The Dancing Doll Murders

CHAPTER VI

NO mistaking the meaning of that plunging truck. This was the way the killers had taken to gain entrance and batter down all barriers. They had slain or knocked out the lawful driver, stolen the truck.

Their machine-gun cut a swathe of destruction through the night. Van couldn’t see its effect. But he felt certain that some of Farragut’s men were being mowed down by that hail of bronze-jacketed lead. The crashing of the police positives seemed more intermittent now.

The truck came on to the barbed-wire gate. It appeared to crouch for a split second, a gleaming-eyed monster gathering itself for a fresh burst of speed. Then its bumper struck the frame of the gate. It plunged through splintering boards like matchwood, snapping barbed wire strands as though they were cotton threads. It wallowed on toward the house, its motor thundering.

Van watched, lynx-eyed, his fingers clawlike over the black butt of his automatic. A moment later he leaped back from the window and whirled. He felt the whole house shudder as the vehicle struck. Timbers snapped. Boards grated. The huge truck squalled to a stop.

Half the porch and a corner of the cottage had been ripped wide open. Night wind rushed in, chill with the presentiment of death. Van heard the killers calling to each other. There seemed to be several of them on board the truck, assassins worked up to a fever pitch of excitement, thirsting for human blood.

The machine-gun yammered again. Out in the darkness police automatics answered. Lead struck the body of the stalled truck, screaming away into the night like a frightened wraith fleeing a scene of murder.

Tiptoeing close to the broken corner of the building, Van heard one of the killers call out an order.

“Go in an’ get ‘im, Dopey! Rip ‘im wide open. We’ll hold off the lousy coppers.”

“Okay,” came the snarled answer. “Leave the old guy to me!”

A black figure detached itself from the truck. It slipped through the broken hole in the building, came on purposefully; and Van caught a brief glimpse of light reflected from a machine-gun’s ugly snout. He tiptoed back into Blackwell’s bedchamber, spoke in the harsh, querulous voice of the recluse.

“Who is it? What do you mean, you fools, smashing into my house?”

The gunman couldn’t see him. Van took a desperate chance in that instant. For a flashlight stabbed toward him, bathing his disguised face, and Van waited. He knew that two hands are needed to hold and fire a machine-gun. Then the light went out. There was a ripping, vicious burst from the rapid-firer. The gun clattered like a mad thing out in the hallway in the hands of the killer who had entered.

But Van had leaped far to the left of the doorway as soon as the light was extinguished. Bullets lashed empty space at the spot where he had been. He screamed now, the cry of a mortally wounded man, throwing his voice so that it seemed to come from straight in front of the gunman. Then he groaned realistically; snatched a quilt from the bed; flung it over a light, straight-backed chair; and, as the man came close, Van hurled the chair to the floor so that it fell with a convincing, muffled thud.

The killer stepped through the bedroom door, brought his gun into action again, and pumped bullets viciously into what he thought was Blackwell’s prostrate body. Then he flicked on his flash to make sure his work was done.

That was his last conscious act that night. Van got a brief glimpse of his savage face, flushed, with eyes that were unnaturally bright and glassy. A drug addict, pumped so full of the stuff that he was hardly human!

Van leaped with the silent swiftness of a springing puma. The butt of his gun came down on the hophead’s skull. The man pitched forward, dropping his weapon without a moan. Van grabbed him by the collar, pulled his unconscious body away from the door into a corner of the room.

He found the man’s flash, clicked the switch, and set it on a chair. For a tense minute, while the guns continued to blast outside, Van studied the drug addict’s still features. Then, working with desperate quickness, knowing that each split second was precious, he began removing his disguise of Simon Blackwell. It had served its purpose, drawn the murderous fire of the killer, letting those outside know that Dopey had found his prey. After the wig had been withdrawn, the moulage scraped off, Van began a new impersonation. This must be another masterpiece.

There was no time for finesse. No time even to study his subject as he would have liked to. The Phantom was about to take a seemingly suicidal step. It wasn’t the first time he’d used disguise to thrust himself into direct contact with dangerous criminals. He’d done it before. It had brought him close to death on several occasions. Some day he would slip up, take one chance too many, but until then -

He took out a mirror. His long fingers, dipping into the auxiliary make-up kit he always carried, began spreading red pigment over his face, covering Blackwell’s deathly pallor, imitating Dopey’s hectic, narcotic flush. He worked swiftly, surely, with the deftness of an actor between scenes who knows he has only a minute or two before the curtain rises.

He dabbed black wax, a coal tar derivative, on his teeth to simulate Dopey’s broken snags. He thrust a spongy pad under his lower lip in imitation of the man’s prognathous mouth. He widened both nostrils with hollow, truncated cones of red celluloid, kept for such a purpose. He rose, so monstrously changed that his own mother wouldn’t have known him.

Already the killers outside called to him blasphemously. Van snatched up the hophead’s hat, drew off his coat, slipped into it. He grabbed the machine-gun, stepped over Dopey’s inert body, and plunged into the hall.

“Okay, pals!” he called loudly, imitating Dopey’s snarling voice, which he had picked up from hearing that one sentence spoken.

A volley of curses almost as scorching as bullets met him when he slipped outside.

“What the hell kept you, mug? Does it take all night to croak one spavined old guy?”

A flashlight flicked into Dick Van I Loan’s face. He knew he stood on the brink of death, for his make-up, put on so quickly, could hardly be exact. But he grinned wickedly, showing his blackened teeth, holding out a wad of bills he had taken from his own pocket.

“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!