“Nice joke on Lord,” Kilian said tonelessly. “Looks like you’ll have to dig us up another Englishman, Jerry.”
Tracy was on his feet, clutching at the edge of Fitz’s desk to steady himself.
“But Lord fired at us through the door; tried to kill me. Why’d he run? Why did he—”
“Take it easy, Jerry,” Fitz said.
“Take it — hell!” His hand quivered from his pocket and dropped a flattened slug and a wilted carnation on the desk. “Lord tried to wipe me out on the way to the broadcast tonight. He came back to Hilliard’s to get the gun. He slugged Butch over the head. Why? Why, if he didn’t kill Hilliard, did he kill himself?”
“They’re still not his prints,” Hanley said. “Don’t blame me.”
Butch stirred massively in his chair, his big fists clenched. “If any of you suckers are trying to say that Jerry is responsible for—”
Nobody paid any attention to him.
“Lord said he was being framed,” Tracy faltered. “I heard him yell that much through the door before he lost his head and—”
“Skip it, Jerry,” Fitz said. “He was running from the cops, not you. You were just along for the ride. You know that, Jerry.”
“I know that my broadcast tonight doomed Hilliard. I know that Bert Lord fell thirteen stories — and turns out to be innocent.” He took a deep, quivering breath. “If you boys don’t mind, I think I’ll go home.”
“Yeah. Do that,” Fitz said gruffly.
Tracy wasn’t aware of Butch’s presence alongside him till they reached the street. Butch called a taxi and Tracy seemed suddenly to wake up.
“Beat it, Butch. I don’t need you.”
Butch took one look at his employer’s tightly wrinkled face. There were times when argument was a waste of breath. This was one of them.
“O.K., Jerry. Don’t make it too late. I’ll wait up for you.”
Tracy didn’t answer. Butch got in the cab and drove away. The Daily Planet’s ace columnist flagged another taxi. He went up Fifth Avenue to 59th and made a slow circle through the park. He thought of a million things about Hilliard’s murder, but the core of his thinking was always the same: the flattened, battered body of Bert Lord.
He snapped out of his mental haze when the taxi emerged again from the park at 59th. He drove to the nearest drugstore and thumbed swiftly through the D’s in a telephone book.
Ken Dunlap was an Englishman. Ken Dunlap had once been in love with the dark-eyed Mrs. Hilliard. When she had married the tobacco tycoon there had been no pretense of love on her part. Suppose that Dunlap and not Lord was the sleek Ronald Jordan alias everything else that the British police had let slip out of England. The scandal tip about Lord had come from a woman using a disguised voice on the wire. Betty had been a grade A radio actress when she signed off to marry Hilliard. If Betty Hilliard had planned for Dunlap to kill her husband and split a fortune between them, the affair between Lord and Hilliard’s adopted daughter was a perfect smoke screen.
Betty’s refusal to tell where she had been when she left the house might be a deliberate bit of cleverness. A belated infidelity alibi from Dunlap would smirch her and save her at the same time. The cynical columnist’s section of Tracy’s brain handed him a headline: Dirt for Dough’s Sake.
Ken Dunlap’s apartment house was on Par Avenue. It was one of those expensive stone hives in the Fifties, the sort from which news trickled like a perennial spring into Tracy’s notebooks. The mg doorman was a stooge on the Tracy payroll.
In two minutes Jerry learned that Dunlap had gone out alone around 7:30 and hadn’t come back yet. The doorman had whistled Pete Malloy’s cab from the corner hackstand and Dunlap had been driven uptown.
“You sure he’s still away?”
The doorman grinned. “I’m sure enough to slip you a master key if you want to convince yourself.”
“I won’t go up, but slip me the key anyway.”
He walked onward to the corner and spent ten dollars on Pete Malloy. The cabbie had taken Dunlap on an aimless ten-minute drive, and had dropped him finally at a west side corner about a quarter to eight. He was positive about the time and positive about the street.
Tracy blinked. The spot where Dunlap had alighted was a short block from the Hilliard home.
Tracy ducked into a whitewashed alley that led to the basement of the apartment house. The service elevator, untended at night, stood open and empty at the foot of the shaft. Tracy rode the car to the floor below Dunlap’s and climbed the last flight, leaving the car’s door jammed open in case he needed it for a quick scram.
He rang Dunlap’s service bell and ducked into the shadow of the dark stairs. No one answered his ring. After a while, he opened the door quietly with his master key.
The apartment was in total darkness. Tracy tiptoed through the kitchen and pantry, went through a dining room. In the huge adjoining living-room, he snapped on the lights and began a quick, noiseless search. What he wanted was some small object which might reasonably contain a set of Dunlap’s fingerprints.
He didn’t see any personal object small enough that could be wrapped and slipped into his pocket.
He went into the bedroom and turned on a lamp. Almost the first thing he saw was a flat gold cigarette case lying on a night table alongside an extension telephone. He wrapped it carefully in his handkerchief and slid it into his pocket.
He was turning to put out the lamp when he heard the grate of a key in the apartment’s front door.
Tracy never moved faster in his life. A click, and the bedroom went black. A swift dart across soundless rugs and the living-room lapsed into darkness.
Utterly unaware that the lights had been blazing a second earlier, Ken Dunlap walked quickly into his living-room and snapped on the wall switch.
The few seconds interval between the slam of the apartment door and the unwelcome arrival of Dunlap had enabled Tracy to melt noiselessly into the blackness of the bedroom. Trapped, he stood behind heavy velour curtains, watching his suspect.
Dunlap seemed to be as nervous as a cat and in a coldly vicious temper. He kept muttering a low-toned growl of profanity; but it was without emphasis, as if his mind was centered on something else. He had heavy shoulders and a broad, clean-shaven face.
Tracy heard him mutter: “Mustn’t get the wind up, or we’ll both be lost!”
The sudden ring of a telephone bell halted Dunlap in midstride. Tracy, aware of the phone set on the night table, stiffened behind his curtain. Then he realized that its bell was silent. It was merely an extension phone; the bell was ringing in the living-room.
Tracy tiptoed away from the. curtain and lifted the duplicate phone with cringing care.
He heard the sharp bite of Dunlap’s voice on the wire. “Who is it?”
“Betty.”
“Right-o. What’s up?”
“Ken, we’ve got to do something. Alice knows about the letters! And I don’t trust Furman. That secretary has sharp eyes and big ears.”
Dunlap swore. “Don’t worry, sweet. I’ll take care of them both if necessary.”
“You’ll have to risk coming here, Ken. I’ve got to see you. There was a nasty little columnist here from the Daily Planet. I think he overheard Alice telling me about the letters.”
“I’ll handle it. Now listen...”
Tracy didn’t wait for the rest. His only chance to get away unseen was to risk a sneak while Dunlap was still hunched tensely over the phone outside. He lowered his own instrument gently into its cradle.
Before he could take two steps there was a sudden rush of heavy feet. The velvet curtain that screened the doorway of the dark bedroom was swished viciously aside. Light flooded the room.