The Case of the Mischievous Doll

Mason picked up a chair, swung it around in a circle and crashed it against the panels of the kitchen door.

The door panels splintered. Mason kicked some of the splinters away with his heel, looked inside the kitchen and said, “A big kitchen table against the door and mattresses jammed between the wall and the table.”

“They’re in the kitchen, I tell you,” Drake said. “Get away — the police will be here within a matter of seconds.”

Mason swung the chair again, crashed another panel in the door, ripped out the panel with his bare hands, looked through the wrecked door into the kitchen, then suddenly turned and sprinted for the corridor.

“What’s the matter?” Drake asked.

“There’s a back door,” Mason said. “It’s open.”

The lawyer reached the corridor, rounded a turn, went down an L in the corridor, came to an open door and entered the kitchen. Drake was a few steps behind him.

“Well,” Drake said, “we certainly fell for that one. It felt just as though someone was holding that door. You can see what happened. They took two mattresses, put one between the table and the door, the other between the table and the electric stove. It would give just an inch or two but not enough to get the door open. It felt as if someone was holding it from the inside.”

Drake ran back to the telephone, again called police, said, “Get your dispatcher to alert the cars coming in on that murder and kidnapping charge that at least one man and a woman — the woman probably being a hostage — have just made their escape from the apartment house. They may have reached the street but they can’t have gone far. The radio car should be on the alert.”

Drake hung up the phone, then went over to where Mason was kneeling by the motionless figure on the floor.

“This guy’s still alive,” the lawyer said.

Drake felt for the man’s pulse. “Faint and thready,” he said, “but it’s there. Guess we’d better phone for an ambulance. Oh-oh, look here.”

The detective indicated a small red stain on the front of the man’s shirt.

He opened the shirt, pulled down the undershirt and disclosed a small puncture in the skin.

“What the deuce?” Drake asked.

“The hole made by a twenty-two calibre bullet,” Mason said. “Let’s be careful not to touch anything, Paul. Get on that phone and tell police that this man is still alive. Let’s see if we can get an ambulance to rush him to the hospital.”

Again Drake went to the phone and put through the call. Then the lawyer and the detective stood for a few moments in the doorway.

“Where did those mattresses come from?” Drake asked.

“Apparently off the twin beds in the bedroom,” Mason said. “They were taken to the kitchen. Evidently the idea was they would barricade themselves and shoot it out, and then they found they could close off the kitchen door and give themselves a chance to slip out into the corridor and down the stairs.”

“You think there were two?”

“There were two mattresses,” Mason said. “Evidently from the way the bedclothes are arranged, someone simply took hold of the ends of the mattresses and dragged them across the room. There probably wasn’t time to make two trips, so there must have been at least two people or perhaps three people, because one of them must have been holding the girl — and that accounts for the scream we heard which was stifled.”

“They had to work fast from the time we first rang the chimes,” Drake said. “Of course we could hear the sound of people moving. It must have been—”

“It was probably all of fifteen seconds,” Mason said. “A lot could have been done in fifteen seconds. If that girl had only screamed earlier, we’d have been smashing our way in instead of standing there at the door like a couple of nitwits.”

“And the girl?” Drake asked.

“My client, Dorrie Ambler,” Mason said.

“You wouldn’t think they could have gone far,” Drake protested. “They—”

A voice from the doorway said, “What’s going on here?”

Mason turned to the uniformed officer. “Evidently there’s been a shooting, a kidnapping and burglary. We trapped the people in the kitchen but they barricaded the kitchen door and got out through the service door.”

The officer moved over to the man on the floor, said, “Looks to me as though he’ll be another DOA.”

“We have an ambulance coming,” Mason said.

“So I’ve been advised. You have any description of the people who were in on this caper?”

Mason shook his head, said, “I notified the police to have the dispatcher—”

“I know, I know,” the officer said. “We’ve got four radio cars converging on the district and they’re stopping everyone coming out of the apartment house. But it’s probably too late to do anything.

“Here’s the ambulance now,” he said, as they heard the sound of the siren.

The officer said, “Okay, you fellows have done everything you can here. Now let’s get back out in the corridor where we don’t leave any more fingerprints than necessary. Let’s try and keep all the evidence from being obliterated.”