Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter

by Tinsley, Theodore A.

  Tracy raced shoreward across the boathouse float. His voice drifted back as crisp as the crack of a whip.

  “Have your motorcycle cops pick up my car at the main gate of the grounds. I’ll be travelling fast! And, Fitz, while you’re at it, see if you can dig up some pants for Butch—stylish stout!”

  Fitz smiled grimly as he turned toward the paunchy Harold Shipley. The Midport publisher squealed. He was a shade too slow backing away.

  MY CANDLE BURNS

  The strange death pose of a fabulous glamour girl sets Jerry Tracy on a Blue Book kill

  JERRY TRACY LOOKED TOUGHEST when he was it his weakest ebb of sales resistance. Tonight he looked meaner than the law allows. His eyebrows were cocked crookedly. His mouth had a sour, southeast twist. When he replied occasionally to Butch’s eager babble, he sounded like a discontented frog. Actually, Jerry was enjoying Butch’s excitement.

  They were on their way to the Garden to watch a featherweight leather-pusher named Harry Bendetto. Bendetto was in the first prelim bout. He was five feet ten, thin as a shad and twice as bony. The length of his jaw made the experienced Tracy wince in advance. But Harry Bendetto had one supreme virtue.

  He was Butch’s latest ring discovery.

  Butch was always uncovering lunks like that. As soon as one of them kissed the canvas, Butch popped up blithely with another. With Butch, hope always triumphed over experience. Tonight was no exception. Butch was wearing his niftiest Garden ensemble: a fawn-colored coat, with a peak cap to match; the toes of his ox-blood shoes looked as if they had mumps.

  “Jerry, I’m tipping you! Bet your shoit on this lad! He can’t miss, not with that brand-new one-two I loined him. Your right comes up fast, see? Then your left hoils itself into de opponent’s mush—”

  Tracy backed hastily as Butch halted on the sidewalk and went into an elephantine dance, with both fists stabbing ferociously.

  “If Bendetto tries a stance like that, somebody is going to light a cannon cracker in his belly,” Tracy said somberly.

  “Aw, nuts. You ain’t getting what I mean. You’re already leaning in close, see? You—brrrp!”

  The Daily Planet’s dapper little columnist recoiled.

  “It musta been the onions,” Butch said. “With me, they should never soive onions with hamboigers. Anyway—”

  “Any way you serve ’em, they’re terrible! Come on!” Tracy grabbed Butch by the arm and hurried him along.

  Because Tracy was walking on the outside, he missed the full brunt of the collision when the man in the velour hat bounced headlong into Butch. As it was, the impact shoved Tracy violently to the curb where he teetered wrathfully with one foot up and one foot down.

  The man had darted swiftly out of an alley. He was twice as startled as Butch. He made no apologies. His left hand grabbed Butch by the necktie and for an instant the two scuffled awkwardly together. The man in the velour hat tried to toss Butch out of his way. Butch was too heavy to be tossed. He misunderstood what was going on. He thought that the well dressed man was trying to pull a stick-up.

  Butch tore loose and ruined a sixty-nine cent tie. If he’d thrown a quick, blind punch he might have knocked his panting foe kicking. But Butch was too eager to try out Harry Bendetto’s brand-new one-two. He went into a massive crouch. Both hands flew up and one of them cocked backward.

  The stranger lit the cannon cracker Tracy had predicted. It exploded in the pit of Butch’s belly. His mouth flew open. He went down in an aura of stale onions.

  The whole thing happened while Jerry Tracy was still doing his balancing act on the curbstone. The instinct to avenge Butch started him into battle. But common sense put on the brakes. Tracy was a little guy. He wasn’t exactly yellow, but he did his best fighting when he was backed in a corner. He realized instantly that the man in the velour hat knew how to box!

  Tracy ducked prudently away and allowed the guy to scram. The fellow raced up to the corner and jumped into a parked car. It looked like a Lincoln Zypher. In a moment the car and Paul Voisin were gone with the wind.

  That’s who the guy was—no doubt about it! He had tried to shield his face during the brief brawl. But Tracy had seen the long, supercilious nose, the tiny mustache, the iron-gray Toscaninni hair at the edges of the velour hat. The hat came from France. So did Paul Voisin.

  His lineage was proud. He could trace his ancestry to an illegitimate son of one of the early French kings. In New York he was quite a cafe celeb. Not the place where there was always a table reserved for Jerry Tracy; Voisin’s hangouts were the ones where the Daily Planet’s ace scandal columnist would be ejected deftly on sight.

  Tracy wondered what this Paul Voisin was doing tearing out of a dark apartment house alley in so desperate a hurry. He scented scandal. A glance at the ornate front of the apartment building increased Tracy’s hunch. He forgot about Paul Voisin and began to think about Linda Payton. Tracy hadn’t shoveled any ermine dirt for a long time. Little goose-pimple shivers of anticipation went up and down his spine.

  Linda Payton lived in that swanky building. Daughter of Cass Payton of Greenwich, Connecticut. Heiress to copper tubing and brass pipe in peace time, shell casings and armor plate in war. Betrothed to the elegant Paul and all set to move to a chateau on the Loire. The marriage contract signed, the dowry all arranged.

  And the elegant Paul pulling a desperate sneak from a service alley!

  Nobody had seen the swift encounter. Tracy leaped to where Butch was staggering to his feet. It was dark at the head of the alley. Tracy began pushing Butch out of sight.

  “The punk didn’t hoit me none,” Butch mumbled. “I musta tripped. Did he get your watch?”

  “No. And keep your big mouth shut!”

  “Hey, cut out the pushin’! Ain’t we going to the Garden?”

  “You’re going into the nearest ash-can if you don’t stop that yapping!” Tracy whispered.

  The basement door of the apartment building was closed but not locked. Tracy tiptoed cautiously toward a corridor angle from which he could see the rear elevator. The service car was at the basement level. There was no sign of the operator.

  Tracy was not surprised. He knew that even in expensive joints like this economy ruled the night shift. Deliveries were spasmodic after six P.M. The furnace man or the porter doubled in the service car whenever the night button was pushed. Tracy tiptoed back and got Butch.

  They rode the empty car to the third floor and left it there. They climbed the rest of the way up the staircase that boxed in the shaft. Tracy didn’t need a guide book to tell him on what floor Linda Payton lived. He had tried to interview her several times.

  Tonight Tracy had a magic password. All he had to do was to announce that he intended to print a squib concerning Paul Voisin’s peculiar sneak via the cellar and alley. Tracy was sure that Voisin had sneaked in as well as out. Had the French play boy arrived by the front door, he would have had to leave the same way. An unseen departure would have made it look embarrassingly as if the elegant Paul had spent a pre-nuptial night with his intended bride.

  Tracy grinned as he climbed the stairs. Linda Payton was Grade A copy, even without dirt. Six years ago she had been America’s most publicized glamour deb. Her father had hired most of the Waldorf-Astoria for elbow room when he had presented Linda to society. Linda’s mother was dead; and up to that time Cass Payton had been too busy lining up his second billion to bother much with his daughter. He made up for that after her debut. Linda did everything, went everywhere. Her travels and escapades kept the society pages dramatic during the Depression.

  But six years had worn Linda’s glamour pretty thin. According to rumor, she was bored, blasé and unhappy. It was no longer fun to throw a drunken party at Pierre’s to help the unemployed. Linda hadn’t got tight since the night she had quoted Nietzsche and made a half-hearted attempt at suicide. Night spots never saw her any more. She began to fancy herself as a serious poetess and had one or two volumes printed at her own expense. Her betro
thal to Paul Voisin was her father’s doings. Linda didn’t love Paul; but it was a socially correct alliance and a chateau in the Loire valley would please Papa. All this made a peculiar background for Paul Voisin’s sneak act—to say nothing of his attempt to knock Butch and Jerry cold before they could recognize him.

  Linda’s service door wasn’t locked. It wasn’t even closed! Jerry Tracy widened the crack a little and peered. The kitchen was empty. There was Scotch and soda and a bottle of sherry on a side table. A silver tray of appetizers was ready to serve. From the warming compartment of an enormous gas range came the savory odor of a cooked dinner. But there was no sign of a servant.

  Tracy hesitated, wondering where the maid was. Then he saw two objects that made him remember suddenly that tonight was Thursday. Folded neatly over the back of a chair was a frilly lace apron no bigger than a man’s pocket handkerchief. On the table, near the pearl onions and the celery, lay an open cookbook.

  The maid’s night out, of course! A tête-à-tête dinner for Paul Voisin to celebrate the approaching marriage. But why had the sleek Frenchman lammed out so stealthily? And why was Linda so damned quiet in the dining-room?

  She didn’t look up when Tracy stared at her lovely back from the doorway. Her back was bare from her neck almost to the base of her spine in a superb evening gown. She was seated in a chair, leaning over the table. Her gaze was concentrated on a small wine stain that marred the snowy cloth.

  She was stone dead.

  “Jeez a’mighty!” Butch gasped.

  Tracy whirled. His face was white, his eyes like hard pellets.

  “Get back to the kitchen! Shut the door and lock it! Don’t make any noise. And stay there!”

  Linda’s dead face was contorted. But her hands were the most horrible thing about her. They were clenched close together, fist against fist, clutching something that couldn’t be seen. The outside of each joined fist had been seared by flame. Peering with infinite caution, Jerry Tracy could see the blackened ends of two candle wicks.

  The lighted wicks had burned closer and closer to Linda’s dead fists until the searing of her own flesh had quenched the twin flames.

  Linda Payton had died, burning a candle at both ends!

  She had swallowed poison. Tracy thought about cyanide. He had seen cyanide deaths before. There was no way to prove it from the contents of the glass which Linda had drained. The bouquet of the dry sherry almost covered the fainter odor of bitter almonds. No wonder Paul Voisin had fled! Linda had played a ghastly trick on him. She had invited him over for a cute tête-à-tête dinner—so that Voisin’s arrival would point up her final dramatic exit from a stale life and a loveless marriage. Linda always liked the dramatic touch, the spectacular fadeout. It was like her, too, to pick a famous tag line from a first-rate poet:

  “My candle burns at both ends,

  It will not last the night. … ”

  Voisin, a realistic Frenchman, had taken one look and fled to keep his civilized name out of a mess. It fitted perfectly except for an annoying oddity. Why had the elegant Paul taken the cellar route to attend a private dinner cooked by his promised bride? Certainly not because Linda had warned him she was committing suicide! Voisin would be unwilling to stick his patrician nose smack into the middle of a coroner’s inquest just to oblige the theatrical desire of his late intended!

  Jerry Tracy walked around the table. He sniffed at the other glass, the empty one. There was no cyanide odor.

  The glass was as clean as a whistle. But when Tracy tilted it, using a napkin, he discovered a faint discoloration on the fragile surface of the table. Somebody had washed the glass and put it back wet. The maid, who had set the table for two before she had departed? Hardly! Voisin? Less chance than that!

  “Maybe the murderer?” Tracy whispered aloud.

  Murder suddenly seemed a lot more logical than suicide. The candle act didn’t match up with the cyanide swallowing. Tracy had once seen a desperate little chorine take the cyanide exit. The stuff was not instantaneous; nor easy, either. It tied you into agonized knots. Linda would never have been able to hold on to that double-lighted candle.

  Someone might have arranged the suicide prop after she had died! The same someone who had poisoned the inside of two empty glasses and had hastily washed out the other later.

  Tracy’s reaction to this slant was prompt. He darted across the room to the phone and called the managing editor’s desk at the Daily Planet. He was trembling with eagerness. The story was so big that Tracy temporized in order to regain control of his voice.

  “Mike, what have you got on the front page that’s good? I’ll match you for it!”

  “No use, Jerry. We’re loaded and ready to roll. We’re after a cop killer tonight! Somebody bumped a motorcycle cop up near the city line. Battered his head to bloody paste. The mayor’s up there now. So’s the commissioner, We’re heading a city-wide crusade to nab a cop killer. Top that, Jerry, or don’t bother me!”

  “How would you like me to kill Linda Payton?”

  “Swell. But you’d better hire yourself a good lawyer beforehand. Old Cass Payton would just about—” The chuckle faded from Mike’s voice. He caught the nervousness in Tracy’s tone on the wire. “Jerry, wait a minute! You’re not—”

  “She’s dead, Mike! Linda Payton. Violently. You should see her hands. Clean out the front page and leave a hole for some nice horror pix.”

  “Cripes!”

  Tracy could hear Mike yelling fiercely to somebody. Then the voice was a whiplash on the wire again.

  “How did she get it? Where is she?”

  “In her own apartment. Cyanide. I just found her.”

  “Suicide? By Gawd, she tried the Dutch act less than a year ago.”

  “The set-up suggests suicide, Mike. But my guess makes it murder.”

  “Don’t guess, damn it! Make sure! What about the police?”

  “Out of it so far. Better call Headquarters after I hang up. We’d never get away with a stall on this one. Try to contact Inspector Fitzgerald. Fitz is our boy. He’ll give the Planet a break.”

  “O.K. Here’s your rewrite!”

  Tracy shot the stuff in a swift, nasal monotone. He didn’t mention Paul Voisin. In a murder set-up Voison was the most logical suspect. Too logical! Tracy decided to hold back about the Frenchman. He was never a guy to crawl out on a limb until he knew how far down the ground was.

  “Keep it the old ‘found dead in her apartment from cyanide poisoning’,” he snapped, “Play up the candle. Run Millay’s poem in a big box. Don’t mention suicide. Let the customers take that for granted from the layout. If it turns out to be murder, we can switch and be the only sheet in town to call it right. Hold on for some more in about three minutes!”

  Tracy prowled around the dining-room, his sharp eyes missing no detail. He examined the sideboard and china closet. He looked at the rug and all the chairs. Dropping to sharply creased knees, he lifted the lacy banquet cloth and peered under the table. He found nothing that added to the picture.

  Linda Payton remained frozenly indifferent. Tracy’s gaze kept jerking back to her in spite of his absorbed hunt for some added trifle that might point toward murder. It was hard to think of Linda as dead, even with her face twisted and stony. She had ebony-black hair and skin like cream. Her slumped pose was the only awkward note. Murder or suicide, Linda had made a superb exit.

  The apartment was not a large one. Tracy didn’t waste much time discovering that the dining-room, bedroom, bath and maid’s quarters weren’t going to be any help.

  In the pantry broom closet, however, Tracy found a peculiar bit of carelessness. Somebody had upset a bottle of cedar oil, the stuff used to polish furniture. It had a strong, pungent odor. It smelled like fresh sawdust. That was why Tracy had halted on his way to the kitchen to jerk open the closet door. He wondered why the fallen bottle hadn’t been replaced upright. Everything else was neatly arranged. Had somebody ducked in or out of the closet in a hell of a hurr
y? Out, probably! Otherwise the person who had kicked the bottle over wouldn’t have left it lying that way.

  Frowning, Tracy went into the kitchen and found Butch cheerful and relaxed. Butch had the top off a bottle of pearl onions and was spearing them rapidly with a silver fork. Butch had opened the Scotch, too. It made a perfect combination. The onions made Butch thirsty; the Scotch made him hungry again. He was doing all right.

  “Wanna poil, Jerry? I shouldn’t be eatin’ them, though. Onions always re-toin on me. They—brrrp!”

  Tracy said, “——!” in a vicious undertone. He capped the jar, and hauled Butch away from the Scotch.

  “Listen, you blasted manhole cover! I want you to—”

  He stopped talking suddenly and froze into rigid silence. A click came from the front of the apartment. It sounded like a door closing—the front door! Silence followed. Then feet began to move stealthily, heading inward toward the dining-room.

  Tracy’s heart did a frightened somersault. The man—those footfalls certainly sounded masculine—had reached the dining-room. He must already be staring at the glamorous corpse of Linda Payton. Yet not a sound came from him. Either he had magnificent self-control, or he expected to find death!

  Tracy could think of a million reasons why the smart thing was to wait in the kitchen and see what happened. But Butch ruined that.

  “Hey!” he growled. “Lemme take him!”

  He shoved Tracy aside and raced thumping through the pantry.

  “Look out for a gun!” Tracy shrilled.

  He was just a step behind Butch when they burst into the dining-room. The man was across the table from Linda. There was no gun in his hand and scarcely any expression in his cold eyes. He uttered no cry. But he moved like chain lightning.