He gave Billy Higson a crisp new five and put the peculiar bill in his pocket.
“What goes on, Jerry?” Higson asked him pleasantly.
“Keepsake. I gave it to Butch by mistake and the boob spends it on beer. Thanks a lot, Billy.”
“Keepsake?”
“Yeah. My grandfather once saved Hitler’s life on the roller-coaster. Come on, Butch.”
Higson eyed Butch’s stiff right arm, but he didn’t say anything. Higson had built up a million-dollar restaurant trade from a cheap hole in the wall by the simple expedient of serving good food and ferociously minding his own business.
There was no taxi in sight outside, so Tracy and Butch walked a block or two up the avenue, watching for a roller. They were crossing a side street when Butch grunted: “Here comes one now.”
A second later Tracy yelled shrilly and jumped. The left wheel of the speeding taxi missed the columnist by a scant inch. The reckless cab-driver roared away with increased speed.
Tracy was up on his feet in an instant, staring at Butch. Butch got up more slowly, his face twisted with pain. There was a smudge of blood on the asphalt where he had dived.
“I’m okey,” he muttered thickly. “Damn cut’s beginning to bleed again. Did you get that ——’s number?”
Jerry’s eye glanced eastward towards Sixth where the speeding cab had already rocketed out of sight. “The guy must have been drunk. Too late now. Let him go.”
“But hey—” Butch glared incredulously at his very calm employer. “That bum tried to kill us! He aimed deliberately at us.”
“Forget it, keed.”
There was no cop in sight, Jerry was thankfully aware; but there’d be one along any minute. He didn’t want any police curiosity about Butch’s wound. He pushed Butch through the growing crowd, elbowed the nosey gawkers aside.
“Come on, dope,” he whispered. He hustled Butch along the avenue to the parked cab that he had noticed while the crowd was forming.
“Two-eighty-four Central Park West, and make it snappy!”
The hacker pushed down his flag and peered curiously at his two disheveled fares. “What happened back there? That mugg in the Yellow drunk or somepin?”
“It was our fault,” Jerry said mildly. “The lights were against us and we were slow getting across.”
He silenced the indignant Butch with a warning grimace. They rode the rest of the way in silence. There was a faint ruminative smile on Tracy’s taut lips. He knew that the guy who was driving that bullet-like Yellow cab had done his best to commit murder. …
Tracy had managed to get a quick glimpse before he had dived headlong away from those crunching front tires of the roaring taxi. The driver had a long nose and a thin, hawklike face. It wasn’t anyone that Tracy knew. Ditto for the fare in the back seat. Tracy didn’t know the woman either—but he had heard about her. Very recently!
His smile deepened as he recalled Butch’s description of the dame who had lured him into the doorway. “The hardest faced blonde I ever seen in my life!”
The wound in Butch’s side turned out to be painful but not too serious. Tracy waited in the discreet medical office on Central Park West and watched Doc Collander cauterize it and tape it. He took the big fellow back in his penthouse and shoved him into bed. Ten minutes later Tracy was idling along Broadway, his sharp eyes alert. He was looking for a gray-whiskered sandwich-man with two fingers missing from his left hand. Butch had remembered that detail. He had also remembered miraculously, that the guy was carrying a sign for Madame Blanche’s Beauty Shoppe.
To anyone but Tracy the task of finding a wandering sandwich-man along Broadway might be something of a sticker. But Tracy was familiar with the lazy habits of the breed and knew where to look. He found his bum lounging at the curb, staring vacuously at the wreckers tearing down the historic remains of the old Criterion Theater.
The sandwich bum remembered the episode of the five-dollar bill but he was inclined to be surly, till Jerry slipped him a buck, and then he loosened up.
He was standing on the curb, he remembered in a thin, whiskey-quaver. It was windy as hell and he was rubbing the dust out of his eyes, when this guy in the brown suit stopped short, grinned, handed him the five bucks—and beat it without a word. A fat kinda guy, big, good looking, no hat. The guy’s gray hair stuck up in a pompadour, and he was wearing a diamond ring like a lighthouse. The sandwich-man was staring at the bill, wondering what the gag was—and then Butch came along—a big fat slob in a derby and—
Tracy stopped the rambling recollections with a curt question. “You didn’t happen to wink at this mope in the brown suit, just before he handed you the dough?”
“Huh?” He looked puzzled. “I dunno. I—I might have. You see, like I told you, the dust was blowin’ to beat the band and—”
“Who else came around to ask you about that five spot?” Tracy cut in. “Someone did; am I right?”
“Sure. How—how did you know that, Mister?”
Jerry chuckled. There was a spot of color in his lean cheeks. “Someone came along looking for it yesterday. You told him the thing was a phoney. You said you had sold it for a buck to a big fat slob in a derby hat.”
“Yeah. Only it wasn’t a man who come lookin’. It was a dame.”
“A big fat woman with black hair?”
“Nope. She was thin. A tough lookin’ blonde with mean little eyes. She hung around wit’ me a long time, hopin’ the guy in the derby would go passin’ by. He did, all right, and I pointed him out to her in the crowd.”
Tracy’s faint smile flickered like a subway light. “Thanks a lot, Pop.”
He gave the bum an extra buck and legged it across the street to a taxi.
“Corinthian Hotel,” he told the hacker.
He knew now exactly how the sandwich-man had happened to come into the picture. Fin Harrigan was the answer. Fin must have been out to the race track that day and made a lucky cleanup. But where did Fin fit in? Of all the gamblers in the big town, Fin was probably the squarest and most likable. To Tracy’s personal knowledge, Fin had never been mixed up in a phoney deal in his life. He didn’t see him very often, but they were good friends.
The description fitted him. So did the five-dollar gift. Fin was always scattering them broadside: that was how he had earned his nickname. He was as superstitious as hell—and tarred with the inevitable generosity of the professional gambler. Whenever he was riding high after a lucky plunge, he had a habit of placating his luck by handing out a fiver to the first man, woman or child whom he caught winking as he passed. The dust in the sandwich-man’s bleary eye explained the sudden gift. But it didn’t explain the numerical mustache on Lincoln—or the hard-faced blonde and her chauffeur pal who was ready to kill to get hold of it.
Fin was in bed when Tracy dropped in on him at the Corinthian. He came into his tiny sitting-room, yawning, dressed sketchily in a green pajama top. His legs were hairy and well muscled. His broad, good looking face seemed curiously young under his stiff mane of gray hair. Fin spent plenty of money in barber shops and gymnasiums.
They shook hands and Tracy chuckled. He looked the gambler squarely in the eye and winked very deliberately. Instantly Fin Harrigan roared with appreciative laughter. He walked across to where his trousers lay humped over a chair, peeled a five dollar bill from a thick roll and handed it to the Daily Planet’s columnist.
“What is this, Jerry?” he grinned. “A brand-new way to make a quick touch from a superstitious pal?”
He stopped short suddenly. Tracy saw an idea hit him and widen his eyes.
“Hey—I’ll bet it’s about that blonde! She is a friend of yours, Jerry?”
“So she came to see you, eh?”
“Sure. She was after a five-spot she seemed to think I had. I asked her how come, and she said we were both standing together at the pari-mutuel window when they paid off on Soapsuds in the third race. It was as windy as hell and her handbag was open and the wind scattered some of her
dough. I remembered it perfectly when she reminded me. I had dived like a gentleman for her dough and gave it back to her—but she seemed to think I had mixed one of her five spots with my own. It was a lucky number, she said, one she didn’t want to lose. Naturally, I could see her point.”
“Naturally,” Tracy said.
“Well, to make a long story short, I showed her every five I had. But none of ’em was hers. She said there was a mustache on the engraving of Lincoln; that was how she could tell it.”
Jerry nodded. “Did she try to get you to remember where you might have spent fives the day before?”
“Yeah.” Fin chuckled. “Can you imagine that? Me trying to check on all the fives I spend! However, I remembered some of them. The restaurant downstairs, the newsreel theater—”
“And a whiskered old sandwich-man who gave you the first lucky wink after you got back to town from the racetrack,” Tracy suggested softly.
“Correct. I told her that, too.” He frowned at the columnist. “How come you know all this, Jerry? Is the blonde on the crooked? They tell me you work for the cops sometimes.”
“Sometimes, Fin. But not now. This is a purely personal slant. A boy friend of that lousy blonde stuck a knife into Butch’s ribs. Luck was all that saved him from the morgue. Butch is one guy I don’t let people stab, Fin—not without doing things about it!”
“I’ll be damned. Butch is one swell guy.” Harrigan looked serious. “If I’d known it at the time, I’d have smacked that blonde right in the kisser.” He found his green silk pajama pants and hoisted them on his hairy legs. “What’s it all about, Jerry?”
“Search me.”
Harrigan lit a cigarette. He was obviously in a lazy mood, anxious for company, but Tracy had no time to waste discussing pros and cons. He had a column to turn out, and chewing the rag with the affable Fin wouldn’t help a bit. The Daily Planet didn’t pay Tracy a princely salary in order for him to indulge his fancy in private murder investigations; the Planet wanted crisp, sparkling dirt for a couple of million customers all over the country who’d stop buying the sheet if the column skipped an issue.
“I’ll let you know if the blonde turns up again,” Tracy promised as he shoved off.
“Thanks. I’ll appreciate it.”
Jerry went back to his Times Square office and got to work. When he was hot on a column, time went by swiftly on greased rollers. It was four-thirty before he leaned back with a tired grunt. The phone rang and he cupped it against his ear.
“Yeah?”
“Is this Mr. Tracy? I wanna talk to Mr. Tracy.”
The voice was feminine; but hard, metallic. There was a sharp insistent edge to it that scraped the inside of his ear unpleasantly.
“Right here, lady. What do you want?”
“I want that five-dollar bill you mooched, and I want it no later than tonight—or it will be just too bad for you, wise guy!”
A grim sparkle of interest made Tracy’s narrowed eyes glitter. “I’ll bet you the five bucks you’re a blonde.”
“Don’t try to kid, Mister. You’re too smart a guy to get yourself killed for five bucks.”
“Do you mind telling me who you are?”
“Not at all.” Her laugh sounded like a file rubbing across a pipe. “I’m the babe who dusted your pants with a taxi this morning, when I seen you were foxy enough to get that dough back over in Billy Higson’s Tavern. I also handed a knife to that fat slob of a Butch. … Well, what do you say?”
There was a short pause.
“Do I mail it to you?” Tracy asked dryly. “Or do I drop it in a tin can behind an oak tree in Central Park?”
“You hand it to me,” the voice snapped. “Here’s the schedule. Bring the five bucks over to the Carteret Hotel tonight. Come alone. Get there in the lobby at exactly nine o’clock.”
“How will I know you?”
“Shut up and listen, punk! When you get there, wait fifteen minutes so I can look you over; and then have your-self paged. If everything suits me I’ll come along and hold out my hand and you drop the fin in it. Is that simple enough?”
“It’s swell for you, sister. But what do I get out of it?”
“You keep on living,” the voice rasped.
“Not afraid I’ll come with cops?”
“What are you gonna prove? You think I’m the first dame that took five bucks from a gentleman friend in a hotel lobby?”
The line clicked dead and Tracy put down the instrument. He noticed with a wry smile that his fingers quivered slightly as he lit a cigarette. He had run into plenty of hard dames up and down the Main Stem but this babe sounded as if she wore pants and shaved twice a day. Her voice sounded exactly like the flat whine of Willie Prisk—and Willie had killed two cops before he was rounded up with tear gas and burned to death in Sing Sing.
Tracy took three deep puffs and mashed out his cigarette. He wasn’t exactly scared; but he didn’t feel any too happy about this thing. He took out the five spot and studied it. As far as he could see, it was a normal run-of-the-mint bill, except for that odd numerical mustache on the face of Lincoln, drawn with indelible pencil. 15—10—6—15. …
After a while he put on his hat and walked a few blocks north to a shabby building on Longacre Square. He waited while the five spot was phostated. He took the duplicate and the original back with him to his breezy, sky-high penthouse.
Butch was out of bed, sitting in his underwear in a club chair in the living-room.
“How do the ribs feel, keed?”
Butch laid down his copy of Variety. “Stiff as hell.”
He watched Tracy take a shave, a leisurely bath and change into his favorite dinner coat—the one with the tricky lapels. The coat was cut to accommodate a flat automatic without bulging. Butch eyed his employer hopefully as the weapon patted into place, but he didn’t say anything.
He knew that if Tracy wanted him to go along, he’d have said so.
The Careteret Hotel was one of those popular secondclass places that are perennially crowded. Tracy arrived there on the dot of nine after a pleasant dinner. He sauntered without haste through the long rectangular lobby. Plenty of blondes coming and going, but no sign of the vinegar-visaged dame whose bloodless face had glared at him for one stark instant from the rear seat of a speeding Yellow taxi cab.
He walked to a sofa opposite the desk where he could keep his eye on the clock. There was a girl sitting there and she moved a little and made room.
Tracy thought, with a sidelong glance of approval: “I could bear it a lot better, if my date for tonight was with you, baby.”
She was tall, slim; nice, rather than beautiful. A perky little hat on her chestnut hair; grey eyes with a glint in them like the play of sunlight on water. Tracy liked her eyes and mouth particularly; they carried out the motif of sunlight and fresh air. It didn’t take much imagination to put a golf club in her slim brown hands, or curl her fingers around the wheel of a light roadster. Tracy remembered, with sudden disgust: “I haven’t been outside this lousy town for weeks!”
She was reading a magazine, her dark lashes curled attentively above the opened pages. A faint pink crept into her cheeks and her fingers fumbled as she turned the next page. It was the first blush Tracy had seen in a long time. She’s wondering, he guessed, if she has on too much makeup, and whether she ought to get up and move or just pretend that she’s not aware that I’m staring at her.
He let his eyes wander back to the clock. He didn’t want her to move and take away the faint, clean scent of lilac. When the clock showed nine-fifteen he got up and walked towards the tiny L-shaped foyer where the elevator was housed. He conferred briefly with a bellboy and returned to his favorite sofa.
Almost instantly a droning voice began calling his name. “Mister Tracy! Call for Mister Tracy!”
He let the solemn bellboy pull the rigmarole for a moment, then crooked his finger. He took the empty telegram envelope, stuck it in his pocket. There was a blonde over near a potted p
alm, talking to a hard-faced Italian in a light blue shirt; but her voice sounded sugary and her eyes were coy with a sex-call. Tracy frowned. Where in heck was his nasty blonde?
A hand touched him and he turned. The girl with the chestnut hair was looking at him gravely, her open palm extended.
“Let me have it, please,” she said in a low voice.
There was a faint flicker of fear in her eyes. The hand she held out was trembling. Tracy stared at her, uncertain what to do. He would have known how to handle the blonde, but this was a new type of extortioner to the wise little Broadway columnist.
“Let you have what?” he said in a whisper that matched hers.
“The five dollars.”
“Will any five dollars do—or did you have something particular in mind?”
“The five-dollar bill you were told about over the telephone,” she replied steadily.
Without a word Tracy took out his billfold and laid the marked five spot in her hand. She looked at it, crumpled it swiftly, and crammed it into her bag. The bag was open only for an instant, but Tracy noted the dull glint of a small automatic.
“I’m going to ask you not to try to follow me, Mr. Tracy.”
“Any other small requests?”
She started to rise, but his hand closed instantly on hers and anchored her to the sofa.
“I could yell and have you taken in for extortion,” he suggested.
“You really couldn’t,” she said. “It may be indiscreet to accept five dollars from a man, but it certainly isn’t criminal.”
“It’s a marked bill.”
“Is it?” she smiled.
It enraged Tracy to realize that she was no longer trembling, but thoroughly mistress of the situation.
“I never knew they had gray eyes and an outdoor complexion,” he said deliberately, with a hard smile.
“To what are you referring?”
“Rats.”
Her eyes blazed at him but she didn’t reply. She got up and walked rapidly through the lobby. Tracy, right behind her, held the door open politely, his glance twisting behind him for an instant to note whether anyone else had joined the procession. No one had. Nor was there any sign of trouble on the dimly lit sidewalk.
Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter Page 40