Black Mask (Vol. 21, No. 8 — November, 1938)

Station K-I–L-L by Theodore Tinsley

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’irik 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.”

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 Chesterfield. 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 musta 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 broascasting 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 driver, 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.

Hillard’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.

“You don’t like Betty very much, do you?” Tracy said, his columnist’s mind instinctively probing this new angle.

“I admire her.” Alice said.

Tracy seemed to remember vaguely a young man named Kenneth Dunlap. Betty Hilliard had seen a lot of him before her marriage to the tobacco king. Tracy could tell nothing from Alice’s blue eyes as she opened her evening bag. She didn’t find what she was searching for.

“This is ridiculous. I seem to have lost my key to the house. I distinctly remember putting it in the bag with my own apartment key.”

“Did you have dinner tonight with Bert Lord?”

Alice didn’t answer. But one look at her face told Tracy his suspicious guess had scored a bull’s-eye.

“Wait here,” he said curtly. “Maybe I can find an unlatched window.”

He darted around the side of the house, flitting swiftly through the darkness. His face was wrinkled with sudden apprehension. Why should Bert Lord want to steal Alice’s key? Was it because Alice had warned him what Tracy intended to do on the radio tonight? Lord might take any steps to keep Hilliard from hearing that broadcast.

There was sweat on Tracy’s forehead as he lifted an unfastened window on the ground floor.

The main hallway was quiet under the glow of shaded lamps. Tracy unlocked the front door and admitted Alice. There was a dim light burning in the reception room to the left of the hallway. The room was empty. Tracy crossed to an inner door and knocked. When there was no answer, he opened the door.

Tracy took one look and stiffened. The rustle of Alice’s evening gown seemed enormously loud in the room’s stillness. She swayed and Tracy caught her as she fainted, lowered her down gently.

He lowered her gently to the floor and walked toward the dead man. Bruce Hilliard was lying on the study rug where he had fallen from a wide-armed chair. He had been shot twice; through the head and through the chest.

Evidently death had come to him without warning. His blood-smeared face was placid. He was lying close to a console radio cabinet which stood alongside his desk.

Tracy had seen enough gunshot wounds in his career to recognize lethal bullet holes when he saw them. The slug through Hilliard’s skull had pierced his brain; the hole in his chest was directly over his heart. The body was faintly warm to Tracy’s touch.

No doctor on earth, Tracy thought grimly, could ever decide which of those two shots had actually killed Hilliard. It puzzled him why the murderer should have risked firing twice. The shots must have raised thunderous echoes in the house. Did the killer know the house was empty? Where was Hilliard’s pretty young wife — and his secretary, and his butler?

All this and more zipped, through Tracy’s mind in the few seconds he stared at the corpse. There was no gun near the body and he made no effort to search for it. He wrapped a handkerchief around his hand and picked up the phone. He called police headquarters and recognized the voice at the switchboard.

“Jerry Tracy speaking! Is Inspector Fitzgerald around?”

Inspector Fitzgerald was one of Tracy’s oldest friends. Out of their mutual trust had come Tracy’s unofficial tie-up with the police department. Fitz was an honest and fearless cop. Tracy had his finger on many pulses, The combination had solved many a baffling case in the past.

Luckily Fitz was still at headquarters. Tracy told him the news and Fitz said quietly, “O.K. Stay where you are. I’ll be up there in a hurry.”

Fitzgerald hung up at the other end, but Jerry continued to talk. In picking up the phone he had turned about, so that his back was toward the unconscious figure of Alice Hilliard. He caught a sudden glimpse of her pale face in the square, gilt-framed mirror on the wall behind Hilliard’s desk.

It was the sight of Alice’s eyelids that made Jerry continue to talk calmly into a dead wire. He crowded close to the desk, so that his left hand that depressed the phone’s cross-bar was invisible to the girl lying on the floor in front of the sofa.

Alice was faking that swoon of hers! Her eyelids were quivering. She was so intent on watching the back of Tracy’s head that she failed to notice the mirror.

She was lying closer to the sofa’s edge than she had been when Tracy had left her. One of her arms was under the sofa, moving slowly. She became rigid as Tracy cradled the phone and walked casually toward her.

He was still holding his handkerchief. He stood staring down at her limp body, aware of a quick feeling of pity. A loyal girl in love with a rogue could learn trickery swiftly!

She screamed as Tracy clutched suddenly at her gloved hand and jerked it into view. She was still holding the gun she had tried to push out of sight.

There was a quick, sharp struggle, then Tracy’s handkerchief-swathed hand closed on the barrel and he wrenched the revolver from Alice’s grasp.

The gun was an English model, A Webley. Two of the chambers had been exploded. There was a strong acid reek of burned powder at the muzzle.

Tracy said gently to the sobbing girl: “Do you love Bert Lord that much?”

“He didn’t do it! He couldn’t have!” Her face lifted and it was white with horror. She stared at Tracy numbly.

“Better sit up and take it easy,” Tracy said tonelessly. “We’ll just forget about this little episode. Inspector Fitzgerald will be here in a few minutes. I’ll tell him I found the gun.”

She sank down on the sofa. Tracy stared grimly at the gun he had laid on Hilliard’s desk.

He was turning away to examine the rest of the study when he heard a sudden faint squeak. Someone was lifting a window in the adjoining reception room!

Before Tracy could move there was a quick thud of feet beyond the curtained doorway. A man’s hand thrust fiercely past the edge of the curtain and jabbed at the light switch. The study was plunged into darkness.

The murder gun was the first thing Tracy thought of. He snatched it up by the barrel, throwing out a blindly defensive arm as the unseen figure of his assailant raced through the blackness toward Hilliard’s desk.

A fist crashed against Tracy’s arm, numbing it from shoulder to elbow. The blow toppled him against a high-backed chair. He managed to reel aside and to overturn the chair between himself and his foe. It gave him only a second’s respite, but that was all the time he needed. He remembered a high-topped cabinet in a corner of the room. He threw the Webley revolver upward, hoping it would land out of sight.

The clatter of the overturned chair drowned out the thud of the gun is it landed among piled books and papers on the top of the cabinet. Somewhere in the dark Alice Hilliard was screaming with terror.

Tracy dived to the floor, clutching at the legs of his foe. A knee banged against his forehead, filling his brain with dancing stars. Then he was knocked flat. Fingers clutched swiftly at him in a search for the murder gun. His pockets were probed, his coat was ripped open.

He heard a fiercely muttered oath in a voice he thought he recognized as Bert Lord’s.

Then the front doorbell began to ring. The sound of it revived Tracy’s waning strength. Clawing wildly, he managed to trip his antagonist. The two rolled over and over on the floor.

Dimly, Tracy realized that Inspector Fitzgerald was waiting patiently outside the street entry, unaware that a trapped murderer was fighting desperately to get away. He tried to yell at the top of his lungs, but a fist smashed at his stomach and drove the wind out of him.

His feeble hold on his enemy was broken. He heard a rush of feet toward the outer room. The overturned chair helped him to pull himself drunkenly to his feet. He staggered headlong through the darkness toward the doorway. The velvet curtain steadied him while his blurred eyes swung toward the open window.

He could see vaguely a tall, racing figure outside the house, vanishing swiftly toward the rear of the grounds. Tracy was trying to swing a leg over the windowsill, when a man’s voice yelled harshly behind him. He was dragged violently backward.

Someone began savagely pummeling him. Blood trickled from Tracy’s nose. A blow on the chin almost snapped his head off. His knees bent and he would have pitched to the floor except for the quick clutch of the fool who seemed to have unwittingly helped Lord to make a clean getaway.

“The window!” Jerry gasped through waves of pain. “Get him — window!”

Fitzgerald didn’t seem to understand. He dragged Tracy toward the wall where the light switch was located. There was a click and a sudden flare of brilliance.

Tracy said thickly: “Fitz, you damned fool, you’ve—”

Then his voice trailed into silence. It wasn’t Fitz at all! He was a good-looking young man with a straight, slim back and a crown of dark, glossy hair.

The young man cried fiercely: “You dirty little sneak-thief! How did you get in here — and what were you up to?”

A moment later both men recognized each other. The excited young man was Walter Furman, Hilliard’s missing secretary.

“Right now I’m not up to — much of — anything,” Tracy gasped, and proved it by slumping into unconsciousness.

When Jerry recovered his senses the first thing he heard was the angry snarl of Inspector Fitzgerald.

“I don’t care what you thought! What the hell did you have to beat him up like that for?”

“I didn’t. The fellow who went out the window did most of it. I thought Tracy was a burglar. I didn’t realize what had happened until I turned on the lights.”

Tracy’s eyes opened. He was on the same sofa where, centuries earlier, he had told Alice Hilliard to lie quietly. She was slumped nearby in a chair, her dulled eyes staring tragically at the floor.

The room was full of people. There were a couple of uniformed cops. A finger-print expert and a police photographer were standing stolidly in a corner, watching a bald-headed man who was crouched on his knees beside Bruce Hilliard’s corpse. That was Grady, the medical examiner.

Hilliard’s secretary was still trying to explain to Fitzgerald what had happened.

“As I told you, no one answered the bell and I let myself in with my key. Naturally I was suspicious of trouble. When I found the lights turned out, and caught a man racing toward an opened window, I didn’t pull punches.”

The medical examiner got to his feet. “Impossible to tell which shot killed him, though I suspect he took the one through the skull first When you’re mad enough to kill a guy twice, you don’t aim at the heart. That was probably done to make sure. Hard to set the time. Could have been a half hour, could have been an hour and a half.”

“He was alive at 8:32,” Tracy said slowly. “That’s when he phoned me at the broadcasting studio. I’d just finished my program.”

“That might fit,” Grady said. “Body’s still fairly warm. No time for rigor mortis. He probably took it while you were on the way over here. The killer was either mad with rage or a blasted psycopath. I may have more dope after the autopsy. Good night, Fitz.”

He went out with a brisk tread.

“I heard your broadcast tonight, Jerry,” Fitz said abruptly. “Did that crack you made about Hilliard’s adopted daughter have anything to do with this kill?”

Tracy glanced at Alice. Her pale face seemed drained of everything but an overpowering exhaustion.

“Tell him, Jerry.”

Tracy shrugged. He told of the scandal tip he had received over the phone from some unknown woman. He told of his check-up on it, and recounted the attempt on his life on the way to the broadcast. He showed Fitz the flattened slug and the white carnation which the escaping gunman had dropped.

“I’m certain it was Bert Lord. Having failed to wipe me out before I could ruin him on the radio, he rushed over here, let himself in with a key he had stolen from Alice’s bag, and bumped Hilliard. He must have figured some stunt to get every one else out of the house... By the way, where were you, Furman?”

Fitzgerald answered for the secretary.

“His alibi is O.K. Jerry. Hilliard sent him over to the Delton Hotel to see Nick White about a show Hilliard was thinking of backing. I checked on that and Nick verified Furman’s story. He was in Nick’s suite from eight o’clock until a quarter of nine. We know Hilliard was alive until 8:32 at least.”

Tracy nodded. Nick White s word could be trusted. He was a fine old Irishman, a veteran producer and a friend of both Tracy and Fitzgerald.

Tracy got shakily to his feet and went over to the tall cabinet in the corner. Mounting a chair, he fished carefully behind the books and papers atop the cabinet with a handkerchief-wrapped hand.

Fitz gave a quick yelp of excitement as he saw the gun.

“I managed to toss it up there just before Lord tackled me.” Tracy said. “That’s what he came back for.”

Fitz took the gun with almost cringing care.

“English make, eh? A Webley. Two chambers fired. All right, Hanley, give it the works.”

Hanley was the finger-print man. He took the weapon over to Hilliard’s desk.

While he was busy, Sergeant Kilian came in. Kilian was Fitz’s right-hand man. He had a hoarse, friendly voice, a cobblestone head and a mouth like a mailbox slit.

“What did you find out upstairs?” Fitzgerald snapped.

“Not a thing,” Kilian said cheerfully. “Hilliard’s wife flew the coop all right. So did the butler. Nothing upstairs to explain why.”

Tracy gave Walter Furman a slow stare. “Were they both in the house when Hilliard sent you over to see Nick White?”

“Yes. Both of them came into the study to talk to Hilliard. Marcom — that’s the butler — had some tradesmen’s bills that had to be okayed. Mrs. Hilliard usually listened with her husband to the Tracy broadcast. But tonight she said she had a sick headache. She went up to her room to lie down just before I left the house.”

Over at the dead man’s desk the finger-print man suddenly ceased his monotonous whistling of a popular tune.

“Good news, Fitz,” he said.

“What you got?”

“Two middle fingers of the right hand. Thumb blurred, but who cares? Maybe—”

He stopped talking as a woman’s scream echoed with startling abruptness from the front hallway of the house.

Sergeant Kilian, who was nearest to the door, bounced forward with a swiftly drawn gun in his beefy hand. He peered into the hall, gaped a moment, then holstered his weapon.

“All right, Halligan. Bring her in here.”

Halligan was the cop who had been left on duty inside the front entry. He clumped stolidly into the room, his hand tightly gripping the arm of a dark-haired and exceedingly pretty woman.

“I caught her sneaking in the front door,” Halligan said. “She had a key. She closed the door quietly and started to tiptoe down the hall toward the stairs. When I grabbed her she started to fight, till she saw my uniform, then she cooled down.”

Tracy said dryly: “Better let go of her, officer. This is Mrs. Hilliard.”

Betty Hilliard stood alone, very stiff and straight, seemingly aware of nothing except the murdered body of her husband. Her dark hair and eyes emphasized the pallor of her skin. She was like marble until she turned and saw Alice staring steadily at her. Then her face flooded with crimson.

“How did this happen, Alice?” she asked with an obvious effort at control.

“I wouldn’t know, Betty.”

“You could guess though, perhaps?”

There was pent-up hatred between these two women. Alice’s jaw tightened at the sneer in Betty’s voice. She turned swiftly toward Inspector Fitzgerald.

“You might as well know, Inspector, that it wasn’t Bert Lord who tried to steal that gun. It was not his voice.”

Fitzgerald didn’t answer that. He walked across to Hilliard’s desk and examined the two finger-prints that the headquarters expert had brought out on the butt of the Webley revolver.

“I’d like to get a quick check on these prints from London. Can you make a classification index for me right away?”

“Yeah.” He took out of his bag a classification sheet printed in squared columns. Slowly he began to record with digits and letters the indices of the specimen print.

“How long were you away from home, Mrs. Hilliard?” Fitz asked the dead man’s wife.

“Quite a while. I left shortly after Mr. Furman departed.”

“Where did you go?”

Betty Hilliard took a long time replying. “I left to attend to some personal business which I have no intention of discussing with you or anyone else.”

“Was your husband alive when you left?”

“Yes. He was in this room waiting to hear the Tracy program. I left with his permission.”

Alice Hilliard’s faint laughter had a sting in it, but the other woman ignored the implication.

“O.K. on that index synopsis,” the finger-print man said.

Fitzgerald went to the phone and called the exchange manager. He identified himself and explained what he wanted. It didn’t take long to put through the trans-Atlantic call. Fitzgerald talked briefly to Scotland Yard and then handed the phone to the finger-print man. It was not a very good connection. Hanley had to talk loudly and repeat his jargon of figures and letters over and over.

Fitz and Kilian, who knew what it was all about, listened eagerly. But Tracy only pretended interest. His ear was cocked in an entirely different direction. Alice had drifted closer to Betty Hilliard. Her lips moved in a swift undertone.

“You’re not kidding me. Who was the boy friend — Ken Dunlap?”

“It certainly wasn’t Bert Lord! If you try to drag me into a scandal—”

“All I’m after is the truth. If those gun-prints belong to Bert, I want him to pay the penalty. But if he’s innocent, I’ll know who’s guilty. And if you think I won’t produce those letters of yours—”

Alice saw Tracy and her murmur stopped.

The fingerprint man was still yowling into the telephone. “Yeah. All right. ’By.” He pronged the receiver with an oath of relief.

“If they’ve got a match in the London files, there ought to be an answer in about an hour. I told him I’d take it at the bureau in Headquarters. Drop in when you’re finished. I’ll check our own files while I’m waiting.”

“I’d like to borrow your ink pad and a couple of specimen sheets,” Fitz said.

He didn’t explain what he wanted them for and the print man didn’t ask. But Tracy knew. He was grimly glad he had sent Butch to keep a watchful eye on the penthouse of Bert Lord. The challenging talk between Alice and Betty Hilliard hadn’t changed Tracy’s mind about the identity of the man with whom he had battled in the dark for possession of the murder gun. He felt sure that was Lord.

The only thing that still puzzled him was the continued absence of the butler. Where in hell was the elusive Marcom?

Unexpectedly Marcom answered that question himself. There was a timid knock at the rear door of the study and when Sergeant Kilian sprang forward and threw open the door, Marcom was gaping with astonishment at the threshold.

His amazement changed to terror as Kilian grabbed and yanked him into the room. He cringed at sight of Hilliard’s sprawled body. Tracy, watching him narrowly, saw his eyes veer for a swift instant. They flicked toward Betty Hilliard and then went blank and expressionless.

“Where the hell did you come from?” Kilian growled. “Sneak in the back door?”

“I didn’t sneak through any door, sir. I came in the back way, using my regular household key. I heard voices here in the study and—”

“Was Hilliard alive when you went out? And how long ago was that?”

“About an hour, sir. I didn’t speak to Mr. Hilliard about going out.”

“Why not? Do you come and go as you please?”

“I had Mrs, Hilliard’s permission. I was attending to an errand for her.”

“Marcom is quite correct,” Betty Hilliard said quickly. “As Mr. Furman has already told you, I retired to my bedroom with a headache. I found I had none of the special tablets I use, so I sent Marconi downtown to get some at the office of my physician.”

“Why didn’t you say so before?”

“You didn’t ask me,” Betty said calmly.

“Let’s see those tablets,” Kilian told Marcom. He took the small package, unwrapped it, then smiled grimly. “I thought so. There’s a half-filled box of these same tablets in the drawer of Mrs. Hilliard’s night stand upstairs in her room. I know because I looked.”

Betty’s face paled. “I... I forgot I had them.”

Inspector Fitzgerald waved his scowling assistant aside. His own voice was suave and friendly. “You’re involving yourself in an unnecessary tangle, Mrs. Hilliard. If we don’t know where you went—”

“You don’t, and you won’t!”

“The assumption, of course,” Fitz explained patiently, “is that you got rid of the butler on a fake errand, so you could leave the house without the knowledge of your husband or Marcom. Probably by the rear door.”

“Well?”

“I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m merely pointing out that a woman with a guilty knowledge of a well arranged murder might leave beforehand by the back door to avoid alarming her husband; and return by the front door in order to discover his murder, in case the butler was still away.”

Betty’s smile was ghastly. “You might do a lot better, Inspector, by waiting for London to report on the finger-prints of Mr. Bert Lord.”

Jerry Tracy shot her a quick question. “Are you the woman who phoned me the scandal tip about him?”

“Sorry. I’m not the type.”

“You are, you liar,” Alice said harshly. “I should have guessed that the tipster was you! Why didn’t you tell Tracy, while you were spilling your dirty hints, to investigate the love life of a sleek young lad named Ken Dunlap?”

“If you dare to soil my name—”

“You’ve already done that yourself, darling. Your husband knew, too. If he hadn’t died so suddenly tonight, there’d have been a divorce trial that would have sat you where you belong. In the gutter.” Alice was shaking with rage. But Hilliard’s wife remained frozenly composed. She said:

“As long as we’re discussing charges, I think we had better stick to real facts. My husband’s will, for instance.”

“What about it?”

“It was about to be changed, cutting you and your precious British jailbird out of any share in your foster father’s estate.”

“That’s a lie,” Alice said.

“If it is, why did he give you a check this afternoon for fifty thousand dollars? Wasn’t it your final quit-claim on the family — to get out and stay out?”

Tracy and Fitzgerald and Sergeant Kilian were listening grimly. It was to them that Alice turned. Her effort to control herself made her voice almost inaudible.

“I’ve already told you that if Bert Lord is guilty of murder, I’ll do everything in my power to help you convict him. I don’t think he is, but the record of the finger-prints will settle that. The check to which my father’s cheating little wife refers is actually a proof of Bert’s innocence. It was given to me — and to him — here in this house this afternoon, as a wedding present.”

“What?” Tracy gasped.

“It’s true. Bert came here like a man and had a long talk with father. He denied those anonymous lies about his career in England and Father believed him. Father gave me a check for fifty thousand dollars and promised to stand back of Bert and me. All this talk about changing his will is pure spiteful invention on Betty’s part.”

She drew a deep sobbing breath.

“That’s why Bert and I appealed to you, Jerry, at the broadcasting station tonight not to spill that lying gossip. It’s why Father was angry enough to summon you to his home. He wanted the scandal covered up because he believed in Bert. He was trying to... to help us!”

“Then who killed him?” Tracy rasped.

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

She was weeping wildly. Betty, dark-eyed, somber, watched her with bold antagonism. For the first time in this whole cocksure evening, Tracy felt completely at sea.

Fitz rubbed his nose for a moment. “Remain here on duty until you’re relieved,” he told the gaping policeman at the study door. His glance moved toward Furman and the butler, toward the weeping Alice and the pale, scornful Betty. “Arrest anyone who attempts to leave this house. Come on, Sarge! Jerry, I’ll need you, too.”

The three of them piled into Fitz’s shabby department car outside.

“Are you absolutely certain,” Fitz asked Tracy sharply, “that it was Lord’s voice you heard when you had that battle in the dark?”

“That’s the one thing that’s got me worried,” Tracy admitted. “It sounded like him. I still think it was. But why did he forget the damned gun in the first place? And how did he know the house would be so conveniently empty when he killed Hilliard?”

“Where’s this Lord live?” Fitz asked.

Tracy told him. The car began to hum downtown.

“I sent Butch to watch Lord’s penthouse,” Tracy said, “with orders to shadow him if he pulled a sneak.”

Fitz nodded. “If he’s innocent, he should have no objection to giving me a sample of his right hand.”

“Suppose he refuses?”

“He can’t,” Fitz said grimly, “if he’s arrested on suspicion of homicide.”

Bert Lord’s address was a swanky apartment house on the East River fringe of the midtown district. He occupied a penthouse eighteen stories up. The building had a canopy, two doormen and a string of empty taxis outside. But Lord’s penthouse afforded his comings and goings a privacy not enjoyed by the other tenants.

The entrance to his self-service elevator was on the river side of the building. A short dead-end street extended between the building and the river wall. A few empty cars were parked there, cool and quiet in the darkness. Lord’s entrance was a small, inconspicuous door, set flush in the ground floor.

Butch was nowhere in sight.

A quick twist of the bronze doorknob showed Tracy that the lock of the private entrance was broken. He stepped into a narrow hallway that was pitch dark. Before Fitzgerald could snap on a pocket torch, Tracy stepped on an extended hand that lay limply on the floor.

Fitz’s torch clicked a bright beam of light as Tracy recoiled with a gasp. The light centered on the back of an unconscious man’s head. It was Butch, and he was lying flat on his face with blood oozing from a lump on his scalp.

Tracy dropped to his knees and turned Butch over. The practical Sergeant Kilian shoved Jerry aside. He had a flat half-pint flask in his hand, and he didn’t seem to mind how much of it he spilt. Before it was half empty Butch was gurgling weakly. His eyelids fluttered open, then blinked dazedly.

A moment later Butch uttered a yell and bounced groggily to his feet. He aimed a wild swing at Kilian which the sergeant hastily ducked. Fitzgerald grabbed Butch’s arm and pinioned it. His torch flared into the dazed bodyguard’s eyes, blinding him.

But it was Tracy’s voice that cut through Butch’s punch-drunk hangover from the blow on his skull.

“Snap out of it, champ! What happened? Where’s Lord?”

Butch finished his own cure by draining Kilian’s flask.

It was Butch who had forced the lock on the street door, Tracy disclosed with a disgusted mumble. Butch had turned out the hall light himself, so he could watch the private penthouse elevator at the end of the corridor, without running the risk of being seen if someone looked in from the street.

“Just what the hell were you planning to do?” Sergeant Kilian asked in a tone of blank wonder.

“Jerry told me to shadow the guy. I figured if he came down in the elevator, I’d rough the louse up, haul him back to his penthouse and phone Jerry. Ain’t that what you wanted, Jerry — shadow him and then let you know how I made out?”

Kilian snickered and Tracy said harshly, “Skip your detective methods and tell me what happened.”

“Well, the bum wasn’t upstairs at all. He musta sneaked in on gumshoes from the sidewalk while I was watchin’ the elevator. I took somepin’ on the skull... That’s nice liquor you got, Sarge.”

Fitzgerald said glumly, “Looks like a pick-up after all. Lord’s probably high-tailing it out of town, but a quick alarm ought to nail him before he can get far.”

“He ain’t outa town,” Butch said patiently. “The guy’s upstairs, unless he come down again.”

“Huh?” Fitz stared at him with his mouth open.

“He went up. I heard him go stumblin’ in the elevator before I passed out.”

The shaft door at the end of the corridor wouldn’t open. Fitz punched a button and a faint hum became audible from aloft.

“The car is still up above,” Fitz muttered. “Did the sap actually waste time to pack a bag before he scrammed?”

They rode up in an uneasy silence to the penthouse. Lord’s door was on the opposite side of a small foyer. Sergeant Kilian tried the knob gently, then rang the bell.

Almost instantly a voice cried from within, “Who is it? What do you want?”

It was Lord’s voice, shrill with fright. He was evidently standing tensely just inside the door. Tracy motioned quietly to Kilian and stepped closer.

“This is Jerry Tracy. I want to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“About my broadcast tonight Mr. Hilliard sent me over to—”

“Hilliard sent you?”

“Yes.”

“Is anybody with you?”

“No.”

“You’re a liar. Hilliard’s dead! You’ve come racing over here with the cops, I didn’t kill Hilliard. I’m not going to be framed for his murder. If you try to come in here you’ll get more than I handed that stupid body-guard of yours!”

“All we want is a sample of your finger-prints,” Tracy said quietly. “If you’re really innocent, you can prove it in two minutes.”

Lord’s answer was a bullet that split the panel of the door an inch from Tracy’s ear. Four more followed it in a crashing fusillade, but Kilian’s lightning grab at the first crash had yanked Tracy backward to the floor.

There was a hoarse cry from within, followed by the swift thud of retreating feet.

Inspector Fitzgerald’s gun sent smashing thunder at the lock of the door. But it failed to blow out the jammed mechanism. Kilian threw his shoulder against the door and so did Butch. Their combined assault did the trick. The door went flat with them and Tracy and Fitz sprang over their prone bodies.

They were in an empty living-room with wide French windows that faced on the darkness of a flat terrace. The scream that halted them in mid-stride didn’t come from the terrace. It sounded from somewhere in the rear of the apartment. It was knife-like in its horror, and knife-like in the way it dwindled into silence.

Tracy had heard that kind of ebbing scream only once before in his life. His scalp crawled at the memory. He had a swift mental picture of a poor lunatic crouched tensely on a stone ledge at the peak of a Fifth Avenue skyscraper. The man had jumped with that same ebbing shriek as police had grabbed vainly to save him from suicide.

Tracy raced through the apartment toward a rear bedroom. There was a half-filled suitcase on the floor. Clothing was scattered all over the bed. The window was wide open.

Far below on the roof of a fourth story cutback was a small mass that didn’t move. He must have taken a desperate chance to escape along a ledge that extended dizzily toward another window. A shred of his sleeve was hanging from the steel hook used for the belts of window cleaners.

“He must have grabbed for the hook when he lost his balance,” Kilian said.

“Guilty as hell,” Fitz said quietly.

His face was as pale as Tracy’s but there was not a tremor in his big, bony frame.

In silence they descended in the private elevator. They went around to the front entrance of the building. There was no alarm out front as yet. Chauffeurs in the taxi line stared curiously, sensing trouble but not saying anything.

The fat over-rouged woman at the fourth floor rear had left her door conveniently open when she had rushed out to the hallway to faint. Fitz and Kilian climbed out to the roof of the cutback.

One look from the window was enough for Tracy. The man himself lay face down, mutilated unrecognizably by the fall. But the impact had torn loose a white carnation from Lord’s lapel. It lay in a darkish stain alongside the body, shredded and no longer white. Tracy stayed inside, a little sorry he’d eaten so much for dinner.

When Fitz climbed in again his hands were smudged with recording ink and he had a finger-print sample which he placed carefully in his wallet.

He grinned bleakly at Jerry’s expression.

“A good cop has the soul of a louse, Jerry. Let’s go over to Headquarters. These prints are about the only thing left of him.”

A typewritten memo lay on Fitzgerald’s desk. It was from the finger-print expert who had phoned the indices of the gun-prints to London. The reply from London had come across ten minutes ago. Fitzgerald showed the memo to Tracy.

Hanley was the finger-print man. Fitz’s ring brought him downstairs from the bureau. He came in with brisk cheeriness.

“Forget about extradition. We’ve got a copper-riveted case right here. Bert Lord is the phony passport monicker. Two minutes with the guy will prove it. Have you picked him up?”

“You do it,” Sergeant Kilian said. “He dropped thirteen stories without a parachute.”

“Suicide, eh?”

“He tried an outside get-away along a stone ledge while we were breaking down the door.”

Fitzgerald opened his wallet and handed Hanley two sensitized sheets of paper with the record of the second and third fingers on Lord’s right hand. He had taken two to make sure. Blood smears had ruined the first.

Hanley said, “Beautiful!” and meant it. He took the good sample and laid it alongside the print he had taken from the gun. With a metal-tipped stylus he pointed to the complicated pattern of loops and whorls.

“Lemme show you what a really pretty- science this business of—”

He stopped suddenly, his face queerly puckered.

“Gawd!” lie breathed. He laid down the stylus with a gentle slowness as though he were afraid it might break.

“What’s the matter?” Fitzgerald asked.

“Our guy didn’t do it.”

“Huh?”

“The prints don’t match. The guy who gunned Hilliard wasn’t Bert Lord.”

Stunned, Fitzgerald stared at the expert. “You just told us that the British police—”

“Sure. They said that the guy who used that Webley on Hilliard was Ronald Jordan, alias Harry Clifton, alias Richard Duke. But you can take my word he wasn’t Bert Lord! I don t know why the hell the fool went out the window, but his prints show he didn’t kill Hilliard. If you put me on the stand, I’ll have to be a defense witness.”

“Nice joke on Lord,” Kilian said tonelessly. “Looks like you’ll have to dig us up another Englishman, Jerry.”

Tracy was on his feet, clutching at the edge of Fitz’s desk to steady himself.

“But Lord fired at us through the door; tried to kill me. Why’d he run? Why did he—”

“Take it easy, Jerry,” Fitz said.

“Take it — hell!” His hand quivered from his pocket and dropped a flattened slug and a wilted carnation on the desk. “Lord tried to wipe me out on the way to the broadcast tonight. He came back to Hilliard’s to get the gun. He slugged Butch over the head. Why? Why, if he didn’t kill Hilliard, did he kill himself?”

“They’re still not his prints,” Hanley said. “Don’t blame me.”

Butch stirred massively in his chair, his big fists clenched. “If any of you suckers are trying to say that Jerry is responsible for—”

Nobody paid any attention to him.

“Lord said he was being framed,” Tracy faltered. “I heard him yell that much through the door before he lost his head and—”

“Skip it, Jerry,” Fitz said. “He was running from the cops, not you. You were just along for the ride. You know that, Jerry.”

“I know that my broadcast tonight doomed Hilliard. I know that Bert Lord fell thirteen stories — and turns out to be innocent.” He took a deep, quivering breath. “If you boys don’t mind, I think I’ll go home.”

“Yeah. Do that,” Fitz said gruffly.

Tracy wasn’t aware of Butch’s presence alongside him till they reached the street. Butch called a taxi and Tracy seemed suddenly to wake up.

“Beat it, Butch. I don’t need you.”

Butch took one look at his employer’s tightly wrinkled face. There were times when argument was a waste of breath. This was one of them.

“O.K., Jerry. Don’t make it too late. I’ll wait up for you.”

Tracy didn’t answer. Butch got in the cab and drove away. The Daily Planet’s ace columnist flagged another taxi. He went up Fifth Avenue to 59th and made a slow circle through the park. He thought of a million things about Hilliard’s murder, but the core of his thinking was always the same: the flattened, battered body of Bert Lord.

He snapped out of his mental haze when the taxi emerged again from the park at 59th. He drove to the nearest drugstore and thumbed swiftly through the D’s in a telephone book.

Ken Dunlap was an Englishman. Ken Dunlap had once been in love with the dark-eyed Mrs. Hilliard. When she had married the tobacco tycoon there had been no pretense of love on her part. Suppose that Dunlap and not Lord was the sleek Ronald Jordan alias everything else that the British police had let slip out of England. The scandal tip about Lord had come from a woman using a disguised voice on the wire. Betty had been a grade A radio actress when she signed off to marry Hilliard. If Betty Hilliard had planned for Dunlap to kill her husband and split a fortune between them, the affair between Lord and Hilliard’s adopted daughter was a perfect smoke screen.

Betty’s refusal to tell where she had been when she left the house might be a deliberate bit of cleverness. A belated infidelity alibi from Dunlap would smirch her and save her at the same time. The cynical columnist’s section of Tracy’s brain handed him a headline: Dirt for Dough’s Sake.

Ken Dunlap’s apartment house was on Par Avenue. It was one of those expensive stone hives in the Fifties, the sort from which news trickled like a perennial spring into Tracy’s notebooks. The mg doorman was a stooge on the Tracy payroll.

In two minutes Jerry learned that Dunlap had gone out alone around 7:30 and hadn’t come back yet. The doorman had whistled Pete Malloy’s cab from the corner hackstand and Dunlap had been driven uptown.

“You sure he’s still away?”

The doorman grinned. “I’m sure enough to slip you a master key if you want to convince yourself.”

“I won’t go up, but slip me the key anyway.”

He walked onward to the corner and spent ten dollars on Pete Malloy. The cabbie had taken Dunlap on an aimless ten-minute drive, and had dropped him finally at a west side corner about a quarter to eight. He was positive about the time and positive about the street.

Tracy blinked. The spot where Dunlap had alighted was a short block from the Hilliard home.

Tracy ducked into a whitewashed alley that led to the basement of the apartment house. The service elevator, untended at night, stood open and empty at the foot of the shaft. Tracy rode the car to the floor below Dunlap’s and climbed the last flight, leaving the car’s door jammed open in case he needed it for a quick scram.

He rang Dunlap’s service bell and ducked into the shadow of the dark stairs. No one answered his ring. After a while, he opened the door quietly with his master key.

The apartment was in total darkness. Tracy tiptoed through the kitchen and pantry, went through a dining room. In the huge adjoining living-room, he snapped on the lights and began a quick, noiseless search. What he wanted was some small object which might reasonably contain a set of Dunlap’s fingerprints.

He didn’t see any personal object small enough that could be wrapped and slipped into his pocket.

He went into the bedroom and turned on a lamp. Almost the first thing he saw was a flat gold cigarette case lying on a night table alongside an extension telephone. He wrapped it carefully in his handkerchief and slid it into his pocket.

He was turning to put out the lamp when he heard the grate of a key in the apartment’s front door.

Tracy never moved faster in his life. A click, and the bedroom went black. A swift dart across soundless rugs and the living-room lapsed into darkness.

Utterly unaware that the lights had been blazing a second earlier, Ken Dunlap walked quickly into his living-room and snapped on the wall switch.

The few seconds interval between the slam of the apartment door and the unwelcome arrival of Dunlap had enabled Tracy to melt noiselessly into the blackness of the bedroom. Trapped, he stood behind heavy velour curtains, watching his suspect.

Dunlap seemed to be as nervous as a cat and in a coldly vicious temper. He kept muttering a low-toned growl of profanity; but it was without emphasis, as if his mind was centered on something else. He had heavy shoulders and a broad, clean-shaven face.

Tracy heard him mutter: “Mustn’t get the wind up, or we’ll both be lost!”

The sudden ring of a telephone bell halted Dunlap in midstride. Tracy, aware of the phone set on the night table, stiffened behind his curtain. Then he realized that its bell was silent. It was merely an extension phone; the bell was ringing in the living-room.

Tracy tiptoed away from the. curtain and lifted the duplicate phone with cringing care.

He heard the sharp bite of Dunlap’s voice on the wire. “Who is it?”

“Betty.”

“Right-o. What’s up?”

“Ken, we’ve got to do something. Alice knows about the letters! And I don’t trust Furman. That secretary has sharp eyes and big ears.”

Dunlap swore. “Don’t worry, sweet. I’ll take care of them both if necessary.”

“You’ll have to risk coming here, Ken. I’ve got to see you. There was a nasty little columnist here from the Daily Planet. I think he overheard Alice telling me about the letters.”

“I’ll handle it. Now listen...”

Tracy didn’t wait for the rest. His only chance to get away unseen was to risk a sneak while Dunlap was still hunched tensely over the phone outside. He lowered his own instrument gently into its cradle.

Before he could take two steps there was a sudden rush of heavy feet. The velvet curtain that screened the doorway of the dark bedroom was swished viciously aside. Light flooded the room.

Tracy blinked but Dunlap didn’t. He stood there with fists knotted tightly, his voice ominously quiet.

“Cheerio, Mr. Tracy. You seem to be awf’ly clever at overhearing things. But not clever enough to hide a click on a busy wire.”

“You didn’t, by any chance, murder Bruce Hilliard tonight, did you, Mr. Dunlap?”

That stopped him. “You think I did?”

“You were there tonight after Betty Hilliard obligingly emptied the house for your arrival. I have two witnesses to prove you left here and went there.”

“Right-o.” Dunlap remained polite. “But unfortunately for your logic, I didn’t go in. Hilliard was already dead on his study floor when I peered through the window.”

“When was that?”

“A quarter of eight.”

“It won’t wash. Hilliard was still alive at eight-thirty. He phoned me right after my broadcast ended. Do you know Bert Lord?”

“We’re fairly friendly,” Dunlap said.

“Friendly enough to steal his gun?”

Dunlap exhaled faintly. “I begin to see your drift. Fingerprints, eh? Looking for samples in my apartment. That was bloody foolish of you.”

Tracy’s fist lashed out as Dunlap sprang. The blow didn’t stop the headlong rush of the heavy-set Englishman. A heave jack-knifed Tracy backward. He tried to kick out with both feet but Dunlap was around him like an eel. Fingers closed on Tracy’s windpipe. The pressure eased before Tracy lapsed into unconsciousness, but he lay utterly helpless with a red haze whirling before his bulging eyes.

Through the haze he could see Dunlap grimly examining the cigarette case he had found in Tracy’s pocket. He also found the master key.

“So you sneaked in here with the connivance of the blasted doorman downstairs! Well, it won’t do you a particle of good.”

He hauled Tracy upright with one hand, anchoring him on swaying legs.

“If I weren’t in such a hurry to get somewhere else, I’d give you what-for, my friend. As it is—”

Tracy saw the fist shoot upward in a powerful uppercut, but he was too groggy to roll his head. The blow caught him squarely under the chin. He could feel the hammering impact of every tooth in his head. Then he didn’t feel anything...

He came riding out of nothingness on long waves of nausea. It seemed as if someone had launched Tracy on a surfboard that raced up and down the smooth chasms of endless waves. Flat on his face he held on desperately until he became confusedly aware that his fingers and his wide-open mouth were pressed against the soft texture of a rug.

He got up dizzily, clutched for a bedpost and fell over a chair. He felt weak and sick. He knelt with head hanging until the sickness reached its climax, then he felt better.

There was no sign of Dunlap in the apartment. Tracy glanced at his wrist watch. He had been unconscious over two hours.

He jumped to the telephone on the night table. He could get no answer from the operator. The line was dead. So was the phone in the living-room. Dunlap had done a neat job.

Tracy raced out the front door to the corridor and kept his finger jammed on the elevator button until the indicator began to move. To his relief the elevator was operated by his friend, the doorman.

The doorman gasped as he recognized the battered little columnist.

“Jerry! For Gawd’s sake! Did Dunlap—!”

“Get this cage down quick! How come you’re running it? Switchboard man off duty?”

“He went over to Madison Avenue for some coffee.”

“Swell. I want to phone without any publicity.”

“Jerry, you told me you weren’t going up to his apartment. If I’d only known, I could have warned you when he came in.”

“I know. It was a dumb stunt. I went in the back way after I spoke to the hackman at the corner. Did Dunlap hire the same cab this time?”

“No. He stopped a roller.”

They had reached the street lobby. The doorman jumped to the deserted switchboard and plugged an outside wire.

“Police headquarters,” Jerry growled. “Hello? Jerry Tracy! I want to talk to Inspector Fitzgerald or Sergeant Kilian. Either one.”

“Sorry, Jerry. They’re both out right now on that Hilliard thing.”

“Did they go back to the Hilliard home?”

“I don’t think so. It was some other angle.”

“Try all of the mid-town precincts. If you get ’em, tell ’em I’ll be over at Hilliard’s. Wait! Better tell ’em to give me a quick buzz before they start.” He gave them the number.

“Anything hot?”

“Hot enough. I’ve got a hunch two more people are due to get the works tonight.”

“Wow! O.K.”

Tracy hung up and called the Hilliard number. All he could raise was a busy signal. Sweating, he waited and tried again. Buzz-buzz-buzz... Every minute he waited here he was giving Dunlap additional time. And yet if he quit and raced for a cab, he was giving him still more time. He got two more busy signals before he cursed and ran out into the street.

The doorman’s whistle brought him the night-hawk hackman from the corner. Tracy slammed in and went streaking uptown and across to the west side.

There were lights on in the Hilliard home, but Tracy’s ring at the doorbell went unanswered. Racing across the dark grounds, Tracy found that the side window through which he had originally entered was still open. He squirmed over the sill and darted for Hilliard’s study.

To his angry amazement Hilliard’s butler was seated calmly in an easy chair, smoking a cigarette. There was no sign of the cop who had been left on guard — or of anyone else.

“Why the hell don’t you answer the doorbell?”

Marcom said placidly, “The policeman told me to remain in this room and see that nothing was disturbed. After he went I thought I’d better not leave the room.”

Tracy felt a chill of anxiety. He had heard Fitz tell that cop to remain on duty until relieved!

“When did the cop leave?”

“I don’t know. I stepped into the hall to speak to him a moment ago and he wasn’t there.”

“Has a guy named Dunlap been here? Did he and the cop go away together?”

“No, sir. Mr. Dunlap arrived before that. The four of them—”

“What four?”

“Mr. Dunlap and Hilliard’s secretary, Mr. Furman, went away with Mrs. Hilliard and Miss Hilliard. They all seemed very friendly, particularly the two women, which puzzled me, sir.”

“Me, too,” Tracy growled. “What happened?”

“There was talk about going to Mr. Hilliard’s Long Island estate in order to avoid newspaper reporters. The policeman vetoed that. Then the front door bell rang and the policemen left me here.”

The word “bell” reminded Tracy suddenly of the peculiar series of busy signals when he had tried to call Hilliard’s home.

“Who’s been using this phone?”

Marcom looked puzzled. “No one, sir. There haven’t been any calls.”

Tracy noticed that a small screen had been shifted from its accustomed place and was standing in front of the telephone desk. He whisked it away and nodded with grim understanding. Someone had slyly disconnected the phone by lifting it from its cradle. He placed it back.

Tracy stood stiffly still, his brow wrinkled in thought. His preconceived suspicion of Bert Lord as Hilliard’s murderer had long since vanished. There was the phone call which Tracy had received on his private line at the broadcasting studio from Bruce Hilliard. Remembering something that Ken Dunlap had told him sneeringly in his Park Avenue apartment, Tracy was coldly convinced that Hilliard had been dead when that alleged call of his had gone over the wire at 8:32. And if Hilliard was dead, only two people could possibly have made the phony call.

One of them was a woman, one a man. The realization of the man’s identity made the hair crawl on Tracy’s scalp. He did a sudden, seemingly illogical thing. He darted toward the radio over which Hilliard had been listening when he was shot to death. He examined the dial swiftly.

“Has anyone been near this machine?”

“No, sir,” Marcom said.

“Come on! I want to have a look at the front door.”

The rug in the entry was badly disarranged. On the polished boards of the exposed floor was a tell-tale drip of blood. Tracy followed the trail a few feet to a hall closet. When he wrenched open the door, the unconscious body of the missing policeman tumbled head-first out. He had been knocked cold, probably by brass knuckles, judging from the multiple abrasions across his bleeding temple.

Marcom uttered a terrified cry.

Tracy said, “Ah, shut up.” The thing was too foolishly simple. The four of them had sneaked out the back door, while a dumb butler sat like a fool in Hilliard’s study and a cop stood jammed on unconscious feet in the hall closet.

The phone began to ring.

“Hello!”

A woman operator answered. She sounded angry. “Your instrument was off the hook. There’s a call that’s been blocked for five minutes. Are you Mr. Jerry Tracy?”

“Yes. Let’s have it!”

Inspector Fitzgerald’s crisp voice came on the wire. “I’ve been trying to get you, Jerry. What’s wrong?”

“Plenty! Furman and Alice have gone to Hilliard’s Long Island estate with Betty Hilliard and Dunlap. The trip was ostensibly taken to avoid reporters, but I suspect it concerns certain letters which Betty wrote to Dunlap after her marriage.”

Tracy’s words raced. “Fitz, we’ve got to get there fast, or there’ll be another murder! A double one this time!”

“I’ll pick you up with a police car that’ll do eighty.”

“Swell. Only phone the police air base first. Tell ’em to have an amphibion waiting. The car’ll do as far as North Beach. We’ll need the plane to make up the time we’ve lost.”

“I’ll handle it!” Fritz growled.

North Beach airport whisked away like a flat, black pancake in the uncertain light of dawn. The police pilot did not climb very high. Banking, he gunned the amphibion into bullet-level flight, Fitzgerald and Sergeant Kilian were packed uncomfortably together, with Jerry Tracy crouched between their knees.

The hills and coves of Long Island’s north shore raced swiftly astern. Tracy stared ahead through the moonlit darkness, watching for the narrow entrance to the inlet where Hilliard’s country home was located. Speed sang in his blood. The wild automobile race northward through Manhattan and across the Triborough Bridge — that was nothing compared to this!

Suddenly he pointed. A shaggy headland was shouldering the darkness straight ahead.

The plane curved outward from the shore, banking and slackening its speed in preparation for a water landing. The pilot was taking no chance with the cove entrance beyond the headland. He planned to taxi through on the surface of the water.

But a yell from Jerry Tracy changed the pilot’s mind. Fitz, too, was pointing. A lengthening streak of foam showed on the surface of the water where the cove joined the sound. A dark speedboat was fleeing eastward toward Greenport and the open sea.

It was a fast streamlined craft with a knife bow, but it was no match for the police flying boat. The amphibion overhauled it with the ease of a dropping hawk. It roared less than twenty feet above the cruiser. Tracy, peering, saw the blurred faces of Betty Hilliard and Ken Dunlap.

Betty seemed to be tied hand and foot. Dunlap was free. He was springing to the engine controls, slowing the boat’s mad speed. The amphibian curved into the wind and landed with a shower of spray. Its momentum carried it alongside the drifting boat.

Sergeant Kilian risked a ducking with a wide, reckless leap. He was on his feet instantly in the rocking craft, his gun pointed at the tense figure of Dunlap. There was a fishing knife in Dunlap’s hand.

“Drop it!” Kilian rasped.

The knife clattered. Kilian 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 phony.

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.

Kilian 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.”

Kilian 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 Kilian. 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 i was unlocked. Betty was gone. He 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 grimly to Kilian 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 Kilian 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 broadcasts. 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?