what kind it was. But his eyes gleamed with excitement. He imagined the scene that had taken place here. Cocktails perhaps, and a tryst between Blackie and some glamorous woman. An orchid crushed and abandoned while romance had its way. And there was a possibility, a slight one to be sure, that he might use this flower to open a new lead.
The janitor came through the door again, and Van questioned him.
“What’s Mr. Warburton like?”
“Dark, good-looking, a nifty dresser; not – not like him.” The janitor rolled his eyes fearfully toward the blood-smeared corpse. “Mr. Warburton is a high-class feller.”
“Did any women come here to see him?”
The janitor gulped. “Might have. I wouldn’t know. I live in the downstairs back. Mr. Warburton has his key.”
“And I suppose you don’t know anything else about him?”
“Nothing – except he said he was a stranger in town. Couldn’t give references, but he made up for that by paying three months rent in advance.”
Van nodded. “Big-time crooks are always liberal.”
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