“Looks like you may have to,” Dabney said.
A light began to flash inside a glassed booth. It was Tracy’s private phone to enable him to take last minute news flashes from his secretary. Dabney answered the call, said very gently. “Yes, Mr. Hilliard.”
The voice on the phone was thick with anger. Tracy had to listen hard to make out the slurred words.
“What the hell do you mean by publicly humiliating my daughter? If you had information that this Bert Lord is a crook why didn’t you come privately to me?”
“Because your daughter is a headstrong girl, Mr. Hilliard. I don’t think you could have stopped her. Or your wife, either. You might have made it tough, but I wanted to make it impossible. That’s why I went on the air and told the world.”
“Damned kind of you! I’ll expect to see you in fifteen minutes. If you’re not—”
“I’ll be there,” Tracy said quietly.
He glanced wryly at his watch. Eight thirty-two. He’d expected a quick reaction and he’d got it — two minutes after the sign-off.
He scribbled the name and address of Bert Lord on a card and handed it to Butch.
“I want you to watch this guy’s apartment. It’s a swanky penthouse, with a private entrance and a private elevator. If Alice Hilliard shows there, stop her. Make a scene, grab her purse, do anything that will get the two of you picked up by cops. Phone me at Hilliard’s home from the police station. I’ll take care of everything. Scram!”
Butch nodded. If Tracy had asked him to disrobe in Times Square and bark like a dog, the order would have been cheerfully obeyed. In Butch’s simple philosophy there was always a sensible reason for everything Tracy did. His big feet went rapidly away.
A few minutes later Jerry Tracy descended in the rear elevator and emerged on the sidewalk. There was a row of taxis parked along the curb. He slammed himself into the first in line.
Before he could talk to the driver, the door on the street side of the cab opened and slammed. Alice Hilliard dropped panting into the seat beside Jerry. She had come racing from a doorway across the street. Tracy, who had just sent Butch to head her off from Bert Lord’s penthouse, was completely discomfited. Alice’s sob didn’t help him much, either.
In a stony voice he gave the driver Hilliard’s address.
“I’m going with you,” Alice said.
“You’re foolish. You’re only making it tougher. Why not let me drop you off at your own apartment?”
“Sorry. I want to be there when you tell Father that I’m in love with a louse.”
“Oke by me.” His shrug stung her to anger.
“If you’re wrong about this, I’ll never let up on you, Jerry! Not until I’ve driven you from New York.”
“And if I’m right?”
She didn’t reply.
Hillard’s home was an ornate old-fashioned dwelling on a west side street that rammed into a quiet dead end above the twinkling darkness of Riverside Drive. The house was set back from the sidewalk and there were green, park-like grounds. Tracy rang the bell and waited. There was no answer.
“That’s funny. Aren’t there any servants in this joint?”
“It’s their night out, except the butler, and father’s a little deaf,” Alice suggested. “Perhaps he can’t hear the bell.” “Does he have to? He’s got a butler and a secretary and a wife.”
“A very pretty wife, too,” Alice said.
Her soft words made Tracy glance sharply at Hilliard’s adopted daughter. Alice and Betty were almost the same age, Tracy had never thought of friction between them, but he did now. He had supposed that Alice’s switch to a small apartment downtown had been her tactful withdrawal from an oldish foster father with a young wife.
“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 girclass="underline" “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.