The Voice on the Wire
Summary
A chrome-plated taxi gliding through nocturnal Manhattan becomes a rolling crypt when a leprous, ownerless hand—gloved in obsidian silk—materializes inside the cabin and delivers the fabled Sen Si Yao, a one-blow heart-stopper pilfered from samurai esoterica, straight to the sternum of bon-vivant Alvin Van Cleft, serial collector of chorines. The corpse slumps, Polly Marion screams into her ostrich-feather boa, and the metropolis gains another blood-bead on its garland of unsolved theatrical assassinations. Enter Howard, the heir whose grief is laced with entitlement; John Shirley, a gentleman criminologist who treats homicide like a parlour puzzle; Professor Montague, physician-philosopher with a cloak-and-dagger streak; and Cronin, the blunt-force detective whose skull will shortly be re-decorated by brass knuckles. The quartet orbit a disembodied voice crackling over candlestick telephones, promising carnage to anyone who decodes the cabalistic pattern: three dead libertines, all patrons of hoofers, all culled by a ghost hand. Clues scatter—taxi meters frozen at 13¢, a broken Japanese fan, chloroform traces on a velvet collar—until Shirley deduces the Oriental Death Punch, only to find Cronin pulverized and Montague targeted. The professor slips into greasepaint disguise, vaults a garden wall, and throttle-slams two assassins, revealing the first suture in the conspiracy: the killers are Occidental thugs cosplaying as Asian phantoms, hired by a velvet-voiced puppeteer who weaponizes xenophobia to mask plain old vendetta.
Synopsis
Episode 1: "The Oriental Death Punch" Alvin Van Cleft has a penchant for chorus girls, particularly Polly Marion. One night they leave a café and enter a taxi, closely watched by two muffled figures. As Van Cleft and the girl are riding through the park Van Cleft falls into a stupor, a mysterious hand which seems to have no attachment to a body, enters the cab and kills Van Cleft. Later Howard, his son, is notified by a mysterious voice that his father has been murdered and is the third victim, two others interested in chorus girls having preceded him. Howard notifies John Shirley, interested in criminology, and Professor Montague, a prominent physician, and they, together with Cronin, head of a detective agency, start working on the case. Shirley arrives at the conclusion that Van Cleft was murdered by the Japanese death punch, Sen Si Yao, as he is telling this to his friends he receives a telephone message that Cronin is in Bellevue Hospital with a crushed skull and that Montague may be the fourth victim. Shirley visits Cronin, who tells how he was beaten by two chaps who had been in the same taxi with him. Shirley then receives a message that he will be the next victim if he does not stop meddling in others' affairs. The professor, to the surprise of Howard, disguises himself and goes out the back way; as he jumps over the wall he is attacked by two thugs, whom he overpowers and marches to the police station.
