Robert Wallace - The Dancing Doll Murders

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 After the wig had been withdrawn, the moulage scraped off, Van began a new impersonation.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.