Nace went down the rope hand over hand. Although the rope reached to the roof of the building far below, Nace did not descend the whole distance. He stopped perhaps thirty feet down and began to swing himself. The hard brick bruised his shoulders, knees, elbows, and scuffed his fists. But he was soon able to grasp the fire escape and swing onto the steps.
He bounded upward, trying to blend speed and silence. He reached the top and jumped over a high coping onto a tarred roof.
From the window below, Sergeant Gooch’s voice roared, “He slid down the rope to that roof below!”
That was exactly what Nace had hoped Gooch would think.
Nace ran to a roof hatch and descended to the top elevator landing. Luck was with him, for he found a cage waiting. He rode it down to the lobby level and swung out through the passage to the cement-floored courtyard.
He opened the hearse doors. Jeck and Tammany still slumbered inside. Nace picked up the black derby Jeck had worn and dug the newspapers out of the sweatband. He unfolded them, found they were the first two sheets from a small weekly.
It was the Lake City Chronicle, dated three weeks back. It proved nothing except that Jeck habitually wore this somber garb.
Nace closed the hearse doors, locked them, then traveled at a long-legged walk out of the courtyard.
He went to the parking lot where his weather-beaten roadster stood. Unlocking the rumble seat, he took out a rather bulky canvas bag that was closed with a zipper fastener. He put it in the front seat, then got in and nudged the starter with his toe.
He wheeled the roadster out of the lot, thence westward toward the George Washington Bridge. This was the most direct route to Hudsonville, the Jersey town where Jeck claimed he had seized the hearse.
He turned down the windshield and the breeze soon cooled the adder off his forehead. He discovered he had bitten his pipe stem sometime during the excitement, cracking it badly.
He replaced it from a case of spare stems that he drew from the zipper bag. The bag held a conglomeration of articles, ranging from intricate electrical mechanisms to an efficient assortment of skeleton keys.
This zipper bag was Nace’s sack of magic. It held about everything he needed in his perilous profession. It was largely judicious use of the contrivances contained in the bag which had lifted Nace to a position of prominence.
A newspaperman had once dubbed Nace the “Blond Adder.” The name had been unusual enough to stick. Nace knew the value of publicity in drumming up business, so he made it a point to always give the newspaper reporters a good story. Hence he was frequently on the front pages.
That Nace had spent several months in England as a paid consultant to Scotland Yard showed he was good in his line.
The George Washington Bridge rolled a greasy cement ribbon under the roadster. Nace took the main pike toward Hudsonville.
The little Jersey town was a long shot on Nace’s part, but he had to take hold of the mystery somewhere. Having not the slightest idea what it was all about, he had selected Hudsonville.
Houses alternately thinned out and became plentiful as he passed through villages. The roadster hit rough pavement and he held the canvas bag on his knees so it would not jar about.
A roadside sign told him he had three more miles to go.
A hulk of a filling station, a brood of tourist cabins behind it, appeared on the left.
The roadster shot past. Then it squatted a little and rubber wailed as Nace applied the brakes. He backed down the pike and into the filling station.
He had noticed that two of the pump measuring jars were filled with amber gasoline. Gas of that color had been in the hearse tank.
No one came from the station. Nace honked his horn. The blare went unanswered. Nace got out and went into the station, but found no one. He called loudly. Somewhere in the distance, a rooster crowed; there was no other sound.
He swung back toward his roadster, holding a match over his pipe bowl and pulling in smoke. Instead of getting into the car, he spun on his heel and came back.
He started a rapid search of the cabins. They numbered ten. The first seven were empty. This was slack season for the tourist trade.
Red rivulets had crawled from under the door of the eighth cabin and were thickening and drying in the morning sun. Nace took his pipe out of his teeth. He had an expensive habit of biting the stems off when sudden developments came. He nudged the door inward with a foot.
A stocky, curly haired man lay on the floor. He wore the stained white coveralls of a filling-station attendant. Four bullets had tunneled through his chest.
A form swathed in a sheet was on the bed. Nace did not investigate this ominous figure immediately, but studied the man who had been shot.
A cheap automatic was half concealed by the body. Nace turned the corpse over, and saw a shiny deputy sheriff badge pinned to the grimy coveralls. The cheap automatic had discharged one bullet into the wall, and had jammed in extracting the empty shell.
The man, obviously a combination of filling station attendant and deputy sheriff, had come investigating something suspicious, and a jammed gun had been the death of him.
Nace flung out a long arm and peeled the sheet off the bed. This disclosed the figure of a corpse in underwear.
Chapter III
Sergeant Gooch’s Tip
A ghastly, pop-eyed look about the corpse instantly riveted Nace’s attention. The eyes were half out of their sockets; the tongue stuck out, stiff and pale, farther than Nace had ever seen a tongue protrude. The whole cadaver had a strangely bloated aspect.
Nace grimaced, eased off his steel-lined wig and ran long, bony fingers through his natural hair. He got his zipper bag from the car, and took out a magnifying glass, together with various test tubes and chemicals.
The stuff he was using actually comprised a compact analysis kit. Unlike most private detectives, Nace had not served an apprenticeship with the police. He had spent those years at famous universities, studying medicine, chemistry, electricity and similar subjects. Few knew it, but he was a licensed doctor; he had been admitted to the bar as a practicing lawyer, and he had written a textbook on electrochemistry.
Twenty minutes later, he left the vicinity of the filling station and its flock of tourist cabins. The curly haired deputy sheriff-station attendant had been dead only a few hours.
The death hour for the pop-eyed corpse had been at least two days ago. The cause of the fellow’s death was one of the blackest mysteries Nace had ever encountered. To all appearances, the man had literally swelled to the bursting point from some strange inner pressure. The direct cause of death was suffocation, after ruptured cell walls had filled his lungs with blood.
The hearse driver, it was Nace’s theory, had driven into the tourist camp and rented a cabin in which to leave the body. Nace thought of Jeck. The man might have been the attendant’s murderer. Jeck’s conversation with Tammany had shown that he had overhauled the hearse with the expectation of finding something of value in it. He might have been searching when the deputy sheriff intervened.
Nace nursed the roadster around a curve at fifty-five. “Jeck and Tammany are on the prowl for something they want bad,” he summarized. Then he thought of the red-headed girl and the purple-nosed man. “Those two are not exactly soft, either.”
Back in town, Nace did not return his roadster to the parking lot. Sergeant Gooch and Honest John MacGill knew his custom of keeping it there. He slid the machine into the curb some two blocks distant.
Carrying his bag, he strode to the corner. He did not round into the street on which his office faced. Instead, he leaned against the corner just out of sight. He produced a small pocket mirror and ostensibly combed his blond mop. The mirror gave him a view of the street.