The Scarlet Ace Page 3

  Remember how Crowley stood ’em off?

  The foxy top-hatted fugitive was up the drain, like Crowley, and police and city firemen were snarling like fox-hounds, trying to sniff out an opening. Blue-coated fox-hounds with their jaws wide, ready to pounce and crunch...

  The crowd in the street was terrific. The harsh clang of bells and the hooting of police sirens brought spectators swarming into the neighborhood like a black outpouring of ants. Sweating cops swore fretfully and shoved ’em back. Occasionally the crowd split like a dark wave, gave way sullenly to permit the passage of a clanging apparatus truck.

  There were two police emergency crews in the cleared area. A hook and ladder company down by the corner. On the roofs opposite the besieged building, uniformed figures watched from behind portable steel shields. Smoke puffs eddied in the air.

  A Hearst-Metrotone sound truck was parked on the street in dangerous proximity to the vapor from tear-gas grenades and the whine of deflected bullets. A man with a sallow dead-pan phiz was up on top of the truck, grinding steadily beside the tripod of his big news-reel camera.

  In the narrow alley on the north side of the structure the smoke-eaters were as busy as beavers raising a long teetering ladder, bracing its weight, swinging the top of it against dull whitewashed brick.

  The police were rushing the front door again to divert attention from the flanking attack. Blows rattled on the steel barrier. Tear-gas bombs went hurtling like dark eggs through the broken panes of the barred ground-floor windows.

  A fusillade of submachine bullets cut downward from an upper window. The cops dropped their tools hastily and crawled out of range. From the housetops across the street came an answering volley as police marksmen tried to nip the reckless killers.

  A sigh like a boom of surf rose from the far-off spectators. They sensed something coming—the climax—the last rush of the law. It was hard work to hold ’em. They swayed and pushed fiercely to get into the danger zone where they could see better.

  A young cop, dizzily astride a stone cornice, saw the metal scuttle rising suddenly on the roof across the alley.

  A snakelike figure was up and out in the open like a flash. It was running, head bent low, toward the north edge of the roof. The firemen in the whitewashed alley had succeeded in raising their long ladder and the top of it quivered with the rush of ascending feet.

  The cop opposite yelled a warning and fired. His hasty bullet missed. The crouched figure straightened and the Tommie gun in his steady grip blasted the cornice with flying chips. The cop sagged, lifted weak arms outward like a swimmer and fell headlong into the alley.

  With the same snakelike glide the murderer ducked downward and was gone. The heavy steel scuttle dropped with a bang.

  Rubber-booted firemen came swarming into view over the edge of the roof. They carried pikes, with tempered steel hooks, broad-edge axes and fat flashlights. No guns, they left that to the lean-jawed cops at their elbows.

  The pikes hooked under the scuttle edge. The scuttle refused to budge. They abandoned the vain effort at the barked orders of a cold-eyed battalion chief.

  In the center of the captured roof two axemen stood shoulder to shoulder. Their backs rose and fell with monotonous regularity. Their blades bit into the tar paper. A pikeman caught an exposed edge of tin with his hook and ripped it crookedly away. Thud! Boom! Thud! went the thundering axemen. Loose plaster dust whitened their boots and danced on the roof like flour in a sieve.

  On the sidewalk of the street below a manhole cover moved and began to lift slowly.

  Someone was pushing up cautiously from the cellar of the besieged building. In the roaring confusion in the street only one man saw the coal-chute cover quiver and lift. He stood on the curb scarcely a half dozen paces away; Patrolman Quinn from the Mercer Street Station, rushed to the battle zone on reserve duty a short time before.

  Quinn’s eye gleamed. He smelt a lone capture, and visioned his round, honest phiz on the front page of every tab extra. He slid out his department revolver and held the weapon concealed under the flap of his coat.

  Suddenly his eyes rounded with incredulity. He swore with disappointment. A blackened police cap was rising from the coal chute. Under the cap was a dirt-streaked, sooty face and blue uniformed shoulders.

  The cop rushed over to Quinn and prodded his chest with a dirty forefinger.

  “Where’s the inspector? I found a way into the damn place. Right through the cellar. There’s only a thin, wooden door at the head o’ the stairs. One man can bust it in.”

  “Through the cellar?” Quinn echoed. “Attaboy! How’d yuh git in?”

  “Back yard. Smashed off a fanlight and dropped through. Where’s the inspector?”

  “I dunno. He was here a minute ago. Holy cat! Hey, Sergeant, Sergeant!”

  They poured the hot info into the sergeant’s big red ear. He nodded and gave a brisk foghorn yelp.

  “Peterson? All right, Doyle! Vedderkind! That’s enough…”

  He gave the dirt-streaked cop a swift shove.

  “Find Captain Wagner and tell him to rush a bunch to the front door. Tell him I’m openin’ up from the inside. I’m takin’ four men through the cellar, tell him.”

  The sergeant knelt and squirmed headfirst into the round opening, and his legs wriggled out of sight down the black slant of the chute. Quinn and the rest followed.

  The dirt-streaked officer dodged around the rear end of an empty emergency truck and hurried diagonally across the street. There was a little stationery and candy store near the corner. A group of firemen and one or two bored-eyed reporters blocked the doorway.

  “Where you been, fella?” a fireman grinned. “Diggin’ coal?”

  “Damn right. We got the cellar wide open.”

  “Wow!” grunted a reporter. “Thanks for the dope!”

  The group dissolved. The dirty-face cop went into the store, called for a bottle of soda-pop and drained it in a long, thirsty gulp. He set it down on the counter with a bang and walked out.

  A perspiring patrolman nodded to him as he shoved into the crowd at the teeming street intersection. The tightly packed mob wiggled and heaved to get an admiring look at the dusty hero as he bored through. He disappeared almost instantly, like a pebble tossed into the ocean.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE HAND OF DEATH

  The street was curiously quiet. Bluecoats stood in a massed phalanx in front of the braced door of the beleaguered building. From inside came a dull crashing echo and the sound of running brogans.

  There was a rattling of chain and bolt behind the metal door. Then it swung wide and a quartet of grimy cops stood revealed in the opening. They beckoned grimly with their drawn guns. Up the smoky staircase went a boiling tide of blue uniforms.

  Pistols began to crack. A second wave of uniforms came down the rickety stairs from the attic. The flashing blades of the firemen had at last smashed a roof opening, and cops dropped through the ragged hole with the speed of parachute jumpers bailing out of a doomed ship.

  Short and sweet. From room to room. In hardly more than a minute or two there came thinly to the ears of the watchers outside the sound of men yelling shrilly for quarter. The crackle of pistol fire ceased.

  The commissioner, followed by his chief inspector, hurried into the building.

  Out in the street the man on the newsreel camera began to grind smoothly.

  “Here they come, Harry!” a voice yelped.

  Four of ’em. Four trapped gorillas, bloodstained, haggard, snarling. Gripped on either side by stalwart guards. Hustled across to the patrol wagon like limp sacks of meal.

  Their eyes blinked in the bright daylight. They cringed and ducked their heads as they stumbled past the lens of the whirring camera. The patrol wagon snorted away with a brisk clanging of its bell. The crowded spectators murmured and swayed forward, on tiptoe for some more free thrill. No sign of the commissioner. He was still inside with his chief inspector.

  “But tell me, In
spector, where in hell he got to?” the police commissioner was growling tonelessly.

  He was sitting on a battered chair in an upper room of the house, with blank misery on his florid face. The air was heavy with the stench of exploded powder, and the room was a topsy-turvy wreck. The chief inspector paced nervously up and down, kicking stray cartridge cases across the littered floor.

  “I’ve gone over every inch of the dump, Commissioner,” he snarled unhappily. “He wasn’t here, that’s all. He couldn’t be here. And yet, damn it—”

  “He was trailed here, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he’s not here two seconds after we smash in. He must have got out some other way.”

  “But, Commissioner, how could he? Hardly a minute after we got through the cellar hole we had the whole gang cooped.”

  “Who led the attack through the cellar?”

  “Sergeant Keller of the Mercer Street Reserve.”

  “Get him up here. I want to talk to him.”

  A cop in the doorway caught the inspector’s curt nod and vanished. He came back in a moment or two with the smiling Sergeant Keller. Keller was happy. The Old Man calling him up like this! He’d be gettin’ his picture in the paper, maybe. He snapped a salute.

  The commissioner acknowledged the salute grimly.

  “Keller, you went through the sidewalk chute, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Could anyone have got past you, sneaked past you, I mean! Hid in the cellar, maybe, and crawled out after you went upstairs?”

  Keller shook his head instantly.

  “Not a chance, sir. I left a man on guard below. Not a soul come out. I’ll swear to it, sir. No one at all, except—”

  “Except?” barked the commissioner.

  Keller’s chin sagged slightly. Under the commissioner’s stony glare he felt the hair on his scalp twitch.

  “Except the patrolman who found the way,” he said uneasily. “He was the only one. Quinn saw him come out.”

  “Know the man? Recognize him? Didja get his shield number?”

  “No, sir, that I didn’t. He was from some other precinct.”

  “My God! Get Quinn! Get downstairs fast and send him up here. Take a squad and see if you can find any signs of that patrolman.”

  Quinn appeared presently with dragging feet. Keller had spilled an awful suspicion to him and it made poor Quinn feel sick and cold.

  Under the rapid fire examination of the chief inspector the harassed patrolman grew redder and redder. The more he floundered the thicker became his unhappy brogue.

  The commissioner interrupted the examination with a brusque wave of his hand. It was as plain as a pikestaff to him what had happened.

  “A piece of stupid blundering, Inspector,” he breathed savagely. “You should have been on the lookout for bogus policemen after the way in which Major Lacy was kidnapped... That’s all, Quinn! Report back to your superior.”

  “We’ve got four prisoners,” the inspector consoled weakly. “One of ’em is sure to squeal.”

  “I doubt it. Those prisoners are plain mugs, torpedoes. They won’t spill anything they don’t know and I doubt like hell if they know much. No, you’ve lost the prize chicken of the flock, Inspector.”

  His forebodings were justified. The bogus cop had left a brief trail. The man in the candy store told how he had walked in calmly and swilled a bottle of cold soda-pop. A couple of firemen had a blurred remembrance of him. The officer who had punched a hole in the crowd for him with his riot-stick was equally vague on description. Just a dirty-faced cop...

  And that was all in the way of clues or trail left to the police by the suave young emissary of the Scarlet Ace.

  * * * *

  Tattersall Lacy sat at ease in the police commissioner’s office, smoking a long dark panatela with meditative enjoyment. His companion was not so calm. District Attorney Marvin was a younger man; more eager. He kept rapping the padded arm of his chair with a soft fluttering of his fingertips.

  Lacy looked at the nervous fingers and smiled.

  Marvin scowled.

  “I wish he’d get here with that confounded prisoner. Do you think we’ll be able to reach the Scarlet Ace through this blasted top-hatted murderer?”

  “I’ve been toying with some small hopes of that happy event,” Lacy nodded.

  He looked up suddenly with alert eyes, and Marvin jumped to his feet. The commissioner strode into the private office.

  Marvin jerked out an eager question at him. Lacy said nothing. He was studying the face of the police chief, boring with bright scrutiny into the hard blue eyes of the department head. They looked flinty, dead. The same dead look crept into Lacy’s.

  “So the captured criminal was not captured, eh?” he said in a low tone.

  “He got away,” said the commissioner in a thick, tired growl.

  “I was afraid of that,” Lacy admitted.

  His face was very pale with the effort to control the icy rage that was seething under the dead calm of his exterior.

  “I wish to the dear God of efficiency, my friend, that you had permitted me to follow my own tactics on this case. You remember I asked permission to handle the case personally, with the assistance of the staff of Amusement, Inc.”

  The mild words were edged with a lash-crack. “Please understand, Commissioner, I’m not complaining, but I certainly am questioning your judgment in this damnable fiasco.”

  His teeth clicked and he was silent, Suddenly he began to laugh mirthlessly.

  “I wonder if you have any conception of the psychology that underlies this whole episode? Is your imagination on the move? Would you risk a prophecy right now?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” the commissioner growled shortly.

  “Just this,” said the major. “I’m inclined to think that we shall have our hands on the man in the top-hat no later than let’s say, tomorrow. That’s my prophecy, gentlemen.”

  Again that faint, mirthless chuckle, “Call me up tomorrow before noon. I rather fancy I’ll have information.”

  The Iron Major secured the information without much trouble. He found it in the pages of the New York Times on the following morning. Not on the front page. That was taken up with the long and dramatic details of a picturesque police siege that had netted four vicious gunmen.

  Lacy found the item he expected in a quarter column story in the corner of an inner page that was mostly Gimbel Brothers.

  HARLEM MURDER BAFFLES POLICE

  The body of an unidentified man was discovered shortly after dawn this morning by the janitor of the apartment house at 31648 Lenox Avenue. The janitor, Curtis Windermere, colored, found the body wedged behind a pile of ash cans in the service alley. A playing card, the Ace of Diamonds, was found pinned to the victim’s coat and the bullet that killed him had been fired at point-blank range through the card into the heart. The victim was about twenty-five years old, with brown eyes, sandy hair and ruddy complexion. Every mark of identification had been removed from his expensive and well-tailored clothes. Detectives of the West 135th Street Station are inclined to believe—

  Lacy smiled sardonically. His smile deepened later when District Attorney Marvin came on the wire.

  “How did I guess? I didn’t. I knew. In your excitement over the fellow’s escape you forgot the one essential point. He failed! I’m still alive and breathing. Don’t you see?”

  His voice hardened impatiently.

  “The man in the top-hat failed. He paid for that failure with his life. Apparently alibis or excuses don’t carry much weight with the Scarlet Ace. I flatter myself that I caused ‘the Master’ considerable mental pain when I eluded his carefully planned trap. So he killed his blundering lieutenant. The Scarlet Ace believes in efficiency. Which was just too bad for the suave young man in the top hat. I think we can write finish to this particular adventure.”

  He hung up the telephone receiver and made a brief entry in a small lea
therbound notebook.

  “Another cog ripped from the crime machine.” he said mildly to Charlie Weaver.

  His pint-size chief of staff grinned.

  “Keep a line blank for the Scarlet Ace,” he suggested harshly.

  John Tattersall Lacy laughed. His voice sounded dry.

  “Maybe two lines,” said the ex-major of Marines, with a glint of humor in his clear eyes.

  They called him the Iron Major. Not a bad name at all if you looked carefully at those smiling grey eyes of his.

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  THE SCARLET ACE

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  Landmarks

  Cover