Broadcasting Company. In a number of other industrial corporations, too. And in Frank Havens' coast-to-coast chain of newspapers, including the New York Clarion. Richard Curtis Van Loan was wealthy, but not cumbersomely so.
But the tall, athletic Park Avenue clubman and man-about-town had cleared his mind of Muriel's tea-dance before he reached the curb. And he had no intention of driving first to Radio City, as he jumped into his fast, powerful coupe. South of Central Park, the Clarion tower lights were still flashing their urgent secret code for the Phantom.
And the Phantom was answering that call! Answering it now in the fast run of Dick Van Loan's dark blue coupe down Fifth Avenue and across town to Eighth.
He parked a block from the towering Clarion Press building, but did not immediately get out of the car. Instead, bending low in the coupe's seat, he produced from a panel beneath him a small, compactly equipped make-up kit.
Working rapidly, with swift glances of caution at the hurrying pedestrians passing a few feet from the car windows, he began the familiar task of disguising his features. It was an old story with him, this quick change of character.
Always, when the inevitable Clarion call came to war on crime, it was Van's deft, experienced fingers that brought the Phantom into being again—as those sure, artistic fingers had done in the beginning. For the Phantom was Dick Van Loan's own creation, a product of his restless energy, his fearless demand for action, and his determination to put his wealth and talents to the best use.
Van hated crime and criminals instinctively. But it was Frank Havens, a far older man, who had shown him that always, behind the scenes of every series of modern crimes, some one brain, some one man, was the ruthless guiding genius, untouchable by the usual forces of law or the police.
The Phantom was Richard Curtis Van Loan's answer to the death challenge of lawlessness. The Phantom, a sinister figure without name, without identity—more untouchable and grimly mysterious than the slipperiest of those crooks and killer geniuses of crime whose ravages he was fighting.
It was the Phantom's real identity, the identity of Richard Curtis Van Loan behind the varied character disguises of the Phantom, that had to be ultimately and desperately protected. Without that complete anonymity, all the aids he used—the different character roles, the three hideouts, his gift of ventriloquism, even the red code lights still signalling him from the pinnacle of the Clarion Building—went for naught.
Dick 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
