“Has anyone been near this machine?”
“No, sir,” Marcom said.
“Come on! I want to have a look at the front door.”
The rug in the entry was badly disarranged. On the polished boards of the exposed floor was a tell-tale drip of blood. Tracy followed the trail a few feet to a hall closet. When he wrenched open the door, the unconscious body of the missing policeman tumbled head-first out. He had been knocked cold, probably by brass knuckles, judging from the multiple abrasions across his bleeding temple.
Marcom uttered a terrified cry.
Tracy said, “Ah, shut up.” The thing was too foolishly simple. The four of them had sneaked out the back door, while a dumb butler sat like a fool in Hilliard’s study and a cop stood jammed on unconscious feet in the hall closet.
The phone began to ring.
“Hello!”
A woman operator answered. She sounded angry. “Your instrument was off the hook. There’s a call that’s been blocked for five minutes. Are you Mr. Jerry Tracy?”
“Yes. Let’s have it!”
Inspector Fitzgerald’s crisp voice came on the wire. “I’ve been trying to get you, Jerry. What’s wrong?”
“Plenty! Furman and Alice have gone to Hilliard’s Long Island estate with Betty Hilliard and Dunlap. The trip was ostensibly taken to avoid reporters, but I suspect it concerns certain letters which Betty wrote to Dunlap after her marriage.”
Tracy’s words raced. “Fitz, we’ve got to get there fast, or there’ll be another murder! A double one this time!”
“I’ll pick you up with a police car that’ll do eighty.”
“Swell. Only phone the police air base first. Tell ’em to have an amphibion waiting. The car’ll do as far as North Beach. We’ll need the plane to make up the time we’ve lost.”
“I’ll handle it!” Fritz growled.
North Beach airport whisked away like a flat, black pancake in the uncertain light of dawn. The police pilot did not climb very high. Banking, he gunned the amphibion into bullet-level flight, Fitzgerald and Sergeant Kilian were packed uncomfortably together, with Jerry Tracy crouched between their knees.
The hills and coves of Long Island’s north shore raced swiftly astern. Tracy stared ahead through the moonlit darkness, watching for the narrow entrance to the inlet where Hilliard’s country home was located. Speed sang in his blood. The wild automobile race northward through Manhattan and across the Triborough Bridge — that was nothing compared to this!
Suddenly he pointed. A shaggy headland was shouldering the darkness straight ahead.
The plane curved outward from the shore, banking and slackening its speed in preparation for a water landing. The pilot was taking no chance with the cove entrance beyond the headland. He planned to taxi through on the surface of the water.
But a yell from Jerry Tracy changed the pilot’s mind. Fitz, too, was pointing. A lengthening streak of foam showed on the surface of the water where the cove joined the sound. A dark speedboat was fleeing eastward toward Greenport and the open sea.
It was a fast streamlined craft with a knife bow, but it was no match for the police flying boat. The amphibion overhauled it with the ease of a dropping hawk. It roared less than twenty feet above the cruiser. Tracy, peering, saw the blurred faces of Betty Hilliard and Ken Dunlap.
Betty seemed to be tied hand and foot. Dunlap was free. He was springing to the engine controls, slowing the boat’s mad speed. The amphibian curved into the wind and landed with a shower of spray. Its momentum carried it alongside the drifting boat.
Sergeant Kilian risked a ducking with a wide, reckless leap. He was on his feet instantly in the rocking craft, his gun pointed at the tense figure of Dunlap. There was a fishing knife in Dunlap’s hand.
“Drop it!” Kilian rasped.
The knife clattered. Kilian scooped it up. Fitzgerald and Tracy sprang aboard and the seaplane began to drift away from the rocking boat.
“Cuff him, Sarge,” Fitz growled.
There was a quick scream from Betty Hilliard. “Let him alone, you fools! He’s innocent. Ken, tell them what happened, quick! Untie me, someone!”
Tracy loosened her bonds. He didn’t have much trouble with the rather hastily knotted cords that fettered her wrists and ankles. Fitz was listening to Dunlap, watching him like a hawk. His story sounded too fast and too phony.
He accused Furman and Alice Hilliard of attempting murder. They had, he declared, lured him and Betty to the Long Island estate with a promise to return certain missing love letters that had passed between Dunlap and Hilliard’s young wife. Furman and Alice had taken them to Hilliard’s boat house at the edge of the cove. Before Dunlap was aware of treachery, he and Betty were bound hand and foot and tossed into Hilliard’s speedboat. The rudder was lashed tightly, the engine started, and the boat was sent racing into the Sound to be blown up as soon as the delayed spark of a fuse reached the gas tank.
Kilian said, incredulously, “A fuse? An explosion?”
“Where’s the fuse?” Fitzgerald snapped.
“Overboard,” Dunlap said slowly, his eyes watchful. “I rolled to the knife just in time. Guess they overlooked that fishing knife in the dark. It was under a seat. I cut my bonds, tossed the damned fuse over the side, a few seconds before your plane showed up.”
Kilian said dryly, “Funny you didn’t draw any blood with those quick knife cuts.”
“He’s telling the truth,” Betty Hilliard cried. “Furman and Alice wanted it to appear as if we blew up accidentally in a guilty attempt to flee. They must have been in cahoots with Lord.”
Fitzgerald looked at the Daily Planet’s little columnist. Tracy’s dim smile was enigmatic.
“Lord didn’t kill Hilliard,” he said. “I’ve known that for some time. Hilliard was shot twice because a man and a woman murdered him. Each wanted a hold on the other, so each fired at him, using Lord’s stolen gun. Then, you see, with them both witnessing the other’s shot, neither could ever talk. We’d better get back to that boat house.”
“You won’t find them,” Betty cried. “They’re miles away by this time.”
Dunlap didn’t say anything. Tracy jumped to the speedboat’s engine and started it. Fitz yelled an order across the black water to the drifting seaplane. As the boat raced back to the entrance of the cove, the seaplane began to taxi slowly in its wake, dipping along like an unwieldy gull.
The boathouse was a two-story wooden building on the left side of the cove. A light was burning on the lower floor. It was the only light visible in the darkness. Hilliard’s country home, perched high on the cliff, was black and formless among the trees.
Tracy switched off his engine and allowed the speedboat to ground on a shelving beach. He and Fitz hurried noiselessly toward the partly opened door of the boathouse.
A cautious glance inside made them both stiffen. Walter Furman and Alice Hilliard were lying close together on the floor. There were handkerchiefs thrust into their mouths; their wrists and ankles were tied with lengths of fishing cord. Their faces were livid with terror.
Fitz started to spring forward, but Tracy caught him in a tight grip and yanked him soundlessly back out of sight. He had seen something that Fitz hadn’t. The knob of a rear door was turning slowly! Someone behind the boathouse was about to make a stealthy entrance.
A small window allowed Tracy and Fitz a hidden view of the interior. The back door was wider now, although no one was visible in the blackness beyond. On the floor Walter Furman was threshing furiously.
A man bounded suddenly into the lighted room. There was a gun in his hand and it swung toward the pair on the floor.