“Why not? Do you come and go as you please?”
“I had Mrs, Hilliard’s permission. I was attending to an errand for her.”
“Marcom is quite correct,” Betty Hilliard said quickly. “As Mr. Furman has already told you, I retired to my bedroom with a headache. I found I had none of the special tablets I use, so I sent Marconi downtown to get some at the office of my physician.”
“Why didn’t you say so before?”
“You didn’t ask me,” Betty said calmly.
“Let’s see those tablets,” Kilian told Marcom. He took the small package, unwrapped it, then smiled grimly. “I thought so. There’s a half-filled box of these same tablets in the drawer of Mrs. Hilliard’s night stand upstairs in her room. I know because I looked.”
Betty’s face paled. “I... I forgot I had them.”
Inspector Fitzgerald waved his scowling assistant aside. His own voice was suave and friendly. “You’re involving yourself in an unnecessary tangle, Mrs. Hilliard. If we don’t know where you went—”
“You don’t, and you won’t!”
“The assumption, of course,” Fitz explained patiently, “is that you got rid of the butler on a fake errand, so you could leave the house without the knowledge of your husband or Marcom. Probably by the rear door.”
“Well?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m merely pointing out that a woman with a guilty knowledge of a well arranged murder might leave beforehand by the back door to avoid alarming her husband; and return by the front door in order to discover his murder, in case the butler was still away.”
Betty’s smile was ghastly. “You might do a lot better, Inspector, by waiting for London to report on the finger-prints of Mr. Bert Lord.”
Jerry Tracy shot her a quick question. “Are you the woman who phoned me the scandal tip about him?”
“Sorry. I’m not the type.”
“You are, you liar,” Alice said harshly. “I should have guessed that the tipster was you! Why didn’t you tell Tracy, while you were spilling your dirty hints, to investigate the love life of a sleek young lad named Ken Dunlap?”
“If you dare to soil my name—”
“You’ve already done that yourself, darling. Your husband knew, too. If he hadn’t died so suddenly tonight, there’d have been a divorce trial that would have sat you where you belong. In the gutter.” Alice was shaking with rage. But Hilliard’s wife remained frozenly composed. She said:
“As long as we’re discussing charges, I think we had better stick to real facts. My husband’s will, for instance.”
“What about it?”
“It was about to be changed, cutting you and your precious British jailbird out of any share in your foster father’s estate.”
“That’s a lie,” Alice said.
“If it is, why did he give you a check this afternoon for fifty thousand dollars? Wasn’t it your final quit-claim on the family — to get out and stay out?”
Tracy and Fitzgerald and Sergeant Kilian were listening grimly. It was to them that Alice turned. Her effort to control herself made her voice almost inaudible.
“I’ve already told you that if Bert Lord is guilty of murder, I’ll do everything in my power to help you convict him. I don’t think he is, but the record of the finger-prints will settle that. The check to which my father’s cheating little wife refers is actually a proof of Bert’s innocence. It was given to me — and to him — here in this house this afternoon, as a wedding present.”
“What?” Tracy gasped.
“It’s true. Bert came here like a man and had a long talk with father. He denied those anonymous lies about his career in England and Father believed him. Father gave me a check for fifty thousand dollars and promised to stand back of Bert and me. All this talk about changing his will is pure spiteful invention on Betty’s part.”
She drew a deep sobbing breath.
“That’s why Bert and I appealed to you, Jerry, at the broadcasting station tonight not to spill that lying gossip. It’s why Father was angry enough to summon you to his home. He wanted the scandal covered up because he believed in Bert. He was trying to... to help us!”
“Then who killed him?” Tracy rasped.
“I don’t know, I don’t know.”
She was weeping wildly. Betty, dark-eyed, somber, watched her with bold antagonism. For the first time in this whole cocksure evening, Tracy felt completely at sea.
Fitz rubbed his nose for a moment. “Remain here on duty until you’re relieved,” he told the gaping policeman at the study door. His glance moved toward Furman and the butler, toward the weeping Alice and the pale, scornful Betty. “Arrest anyone who attempts to leave this house. Come on, Sarge! Jerry, I’ll need you, too.”
The three of them piled into Fitz’s shabby department car outside.
“Are you absolutely certain,” Fitz asked Tracy sharply, “that it was Lord’s voice you heard when you had that battle in the dark?”
“That’s the one thing that’s got me worried,” Tracy admitted. “It sounded like him. I still think it was. But why did he forget the damned gun in the first place? And how did he know the house would be so conveniently empty when he killed Hilliard?”
“Where’s this Lord live?” Fitz asked.
Tracy told him. The car began to hum downtown.
“I sent Butch to watch Lord’s penthouse,” Tracy said, “with orders to shadow him if he pulled a sneak.”
Fitz nodded. “If he’s innocent, he should have no objection to giving me a sample of his right hand.”
“Suppose he refuses?”
“He can’t,” Fitz said grimly, “if he’s arrested on suspicion of homicide.”
Bert Lord’s address was a swanky apartment house on the East River fringe of the midtown district. He occupied a penthouse eighteen stories up. The building had a canopy, two doormen and a string of empty taxis outside. But Lord’s penthouse afforded his comings and goings a privacy not enjoyed by the other tenants.
The entrance to his self-service elevator was on the river side of the building. A short dead-end street extended between the building and the river wall. A few empty cars were parked there, cool and quiet in the darkness. Lord’s entrance was a small, inconspicuous door, set flush in the ground floor.
Butch was nowhere in sight.
A quick twist of the bronze doorknob showed Tracy that the lock of the private entrance was broken. He stepped into a narrow hallway that was pitch dark. Before Fitzgerald could snap on a pocket torch, Tracy stepped on an extended hand that lay limply on the floor.
Fitz’s torch clicked a bright beam of light as Tracy recoiled with a gasp. The light centered on the back of an unconscious man’s head. It was Butch, and he was lying flat on his face with blood oozing from a lump on his scalp.
Tracy dropped to his knees and turned Butch over. The practical Sergeant Kilian shoved Jerry aside. He had a flat half-pint flask in his hand, and he didn’t seem to mind how much of it he spilt. Before it was half empty Butch was gurgling weakly. His eyelids fluttered open, then blinked dazedly.
A moment later Butch uttered a yell and bounced groggily to his feet. He aimed a wild swing at Kilian which the sergeant hastily ducked. Fitzgerald grabbed Butch’s arm and pinioned it. His torch flared into the dazed bodyguard’s eyes, blinding him.
But it was Tracy’s voice that cut through Butch’s punch-drunk hangover from the blow on his skull.
“Snap out of it, champ! What happened? Where’s Lord?”
Butch finished his own cure by draining Kilian’s flask.
It was Butch who had forced the lock on the street door, Tracy disclosed with a disgusted mumble. Butch had turned out the hall light himself, so he could watch the private penthouse elevator at the end of the corridor, without running the risk of being seen if someone looked in from the street.