Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter

by Tinsley, Theodore A.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Why didn’t you say so before?”

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

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

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

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

  “You don’t, and you won’t!”

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

  “Well?”

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

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

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

  “Sorry. I’m not the type.”

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

  “If you dare to soil my name—”

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

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

  “What about it?”

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

  “That’s a lie,” Alice said.

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

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

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

  “What?” Tracy gasped.

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

  She drew a deep sobbing breath.

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

  “Then who killed him?” Tracy rasped.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Where’s this Lord live?” Fitz asked.

  Tracy told him. The car began to hum downtown.

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

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

  “Suppose he refuses?”

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

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

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

  Butch was nowhere in sight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “About what?”

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

  “Hilliard sent you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is anybody with you?”

  “No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Guilty as hell,” Fitz said quietly.

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

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

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

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

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

  He grinned bleakly at Jerry’s expression.

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

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

  “Index of prints positively identify Hilliard’s murderer as fugitive British criminal. Ronald Jordan, alias Harry Clifton, alias Richard Duke. Specialty rich women. Escaped custody after killing two constables. Believed to have reached America under forged passports. Photos follow. Extradition urgently desired.

  Hanley.”

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

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

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

  “Suicide, eh?”

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

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

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

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

  He stopped suddenly, his face queerly puckered.

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

  “What’s the matter?” Fitzgerald asked.

  “Our guy didn’t do it.”

  “Huh?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Take it easy, Jerry,” Fitz said.

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

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

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

  Nobody paid any attention to him. “Lord said he was being framed,” Tracy faltered. “I heard him yell that much through the door before he lost his head and—”

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