“Just what the hell were you planning to do?” Sergeant Kilian asked in a tone of blank wonder.
“Jerry told me to shadow the guy. I figured if he came down in the elevator, I’d rough the louse up, haul him back to his penthouse and phone Jerry. Ain’t that what you wanted, Jerry — shadow him and then let you know how I made out?”
Kilian snickered and Tracy said harshly, “Skip your detective methods and tell me what happened.”
“Well, the bum wasn’t upstairs at all. He musta sneaked in on gumshoes from the sidewalk while I was watchin’ the elevator. I took somepin’ on the skull... That’s nice liquor you got, Sarge.”
Fitzgerald said glumly, “Looks like a pick-up after all. Lord’s probably high-tailing it out of town, but a quick alarm ought to nail him before he can get far.”
“He ain’t outa town,” Butch said patiently. “The guy’s upstairs, unless he come down again.”
“Huh?” Fitz stared at him with his mouth open.
“He went up. I heard him go stumblin’ in the elevator before I passed out.”
The shaft door at the end of the corridor wouldn’t open. Fitz punched a button and a faint hum became audible from aloft.
“The car is still up above,” Fitz muttered. “Did the sap actually waste time to pack a bag before he scrammed?”
They rode up in an uneasy silence to the penthouse. Lord’s door was on the opposite side of a small foyer. Sergeant Kilian tried the knob gently, then rang the bell.
Almost instantly a voice cried from within, “Who is it? What do you want?”
It was Lord’s voice, shrill with fright. He was evidently standing tensely just inside the door. Tracy motioned quietly to Kilian and stepped closer.
“This is Jerry Tracy. I want to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“About my broadcast tonight Mr. Hilliard sent me over to—”
“Hilliard sent you?”
“Yes.”
“Is anybody with you?”
“No.”
“You’re a liar. Hilliard’s dead! You’ve come racing over here with the cops, I didn’t kill Hilliard. I’m not going to be framed for his murder. If you try to come in here you’ll get more than I handed that stupid body-guard of yours!”
“All we want is a sample of your finger-prints,” Tracy said quietly. “If you’re really innocent, you can prove it in two minutes.”
Lord’s answer was a bullet that split the panel of the door an inch from Tracy’s ear. Four more followed it in a crashing fusillade, but Kilian’s lightning grab at the first crash had yanked Tracy backward to the floor.
There was a hoarse cry from within, followed by the swift thud of retreating feet.
Inspector Fitzgerald’s gun sent smashing thunder at the lock of the door. But it failed to blow out the jammed mechanism. Kilian threw his shoulder against the door and so did Butch. Their combined assault did the trick. The door went flat with them and Tracy and Fitz sprang over their prone bodies.
They were in an empty living-room with wide French windows that faced on the darkness of a flat terrace. The scream that halted them in mid-stride didn’t come from the terrace. It sounded from somewhere in the rear of the apartment. It was knife-like in its horror, and knife-like in the way it dwindled into silence.
Tracy had heard that kind of ebbing scream only once before in his life. His scalp crawled at the memory. He had a swift mental picture of a poor lunatic crouched tensely on a stone ledge at the peak of a Fifth Avenue skyscraper. The man had jumped with that same ebbing shriek as police had grabbed vainly to save him from suicide.
Tracy raced through the apartment toward a rear bedroom. There was a half-filled suitcase on the floor. Clothing was scattered all over the bed. The window was wide open.
Far below on the roof of a fourth story cutback was a small mass that didn’t move. He must have taken a desperate chance to escape along a ledge that extended dizzily toward another window. A shred of his sleeve was hanging from the steel hook used for the belts of window cleaners.
“He must have grabbed for the hook when he lost his balance,” Kilian said.
“Guilty as hell,” Fitz said quietly.
His face was as pale as Tracy’s but there was not a tremor in his big, bony frame.
In silence they descended in the private elevator. They went around to the front entrance of the building. There was no alarm out front as yet. Chauffeurs in the taxi line stared curiously, sensing trouble but not saying anything.
The fat over-rouged woman at the fourth floor rear had left her door conveniently open when she had rushed out to the hallway to faint. Fitz and Kilian climbed out to the roof of the cutback.
One look from the window was enough for Tracy. The man himself lay face down, mutilated unrecognizably by the fall. But the impact had torn loose a white carnation from Lord’s lapel. It lay in a darkish stain alongside the body, shredded and no longer white. Tracy stayed inside, a little sorry he’d eaten so much for dinner.
When Fitz climbed in again his hands were smudged with recording ink and he had a finger-print sample which he placed carefully in his wallet.
He grinned bleakly at Jerry’s expression.
“A good cop has the soul of a louse, Jerry. Let’s go over to Headquarters. These prints are about the only thing left of him.”
A typewritten memo lay on Fitzgerald’s desk. It was from the finger-print expert who had phoned the indices of the gun-prints to London. The reply from London had come across ten minutes ago. Fitzgerald showed the memo to Tracy.
“Index of prints positively identify Hilliard’s murderer as fugitive British criminal. Ronald Jordan, alias Harry Clifton, alias Richard Duke. Specialty rich women. Escaped custody after killing two constables. Believed to have reached America under forged passports. Photos follow. Extradition urgently desired.
Hanley was the finger-print man. Fitz’s ring brought him downstairs from the bureau. He came in with brisk cheeriness.
“Forget about extradition. We’ve got a copper-riveted case right here. Bert Lord is the phony passport monicker. Two minutes with the guy will prove it. Have you picked him up?”
“You do it,” Sergeant Kilian said. “He dropped thirteen stories without a parachute.”
“Suicide, eh?”
“He tried an outside get-away along a stone ledge while we were breaking down the door.”
Fitzgerald opened his wallet and handed Hanley two sensitized sheets of paper with the record of the second and third fingers on Lord’s right hand. He had taken two to make sure. Blood smears had ruined the first.
Hanley said, “Beautiful!” and meant it. He took the good sample and laid it alongside the print he had taken from the gun. With a metal-tipped stylus he pointed to the complicated pattern of loops and whorls.
“Lemme show you what a really pretty- science this business of—”
He stopped suddenly, his face queerly puckered.
“Gawd!” lie breathed. He laid down the stylus with a gentle slowness as though he were afraid it might break.
“What’s the matter?” Fitzgerald asked.
“Our guy didn’t do it.”
“Huh?”
“The prints don’t match. The guy who gunned Hilliard wasn’t Bert Lord.”
Stunned, Fitzgerald stared at the expert. “You just told us that the British police—”
“Sure. They said that the guy who used that Webley on Hilliard was Ronald Jordan, alias Harry Clifton, alias Richard Duke. But you can take my word he wasn’t Bert Lord! I don t know why the hell the fool went out the window, but his prints show he didn’t kill Hilliard. If you put me on the stand, I’ll have to be a defense witness.”