Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter

by Tinsley, Theodore A.

  “Drop it!” Killan rasped.

  The knife clattered. Killan scooped it up. Fitzgerald and Tracy sprang aboard and the seaplane began to drift away from the rocking boat.

  “Cuff him, Sarge,” Fitz growled.

  There was a quick scream from Betty Hilliard. “Let him alone, you fools! He’s innocent. Ken, tell them what happened, quick! Untie me, someone!”

  Tracy loosened her bonds. He didn’t have much trouble with the rather hastily knotted cords that fettered her wrists and ankles. Fitz was listening to Dunlap, watching him like a hawk. His story sounded too fast and too phoney.

  He accused Furman and Alice Hilliard of attempting murder. They had, he declared, lured him and Betty to the Long Island estate with a promise to return certain missing love letters that had passed between Dunlap and Hilliard’s young wife. Furman and Alice had taken them to Hilliard’s boat house at the edge of the cove. Before Dunlap was aware of treachery, he and Betty were bound hand and foot and tossed into Hilliard’s speedboat. The rudder was lashed tightly, the engine started, and the boat was sent racing into the Sound to be blown up as soon as the delayed spark of a fuse reached the gas tank.

  Killan said, incredulously, “A fuse? An explosion?”

  “Where’s the fuse?” Fitzgerald snapped.

  “Overboard,” Dunlap said slowly, his eyes watchful. “I rolled to the knife just in time. Guess they overlooked that fishing knife in the dark. It was under a seat. I cut my bonds, tossed the damned fuse over the side, a few seconds before your plane showed up.”

  Killan said dryly, “Funny you didn’t draw any blood with those quick knife cuts.”

  “He’s telling the truth,” Betty Hilliard cried. “Furman and Alice wanted it to appear as if we blew up accidentally in a guilty attempt to flee. They must have been in cahoots with Lord.”

  Fitzgerald looked at the Daily Planet’s little columnist. Tracy’s dim smile was enigmatic.

  “Lord didn’t kill Hilliard,” he said. “I’ve known that for some time. Hilliard was shot twice because a man and a woman murdered him. Each wanted a hold on the other, so each fired at him, using Lord’s stolen gun. Then, you see, with them both witnessing the other’s shot, neither could ever talk. We’d better get back to that boat house.”

  “You won’t find them,” Betty cried. “They’re miles away by this time.”

  Dunlap didn’t say anything. Tracy jumped to the speedboat’s engine and started it. Fitz yelled an order across the black water to the drifting seaplane. As the boat raced back to the entrance of the cove, the seaplane began to taxi slowly in its wake, dipping along like an unwieldy gull.

  The boathouse was a two-story wooden building on the left side of the cove. A light was burning on the lower floor. It was the only light visible in the darkness. Hilliard’s country home, perched high on the cliff, was black and formless among the trees.

  Tracy switched off his engine and allowed the speedboat to ground on a shelving beach. He and Fitz hurried noiselessly toward the partly opened door of the boathouse.

  A cautious glance inside made them both stiffen. Walter Furman and Alice Hilliard were lying close together on the floor. There were handkerchiefs thrust into their mouths; their wrists and ankles were tied with lengths of fishing cord. Their faces were livid with terror.

  Fitz started to spring forward, but Tracy caught him in a tight grip and yanked him soundlessly back out of sight. He had seen something that Fitz hadn’t. The knob of a rear door was turning slowly! Someone behind the boathouse was about to make a stealthy entrance.

  A small window allowed Tracy and Fitz a hidden view of the interior. The back door was wider now, although no one was visible in the blackness beyond, On the floor Walter Furman was threshing furiously.

  A man bounded suddenly into the lighted room. There was a gun in his hand and it swung toward the pair on the floor.

  Fitz’s yell of amazement startled the murderer. He was a man alongside whose smashed body Fitzgerald had knelt only an hour or so earlier to take fruitless fingerprints.

  Bert Lord! The man who had jumped or fallen thirteen stories.

  Lord’s gun muzzle jerked toward the window. His shot and Fitz’s roared simultaneously. Glass showered Tracy as Lord’s bullet grazed his scalp. Fitz’s bullet missed the whirling killer’s chest, but it drilled through the palm of Lord’s outthrust left hand.

  The stairs to the upper floor were closer to Lord than the rear door. He raced upward. That was a mistake. Fitz was inside the front door like a lean-limbed tornado, pumping lead.

  He fired four thunderous shots and one of them drilled Lord’s back below his shoulder blades. Lord clung with one hand to the wooden bannister, trying to aim his gun muzzle downward toward Fitz. To Tracy it seemed like a million years, but it was really not more than three or four seconds.

  Lord toppled almost leisurely over the bannisters. He struck on his head and rolled over. His neck stayed twisted at an unnatural angle. He looked as if he were slyly peeping over his shoulder at the rigid figures of Tracy and the police inspector.

  Fitz said huskily, “That’s one for the book. He falls thirteen stories and doesn’t get killed. Then he flops six feet over a bannister and breaks his neck.”

  “Only, of course,” Tracy said, “he didn’t fall thirteen stories. He pushed someone out. When you have time to get an autopsy done, you’ll sure as hell find out it was his poor valet. “I’ve heard he had one the same height and size as he was.”

  Tracy breathed relievedly. “I’m glad I didn’t scare him into suicide. He suspected We’d get a line on him from Scotland Yard where he’s wanted for murder. So he undoubtedly bashed in his valet’s head, dressed the body in his clothes—even to the flower—and tossed him out the window. He knew he’d have time to escape before the poor, smashed body could ever be identified and that, in the meantime, we’d think it was he.”

  Dunlap and Betty Hilliard came in, herded by Killan. On the floor the bound figures of Alice and Furman had stopped writhing. Both couples were watching Tracy, who kept staring at the dead Lord with a bleak smile.

  “Lord shot at me through the penthouse door, his scream at the window, was a bluff,” Tracy said thoughtfully. “After Lord shoved out his valet, he jumped calmly into his bedroom closet. When we raced downstairs to view the mangled body of the valet he’d killed, Lord made a quick sneak. … Have you still got those prints from the murder gun?”

  Fitz nodded. He smeared Lord’s dead fingers lightly with fountain pen ink and pressed them gently against a sheet of paper. Then he compared the result with the prints he carried from the Webley revolver. “Check,” he said. “A perfect match.” Tracy shook his head. “It’s not as simple as that, Fitz. Lord was framed.”

  “Then why did he fake his own death?”

  “The prints answer that,” Tracy said. “Bert Lord, if we’d caught him, would’ve been extradited to England and been hanged. Hence his desperate alibi at the penthouse window. But he didn’t kill Hilliard! And he wasn’t the man who ambushed me on my way to the broadcast studio tonight. Why should Lord, a clever crook, have been dumb enough to drop his well known white carnation where Butch and I would find it?”

  Tracy turned suddenly toward Ken Dunlap. “You admit you went to Hilliard’s house tonight. At a quarter of eight, you said. Three quarters of an hour before he was talking to me on the phone.”

  “Hilliard was dead when I saw him,” Dunlap said calmly. “The back door was unlocked. Betty was gone. Her husband was dead. That’s the truth.”

  “Why did you go there at all?”

  “None of your damned business!”

  “I’ll tell you,” Betty Hilliard said wearily. “Ken came because I love him. He wanted to ask my husband to permit a divorce so that we could marry. I phoned Ken and begged him not to come, afraid of my husband’s violent temper. But Ken insisted. So I got rid of the butler and sneaked out to intercept Ken. I—I couldn’t find him.”

  Fitz nodded griml
y to Killan and the two cops moved closer to Dunlap. Tracy began to talk in a quiet, even voice.

  “Hilliard was killed by a man and woman about 7:30 with Lord’s gun. The gun was left to incriminate Lord. Alice even tried to make me think she was shielding Lord, by trying to keep the gun out of sight. The man who shot Hilliard then rushed downtown, bought a white carnation and took a shot at me, further involving Lord. Lord suspected the double-cross when he showed up at the studio and I accused him of the ambush. He raced to Hilliard’s house, after a quick trip to his penthouse to find his revolver missing. He was the guy who tried to steal his own gun from me in the darkness—and failed.

  “Lord knew, too late, what he was up against. So he faked his own death to make his fade-out easy. I should’ve suspected about his valet because I once wrote an item in my column about the town’s best-dressed valet who could wear his master’s old clothes. That was Lord’s man. Anyway, Lord dared not tell the truth to the cops about the murderess and her boy friend, because to do so would be to hand himself over to British justice. The killers realized at once what Lord had done. But they, too, had to keep mum about his fake death or else disclose the fact that they had framed him.

  “Lord was hanging around the Hilliard home when Ken Dunlap arrived in response to the call from Betty. I was in Dunlap’s apartment when he got that call. Betty had already made a tearful appeal to Alice about the letters which Alice had found. The result was that a truce was patched between the two women. Lord knocked out the cop on duty, but he was too late for his real revenge. The two couples had already started for Hilliard’s Long Island place. Lord followed—for revenge. He’d lost everything. The rest is obvious.”

  “But.” Inspector Fitzgerald’s voice sounded dazed, “it was Alice Hilliard and Furman whom Lord tried to kill.”

  “That’s right,” Tracy said.

  “You mean that Furman and not Dunlap—”

  “I mean,” Tracy said quietly, “that you’ve got your killers already tied up on the floor here, in fake knots of their own making. Hilliard was killed by his adopted daughter and a crooked secretary who happens also to be Alice’s lover.”

  Sergeant Killan said dully, “Then all that nutty stuff about the motorboat and the burning fuse was true?”

  Tracy nodded. “Furman’s a good psychologist. He figured that if the explosion didn’t blow Betty and Dunlap to smithereens, their story would be too fishy to believe. That’s why he played safe with the cords and gag. That’s also probably why he didn’t search the boat and find the fishing knife.”

  Walter Furman lay very still on the floor alongside Alice. He had spat out his gag. His voice was scornful.

  “You’ve forgotten my alibi.”

  “You haven’t any. You had enough time after you killed Hilliard to make your fake ambush of me, drop the carnation, and go to meet Nick White at his near-by hotel. Alice met me at the broadcast building with a fake tearful appeal to build her alibi. You thought you were both in the clear, because you intended to make it seem that Hilliard was still alive two minutes after my broadcast ended.”

  “How do you know he wasn’t?” Furman said huskily.

  “No one touched his radio set from the moment the body was discovered. Hilliard never missed one of my broad casts. Yet his dial was tuned at another station. In other words, he was killed before I came on the air. He couldn’t have heard my squib and, therefore, didn’t summon me to his house. You did that!”

  “Prove it, wise guy.”

  “Easily,” Tracy said steadily. “My studio phone is unlisted. I use it to get last minute news flashes from my private secretary. Only two other people know that number. Hilliard, who was already dead—and his confidential secretary, Walter Furman.”

  “I really ought to have a motive.”

  “I can guess at one. That check Hilliard gave Alice this afternoon for $50,000. It might have been forged by—”

  “No.” Hilliard’s wife spoke suddenly. “My husband signed it. He told me about it. It was a final gift to Alice in lieu of any share in his estate in the event she married Lord. He had already changed his will, cutting her off. Then Alice tried to blacken my character. My husband threatened to stop payment on the check. I heard him tell Furman to notify the bank in the morning. He wrote a notation on the stub. Make Furman tell you what he did with the book.”

  Furman’s hand moved like a streak of lightning from beneath his prone body. He had slyly released his hidden right hand from the loosely twisted cords. As he heaved to his knees a pistol glittered.

  “Quick!” Alice screamed harshly. “I can take it! Let’s go this way!”

  Fitz tried to clutch at Furman but he twisted like an eel. He leaned swiftly toward Alice. She had knelt to face him, and she took without a quiver the bullet that he sent crashing into her breast. A second later the smoking muzzle spat flame into Furman’s temple.

  He fell in a flat huddle. There was a ghastly smile on Alice’s pale face. She had pitched forward across the body of her lover.

  “She took it, all right,” Fitz said.

  “Some women can take anything—except decency,” Tracy said.

  His lips tightened and there was silence. What else, was there to say?

  GUIDE TO MURDER

  Jerry Tracy spends a night at the World’s Fair—with an Aquacade girl and murder.

  IF THERE WAS ONE exhibition at the World’s Fair in which Jerry Tracy’s interest was nil, it was Babylonian archeology. To stare at the dull reproductions of an antique civilization made the back of Tracy’s throat dusty. But it was a lot better than trying to make small talk with George Huston.

  Huston seemed to resent Tracy’s presence. Not once since their arrival at the Fair grounds had he spoken a direct remark to the Daily Planet’s famous little columnist. He addressed his talk to Barbara Shipley and her father, including Tracy in the conversation with oblique nastiness: “As our journalistic guide will probably agree—” Small time stuff like that.

  It amused Tracy for a while, then it began to get on his nerves.

  He had given up an evening to pilot these three out-of-towners around the Fair grounds only because of a desire to do a favor for his boss. Shipley had wired that he was coming to New York with his daughter and her fiancé for a look at the Fair. He suggested that it might be more interesting if Jerry Tracy showed them around. Shipley published an important newspaper in Midport, Illinois. The paper was an essential link in a syndicate expansion schema which the owner of the Daily Planet had been working on for months. Jerry grinned wryly and accepted the assignment.

  He had expected to be bored, but he hadn’t expected anything as terrible as George Huston. He had met a lot of small town wise guys in his day, but none worse than this man. Huston never muffed a chance to be sneeringly sarcastic at Tracy’s expense. He was so anxious to be smart he was nasty.

  It was Huston who had insisted on going to the Babylonian Building. Tracy demurred. He pointed across Fountain Lake toward the brightly lit Loop, the amusement center of the Fair. The fire-work’s display was due to start soon. They hadn’t seen the bathing beauties at the Aquacade. It was a gorgeous water spectacle, staged by a master showman—

  Huston’s laugh was like sandpaper.

  Turning his back on Tracy, he made a sneering pretense of trying to convince Shipley with an ironic barker’s spiel.

  “You’ll like it. You’re bound to. Every girl a looker! They wiggle. They squirm. They wear postage-stamp tights. Our tired journalistic friend recommends them highly. You can’t lose! All you need is your ticket of admission and a dirty mind.”

  Barbara Shipley protested indifferently.

  “Really, George, that’s not very nice.”

  Her indifference puzzled Tracy. Barbara had been pleasant enough on the trip from the hotel. Something had happened on the Fair grounds to change her. There was a repressed nervousness in her that had grown as the dusk faded into brilliantly lit darkness.

  She said hurriedly,
“I’m sure Mr. Tracy won’t mind humoring us. It might be very nice to go where it’s quiet.”

  “By all means,” her father said.

  Harold Shipley looked as if his nerves could stand a little rest. Ever since dinner at the French Pavilion he had developed a jerky habit of rubbing his chin. It gave him an excuse to twist his head and glance about him. Tracy wondered if this uneasy habit had anything to do with the man at the French Pavilion.

  The man had sat at a nearby table. He had left a moment or two after they had been seated. Except for his eyes Tracy might not have noticed him at all. They were pale blue, almost whitish, the color of glacial ice. For an instant the eyes rested on the newspaper publisher from Midport. Shipley cringed and seemed to nod faintly. The man smiled without moving a muscle of his face. It was a trick of the eyes alone.

  Tracy had a hunch that a wordless signal had passed between the two men. It took a couple of drinks to bring the color back into Shipley’s strained face.

  From that moment had come the chin-rubbing and the eye-roving of the Mid-port publisher. Coupled with Huston’s sarcasm and Barbara’s inattention, it made Jerry Tracy feel like a poor relation with a bad case of B.O.

  But he swallowed his irritation until Huston made his crack about the Aquacade. Huston kept it up.

  “It seems a shame to deprive our sensational little friend of the opportunity of seeing his flesh show. Perhaps he’d like to rejoin us later. Far be it from me to curb a Broadway columnist’s natural—”

  Tracy’s angry clutch almost tore the buttons loose from Huston’s coat. He whirled the young lawyer around. His voice was low, almost conversational.

  “One more crack out of you and I’ll hang one on your jaw!”

  Huston tried to break loose and couldn’t.

  “Let go, damn you! People are watching us.”

  The crowd of sightseers on the way to the amusement area had begun to thicken. Tracy released his grip. Huston straightened with a forced smile. A Fair policeman, very natty in his broad Stetson and dark-blue tunic, gave Tracy and Huston a slow stare.