Butch swung the car through the driveway and out to the rain-pelted street.
As they turned into Locust Avenue, Jerry’s eyes peered ahead through the slanting sliver of headlight-illuminated rain.
“Is that the parked car you saw?”
“Yeah.”
“Slow down a trifle when we go by. Don’t let ’em see your face. Cut in close and go right by ’em.”
“Okey.”
Butch ducked his head low over the wheel. Tracy, hunched beside him, gave the stalled car a lightning scrutiny from under the wet brim of his hat. Two of ’em—a man and a woman. The man’s back was turned; all Tracy could see was a very sporty, extremely gray topcoat—almost a white-gray. The woman was the dame who had called at Sweetie Malloy’s kitchen to borrow a cup of sugar.
Butch, who had glanced casually into the rear-vision mirror, gave a faint yelp. “Hey! They’re follerin’ us, Boss!”
“I know. Show ’em how fast you can go with a special engine job that cost me plenty of jack.”
Butch crooned with delight. “Fast as I like?”
“Sure. Lose ’em.”
Butch lost them in a straightaway mile of hair-raising speed along water-slippery concrete. He made doubly sure by two sneaking turns through the bumping darkness that brought the Chrysler to a parallel highway.
“We’re going to Brooklyn,” Tracy said. “We’re going to dump the body in a vacant lot at the corner of Pike and Pacific.”
The place registered instantly with Butch. “I getcha. The spot where the cops found Snipe Moretto last week.” His smile bathed Tracy with fond admiration. “Jeeze, you sure got brains in that little nut o’ yours. The cops’ll think it’s a gang killin’. They’ll think Snipe Moretto’s boys got hunk with the Peewee gang.”
The flitting Chrysler roared smoothly through the Bronx, crossed into Manhattan, went all the way down to Canal and across the Manhattan bridge into Brooklyn. It was barely nine o’clock, but the steady torrential rain had swept the streets clear of all but a driblet of traffic. No signs of pedestrians at all. At Pike and Pacific, Butch braked the car to a stop and got out with a hand-jack. Unmindful of the soaking rain he jacked up the rear axle and pretended to go to work on a tire. Tracy drifted unobtrusively to a gap in the rickety fence and peered into the vacant lot. He came back and rested one hand negligently on the closed rumble. An occasional automobile rocketed by, throwing water flying in a soggy splash. “When I say ready—out with him!” Jerry whispered.
More cars. Tracy straightened nervously as the last one swerved out of sight around a corner. As far as he could see, the street was empty for the moment except for the sullen hiss of the October rain.
“Ready!”
Up went the lid of the rumble. Arms plunged and caught at the wedged-in corpse. In a moment Tracy and Butch had staggered across the deserted sidewalk and vanished through the gap in the fence. They were gone less than sixty seconds. Butch let down the jack and tossed it into the open rumble. Jerry closed the lid with a bang.
The Chrysler was in motion almost before the columnist could close his door. Butch’s hands, he noticed, were shaking on the circumference of the wheel. His own were tremulous, too. The car took an erratic slide and straightened out.
“That’s that, Boss.”
“Yeah. That’s that.”
A vivid picture was still uppermost in both their minds: a dead man lying in a grotesque huddle in the rainy darkness of a vacant lot. Cold and inanimate, in a sordid welter of tin cans, mud and busted bed-springs. … Tracy felt a little sick at the necessity of heaving even a dead man to a rest like that.
Jerry had a grim hunch that if he didn’t make a quick job of this case, the gal who asked for a cup of sugar and the guy in the gray-white topcoat might do something damned nasty to a pint-sized columnist who had developed such an uncanny habit of minding other people’s business—when they broke the law. Whoever they were, those two were in the thing up to their ears, along with the bubble dancer.
“Drop me off at Nevins Street,” he told Butch in a low tone. “I’ll grab the subway back. Remember to tell Felix that the car wasn’t out of the garage tonight. Get rid of those two packages of mine somewhere. Be sure no one sees you do it. Better smash ’em both up and stick ’em in one of the garage trash cans.”
He watched the crimson tail-light of the Chrysler vanish in the rain and descended frowningly into the Nevins Street station. He rode a Seventh Avenue express to Times Square, caught a cab, rode quietly with set jaw to the Club Español.
Tracy was soaked and soggy, a bit squishy at the heels, but the Español’s doorman recognized him with a respectful grin.
“Bad night, Mr. Tracy.”
Jerry said, “Yeah,” and made quick puddles towards the cloak room. Suddenly he stopped short in the center of the foyer. He was staring at a familiar white-gray topcoat. The coat was being handed across to Nita, the checkroom girl, by a thickset, muscular man of medium height, with bushy black hair and a neck almost as big as Butch’s.
Tracy began backing quietly towards a convenient Spanish arch, but Nita’s face had lifted and her pert red lips were smiling at the columnist.
“Hey, hey, Jerry mio! Lousy night, no?”
The muscular man whirled like a cat. His dark eyes focused on Tracy. Jerry advanced smilingly, fumbling casually for his cigarette case, taking in the guy’s details with one slant-eyed flash. Didn’t know the mugg from Adam. The fleshy cheeks, blunt nose, shaggy black eyebrows made a brand-new tintype for Tracy’s mental rogues’ gallery. But the topcoat was an old friend!
The stranger grabbed the coat from Nita with a brusque snatch. “Forgot something,” he muttered, and with his face averted from Tracy, barged through the lobby and butted out into the rain.
Tracy waited for ten hesitant seconds. The hard-boiled bubble dancer could wait, he decided. This was a guy to check on in a hurry.
There was no sign of him on the gleaming black lacquer of the rain-drenched sidewalk. A taxi was moving from the curb and Jerry said swiftly to the doorman: “A guy just came out. Did he take that cab?”
“Was he a sorta short, heavy mugg in alight coat?”
“Yeah.”
“He walked. Pretty fast, too. Went around the corner.”
“Thanks.”
Jerry caromed off a bobbing umbrella and made it to the corner without delay. His eyes narrowed with elation. That car parked at the curb down the street looked a hell of a lot like Light Coat’s tin wheelbarrow. Might swish by and give it a look.
A hand clutched him as he passed a pitch-dark doorway. The clutch lifted Jerry off his feet, yanked him headlong into the narrow entry.
His fist swung instinctively and skidded off a wet ear. The force of his hasty blow threw him off balance but it saved him a fractured skull. A pistol butt hit Jerry’s falling shoulder and laced it with numbing pain. Before it could hit again Jerry’s left hand closed desperately on a thick ankle and toppled his antagonist.
Neither of them made a sound. The hiss of the rain on the black sidewalk and the scuffling of their entangled legs on the tiled pavement of the doorway was the only noise audible.
The clubbed gun swung backward for a bone-smashing blow.
Jerry butted his head against the man’s nose. He bit his way through the hand that crushed his mouth and chin. The killer yelped shrilly and they rolled apart for an instant. Tracy staggered to his feet, slipped, went down jarringly on hands and knees. He managed to throw one arm upward and he took the savage gun smash on the wincing tendons of his forearm.
His assailant turned, chin and mouth crimson from his butted nose, and ran head-downward through the rain. He darted along the sidewalk and slammed headlong into his parked car. As the gears meshed Jerry leaped to the running-board, clutched at the wheel, tried to throw the automobile toward the sidewalk.
A straight-arm blow to the mouth tore him loose and sent him reeling backward. The pavement came up dizzily and socked the back of his
skull with a force that bounced his teeth together. It took him a dazed minute to remember where he was and to sway dizzily upward from the cold puddle he was blotting with his aching back.
The car was in high, roaring towards Sixth Avenue. Its stop light flared crimson, the car skidded around the corner and vanished.
Tracy sat down on the uncomfortable spiked top of a hydrant and tried to pull himself together. His head still felt like an overstuffed chair. A man with a dripping umbrella came down from Seventh, stopped hesitantly.
“S’matter, buddy? Sick?”
“Nope. I’m all right.”
Except for an arm that felt like boiled spaghetti and a lump on the back of his head where he had kissed the sidewalk, Jerry was beginning to feel normal. The man with the umbrella handed the columnist his hat and walked off. Didn’t even look back.
“If I’d been jumped like this in Peoria,” Tracy reflected grimly, “there’d have been six cops with notebooks, a hook and ladder company, and a thousand nosy gazabos. Get half killed in Manhattan and a lone guy with an umbrella hands you back your hat—and goes right on to the drug-store to buy his aspirin!”
The thought made him grin cheerfully. He went back to the Club Español with almost a jaunty stride.
He asked for an inconspicuous table and got it. Garcia, the swarthy and affable head-waiter, bubbled with friendliness for the Daily Planet’s expensive little hireling. Tracy had helped many a good show, had rescued many a lousy one, by a good-humored boost salted away in a pert paragraph.
Garcia rubbed swarthy hands together. “Señorita Lois goes on in about wan hour. You weel like her, I’m sure.”
“I can’t wait an hour. I want to see her now.”
Garcia’s chuckle seemed a bit strained.
“Ah, no, no. … Why not wait, have a few dreenks—see for yourself thees glorious dance she makes with thees glorious body, no?”
“You mean she doesn’t want to talk to me?”
“Tonight she is a leetle bit upset.”
“Sick, eh?” Tracy’s tone was sharp.
“No, no. Worried, per’aps. Maybe a leetle temperament. Ha, ha! She snarl and she snap. She weel talk weeth no one.”
“Tell her Jerry Tracy wants to see her.”
Garcia shrugged, scowled, departed. When he returned his message was brief.
“She say—” He gulped. “She say how you lak to go to hell in a tin bucket?”
“I see. Got an envelope and a small hunk of paper?”
“But surely.”
Tracy cupped the paper behind his left hand, scrawled a brief sentence, sealed the envelope. “Take her this.”
In three minutes Garcia was back. There was incredulity in his black eyes, a faint overlay of perspiration on his olive forehead.
“You are indeed a magician, Señor Tracy. She see you. Come weeth me.”
Tracy threaded his way past crowded tables, paid no attention to the whispered buzz of comment his presence excited. He crossed a shining expanse of open floor, ducked under a curtain of heavy brocaded material and climbed a flight of wooden stairs to a closed door.
“Beat it,” he told Garcia.
He opened the door without knocking, clicked it shut behind him.
“Hello, Toots.”
His note was still in her hand. She had thrown a light robe over her shoulders but the thing gaped candidly and Tracy, in spite of the hard anger that gripped him, was forced to admit to himself that this kid was strictly the goods.
It was hard to say which was uppermost in her swimming dark eyes: rage, or a bright, overmastering fear.
“Listen, you wise little newspaper heel! If you’re trying one of your celebrated snoop acts, pulling a cheap bluff—”
“Shut up!” He was not an awful lot taller than the dancer, but he seemed to loom a foot higher as he tramped slowly towards her. “As far as I’m concerned, Toots, you’re a two-bit strip act—and I’m doing you a favor to sneeze at you. I never fool and I never bluff. I asked you how you’d like to push a bubble around in a death cell. Think it over, Miss Malloy.”
“You—damn you. … Who said my name’s Malloy?”
She sprang at him without warning, caught both his shoulders in a nail-digging frenzy. Her flimsy robe trailed but neither of them was aware of anything but their locked double glare. Tracy kept his lips compressed, gave no indication whatever that the pointed nails of the dancer were hurting him like hell.
He flung her backward a step.
“If you don’t talk—and talk plenty, Toots!—I’m gonna nail that kalsomined shape of yours to the cross. I’m calling you Malloy because you’re Sweetie Malloy’s daughter.”
He heard the sharp hissing of her breath. There was a moment of utter silence in the room.
“Well? So what if I am?”
“I want to know why you’re so damned scared tonight. Are you waiting to hear the newspaper extras that your mother has been pinched for murder?”
Her rouged face was as white as the notepaper that fluttered to the floor at her bare feet. “You’re nuts. You’re absolutely insane.”
“Am I?” He stopped and placed the paper in his pocket. “If I’m insane, let out a scream and have me pinched for annoying you. I’d love to tell the cops why Sweetie Malloy could not have killed Phil Clement, your manager.”
“Is Phil—dead?”
“You know damn’ well he is. … You’re the one that killed him. How about going straight back to your apartment and talking this over?” His glance was like the flick of a whip. “Well?”
“Let’s go,” she gasped.
She clutched at his hand, wrenched the door open. Barefooted, panting, she sprang down the wooden staircase, her left hand dragging the startled columnist. A chorus girl, ascending the narrow stairs, flattened herself against the banister as the almost nude dancer and the columnist swept on past her.
“Well, for Gawd’s sake. … ”
“Hey, wait a minute!” Tracy growled. He pulled the fluttering robe tight, knotted the silken cord securely. “Where’s your shoes? You can’t go out barefooted, dope!”
There was almost an insane blaze in Lois’ eyes. She jerked him forward, pattered through a darkened corridor, swung open a door. There was a paved alley outside and a parked limousine.
“Yours?” Tracy snapped.
“Yes.”
“Swell.” He swung her up in his arms with a sudden heave and carried her through the rain. A sleepy chauffeur in a plum-colored uniform flung open the automobile’s door, gaping stupidly.
Tracy bounced Lois in on the cushioned seat, crawled in beside her. “Tell this lad it’s okey. Tell him home, James.”
The chauffeur had recovered his scattered wits. He had the door open again, a wrench hefted menacingly in his gauntleted hand.
“It’s—it’s all right, Peter,” Lois whispered fiercely. “I’m—I’m not feeling well. Drive us home.”
“And toss that overcoat of yours back here!” Tracy snapped at him.
Lois Malloy jerked the speaking tube to her tremulous lips. “I won’t need you any more tonight after we get there Peter. You can put up the car and go home.”
“Yes, Miss.”
The apartment building was a swanky stone hive that went up and up through the rain like the side of a terra-cotta cliff. It had a canopy, a doorman, a rubber carpet to the curb and an umbrella ready to be snicked open for milady.
Tracy shoved all the hubbub away with a sweep of his arm. He grinned at the startled doorman. He was just beginning to realize that he was bareheaded and coatless himself. And the bubble dancer’s appearance was enough to make any respectable doorman gulp.
Jerry carried Lois Malloy to the silver and onyx elevator. She wriggled loose and slid to her feet as the car ascended. Jerry didn’t mind that a bit; it had been quite a trick to carry her with that numb left arm of his. Her eyes, he saw, were free of terror; they were colder now, wary, self-possessed.
“I haven’t my key w
ith me,” she told the stolid elevator man. “Will you get a duplicate, please?”
“Yes, Miss.”
She padded barefooted to her penthouse door and waited with Tracy while the elevator man descended.
“Maid out tonight?” Tracy suggested.
“Yes.”
“What’s her name?”
“Does it matter?”
“I think so.”
“Her name’s Selma.”
“Selma what?”
She whirled at him suddenly. “How the hell do I know? Just plain Selma!”
The doorman appeared, inserted a key, opened the door, vanished. They went into a gorgeous living-room and Tracy said mildly: “Nice dump you’ve got.”
Lois’ bare feet made quick, meaty sounds on the floor. She jerked out a cabinet drawer, slammed viciously about with a gun in her hand.
“Listen, you! Stand right where you are. What do you know about my—my mother? And what do you know about Phil Clement?”
“I know why Clement was killed—and where,” Tracy bluffed.
“Yes?” Her voice grated. “He was killed because my mother was dumb enough to take him on as a lover. And if you think you can drag me into her mess, you’ve got another think coming.” Tracy nodded a little. “I’ve seen and touched a lot of lice in New York,” he said in a slow whisper, “but you’re the first dame I’ve run into who tried to dodge a murder rap by jamming her own mother into the electric chair.”
The gun in the dancer’s hand was as steady as a rock. Her crimson lips jeered. “Sweetie Malloy gunned Clement in her own house. The body’s on her own bedroom floor. She’s surrendering to the cops—if she hasn’t done so already.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Because she phoned me and confessed.”
“And you’re letting her take the rap?”
“Why not? She killed the guy, didn’t she?”
Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter Page 45