The Phantom Detective: 5 Murder Mysteries in One Volume. Robert Wallace
Van Loan slid the make-up case under the seat into its trick compartment. But it wasn't the Park Avenue clubman who sat upright in the coupe now.
The lean, tanned face had disappeared, replaced by a square featured, sallow-skinned man twenty years older than Van Loan. The hair was combed unbecomingly on the opposite side of the greying head, and the eyebrows curled upward belligerently.
A twist of the necktie, a slip of two notches in the soft leather belt, and an awkward, ill-fitting hitch of the grey suit coat, rounded out the convincing picture of a rugged, aggressive but personally sloppy and rather shopworn character of no particular qualifications.
What unknown talents the character possessed, were added to by a shoulder-holstered Colt .38 automatic, a carefully pocketed black silk mask, a pencil flashlight, and a peculiarly designed platinum and diamond badge.
It was seventeen minutes after three o'clock in the afternoon, and the delayed storm was just beginning to spatter the pavement with the first big drops of a heavy rain, when the Phantom, alias Jim Doran, jammed a crumpled panama low over his eyes and faded down the street away from the locked coupe.
He paused abruptly at the corner of Eighth Avenue, lighted a cigarette as he listened to an announcer's tense voice cracking from a loudspeaker in a radio shop doorway:
"Flash! The giant government irrigation project at Rock Canyon Dam, Arizona, has just been destroyed by a series of devastating explosions. The entire dam has been demolished and the canyon itself is a raging torrent. Loss of life is estimated at well over a thousand, with the toll mounting.
"Property damage will be incalculable until the water now sweeping the whole Arizona valley spends itself. The President of the United States was saved by quick action on the part of his Secret Service guards and members of his staff. This report comes by telephone from Phoenix, all radio facilities at Rock Canyon having been destroyed by the disastrous explosions.
"A mysterious voice, cutting in upon the President's dedicatory address at the dam a few seconds before the series of blasts, threatened this fatal national disaster and others to follow.
"Federal investigators are flying to the scene. This is the first report that has been received. More details will be broadcast as they are relayed to us."
The voice stopped, and people on the street stared blankly at one another, stunned, heedless of the increasing rain.
Jim Doran's squarish face became rocky, his keen grey eyes smoldering as he strode grimly a half block north. He ducked into a subway kiosk, came up into the Clarion Building on the other side of the wet street.
The Phantom was reborn.
Chapter Three.
Special Corpse
The editorial offices of the Clarion were on the eleventh floor and Frank Havens had a bulletproof glass cubicle there, raised above the floor level in a far corner.
But the publisher's real office was a triplex suite on the eighty-fifth and top floors of the towering press building, reached only by a private express elevator entered through a sliding panel in that non-shatterable glass cubicle overlooking the editorial rooms.
Turmoil and cyclonic confusion seemed to have hit the enormous editorial office when Jim Doran stepped off the public elevator and was stopped by the wise-eyed blond receptionist at the railing gate. Telephones jangled, typewriters and teletypes clattered, adding to the bedlam of excitedly shouted orders and rushing copy boys.
But the suspense-ridden, grinding overtones of the Clarion's frenzied editorial department, the Phantom realized grimly, was only a larger duplicate, of the frantic commotion occurring in every metropolitan press editorial room in the country at this moment. The universal, terse newspaper cry was:
Hold that Rock Canyon wire open!
"Jim Doran, to see Mr. Frank Havens," Van told the girl curtly. Jim Doran was one of the score of names that Dick Van Loan and the publisher had agreed upon as Phantom aliases. "Mr. Havens is expecting me," he added as the girl at the desk hesitated.
She gave him a sharp, respectfully curious glance as she finished putting through the call to Havens' quarters, and a moment later Jim Doran was slouching through the familiar maze of editorial desks, guided by an alert copy boy.
Toby, the publisher's trusted elevator guard, rode him up in the private express car from the glass cubicle, watching him warily but without recognition. Toby had known Richard Curtis Van Loan for some years.
Van's veiled grey eyes hid his satisfaction, as the keen scrutiny of the operator failed to catch the slightest flaw in the quick character make-up of nondescript Jimmy Doran. Toby's shrewd, bold eyes were always an infallible first test.
At the eighty-fifth floor, the swarthy operator slid back the elevator door. Jim Doran stepped out of the car, stood a moment in the ornately furnished reception foyer staring belligerently at the uniformed policeman eyeing him suspiciously. Behind him, the car door slid shut silently as Toby took the elevator down again.
"I'm here to see Mr. Havens," Van announced in a deep, gruff voice that was not at all the smooth baritone of Richard Curtis Van Loan. "Didn't expect to find you cops up here."
Before the policeman could question him, Judkins' tall, bald-headed figure appeared on a balcony at one end of the room. The publisher's confidential secretary called down to the cop:
"If that's Mr. Doran, send him right up, officer."
Van nodded to the cop, brushed past him and mounted the staircase to the balcony.
Judkins' sallow glance was nervous but his worried brown eyes were without recognition as he led Jim Doran through a doorway into a large room that was more lounge than office.
"Mr. James Doran," he announced, and withdrew, closing the door.
Frank Havens' penetrating gaze darted up sharply as Dick Van Loan crossed to the wide, polished walnut desk behind which the publisher sat drumming his fingers anxiously. Six other men, one in the uniform of a police captain, looked up quickly from the armchair about which they were grouped.
But the figure slumped in that chair did not move.
As Van's swift glance took in the unusual tableau, his right hand swung across the desk toward Havens in a hearty handshake that hid the small platinum-and-diamond badge palmed in his long fingers. The significant emblem of a mask outlined by the brilliant gems was the only design on the smooth platinum surface of that cryptic shield. But it was enough.
Frank Havens' worried eyes glinted with recognition as Van's swift fingers gave him, but not the others, a flashing look at that Phantom badge. The emblem disappeared again in Jim Doran's hand.
"Gentlemen, Mr. James Doran!" Havens said and stood up from behind his desk. The name had weight now as he spoke it. Jim Doran was no longer a password name, but had become a reality. "Mr. Doran will represent me in this investigation." He nodded his grey head toward the silent figure in the armchair.
Van stepped over to the armchair, his eyes on the domelike head of the middle-aged man slumped there. A small fleck of blood stained the fellow's white lips as the Phantom raised the lolling head and studied the fixed expression of sheer surprise stamped on the dead man's face.
Rigor mortis had not yet set in, and there were no visible marks of violence on the neatly dressed body.
"This wants some preliminary explaining," Jim Doran grumbled. "I didn't think anybody'd be interested in just one corpse, after what happened at Rock Creek Canyon."
"We know about that," the officer in the captain's uniform said. "This happens to be New York City, not Arizona."
Van glanced up, curiously aware that Havens, in his repressed excitement, had not named him as the Phantom, although two of the men in street clothes were