The ruddy man still writhed from the pain in his middle. Nace tangled thick, bony fingers in the fellow’s luxuriant hair and lifted. The man forgot the ache in his ample middle for the new agony in his scalp. He came to his feet, spluttering.
“For laying hands on the Baron Marz von Auster, you shall—”
The serpentine scar on Nace’s forehead seemed to come and go with his pulse. He shook the man. “Is that what you call yourself?”
“I am the Baron Marz von Auster!” snarled the other. “The title of baron is genuine, I might add!”
“That’s two strikes on you — I don’t like titles!” Nace, flushed and hard looking, shook the man again. “Where’s the woman?”
The baron licked his lips. “You are wrong! There is no woman here!”
Still gripping a fistful of black hair, Nace straight-armed the baron out ahead of him.
“We’re going to look this dump over!” he advised.
The living room of the bungalow was paneled, and beamed in natural wood. The furniture was natural wood and red leather. The Aubusson underfoot looked expensive. A telephone stood to one side.
The radio droned away noisily beside the phone stand. It was a large set in a custom cabinet that matched the other furniture.
Nace glanced at the kilocycle number at which the dial was set.
“The Morning Tribune station,” he murmured, and listened to the Yankees-Red Sox score. The Yanks had won.
“Did you come in to get baseball scores?” snarled Baron Marz von Auster.
Nace kicked open the handiest door. It gave into a study. He glanced in, whistled shrilly.
Almost every piece of furniture in the study was torn to bits. Stuffing, springs, upholstery leather, strewed the floor. The search had even progressed to splitting the table legs.
Nace’s shaggy brows snuggled together. He asked:
“Is this your house, baron?”
“Yes!”
“You’re a liar! The phone book and the city directory both said a guy named Jimmy Offitt lived here!”
Baron von Auster knotted his fists so tightly his pursy arms trembled.
“I do not know who you are, or what brought you here!” he snarled. “But I do know this — you had better go! Go! Go — before something happens to you!”
“Don’t get sassy!” Nace nodded at the mutilated study. “Hunting something, eh?”
Baron von Auster answered with stiff silence.
“Hadn’t got this far with your search, eh?”
“I was not searching!” Baron von Auster clipped. “What happened here was my own affair! Now, if you do not leave at once, I am going to have you arrested. I am wealthy, and I will use my money to see that you rot before you get out of jail!”
“You talk as big as that robber of an umpire the cops rung into our ball game!” Nace jeered.
Snorting cheerfully, Nace shoved his prisoner for another door. His cleated baseball shoes left big, unlovely scars on the varnished hall floor.
He found a bedroom. It was a wreck. The dressing table had been taken apart, paper scraped off the walls, the mattress ripped open. Nace tried a second bedroom, a kitchen, the bath, pantry. He looked in closets, cupboards, the refrigerator. He climbed into the attic and struck matches. He descended to the basement, peering into coal bins and the furnace.
He found no one. About half of the house had been torn up. They returned to the front room where the radio was mouthing ball scores.
There, Baron von Auster suddenly missed his two thousand dollar roll.
“Thief!” he wailed. “So that is it! You are one of the thieves who have torn my house up in this fashion! Not finding what you wanted, you came back to hunt!”
“To hunt for what?” Nace asked curiously. “What was I after?”
Baron von Auster swore, and spread his hands. “What do you thieves usually seek? Jewels — money—”
Nace scowled. His knobby face was red with fresh sunburn. And about his left eye, a bruise was growing. It had darkened perceptibly since he had entered the bungalow. Unmistakably, he had been in a fight before he arrived.
He grasped the baron’s hands and turned them palm-up. Under the fingernails was a gray deposit of plaster and colored bits of wallpaper.
“I suppose your manicurist put that there?” he questioned dryly. “Of course, you couldn’t have gotten it while pulling paper off the walls!”
Baron von Auster said a tight-lipped nothing.
Nace boxed the knuckles of a big fist and shook them under the pinkish man’s nose. The movement caused dust to puff from his grimy baseball shirt. His cleated shoes had been leaving dust prints on the Aubusson.
“I asked you a question!” he rumbled. “What was the object of this search? What’s going on here? Where’s that woman? And who was she?”
Baron von Auster sucked in his stomach, pulled in his chin, as if to get them both away from that big, hard fist.
“By what right do you demand to know?” he wailed.
Frowning, Nace seemed to consider. The radio muttered on. It was giving the scores of commercial and sand lot teams of the city.
“Listen!” Nace said, and pointed at the apparatus.
The voice from the loud-speaker was saying: “The real fireworks of today’s baseball came from a local diamond, where a game between the police nine and a team of private detectives ended in a free for all fight, with the score seven to nothing in the sixth inning.
“Lee Nace, probably the city’s most astute private detective, and certainly the most widely known, was pitching. According to reports, he beaned a sergeant of police. The latter swung on Nace, with the result that it took three riot squads of policemen to save their own team from the embattled private operatives.”
“He forgot to say that bunch of cops rung a retired flatfoot in on us for an umpire!” Nace growled. Then, glowering at the baron, he indicated his own darkening left eye. “There’s where that bum of a sergeant sockoed me!”
The rosy man wet his lips three times in quick succession. He ran a hand slowly across his hair where Nace had pulled it.
“You — are — Nace?” he muttered, as if repeating some very bad news.
“In person — not a pinch hitter!” Nace told him with a sort of fierce levity. “The cops chased us out of that ball park — the tramps — and we couldn’t get our clothes out of the lockers. I went to my office. When I came in the door, the phone was ringing.”
He shot his jaw forward belligerently. “It was that woman! She asked if I was Nace, speaking in a whisper. Behind her, I could hear a radio going. Then the woman began to yell. In a minute, she was cut off. But that radio — it was tuned to the Morning Tribune station. They were just starting the baseball scores. This set is tuned on that station!” He pointed at the radio.
Baron von Auster wet his lips several more times. He peered furtively at Nace, then away. He seemed fascinated by the weird serpentine scar on Nace’s forehead, the scar that had become so brilliant it was almost like a design done in red ink.
“I don’t know you!” he said thickly. “I do not know anything about what you have found here! Nein!”
Obviously, he was lying on both counts. He had heard of Nace. He couldn’t have helped it, if he had read the recent newspapers. Nace — dubbed the “Blond Adder” because of his light hair and the serpentine scar on his forehead — had just returned from England, where he had spent some months as technical consultant at Scotland Yard.
Nace made good newspaper copy. He was tough. His language was picturesque and forceful. His methods were spectacular. He knew that newspaper publicity boomed his business, so he went out of his way to accommodate the news hawks. Occasionally, he wrote magazine features.