Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter

by Tinsley, Theodore A.

  He drew back into the bedroom. There was a woman’s handbag on the covered dresser; a comb, a lipstick. A faint odor of perfume was rapidly vanishing in the damp smell of rain on the rug.

  Tracy didn’t touch the handbag or the smaller articles. He had only one tense thought in his mind. He had seen down below in the reception room the unmistakable outline of a sheeted telephone desk. He thought hotly: “Murder is news!”

  The Daily Planet first! Then the police. McCurdy, the night chief of the city room would have a chance to rip out an extra almost before the Queen Mary sailed. The opposition would print the usual stereotyped story stating that Edgar Drake had sailed at midnight, maintaining his usual policy of granting no press interviews. The Daily Planet would rip the town wide open with the sensational truth, under the famous by-line of Jerry Tracy himself! Front page socko!

  He sneaked swiftly down the broad staircase. Drake’s body still lay stark and motionless on the blood-soaked Chinese rug. Tracy’s lean fingers trembled as he uncovered the telephone. The chances were a hundred to one that the line was disconnected. But as he lifted the instrument he was overjoyed to hear the strong steady hum of the dial tone. His finger began to twirl The Planet’s exchange letters.

  Without warning the room went pitch-black.

  Feet came thudding across the rug, straight toward the startled columnist. He threw up a defensive arm as a man’s plunging body crashed into him. The impact bent Tracy backward across the sharp desk edge.

  He rolled sidewise and slid to the floor. His twined fingers caught behind the hinged hollow of a bent knee and slid upward to thigh and crotch. Tracy was no fool in a rough and tumble fight. He was small-boned but as active as a flea. He used both hands and a quickly thrust foot in an effort to trip his unseen assailant and get him on the floor. In a savage gutter roll Tracy was as tall as anybody else.

  But this foe was too strong to upset. And Tracy’s blind thrust had left him unprotected. He felt a hand clutch his throat and tighten like a vise. Both men went down in a thrashing huddle with Tracy underneath. A knee dug into Tracy’s groin. His mouth flew open with a gasp of agony. He knew the fingers had left his throat but he was powerless to move. Then he heard a grunt, saw the dark silhouette of an upraised arm whizzing downward at his skull.

  There was no sense of impact. A spasm of brilliant flame, vivid and edged like a buzz-saw, was the last thing Jerry Tracy remembered. He could see the flame whirl, throwing off fiery chunks like molten baseballs. Then, nothing. …

  The sound of feeble groaning roused him. It was a long time before he realized that the groans came from himself. The back of his head hurt horribly. It was sticky, oozy with blood and his fingertips grated against it like sandpaper. But the pain brought him back to reality. He remembered the murderous attack, the downward whizzing arm. He got one knee under him, bracing himself in the darkness with both palms flat against the floor.

  He felt drunker than he had ever been in his life. But once he was up on his feet, with the hard edge of the telephone desk behind him, he was able to orient himself and to recall the layout of the room. The electric light cord on the floor led him to the lamp.

  He missed the Chinese rug before he missed the body.

  The floor where the bloody rug had lain was now completely bare. Both the rug and the dead millionaire were gone. A sudden wondering thought jerked Tracy’s muddled eyes toward the foot of the stairs. The white fleecy rug was gone, too—the rug on which the bloody imprint of a woman’s slipper had been faintly traced.

  Jerry said slowly, “Whoa! Wait a minute!” with the drowsy gravity of a drunken man.

  He caught hold of the balustrade of the stairs and climbed upward with grim persistence, knowing damned well what he’d find in that upstairs bedroom.

  Nothing!

  The light was out, and he guessed that the window was boarded up before he found and clicked the switch. The woman’s handbag was gone. So were the comb and lipstick. The boarded covering over the window looked as if it had never been moved. Jerry plodded thoughtfully back downstairs.

  Except for a splitting headache and a raw lump at the base of his skull Jerry Tracy had nothing to show for his big sensational murder triangle. The story had slid away from him with the deft speed of the fleeing Pauline Drake. That she was Pauline, Tracy still didn’t doubt for an instant. It was possible that someone else might have been using her car with the monogram. But Drake would not have risked dragging a tabloid columnist in on such a scandalous mess unless he was sure of his evidence.

  The wily David Corning had killed both Drake and the story! Murder wasn’t news—not without a body! Drake in death was still as stubbornly anonymous as if he were already locked in his cabin on the Queen Mary, waiting for the long-drawn hoot of the vessel’s midnight Coronation departure.

  A sudden exclamation came from the Daily Planet’s columnist. He jerked out his watch and glanced at the dial. The hands showed ten minutes past midnight. There was only one thing he could do now: Call police headquarters and get hold of Inspector Fitzgerald. Fitz would look funny when he heard the screwy yarn. The only understandable thing that had happened all evening was the sticky lump on the back of Tracy’s own noggin. No fantasy about that, he thought grimly.

  For the first time in his life Jerry Tracy was in the ridiculous position of a professional wrecker with a stick of Grade A dynamite and no fuse. To allow the slightest hint of what he knew to leak into newsprint would involve more than ridicule at a wild story; it would mean a damned nasty libel suit. The principals in the case were too prominent in society and finance to fool with in the absence of a corpus delicti.

  “O.K.,” Jerry breathed softly. “We’ll get Fitz and we’ll find the body.”

  He reached for the telephone that should have been disconnected, but wasn’t. At this exact moment a cold voice said:

  “Stick ’em up!”

  Tracy whirled—and gasped. So did a lean old man with a blue-barreled gun. He was tall, gray-thatched under a shapeless felt hat, with a florid, ruddy-veined face and eyes like blue mica. Tracy dropped his half-lifted hands.

  “Fitz! Where in hell did you come from?”

  Inspector Fitzgerald growled a vicious reply. His voice was like the rasp of a file; but the rasp came from incredulous amazement, not anger. There was deep-rooted friendship between the pint-sized columnist and this arrow-straight police veteran.

  “I might have known it, you little punk. Killan bet me a buck you’d beat us here somehow. How do you do it—tune in on the corpse?”

  A man, shorter and a lot heavier than Fitzgerald, emerged from the shadow of a velvet drape. He had a square, cobblestone head and a neck like a letter-box. This was Sergeant Killan, Fitz’s right hand and fist on a murder case. Killan looked puzzled but pleased. He held out a pudgy palm to his superior and said, “Give.” Fitz paid him the dollar.

  Killan grinned. “O.K., Jerry. Where’s the body?”

  “There isn’t any. Somebody swiped it.”

  “Huh?” Fitzgerald said.

  “Wait a minute, Fitz. Let’s get this thing straight. How did you know there was a corpse here.”

  “Got a phone call from a west side pay station. The guy that phoned the tip did his talking through a handkerchief. He talked damned fast, too. He was gone before I could rush a squad car to the drug-store. He said if I hopped up fast to Edgar Drake’s town house I’d find a board loose on a rear courtyard window and the old guy dead in his own parlor. Did the lad with the handkerchief phone you first?”

  “It was Drake himself who called me. I was supposed to meet him here.”

  “So what? Didn’t he show up?”

  “He sure did,” Tracy snapped. “The last I saw of him, he was flat on his back on a Chinese rug over there.”

  “What Chinese rug?”

  Tracy told him the whole amazing story with swift, incisive phrases, beginning with the phone call he had from Drake and ending with the arrival of Fitz and Killan.
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br />   “It doesn’t make sense,” Killan growled. “A guy slugs you to get rid of the body and the evidence, then he calls up headquarters and says come and get it. Let’s see that clue you found.”

  Tracy showed it. The sergeant and the inspector examined the object with blank faces. Like Tracy’s story it didn’t make sense.

  “Mind if I keep it?” Jerry asked.

  “Why? Got some kind of an idea about it?”

  “Nope. Not even a hunch. I’d like to sort of hold on to it a while and think about it. It’s no good for prints—no good unless there’s a corpse to make a murder case. I give you my word I’m not trying to hold a thing back. You can have the clue—if it is a clue—whenever you want it.”

  Inspector Fitzgerald had worked with Tracy too often to suspect his motives. Tracy had his own intuitive methods that sometimes brought home the bacon. And when the bacon arrived it always meant one hundred per cent police credit for the long horse-faced inspector. He let Jerry have the ear stopper.

  Then Fitz said abruptly, “Stick around a minute. I want to give this whole dump the once-over. Come on, Killan.”

  The two vanished upstairs after a careful inspection of the spotless reception room. After a while they returned and went down to the basement. Jerry knew they were giving the deserted old mansion a thorough search, but he didn’t have much hope they’d find anything. He improved his time by staring at the telephone and pondering a few interesting questions. He was smiling faintly when the pair drifted back with a gruff, unhappy: “Nuts!” from Killan.

  Fitz stood on stiffly planted legs, chewing morosely at his lip.

  “I’m accepting as gospel everything you’ve said, Jerry. That gives us Drake, his wife and probably David Corning. Corning’s a hell of a smart corporation lawyer. He’d have to be, or Drake wouldn’t hire him. The whole set-up suggests a love triangle with a jealous husband getting the works. But if Corning did it, why should he first cover it up and then call the cops?”

  “I don’t know,” Tracy admitted. “But I can think of three questions for a starter.”

  He told them and Fitz said, “Right,” with sparkling emphasis. He yanked up the phone. He identified himself to the operator and got the exchange man-ager in a hurry.

  “Has this phone been in continuous operation since the Drake home was closed two months ago?”

  “No. It was disconnected up to three days ago. Then we had a request to resume service.”

  “From whom?”

  “From Mrs. Drake. Is—is anything wrong?”

  “No. Forget I called you.”

  Fitz’s second number got him the Cunard pier. From the night superintendent he learned that Edgar Drake had changed his mind and had not sailed on the Queen Mary. A last minute cancellation had come through and Mr. Drake’s baggage had been taken off the liner and left on the pier. He understood that the millionaire had been obliged to leave hurriedly for an unexpectedly important business conference in the Middle West.

  “Did Drake himself cancel his passage?”

  “No, sir. His attorney called up for him. A Mr. David Corning.”

  “Thanks.”

  Fitzgerald glanced approvingly at the impassive face of Tracy. He got back to the operator. After an uneasy wait, he located the number of Corning’s New Jersey home and asked for the lawyer. All he could get was a very dry and very fishy-voiced butler. Mr. Corning was not at home. He was staying overnight in New York on some urgent business connected with Drake Utilities.

  “I’ll say it was urgent,” Fitzgerald muttered. His heavy paw cradled the receiver. “Jerry, are you damned sure that the dame who dived out that upstairs window was Pauline Drake?”

  “I told you I don’t know. But my guess is yes.”

  “All right. Here goes for a Winchester call. Boy, this is going to be ticklish.”

  He held the receiver partly away from his ear, so that the voice on the wire was clearly distinct to Killan and Tracy. Both leaned forward so as not to miss a word.

  “Mrs. Pauline Drake?”

  “Yes. Who is this, please?”

  “I’m sorry to have to bother you at this hour of the night. This is Inspector Fitzgerald of the New York police. We have reason to believe that something serious may have happened to your husband. He seems to have disappeared.”

  “That’s ridiculous. My husband is away on a business trip. He sailed at midnight on the Queen Mary.”

  Fitz’s head half turned. His lips framed a noiseless question: “Is it her?”

  Tracy nodded. He had seen Pauline Drake at too many social functions to miss the calm throatiness of her voice, even on a telephone wire. He was not surprised at her prompt answering of the Westchester phone. Tracy’s long lapse into unconsciousness, plus the time used up since the arrival of Fitz and Killan had given the wife of the dead millionaire ample time to drive back to Westchester.

  “Your husband didn’t sail,” Fitzgerald said deferentially. “He canceled at the last moment.”

  There was soft, indulgent laughter. “That doesn’t mean anything. My husband often does things like that.”

  “The information I have would indicate your husband may have been murdered.”

  Fitz shot it bluntly to her, but all he got was a brief sigh that could have been polite annoyance—anything.

  “There must be some mistake, Inspector. Edgar called me a little after ten tonight. He seemed in excellent spirits over some business deal—a merger out West—something of that sort. Really, Inspector, I—”

  “Did he talk to you personally?”

  Pauline Drake’s voice hesitated for a perceptible instant. The pause was neatly covered, but not quite well enough to deceive the three rigid listeners.

  “As a matter of fact, he talked with Anne Leslie, my secretary. I was out driving in an effort to get rid of a bad headache.”

  She sounded almost conversational. No excitement. No sign of grief or worry. Suddenly the well poised voice hardened.

  “Do I understand you to say that you merely suspect my husband is dead?”

  “We haven’t found his body yet,” Fitz admitted.

  “Then I’d be very careful if I were you,” Pauline Drake replied coolly, “not to start any police wheels turning or to make any fuss in the newspapers. You may be interfering with well meaning zeal in a confidential business trip that doesn’t concern you or the public My husband is a prominent man and might be angry enough to interfere with your police advancement when he returns.”

  Fitzgerald’s ruddy face flushed a deeper crimson at the threat.

  “I have an eye-witness, madam, who will swear he saw your husband on a bloody Chinese rug, with a knife jammed up to the hilt in his chest. You can take my word, Mr. Drake’s dead—corpse or no corpse.”

  “Oh!” There was a long pause. Fitz let it continue. “Very well. I intend to be in New York tomorrow morning. At the Waldorf. If you care to see me, I shall be at your disposal. Will ten o’clock be convenient?”

  “It will,” Fitz said. “Thank you for your cooperation.”

  He hung up with a slow lingering gesture and turned toward Tracy.

  “No publicity, Jerry. We’re both walking on eggs—expensive ones, too! You’re stuck as much as I am. Not a single word about Drake except that he missed the boat.”

  “You’re maligning the Daily Planet, Fitz. The ship newsman will have that item already. I’ll be as mum as an oyster provided I get an exclusive when the case breaks. And provided I’m in on that interview tomorrow morning at the Waldorf.”

  “Did I say no? You’re my star witness, you little punk.”

  “Witness to what?” Killan murmured sourly.

  The three left the empty house via the loosened board over the window of the rear extension. Fitz’s car was out at the curb but Jerry refused a lift in spite of the pouring rain.

  “It’s too much out of your way. I’ll grab a cab over at the avenue and buzz home to bed. My head feels like a hardboiled egg and I ache
all over. See you in the Waldorf lobby at ten tomorrow.”

  Tracy heeled rapidly westward through the rain, head bent, his raincoat flapping. The thought of a double Scotch and a tired dive between cool sheets was a pleasant picture to contemplate. If he was lucky enough to spot an empty cab.

  He was. A taxi was rolling sedately down the deserted avenue, and it swerved in toward the curb at Jerry’s whistle. The driver hooked the door open and Jerry sighed and ducked in. But only for an instant. With one foot on the running-board and the other in the cab, he uttered a startled yelp and threw himself backward. There was a figure crouched on the floor of the cab, hidden up to his eyes by a concealing lap-robe. The eyes and the glint of a pistol barrel spelt stick-up to the startled columnist. He bounced backward to the sidewalk as though he’d been shot from a gun.

  He had no chance to run or even to duck. The taxi chauffeur had piled out of the front seat. He swung a wet fist to Tracy’s jaw and the columnist went down.

  Instantly Tracy was in the midst of a mad, squirming tussle. A heavy body jammed down on his back, shoving his face against the puddled sidewalk. Tracy spat out water and yelled at the top of his lungs. He continued to yell, squirming and kicking as he felt hands probing through his pockets, searching him thoroughly from head to foot. The man on Tracy’s back kept him from turning. A palm cut short Jerry’s shrill cries, but he bit grimly and freed his throat.

  He managed to swing up an arm and clutch blindly at one of the crooks, but the rip of cloth lost him his grip, and the next instant a gun butt against his skull drove his nose flat against the pavement.

  Dazed, he tried to turn over. The crooks were no longer on top of him, but he was too paralyzed to move. He heard the quick slam of the taxi’s door and the roar of its engine. The cab skidded around the corner in a drunken slither. It was gone before Tracy could sit up and unglue his eyes. He was puzzled at the holdup men’s swift flight until he heard the faint blatting of a police whistle far up the avenue. A cop, thank God! The onrushing thud of his slopping brogans made Jerry grin with relief.