But the grin was only momentary. It was replaced by a hard watchfulness. The whole attack had been too pat, too completely managed to be an ordinary stick-up. He had had merely a vague glimpse of the taxi driver’s face and none whatever of the man who had searched his pockets with such desperate, panting haste. Jerry remembered, with a catch of his breath, the clue he had picked up from the body of Edgar Drake. His hat was lying upside down in a puddle and he stuck an anxious finger inside the sweat band. The black-and-red rubber ear gadget was still safely stowed away.
Tracy was on his feet by this time, steadying himself on the sleek, rubber-clad arm of a panting young patrolman. He told a vague story of a crooked cab driver and omitted all mention of the man under the lap-robe. He said he was Harry W. Messer of Harrisburg, Pa. In town for a week’s vacation. Had a few drinks in a little place up in Harlem and, like a fool, had shown a well filled wallet at the bar. The cop wrote this all down in his notebook shielded from the rain by the flap of his raincoat.
“Ain’t hurt much, are you? Want an ambulance?”
“I’m all right. A cab is all I want.”
His eyes had been watching the sidewalk and curb as he talked. There was a sopping wet match-pad lying near the curbstone, green pasteboard with bold yellow lettering. It hadn’t been there when Tracy had hailed the phoney cab. The cop at his elbow was staring up the avenue. Tracy scooped up the match-pad with an innocent bend of his body and slipped it into his pocket. He knew it wasn’t his. It must have fallen from the pocket of his assailant. He remembered his quick clutch and the rip of tearing cloth as the fellow had fled.
He didn’t look at his find until he was on his way again behind a law-abiding hackman. Then he cupped the thing in his palm and changed his mind about going home. The name of a man he hadn’t thought about all evening popped into his mind. Tony Pedley! Pauline Drake’s son by a former marriage. The son Drake hated so!
The printing on the match-pad helped to concentrate his thinking on Tony:
CLUB POM-POM
Entertainment and Dancing
In the Modern Manner
Moderate Cover Charge.
Sure! Tony Pedley played a trumpet in the Club orchestra. Tracy was familiar with his lean, youthful face, his dark, sullen eyes. He had looked the kid over several times after he had wormed out of Fred Hammer, the Pom-Pom’s genial owner, just who Tony really was, and that the kid hated Drake’s guts enough to quit college and take a lousy trumpet job rather than accept a penny of the millionaire’s support. But there might be more to the feud than that—a hell of a lot more.
Tracy leaned forward suddenly and slid back the front glass panel.
“Do you know a good clean place where I can wash up and get some of this mud off my face? Somewhere in the neighborhood?”
“Sure.”
He swung around a corner and braked in front of a small all-night Grill and Bar. “Cleanest washroom around here. I use it myself.”
“Wait here. I’ll be out in a minute.”
There was nobody inside but a sleepy counterman. He looked mildly startled as the bedraggled columnist walked in.
“S’matter, pal? Take a nose-dive somewhere?”
“Yeah. I almost got it on the tail from a hit-run down at the corner. Where’s the washroom?”
“Straight back. To your left.”
Ten minutes later Tracy was in his taxi, clean as a whistle, heading for the Club Pom-Pom. The bump at the base of the skull was still messy, but his upturned coat collar took care of that. He kept thinking about Pauline Drake’s son. The kid was young but plenty hefty in the shoulders. He could easily have been the guy who’d knocked him cold in the mansion on 56th and the guy in the taxi, too.
The Club Pom-Pom was still going strong. A hot swing number had the customers doing epileptic things on a packed dance floor. Everybody was half-canned and noisy. Tracy shot a quick glance toward the orchestra and then slid unobtrusively along the rear wall toward his favorite table near the curtained angle of Fred Hammer’s office. The waiter grinned and brought Jerry’s usual. Hammer drifted through the curtains before the columnist was half through his double Scotch.
“Hi, Jerry! I thought you hated rain.”
“I do. That’s why I’m mixing it with Scotch. How’s biz?”
“Not bad.” He eyed the noisy bedlam and his face crinkled pleasantly. “When they yell, they spend. You like?”
Tracy made a wry face. “All except the trumpet player. He’s lousy.”
Hammer chuckled delightedly. “Trust you to notice that! The punk is a substitute; we had to hire him on short notice. Tony took a run-out tonight. Left us short a trumpet.”
“Uh-huh?” Tracy sipped. “Nice guy!”
“Not the way you say it. The kid really is nice. He has a bum stomach. Sat around looking sick and unhappy. I didn’t have the heart to stop him when he slipped out to grab some fresh air. He phoned in from a drug-store, saying he was sicker than a pair of pups. Sent for that punk to play out the night for him. Listen to that corny blast! The band leader’s sore as hell and you can’t blame him. … ’Nother drink?”
“Nope. Nice Scotch, but I want bed. So long, Fred.”
He took one of the club’s gyp cabs home. He paid the exact legal fare plus a quarter, and the driver grinned at his famous little fare.
“Night, Mr. Tracy.”
Jerry wished by now that he had taken that second drink. The lump under his turned up raincoat collar felt like hot roast beef. And his thinking was just as painful. One more question mark to play with. His cock-sure suspicion of Drake’s clever lawyer looked anemic in the light of Tony Pedey’s midnight ramblings. Maybe Corning wasn’t in the mess at all, except maybe to cover a murder for Tony’s sake, or rather Pauline’s. It was Tracy’s business to know the town’s rumors, and he was aware of divorce trouble between Pauline Drake and her husband. Pauline wanted to be free and Drake had said no—with gestures, if Tracy’s info was correct. Her son, Tony, had made threats that if Drake didn’t step out of the picture and allow Pauline an uncontested suit, he’d find a way to force him, millions or no millions.
Tracy took his unsolved questions into his penthouse suite—and Butch handed him still another.
The big, pug-nosed valet was sprawled in a deep leather chair in the living-room, with his bare feet propped up on a hassock. He was glaring at the telephone desk with an expression of deep animosity. Except for peppermint-striped pajama pants, Butch was as solidly naked as an ox and looked something like one. So intent was his baleful scrutiny of the phone that he failed to notice the soft-footed arrival of his employer until Tracy murmured, “How were the prelims tonight at the Garden? Did your boy win?”
Ordinarily Butch would have grunted, grinned, scratched his matted chest with a slow fingernail. But tonight even Butch was screwy!
“Where the hell have you been?” he growled.
“Huh?”
“You been sleepin’ with anybody?”
For the first time in his wise-cracking life Tracy stared at Butch without a comeback. The infernal impudence of the question made his jaw sag. But before he could spark into anger, Butch was gabbling confused talk. The big fellow wasn’t impudent; he was scared.
“Honest, Jerry, I been on pins and needles. The phone’s been ringin’ every five minutes. Every damn columnist in town is on your tail tonight. A lot of ’em that hate your guts. Nick White called up twice from the Chronicle.”
“That guy?” Tracy looked suddenly as if he had bitten into a mouse. “What did he want?”
“I’m trying to tell yuh. Jeez, Jerry, if you been playin’ around, I hope you didn’t leave yourself wide open for a punch. Somebody tipped those wolves. They all want to know about a date you had tonight. Were you sleepin’ with some dame? That’s the idea I got from the dirty laughs.”
Tracy’s hand moved unconsciously toward the lump under the collar of his raincoat.
“I slept alone,” he said grimly. “And I’d
like to know just how in the name of Hades—”
The phone began to ring. He pivoted and grabbed it.
“Yeah?”
It was Nick White. Tracy tightened as he heard the oily chuckle of the Chronicle’s columnist.
“Hello, Casanova. I’ve been hearing a little dirt.”
“You should. You’ve always got your ear in a spittoon.”
Nick’s voice cracked back:
“I got a tip that I’d get a grand story if I could find out from you where and under what circumstances you took an hour’s sleep tonight.”
Jerry thought fast. He knew exactly what had happened. The mysterious lad who had telephoned Inspector Fitzgerald that Drake’s murdered body was lying in his boarded-up town house had pulled the same little stunt on Tracy himself. Somebody seemed deliberately anxious that Drake’s body be found—and found in a blaze of newspaper publicity. Otherwise why drag Jerry into it with a provocatively phrased tip to every one of his columnist rivals?
Tracy’s prompt laugh on the wire was twice as nasty as Nick White’s.
“I knew you’d fall for it. You’re the sixth sap that’s called up. Thanks for an easy grand.”
“What do you mean I’m the sixth? What’s the gag?”
“Did the fellow who phoned you that tip sound as if he was gargling through a handkerchief?”
“Maybe he did. So what?”
“A thousand bucks, sap! I always get bright ideas when it rains. I bet a friend of mine that I could get six of my worst enemies out of bed to inquire after my health. It’s been a real pleasure to hear from you. Good night, Stinker.”
“Why you dirty little ——”
Jerry banged the phone. He was feeling better again. But as he squirmed out of his raincoat he grimaced. Butch’s eyes rounded as he saw the blood-matted lump that had been concealed by Tracy’s coat collar.
“Jerry! For the luva Joe Louis! Where did you—”
“Forget it. G’wan to bed. I’m all right.”
“C’mere, you!” When Butch got gruffly paternal like that, there was no arguing with him. He shoved Jerry into the bathroom and snapped on the light. “Stay there, Scrapper, till I get me kit.”
His kit was a ratty little leather bag that contained all the implements and unguents that Butch used when he seconded friends of his at the ringside. Jerry winced at the realistic treatment.
“Shuddup! You ain’t hoit bad. That bum I seconded tonight was worse off than you before the foist round was over. Hold still till I clip the hair away.”
It hurt like the dickens and then felt magically better.
Butch spun Jerry around.
“Jeez, your chin is bruised, too. How’d you get it?”
“A guy hit me and I hit the sidewalk.”
“Bigger than you, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Tch, Tch. Look, Jerry, you’re a pretty good little featherweight, but you ain’t in condition, and even if you was, gutter fightin’ is the bunk.” He tightened the adhesive straps and patted the neat bandage with a brief, loving pressure. “O.K. Now if you’ll just tell me the name of the big lug who—”
“Go to bed,” Jerry grinned. He poured himself a stifle peg of Scotch and downed it. “Turn out the lights like a good guy. Call me first thing in the morning. I’ve got four people toll dream about and I don’t want to over-sleep.”
Four people was right! Pauline Drake and two men who loved her: her son, Tony Pedley, and her dead husband’s lawyer, David Corning. The guy on the phone made the fourth. Jerry knew it was silly to think of him as the murderer—Jerry had never yet heard of a murderer who wanted the body fourth—but a queer hunch continued. He fell asleep wondering about it.
At ten o’clock sharp the next morning Jerry Tracy met Inspector Fitzgerald and Sergeant Killan in the lobby of the Waldorf. He had already read all the morning papers for the news concerning Edgar Drake. There wasn’t much but it hit the front page. The thing that had made Tracy frown, as he read, was the emphasis. It was all about Drake Utilities. The vast railroad and industrial empire of the missing millionaire appeared to be on a bullish upward movement. Wall Street was apparently not disturbed by vast sudden cancellation of Drake’s European trip. The news account ended with a reassuring statement from David Corning pointing out that Drake’s sudden departure for the West was to sign papers for a vast new merger with a competing rival. Tracy had looked at yesterday’s closing prices on the stock market page. Drake Utilities was up two points and a half.
Tracy rode up in the elevator with Fitz and Killan to the spacious tower suite Mrs. Drake had reserved from Westchester by telephone. It was exactly four times bigger than the miserly one-room apartment her husband had occupied the preceding day.
The door was opened by a very pretty blonde who nodded and ushered the three men in. Behind her, Killan caught Tracy’s eye and his lips formed a noiseless and approving: “Not bad.” To Tracy the girl looked definitely tired, perhaps frightened. He wasn’t sure of the latter. He got it from the stiffness of her shoulders, the rigid way she walked as she preceded them to a gorgeous, sun-drenched living-room.
A tall dark-haired woman had risen from a couch, her glance serenely questioning. Tracy had seen her a dozen times before on opening nights and at swanky receptions, but the effect was just the same as ever. He gulped as he knew Fitz was doing. Killan’s mouth hung open.
It was as though the blond secretary had disappeared from the room, although she was standing almost at Pauline Drake’s elbow. The older woman’s beauty made the fresh prettiness of her secretary fade to something pert and silly. It wasn’t Pauline’s face or her faultless figure; it was something deeper in the dark eyes that made men bend attentively at sight of her. The charm and poise of maturity. The blonde was the bud; Pauline Drake was the breathlessly perfect flowering.
“Inspector Fitzgerald, I presume?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Fitz mumbled.
“And these other gentlemen?”
Tracy said nasally, “And Mr. Jerry Tracy of the Daily Planet.”
She ignored him. “Do you think, Inspector, that it was quite fair to bring a newspaper reporter?”
“Not a reporter, Mrs. Drake,” Tracy corrected swiftly. “An eye-witness to a murder.”
He snapped it out brutally, his eyes watching both women narrowly. They took the challenge like thoroughbreds. The flick of terror in the blond secretary’s eyes was instantly covered; Pauline Drake showed nothing but a well-bred incredulity.
The pause was broken by a sardonic masculine voice from a far corner of the room. A man had risen from a deep armchair whose tall back had concealed him from view.
“Are you bringing us a sensational news item, Mr. Tracy, or an accusation of some sort? I find it hard to decide from your tone.”
He came forward, smiling courteously; a medium-sized man with a large handsome head and pleasant brown eyes.
“Mr. David Corning,” Pauline said with a faint intake of relieved breath. “My husband’s legal adviser, and—mine. Naturally I consulted him after your peculiar phone message last night, Inspector. Anne and I thought—pardon me, this is Anne Leslie, my secretary.”
There were awkward how-de-does, cut through by Corning’s amused voice. There was a whiplash at the tip of his polite drawl. “Would it be too much to ask you to repeat your eye-witness story of Mr. Drake’s alleged death?”
“That’s what I came here for.” Tracy said.
He repeated carefully everything that had happened the night before, beginning with the moment Edgar Drake had telephoned him his angry suspicion of his wife’s fidelity. When he described the flight of the woman from the upstairs bedroom window Corning chuckled dryly.
“Do you attend many motion pictures, Mr. Tracy?”
Tracy didn’t answer. Pauline’s face was dead white, but she kept her head high, her gaze directly at the Daily Planet’s columnist. Tracy suppressed only his finding of the rubber ear-stopple and the subsequent attack on him
in the rain.
“It’s utterly ridiculous,” Pauline gasped. “My husband never—”
Corning stopped her with a light touch of his hand on hers. Her face flushed at the brief contact; she seemed to sway toward him, then checked herself. Corning’s face, too, was pinker. The friendliness was gone from his calm voice. His words were like the clink of ice.
“I don’t, of course, believe this wild yarn for one moment. The whole preposterous story rests on the unsupported word of a man who—pardon—who makes his living on hints, winks and gutter innuendo. You choose to ignore my own reasonable explanation for Mr. Drake’s departure. Instead, you invent a body, conveniently missing. You frame an imaginary—”
Tracy kept his temper. His finger touched the neat little bandage Butch had taped on the back of his skull.
“You think this lump is imaginary?”
“I’m not interested in the mementos of your barroom brawls, Mr. Tracy. In fact, I’m not interested in you at all. I merely want to point out to Inspector—”
He reached a sinewy hand to swing the columnist out of his path, but Tracy beat the angry lawyer to it. Corning went abruptly back on his heels from the straight-arm shove and Jerry rasped a point-blank question at Pauline Drake.
“Where was your son last night?”
The shot was a bull’s-eye. The woman quivered as if she had been struck. Her mouth flew open and her rigid control left her. She began to stammer.
“My—my son has nothing to do with this. I haven’t seen him lately. Don’t you dare attempt to—”
Corning stopped her frightened babble. This time he cupped her shoulder protectingly, held her close to him. Tracy was aware of the possessive tenderness of the man’s gesture, the answering flaring from the woman. These two were in love!
“You’ve had divorce trouble with your husband, Mrs. Drake?” he said quickly.
“Perhaps. What of it?”
“Don’t answer him,” Corning snapped.
“You don’t have to,” Tracy told her. “It’s my business to know things like that. For the past six months your life with Drake had been a living hell. You asked him for a divorce and he laughed at you. He told you that if you tried to get one in his absence, he’d use his millions to smirch you and ruin you. Your son knew that. He went to Westchester three weeks ago and threatened Drake. He told Drake that unless he agreed to a quiet divorce—he’d kill him. He even gave him a deadline. The deadline was midnight last night, when the Queen Mary sailed. … I’m not asking you any of this; I’m telling you.”
Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter Page 68