His eyes glanced briefly downward at his feet and lifted again. The murderer crouched behind him didn’t see that glance. But Fitz did.
Tracy let his upraised arms sag deliberately until the savage whisper behind him snarled: “Keep ’em high or I’ll split your spine open!” Tracy wanted Fred Hammer to keep thinking about his hands—not his feet. He had stepped on the trailing edge of his shoelace and had drawn one foot gently sidewise, pulling the loose bow of the lace open.
He felt the crafty shove of Hammer behind him. He stopped the killer’s shielded progress across the room with a jeering whisper that held a touch of his nasal Broadway arrogance:
“Well, I gummed it at the end, Fred. But you’ve got to admit that I pick winners.”
The pistol muzzle hurt Tracy’s spine. But the slow double-shuffle halted.
Fitz was like carved granite across the room. He kept his hands high, his eyes away from Tracy’s feet.
“How did you know it was me, wise guy?” Hammer snarled.
“Easy.” Tracy crammed complacency into his brief chuckle. “You’re the guy that tipped Drake to the presence of Pauline and Corning in this house. You’re also the guy who called up the police and the columnists of a half-dozen newspapers. You planned it to look like a love triangle. When I butted in, you tried to ring me in, too. But the trouble was you dropped that rubber ear-stopple. You didn’t discover it until you had tipped the cops. Then you came racing back here, but it was too late. By that time I’d been cracked on the skull by Corning and he’d hidden the corpse. You see, Corning and Pauline both thought Tony Pedley had done the job. Tony was the only one who knew about the secret appointment—until you innocently wormed it out of him. Tony was never near this house last night. He was trying to cover Corning and his mother—until I showed him the clue left by the real murderer. And Corning was trying to protect Tony.”
“I still don’t get it,” Fitz insisted stubbornly from across the room.
Tracy heard Hammer chuckling behind him. The columnist had managed to twist his left foot free from the loosened laces. Very gently he slid his stocking heel, then his toes out of the low-cut shoe.
“You tell him, Hammer. Pedley got wise to you, just before he locked us in that bathroom. He recognized the ear-stopple. Right?”
“Right. I guessed the kid would make a bee-line to Corning to tell him what he’d found out. I got rid of you and trailed him. Shot him through the rear window just as an El train went by—but not till Corning had admitted to him where the body was hidden. The kid died before he could tell Corning who I was.”
Pauline Drake uttered a faint, choked, dreadful sound. Her face drained dead as ashes. Then she said—and the quietness of her voice was more violent than hysterics, more dreadful than a scream: “You killed Tony? You killed my son?”
Corning raised his manacled arms in a futile gesture to comfort her—to catch her. She had fallen headlong on the floor.
Hammer’s crooked exultation vanished. He said in a hard undertone: “Get going, Tracy. Take it slow ahead of me to that hall doorway. If anybody breathes, I’ll start a slaughter!”
Tracy’s stocking foot felt gently for the lamp cord on the floor. He hadn’t looked at it since that first downward glance. Now he felt the ridge of it under his foot and his toes curled around in a taut grip.
The stiffening of his muscles warned Hammer. He saw the extended foot, yelled.
Tracy flung himself flat as his toes jerked the cord.
The lamp toppled and crashed, plunging the room into pitch darkness. Streaks of flame from Hammer’s guns pierced the blackness. But Tracy had twisted against the killer’s knees and his furious clutch brought the man down.
A bullet blasted past Tracy’s ear, deafening him. His fumbling grasp caught at the hot barrel, shoving it convulsively away. Hammer had lost one of his guns in that mad tangle of arms and legs. His free hand closed on Tracy’s throat. Gasping, Tracy fought to keep the jerking muzzle of the gun averted.
Then there was a quick thud of approaching feet, a desperate squirm of Hammer—and the roar of a police positive. Tracy felt the killer’s body bounce under the bullet’s impact. His limp weight pinned Jerry’s chest and shoulder to the floor.
The silence that followed was broken by the faint, thoroughly scared whisper of the Daily Planet’s columnist.
“I—I think you’d better light a match, Fitz.”
The beam of a pocket torch played through the darkness like a bright tunnel. Fitz was crouched alertly about six feet away. He had knocked Pauline Drake and Anne Leslie headlong as he sprang to the aid of Tracy, but he hadn’t had time to shoot the killer. Sergeant Killan had attended to that.
Killan was on one knee next to Hammer’s faintly squirming body. The sergeant’s broken arm still hung limply at his side, the fingers dripping blood. But there was nothing wrong with Killan’s left hand—or the gun either.
Tracy got up, swayed, fell down again. Fitz steadied him.
“You hurt?”
“I’m all right. I just—” He didn’t get sick, but the successful throttling down of his heaving stomach brought cold beads of sweat out on his forehead. “I just can’t take it, I guess.”
Killan grinned. “The hell you can’t, Jerry. That trick with the lamp cord was a darb. I was bettin’ a thousand to one against your spine being a target.”
He glanced at Hammer with a bleak, professional brevity.
“Not bad for a blind target—with a pal of mine all wrapped around him. He’ll last about twenty minutes. With luck.”
He added, in puzzled tones, “Why did the dope sneak back here anyway? Was he after Corning?”
Tracy shook his head.
“Hammer was after the body. He heard Corning tell Pedley where it was concealed before he shot the kid through the window. He had to get Drake’s body discovered in a hurry in order to cash in on his short-selling coup in Wall Street. So he dragged the body out, but before he could call the police and scram, Corning arrived here, desperate to sneak the corpse away from the house to protect Tony, and Pauline’s fortune from a market crash. Hammer heard him coming and ducked behind the Chinese screen.”
Across the room Inspector Fitzgerald was already hanging up the phone. Corning’s hands were no longer cuffed in narrow steel bands. They were spread wide and tightly, and Pauline Drake was inside the lawyer’s arms. They were both shaking with emotion. Tears poured down her white cheeks but Corning, curiously, was making most of the noise.
“Darling, oh, darling, darling!” she said.
She reached up and touched his lips fumblingly with her finger-tips. Tracy got a straight look at her eyes and at Corning’s. They couldn’t see him but he turned away. He had a funny feeling that for the first time in his irreligious life he’d been in church.
Fitz’s low voice was at his ear.
“How in the hell did you tie up those rubber ear-stopples to Hammer?”
“The guy that slugged me to get ’em back dropped a match-pad from the Pom-Pom Club. When Pedley was killed, I suddenly thought of Hammer. He’d been willing to go with me to Pedley’s apartment, but the minute Pedley recognized the clue and locked us up, Hammer was twice as eager to get away from me. I beat it down to the Pom-Pom, showed the clue to the hat-check girl, and she spilled the answer. You remember how noisy it is at the Pom-Pom? Fred always wore them in his ears when he figured up accounts in his rear cubby. Couldn’t concentrate on business with the noise of that swing band slashing through the velvet drapes. I slid into his office and found the duplicate tucked away in a pasteboard box in one of the desk cubby-holes. As simple as that.”
“How about this Amos Brandt business? Did you find a broker’s memo there?”
Tracy shook his head.
“That was pure luck, Fitz. Before I could scram the phone rang. It was Hammer’s broker, calling him up to tell him that Drake Utilities was still climbing. He wanted fifty thousand additional cash to cover the margin on Amos Brandt’s short-s
elling speculation. No wonder Hammer was so nuts to find Drake’s hidden body. He had to bring it to public notice and drop the stock or be wiped out.”
“There’s more to it than greed,” Fitz said. “Hammer must have hated Drake’s guts. I’ve got a hunch you’ll dig up a hell of a big scandal before you’re finished with the Drake family.”
“I’ve got a hunch I won’t!” Tracy snapped. “What kind of a louse do you think I am!”
There was nastiness in his tone, challenge in every line of his shrewd little face. But he was smiling, too. He kept staring at Fitz, and after a moment the big horse-faced inspector flushed and nodded.
“You’re going to forget for once in your life that you’re a dirt columnist, eh? Give a couple of people a break, eh?” His glance swung toward Pauline and Corning, then back to Tracy. “Damned if I don’t think you’re decent.”
“If you think so, sue me!” Jerry Tracy said harshly, but there was pleasure in his eyes.
NO MORE LIMERICKS
Jerry Tracy strikes at labor killings
JERRY TRACY SCOWLED AT the elevator man who was dropping him from Jack Davy’s apartment to the street level. Jerry’s stomach was pleasantly distended with beer and cheese sandwiches. His annoyance had nothing to do with the food or the elevator man. He was sore at Jack Davy,
Jack had just had the gall to ask if there was anything serious back of that silly limerick Tracy had printed in last Tuesday’s column of the Daily Planet. And Jack was the nitwit who had started the whole mess!
Tracy had told him savagely, “Ssh! Don’t expose me, pal, but it’s true. I’m really a heel! I run half the rackets in this town.”
He had said the same thing, bitterly, to a dozen other friends in the past three days—including Inspector Fitzgerald, who should have had more sense. Funny how a feeble little joke could turn so damned sour!
Tracy was a victim of his own disinclination to kick out friends who dropped into his office on rainy days. Like a sap, he had listened to Jack Davy and his blasted string of limericks. Worse, he had fiddled idly with his typewriter after Jack had gone. It had been a dull day for snappy items and Tracy had needed an amusing filler. So he’d typed a few lines batting out what he thought was a mild joke for the customers, and boxed the whole thing at the head of his column.
After that, the deluge!
The lines of the idiotic jingle stuck in Tracy’s mind. He could stare at the wall of the descending elevator and see the cold black type that had given the town’s gossips a chance to lift smart eyebrows and exchange wise whispers:
POPULAR IDEA OF A BROADWAY COLUMNIST
When the last scandal item is in,
I can still earn a living from sin—
I’m a pal to the mugg,
And the lug and the thug—
And, my Gawd, how the money
rolls in!
The elevator man yawned and headed for a chair at the rear of the lobby. Tracy walked grumpily to the street.
His annoyance increased as he stepped into the stinging impact of sleet cutting through the black night. Hail bounced off Tracy’s hat-brim, crunched like frozen sand under his feet. He slipped and fell awkwardly to one knee as he started toward the curb.
His darkened car was parked across the street behind two or three others.
The sight of it made Tracy forget his grouch. Even under the milky blur of the storm, that car was a double-barreled honey! It was a brand-new sport sedan, sleek as a bubble, with all the gadgets, from the stainless steel nude on its radiator cap to the streamlined trunk in the rear.
Tracy didn’t quite like the idea of driving his brand-new boat along streets like glass. He could easily call up the garage and have somebody drive the car back while he took a taxi. Or he could put on chains and take a chance on a skid.
Unlocking the trunk, he fumbled irresolutely in the interior. The chains were there. They jingled at his touch. Sleet beat against his bent shoulder and pelted him in the ear.
He had no warning of the girl’s presence until a sudden clutch at his arm spun him on the slippery pavement and almost upset him.
The girl was panting. Quick puffs of vapor came from her throat. She cried, “Hide me! Hurry up!”
“Huh?” Tracy’s defensive arm lowered.
He saw the fur coat first, then her legs below the coat. The girl had no shoes on. There was nothing between her feet and the frozen pavement except the cobweb thinness of silk stockings. Her fur coat was only partly buttoned. Tracy caught a glimpse of the wreck of a white evening gown. It had been ripped from one shoulder. There was a jagged scratch of blood on the bared flesh running partly downward toward the swell of the girl’s breast under the white cobweb of her bandeau.
“Please!” she begged. “Help me hide!”
She had evidently been running fast and hard. Her hair was disheveled, but she was easy to look at. Tracy’s quick glance at her stockinged feet and her scratched shoulder didn’t blind him to the fact that the girl was a stunning beauty. Dark-eyed, dark-haired, she swayed under the lash of sleet like a long-stemmed orchid. Her high cheekbones and the slight slant to her eyes registered automatically in Tracy’s observant mind. Russian? Polish?
Her fingers were still vise-like on Tracy’s arm. She shoved him aside with a strength that surprised the columnist. With a lithe bend of her body, she crawled hastily inside the opened trunk at the rear of his sedan.
“Lock it!”
Tracy was turning the key before he realized he was obeying. He stared up and down the street, wondering if anyone had witnessed the girl’s swift appearance and disappearance. There was no one in sight.
The girl couldn’t have rushed from the front entrance of the near-by apartment house; the hallman would have noticed her frantic appearance and barged out after her. She had probably raced from the rear service alley where a dim light glowed above a wide-open gate.
Something about her Slavic beauty teased Tracy’s memory. He was certain he had never seen her before in his life. Yet the formation of her face reminded Jerry of somebody she resembled. He couldn’t focus his memory. It annoyed him.
So did the bouncing fury of the sleet. The icy little pellets stung like buckshot. Tracy hunched his chin into his coat collar and unlocked the door of his sedan. He slid behind the wheel and sat there, feeling a little foolish, listening to the click of hail against his windshield. He didn’t switch on his lights.
He thought, uneasily: “Now what?”
Then he saw the man.
The fellow came running so fast from the service alley that his feet slid out from under him on the turn, and he went skating along the glassy sidewalk on the back of his neck. He was up in an instant, glaring through the blur of the sleet.
There were three or four darkened cars parked closer to the man than Tracy’s. He approached them swiftly, peering into each. One hand remained stiffly in a pocket of his coat. “Gun,” Tracy thought. His heart expanded with a quick lift of excitement.
He had no idea whether the girl curled up inside his locked trunk was a sneak thief or a pet-and-run virgin. He didn’t much care now. He could smell the unpleasant stink of trouble blowing his way unless he pulled a quick sneak. He stepped on his starter.
As it whirred, the man with one hand in his pocket straightened. He hauled around from his inspection of the other cars and darted toward Tracy’s. He caught at the door handle, wrenched it open. His face was distorted with fury.
“Wait a minute, you!”
The sedan’s engine was already roaring. Tracy cut it to a murmur which died almost instantly in the freezing weather. He turned around, pretending anger, but making sure his hands were in plain sight on the rim of his wheel.
“What the hell’s the idea yanking my door open like that? What do you want?”
The man had been peering watchfully over Tracy’s shoulder into the rear of the sedan. Suddenly he blinked and shrugged. His lips twisted in a sheepish grimace. But Tracy sensed a deadly tensi
on behind the grin.
“Sorry, Mac, I wasn’t trying to get tough. I—I guess I’m a little excited. Did you see a girl run out of that apartment alley a minute ago?”
He had a square, fleshy face with rather full lips. There was liquor on his breath, but no haze of drunkenness in his eyes. They were hard, clear, watchful; like wet, gray stones. As he leaned closer, Tracy saw a trickle of blood on his forehead near the hollow of his left temple. Something circular and solid had banged the man with bruising effect. The spiked heel of a woman’s slipper could have done the trick nicely.
“A girl?” Tracy said. He let his gaze and the tone of his voice prod the man into awkward explanation.
“My wife. She just ran out on me. We had an argument. She’s pretty tight. Ran out in her stocking feet. I’m afraid she’ll—”
“I didn’t see her,” Tracy said.
He knew it was a mistake the moment he said it. He could see the man’s forehead wrinkle, estimating time. Barely a minute had elapsed between the girl’s disappearance and the man’s arrival. Tracy should have told him that the girl had rushed down the street and had darted into a doorway somewhere. But it was too late now!
“You didn’t see her?”
“No.”
“You’re a dirty little liar!”
His clenched hand jerked from his pocket. The gun was a small one, but the muzzle was not more than three inches from Tracy’s ribs.
“Reach back and snap on your dome light. Unlock the rear door.”
Tracy obeyed. The man took a quick look at the lap-robe that hung in bunched folds from a chromium bar. He made sure that no one was crouched on the floor under the bulky material of the robe.
“Satisfied?” Tracy said, trying to start the car again.
“Like hell! She wasn’t in any of those other cars. She’s got to be in yours. Get out and open that trunk!”
Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter Page 71