The Phantom Detective - The Dancing Doll Murders

by Robert Wallace

  The girl’s eyes dilated at the revelation that Van knew of her connection with Blackie. She gestured mechanically. Her voice almost broke.

  “Back there — in a side road — they parked it —”

  Van had already jerked her to her feet and was running, dragging her along with him while the inspector followed.

  THEY found the killers’ car a hundred feet in from the highway, standing with lights out in a rutted lane. The engine was silent. The Chief’s men had taken no chance on their hearing it. Van swore and fumed while the self-starter whined, while the cold motor gave him trouble. Every second was precious. He got it going finally. With Inspector Farragut in back with the girl he roared out of the lane.

  Once on the highway, he sent the big car hurtling ahead. It was fast, but he knew that the limousine carrying Moxley had many minutes advantage. He knew that if ever he’d raced with death he was doing it tonight.

  Farragut spoke huskily as they neared the city. “If we don’t make it in time, Phantom, I’m afraid the next killing may be a doubleheader. The Chief’s likely to come back to Caulder’s place, and wipe out Caulder and Moxley both.”

  Van didn’t answer. His lips were grim, his hands taut on the wheel, his eyes burning. He knew better than Farragut the fate that awaited Moxley. Miles fled by underneath them. They roared at last down a long avenue.

  Then Van twisted the wheel savagely and swerved into the Caulder drive. There were detectives standing on the porch, but Van, leaping from the car, ran past them. Inside the house he grabbed another of Farragut’s men.

  “Where’s Moxley?” he demanded.

  “Upstairs with Caulder. They wanted to be alone except for the nurse. He’s with them and will give warning if —”

  But Van was already out of earshot, plunging up the broad stairway like a being possessed. He reached the top landing, sped down the hall where painters, plasterers, and carpenters had already erased the signs of the grenade. He checked himself violently before Caulder’s door, reached for the knob. The door was shut, locked — and Dick Van Loan’s blood seemed to go cold within him.

  “Who is it?” came the muffled voice of Caulder’s nurse inside. There was something in that voice, a note of apprehension, that further chilled the Phantom.

  He didn’t answer. He took two steps back, hurled his body forward, striking the door savagely with all the force of his powerful frame. The panels bent, the lock snapped — the door crashed open. Van plunged into the sick room, drawing his gun — they stopped frozen.

  The nurse had a small leather blackjack in his hand, and he stood above Judd Moxley. Moxley lay on the floor unconscious. And Esmond Caulder, his face bandaged where he’d been burned, was on the bed. The nurse dropped the blackjack suddenly and went for a gun. His hand dived into the pocket of his white uniform. He fired through the cloth.

  That bullet came so close that it seared Van’s right side. But he fired back. His shot caught the nurse in the shoulder, smashed his gun arm, and literally spun him. The man fell over a chair leg and crashed against the wall.

  Before Van could turn, a screaming mouthing human fury leaped at him off the bed. Van went down under the weight of that first onslaught. But he twisted in time to avoid the smothering blanket that Esmond Caulder tried to loop over his head. He twisted, and then lashed out at that murder-contorted face with all the strength in him. He knocked Caulder off him, knocked him back against the foot of the bed.

  Caulder, dazed as he was from Van’s blow, tried to pluck a gun from some inner pocket. Van brought the muzzle of his own automatic down in a smashing swoop on Caulder’s wrist, breaking the bone, sending Caulder’s weapon spinning away.

  There was a brief, dramatic silence while Caulder stared up at Van, his wrinkled face a satanic mask of hate and frustration. Then Farragut came bounding into the room, gasping, gesturing a gun in his hand, and two detectives close behind him.

  “Great God! What are you doing, Phantom?”

  Dick Van Loan pointed. “The Chief, Inspector! Take a look at him. He won’t have a chance to kill off the rest of his family now.”

  “The Chief — Caulder?”

  “Exactly! He wasn’t dying of angina pectoris. He even fooled the doctor. There are drugs, Inspector, which can slow the pulse, cut down the heart action, and turn the face white and the lips blue. There are drugs which can reproduce the symptoms of the worst heart trouble.

  “Chloral hydrate in certain combinations will do the trick. Few people want to use such things; but Caulder did. Caulder, with his period as administrator almost over wanted the family fortune all for himself; or as big a slice of it as he could lay his hands on.”

  “But how?” said Farragut. “He could never have got it. If he’d pulled through his illness we’d all have suspected him.”

  “He didn’t intend to pull through,” said Van grimly. “At least not publicly. That was the beauty of it — the diabolical cleverness of his plan. He was ‘dying,’ almost ready to slip into a ‘coma.’ But haven’t you noticed, Inspector, that Caulder and Moxley look very much alike? So much that a little plastic surgery would make them identical. No, Caulder didn’t intend to pull through so far as the world went. He was willing to lose his own identity for the sake of a fortune. He planned to murder Moxley right here in this room tonight, leave Moxley in the bed here, and go back to prison himself as Moxley.”

  VAN reached forward, ripped the bandages from Caulder’s twitching face.

  “You see! It only needed a little facelifting! That nurse of Caulder’s is versatile as an assistant. If you search his room I think you’ll find a case of surgical instruments. And when it comes to throwing hand grenades he’s pretty efficient, too.”

  “You mean that he —”

  “Certainly. That attack on Caulder the other night was a home-made show. The nurse threw one grenade out of the window, killed two men on the lawn. The other he threw in the hall up here. He timed things exactly under Caulder’s direction. He even went so far as to smoke up Caulder’s face a little to make way for the bandages which would later cover the plastic surgery. He found time to run to the rear of the hall to make you think you heard the killer escaping. Then, heroically, he put out the fire. It was a masterly way of throwing dust in all our eyes, Inspector.”

  “I get it now, but how —”

  “It had to be that,” said Van grimly. “I began to have my suspicions the other night. But you’ll understand when I say I could hardly believe it. I had to have some fact that would give strength to such a theory. And, speaking of dust, that’s where I found it. It was in the sample I took from Caulder’s closet.

  “Squires had a right to act as he did and attach importance to that clay. He must have gone to Caulder’s closet to get some legal paper, and he saw the fresh clay on Caulder’s shoes. Get it? Fresh clay on the shoes of a man who’s supposedly been in bed for weeks, dying of heart trouble! Caulder had been sneaking out in the dead of night.

  “He got the clay on his feet when he went to see Blackwell. That was his one slip really — that, and letting Squires see it. Poor Squires paid for his discovery with his life.”

  Van gestured to the head of the bed. “Caulder has this house wired, of course, so that he could lie up here and listen to everything his heirs were saying about him. He must have heard Squires ask Steve Huston to get the Phantom. Then, under his direction, the nurse went out and phoned a special hurry call to Guido ordering Squire’s death.”

  “But Blackwell —”

  “As innocent as you, Inspector. I thought so all along. I was certain when he ran off and hid. A man of the Chief’s type wouldn’t have brought suspicion on himself by running. He was obviously playing too crafty a hand for that.”

  “Why the dancing dolls, Phantom? Was it just to confuse us?”

  “That, and to make the whole thing look like an outside job. Caulder had a lot of time to spend in bed, and he must have had fun modeling those features of his dear relatives. Didn’t
you, Caulder? How you hated every one of them! And you thought you were being very theatrical, and at the same time throwing dust in our eyes! You did, Caulder — clay dust that finally betrayed you under a microscope!”

  THE END