by Hal Erickson
synopsis
A celebrated short story by Ray Bradbury is the source for this eerily entertaining episode. Detective Krovitch (Charles Bronson) shows up at a seedy vaudeville house to investigate the murder of one person and the disappearance of another. Among the suspects is an elderly ventriloquist named John Fabian (Claude Rains), who seems obsessed with his strangely alluring female dummy, named Riabouchinska. Ultimately, the detective solves both the murder and the disappearance -- but only with the help of Riabouchinska, whose voice is provided by radio actress Virginia Gregg (later the voice of another infamous character in the Hitchcock canon, namely Norman Bates' mother in Psycho).
