Robert Wallace - The Dancing Doll Murders

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!

THE Phantom moved with desperate quickness. While those about him, stunned by surprise, were grasping the fact that he was an impostor, he grabbed a straight-backed chair and swung it savagely at the overhead light. His only possible hope of escape lay in darkness. He was no miracle worker. There were a dozen armed and merciless criminals facing him, ready to riddle him with screaming lead.

The chair struck the big bowl light, hurling slivers of glass halfway across the room. But even at that, one of Bowers’s gunmen triggered with the speed of a striking snake. A slug came fearfully close to Dick Van Loan’s neck. He flung himself sideward, taut with the knowledge that he had escaped death with nothing to spare. The whole place seemed to explode into shouting tumult.

No one else dared fire, but there was a concerted rush of plunging bodies toward the spot where Van had been. He streaked away. A man got in his path, and Van felled him with a lashing blow of his fist. That was one point in his favor. He could treat them all as enemies, while the darkness forced them to be cautious with each other.

A flashlight clicked on somewhere. Its beam moved frantically over the heads of the milling mob. Van clenched his teeth. He knew if that light touched him it would spell his doom. But he couldn’t risk firing, because the flash of his gun would draw a volley. He stooped low, raced along the left side of the office toward the workroom door.

He heard Bowers’s voice, calm amid all the hubbub, giving orders by phone to some of his men below. His words carried plainly to the ears of the Phantom.

“There’s a guy up here who looks like Dopey but isn’t. Cover the exits. Don’t let him get out. If you see him let him have it.”

Van’s heart went cold. He was four stories above the street, in unfamiliar surroundings, and by that quick order Bowers had trapped him. The Phantom could fight, but the chances of winning now were hopeless. He had planned to make a mad plunge down the building’s stairs ahead of the murder pack. But, no matter which way he went, there would be guns waiting.

He clutched the knob of the office door and turned it. There was a bulb burning in the workshop outside. He leaped through the doorway, silhouetted for a second, and in that second death came close again. Guns crashed in the darkness. Bullets followed him in a leaden hail. If he hadn’t whirled and run toward the side of the workshop parallel with the office partition he would have been riddled.

HE risked firing now. Not at the men behind, but at that bulb ahead. Its light would make him an easy target once the killers entered the workshop. His shot sped true. Glass shattered. The room went dark again. And Van had glimpsed the location of the stairway.