by Lester Dent
Something over a dozen feet to the right climbed the spidery metalwork of a fire escape.
Nace went down the rope hand over hand. Although the rope reached to the roof of the building far below, Nace did not descend the whole distance. He stopped perhaps thirty feet down and began to swing himself. The hard brick bruised his shoulders, knees, elbows, and scuffed his fists. But he was soon able to grasp the fire escape and swing onto the steps.
He bounded upward, trying to blend speed and silence. He reached the top and jumped over a high coping onto a tarred roof.
From the window below, Sergeant Gooch’s voice roared, “He slid down the rope to that roof below!”
That was exactly what Nace had hoped Gooch would think.
NACE ran to a roof hatch and descended to the top elevator landing. Luck was with him, for he found a cage waiting. He rode it down to the lobby level and swung out through the passage to the cement-floored courtyard.
He opened the hearse doors. Jeck and Tammany still slumbered inside. Nace picked up the black derby Jeck had worn and dug the newspapers out of the sweatband. He unfolded them, found they were the first two sheets from a small weekly.
It was the Lake City Chronicle, dated three weeks back. It proved nothing except that Jeck habitually wore this somber garb.
Nace closed the hearse doors, locked them, then traveled at a long-legged walk out of the courtyard.
He went to the parking lot where his weather-beaten roadster stood. Unlocking the rumble seat, he took out a rather bulky canvas bag that was closed with a zipper fastener. He put it in the front seat, then got in and nudged the starter with his toe.
He wheeled the roadster out of the lot, thence westward toward the George Washington Bridge. This was the most direct route to Hudsonville, the Jersey town where Jeck claimed he had seized the hearse.
He turned down the windshield and the breeze soon cooled the adder off his forehead. He discovered he had bitten his pipe stem sometime during the excitement, cracking it badly.
He replaced it from a case of spare stems that he drew from the zipper bag. The bag held a conglomeration of articles, ranging from intricate electrical mechanisms to an efficient assortment of skeleton keys.
This zipper bag was Nace’s sack of magic. It held about everything he needed in his perilous profession. It was largely judicious use of the contrivances contained in the bag which had lifted Nace to a position of prominence.
A newspaperman had once dubbed Nace the “Blond Adder.” The name had been unusual enough to stick. Nace knew the value of publicity in drumming up business, so he made it a point to always give the newspaper reporters a good story. Hence he was frequently on the front pages.
That Nace had spent several months in England as a paid consultant to Scotland Yard showed he was good in his line.
THE George Washington Bridge rolled a greasy cement ribbon under the roadster. Nace took the main pike toward Hudsonville.
The little Jersey town was a long shot on Nace’s part, but he had to take hold of the mystery somewhere. Having not the slightest idea what it was all about, he had selected Hudsonville.
Houses alternately thinned out and became plentiful as he passed through villages. The roadster hit rough pavement and he held the canvas bag on his knees so it would not jar about.
A roadside sign told him he had three more miles to go.
A hulk of a filling station, a brood of tourist cabins behind it, appeared on the left.
The roadster shot past. Then it squatted a little and rubber wailed as Nace applied the brakes. He backed down the pike and into the filling station.
He had noticed that two of the pump measuring jars were filled with amber gasoline. Gas of that color had been in the hearse tank.
No one came from the station. Nace honked his horn. The blare went unanswered. Nace got out and went into the station, but found no one. He called loudly. Somewhere in the distance, a rooster crowed; there was no other sound.
He swung back toward his roadster, holding a match over his pipe bowl and pulling in smoke. Instead of getting into the car, he spun on his heel and came back.
He started a rapid search of the cabins. They numbered ten. The first seven were empty. This was slack season for the tourist trade.
Red rivulets had crawled from under the door of the eighth cabin and were thickening and drying in the morning sun. Nace took his pipe out of his teeth. He had an expensive habit of biting the stems off when sudden developments came. He nudged the door inward with a foot.
A stocky, curly haired man lay on the floor. He wore the stained white coveralls of a filling-station attendant. Four bullets had tunneled through his chest.
A form swathed in a sheet was on the bed. Nace did not investigate this ominous figure immediately, but studied the man who had been shot.
A cheap automatic was half concealed by the body. Nace turned the corpse over, and saw a shiny deputy sheriff badge pinned to the grimy coveralls. The cheap automatic had discharged one bullet into the wall, and had jammed in extracting the empty shell.
The man, obviously a combination of filling station attendant and deputy sheriff, had come investigating something suspicious, and a jammed gun had been the death of him.
Nace flung out a long arm and peeled the sheet off the bed. This disclosed the figure of a corpse in underwear.
Chapter III
Sergeant Gooch’s Tip
A GHASTLY, pop-eyed look about the corpse instantly riveted Nace’s attention. The eyes were half out of their sockets; the tongue stuck out, stiff and pale, farther than Nace had ever seen a tongue protrude. The whole cadaver had a strangely bloated aspect.
Nace grimaced, eased off his steel-lined wig and ran long, bony fingers through his natural hair. He got his zipper bag from the car, and took out a magnifying glass, together with various test tubes and chemicals.
The stuff he was using actually comprised a compact analysis kit. Unlike most private detectives, Nace had not served an apprenticeship with the police. He had spent those years at famous universities, studying medicine, chemistry, electricity and similar subjects. Few knew it, but he was a licensed doctor; he had been admitted to the bar as a practicing lawyer, and he had written a textbook on electrochemistry.
Twenty minutes later, he left the vicinity of the filling station and its flock of tourist cabins. The curly haired deputy sheriff-station attendant had been dead only a few hours.
The death hour for the pop-eyed corpse had been at least two days ago. The cause of the fellow’s death was one of the blackest mysteries Nace had ever encountered. To all appearances, the man had literally swelled to the bursting point from some strange inner pressure. The direct cause of death was suffocation, after ruptured cell walls had filled his lungs with blood.
The hearse driver, it was Nace’s theory, had driven into the tourist camp and rented a cabin in which to leave the body. Nace thought of Jeck. The man might have been the attendant’s murderer. Jeck’s conversation with Tammany had shown that he had overhauled the hearse with the expectation of finding something of value in it. He might have been searching when the deputy sheriff intervened.
Nace nursed the roadster around a curve at fifty-five. “Jeck and Tammany are on the prowl for something they want bad,” he summarized. Then he thought of the red-headed girl and the purple-nosed man. “Those two are not exactly soft, either.”
Back in town, Nace did not return his roadster to the parking lot. Sergeant Gooch and Honest John MacGill knew his custom of keeping it there. He slid the machine into the curb some two blocks distant.
Carrying his bag, he strode to the corner. He did not round into the street on which his office faced. Instead, he leaned against the corner just out of sight. He produced a small pocket mirror and ostensibly combed his blond mop. The mirror gave him a view of the street.
A squad car full of plainclothes men was at rest in front of Nace’s office.
Nace went around and peeked into the areaway
where the hearse stood.
Honest John MacGill was ensconced comfortably on the front seat of the hearse.
From his zipper bag, Nace drew an iron egg of a smoke bomb. He dropped it, spewing a black worm, on the cement. He let the worm grow into a huge, writhing monster that gorged the crack of an entryway.
“Help! Fire, fire, help!” Nace piped in a shrilly altered voice. He waited, concealed in the dark vapor cloud.
Into the smoke lumbered Honest John MacGill. Puffing, sneezing, he yelled, “What the hell kind of a fire is this? Where’s it at?”
Leaving Honest John lost in the smoke, Nace ran past the hearse and into the basement of the office building. A freight elevator carried him to his office level. There was no attendant in the freight elevator. He ran it himself.
It deposited him around an angle in the corridor. The spot could not be seen from his office door.
Nace produced a key and let himself through a door that bore no lettering. A leather chair built for comfort, a smoking stand on which stood a rack bearing half a dozen pipes exactly alike, a powerful reading lamp and numerous cases filled with books and magazines comprised the fittings. This was Nace’s study. Not even the building attendants knew it was here. He even cleaned the place himself.
The smoking stand had a large cylindrical base. Nace lifted the top off this. Two square glass panels were revealed. In one could be seen Nace’s outer office. In the other was portrayed the inner room, his laboratory.
It was not a television machine, but a complex arrangement of mirrors and perfectly straight tubes.
Sergeant Gooch was visible, seated at the office desk, a box of Nace’s cigars open before him. His mouth was pulled down at the ends, putting wrinkles in his blue-bearded jowls.
Policemen and detectives were parked around the office and others were in the inner room.
Sergeant Gooch’s lips moved and he waved both hands.
Nace hastily slapped two small switches beside the glass view-panels. On the walls of the room where he crouched were two innocent-looking oil paintings. At the touch of the switches, these became diaphragms of loud speakers, which reproduced what was being said in Nace’s office and laboratory. They operated from sensitive microphones and a vacuum tube amplifier. The mikes were well hidden in Nace’s office.
“Broadcast it again to the squad cars!” Sergeant Gooch was bellowing. “Maybe some of them didn’t get it the first time. Describe the red-headed dame and that purple-nosed lunk who was with her. And while you’re doing it, describe Nace again, too.”
Nobody made a move to comply with the command. Sergeant Gooch liked to yell. His men could tell from the exact tone of his voice when he was giving an order he really wanted carried out. He was not using that tone now.
“The call is going out every half hour!” somebody told him.
Sergeant Gooch threw one of Nace’s cigars, with no more than an inch smoked, into the cuspidor, and took a fresh one. He fired it with Nace’s desk lighter, handling the lighter roughly, as if he hoped it would break.
“Hell! I’d give a brass monkey to know what this is all about!” Gooch made a face in the cigar smoke. “If the red-headed dame and her shadow with the violet schnozzle hadn’t pulled their freight, I might know something!”
SOMEBODY snickered. Gooch looked pained. “Aw, d’you have to rub it in?”
“I can’t help thinkin’ how you and Honest John was actin’ when we got here! Ha, ha, ha! Ironed to the radiator with your own handcuffs! We could hear you yell and rattle the cuffs two blocks away!”
Nace grinned wolfishly at the two glass squares into which he was staring. It would appear that the Titian and her damson-nosed companion had turned upon Gooch and Honest John when they came in.
Nace was more than mildly surprised. The girl had been in the act of summoning the police when he seized her.
Sergeant Gooch got up with the box of Nace’s cigars and passed the cheroots around. “It was kinda strange how that happened. The dame seemed glad enough to see us. The big guy kinda stood around and moped. Then he threw down on us with the revolver. The fire-top didn’t seem to approve of that. She looked at the big guy like she was ready to knock his block off. But she helped dress us up with our own jewelry. And they went out together.”
Sergeant Gooch came back to the desk with the cigar box. He took a fresh weed for himself. “They got clean away. We charged around huntin’. And were we surprised when we found them two guys sleepin’ in the hearse!”
“The hospital should be letting us know what ailed them two slumbering beauties!” vouchsafed an officer.
“Yeah.” Sergeant Gooch rasped fingers over his chin shag. “You know, the sleep them fellers was havin’ had all the earmarks of Lee Nace’s work. Some damn funny things happen to people who mix themselves up with Nace.”
At this point, Honest John MacGill arrived. He was swabbing at his eyes with his sleeve—they were watering from the effects of the smoke.
Sergeant Gooch pointed his cigar at Honest John. “A fine lot of help the department gives me! Look at ’im! I set ’im in the hearse and he breaks out in tears, probably from thinkin’ of funerals—”
“Aw, can it!” Honest John growled. “When I find the dang joker who threw that smoke bomb in the alley and then hollered fire—”
Gooch got up, squawking, “What’s this about a smoke bomb?”
“That’s what I said!” Honest John leered about truculently. “If I thought one of you monkeys—”
“It wasn’t anybody from the department!” Sergeant Gooch told him grimly. “Smoke bomb! Ha! That’s something else that smacks of Nace!”
“Damn the luck!” Honest John howled. “I’ll bet that’s who it was!”
Sergeant Gooch teetered on his heels. “Sure it was Nace! He used that smoke bomb so he could get into the building, I’ll bet!” Gooch went to the window, leaned out and gestured at the plainclothes men in the squad car below.
Nace could not see his moving arms in the picture that was reflected by the arrangement of mirrors and straight tubes, but he guessed that Gooch was signaling some of the officers to the rear. He drew back inside.
A detective asked, “What put you on the trail of this mess, anyway?”
“A telephone call!”
SERGEANT GOOCH gestured everybody toward the door. “Somebody called me about daylight and said Nace had murdered a man and was hiding the body in his office. Well, bless your Uncle Gooch, that sounded fishy! But it was a chance to worry Nace a little, and there is nobody I enjoy worryin’ more! I got a warrant and come up here and turned his place upside down!”
“What’d you find?”
“Hell—what I expected! Nothin’! C’mon, you guys! We’ll frisk this building!”
Sergeant Gooch was opening the door when the telephone rang. He came back, picked up the instrument.
“Yeah, this is the pride of the cops…. He did!… They did? Both of ’em?… Ow-w-w! What is this town comin’ to!”
Gooch ground the receiver savagely upon its hook.
“What’s happened?” somebody asked him.
“Happened! Happened!” Gooch flung his cigar out of the window with great carelessness for the heads of pedestrians below. “Them two guys we found asleep in the hearse! They jumped off stretchers while they was bein’ carried into the hospital, and ran and got clean away! Can you beat that?”
From the door came a faint scraping noise. A detective sprang over and looked into the hall, after frowning at the mail box.
“It’s the mail!” he said over his shoulder. Then, in a louder voice directed at the mailman, “Hey, Uncle Sam, what’d you drop for Nace?”
The mail carrier’s reply was not audible to Nace.
The detective now began to work at the mail box, which was a stout steel case affixed to the door. He tugged, swore, smacked the metal with the heel of his hand, tugged again. “I can’t get the dang thing open! The mailman says he dropped in four letters!”
> Sergeant Gooch ambled toward the laboratory, bristled jaw out, saying, “I’ll see if I can find a hammer or a screwdriver or something!”
His long face knobby with angry muscle welts, Nace got up and jumped to a telephone on a bookcase. Instead of a bell, this instrument was fitted with a light that brightened when a call came in. Nace dialed the number of his office.
The phone was near enough the smoking stand base so that he could look into the glass panels and see what happened.
Sergeant Gooch, a hammer and screwdriver in one hand, answered the call.
Nace made his voice hard, angry. “This is Nace! What’s the idea of you and your shadows cluttering up my place?”
With one hand, Gooch made frantic silent gestures at Honest John, directing him to trace the call. Honest John dived out through the door. Sergeant Gooch began stalling to hold Nace on the wire, telling Nace what a pal he was, thanking him for the cigars, and finally:
“I’m sorry about that search warrant business, Nace, old boy, old boy. The thing was all a big mistake—”
“You’re a liar!” Nace advised him. “You have never in your life admitted you could make a mistake!”
Honest John had worked swiftly. He put his head in the door, whispered loudly, “The phone is in an office on the top floor of this building!”
NACE hung up. There was a phone upstairs all right. The instrument he was using was tapped into that line, but the instant he hung up, jack switches automatically cut it off so the tap could not be traced.
Gooch and his men bolted out of Nace’s office.
Nace gave them time to get well on their way upstairs, then ran to his office, got four letters out of the mailbox, and whisked back to concealment. He shuffled the letters.
Three advertisements, he discarded at once.
The last letter was postmarked from Lake City, Ohio, the day before. It was somewhat bulky. He opened it. There was a letter.
Dear Cousin Nace:
I have your note requesting that our relations be strictly of a business nature. That such would be the case was, of course, my understanding before I appealed to you.
