by Lester Dent
The retainer which you request for your services seems rather large, but I am enclosing it. Please consider yourself hired.
I am also bringing the body to you in New York, as per your request, although I am still doubtful about this being the best procedure. You may expect us shortly after you receive this letter.
Julia Nace
Clipped to the letter were two five hundred dollar bills and three one hundred dollar bills.
Nace frowned. The adder scar was a faint pink shadow of itself upon his forehead.
“Julia Nace,” he said slowly. Then he placed her. She was one of his relatives he had never seen. They were connected with some kind of a shipping business on the Great Lakes.
Nace felt absently of his steel-armored wig. The brother, Jerome, had died a few weeks ago, he remembered now.
He thought of the red-head, wondering if she was Julia Nace, grinned, said, “As a relative, she would be easy to take!”
Julia Nace, it appeared from the note, had been writing letters and receiving answers, under the impression she was in communication with the branch of the family tree that had gained fame as a detective.
Today was Nace’s first contact with the affair, by letter or otherwise. Somebody had been playing the girl for a sucker.
NACE clicked the switches which shut off the two loud-speakers disguised as paintings. He replaced the pedestal of the smoking stand. He opened the door into the hallway. No cops were in sight.
Nace whipped silently to the freight elevator, entered, nursed the door shut, and sent the cage downward. He stopped the cage on the second floor, making as little noise as possible.
This was not the first time Nace had found occasion to leave his office building without being observed. He crossed to a large metal cabinet that stood against the end of the corridor. He opened the door, wedged through many soiled garments, found a secret catch and got the rear open.
A moment later, he stepped out of an exactly similar cabinet in the next building. This building was very long, extending the remainder of the block. Nace walked down passages, descended stairs, and mingled with the crowd at a furniture auction being held in a room opening off the lobby.
He bought a cheap but bulky wicker chair and walked out carrying it on his shoulder in such a manner that it concealed both his height and features from Gooch’s detectives. Nace walked a block, rounded a corner, and threw his chair into the first empty truck he saw.
He had been doing some thinking. Jeck and Tammany must have awakened in the ambulance en route to the hospital. They would, of course, have no idea what had happened to them during the last two hours.
Their first move would be to try to get a line on what had occurred. The logical place for them to seek information would be in the vicinity of Nace’s office.
Nace turned into an alley, with the idea of entering a rear door of a store and going forward to watch the street before his office.
He no more than stepped into the alley before guns began clapping thunderously. Lead squawled, chopped brick around him, ricocheted. A slug did something hot, painful, jarring, to the back of his neck.
Nace slapped flat on the alley bricks. That was the old stand-by trick of a man under fire. Sometimes it made those shooting at him think they had scored a fatal hit.
It worked. Down the alley, a taxi motor boomed. The cab went out of the alley like a racing whippet out of a starting box.
Nace shoved up from where he had dropped. He burned alternately hot and cold. He did not shoot at the receding hack—for the very good reason that he did not carry a gun. Muscles and wits, Nace maintained, were more to be depended upon than firearms. A man putting all trust in a gun was likely to be at a loss if disarmed.
He glimpsed the license number of the hack. Who rode the cab, he could not tell. Nor had he been able to see who had shot at him, so swiftly had the thing happened.
He turned away, feeling the back of his neck. His wound was only a scratch, but had the bullet come an inch closer, it would have parted his spine.
He worked away from the vicinity, keeping out of sight of policemen. He turned his coat collar up and stuffed his handkerchief under it to hide his hurt.
TWO hours later, he was sitting in a speakeasy, a small bandage taped over his neck, when a newsboy came in with the latest editions. Nace bought a paper. A front-page item caught his eye almost immediately.
A taxi driver had been found in his machine beside a Long Island road. The license number was that of the cab carrying the gunsters who had fired upon Nace. The driver was dead when discovered—skull crushed in.
The spot where the taxi had been found was a quarter of a mile from a commercial airport.
Nace got his hat, paid his bill, and tramped out of the speak. He secured his roadster from the spot where he had parked it, and headed for Long Island. He snapped on the radio under the dash and shortened down the wavelength to pick up police broadcasts.
For a time, the instrument mumbled nothing but routine business.
“All cars attention! A pickup order for Lee Nace, the private detective.” Nace smiled without alarm. But his face froze at the next words from the radio. “This man Nace is wanted by the New Jersey authorities on a murder charge. Witnesses saw him departing from a tourist camp where the bodies of two murdered men were found.”
The radio launched into more routine.
Nace took a side road to avoid the spot where the taxi and the murdered driver had been found. He pulled up at the edge of the airport tarmac.
“I want,” he told the field manager of one of the city’s largest aerial taxi services, “to hire a plane to take me to Lake City, Ohio.”
The manager grinned. “What is this, a gold rush?”
“Why?”
“You’re the third. About an hour ago, two other planes left for Lake City. They got off about fifteen minutes apart.”
Nace recited monotonously, “One carried a red-headed girl and a purple-beaked guy. A man dressed in black and a little, hawk-faced fellow hired the other ship. Which pair went up first?”
“The girl and the fellow with the sunrise face.”
“Give me the fastest ship you have!” Nace said grimly.
Chapter IV
Peril House
THE afternoon was well along when Nace’s hired plane sloped down out of low-hanging cotton-tuft clouds and wheeled a slow circle over Lake City.
Between four and five thousand would catch the population of the place. A three-story structure was the tallest building in town. This was the schoolhouse. Some of the streets were unpaved. Plumes of dust trailed such vehicles as were using the near-by country roads.
The sun-irradiated blue smear of Lake Erie began at the edge of town and stretched away until it was lost in a gray haze. Near town were docks, moored launches and cruisers, and small boats drawn up on a pale beach.
Perhaps a mile down the shore, there was an empty dock, warehouses, and a great rambling old house situated on a vast but seedy-looking lawn.
Nace had been unable to secure a fast ship, and knew he had not passed the two taxi planes from New York. The ships were not to be seen. Nace hoped they had arrived, landed their passengers and departed. They could have beaten him here by a couple of hours.
His own ship let him out in the stubble of an oatfield. He had brought his zipper-fastened canvas bag. Carrying it, he hoofed into town.
He found a car with a taxi sign on the windshield. The driver told him Julia Nace’s place was about a mile away on the lakefront. It was, Nace discovered, the establishment with the empty wharf, warehouses and old rambling house.
The hackman also said three or four planes had circled the town within the last two hours. This was fair evidence that his quarry was ahead of him. He could not account for the fourth plane. It might have been a barnstormer.
He rode the taxi halfway out, dismissed the machine, and hoofed it the rest of the way. Nearing the place, he vaulted one of the fences that paralleled
the road and eased through brush and small trees. He was taking no chances.
From a distance of a hundred yards, he surveyed the sprawling house. As he watched, a farmer in a wagon passed along the road. A small terrier trailed the wagon. The dog bounded across the rambling lawn to the front door of the ramshackle house.
The actions of the dog then became strange. It reared upon its rear legs, as if to look in the open door. Then the animal spun and fled at full speed, tail tucked under.
Nace let the wagon get out of sight. Then he sprinted for the door of the house
He did not know what he was expecting. Whatever it was, he was disappointed. When he veered inside, he saw only a composite of worn hall carpet, ancient stairs with a worn runner, and brightly figured wallpaper.
There was mail on the hall table—circulars from a marine engineering concern, a boat builder, a nursery, and a telephone bill. All were addressed to Miss Julia Nace.
Nace opened a door, found himself in an old Colonial living room. There was a picture of Nace’s grandfather, Silas Murray Nace, over the fireplace mantel. The venerable old gentleman was garbed in the uniform of a buck private of the Confederate army.
Grandfather Nace was tall, blond, angular of feature.
Nace cocked a critical eye at the picture, remarked, “The block the chip came off of.”
He did not waste more time admiring his ancestor. He began a search of the house. He found the kitchen well stocked with food. Adjacent, he found a windowless, rather large room that had evidently once been a pantry. But it now bore a bed, a dressing table, a hooked rug. Feminine garments were draped on hangers.
Two Winchester repeating rifles rested on nails driven into the walls. There was also a box of a rural telephone on the wall. Nace lifted the receiver and listened. A dead silence told of cut wires.
Stepping back, Nace absently tamped tobacco into his pipe.
HE thought of the way the dog had acted. Opening his zipper bag, he got out a bullet-proof vest. Peeling coat and shirt, he put the protector on underneath.
The big pantry was a poor place for sleeping. There were no windows. But the door was strong. It struck Nace as a likely bower for someone in fear of attack.
Suddenly, in the direction of the front room, a woman began screaming. Her shrieks had the ripping quality of a soul torn out. They were full of rasp and choke, rather than being loud, and there were no words, but only the enstrangled cries.
Nace moved, but not toward the front room. Instead, he pitched through the kitchen door, banked right around the house, and stretched himself to reach the front door. Lifting on his toes, he floated to a comparatively silent stop in the doorway.
The red-head lay on the floor, well down the hall. Her long, finely moulded form was slightly atwist, with knees drawn up and both arms under her. Her head was canted on one side, so that her face was toward him.
Her eyes were open so widely that they seemed to protrude.
Nace ventured a doubtful step across the threshold.
Something seemed to squeal behind him. The squeal was so sharp, sudden, as to be something of a snapping report. It was a bullet, and it hit Nace in the back, directly over the heart.
He sprang convulsively upward and forward, came down with a noisy crash, and rolled completely over twice, bony limbs rattling on the floor.
Noise of the rifle shot swished across the clearing, hit the house, and an echo glanced back, a single crack like a stick breaking.
The red-headed girl got up from the floor, both her hands gripping a sawed-off shotgun on which she had been lying. She ran past Nace to the door. She stocked the shotgun to her shoulder and looked out.
The uncertain waving of the muzzle showed that she could see no target. A rifle bullet came through the door with a piping squeak. It hit the wall, scooped a fistful of plaster upon Nace’s prone form.
The girl backpedaled from the door. Nace got up, trying to reach his back with both hands. The bullet-proof vest had saved him, but the slug had carried an energy of many hundreds of foot pounds. He stumbled into the room that held the picture of Grandfather Nace, fell prone on the floor and lay there, writhing a little in agony.
The girl went to the window, picked the curtain back, and looked out. She stood there perhaps a minute, then turned. Her face was very white under her red hair.
“I can’t see a sign of him!” she said, hot excitement in her contralto voice.
Nace pulled up on hands and knees and went to the window. His back was a mass of dull pain. He watched the brush at the edge of the lawn for three or four minutes, but could discern no trace of the rifleman.
He got to his feet and stood with his back pressed tightly to a wall. This seemed to ease the pain a little.
“Whoever fired the shots was trying to kill both of us!” said the girl.
Nace wiped a cold sweat of pain from his forehead with a jerky gesture that dislodged his steel skullcap of a wig. His eyes held a bleak suspicion.
“Suppose I choose to think the shots were part of that act you were putting on?” he grated.
Her hands tightened angrily on her blunderbuss. “The second shot was aimed at me! Couldn’t you see that?”
“I saw that it missed you! If the sniper out there was your pal, he might have planted the second shot to draw suspicion from you.”
The girl shrugged, rested her shotgun in the crook of an arm. “I was putting on an act, all right. But the shooting was not part of it. I was upstairs and saw you come prowling around. So I came down here and screamed and laid down on my gun. I thought I’d get a chance to hold you up when you came in. I wanted to get my hands on you.”
“Why?”
“I’ve got some questions I want to ask you!”
NACE stumbled to one window after another, peering through them, until he had surveyed all sides of the house. He could discover no one. He came back to the girl, saying, “Shoot your questions!”
She snapped angrily, “You doublecrossed me!”
“There’s where you’re all wet!”
“I wrote you letters telling you all about this trouble!”
“If you did, somebody’s been lifting ’em! I only got one! It enclosed a retainer fee!”
The girl cocked and uncocked her gun absently. “I mailed that last letter myself, from the post office. The others, I simply put in the rural box out in front.”
“You can see what happened!” Nace told her. “Now, give me the lowdown on this!”
The girl went into the pantry bedroom off the kitchen, came back carrying both Winchesters. She did not offer the rifles to Nace, but stood them against the wall, where he could easily reach them.
“You’ve heard of Mel Caroni?” she asked.
“Sure! Who hasn’t?” Nace snorted. “He was Chicago’s gang big shot. But he’s in Atlanta now—income tax. They say he’s broke.”
“You bet he’s broke!” the girl said grimly. “He converted everything he had into cash and jewels, and tried to skip the country. A coastguard cutter sank his boat out on the lake, not fifteen miles from here.”
Nace raised his eyebrows and lowered his mouth ends to register understanding. “And Caroni’s hoard sank with the boat?”
She nodded. “Caroni hired us to recover the stuff. You know, we own the Lake City Salvage Company.”
The girl took four shotgun shells from a pocket of her sports skirt and toyed with them. “The night after we located the wreck, there was an explosion which killed my father and two of the crew, and sank our salvage boat. My brother and the rest of the crew escaped.”
“Where do Tammany and Jeck hook in?”
“They’re two of Mel Caroni’s gangsters,” she explained. “After the explosion, we refused to have anything more to do with the salvage job. They seem to think we got Caroni’s treasure. They’ve been hanging around.”
NACE flexed his arms, bent his back a little, grimacing. He went to a window and started to lift the shade.
A bulle
t planked through pane and shade and thumped loudly into the wall.
Nace dodged back involuntarily, then bent forward again, plucked up the shade and stared out. He saw no one.
Broken glass emptied from between shade and window sill as if the fragments were coming out of a sack. Fully two minutes, Nace stood and stared.
“What about your brother?” he asked over his shoulder.
The red-head dropped shotgun and shells and splayed both hands over her face. “It was ghastly! Awful! We found him down by the lake shore! His eyes and tongue—they protruded! He was all swollen! I don’t think the Lake City doctors knew what had killed him. But they claimed he had been bitten by a snake!”
“What kind of a snake?”
“Water moccasin! Usually, you don’t find them this far north! But the shore here is infested with them.”
Nace did not take his eyes from the outdoors. He could discern no sign of the sniper.
“And Jud Ogel?” he prompted.
“We found him day before yesterday!” The girl picked up shotgun and shells. “Jud Ogel was in exactly the same condition as my brother. I immediately wrote you! Yesterday morning, I got word to bring the body to New York, where experienced chemists could be put to work to find the cause of death.”
“A stall!” Nace said. “You had Zeke rent a hearse and start the body for New York, huh?”
“That’s right!”
“Zeke gave a fake name when he hired the hearse!”
“Did he? I guess he didn’t want to connect me with the affair.”
“And Zeke’s story is that somebody stole the hearse?”
“Two masked men! One of them called the other by your name.”
Nace moved to another window and continued his staring outdoors. “Now maybe you can explain why Zeke tried to shoot me!”
“Zeke said he just kind of went crazy from thinking you were connected with the murders of my brother and Jud Ogel. He wasn’t responsible.”
“Who is Zeke?”
“One of the divers working for my father’s—my company. Jud Ogel was a diver, too!”
