Writing the yarn is a bit more complicated. It usually happens like this: I rise as late as possible, enjoy a leisurely breakfast, smoke two cigarettes, wait to see what the postman has brought, play with my thirteen-months-old daughter a while, sharpen three pencils, rearrange my Royal portable, look out the window, think wistfully how nice it would be if I were a plumber, an aviator or a subway motorman. …
At this point my wife comes in very quietly, pulls down the shade, removes all books, papers and magazines, then goes away, locking the door behind her.
After that I write the story.
STATION K-I-L-L
It was a network of greed over which Jerry Tracy broadcast a sentence of death
THE BULLET whizzed through the crown of Jerry Tracy’s fedora, tilting the hat crookedly over his left temple. He heard the thwack of the leaden slug against the brick theater wall that paralleled the sidewalk. Whirling, he stared with dazed incredulity at the wall. There was a powdery gouge on the surface of the brick. A flattened chunk of lead lay on the sidewalk.
The explosive banging from the motor of a truck up near the corner had drowned out the crack of the pistol shot.
Butch flung his massive body in front of Tracy. He had a pugilist’s instinctive reaction to peril in spite of the fact that it was ten years since Butch had been in a ring. His loyalty to the dapper little columnist of the Daily Planet went beyond his duties as body-guard and made him risk his own life without hesitation,
But no more bullets came from the dingy row of rooming houses across the street.
“Are you hoit, Jerry?” Butch growled.
“I’m O.K. Where’d it come from? That middle doorway?”
“I t’ink so.”
That doorway, in the middle of a row of rooming houses, was slightly ajar. The street was a narrow one, and someone with a lousy aim had gummed up a perfect ambush.
“Stay here!” Tracy snapped.
“Nuts to you,” Butch said. His beefy palm shoved hard. Tracy spilled awkwardly to one knee and his tilted hat fell off. “What the hell do you think you got me for?” he growled at Tracy.
He faded across the dark street—not too fast, because a couple of pedestrians were approaching. Butch’s big hand scratched at what might have been an annoying itch under his armpit. He leaned for an instant against the casing of the rooming-house entry. A quick glance inward and he vanished without hesitation.
Tracy guessed sourly: “The gunner must’ve made a backyard sneak.”
He remembered suddenly that he was down on one knee, alongside a bullet-drilled hat and a flattened slug. The slug was still warm as Tracy palmed it and dropped it into his pocket. He got up, kicking petulantly at a crack in the sidewalk for the benefit of the two staring pedestrians.
One of them kept going. The other—the dopier of the two—said solemnly: “S’matter, Mister? Didja fall?”
“Yeah.”
“Ain’tcha gonna pick up your hat?”
Tracy looked at it. The two holes in the soft crown were hidden by the flare of the upturned brim.
“You saw me fall!” Tracy said in a brisk, lawsuit tone. He flipped out a notebook and a pencil. “What’s your name? Where do you live?”
“Who, me?” The dope reared like a pony. “I didn’t see nothing.”
He went rapidly away. Tracy picked up the drilled hat. He ripped out the monogrammed sweatband and dropped the hat in a near-by ashcan. That changed it from a front-page news item to a hunk of junk.
Butch’s big lop-eared face was peering from the doorway across the street. Tracy joined him.
“Did the guy get away?”
“Yeah. But I wanna show you something he lost.”
They tiptoed quietly across the dim floor so as not to attract any attention from curious lodgers. They descended steps to the yard. It was paved except for a strip of earth alongside the rear fence where tall weeds grew. Butch’s big feet had smudged the smaller prints of the escaped fugitive. Butch had gone over the fence in a hurry but the other fellow had enjoyed too big a start.
There was a cellar on the other side, Butch reported glumly, and a whitewashed alley that led to the rear street. The guy must have had a car parked, one with a nice, speedy pick-up.
“This here is what I meant,” Butch said, pointing downward at the weeds. “The guy musta tore it off on the same nail that almost ruined my—”
“Let’s not go into biology,” Tracy said dryly.
He picked up the white carnation that had fallen by the fence. There are all kinds of carnations, beginning with the ones you can buy for a nickel from sad-looking street peddlers. This was the expensive kind, the sort Bert Lord always wore.
There was no surprise in Jerry Tracy’s mind. He had suspected Lord the moment the bullet had ripped through his hat. The sleek, good-looking Englishman must have found out what Tracy was going to spill on the air tonight in his cigarette broadcast. It was hard to keep juicy items like that under cover. Scandal tipsters, particularly women, had a vengeful habit of phoning the victim beforehand, to make sure that the barb hurt.
Tracy wanted it to hurt. He never used poison arrows except on crooks. And Bert Lord was the dirtiest kind of crook. The sort who go after easy dough by the marriage route. It was so fatally easy, too, when the girl was twenty-three, pretty as a rotogravure special, and too decent to smell a rat hidden under a layer of barber-shop culture and British tweeds.
Tracy could have gone directly to Bruce Hilliard, or perhaps to Hilliard’s young and socially ambitious wife; but the radio method was better. When you told the world—and that included the ships at sea—that the adopted daughter of Tracy’s own cigarette sponsor, Bruce Hilliard, was in love with a sleek graduate of a British jail, it didn’t leave Alice Hilliard much chance to do anything foolish.
It didn’t leave Lord much chance either, except for a quick try at murder along Tracy’s usual route to Radio City.
The Daily Planet’s dapper columnist dropped the carnation into the pocket that contained the flattened bullet. Butch gave his employer a low-lidded glance.
“Would this thing have somepin to do wit’ tonight’s broadcast, boss?”
Tracy had recovered his composure. His voice sounded as thin as a dime. “I’ll give you the air instead of putting you on if you don’t mind your own business, Butch.”
Tracy stopped at an avenue shop and bought a new hat. To appear bareheaded was not in the well dressed Tracy manner; it might excite curious comment.
“Wind blow it away, sir?” the clerk asked politely.
“I threw it away. It had a rat hole in it.”
“You mean a moth hole, sir?”
“I mean a rat hole.”
It was a foolish thing to say, but he couldn’t resist the quip. He took a cab over to Radio City. He always came and went by the rear elevator used by bandsmen with their bulky instruments. It was insurance against nuts and cranks. Tracy’s broadcast was done from a private studio. The public never saw him at the mike; and if they hung around the rear corridor, Butch’s shoulder took care of that.
But Butch didn’t try to shove away the girl in the furred wrap. She stepped quickly in front of Tracy.
“Please! I’ve got to talk to you.”
It was Alice Hilliard. Slim and lovely, with blue eyes and hair the color of strained honey. Butch and Tracy got the same look at her, but saw different things. Butch noticed the slender line of thigh and hip candidly molded by the evening gown, the soft cleft of her bosom as she swayed appealingly toward Tracy. Tracy saw only her eyes. They were filled with tears.
“Jerry, don’t do it! I realize you’re trying to protect me. But, Jerry, you’re not God! You can’t judge a man and condemn him and punish him in one—”
So she knew! That made it tougher.
“Who told you?”
“The woman who phoned you the scandal tip was vicious enough to telephone me, too. Jerry, you’re so wrong about Bert. He’s a straight shooter.”
&n
bsp; Tracy’s nostrils whitened. “Not so damned straight at that,” he said. “Almost six inches too high.”
“Wait until next week before you—”
“A week and you’ll marry the louse.” He stared at her. “Won’t you?”
Before she could answer, a suave, perfectly modulated voice sounded behind them. “Mr. Jerry Tracy, I believe? The scandal-monger?”
The man had stepped noiselessly into the corridor from the street. The first thing Tracy saw was the fresh white carnation in his lapel. He was a tall, strongly built man in his middle thirties, with a dark smudge of mustache and a scrubbed, pink skin. His clipped voice was insultingly polite. He was wearing dinner clothes under a Chester field. His expression was cool and remote, like a British gentlemen in an ad for Scotch whiskey.
Alice Hilliard gave him a quick, frightened look. “Bert, you mustn’t—”
“I’m afraid I must,” Lord said. He took her gently by the arm and turned her toward the street exit. “A blackmailer can always be reasoned with—that’s the heart of his trade. Wait for me in the public lounge, darling. I think I can promise you there’ll be no dirt concerning you and me on the wireless this evening.”
Alice hesitated, then she obeyed. It irked Tracy to witness her childlike submission. After she had left, Butch stared grimly at the fresh white carnation in Lord’s lapel.
“He must a just bought himself a new one. Jerry, is this guy the louse?”
Lord’s gloved hand tightened on his Malacca stick. But he kept his hard, smiling gaze on Tracy.
“I’m not used to haggling. What’s your lowest price?”
“Take him. Butch,” Tracy snapped. “I want his gun.”
Butch dove with a low growl of pleasure. Lord’s cane struck like a whiplash at Butch’s skull, be he swerved and took the blow on his hunched shoulder. There was a quick, panting tussle, followed by a shrill squeal. Lord’s stick was wrenched from his grasp and fell clattering to the floor.
One of Lord’s arms was twisted behind his back. The painful angle at which it was bent drained Lord’s face of color. Butch’s big knee was poised for an upward thrust at the belly of his antagonist.
“Stand still, pal, or I’ll rupture you. Go ahead, Jerry.”
Tracy frisked the man. There was no gun.
“What did you do with it?” Jerry asked him tonelessly. “Park it somewhere after you went over the backyard fence?”
Lord didn’t say anything until Butch released him. Then profanity bubbled from him in a husky whisper. Nasty stuff. Gutter talk from the slums of London. All of his culture forgotten.
“You bloody fool! I’ll ’ave your ’eart for this!”
“I’m skipping that gunplay of yours a while ago,” Tracy told him steadily. “But I have no intention of skipping the broadcast. If you have any sense, you’ll hop the nearest garbage scow and take a quick sneak to England.”
Lord’s narrowed eyes were bits of mica. He kept watching Tracy with a bloodless smile as he adjusted the damage to his clothing. He picked up his cane. When he finally spoke he had regained both his self-control and his faultless accent.
“I’m int’rested in your remark about gunplay and a backyard fence. Are you suggesting—”
“I’m suggesting that you get the hell out of New York and let Alice Hilliard alone.”
“Cards on the table, eh? Right-o. I think I can play any style of game that suits you, Mr. Tracy. If you slander me on the wireless tonight, I’ll see that you stop living. Good evening.”
He left the building with a quick stride. Butch growled “Nuts!” as Tracy grabbed him. The columnist swung him around and punched the elevator button.
“It’s eight o’clock sap! I’m on the air in thirty seconds.”
They ascended swiftly. In the upper corridor a man’s head was jutting anxiously from a doorway. At sight of the Daily Planet’s columnist his worried forehead smoothed and he patted the tip of his nose as a signal to someone inside the broadcasting room.
Tracy was arriving exactly on time. Even a bullet couldn’t spoil his record of never being late for his weekly gossip show.
The announcer was reading the commercial at the floor mike. Tracy slipped into his familiar wooden chair, grabbed his table mike, placed the neat pile of script pages under his eyes. The announcer’s voice crackled with the familiar introduction that once a week turned a million listening ears toward loud speakers:
“And now the Hilliard Tobacco Company reminds you that ‘Where there’s smoke there’s fire.’ Light up and let America’s greatest gossip columnist tell you the news you like to tell your neighbors! Presenting—Jerry Tracy!”
Jerry came in as he always did, like sleet bouncing off a tin roof. He ripped competently through his assignment, tossing each script sheet to the floor as he finished it. The squib about Bert Lord was not in the script. Tracy would be deliberately breaking studio rules by inserting it. He watched the clock and killed his last item to make room for it. He was conscious of the gasp of the announcer as he spoke his piece with hard, nasal clarity:
“What British crook has come to the U.S.A. under forged passports on a suave hunt for cigarette money? According to your correspondent’s information this gentleman’s specialty has led him close to the adopted daughter of a well known tobacco tycoon. ‘Where there’s smoke there’s fire’ is a swell warning for a crook to remember. It may save him a bad burn when the girl’s father realizes what’s going on. Will the crook be smart and scram? Lord only knows!”
Tracy’s jaw was tight at the sign-off. Dabney, the announcer, stared curiously at him. Dabney was a veteran on the hour and a good friend of Tracy’s.
“It’s none of my business, Jerry, but did Bruce Hilliard O.K. that last item?”
“Why?”
“I just wondered. Do you think it’s a good idea to dump a load of dirt in the front yard of your own sponsor?”
“If you got the point,” Tracy said slowly, “Hilliard will, too. That’s what I wanted. If I have to, I’ll take the rap for it,” he added grimly.
“Looks like you may have to,” Dabney said.
A light began to flash inside a glassed booth. It was Tracy’s private phone to enable him to take last minute news flashes from his secretary. Dabney answered the call, said very gently. “Yes. Mr. Hilliard.”
The voice on the phone was thick with anger. Tracy had to listen hard to make out the slurred words.
“What the hell do you mean by publicly humiliating my daughter? If you had information that this Bert Lord is a crook why didn’t you come privately to me?”
“Because your daughter is a headstrong girl, Mr. Hilliard. I don’t think you could have stopped her. Or your wife, either. You might have made it tough, but I wanted to make it impossible. That’s why I went on the air and told the world.”
“Damned kind of you! I’ll expect to see you in fifteen minutes. If you’re not—”
“I’ll be there,” Tracy said quietly.
He glanced wryly at his watch. Eight thirty-two. He’d expected a quick reaction and he’d got it—two minutes after the sign-off.
He scribbled the name and address of Bert Lord on a card and handed it to Butch.
“I want you to watch this guy’s apartment. It’s a swanky penthouse, with a private entrance and a private elevator. If Alice Hilliard shows there, stop her. Make a scene, grab her purse, do anything that will get the two of you picked up by cops. Phone me at Hilliard’s home from the police station. I’ll take care of everything. Scram!”
Butch nodded. If Tracy had asked him to disrobe in Times Square and bark like a dog the order would have been cheerfully obeyed. In Butch’s simple philosophy there was always a sensible reason for everything Tracy did. His big feet went rapidly away.
A few minutes later Jerry Tracy descended in the rear elevator and emerged on the sidewalk. There was a row of taxis parked along the curb. He slammed himself into the first in line.
Before he could talk to the dr
iver, the door on the street side of the cab opened and slammed. Alice Hilliard dropped panting into the seat beside Jerry. She had come racing from a doorway across the street. Tracy, who had just sent Butch to head her off from Bert Lord’s penthouse, was completely discomfited. Alice’s sob didn’t help him much, either.
In a stony voice he gave the driver Hilliard’s address.
“I’m going with you,” Alice said.
“You’re foolish. You’re only making it tougher. Why not let me drop you off at your own apartment?”
“Sorry. I want to be there when you tell Father that I’m in love with a louse.”
“Oke by me.” His shrug stung her to anger.
“If you’re wrong about this, I’ll never let up on you, Jerry! Not until I’ve driven you from New York,”
“And if I’m right?”
She didn’t reply.
Hilliard’s home was an ornate old-fashioned dwelling on a west side street that rammed into a quiet dead end above the twinkling darkness of Riverside Drive. The house was set back from the sidewalk and there were green, park-like grounds. Tracy rang the bell and waited. There was no answer.
“That’s funny. Aren’t there any servants in this joint?”
“It’s their night out, except the butler, and father’s a little deaf,” Alice suggested. “Perhaps he can’t hear the bell.”
“Does he have to? He’s got a butler and a secretary and a wife.”
“A very pretty wife, too,” Alice said.
Her soft words made Tracy glance sharply at Hilliard’s adopted daughter. Alice and Betty were almost the same age. Tracy had never thought of friction between them, but he did now. He had supposed that Alice’s switch to a small apartment downtown had been her tactful withdrawal from an oldish foster father with a young wife.
Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter Page 81