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34 Black Mask
from his pocket and dropped a flattened park at 59th. He drove to the nearest
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 him- self?"
"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 th• k
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 Bet- 1)'.Hilliard had planned for Dunlap to kill her husband and split a fortune be- tween them, the affair between Lord and Hilliard's adopted daughter was a per- fect 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
I'll go home." '
"Yeah. Do that," Fitz said gruffi T' y.
in
a · head-
racy wasn t aware of Butch's p ence alongside him till they reached street. Butch called a taxi and Tracy seemed suddenly to wake up Y
·
apart-
"Beat it, Butch. I don't need you." Bth k
those expensive hl·ves in the Fifties,
uc too onelookathisemplo , tightly wrinkled face. There were
.· sort from which news1 . trickled like a perennial
spring into Tracy's notebooks. The nigh doorman was a stooge on the Tracy
payroll. . that In two minutes Jerry learned 7.30
when argument was a waste of breath This was one of them.
"O K J
'll ...erry.Don'tmakeittoolate.
I
the cab a d dr
wait up for you."
Tracy didn't answer. Butch got in
Dunlap had gone out alone around · do man
rove away Th Daily Pl t's · e ai Y
taxi
Heace columnist flagged aanother
and hadn't corrie back yet. The oorma had whistled Pete Malloy's cab from
·
and de
up 1 venueto59th
I ha the corner hackstand and Dun ap
been driven uptown.
"You sure he's still away?"
The doorman grinned. "I'm . sure enough to slip you a master key 1£ you want to convince yourself."
"I won't go up, but slip me the key
anyway ." .
11
H ma e a slow circle through the park. e thought of ·11· .
Hillia d's a mil ion thing s about thinkings murder, but the core of his
1
was always the same : the flat- tened, battered body of Bert Lord.
He snapped out of his mental haze
when the taxiemermged again from the erged- a ..
of Tracy's brain handed him line: Dirt for Dough's Sake.
EN DUNLAP'S
ment house was on Park
A venue. It was one
0
stone
the s