Naturally, there was no newspaper mention of a gun mugg named Sammy or a sleek, dark-eyed chiseler named Visco.
Tracy had no real hope of locating Visco. He and Sammy were probably holed up somewhere, figuring their next move. The puzzle of Vivian’s death would have to be cracked at the middle angle of the triangle—the sucker who smoked Corona Coronas.
Jerry waited until almost eleven, hoping to get a phone call from Alyce, the cigarette gal at the Terrace Club. But there was no call; and Tracy didn’t want to start possible gossip by phoning the restaurant to find out where she lived.
He didn’t even like to phone Thelma, but he did. She said everything was all right, in a small, far-away voice. She sounded scared.
Tracy reassured her, grabbed a cab and hustled down to his dusty Broadway coop. He locked the door, disconnected his phone and got busy. He was neither a cop nor a dick. He was a columnist, working under an iron-clad contract. He was only two columns ahead, and they snarled down at the Planet office when he didn’t have four under his belt.
He tailored some new ones and when he finally quit, the afternoon had faded to dusk. He had a swim, a rub-down and a shower at the Midtown Athletic Club. Dinner in a side-street eatery where they cooked the best pork chops in town and he could eat in peace. Then a dash to a first-night performance where he had to review a dull drama with a single set, a dress-suit adultery problem, and five characters who spoke with a British accent and seemed vaguely sorry they had ever left England.
Tracy was sorry, too. He sneaked out during the last act, wrote two hundred words in the men’s room downstairs and phoned it to the Planet to save time hunting for a messenger boy.
Then he was off to Billy Rose’s new spot, and that was a lot better. He went to bed mildly cockeyed and very tired. He thought dully about staying in bed for a week, but fell asleep before he could decide about it.
His phone buzzed him awake in mid-morning. The easiest way to stop it was to unhook the thing, yell, “Go to hell” and hang up. But the sweet strawberry syrup voice on the wire snapped him wide awake.
It was Alyce and she wanted to talk about cigars.
“Why the hell didn’t you call me yesterday morning?”
“I din’ wanna disturb you,” Alyce cooed. “They say you never get up before noon. Then in the aft’noon, I called your Broadway office and I can’t get no answer, and what’s the idea anyway, Mr. Tracy? Are you handing me a horse’s tail on that build-up you promised me in your colyum?”
“Don’t be silly,” Tracy said. “What did you find out?”
“Well, I mooched around and got a line on the big spenders and heavy tippers. I tested each of ’em with a little eye work and hip wriggle and, believe me, they’re all gal conscious. All of ’em are on the fat side and middle-aged. I—”
“Let’s have their names.”
“Wait a minute,” Alyce said. “There’s a catch in the thing.”
Her voice dropped to a hushed whisper. She sounded like Special Agent F-38 in a spy melodrama.
“Not one of them smokes cigars. I ask ’em if they’d like a Corona Corona, and three of them laughed and one pinched my leg. Look, Jerry, about that write-up of me in the column, you could say I was born in the South—”
“Sure, sure,” Tracy said. He thought fast. “These big spenders come pretty regularly to those radio parties, don’t they?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you notice whether any of them were missing? Take your time and think hard. It’s important.”
There was a long silence at the other end of the wire. Tracy waited tensely.
“Come to think of it—” Alyce said.
“What’s his name?”
“Phil, they call him. I’m not sure of his last name. I think he’s an Irishman. Ryan or Regan, somethin’ like that. I don’t think he lives in New York; I’ve seen him fussing with timetables when it gets late.”
“You’re a sweetheart! Thanks.”
“Look, if you made me a Southern gal in that column write-up—”
“I’ll build you six white pillars and a big moon over a cotton field, and—”
“Put in somepin’ about mint juleps and a sweet old mammy who’s been with the fambly for years,” Alyce said dreamily.
Tracy clicked down the receiver and bounced to his feet. He darted to his wardrobe closet and found the suit he had worn the night he had driven Thelma to the Plaza. A guy named Ryan or Regan. … The name Regan seemed to hit a fuzzy chord in his memory. He looked at the list Thelma had scribbled for him in his speeding sedan that night.
The third name on the list was Phil Riggam.
Tracy rubbed his head and took a drink. Then he grabbed a taxi and went down to the Planet building. He had a private office there but he seldom used it, preferring to work in the untidy rat nest he had leased in Times Square. He went downtown because he needed the expert help of nosy Al Decker who covered the hotel news.
Jerry’s arrival created a sensation among the Planet copy boys. All of them nourished the hope of some day being assigned to Tracy, of darting in and out of hot spots on the twinkling coat-tails of the town’s most famous columnist.
Tracy jabbed a forefinger at a smart-eyed kid named Tony and drew him into the private cubby. He liked the way Tony nodded silently and listened. He sent him out to the city room to look up Phil Riggam in all the suburban telephone books.
Then he got busy on his own stuff. He had a radio news spiel to assemble for his weekly air program. Hot, crackling items about Hollywood and Manhattan. Flash, flash! in a voice like pelting pebbles. But there was nothing flash, flash! in the slow sifting and verification of the stuff.
Tony came back presently. No luck. There wasn’t any Phil Riggam listed in Westchester County, Long Island or northern New Jersey.
Tracy closed his eyes and tried to think coherently. If Riggam had been photographed with the dead Vivian before she had been posed to look like a suicide, it meant blackmail. That meant dough to be handed over to Visco, or some smart guy behind Visco. They’d never let the sucker leave town till he paid! It would take time to raise any sizeable wad of cash. And the sucker would have to move slowly for fear of arousing suspicion on the part of his wife or his business associates back home.
Riggam had probably already overstayed his New York visit and was sweating with worry in some Manhattan hotel.
“Look, Tony,” Tracy said. “Has Al Becker come in yet from his hotel tour?”
“No, sir.”
“Stick around until he does. Here’s what I want you to find out. I’m interested in a middle-aged chump from out of town. He has plenty of dough and a job that brings him to New York regularly. He likes night clubs, excitement and the fun of meeting Broadway big shots. He’s a push-over for women, especially when the gal is young, blond, and a little on the dumb side.”
“I getcha,” Tony said.
“Here’s the question you ask Al Decker. What hotels would a sap like that be apt to go to? Ask Decker to make up a list. You’ll have to tell him the info is for Jerry Tracy and he’ll be curious as hell. So how will you shut his trap?”
Tony grinned. “The managing editor canned a switchboard girl to get Margie Graham her job. The M. E. is nuts about this Margie. Decker’s been dating her on the quiet. Okey?”
Tracy chuckled. “Swell! Keep away from journalism schools—and some day you’ll be batting out a neat column. Scram!”
Tony didn’t come back until long after lunch time. He brought with him a list of fourteen hotels. Tracy handed him a dollar bill and a bigger one that made the kid’s eyes pop.
“The big one’s yours. Change the buck at a subway booth and get nickels. Call each of these hotels and ask for Mr. Phil Riggam. If Riggam answers, hang up. Now tell me why you’re going outside to make those calls.”
“Because Al Decker will have Margie all primed at the switchboard to find out what’s going on.”
“I think you’re going to work for me regularly,”
Tracy said.
It took eleven of the fourteen calls to locate Phil Riggam. He was at the Hotel Nagler, but Tony hadn’t actually talked to him. Riggam had left orders at the Nagler desk that he was ill and didn’t wish to be disturbed.
Jerry Tracy decided that it was time to disturb him.
Darkness was setting over Manhattan when Tracy drove up to the Nagler. He picked up a house phone. The operator gave him a prompt nix on Riggam’s room number. Tracy buttonholed the clerk and said a few crisp words. The clerk hesitated. Tracy had done plenty of favors for him and this was the first time he had ever tried to collect.
“Will this jam me in any way, Jerry?”
“No.”
“Miss Weaver, let him have 924.”
Phil Riggam sounded high-pitched and nasty. He yelled a profane oath at being disturbed and hung up. Tracy buzzed him again.
“The name is Jerry Tracy. Of the Daily Planet. I want to talk about a photograph. Or would you rather I’d just go ahead and print the yarn?”
He could hear all the air in Room 924 rush into Riggam’s gasping mouth.
“Oh! I—you better come up.”
Riggam was a heavy man. He had bulging, sleepless eyes and a grayish face. He was so frightened he looked ready to collapse. The moment he closed the door his hand wrenched into view from behind his back. He was clutching a gun. He swung the warning muzzle in line with Tracy’s stomach. His face was green with fright.
Tracy took one look at the shaking gun and the spasmodic finger on the trigger. He didn’t want gun-play or a fight, but he didn’t want to be killed by a sucker almost out of his wits with terror. He kicked Riggam in his fat shins and sighed as he saw the gun drop. Then he hit Riggam in the jaw.
He put the captured gun in his pocket. He talked briefly and to the point.
“I didn’t kill her,” Riggam whispered. “I swear I didn’t! You’ve got to believe me. You—”
He went completely to pieces under Tracy’s fish-cold eye. He was softer than a ripe banana.
“Spill it,” Tracy rasped. “How was Vivian killed?”
It was about what Tracy had figured. Riggam had gone to Vivian’s apartment for a couple of drinks. He made a play for her and Vivian seemed complaisant. Then, suddenly, she turned nasty. She shoved him away from her and grabbed a gun. Riggam froze with his hands up. Then two guys came in, one of them with a camera.
“What did they look like?” Tracy asked.
The man with the camera was obviously Lefty, the mugg Tracy had killed on Sixth Avenue. The other fellow was Visco. Visco grinned at Vivian and said. “You done swell.” He asked her for the gun and she handed it to him. Then, still grinning, he leaned coolly close and blew out her brains.
Riggam witnessed this with sick horror. But he wasn’t too sick to ignore Visco’s purring whisper. He was forced to kneel close to the bed, with the murder weapon in his hand, pointed waveringly at the girl’s shattered temple. Visco unscrewed the bulbs over the mantelpiece and substituted photoflood bulbs. He took the pictures and tossed the bulbs out the window, crashing them against a brick wall in the next yard. Then he wiped the weapon clean, adjusted it carefully in the girl’s dead hand and waited with grim patience for rigor mortis.
“How much was the shakedown to let it stay suicide?” Tracy asked.
“Fifty thousand dollars. Even if I could prove the conspiracy, I didn’t dare try. I’m a member of a conservative firm. I’ve got a wife and children who—”
“But you did try to make Vivian, didn’t you?” Tracy said in a hard, bitter undertone. “I mean, make her.”
Riggam’s lips quivered. “I’m human,” he whispered.
“Human! That’s what every one of you lice yelp when you’re caught. Out-of-town hypocrites on the loose in Manhattan! Yelling to your small town friends about New York’s dirt, and then sneaking here to find it! Sure you’re human! That’s why Manhattan’s overrun with pimps and gamblers and gun muggs—to take buzzards like you who roll in on Pullmans from the sticks. … Well, how much of the bite did they collect from you?”
“Half. I promised Visco I’d raise the other twenty-five grand if he’d give me a little time.”
“Where do you meet Visco?”
“He phones and sets the spot.”
“How can he? You told the desk downstairs to stop all incoming calls?”
“I have two phones here. One of them is a private wire.”
Tracy walked across and took a note of the private number. Standing there, eying the phone, he felt a sudden queer chill along his spine. A girl’s face popped into his mind, her lips scared, her blue eyes pleading. He hadn’t phoned Thelma in two days!
He scooped up the receiver and called the Hotel Plaza.
The desk clerk’s reply made Tracy go empty inside. Thelma was gone! She had left the Plaza about an hour earlier. She had gone away with a man. The clerk couldn’t remember the man, but the house dick did. Thelma’s companion was a big, broad-shouldered, good-looking guy with white teeth and a kind of a twitchy smile.
Colling, of course! The announcer who read the commercials on the Soapsud Amateur Hour!
Tracy remembered with a gasp that the air show was a twice a week program. That was where Colling was taking Thelma! Tracy had felt right from the start that the whole criminal racket stemmed from the Paragon Theater where the air show was held. Was Colling the brain behind Visco? If so, Thelma was done for! She knew too much.
But so, Tracy thought grimly, did he!
He decided to beat it quickly over to the Paragon Theater and force a blow-off with himself as bait. Riggam looked scared as the Daily Planet’s lean little columnist darted for the door.
“Where are you going? What about me? What shall I do?”
“I hope you fry in hell,” Tracy grated.
But he calmed down in the elevator. By the time he reached the ground level he knew what he was going to do. He got five nickels at the cigar counter and closed himself inside a public phone booth. He called the Paragon Theater and tried to get Ned Carlisle. But Ned was up to his ears, too busy even for Jerry Tracy. Jerry asked for his assistant and finally Hal Bruce came on the wire. Tracy made his request quickly.
He asked for two seats in the sponsor’s row. That was the first row in the theater and it was never disposed of to the public. Most of the time it was half empty, and it was so now. Bruce sounded puzzled; but he agreed to hold two seats at the box office for the two gentlemen who would ask for them in the next few minutes.
Tracy’s second nickel got him Phil Riggam over the private telephone in Room 924. He made his voice gruff, like Visco’s, and he filtered it through a bunched handkerchief over the transmitter.
“I haven’t got the money yet,” Riggam gasped.
“The hell with that. I want to see you! Hustle right away to the Paragon Theater. Tell the guy at the box office you want one of those seats in the sponsor’s row. A tall guy with blue eyes and a mop of gray hair will sit next to you. Don’t talk to him unless he talks to you. Got that straight?”
“Y—yes.”
“Okey. Now scram!”
The tall guy with blue eyes and a mop of gray hair was, of course, Inspector Fitzgerald of Manhattan Homicide. Tracy was sweating freely in the hot booth by the time his third nickel bounced his call through police headquarters to Fitz’s divisional office.
Fitz said with quick awareness of Tracy’s tension: “What’s the matter? Something wrong?”
Tracy bounced Fitz out of his chair with the flat announcement that he’d found out the truth about Vivian’s death and could prove her suicide was murder. He told Fitz the same thing he had told Riggam about the sponsor’s row tickets.
“The blow-off is coming tonight, Fitz! Right in that theater, or I’m crazy! You’ll be sitting next to a fat, paunchy guy who’ll look sick and worried. Don’t say anything to him unless he says something to you. Just sit.”
“You’re a little guy, Jerry,” Fitz said slowly, “but you hav
e the damndest habit of raising a big stink. Are you sure this stink is on the level?”
“Don’t go then!” Tracy snapped and hung up. Boy, that ought to get Fitz down there in a hurry.
Tracy grabbed a cab and hustled over to the theater.
Applause rocked the darkened auditorium. The show was already on the air. Colling, smiling and debonair, had just left the commercial mike and was deftly fading offstage. The applause was for Ned Carlisle and a radiant honey blonde whom the producer was leading to the center stage mike.
The show always opened with the winner of the preceding contest, Ned explained unctuously, and this time he had particular pleasure in reintroducing a talented little lady whose gorgeous, God-given voice. …
Jerry Tracy watched Thelma’s nervousness add an electric tension to her loveliness. Her voice steadied after the first faltering note, then it was like rich, velvet warmth in every nook and cranny of the darkened playhouse. Tracy listened, relaxed and dream-like in spite of himself.
A moving light in the rear of the center aisle roused him. He saw the bulky figure of Phil Riggam following a soft-footed girl usher. Riggam’s ticket to the sponsor’s row had admitted him to a show where customarily no one entered after the on-the-air signal was flashed to the door.
Tracy ducked quietly out the lobby and hurried around to the stage. Almost the first man he saw was Colling. The announcer gave him a quick, startled look. “Hello, Jerry,” he whispered, then he was gone with an apologetic smile.
Thelma had already left the stage. But no one to whom Tracy spoke seemed to know where she was. The watchman at the stage door said she hadn’t left the theater.
Hal Bruce appeared in the dimness behind the backdrop. He grinned and shook hands hastily with Jerry.
“Thelma? I don’t know. Maybe she’s in one of the dressing rooms.”
He trotted off to confer with a lanky electrician in soiled overalls. Tracy swore anxiously under his breath. Uneasiness for Thelma’s safety pricked him to speed. He found where the dressing rooms were located and hurried along, opening doors. Thelma was sitting quietly in the last room along a dim corridor. She seemed to be relaxed and comfortable.
Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter Page 79