The Dancing Doll Murders

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.

He moved stealthily along the passage, flashing his light. The Chief had come this way, for the black length of the severed air line snaked along beside Van. Then Van stopped suddenly, peered ahead, half expecting another murderous attack.

But what he had seen was only the heavy, steel-plated diving suit lying like the skin of a deep-sea monster on the passage floor. The chipped glass of the lolling helmet seemed to stare up at Van resentfully. There was a big tank of compressed oxygen beside the suit, and the air line led to this.

VAN hurried on. Where had the Chief disappeared to? Where did this passage end?

He discovered shortly. His light made wavering shadows on the damp floor as he strode along. The corridor went straight ahead for almost a hundred feet, then dipped down. Van heard the thin wail of a police siren, heard wheels rumble overhead, and knew he was passing under the street.

His jaw set grimly. The Chief had taken amazing pains to keep his identity hidden from his men. The passage curved to the right, down, and up again. It ended at last in a short flight of crude stone steps.

There was a locked door at the top of them, but Van got it open. He came out in the cellar of another house. The rear door of the cellar was swinging wide. It led into a backyard. The Chief had obviously made his escape this way. For there were unlatched gates through several yards, then a short alley leading into another block that paralleled the one in front of the mystery house.

Van knew now exactly how the strange murderer had stolen in and out. But the knowledge came too late to help him. The Chief had made his get-away and would never return.

Van hurried back to the deserted mansion behind the high brick wall. Police cars were parked two abreast in the street. A half dozen prisoners, one with a broken arm, were being herded into a patrol wagon that stood at the curb. Two more came out on stretchers and were shoved into a car that would take then on their last ride to the city morgue.

But these were not all. Van, still in the disguise of Blackie Guido, used the diamond and platinum badge of the Phantom to get through the cordon of grim-faced cops and reënter the house. When Farragut saw the badge, and realized that this swarthy, hawk-nosed man was the Phantom, he swore explosively.

“Damn it, man! We thought you were in here. We heard the shots in the gymnasium. We thought you’d been killed.”

“I was in the gym,” said Van quickly, and he told what had happened. The inspector’s dour face tensed with amazement. He drew off his hat, ran a trembling hand over his bald head.

“Then you lost out, too, Phantom! That devil gave you the slip. This didn’t turn out to be such a hot clean-up. I let three of his men get away.”

“Three?”

“Yes. They hid in the left wing of the house, shot their way to the street after most of my boys were inside. We didn’t even get a look at them.”

Van strode outside again, stared closely at the prisoners and the two corpses.

“I’ve got the Chief’s key man in a place of mine ready to hand over to you,” he said to Farragut. “He’s promised to turn State’s evidence. But one of those who slipped by you tonight was as bad as any, a fellow they call Doc. I can give you a good description of him and the two others; but it may not do much good.”

“It will,” said Farragut. “We’ll round up every damn’ mother’s son of ‘em in this murdering mob.”

The Phantom nodded grimly. His eyes were bleak as he stared at the inspector. “Even if you do you still won’t have the Chief. As long as that devil’s loose the members of the Caulder family won’t be safe. This case won’t be over either. Better keep men posted to guard Moxley, Gray, Winstead, and Esmond Caulder – Blackwell, too, if you can find him. My hunch is that we haven’t heard the last of the Chief yet!”

The Phantom was right. Less than twenty-four hours later the tinkling tocsin that warned of murder sounded again. Van was in Frank Havens’s office in the Clarion Building talking over the details of the case when Farragut phoned. Havens answered the call. Van saw his knuckles whiten on the receiver as his fingers clenched.

The publisher listened, said, “Yes, he’s here, I’ll tell him,” then put down the phone and faced Van with blazing eyes. “Farragut’s out at Esmond Caulder’s. He says Caulder got one of the dancing dolls in the late mail a half hour ago.” Havens’s voice rose. “Can’t that hellish murder fiend even leave a dying man alone!”

Van’s fist clenched at his side, too. He drew in a quick gust from the cigarette he was smoking, then savagely tossed it away. He tried to speak composedly.

“I heard the Chief say that old Caulder might have to be given a push into the Great Beyond,” he said.

“It’s like a nightmare,” groaned Havens. “This thing won’t stop till every last member of the Caulder family’s dead. It’s Esmond Caulder next, then Gray probably, then Winstead if the poison he swallowed hasn’t already killed him. The last bulletin from the hospital said he was still alive.”

“I’m beginning to think Blackwell was wise,” said Van softly, “to run away.”

Havens clutched him. “Wise! There’s more behind it than that. Frankly, Van, doesn’t all the suspicion in the world point at Blackwell?”

“Suspicion – yes. But the law needs more than suspicion to send a man to the chair. Do you realize, Frank, that in all this sinister business we don’t know one damn’ thing really about the Chief? His men slipped up, bungled things; but the Chief made good every time.”

The publisher nodded quickly. “It’s even possible that when you ‘saved’ Blackwell out at Channel Point it wasn’t necessary. If Blackwell’s the killer the attack of those hopheads was only a sham. After the cunning the Chief’s shown I’m ready to believe anything. And we mustn’t forget that the clue of the clay that Squires brought here pointed straight at Blackwell. Maybe Farragut’s interpretation of it was right after all.”

Van only shrugged. He had a feeling suddenly that the answer to the whole hideous riddle was in sight – just around the corner if he could only reach it. He grabbed his hat.

“I’ll call you later. I’m going out to Caulder’s to see if I can help.”