Robert Wallace - The Dancing Doll Murders

FOUR people stared in frozen fascination at the small dancing figure on the polished table in the century-old home of Esmond Caulder. The thing was a musical doll of German make. It shuffled, pirouetted, arms outstretched stiffly, while a tinkling, monotonous melody came from a music box inside it.

To one in particular of those watching there was something strangely disturbing about the doll. Don Winstead, Caulder’s youngest nephew, saw his own features imprinted on that tiny waxen face. His own blond hair, his own petulant mouth, his own high cheek bones and straight nose. It was his very image – his effigy in brief!

And there was something else! Winstead’s nostrils flared. An emotion close to horror darkened his eyes. For on the manikin’s white shirt front was a lurid stain. A blotchy crimson oval, with hideous spreading tentacles – blood! The macabre effect was completed by a slender dagger no bigger than a broken toothpick that was thrust into the exact center of the spot.

“What’s the idea?” his cousin, Eben Gray, asked sardonically. “Your loving sweetie send you this little keepsake of yourself?”

But Don Winstead wasn’t smiling. The doll had come in the late mail in a package addressed to him. A premonition of approaching evil slid chill fingers along his back.

“I don’t know!” he said thickly. “Stop it! Maybe it’s somebody’s idea of a joke – but that damn’ thing with its bloody shirt front gives me the jitters. This isn’t any time to get gay about death!”

The smile was erased from Eben Gray’s saturnine face. He and the other heirs of Esmond Caulder stared at each other. Don and his brother, Reggie Winstead, were visibly frightened. The striking Mrs. Orville Tyler, society divorcee, lost her look of perpetual boredom.

Gray reached out and stopped the doll’s movements with a swift encircling gesture.

Don Winstead was right! It wasn’t any time to get gay about death. Upstairs, old Esmond Caulder lay on his bed in the last excruciating stages of angina pectoris, Each of those present expected to inherit a huge slice of the Caulder fortune; but propriety demanded that they assume long faces and pretend grief at their uncle’s approaching end.

Winstead spoke suddenly, addressing Jason Squires, the family lawyer, who had entered from the library.

“Do me a favor, Squires,” he muttered, touching the doll. “Wrap this damn’ thing up and take it away. I don’t even want it around.”

Squires, a tall, gaunt-faced man with eyeglasses and thinning hair, nodded politely and picked up the doll. But, even before he could turn, a sudden sound at one of the big windows made him stiffen.

The others stiffened also. A hissing exclamation of terror came from Don Winstead’s lips. For the window was sliding open, lifting mysteriously, inexorably, as though an unseen, unknown force outside were pushing it up. And, as they stared in rigid wonder, two men with white handkerchiefs across their faces stepped in out of the dusk.

Only their eyes showed, bright, glittering, alight now with some unholy purpose. They scanned the room quickly. Awkward, sinister weapons were cradled in their claw-like hands.

None of those watching recognized these as the new, deadly Colt Monitor rifles which could send a stream of cupro-nickel slugs screaming through flesh at a rate of many hundred per minute. But the meaning of the guns was plain. Death, terror, menace, had come like a thunderbolt swooping in out of the night!

The strangers moved away from each other. One on each side of the big window, they raised their guns and covered the cowering Caulder heirs. Then another man came in from the early evening darkness. He, too, wore a handkerchief mask; but he was smaller, wiry, apparently unarmed.

There was something mincingly precise about his entrance, like that of a parlor magician about to entertain his friends. He wore light-colored gloves. He reached up abruptly and drew something from one long sleeve of his overcoat, heightening the impression that a sleight-of-hand act was about to be performed.

But there was nothing of parlor magic about the cold steel that shimmered in his fingers. Don Winstead cried out again, cringing back, his face taking on the greyness of drying putty. Even the stunning Mrs. Tyler went as pale as death.

The man with the knife took two mincing steps forward. He raised his arm in a swift parabola, flung the steel so quickly that all the terrified watchers saw was a glittering, flashing streak in space. But they heard the ghostly whir of the bright blade as it fanned the air. Then another sound came – a sickening, hollow thud as a human body blocked its path.

There was a scream from Don Winstead, torn from his quivering throat as though by ripping fingers. The handle of the knife that had come to rest struck awkwardly out of his chest at the left side close to his heart. Red froth drooled from his lips. His eyes rolled wildly. He gave a bubbling gasp, clawed at the air for a moment, and fell forward, striking on his face and driving the knife still deeper.

The killer wiped his gloved hands in a gesture that was done for brutal effect. He turned and minced back to the window, stepped out with the other two armed men. In a moment they were swallowed up in the dim oblong of descending darkness.

The three remaining heirs looked at each other with livid faces. They glanced fearfully at the fallen body of Don Winstead, then at the small figure in Lawyer Squires’s hands. They were stunned by the horror of the thing. Stunned – for the hideous, symbolic prophecy of the red-stained dancing doll had been fulfilled!

Squires was first to come to his senses. He flung the door from him as though it were something loathsome. In a half dozen frenzied steps he crossed to a phone on a wall table. An excited operator a mile away connected his trembling voice with Police Headquarters.

Fifteen minutes after the glittering shaft of murderous steel had sailed through the air to bury itself in Don Winstead’s heart, black cars filled with plainclothes men and blue-coats were squalling into the Caulder drive. But there was no sign of the killers when mild-faced, bald-headed Inspector Farragut of the Homicide Bureau entered the house.

On the very heels of the police, a small battered coupé with a soiled card bearing the word “Press” stuck in the windshield roared into the drive. It whirled up, almost ripping a fender from the inspector’s big sedan. Out of it leaped Steve Huston, small, black-haired, and seemingly omnipresent reporter for the Clarion. As a hell-bent news-hound he had a nose that would make a German police dog growl with envy.

But tonight, in spite of appearances, there was nothing clairvoyant about his arriving so soon. Things had been slow for the past twelve hours. He had paid off an old poker debt he owed the desk sergeant at Headquarters in return for a promise that the sergeant would tip him off if anything big broke. Something had, and Huston had a red-hot appetite for news. He had already got in touch with the city desk and phoned in the first bare details of the murder.

For once his presence was hardly noticed by Inspector Farragut as Huston slipped in through a back door and entered the spacious Caulder home.

For Farragut had picked up the dancing doll. Slowly he wound the key in the back, set it on the table, and let it dance again while the three Caulder heirs cowered back in bulging-eyed terror.

“Stop it, Inspector!” The choked words this time came from Eben Gray.