Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter

by Tinsley, Theodore A.

Tracy came forward with a dusty chair. “Sit down, kid.”

  She said to him jerkily, without anger: “That was a lousy piece of humor, Jerry.”

  Her voice was low and husky; a curious flat contralto as though she had a frog in her throat. It imparted a flavor of metallic cynicism to her speech. She spoke in jerky phrases like spurts from a faucet.

  Tracy said to her: “I’m still worried about that dirt special, Babe. There’s one or two angles about it—Listen!”

  “What good’s listening? You’re at bat, boy friend. It’s up to you to hit the ball or strike out.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Don’t print the item if you’re worried.”

  “Oh, for —— sake!” he growled. “I know it’s my play. I got my share of guts. But honey, when you hop flat-footed into print with octoroon news—”

  She interrupted him instantly. Swung around and glared at him. Her jerky voice was hard with a suppressed fury.

  “I see, sez the blind man. Meaning me. You’ve spilled him the outline, haven’t you? That’s why he’s here. How lovely! Who is he?”

  The man with the closed eyes sat impassively. Neither Daisy nor the columnist paid any more attention to him than if he were a suit of armor standing in a corner.

  Tracy said: “He’s a friend of mine.”

  “Thanks. I heard that before. I’m trying to see where he fits in and I can’t. You’ve spilled the tip to him, that’s all I know. Who is this bum? Oh, Jerry lad, are you going crazy in the head to spill out a confidential think like—”

  “I’m not crazy,” Jerry snapped. “He’ll be under Butch’s palm for the next three days. Forget it.”

  “Forget nothing,” the girl cried in husky undertone. “Why is he here at all? There’s something screwy about the whole thing. My —— sweetheart, are you crossing me up?”

  Tracy replied unevenly: “Don’t be silly.”

  They were both silent. Daisy’s eyes were bright scalpels, cutting, slashing through flesh and tissue to get at Tracy’s remote mind.

  After a while Daisy said: “Get my coat for me, please.” She stood up. Her voice rasped viciously. “Will you—get—my—coat?”

  Tracy got up, too. He looked at the brown-bearded sleeper. The columnist was trembling. “What do you say, mug? What’s the answer? Come out of your trance!”

  The eyelids lifted.

  “You want a definite answer?”

  “I want a yes or no. Shoot!”

  “Give her her coat,” the blind man sneered. “You’re lucky to get rid of her. She’s crooked. Crooked as hell.”

  Tracy was over him suddenly, whispering at him out of contorted lips.

  “Are you sure? How do you know?”

  “That’s none of your damned affair. You wanted my verdict. You got it.”

  The girl was wrestling blindly with the sleeves of her coat. She shoved Jerry away and got it on by herself. There were tears of rage in her eyes but her voice remained steady.

  “I gather that the prediction won’t appear in your column, Jerry.”

  For answer he opened a drawer of his steel desk, took out a sheet of paper, scratched a matched and watched the flame transfer itself. He held the sheet till it burned thumb and finger; then he allowed the corer to drop writing into the metal waste-basket.

  They looked at each other like ghosts.

  The girl nodded dully. “Thanks for the buggy ride. It was nice to know you, Jerry. I wish you had decided yourself, though. I—I hate a yellow ba—”

  Her hand was on the door-knob. She pulled herself together visibly and laughed a little. Tracy was staring woodenly out the window. Her voice went hard.

  “Dumb Daisy, the girl that can take it. A sucker for a left hook. Punch drunk for six months and never knew it. Cherrio, m’lad!”

  She went away fast.

  Tracy turned around from the window. He said harshly: “Butch! Git in here!”

  “Okey, Boss.”

  “Take this guy over to my place. Throw his clothes in the sink and see what you can find for him. You and he are mustard plasters for the next three days, see? Just like that!” He held up two parallel fingers jerkily. “I’ll phone McNulty that you’re coming.”

  He snow-shoed across the floor to his desk. Sat down heavily. Unhooked the receiver with a fumbling hand.

  Late in the afternoon on the third day of the blind man’s captivity Jerry Tracy came home from the office in his usual fast cab, but the speed was all in the wheels of the machine. He wasn’t in any hurry himself. He paid off the hackman with maddening deliberateness. He slouched into the building, said “Hawzit?” and rode a city block vertically.

  He didn’t bother ringing for the Chinaman. Instead he played aimlessly among his keys and unlocked the door himself. The Chinaman heard his slow step in the foyer and met him with a glare of indignation for the obvious breach of the employer’s code.

  Tracy smiled wanly at the old fellow. “Okey, McNulty. Butch here?”

  He walked down the hall. Butch came out of a doorway, said: “Hawzit, Boss?” and stepped out of the way.

  The columnist paced slowly towards a leather chair in a corner of the room. His right hand closed up and lifted backward a little.”

  “I oughta smash that —— damned skull of yours,” he said thickly. “D’yuh ever look at the papers?”

  “You know how it is with me,” the guest said acidly.

  “Yeah … I know … Well, I’ll read ’em for yuh!”

  He wrenched a sticky tabloid out of his pocket. He read the first headline: “Brands Society Dancer Negress!” He read again: “Husband Alleges Color Taint; Sues to Nullify Fraud Marriage!” He read some more and then tossed the paper fluttering and sailing.

  “Does that sound like a sure enough news item,” he snarled.

  The man in the chair uttered a shrill, incredulous sound and started gropingly to rise. Tracy shoved him down again.

  “How do you explain it, wise guy? Smell it and hear it. Chew it and feel it and taste it—it’s still a news item! You can tell a horse’s leg from a pig’s whistle through a twelve-inch plank, can’t you? That girl was straight—clean level straight … Damn you and your nose.”

  “Impossible,” he whispered. “I couldn’t be wrong.”

  “Oh, no? Well you were wrong plenty! And Daisy was right. The kid was honest. Square. She had the goods—and the proof of it is splattered on the front page of every sheet in town … And I was sucker enough to go for your mud-gutter mind-act.”

  “Impossible!” the man with the brown beard was mumbling. “It couldn’t be. I was too certain … ” He groped out and rose swaying to his feet. “Get her here! I must know. Call her up! Drag her here! Tell her I’ve got to—”

  “Fat chance.”

  “You’ve got to!” Don’t you see what it means? I can’t be wrong—don’t you see I can’t be wrong? If I was wrong—God help me if I was wrong—” He was babbling.

  “I turned my back deliberately on home and friends. I though that those who loved me were liars out of pity for me, Sorrow for a useless hulk, pity for a helpless burden! I could hear lies in their words of affection. So I fled deliberately to the gutter—and I lived in the gutter for twelve years —— help me!—because no man ever dies who jeers at every breath of air he draws.

  His gaunt body quivered.

  “And now you tell me that the girl, Daisy, is decent. How can that be? If Daisy’s decent, then I’m crooked! Have I always been wrong—stewing in a make-believe hell for twelve long years? Have I been imagining lies and filth where none existed? Was I a self-deluded fool when I fled in black despair from my own home?”

  “You’re rotten, all right,” Tracy spat. “You’ve got crooked ear-drums. Pretty damn’ easy to smell filth when the stench is in your own nostrils, brother!”

  The blind man whimpered. Beat at Tracy with his two fists.

  “Get her! Will you get her? If you don’t, I’ll smash out through the window! I�
��ll crawl on hands and knees till I find her and get the truth. Can’t you see what it means to me?”

  “To hell with you. Who cares about you?”

  The beggar tried to wrestle him aside. Jerry caught at him and hurled him back into the chair.

  Tracy’s face felt stiff. As though his lips were frozen. Hard to frame words. He stood there, breathing heavily, his fingers still clenched. He laughed suddenly.

  “Okey,” he said. “I’ll call her up. I got it coming to me.”

  He turned on his heel and went out of the room.

  When he came back he sat down heavily. He saw Butch peering with dumb bewilderment from a doorway and he hurled an ashtray at the lumpy face. Butch receded without a sound.

  The clock went tick, tick, for a long time—like the steady tap of a pick on rock—and suddenly a bell was ringing faintly, the Chinaman McNulty said gravely: “Lady say hully up, go way, shut up!”—and Daisy was standing small and white-faced in the room’s doorway.

  She broke the silence with a flat, expressionless murmur. “Hello, Jerry, m’lad.”

  She came forward a step and the blind man rose. He stumbled mistakenly away from her, peering horribly, till she said: “Well?” and then he turned.

  He said in a cringing whisper: “Will you answer me truly, as God is your judge?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Was—I wrong?”

  She looked at his face.

  “I’m sorry for you, my friend. You were wrong.”

  He swayed on his feet and his hands went out and she stood quite still. His thin questing fingers brushed her forehead, explored cheek and mouth, slid tremulously along the smooth line of her jaw. She allowed it, her eyes averted from his. She was like ice.

  He said thickly: “Will you please—Tracy—leave me here—have a moment alone with—this girl?”

  Tracy hesitated, went out. He bounded back when he heard Daisy’s muffled scream. She looked daunted, weak; there were tears in her eyes.

  She cried: “Jerry, please—Tell him it’s all right. Talk to him, Jerry … This poor devil’s in hell.”

  “Hell?” the blind man croaked. “Twelve years of it. And wrong—blind wrong. Doubly blind. In a hell of my own filthy making.”

  They heard him whimpering with terror like a frightened child.

  “Lost … Blind … Beyond all light … ”

  The girl said to him, tremulously: “That’s not true, is it, when you’ve come out, when you’ve come back?”

  “Out?” he whispered bleakly. “Back?”

  “You’ve been lost in the dark. You know it now. Could you know it if you were still lost?”

  “Sit down,” Jerry said to him. He touched him with a chair. The man obeyed like an automaton.

  “You don’t belong on Broadway with a tin cup. Where do you belong?”

  No answer to that.

  “Can’t blame you for not trusting lice,” Tracy said deliberately.

  He jerked: “Don’t—for —— sake!”

  The girl’s hand touched him. “There are two of us. You’re only one. And we’re trying to help.”

  “It wasn’t shrapnel,” Tracy said. “Was it?”

  “No … Not shrapnel. Nor on the Ourq. I was gas … In a gulley. Beyond the dynamited bridge-head at Dun.”

  “And was there a Protestant Episcopal university, or was that—”

  “That’s true. I’m a poor hand at fiction, as you thought. Only there wasn’t any professor; he was an instructor. And his branch wasn’t chemistry; he taught a less exact—” He shuddered painfully. “They re-offered him his place—afterwards—but he didn’t want their charity, pity … ”

  “Who said it was pity?” Tracy interrupted. “You came back with the same brain, didn’t you? You have a voice. Were your eyes so necessary? What branch did you teach?”

  “Literature.” He began to laugh at the thought of literature. Gaspingly. “Lyric p-poetry! Shelley’s Ode to a Skylark—after dark!” his laughter shook.

  “Quit it, or I’ll slap you in the jaw! Wife?”

  “No. A mother and—and a sister—please! Let me alone, will you?”

  “And you sneaked like a rat. Ran away.”

  “Do you think,” he cried fiercely, “I’d lie on their doorstep? A bag of soiled laundry? A burden?”

  The girl spoke suddenly. Her metallic voice was low, fiercer than his.

  “What makes you think, damn’ fool, that you’d be a burden to a sister who happened to love you?”

  The blind man said brokenly: “Stop! Stop! I want to think. I want to sit quietly—you’ve torn me open, bleeding … ”

  “Easy, old man,” the columnist murmured. He turned to the girl and jerked his head towards the doorway.

  The wondering Butch saw them cross the corridor together and go into another room. Tracy walked to the sideboard and poured himself a drink. Daisy was dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. Tracy looked at her for a moment in the mirror.

  He said to her, jerkily: “You came around when I asked you, kid—and that’s the puzzle to me.”

  “Is it?”

  “Maybe it isn’t. I dunno. I feel dopey.”

  “I feel,” Daisy said quaveringly, “as though I’d been blown through a vacuum cleaner,” She tried to smile. “I guess, between us, we’d make a fair Boy Scout—good deed a day … How’d it ever start, Jerry?”

  “I dunno.” His smile matched hers. “Funny, isn’t it? I’m supposed to be a newspapermen. But if some mug was to hand me a bass-drum, I could feel like the Salvation Army.”

  He leaned a little and slapped her lightly on both cheeks, shook her a bit by the shoulders and slapped her again. She seemed to now what he meant.

  He stepped away from her, grinning stiffly at nothing.

  “Butch!” he howled. “Butch! Git in here, mug!”

  Butch said in a relieved voice: “Coming, Boss.”

  “Fold your arms,” Jerry told him.

  He did, and the columnist swung hard and cracked him in the jaw. Butch backed away with a pained yelp.

  “Easy, Boss! What’s de big idea? You nuts, or somethin’?”

  “I gotta get hard in a hurry or I won’t be worth a dime to anybody. Just getting tough, that’s all. See what I mean?”

  Butch rubbed his jaw slowly and digested the idea. His massive brow darkened. His mind groped visibly for a satisfactory oath. For twenty seconds he struggled for the bon mot.

  “Is zat so?” he said at last. “Yuh don’t tell me!”

  BALL AND CHAIN

  A sharp story of Jerry Tracy, wisecracker

  JERRY TRACY, wisecracking columnist for the daily Planet, crossed one knee over the other and made little swinging circles in the air with his patent-leather toe. He eyed his faithful bodyguard, Butch, with a kind of sour impatience.

  “I’m beginning to think there’s a depression,” he grumbled.

  Butch didn’t say anything. His lumpy jaws continued their slow mastication of what had once been spearmint gum.

  “People don’t eat any more,” Tracy growled. “And when they don’t eat there’s no garbage. And when there’s no garbage—where do I come in? Stop that damned chewing, sweetheart; Papa’s talking to you!”

  Butch’s gum made a sticky crackle. He said: “Huh?”

  “What’s a good way to pad an empty column?”

  Butch’s forehead wrinkled with concentration. He hiccoughed faintly.

  “How’s this, Boss? Them three little dots you always use—you know what I mean? How ’bout writing ’em?”

  “Writing them?”

  “Sure thing. Write ’em out. Dot, dot, dot! See what I mean, Boss? Think of all the space yuh’d—”

  “Oh, my ——!” Tracy said wearily. “One lonesome squib left in the locker—and he tells me to use dot, dot, dot!”

  He dragged out a notebook and flipped open the pages. “Listen to this one. Bum.” He read the squib aloud: Observed on Park Avenue: Charles Spencer, o
f the boot and shoe Spencers, dining at Pierre’s with his ex-wife, Kitty. … Tucked away at a small corner table and v-e-r-y feckshnate. … The decree was made final last week. … And that makes it FUN. … ”

  Tracy paused and looked expectant

  “Lousy,” said Butch.

  The big bodyguard was grinning. If he had said any other word Tracy would have crowned him. It was a little game they played together. Whenever the boss was in the dumps he always read a squib to Butch; Butch always said: “Lousy!” and Jerry came instantly out of his gloom with a grin a mile wide. No sense to it at all, Butch thought, but so long as the crack made the boss happy. …

  He lumbered outside to the outer office, closing the door softly behind him. Tracy chuckled, pulled open a drawer in his desk and started riffling through selected mail. It was a little after eleven o’clock in the morning—early for Jerry to be on the job.

  The phone rang and he scooped it up.

  “Lo? Oh—hello, Garbo!”

  Garbo was the child on the switchboard in the Planet office. A carrot-haired baby with seven freckles and a temper like a keg of loose nails. She handled all calls through the Planet shop to Tracy’s hideaway. An efficient little gamin. Nora something or other. The first time Tracy called her Garbo she got up and kicked him in the shins. Nowadays she contented herself with a grin that matched his and a soft: “Nerts to you, boy friend!” They got along swell.

  Tracy said to her: “What’s new?”

  “Mysterious party with a dirt-nugget for the colyum.”

  “Male?”

  “Fe.”

  “What’s the dirt?”

  “How the heck do I know? This is the third time the dame’s called up. McCurdy said ask you. Wanta talk to her?”

  “She on now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okey. I’ll take it.”

  “I didn’t think you could,” she chuckled. A buzz, a click, then: “Mr. Tracy, the columnist?”

  “In the flesh, sweetheart. Eardrums and all.”

  “I have an item for you about a famous Broadway comedian.”

  “All right, Blondie. Let’s have it.”

  “How do you know I’m a blonde?”

  “Don’t be silly. You said Broadway comedian, didn’t you?”