Robert Wallace - The Dancing Doll Murders

Van reasoned that the mysterious Blackie who had had his wire strung so far, using other people’s property for his own ends, would hardly be apt to take liberties with such a building as that.

He went to the street. Then, still as a repairman, he announced to the janitor of the studio apartments that the gent on the top floor had asked him to inspect a radio. The janitor, seeing Van’s businesslike look, grunted and let him in. In the foyer, Van looked around.

“Mr. Warburton you mean,” the janitor said. “Haven’t seen him around this morning.”

Tense with excitement, Van rode up in a small automatic elevator. He knocked at the door of the top-floor studio, cap tipped over one eye rakishly, ready to give a breezy excuse of having been given the wrong address when the occupant complained that he hadn’t called a repairman. At all costs he wanted to get a look at the man, Blackie, who lived here under the name of “Warburton.” His progress in the case depended on that.

But there was no answer. He tried the door then, and to his surprise found it was unlocked, An inner voice at that moment warned him of deadly danger. There was something about the stillness of the big studio apartment that seemed heavy with menace, the threat of death.

The fact that the door was unlocked made him suspicious, His left hand gripped his tool kit with seeming negligence, His right was thrust in his pocket, toying with the butt of his.38.

“Radio man!” he called nasally. But still there was no answer. Heavy tapestries around the walls of the big apartment hung down with a funereal stillness. Light from the huge north window filled the room with sunless illumination. Artists had lived here in times gone by, but the most recent occupant, Van believed, was an artist of murder.

There were signs of luxury in the room’s furnishings. Antique chairs and tables, Akbar, Sarouk, and Hamadan rugs worth many hundreds of dollars. The place had apparently been rented furnished by a man who didn’t mind flinging cash around.

And then Van caught his breath. For suddenly he saw evidence that some one had beaten a hasty departure. All the drawers of a small writing desk near one wall were opened and empty. On the hearth were the black ashes of a pile of freshly burned papers. The someone who had left quickly had taken pains not to leave any evidence behind.

Van’s scalp went tight at that. It meant that “Blackie” who had rented this place had somehow got onto the fact that the incognito which he’d taken such pains to protect was in danger of being exposed. Either he had a secret signal device of which Van didn’t know, or else he had tried to use the wire and when Hog-face hadn’t answered he had become suspicious.

Dick Van Loan’s gaze became riveted suddenly on a black walnut secretary. It was over at the other side of the room, half hidden in shadow. He walked toward it – and then it seemed as if the blood was being squeezed out of his heart by constricting fingers of excitement, For there was something propped up against the front ledge of the secretary – a tiny figure, a doll, of a type Van had seen before!

He went straight to it. Breath caught in his throat. That doll, one of the small musical manikins of German make, had because of the strange and hideous developments of the past twenty-four hours, come to be associated in Van’s mind with – murder. And something else held him spellbound. The doll wore the black mask of the Phantom!

There was no mistaking the symbolic meaning of that dark strip of cloth which had been cut from an old stocking. The original features of the doll hadn’t been tampered with this time. The killers hadn’t tried to reproduce one of the Phantom’s thousand or more disguises. They didn’t know how his real face looked. So the doll’s own painted wax features were in evidence, blank, innocent, staring.

But the black mask was sufficient to indicate who they meant. Its portent was clear also. Death to the Phantom!

Even as Van saw and understood, a faint, spine-chilling click sounded directly behind him. Van’s body went rigid. He recognized that sound as the safety catch of some sort of gun being released. And a voice spoke immediately after it in tones so deadly that even Dick Van Loan’s coolly trained nerves jumped.

“Move an inch, Phantom, and you’ll be on your way to Hell! Stand still and you’ve got a couple more seconds to live!”

It wasn’t Blackie’s voice. It was another’s, that of some underworld henchman of Blackie’s, there to do murder.

“Sure.” the voice continued, “this is your fade-out, Phantom! That rig of yours doesn’t fool me. You walked right up to that doll there – and gave yourself away. You’re the mug I’m after, an’ you’re gonna get it!” The unseen gunman gave the quavering, hyena-like laugh of one who takes a perverted joy in murder. “Raise your mitts, Phantom! Turn around so I can see you – and take it in the belly like a gent!” Van Loan raised his arms slowly, fingers digging into the black-masked doll. Terror appeared to have frozen him. He seemed to be acting in palsied obedience to the gunman’s harsh command.

But his ears, trained in the science of acoustics, were tracing the direction of the killer’s voice. He had determined, before the man finished speaking, the exact spot where he stood. And the hand that held the manikin moved with desperate, spring-like swiftness.

UP and over his shoulder, Van’s fingers spread. He tossed the doll fiercely, jackknifing his body at the same instant, executing a quick right-about face, using the masked manikin that symbolized his murder as the only possible means of escaping death.

For its torso, weighted with the music-box mechanism, made a usable missile. It struck the mobster’s chest. The gun blared loudly. But the first burst of bullets passed over Van’s head. Glass shivered in the secretary and fell in a tinkling cascade.

Van crouched. There wasn’t time to consider consequences nor to weigh issues now. Life and death hung in the balance. Death was in the black muzzle of the mobster’s machine-gun, already swinging down. Never had Van’s life depended so utterly on the lightning swiftness of his draw. It was kill or be killed.

His.38 became a gleaming streak of metal gripped in one clawlike hand. He fired from the hip, not seeming to aim. But a grey hole appeared above the gunman’s left eyebrow, As he sagged forward the back of his head was a bloody horror. His fingers contracted on the trigger spasmodically The machine-gun’s muzzle stitched a line of uneven dots in the white ceiling. But the man was lifeless when he struck the floor.

Van straightened, wiped away the thin beads of sweat that dampened his forehead. He never liked to kill if he could help it. His job was tracking down criminals, outwitting them. How and when they were punished was up to the courts. But this time there had been no choice. He’d been forced to shoot a man he would have preferred to question. By killing the man he might have blocked his own progress in this baffling, sinister case.

For another quick survey of the apartment convinced him that its former occupant had taken pains to leave behind nothing identifying. He crossed to the shattered secretary, pulled open a drawer, and saw that it, too, had been emptied. He examined the desk more closely. Every scrap of printed matter in it had been destroyed.

Hurrying into the bedroom, he jerked open the door of a clothes closet, and had no better luck. Blackie had taken all his personal belongings with him. He must, thought Van, have packed up and got out some time before dawn, stationing his rodman in the apartment to slay the Phantom. That would have been before the janitor was up, and so the janitor hadn’t heard the one come nor the other leave.