Farragut, head of the Homicide Squad, led them. They had orders from him as strict and detailed as those of a shock-brigade in some invading army. Yet their success tonight depended on one man — the Phantom.
Van had already preceded them. Using Guido’s keys he had slipped through the gate, approached the house, and quietly entered a ground floor door. He knew his way now, knew approximately how the rooms were arranged. After he was once inside he made no attempt to be stealthy.
A flashlight suddenly winked on and fell on his face. “Hello, Blackie.”
Under that light Van didn’t hesitate or wince. He was too sure of his impersonation, He wore Guido’s Chesterfield, Guido’s derby. There were spats on his feet and pigskin gloves in his hands.
But these were mere embellishments to his makeup. He would have been taken for Blackie Guido no matter what clothes he had come in. For his face was swarthy, his nose hawklike. He had even inserted over his eyes two optical disks that appeared to give him agatelike black eyes. With adhesive plaster and facial putty he had molded his features into a perfect likeness of the Chief’s key man.
He didn’t answer the greetings of the guard with the flashlight. He simulated Blackie’s sullen mood, merely nodded, slapped his gloves, and stalked on to the billiard room beyond which the mob members were gathered. They tensed as soon as he made his appearance. Blackie Guido was feared and hated. And there was terror in the air tonight.
The cold-blooded murder of Bowers and others of their own mob had cast a spell upon them. They were uneasy because Simon Blackwell had not been found. Grim wolves of murder had combed the whole city the night before without success. They had even visited Channel Point. All through the day Guido’s killers had slunk through the streets. But their quarry evaded them.
The man called Doc greeted Van with his fawning grin. “I got rid of those hopheads for you. They never woke up this morning, The boys took them and Bowers out to the sticks and dumped them in a pond.”
Still Van was silent. He gazed at Doc with morose disinterest. Doc cringed.
“What are you going to do — about Blackwell?” he asked. “What are you going to tell the Chief?”
“That’s my business!”
Van paced the loom tigerishly, glanced at his watch. It was one-thirty now. He had told Farragut not to let his men cross the wall nor show themselves too plainly around the neighborhood until after two. At exactly two-ten they were to surround the house and break in.
It was up to them to catch the Chief’s mobsters, or as many of them as they could. Van held himself solely responsible for the capture of the Chief. For there was no way of letting detectives into the gymnasium while the Chief was there. Any shooting before he arrived, any unusual noise would surely keep him away.
Doc lighted an evil-smelling cigar. “It was tough, Blackie, about Reggie Winstead! But he hasn’t died yet. Maybe he took that poison just a cover up. Maybe he is the Chief.”
Van was wondering the same thing. But he was skeptical. The Chief had said he’d be here tonight. Van had the feeling that the Chief was as grimly certain to arrive as death. And what would he do when he was face to face with arch-killer? Van had no inflexible plan of action. It would depend largely on how things turned out.
But he fingered the butt of the heavy .45 Webley he had brought tonight and wore in a shoulder holster. A bullet from that, if it sped true, should smash the goggle glass of the Chief’s helmet; make it impossible for him to submerge.
Doc’s trembling hands and white face showed his anxiety. “It’s tough about Blackwell,” he repeated. “Wonder what the Chief will do?”
“Shut up!” Van spoke so harshly, so venomously that Doc withdrew. Van had a purpose in wanting to break down the morale of these men as much as possible. It would make it easier for the detectives.
He lighted a cigarette and silently puffed it. No one in the big room spoke. Resentful, criminal eyes fixed themselves on Van, slid away again, furtively. There were those present who would have filled him with lead if they dared. But as Guido he was the paymaster, and he was the only one among them in personal contact with the Chief.
Minutes passed, and the air of the room seemed to thicken. They all felt they were approaching a crisis. They didn’t guess what kind. The big gas heater sizzled. Cards slapped fitfully as a man playing solitaire dealt himself hands. These were the only sounds.
Then Van flung down his cigarette, stepped on it, turned toward the gymnasium door. It was one-forty-five. The Chief, if he was coming at all, would come in five minutes.
Van closed and locked the door behind him against the battery of curious stares. He switched on the overhead lights that threw their pale glow down onto the black , oily surface of the pool. He went to the wall, found the electric button behind the loose molding. He gave the signals Guido had revealed Then, muscles tense and rigid, he took his place in the chair.
HE waited six minutes, almost giving up hope, before the first sluggish bubble burst on the pool’s surface. It seemed to wink at Dick Van Loan like a mocking eye. Then the water grew agitated. There was that same feeling that hellish subterranean forces were at work. More bubbles appeared. And suddenly the black helmet lifted above the water, the round, sinister goggle glass pointed at Van.
“Your report, Blackie!”
Prepared as he was for it, the sepulchral tones of that disguised voice made Van jump. He gripped the aims of his chair as Guido had the night previous. He hunched forward, drawing his face into lines of fear. He could dimly see the glitter of eyes behind that goggle glass, sinister, calculating, watching his every move.
A sense of panic came for a moment that his disguise might have failed. But the helmet didn’t submerge. The strange eyes continued to watch him. Van made his own voice sound as much like Guido’s as he could.
“Give me a little more time, Chief — just a little more time, and I’ll get him! Blackwell, I mean. Even the cops don’t know where he is. But I know my boys will find him. Then —” Van made a stabbing gesture with his finger.
LAUGHTER, harsh, cold, came from the helmeted head. “You can’t find Blackwell, and you hounded young Winstead so that the boy took poison. What was the idea, Blackie, in setting some of your men to watch Winstead? Were you trying in some way to doublecross me?”
“Hell, no, Chief! You said — that is — I figured we’d better keep a close watch on him after what you said last night.”
“You’re lying, Blackie! I know you had other reasons for spying on Winstead. I’d wash my hands of you and your bunch of degenerates, turn you all over to the police, except that there is work still to be done.”
Van leaned forward. “Yes, Chief, anything!”
He was watching the face of his wrist watch. The hour hand had crept past two. Detectives would be battering at the doors in another nine minutes. And, with them close by, there was danger any moment that some alarm might sound. The Phantom’s right hand tensed to dart for his automatic. But his ears strained to catch the Chief’s next words.
“Eben Gray is still alive,” the voice went on, “and old Esmond Caulder is clinging to existence on his deathbed. His leechlike hold must be loosened. He must be helped into the Great Beyond if necessary. Then there is Judd Moxley, whose sentence will be up shortly. Yes, Blackie, bungling as you are, I still have work for you.”
“You’re gonna finish ‘em all, Chief?” Van made his voice sound relieved, eager. He couldn’t quite fathom the helmeted killer’s new leniency toward Guido, and the Chief’s words seemed indecisive. Was he deliberately throwing up some sort of smoke screen? The Phantom wondered.
But Van’s acting was cut short by the sudden clamor of a bell. It sounded out beyond the billiard room in some distant part of the house. It was loud enough to echo raucously in the gym’s high ceiling. On top of it men’s voices sounded in an excited tumult.
The helmeted figure in the pool had frozen. The half-hidden eyes continued to peer at Van. Then laughter rumbled, m
ore harsh, more mocking than any that had gone before.
“That can mean only one thing, Blackie! The police have come, led here by the Phantom! The Phantom — who’s not supposed to know anything about you! Good-by, Blackie, you monkey-brained fool! May you have an easy trip to Hell!”
In that instant before the shoulders and helmeted head began the downward movement into the pool, Van’s .45 automatic appeared in his hand. The gun belched flame. The report sounded like a thunder clap in that tiled chamber. A white chip flew from the front of the Chief’s round observation glass. The helmeted head bobbed back a few inches under the impact of the bullet.
But Van was bitterly disappointed. That first shot told him that the glass was convex and had a lenslike thickness, It could be chipped by lead. It couldn’t be shattered or pierced. Another shot brought a second white pockmark. The head bobbed again. But now it was submerging and, between Van’s bullets, came the mocking, gloating voice.
“Blackie wouldn’t have done that! Blackie’s a coward! Good-by to you, too, Phantom!”
Rage, a feeling of helplessness shook Dick Van Loan under the lash of that taunting voice. He aimed straight at those vanishing shoulders, heard bullets slap against case-hardened steel. And he emptied his clip to the accompaniment of jeering laughter.
The head was almost gone now, a black, sinister blob barely showing above the water. Satan himself seemed to be sinking into the pool. And, goaded by the knowledge of his failure, Van did a suicidal thing.
In one movement he peeled off the outer clothing of Blackie Guido. In the next he dropped his gun on the chair and leaped toward the pool. A burst of gunfire sounded from the billiard room as his body arched up and down. The police had arrived, were breaking into this den of human jackals. But the worst criminal of all was escaping before Van’s eyes.
He plunged through space in a clean dive with his arms stretched straight toward the man who mocked him. His own head struck almost under the shadow of that goggling glass eye. He went on down through the fetid, stale water till his hands locked around a metal-armored form. He clung with reckless desperation, clung, and was dragged many feet below the surface.
For the pool was deep, deeper than Van had realized. His feet and knees brushed an iron ladder. He tried to thrust his shoes between the rungs, tried to stop the Chief’s descent. But the gravitational pull of the steel-weighted suit was too much for the Phantom. He reeled sideward off the ladder with the Chief on top of him. He fell six feet farther into a nightmare world of stagnant water. He struck, and it seemed that all the breath was being crushed out of him.
But he still had a grip on that thrashing body. His smarting eyes opened. In the dim glow that penetrated downward from the overhead lights he saw a twisting air line. He tried to reach it, tear it from the back of the Chief’s helmet. But the man in the suit struck at him.
JUST in the nick of time Van caught a blurred flash of steel. The Chief had a knife. He had drawn it from his belt. He was lunging at Van with it. The bulky suit made his aim awkward; but Van barely escaped. He felt the blade slice his shoulder; knew that the monster he was fighting was trying to drive it straight into his back.
Van’s fingers clenched over a steel-armored wrist. He held on with a grip of death. His face was close to the chipped lens of the goggle glass. Even now it seemed to him he could see the flash of sinister eyes. The eyes of an octopus! The eyes of death looking at him! And Dick Van Loan realized that his lungs were almost bursting.
He was a good swimmer, had trained hours on end in all the niceties of aquatics. But the only air he had was what he’d come down with. And half of that had been squeezed from his lips in that first plunging fall.
The man in the diving suit seemed to sense Van’s peril. Instead of trying to break away, the Chief locked his left arm around Van’s body. While his right sought to thrust the knife in, he held Van savagely. And the sheer ponderousness of his movements was now in the Chief’s favor.
The suit’s steel armor weighted Van down like reptilian scales. He tried to break loose, and the Chief only clutched tighter. Van knew he was weakening. He dared not free his right hand from the other’s right wrist.
And yet, without his right arm to aid him, he was powerless to break away. Blood from his shoulder wound made a filmy plume behind him. The Phantom fought with aching lungs, pounding heartbeats, and with each fraction of a second bringing him nearer death.
CHAPTER XVI
MURDERER’S EXIT
EVEN Van’s brain was throbbing. A thousand devils with hammers seemed to be beating inside his skull. He concentrated his attention on wrenching away that knife. For a moment he locked both hands around the Chief’s right arm. One at the wrist, the other high up. He twisted like a madman, forced the Chief’s elbow out.
They struggled there, two plunging, writhing ghost figures in a shadow world. And, while the Chief breathed easily through his air line, every moment added to the Phantom’s torture.
It was only a matter of time now, before he went unconscious. Van knew it. He had been on the borderland of drowning before. He gathered his will, concentrated it, whipped his muscles to a titanic effort. He succeeded in getting the Chief’s arm out still farther, twisting it still more.
The armor protected the Chief’s flesh from bullets, but it was no protection against Van’s tendon-wrenching tug. The Chief’s fingers opened. The knife dropped to the tiled bottom of the pool. Van caught the steel glitter of it as it fell, saw it still gleaming like the upturned belly of a thin silver fish.
But he couldn’t get it. The Chief saw to that. The man in the metal-plated suit had locked his arms, both of them, around Van’s body. He was clinging now with the desperate evil purpose of keeping Van submerged until he drowned. Ordinarily Van might have broken free. But he was weakened now, his lungs aching and shriveling for the want of life-giving air. And his clenched fists beating on that steel-lined suit made no impression.
The snaky air line brushed Van’s face. He could see the serpentine shadow of it curling down, looping on the tiles. For an instant he felt it like a squirming body under his foot. And with the touch of it there burst in the Phantom’s tortured brain a bombshell of hope. His arms were pinioned helplessly. His foot alone could make no impression on that line. But there was still something — something that might save him by breaking the hold of this homicidal monster. There was the thin, gleaming blade of the knife!
Van ceased to struggle. He gave up trying to free his hands and fingers. Husbanding the last shreds of his failing strength he swayed like a man sinking into the depths of unconsciousness. He was so close to it that it required no real acting. But one foot, his left, moved out and planted itself on the handle of that knife. With the other, in a cautious staggering turn, he gathered in a length of the looped air line. He brought it closer, closer, with the edge of his toe.
Now! He teetered forward, brought his full weight down on the knife handle, pressing it to the tiles. He held it so, forced the air line under the blade with his left foot, and suddenly lurched sideward.
The abrupt, unexpected movement unbalanced the Chief. The sideward jerk drew the rubber air line tightly against the edge of the steel. As both men stumbled, a column of dancing bubbles rushed past their eyes. They leaped up from the pool’s bottom, escaping from the end of the severed air line like a school of tiny silvery fishes darting out of a miniature cave.
And, as the bubbles fled upward, the Chief relaxed his hold on Van and staggered back. Van’s dazed brain told him that the Chief was breathing in water. His helmet was filling up. Instead of oxygen he had sucked in a lungful of the stagnant death of the pool. But Van was almost beyond the point of conscious reasoning. His knees were giving way. His eyes were throbbing centers of torment hammered on by his brain. Dimly he saw the Chief’s grotesque figure move off in the shadows.
And in that instant the last flare up of Van’s will power drove him forward. Lurching, staggering, stroking mechanically with his half
-paralyzed arms, Van forced himself to follow that receding figure.
It was the grimness of the born man-hunter, the tenacity that makes a dying bulldog hang on. It was the fighting heart of the Phantom that had carried him through a hundred perils, made of him the avenging Nemesis that the whole underworld feared.
He blundered after the Chief, lunged through a small subterranean opening as the man ahead tried to close it — an opening which Van knew instinctively must be worked by some powerful mechanism that could hold the water pressure temporarily in check — probably on some kind of lock principle.
Without exerting his muscles, but using his body as a wedge, Van kept the slide opening from shutting until he, too, could slip through.
But it was pitchblack in the lock chamber, and there was more water though not of the depth of that in the pool. Van lost sight of the Chief. The helmeted killer lurched away into utter darkness. And Van’s lungs and brains and body rebelled at last. Mechanically, without knowing he was doing it, Van’s arms moved feebly, painfully and carried him to the surface.
He lay in Stygian blackness, face barely above the water, sucking in great mouthfuls of musty air. It was a stalemate. The Chief had escaped, his identity still a mystery. But Van had kept himself from being murdered. He had put up one of the greatest battles of his life!
IT was many minutes before he had strength enough to swim slowly, cautiously forward in the direction the Chief seemed to have gone. Then he bumped against the rungs of another ladder fastened to a rough cement wall. Van clung to it, listening. There was no sound in the gloom except the faint drip of water. He reached in his pocket, got his wet but waterproof flash, and turned it on.
The wall and the ladder ended at the mouth of a narrow passage that was high up in the wall above the water level. Van drew himself up the ladder to tie passage opening. It felt strange to be on his feet again after that death-laden eternity under the water.
The Phantom Detective - The Dancing Doll Murders Page 12