From the door came a faint scraping noise. A detective sprang over and looked into the hall, after frowning at the mail box.
“It’s the mail!” he said over his shoulder. Then, in a louder voice directed at the mailman, “Hey, Uncle Sam, what’d you drop for Nace?”
The mail carrier’s reply was not audible to Nace.
The detective now began to work at the mail box, which was a stout steel case affixed to the door. He tugged, swore, smacked the metal with the heel of his hand, tugged again. “I can’t get the dang thing open! The mailman says he dropped in four letters!”
Sergeant Gooch ambled toward the laboratory, bristled jaw out, saying, “I’ll see if I can find a hammer or a screwdriver or something!”
His long face knobby with angry muscle welts, Nace got up and jumped to a telephone on a bookcase. Instead of a bell, this instrument was fitted with a light that brightened when a call came in. Nace dialed the number of his office.
The phone was near enough the smoking stand base so that he could look into the glass panels and see what happened.
Sergeant Gooch, a hammer and screwdriver in one hand, answered the call.
Nace made his voice hard, angry. “This is Nace! What’s the idea of you and your shadows cluttering up my place?”
With one hand, Gooch made frantic silent gestures at Honest John, directing him to trace the call. Honest John dived out through the door. Sergeant Gooch began stalling to hold Nace on the wire, telling Nace what a pal he was, thanking him for the cigars, and finally:
“I’m sorry about that search warrant business, Nace, old boy, old boy. The thing was all a big mistake—”
“You’re a liar!” Nace advised him. “You have never in your life admitted you could make a mistake!”
Honest John had worked swiftly. He put his head in the door, whispered loudly, “The phone is in an office on the top floor of this building!”
Nace hung up. There was a phone upstairs all right. The instrument he was using was tapped into that line, but the instant he hung up, jack switches automatically cut it off so the tap could not be traced.
Gooch and his men bolted out of Nace’s office.
Nace gave them time to get well on their way upstairs, then ran to his office, got four letters out of the mailbox, and whisked back to concealment. He shuffled the letters.
Three advertisements, he discarded at once.
The last letter was postmarked from Lake City, Ohio, the day before. It was somewhat bulky. He opened it. There was a letter.
Dear Cousin Nace:
I have your note requesting that our relations be strictly of a business nature. That such would be the case was, of course, my understanding before I appealed to you.
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.
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.