“No. Independent. A yellow cab with a small checker border around it. Not a Checker, though. Am I helpful?”
“Not very much. You’ve narrowed the possibilities some, but it’ll take plenty of looking. You got plenty of time?”
“All day,” Tracy said grimly.
Brady took him to the record room and showed him where to look. Even with the big companies and the associations eliminated, it seemed like a hopeless job; but Jerry peeled off his coat and went patiently to work. Brady assigned a clerk to assist him and that helped, but the morning went by without result. Tracy gulped a rotten lunch in a bang-and-clatter joint around the corner from Worth Street, and came back for more punishment. It was past four o’clock when the clerk, who was getting grumpier by the minute, held out a photo and asked indifferently: “How ’bout this?”
The Daily Planet’s perspiring columnist took one look at the photo and yanked it out of the man’s hand. Even in the picture the hackman’s eyes looked bright and piercing. And that long, thin beak like a razor was no coincidence.
Jerry took the photo back to Brady’s office and Brady pressed a button and collected dope. The fellow’s name was Marty Danker. Operating an independent hack for four years. Two traffic violations, but nothing in the way of a criminal record. Home address, 239 Dover Street. Traffic stand at Herald Square, opposite Macy’s. Unmarried. Thirty-five years old.
The age part of it made Tracy nod slightly. The guy couldn’t have been mixed up with Jess and Dora Spencer in the actual kidnaping of little Harry Connor. Eighteen years ago would make Danker seventeen when the two hundred grand disappeared. It would make Lilac—funny how Tracy’s mind kept trying to eliminate her from the thing—about six years old when the snatch took place. If Lilac had killed Dora Spencer and was in a conspiracy with Danker, her knowledge of the hidden treasure must have been recent. Probably since Spencer had died in the prison grounds and left his widow with a valuable and meaningless clue to unravel.
Tracy shook hands with Brady and went up to Herald Square. There were a couple of cabs parked in the triangle but no sign of Marty Danker’s battered Yellow. Tracy waited under the striped awning of a snooty men’s clothing shop. In twenty minutes or so, Danker drove up from Sixth Avenue, pulled in at the tail of the line and began to read a tabloid.
He hadn’t read five minutes when he glanced at the sidewalk and grinned. Under his awning covert Tracy grinned too. The girl on the sidewalk was Lilac, and she seemed to be on excellent terms with the hacker.
Danker got out of his cab and the two began to chat very chummily. He slipped an arm about her waist and she giggled and pretended to slap him. Her clear laugh made Tracy’s face darken; he was thinking of her pale face framed in a half-opened door behind which a body lay.
She left Danker and crossed the street. Tracy followed her without hesitation. He could pick up Danker any time he wanted; but he still hadn’t the faintest idea who Lilac was or where she hung out.
She went into Macy’s big corner entrance and so did Tracy. The place was swarming with shoppers and he closed up the distance between them, fearful that she might pull a sudden sneak into 34th and elude him. The quick rat-tat of her heels took her back to the book section, a quick tour among the perfumes, along the stationery counters and onward towards the crowded elevators.
Tracy was negligently watching the dial on the adjoining shaft, his back to the girl, when a heavy clutch at his shoulder whirled him around. A special officer was glowering at him.
“Is this the man, Miss?”
“Yes.” Lilac’s gray eyes were clouded with injured innocence as she stared directly at the uncomfortable columnist. “He’s been following me for the past half hour. He followed me from Gimbel’s, into Saks’, and across here. Can’t you stop him from annoying me?”
She colored faintly under Tracy’s level stare but her eyes never wavered.
“Want him arrested, Miss?” the special cop growled.
“No. I—I just want him to stop bothering me.”
“Okey. Come on, you—out! If I catch you in here again, I’ll have you run in!”
He walked the silent columnist through a lane of curious faces and twirled him through a revolving door into 34th Street. The cop followed through to make sure he didn’t come back.
The roar of traffic drowned out Tracy’s quiet murmur and the cop glared at him. “What was that last crack?”
“I said,” Tracy repeated softly, “you’re a smart girl, Lilac.”
He walked to Seventh and took a subway local. Tonight he’d see what he could do down at 229 Dover Street. If Danker kept late hours with his cab, Jerry might be able to get inside the apartment and case the joint.
Up to a certain limit, Jerry Tracy was a privileged person in affairs which were obviously for the police and in which the ordinary citizen would not have dared to venture. In many a baffling crime, to Inspector Fitzgerald in particular he had been a detective without a shield, a minister without a portfolio. His tips, his uncanny knowledge of people and his keen, analytical mind had more than once been of invaluable aid. Jerry knew well enough he had no business to follow this further alone. But he was not ready to call copper yet, and he knew that, short of deliberate murder, he would be forgiven—if in the end he could lead the police to the crime’s climax.
It was almost seven o’clock before Tracy called it a day and closed his desk. He didn’t bother going back to his penthouse for a bath and a change of clothes, although he felt tired and messy. He dined in a quiet wop joint near the northerly fringe of Greenwich Village and took his time with the meal. It was already dark when he turned into the short three-block diagonal of Dover Street.
The house was a shabby red-brick tenement, tucked alongside a more ornate structure with a canopy and a doorman, in the incongruous architectural clutter of Greenwich Village. Tracy located Danker’s apartment by the simple expedient of descending to the tenement cellar and examining the name plates in the dumbwaiter directory. Danker’s rooms were on the ground floor in the rear.
The thin wail of a clarinet from a closed door beyond the coal bins told Tracy that the janitor was musically employed for the moment. He walked through a narrow concrete passage to the backyard and surveyed the rear windows of the first floor. The place seemed to be pitch-dark. Tracy eyed the jutting fire-escape and the top of the side fence. It was now or never, he thought. Two minutes later, he had straddled across to the slatted iron platform and was trying the window of Danker’s bedroom. The sash was unlocked and lifted with only a mild squeak.
Tracy saw instantly that his guess about Danker’s absence was wrong. There was a faint reflection of light under the bedroom door, and the columnist crouched there for a moment, listening. He could hear the distant buzz of a man’s voice and a clink that sounded like a bottle.
He opened the bedroom door. Beyond him were two shadowy rooms and a narrow passage that seemed to lead to the front door. The light came from the kitchen, Tracy decided; that was why he hadn’t noticed it from the outside; the kitchen probably fronted on an enclosed shaft.
He froze suddenly as he heard a woman’s clear laugh. It was as familiar to him as gray eyes and the odor of lilac. He was as certain she was in the kitchen as though he could actually see the girl.
A man’s voice said jovially: “You wouldn’t try to kid me, would you?”
“Don’t be silly, Marty. Do I look like a gal that kids?”
Tracy moved towards the light with slow care. By dropping to hands and knees and crawling along beside a sofa, the Daily Planet’s columnist could peer into the kitchen. He could see Danker’s shoulder and the left side of his face. Couldn’t miss that nose! Danker was pouring whiskey into a small tumbler and grinning at the girl. The girl was Lilac. She was facing the doorway and her eyes were wide and shining.
“I wouldn’t fool you the way Dora Spencer did,” she giggled.
With a soft oath Danker banged down his tumbler on the table and clutched amorously at her body.
<
br /> She giggled again as she leaned towards him. “Lemme whisper a big secret in your ear, boy friend.”
Danker said, “Yeah?” in a wondering tone. “That’s different. That calls for some more liquor! Some more rye—or Scotch?”
He got up suddenly and lumbered towards the living-room. Tracy rolled noiselessly under the sofa. The sofa went crashing over as Danker’s left hand shoved. His gun pointed ominously at the exposed and discomfited columnist.
“Up on your feet, stupid!”
Tracy rose slowly, his face livid with disgust. The girl had seen him—and trapped him with clever cunning. With Danker’s gun at his back, he was walked into the kitchen and slapped brutally into a chair. The girl’s hand came out of her bag with a tiny automatic.
While the smiling Lilac held Tracy helpless with her weapon, Danker yanked a length of twine out of a kitchen drawer and looped the columnist’s hands and feet to the chair.
“Do you still think I’m okey, Marty?” the girl giggled.
“I sure do, babe. Nice eye work.” He leered ferociously at his captive. “The great Jerry Tracy, huh?” His laughter boomed softly. “You can write your next column for the Planet from the graveyard.”
Jerry, watching the girl, saw her eyes widen with a look of absolute bewilderment.
“Jerry Tracy?” she gasped. “You mean he’s the man who writes the column in the Daily Planet?”
Danker grinned. “Who did you think the mugg was?”
“I—I knew his name was Tracy, but I—I thought he was a crook. I thought he was after the—the—”
Tracy interrupted her harshly. “Is that why you went to Dora Spencer’s flat and killed her?”
“I didn’t kill her,” the girl whispered. Her face was very pale. “She was dead when I got there.”
“Huh?” Danker’s bright eyes swung towards Lilac with hard suspicion. “By God, Dora was telling the truth! You were there, huh? Dora swore she had been hijacked by some dame, but I thought she was—” He stopped suddenly.
“You thought Dora was lying,” Jerry Tracy said evenly. “So you killed her yourself, eh, Danker?”
“Nerts,” he snarled furiously. “Keep your mug shut or I’ll beat in your skull!” His gun muzzle moved ominously towards Lilac. “You took that five spot from Dora, didn’t you?”
She shrugged and began to laugh. “So what? Two hundred grand is a lot of dough. You never were able to cash in on it with Dora. That’s why I decided to ease into the picture. I figured that with your muscle and my brains, we could go places and buy things.”
She fumbled in her bag and tossed Danker the crumpled five spot with a negligent gesture. He picked it up, squinted for a second at the engraving of Lincoln and sighed noisily.
“I don’t quite get you, babe. What’s your angle?”
“Just a little girl trying to get along,” she said tonelessly.
“You know where the dough is hidden?”
“Not yet,” she admitted. “But I got a lot more brains than Spencer’s wife had.”
“She was sure dumb,” Danker said with a clipped oath. “She had the damned five spot worn out, carrying it around with her. She never could figure out what it meant.”
“It might have been an address,” Lilac said.
Danker scowled and shook his head. “We been all over that, Dora and me. That’s the first thing we thought of. That Lincoln stuff sounded like a tip. Jess Spencer was pinched in a house on Lincoln Avenue, up in the Bronx.”
“Yeah?” Lilac answered him indifferently but her eyes were bright.
“Yeah. But it’s a short avenue. And them numbers on the fiver ain’t a house number anyway.”
“He wouldn’t hide it in a house, silly,” Lilac said.
“Why not?”
“Jess knew when he buried the dough that he was in for a twenty-five-year stretch at least, if the cops nabbed him.”
“So what?”
“Twenty-five years is a long time. He’d have to be sure the building wasn’t torn down while he was in jail. He wouldn’t dare bury it in a vacant lot for the same reason. Might find a new house built over it when he got out.”
Danker’s hot eyes sparkled. “Hey—I think you got the right idea, babe. But where in hell would he go—a museum or a church or somethin’?”
Lilac’s cheeks were pink with excitement. She didn’t once look toward the trussed columnist; but Tracy had an odd feeling that she was thinking about him and his predicament all the while she was talking.
“Can’t you see?” she told Danker impatiently. “Spencer didn’t have time to go roaming the city. He was a marked man. He’d have to work fast.”
Her finger pointed unsteadily at her companion.
“Is there anything in that Lincoln Avenue neighborhood that might be safe for twenty-five years?”
“There’s a branch public library next to the joint where Jess was pinched,” Danker said slowly. “That’s out, ain’t it? Where in hell could Jess hide two hundred grand in a library?”
“Not inside, certainly. That’s crazy. Wait—is there a backyard to the place?”
“Yeah. Dora and me looked through the cellar and backyard of the place where Jess hid out—and we took a peek over the fence, too. The yard behind the library is kind of a fancy joint. Grass and stone paths and little green benches and—hey!” He uttered a choked yelp of jubilation. “That library—it’s the Lincoln Branch!”
He pounded his fist on the table and the flushed cheeks of the girl went suddenly white.
“Okey, Marty. So what do we do about it?”
Danker’s glance flitted towards the helpless figure of Tracy. “We scram up there, babe—as soon as we fix up this mugg. We’ll hand it to him nice and quiet. Stuff up all the cracks, turn on the gas in the oven, lock the door and—blooie!”
Lilac seemed to nod.
“One move out of you, and I’ll kill you,” she told Danker in a grave, quiet whisper.
She had scooped up Danker’s discarded gun and she was pointing it at his heart without a tremor. Tracy, staring unbelievingly at the two of them, saw utter determination in the girl’s eyes, and a sick fear in Danker’s.
Lilac moved slowly backward, gray eyes alert, until her groping left hand found the kitchen drawer and pulled it open. She took out a bread knife and sidled across to Tracy’s chair. The pressure of the sawing blade pulled his trussed hands tight for an instant and then sprung them free. He clutched the knife from her without a word and, squirming, slashed the ropes away from his ankles.
“Take the gun,” the girl breathed.
Jerry’s hand dived along her shaking forearm and took the weapon.
“Get over to the wall, you heel!” he told Danker. “Turn around. Get your face—”
Danker whirled suddenly, his hand flicking at Tracy’s wrist like a whiplash. But Jerry had been watching, and he brought the gun downward in a hard smash against Danker’s temple. The crook’s knees sagged and he dropped inertly to the linoleum floor.
The girl began to cry suddenly. Tracy laid the gun on the table, helped her gently into a chair.
“Did you kill Dora Spencer?” he asked her. “Tell me no and I’ll take your word for it.”
“No.” She looked at him, tremulous but unflinching.
“Who are you? Why are you in this mess?”
He could barely hear the whispered reply. “I’m—Margaret—Connor.”
“You’re—Well, I’ll be damned!”
He eyed her with an astonished comprehension. The sister of little Harry Connor! Six years old when the kidnaping had occurred—add eighteen more—that would make her about twenty-four now. It checked.
Tears were welling in her gray eyes. “I—I knew the money was hidden somewhere—Father’s money. His own—stolen from him—and he needs it so desperately now!” Her voice steadied with fierce earnestness. “I came to New York two weeks ago. I went to the police and appealed to them. They said the case was cold, closed, finished. They c
ould do nothing to help me. So I—I decided to go it alone. I got on the trail of Dora Spencer—and through her I found this horrible Marty Danker. I deliberately picked him up on the street, let him ride me around in his cab and make love to me, to—to try and find the clue to where Father’s money was hidden.”
“How did you manage to trick Spencer’s widow and grab the five spot for yourself at the Carteret Hotel?” Tracy asked her.
“I was hidden in Dora’s flat when she telephoned you. I—I knocked her out with a gun before she could kill me. She—she was like a raging she-devil. I met you at the hotel. I went back afterwards, determined to force her to tell me all she knew. She was dead when I got there. I don’t know who killed her.”
“I do,” Tracy said grimly, remembering Danker’s damaging admission a few moments before. He looked at the gun lying on the table. “When the ballistics experts get hold of that gun, they’re going to find rifling marks that will put our friend on the floor here in the electric chair.”
He stared at her. “Whom did you see when you went to Police Headquarters?”
“A man named Inspector Fitzgerald.”
“Fitz? That makes it very swell.”
He dashed into the living-room and picked up the phone he had already noticed. He got Fitz after a little delay in re-routing.
“Anyone call to see you about two weeks ago, Fitz? In reference to reopening the Connor kidnaping case?”
“Yeah. Anything new in that line, Jerry? The Connor kid’s sister came to see me—Margaret Connor.”
“Listen, Fitz! Grab hold of Sergeant Killan if you can. Get a cab and ride up to Lincoln Avenue in the Bronx. Wait for me there and keep under cover. Next door to the branch public library.”
He grunted suddenly.
“Wait! I’m forgetting. Come to Dover Street first. The number is two-twenty-nine. I’ve got the murderer of Dora Spencer waiting here for you.”
“What! Hold him, Jerry, hold him!”
The line clicked and Tracy hustled back to the kitchen. He halted stupidly in the doorway. Danker’s gun was a glittering menace and Danker was grinning. He was up on his feet and humorously alert. Margaret Connor, her hands stiffly above her head, said hopelessly: “He wasn’t unconscious. He was shamming. He grabbed the gun off the table while you were telephoning.”
Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter Page 42