“Put up your gun,” Halliday begged thickly. “I—I give you my word I won’t prosecute, if you haven’t killed Cora.”
“Too late,” Miss Clarkson jeered. Her gun was very steady. She laughed a little as the blond thug on the floor groaned and swayed to his knees.
“That’s Jim Barfield—didn’t know you had an ex-convict brother-in-law, did you, Phil? I showed him how he could cut in on bigger profits than by blackmailing his damned sister. Get those guns, Jim. We’re all going out to the garage.”
Barfield grinned and staggered across to the weapons. He shoved one in his pocket. The other two guns were bright with menace as he kicked Butch lightly, steadily, in the face; little bruising impacts, until Butch groaned, gulped, stirred. He backed Butch across toward the others and Miss Clarkson’s left hand unlocked the back door and threw it open.
Flying snow covered them like a white shroud. They stumbled backward in it, hands helplessly aloft, unable to make the slightest move to leap at the shining guns that drove them so relentlessly toward the garage.
Halliday’s secretary held them at bay in the dim light of a lantern on a rusted hook. Jim Barfield tied them up. Halliday’s own sedan was there, the one in which Cora had been kidnaped. Miss Clarkson stepped on the starter, awoke the engine to a slow, rhythmic purring.
“Yell all you like,” the pale-faced murderess laughed with vindictive fury as she went to the door. “I’ve already tested the acoustics of this little lethal chamber.”
The heavy garage door rolled shut and locked behind her.
Halliday’s voice said tremulously, “We’ve got to try and—”
“Don’t talk—work!” Tracy snapped.
Neither of the three trussed men could reach one another. They were securely tied to three of the wheels of the car, the ropes passing tightly between the spokes. They struggled grimly, writhing and twisting at their bonds, their faces pale in the light of the lantern. The sound of the running motor of the sedan was like a steady croon of death in the air-tight garage, a creeping death that was odorless, tasteless, deadly. Carbon monoxide. …
Jerry’s slashed neck didn’t pain any more. He had a queer feeling of drowsy well-being. He knew what it meant, fought against it. If he could only rip himself loose, reach up to that tiny window high up in the rear wall of the garage. … He thought he saw a white face glimmering outside the window and bit his lips savagely to fight off the hallucination. It was only when the glass of the window smashed into fragments and a small bleeding fist protruded that he snapped back to dizzy reality.
It was Daisy Furlong, the little dancer whom he had ordered to stay in the parked automobile around the block. He had completely forgotten the nervy little kid!
“Gas!” he cried to her thickly. “Hurry!”
She writhed head-first through the narrow aperture like a snake. Hung for an instant—and deliberately let herself fall, head downward. As she fell, her supple dancer’s body twisted in the air and her head snapped forward toward her chest. She took the jarring crash on her back and shoulders with the dexterous grace of a circus tumbler. She was up in an instant, panting, slashing at Tracy’s bonds with a knife she had snatched up from a grindstone table over near the cobwebbed wall.
The three men were free in almost an instant. Jerry ran weakly toward the sedan and shut off the pulse of the motor. Butch and Halliday began to hurl their big bodies grimly against the locked garage door. It was immovable.
“No use,” Daisy cried fiercely. “Those two rats have the key. We’ll have to climb out that damned little peanut of a window!”
Phil Halliday’s lips curved with a blurred, impotent smile.
“Guess you’re elected, Jerry. Butch and I are too big to get through.”
“Yeah,” Jerry said. “Come on. Gimme a lift!”
“Me first,” Daisy cried. “We’ll need two of us! Besides, Jerry’s hurt. He’d kill himself trying to get down outside.” She lunged forward between the two big men. “Come on, damn you! Toss me up!”
They tossed her upward like a bird. Hanging outside the tiny window-frame in the flying snow, her feet poised on the crazy contraption she had built out of a broken chair and a couple of rusty pails, the dancer pried Tracy through the tight opening of the window and managed to lower him by the arm-pits before her sagging perch fell apart.
As they ran toward the house Daisy thrust something into Tracy’s cold hand. It was the knife with which she had cut his bonds.
“I got a hunch you’ll need it, boy friend,” Daisy whispered. She looked elfin, sprite-like in the flying snow, as pretty as hell. But her grim hand on Tracy’s arm was as steady as a steel hinge.
Miss Clarkson had left the kitchen door of the house unlocked. They opened and closed it without a sound. The lamp still burned desolately on the bare boards of the floor. Upstairs they could hear the slow shuffle of feet. A sinister, dragging sound that echoed through the thin plaster of the ceiling.
It was dark in the lower hallway and they ducked out of sight behind the curve of the staircase. Tracy crouched alertly, his knife swung stiffly backward like a machete. Bump, bump, came the slow sound of descending feet on the stairs. The feet reached the bottom step and turned.
Tracy saw the little blond guy first. His back was toward the columnist. He and Miss Clarkson were panting breathlessly, carrying the limp body of Cora Halliday between them.
Cora’s body dropped with a thump as Tracy leaped forward. The man and the woman sprang apart. Jerry dived straight at the man; Daisy took care of the woman.
The dancer dived headlong at Miss Clarkson as the blond guy yelled and drew his gun. His draw was fast, but Tracy’s swing of the long-bladed knife was even faster. It chopped downward in a whizzing arc and hacked into the flesh of the extended arm. The gun dropped and the little guy screamed and staggered backward, blood spurting from his gashed flesh.
Tracy kicked him savagely in the shins and brought him down in a crashing huddle. Both men clutched for the fallen gun and Tracy won. The columnist was like a streak of light. His bandaged throat ducked away from the clutching fingers of his foe and he brought the butt of the gun down on the man’s skull—hard. Again and again he struck, until the desperate squirming underneath him ceased.
He got up, staring drunkenly at Daisy. “Little guys are my meat,” he said thickly.
“That’s the way I feel about tough dames,” Daisy said.
The dancer’s face was gouged and furrowed from Miss Clarkson’s nails. A split lip didn’t help her smile any. One hand was twisted deep in a pocket of the murderous secretary’s dress, the other was a steel band on the woman’s gasping throat.
She drew her hand out and tossed Jerry a key. “Scram! Get those boys out of the garage. I’ll take care of this crazy buzzard. The other guy is out like a light.”
Light minutes later Cora Halliday, roused from her drugged stupor, was in her husband’s big arms. He sat with her on the dusty staircase and haltingly, dazedly, she told some of the horror she had undergone. Miss Clarkson, fettered and helpless, glared like a gray cat. She had become suddenly old, wrinkled, stringy looking. She kept mumbling to herself in a quiet undertone, but no one paid any attention to her.
In the yellow light of an oil lamp Cora Halliday’s lovely face was still stark with remembered terror. Her brother had been blackmailing her, Cora told the attentively listening men. She had been paying him money to keep his mouth shut about his prison record. She had cut loose from her shiftless and criminal family years earlier and had gone to Miami. It was there that Phil met and married her. She loved him desperately. She was afraid she’d lose him if he ever found out about her jailbird family. Phil wanted a child and so did she—and it made her afraid, afraid. …
“Is that why you didn’t want the police in?” Tracy asked Halliday in a low voice. “Did Cora ask you not to?”
“Yes. I loved her, believed in her. I always will.” He bent and kissed his wife’s lips with a proud, deliberate gesture. “My God, Cora, I
love you. Didn’t you know that?”
“It was your brother who kidnaped you?” Tracy asked Cora.
“Yes. I was certain he’d followed us to New York and I went to Phil’s office and showed his photo to that—that she-devil. I made no threats. That was a lie on her part. She was already in cahoots with my brother, Jim. He had told me and I went to see her—to beg her—
“When I looked out my bedroom window last night, I—I saw my brother beckoning to me. I climbed out the window to beg him not to disclose his identity to my husband. He struck me over the head—drove me to this horrible house.”
She began to weep. Phil Halliday smoothed her hair with awkward tenderness, looked at Jerry. “Does this mess put you in a bad spot, Jerry?”
“Not when the cops get here,” Jerry said. “Inspector Fitzgerald has had dealings with me before. He’ll have a complete confession out of this blond monkey on the floor before you can shake a lamb’s tail. But it’s got to be cops now, Phil—and newspapers, I’m afraid.”
“Right.” Halliday’s big jaw clenched. “Call in the cops, Jerry. My wife and I have nothing to hide from anyone, thank God.”
A timid hand plucked at Tracy’s sleeve. Daisy Furlong’s smile was wan, humorously exasperated. She touched her blood-streaked face.
“Well, there goes a swell dancing job. I wouldn’t mind losing it so much if it weren’t for the thought of Morrie Green. Boy, how that slimy little punk will grin when he fires me!”
“You leave Morrie Green to me,” Jerry said huskily. “You’re going back to that job on a wave of publicity that’ll lift you right out of those dime Woolworth panties that you’ve been buying of late. A year from now you’ll have silk ones with gold lace. I’ll see that you’re tops, with everything you want.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Everything I want.” Her voice sounded suddenly flat. She saw Jerry was puzzled at her lack of enthusiasm. She rumpled his hair with a fierce little pat.
“You’re a swell guy, Jerry. They don’t come any better.”
Tracy couldn’t match up her smile with her eyes. They made him think of kids he had seen staring at cakes in a bakery window. He had a funny feeling there were tears back of Daisy’s pert eyes.
He couldn’t figure it at all.
MANHATTAN WHIRLIGIG
Jerry Tracy decides blackmailers aren’t worth killing.
BUTCH CAME INTO THE penthouse bathroom without knocking. He always did. The fact that Jerry Tracy was taking his pre-evening bath meant nothing to Butch. He told his pint-sized employer with simple dignity:
“Dere’s a screwy guy outside with a full-time grouch. He wouldn’t gimme his name. Says either you come out, or he’ll come in and yank you out. Do you wanna see the guy or shall I brush him off?”
Jerry grinned, rubbed lather out of his ear. A small man, he looked pink and microscopic in the enormous tub.
It was probably the biggest tub on the island of Manhattan.
“What’s he burned up about?”
“He says he wants to talk to you about a duck.”
Jerry Tracy decides blackmailers aren’t worth killing.
Jerry laughed at that, a brief chuckle without warmth or amusement. Stony triumph swam for an instant into his eyes. “I wondered how long it would take the harpoon to start hurting. Is he a tall gent with iron gray hair, ditto on the mustache, a gray goatee tucked under his lower lip?”
“Kayo. You know him?”
“Yeah.” The Daily Planet’s famous scandal columnist heaved upward out of soapy water. He stepped onto a thick white rug and began to towel his lean, hard-packed body with vicious pleasure. “Take yourself a walk, Butch, or eat a sandwich or something. I’ll see the guy alone.”
“Do you think you can handle him?”
“What do you think?”
Butch took a look at the compact nakedness of his employer. His grin widened, became fond, almost parental. “If you’d only cut out cigs, you little punk, you wouldn’t make a bad featherweight.” His big palm made a smacking sound below Tracy’s spine. He lumbered cheerfully away.
Jerry drew on his silk robe, kicked into flat slippers. He had looked forward to this interview with cold pleasure. Like a man who waits for a snake to glide from under a stone so that he can mash it with one clean stroke of a club.
“How do you do, Doctor?”
His visitor bounced upward from a living-room chair. Tense with rage, he came striding toward the columnist, a crumpled copy of the Daily Planet gripped in his clenched hand. His knuckles were white. He shook the rolled tabloid under Tracy’s nose.
“You slimy little rat! You can’t get away with this, do you understand? If you think for one minute that I’m going to sit idly by and allow a cheap newspaper jack to make a laughing stock of my daughter and ruin my professional standing in the community—” His words stuttered passionately. Tracy didn’t move an inch backward. He was utterly calm, his eyes hard with dislike.
“Let’s cut out the yelling and get down to brass tacks. You’re Dr. Andrew Stoner, a gentleman, a scholar, and Park Avenue’s swankiest psychoanalyst. I’m Jerry Tracy, a rat from a Broadway sewer. So what do you want?”
“You know damn well what I want! An apology printed in tomorrow’s column, or I promise you that you’ll wish you’d never—”
“Oh, you mean the duck squib? You mean this?”
Deliberately he read the paragraph aloud, clipping the words out with slow, nasal amusement:
RAISED EYEBROWS DEPARTMENT
Seen yesterday on Park Avenue. Over-rich, over-dressed deb, creating Gloria-sensation by public stroll with pet duck. … Deb is daughter of prominent dream-book doc. Can it be that the duck stroll is a tie-up with papa’s biz slogan? Quack! Quack!
Dr. Stoner’s face was purplish. He said, menacingly, “Are you going to retract?”
“No. I’m going to print one twice as amusing tomorrow—and every day after that—until I’ve run you out of town on a wave of ridicule. If you don’t like it, sue! The Daily Planet keeps a smart lawyer on a yearly retainer just to take care of crooks like you.”
“Crook? What do you mean?”
“Don’t you call a blackmailer a crook, Doctor?”
The red faded from Stoner’s aristocratic face, leaving it white and pinched. Tracy shoved past him, strode toward a desk in the corner, his silken robe fluttering backward from his naked legs. There was a portable typewriter on the desk and the columnist slid a blank sheet around the cylinder. He made the keys rattle like a machine-gun. Then he spun about, his voice as metallic as the machine.
“Here’s tomorrow’s squib. How do you like it?”
It was Jerry who was angry now. Stoner had regained his self-control. The typed sheet was steady in his hand. He read the paragraph with lidded attention:
What wealthy Park Avenue psychoanalyst is the town’s smoothest magician? He has only one trick—but one is all he needs. … He turns a breakdown into a shake-down. Duck that one, Doctor!
Stoner’s teeth showed like nicks in a razor blade. “How much am I supposed to pay you, Mr. Tracy?”
“Not a dime. If you’ve got the sense I think you have, you’ll link arms with that snooty blond daughter of yours and take a well bred sneak for Penn Station. Try Kansas. I haven’t any friends there for you to bleed.”
“Do you mind telling me what particular friend of yours I’ve bled?”
Tracy’s throat raided impatiently. “The name doesn’t matter. If you think I’m bluffing, get this! I know all about the appointment for tonight at nine-thirty. I know the street and the brownstone house where the dough is to be passed. It’s only a grand tonight, because my friend is a minor victim and has to be squeezed with caution to make the gravy last.”
“I think you’re insane.”
“Out! I’ve just taken a bath and I want to stay clean. Is that plain?”
“Let’s both be plain,” Stoner said slowly. His words seemed to crawl up out of his throat from a long way down
.
“I don’t know what your game is, Tracy, but I know danger when I see it. I have no intention of going to the police. I’m perfectly able to protect myself and my daughter Gloria from scandal. I’ll be watching the Daily Planet to see if that second squib appears. If it does, it will be the last paragraph you ever write. I mean that literally and exactly, Mr. Jerry Tracy. Good evening.”
His face veered menacingly over his shoulder from the foyer, then the penthouse door clicked.
Tracy said, “Nuts!” in a hard, angry murmur. He was uncomfortably aware that he had said too much. He should have kept his mouth shut about the brownstone and the appointment for nine-thirty, but the clever Stoner had stung him into foolish verbosity. Well, it couldn’t be helped now. He rubbed damp palms against his silken robe and yelled grimly for Butch.
He gave him the typewritten paragraph that Stoner had tossed contemptuously on the rug. “Take this down to the Daily Planet office and hand it to McCurdy—no one else. Tell him I want it run at the top of the column. Scram.”
Butch hesitated. “You goin’ out tonight, Boss?”
“Yeah.”
“Me, too?”
“No.”
“O.K., pal. You needn’t bite me head off.” He clumped off, worried but obedient. Whenever Tracy was in that curt, monosyllabic mood, Butch knew better than to argue.
Half an hour later Jerry Tracy was in a taxicab, riding swiftly through windy darkness toward the modest east side apartment of Al Redman. The thought of Al and his wife made Jerry’s jaw harden. Al and Florence! Two of the swellest humans a guy could know. Florence was completely unaware of the mess in which her husband was tangled.
At this hour she was probably preparing dinner in the huge kitchen of their old-fashioned, comfortable flat. Al would be in the living-room pretending to read the paper. Tracy had already phoned Florence that he and Al were going to a hockey game that night. It was an easy out. Florence had an amused indifference for any kind of competitive sport.
It was hard to couple Al and Florence with the suave Park Avenue racket of Dr. Andrew Stoner. Geographically and socially they lived on different planets.
Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter Page 60