“Any trouble?”
“No trouble at all,” Harold Shipley intervened huskily. “Just a small bit of horse play.”
He took Huston’s arm and pushed through the crowd. Tracy followed with Barbara. She murmured a vague word of apology for the conduct of her fiancé. But her mind was elsewhere. She and Huston were the damnedest engaged couple Tracy had ever met. If she was in love with the guy, Tracy was a six-foot Hottentott with a ring in his nose!
He trailed along to the Babylonian Museum, wondering more and more about the man with the pale blue eyes in the French Pavilion. As far as Tracy knew Barbara and her fiancé hadn’t noticed the guy, but they acted a lot like Shipley. All three of them were obviously itching with the desire to get rid of Tracy.
Shipley made the first break. After glancing with ill concealed impatience at the faded Babylonian mosaics, Shipley excused himself with a muttered something about getting a drink of orangeade. He was off like a shot before anyone could comment.
A sudden crackle of aerial bombs sounded from the direction of the Lagoon of Nations. It gave Tracy an excuse to drift toward the door of the museum and crane his neck. He got there in time to see Shipley hurrying along the pathway outside—in the opposite direction from a refreshment booth! His goal seemed to be a cross path beyond the raspberry-colored concrete of a domed industrial building,
A man was lounging there. He ducked around the corner as Shipley approached, but not before Tracy got a glimpse of his lean face. It was the guy who had tipped Shipley the nod in the restaurant. The publisher from Midport vanished after the blue-eyed guy.
Tracy crossed the marble-floored museum to where Huston and Barbara were making a pretense of examining the exhibits. Barbara had the air of a girl elaborately trying to remember something.
“Good gracious!” she cried suddenly. “Souvenir cards! I completely forgot about them. Do you mind if I—”
Tracy didn’t mind. Nor did Huston. He said, “Run along, dear,” in a smooth tone. The muscles at the corners of his jaw were taut. He was holding on to a display case with both hands as if he were afraid the case might get away from him.
Tracy helped Huston look at the ancient jewelry display for a moment or two until she was gone.
“Pretty dull here.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Perhaps you’d like to help Barbara pick out her souvenir cards.”
“No.”
“I think I’ll drift over to the door and watch the fireworks.”
“I don’t give a damn what you do,” Huston said in a strained voice, “so long as you leave me alone.”
In the pillared portico, Tracy was able to keep an eye on Barbara Shipley without himself being seen. The girl went straight to a souvenir booth and for a moment Tracy thought he had been overly suspicious. Then he noticed the man who stood in front of a rack of postcards. Barbara stopped alongside him. His head turned and his lips moved in what looked like a quick appeal. His hand caught hers and held it in spite of her effort to draw away.
He had a small dark mustache and white teeth that gleamed when he smiled. He was smiling now. A sort of Rhett Butler guy, very sure of himself. They moved around the corner of the souvenir booth, out of sight of the employee inside. The man leaned quickly and kissed Barbara. She gave in to his embrace. Nothing polite about that love tableau! It was raw, physical, unashamed.
After a while Barbara whispered something to the dark guy. He faded down a side path toward the rear of the museum building, moving with an easy stride of his long legs and a cocky swing of his shoulders. Barbara picked up a half dozen souvenir cards, the first she could grab.
She found Tracy standing alone in front of one of the Babylonian showcases. Her eyes veered in search of her fiancé. Tracy saw quick suspicion pinch them when she saw no sign of Huston.
“Where’s George? Did you see where he went?”
“I don’t know,” Tracy said truthfully, “I got interested in something else. When I looked around he was gone.”
A moment later Harold Shipley came in. He was breathing heavily. There was dull anger in his eyes. He, too, wanted to know what had become of Huston. He acted as though Tracy was responsible for the fiancé’s sudden sneak.
“How did you like your orangeade?” Tracy asked him.
“Eh? Oh, excellent! Barbara, didn’t George tell you where he was going? Weren’t you with him?”
She flushed and showed her father the postcards she had bought. Shipley looked as if he were on the verge of pumping questions at her, but he managed to check himself. He turned and vented his anger on Tracy.
“Don’t stand there like a fool! You must have seen where Huston went. Go find him! It’s time to leave.”
The distant popping of fireworks had ceased. An attendant behind a desk in the museum rotunda glanced at the clock and pressed a button. Chimes began to echo through all the corridors. Over at The Loop the closing hour was considerably later. But the final crash of aerial bombs from the Lagoon of Nations meant that the free educational exhibits at the north end of the Fair were ended for the night.
The few stolid sightseers in the Babylonian Building began to trickle toward the front portal.
“This is ridiculous,” Barbara Shipley told Tracy. “Surely you must know where George went. We left him in your charge. Even an office boy would be competent to—”
“Yeah,” Tracy said. “An office boy! That’s me.”
He was getting sicker and sicker of these screwy goings-on. His voice rasped.
“Stay here, and don’t do any more wandering till I come back. In the meantime, talk about postcards and orangeades!”
A quick glance passed between father and daughter. Tracy turned on his heel and left them.
Having seen no sign of Huston in the rear corridors, Tracy descended a marble staircase where a sign indicated the presence of a washroom. The room was empty. It added fuel to Tracy’s mounting anger. The boy friend was like the father and daughter—up to something damned queer. But where in heck could Huston have sneaked?
Tracy descended another flight of marble steps. He opened a rear door whose presence he had not hitherto been aware of.
He gasped with instinctive pleasure as he stepped into the most beautiful formal garden he had ever seen. Dim blue lamps strung sparsely along the tops of hanging vines gave a shadowy effect of moonlight on snow. Snow-like, too, was the whiteness of cupped flowers in a formal garden that surrounded the pool.
The pool was rectangular and quite long. A flagged walk was paved with irregular chunks of flat stone, and between the edges of the stones was a carpet of cool green moss. Spaced at regular intervals were the nude figures of six stone goddesses. In the semi-darkness of the walled garden these kneeling statues seemed poised and alive. It took Tracy a dazed instant to realize that the peaked breasts and slenderly arched torsos were not creamy flesh but the cold perfection of marble.
He had never until tonight entered the portals of the Babylonian Museum. To Jerry Tracy the hanging gardens of Babylon were something you read about in dusty textbooks on a rainy day. He decided with a gulp that history had its points.
He stepped over a clipped hedge to have a closer look at the pool. The water looked cool enough to drink—and that’s what the man behind the hedge was doing.
He was down on his knees, his face bent over the water. Both hands rested on the stone lip of the pool. He paid no attention to Tracy, not even when the columnist spoke. Tracy took a quick step forward.
The back of the man’s bent head was a sticky blur of blood. The weapon that had smashed his skull lay alongside his elbow. It was one of the flat paving stones that had been ripped from its soft bed of moss. The dead man hadn’t fallen into the pool because the raised edge supported the weight of his inclined body.
His ear and the side of his face looked as if it was just painted. Red drops dripped from his chin and dissolved into a smoky swirl in the water.
Tracy didn’t touch him.
He took one look at the dead face. It was George Huston.
Jerry Tracy backed up. Then he changed his mind. His glance, lifting beyond the corpse of Huston, flicked suddenly along the dim walk that bordered the length of the pool. He had an instinctive feeling of movement in one of those nude marble statues. The movement was not in the statue itself, but directly behind it.
Jerry sprang forward. A figure jerked into view with a barely audible gasp. The figure was white from head to foot. But not with the smooth nudity of marble. Tracy caught a blurred glimpse of a white rubber bathing cap, a woman’s white silk swim suit, bathing shoes.
A cape fluttered upward like a milky sail in the darkness. It covered the head and body of the fleeing girl. She ran and Tracy sprinted after her. Not a sound came from either of them. It was like a queer nightmare pursuit in a magic garden.
On the fluttering cape ahead of him Tracy saw the outline of black letters across the fleeing girl’s shoulders. The letters spelled the word: Aquacade.
For an instant Tracy thought the girl was going to dive into the pool and swim across to where a door in the vine-covered wall of the garden led to the fairgrounds. But the fugitive veered from the water at the last moment. She raced down the long side of the pool with Tracy pounding after her. Rounding it, she made for the wall gate, which Tracy could see was slightly ajar.
The girl vaulted a thick hedge and ducked out of sight. Tracy made the leap a moment later—too fast a leap, as he realized instantly. A foot from the blackness behind the hedge thrust itself between his legs. He sprawled. Before he could turn and grapple with the cloaked girl behind him, he felt the impact of a fist against his jaw.
It wasn’t any female fist. It jolted him into a dazed huddle. He heard dimly the rasp of a masculine oath, then his wide-open eyes saw only blackness. The man who had waited behind the hedge to help the bathing girl escape yanked Tracy’s soft hat downward over his ears and eyes, blinding him.
There was a quick echo of fleeing feet.
Tracy fought weakly to yank the jammed hat off his head. The more he jerked, the more his stumbling feet tangled. His muffled yells sounded like the bleat of a man in a barrel.
Then he heard another cry and the race of returning feet. Tracy managed to pull the jammed hat off his head. He backed up as a bulky man dove at him. He sent a wild punch bouncing off his foe’s chest, then tried to grapple. He was afraid of a gun or the ripping slash of a knife.
He got neither. A powerful hand twisted in his collar and lifted him clear off his feet. Dangling helplessly a half foot above the ground, Tracy caught a blurred glimpse of a rock-like face and a broad-brimmed Stetson.
The sight brought Tracy to his senses. He didn’t need to look at the dark-blue tunic or the swanky puttees to realize that the big guy who was shaking him like a monkey on a stick was a World’s Fair cop.
He gulped helplessly. He was slowly choking to death in that inexorable grip and the cop noticed it. He lowered the gasping little columnist to the ground.
“What the hell’s going on here? Who yelled?”
Tracy said thickly, “A guy’s just been killed. Somebody—”
The cop’s head veered suspiciously. He said, “Uh-huh!” as he saw the dead man at the other end of the pool. He dragged Tracy along the flagged walk like a sack of meal.
“What did you kill him for?”
“I didn’t.”
“Who did?”
“I don’t know. A guy was hidden behind a hedge. He socked me and yanked my hat over my head. I didn’t get a look at him.”
“Nuts!” What do you think I am, a dope?”
“You sound like one,” Tracy snapped.
He fished out his press card and showed it to the rookie cop. He knew all these cops at the Fair were rookies, lads who had passed the police examination and were waiting for regular city appointments. The biggest and handsomest had been assigned to Fair patrols. This guy had been petted by the smiles of lady visitors into a tremendous sense of his own importance.
“So you’re Jerry Tracy, eh?” the cop said. “So what? You’re a liar by my time! Nobody ran out that wall gate or I’d have seen him when I came up the alley.”
“Did you come up both ends of the alley?” Tracy snapped.
The cop’s ears turned pink. He lost his temper and caught Tracy’s arm in a hammerlock. But before he could twist it, there was a startled cry from the rear door of the museum building, Harold Shipley was standing there with his daughter.
He saw Tracy in the grip of the cop, and just beyond them the body of the dead man. He moved in front of Barbara and tried to block off her view. But she had seen George Huston. She gave a shrill scream and fainted.
Shipley paid no attention to her. He kept staring at Jerry Tracy and there was a queer edge to his voice.
“My Gawd, Mr. Tracy! Surely you didn’t—you couldn’t—”
“Couldn’t what?” Tracy demanded sharply.
“Do you people know each other?” the cop asked.
“Of course. My name is Harold Shipley. I’m the owner and publisher of the Midport Chronicle. We came East yesterday to see the Fair. The dead man is—was—my daughter’s fiancé. Mr. Tracy acted as guide for us. He and Mr. Huston got into an argument over something Mr. Tracy said about a girl show and—”
Tracy winced at the utter gall Shipley had! He was making it sound as if Tracy and Huston had quarreled over something nasty Tracy had said.
A new voice spoke up from the dimly lit garden. It was another cop whom Tracy remembered instantly.
“Shipley is right. I saw the little guy and Huston try to trade punches only a little while ago over in the amusement area. I broke it up and moved them on. Hold everyone here while I hop to a phone.”
His tall, booted figure raced into the building.
“Why did you kill Huston?” the rookie cop kept asking.
He shook Tracy until his teeth rattled. Tracy clamped his lips and watched Shipley. There was a rigid expression on the publisher’s face as though he were bracing himself against anything Tracy might say. Barbara Shipley had come out of her faint and was on her feet again, leaning on her father’s arm. She, too, was tense.
Tracy knew that if he mentioned the handsome Rhett Butler guy whom Barbara had met secretly at the souvenir stand, the girl would deny it and call him both a murderer and a liar. So would Shipley if Tracy alluded to the guy with the ice-blue eyes who had tipped Shipley the nod in the French Pavilion.
“So you didn’t really see the killer, eh?” the cop said grimly.
He didn’t know a thing about the fleeing girl in the bathing suit and cape, and Tracy had no intention now of telling him. When the garden flooded with more cops Tracy refused to add a word to his skimpy story.
“I’ll wait for the Homicide squad,” he said flatly. “It won’t do you a bit of good to bark. And if anyone lays another finger on me I’ll crucify the whole lot of you in the Daily Planet.”
He hated the thought of keeping quiet about the screwy behavior of Shipley and his daughter just prior to the murder. But he was loyal enough to the Planet’s owner to want to keep quiet until he got the low-down on this fidgety newspaper publisher from the Middle-West. Besides, Tracy’s truthful story of what actually had happened would sound too fantastic for belief. Even Inspector Fitzgerald wouldn’t swallow that stuff about a bathing girl who had tried to double for a nude statue.
Tracy felt better when Fitzgerald arrived twenty minutes later. He and the Inspector were old friends. Fitz snorted at the idea of Jerry Tracy committing a murder because of a trivial quarrel. Under Fitz’s cross-examination Harold Shipley toned down the quarrel story considerably. But he lied flatly to one of Fitz’s routine questions—and so did Barbara.
They swore that they had been continuously with Tracy up to the moment he had left them to find out what had become of Huston.
By keeping quiet Tracy had them both over a barrel. They could kid Fitz but not him. But Tracy flushed as he met Fitz�
�s honest gaze. He, too, was holding out. He wanted time for a quick trip to the Aquacade before he spilled anything about the figure in the white swim suit. He had a protégé of his spotted in the water show. She ought to be able to tell him if any of the swimmers had ducked away from the performance that had been scheduled at the time of George Huston’s murder.
But it was tough not to be able to play fair with Fitz.
While the Homicide men bustled around the quiet confines of the garden with camera and fingerprint apparatus, Tracy retired out of earshot with Shipley and his daughter.
“You first!” he told the publisher softly. “Who was the man you met, and why?”
Shipley tried to squirm out of it. Tracy turned to Barbara. He described the blue-eyed man, and added curtly: “Talk about your father’s little pal or I’ll talk about you.”
She caved. The man’s name was Eric Lundy, she admitted slowly. He was a Midport politician. He and her father didn’t get along very well. Her frightened whisper seemed to infuriate Shipley.
“Just what I thought,” he muttered. “You’d say anything to hide the fact that you had a sneaking date with Allen Webb.”
“Who’s Allen Webb?” Tracy cut in.
“A rat,” Shipley rejoined in a savage undertone. “A man who hates my guts. He’s tried to ruin me. He’s even made threats to kill Huston, if that was the only way he could marry Barbara—”
“That’s not true,” Barbara said huskily.
“I can prove it is. That’s why Eric Lundy asked me to meet him tonight. He told me that Webb was here at the Fair. He warned me that you were meeting Webb on the sly. You’re crazy in love with Webb. Don’t deny it!”
“What if I am? The engagement to Huston was your idea, I never wanted to marry him.”
A cop was glancing curiously toward the marble bench.
“Take it easy,” Tracy said. “Where can I find this fellow Lundy if I promise you to keep my mouth shut for the present?”
“He said he’d meet me at the Three Ring Restaurant over in the amusement area,” Shipley said slowly.
Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter Page 86
