Fitz’s yell of amazement startled the murderer. He was a man alongside whose smashed body Fitzgerald had knelt only an hour or so earlier to take fruitless fingerprints.
Bert Lord! The man who had jumped or fallen thirteen stories.
Lord’s gun muzzle jerked toward the window. His shot and Fitz’s roared simultaneously. Glass showered Tracy as Lord’s bullet grazed his scalp. Fitz’s bullet missed the whirling killer’s chest, but it drilled through the palm of Lord’s outthrust left hand.
The stairs to the upper floor were closer to Lord than the rear door. He raced upward. That was a mistake. Fitz was inside the front door like a lean-limbed tornado, pumping lead.
He fired four thunderous shots and one of them drilled Lord’s back below his shoulder blades. Lord clung with one hand to the wooden bannister, trying to aim his gun muzzle downward toward Fitz. To Tracy it seemed like a million years, but it was really not more than three or four seconds.
Lord toppled almost leisurely over the bannisters. He struck on his head and rolled over. His neck stayed twisted at an unnatural angle. He looked as if he were slyly peeping over his shoulder at the rigid figures of Tracy and the police inspector.
Fitz said huskily, “That’s one for the book. He falls thirteen stories and doesn’t get killed. Then he flops six feet over a bannister and breaks his neck.”
“Only, of course,” Tracy said, “he didn’t fall thirteen stories. He pushed someone out. When you have time to get an autopsy done, you’ll sure as hell find out it was his poor valet. I’ve heard he had one the same height and size as he was.”
Tracy breathed relievedly. “I’m glad I didn’t scare him into suicide. He suspected we’d get a line on him from Scotland Yard where he’s wanted for murder. So he undoubtedly bashed in his valet’s head, dressed the body in his clothes — even to the flower — and tossed him out the window. He knew he’d have time to escape before the poor, smashed body could ever be identified and that, in the meantime, we’d think it was he.”
Dunlap and Betty Hilliard came in, herded by Kilian. On the floor the bound figures of Alice and Furman had stopped writhing. Both couples were watching Tracy, who kept staring at the dead Lord with a bleak smile.
“Lord shot at me through the penthouse door, his scream at the window, was a bluff,” Tracy said thoughtfully. “After Lord shoved out his valet, he jumped calmly into his bedroom closet. When we raced downstairs to view the mangled body of the valet he’d killed, Lord made a quick sneak... Have you still got those prints from the murder gun?”
Fitz nodded. He smeared Lord’s dead fingers lightly with fountain pen ink and pressed them gently against a sheet of paper. Then he compared the result with the prints he carried from the Webley revolver.
“Check,” he said. “A perfect match.”
Tracy shook his head.
“It’s not as simple as that, Fitz. Lord was framed.”
“Then why did he fake his own death?”
“The prints answer that,” Tracy said. “Bert Lord, if we’d caught him, would’ve been extradited to England and been hanged. Hence his desperate alibi at the penthouse window. But he didn’t kill Hilliard! And he wasn’t the man who ambushed me on my way to the broadcast studio tonight. Why should Lord, a clever crook, have been dumb enough to drop his well known white carnation where Butch and I would find it?”
Tracy turned suddenly toward Ken Dunlap. “You admit you went to Hilliard’s house tonight. At a quarter of eight, you said. Three quarters of an hour before he was talking to me on the phone.”
“Hilliard was dead when I saw him,” Dunlap said calmly. “The back door i was unlocked. Betty was gone. He husband was dead. That’s the truth.”
“Why did you go there at all?”
“None of your damned business!”
“I’ll tell you,” Betty Hilliard said wearily. “Ken came because I love him. He wanted to ask my husband to permit a divorce so that we could marry. I phoned Ken and begged him not to come, afraid of my husband’s violent temper. But Ken insisted. So I got rid of the butler and sneaked out to intercept Ken. I... I couldn’t find him.”
Fitz nodded grimly to Kilian and the two cops moved closer to Dunlap. Tracy began to talk in a quiet, even voice.
“Hilliard was killed by a man and woman about 7:30 with Lord’s gun. The gun was left to incriminate Lord. Alice even tried to make me think she was shielding Lord, by trying to keep the gun out of sight. The man who shot Hilliard then rushed downtown, bought a white carnation and took a shot at me, further involving Lord. Lord suspected the double-cross when he showed up at the studio and I accused him of the ambush. He raced to Hilliard’s house, after a quick trip to his penthouse to find his revolver missing. He was the guy who tried to steal his own gun from me in the darkness — and failed.
“Lord knew, too late, what he was up against. So he faked his own death to make his fade-out easy. I should’ve suspected about his valet because I once wrote an item in my column about the town’s best-dressed valet who could wear his master’s old clothes. That was Lord’s man. Anyway, Lord dared not tell the truth to the cops about the murderess and her boy friend, because to do so would be to hand himself over to British justice. The killers realized at once what Lord had done. But they, too, had to keep mum about his fake death or else disclose the fact that they had framed him.
“Lord was hanging around the Hilliard home when Ken Dunlap arrived in response to the call from Betty. I was in Dunlap’s apartment when he got that call. Betty had already made a tearful appeal to Alice about the letters which Alice had found. The result was that a truce was patched between the two women. Lord knocked out the cop on duty, but he was too late for his real revenge. The two couples had already started for Hilliard’s Long Island place. Lord followed — for revenge. He’d lost everything. The rest is obvious.”
“But,” Inspector Fitzgerald’s voice sounded dazed, “it was Alice Hilliard and Furman whom Lord tried to kill.”
“That’s right,” Tracy said.
“You mean that Furman and not Dunlap—”
“I mean,” Tracy said quietly, “that you’ve got your killers already tied up on the floor here, in fake knots of their own making. Hilliard was killed by his adopted daughter and a crooked secretary who happens also to be Alice’s lover.”
Sergeant Kilian said dully, “Then all that nutty stuff about the motorboat and the burning fuse was true?”
Tracy nodded. “Furman’s a good psychologist. He figured that if the explosion didn’t blow Betty and Dunlap to smithereens, their story would be too fishy to believe. That’s why he played safe with the cords and gag. That’s also probably why he didn’t search the boat and find the fishing knife.”
Walter Furman lay very still on the floor alongside Alice. He had spat out his gag. His voice was scornful.
“You’ve forgotten my alibi.”
“You haven’t any. You had enough time after you killed Hilliard to make your fake ambush of me, drop the carnation, and go to meet Nick White at his near-by hotel. Alice met me at the broadcast building with a fake tearful appeal to build her alibi. You thought you were both in the clear, because you intended to make it seem that Hilliard was still alive two minutes after my broadcast ended.
“How do you know he wasn’t?” Furman said huskily.
“No one touched his radio set from the moment the body was discovered. Hilliard never missed one of my broadcasts. Yet his dial was tuned at another station. In other words, he was killed before I came on the air. He couldn’t have heard my squib and, therefore, didn’t summon me to his house. You did that!”