Robert Wallace - The Dancing Doll Murders

The janitor’s feet sounded in the corridor now. He pounded excitedly on the door and Van let him in.

“Wha-what’s all the racket?” the man gasped breathlessly. He froze the next second, eyes bulging at sight of the sprawled-out corpse. Then his gaze swung to Van in sudden horror. “You – killed him!”

Van jerked his thumb toward the bullet holes in the ceiling and the tommy-gun on the floor. “Self-defense. He tried to get me first.”

Words tumbled from the janitor’s twitching mouth. “Who is he?” What was he doing here? Where’s Mr. Warburton?”

For answer Van barked an order. “Call the police. Ask for Inspector Farragut, Homicide Bureau, and tell him there’s been a fresh killing connected with the dancing doll murders.”

He shoved the janitor toward the door; and, when he’d left, Van hurriedly bent over the man he’d slain. There was a wallet with the name “Joe Vanzanni” in it. A few bills. A half dozen policy slips. A couple of sweepstakes tickets. That was all.

Even most patient examination of the corpse couldn’t help him trace down Blackie. Death had deepened the dark curtain of mystery over the case.

BUT Van had ten minutes in which to work before the police arrived. He left the body, began to search every inch of the apartment with a patient thoroughness that was characteristic. Blackie, for all his care, might have left some overlooked evidence behind. For it had been Van’s experience that even the most crafty criminals slip up.

He looked under the rugs, under the desk and secretary. Then his eyes fastened on a handsome, silk-covered couch against one wall. He went to it, stood staring down for a moment, rocking on his heels. He tried to visualize the possible habits of Blackie. The man had a taste for good living assuredly, or he wouldn’t have rented a place like this. There were many other spots that might have served as well as a clearing house for murder.

Van moved the couch, stared behind it, and suddenly reached down. A withered, crinkled flower lay on the dust of the floor. It had been dropped carelessly, or had fallen from the clothes or hand of someone using the couch. It was an orchid. There was a faint trace of limberness in the short stem still, showing that it wasn’t many days old.

Its petals were so shriveled that Van, a connoisseur of orchids himself, couldn’t make out what kind it was. But his eyes gleamed with excitement. He imagined the scene that had taken place here. Cocktails perhaps, and a tryst between Blackie and some glamorous woman. An orchid crushed and abandoned while romance had its way. And there was a possibility, a slight one to be sure, that he might use this flower to open a new lead.

The janitor came through the door again, and Van questioned him.

“What’s Mr. Warburton like?”

“Dark, good-looking, a nifty dresser; not – not like him.” The janitor rolled his eyes fearfully toward the blood-smeared corpse. “Mr. Warburton is a high-class feller.”

“Did any women come here to see him?”

The janitor gulped. “Might have. I wouldn’t know. I live in the downstairs back. Mr. Warburton has his key.”

“And I suppose you don’t know anything else about him?”

“Nothing – except he said he was a stranger in town. Couldn’t give references, but he made up for that by paying three months rent in advance.”

Van nodded. “Big-time crooks are always liberal.”

“Crooks?”

Van nodded again, picked up the black-masked doll, wrapped it quickly in a piece of newspaper, and stuffed it in his repairman’s tool kit. He turned toward the door. The janitor tried to stop him.

“You can’t leave, feller, till you’ve told the cops everything.”

Van pushed him aside. “I’ll see them when I get downstairs,” he said.

The long black sedan of the Homicide Squad was drawing up to the curb when Van reached the lobby with the janitor following, still protesting that Van couldn’t leave.

Van suddenly stopped and adjusted the black mask over his eyes.

FARRAGUT came through the door accompanied by a group of plainclothes men, and started at sight of Van. “You here, Phantom?”

Van explained briefly what had happened, how he had traced down a secret extension wire, been ambushed by one of the murder group, and had had to kill him. Farragut frowned and stared at him sharply when he’d finished.

“You gave us a big scare, Phantom,” the inspector growled. “When you disappeared from Blackwell’s Place last night my men found a rat named O’Banion there, knocked out cold. You weren’t on deck and we figured you’d been kidnapped. The boys worked over O’Banion with a rubber hose. He broke; but all he told us was the name of a garage that burned last night. He claims he doesn’t know where his gang is now, what these killings are all about or who’s behind them.”

“He doesn’t,” said Van grimly. “Somebody who’s keeping himself in the background is engineering things and handing out cash. We’ve got to find him.”

“Any suggestions as to how we can do it?” Farragut asked skeptically.

Van drew out the shriveled orchid and held it before the startled eyes of the inspector, “I found this upstairs. It may tell me something. I’m going to work on it anyway. I’ll get in touch with you in a little while.”

In twenty minutes Van was bent over a table in the secret laboratory of Dr. Paul Bendix, His face was intent. There was a glass case before him which looked like a small, gold-fish aquarium tipped upside down. Beneath it was a white blotter, and on this the shriveled orchid lay.

Van lighted a Bunsen burner under a small retort, clipped a piece of rubber tubing to the retort’s nozzle. This he attached to an inlet valve at the side of the case. Steam began to blur the inside of the glass. Van let the white vapor swirl in and humidify the air for about ten minutes till tiny droplets of moisture gathered on the shriveled petals of the orchid and the flower began to uncurl and expand.

But it was still a withered thing, brown and hardly recognizable as the fragile blossom it had been. And now Van, working swiftly, began an apparent miracle of science. The steam bath had been given to soften and moisten the fibers of the orchid. He followed it by clipping the outside end of the rubber tube over the nozzle of a small cylinder of gas.

He turned a valve, and this time sulphur dioxide instead of steam filled the case. The pungent, acrid vapor flowed around the orchid minute after minute. Under its influence the flower began to show new life. The plant cells deep in the tissues expanded. The gas molecules penetrated moistened fibers. The orchid swelled, and the withered petals commenced to uncurl and straighten.

Van kept up the revivifying process until the orchid had almost returned to its former shape. It was still stained, but here and there spots of its original color had been brought back.

He shut off the gas flow, sucked the sulphur dioxide out with a vacuum drainer, lifted the case, and removed the orchid. He had spent time in the tropics studying air plants in their native haunts. He was an authority on many kinds of wild, cultivated, and hybrid orchids. He examined the salvaged bloom under a powerful handglass and saw certain characteristic markings.

The flower had been a startling, flamelike orange mottled with vivid blue. It wasn’t one of the common Epidendrums , Cattleyas or Cymbidiums grown so much in greenhouses. Those blue markings against an orange background constituted a lucky break for the Phantom. For the orchid was Calanthe aureus, the rare and beautiful bloom originally from the sweltering jungles of French Indo-China. Few florists raised it. It sold at outrageous prices to customers who wanted something luxurious and novel. As much as fifty dollars might have been paid for the single blossom Van held.