“You don’t like Betty very much, do you?” Tracy said, his columnist’s mind instinctively probing this new angle.
“I admire her.” Alice said.
Tracy seemed to remember vaguely a young man named Kenneth Dunlap. Betty Hilliard had seen a lot of him before her marriage to the tobacco king. Tracy could tell nothing from Alice’s blue eyes as she opened her evening bag. She didn’t find what she was searching for.
“This is ridiculous. I seem to have lost my key to the house. I distinctly remember putting it in the bag with my own apartment key.”
“Did you have dinner tonight with Bert Lord?”
Alice didn’t answer. But one look at her face told Tracy his suspicious guess had scored a bull’s-eye.
“Wait here,” he said curtly. “Maybe I can find an unlatched window.”
He darted around the side of the house, flitting swiftly through the darkness. His face was wrinkled with sudden apprehension. Why should Bert Lord want to steal Alice’s key? Was it because Alice had warned him what Tracy intended to do on the radio tonight? Lord might take any steps to keep Hilliard from hearing that broadcast.
There was sweat on Tracy’s forehead as he lifted an unfastened window on the ground floor.
The main hallway was quiet under the glow of shaded lamps. Tracy unlocked the front door and admitted Alice. There was a dim light burning in the reception room to the left of the hallway. The room was empty. Tracy crossed to an inner door and knocked. When there was no answer, he opened the door.
Tracy took one look and stiffened. The rustle of Alice’s evening gown seemed enormously loud in the room’s stillness. She swayed and Tracy caught her as she fainted, lowered her down gently.
He lowered her gently to the floor and walked toward the dead man. Bruce Hilliard was lying on the study rug where he had fallen from a wide-armed chair. He had been shot twice; through the head and through the chest.
Evidently death had come to him without warning. His blood-smeared face was placid. He was lying close to a console radio cabinet which stood alongside his desk.
Tracy had seen enough gunshot wounds in his career to recognize lethal bullet holes when he saw them. The slug through Hilliard’s skull had pierced his brain; the hole in his chest was directly over his heart. The body was faintly warm to Tracy’s touch.
No doctor on earth, Tracy thought grimly, could ever decide which of those two shots had actually killed Hilliard. It puzzled him why the murderer should have risked firing twice. The shots must have raised thunderous echoes in the house. Did the killer know the house was empty? Where was Hilliard’s pretty young wife—and his secretary, and his butler?
All this and more zipped through Tracy’s mind in the few seconds he stared at the corpse. There was no gun near the body and he made no effort to search for it. He wrapped a handkerchief around his hand and picked up the phone. He called police headquarters and recognized the voice at the switchboard.
“Jerry Tracy speaking! Is Inspector Fitzgerald around?”
Inspector Fitzgerald was one of Tracy’s oldest friends. Out of their mutual trust had come Tracy’s unofficial tie-up with the police department. Fitz was an honest and fearless cop. Tracy had his finger on many pulses. The combination had solved many a baffling case in the past.
Luckily Fitz was still at headquarters, Tracy told him the news and Fitz said quietly, “O.K. Stay where you are. I’ll be up there in a hurry.”
Fitzgerald hung up at the other end, but Jerry continued to talk. In picking up the phone he had turned about, so that his back was toward the unconscious figure of Alice Hilliard. He caught a sudden glimpse of her pale face in the square, gilt-framed mirror on the wall behind Hilliard’s desk.
It was the sight of Alice’s eyelids that made Jerry continue to talk calmly into a dead wire. He crowded close to the desk, so that his left hand that depressed the phone’s cross-bar was invisible to the girl lying on the floor in front of the sofa.
Alice was faking that swoon of hers! Her eyelids were quivering. She was so intent on watching the back of Tracy’s head that she failed to notice the mirror.
She was lying closer to the sofa’s edge than she had been when Tracy had left her. One of her arms was under the sofa, moving slowly. She became rigid as Tracy cradled the phone and walked casually toward her.
He was still holding his handkerchief. He stood staring down at her limp body, aware of a quick feeling of pity. A loyal girl in love with a rogue could learn trickery swiftly!
She screamed as Tracy clutched suddenly at her gloved hand and jerked it into view. She was still holding the gun she had tried to push out of sight.
There was a quick, sharp struggle, then Tracy’s handkerchief-swathed hand closed on the barrel and he wrenched the revolver from Alice’s grasp.
The gun was an English model, A Webley. Two of the chambers had been exploded. There was a strong acid reek of burned powder at the muzzle.
Tracy said gently to the sobbing girl: “Do you love Bert Lord that much?”
“He didn’t do it! He couldn’t have!” Her face lifted and it was white with horror. She stared at Tracy numbly.
“Better sit up and take it easy,” Tracy said tonelessly. “We’ll just forget about this little episode. Inspector Fitzgerald will be here in a few minutes. I’ll tell him I found the gun.”
She sank down on the sofa. Tracy stared grimly at the gun he had laid on Hilliard’s desk.
He was turning away to examine the rest of the study when he heard a sudden faint squeak. Someone was lifting a window in the adjoining reception room!
Before Tracy could move there was a quick thud of feet beyond the curtained doorway. A man’s hand thrust fiercely past the edge of the curtain and jabbed at the light switch. The study was plunged into darkness.
The murder gun was the first thing Tracy thought of. He snatched it up by the barrel, throwing out a blindly defensive arm as the unseen figure of his assailant raced through the blackness toward Hilliard’s desk.
A fist crashed against Tracy’s arm, numbing it from shoulder to elbow. The blow toppled him against a high-backed chair. He managed to reel aside and to overturn the chair between himself and his foe. It gave him only a second’s respite, but that was all the time he needed. He remembered a high-topped cabinet in a corner of the room. He threw the Webley revolver upward, hoping it would land out of sight.
The clatter of the overturned chair drowned out the thud of the gun is it landed among piled books and papers on the top of the cabinet. Somewhere in the dark Alice Hilliard was screaming with terror.
Tracy dived to the floor, clutching at the legs of his foe. A knee banged against his forehead, filling his brain with dancing stars. Then he was knocked flat. Fingers clutched swiftly at him in a search for the murder gun. His pockets were probed, his coat was ripped open.
He heard a fiercely muttered oath in a voice he thought he recognized as Bert Lord’s.
Then the front doorbell began to ring. The sound of it revived Tracy’s waning strength. Clawing wildly, he managed to trip his antagonist. The two rolled over and over on the floor.
Dimly, Tracy realized that Inspector Fitzgerald was waiting patiently outside the street entry, unaware that a trapped murderer was fighting desperately to get away. He tried to yell at the top of his lungs, but a fist smashed at his stomach and drove the wind out of him.
His feeble hold on his enemy was broken. He heard a rush of feet toward the outer room. The overturned chair helped him to pull himself drunkenly to his feet. He staggered headlong through the darkness toward the doorway. The velvet curtain steadied him while his blurred eyes swung toward the open window.
He could see vaguely a tall, racing figure outside the house, vanishing swiftly toward the rear of the grounds. Tracy was trying to swing a leg over the windowsill, when a man’s voice yelled harshly behind him. He was dragged violently backward.
Someone began savagely pummeling him. Blood trickled from Tracy’s nose. A
blow on the chin almost snapped his head off. His knees bent and he would have pitched to the floor except for the quick clutch of the fool who seemed to have unwittingly helped Lord to make a clean getaway.
“The window!” Jerry gasped through waves of pain. “Get him—window!”
Fitzgerald didn’t seem to understand. He dragged Tracy toward the wall where the light switch was located. There was a click and a sudden flare of brilliance.
Tracy said thickly: “Fitz, you damned fool, you’ve—”
Then his voice trailed into silence. It wasn’t Fitz at all! He was a good-looking young man with a straight, slim back and a crown of dark, glossy hair.
The young man cried fiercely: “You dirty little sneak-thief! How did you get in here—and what were you up to?”
A moment later both men recognized each other. The excited young man was Walter Furman, Hilliard’s missing secretary.
“Right now I’m not up to—much of—anything,” Tracy gasped, and proved it by slumping into unconsciousness.
When Jerry recovered his senses the first thing he heard was the angry snarl of Inspector Fitzgerald. “I don’t care what you thought! What the hell did you have to beat him up like that for?”
“I didn’t. The fellow who went out the window did most of it. I thought Tracy was a burglar. I didn’t realize what had happened until I turned on the lights.”
Tracy’s eyes opened. He was on the same sofa where, centuries earlier, he had told Alice Hilliard to lie quietly. She was slumped nearby in a chair, her dulled eyes staring tragically at the floor.
The room was full of people. There were a couple of uniformed cops. A fingerprint expert and a police photographer were standing stolidly in a corner, watching a bald-headed man who was crouched on his knees beside Bruce Hilliard’s corpse. That was Grady, the medical examiner.
Hilliard’s secretary was still trying to explain to Fitzgerald what had happened.
“As I told you, no one answered the bell and I let myself in with my key. Naturally I was suspicious of trouble. When I found the lights turned out, and caught a man racing toward an opened window, I didn’t pull punches.”
The medical examiner got to his feet, “Impossible to tell which shot killed him, though I suspect he took the one through the skull first. When you’re mad enough to kill a guy twice, you don’t aim at the heart. That was probably done to make sure. Hard to set the time. Could have been a half hour, could have been an hour and a half.”
“He was alive at 8:32,” Tracy said slowly. “That’s when he phoned me at the broadcasting studio. I’d just finished my program.”
“That might fit,” Grady said. “Body’s still fairly warm. No time for rigor mortis. He probably took it while you were on the way over here. The killer was either mad with rage or a blasted psychopath. I may have more dope after the autopsy. Good night, Fitz.”
He went out with a brisk tread.
“I heard your broadcast tonight, Jerry,” Fitz said abruptly. “Did that crack you made about Hilliard’s adopted daughter have anything to do with this kill?”
Tracy glanced at Alice. Her pale face seemed drained of everything but an overpowering exhaustion.
“Tell him, Jerry.”
Tracy shrugged. He told of the scandal tip he had received over the phone from some unknown woman. He told of his check-up on it, and recounted the attempt on his life on the way to the broadcast. He showed Fitz the flattened slug and the white carnation which the escaping gunman had dropped.
“I’m certain it was Bert Lord. Having failed to wipe me out before I could ruin him on the radio, he rushed over here, let himself in with a key he had stolen from Alice’s bag, and bumped Hilliard. He must have figured some stunt to get every one else out of the house. … By the way, where were you, Furman?”
Fitzgerald answered for the secretary.
“His alibi is O.K. Jerry. Hilliard sent him over to the Delton Hotel to see Nick White about a show Hilliard was thinking of backing. I checked on that and Nick verified Furman’s story. He was in Nick’s suite from eight o’clock until a quarter of nine. We know Hilliard was alive until 8:32 at least.”
Tracy nodded. Nick White’s word could be trusted. He was a fine old Irishman, a veteran producer and a friend of both Tracy and Fitzgerald.
Tracy got shakily to his feet and went over to the tall cabinet in the corner. Mounting a chair, he fished carefully behind the books and papers atop the cabinet with a handkerchief-wrapped hand.
Fitz gave a quick yelp of excitement as he saw the gun.
“I managed to toss it up there just before Lord tackled me,” Tracy said. “That’s what he came back for.”
Fitz took the gun with almost cringing care.
“English make, eh? A Webley. Two chambers fired. All right, Hanley, give it the works.”
Hanley was the fingerprint man. He took the weapon over to Hilliard’s desk.
While he was busy, Sergeant Killan came in. Killan was Fitz’s right-hand man. He had a hoarse, friendly voice, a cobblestone head and a mouth like a mailbox slit.
“What did you find out upstairs?” Fitzgerald snapped.
“Not a thing,” Killan said cheerfully. “Hilliard’s wife flew the coop all right. So did the butler. Nothing upstairs to explain why.”
Tracy gave Walter Furman a slow stare. “Were they both in the house when Hilliard sent you over to see Nick White?”
“Yes. Both of them came into the study to talk to Hilliard. Marconi—that’s the butler—had some tradesmen’s bills that had to be okayed. Mrs. Hilliard usually listened with her husband to the Tracy broadcast. But tonight she said she had a sick headache. She went up to her room, to lie down just before I left the house.”
Over at the dead man’s desk the fingerprint man suddenly ceased his monotonous whistling of a popular tune.
“Good news, Fitz,” he said.
“What you got?”
“Two middle fingers of the right hand. Thumb blurred, but who cares? Maybe—”
He stopped talking as a woman’s scream echoed with startling abruptness from the front hallway of the house.
Sergeant Killan, who was nearest to the door, bounced forward with a swiftly drawn gun in his beefy hand. He peered into the hall, gaped a moment, then holstered his weapon.
“All right, Halligan. Bring her in here.”
Halligan was the cop who had been left on duty inside the front entry. He clumped stolidly into the room, his hand tightly gripping the arm of a dark-haired and exceedingly pretty woman.
“I caught her sneaking in the front door,” Halligan said. “She had a key. She closed the door quietly and started to tiptoe down the hall toward the stairs. When I grabbed her she started to fight, till she saw my uniform, then she cooled down.”
Tracy said dryly: “Better let go of her, officer. This is Mrs. Hilliard.”
Betty Hilliard stood alone, very stiff and straight, seemingly aware of nothing except the murdered body of her husband. Her dark hair and eyes emphasized the pallor of her skin. She was like marble until she turned and saw Alice staring steadily at her. Then her face flooded with crimson.
“How did this happen, Alice?” she asked with an obvious effort at control.
“I wouldn’t know, Betty.”
“You could guess though, perhaps?”
There was pent-up hatred between these two women. Alice’s jaw tightened at the sneer in Betty’s voice. She turned swiftly toward Inspector Fitzgerald.
“You might as well know, Inspector, that it wasn’t Bert Lord who tried to steal that gun. It was not his voice.”
Fitzgerald didn’t answer that. He walked across to Hilliard’s desk and examined the two fingerprints that the headquarters expert had brought out on the butt of the Webley revolver.
“I’d like to get a quick check on these prints from London. Can you make a classification index for me right away?”
“Yeah.” He took out of his bag a classification sheet printed in squared col
umns. Slowly he began to record with digits and letters the indices of the specimen print.
“How long were you away from home, Mrs. Hilliard?” Fitz asked the dead man’s wife.
“Quite a while. I left shortly after Mr. Furman departed.”
“Where did you go?”
Betty Hilliard took a long time replying. “I left to attend to some personal business which I have no intention of discussing with you or anyone else.”
“Was your husband alive when you left?”
“Yes. He was in this room waiting to hear the Tracy program. I left with his permission.”
Alice Hilliard’s faint laughter had a sting in it, but the other woman ignored the implication.
“O.K. on that index synopsis,” the fingerprint man said.
Fitzgerald went to the phone and called the exchange manager. He identified himself and explained what he wanted. It didn’t take long to put through the trans-Atlantic call. Fitzgerald talked briefly to Scotland Yard and then handed the, phone to the fingerprint man. It was not a very good connection. Hanley had to talk loudly and repeat his jargon of figures and letters over and over.
Fitz and Killan, who knew what it was all about, listened eagerly. But Tracy only pretended interest. His ear was cocked in an entirely different direction. Alice had drifted closer to Betty Hilliard. Her lips moved in a swift undertone.
“You’re not kidding me. Who was the boy friend—Ken Dunlap?”
“It certainly wasn’t Bert Lord! If you try to drag me into a scandal—”
“All I’m after is the truth. If those gun-prints belong to Bert, I want him to pay the penalty. But if he’s innocent, I’ll know who’s guilty. And if you think I won’t produce those letters of yours—”
Alice saw Tracy and her murmur stopped.
The fingerprint man was still yowling into the telephone. “Yeah. All right. ’By,” He pronged the receiver with an oath of relief.
“If they’ve got a match in the London files, there ought to be an answer in about an hour. I told him I’d take it at the bureau in Headquarters. Drop in when you’re finished. I’ll check our own files while I’m waiting.”
Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter Page 82
