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?”