The Phantom Detective - The Dancing Doll Murders

by Robert Wallace

  “I lifted a little dough from the old gent’s carcass,” he muttered.

  “Yeah, while we stayed out here getting hell from the cops!” A greedy hand snatched the bills from Van’s fingers. A voice snarled:

  “I’ll take that for a bonus. Now get the hell out of here, both of you — the boat’s waitin’.”

  The third man up on the truck, hidden behind the thick metal body, swept a last burst of bullets into the blackness where the cops were closing in. The man who had spoken to Van did likewise. Van lifted the gun that he had taken from Dopey and pressed the crescent-shaped trigger, too, careful to send his shots high.

  Then he followed the others as they crouched down like night-raiding Indians and fled for the waiting boat. The cops couldn’t see them. They didn’t know there was a boat waiting just off-shore. They thought the three raiders had smashed the truck accidentally and that they had them trapped. Shots continued to rattle, covering up the running footsteps of the three.

  Close to the edge of the river the man who had snatched the bills from the Phantom stopped and blinked his flash. He cupped his hand over the lens, pointing outward, so the detectives behind couldn’t see.

  The low rumble of a speedboat’s engine sounded. It slid ghostlike in toward the shore. Van could glimpse the pasty face of another stranger slumped behind the wheel. His companions waded out into the cold water, climbed into the boat, and Van did likewise.

  “All set,” said someone. And suddenly the speedboat’s engine snarled into throaty life, and the coffin-shaped craft streaked out into the black river. Only then did the detectives on the point realize that a getaway was being made under their very noses. More shots sounded and a few harmless bullets whined overhead.

  But Farragut had evidently anticipated that a landing might be made on the point from the water. For a dark shape showed up suddenly off the left of the speedboat’s bow. A brilliant lavender searchlight winked on, fanned the water for a moment, then came to rest on the killers’ craft.

  “COPS!” hissed the man beside the Phantom.

  The speedboat’s pilot swung the wheel so violently that the streaking craft seemed to lift up and plunge ahead on its gunwale. It came within an ace of turning turtle. Water cascaded into both cockpits. Then it righted itself and was off on another angle, leaving the police boat astern. But a gun on the deck of the police cruiser began to chatter, lashing lead close as a signal to stop.

  The man beside Dick Van Loan whirled, lifted the ugly snout of his tommy-gun, and held the trigger hard back. He hosed bullets at the dazzling eye of the searchlight. For a full minute the gun jerked and chattered while acrid fumes of cordite whirled around them. Then the gunman found his mark. The searchlight disappeared as abruptly as though a giant hand from the sky had snuffed it out.

  The pilot began zigzagging, throwing his passengers from side to side so that they fell, cursing and clinging to each other. But he avoided the bullets that were probing through the darkness for their lives. The powerful motor amidships rose higher and higher until the boat seemed to hang taut and motionless on the highest crest of the waves. But Van could tell by the wind blast that it was streaking ahead. The shots behind grew even more random. They were leaving the police cruiser far astern.

  The mad getaway continued. Dick Van Loan was a companion of killers leaving what they thought was a murder scene. He was in with murderers who backed up with knife and bullets the sinister threat of those mysterious dancing dolls.

  Yet these men were only tools, he felt certain, instruments of a more cunning, ruthless will. He made, therefore, no attempt to stop them.

  His cue was to go along with them, find out where they went, and who supplied the payoff.

  The boat veered again. It headed in toward a dark section of the shore. The pilot slowed the engine, cut it down to a mere idling speed. The craft nosed in to a low sea wall, with a gloomy riverfront street beyond it. It bumped against rocks while Van and the others swarmed out.

  Then the pilot reached back and dropped a match into a wad of oily waste in the boat’s cockpit. Rather than leave any clues for the police they were setting fire to a speedboat that must have cost several thousand dollars. Van realized that it was probably stolen property anyway. Fingerprints were what the killers feared.

  They sprinted across the vacant lot to a big parked sedan. The top of the sea wall was showing red as the car sped away.

  The pilot of the speedboat was now the driver, a squat, toadlike man with a thick-lipped mouth. The other two were obvious mobs’ men; flat-chested, hard-faced. A letdown had come after their fast action. They sat hunched beside the Phantom, their glassy eyes staring straight ahead.

  The driver tooled the big car halfway across the city, up a cobblestoned avenue for nearly a mile, then into a block of grimy, red-brick buildings. He twisted the wheel deftly, stopped with his headlights close to a large metal door. He winked them on and off three times and the door slid up.

  The car lurched into an old garage, crossed an oil-smeared floor, and entered a big elevator. The man who had let them in slammed shut the elevator door and they were lifted creak­ingly four stories above street level. Then the car rolled out into another cement-floored room.

  Van’s quick eyes took in his surroundings. A half dozen automobiles in the higher-price brackets stood around the big room in various stages of disassembly. Most of them were almost new. But their motors were exposed.

  Grinding machines, welding torches, and paint-spraying devices were close at hand. Undoubtedly this was a place where “hot” cars were repainted, reassembled, and their motor numbers changed. The business of car stealing had been put aside temporarily for the more sinister occupation of murder.

  The men with Van left this chamber and climbed a flight of narrow steel stairs to a floor still higher. They passed through a workshop to a partitioned room in the building’s center a big windowless barn of an office. In this room were more than a dozen people.

  VAN had never seen a more motley, evil-looking group. It was as though whoever was behind the dancing doll murders had deliberately got together the crème de la crème of the city’s most murderous characters. Hopheads, mobsmen, individual professional killers.

  There was one elderly man wearing glasses, whose face was mild and almost benign looking, except for the grey hair thinning in two peaks on either side of his high forehead like sprouting horns; and except for something furtive and crafty in his smile. He had seen better days obviously. Van wondered who he was and what he was doing here.

  Another man, big, brutal-looking, with a black-browed face claimed his attention. This one seemed to be the boss. For the three with Dick Van Loan, headed straight for him.

  One of them nodded.

  “The job’s done, Bowers.”

  Bowers grunted, his eyes expressionless as polished agates. He reached for a phone on his desk, and suddenly the Phantom’s gaze became alert behind negligently drooping lids. For the phone was a new one and the big man called Bowers was dialing. Van was close enough to see the numbers and letters. His machine-like brain registered each movement as the big man’s pudgy finger twirled the dial.

  KLondike 5-9292!

  There was a pause, then the big man said: “Lemme speak to Blackie.” Another pause, and Bowers continued:

  “Blackie, the boys are back. Want to come over and talk to them about the job?”

  Van’s pulses tingled. He caught the inflection in Bowers’s voice. The man was speaking to “Blackie” as one addresses a superior. He was turning in a report, awaiting orders. It might be that he was in direct contact with the brains of the murder ring. The man at the other end of the wire gave an answer that Van couldn’t hear. Bowers dropped the receiver in its cradle, lit a cigar, and leaned back in his office chair.

  Van was still watching him. But an eerie sense of danger made him turn his head. He stared for a moment straight into the face of the elderly man whose high-peaked forehead made him look very much like
a devil.

  The man had risen abruptly, and now came toward Van with that furtive, cunning smile on his face. He stood in front of the Phantom, hands clasped behind him, teetering on his heels — and time seemed suddenly to hang suspended.

  For there was an expression of interest, of deepening suspicion on the grey-haired man’s face.

  He spoke in a husky, cultured voice.

  “Dopey, you don’t look right! After that shot of morphine I gave you — there’s something funny!”

  The big boss Bowers heard him, and swung around. “What’s that you say, Doc?”

  The smile on the face of the other deepened, became almost angelic.

  “Just a little professional observation, Bowers. I’m somewhat puzzled. I gave Dopey O’Banion here thirty grains of morphine to pep him up before he went with the others to do his job. And now look at his eyes. No sign of expansion in the pupils. Murder seems to counteract the effect of drugs in Dopey.”

  Though his face betrayed no emotion, Richard Curtis Van Loan’s heart was hammering This smiling man in front of him whom they called “Doc” was bringing him close to the brink of destruction.

  Then another voice that cut like a knife through the now quiet room brought him closer still. It was the voice of one of the hopheads who had come back with him from Channel Point.

  The man’s lips were slack. He was staring not at Van’s face, but at his hands.

  “Look!” he screamed suddenly. “That guy ain’t Dopey! He can’t be! Dopey’s got a sliced-off finger!”

  There hadn’t been time for Dick Van Loan to make a close study of his subject. He had played his cards as they came to him — played them bravely, recklessly — and had lost.

  For he read death on the faces of those around him. In his first close contact with the criminals the Phantom stood exposed!

  CHAPTER VII

  THE PHANTOM TRAPPED

  THE Phantom moved with desperate quickness. While those about him, stunned by surprise, were grasping the fact that he was an impostor, he grabbed a straight-backed chair and swung it savagely at the overhead light. His only possible hope of escape lay in darkness. He was no miracle worker. There were a dozen armed and merciless criminals facing him, ready to riddle him with screaming lead.

  The chair struck the big bowl light, hurling slivers of glass halfway across the room. But even at that, one of Bowers’s gunmen triggered with the speed of a striking snake. A slug came fearfully close to Dick Van Loan’s neck. He flung himself sideward, taut with the knowledge that he had escaped death with nothing to spare. The whole place seemed to explode into shouting tumult.

  No one else dared fire, but there was a concerted rush of plunging bodies toward the spot where Van had been. He streaked away. A man got in his path, and Van felled him with a lashing blow of his fist. That was one point in his favor. He could treat them all as enemies, while the darkness forced them to be cautious with each other.

  A flashlight clicked on somewhere. Its beam moved frantically over the heads of the milling mob. Van clenched his teeth. He knew if that light touched him it would spell his doom. But he couldn’t risk firing, because the flash of his gun would draw a volley. He stooped low, raced along the left side of the office toward the workroom door.

  He heard Bowers’s voice, calm amid all the hubbub, giving orders by phone to some of his men below. His words carried plainly to the ears of the Phantom.

  “There’s a guy up here who looks like Dopey but isn’t. Cover the exits. Don’t let him get out. If you see him let him have it.”

  Van’s heart went cold. He was four stories above the street, in unfamiliar surroundings, and by that quick order Bowers had trapped him. The Phantom could fight, but the chances of winning now were hopeless. He had planned to make a mad plunge down the building’s stairs ahead of the murder pack. But, no matter which way he went, there would be guns waiting.

  He clutched the knob of the office door and turned it. There was a bulb burning in the workshop outside. He leaped through the doorway, silhouetted for a second, and in that second death came close again. Guns crashed in the darkness. Bullets followed him in a leaden hail. If he hadn’t whirled and run toward the side of the workshop parallel with the office partition he would have been riddled.

  HE risked firing now. Not at the men behind, but at that bulb ahead. Its light would make him an easy target once the killers entered the workshop. His shot sped true. Glass shattered. The room went dark again. And Van had glimpsed the location of the stairway.

  Bowers’s men, anticipating his next move, began firing fiercely through the blackness toward the stairway head. They laid a barrage of bullets that would keep Van from attempting escape that way. But he couldn’t turn, couldn’t pause now. He dropped flat, snaked forward over the cold cement floor, and saw the flashlight go on again.

  He whirled, ripped a bullet from his .38 straight at it, and heard a man cry out. He pivoted to the right as the flashlight clattered, and while Bowers’s gunmen tried to rake him with lead. But the shots went high. The Phantom reached the stairway and plunged down.

  At the foot of them there was revealing light again. The big assembly room with the cars in it seemed empty. But, as Van moved across it toward the head of the second stairway, two running men appeared. They were dressed in greasy overalls. Both carried sawed-off automatic rifles.

  They saw him at the same instant he saw them. His hastily flung shot sent them dodging back into the black mouth of the stairway. But now that means of escape was cut off.

  Van’s eyes roved the room desperately. The windows, he saw, had heavy steel mesh across them. If he ducked in among the cars he would only be prolonging his murder. The men above, already at the top of the stairway, would hunt him down and slaughter him.

  Then he saw the open door of the big elevator and made a quick decision. It still stood at the fourth-floor landing with the sedan that had brought Van and the others from the river in front of it. It was slow, ponderous, but it offered momentary refuge.

  VAN leaped in, jerked the inside handle that snapped the two sliding doors shut. Bullets smashed against them even as they came together. Van’s fingers touched the elevator control, and the big cage began to move slowly down.

  He didn’t stop it till it reached street level. But the instant he opened the sliding doors a couple of inches he realized again that he was trapped. The dial on the outside revealed to Bowers’s men below that the cage had descended. They were watching and knew that the fugitive had arrived. Bowers’s telephoned warning had made them alert.

  A stream of slugs smashed into the doors as Van partly opened them. He closed them again with a quick jab of the handle; and lead continued to come through the door panels till Van, to save himself from quick annihilation, had to touch the control lever again and start the car up. As he paused at the second floor the hopelessness of his situation was borne home to him even more keenly. Once more that dial outside be­trayed him. There were men watching there, too, eager to put him on the spot. He was like an animal being hunted, cornered, with no way for escape. He could run the cage up and down; but, at whatever floor he stopped the killers would know it. He would be met by a hail of lead if he tried to step out, and if he stayed in the cage they would get him sooner or later.

  Already he heard men hammering on the fourth-floor door in the big shaft high above him. Once they got that open they could fire down through the open top of the cage.

  There was no panic in Van’s mind as he considered his peril. He clearly saw that force was futile now, that his only possible hope of saving himself lay in somehow outwitting his would-be slayers. But how? What possible trick could he use to divert the killers’ attention long enough to give him a chance to escape?

  The sides of the big cage were open except for a sheet-iron safety wall about five feet high. It was the regular type of car elevator Van had seen in many garages. He might be able to leave it, climb up or down the shaft on the steel cables, but if he did s
o what would it avail?

  It was then that the Phantom devised a subtle play. Those dials outside, telling the killers just what floor he was on had been his chief undoing. Except for them he might have escaped by taking the watching guards by surprise. Why not turn those betraying dials into an asset?

  Van’s eyes were bright with excitement as he let the big elevator move up. The men above, hammering at the sliding doors to burst them in, would watch his progress on the dial, and think that in his panic he had utterly lost his head. Those on the first, second, and third floors, would follow the upward progress of the cage also.

  And Van made his big play now, his carefully thought-out chess move on a board of life and death. He was staring aloft, watching the big counterweights in their grooved track at the side of the shaft come down. They would pass between the elevator cage and the wall, huge bars of tongued pig-iron which partially balanced the weight of the cage and took some of the load off the hoisting cables operated by electrically driven gears above. There was room between the elevator and the shaft wall for a man’s body to slip through.

  Van left the control lever on; crossed the floor of the cage swiftly; and, grasping the overhead steel braces, drew himself up to the top of the five-foot safety wall. Here he waited till the car had passed the second floor and the big counterweights had come parallel with it. They went down as the cage went up. Van knew that the principle of all elevators was the same.

  It was dangerous business dropping down off the narrow cage rim to the greasy top of the descending counterweights. Though the cage’s speed seemed slow, the combined upward and downward speed as it and the counterweights passed was perilously rapid!

  Van swung his body over, clutched the counterweight cable, and slid down it to the top of the pig-iron bars between the wall and the elevator cage. The cage continued up as Van went down.

  And now the clever strategy of his move was apparent. For the killers on the various floors were watching the dials. There was a burst of firing high on the fourth floor as the emergency control switch stopped the elevator when it reached its point of maximum upward movement. Bowers’s men thought their quarry had returned in his panic. They thought they had him this time.