Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter

by Tinsley, Theodore A.

  The girl walked to the curb and got into the foremost taxi. Tracy took the second in line.

  “Follow that cab and earn yourself ten bucks,” he told his driver.

  “Sure thing, Chief.” The hacker wasted ten seconds in a slow scrutiny of his fare, and then made it up going round the corner.

  At Tracy’s curt order he didn’t crowd the fleeing cab too closely. The Daily Planet’s puzzled columnist didn’t quite know what to expect from the self-possessed girl with the chestnut hair; but he wasn’t taking any fool chances on a sudden spatter of lead from another car lying in wait somewhere along the route.

  The chase led downtown by zigzag stages all the way to 34th. A wild swing crosstown and up again. At Fifth and 36th a red light brought a curse from Tracy’s driver and a swift slithering of braked wheels. A block ahead, the fleeing cab broke through the light with a swift left turn. That left Tracy holding the bag on a wrong-way street. He slipped an extra ten to his chauffeur; and the latter, after a swift glance up and down the avenue for cops, swung his wheel and sped west against the east-bound arrow.

  He turned into Sixth after a pause and a brief grunt of satisfaction. At 50th the fugitive cab slid round the corner in front of an east-bound bus. Down Broadway again, pocketed behind a string of intervening cars—and suddenly Tracy’s chauffeur grunted in alarm: “Hey—you’re gonna lose her! She’s just gone into the Paramount Theatre!”

  “Get up as close as you can,” Tracy snapped.

  By the time he was out on the curb the girl had vanished inside the theatre. Grimly he added some more to the hacker’s pay.

  “Stick in front. If she comes out again, beat it around to the side entrances. I’ll be watching there.”

  “Oke.”

  Tracy hurried to the corner with eager strides—and stopped instantly. The shrewd girl had already left the theatre by one of the side exits and was crossing the street. Hunched in an orangeade doorway, he watched her come boldly back to Broadway along the opposite side of the street.

  She melted into the swirling crowd and Tracy tailed her cautiously to 42nd and down the corner entrance into the subway. She took a northbound express and so did Tracy. At 72nd she got out and walked up Amsterdam to 75th. The chase ended just west of Columbus Avenue, when she disappeared into the entrance of a shabby walk-up apartment.

  Tracy thanked his lucky stars for the ill-lighted hallways of the dilapidated old dump. He went up the stairs like a noiseless shadow, listening at each dim landing for the faint rustle of her feet on the staircase above. She went straight to the top floor.

  Peering through dusty banisters, his body slanted flat on the stair carpet, Tracy saw her walk to the rear apartment, unlock the door and let herself in.

  He hesitated. There was no telling whether the girl was alone inside, or whether she was dutifully handing over the mysterious five spot to the blonde and the sharp-nosed taxi driver who had tried to kill Tracy. It angered Jerry to realize how the girl’s clear gray eyes and the elusive scent of lilac perfume had made a sap out of him. All through the taxi chase he had been trying to figure some innocent explanation for her, a harmless out of some kind.

  As he tiptoed towards the closed door of the apartment, his mind whispered stubbornly: “Maybe she’s a private dick.” The thought made him grin sourly. If she was a dick, he was a subway motorman! Tracy had met dozens of lady “ropes” and they were all maternal looking dames of the dowager type, with large bosoms and placid, confession-eliciting faces.

  He waited outside the door, listening for some sound from within. Suddenly he heard a key grating on the inside of the lock. He stepped noiselessly backward, his hand darting towards the butt of his hidden automatic.

  The door opened slightly and he saw the bloodless face of the girl staring cautiously out. Their eyes met for a clashing instant and he sprang forward. But quick as he was, the girl was quicker. She slammed and locked the door as he threw himself against it. He could hear the receding rustle of her feet; then an L train roared past on Columbus Avenue, and all he could hear was the pound and rumble of its passage.

  Tracy rubbed his nose thoughtfully. The situation was ticklish. If the tough blonde was in there too, it meant gunplay sure as hell. It meant butting in on something damned nasty, concerning which he still had no real knowledge whatever beyond the shrewd suspicion of crime, either already committed or impending. He thought of Butch’s stab wound and that decided him. Nobody on earth was going to stick a knife into Butch and get away with it! It would make too bad a precedent for later work against crooks!

  With his coat loose and his gun handy, Tracy opened a jack-knife he always carried, and went quietly to work with something that looked like an elongated bottle opener of the “anchor” type. Five minutes’ careful work took care of the old-fashioned lock. He was convinced that the girl was no longer in the apartment. He pushed the door gently open till it touched flat against the inner wall.

  The lights were all on. Nobody in sight. A cheap railroad flat, one room opening into another.

  Tracy’s eyes widened as he stepped into the bedroom and saw the tough blonde staring at him with expressionless face. She was on the floor, looking up. Very dead. A bullet in her neck. Her heavily rouged face pale, and not so tough after all.

  Her flesh was still warm to Tracy’s probing fingers. Over near a dresser there was a reflection of something blue on the carpet. He saw the same blue glint under a chair. He bent and picked up two turquoise beads. He sniffed them with a hard smile and it seemed to him he could detect the faint odor of lilac.

  Over near the window his foot crushed on something and he picked up another bead. The window was wide open. Rusted fire-escapes led to a small fenced yard below. Tracy didn’t bother going down; the smart Lilac Kid had too good a start. She also had the five-dollar bill. And the dangerous blonde was dead. No wonder she hadn’t kept the appointment. There was an ugly bruise on her forehead; Lilac must have knocked her out and hurried over to meet Tracy herself. Came back again and killed the blonde under cover of the roar of the Elevated while he, Tracy, had waited like a dope in the hall outside. He remembered the ugly little gat he had seen in Lilac’s bag when he had turned over the five spot to her in the Carteret.

  “It still might have been that razor-nosed taxi driver,” a stubborn whisper insisted in Tracy’s mind.

  Yeah! It might! But in any event, it still left the taxi driver and Lilac to reckon with. And a full-sized mystery to tear apart. There must be oodles of dough behind all this nonsense of a five-dollar bill. Nobody took a chance on murder for five bucks—not in Manhattan, anyway! Greed and murder. …

  Tracy made a discreet exit from the flat and the building. He didn’t want cops adding his own name to the cast of characters.

  But before he grabbed a cab home to his expensive penthouse he walked into a Columbus Avenue drug-store and telephoned an anonymous tip to Police Headquarters. He wanted that dead blonde identified in a hurry. It might help.

  Butch was in bed when Tracy got back but McNulty, the suave and imperturbable Chinese butler who had long since forgotten his real name was Mei-No-Lee, was pottering around with a vacuum sweeper, looking virtuous and indignant.

  “Where hell you hang alound allee time?” he hissed. “Man call up, say mebbe important and where is good fliend Tlacy? I make sad usual answer—how hell I know when Mister Tlacy not any time take tlouble tell nothing. No time. Never.”

  Tracy grinned. “Who was it, Keed?” His eyes narrowed when McNulty told him. “Fin Harrigan, eh? I wonder what he wants?”

  “No find out if no call up,” McNulty said grumpily.

  Tracy looked up Harrigan’s number and gave him a buzz.

  “Maybe it’s not important,” Fin said, “but I thought I’d let you know anyway. It’s about that five-dollar bill. I remembered something else.”

  “Shoot.”

  On his way home from the track, Fin explained, a pickpocket had made a try for his leather. The guy had be
en clumsy and Fin had whirled in the crowded train shed and made a grab for him. A sneaky-looking dip with bright eyes and a long, thin nose. He was as spry as an eel and made a complete getaway, because a dopey dame chose that exact instant to bump into Fin and throw him off balance. Fin didn’t connect it with the blonde at that time, because he was still unaware that he had picked up her five by mistake. Did Tracy think the thin-nosed guy had been after the Lincoln fin?

  “Maybe,” Jerry said. “Who was the dame that bumped you? The blonde who showed up afterwards?”

  “No. If it was her, I’d have remembered and been leery. This other dame was a hell of a nice looker. Tall, willowy, a kind of a cute little hat over one eye—”

  “I’ll bet it was Lilac,” Jerry muttered.

  “Huh? How the devil did you know that?” Fin asked in a mystified voice. “Come to think of it, she did smell faintly of lilac perfume. Hey, what the hell is this all about?”

  “You got me, brother,” Jerry said.

  “Well, anyway, I thought I’d tell you.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  Tracy hung up and considered things. After a while he got out his photostatic copy of the bill and examined again the queer numerical mustache on the face of Lincoln. 15-10-6-15—and Lincoln. Could it be a clue to an address somewhere? If there was a lot of dough behind this funny business, it might be hidden dough.

  Tracy went into his library and pulled down the big city directory. He found a Lincoln Place in Manhattan, a Lincoln Avenue in the Bronx and—yep, a Lincoln Street over in Brooklyn. Thinking about it didn’t do him a bit of good. The hyphenated numbers were no help, either.

  He slammed the whole thing out of his mind with a stiff hooker of Canadian rye and went to bed.

  The next morning Butch pulled him right back into the thick of things. Butch was yanking at the leg of Tracy’s pajamas, waving an inky Daily Planet in front of him. A glance at the photograph and the headline brought Jerry leaping out of bed. The hard-looking blonde he had last seen on the bedroom floor had the whole front page of the, tabloid to herself. The headline said with black brevity:

  Widow of Jess Spencer Slain!

  Tracy read every line of the murder story with grim attentiveness. The details of the finding of the body of blond Dora Spencer didn’t interest him worth a damn. But the resume of the life and works of her dead convict husband did! Tracy’s memory was pretty vague about Jess Spencer and the notorious Harry Connor kidnaping. It had happened eighteen years before, one of those forgotten causes célèbres of crime—like Pat Crowe and the Cudahy snatch.

  It all came back to Tracy as he read. It was one of those things the Sunday Edition raked up occasionally for a human-interest yarn: “Prison Walls Still Guard Secret of Missing Two Hundred Thousand Dollars.”

  After a humdrum career of petty crimes, Jess Spencer had electrified the country by kidnaping little Harry Connor, four-year-old son of a wealthy building contractor, from his father’s huge estate in Westchester. It was a one-man job but it worked. The ransom was paid—$250,000—and the boy returned unharmed; but he was a frail child and he died later on. Egged on by the tremendous hue and cry of the press, the police nabbed Spencer. He was tried, convicted and given a twenty-five-year stretch.

  But the ransom money had disappeared; that was the big puzzle. Spencer had fifty thousand with him when he was caught, but he stoutly denied any knowledge of the two hundred grand. He named a mysterious pal called “Joe” as the recipient of the missing fortune, but nobody believed that for a minute. Spencer went to prison with a grin. The police arrested Dora—she wasn’t a blonde in those days—and they grilled her without result. She was not implicated in the kidnaping and claimed she knew nothing at all of any missing $200,000. The whole thing died away in the cynical laughter of the public. Vaudeville comedians joked about the shadowy “Joe” and even the kids in the street had a chanting catch-word: “Who got the dough? A guy named Joe!”

  Spencer himself never got out of jail. Another convict had stabbed him to death with a pair of garden shears after an altercation in the prison grounds. Tracy remembered Spencer’s death well enough; it had happened three months ago. The wife had dropped out of sight and didn’t claim the body. And that was the end of the celebrated Connor case and the end of $200,000.

  Abruptly Jerry Tracy threw the Daily Planet to the floor. He began pacing up and down, concentrating on the implication of the thing.

  Suppose the cunning Jess Spencer had coolly buried the loot somewhere, planning to dig it up again after he had earned a commutation of sentence or a parole from an easy-going system that got sentimental and forgiving as the years rolled by. Pat Crowe had gotten out—why not Jess Spencer? He might have trouble remembering the location of the treasure over so long a period of time. He’d need a written clue of some sort—and whom would he dare to trust, even with the cipher, except his wife? His wife would be damned sure to save the five spot carefully. Not knowing what the symbols meant, she’d be under no temptation to betray the hiding place to some smart lover who might bob up while Jess himself was rotting quietly away in prison.

  Jerry Tracy lit a cigarette with unsteady fingers and made the air of his bedroom blue with quick, nervous exhalations of smoke.

  Could the thin-nosed taxi chauffeur be the mysterious “Joe” of song and story? Nerts—too young! He was undoubtedly some wise guy who had gotten hep to the importance of the Lincoln note, and had been working hand in glove with Jess Spencer’s widow. If he and the blonde had been lovers, as Tracy suspected, the death of the convict and the utter loss of her last hope to find out from Jess what the penciled clue really meant, must have driven them both to greedy desperation.

  In that case, where did Lilac fit in? Was she working in cahoots with the taxi guy, trying to rook Dora Spencer? How come Dora had allowed Lilac to muscle in? And why the devil should Lilac murder the blonde after she had grabbed the five spot from Tracy?

  Fin Harrigan! Tracy considered that angle. It might be that Fin and this Lilac dame … The columnist bit off an oath of disgust. Fin, he knew damned well, was as honest as the day was long. Might as well suspect Butch or the sandwich-man. Jerry had actually begun to canvass the possibilities of the sandwich-man as a suspect, when he saw the image of his own screwed-up face in the mirror. He burst into a roar of laughter and came back to common sense.

  He strode to the bedroom door and threw it open.

  “Hey, McNulty! Where the hell are you?”

  A shadow moved meekly out of the kitchen. “Hey, hey, Marster! You hungly, mebbe?”

  “No. Me thirsty. Bring me a pot of coffee as high as your vest buttons. I need stimulation. It seems I’m a damn’ fool, McNulty.”

  The almond eyes blinked innocently. “When the Marster speaks, let no servant contladict.”

  Tracy chuckled. “Is that from Confucius?”

  “No. That come stlaight from McNulty.”

  Tracy drank three cups of the black stimulating stuff before he bothered to crawl out of his pajamas. Then he shaved and let the stinging needles of his shower-stall redden his lean torso for a while. A complete change of raiment from the skin out made him feel lots better.

  “Goin’ out, Boss?” Butch asked him, with a hopeful sidelong glance.

  “Yep.”

  “Kin I come, too?”

  “Nope.”

  “Aw, chee!” Butch’s lower lip pouted like a child’s. “Anyone would t’ink I was a—a invalid or somepin. Look!” He lifted his right arm swiftly, gasped a little and lowered it with painful care.

  “Yeah. I see.” Tracy turned and looked at McNulty. “I don’t want this dope to sneak out, savvy? If he tries a sneak, you stop him quick like hell.”

  McNulty went padding into the kitchen and came out again with an agile-looking vegetable knife. “Me savvy.”

  He took a forward step and Butch, who had had dealings with the literal-minded Chinaman before, backed up hastily and sat down. “Okey, okey! Cut out the foolin’.
I ain’t goin’ out.”

  Tracy closed the door of the penthouse with a grin.

  He drove straight to his Times Square office and buckled down to work for two whizbang hours. Then he had an egg sandwich and some more coffee and went spinning downtown, all the way to Worth Street. He walked into the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and kept annoying people till he got into an office with a high ceiling and a grand view of the river.

  “Hello, Brady. Why don’t you call off your army once in a while, so taxpayers can get in?”

  “Hiyuh, Jerry! Why don’t you let a man know you’re comin?”

  They shook hands and Brady rolled a cigar across the polished desk. He was a pudgy, prosperous-looking Irishman with a nest of shrewd wrinkles around his blue eyes. He played a grand game of golf and had seven children, all boys.

  “Last time you were here,” he said, with a slow, friendly smile, “you were interested in a headless corpse in a row-boat under the Cunard pier. What is it this time?”

  “Just routine.”

  “Sure. The rowboat corpse was routine, too, as I remember.”

  “I want to get some dope on a hacker.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That helps,” Brady said dryly. “Do you know who he works for and what he looks like?”

  “Long nose. Long and thin and shiny as if he rubbed it every morning on a grindstone. Light eyes, very bright; sort of a piercing glare when he looks at you; you know, feverish, like a consumptive.”

  Tracy smiled and shrugged.

  “I only saw the guy once—and I was damned near under his front wheels when I took my look.”

  Brady seemed disappointed. “Just a hit-and-run, eh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was he a company driver?”