Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter

by Tinsley, Theodore A.

  Whirling, Tracy ran back into the apartment house. To the startled hallman he shot a quick order.

  “Eddie! Get outside and watch my car. Don’t let anyone go near it until I come back!”

  He dashed for the elevator and ran it upstairs himself. He kept a finger on his bell button until Butch came stumbling to let him in. Butch was in his underwear, fuzzy-eyed, half asleep.

  “Hey, Jeeze, what the—”

  Tracy raced to a desk and grabbed duplicate auto keys. He was darting toward the foyer when he suddenly stopped. The sight of his phone gave him an idea. He was still eager for a check-up on that first mysterious phone call Vera had made. The last two numbers might mean something to Leo Pelman. He grabbed the phone.

  But Pelman didn’t answer. After listening to three long rings, Tracy banged down the receiver.

  Butch grabbed him by the arm. “What’s wrong, boss? Wait’ll I pull on me pants and I’ll—”

  “Go to bed! I don’t need you.”

  They were still arguing about it when the phone bell rang. It was Leo Pelman. The reporter sounded elated, excited.

  “I promised to call you back, Jerry.”

  “I just tried to get you.”

  Pelman chuckled. “Keep your shirt on. I heard the bell, but I was knee-deep in stuff about the Chanler strike.”

  “Do you know anyone whose phone number ends in 7-3?”

  “No. Why?”

  Tracy didn’t waste time trying to explain. “Listen, Leo! Get dressed as fast as you can. Grab a cab and go up to Ed Spane’s apartment. Wait outside for me. And, listen, bring a gun!”

  He could hear the startled gasp of the Daily Planet’s labor expert. “What’s the idea, Jerry?”

  Tracy told him about Vera, her theft of Tracy’s keys, her unsuccessful effort to recover whatever she had hidden in the trunk of his sedan.

  “She’s heading back to Spane’s. I’m going to cover that conference if it kills me. I want you to back me up.”

  Pelman hesitated. Then he said in a strange tone: “Jerry, I hate to get personal. Is your angle on this thing clean?”

  “What the hell do you mean?”

  “There’s been some funny talk about you all over town. You ran a limerick in your column—”

  “Are you going to bring that up? It was a joke, a gag. It was supposed to be funny. … Will you meet me or not?”

  “I’ll meet you,” Pelman said slowly,

  Tracy banged down the receiver. “Go to bed, Butch! I’ll explain later.”

  He raced to the elevator and dropped himself downward to the street. The hallman was still watching Tracy’s parked car.

  “Anything happen while I was gone?”

  “Yeah. That dame who took that taxi drove back. She must a just circled the block. She stopped right next to your sedan and started to hop out. Then I came running from the doorway and she changed her mind. She went away fast in the cab.”

  “Thanks.”

  Tracy bent swiftly in the whirl of snowflakes and unlocked the sedan’s trunk. He searched the interior with quick thoroughness. He found something tucked under one of his tire chains. It was part of a page torn from a newspaper.

  Staring at it, Tracy had a sudden sick feeling. He was staring at one of his own columns, torn from the Daily Planet.

  It was idiotic, a mad coincidence, but there it was! The thing that Vera had stolen from Spane was something that pointed at Tracy himself. His eyes ran down it mechanically, looking for an answer to the riddle. A bunch of social gossip that didn’t mean a thing. No marks on it, no paragraph underlined.

  Tracy placed it in his wallet with fingers that were not quite steady. Why should Spane pull a gun to get back one of Tracy’s columns? And what did Vera mean by that sullen remark of hers when Tracy had first questioned her? “I’m sorry I dragged you into this. Or did I drag you in?”

  He slid behind his wheel and drove hard and fast through the storm toward Ed Spane’s apartment.

  There was no sign of Vera’s taxi outside. Tracy parked at the curb and waited for Pelman. He had a gun with him, and the feel of the weapon sparked his impatience. He got out and locked the car. The wind whipped at his coattails and sifted snow down his collar. The street was like a sheeted tomb. And still no sight of the leisurely Pelman.

  Tracy was afraid to wait downstairs too long. He entered the apartment’s dimly lit lobby. It was after midnight and the doorman had gone off duty. The house was one of those self-service elevator places. Tracy located Spane’s apartment by inspecting the names tucked below the letter boxes. He rode the elevator to the fifth floor.

  Listening outside Spane’s door, he could hear the subdued mumble of voices. A man and a woman. He waited until the woman’s voice lifted, then his jaw hardened. Vera! She sounded shrill with fright. She was arguing about something. Tracy caught the quick syllables of his own name.

  Drawing his gun, he rang the bell. The voices ceased inside. There was silence for a moment. Then heavy feet approached the door.

  “Who is it?”

  “Jerry Tracy. Open up, Spane! I want to talk to you.”

  “I told you he’d come back,” Vera’s voice sobbed.

  “Shut up!” Spane growled. “Oke, Tracy. Wait a minute!”

  The bolt on the door slid back. Tracy lifted his gun and set himself for trouble.

  But the face that peered at him from the open doorway startled him so that he recoiled with instinctive amazement. It wasn’t Ed Spane! It was a younger man with a hard, frightened face and blazing eyes. Tracy had barely time to see the deep cleft of a dimple in the man’s chin when a hand clutched at the columnist and yanked him headlong into the darkened room.

  Tracy tried to jerk up his gun. He was no match for the strength of his foe. The weapon was wrenched from his hand. A rap on the skull dropped him, stunned, to his knees. Another blow filled his brain with blazing pinwheels.

  He went down on his face, and a knee jammed into his limp backbone.

  He could hear Vera scream in a fading faraway echo: “For God’s sake, don’t hurt him! Don’t, don’t!”

  The weight lifted from his body. Footsteps raced away. Somewhere—thousands of miles from Tracy’s blurred consciousness—a door slammed. Then silence. …

  Tracy fought against the blackness that was blotting out his senses. Gritting his teeth, he pushed himself up from the floor. He took a blind, dizzy step and fell over an unseen chair. That was all he remembered.

  The sound of his own groaning brought him back to reality. The chair he had fallen over helped him. He leaned on it till the blackness of the room stopped rolling like a ship at sea. His probing hand touched the cool surface of a wall. He found a light switch and clicked the room into yellow brilliance.

  It was empty, of course. Vera and Roy Chanler had taken it on the lam down the back stairs. Tracy knew his assailant was Chanler. That dimpled cleft in his chin recalled Leo Pelman’s sardonic description of the mill owner. “A guy with a cute dimple in his chin and eight million dollars!”

  Tracy thought suddenly of Ed Spane. With a sinking feeling of horror, he began to move from room to room, searching for Spane’s body. But tonight his hunches weren’t working. Dead or alive, Spane was nowhere to be found. Having peered hastily into a bedroom, a bathroom and a small kitchen, Tracy returned to the living-room.

  His watch was still running. He was surprised to discover that barely five minutes had elapsed since he had noted the time in the ascending elevator. Chanler’s blows had been hastily delivered. Tracy had been stunned rather than knocked cold.

  There was still a faint chance of picking up the trail of the fugitives.

  However, glancing toward the desk of the missing Ed Spane, Tracy saw something that brought a startled exclamation from him. There was a pile of tabloid newspapers on the union official’s desk. They had all been folded open to an inner page. Every one of them was a Daily Planet.

  A familiar double column of newsprint met Tracy’s incred
ulous gaze:

  BROADWAY IN PERSON

  by

  Jerry Tracy

  Unlike the specimen that Vera had hidden in the trunk of Tracy’s sedan these columns were marked. In each of them a single paragraph had been circled with a blue pencil!

  They were routine paragraphs that Tracy himself had composed. Not one had come from an outside source. The thought that someone might have used his column to send private code messages to Spane vanished from Tracy’s mind. It was ridiculous—unless Jerry himself had a split personality and was in cahoots with a crooked labor leader without being aware of it.

  But there were the marked paragraphs!

  Tracy shivered as he thought of the frosty blue eyes of Inspector Fitzgerald. Fitz had already called him down to Center Street to question him about that silly limerick Jerry had printed, boasting about his underworld connections. If Fitz ever saw these marked columns. …

  He took one for a sample and placed it in his wallet with the one he had taken from his sedan trunk. Then, drawing a deep, unhappy breath, he tiptoed through the kitchen to the rear service door. He’d had all he wanted of trouble for tonight! He’d been threatened by Ed Spane, hoodwinked by Vera Durensky, slugged by Roy Chanler. But the thing that frightened him most was the grim feeling that he was being framed.

  He threw open Spane’s kitchen door.

  He took one step across the sill—then he stopped.

  A tall, gray-haired man in a derby and a black overcoat was standing in the hall. He had eyes the color of a blue lake under moonlight. There was a gun in his hand and it was pointed menacingly at the startled columnist.

  The cops had guns, too. There were two of them, standing on either side of the man in the derby. Tracy said weakly, “Hello, Fitz.” Amazement remained only a second in Inspector Fitzgerald’s eyes. They were cold and hard.

  “Get back inside! Take his gun, Devlin! Kennedy, go through to the front and let the others in.”

  “Listen, Fitz,” Tracy said.

  “Don’t be a damn fool.”

  “Shut up!”

  It was his way of telling Tracy that friendship was out. Two more cops came in from the front door. Sergeant Killan, Fitz’s Homicide assistant, was with them. Killan gave Tracy a crisp scrutiny and then hurried out of sight. Tracy could hear him searching the other rooms of the apartment.

  “Where’s Spane?” Fitz barked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are you doing here?” Tracy didn’t answer. He was thinking swiftly. It was obvious that someone had phoned the police to pin him tight in a frame-up. That the situation was serious, he could tell from Fitzgerald’s grim scrutiny. He decided to say nothing about Vera Durensky or Roy Chanler. He had no idea what he was involved in, or how deeply. His only refuge was to keep his mouth shut about what he knew, until he could investigate personally.

  “What are you doing here?” Fitz repeated.

  “I came to see Ed Spane on a personal matter.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who gave you that lump on the skull? Spane?”

  “Yeah. We had an argument. He socked me and I swung a couple myself. Then Spane ran out.”

  “Out where?” Sergeant Killan interrupted. He had returned from his search of the apartment in time to hear Tracy’s statement.

  “Out the front door.”

  “Yeah?” Killan grasped Tracy by the arm. His tightening fingers hurt. “I wanna show you something.”

  What he showed Tracy was in the bathroom. Killan pulled back the rubber shower curtain with a gloved hand. Tracy had missed it in his hasty search but there was Spane—in the tub. His legs were doubled up, his hands clasped over his belly. There was blood all over his hands and a lot more of it in the tub. The knife that had killed Spane was gone.

  “You socked him and he ran out,” Fitzgerald suggested. He was standing alongside Killan. “Is that your story?”

  “I’m sorry. I was lying.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  For a second Jerry pulled out of his daze with a trace of his nasal Broadway insolence.

  “Don’t be a sap! When I kill a guy, I don’t use a knife. I use a typewriter.” He grinned but nobody else did.

  “Do you know who did kill him?”

  “No.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “Duplicate key. Spane and I were pretty friendly.”

  “Your friendship have anything to do with that underworld limerick you printed in your column recently?”

  Tracy’s pale cheeks mottled with impotent rage.

  “Damn it, Fitz! I’ve told you that limerick was a joke.”

  “So you let yourself in with a key,” Fitz grunted. “And Spane wasn’t home, or you thought he wasn’t. … Let’s get back to the living room.”

  He walked to Spane’s desk and picked up the pile of folded Daily Planets.

  Sergeant Killan said softly: “What did you come to see Spane about, Jerry?”

  “I happened to be in the neighborhood. Across the street, as a matter of fact. I was visiting a friend of mine named Jack Davy. When I left him, I walked across here.”

  “This Davy, he’s a great guy for limericks, ain’t he?”

  “Go to hell!” Tracy rasped.

  Fitz was still staring at the newspapers. His grizzled head lifted and he nodded to one of the uniformed cops.

  “Get hold of this Jack Davy. Bring him over here.”

  The cop saluted and vanished. He had barely left when there was a sudden commotion at the door. The policeman on guard growled: “Wait a minute! Where the hell are you going?”

  A man came barging in excitedly. It was Leo Pelman. Tracy gave a cry of relief.

  “Leo! You’re just the guy I want to see. Will you tell these dumb Sherlocks that we—” He stopped short. He was going to add impulsively: “—that we had an appointment to meet here?” He choked it off. It would mean mentioning Vera and the column she had stolen from Spane. He finished, weakly: “That I’m on the level and I’m not a crook or a killer?”

  His eyes flashed a warning to Pelman, but the labor reporter didn’t get it.

  “Killer?” Pelman echoed. “You mean Spane is dead?”

  Inspector Fitzgerald eyed him coldly. “If you didn’t know it, what are you doing here? You a mind reader?”

  Pelman laughed scornfully. “You’re nuts, Fitz, if you think that Tracy is mixed up in a kill. I knew all about him coming to see Spane. We had an appointment to meet here.”

  To Tracy’s despair, Pelman told about Jerry’s telephone call. Fitz listened with a granite face to the story of Vera’s flight from Spane’s apartment, Tracy’s rescue of her and their subsequent visit to Tracy’s penthouse. Pelman mentioned Tracy’s request to meet him at Spane’s and back him up in case of gun-play.

  “You didn’t think there was anything queer about all that?” Fitzgerald asked grimly.

  “Well, there’s been some silly gossip in the underworld. Jerry ran a joking limerick in his column about his hook-up with crooks and the dough it brought him. I mean—hell, I don’t mean anything! Tracy’s O.K.”

  Fitz didn’t reply to the rattled labor reporter. He showed Tracy one of the folded Planets.

  “What’s the idea of the marked paragraph in that column?”

  “How the hell do I know? I didn’t mark it.”

  “You and Spane wouldn’t be using that Broadway column of yours for a secret code?”

  “No!”

  “All right. Don’t yell at me.” Fitz laid down the paper. “Why did you lie about being alone here tonight? Are you trying to hide something about that crooked strike set-up at the Chanler Knitting Mills?”

  Tracy didn’t answer.

  “Dujensky’s daughter didn’t stab Spane. No woman could have jammed a heavy knife home that way. A man did the job, and he had five strong fingers around Spane’s throat while he did it. Who was it—Roy Chanler?”

  “I wouldn’t know.
”

  “Any idea where Chanler and the girl are now?”

  “No.”

  Fitz swung irritably toward Sergeant Killan. “Get on the phone and call Headquarters. Have a general alarm sent out right away for Vera Durensky. Pick up Chanler at his home—or wherever he is.”

  While Killan was at the phone there was another scuffle at the doorway of the apartment. Patrolman Kennedy strode in, dragging a meek, inoffensive looking man by the collar. It was Jack Davy. He had a quizzical, friendly face, but there was no friendliness in his voice. He was yelling indignantly at the top of his lungs.

  “What’s the idea, you—you Cossack!”

  Tracy said tonelessly: “Skip it, Jack. I’m in a spot. They want to know why I was in this particular neighborhood tonight. Tell ’em.”

  Davy grinned. “That’s easy. We had some beer together. I told Jerry a few new limericks. I’m a great guy for limericks.”

  “Did you tell him that one he printed in The Daily Planet?” Fitz snapped.

  “Not me. Jerry is still kinda touchy about that one. In fact, he got sore tonight when I—”

  “When you asked him if there was any truth behind it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What did he say?”

  Davy blinked. “He said: ‘Sssh! Don’t expose me, pal, but it’s true. I’m really a heel! I run half the rackets in this town.’ You know—kidding.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  The irony in Fitzgerald’s snarl didn’t disturb Davy. He had recovered his good nature. He stared at Fitzgerald with a reminiscent air.

  “Do you know the one about Mrs. Logan?”

  “Nuts. Don’t bother me.”

  “It’s a pip. Listen:

  “Have you heard about poor Mrs. Logan?

  “She had dandruff all—”

  Fitzgerald’s voice roared. “Kennedy, shove this nitwit over in the corner!”

  Tracy tapped the inspector’s angry shoulder. “I’m walking out of here, Fitz. Right now! If you don’t like it, arrest me! Or you can have some fool trail my sedan.”