“Where was the dough paid?”
“In a brownstone dump down in Greenwich Village. 79 Brixton Street. Same place where I blasted at you in the alley.”
There was no embarrassment in his voice and none in Tracy’s.
“That’s what I thought, Tick. What’s your idea of our next move?”
Tick’s idea was simplicity itself. He was all for visiting Dr. Stoner’s Park Avenue home, enticing him out to a car on some pretext, and dropping his body in a vacant lot somewhere. Queens County would probably make the best cemetery, Tick thought.
Jerry talked him out of that. Jane wasn’t much help; she looked sick, forlorn. Jerry had saved her life, she had saved his. The reaction left her spent and weak.
Grimly Jerry Tracy outlined the situation as he saw it. Stoner’s attack from behind the bedroom curtain had been made so swiftly that in all probability Stoner was uncertain as to whether his scheme had succeeded. He or some agent of his was undoubtedly down in the street, waiting to see if the duped Tick Anderson hurried out with a pale and terrified Jane. If that happened, it meant that Tracy was cold meat upstairs and the doctor was sitting pretty.
“On the other hand,” Tracy said, his smile knifelike, “if Tick and I walk out arm in arm, it’s proof positive that the frame-up failed. It means that we’re both wise. Worse than that, Stoner will know that he’s got to get rid of not only me but Tick. His life won’t be worth a nickel from now on. He’ll have to make a protecting move, and make one damn fast. And that’s how we’re going to take him.”
Jane said tremulously from the sofa, “Promise me you won’t let Tick do any—gun-work.”
“Guns are out,” Tracy said. “We don’t want cops in on this set-up any more than Stoner does. I gave my word to a damn good friend of mine to pull him out of a blackmail hole without publicity. All I’m after is to end the doctor’s graft and drive him out of town. What do you say, Tick?”
“Yeah.”
They started for the door. Tick paused suddenly. He was staring at Jane, and for the first time Tracy saw fear in the man, a kind of wincing horror back of the hard blue eyes.
“We can’t leave the kid here. She might be killed. I’ll stick.”
Tracy shook his head. “She’s safer here alone. The further away we are, the safer Jane is.”
“I guess you’re right.” He walked hesitantly toward the sofa, ran his hand for an instant through Jane’s dark brown locks. He said roughly, “Keep that door locked. Get me?”
Jane nodded, didn’t reply. When the door had clicked behind them, she sat motionless until the sound of their feet vanished. Then she rose suddenly.
She walked through the connecting doorway to the bedroom. By craning her neck out the window, she could see along a rear yard to the street. Beyond the edge of a fence was the black interlaced blur of the Elevated structure on Columbus Avenue. Under it, where the corner turned, a taxicab was parked.
Watching steadily, her hand braced on the cold stone of the sill, Jane saw Tracy and her brother approach the cab. Tick got in first, Tracy after him. The taxi rolled out of Jane’s vision.
She drew back into the bedroom, hurried to her clothes closet. Breathlessly, she slipped out of her torn house-dress, pulled a street dress over her head. She had only one decent coat, a brown sport coat without fur trimming. It was on her in a twinkling, her brown felt hat pulled deftly over forehead and one eyebrow.
An address was as clearly in her hand as though the letters were printed on the inside of her skull. 79 Brixton Street. The place where Tick had said he had been paid his blood money. Where the criminal father of a well-fed blonde —— Jane didn’t finish framing the ugly word or the sentence.
She opened a bureau drawer, took out a small pearl-handled gun. Tick had given it to her once, made her keep it for protection, in spite of her protests that she was afraid of weapons. She slipped it with a steady hand into the pocket of the brown coat.
Jerry Tracy and Tick Anderson raced along in the taxicab through chilly darkness. Jerry wasn’t certain whether their arm-in-arm exit from the tenement had been noticed or not. A man had been buying a newspaper at the corner stand, another loitering aimlessly in the doorway of a cigar store. Just for luck Tracy gave the cab driver his penthouse address before he got inside. Gave it in a loud, clear voice.
If there were any fireworks due to start, they might as well come right now—tonight. He felt elated, wound up, tight as a clam. Beside him Tick seemed dopy, half asleep.
The taxicab swerved presently into a wide side street with a hundred foot clearance from curb to curb. Tracy’s penthouse was invisible from the street, perched on a granite set-back that concealed his paved terrace and a palisade fence of split cedar that didn’t look like much but had set Tracy back plenty. The roof of the apartment building seemed to scrape the stars. Tracy always felt an inch taller when he looked up at it. Not a bad dump for a little guy!
The night hallman was out at the curb, flicking open the cab’s door and bowing with one motion.
“Good evening, Mr. Tracy. I have a message for you.”
“When? Who from? Phone call?”
“Just a few minutes ago. From a Mr. Al Redman. A phone call; yes, sir. I typed a memo report.”
Tracy turned to his dough-faced companion, tapped him briefly on the shoulder. “Wait here in the cab, Tick. I’ll be out in a minute.” To the chauffeur he said with a faint grin, “Maybe I can build up your meter some more.”
The switchboard alcove inside was done in marble like a chapel crypt. Tracy ripped open the envelope and read the neatly typed memo:
Mr. Al Redman states that he is calling from a drug-store on the corner of Brixton and Varick. He would like to meet Mr. Tracy as soon as possible in the cellar of a brownstone house which Mr. Tracy knows about. The rear cellar door is unlocked. Mr. Redman said to make it quiet clear that the matter is urgent.
Tracy smiled, shoved the message in his pocket. “Thanks,” he told the hallman and hurried outside to the waiting cab. His crisp order sent the taxi buzzing over to Lexington Avenue where there was an all-night drug-store on the corner.
Knowing Redman’s methodical habits and the layout of his apartment, the Daily Planet’s columnist had no hesitation in calling him at this late hour. Al always went straight to the kitchen for a snack before he retired. If he’d gone to a movie after the brownstone appointment as Jerry had advised him, he’d probably be just about home. The telephone was on a small bracket near the kitchen door. Al’s quick grab would choke off the ring of the bell before it could awaken Florence in the bedroom.
Tracy’s guess was good. The bell buzzed only once. Then there was a click and Al’s voice whispered cautiously, “Hello?”
“Jerry.”
“Thank the Lord. I’ve been waiting in the kitchen to hear from you. Jerry, something darned queer happened tonight. I—”
“Wait a minute. Did you try to get me on the phone a little while ago?”
“Phone? No.” He sounded puzzled.
“O.K. Forget it. Did you pay the dough tonight?”
“No. That’s what I want to tell you about. I got there right on time and rang the front doorbell, same as usual. Nobody answered. I rang about six or seven times. Then I left—afraid to stand there too long. I went to a movie so’s not to get home too early.”
“That’s swell. You hop to bed now and don’t wake up Florence.”
Tracy hung up.
Jerry’s taxicab sped down Seventh to Greenwich Village. At Sheridan Square, Jerry said “Here.” He and Tick walked the five blocks down Varick to Brixton. He explained to Tick in a grim whisper.
“That phone message to the penthouse was the dumbest kind of a fake. Stoner must be pretty jittery to think I’d fall for it. We’re going to call on him, but not through his conveniently unlocked cellar door. We’ll try the last place he’d think of; the alley window with the burglar alarm.”
Tick looked doubtful. “Won’t he hear the bell?
”
“Don’t be a sap.”
There were a couple of shivering bums hanging around the Varick Street corner, but Brixton Street was deserted, a crooked tunnel of darkness. The wooden tub on which Tracy had climbed from the alley pavement to the back parlor window was lying upended where he had left it. The window above was closed. He didn’t try to raise it.
Propped darkly against the sill by the big hands of Tick, he removed the lower pane very neatly with a diamond cutter which, he told himself savagely, he should have used on his original visit.
He passed the square pane down to Tick, who laid it flat on the alley pavement. A moment later Tick was up on the sill and into the pitch-black room. They stepped cautiously toward the wall and Tracy’s lips breathed a low-pitched whisper into the gunman’s ear.
“Don’t move. You’re too heavy. I’m sneaking out that door and down the hall. Stoner’s probably down in the cellar, just inside the rear door. I want to see if he’s got a light on.”
There was no carpet on the parlor floor but Jerry’s small, expensively shod feet made no creaks. He passed through the parlor door and into the hall. It was so dark that his extended hand was invisible. He had taken barely three or four steps when he heard a queer sound from the room he had just quitted. It was a quick gasp, like the loud exhaling of air from a man’s throat. Almost instantly there came to the startled columnist’s ears the dull thump of a falling body.
Tracy whirled, tiptoed noiselessly back to the parlor. The room was wrapped in profound silence. It was too dark to see anything but the outline of the window. Moving with infinite care, Jerry stepped closer to the wall and approached the spot where he’d left Tick.
His foot touched Tick’s ribs before he saw him. The gunman was flat on his back, his body rigid. Jerry felt Tick’s face. The eyes were wide open. Yet Jerry, bending above him, running his hands over Tick, could feel no blood. Puzzled, he laid a quick palm on Tick’s heart and felt it beating faintly.
Without warning something touched Tracy with numbing agony on the flesh of his neck. He fell forward, twisted, paralyzed, every muscle in his body locked with pain. He knew that the breath had sucked out of his lungs, but he was powerless to breathe in again. Too late, he realized what had happened to Tick. Electricity … the numbing shock of high voltage. …
The thought burst like a pale rocket in his brain, exploded into streaky blobs of light, then the lights drifted downward, downward into darkness, carrying Tracy with them into oblivion.
Bumping of his body down a wooden staircase brought Jerry Tracy dazedly back to consciousness. Someone was dragging him callously along as though he were a sack of potatoes. His wrists were bound securely behind his back; his fettered feet went thump-thump down wooden steps to a concrete floor.
Each step hit Tracy soddenly, bruising every inch of his body. His eyes jerked open.
Bright illumination from an electric bulb showed him a low, whitewashed ceiling, wooden bins for coal, the squat pot-bellied shape of a furnace. He was in the cellar of the brownstone, alongside the similarly trussed figure of Tick Anderson.
Laughter rustled behind him. Turning his aching neck, he was able to see the tall figure of his assailant. A hooded black mask covered the man’s head and face.
“Intelligence versus stupidity,” the blackmailer said slowly, his voice pitched deliberately to a metallic throatiness. “You should never have locked horns with a psychoanalyst, Mr. Tracy.”
It was impossible to detect in the voice any trace of the suave Doctor Stoner. But there was so strong a hint of self-satisfaction and conceit that Tracy took the cue immediately. Huskily, he called himself a sap, asked humbly for the details of his capture.
“Simple enough. I knew you had the Broadway mind, which is to say, the mind of a child. A child would check on my telephone message and discover it to be a fake. A child would assume I was waiting in the cellar. A child—or a Broadway columnist, if you prefer—would decide that a burglar-proof window would be the last place I’d think of particularly when a previous attempt had failed so dismally at that same window.”
“You used electricity, of course?” Tracy said quietly.
“Naturally. House current stepped up to a paralyzing voltage by a compact device in the parlor closet. There was a chance that even in the darkness you might have noticed that the closet door was slightly ajar, but you were so convinced that I was in the cellar and so anxious to hide your presence, that you never thought of mine.”
Again the slurred laugh chuckled behind the mask. “In short—”
He stopped. Whirling, his masked face jutted intently toward the cellar steps. From the floor above had come a sudden clattering sound, the crash of something overturned.
Before Tracy’s opened mouth could yell, the masked man crashed the butt of a pistol against his forehead. As Tick tried to roll away the gun struck again. Both victims were hauled swiftly to the open door of a coal bin and thrown inside. The door closed. There was a faint click of a padlock, followed by a complete and sinister silence.
Lying half across Tick, his forehead warm with a trickle of blood, Tracy knew that the silence was a blanket covering the noiseless ascent of a killer up those cellar steps.
He was about to scream a warning, when again he stopped. This time his action was voluntary. In the dim half-light that trickled through the cracks of the coal bin, he saw a figure rising slowly from behind a pile of empty barrels in the corner. A girl in a brown felt hat and a brown sport coat. Her face deathly pale, a finger laid warningly across her lips. Jane Anderson!
Sobbing, she sprang at the two prisoners. A small penknife slashed desperately across their bonds. Tick waddled bear-like to his feet, caught his sister as she swayed.
“Gawd, kid, what are yuh doin’ here? How did you—”
“I was afraid you might—get into trouble. I sneaked in the rear cellar door. The light was lit and there was no one in sight. Then I heard him coming downstairs and I hid in the coal bin—”
Tracy was hurling himself desperately against the padlocked door. The barrier held and bounced him backward. From the floor above came a shrill scream, the horrified cry of a woman. “Father! Help!”
Tick seemed dazed, witless in the emergency. Tracy yanked him away from Jane, snarled at him in high-pitched fury: “Quick! Kick that door down!”
The padlock held but the cast-iron hasp snapped. The door went outward in a rending crash of wood. Tick got up, his body automatically shielding his sister from the empty stairs. Tracy went past him like a track sprinter. His .32 was a bright glitter in his hand. Over his shoulder he clipped, “Stay here! Stay with Jane!”
“No, no!” Jane cried. “Help him, Tick!”
He took the stairs recklessly, aware that he was risking death. He had recognized that scream from the floor above. The voice, vibrant with terror and horror, was Gloria Stoner’s.
There was a light on in the hallway at the top of the stairs. The narrow hall led to the front of the house. As Tracy raced through he heard a faint moan from a front room. Whirling, he sprang through the doorway and threw himself sidewise with almost the same motion.
Gloria Stoner was rising dazedly from the floor in the opposite corner. Her temple and cheek were stained with blood. There was a gun in her up-flung hand and she pointed it at Tracy, her eyes shiny with madness.
The gun flamed as Tracy ducked aside. He caught at the back of a spindly chair. He felt the breeze from a bullet, heard its harsh thwack as it hit the wall above his bent shoulder. Then he sent the chair sailing across the room.
It hit Gloria’s legs and buckled her backward. Before she could fire again he was on her like a panther, wrenching the hot weapon from her hand, hauling her roughly to her feet.
“Where’s your father? Where is he?”
Her head rolled drunkenly under his grim tug. She was paralyzed, incapable of speech. He could hear Tick’s voice, the sound of feet racing along the hall from the cellar stairs.
“Jerry, where are you?”
Jane was there, too. She and her brother stared inward from the threshold of the hall doorway.
“Did you see Stoner?” Tick roared. “Where did he go?”
“I don’t know. Keep an eye on both these women. I think—”
He saw Gloria stare suddenly over his shoulder. She fainted, went slack in his arms, toppled to the floor.
Jane Anderson darted forward. “Look out, Jerry! Behind you! The kitchen door!”
It was opening slowly on a crack. Now it flew wide. Too late, Tracy saw the masked face, the level menace of a gun. Jane’s arm flew out wildly as the gun flamed. She struck at the wrist, knocked it upward. The bullet smashed into the plastered ceiling.
But in the same instant, Jane Anderson caught in an enveloping clutch, was swung like a helpless shield in front of the masked gunman—and Tick’s gun was blazing!
To Jerry’s horror Tick’s bullet struck the girl. He saw Jane slump sidewise in the blackmailer’s grip. Blood stained her throat crimson. Her captor tried to hold her upright, firing from behind the limp protection of her body.
Tracy crouched backward for an instant against the wall, powerless to make a move across the line of gunfire. Tick’s heavy gun jerked in his hand as he pumped bullets. He was revealed starkly for what he was, and always would be—a killer. Tracy’s yell of horror went unheard in the din.
To Tracy the desperate gun duel seemed to endure for minutes. Actually, barely five seconds had elapsed from the moment the little columnist had crouched against the wall. He gritted his teeth and hurled himself forward.
As he did, the blackmailer pivoted suddenly and fired. The flash was so close to Jerry’s face that he could feel the heat of it across his cheek. He caught gun and wrist, bent the smoking weapon upward between the man’s shoulder blades.
Across the room Tick Anderson was standing very stiff and straight. There was a round black circle on his forehead as if a fly had suddenly come to rest there. Tick’s gun clattered to the floor. As he pitched forward, his left hand started to waver weakly toward his forehead. The blind, dying gesture was never completed. Tick fell flat on his face, lay there without motion.
Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter Page 64