Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter

by Tinsley, Theodore A.

  He hunched his shoulders and strode doggedly out into the downpour. Hammer glanced at the hat-check girl.

  “Can you beat that for a screwy runout? Must be dame trouble.”

  “Not that lad,” Evelyn said snappishly. There was dim resentment in her voice as she ran a smooth palm approvingly along her tight black-satin hip. “He’s the only guy in the band that hasn’t made a pass at me. If you ask me, he needs a tonic—or something. There’s something eating at that guy and it isn’t woman trouble. If he ever breaks down, I’ll be the one who breaks him.”

  Hammer chuckled and turned away. He went back to his office.

  A block away in the driving rain, Tony Pedley wiped a tremulous hand across his wet face. There was a drug-store on the opposite corner and a taxi-cab parked at the curb. Tony’s eyes gleamed.

  “Yes, Mr. Drake,” he whispered to himself in a vicious mimicry of servility. “Yes, Mister Drake!”

  At that precise instant in a tower room at the Waldorf a waiter from the bar was repeating the same whining formula. He backed out deferentially with an empty tray and closed the door. Drake took a meager sip of his highball and then began pacing up and down the room. His quick strides seemed to release some of the suspicious rage that had been bottled up in him all evening. A spot of red came into the gray cheeks. There was a small photograph of his wife propped on the bureau and the sight of it halted him with clenched fists.

  “Damn you!” he whispered.

  He studied the dark, lovely eyes, the half-smiling mouth. He read a jeer into that smile. The picture was like Pauline herself—a smooth enigma. If only he could know definitely what she was thinking, planning, perhaps doing. Infidelity was something he could take care of very nicely. He’d already attended to it a dozen times—mentally—with the aid of fifty million dollars.

  “If I thought,” he told the picture with slow, whispered fury, “that you and that lickspittle lawyer of mine would dare to use my absence to—”

  He turned and slammed down his highball glass on the polished surface of a desk. The impact slopped some of the liquor against the ivory telephone. Picking up the instrument, he called the number of his Westchester mansion.

  He scowled as he heard the clear impersonal tone of Anne Leslie, his wife’s secretary. He didn’t like Anne. He hadn’t hired her. He hadn’t even been able to fire her when he had sensed a growing intimacy between the two women. Anne Leslie’s continued presence in the Westchester estate was one of Pauline’s few triumphs against her husband’s will.

  “Put my wife on. Tell her I want to talk to her.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Drake. Mrs. Drake is not in just now.”

  “Not in? Where is she?”

  “She took her personal car and went out for a brief drive.”

  “Where?”

  “Nowhere in particular, I believe.” Anne’s voice hesitated. “Mrs. Drake had a sick headache. She thought the—er—a drive would make her feel better.”

  “How long has she been gone?”

  Again the secretary’s voice seemed to hesitate. “About ten minutes, I should say. Is there any particular message I can take?”

  “No. I merely wanted to chat with her. I’ll be busy from now on till sailing time. You might, if you will—” his voice sneered, “—give her my love.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He cradled the phone grimly. His eyes peered outward at the rain-swept roofs of Manhattan. He knew Pauline’s fastidious distaste for any kind of personal inconvenience. She hated to be out in rain. And she never had headaches. Lies! Beginning the very moment he turned his back. By God, before he could even reach the pier!

  Tortured with jealousy, he tried to decide what to do. His indecision was cut short by a ring of the telephone. For an instant he thought it might be Anne, calling back in panic to fashion a more plausible alibi for his roving wife. But the voice was that of a man. A queer, muffled voice that he had never heard before.

  “Is this Mr. Drake? Mr. Edgar Drake?”

  “Yes. What do you want?”

  “I don’t want a damned thing. I’m just telling you something I thought you’d like to know. Your wife is two-timing you with her favorite boy friend. Right here in Manhattan. Right now.”

  “Wait a minute! Who is this talking? Are you one of my private—”

  “Shut up and listen! She’s in your own house on East 56th. She arrived here half an hour ago in her own coupé. The boy friend came in a taxi. He’s been in there with her ten minutes. He—”

  “Wait! Are you absolutely sure about this? If you’re telling me the truth, I’ll be willing to pay you—”

  “Save your dime, Mister.”

  The wire clicked and went dead. Drake jiggled the hook furiously. “I’ve just had an important telephone call that I want traced at once,” he yelled at the operator. “I’ve got to know where the call came from.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. The party has disconnected. We cannot trace it but I’ll call the Central office if—I don’t think it would help, though, Mr. Drake.”

  “Forget it,” Drake snapped.

  The surge of anger left him abruptly. He didn’t want any questions, alarms. Not yet. He felt suddenly as cold as ice, hard as chrome steel. He jammed on his hat and slipped into his cheap belted raincoat. With steady fingers he reached under the bed and drew out a small alligator bag. It was the only piece of baggage left in the room. All the rest was already on the Cunard pier, perhaps by this time stowed away in his Deck A suite on the Queen Mary. The thought of the ship and a profitable European business trip made him smile bleakly. He took a .38 automatic from the alligator bag and slipped it into his pocket.

  He was starting for the door when he saw a newspaper lying neatly folded on a chair. The bold black title seemed to leer at him, damp and inky: Daily Planet. For an instant Drake’s puckered eyes widened and went utterly expressionless. Then he spread out the paper and riffled the pages with feverish haste. He was looking for the one thing that Planet readers always read first. The sight of the familiar double column drew a mean, barking laugh from the millionaire:

  Broadway in Person

  by

  Jerry Tracy

  Drake stared at the most famous scandal column in the world until the print blurred under his thoughtful gaze. The gun in his pocket seemed suddenly silly. He had overlooked the one perfect revenge. To a flashy little genius of innuendo like Jerry Tracy, Pauline would be the gift of a lifetime. Only there’d be no need for innuendo. Jerry Tracy would write this story as an eyewitness reporter. The Most Beautiful Woman in America. … Drake could see the glamorous Pauline, stripped and dishonored on a million breakfast tables. A dirty laugh for anyone with two cents to buy.

  He pawed through a Manhattan directory and found Tracy’s number.

  He thought, “I’ll make her name stink from California to Maine.”

  The soft, faraway burr-burr of the signal bell was the most pleasant sound Drake had ever heard in fifty-two years of living. …

  Jerry Tracy grunted with annoyance as he heard the loud jangle of his penthouse telephone bell. His fingers kept busily picking away at his portable typewriter. He had a weekly radio gossip spot on a national network, and that meant advance copies for the agency and the sponsor, plus a copy for the cautious studio censor.

  The phone continued to ring.

  Ordinarily Butch, his bodyguard-valet, whom he used for everything but guarding him, would have answered it. Or McNulty, Jerry’s Chinese paragon of kitchen magic. But tonight Butch was out seconding a friend in a prelim bout at the Garden; and McNulty was down at Pell Street on some involved ceremonial business that had to do with ancestors and rice. Jerry swore, grinned a little, and got up. He could no more resist answering the call than a fireman could ignore an alarm gong. A lot of his best socko items came over the wire from disgruntled servants and amateur busybodies.

  He slip-slopped in flat bedroom slippers to the ivory-inlaid phone stand, his silk dressing gown flut
tering behind his hard-packed, naked body.

  “Yeah?”

  “I want to speak to Mr. Jerry Tracy. Jerry Tracy, of the Daily Planet.”

  “Right here.”

  “This is Edgar Drake speaking from the Hotel Waldorf. I’ve got to see you at once on a matter of the utmost importance.”

  “Huh? I didn’t quite get that. Do you mind repeating?”

  Tracy’s bored eyes were suddenly bright, his face tense and alert. He had recognized the name but he wanted to listen again to make sure. Edgar Drake. Drake Utilities. A financier whose business and private life was a constant pain in the neck to newspapermen. Drake didn’t even give interviews to ship newsmen. Tracy had taken it for granted that the sly old wolf was already stowed away in his suite on the Queen Mary, waiting for the whistle to toot at midnight. And here he was calling the town’s biggest dirt-sifter, his voice an undertone of nervous, racing eagerness.

  “Go ahead, Mr. Drake. Shoot!”

  Incredulity came into Tracy’s eyes as he listened. Then a hard exultation.

  “Let me get this straight. Your town house on East 56th. Rear courtyard. Fifteen minutes.”

  “I promise you the biggest dirt story of your career,” the financier’s voice whispered chokingly. “An eye-witness story, do you understand? I’m giving you the exclusive tip. I want it dirty! And funny!”

  “I’ll be there,” Tracy said and hung up. He added softly, “Nice guy!”

  He kicked off his flat slippers and sent the dressing gown sailing like a silken parachute. He dove naked into his bedroom and began to haul on garments. In ten minutes he was fully dressed. But it took another ten minutes of whistling and phoning before he could snare an empty cab and race uptown. A downpour like this was a hack driver’s paradise. Tracy left the cab at the corner of 56th and plodded east through the slant of the rain.

  Drake’s town house was a bleak stone relic in a park-like expanse set back from the sidewalk behind a tall grilled fence. Jerry whistled faintly as he took a look. The massive front door and every one of the windows was tightly boarded up.

  There were no cars parked along the street and the soaking rain had mopped up pedestrians. Not a remote twinkle of light or life in the house. The thing had all the earmarks of a practical joke. But Tracy moved like a swift phantom past the grillwork of the fence, looking for the small gate Drake had told him he would find unlocked. There was no fake about Drake’s voice, nor the venom with which he had gasped out his wife’s name. Tracy knew jealous rage when he heard it.

  He found the gate and tried it. It was unlocked. He moved cautiously down a broad stone driveway to a dim courtyard in the rear. The back of the mansion was no different from the front. Boarded up and black from cellar to roof. No sign of Edgar Drake anywhere.

  The courtyard was walled in the rear and there was a tradesman’s gate leading into 55th. This rear gate, too, was unlocked; and Tracy discovered with grim elation that there was an empty coupé parked at the curb outside. The car was Pauline’s. No doubt about that at all! She’d been sap enough to use a personal car with a monogram.

  Excitement quickened Tracy’s pulse. With his shoulders soaked and his hat-brim spilling water, he examined swiftly the boarded windows of the basement extension. That coupé parked in the rear meant Pauline! The unlocked front gate meant the vindictive Drake! Both of them inside the house somewhere—a gray-faced front-page millionaire stalking the loveliest woman in America, a glamorous beauty whose love he had tried to buy as he would a chain of railroads. Tracy could smell dynamite in the set-up.

  The first two basement windows were immovable. But the third was the pay-off. The boarded protection had been loosened on one side, so that it could be pried easily open to the space of almost a foot. Tracy squirmed between the rain-soaked boards and the window sill.

  The window lifted easily. It was pitch-black inside and utterly soundless. Tracy cupped a quick match flame in his palm and lowered himself lightly to a concrete floor. The place was the laundry-room, with tubs and dryers and gaunt curtain stretchers against the wall. Beyond was a kitchen and a pantry, and a short passageway that gave access to a rear flight of stairs. Tracy ascended noiselessly and began to prowl through the house. He used matches sparingly, blowing them out after a hasty, pivoting glance.

  The house was like a musty tomb. Draped furniture sent long circling shadows as Jerry’s matches flared. White muslin covered pictures and mirrors. There was a pierced archway in the front hall and Tracy knew enough of architectural relics like this, to guess that beyond him was a formal reception parlor, opening from the high-stooped stone entry at the front of the mansion.

  He listened but he was unable to hear the faintest sound. Then his fifth match flared—and he saw the quiet face of Edgar Drake.

  The millionaire lay flat on his back. There was a knife in his chest, driven hilt-deep. Both knees were drawn stiffly up and both hands had twisted themselves behind his back-tilted head, so that he looked like a man lazily floating … on a blood-drenched Chinese rug … floating with a knife blade deep in his chest.

  The match flame burned Tracy’s damp fingers and he struck another, moving slowly toward a tall floor lamp, the only uncovered object in the room. A black cord on the floor connected it with a wall socket and he stepped over the cord with exaggerated care. The click of the button was the only sound in the house. Tracy glanced toward the broad, curving staircase out in the main hall and back again toward the body.

  He examined Drake with grimly slitted eyes. The knife was a little off center in the dead man’s chest, probably smack through the heart. The handle looked shiny and clean. No telling about tricky things like prints, but Tracy was willing to bet that gloved hands had driven that blade into the unfortunate millionaire. The rug was rumpled enough to indicate some slight evidence of struggle. There was a bruise on the back of Drake’s skull.

  Tracy didn’t see the bruise until he had moved the tautly clasped hands. He didn’t touch the flesh, just jerked gently at the cuffed sleeves. As the left hand moved, a tiny black object was exposed on the rug. Tracy stared at it a long minute before he picked it up. He crouched quietly and peered into both ears of the dead man. Neither ear was plugged.

  He examined the queer object, holding it carefully in his palm. The thing had undoubtedly been dropped by the murderer, but there was scant chance of finding a print on it or of Tracy’s marring the clue with a print of his own. The thing was a rubber ear stopple, the sort of contrivance worn by swimmers to keep out water. Black rubber, with a red dot on the outside surface. Tracy made reasonably sure that Drake hadn’t dropped it by searching the pockets of the corpse with swift efficiency for a duplicate.

  He started to put the rubber disc into his own wallet, then changed his mind. Instead, he slipped it inside the tight leather sweatband of his soaked gray fedora. He didn’t stop to analyze his reason for this extraordinary precaution. When a hunch came to Tracy he always followed it. He kept his eyes and his ears centered on the pierced doorway and the broad staircase in the soundless corridor.

  The killing must have been done damned recently. The body was warm and Jerry had lost no time. The murderer must be still in the house. Into Tracy’s mind came a quick picture of David Corning, the millionaire’s good-looking, athletically built lawyer. Drake’s venomous voice on the wire had hinted at his attorney without actually naming him. Tracy knew he was no physical match for Corning, but he felt no fear. Pauline and Corning—upstairs—wondering who had turned on the lamp in the reception room, rigid with guilt. The biggest, most sensational murder story in Tracy’s whole career! He felt able to cope with twenty Cornings.

  He was close to the foot of the broad staircase when he saw the footprint.

  It was on a white, fleecy rug, so vaguely defined that he dropped to one knee to make sure. The mark of the heel was clearest; a tiny circlet of faint crimson. The rest of the sole had left a sliding smudge on the strands of white fleece; but Tracy was able to reconstruct t
he fragile outline of a woman’s slipper. The toe pointed directly toward the staircase.

  Jerry Tracy was still examining the faint toe-mark when he heard a barely audible sound. The noise came from the floor above. A faint squeak, followed by a louder echo—one that instantly brought Tracy racing up the stairs. Someone was ripping the boarding away from a covered window!

  It was dark at the top of the stairs. The upper hall was a tunnel of blackness. But there was a narrow line of horizontal light at the far end. Beyond a closed door was a lighted room, its brilliance visible under the crack of the door. Tracy sprinted, caught at the knob, whirled it. He spilled into the room, throwing himself prudently side-wise on hands and knees.

  The room was empty.

  It was a bedroom, its furniture covered with decorous muslin like the rest of the house. Rain slatted inward through a wide open window. The window’s wooden protection had been pried loose. It lay wet side uppermost on the rug like a flat gray shield.

  Tracy darted for the opened window. Rain slashed at his outthrust face, dripped from his nose and chin. He saw a dark figure rolling headlong on the wet concrete of the rear courtyard. A woman! She had leaped desperately from the sloping roof of the laundry extension. Tracy had a blurred glimpse of exposed silken legs and slim, pointed slippers, Then the woman was up and racing for the courtyard’s rear gate.

  It was impossible to catch a glimpse of the vanishing woman’s face. She was shrouded by a long raincoat, its rubber hood drawn over the back of her head. An upflung arm and elbow had concealed her features, and she was out the gate and gone before Tracy could straddle the sill. The explosive roar of an automobile engine was followed almost instantly by a shrill accelerating whine.

  Tracy started to drop to the shed roof, then suddenly changed his mind. He knew he had no chance whatever to stop that fleeing car. He had seen no sign of Corning. The murderous lover of Drake’s wife must be still somewhere in the house! Tracy’s identification of the fleeing woman as Pauline was pure guess, based on an indefinable sense of grace and loveliness as she fled, and on her car.