The Weird Adventures of The Blond Adder

The man in black looked like a crow in mourning. He said he was an undertaker — and had a coffin ready for Detective Lee Nace. The police sergeant looked like trouble — went out of his way to make things tough for Lee Nace. The red-headed girl looked like a million. She brought haunting memories to Nace. The corpse in the cabin looked like a horrible nightmare. It plunged Lee Nace into an amazing race with a grim and terrible death.

Chapter I Coffin Bait

It was the morning of Friday, the thirteenth. Nace accidentally broke the rear-view mirror on his roadster while driving downtown. A black cat angled his path when he was leaving the parking lot. Near his office, a ladder slanted over the sidewalk and Nace forgot to go around it.

Crass superstition? Sure it was. Nace paid no attention to any of it. Maybe it was his hard luck that he didn’t, for the pay-off was not long in coming.

In front of his office building, Nace met Police Sergeant Gooch. As far as Nace was concerned, Gooch was another black cat.

“Hello — tall, blond, handsome!” Gooch smirked around a cigar.

Nace gave him a bony-faced leer.

“You’re going for your morning shave, I suppose?”

Gooch’s teeth mashed his cigar angrily. He had a prolific blue beard, and was touchy about it. He shaved three times a day it was rumored.

“The same old cop-loving Lee Nace,” he said wryly.

“Sure! I love cops.” Nace pumped a breezy fist against Gooch’s fat middle. “I’ll prove it. C’mon up to the office. I’ll give you a cigar. I keep a special brand for you public servants.”

Gooch smiled dreamily, picked the Havana from between his teeth, and held it so Nace could see the maker’s name on the band.

Nace’s neck slowly became purple as he looked at the band. On his forehead, a small scar reddened out like a design done with red ink and a pen. A long time ago, a Chinaman had hit Nace above the eyes with the hilt of a knife that bore a carved serpent. The scar, a likeness of a coiled adder, was ordinarily unnoticeable, but came out vividly when Nace was angry.

“You got that stogie out of my office!” he rumbled savagely.

Gooch’s round face was placid. “I hope you don’t mind—”

“Mind!” Nace shoved his angular face against Gooch’s cherubic one. “If you think I’m gonna have flatfeet busting into my place, you’re crazy! I’ll prefer charges! I’ll have you clapped in your own holdover! I’ll—”

“Now, now, honey, don’t have a hemorrhage!” Gooch fished a folded paper out of his tight blue suit, presented it. “Look, dear!”

The document was a search warrant for Nace’s office.

Nace cradled back slowly on his heels. The serpent still coiled redly on his forehead. His eyes were smoky, far-off.

“What the hell, Gooch? What the hell? Is this one of your little ideas, or—”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Gooch blew smoke airily, then started off.

Nace planted in front of him. “You’d better tell me—”

“Tell you — nothing! It’s police business! We don’t roll around gabbing—”

Nace jerked the cigar out of Gooch’s teeth, threw it in the gutter. Simultaneously, his other hand dove under Gooch’s coat and came out with four more cheroots of the same brand.

Gooch grasped at his pocket, but was too late to save the Havanas. He made a slit-eyed, wrathful face, lower lip protruding beyond his upper. He gave a difficult, thick laugh.

He walked away, putting the search warrant in his pocket.

The elevator boy stared, fascinated, at the cherry serpent on Nace’s forehead as they rode upward. Nace found his office door locked, and knew Gooch must have used a master key.

Nace ducked a little, from habit, as he went in. He was tall enough so that the top of a door occasionally brushed off his hat.

He roamed, gaunt and angry, around the outer office, opening a tall green metal box of a clothes locker and probing desk drawers and other places. Tramping into the inside room, he wandered down a long workbench, delving into cabinets. Nothing was greatly disarranged, but evidence showed that Gooch had made a thorough search.

Frowning, Nace lunged back into the outer office and slammed down at his desk. He dug out his pipe and a silk pouch of rough cut. He rasped a match alight on the under side of the desk, applied it to his pipe and sat scowling. The serpent scar gradually went away from his forehead.

“Damned if it don’t beat me!” he muttered. “Gooch gets funny ideas of a joke! Maybe that was one of  ’em!”

As if that dismissed the affair, he took the morning paper out of his pocket, cracked it open, and settled back to read.

He was over as far as the sport page when a strange-looking man came in. The fellow walked slowly, kept his head down. He wore a black suit, black derby, a black string tie, black cotton gloves on his hands. He was the picture of a crow in mourning.

“Good morning, sir!” he said solemnly. “I am in search of a Mr. Lee Nace.”

Nace put his paper down. “That’s me.”

“I believe you must have made a mistake about the address you gave us,” the newcomer murmured. He took off his black derby as if he had just thought of it. “There was, I am sorry to say, no such address.”

“What kind of an address?”

“Why — where we were to take the coffin.”

Nace placed his pipe atop his paper. He grinned widely, then scowled sourly, as if practicing making faces. On his forehead, the serpentine scar coiled redly.

“What the hell?” he said savagely. “Is this somebody’s lousy idea of more humor? Did Gooch send you?”

The man in the crow garments looked even more mournful.

“Perhaps I should have explained,” he murmured. “What I mean is the coffin bearing your brother’s body. It’s in a hearse downstairs.”

Nace picked up his pipe, laid it down. He gave the man a hard eye. “You wouldn’t kid me, buddy?”

The man seemed injured. “Perhaps there has been a mistake—”

“You’re blasted right there’s been a mistake!” Nace snorted. “I don’t know anything about a coffin or a dead man. Anyway, I haven’t got a brother!”

The other fumbled his derby. The hat was sized down by a stuffing of newspapers in the sweat band. “Are you Lee Nace, the private detective?”

“Sure.”

“When you telephoned me, you said—”

“I didn’t telephone you!” Nace got up from behind the desk and came around and stood close to the man. “I still think this is a joke, buddy! Maybe you’re in it, and maybe you’re not. Be a good guy and spill the works!”

The man absently adjusted the newspapers in his derby. “I am from Lake City. My name is Stanley, and I own the Quiet Service Funeral Parlor. Yesterday, a Mr. Nace telephoned me—”

“I’m betting his name wasn’t Nace!”

“He used that name. He said he wanted the body of his brother taken to New York. He told me to come to a home in Lake City for the — er, remains, and I did that. Then I drove all day and all night—”

“Was there anybody at the house where you got the body?” Nace inserted.

“Oh, yes! Two of them. One was a big, red-headed girl. The other was a man, a big man. He had a purple nose. The body was there in a coffin. Like I said, I drove all night—”

“The two at the house have names?”

“They forgot to tell me—”

Nace picked up his newspaper, popped it into a wastebasket. “Go on with the yarn.”

“I got in New York this morning—”

“If I know my geography, Lake City is on the Lake Erie shore, just across the Ohio state line. That right?”

“That is correct. Lake City is a beautiful little town of—”

“You made a damn quick trip for a hearse!”

The man put his black derby on. His mien was not so mournful now. “I opened her up a little. She’s fixed up with a siren. We use her for an ambulance sometimes. Anyway, I tried to find the New York address them people give me, and there wasn’t no such thing. So I got your office address out of the phone book and came here.”

Nace set teeth in his pipe stem, fanned a match over the bowl. He did not mention the fact that his phone was unlisted. His name and number were not in the directory.

“Well,” he said. “It looks like the next move is yours.”

The man adjusted his derby. The headgear was sizes too big, but the folded paper in the sweatband made it fit snugly. “They told me in Lake City that you would pay me for the trip.”

Nace snorted. “Do I have to tell you the answer to that one?”

The visitor recovered his mournful look. “If this is a joke, mister, it’s on me, not you.”

“Sure.” Nace puffed his pipe bowl hot. “I think I’ll take a look at your passenger from Lake City.”

“Of course!” said the black clad man.

He walked ahead of Nace into the tiled hall, and thumbed for an elevator. Nace began slapping his pockets with great vigor.

“Wait a minute!” he grunted. “Forgot something!”

He swung back into his office. But he did not put anything into his pockets. Instead, he made sure the hall door had set its spring lock, so his visitor could not follow him. Then he snapped open a desk drawer and took out a steel skullcap, lined with sponge rubber. This bore a blond mop which exactly matched Nace’s hair.

He put it on, adjusting it by a mirror on the inside of the clothes locker door. The thing made his head look a little bigger, but only a close observer would notice that.

He rejoined the man in the raven garb. They rode the cage down to the lobby. Nace, with a habitual duck as he stepped out of the elevator, headed for the street.

“Wait!” said his guide. “I parked the hearse around behind.”

“Sure. I guess it would collect a crowd out in front,” Nace said. But he began to get a cold feeling around his spine.

They circled back of the elevators, and went down a long passage with shoe soles clicking on cold concrete.

They came out in a pit of a courtyard, concrete floored. A slit between two buildings gave access to the street. There was a circle of big iron doors, loading platforms, dirty windows. The air smelled of rubbish, gasoline and disinfectant.

The hearse was black and long. The windows were backed by light tan curtains, fully drawn.

Nace’s guide took off his black derby and climbed in, after flinging open the double doors at the rear. Tan curtains whizzed on the slide as he brushed against them. He reached back and closed them, although they had let in light.

“Come and look,” he invited.

Nace clambered in and forward, seeming not to notice that the somber man maneuvered to a position behind him. The fellow opened the forward half of the coffin.

Nace did not look surprised when he saw no body in the pearl-colored interior.

Instead, he sank a little, bending both knees. He had a good idea of what was coming. He wanted to take it on the top of his head.

The blackjack made a whistle, a thunk! Its leather burst and shot sprayed the hearse interior.

Nace fell, ears belling, colored lights crawling around in his eyeballs. The man had either never used a blackjack before, or he had meant to kill. Only the steel skullcap had saved Nace.

The man spurred Nace with a foot. “You’re supposed to be quite a guy in the big town. But take the word of an elm-peeler from the sticks, you ain’t so hot!”

He went back, closed the rear doors. Nace opened an eye and studied as much of the coffin lid as he could see from his position on the floor. It bore no lock, much to his relief.

The man came back, humming cheerfully, and flipped open the other coffin lid. He got hold of Nace’s shoulders and lifted. Nace let himself be dumped into the coffin and lay there, feet sticking out. The man pushed at Nace’s feet.

“Yah!” he snorted. “You would be too long to fit!”

He scrambled out the back. Nace heard the rattle of the lock on the rear door, but did not worry greatly. He could kick a window out if necessary.

Starter gears gnashed iron teeth. The engine came awake with a hoot. It moaned a few times as the man pedaled the accelerator.

Then several things happened in slap-bang order. Shoes scuffed on concrete as a man rushed from some hiding place. The wild footsteps reached the hearse. Blows whacked. A gasp made a sound as if paper had torn.

The hearse seemed to spring backward. Evidently the driver had slumped against the shift lever, knocking it into reverse. Nace’s head hit the coffin and so hard that the shock trickled to his toes.

The vehicle came to a stop with the engine killed.

“You would give your pal Tammany a run-around, would you?” growled the newcomer, harsh-voiced.

Nace got up and sat on the coffin edge.

Chapter II The Pop-Eyed Dead

Leaning forward, Nace picked the curtains apart a crack. He got a good view of the new arrival.

The fellow was a little, dapper hawk. He was around five feet, weighing maybe a hundred and twenty. He was twitching scuffed skin off the fist with which he had just struck blows. He flexed the fist, snapped crimson drops off, then blew on it.

Seizing the dark-clad man, he hauled the fellow from behind the wheel, exhibiting amazing strength for one so small.

The man in black was so dazed that he could not stand erect.

Leaning down, the little man slapped. The blows had the crack of a pistol shot.

“I should smear you, Jeck!” he gritted.

The sitting man put both hands over his cheek, wailed, “Listen, Tammany—!”

“Listen — hell! I’ve listened to you too much already!”

“I couldn’t find you, Tammany!” Jeck put up black-gloved hands, as if to shield off more blows. “They started to take Jud Ogel’s body to Nace. And I couldn’t find you. I tried everywhere, and I couldn’t get you. What was I to do? The body-moving gag looked like a stall to get the stuff out of town.”

“Was it?”

“That’s the funny part! I grabbed the hearse near Hudsonville, in Jersey. There wasn’t nothin’ in it! Not even Jud Ogel’s body!”

Little Tammany snapped more red from his fist. “Well, when I found everybody concerned had left for New York, I set sail myself. Understand me, I’m not saying I believe a word of your talk. But we’ll play like I do. Who’s this bird, Lee Nace?”

“A private dick. I called a newspaper and got some dope on him. He has a rep.”

“Bad or otherwise?”

“Search me! He’s something the police don’t like. But that don’t mean anything. The private shamus that they would like don’t live.”

Tammany swelled his knot of a chest. “Let’s wake him up and talk to him. I saw you put him in the back.”

“He’ll take a lot of awakening, I guess.” Jeck shoved up on his feet and stood, legs weaving at the knees.

“I hope you didn’t kill him! He seems to be the key to this whole mess!”

Nace angled silently to the rear door. The serpentine scar was bright on his forehead. So they thought he was the key! And he had no idea what it was all about!

Nace wore elongated, ornate cuff buttons. He removed the one from his left sleeve. He worked at the two halves with his fingernails. Hidden lids came open. Two tiny darts were disclosed.

The lock at the rear rattled, then the doors whisked back. Tammany was first to show himself. Nace flipped a dart. It flew too swiftly to be seen, but materialized like a tiny thorn, clinging to Tammany’s neck.

The blank look on the stricken man’s face alarmed Jeck. He sprang forward, only to get Nace’s second dart in the cheek.

For perhaps a count of ten, both men stood still, faces becoming blanker. Tammany was the first to pile down slackly on the concrete. Jeck followed him, seeming to turn into a pile of black cloth.

Nace hopped out and dumped both men into the hearse. It was early, but someone might look out of the neighboring windows and see what was happening.

Locating a set of the web straps used in lowering caskets in graves, Nace employed them to bind both men securely. He tore padding out of the caskets and made two gags.

The men would sleep for two hours or so. The drug on the darts produced an unconsciousness that lasted about that long.

Nace searched them, finding money, cigarettes, and cards that showed them to be Thomas Tammany and Leo Jeck, members of the Lake City country club. There was nothing really important.

Nace’s height made him seem awkward as he got out of the hearse. He went around and looked at the name done in small silver letters on the front door. The Quiet Service Funeral Parlor, of Lake City. He eyed the license number, fixing it in his memory. The gasoline tank was nearly full. The gas was a colored variety — dark amber.

Nace entered his office building, banging his heels along the concrete corridor. The adder was gone from his forehead. He stoked his pipe on the way up in the elevator.

From his office, he put in a long distance call to Lake City. He held the wire, listening to clicks and animated feminine cries as the connection was built up.

“Hello — Quiet Service Funeral Parlor?” he said at length. “I want to find out something about a hearse of yours.” He gave the license number.

“We only got one hearse!” a wheezy voice came back at him. “We rented it out to a feller yesterday.”

“Who was he?”

“Said his name was Smith, from a little town over in Pennsylvania, where he has a funeral home.”

“What did he look like?”

“Say — has something happened to our hearse?”

“It’s safe here in New York, but we’re hunting the bird who was driving it. Describe him!”

“He was a big man. The main thing I remember about him was his nose. It was purple looking.”

“Thanks, buddy!” Nace hung up. Black-clothed Jeck, when he had first appeared, had declared a red-headed girl and a purple-nosed man had consigned him the body in Lake City. Jeck’s story had been a lie, of course, but the part about the man with the purple nose was significant.

Nace got up and walked slowly around the chair. He went to the window and stood looking down. His pipe bubbled and hissed and smoke made a fog against the pane.

Detective Sergeant Gooch sat in a squad car across the street. Beside him in the machine was Honest John MacGill. Honest John was three-hundred pounds of plugging, straight copper. Men like him backboned the police department.

The tense manner of both policemen showed they were watching Nace’s office building.

Nace caught their gaze. Sergeant Gooch waved a cigar he was smoking, then took off his hat and poked a finger inside to show he had been carrying some of Nace’s weeds there. Scowling, Nace pulled down the window shade. There was no particular hate in his scowl. Gooch and Honest John were all right. But they did love to ride a private operative.

Nace, thinking of the search warrant, swung over to the telephone. He had a friend down at headquarters that might be able to tell him what was behind the warrant. Sergeant Gooch would never part with the information, it was sure.

He picked up the phone.

A contralto voice behind him said, “I think you have galloped around long enough!”

Nace spun. She was tall, with red hair and eyes a contrast in blue. Her form was moulded exquisitely upon large bones. The bluing was worn off the double-action Colt which she held.

Nace sucked angrily at his pipe. She had been concealed in the inner room. Nace growled around his pipe stem, “What kind of a game—”

“You might as well save that!” She gestured her gun at the window. “Why did you pull down the shade just then?”

Nace gave her surly silence for an answer.

“It won’t take long to find out!” She whipped to the window with a feline grace, and ran the shade up. “Ah — my friends, the policemen! Well, they aren’t doing any good down there!” She worked at the fastening to get the window open. She was, he could see, going to call Gooch.

Nace pulled his pipe out of his teeth and pegged it at her gun hand. He had practiced long hours at throwing things. His aim left nothing to be desired. The pipe tapped her knuckles.

Pain tightened her finger on the trigger. The gun coughed. Plaster geysered off the wall. Nace took a gangling leap, grabbed her arm, shook it. The gun went skidding across the room.

Holding her tight in his arms, Nace ran to the inner office. He had no idea what it was all about, but the thing smacked of a frame-up.

His eyes roved the inner office with practiced speed. There was no sign of evidence planted to connect him with some crime.

He had the red-head’s arm pinned, but she began to kick at his shins and scream loudly.

Nace carried her back, picked up his pipe, then, still holding her, went to the window and looked down. Sergeant Gooch and Honest John MacGill were not in the squad car. They must have run into the building, drawn by the shot.

The girl had changed her screaming to words.

“Big Zeke!” she shrilled. “Help me!”

Came a banging at the hall door. The spring lock had secured the panel automatically when Nace entered. With a crash and jangle, frosted glass cascaded out of the door. A man shoved head and shoulders inside.

The man was almost as tall as Nace, fully twice as heavy. His hands were rust-colored, huge, shaggy with tobacco-hued hair. His nose was big, and a network of veins that seemed to lie on the surface gave it a purple color.

He bearded Nace with a blue revolver that was a twin to the girl’s weapon. Nace spun the girl away, flung himself backward. A bullet dug plaster on a line with the space he had vacated. More bullets came. They pursued Nace, always a yard or so behind, as he pitched into the inner office.

He slammed the door, twisted the key. His face and hands were pale, but the adder scar was a scarlet stamp on his forehead. Lead began clouting splintery holes in the door.

Nace jerked a coil of linen rope from behind the cold radiator. The rope was there for just such an emergency as this. One end was already secured to the radiator. He jerked up the window and flung out the rope. This window was on the side of the building. It was six stories down to a rooftop.

Something over a dozen feet to the right climbed the spidery metalwork of a fire escape.

Nace went down the rope hand over hand. Although the rope reached to the roof of the building far below, Nace did not descend the whole distance. He stopped perhaps thirty feet down and began to swing himself. The hard brick bruised his shoulders, knees, elbows, and scuffed his fists. But he was soon able to grasp the fire escape and swing onto the steps.

He bounded upward, trying to blend speed and silence. He reached the top and jumped over a high coping onto a tarred roof.

From the window below, Sergeant Gooch’s voice roared, “He slid down the rope to that roof below!”

That was exactly what Nace had hoped Gooch would think.

Nace ran to a roof hatch and descended to the top elevator landing. Luck was with him, for he found a cage waiting. He rode it down to the lobby level and swung out through the passage to the cement-floored courtyard.

He opened the hearse doors. Jeck and Tammany still slumbered inside. Nace picked up the black derby Jeck had worn and dug the newspapers out of the sweatband. He unfolded them, found they were the first two sheets from a small weekly.

It was the Lake City Chronicle, dated three weeks back. It proved nothing except that Jeck habitually wore this somber garb.

Nace closed the hearse doors, locked them, then traveled at a long-legged walk out of the courtyard.

He went to the parking lot where his weather-beaten roadster stood. Unlocking the rumble seat, he took out a rather bulky canvas bag that was closed with a zipper fastener. He put it in the front seat, then got in and nudged the starter with his toe.

He wheeled the roadster out of the lot, thence westward toward the George Washington Bridge. This was the most direct route to Hudsonville, the Jersey town where Jeck claimed he had seized the hearse.

He turned down the windshield and the breeze soon cooled the adder off his forehead. He discovered he had bitten his pipe stem sometime during the excitement, cracking it badly.

He replaced it from a case of spare stems that he drew from the zipper bag. The bag held a conglomeration of articles, ranging from intricate electrical mechanisms to an efficient assortment of skeleton keys.

This zipper bag was Nace’s sack of magic. It held about everything he needed in his perilous profession. It was largely judicious use of the contrivances contained in the bag which had lifted Nace to a position of prominence.

A newspaperman had once dubbed Nace the “Blond Adder.” The name had been unusual enough to stick. Nace knew the value of publicity in drumming up business, so he made it a point to always give the newspaper reporters a good story. Hence he was frequently on the front pages.

That Nace had spent several months in England as a paid consultant to Scotland Yard showed he was good in his line.

The George Washington Bridge rolled a greasy cement ribbon under the roadster. Nace took the main pike toward Hudsonville.

The little Jersey town was a long shot on Nace’s part, but he had to take hold of the mystery somewhere. Having not the slightest idea what it was all about, he had selected Hudsonville.

Houses alternately thinned out and became plentiful as he passed through villages. The roadster hit rough pavement and he held the canvas bag on his knees so it would not jar about.

A roadside sign told him he had three more miles to go.

A hulk of a filling station, a brood of tourist cabins behind it, appeared on the left.

The roadster shot past. Then it squatted a little and rubber wailed as Nace applied the brakes. He backed down the pike and into the filling station.

He had noticed that two of the pump measuring jars were filled with amber gasoline. Gas of that color had been in the hearse tank.

No one came from the station. Nace honked his horn. The blare went unanswered. Nace got out and went into the station, but found no one. He called loudly. Somewhere in the distance, a rooster crowed; there was no other sound.

He swung back toward his roadster, holding a match over his pipe bowl and pulling in smoke. Instead of getting into the car, he spun on his heel and came back.

He started a rapid search of the cabins. They numbered ten. The first seven were empty. This was slack season for the tourist trade.

Red rivulets had crawled from under the door of the eighth cabin and were thickening and drying in the morning sun. Nace took his pipe out of his teeth. He had an expensive habit of biting the stems off when sudden developments came. He nudged the door inward with a foot.

A stocky, curly haired man lay on the floor. He wore the stained white coveralls of a filling-station attendant. Four bullets had tunneled through his chest.

A form swathed in a sheet was on the bed. Nace did not investigate this ominous figure immediately, but studied the man who had been shot.

A cheap automatic was half concealed by the body. Nace turned the corpse over, and saw a shiny deputy sheriff badge pinned to the grimy coveralls. The cheap automatic had discharged one bullet into the wall, and had jammed in extracting the empty shell.

The man, obviously a combination of filling station attendant and deputy sheriff, had come investigating something suspicious, and a jammed gun had been the death of him.

Nace flung out a long arm and peeled the sheet off the bed. This disclosed the figure of a corpse in underwear.

Chapter III Sergeant Gooch’s Tip

A ghastly, pop-eyed look about the corpse instantly riveted Nace’s attention. The eyes were half out of their sockets; the tongue stuck out, stiff and pale, farther than Nace had ever seen a tongue protrude. The whole cadaver had a strangely bloated aspect.

Nace grimaced, eased off his steel-lined wig and ran long, bony fingers through his natural hair. He got his zipper bag from the car, and took out a magnifying glass, together with various test tubes and chemicals.

The stuff he was using actually comprised a compact analysis kit. Unlike most private detectives, Nace had not served an apprenticeship with the police. He had spent those years at famous universities, studying medicine, chemistry, electricity and similar subjects. Few knew it, but he was a licensed doctor; he had been admitted to the bar as a practicing lawyer, and he had written a textbook on electrochemistry.

Twenty minutes later, he left the vicinity of the filling station and its flock of tourist cabins. The curly haired deputy sheriff-station attendant had been dead only a few hours.

The death hour for the pop-eyed corpse had been at least two days ago. The cause of the fellow’s death was one of the blackest mysteries Nace had ever encountered. To all appearances, the man had literally swelled to the bursting point from some strange inner pressure. The direct cause of death was suffocation, after ruptured cell walls had filled his lungs with blood.

The hearse driver, it was Nace’s theory, had driven into the tourist camp and rented a cabin in which to leave the body. Nace thought of Jeck. The man might have been the attendant’s murderer. Jeck’s conversation with Tammany had shown that he had overhauled the hearse with the expectation of finding something of value in it. He might have been searching when the deputy sheriff intervened.

Nace nursed the roadster around a curve at fifty-five. “Jeck and Tammany are on the prowl for something they want bad,” he summarized. Then he thought of the red-headed girl and the purple-nosed man. “Those two are not exactly soft, either.”

Back in town, Nace did not return his roadster to the parking lot. Sergeant Gooch and Honest John MacGill knew his custom of keeping it there. He slid the machine into the curb some two blocks distant.

Carrying his bag, he strode to the corner. He did not round into the street on which his office faced. Instead, he leaned against the corner just out of sight. He produced a small pocket mirror and ostensibly combed his blond mop. The mirror gave him a view of the street.

A squad car full of plainclothes men was at rest in front of Nace’s office.

Nace went around and peeked into the areaway where the hearse stood.

Honest John MacGill was ensconced comfortably on the front seat of the hearse.

From his zipper bag, Nace drew an iron egg of a smoke bomb. He dropped it, spewing a black worm, on the cement. He let the worm grow into a huge, writhing monster that gorged the crack of an entryway.

“Help! Fire, fire, help!” Nace piped in a shrilly altered voice. He waited, concealed in the dark vapor cloud.

Into the smoke lumbered Honest John MacGill. Puffing, sneezing, he yelled, “What the hell kind of a fire is this? Where’s it at?”

Leaving Honest John lost in the smoke, Nace ran past the hearse and into the basement of the office building. A freight elevator carried him to his office level. There was no attendant in the freight elevator. He ran it himself.

It deposited him around an angle in the corridor. The spot could not be seen from his office door.

Nace produced a key and let himself through a door that bore no lettering. A leather chair built for comfort, a smoking stand on which stood a rack bearing half a dozen pipes exactly alike, a powerful reading lamp and numerous cases filled with books and magazines comprised the fittings. This was Nace’s study. Not even the building attendants knew it was here. He even cleaned the place himself.

The smoking stand had a large cylindrical base. Nace lifted the top off this. Two square glass panels were revealed. In one could be seen Nace’s outer office. In the other was portrayed the inner room, his laboratory.

It was not a television machine, but a complex arrangement of mirrors and perfectly straight tubes.

Sergeant Gooch was visible, seated at the office desk, a box of Nace’s cigars open before him. His mouth was pulled down at the ends, putting wrinkles in his blue-bearded jowls.

Policemen and detectives were parked around the office and others were in the inner room.

Sergeant Gooch’s lips moved and he waved both hands.

Nace hastily slapped two small switches beside the glass view-panels. On the walls of the room where he crouched were two innocent-looking oil paintings. At the touch of the switches, these became diaphragms of loud speakers, which reproduced what was being said in Nace’s office and laboratory. They operated from sensitive microphones and a vacuum tube amplifier. The mikes were well hidden in Nace’s office.

“Broadcast it again to the squad cars!” Sergeant Gooch was bellowing. “Maybe some of them didn’t get it the first time. Describe the red-headed dame and that purple-nosed lunk who was with her. And while you’re doing it, describe Nace again, too.”

Nobody made a move to comply with the command. Sergeant Gooch liked to yell. His men could tell from the exact tone of his voice when he was giving an order he really wanted carried out. He was not using that tone now.

“The call is going out every half hour!” somebody told him.

Sergeant Gooch threw one of Nace’s cigars, with no more than an inch smoked, into the cuspidor, and took a fresh one. He fired it with Nace’s desk lighter, handling the lighter roughly, as if he hoped it would break.

“Hell! I’d give a brass monkey to know what this is all about!” Gooch made a face in the cigar smoke. “If the red-headed dame and her shadow with the violet schnozzle hadn’t pulled their freight, I might know something!”

Somebody snickered. Gooch looked pained. “Aw, d’you have to rub it in?”

“I can’t help thinkin’ how you and Honest John was actin’ when we got here! Ha, ha, ha! Ironed to the radiator with your own handcuffs! We could hear you yell and rattle the cuffs two blocks away!”

Nace grinned wolfishly at the two glass squares into which he was staring. It would appear that the Titian and her damson-nosed companion had turned upon Gooch and Honest John when they came in.

Nace was more than mildly surprised. The girl had been in the act of summoning the police when he seized her.

Sergeant Gooch got up with the box of Nace’s cigars and passed the cheroots around. “It was kinda strange how that happened. The dame seemed glad enough to see us. The big guy kinda stood around and moped. Then he threw down on us with the revolver. The fire-top didn’t seem to approve of that. She looked at the big guy like she was ready to knock his block off. But she helped dress us up with our own jewelry. And they went out together.”

Sergeant Gooch came back to the desk with the cigar box. He took a fresh weed for himself. “They got clean away. We charged around huntin’. And were we surprised when we found them two guys sleepin’ in the hearse!”

“The hospital should be letting us know what ailed them two slumbering beauties!” vouchsafed an officer.

“Yeah.” Sergeant Gooch rasped fingers over his chin shag. “You know, the sleep them fellers was havin’ had all the earmarks of Lee Nace’s work. Some damn funny things happen to people who mix themselves up with Nace.”

At this point, Honest John MacGill arrived. He was swabbing at his eyes with his sleeve — they were watering from the effects of the smoke.

Sergeant Gooch pointed his cigar at Honest John. “A fine lot of help the department gives me! Look at ’im! I set ’im in the hearse and he breaks out in tears, probably from thinkin’ of funerals—”

“Aw, can it!” Honest John growled. “When I find the dang joker who threw that smoke bomb in the alley and then hollered fire—”

Gooch got up, squawking, “What’s this about a smoke bomb?”

“That’s what I said!” Honest John leered about truculently. “If I thought one of you monkeys—”

“It wasn’t anybody from the department!” Sergeant Gooch told him grimly. “Smoke bomb! Ha! That’s something else that smacks of Nace!”

“Damn the luck!” Honest John howled. “I’ll bet that’s who it was!”

Sergeant Gooch teetered on his heels. “Sure it was Nace! He used that smoke bomb so he could get into the building, I’ll bet!” Gooch went to the window, leaned out and gestured at the plainclothes men in the squad car below.

Nace could not see his moving arms in the picture that was reflected by the arrangement of mirrors and straight tubes, but he guessed that Gooch was signaling some of the officers to the rear. He drew back inside.

A detective asked, “What put you on the trail of this mess, anyway?”

“A telephone call!”

Sergeant Gooch gestured everybody toward the door. “Somebody called me about daylight and said Nace had murdered a man and was hiding the body in his office. Well, bless your Uncle Gooch, that sounded fishy! But it was a chance to worry Nace a little, and there is nobody I enjoy worryin’ more! I got a warrant and come up here and turned his place upside down!”

“What’d you find?”

“Hell — what I expected! Nothin’! C’mon, you guys! We’ll frisk this building!”

Sergeant Gooch was opening the door when the telephone rang. He came back, picked up the instrument.

“Yeah, this is the pride of the cops…. He did!.. They did? Both of ’em?… Ow-w-w! What is this town comin’ to!”

Gooch ground the receiver savagely upon its hook.

“What’s happened?” somebody asked him.

“Happened! Happened!” Gooch flung his cigar out of the window with great carelessness for the heads of pedestrians below. “Them two guys we found asleep in the hearse! They jumped off stretchers while they was bein’ carried into the hospital, and ran and got clean away! Can you beat that?”

From the door came a faint scraping noise. A detective sprang over and looked into the hall, after frowning at the mail box.

“It’s the mail!” he said over his shoulder. Then, in a louder voice directed at the mailman, “Hey, Uncle Sam, what’d you drop for Nace?”

The mail carrier’s reply was not audible to Nace.

The detective now began to work at the mail box, which was a stout steel case affixed to the door. He tugged, swore, smacked the metal with the heel of his hand, tugged again. “I can’t get the dang thing open! The mailman says he dropped in four letters!”

Sergeant Gooch ambled toward the laboratory, bristled jaw out, saying, “I’ll see if I can find a hammer or a screwdriver or something!”

His long face knobby with angry muscle welts, Nace got up and jumped to a telephone on a bookcase. Instead of a bell, this instrument was fitted with a light that brightened when a call came in. Nace dialed the number of his office.

The phone was near enough the smoking stand base so that he could look into the glass panels and see what happened.

Sergeant Gooch, a hammer and screwdriver in one hand, answered the call.

Nace made his voice hard, angry. “This is Nace! What’s the idea of you and your shadows cluttering up my place?”

With one hand, Gooch made frantic silent gestures at Honest John, directing him to trace the call. Honest John dived out through the door. Sergeant Gooch began stalling to hold Nace on the wire, telling Nace what a pal he was, thanking him for the cigars, and finally:

“I’m sorry about that search warrant business, Nace, old boy, old boy. The thing was all a big mistake—”

“You’re a liar!” Nace advised him. “You have never in your life admitted you could make a mistake!”

Honest John had worked swiftly. He put his head in the door, whispered loudly, “The phone is in an office on the top floor of this building!”

Nace hung up. There was a phone upstairs all right. The instrument he was using was tapped into that line, but the instant he hung up, jack switches automatically cut it off so the tap could not be traced.

Gooch and his men bolted out of Nace’s office.

Nace gave them time to get well on their way upstairs, then ran to his office, got four letters out of the mailbox, and whisked back to concealment. He shuffled the letters.

Three advertisements, he discarded at once.

The last letter was postmarked from Lake City, Ohio, the day before. It was somewhat bulky. He opened it. There was a letter.

Clipped to the letter were two five hundred dollar bills and three one hundred dollar bills.

Nace frowned. The adder scar was a faint pink shadow of itself upon his forehead.

“Julia Nace,” he said slowly. Then he placed her. She was one of his relatives he had never seen. They were connected with some kind of a shipping business on the Great Lakes.

Nace felt absently of his steel-armored wig. The brother, Jerome, had died a few weeks ago, he remembered now.

He thought of the red-head, wondering if she was Julia Nace, grinned, said, “As a relative, she would be easy to take!”

Julia Nace, it appeared from the note, had been writing letters and receiving answers, under the impression she was in communication with the branch of the family tree that had gained fame as a detective.

Today was Nace’s first contact with the affair, by letter or otherwise. Somebody had been playing the girl for a sucker.

Nace clicked the switches which shut off the two loud-speakers disguised as paintings. He replaced the pedestal of the smoking stand. He opened the door into the hallway. No cops were in sight.

Nace whipped silently to the freight elevator, entered, nursed the door shut, and sent the cage downward. He stopped the cage on the second floor, making as little noise as possible.

This was not the first time Nace had found occasion to leave his office building without being observed. He crossed to a large metal cabinet that stood against the end of the corridor. He opened the door, wedged through many soiled garments, found a secret catch and got the rear open.

A moment later, he stepped out of an exactly similar cabinet in the next building. This building was very long, extending the remainder of the block. Nace walked down passages, descended stairs, and mingled with the crowd at a furniture auction being held in a room opening off the lobby.

He bought a cheap but bulky wicker chair and walked out carrying it on his shoulder in such a manner that it concealed both his height and features from Gooch’s detectives. Nace walked a block, rounded a corner, and threw his chair into the first empty truck he saw.

He had been doing some thinking. Jeck and Tammany must have awakened in the ambulance en route to the hospital. They would, of course, have no idea what had happened to them during the last two hours.

Their first move would be to try to get a line on what had occurred. The logical place for them to seek information would be in the vicinity of Nace’s office.

Nace turned into an alley, with the idea of entering a rear door of a store and going forward to watch the street before his office.

He no more than stepped into the alley before guns began clapping thunderously. Lead squawled, chopped brick around him, ricocheted. A slug did something hot, painful, jarring, to the back of his neck.

Nace slapped flat on the alley bricks. That was the old stand-by trick of a man under fire. Sometimes it made those shooting at him think they had scored a fatal hit.

It worked. Down the alley, a taxi motor boomed. The cab went out of the alley like a racing whippet out of a starting box.

Nace shoved up from where he had dropped. He burned alternately hot and cold. He did not shoot at the receding hack — for the very good reason that he did not carry a gun. Muscles and wits, Nace maintained, were more to be depended upon than firearms. A man putting all trust in a gun was likely to be at a loss if disarmed.

He glimpsed the license number of the hack. Who rode the cab, he could not tell. Nor had he been able to see who had shot at him, so swiftly had the thing happened.

He turned away, feeling the back of his neck. His wound was only a scratch, but had the bullet come an inch closer, it would have parted his spine.

He worked away from the vicinity, keeping out of sight of policemen. He turned his coat collar up and stuffed his handkerchief under it to hide his hurt.

Two hours later, he was sitting in a speakeasy, a small bandage taped over his neck, when a newsboy came in with the latest editions. Nace bought a paper. A front-page item caught his eye almost immediately.

A taxi driver had been found in his machine beside a Long Island road. The license number was that of the cab carrying the gunsters who had fired upon Nace. The driver was dead when discovered — skull crushed in.

The spot where the taxi had been found was a quarter of a mile from a commercial airport.

Nace got his hat, paid his bill, and tramped out of the speak. He secured his roadster from the spot where he had parked it, and headed for Long Island. He snapped on the radio under the dash and shortened down the wavelength to pick up police broadcasts.

For a time, the instrument mumbled nothing but routine business.

“All cars attention! A pickup order for Lee Nace, the private detective.” Nace smiled without alarm. But his face froze at the next words from the radio. “This man Nace is wanted by the New Jersey authorities on a murder charge. Witnesses saw him departing from a tourist camp where the bodies of two murdered men were found.”

The radio launched into more routine.

Nace took a side road to avoid the spot where the taxi and the murdered driver had been found. He pulled up at the edge of the airport tarmac.

“I want,” he told the field manager of one of the city’s largest aerial taxi services, “to hire a plane to take me to Lake City, Ohio.”

The manager grinned. “What is this, a gold rush?”

“Why?”

“You’re the third. About an hour ago, two other planes left for Lake City. They got off about fifteen minutes apart.”

Nace recited monotonously, “One carried a red-headed girl and a purple-beaked guy. A man dressed in black and a little, hawk-faced fellow hired the other ship. Which pair went up first?”

“The girl and the fellow with the sunrise face.”

“Give me the fastest ship you have!” Nace said grimly.

Chapter IV Peril House

The afternoon was well along when Nace’s hired plane sloped down out of low-hanging cotton-tuft clouds and wheeled a slow circle over Lake City.

Between four and five thousand would catch the population of the place. A three-story structure was the tallest building in town. This was the schoolhouse. Some of the streets were unpaved. Plumes of dust trailed such vehicles as were using the near-by country roads.

The sun-irradiated blue smear of Lake Erie began at the edge of town and stretched away until it was lost in a gray haze. Near town were docks, moored launches and cruisers, and small boats drawn up on a pale beach.

Perhaps a mile down the shore, there was an empty dock, warehouses, and a great rambling old house situated on a vast but seedy-looking lawn.

Nace had been unable to secure a fast ship, and knew he had not passed the two taxi planes from New York. The ships were not to be seen. Nace hoped they had arrived, landed their passengers and departed. They could have beaten him here by a couple of hours.

His own ship let him out in the stubble of an oatfield. He had brought his zipper-fastened canvas bag. Carrying it, he hoofed into town.

He found a car with a taxi sign on the windshield. The driver told him Julia Nace’s place was about a mile away on the lakefront. It was, Nace discovered, the establishment with the empty wharf, warehouses and old rambling house.

The hackman also said three or four planes had circled the town within the last two hours. This was fair evidence that his quarry was ahead of him. He could not account for the fourth plane. It might have been a barnstormer.

He rode the taxi halfway out, dismissed the machine, and hoofed it the rest of the way. Nearing the place, he vaulted one of the fences that paralleled the road and eased through brush and small trees. He was taking no chances.

From a distance of a hundred yards, he surveyed the sprawling house. As he watched, a farmer in a wagon passed along the road. A small terrier trailed the wagon. The dog bounded across the rambling lawn to the front door of the ramshackle house.

The actions of the dog then became strange. It reared upon its rear legs, as if to look in the open door. Then the animal spun and fled at full speed, tail tucked under.

Nace let the wagon get out of sight. Then he sprinted for the door of the house

He did not know what he was expecting. Whatever it was, he was disappointed. When he veered inside, he saw only a composite of worn hall carpet, ancient stairs with a worn runner, and brightly figured wallpaper.

There was mail on the hall table — circulars from a marine engineering concern, a boat builder, a nursery, and a telephone bill. All were addressed to Miss Julia Nace.

Nace opened a door, found himself in an old Colonial living room. There was a picture of Nace’s grandfather, Silas Murray Nace, over the fireplace mantel. The venerable old gentleman was garbed in the uniform of a buck private of the Confederate army.

Grandfather Nace was tall, blond, angular of feature.

Nace cocked a critical eye at the picture, remarked, “The block the chip came off of.”

He did not waste more time admiring his ancestor. He began a search of the house. He found the kitchen well stocked with food. Adjacent, he found a windowless, rather large room that had evidently once been a pantry. But it now bore a bed, a dressing table, a hooked rug. Feminine garments were draped on hangers.

Two Winchester repeating rifles rested on nails driven into the walls. There was also a box of a rural telephone on the wall. Nace lifted the receiver and listened. A dead silence told of cut wires.

Stepping back, Nace absently tamped tobacco into his pipe.

He thought of the way the dog had acted. Opening his zipper bag, he got out a bullet-proof vest. Peeling coat and shirt, he put the protector on underneath.

The big pantry was a poor place for sleeping. There were no windows. But the door was strong. It struck Nace as a likely bower for someone in fear of attack.

Suddenly, in the direction of the front room, a woman began screaming. Her shrieks had the ripping quality of a soul torn out. They were full of rasp and choke, rather than being loud, and there were no words, but only the enstrangled cries.

Nace moved, but not toward the front room. Instead, he pitched through the kitchen door, banked right around the house, and stretched himself to reach the front door. Lifting on his toes, he floated to a comparatively silent stop in the doorway.

The red-head lay on the floor, well down the hall. Her long, finely moulded form was slightly atwist, with knees drawn up and both arms under her. Her head was canted on one side, so that her face was toward him.

Her eyes were open so widely that they seemed to protrude.

Nace ventured a doubtful step across the threshold.

Something seemed to squeal behind him. The squeal was so sharp, sudden, as to be something of a snapping report. It was a bullet, and it hit Nace in the back, directly over the heart.

He sprang convulsively upward and forward, came down with a noisy crash, and rolled completely over twice, bony limbs rattling on the floor.

Noise of the rifle shot swished across the clearing, hit the house, and an echo glanced back, a single crack like a stick breaking.

The red-headed girl got up from the floor, both her hands gripping a sawed-off shotgun on which she had been lying. She ran past Nace to the door. She stocked the shotgun to her shoulder and looked out.

The uncertain waving of the muzzle showed that she could see no target. A rifle bullet came through the door with a piping squeak. It hit the wall, scooped a fistful of plaster upon Nace’s prone form.

The girl backpedaled from the door. Nace got up, trying to reach his back with both hands. The bullet-proof vest had saved him, but the slug had carried an energy of many hundreds of foot pounds. He stumbled into the room that held the picture of Grandfather Nace, fell prone on the floor and lay there, writhing a little in agony.

The girl went to the window, picked the curtain back, and looked out. She stood there perhaps a minute, then turned. Her face was very white under her red hair.

“I can’t see a sign of him!” she said, hot excitement in her contralto voice.

Nace pulled up on hands and knees and went to the window. His back was a mass of dull pain. He watched the brush at the edge of the lawn for three or four minutes, but could discern no trace of the rifleman.

He got to his feet and stood with his back pressed tightly to a wall. This seemed to ease the pain a little.

“Whoever fired the shots was trying to kill both of us!” said the girl.

Nace wiped a cold sweat of pain from his forehead with a jerky gesture that dislodged his steel skullcap of a wig. His eyes held a bleak suspicion.

“Suppose I choose to think the shots were part of that act you were putting on?” he grated.

Her hands tightened angrily on her blunderbuss. “The second shot was aimed at me! Couldn’t you see that?”

“I saw that it missed you! If the sniper out there was your pal, he might have planted the second shot to draw suspicion from you.”

The girl shrugged, rested her shotgun in the crook of an arm. “I was putting on an act, all right. But the shooting was not part of it. I was upstairs and saw you come prowling around. So I came down here and screamed and laid down on my gun. I thought I’d get a chance to hold you up when you came in. I wanted to get my hands on you.”

“Why?”

“I’ve got some questions I want to ask you!”

Nace stumbled to one window after another, peering through them, until he had surveyed all sides of the house. He could discover no one. He came back to the girl, saying, “Shoot your questions!”

She snapped angrily, “You doublecrossed me!”

“There’s where you’re all wet!”

“I wrote you letters telling you all about this trouble!”

“If you did, somebody’s been lifting ’em! I only got one! It enclosed a retainer fee!”

The girl cocked and uncocked her gun absently. “I mailed that last letter myself, from the post office. The others, I simply put in the rural box out in front.”

“You can see what happened!” Nace told her. “Now, give me the lowdown on this!”

The girl went into the pantry bedroom off the kitchen, came back carrying both Winchesters. She did not offer the rifles to Nace, but stood them against the wall, where he could easily reach them.

“You’ve heard of Mel Caroni?” she asked.

“Sure! Who hasn’t?” Nace snorted. “He was Chicago’s gang big shot. But he’s in Atlanta now — income tax. They say he’s broke.”

“You bet he’s broke!” the girl said grimly. “He converted everything he had into cash and jewels, and tried to skip the country. A coastguard cutter sank his boat out on the lake, not fifteen miles from here.”

Nace raised his eyebrows and lowered his mouth ends to register understanding. “And Caroni’s hoard sank with the boat?”

She nodded. “Caroni hired us to recover the stuff. You know, we own the Lake City Salvage Company.”

The girl took four shotgun shells from a pocket of her sports skirt and toyed with them. “The night after we located the wreck, there was an explosion which killed my father and two of the crew, and sank our salvage boat. My brother and the rest of the crew escaped.”

“Where do Tammany and Jeck hook in?”

“They’re two of Mel Caroni’s gangsters,” she explained. “After the explosion, we refused to have anything more to do with the salvage job. They seem to think we got Caroni’s treasure. They’ve been hanging around.”

Nace flexed his arms, bent his back a little, grimacing. He went to a window and started to lift the shade.

A bullet planked through pane and shade and thumped loudly into the wall.

Nace dodged back involuntarily, then bent forward again, plucked up the shade and stared out. He saw no one.

Broken glass emptied from between shade and window sill as if the fragments were coming out of a sack. Fully two minutes, Nace stood and stared.

“What about your brother?” he asked over his shoulder.

The red-head dropped shotgun and shells and splayed both hands over her face. “It was ghastly! Awful! We found him down by the lake shore! His eyes and tongue — they protruded! He was all swollen! I don’t think the Lake City doctors knew what had killed him. But they claimed he had been bitten by a snake!”

“What kind of a snake?”

“Water moccasin! Usually, you don’t find them this far north! But the shore here is infested with them.”

Nace did not take his eyes from the outdoors. He could discern no sign of the sniper.

“And Jud Ogel?” he prompted.

“We found him day before yesterday!” The girl picked up shotgun and shells. “Jud Ogel was in exactly the same condition as my brother. I immediately wrote you! Yesterday morning, I got word to bring the body to New York, where experienced chemists could be put to work to find the cause of death.”

“A stall!” Nace said. “You had Zeke rent a hearse and start the body for New York, huh?”

“That’s right!”

“Zeke gave a fake name when he hired the hearse!”

“Did he? I guess he didn’t want to connect me with the affair.”

“And Zeke’s story is that somebody stole the hearse?”

“Two masked men! One of them called the other by your name.”

Nace moved to another window and continued his staring outdoors. “Now maybe you can explain why Zeke tried to shoot me!”

“Zeke said he just kind of went crazy from thinking you were connected with the murders of my brother and Jud Ogel. He wasn’t responsible.”

“Who is Zeke?”

“One of the divers working for my father’s — my company. Jud Ogel was a diver, too!”

Nace tried a third window. “Where is Zeke now?”

“I don’t know. He came out here while I remained in Lake City to buy groceries. When I got here, there was no sign of him.”

Nace was perspiring. “Who do you think is the villain in this bit?”

“Tammany and Jeck!” she said promptly.

Chapter V Corpse Under the Carpet

Nace moved over to the door, making faces as his back pained him. He looked out, shivered.

“You cover me with the shotgun,” he suggested. “I’m going out.”

“That’ll take nerve!” The girl eyed him, shrugged, took up a position with her shotgun. “I guess you’ve got it.”

Nace left the door at a headlong run, and lined for the nearest brush. The serpent was a blaze on his forehead. Each instant, he expected to be shot at. He was in a cold sweat when he plunged into the bushes. No shots had come.

He worked toward the lake, stopping often to listen. Trees grew thicker and larger. The ground sloped down sharply. Through the leafage, he caught the blue shimmer of Lake Erie.

Came a soft flutter in the ground plants. Nace sighted a slimy, writhing reptile. One of the moccasins! The venomous thing plopped into the lake. He heard two more of them as he worked toward the wharf. The place was alive with them.

Then he heard the girl cry out from the house. It was a single wail, full of blood-curdling horror. And it was very muffled.

Nace sprinted for the rambling old house, heedless of noise.

Someone shot at him with a rifle. He could not tell how far the bullet missed him — perhaps a yard. He sighted the steel snout of the rifle, waving about in the bushes. The sniper was beyond the house, a bit to the right of it. None of the fellow’s person was visible.

Nace angled over and got the house between himself and the gunner. No more bullets came.

He dived into the kitchen, crossed it, hit the hallway.

“Julia!” he yelled.

“Down here!” Her voice was in the basement.

Nace found the basement door open off the hall. He rattled his feet down rickety stairs.

The red-headed girl stood in one corner of the musty cellar, beside a pile of old carpets. She had pulled a carpet off an object. She looked at the thing that she had uncovered, and shrieked again, hysterically, in spite of herself.

Nace went over and stared. Then shoved the girl away, saying, “Quit looking at it, dammit!”

The body of Tom Tammany had been under the carpet. The man’s eyes and tongue protruded. All over, he was swollen and purple.

Nace ran for the cellar stairs, gritting, “This thing is getting damn bad!”

He gained the hallway, veered into the sitting-room, and got one of the Winchesters. Ordinarily, he did not use a firearm. But this was going to be an exception.

The red-head came up from the cellar, choking, “While you were out, I thought I would search the house for Zeke—”

Replying nothing, Nace began a careful scouting, first from one window, then another. The girl got the other Winchester and also began peering from windows.

Five minutes later, the girl cried from the front door, “Look who’s coming!”

Detective Sergeant Gooch came stamping from the direction of the road. He held a blue service revolver in each hand. Before him, he herded Jeck and Zeke.

Coming near, Sergeant Gooch stepped to one side, so that he could cover Nace and the girl, as well as Jeck and Zeke.

“Drop that artillery!” he snapped.

“Be yourself!” Nace growled. “You’re out of your bailiwick!”

Gooch cocked both his revolvers. “Bailiwick, hell! Something’s happened to Honest John, and I ain’t fooling! Drop ’em!”

Nace told the girl, “This crazy cop has shot more people than he’s got fingers and toes! We’d better do as he says!”

“Where’s Honest John?” Gooch demanded savagely. “He left me to go on a lone-handed scout, and he ain’t come back!”

“How should I know?” Nace asked. “I didn’t even know you two were in this neck of the woods!”

“Somebody reported your car at the New York airport,” Gooch explained grudgingly. “We learned you and the rest of the gang had chartered planes for Lake City. So we followed. Officially, we’re investigating the murder of that taxi driver. We beat you here. Our police plane was fast!”

Nace gestured at Jeck and Zeke. “Where did you tie into these two?”

Gooch glared at Jeck. “I caught this monkey running down the road with a rifle. A minute later, the other guy came out of the brush of his own accord.”

Big Zeke wrinkled his purple nose and spoke up in a harsh rumble. “I was followin’ Jeck. I been followin’ him for the last hour!”

Nace snapped at Jeck, “So it was you who shot at me!”

“No, it wasn’t!” Jeck disclaimed.

“That’s right! It wasn’t him! I been watchin’ him!” Zeke made the statement vehemently.

The girl roved bewildered eyes. “Then who was it?”

Nace scowled blackly at Sergeant Gooch. “It strikes me as damn funny — you two guys showing up here. Are you sure you’re not doing anything but upholding the law?”

Blood sheeted under Gooch’s blue beard stubble. “For a little bit, I’d knock you into the middle of next week!”

“Any time you feel lucky, old son!” Nace leered. “Was it a man or a woman who telephoned you that wild story about a body being in my office?”

“Man.”

“Okay.” Nace took out his pipe and yellow silk pouch. He dunked the pipe in the pouch, making the act a small gesture at Jeck. “I don’t suppose you know anything about who killed that filling station attendant, shot at me in that New York alley, or murdered the taxi driver?”

Except for the black gloves, Jeck still wore his crowlike garments. “Listen, wise guy, all I did was grab that hearse because I thought Caroni’s treasure was in it. There wasn’t nothing in it, not even a body—”

“He’s a liar!” Zeke yelled.

“There wasn’t nothin’ in the hearse!” Jeck repeated sullenly. “I went to get you, Nace. I thought you might know where the swag was, and I could make you cough up! After you put me and Tammany to sleep and damned if I know yet how you done it — we woke up on stretchers. We was scared, and got right out of town. We didn’t shoot nobody.”

Nace ran plumes of smoke from his nostrils. “Why were you prowling around out here?”

“I was lookin’ for Tammany. We separated just after we got to Lake City. Tammany disappeared.”

Sergeant Gooch waved his guns as if they were pennants, and shouted, “Pipe down! Pipe down! We can go into this later! What we’re gonna do now is find Honest John!”

Nace, raising his voice angrily, shouted, “Let’s find out where we’re going first! Somebody around here has got his hands on that Caroni treasure! He knows he’s got to keep it secret, because Caroni’s gangsters would take it away from him. So he’s been killing everybody who finds out he has it. I think I know how he’s been pulling the murders so as to leave his victims looking like they were about to explode, but I’ve got to get some proof.”

Sergeant Gooch roared, “If you know anything about them killings, you’ve got to tell me—”

“In a horse’s neck!” Nace told him. “Let’s go hunt Honest John!”

They trooped out of the house.

“I think Honest John went toward the warehouse and wharf!” offered Sergeant Gooch.

As they made for the warehouse, Nace observed each of the others in turn. They were all glancing about nervously as if expecting more shots.

The red-headed girl came close to Nace, shivering, “Do you suppose the person behind this is someone we haven’t even seen?”

“I’m not going to risk a laugh by saying what I think!” Nace told her.

The warehouse was big, heavily timbered. It extended out over the water. The wharf itself was only a continuation of the warehouse floor.

The massive door was unlocked. Nace shoved it in. There was a passage the length of the structure, with stall-like storerooms on each side.

Just inside the door, they found Honest John’s hat, shoes, trousers and coat. The latter two garments were almost as large as small tents.

Nace scrutinized one of the stalls. It held parts of marine engines. He tried the next storeroom. It held great piles of well-greased chain hawsers. This was all equipment for salvaging operations.

In the third cubicle were stored coils of one-, two- and three-inch manilla rope. Some of the coils were new, still in burlap coverings.

Honest John MacGill sat on one of the rope coils, clad only in his underwear. He was dead and swollen and his eyes and tongue almost hung out of his head.

“Stick right here, every one of you!” Sergeant Gooch rapped. “Nace — you watch ’em!”

He ran down the passage, popping his head into stalls, searching.

Black clad Jeck spun, tried to pull a gun from a shoulder holster. Nace took four quick jumps and swung a bony mallet of a fist. Jeck folded down and flopped end over end, like a crow shot on the wing.

He squirmed, dazed, but not unconscious. “I ain’t had nothin’ to do with this!” he whimpered.

Nace kicked the gun into a corner, blew on his fist. The adder on his forehead was a pale salmon. “You picked a swell way to show it!”

Sergeant Gooch came back. His face was like dough, stuck full of short blue pins. He was almost crying with baffled rage.

“There ain’t nobody else here,” he said thickly.

Nace turned on the red-headed girl. “Were your brother and Jud Ogel in their underwear when you found them dead?”

“Yes, they were!” she replied, then turned swiftly and walked out.

“Hey, you! Come back here!” Gooch ripped.

Nace gave the police officer a scathing eye. “I hope you don’t expect her to stay here and look at that body!” He followed the girl outdoors.

In a moment, Gooch followed, covering Jeck and Zeke with his revolvers.

“We’ll go to the house!” Gooch snapped. “I’m gonna ask some questions! I’m gonna get to the bottom of this, I am!”

They moved to the house. Nace, hanging back, let the others enter first.

“The telephone is out of order,” he said shortly. “I’m going after the local coroner and sheriff.”

Sergeant Gooch sniffed, half from anger, half from grief. “Now listen, Nace! We won’t get anywhere by ringin’ these hick cops—”

“The old copper spirit!” Nace answered. “Nobody can do anything quite as well as a New York flatfoot!”

He heeled around and strode across the lawn to the road, thence along the pike in the direction of Lake City.

Once out of sight of the house, however, he slipped silently into the brush. Working through it, he reached the lake shore, then turned left. He used only enough caution so that those in the house did not hear him. He ducked into the warehouse.

Chapter VI Murder By Suction

In one of the stall-like storerooms nearest the wharf end, he found an assortment of diving suits. These ranged from light metal head rigs — nothing but a helmet and short shoulder mantle to ponderous, all-metal suits for deep-water work.

The fact that Honest John was in his underwear indicated that he had been planning to use a diving suit. The detective would naturally have removed his outer clothing so that he would not be soaked in case the diving garb leaked.

But none of the diving suits had been used within the last hour or so — not one was wet. Bending low, Nace scrutinized the place, catching the light from various angles.

There was a faint deposit of dust on the floor. It was scuffed with many tracks — tracks of men in bare feet, and prints of men in shoes. And in two spots, lack of dust marked where two diving suits had recently lain.

After these discoveries, Nace took great care not to mutilate the tracks in the dust.

He lifted one all-metal suit, complete with helmet, and carried it out into the passage, thence toward the dock. He lowered it, reentered the warehouse. In an end stall in the structure, he found a powerful air pump, already set up. No doubt it was there for the purpose of testing diving suits. There was plenty of air hose.

The compressor was operated from an electric motor. It made some little noise when he switched it on. It might be heard at the house. He found an electric lantern, waterproofed for diving use.

He began donning the diving suit. This proved to be something of a task. The rig had not been tailored for a man of Nace’s unnatural height. It was of ample girth, however, permitting him to assume a crouching position.

Nace was basing his procedure on a well-grounded suspicion. Honest John had been in a diving suit, or about to get in one, which meant he had been preparing to enter the water for some purpose. That purpose could hardly have been anything except the securing of the Caroni treasure.

Honest John must have discovered the possessor of the treasure making a dive to see that the hoard was safe, and had been murdered for his pains. No doubt Tammany had been slain for the same reason. The killer, knowing the wet suits would betray the loot hiding place, had gotten rid of them, probably dumping them off the dock.

The Caroni swag, unless Nace’s guess was far wide, was concealed somewhere around the dock, under water.

Nace adjusted the air valves on the suit. The air pump was fitted with automatic controls. It would need no attendant for the short dive that he expected to make.

He closed the thick glass window of his helmet, clumped to a ladder, and laboriously let himself into the water.

The sun was low. The wharf shadow lay over the water where he was descending. This made the depths gloomy. With foresight, he had switched on the electric lantern before starting down. It diffused a pale luminance.

The water was much deeper than he expected. He settled on the mud bottom, began to play his light. Almost at once, he picked up footprints in the mud. They had been made recently — fine mud was suspended in the water in and around each print. Nace followed them.

The trail angled in toward the wharf piling. Nace tugged the air hose carefully behind him. He saw one of the moccasins, swimming under water. Farther in among the pilings, he discerned another. The writhing, repulsive things made him shudder.

A few feet within the forest of piles he found what he had expected.

Several rubberized bags were stacked close together. He grasped one of them with the claw-like pincers which served as hands on the metal diving suit.

Treading slowly, feeling his way back through the fog of mud he had stirred up, he returned to the stair-ladder. He climbed laboriously, the sack clinging to one claw. Reaching the wharf finally, he dropped the bag and began to work upon it with his iron claws.

The rubber-coated fabric was tough. He wrenched at it, tore it.

Pieces of jewelry, many neat bundles of currency, cascaded out. It was beyond a doubt, Caroni’s treasure. The rest would be easy to get. It could await capture of the murderer.

Nace suddenly sensed a faint jarring against the wharf planks. He tried to spin. He knew the jarring was from the slam of feet as men leaped toward him.

Before he got around, a stout manilla rope looped over his shoulders. It snugged. Nace, as clumsy as a pile of scrap iron in the ponderous metal suit, was jerked off his feet. He slammed down with a great rattling and banging.

It was then that he saw his assailants numbered two. Jeck and Zeke! They piled fiercely upon him.

Nace rolled, seeking to get slack in the rope, so he could free his arms. The armored diving suit was a protection against the blow of any fist or club. Jeck and Zeke apparently did not have guns. At least, they were not flourishing any.

Nace lifted a great metal blob of a weighted shoe and crashed it down on Jeck’s foot. The foot flattened out as if it were a meatball that had been stepped on. Jeck screeched, fell, and almost succeeded in tying himself in a knot around his injured foot.

Zeke jumped upon Nace’s steel back, like a gigantic, rusty bullfrog upon a small turtle. He was a bigger man than Nace, possibly stronger. That, coupled with the unwieldiness of the diving suit, kept Nace from arising. He was, in fact, held helpless.

Zeke got hold of the rope and succeeded in securing the awkward metal arms of the diving suit.

“Quit yer whinin’!” he snarled at Jeck. “C’mon and hold this bird in his tin nest! I got somethin’ to try!”

Jeck wailed, “That girl! She got away from us at the house—”

“Never mind her! She ran toward town for help, and it’s more’n a half mile to the nearest house! We got time!”

Zeke left Nace, ran along the wharf, and disappeared in the warehouse. Jeck got up on one foot, hopped over, and sat on Nace. When Nace yelled, Jeck unscrewed the glass window and opened it so he could hear the words.

“You would have done better to keep out of this!” Nace told him. “I was sure you didn’t pull those murders!”

Jeck showed surprise through his pain. “How’d you know that?”

“It was all Zeke, right from the first. There was nobody in the hearse when you grabbed it. That made it pretty certain that Zeke had already ditched the body, killing the filling station attendant while he was doing it. Then he tried to kill me in my office. That showed he was scared of me.

“He telephoned the police that lie about the body, so as to get me in trouble so I couldn’t help the girl. Probably he intended to plant Jud Ogel’s body in my office. I have no proof of that, of course. Neither can I prove that he shot at me and murdered the taxi driver, but he wasn’t with the girl, and he could have done it.

“When he came back here, the first thing he did was to look and see if his treasure was safe. Honest John and Tom Tammany saw him doing that, and he killed them both. Then he tried to potshoot me and the girl. He probably threw the rifle he had used into the lake. And he claimed he had been following you so as to draw suspicion from himself. You’d better be wise, Jeck, and let me go!”

Before Nace’s argument could get results, Zeke reappeared. He carried a great, writhing, poisonous water moccasin, gripping it just back of the head.

Leaning over Nace, Zeke gritted, “I’m gonna put this thing in the suit with you! That’s what I done with the girl’s nosey brother, when he caught me lookin’ at my swag. Then I’m gonna close your suit up tight and reverse the air pumps. They’ll suck all the air from your suit. Your eyes and tongue will stick out. You’ll look like hell when they find you! Like Jud Ogel looked!”

“I figured that’s the way you did it!” Nace told him hatefully.

“How come you figured that out?”

“That purple beak of yours showed you were a diver. Most old-time divers have schnozzles like that. It’s the pressure that does things to the fine blood vessels under the skin. You being a diver, it was natural you’d think of a stunt like this taking pressure out of a diving suit to do your murdering.”

Zeke shoved the moccasin’s head close to the helmet opening. It was so near that Nace shrank back to avoid its darting tongue.

“You ain’t gonna do much more fine deductin’!” Zeke grated.

Red-headed Julia Nace came racing out of the warehouse. She held a revolver — one of Sergeant Gooch’s police specials. She ran in a semicircle.

While Zeke still gawked at her, the revolver cracked flame.

Before Nace’s face, the head of the moccasin disappeared as if by magic. The bullet had shattered it.

Zeke straightened, yelling. He flung the only weapon at hand — the snake. It gyrated, contorting in the air, toward the girl. She ducked from the hideous thing in spite of herself.

Zeke rushed her. She shot at him. Missed! She fired again, and the bullet tore flesh from his shoulder. Then his fist caught her on the jaw and she dropped as if poled. She hit the wharf hard and did not move a muscle.

Whirling, Zeke ran back. Halfway to Nace, an idea seemed to hit him. He sprang upon Jeck, gibbering, striking with his fists.

Jeck went down, knocked unconscious. Zeke rolled Jeck on his face. Then he backed away, took a running jump and came down with both feet in the middle of Jeck’s back. There was a sickening pop as Jeck’s spine broke. He must have died instantly.

Zeke screamed madly, “By hell, there ain’t nobody gonna get a split of that swag! I bombed the salvage boat so I’d be the one to get it in the first place! I’ve had to kill men since to keep it! I’ll kill a few more! That woman, too!”

He leaned down, grasped the window of Nace’s suit, preparing to close it. He could not resist one last boast.

“I’ll reverse the pump and it’ll suck the air out of your suit! That’ll fix you! I altered that pump especially for these sucking jobs!”

Then he jumped, howled, and clapped both hands to his eyes. He weaved back wildly, pawing at his face. He came blindly to the edge of the wharf and plunged over.

There was a loud splash. A silence! Then more splashes. Zeke began screaming. His voice was horrible.

“I can’t swim! Help! I can’t—”

An ominous guggle-guggle-guggle ended that. There was no more noise. Zeke had drowned.

Nace lay in silent agony. He opened a tear gas bomb that he had the foresight to carry inside the diving suit.

Thirty minutes later, he was rubbing his eyes and confronting the red-headed girl and Sergeant Gooch. The red-head had regained consciousness, unhurt except for an aching jaw.

They had found Sergeant Gooch bound securely in the house.

Gooch was growling, “Them two came to an understanding, then they grabbed me—”

“They wouldn’t have come to an understanding if you hadn’t left them alone while you tried to third degree me!” the red-head snapped.

Gooch flushed under his blue beard stubble. “I thought—”

“I doubt it!” said the girl. “I haven’t seen you show any signs of being able to think!”

Nace eyed her steadily. “Say, are you going ahead with this salvage business that your father ran?”

She hesitated. “No. Why?”

Nace grinned widely. “For years, I’ve been looking for a woman assistant. You’ve got everything it takes. How’d you like the job?”

“I think I’d go for that in a big way!” she said promptly.

“Fine! We’ll show these New York cops some things!”

Sergeant Gooch emitted a forlorn groan.