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.
When Jerry recovered his senses the first thing he heard was the angry snarl of Inspector Fitzgerald.
“I don’t care what you thought! What the hell did you have to beat him up like that for?”
“I didn’t. The fellow who went out the window did most of it. I thought Tracy was a burglar. I didn’t realize what had happened until I turned on the lights.”
Tracy’s eyes opened. He was on the same sofa where, centuries earlier, he had told Alice Hilliard to lie quietly. She was slumped nearby in a chair, her dulled eyes staring tragically at the floor.
The room was full of people. There were a couple of uniformed cops. A finger-print expert and a police photographer were standing stolidly in a corner, watching a bald-headed man who was crouched on his knees beside Bruce Hilliard’s corpse. That was Grady, the medical examiner.
Hilliard’s secretary was still trying to explain to Fitzgerald what had happened.
“As I told you, no one answered the bell and I let myself in with my key. Naturally I was suspicious of trouble. When I found the lights turned out, and caught a man racing toward an opened window, I didn’t pull punches.”
The medical examiner got to his feet. “Impossible to tell which shot killed him, though I suspect he took the one through the skull first When you’re mad enough to kill a guy twice, you don’t aim at the heart. That was probably done to make sure. Hard to set the time. Could have been a half hour, could have been an hour and a half.”
“He was alive at 8:32,” Tracy said slowly. “That’s when he phoned me at the broadcasting studio. I’d just finished my program.”
“That might fit,” Grady said. “Body’s still fairly warm. No time for rigor mortis. He probably took it while you were on the way over here. The killer was either mad with rage or a blasted psycopath. I may have more dope after the autopsy. Good night, Fitz.”
He went out with a brisk tread.
“I heard your broadcast tonight, Jerry,” Fitz said abruptly. “Did that crack you made about Hilliard’s adopted daughter have anything to do with this kill?”
Tracy glanced at Alice. Her pale face seemed drained of everything but an overpowering exhaustion.
“Tell him, Jerry.”
Tracy shrugged. He told of the scandal tip he had received over the phone from some unknown woman. He told of his check-up on it, and recounted the attempt on his life on the way to the broadcast. He showed Fitz the flattened slug and the white carnation which the escaping gunman had dropped.
“I’m certain it was Bert Lord. Having failed to wipe me out before I could ruin him on the radio, he rushed over here, let himself in with a key he had stolen from Alice’s bag, and bumped Hilliard. He must have figured some stunt to get every one else out of the house... By the way, where were you, Furman?”