Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter

by Tinsley, Theodore A.

  “It better be a good one, because—oh!”

  He stopped short. His voice sounded like dried peas rattling in a tin pan. “How did this happen?”

  “It—it happened.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “I did.”

  Tracy said very softly: “I knew a guy once who used to lie the same way you do. The more he lied, the more truthful he looked. He never could fool me worth a damn.”

  Jerry Tracy bent downward above the sprawled body and surveyed it with narrowed eyes. The man had taken a small calibered bullet almost exactly through the navel. The corpse was on his back, with his legs together, one arm trailing stiffly towards the dresser. The sleeve of the extended arm, Tracy noted, was quite rumpled. Black, silky hair, a little thin on top; a small black mustache that accented the curve of petulant lips. Eyelids shut tightly. Ears without lobes.

  Tracy straightened. “You killed this fellow, Sweetie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “For—for reasons I’d rather not discuss, Jerry.”

  “We’ll skip the reasons. You killed him about a half hour ago, eh?”

  “No,” Sweetie Malloy said calmly. “I killed him early this afternoon.”

  Tracy’s chuckle held no amusement. “Smart woman refuses to be tripped by cunning columnist.” He shook his head. “It’s no use lying, Sweetie. Too many other things to explain away. Corpse bled like a pig when he took the slug in the belly—but your rug’s nice and clean. The gun on the rug could have done it—maybe did do it—but not here, Sweetie. And you should never try to bend an arm after rigor mortis has set in; it makes a lot too many wrinkles in the sleeve and sets the mind of a bright little guy galloping with the proper answers.”

  “Nevertheless, I killed him here in my bedroom,” she said, stonily.

  “What were you planning to do if I hadn’t butted in?”

  “I was going to call the police and confess.”

  “Mmmm. … Going to, eh? Since this morning?”

  Composure fled from her. “My God, Jerry—stop grinning at me like a—a hyena! Did you ever murder anyone—and—and try to decide what to do? Did you ever stare all day at a dead man and think—and think—till you almost went mad with terror and despair? And then, just when you had nerved yourself to take what you deserved—to have the doorbell ring and—and be tortured by a well-meaning friend who—”

  Tracy strode grimly forward as her voice mounted shrilly. With deliberate brutality he shook the hysteria from her.

  “Stop yelling. Do you want to get me into trouble, too?”

  “No, no!” she gasped. “Please go—please, Jerry! I—I brought you up here to show you how dangerous, how suicidal it would be for you to remain until—”

  “Save your breath. I won’t budge an inch. Who you trying to shield?”

  Sweetie didn’t reply.

  “Who’s the lad on the floor?”

  “A—a man named Phil Clement. He was a—lover of mine. If you’re familiar with the movies we were—living in sin.” The hard desperation went out of her voice suddenly. “Jerry, you must believe me! Phil Clement found out something that I couldn’t bear to have exposed, and he—he tried to blackmail me.”

  “I happen to know,” Tracy reminded her, “that the income you live on, Sweetie, wouldn’t attract a grasshopper.”

  “For your own sake, leave before I call the police.”

  “I’m staying here until I find out the truth.”

  There was a telephone on the low night table and Sweetie sprang towards it. Jerry wrenched the receiver out of her hand before she could utter a word. He slammed it back on the prong and held the sobbing woman motionless for an instant. Something in the wild stare of her eyes gave him a sudden idea.

  “If I promise to leave here in ten minutes, will you have one drink with me as a—a substitute for the birthday cake and the—the candles?”

  Sweetie Malloy nodded haggardly.

  “Where do you keep the liquor?”

  “Downstairs. Kitchen. There’s a bottle of Scotch in the little closet off the dinette.”

  She had sunk into a chair, her eyes closed. He closed the bedroom door softly, his mind grimly on the bathroom and the medicine cabinet. A sedative! There must be a sedative there! He was betting shrewdly on the habit that must have been a part of Sweetie Malloy at the height of her Broadway glamor. He had never known a celebrity yet who wasn’t an insomniac. Jerry was one himself. Late hours and the constant whirl of excitement made a sedative as familiar as breakfast food. And where would it be but in the medicine cabinet?

  He found a bottle of veronal on the lowest shelf. Soundlessly he tiptoed down the carpeted stairs, hurried to the kitchen. He made two stiff highballs. Into the glass with a slight nick at its edge he put a double dose of veronal. He placed both glasses on a tray and went back upstairs.

  Sweetie Malloy reached out listlessly as he touched her shoulder and presented the tray. She took the glass without the nick.

  “Whoa!” Tracy said humorously and plucked it from her fingers.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Ginger ale in the other one. Did you think I wouldn’t remember?”

  “Oh—thanks.”

  She took the one with the cracked rim and drank deeply. Finished it with a second long gulp. Tracy emptied his, too.

  “Bum Scotch,” she said faintly. “It’s the best I can afford.”

  “That’s all right, Sweetie.”

  She sat there holding the empty glass. Gradually the tense lines were smoothing out in her face. “You’re the best friend I have in the world,” she said dreamily. “I wouldn’t drag you into a mess like this for a million dollars. On my birthday—that’s funny, isn’t it?”

  “Pretty funny,” Tracy agreed.

  Rain drummed with insistent sound on the window panes. The overhang of the bedclothes hid the corpse from view. Tracy’s lowered gaze watched the relaxing fingers on the empty glass. Sweetie clutched sluggishly as the glass dropped into her lap. It bounced off to the floor and she regarded it for an instant with a blurred grimace. Suddenly her eyes widened, knowledge brightening them.

  “Jerry. … What—what—”

  “Take it easy, keed.”

  She swayed unsteadily to her feet, her eyes struggling to retain their fleeting look of tragic accusation.

  “You’ve—you’ve doped—”

  “Sure,” Tracy said softly.

  He caught her weight as she pitched forward. Holding her limp body in his extended arms the Daily Planet’s wise little columnist stared down at one of the few really fine women he had known in his life. Sweetie Malloy harboring a blackmailing lover? Sweetie Malloy killing a man—for any reason whatsoever? The idea was preposterous, sheer lunacy.

  Sweetie wasn’t that kind. She had had no furtive lovers—and only one marriage. It wasn’t her fault that Jack Malloy was a rotter and a total loss. He didn’t even have dough! But she loved him, married him, stuck with him till the hour he died. She had saved enough from her own savings to purchase this cheap house in the suburbs and provide her with a meager income. Finished with the stage, forgotten by the blatant Broadway crowd, she had moved gallantly into obscurity. And this was the woman who was trying to assume the guilt for a sordid murder, who would have leaped into black, scandalous headlines but for Jerry’s providential arrival in the rainy dusk.

  He carried her sagging weight across to the bed and dropped her with a soft grunt. He had turned back towards the murdered man when he heard the peculiar sounds Sweetie Malloy was making. The high-necked dress was cutting into her throat, purpling her unconscious face. For an instant Tracy hunted unsuccessfully for hooks or buttons, then with a sibilant oath he whipped out his penknife and slashed the neck of the dress open.

  The tiny gold links of a locket chain were rising and falling with her labored breathing. Tracy frowned, reluctant to pry into her pe
rsonal possessions. But the thought of the corpse on the rug swept away his sympathetic instincts. He drew the locket gently upward from the white cleft of her bosom.

  He snapped the flat case open and stared at the scrap of photograph inside.

  Sweetie herself. Taken evidently when she was a child of about fourteen. Self-possessed, mature looking, very lovely.

  He was clicking the locket shut when a peculiar thought stayed his hand. The eyes—they weren’t Sweetie’s eyes. Even in the child’s face, they were harder, clearer, devoid entirely of that shy reticence that had always been Sweetie Malloy’s chief charm. He saw now that the hair dressing was too modern; the scrap of dress that showed in the photo was a fairly recent style that was not more than five or six years outmoded. Sweetie’s own childhood belonged way back in the early Nineties; it couldn’t possibly be her. Then who was this clear-eyed, defiant little beauty? Tracy’s memory told him he had seen this kid somewhere, was dimly familiar with the contour of the face, especially the reckless flame of the eyes. She’d be about twenty now. A grown woman.

  He pried out the picture with the point of his penknife and his breath caught as he read the rounded, childish handwriting on the back of the photo; “To Mother from Lois.”

  Lois. … He knew the face now! His imagination filled out the promise of beauty in the face, matured and hardened the lovely mouth, added a nude body misted to a milky radiance under the glow of diffused lights. … Señorita Lois; she used no other name. Poised in the perfumed darkness of the Club Español, dancing like a flitting white moonbeam behind the iridescent translucence of an enormous floating bubble.

  Tracy closed the locket, replaced it gently around the neck of Sweetie Malloy. Poor, desperate, gray-haired Sweetie! Pleading guilty to murder, secretly conveying a dead body to her own home and bedroom—to save this same reckless-eyed child? It was only a guess, but to Tracy it seemed a guess perilously close to certainty.

  A grim hatred for the charming Señorita Lois grew in Jerry’s mind. Without Lois there was no need at all for Sweetie’s desperate sacrifice. A childless Sweetie had no sane reason for attempting to frame herself to burn in the electric chair. But if she had a daughter. … If her daughter had killed a man, had begged Sweetie in hysterical terror to save her—save her. …

  Jerry’s lean jaw hardened. All Lois had to do, apparently, was to lock her damned crimsoned lips and let her unsuspecting mother take the rap. Sweetie would never disclose the secret. Tracy himself, friend of years as he was, had never once dreamed that Sweetie’s marriage with drunken Jack Malloy had produced this pampered and sinuous darling of the Club Español. A damned, cowardly murderess, if his hunch was correct. A gal whom Jerry Tracy was going to pay a grim visit before this tragic night was over.

  He re-examined the corpse on the floor. Except for tailor marks the clothes were empty of clues. But Tracy was patient with his searching and his patience was rewarded by a stiff, oblong pressure in the lining of the man’s coat. He found the hole in the inner pocket, ripped it wide with his forefinger, felt down through the lining and drew up the pasteboard. There were only two lines of print:

  Phil Clement

  Representing Señorita Lois

  Rain still slogged viciously behind the drawn shades on the window. Tracy shuddered slightly at the sound; he knew what he had to do tonight before he called on Sweetie’s unnatural and cowardly daughter. He’d get rid of the body, plant it somewhere else for the police to find. With the police shorn of all clues that might show where and under what circumstances the man had been murdered, Tracy himself would be free for at least one night to go to work on Lois, uncover the whole slimy truth. Sweetie would keep quiet as long as Lois’ name remained a secret. Besides, if she stepped forward now and tried to re-assume the guilt, it would drag Tracy himself into a criminal mess—and Sweetie, God bless her, wasn’t built that way!

  Tracy strode to the telephone on the night table and called his penthouse. To his disgust McNulty, his ancient Chinese butler, answered the call instead of Butch. In a steady voice Jerry assured the Chink that he was perfectly dry and in the best of health, that he wouldn’t be home for dinner—and please put Butch on, like a first-class and intelligent Chinaman!

  “You got him laincoat an’ lubbers?”

  “Sure, sure. I’m all right, keed. Honest!”

  Then Butch’s adenoidal bellow came over the wire. “Hello, Boss. Jeeze, what a night, huh?”

  “Where’s the Chink?”

  “Gone back in the kitchen.”

  “Swell. I want you to phone my garage and get the car. The Chrysler, not the Lincoln. Don’t tell the Chink where you’re going.”

  “How kin I?” Butch asked in a puzzled voice, “when I dunno meself?”

  Tracy gave him the address. “Drive out here right away. You can’t miss the cottage. It’s three from the corner of Locust. Pull into the drive and park at the back of the cottage. Keep your mug covered up as much as you can. I don’t want anyone recognizing you on the drive through Manhattan.”

  “Oke.”

  “And tell Felix over at the garage to keep his trap shut about the Chrysler going out. If anyone asks later on, both my cars were there all night.”

  “Oke.”

  Tracy hung up with a nervous click. He prowled swiftly about the shaded bedroom, pocketed the gun from the rug, tidied the grim evidence of struggle that Sweetie had so pathetically counterfeited, made the room normal and neat except for the huddled corpse. Sweetie was still breathing with drugged regularity; she’d be asleep for hours yet.

  The Daily Planet’s pint-sized columnist went downstairs to the kitchen and made himself a hasty sandwich with some Swiss and rye he found. He was as hungry as hell; and besides, it gave him something to do while he waited for Butch. Inaction always got on his nerves, made them raw and jumpy.

  He had finished the sandwich and was hunting for a bottle of beer when the bell rang at the rear door.

  Jerry Tracy stiffened. He knew that the prompt caller at the kitchen couldn’t possibly be Butch. Then who was it? And should he answer the ring or let the guy get tired and go away? Again the bell rang. The guy outside knew that the lights were on in the cottage, that someone was at home. Jerry would have to answer or arouse suspicion that something was wrong.

  A plan formed instantly in his mind. He sprang noiselessly towards the gas range, turned on one of the burners. He grabbed an empty kettle from the table, filled it with water, stood it over the blue flame. Then he walked noisily towards the rear door, flung it open.

  To his surprise the caller was a woman. Rain slanted against the columnist’s bare head. He stared at the woman, trying to get a glimpse of her dripping face.

  “Mrs. Malloy is quite ill,” he said curtly. “What did you want?”

  “Ill? I’m—I’m sorry.”

  Her beady eyes stared suspiciously, peered past him through the half opened door. “I’m—I’m Mrs. Malloy’s next door neighbor. I came to borrow a cup of sugar. You see, we’re having a little party and—”

  Tracy leaned forward, glanced alternately to right and left. Both adjoining houses were dark from cellar to garret.

  “I’m Doctor Rolfe,” he told the woman with a cool smile. “We mustn’t disturb Mrs. Malloy—but come in, by all means! And—er—get your cup of sugar.”

  His firm hand drew her unwillingly across the threshold. He took a good look at her in the light. She was fully dressed for the street; hat, coat, high-heeled shoes, gloves. Soaked with rain. Obviously out in the storm longer than it would take to run from an adjoining doorway. Pale angular face. Might be a Swede. Watching the suave stranger that she had not expected to run into, with a puzzled, scared expression in her bovine eyes. That lump in the sagging pocket of her long coat was a gun bulge, or Jerry was crazy!

  He lifted the lid of his kettle and peered professionally.

  “Mrs. Malloy had a bad heart attack this afternoon. She’s upstairs in bed, barely conscious. I’m heating hot
water now for a—ahem—parallelogram treatment.”

  He smiled faintly.

  “You no doubt know where she keeps the sugar. Help yourself.”

  The woman’s eyes swept the cupboard helplessly. “I—I guess I won’t bother, Doctor. Thank you; I—I won’t stay.”

  “Shall I tell Mrs. Malloy who called?”

  “No, no. Don’t annoy her.”

  She backed towards the kitchen door, swung it open and ducked out into the drumming rain. The minute the door closed Tracy ran noiselessly into the front room. With his eye carefully glued to a corner of the shifted shade, he saw the woman hurrying from the driveway to the sidewalk. She melted into the darkness towards Locust Avenue. A liar and a faker. As bad an egg as Tracy had ever smelled. Who was she? Did she know about the corpse upstairs? Could she be—his jaw tightened—an emissary of Señorita Lois?

  He went back to the kitchen and turned out the gas flame under the kettle. He heard the pulsing hum of a motorcar with a thrill of satisfaction. The car turned slowly into the driveway from the street. It braked behind the cottage and a moment later the bell rang briefly. It was Butch.

  Tracy yanked the startled big fellow into the kitchen and snapped an eager question at him. “See any sign of a woman walking along Locust Avenue?”

  “Naw.” Butch snorted with derision. “On a night like this they ain’t nobody walkin’. Street’s as empty as a—a motorman’s glove. I mean,” he added hastily, with a silly grin, “a motorman without no hand.”

  “Did you see a car parked anywhere along Locust?”

  “Oh, sure. About four blocks down. Parked without lights. You tol’ me not to show me mug much, so I didn’t give it no gander.” He grinned. “Jeeze, let ’em park—I was young meself once!”

  Jerry wiped the romantic grin off Butch’s thick lips with a curt sentence or two.

  “Huh?” Butch gasped. “Moider? Right here? An’—an’ we’re gonna snatch the body?”

  “Right. And I don’t want any mistakes.”

  Less than ten minutes after Butch had arrived, the body of Phil Clement was carried discreetly out the back door of the cottage and stowed away in the rumble of the Chrysler. He made a tight fit—but he fitted. The adjoining houses were still dark. Tracy smeared the license plates with a handful of wet earth. He was climbing in alongside of Butch when he suddenly remembered his two bundles—the birthday cake and the candles! Swearing grimly, he hurried back into the cottage and got them.