“Van speaking,” he said. I want you to do me a favor.”
The publisher gasped. “Good God, Dick! I’ve been waiting to hear from you. Where have you been? Farragut told me he’d run across you. What happened out at Blackwell’s place? How did you keep from being murdered?”
CAN’T explain it all now,” said Van quickly. “I want to prevent another killing. Every member of the Caulder family, I think, is in danger. One of them, I don’t know which, is slated to die tonight. I want you to let Steve Huston help me. Get him to go to the Hotel Chatterly and make guarded inquiries about a singer named Dolly DeLong. Tell him to be careful, but learn everything he can – particularly who her gentleman friend is, the one who sends her expensive flowers. The girl at the switchboard should be able to give him facts about her phone calls if Steve handles her right. I’ll meet Steve at the hotel and phone you later.”
He started to hang up, but Havens’s excited voice stopped him.
“Hold on, Van! There’s a call coming in from Inspector Farragut right now on another wire.” There was a brief pause, then Havens spoke again, his tones harshly rasping.
“Damn right about the Caulders! Farragut wants to see you. He says Mrs. Tyler, the niece, has just been handed one of the dancing dolls!”
The Phantom swore and his clamping fingers whitened around the phone.
“That means murder!” he muttered softly. “Ask Huston to get to work on the Dolly DeLong slant alone for the time being. I’ll go see Farragut right away!”
Detectives filled Mrs. Tyler’s big West End apartment when Dick Van Loan arrived. He had disguised himself as “Rodney Post” special investigator to the district attorney’s office. Only Farragut and Steve Huston knew that he was the Phantom. There was an air of tense uneasiness in the place. The woman who’d been marked as the Chief’s next victim seemed the least excited of all. But that, Van felt certain, was only a pose. He studied her covertly. It seemed to him that under her slinky beauty she possessed a shrewish disposition and feline claws. And her voice – it was low, husky, affected as she spoke to him.
“You seem different, Mr. Post, from these detectives!” she confided. “It’s a nuisance having them about.”
Van answered grimly. “If they keep you from being murdered, that’s all that counts,” he told her.
“Murdered!” The woman shivered. Van saw haunting shadows of fear deep in her eyes.
“Yes.”
He pointed to the dancing doll that had come in a parcel post package. It lay on the drawing room table staring up at the ceiling with its blank wax face. Its features had been molded into an exact reproduction of Mrs. Tyler’s. The same straight nose. The same high cheek bones. The same arrogant, willful, slightly exotic mouth. And there was a black thread tied around the shapely throat.
“That can mean only one thing,” Van said. “The murder method this time is to be strangulation.”
Mrs. Tyler put her hands to her throat. It was white and soft, and Van saw a tiny pulse throbbing in it. She laughed shakily.
“If you do as we say,” said Van, “I think we can protect you. If you don’t you’ll take your life in your own hands.”
The woman drew in a gust of grey vapor from her cigarette. She laughed again. Two detectives stood on opposite sides of the room watching her. The butts of the automatics they carried in armpit holsters showed inside their half open coats.
The air was charged with tenseness. The threat of death seemed to hang heavy in the room in spite of the precautions taken. Menace tapped with unseen ghostly fingers against the windows that shut out the night. Down the hallway, Inspector Farragut’s voice rumbled steadily as he gave last minute commands.
Mrs. Tyler pressed a button, and nervous steps sounded as her maid, Marie, entered – the only one of her servants Farragut had allowed to remain. The girl’s pallid face showed terror.
“Bring cocktails, Marie.”
“Yes, madam.”
When the maid returned five minutes later with a shaker and glasses, Van noticed a furtive, excited look in her eyes. She set the tray down. Van caught a brief glimpse of a bit of white paper tightly clenched in her palm. She kept it concealed, poured a Martini, and managed to pass the paper along with the liquor to her mistress. Mrs. Tyler’s fingers closed eagerly around the note.
Van’s heart beat faster. What was the woman up to?
She pretended to use her compact, retiring to a couch in the room’s corner, and Van saw her surreptitiously spread out the paper the maid had brought. She read it quickly, slipped it stealthily inside her dress while Van’s thoughts raced. What was this secret billet-doux she found so exciting? Who was it from? He made a gesture of impatience and approached her.
“That paper? I’d like to see it, Please!”
Mrs. Tyler gasped and quick anger flamed in her cheeks. Van smiled sardonically. “It’s my business to watch people. I saw Marie give you a note.”
The woman spoke haughtily.
“Remember that this is my apartment and that Marie is my maid.”
Van nodded. “Right – but the police can’t do their best work without your cooperation. This is no time for secrets.”
SHE raised her eyes. They met Van’s challengingly. “I don’t like to be spied on. You’re no gentleman after all.” She drained her cocktail glass, rose, and swept out of the drawing room disdainfully.
Van shrugged. Her arrogance was stupid. But there were detectives stationed all over the house. It was up to Farragut’s men to watch over her, too. He turned to question the maid, and at that instant Mrs. Tyler’s voice sounded down the hall, raised in complaint.
“No, I won’t have it! I want to be alone!”
Van jumped up. He saw an embarrassed detective step out of the kitchen door, and gesture helplessly. “She says she wants to mix another cocktail and that I’m in her way.”
Van was puzzled. Why did Mrs. Tyler seem determined to jeopardize her life? Had some emotion stronger than fear made her forgetful that she was in danger every moment she was alone?
Farragut came and called to his man. “Where’s Mrs. Tyler?”
The detective shrugged. “Right there in the kitchen. She’s mixing a drink and told me to get out. Says she can’t move without tripping over my big feet.”
“Never mind what she told you Stay in there with her.”
“Yes, sir.” The detective started back to his post, and Mrs. Tyler, inside the kitchen, slammed the door.
Dick Van Loan leaped forward. He pushed the detective aside, pounded on the door. “Don’t be a fool, Mrs. Tyler! We’ve all of us warned you! Every second you’re alone you’re risking your life!”
A contemptuous laugh was the only response the woman made.
Van listened. He couldn’t hear the rattle of ice in the cocktail shaker or a gurgle of liquor. There was no sound for several minutes, then Mrs. Tyler moved stealthily across the room and raised a window. They could hear the sash weights whisper.
“Great Scott!” snapped Farragut. “What’s she doing? Is she mad? Has she lost her sense?”
As though the night itself were giving answer, there was a sudden harsh and horrible scream. It was muffled, choking, hideous, an animal cry of primitive terror. It was cut off by a knifeblade of silence – a silence more terrible in its portent even than that weird cry. And then they heard a peculiar drumming noise as of human feet beating an unearthly tattoo against the floor.
OPEN up! Good God – what’s happened?” Inspector Farragut was twisting at the knob with shaking fingers.
But Dick Van Loan said nothing. White-faced, he drew back and launched his body straight at that locked door. It was heavy, massive. All the doors in this luxurious apartment were made of hand-finished oak.
It withstood the first lunge of his hard, well-muscled body. He drew back, lunged again. The door groaned this time, but the lock and the hand-wrought hinges held. And all the time, coming faintly to Van’s ears like a hideous, far-off funereal drumming was the clatter of Mrs. Tyler’s feet.
The sound stopped suddenly, and a vacuum of silence lay like a shroud behind that stubborn door.
Panting, Van ran for a chair, returned with it, and smashed at the panels savagely. He broke through one,
