Tracy was the only one who saw the waiter hand her the note. He followed her when she excused herself and left the table.
It took a little time to make his pursuit look casual. When Tracy reached the side corridor that led to the sunken terrace outside, he discovered that Colling was ahead of him. The announcer was crouched just inside the door that Thelma had left partly open behind her.
Colling was so intent on listening to what went on outside that he failed to notice Tracy step noiselessly behind a velvet drape in the corridor.
The two figures on the terrace were shrouded in darkness. Their voices were low. But the words were distinctly uttered.
“I’m not angry at you,” Thelma cried tensely. “I’m just—”
“Afraid? Is that it, babe?”
She didn’t reply.
“Afraid of what?” Visco’s voice growled. “Is there any harm in my seeing you home? I’m not a bad looking guy. Anyone would think I had warts and a hair-lip! Be nice, babe. What do you say?”
Thelma’s reply was too low to be audible. But Visco’s was curt with rage.
“O.K.! Thanks for the insult. But remember this, sister! If you won’t go for me, maybe I’ll go for you! Think it over.”
His stocky figure swung away from the girl. He crossed the sunken black terrace to the opposite side, ran lightly up a flight of stone steps and vanished.
Thelma returned slowly to the corridor door. She seemed surprised when she saw Colling. The announcer murmured something but the girl was too frightened to notice his embarrassment. There was eagerness in her quick murmur.
“Mr. Colling, will you do me a very great favor? Will you take me home tonight?”
Colling hesitated. In the light from the door lamp, his good-looking face was muddy.
“Sorry,” he said huskily. “I happened to hear what Visco said. I’m not sticking my neck out. I don’t want any part of that guy.”
He turned on his heel and left her. Thelma remained stiffly where she was. Tracy could hear the hysterical catch in her throat as she leaned against the wall, staring out at the black terrace. Be stepped noiselessly from behind the drape.
“Is something the matter?”
She whirled at the quiet sound of his voice. He liked her blue eyes at close hinge. The longness of her face gave her a lean boyish look. But there was nothing masculine about the tremble of her lower lip. He saw the lip stiffen as she made up her mind. “Mr. Tracy, do you have a car nearby?”
“Parked right around the corner.”
“Would you—will you drive me home now?”
“Sure. Why not?” There was a lot he wanted to ask her, but he didn’t. “Make a quiet getaway as soon as you can. I’ll be out front on Fifth Avenue near the corner.”
He had to wait a little over ten minutes. It gave him time to mooch around, with an eye cocked for Visco. But if the peek lad with the nasty voice was anywhere in the neighborhood, he was under cover.
Tracy drove Thelma away without any fuss. Her address was not very far away. Tracy choked down the powerful engine of his sedan and took his time driving.
“Has this Visco guy been bothering you much?”
Thelma gave him a quick, probing glance. She could have evaded his question, but she didn’t.
“Off and on,” she said. “He’s quite a nuisance.”
“What’s he after?”
“The usual thing, I suppose.”
“Who is he? Where’s he from?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he ever bother Vivian La Grange?”
Thelma’s composure fled. It was difficult to understand her blurred voice. Tracy patted her trembling shoulder.
“O.K., keed. Don’t think about it.”
Thelma lived on Sixth Avenue in a forlorn brick building that looked ready for wreckers. There was an empty store on the ground floor alongside a narrow vestibule. Subway construction had turned Sixth Avenue into a planked-over morass of sand-piles, concrete, and red lanterns. Night laborers flitted in and out of holes like gnomes. The planked street quivered with the dull boom of a subterranean explosion. The elevated structure overhead seemed to sag wearily on gaunt steel pillars.
“Do people like to live in a spot like this?” Tracy said faintly. He said it to himself, rather than to Thelma.
“I like the glamour of it,” Thelma said with a wan smile.
Workmen on a swinging scaffold were riveting under the grilled belly of the el. There was a noisy tat-tat-tat-tat and a stream of golden sparks spilled downward like the spreading petals of a flower. To Jerry Tracy there wasn’t any garden flower on earth that could compare with that sudden hot gush of beauty.
Thelma’s crack had been intended as a brave little joke; but to Tracy it was truth. Glamour? Tracy lifted his eyes, sensing the things no outlander to Manhattan ever realized.
The el, outlined starkly against the black night sky, was lovelier than a temple. This was the real New York, the kind that milkmen knew, and cops, and night-hawk columnists.
Tracy sighed and took the girl’s tired arm. He climbed narrow bare stairs to her room on the top floor. Thelma unlocked the door and opened it.
A man with a black, stubby automatic stood just inside the threshold.
“Skip the yells,” he said grimly. “Just walk in.”
The gunman’s left hand bolted the door behind them. He was swarthy and sullen, with a hint of foreign accent in his husky voice. One of his eyes looked faintly milky, as if a cataract were beginning to form over it.
A second man stepped out of the bathroom. He grinned over his gun, showing a tooth-gap in the left of his mouth. He had a spreading nose and one of his ears seemed larger than the other.
“Nice handling, Sammy,” he said to the first gunman.
They didn’t look like brothers, but they might have been cousins. Short, chunky, heavy in the hip. Foreign in everything but speech. No sign of coal dust on them; but coal dust was what Tracy thought about, in spite of their expensively cut suits.
“Over against the wall, suckers!” Sammy said. “Spread apart.”
“Bohunks!” Tracy thought.
He felt ice in his upraised fingertips. These gun guys were carbon copies of Visco. Hard guys from the hard coal district of Pennsylvania. Tough enough to get ideas. Smart enough to graduate to the mobs of Pittsburgh. Riding eastward in a Pullman to hunt in the richer jungles of Manhattan.
Thelma’s face was so pale it looked bluish.
“Let’s hurry this thing up, Lefty,” Sammy said. “I want to collect.”
A hollow boom from the tunnel under Sixth Avenue made the floor jar. The sound of riveting from the el made intermittent echoes like the snarl of a machine-gun.
“We better wait for an el train to go by,” Lefty grinned. “Make things a little neater for the blowoff.”
“You boys sore about something?” Tracy whispered. His tongue felt like blotting paper.
“What’s there to be sore about?”
Sammy said. “This is just a business deal.”
“You’re dough on the hoof, Mister,” Lefty said. “A five-hundred-dollar bill, waiting to be folded up with a slug and split two ways.”
Thelma’s mouth opened. She tried to say something and couldn’t.
“I’ll take Tracy,” Lefty said. “Listen for that damned el train, Sammy.”
His finger cuddled around the trigger Thelma was making queer, mouthing noises. Suddenly she was able to break the paralysis of her pale lips.
“For God’s sake, wait! There’s something wrong! You’re not supposed to kill him. He’s here just to get a good beating. Visco said so!”
Both killers laughed.
Tracy’s face swung unbelievingly toward the girl. He was dazed. He didn’t believe the thing he had just heard. But he had to when he saw Thelma’s face. She had deliberately put the finger on him. Visco’s pugnacious encounter with Tracy backstage at the theater was a phoney build-up. So was the scene on the dark restau
rant terrace at Radio City. Visco and a girl with clear blue eyes! And two hunkie gunmen who needed five hundred bucks!
The faint hum of an approaching el train made a thread of far-away sound. The riveters had stopped again.
“I’ll give you one thing, Thelma,” Tracy said with bitter slowness. “You’re the smoothest little tart in Manhattan. You did a nice job.”
She didn’t hear him. She kept crying hoarsely: “A beating! Just a good going-over, not a murder. Visco said so! Can’t you understand?”
“Better shoot him through the belly,” Sammy said. “It’ll look better to the cops. More like a woman done it.”
“That’s how I figure, too,” Lefty said.
He darted toward Thelma and whirled her suddenly on her heels. His stubby fingers caught the neck of her gown and ripped it. The material split in a ragged tatter from one shoulder, uncovering the swell of her left breast.
“You shouldn’t have tried to rape her, Tracy,” Lefty jeered. “She’s a nice girl. That’s why she shot you in the gut. No jury would blame her.”
“Only she lost her nerve after the kill,” Sammy said. “Maybe she figured juries are tougher these days. So she bumped herself, right through the temple. Eh, Lefty?”
Tracy couldn’t breathe. There was an acrid taste in his throat. The train was getting closer. Tat-tat-tat-tat went the riveters on Sixth Avenue.
Blood trickled from Thelma’s lower lip. She was moaning through tightly clenched teeth.
“No, no! Don’t, please. For God’s sake, don’t!”
She twisted hysterically to face the gunman behind her. The blind terror of her motion loosened the rest of the torn gown from her covered shoulder. It dropped in a green shimmering puddle about her feet. She tripped on it and fell against the startled Sammy. Terror wound her groping fingers around his gun. Instinct brought her leg upward, the knee bent. Its impact caught Sammy in the groin and he went down, with the clawing, fighting girl on top of him.
Lefty fired almost point-blank at Tracy.
The slug singed Tracy’s hair as it blew plaster from the wall. He had dropped under it, landing on knees and chest and chin. For an instant he lay motionless, his rump tilted upward like a cow in a stall. Then the soles of his feet kicked at wall. He dove forward below the flame of the jerking gun muzzle and struck Lefty head-on. His skull pushed between Lefty’s legs, toppling him backward.
The two rolled over and over, fighting for the gun. Jerry’s sweat-slippery palm clutched and missed. Lefty brought the barrel around with a grunt. He lined it pitilessly and his finger tightened. But the weapon swerved at the last second. The bullet pumped wide of Tracy’s ear. The explosion deafened him.
Lefty’s head sagged.
There was a crimson smear on his forehead and a spill of blood down his nose. Thelma had grabbed the weapon from the man her knee had disabled. She had swung the butt against Lefty’s skull with desperate haste. But her aim was bad. The blow had skidded, merely ripping the skin. Lefty’s glazed eyes cleared.
Thelma reeled and dropped her weapon. Tracy’s fingers darted for it like a scrabbling spider. He whirled the muzzle, jammed it against the elastic pressure of flesh, fired.
Nobody stopped him as he swayed to his feet.
He was unaware that Lefty was dead or that Thelma had fainted. He was glaring at the bent figure poised on the sill of the rear window. The thug who had been kicked in the groin had crawled with agonized effort to the sill and had lifted the sash. He hung forward, like a top-heavy snowball.
Before Tracy’s dazed brain could telegraph an upward lift to the gun in his hand, Sammy tumbled groaning to the fire-escape platform outside the window. He fell down the first slanting ladder and ran down the second. Tracy didn’t shoot Sammy as the gunman weakly straddled a low back fence. He didn’t want to kill anybody. He just wanted to be let alone. He was shaking like a leaf. So scared that it hurt.
He shut the window and made incredulously sure that Lefty was dead. Tracy’s single bullet had made a ghastly mess of Lefty’s jawbone and throat. The girl had fainted almost on top of him. Tracy pulled the unconscious Thelma away from the edge of spreading crimson.
After a while he got his nerve back.
He worked on Thelma roughly, slapping her face, rocking her head briskly with his fingers twisted in her thick, honey-colored hair. She came out of silence with a dull moan. Tracy shoved her torn gown at her.
“Come on! Get it on! You’re damn near naked, dope! Got any pins?”
He was so close to hysteria himself that he was able to get tough with her. He knew now that she wasn’t a cheap tart, but a sucker like himself. Like Vivian La Grange!
“Do you live here? You don’t, do you? This was just a spot that Visco arranged?”
“I didn’t realize what he—I swear I—”
“Come on! I’ve got both the guns and I don’t think we left any prints.” He smiled thinly as he helped her tie her dress on. The riveters on Sixth Avenue were still stuttering noisily. “Listen to that! That’s exit music!”
They slid like ghosts down the creaky staircases of the quiet house. Tracy knew why it was so quiet when he saw there were no names in any of the rusted name-plates downstairs. He’d been too careless to notice that on the way in.
The pair drove eastward through a dim, soundless street flanked by drowsy warehouses and loft buildings. Tracy blessed his luck in parking that big showy sedan of his out of sight of the subway workmen around the corner on Sixth Avenue. Nobody’d remember it. His knuckles stayed taut on the wheel.
“What made you think I needed a good beating up, Thelma?”
He heard her quick breathing. There was no vibration in her words now. She sounded lifeless.
“Vivian was my best friend. We starved together in cheap rooming houses, hoping for a break. She got one. You ruined that with your column. You hounded her to suicide.”
Tracy looked sideways at Thelma’s pale face, at her mouth and her square little chin.
“You’ve got a nice voice for singing. Suppose I got sore about what happened tonight? Suppose I put the heat on you in my column to even up things? Think you could take it?”
She said in the same expressionless tone: “You could kill me, Mister, and I’d sing on a slab in the morgue.”
“You’ve answered yourself, sweetheart,” Tracy said huskily. “No human being on earth can down a girl with guts and talent. Vivian was licked by herself. Not by me. And she didn’t commit suicide.”
He spun the sedan swiftly around a corner into Fifth Avenue.
“She was murdered!”
He felt the quick pressure of Thelma’s cold fingers on his wrist. She didn’t speak.
“What was Visco’s line to you about Vivian?”
“He said he was Vivian’s boy friend from Altoona. He asked me to—to help him get even with you for her death.”
“I know. Forget that. We were both dumb.”
“But why would he want to kill you—or me?”
“A little matter of a scrap of black camera paper and an expensive cigar butt,” Tracy said grimly. “I think somebody saw me pick them up.” He added: “I can see Visco as the trigger boss behind all this, but not the brains. Somebody who’s very smart has been using desperate little kids like Vivian in some water-tight racket. Green-as-grass kids with pretty faces and fresh, cushy figures. Vivian is the fourth girl like that who has ‘committed suicide’ in the last six weeks. … Where do you live?”
She told him and he shook his head.
“Too dangerous now. Our fugitive friend Sammy will unknot his bruised belly and report to Visco. I’m going to tuck you away in a spot where gunmen and chiselers will need a hell of a genteel alibi to get at you. We’ll make it Fifth Avenue. Hotel Plaza.”
Thelma gasped. “The Plaza! But look at me! And I have no baggage or—”
“And while I think of it,” Tracy interrupted, “I want you to concentrate about Vivian’s boy friends. I mean the elderly kind, the lad
s with dough. Try and remember if any of them smoked cigars. Men that Vivian might giggle about as middle-aged suckers.”
Thelma was silent for a while. Then she mentioned haltingly three or four names. Tracy slipped her a notebook and pencil stub and made her write them down.
He kept watching her for a moment, a faint frown creasing his forehead.
“Are you particularly friendly with Colling?”
“No,” Thelma said, “I hardly know him.”
“Then why,” Tracy said, “did you ask him to see you home tonight?”
Thelma flushed. “That was a build-up,” she admitted. “I knew you’d have no suspicions of my motive if I asked someone else first instead of going directly to you.”
“Suppose Colling had agreed to see you home?” Tracy murmured, his glance still steadily on hers. “Your whole scheme would have gone haywire, wouldn’t it? I can’t figure why you took so big a gamble.”
Thelma’s flush deepened. “I knew Colling would refuse. Visco told me he had thrown a scare into the announcer. He told Colling he’d blow him apart if he ever caught him playing around with me.”
“Visco must be a lovely character,” Tracy said dryly. He skimmed the sedan circlewise from Fifth Avenue and halted before the dimly decorous front of the Hotel Plaza.
“You’re in damned serious danger of death, sweetheart. Don’t stir an inch without orders from me. Find out what room service means and use it. Understand?”
She nodded tremulously and Tracy grinned at her.
“Now we’ll see how much attention a little guy from Broadway rates along Central Park South!”
Jerry Tracy didn’t sleep much the rest of that night. Most of the time he spent lying awake, thinking hard, in the privacy of his sound proofed penthouse bedroom.
In the morning Butch, his combination servant and body-guard, brought him the papers and he read all about the death of Lefty in a crumbly old Sixth Avenue house. Only the papers didn’t call the guy Lefty. He figured in all the stories as “the victim.” The police ascribed his death to a gang quarrel. There was no record of his fingerprints in Center Street. Copies of the prints had been sent to the Federal Bureau in Washington. Opinion was that the guy was an ambitious out-of-town hoodlum who had tried to cut in on a Manhattan gang, and been neatly cut out.
Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter Page 78