Her smile of recognition faded at sight of Tracy’s blazing eyes.
“I told you not to leave the Plaza! Why did you permit Colling to bring you back to the theater?”
“I was afraid that if I didn’t I’d lose my chance for a stage career. The winner has to appear on the next program for an encore. I’ve fought and starved and waited too long to risk failure now. I’d rather be dead like Vivian, than a flop!”
Tracy loved her for the courage in her clear eyes. But it didn’t make him forget her danger.
“How did Colling discover you were hidden at the Plaza?”
“I don’t know. I just—”
“O.K. Hold that pose, suckers!” a voice growled.
Visco had stepped from a closet in the end wall of the room. The man with him was Sammy, the thug to whom Thelma had given the knee in the murder spot back on Sixth Avenue. But there was no agonized crouch to Sammy now. He was erect with catlike vigilance. There was murder in his pinched eyes.
Visco said curtly: “We’re leaving this theater, folks. Don’t spoil a pleasant trip by making us sling lead. Sammy, go get rid of that old duck on the rear door.”
“Wait a minute,” Tracy said quickly. There was sweat on his pale forehead. He forced calm, sneery complaisance into his smile.
“Do you guys actually think I walked into here tonight with my head in a bag? Take a look out that stage door and get a load of the plain-clothes arrangements. Or better still, duck backstage and take a quick slant through the curtain peephole. Figure out why those two guys are sitting together in the front row.”
“It’s a bluff,” Sammy snarled.
“It’s a blow-off,” Tracy corrected.
“Watch these muggs!” Visco said harshly.
He vanished down the dressing-room corridor like a dark streak. When he came back, there was rage in his eyes, but no worry.
“You’ve been smart enough to make it hard,” he admitted. “But you’re still a sucker. Lock that door, Sammy! We’re going out the closet, same as we came in.”
The rear of the closet was thin partition board. A newly cut panel came away without fuss or trouble. Visco went first and Tracy and the girl followed. There was nothing else to do. Sammy replaced the panel.
They were in a dimly lit dressing-room corridor. Narrow steps led downward. Two flights. Dusty and utterly silent except for the faint echo of amateur hill-billy music from the distant stage.
The cellar of the theater was a quiet white-washed cavern. A man in overalls saw the stiffly moving group and came closer with a puzzled look. Sammy’s gun-butt against his skull sounded like a home run in a ball park. The thug lugged the victim’s trailing heels back of a pile of empty wooden cases.
“What do we do with Tracy and the dame?” Sammy whispered eagerly.
What he’d like to do was clear and pitiless in his eyes. But Visco shook his head.
“Nix on the gun stuff. When these dopes are missed after the show, there’ll be a police search. We’ve got to bunk ’em until we can figure how to get ’em out. We’re still in one hell of a spot, Sammy.”
“Hey, maybe you better ask—”
“Shut up!”
“I always figured you weren’t the brains in this racket,” Tracy told Visco softly.
Visco hit Tracy back of the ear. Sammy kicked him in the ribs until he groaned and swayed upright again. A black muzzle kept Thelma’s shriek dammed up in her throat.
The cellar was a maze of pipes and machinery. But Visco seemed to know exactly where to go. Jerry and Thelma were forced to walk forward under a line of asbestos-covered pipe supported by metal brackets from the low ceiling. The rear end of the basement was partitioned off from the rest. Visco opened an unlocked door with a quick twist of his hairy hand. Then Tracy saw the huge radio cabinets massed against the wall.
That’s what they looked like. Enormous steel radio cabinets, built side by side, taking up most of the space from floor to ceiling. A rhythmic hum made a pleasant murmur. Ducts led away from the smooth cleanliness of the massive equipment.
Tracy knew what it was before Visco opened a metal panel that pivoted vertically downward on a bottom hinge. An air-conditioning unit. Fans and blowers and compressors that sucked in air, filtered and tempered it, and then forced it through ducts to the theater auditorium upstairs.
“How the hell you gonna shove ’em in there?” Sammy growled.
The whole space was packed with an intricate pattern of machinery. Visco had opened the compressor unit. He swore and closed the tilted panel. He had better luck on his next try.
“Okey,” he said curtly. “Tracy first. Then the girl.”
Sammy tied them with some heavy cord he had found on a work bench outside. Then they were shoved into a shelflike space to the left of what looked like a big dynamo. It was silver-gray and Tracy saw that it was an aluminum housing for an enormous fan that whirled and hummed out of sight.
Over the bent heads of the jammed-in prisoners were two tilted screens that made an inverted B. The screens were honeycombed like the radiator of an automobile and behind the grill work was spun-glass filter material, flecked with crimson spots that looked like mashed cherries.
“Nobody can squeal if they’re dead,” Sammy growled. “Why not lemme blast ’em right now?”
“Go ahead,” Tracy said coolly. “If you want gun echoes to be heard all over the theater through those air ducts. This spot is a perfect mike pick-up.”
He knew it wasn’t, but the lie worked. It postponed the kill, but it got hasty gags jammed into the prisoner’s mouths. Tracy’s frown warned Thelma not to struggle. He didn’t want either of them to be slugged unconscious.
The tilted, metal door slammed upward. Tracy began to chew fiercely at his hastily applied gag. He got it loosened enough to gasp a low-toned order into Thelma’s ear.
They were lying back to back, but he twisted painfully until the girl’s bound hands touched his coat front. Thelma managed to unbutton the coat, and to feel with numb fingertips in the pockets of his vest. She got hold of Tracy’s miniature cigarette lighter. She lifted it slowly, inch by inch, rigid with the fear that she might drop it. Her thumb clicked it tremulously and the tiny blue-tipped flame glowed.
Tracy told her what to do. She didn’t protest. She knew as well as Jerry did, the desperate urgency of their predicament. A wriggle of the columnist brought his back around to face the bound hands of Thelma. She held the flame of the lighter below Tracy’s tied hands, at the edge of his coat.
The cloth charred. Then suddenly Tracy felt the agony of flame. Thelma gasped. Her joined hands beat the fire out.
“The hell with me!” Tracy cried. “Let it burn! They’ve got to smell it in the theater—the stench of it coming out through the air ducts!”
Again pain licked at his body. He writhed, gritting his teeth. He could smell the acrid stench of the cloth. He knew every duct from the mixing chamber was carrying the stink upward through the air conditioning system. Noses would sniff. People would blink and dart questioning glances at one another in the darkness of the auditorium. Fitz, too, sitting stolidly in the first row, waiting for a blow-off that Tracy had promised. …
Again Thelma pounded Tracy’s back and the flaming coat smouldered. The odor made his eyes brim with tears. He told himself fiercely that it was the odor, not the agony in his flesh. He could take it! Fitz had told him he was a little guy who was always raising a big stink. His lips twisted into an ironic grimace at the thought.
His ears were listening with every atom of his will. Suddenly he heard the muffled tread of footsteps racing toward the closed panel of the air-mixing chamber. A hand swung the panel downward.
The dark peering eyes of Visco were opaque as black frosted glass. A gun muzzle thrust itself at Tracy’s face.
But before Visco’s finger could explode shattering thunder into Tracy’s skull there was a warning yell from the basement beyond the line of Tracy’s vision. Sammy was shouting harshly.
/> Visco whirled and ran. Tracy, kicking with all his strength at the soft pressure of Thelma’s body, fell headlong outward. He landed with a jarrying thump on the basement floor. Rolling over, he saw two men racing toward the killers. Colling was sprinting forward, his mouth wide open. Behind him was Hal Bruce. Bruce saw the armed gangsters and gave a startled cry. A gun leaped from his hip pocket.
But as he levelled it, Colling stumbled. The two men collided and fell. Visco stood stock-still for an instant, watching their writhing figures. Then Bruce’s arm jerked and a bullet drilled into Visco’s stomach, dropping him as if he’d been chopped by an ax.
Sammy had leaped sideways toward the concrete wall. He was firing like a maniac. Bullets ripped between Colling and Bruce as they rolled apart. Two more men were racing from the gloom of the distant stairway. Tracy’s heart pumped as he recognized the gray mop of hair and the big police gun. The gun was in Fitz’s right hand, and his left was firmly gripped on the arm of Phil Riggam. He forced Riggam to run with him like a jerking, terrified dummy.
Fitz fired in mid-stride. Three bullets criss-crossed the path of Sammy’s blind fusillade of lead. One of them missed. The other two didn’t.
It was Fitz who untied Tracy and released Thelma. Hal Bruce was shaking like a leaf. Colling looked like a man who had been in and out the seven gates of hell.
“I’m sorry I tripped you,” he told Bruce dully. “I didn’t mean to. I couldn’t help it.”
“That’s all right,” Bruce said.
Fitz had re-hooked his fingers on Riggam’s quivering arm. “Was this guy one of them, Jerry?”
Tracy was still staring at the inert figures of Sammy and Visco. Both were stone dead. Tracy turned stiffly, shook his head.
“Let him alone, Fitz. He was the sucker, the come-on. Visco was trying to take him for fifty grand.”
“Just those two rats on the floor, eh?”
“No,” Tracy said. “Three rats. There was one more—the brain behind the whole dirty racket.”
He looked grimly at Colling.
“How did you know Thelma was at the Plaza Hotel when you went there tonight to get her?”
Colling hesitated. His mouth twitched. “Why, Hal Bruce said—”
“I said nothing,” Bruce barked. “Don’t try to shift any trouble on me, you damned liar!”
“Somebody is lying,” Tracy agreed in a mild voice.
He had turned slightly, his tone belying the tension of his tightening muscles. When he leaped he took Ned Carlisle’s assistant entirely by surprise. Hal Bruce’s hand jammed half-way out of his pocket. The two men rocked desperately together, then Fitz clipped Bruce and wrenched his gun away.
Bruce shuddered. He recovered his calmness with an effort. “I didn’t mean to start any fuss. You scared me with that dive of yours, Jerry. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too, Hal,” Tracy said. “I hate to turn in someone I always thought was on the level. But you’re guilty as hell. Colling told the truth about his visit to the Plaza. You told him to go there! If he were guilty, Colling would never have appeared openly and tipped his hand. He’d know, as you were afraid, that I’d find out.”
Tracy’s lips tightened.
“You knew Thelma was at the Plaza because you trailed me there the night I slipped out of your trap on Sixth Avenue. You couldn’t have found out any other way. The girl wasn’t even registered.”
“Jerry, you’re being ridiculous,” Bruce said quietly.
“I also noticed how you killed Visco. That was a miracle of luck for you—if you were innocent. Visco had the drop on you, but he backed up and didn’t fire. He didn’t, because you were his boss! He left the play to you, and you killed him to shut his mouth. In other words, I’m old enough to vote and I don’t believe in miracles.”
“You’ll need a better case than that to take me into court,” Bruce said. “You can’t blast a man’s reputation with surmises.”
“You can with proof,” Tracy said. “The photographs that Visco snapped to put the bite on Phil Riggam went straight to you. You’d be a sucker to trust Visco with them—and you didn’t.”
Jerry Tracy was a good poker player. He was bluffing to the limit of his wits. But it was sound bluffing, based on the psychology of a desperate and shaken antagonist who could see only the backs of the cards. Tracy kept his glance on Hal Bruce’s necktie, but he was watching the man’s eyes from under lowered lids. His voice was soothing, almost hypnotic.
“Those photographs are dynamite, Hal. You’d have to hide ’em in a spot easily accessible to you, yet safe from discovery. You picked this theater cellar because you know every inch of it. Those blackmail photos have your prints all over them, Hal. I know—because I’ve already examined them!”
“Rot!” Bruce cried hoarsely.
His hunted glance swept circlewise toward the air conditioning chamber where Tracy had been hidden. It was beautifully done, a bit of desperate artifice by a man whose crooked brain had transformed guile into habit.
But Tracy, watching hawk-like, saw Bruce’s chin lift slightly, saw the terrified eyes pause overhead for the whiplash fraction of a second. The milky cylinder of an asbestos-lined pipe hung low from the ceiling. A small segment of the asbestos covering looked smoother than the rest. Its smoothness had not been quite camouflaged by the paint brush or the cleverly smudged dirt.
Tracy’s upflung hand clawed at it.
The covering was thin cardboard. It ripped away, disclosing a space around the pipe. Curved papers fluttered downward to the floor. Tracy pounced on them like a bright-eyed ferret.
Bruce must have expected doom. His swift glance toward the air-conditioning apparatus had been meant merely to turn Inspector Fitzgerald. His fist crashed against Fitz’s profile. As the inspector staggered under the blow, Bruce snatched the gun from his loosened grasp.
Thelma screamed. Tracy darted forward. The gun barrel made a glittering arc. Fitz, recovering instantly, tried to grab it, but he was a shade too late. Bruce’s ghastly grin quivered as he pulled the trigger. His head bounced with the impact of the bullet he sent ripping through his own brain.
He slid inertly through the instinctive circle of Fitz’s outflung arms.
Tracy said faintly: “Let go of him, Fitz. You’ll get yourself messed up.”
The little columnist’s face was pale. One of his arms had slid around Thelma, just how he didn’t remember. He patted her quivering shoulder as he talked.
“Bruce did what I hoped he’d do. He’s made this thing a D.A.’s report instead of a Grand Jury and a court-room trial. Ned Carlisle is one hell of a fine human being and a trial would have smirched Ned and forced him off the air. You can choke off a lot of the publicity, Fitz. I’ll talk to the D.A. myself.”
Fitz nodded mechanically. He was still dazed by the suicide.
“I don’t think Hal Bruce was quite sane,” Jerry Tracy said. “You remember what he was on the stage ten years ago, the greatest tap dancer in the world. Then arthritis hit him and dropped the curtain. I don’t think he ever reconciled himself to an anonymous career as Ned Carlisle’s assistant. And he was used to big dough—you know how much, Fitz.
“Those poor little amateur girls gave Bruce a perfect set-up for crime. He picked the desperate ones and sold ’em on easy money. It was a cruel and water-tight variation of the old badger game—because on each job Bruce killed the deluded girl and protected Visco and himself. The suckers paid up and kept quiet to save their own reputations.”
Thelma shuddered. “I’ll always be seeing Vivian’s face. I’ll never sing again.” There was a blurred smile on the columnist’s lips. It made Fitzgerald think of all the talented kids who were famous now because Jerry Tracy believed in them and liked them. “Oh, yes you will!” Jerry growled. “You’ll sing, baby! A year from now it’ll probably cost me a week’s salary to get inside to hear you. For further details see tomorrow’s column!”
Colling was staring at the little guy, his lips twisting. Tracy
realized suddenly that the announcer’s white-toothed grimace was purely physical.
He said sharply: “Why the hell do you do that? You’ve been doing that guilty mugging so much, I was all set to collar you instead of Hal Bruce for murder. Don’t you like yourself?”
Colling flushed. “My teeth are artificial. I had to have a lot of bad ones yanked out and—well, a radio announcer lives on his voice and appearance. The new plate bothers the life out of me.”
Tracy grinned. In a columnist’s life a feeble gag was better than no gag at all.
“You better get yourself another dentist, son,” he drawled. “That tooth carpenter of yours damned near put the bite on you for murder.”
BEHIND THE BLACK MASK
LAST WEEK WE CALLED up Theodore Tinsley and said to him, said we, “Ted, how about opening your soul to us? Frank Gruber did it last month, and now it’s your turn. How do you write those Jerry Tracy stories?”
Ted said, “What’s that? The baby’s crying and I can’t hear you.”
So we raised our voice and shouted, which resulted in the following.
Before you turn over the page and begin Theodore Tinsley’s new story, “Station K-I-L-L,” perhaps you’d like to share with us this look behind the scenes:
Ted Tinsley now broadcasting:
The editor of Black Mask wants to know (a) how I think up Jerry Tracy stories, (b) how I write ’em.
I’ve picked up Jerry Tracy ideas from all kinds of places—but this is the first time I ever found one in an ashcan. The ashcan was on 50th Street in the short block between Broadway and Seventh Avenue. Some one had thrown away an old peaked cap. I took one look at it and thought about Jerry Tracy. (Naturally, when you’re a writer of detective stories on a Broadway prowl for ideas, you’re not thinking about the price of potatoes in Ireland.) So the junked cap instantly became a brand-new, imported snapbrim fedora.
That seemed queer! Why should Jerry Tracy toss his brand-new hat in a 50th Street ashcan? It wasn’t so damned queer when I took a mental look at the Little Guy’s hat and found a bullet hole through the crown! That was all the start I needed, particularly after I glanced east past the Sixth Avenue elevated and caught a glimpse of the dizzy stone pinnacle of Radio City. Flash! Someone must have taken a potshot at Tracy while he was on his way to a broadcast! And that, believe it or not, is how I got the idea.
Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter Page 80