The Gigolo Mystery

PART I.
CHAPTER I. [UNTITLED]
CHAPTER II. VOLCANIC YOUTH
CHAPTER III. THRILLS AND CHILLS
PART II.
CHAPTER IV. THE DANCING MAN
CHAPTER V. FLAPPERS AND BOOTLEGGERS
CHAPTER VI. RUM ROW
PART III.
CHAPTER VII. THE TWELVE-MILE LIMIT
CHAPTER VIII. SUSPICIONS
CHAPTER IX. HIJACKERS!
PART IV.
CHAPTER X. JUDY PLAYS STOOL-PIGEON
CHAPTER XI. THE RUM CASTLE
PART V.
CHAPTER XII. TRAPPED!
CHAPTER XIII. A SHOT IN THE DARK
CHAPTER XIV. ANOTHER GREEN DEATH CLUE
CHAPTER XV. BROADCASTING
PART VI.
CHAPTER XVI. THE LAST LINK
CHAPTER XVII. TYING LOOSE ENDS
CHAPTER XVIII. THE GREEN DEATH

Who sealed the lips of the adventurous society girl of St. James, whose lifeless body was found on the sinking "Gigolo" off the North Shore of Long Island? Arthur B. Reeve, author of the famous Craig Kennedy detective mystery stories, brings together a most remarkable group of characters in this amazing tale of intrigue, of love and crime in subtle conflict. You will be thrilled and fascinated as the tale unfolds. It begins here.

PART I

CHAPTER I
[UNTITLED]

"CAN you make out what that is below us, Craig?" I shouted through the speaker to make myself heard above the staccato of the air motor. "Over toward Old Field Light!"

"Looks like a coast guard boat," he shouted back, seizing the scouting glasses, "trying to save a fifty-foot cruiser from sinking!"

Kennedy and I were flying down the North Shore of Long Island on a little jaunt in an air-boat, surveying the course for his projected Long Island Airways by which he planned to bring all Long Island, even as far as Montauk, within half an hour or less of New York by way of Kip's Bay.

"It's perfect weather for sailing on the water; there seems to be no good reason why the cruiser should be in such distress," he added, handing the glasses over to me. "There's something very wrong down there, Walter. We're so near our landing stage at Poquott anyhow that I think I'll drop down and see if we can lend a hand in any way."

I took the glasses, as Kennedy planed down, and studied the little drama below. Indeed they were working frantically. The coast guard boat had towed the sinking cruiser about as far in-shore as she dared without running aground herself and they were hustling out the little tender to complete the job of towing so that the cruiser might be beached before she sank completely in the Sound.

OUR flying-boat taxied over the now comparatively calm water of the Sound in front of Pine Beach just as by dint of heroic and prompt action the coast guard crew in the tender managed to run the nose of the fast-sinking cruiser, now practically a-wash, up as far as possible on the sand. I cast off the anchor from between the pontoons and our craft rode the light swells, heading into the southwest off-shore breeze as we faced the mysterious fair-weather tragedy.

To my surprise Craig's name floated out from the tender as a figure in the stern saved his arms semaphore-fashion.

"Ahoy yourself! Hello—McNaught!" Craig's keen eye had recognised the figure and the voice instantly and he grabbed the megaphone to answer, then turned to me. "Walter, can you make them out? It's McNaught of the Prohibition Administrator's Office."

Conversation was difficult under the handicaps and we waited until the tender pulled up to the leeward of us then managed to clamber aboard her as McNaught's hearty hands assisted us in the transfer, none too easy except in the calmest water.

"What's the matter?" asked Craig as the tender now headed back to the beached cruiser which it had shoved as far up shore as it could. "It's just about the turn of the tide; the tide's running out now. It won't be long before you can see pretty much what was the trouble. Did you take the people off?"

"That's the strange part of it," returned McNaught. "We sighted the boat sinking, but there wasn't a signal of distress, not a sign as if anybody was aboard. Yet she was sinking, slowly, and the engine was running, aimlessly, without a pilot. By the time we got abreast of her it was too late to board her safely. We shouted and called. No answer. So when her motors stopped we nosed her in toward shore and just got her to the beach in time. I figure on the falling tide we'll soon be able to learn something about her."

MCNAUGHT bent over closer to Kennedy and me. "Well, you see we have information of a trawler that's been lightering in the stuff from a tanker out past the twelve-mile zone. Officially the 'Samoset'—that's the coast guard boat I'm on here—was to arrive in this region tomorrow. Secretly our orders were to get here a day ahead of time. That was to get ahead of any leaks there might be, tipping these people off. We haven't sighted any trawlers yet—and we did sight this craft just about where we expected the trawler. By Godfrey, where do you suppose all these people on the beach are coming from? There must be a hundred already. Let's go ashore. We might learn something."

It was true; from the big estates and the little bungalows all along Pine Beach the presence of a coast guard and a flying-boat was attracting the curious.

As the tender nosed its way where we could leap ashore I could see the name in gilt letters on the cruiser: "Gigolo," beneath which was its home port, "Harbor Head, N.Y." She was a beautiful craft and must have represented a great many thousands of dollars, roomy, yet with superb lines, a combination of comfort and speed.

"What happened?" inquired one of the crowd. "That's young Eversley Barr's boat, which he had built last winter up the Hudson."

Neither McNaught nor Kennedy was dealing any information. "You people just keep back," ordered McNaught.

There was no keeping back their tongues, however. "Don't look like anything wrong with that hull," observed one shrewd amateur old salt. "Looks to me like someone opened the sea-cocks and was letting the water in."

The observation coincided pretty much with that of Kennedy, who had suggested to McNaught to send the tender back to the "Samoset" for a pump that ran on the tender's motor.

Between the pump and the falling tide it was not long before we might expect some further light on the mystery of the crewless "Gigolo." Unable to restrain himself longer. McNaught clambered over the still half-submerged side.

Kennedy and I were not far behind him in scrambling aboard and, as the cruiser listed with our weight, we clung to the roof of the cabin and peered down and in through the windows with him.

What I saw was enough to justify McNaught's exclamation. There in the cabin as the water swirled about her feet was a girl, young, beautiful, blonde, one of those blondes who can wear a red dress with effect—her body thrown back in the arm-chair before the table—dead!

On the table before her were the remains of what might have been breakfast or a light lunch for two. Before her was a plate with a bunch of grapes, perhaps half eaten.

But it was not that that fixed my attention now. It was the face of the girl. Not only her face, but her arms and hands, her neck and shoulders—in fact, her whole lithe, beautiful body was green!

"Not drowned," he muttered after a quick determination that artificial resuscitation was too late. "Not shot. No marks of violence on her."

"Poisoned," I suggested, awed a bit, for such a tragedy to a beautiful woman strikes even a newspaperman with more than ordinary force by its contrasts. "What's this Green Death?"

Kennedy would say nothing but was making a hasty survey of the cabin, collecting and marking the objects on the table, even the grapes, everything.

"Gosh, Ed! It's Lola Langhorne of St. James! You know—who divorced Allen Harper because he was more in love with his polo ponies and his mother than with her—she said! Gosh!"

While Kennedy continued to examine the girl and the cabin, I took it upon myself to police the boat and shoo off the curious while I urged the men in the tender to speed on the pump, and McNaught found a way to examine the hold and determine how the water had rushed in.

"Sea cocks open, all right," he reported a minute later, then added tumultuously. "I was right—a hundred and ten cases of hootch in the hold! She was huckstering the stuff, all right, this boat was! What about her?" he nodded toward the dead girl.

"Get another boat from the 'Samoset'," directed Kennedy quietly. "I want the men to lift the body off on it, take it ashore to the St. Charles Hospital. Have them call up my friend Sister Marie there, get the ambulance down, and then get in touch with Coroner Gibson. Walter and I will taxi our air-boat around through the breakwater and up the harbor to our landing stage. We'll be up to the hospital by the time you get there. Have your men get the 'Gigolo' afloat, if they can, but leave everything untouched on it as far as possible. I'm taking along this stuff I collected in the cabin."

I realized that our flying boat jaunt was at an end as we faced the problem of how Lola Langhorne was killed and by whom.

CHAPTER II
VOLCANIC YOUTH

"DOCTOR, I wouldn't presume to intrude on your rights as coroner and as a physician in Harbor County," ingratiated Kennedy when a few minutes later we arrived at the St. Charles Hospital.

McNaught had done everything as instructed. The body was there; Sister Marie, the nurse, was waiting; Doctor Gibson, the coroner, was waiting. But McNaught himself was not waiting. He had disappeared somewhere on some mission. "Have you had a chance to look at the body, Doctor?"

"What then?" The alternatives fairly bubbled from the coroner's lips as if he would show these city crime-doctors how they handled things out in the country. It was merely a rhetorical question. "I'm analyzing the stomach contents for a poison." He answered his own query in a manner that showed he needed no help from outside.

I had no time to comment or to ruminate on the bucolic assurance that accepted these facts, this hideous green death for instance, as a matter of course, and condescended so blithely to inform Kennedy soon just how it all was. We were interrupted by another of the sisters who informed us that McNaught was in the waiting room with a young lady and wished to see us.

Kennedy gravely thanked the coroner who returned to his autopsy and we found McNaught now accompanied by a flashily-dressed young person who might have been pretty if she had left even some of the artificialities to older women.

"I didn't tell you, Kennedy, although I may have hinted at it, but I had brought out my informant and had her down at the Shore Inn. I thought you might like to hear what Miss Mazie Mellish has to say, first hand. I believe she knows some of the people that may be involved in this affair better than anyone else."

Mazie laughed. Among many things that Mazie was not, she was not embarrassed. Even the calm of the hospital and the quiet, devoted sisters did not embarrass this volcanic young person. I saw she was looking at Craig's hands as well as mine.

"If you boys want a real manicure, come up to the Hotel Monte Carlo—in the barber shop. That's my business. Get me? I'm there—"

"Just a minute, Mazie," interrupted McNaught. "Let's not discuss business—yet. You will remember, Kennedy—certainly Jameson will, anyway, from being on the 'Star'— about the reported disappearance of a Trixie Dare—"

"Trix was manicurist in the beauty parlor at the Monte Carlo," interrupted Mazie. "Some kid—jazz crazy!"

"Of course, you knew this Trixie Dare?" prompted Craig to hasten getting down to the facts.

I WAS interested in that. The Golden Glades had been raided only a few days before and I had written it up for the "Star," village flappers, college chaps and all. I studied Mazie. Why was she telling anything to McNaught? I have been on enough of Kennedy's cases to realize that there is a reason back of everything people do, though some don't even know it themselves. Mazie's motive was that which fires a good many of the crimes and most of the petty meannesses of women—jealousy—in this case of a girl prettier than herself.

Mazie's face clouded. "I ought to-a-known better! I introduced her to my boy friend—and I lost him!"

There was vexation over her tactical and unusual error. When girls pal, if one is as pretty as Mazie, the other is usually fat enough for the reduction works, the more especially if the girl expects to introduce her foil to the fellow. Mazie was vexed really because she had not followed her instinct. "How did that happen, Mazie?" asked Craig, patiently leading on to get the real story that might underlie the tragedy on the boat.

Mazie chewed viciously at a small piece of gum, sometimes cleverly concealed in the back of her mouth. "Oh, I just took Trix down to the Golden Glades a couple of times, that's all. Trix was all dolled up, with her curly brown hair and big blue eyes. She just had all the boys after her down there. She had a way with her, too. You know what I mean. She had IT....

"My boy-friend used to be head waiter down there. They call him Don the Dude. His real name is Donate Benito Donato. Well, he was a big, tall fellow, good looking, and I liked him—but it's all off now. Do you know what that guy did? As soon as he saw Trix with me, he came right up. She got the attention; not me. What do you know about that? But I ain't got them eyes—and my hair is straight and black and shiny."

"Quit kiddin'!" But I noticed she rubbed her shiny locks to be sure they were arranged perfectly. "This Don the Dude's quite a sport these days, some racket, see? He never misses a fight at the Garden and he knows the name and past performances of the ponies. But this last one he picked is gointer be scratched, see?"

Her black eyes snapped. "We hadn't been in the Golden Glades long that last night, see?—when it was raided, understand?—by a bunch of reformers. Some association. I read afterwards they was going after to end the tawdry tea-room iniquity—whatever that is. It's a bunch that can't make a living 'cept by watching what other people do and drawin' a salary to stop 'em....

"Now don't get impatient, Mr. McNaught, I'm tellin' this in my own way. I'm comin' to the point. I was sittin' with Trix and this Don the Dude when these people crashed us. But Don he led us out through a back way. I never knew they had such an exit before. We got out into the backyard and from that into an alley. You bet we done some hustlin'!

"DON just shoved us in a taxi with a driver who was a friend of his. But, say, you'd ought-a-seen another couple rush up. It was that Lola Langhorne—maybe you read about her gettin' a divorce in the papers? She comes up to the Monte Carlo Beauty Shop and Trix knows her. And that young fellow, Eversley Barr, was with her. She called him Ev. Well, they just naturally piled into the taxi, too, and then this here, now, Jake Merck, that's the driver, he looped it uptown as fast as he could and never got no ticket, neither. Some driver!" She considered the reminiscence with animation. "We was all laughing and joking. We had all jammed in in such a hurry, it was hard to tell where our legs was or where they belonged. Believe me, there wasn't nothing in its right place!"

"They went up to the Exclusive Club," interrupted McNaught, to get back to the facts. "There was this Don the Dude, Trix, Maize, Eversley Barr, Lola Langhorne, and, when they go there they invited the driver in with them, this Jake Merck."

"Yeh," resumed Mazie, eager to tell it herself. "We got talking over the drinks, didn't even dance. Don says he's had some money on a pony, a thirty-to-one shot, what finishes half a length ahead of the field and he's got $300. He's rich. This Jake says he just had an offer of $450 for his taxi and is gointer sell it in the morning. Well, then, Trix, she says she has saved up $250 in the bank. Then they got to talkin' what they had on 'em and the cash was forty-five dollars, not countin' the checks. They said they was rich—and I thought myself they was pretty well fixed between 'em—$1,045. Then Don, who's left off waitin' and is a racketeer, says, 'Why work?' and the others says, 'But how live?' and he says, 'Rum runnin', of course, and they says, 'That's all been broken up; there ain't no more Rum Row,' and he says 'Applesauce!'"

Mazie paused for breath and I paused to consider how the raid to make Trix and Lola and the rest good had sent them all wrong and killed one of them, so far, branded by the reformers who saved their souls. Before Mazie could get her second wind, McNaught took the floor.

"It was at this point that young Eversley Barr came into the picture as I understand it. You know he has actually an allowance of five thousand a month. He said he had a friend on the bootleg curb market that hangs out around a certain bank on Longacre Square who told him there were a hundred thousand cases of good stuff on the docks at Nassau—ten million dollars worth at New York prices. Someone had told him that tankers were bringing in some of it, at least ten thousand cases at a clip, and that there was a little tramp steamer, named the 'All Alone,' under Canadian registry, that could be bought and could carry twenty thousand cases, maybe more. He told them this fellow wanted him to go in on it and that the bank would finance it, if Barr was in it."

"THE upshot was that Lola Langhorne told them she had her little estate on St. James Harbor and a station-wagon and a sport-car with the niftiest trunk on the baggage rack. She said rum running was more sport than hunting big game in Africa or the Arctic. Maybe she's right. Well, these two crowds get together—and then another chap at the club, Warner Davis, a sort of racketeer, only I don't yet make out what his racket is, and his girl, Jean Bartow, like a gun-moll—they all get together and form a partnership."

"Yeh—that's it," interrupted Mazie again, a little peeved at not holding the center of the stage. "Don the Dude and Trix, Ev and this Lola, they was havin' a great time over the fortune they was gointer make in a hurry. They didn't pay much attention to me. I wasn't in it. I ain't got two hundred and fifty cents in no bank. And Don, he was groggy over Trixie.... But I got something that they forgot and that's my tongue. It wasn't long before I got the hunch to blow the works to the prohibition enforcement for the dirty deal that they was handin' me.

"They had plenty of hootch and the party got sloppy, specially after this Warner Davis and Jean Bartow met up with them. This Warner Davis was a good spender, jolly, and he seemed to know everybody in town. He says he could sell the stuff tonight with Jean, once it was landed, the whole hundred thousand cases, and get more out of it than anyone else. It wasn't long before this Warner Davis says he will come in and go along on the trip and Jean was to stay here and take the orders and keep 'em wised up and all that. They had it all arranged down to spending the money, see?"

"And did they actually go into it, all of them?" inquired Kennedy, at last seeing the full import of what McNaught was getting at in the inception of this amateur rum-running plot.

"Surest thing you know! But lissen. By this time Trix began showing her claws to me and I won't take it from no cat. We had an awful word battle and Don as much as told me I better beat it while the beatin's good. Huh! I was so mad I flings my gloves that I was carryin', the fingers, right in Trix's face and I does beat it. You couldn't see me for legs.... And the next thing I does one day when I see Trix don't show up on her job no more, is to blow it all to Mr. McNaught here, who says he'll wait till they actually get back and do something, then he'll crash 'em, and I'll get a reward, a job maybe in his unit, for spillin' the dam' beans of these double-crossers!"

Mazie was genuinely angry now. "There ain't only that cruiser of Eversley Barr in it and Lola Langhorne's station-wagon and sport-car, but, later, they had to have a dock and a barn or some place to store the stuff and they took in little Judy Hancock, the daughter of the banker, J. Kearney Hancock, with the big summer place at Nissequogue—oh, they was all into it, this fast young set out this way, and that's why I'm willin' to be out here—'cause it all stole my boyfriend off me, and they wasn't makin' no place in it for me, anyhow."

"Oh, they was all into it, this fast young set out this way, and that's why I'm willin'—it stole my boy friend off me."

McNaught winked sidewise. After all Mazie was no more transparent than are the great international bankers. There wasn't anything in it for her.

"And another thing," she tumbled out to make a complete story of it, "you know this Judy Hancock had a mighty good wireless on her place and the 'Gigolo' had a wireless. You see, they was all set. Ev Barr was financin' and all the girls was crazy over him, anyhow, Lola Langhorne, Judy Hancock, even Trixie Dare. Say, I seen there was trouble comin'—and I ducked—quick!"

A liveried chauffeur handed Kennedy a note. He read it, crumpled it in his pocket and nodded, "No answer—except I'll be there!"

CHAPTER III
THRILLS AND CHILLS

"IT was little Judy Hancock," explained Kennedy about the note a few minutes later when we had left the hospital and made an appointment to meet McNaught later. "In some kind of trouble down at a lawyer's office in the village. I knew her father, Kearney Hancock, president of the Harbor County Bank out here, and a lot of things in the city. It must be something to do with the case or she wouldn't know where to find me. How fast news spreads! I'd better see what it is and if I can help her."

It wasn't long before we met a very excited girl in the law office on the second floor of the bank building. Judy was undoubtedly pretty, scarcely more than in the debutante age, with a mass of golden hair which she was constantly brushing back with a small white hand in graceful, quick, nervous actions.

"Mr. Kennedy," she blurted out, "I've been arrested by revenuers in my car on the state road for carrying a case of liquor! I gave a fictitious name. But they have the car and of course when they look up the license number they'll find my real name and all that. I left my diamonds as bail, but they were kind enough to fingerprint me and let me out that way because I was a girl. And the worst of it is the case of hootch was planted on me at that!"

Judy smiled a wanly superior smile and turned to Craig. "The trouble is, Mr. Kennedy, I've been in a rum-running scheme all the time, just for the excitement of the thing. Ev Barr told me there was no particular danger in it, so I went in, just for a lark. But it seems as if we were wrong."

As I studied Judy, I couldn't help wondering at sweet seventeen of today. Here was one little girl with unusual beauty, wealth and social position. She lacked thrills and excitement. The movies no longer supplied the thrills. She was blasé on racing cars, fast motor boats, aeroplanes, parties, scandal, everything. It was a splendid foundation on which a booze broker might build a capable bootlegging accessory—and evidently had done so. There was a thrill of smartness in defying the law. Now there was a chill of getting caught, rightly or wrongly. Craig said nothing of what he already knew, but just let her talk ahead.

"You see," she went on, "I started in by agreeing with Ev to go down to our bungalow on Pine Beach and use my wireless about the time they expected a tanker outside the twelve mile limit. Ev had a pretty good sending set on his 'Gigolo' and they had a fine one, of course, on the tanker. We've opened our town house and I had the run of the bungalow. So I got in deeper and deeper. It was thrilling, y'know."

It must have been. She was nervously balling and unballing her gloves, plucking at the fingers. "Mr. Jameson," she appealed to me, "you'll keep me out of the papers, won't you? Do you know, I'm more afraid of Dad than the law! Somehow or other I respect him—but the law... I suppose I shouldn't say it with all this talk of respect for law, but all the very best people are laughing at the eighteenth commandment more than ever."

Craig looked at this seventeen-year-old girl in amazement. His face quickly assumed a serious cast. "I'm glad you sent for me, Judy. You're not the first person to see me on this affair today. I know your father, and I feel that I ought to do something to—lighten the blow. The Government is already at work. Tell me frankly—is there anything that would drag you into this murder of Lola Langhorne?" Kennedy paused, looking at Judy with eyes that would not accept a lie.

SHE startled. "Oh!... But of course you know about that. I forgot. Of course. How would I have reached you, otherwise?" She turned as if fascinated, then tremulously spoke of her fears. "We were worried last night over Lola not getting to shore. She had over a hundred cases on the 'Gigolo,' Ev's boat, with Captain Ryder Smith. He's an old fisherman down here that we got to run the cruiser. Ev's out on the tanker. We were worried; no word from Lola all night; and a tip that a revenue boat was coming tomorrow. Then I heard the gossip about the 'Gigolo' sunk and a revenue boat standing by and a dead girl on the cruiser. Down at the dock I heard it was Lola. And I heard they had some of Dad's guns on the 'Gigolo,' too!"

"Easy enough. I suppose 'most anyone of them might have got in the gun room at the bungalow," she answered glibly. "But, Mr. Kennedy, I was worried over Dad's guns. So, I started up here to see our lawyer. I never looked at a thing in my sport car but the gas. Then these revenuers stopped me on the road, showed their badges, wanted to look over the car. I was completely floored when they found a case of Scotch under the cover where the extra rear seat is!"

She paused to convince us. "I didn't know it was there. I told them it must have been a frame. But they only laughed. 'That's what they all say!' One of them was mighty fresh. He said I was too pretty to get into trouble, that there was something better than bootlegging, and tried to make a date with me. I was more afraid of him than I was of either Dad or the law!"

Judy's sophistication was only a cover, like many people who like to be thought a great deal worse than they really are. Under that cover she was almost in tears. "Oh, what a day it has started out to be, Mr. Kennedy! To lose one ©f my girl friends, to have the feeling that I'm some way to be mixed up in her murder, and to be arrested for transporting a case of Scotch I know nothing about—although it was our Scotch and I might have been carrying it if I wanted to! Oh, why did I agree with Ev to go into this thing? Ev fascinates me. You'll help me, Mr. Kennedy? I feel as if I had enemies all around me. Who would take father's guns and leave them on that boat? Who would put that hootch in my car when we were working like mad yesterday, last night and today to get the stuff all landed—and away? Who wanted to get me arrested? Who hates me that much?"

"Or who fears you that much?" corrected Kennedy. "Now, you poor foolish little girl, you've been doing most of the talking, your way. Let me ask you who has been at the bungalow since you have been lightering this stuff ashore? Who had a chance to get the guns?"

"Oh, all of them," she answered hastily. "But Ev's out on the tanker as supercargo, or whatever you call it. You know, I told you we got a tip—at least Warner Davis did—that a coast guard boat was due in this part of the Sound tomorrow. So everybody was working hard to get all the stuff ashore yesterday and today. We had four boats huckstering for us—that's what they call it—huckstering, like it was garden trucks going into the city. Some excitement!"

"Yes—but this coast guard boat, you know. I had a small motor boat, half decked over, and this Jake Merck, the chauffeur, who understands all about gas engines said he would take it out to the tanker, 'All Alone,' and bring in some cases if someone would help him. I think we would have landed it all if this terrible—this murder hadn't happened on the 'Gigolo' which could carry most and was fastest."

"Did you make any trips?" I asked, seeing in it the story of a flapper rum-runner.

"A couple of trips. Trixie Dare made a couple, too. You know we could take only about thirty cases on it. We've been working five days, that is it would have been, with today."

"Where's Jake Merck now? Thirty cases didn't help much with the thousands you had altogether."

"I know it. But we were going to move along the coast somewhere else if we had to. Warner Davis was getting the low-down on that. I guess our tip was no good. The revenue boat got here a day ahead. Why, we decided it was dangerous to leave the stuff in the big garage down there at the bungalow. So Jake got motor-trucks and moved the stuff to a warehouse in the city over on the West Side. It's there now. But Jake's gone."

"Oh, he has a boat, the 'Alert,' sort of a trawler. They say he's made a lot of money running stuff in with it. Oh, he's rich out of the game. Anyhow when this tip came I told them about Ryder Smith and they said to get him even if it cost ten dollars a case for lightering the stuff to shore. So we did. Ev wanted to stay on the tanker so he got Captain Smith to take the 'Gigolo.' The crew of the trawler could handle her and Warner Davis was in charge of that. Jean Bartow, Warner's friend, stayed at the bungalow with me at the wireless but this last trip of the trawler, Warner took her back with him. I had the wireless alone. The last message I received from the 'All Alone' was that Lola and Captain Smith were bringing in a hundred cases last night. They never arrived. Instead the coast guard picks up the 'Gigolo' and Lola is dead. Captain Ryder Smith had disappeared. Maybe he's been drowned."

"Oh, yes. Well, out there on the 'All Alone' they had a big motor dory. Donato—this Don the Dude, as they call him—took that. Trixie Dare made some trips with him but she quit. She's a jealous cat, anyway. I hear she stole Don from another girl in the first place. Lola liked Don pretty well. He's a good dancing man. In Paris they'd call him the gigolo—not Ev's boat! Some of her own medicine to Trixie!"

"But, Judy," inquired Craig, "What's this I hear about you and Ev Barr? Didn't you take—Dr— have any rival?"

Judy looked at him keenly, as if he were uncomfortably close to guessing her secret. "I haven't any affairs! Suppose I do care for Ev Barr? Maybe he is older than I am. Maybe he does keep telling me we'll get married when I am eighteen. What of it? Yes—the only trouble is Ev's such a good fellow all the girls adore him. Sure—Lola went out with him more than I liked. I was hoping Lola wouldn't go to Nassau on the tanker with the rest—but she did—along with Trixie and her dancing man. I ought to have gone. I might have kept Ev out of trouble. But what would Dad have said to that?"

"All the girls cultivate Ev Barr, don't they?" It was as if Kennedy had thrust a knife in a wound and turned it around.

It troubled Judy to answer. It is hard for a girl to admit that the man she loves is a philanderer. It's too much like saying, "I'm a simp to stand it—but I can't help it."

"Oh," she murmured, "I guess even this Jean Bartow had a crush on him. She never said much about it—not before me, anyhow. But she had his picture and it used to make me mad to hear her say, 'When Ev gets back from Nassau' and so on. I don't think Ev even wrote to her, except for a picture card or two. I really think Ev cares for me and wouldn't let me go to Nassau because he didn't want me in danger on the tanker. I've succeeded in getting into enough danger though, it seems... Still, I don't like even that name 'Gigolo' on the cruiser. Ev's no gigolo—although some of these other men look very much like gigolos to me!"

She looked at me appraisingly. "Lola fell for him," she said slowly. "How hard I cannot say. Some of us are queer."

"By the way," Kennedy recalled us to the facts of the case, "the stuff's not at the bungalow but in a warehouse? Where?"

"Yes. Deitz; in the Broadway and Forty-second Street Building, the man who put Ev wise to the hundred thousand cases on the wharves in Nassau in the first place."

We were leaving the Bank Building. "I want you to go to the home of some friend, some quiet home, Judy," admonished Craig. "Before many hours you must tell the whole story to your father."

She shot a startled glance at Kennedy. But there was no chance to remonstrate. The grinding of the brakes of a car interrupted that, as the man at the wheel regarded Kennedy with a very chastened and chagrinned expression on his face. It was the coroner.

"Kennedy," Dr. Gibson was speaking slowly as if every word humbled him, "I have performed many autopsies— but never one like this. Analysis of the stomach contents shows no trace of any poison at all!"

"No marks of a needle?" asked Kennedy too charitable to rub it in and enjoy the medical man's discomfiture.

See November Radio Digest for the next developments in
the mystery of the derelict "Gigolo" and the Green Death.

PART II

CRAIG KENNEDY and his newspaper friend, Walter Jameson, sat down to compare notes and incidents that might have a bearing on the mysterious death of beautiful Lola Langhorne.

"The ghastly green color of her skin should afford some kind of a clue," Jameson insisted; "but who had seen her die? All we know is that we found her dead, sitting at a table in the sinking Gigolo, which carried one hundred and ten cases of liquor—no other human being aboard.

"Of course Mazie Mellish, the dance hall girl, was vengeful. She tipped off the prohibition agents and she was jealous over her sweetie, Don the Dude—Trixie Dare had captured his affections. Mazie, Trixie, Lola, Don and Eversley Barr escaped in Jake Merck's taxi from a raid on the Golden Glades. They fled to the Exclusive Club and there conspired to import and sell one hundred thousand cases of hootch. Lola had a small estate at St. James Harbor on Long Island where they could land the stuff. Ev Barr could back the deal as he had an allowance of $5,000 a month. They were joined by Warner Davis and Jean Bartow, and Davis was to dispose of the liquor in New York.

"Barr's cruiser was planned to bring it ashore. Then they had to have a barn or some place to store the liquor as soon as it was landed. So that brought little Judy Hancock, the banker's daughter, into it, and Judy was in love with Barr. Lola, Trixie and Judy were all in love with Eversley Barr. Judy was seventeen, but she imagined she was very wild, and she volunteered the use of her amateur wireless to signal the rum ship outside the twelve-mile zone. And then some person had planted a case of booze in her car and she was arrested.

"At last the coroner came on the scene and said that he had been unable to find any evidence of poison as the cause of Lola Langhorne's death. What then did cause her to die, her skin turning to vivid green?"

Judy, Kennedy the coroner and I stood there each with the same puzzling question in mind, "How did Lola Langhorne meet her death?"

CHAPTER IV
THE DANCING MAN

BAFFLED, the coroner was regarding Kennedy as we stood for a moment on Main Street of the little village.

"Oh, Miss Hancock, message for you!" A boy on a bicycle had pulled up to the curb, shoved an envelope into Judy's hand and before we knew it was gone around the corner.

Judy took it, a bit nonplussed by being recognized by a stranger. She tore the envelope open, read the scrawl on the inside, and in real terror now handed it to Craig.

Why involve Kennedy? Wasn't it enough to have McNaught get him in? Do you want to cut off the career of a brilliant Criminologist by dragging him deeper into a sordid rum-running case? Keep out of it yourself. Let the Government bungle it.

"That's all right, little girl. It looks as though this was really a threat to me to keep out of the case, more than to you." He studied the paper a moment, then turned to Dr. Gibson.

"To get back to our starting point; Doctor." he said briskly, "here's a girl, Lola Langhorne, found on a sinking cruiser, the 'Gigolo,' out in the middle of Long Island Sound, alone, dead! She is not drowned. She has not been shot. There is not a mark of violence, apparently, on her body. Yet you tell me. Doctor, that she was not poisoned!"

"No," confessed the coroner, "there's nothing, not a thing I can find. Not a trace of poison even in the stomach."

AS we left Dr. Gibson driving up the street, Kennedy turned to little Judy. Judy was full of the threat of the note. But Craig was not quite ready for that, yet.

"Now, Judy," he said gravely, "you've heard enough about Lola Langhorne already to realize that you have been a very foolish little girl, haven't you?"

"The price of that is that you play on the level with me. You're afraid of your father just now. You're not going to slip back into this mess, are you? Suppose you did not go right home. Where would you go, honestly?"

She looked at him directly. There was no evading this man. She thought quick. "Oh, I'd go to Aunt Julia Keasley's in Oldfield."

"Very good, then. We'll consider that a promise on your honor. Now first let's get this straight, just where you really think your little playmates in this fatal society rum-running are now."

Of course Kennedy was seeking more clues from Judy on which to work. Without a doubt she had them, without knowing them. She was thinking it over carefully.

"Now, don't hold back anything. Come clean. Where are they all, the people in this affair?"

"Where are they all? The people in it? Well. Eversley Barr owns that boat, the 'Gigolo.' He is out on the tanker, 'All Alone,' somewhere beyond the twelve-mile limit, with the rest of the stuff."

"We'll try it later. The immediate question is picking up what we can ashore before it is too late. Now, for instance, I've met that girl, Mazie Mellish," he added, changing the subject and watching Judy's face keenly.

"Oh, so then you know about Trixie Dare and Donato already? They're out on another boat."

"They're supposed to be on Captain Ryder Smith's trawler, the 'Alert.' Ryder Smith was supposed to be on the 'Gigolo.' But he seems to have disappeared as if the waves had swallowed him up. Of course, there's Jake Merck ashore, somewhere in the city. I guess."

"Well," I interrupted, "eliminating them one by one as you have enumerated them, Craig. I would say that the first to be found ought to be this Captain Ryder Smith. He was on the 'Gigolo' when it started from the rum boat out there—and certainly not on it when we sighted it from the air here. Find Ryder Smith and we have the key, I would say."

"It sounds simple, Walter. But where would you begin?" Kennedy passed the buck right back to me. "Elimination is the first step in running down a mystery, true. But not too fast, Walter."

I shifted my ground. "What poison was it then? Why not tackle that next?" I had a vivid picture of what we had seen. "How did she get it? I can't forget it—her face—that green!"

"Now that Dr. Gibson has stepped out of the way, I think I could tell that quickly. I have an idea how it was done."

"I'd rather not say until I have a chance to check up and confirm my suspicion."

I knew it was useless for me to pursue the subject. Nothing would draw a word, except of evasion, from Kennedy until he was absolutely sure of his ground.

"The question is, then, who is this Dancing Man?" I speculated. "Is that a cover? Who's ashore? Merck!"

"Not necessarily from anyone ashore," considered Kennedy. "Someone might have an agent ashore. Now, Judy, what about Donato, this Don the Dude? He's quite a well known night-life character. Did—Dr—Don ever try to get familiar with you?"

"He thinks all the girls fall for him! But I care too much for Ev Barr—and, besides, it makes Trix furious every time he looks at another girl. Why, he might have sent that note—that is, had someone ashore send it for him.

"That wasn't just why I asked. I was interested in his habits and his hangouts. Don the Dude was one of the moving spirits in getting this unfortunate affair started. Once we get started on him right, we might break the case wide open and find out who killed Lola Langhorne. It is one way of getting at it. The point is—is there any place out here where Donato used to go?"

"The Exclusive Club—their country roadhouse, over at Landing. He introduced us there. We all used to drop in there. They—"

"Then that's where I am going. But I think you had better not go, Judy, not after that note. You go to your aunt's. Whom shall I ask for, in order to get in right?"

IT was not long after we saw Judy unwillingly on her way to her aunt's before we arrived at the Exclusive Club road-house. It was a long, low, earth-clinging building, like an old English manor-house. Once it had been an estate but now it was a road-house. It was near the water and on the roadside before it stood an old ship's figurehead of Hercules on a pedestal. Hercules had once drifted up from a wreck in a storm.

There was a wide porch, one end of which was closed in to make a dining room for all the year. We entered, seeking this end, where Kennedy picked out a corner, nodding as he did so to a bus-boy, "Send Julius—only Julius, mind."

Kennedy has a way of making himself familiar with strange places and strangers. By the time Julius arrived he was ready to greet him as a long-lost friend.

"Any of the old crowd here?" asked Kennedy. "We just left Judy. I saw Mazie this morning, too, over at Port."

Julius nodded. "Mazie's been here, too—just left half an hour ago, in a taxi."

Julius nodded. Business was what he was there for and he disappeared to execute our orders.

I glanced at Kennedy. "Do you suppose Mazie's double-crossing McNaught and the Government—or is Merck 'taking her for a ride?'"

"I hope it's not a stall, for us," was all he replied. Then as Julius returned with his tray, "I thought Merck was operating some trucks?"

"Sure; Deitz. Broadway and Forty-second. Say, would you give me a card to Dietz, with an O.K.? I'm buying some good stuff, if I can get it right."

Julius was scrawling an address and an O.K. on the back of one of his cards when a boy came with a telephone message.

It was the fictitious name we had agreed on before leaving Judy and Craig nodded. "Telephone, sir."

Kennedy rose, and in a couple of minutes was back from the booth. "It was Judy, as you guessed, no doubt, Walter, I think we'll be moving on to the city. She tried to get the 'All Alone' again by radio at her aunt's. No answer. But she got the trawler, 'Alert,' you know—Ryder Smith's boat, with Warner Davis and Jean Bartow on it. The 'All Alone' has put out to sea, disappeared, moving to some other place where the Government boats are not so active."

"That's why we have to go into the city—this Deitz is the one to tell us in a hurry!"

CHAPTER V
FLAPPERS AND BOOTLEGGERS

IT was the opening Kennedy had been seeking in the case. Hitherto it had been like trying to move a spherical safe; no corners to take hold of. Here was an angle.

It was not long, therefore, before we were back in the city seeking out the syndicate bootlegger, Deitz, in the Broadway and Forty-second Street Building. He was there, all right, doing business under the guise of a law firm whose name was on the door and whose sheepskins and leather books were in the outer office.

What interested me much was the number of girls about as we entered the building. It was in the district where there are many theatrical and motion-picture enterprises. But I felt that that did not wholly account for it. The fact was that here was an alliance of flappers and bootleggers. One might well despair of the great moral reform with the noble motive.

We had not so much as got to the elevators when Kennedy turned suddenly aside and greeted a girl who had been talking to a lounge lizard in a belted coat, tailored up to the minute. To my amazement I saw that it was Mazie Mellish!

"How did you get here? I thought you were out in the country to aid Mr. McNaught."

"I was; sure. But he beat it somewhere on his own business. Why should I neglect mine?" She slid the chewing gum back into some sort of pouch in the hack of her mouth as she talked. "When I saw how easy it was to make money, I went into the game, too. You bet! And all I learns from Mr. McNaught's talk—that helps a poor girl, too. Don't you know girls make mighty good retail salesmen for hootch—the best, in fact? No—I ain't givin' up my manicure work. Betcha life, no. That is my office—the hotel barber shop. I got lots of customers."

She looked at him sharply as though she would have said. "Wouldn't you like to know, Mr. Man!" What she actually said was, "Oh, there's runners comes about and takes 'em. They pays me the commission. Sometimes they gives me a telephone number to call up. Always a different one."

KENNEDY might draw his own conclusions, but she was a tough witness. There was much to reflect on in that conversation as we rode up in the elevator. But there was more coming before the afternoon was over.

We found Deitz. He was a stocky fellow of medium height, with a sharp, weasel nose. I don't know how it is, but Kennedy seems to be able to sell himself to bootleggers and parsons; perhaps he is a good actor. Anyhow, with the card of Julius he sold himself to Deitz in five minutes and had him talking about the intimacies of the business in a way that would have read well in print but would have got the printer into a lot of trouble.

Not only that, but he led the conversation around until we got to the Bahama whisky fleet. He knew all about Ev Barr. In fact, it wasn't long before Deitz opened up and told us practically that he knew where the stuff that Barr was bringing in was.

"I'm getting lots of it from the boats. Most of what the public buys, of course, just between you and me, is this redistilled industrial alcohol. But there's good stuff, too, from the boats and from Canada. But, being as you're friends of Mr. Barr, I'll tell you that that stuff he's bringing in is the best. Lots of it gets cut, with water after it's landed—even while they're bringing it over."

"And some of it has never seen the Bahamas at all, I understand," I put in. "They tell me there are ships with gigantic mills, copper coils that mount up from the hold to the deck, that turn out a couple of hundred gallons a day—with labels, bottles, corks, seals, carried out to the ships."

I said nothing. Anything having to do with the subject I have learned to believe when I know it; otherwise to suspend judgment. I had not forgotten a prohibition director's denial in an interview with me once that there were any rum-running boats—whereupon the "Star" hired a tug, sent a photographer out and snapped fourteen.

Kennedy was pondering the question from a practical angle. "Where is this stuff that has been landed?" he asked. "Can I see it—sample it?"

Deitz, who had an office full by this time waiting to see him, nodded. "Sure," he said under his breath. "If you want to run over to the warehouse. It's the Great Rapids Furniture Warehouse on West Street. I'll give you a card. Only, be a little careful. Go over there, Bob will let you sample the stuff direct, there. Then have dinner with me tonight and we'll talk turkey on price."

Outside Mazie was no longer in the lower hall. Kennedy called a cab and we rode over within a block of the address on the card where Craig dismissed the cab and we walked the rest of the way.

"Did you see that fellow with a cab hanging around up there by the market on the corner?" asked Craig, without stopping.

"I'd be willing to bet that is Jake Merck, from the description. Wonder what he's doing here? Maybe they don't trust each other too much and are watching each other."

We entered. Back of the grimy windows of the blackened brick warehouse I saw such sights involving bottles as might have made a feature story any Sunday for the paper. There was nothing from Great Rapids in this furniture warehouse. But there was lots of other stuff.

It seemed that there were two classes of goods, as Bob readily explained from Deitz's O.K. Some, like that Eversley Barr had brought in, was going to wealthy connoisseurs who were constant customers and whose trade was not only constant but valuable. This stuff was let alone; that was what they were paying for. But there was much that was not.

I had heard of filling non-refillable bottles, of cutting the bottom out of bottles, fusing the glass again after they had been filled with half water or half low-grade stuff. These people had the science of it. No bottle was non-fillable to them. In such a case the label was all right; the seal was all right. But they were getting better than two for one on the contents with the aid of the excellent city water supply and some flavoring. As for the remainder, there were bottles with names blown in them, labels counterfeited, seals duplicated so well, so much to see, that it took us a long time to get down to the real ostensible purpose of our visit. In fact, we never did get to it.

SUDDENLY there was an outcry inside, a clanging and smashing outside—and on our first visit to a whisky warehouse under the present regime, we found ourselves captives in a raid by the enforcement forces!

"McNaught!" muttered Kennedy under his hand as we saw our friend, who was evidently engineering the raid.

"For the love of Mike!" McNaught eyed us among the miscellaneous group that had been herded by a couple of his armed men in the book-keepers' office. "Step outside. I want to see you."

"Was it you pinched little Judy Hancock out there?" asked Kennedy the moment we were in the hall.

"No, but my men tell me the office got a tip—underground—same as this tip was. How did you fellows get here?"

Kennedy evaded answering. I could see, however, that McNaught was much impressed. How was it that he had bobbed up there and at just such a time?

WE had crossed wires on the trail. As far as Craig was concerned he was principally anxious to get back on the main line along which he was acting. Thus it resulted in taking Deitz up on his offer of a dinner and we three went to a rather famous restaurant that conformed with the law.

In spite of the fact that it was Deitz's loss, he did not seem to be unduly worried by the raid. To Deitz it was just an unfortunate hazard in the course of an extra-hazardous undertaking. Besides, his partners were really lawyers. There was always a chance of beating the case.

"I'm amazed at how philosophically you take the raid," remarked Kennedy, as the waiter took our order.

"You can't kick when you lose, sometimes," returned Deitz. "Think what you win other times! For instance, those fellows out there—" he waved his hand with a sparkler on it in the general direction of the Atlantic ocean—"pay an average, let us say, of fifteen dollars a case in Nassau. They might average forty dollars out there on the Banks. That's a hundred and fifty per cent profit and no great risk so far; none from the law as long as they keep out of the twelve-mile limit; it's all on the high seas. Well, suppose these other fellows that bring it from them get a hundred a case ashore. That's another hundred and fifty per cent profit to them. They have the risk, though."

Kennedy smiled. "It's a great business, slaking the national thirst—over five hundred per cent profit from Nassau to New York."

The broker was complacent. "More money in it than in anything I ever tackled, and I've been a bookie, in the market, 'most everything. It's just like any other industry. The middleman is getting all the profits. The producer has to shave his close—and the consumer's the sucker! Now, come back to my terms. Half down—the other half as and when delivered."

"Not a chance!" Deitz laughed at Craig's scepticism. "We can put a revenue man on every truck, if we want. You take your chance after delivery, of course—just like the rest of us —just like you saw this afternoon. But from the time the stuff is landed, not a chance—not with this bird!"

"You know I didn't get an opportunity to sample any of that 'All Alone' stuff. That confounded McNaught jumped in there before your man, Bob, could get to it. Mine are fastidious people. Besides, I'm told the 'All Alone' has been moved to some other spot along the coast from Long Island. I really must know what I am buying, see it."

Deitz looked at him a moment critically. "No trouble on that if you're game," he said quickly. "She's been moved down here to the Jersey fishing banks. Take you out to the fleet if you don't mind the risk."

"Risk?" repeated Kennedy nonchalantly, betraying no whit of his satisfaction at accomplishing what had looked like the unattainable next step in the case only a few hours before. "I think it would be a lark!"

CHAPTER VI
RUM ROW

DOWN near the Battery, Deitz conducted us along a wharf until we came to a staunch but dirty cruiser, the "Skoal," tossing restlessly in the swirl of the tide.

"There are three of the ships in the rum fleet that I have been doing business with," remarked Deitz. "They are lying about fifteen miles out, I should say, and they had pretty full cargoes of the stuff to start with. You say you're most interested in the stuff that Eversley Barr has brought in. Well, we'll see that and the others, too."

On the other side of the slip in the rising moonlight I noted another small boat tossing, evidently waiting for someone. As an arc light on the other wharf swung in the smart breeze, it revealed the face of one man in the boat. To my surprise it was the same face that Kennedy and I had seen watching on the corner as though he might have been a look-out just before the raid.

I called Craig's attention to him, but as the fellow did not seem ready to move and was certainly not watching us, there did not seem to be anything to do but to let him alone. In fact, we forgot him a few moments later when we were underway, slipping out into the choppy waves, down past Governor's Island to the left and the Statue of Liberty to the right.

As we were gliding along through the Narrows and in the Upper Bay we passed a couple of police boats on the hunt for rum smugglers. Kennedy was talking an order of a thousand cases and this caused him to express a fear that it would never get through.

Deitz merely laughed. "Delivery guaranteed for ten dollars a case added to what you pay out here for it!"

"Not me!" protested Deitz. "I'll run it ashore—somewhere—get it on four trucks—my trucks carry about two hundred and fifty cases each—and deliver it anywhere you say—ten dollars a case for delivery. How about that?"

I marvelled at the organization of it all. Of course, everyone was taking a chance. But this man talked of it as though the science of booze blockade-running had reduced the thing to a state where he could quote liquor like cotton.

Still, as we chug-chugged along down in the expanse of the lower bay and around Sandy Hook into the ocean, I was convinced that some at least of the swift-moving craft we saw now and then were revenue boats, fast cruisers of the Dry Navy.

Nothing shook the confidence of Deitz who continued to descant on the quality of his goods, his reputation for prompt and satisfactory service and his credit. Every statement called forth an acquiescent nod from the skipper of the "Skoal," a thick-handed, blond progeny of Norse Vikings.

IT was not quite three hours after we started and some miles southeast of Ambrose Lightship when we sighted a part of the liquor fleet, as free as if it were no man's sea out here within the very beams of Scotland Lightship and Sandy Hook Lightship.

I counted a dozen of them as we ran along, and there were more than that which I could not see. This was the Bahama rum fleet just off shore in the safety zone, hove to, or riding at anchor saucily. As our Norse skipper ran us close to some of them we were taken for buyers and greeted with offers of varied and assorted liquors at prices that fell sharply under what was really international competition.

Here and there I saw a steamer, a trawler, at anchor, looking mightily expectant as they smudged the horizon further out. There were even some auxiliary schooners outside the twelve-mile limit and the stuff they had for sale was Scotch and Canadian liquors.

I learned from the skipper that there were many Nova Scotian and New England vessels, that some came down from Canada to unload, then went on to the Bahamas for a new cargo, coming back and going on again to Canada for more, swinging around the big circuit, as it were. They were migratory birds.

I HAD heard a great deal of talk about the rum fleet being mythical, that it was press-agent talk to promote bootleg sales. But what of this schooner, a slate-gray craft from Halifax? Why was it down from the neighborhood of the Great Banks where fish are about as plentiful as anywhere in the world, to cast its nets in waters off New York where fish are pitifully few?

The skipper changed his course and swung across the trough of a restless sea. The "Skoal" plunged her nose into the swells that mark the deep water some twenty-five or more miles out from the Battery.

"I don't know the 'All Alone'." confessed Deitz after a conference with the skipper. "Nor does the Swede. We're going to put in and ask this Frenchman here. I buy from him sometimes."

We had run alongside a schooner with no topmasts, all stripped down, ready for any gale or anything else. The captain had signs hung out quoting prices—just like gasoline. If he found competition he cut the price to meet it.

"This chap's a wonder," explained Deitz. "The eels aren't any slicker than he is. The government's been trying to get him a long time."

A couple of cargo booms swung out from the masts and over the side hung rope fenders as inviting as a door-mat with "Welcome" worked on it. The lookout shouted. I could not make out what he called, nor the reply of our Viking, but a couple of other muffled figures appeared on deck and stolidly watched us until we came around to the lee, then helped us aboard.

Down in the cabin, with my eyes wide. I saw that guns were everywhere, and knives. It was the mangiest-looking crew imaginable. The captain was not visible at first but at last he came in, a burly, scarred, frayed black man, who greeted Deitz warily in West Indian French-American.

All the while I was watching the ratty crew and wondering what besides those we saw might be under cover down below in the hold or up in the fo'castle.

WHAT an atmosphere, I thought, for murder, for any crime that ran against the laws of God or man!

A question about the tanker "All Alone" elicited first a gruff grunt. It was an invitation to keep off the secrets of the business. But Deitz was too important a customer to be put off with a grunt. The captain finally whispered hoarsely to him and gestured in a general direction southward.

Over the perilous side again to our craft, our skipper headed down to the south'ard and pointed as we came at last abeam of a dirty almost rusty tanker, if anything more disreputable than all the rest, smaller and more wicked-looking. I wondered if it would hold together until we got aboard—and after.

A look-out in olive drab, once issued by a supply officer of the army of the United States, flapped his arms about in a vain attempt to beat off the freezing wind.

"How much for Scotch?" shouted Deitz, the inveterate joker, seizing a little megaphone.

The answer was lost in the wind. In fact, the lookout did not seem to care whether they sold or kept. He seemed to know they had plenty of outlets through chance jobbers. Contemptuously he took out a black bottle, ostentatiously tipped it up as he threw his head back, drained the dregs left in it, then flung the bottle overboard into the lacy crest of a wave that was slinking along the lifting hull of the little tramp tanker.

Our Viking guffawed. Just then a rather athletic-looking chap in a sheep-lined khaki reefer came from below. I saw that this was Ev Barr himself. After him came a dapper fellow in a smart cloth polo cap greatly in favor on Broadway between Longacre Square and Columbus Circle. I took him instantly to be Don the Dude.

"It's Deitz!" shouted Barr excitedly. "Come aboard! Maybe you can help us—something terrible has happened!"

Every forward step on the trail of the mysterious urderers of the lovely Lola Langhorne is fraught with new peril. What was the terrible thing that had happened aboard when Barr shouted to Dietz to come aboard with Craig Kennedy and his companion? Read the thrilling sequence in the December Radio Digest.

PART III

WHAT subtle and mysterious ingredient had entered the blood stream of Lola Langhorne and caused her skin to turn a ghastly green as her life ebbed away in the lonely cabin of the 'Gigolo''?

Even the master detective, Craig Kennedy, was mystified. But searching for a motive he discovered a suddenly organized clique under the direction of Eversley Barr to import a cargo of contraband booze. Barr and Donato, known as Don the Dude, were using their peculiar charm for women to involve not only Lola Langhorne, the pretty divorcee, and her yacht but also little Judy Hancock, the seventeen-year-old banker's daughter. Then there were the night club girls Mazie Mellish, jealous of Trixie Dare and perhaps of Lola, too.

From Mazie Craig obtained his first clues that led him through some of the intricacies of the New York rum runners' labyrinth. He obtained an introduction to Dietz, a liquor broker, and through Dietz as a guide and sponsor Kennedy went out to the fleet in search of the ship that had carried the other members of the party that had been associated with Lola Langhorne just before her death.

Dietz brought Craig Kennedy and his newspaper reporter friend, Waller Jameson, to the tanker where Eversley Bar peered over the rail and directed them to come aboard.

"Come aboard," shouted Barr, "something terrible has happened—maybe you can help us."

CHAPTER VII
THE TWELVE-MILE LIMIT

ACROSS the water out there beyond the twelve-mile limit I looked at the West-Indian Frenchman, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. In the cold moonlight we could see a small boat come up, but we were too far away to see who it was that was making the transfer to the other rum-runner.

Our Viking laughed. "Cap'n has customer already! I gass we bane bring him luck!"

"These fellows in small boats have their nerve, with the revenuers all on the watch," I observed.

"Nerve?" repeated Deitz. "You mean they have no nerves! They don't know what fear is. Take a chance on anything—even being sunk out here in the ocean itself. They gotter be that way. I tell you, you don't know what bein' high-handed is until you run up against one of these here revenue boats. They don't know no law of God or man in keepin' our country pure!"

We had difficulty getting over the side of the "All Alone," as Ev Barr had re-named his tanker which looked to me like she might be rusted so through and through that she would founder if you poked a stick at her.

The name "Haugesand: Norway," a little fishing village in the Land of the Midnight Sun, had been clumsily painted out, in spite of the well-known superstition of the bad luck that attends the change of a boat's name. These were no ordinary sailors, however.

The bark of a police dog which Barr ordered back below so that he might help us aboard unhampered, showed that here was class, no ordinary rum-runner like the one we had just seen.

As Deitz, Kennedy and I came over the rail, we saw that there were several others on the boat poking their heads out of a cabin hatch.

YOUNG Eversley Barr seemed overjoyed to see somebody from land. In a general clatter of tongues we managed to pass not unnoticed but without being inquired about too closely inasmuch as we came sponsored by Deitz and must therefore be O.K. Kennedy was introduced merely as "Mr. Kendrick."

"Why—what's the terrible thing that's happened?" inquired Deitz. "You mean about that girl, Lola Langhorne, that was found dead? Too bad. Too bad about your boat, too. I suppose it will be libelled and seized and put up for sale. They found stuff on it. But you needn't worry about that. My 'legal department' will take care of buying that back. It really amounts to a fine, or a license. Too bad—but they could make it worse—and cost more."

"Oh, hang the boat!" muttered Barr. "I'm not worried about the 'Gigolo.' But Lola—what happened to her?"

Deitz shrugged. One life more or less in this game, even his own, I verily believe, made little difference. The Atlantic was a busy ocean, never so busy since Drake, when bold English sea-pirates lay in wait for Spanish galleons. The new piracy was less romantic than the old, but more active—and a lot more money in it than even in galleons. Deitz's bravado was justified; it was also safer than in the old days. Of course there was nothing going on—yet fortunes were being made in Canada and the Bahamas. About once a month the Coast Guard announced the sea was again clear of rum runners. No one ever stopped to think that if it had been clear the month before there was nothing to announce, then, the month after. Still the smuggling went on accompanied by piracy. It was a game, just a game. Deitz might well smile. Chances had to be taken either one way or the other. "You shrug, Deitz; but that doesn't answer anything. Someone killed Lola Langhorne. She didn't kill herself!"

"No." Deitz was positive in his negative. Apparently that was all that interested him in it. "How are things since you moved down this way from up the coast?" Changing the subject.

"Things have been a little quiet, Deitz," answered Barr. "The revenuers are snooping around and since this—Dr—mix-up there's been nothing doing. I got a notification from the Bank that your certified check was deposited, as agreed. But by golly how glad I'll be to get back on solid ground again!" Barr shook his head, in the depths of his sheepskin collar, as he clutched at a shroud of the mainmast to steady himself in the pitching.

"Humph! It's a good thing that it's a custom of the trade—and you have your check!" growled Deitz. "The warehouse was raided by McNaught and his men not twelve hours after the stuff was in it—and I'm the goat.... But you have to expect those little things, now and then." Deitz tossed it off as lightly as even a big operator in this great American game may over a loss of some sixty thousand dollars or more.

Down in the cabin I thought that the two girls, Trixie Dare and Jean Bartow, were more bored than Barr. It looked as if time now were hanging heavy on a crowd who were eager to get away—could it be?—from one another.

Trixie seemed to keep pretty close to Don the Dude Donato, and there didn't seem to be anything else for Jean to do but make up to Warner Davis. Barr spoke to her only when she spoke to him, and I thought that was rather often. I could see none of the enthusiasm that Mazie Mellish had been telling us that existed the night they all made up to go to Nassau for the hootch.

"I've brought out a couple of customers—these acquaintances of yours, Barr," said Deitz jerking his thumb at Kennedy and me finally, when we got settled in the cabin. They're a couple of wise ones. Before they buy any stuff from me they want to do a little tasting. Their clientèle, they say, will take nothing but the best and they must get it. If we can get together, some way, I'll be responsible for getting the stuff ashore."

Barr went over to a cabinet, opened it, and brought out a couple of bottles, both five-starred. Kennedy and I sampled them. They were the real stuff: there was no doubt about that. I would have been more vehement in praising the mildness and smoothness of it, except for the fact that I knew a sale as Deitz looked upon sales would tax the combined resources of Kennedy and myself if it ever went through. Deitz was a high-pressure salesman. I felt our salvation was in Kennedy's sales' resistance. Accordingly I lay low. Barr, now, on the other hand, seemed a bit more pleased with life, a little brighter under adversity, a quality that, I reflected, had almost fled from millions ashore.

"Pity the poor landlubbers on a night like this!" exclaimed Deitz, always extracting a grain of humor to lighten life. He did not drink, however. Instead, he poured a few drops into the hollow of one palm, then rubbed his palms together, and held both, cupped, up to his nose to smell the bouquet. It was an action I had not seen for many a day with liquor salesmen. Then he took a sip in his mouth, rolled it about, tasted it and spat it out.

"You may look, Deitzie old boy," he smiled to himself at e bottles, "but you must not drink."

I turned to Warner and Jean. They seemed to be the most silent and glum. "What do you think of living on a rum-runner?" I asked, trying to get acquainted.

But it started things, reminiscences from Trixie Dare. It seemed that a week ago, with many thousands of dollars' worth of whiskies, wines, gins, and rare cordials in the hold, and a blue sky overhead with soft, mellow breezes, it had been different. I gathered from the reminiscences that before the week had passed the cargo had been lessened by many cases. It was a picture of canned music on a portable talking machine and of jazz over the radio from New York and other cities, dancing by moonlight, kisses pledged with quarts of Pol Roger and chased by clinkers of Cliquot, in the land where thousands of the pleasure-seekers were vacationing already. This was booze buccaneering par excellence. I felt that the author of "Treasure Island," if he were alive today, would not lack for new and bizarre material.

"Well, you see," unburdened Warner further, "my job since we've been up here has been, a good deal, to cart the stuff ashore. Most of the time Ev Barr's been sort of supercargo, out here. But I can't do any of even that, now. It seems they're watching and it's too risky. On Long Island we had things rigged and could afford to take chances. Now we've got to start all over again. And then someone has to stay here with the girls. We can't leave them alone out here." He waved his hand generally toward the fleet. "Something might happen."

Trixie and Don joined in the conversation. "Has there been time yet for the authorities to get anywhere on that Lola Langhorne case?" inquired Don.

"They're not telling what they know," I covered in my answer, watching him narrowly.

I saw that Trixie had been watching him, too, and her lips moved as if framing a question.

CHAPTER VIII
SUSPICIONS

TRIXIE narrowed her eyes shrewdly as she waited for an opportunity to shoot the question. "Mr. Johnson," she addressed me, "I don't suppose you know, but have they seen or heard anything of Judy Hancock since she disappeared?"

It was like the shock of a dash of cold water in the face to hear Trixie's tone as well as the question. Had her intuition penetrated my alias and did the girl know a good deal more about Craig and me than she was showing? Or was it just chance?

"It seems mighty funny to me that she should run away or whatever has happened to her, just at this time!" she pursued, "We'd know more if she would send on that wave-length we agreed on with that wireless of hers. Seems to me I'd a stayed and seen it through." Trixie looked at Don for corroboration, but she didn't get much in that direction. Don was preoccupied with his own thoughts and ill at ease over something.

"This thing about Lola Langhorne has cast a gloom over the whole business!" exclaimed Trixie. "Before that, everything was going-good. It's too darn bad!"

Yet did I detect a sort of relief in the tone of this girl over the demise of Lola, rather than depression, as though one who might have caused personal trouble in some affair of her heart was thus fortunately taken out of the way? There was something there, but I could not make it out clearly yet.

"Let's not talk about it!" This was from Jean, with a little shiver of the shoulders. "Let's cut the gloom stuff!"

"Yes—why bring that up?" Don the Dude seemed impatient, though he was taciturn on the subject. Again I found myself wondering and trying to look through the glass darkly.

"Well, then," noticed Trixie quickly, "I wish some of you men would start something. It's a great life—if you don't weaken."

IT was just one of those smart trite remarks, that didn't mean a thing yet sounded like something. Warner Davis looked up at it. "Yes—I think the less we think of that murder, or whatever it really was, maybe the better off we'll be out here. Of course we here are all accounted for. But there's others... It seems darn funny Jake Merck, for instance, hasn't shown up out here. And then that raid Deitz was telling about. I wonder what Jake's up to—eh?"

Trix elevated her eyes in a superior manner. "Not in the same class—them two—exactly."

"I don't know. I hear about lots of heiresses that fall for chauffeurs," defended Jean. "It's not ridic, Trix."

I could see that Kennedy was listening in on this interchange and at the same time doing his best to satisfy Deitz and Barr as they discussed quality, quantity, price and delivery. He was trying to shade the price on the basis of twenty-five hundred cases costing $37,500 in Nassau and selling for $100,000 here, with a price of $250,000 for them in the city.

"That Langhorne case is going to cause plenty of excitement in the papers," I volunteered.

On the subject of the murder of Lola none of them seemed to want to talk much. Each was watching and weighing the words of the other. Was there a feeling of mutual suspicion?

"I'm afraid, if I was out here and one of you," joined in Craig, "I'd be so interested to know who it was got her and for what that I'd forget about the hootch business. Was she very pretty?"

He cut short whatever Broadway slang he was about to utter. He had caught the eye of Trixie. It would never do to praise another in this army of beauties where all are generals. Or was there a deeper explanation? Had someone something to conceal?

"I thought when we were coming aboard that you seemed worried over it; that's all." Kennedy said it tentatively, almost apologetically. I knew he was "fishing."

The little party looked from one to the other. There was a return to the former constraint. It was as though no one seemed to want even to think what was in their minds.

Kennedy turned to Barr. "Did Lola Langhorne have any personal enemies?" he persisted.

"I don't know. I don't think so." Yet the very tone was such as to lead me to conclude that Barr did know something at least which he did not care to say to a stranger.

"Of course I don't know anything about this racket," Craig pursued. "But in the trade I've heard Captain Ryder Smith and the 'Alert' mentioned. Who is he and where is he?" He looked about at Deitz. "He might be the one to huckster this stuff ashore provided we get together."

Deitz shook his head. "I'll take care of that. I'd rather. Besides, they don't seem to know where he is or his boat either."

"Almost like that," cut in Barr quickly. "We were operating his boat and he was really in charge of my 'Gigolo,' with Lola."

Kennedy nodded. "Of course, I don't know anything except the gossip I heard ashore. But it seems to me that they said that Warner Davis was operating the trawler 'Alert' and that Miss Bartow was staying with Judy Hancock."

"Yes, I was." Jean Bartow was quick with her explanation. "But the trawler developed some trouble with her engine on Warner's last trip in, couldn't make any speed at all, so after she was unloaded, he let the crew take her to the yard in Greenport where they said Captain Smith always had his work done. He was coming back to the 'All Alone' in the big motor dory and I was tired of doing nothing, so I said I'd go with him."

"So that's how you got out here," nodded Kennedy. "Well, the gossip wasn't so very far wrong then, after all, except they don't know about taking the dory."

"What, an Atlantic dory like that?" she returned. "Remember, the 'All Alone' wasn't off Sandy Hook then. It was off Block Island, about. Why, that dory would be safe in a pretty rough sea in the ocean. That's what they're built for."

"But what about Captain Ryder Smith?" reverted Kennedy. "What became of him? When was he last seen? It seems to me that must be important—if you care about it."

"We do care," hastened Barr. "And it is a mystery. That last load on the 'Gigolo' left the tanker here with Lola and Cap'n Ryder—and that's the last we've seen or heard of him—until we get word as all the rum fleet does about things and we hear about the 'Gigolo' drifting, picked up by the revenue boat and Lola dead. That's when we got the tip to move along down the coast and came here. But I'm worried—and I don't mind who knows it."

"Did she have a quarrel with anyone—or did anyone have a quarrel over her?" I asked, recalling some things Judy had told.

"Say!" broke in Don angrily. "It's bad enough to have had it happen—but that's a bit fresh—from an outsider. Let it drop! Let the police do the work—with gossip!"

Just then there was a series of explosions outside. We forgot to argue and poked our heads out. Any happening out there is like a special extra in the city. It was the other rum-runner we bad been aboard, getting under way with her gas kicker.

"I wonder if they've repealed the Volstead Act—or maybe the Dry Navy's going to run amuck again on the high seas!" Deitz was bound to make his jocose cracks.

It fell flat. The kicker was soon getting the schooner under way. But instead of going out to sea or moving up the line for a better position, she was ranging over toward us.

Suddenly there was a volley of pistol and rifle shots and the glass of our cabin windows was shattered.

With a muttered oath Barr drew an automatic and returned the compliment, but the range was just a little too great for accuracy, nor was the slippery, heaving footing on the old tanker conducive to good marksmanship. Don was firing wildly, too. He was a tea-room gunman, a drug-store cowboy. At least so he impressed me.

In spite of the scattered fusillade from our light arms, on came the schooner, ranging up alongside.

"Hand over that stuff of yours!" boomed a thick voice in a megaphone, borne by the wind.

"Surrender!" boomed the thick voice over the waves. "And be damn quick about it!"

CHAPTER IX
HIJACKERS!

THERE was no immediate reply. For, a small boat, one on a sort of hootch-shopping expedition, some private cruiser, ranged along. It was full of well-bundled-up fellows and girls, singing—and they were carrying a good deal aboard themselves, as well as in the hold. They were, as one might say, half-seas over. Evidently they had heard of bargains and had come out for the lark, doing their shopping early. They ranged up nearer to see the fun. Not a befuddled head among them seemed to realize what it was all about.

"Is this a private fight—or can anybody come in?" shouted one, trying to be funny.

There were screams, male and female—a general ducking for the cabin, such a mix-up of legs and bloomers and arms and felt-hats as only a panic could produce.

The helmsman who was guiding them out where the hootch was cheap swung her helm hard about, got into the trough of the sea, and almost capsized. They shipped more water than would have been a chaser for all they had had to drink—and fled.

This time the demand was repeated. Sullenly Barr, Don and the crew as well as the rest of us allowed the mangy, ratty pack of the schooner to swarm over the rail, some of them almost falling into the fairly heavy seas. There was nothing else to do with the armament of the schooner staring at us.

Then as the ill-smelling crew came toward us, the captain of the schooner suddenly recognized Deitz. "No," he muttered, "just take their guns!"

Both Craig and I were armed and we hated to see those pretty little automatics get out of our possession. But there was nothing else to it for the moment in this fight between roughneck rum-pirates and these silk-stockinged rum-runners.

It was thrilling to me, I admit. It was something to bring back recollections of swashbuckling eighteenth century days when suspicious luggers lurked in every port.

Only then did I realize that these exploits of rum-runners today are revealing a chapter in modern ocean romance which has no parallel this side of the days of Blackbeard, Kidd, Morgan and the other worthies of the Spanish Main.

But this, again, was something else. I suddenly realized that the fellow we had seen dimly waiting in the slip on the other side when we had started from the Battery was indeed Jack Merck! And the passenger, or at least one of them, for whom he had been waiting, was Mazie Mellish!

It might have been piracy on the high seas. But it was different. For here were Mazie and Trixie, the manicure girls,—and such young ladies, as I have said, are rarely dull.

When Trixie saw Mazie climb over the rail and board the "All Alone," followed by Jake Merck, her face and Don's were studies. Beauty and the tearoom manner did not count for much against a Lewis gun. Mazie and Jake had been about the last to come over.

Confidence, a man upon whom she knew she could depend, and revenge, these three made Mazie actually handsome. Her gown was in the latest Broadway fashion for sport-wear and the coat she had on must have cost, for her, a small fortune. The two girls on the "All Alone" looked on in fear tinged with envy. By this time Barr, Warner, Don and the crew had been bound, trussed up so that there was not a fight in all of them.

Then I saw that it was twentieth century primeval. All the men on the schooner were much for Mazie and her ability. I could hear them saying, "Maze will see 'em ashore!" "Leave Maze manage that guy!" It was a plain case of a shrewd girl-crook who had made herself solid with as wicked-looking a group of cutthroats as had ever scuttled a ship on the ocean in the old days of romance. Mazie was thriving on such adulation.

She knew how to put any one of them in his place if he got fresh—and they liked it.

With a devilish look in her eyes and a sneer on her lips, Mazie came up to Trixie who was leaning, half-stunned, against the after cabin. Posing defiantly, she placed her hands on her hips and with arms akimbo surveyed Trixie up and down with a leer. Then she looked at Don the Dude, unheroically bound, with another contemptuous chuckle.

"So! You thought you could steal my man and get away with it, heh? Well. I found out you haven't taken my heart when you took this excess baggage! You told me that night to beat it! That's what I'm telling you now—beat it! You can't beat it. If I wanted to have 'em do it, those men'd throw you overboard—put you in a small boat and set you adrift—make you walk the plank—if we had a plank—anything! I ought to do it!"

Trixie flashed back, dry of eye. She was a curious spectacle of bluffing bravado. She was scared. And Mazie knew it. But Trixie wasn't going to admit she knew Mazie knew it.

"What have you got to say, you cat?" screeched Mazie in her ear. "Don't you hear me? Are you deaf? Where's your tongue?"

TRIXIE was quick-tempered, too. Suddenly she turned and brought her open hand with a resounding whack across Mazie's cheek. There was a general roar from Jake and the other men. I expected momentary violence from them at Trixie's imprudence.

"Take that," Trixie had hissed out, "and that—for the slap with the fingers of your glove that you gave me that night. I haven't forgotten!"

I didn't understand Mazie. She turned from Trixie, with the livid marks of Trixie's hand still on her face.

The men crowded forward ominously. With a shimmy step up to Jake, Mazie told him to stay where he was and keep quiet. She waved her hand. "This is my party! You can give the little girl a hand when it's over!"

Mazie never glanced at Trixie. But she took off her coat and tossed it lightly, like a prize-fighter with his bath-robe, to a man who I had just realized was with them as I heard his name muttered. Cap'n Ryder Smith.

She undid her sport skirt, with a shout from the men. There she was in neat, trim knickers.

By this time her face was pale. Intense anger shone through her eyes. But it was all done quietly and cooly. And it was getting on Trixie's nerves.

Pulling her sleeves up and feeling her hair, Mazie suddenly made one wild jump. With a yell of some deadly female of the species, she landed on Trixie and bore her down to the deck.

"You said it—was empty fingers—the other night! Take that—and that—and that—you—you thief!"

I MADE a move to separate them, but Kennedy and I were covered by half a dozen guns like a flash. The men were shouting and yelling. Jake was dancing up and down with glee. All the troglodyte instincts were loosened. It was his woman at the face of her enemy. "Go to it, Mazie! That's right! Spoil her mug!"

Mazie was indeed a wild woman, oblivious to everything but her struggling rival. Blood was streaming down Trixie's face from the scratches.

Sitting on Trixie's breast as the boat rocked in the long swells, Mazie held her head and ground it into the grimy deck.

"Now—you smart vamp—don't you wish you had let things alone? Sharp nails—the way I cut em, for this, in the hotel!—are better than empty glove fingers—you—"

With a whack on each cheek and moans from Trixie, Mazie picked her up and flung her, not as she had threatened, overboard, but, as the tanker careened, toward Don the Dude, so that she dropped in his lap, uncaught by his trussed-up hands.

TRIXIE was all in, but not seriously hurt. She was whipped publicly, and it was galling.

Mazie made a grand curtsy. "Count—ten—men!" She turned. "Is there a doctor in the house?"

Jake came over and kissed her—which seemed an incongruity until I considered Jake and his curb-cruising breed. "You're great, Mazie! No fuss—just a good mill!"

Of such is the kingdom of Amazon, I thought. On the high seas it once made leaders. The setting changes. But the game is the same.

Always with the main chance in mind. Jake was for taking off the thousands of cases, now.

"Just a minute!" was the deep-sea counsel of the tough captain of the schooner. "Send these others ashore first. What they don't see, won't worry them. They can't tell so much!"

The West Indian pirate looked at Dietz. He knew Deitz and expected to deal with him more and often. He decided it was better so. He even went further.

Deitz was still the humorist, and under obligation to no one. "And get pinched, maybe, with it?" He looked over at our Viking and the "Skoal" riding off stern. "Ships that touch liquor shall never touch mine!" Then he turned and whispered to us, "We'd better beat it while the going is good. Nothing'll happen to the others—if they give up and don't resist. I told you—it's an extra-hazardous business!"

As we buffeted our way back toward the Battery. I drew a long breath of biting salt sea air.

"We may not know who killed Lola Langhorne," I said under my breath, "but we know a lot more about hard women and soft men!"

"Not so soft," corrected Kennedy. "Besides, we know a lot. The dead lips of Lola are eloquent!"

THE next installment of this gripping Craig Kennedy story unfolds farther starling mystery! Don't miss the thrills in the January issue of Radio Digest!

PART IV

WHAT subtle and mysterious ingredient had entered the bloodstream of beautiful Lola Langhorne and caused her skin to turn a ghastly green as her life ebbed away in the lonely cabin of the 'Gigolo'? Even the master detective, Craig Kennedy, was mystified. But while searching for a motive he uncovered a recently organized clique under the direction of Eversley Barr to import a cargo of contraband booze. Barr and Donato, known as Don the Dude, were using their peculiar charm for women to involve not only Lola Langhorne, the pretty divorcee, and her yacht, but also little Judy Hancock, the seventeen-year-old banker's daughter. Then there were the night club girls. Mazie Mellish, jealous of Trixie Dare, and perhaps of Lola, too.

From Mazie, Craig obtained his first clues that led him through some of the intricacies of the New York rum-runners' labyrinth. He obtained an introduction to Dietz, a liquor broker, and through Dietz as a guide and sponsor Kennedy went out to the fleet in search of the ship that had carried the other members of the party that had been associated with Lola Langhorne just before her death.

Dietz took Craig Kennedy and his news-paper reporter friend, Walter Jameson, to the tanker where Eversley Barr and his party were waiting for the storm occasioned by Lola's death to blow over.

Posing as a prospective customer for a large quantity of the best liquor, Kennedy was at the same time pumping Barr and his companions, who included Trixie Dare, Jean Bartow and Don the Dude. Some of the mysterious background of what happened just before Lola Langhorne met her death was being revealed by the gang when suddenly there was a series of explosions and the cry—"Hijackers!"

Among the leaders of the pirate crew was flip little Mazie Mellish. She made straight for Trixie, and the hair flew. Suddenly remembering business, the leaders of the hijackers recognized Dietz and turned him and his companions loose.

CHAPTER X.
JUDY PLAYS STOOL-PIGEON

FAGGED by the all-night trip out to Rum Row, I was awakened early the next morning when Kennedy answered a call at our buzzer.

I was amazed when I saw McNaught walk into our living room accompanied by a very haggard banker, Hancock, the father of the debonaire little Judy.

"We know, Kennedy, that Deitz has been operating from a place they call the Castle, somewhere in the Highlands," shot out McNaught in a business-like manner. "We also know that we are just about to locate it—how, I cannot tell you just yet. But we are not ready to crash the Castle yet. What we want is to locate this Captain Ryder Smith in the Lola Langhorne murder. That is the place to get the line on him. And little Judy Hancock, who has been using wireless to communicate with the rum fleet, knows the Castle." McNaught turned to Hancock.

The banker inclined his head. "In that case Judy must make reparation. She must lead you as best she can to what it is you want to learn in running down this scandalous affair." He frowned. "I am not going to trust myself to see my daughter— yet. Nor do I want to see young Barr, or any of them. No: I shall leave the whole matter of handling the case, as far as my little girl is concerned, in your hands. Kennedy." There was a genuine pathos in the tone of the banker as he turned to Craig, confessing not so much his inability to deal with the younger generation as his doubt of controlling his temper if he should meet them. "I have conveyed word to Judy through her Aunt that she must meet you, sir, and help you."

"Judy is coming in on the North Shore express. I took the liberty of telling her you would meet her at the station."

"Quite right. Mr. Hancock. Now, McNaught, tell me about what is at the Highlands and your program."

"I'm not going down with you, Kennedy," he answered quickly. "You and Judy Hancock will go through with it better if I am not with you. But I shall be there. I am going down under cover. You see, in the first place the 'All Alone' put in there in the early hours of the morning—not a bottle aboard. They've been hijacked."

Kennedy smiled. He did not feign a surprise. "Yes: I was there." he said simply.

"I know you were," returned McNaught. "But I thought it would be news for you to know what happened afterward."

McNaught shook his head. "They got away as soon as the 'All Alone' anchored. Only the crew are on it, and they're as tight-lipped as clams. I don't know yet exactly where they all have gone. That's not the point. What we want is just what you want—a line on Captain Ryder Smith."

"And you'll get that at this place you call the Castle in the Highlands. I understand. It's part of Dietz's machinery and Judy must take us there."

"Exactly. I can't go: not yet. Of course," McNaught added hurriedly, "you understand, it's no roundup—not yet. That's why I want to keep in the background. I may tell you that we located it by means of our radio 'trouble wagon.' But Judy knows where it is, and she must take you."

"The tanker's at anchor down there," explained McNaught. "We are letting no one on it. But you can go. There's really nothing on which to hold it. It was literally cleaned. But there are plenty of marks of violence."

"Yes Ev Barr is gone. Trixie Dare and Don the Dude have disappeared in one direction and Warner Davis and Jean Bartow in another. Of course, Mazie Mellish and Jake Merck may be out there yet, but I don't think so."

THUS it was that, inspired by McNaught and god-speeded by J. Kearney Hancock, we set out in the car to pick up Judy and go down the Bay on the ferry.

Judy Hancock made even this early trip attractive. Her eyes were bright with excitement, her coloring the healthy rose of perfect health and ordered rest, and in her big squirrel coat she was about the daintiest little law-breaker that the great moral reform had produced.

"Oh, Mr. Kennedy, I'm so excited!" she exclaimed as the car swung downtown to the ferry. "What is it all about? Father and Mr. McNaught both practically ordered me to go to the Highlands. They told me the 'All Alone' was there—and had been hijacked. How perfectly thrilling! I wonder if I shall see Ev?" Judy was at least one girl who was capable of coloring—naturally. She was frank, too. "I hope so!"

Kennedy smiled. "I should think you'd be sore at him for getting you mixed up in all this," he suggested.

She though a moment. "Well—I went into it—for him. But I didn't have to go in. He didn't point a gun or hold a knife over me. No: we both have the same complaint—we like thrills. I wanted Ev to think I was a good sport. I wanted to play along. And I didn't think. No; that part of the mess was more my fault than his .... I'm only a kid, after all, as Dad says; but it makes me tired when I read the papers nowadays. Everybody is passing the buck. They must have learned that in the war. The little boy who steals blames the movies. The girl who gets into trouble blames some fellow for betraying her confidence. The man who steals blames his extravagant wife. None of them ever blames himself. But they didn't have to do it. Now I blame no one. I went into this thing myself. I take the blame."

Kennedy was listening with frank approval. "You may be a kid, Judy, but you have the right idea. Most people miss it today. There's too much coddling—and blaming others."

We were on the forward end of the boat now in the car. The wind whipped our faces and brought the rose to Judy's face as no make-up has ever been able to imitate. I liked the gameness of the girl and her viewpoint.

"What are we going to do first, Mr. Kennedy?" she asked. "What is expected of me?"

"This is a serious business," Craig replied thoughtfully, his eyes set far away out on the water where we had seen a great deal the last night. I could see that he was laying a foundation for what was to come when McNaught passed the word. "This law you have been flouting so nonchalantly is really wide awake and reaching out for everyone concerned in any way with this murder."

HE intended it to be blunt without betraying too much. I saw the little girl's color fade at the mention of Lola Langhorne; then she stiffened as she eagerly scanned Kennedy's face, waiting.

"I am going aboard the 'All Alone' first," he continued. "I may find something there that will help. You see, there is just one person we are still looking for, a key person, so to speak."

He shook his head with an indulgent smile. She smiled back wistfully at the glint of hope.

"Mr. McNaught will be down there later, or I shall hear from him there. But there is nothing in this yet for you to fear, I believe, if you like thrills."

Another sigh of relief escaped her. "But, Mr. Kennedy," she blurted out rapidly, "I didn't kill Lola—and I'm sure Ev didn't. He couldn't. I don't know who did. I haven't even any suspicion that is worth while."

"That's nothing for you to worry about," he said frankly, as if it were an opportunity to get across something that had been long on his mind. "But, even if the government doesn't try to hold you on this murder, they have got to do something about the rum-running."

"Perhaps—if you come clean—help the authorities clear things up. It always helps."

"I can't see any special brand of loyalty that has been handed out to you, since you mention it. Someone of them got you in bad with the case of hootch hidden in your car—then tipped the enforcement officers off about you. Do you call that loyalty, playing the game? They even planted things on the 'Gigolo' that connected you up with the rum plot and so on, even if the other hadn't worked. No one has troubled much about coming to your help when you got into trouble and, as far as they knew, disappeared, has he?" added Kennedy pointedly.

"Or she, either," acquiesced Judy bitterly. "Yes, I know all that—and it hurts. I wouldn't have been like that with the others, any of them.... But if telling the truth and coming clean will help Ev Barr, I'll do all I can!"

Kennedy recognized it as her way of throwing herself on the mercy of the court as far as he was concerned and was gratified. It had been what he wanted, this frame of mind in her. Best of all, she was doing it voluntarily, not as a stool pigeon would have done.

CHAPTER XI
THE RUM CASTLE

IT had been impossible for us to follow on shore those who had been on the "All Alone" and it was equally impossible to follow those on the hijacker. There were so many places where they could have landed after the piracy went through. All Kennedy could do was what he had done—notify McNaught and have his forces watch as best they could.

Down at Highlands, when we arrived, bootleg "hucksters," as they were called, were not inclined to be talkative. Some dories were chugging about in the forenoon, however, seemingly in preparation for trips at night. The boastfulness of the past weeks when the same breed of lawbreakers had been landing thousands of cases seemed to have disappeared.

Still, as Kennedy went among the old-style fisher folk along the docks preparatory to meeting McNaught on the "All Alone," I found it an interesting study of rags to riches. Some of them had indeed been getting rich, as rich as if each had found Captain Kidd's treasure or used a can-opener to crack Davy Jones's locker. It was hard to realize that nowadays there was wealth in a greasy fishing smack. These people were queer nouveaux riches.

I recall that we found one tattered old clam-digger from the "Shrewsbury" who had come over for curiosity. He was frayed and there were holes in his boots—to let the water out, he said with a dry smartness as I looked over at the icy tide. That was the class of them; yet they all had money, not dollars, but thousands.

I saw Kennedy's purpose in this seeming waste of time. It was from this old codger, after gaining his confidence, that we learned that Barr and the rest of the kid-glove rum-runners must have been put ashore in the cold gray dawn by Barr's crew whom he left on the "All Alone" in quite the condition that the name of his boat indicated. What had happened undoubtedly was that Barr's party had immediately broken up, each going a separate way. But where? I saw that Craig was looking at Judy from the corner of his eye. Might she know where Ev Barr was at least? Would she tell?

The "All Alone" was moored at the end of the dock. At last the time came when Kennedy could no longer delay going aboard, much as he was inclined not to come into the open but to pick up facts from the gossip of these people. Besides, McNaught was signalling. He had come up from below, quizzing the crew, and caught sight of us.

AS we went over the side Judy was visibly agitated at the sight of McNaught. It was one thing to talk about a revenue man; quite another to meet him.

"I suppose, Miss Hancock, this looks like just an old rusty tub to you now without your friends aboard it. There's not much glamor to it, is there?" pursued McNaught.

Judy listened and watched him speculatively. "No, Mr. McNaught, there isn't. It—it's too much like returning to the scene of the crime—I mean the rum-running, you know." Hastily.

"Well, that's why I wanted you brought down here," he said firmly. "You knew Captain Ryder Smith," he changed the subject suddenly. She nodded. "Of course you did," he went on, "out on Long Island. But what about it down here? He has disappeared, just dropped out of sight, as it were. Now we're going to pick his trail up here. I mean by that we're going to start here to locate him. I have been quizzing this crew. I have learned some things. They confirm what I already have learned from another source."

McNaught was looking at her sharply and she was watching him with that open-eyed air that a girl sometimes assumes, seeming beautiful but dumb until such time as a man lets slip something that banishes the inferiority complex and makes her master of the situation by changing the subject altogether. Only in this case it was McNaught who was master as a detective and this little girl knew it without knowing it.

"You see, it's this way," resumed McNaught. "Every one of these rum-running boats has a sending and receiving radio set which puts the boat in communication with their central station on their short wave-length."

He paused, watching Judy. She winced. "Well, of course, I was communicating with the 'All Alone' on our own set," she said quickly. "I have told Mr. Kennedy all about that."

"I don't mean that and I don't mean the 'All Alone.' What I mean is this other fleet. If you had belonged to the other fleet you probably wouldn't have been hijacked. But you were scabs; you didn't belong to the union. Now, they know you. They would be perfectly willing to take you into the union, so to speak, if you asked. Perhaps the hijacking was just discipline, whatever the personal motives on the surface may have been. They might even discuss a settlement—"

"But, Mr. McNaught, I don't want to get into the union, as you call it. I don't even want a settlement. All I want is to get out of the whole thing—and get Ev out too."

"NOW, Miss Hancock, I am going to tell you something. I'm going to tell you a little bit about what we call the Radio Trouble Wagon. After that you may change your mind about something. Maybe you don't know it but we had begun to get a line on you, only we dropped that for a bigger game. The method we use to locate an unidentified broadcasting station is simple, after all.

"It is a characteristic of a loop-operated radio receiver to get signals most loudly when the loop is pointing directly at the station transmitting. This fact is familiar to all who have owned such sets. Now, if the operator has no idea of where the station to which he is listening is, but merely swings the loop until reception is strongest, he will learn that the station is in one of two directions—that is, either edge of the loop points toward it. A line drawn on a map will make a record of this, though it will not show the distance from transmitter to receiver. It is the principle on which the ship radio compass or direction-finder is based.

"Now, if the set is carried to another spot a few miles away and another line plotted on the map in the same manner, the two lines will cross when extended. The point of intersection will approximate very closely the location of the transmitter. The receiver may then be taken to the point, after which a little time spent in cruising in the wagon will lead the operator directly to the transmitter. Now, you know there is such a central location."

"Yes; I have heard about it, Mr. McNaught, but, honest, I have never been there."

"But you are going there. I know where it is. They will not think it strange if you go there. I cannot go until we are ready to crash it. But you can go, ostensibly to join with them. If they accept you, talk with you, then you can learn where Captain Ryder Smith is. I'll lose his trail, even if I crash it and get them all."

"No buts, Miss Hancock. I am giving Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Jameson minute directions how to find the place. If you want to go free of this thing and make it easy for your friend, Ev Barr, when we get him, go with Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Jameson there. Pose as representing Ev Barr. Offer to join with them. They will welcome Barr's influence and connections. Get them talking. You will get a line on Captain Ryder Smith. For he is in the ring—sometimes —unless he gets a good independent contract like that with Ev Barr. And even then, I suspect, he is in the ring. You will do it?"

"Yes—Mr. McNaught." There was no great enthusiasm in Judy's answer. But the tone indicated she would do her best.

HALF an hour later in Kennedy's sport-car we pulled up before a mansion on the crest of the Highlands overlooking the ocean and, I am sure, with a view from the tower of the bay in the other direction.

"A Rum Castle," he muttered. "It used to be the summer home of an actor you and I have seen many times. But now—well, I wonder if we look enough like a couple of rum racketeers to get by with them? Here goes!" Craig pressed the buzzer.

A huge chap who looked like a bouncer in one of the old dance halls finally opened the door. "Well," he growled, "what do yer want?"

Kennedy turned easily to Judy. "Judy," he said, "this is your party. You tell him."

"We were with him—are yet. We got into trouble with the revenuers, got hijacked, everything. So we've come to see how we can go into the game—right—the next time. Wonderful connections here with the banks and in Nassau, too."

He narrowed his eyes. "Yeh—society rum-runners!" he scowled, then with a sarcastic laugh. "Why didn't you come here first, before you went in?"

"I s'pose money don't mean nothin' to bloods like youse!" He was accepting us at face value. "C'mon in." He closed the door as we entered and bolted it and I saw that he was anything but a butler. He was one higher up, anyway. "Now, spill the chatter."

"In the first place, you see we have a tanker down here at the dock. There's nothing on her. They've got to release her." Kennedy took quick advantage of Judy's opening. "Of course I can't agree to terms alone. But we came to arrange a meeting with your people and Barr. Can it be done?"

The man was still appraising Kennedy. "Anything can be done—if you guys play the game. When shall it be? No harm in talking things over."

"Big Boy!" It was a girl's voice, down the hall. I thought there was something familiar about it, but could not place it, so I presumed I was mistaken.

He got up, shook his head at us to wait and started down the hall. Kennedy turned quickly and tried the front door. It was a trick bolt. Only Big Boy knew the secret. We were locked in.

"Now- what was that you was sayin' about the 'All Alone'?" he resumed in a business-like tone.

"I was saying it was Ev Barr's boat, my partner under cover," replied Kennedy easily. "But I would never run it in again this way."

"No skirts on it," frowned Big Boy. "Skirts on shore is all right." He put emphasis on the last two words.

"It's not only that," Kennedy passed the remark over lightly. "But I will never sail that tanker again without the right captain. Now Cap'n Ryder Smith—"

BIG BOY'S eyes were focused sharply on Kennedy. "You want to get Ryder Smith, eh?" He poked his head forward stretching the wrinkles on the back of his bull neck.

Big Boy crooked his finger. "C'mon down to the mess-room while I telephone out to that Gravel Works in Mount Sinai. You know the game—what you can tow into the city under, say, eight hundred yards of gravel?"

We followed him down the hall to what had once been the splendid all-wood paneled dining room of the old-time matinée idol. It was now a bar, a private bar. But it was the drawing room that we passed that interested me most. The most conspicuous feature of the drawing-room was its armament: sawed-off shotguns, sub-machine guns, tear gas bombs and a variety of large pistols. A little reception room off the front hall had disclosed the radio apparatus. Later I learned of telescopes mounted in the cupola observation tower.

"Have a ball at the bar while I telephone the Gravel Works," waved Big Boy leaving us.

Kennedy nodded and started behind the bar to help us, not for a moment taking his eyes off Big Boy who was passing through the door to what looked like a former butler's pantry where there was a wall telephone. Big Boy was several feet from the door when I saw it slowly shut as if in a draught of wind. But it did not bang.

Kennedy tried the knob of a door on the other side of the little bar. It opened "Come on, quick; let's see if we can open a window!"

Judy and I were close behind him in a passageway at the end of which was a window that must have been only a few feet above the ground.

We were scarcely half way to it when it seemed as if the very floor of the corridor gave beneath us as if hinged at the point where we had opened the door. It was like some of those things one sees in amusement parks. We suddenly found ourselves on a slide precipitated down into a cellar that was really like a great cave in the side of the hill for liquor storage.

We landed in a heap at the foot of the slide, Kennedy and I breaking the fall for Judy who never uttered even a scream. As Kennedy advanced a couple of paces into the murky cobwebby darkness I turned and gave Judy a hand, pulling her to her feet, only to feel her little hand slip out of mine as she brushed past me under one of the arches of the cellar before I knew it.

I turned quickly after Judy. There my eyes scarcely yet accustomed to the darkness could just about make out three shadowy forms and three pairs of guns levelled at Kennedy.

It was then I saw little Judy, slender arms outstretched as her long coat flew widely open, her wild eyes facing the six murderous gats where she had suddenly catapulted herself between them and Kennedy.

Instinctively I reached for my own gun on my hip and as my fingers gripped it I was just about to swing it up and get a bead on one of the figures when I felt a terrific blow. My gun was knocked a dozen feet away on the soggy floor far beyond my reach and a burly Swede was towering over me.

"You'll have to shoot me first, men!" rang out Judy's clear voice. "Mr. Kennedy did not come to get you. I brought him here—and it's Ryder Smith we're after—not you! He's not in the Castle. Where is he?"

What happens when the lights go out, and the new perils that face Craig Kennedy and Jameson in their search for the murderer of Lola Langhorne will he continued in the February issue of Radio Digest. Be sure to get your copy.

PART V

"FIND Captain Ryder Smith and you'll find the man who can tell you who killed Lola Langhorne," declared Craig Kennedy, the famous detective, after all the circumstances had been pieced together pertaining to that unfortunate young woman's death aboard the Gigolo.

Captain McNaught of the revenue service agreed with this deduction, as did Walter Jameson, the newspaper reporter who had been with the two men at the discovery of the girl's body, lopped over a chair before a small dining table on the deserted yacht.

They had found that Lola was one of a group—part professionals, part amateurs—organized to bring in a cargo of liquor from Nassau for surreptitious disposal of thirsty New Yorkers. Conspicuous in this group was Eversley Barr and Don the Dude. Little Judy Hancock, in her seventeen years of sophistication as the daughter of a prominent banker, had been drawn into it because she liked Ev Barr, and it was Ev Barr who wanted to use her radio and Long Island landing facilities to bring the liquor ashore.

Where there are sporty young men with plenty of money there are sporty young women, so Barr and Don the Dude had their feminine circle of admirers. It may have been that Lola Langhorne had incurred the jealous hatred of Trixie Dare and Mazie Mellish, but there was nothing tangible to show that they had had a part in the murder. In fact there was nothing to show exactly what had been the direct cause of death. The once lovely skin of the beautiful Lola Langhorne had turned to a livid green. The coroner had been unable to find any trace of poison. But Kennedy had preserved the remnants of food that remained on the table.

Once launched on the trail they had followed through in their search for Captain Ryder Smith, who had disappeared from the Gigolo not long before it had been deserted, its sea cocks opened, to let it sink with its ghastly burden. Dietz, an influential bootlegger, served as guide to take the famous detective and his friend Jameson to Rum Row. There, aboard the "All Alone," they met Ev Barr and Don the Dude with Trixie Dare and others of the circle of whom Lola Langhorne had once been a part.

And when it seemed that they were getting hot on the trail of Captain Ryder Smith, the "All Alone" was boarded by a pirate crew of hijackers. A terrific fight ensued. Kennedy, Jameson and Dietz were sent ashore in safety, but not before Kennedy recognized among the pirate raiders Mazie Mellish, whom he had first interviewed and who had furnished him his first clue as to the trail of the slayer.

It was little Judy Hancock, the banker's daughter, who was next to serve as a guide on the hunt for Captain Ryder Smith. She believed herself still in love with Ev Barr. If by helping Kennedy she could help Ev escape the charge of murder, she would do what she could. Besides, the detective had taken her to see the body of the dead woman and the scene of her death, and Judy had received a severe jolt as to the real penalty of sin.

McNaught with his Radio Trouble Wagon had located the land headquarters of the big rum runners' organization. But he was not ready to make a raid. He, too, wanted to locate Captain Smith. To get at the headquarters, which was a veritable feudal castle, armed and protected on a hill, would require the assistance of some person known to those inside. He put it up to Judy to lead them and Judy reluctantly consented.

"You know Eversley Barr?" asked Judy a trifle timidly. After a short interchange of suspicious questions and answers, they were admitted. Thinking they had been successful in their pose as peacemakers between the amateur rum runners of Eversley Barr and the organized gang, they followed Big Boy, the guide, through the hall into a bar room. Suddenly their guide left them. The floor dropped like dividing doors and they found themselves sliding down a chute into a dank and musty cave beneath the castle.

In the murky light Judy was the first to perceive three shadowy forms with guns trained on Kennedy. She sprang to his defense immediately.

"You'll have to shoot me first, men." Her voice was clear and ringing as she spread out her arms. "Mr. Kennedy did not come to get you. I brought him here—and it's Ryder Smith we're after—not you! If he's not in the Castle, where is he?"

CHAPTER XII
TRAPPED!

"I KNEW it—this was too easy!" Kennedy with his gun levelled, one against six, was biting the words out decisively. "I knew it when I heard Trixie's voice in the hall upstairs. I won't shoot. She might be down here, too, in the dark. Judy is right. We didn't come to raid the place. It's only to locate Ryder Smith!"

"Put up your gun!" It was the same voice I had heard up in the hall. I recognized it now. It was Trixie Dare's. "Get hack, fellows, where he can't recognize your faces. There!"

Suddenly the lights flashed up and we could see only Trixie standing by a wall switch, no one else, not even the burly Swede beside me, as I recovered my own gun on the damp floor. "Now—remember! Keep your word. There's only eight guns covering you!"

"So this is where you came, Trix, after you left the 'All Alone.'" Kennedy remarked. "I suppose Don the Dude is one of the two gun-men?"

"Ask me no questions!" Trix laughed back with an assurance that anything she might say would be something not to be relied on. "Now, come clean. Mr. Kennedy. What really brought you here?"

"Ryder Smith," repeated Kennedy. "Nothing else. Do you think I'm insane enough to walk right into a trap if it was anything else?"

"And I didn't say he was on a gravel barge or a tug, either!" boomed a voice in the darkness. It was Big Boy's.

"That makes us even, then," laughed Craig. "Now, take my word. On my honor I don't want any of you in the ring. But I do want Ryder Smith."

It was all I could do to restrain myself. Was Kennedy just walking into new trouble by the mere tone of the question? You can't third degree those who have you covered by eight gats.

"Exactly that; that you got it from the papers. I know there's not one of you here knows what caused the Green Death."

"That's easy. If there was, at least one of those gats would have pumped lead into me long ago. And if I had suspected there was, I wouldn't have been here this way, either. There was really no occasion to tip off any of your stunts this way. I don't want any of you. It's Ryder Smith I want. There is just one question I want to put to him. Mind—I don't say he did it—or even knows what the Green Death is, perhaps. I'll play fair with you if you play fair with me. I am not smashing your rum ring. I don't even care about it. I do care about that poor murdered girl—and this pretty little flapper with me. Girls would be all right—if the men amounted to anything!"

"Cut that stuff! I've a good mind to plug you just for that. You keep your trap shut, Trix! What do you mean by coming here and tryin' to make trouble for me, huh? One shot through this peep-hole and I'll take that little flapper you brought right away from you—understand?"

"You would, eh?" Trix had turned suddenly, her hand reaching out for the cellar switch.

There was a shot that seemed to come right from the brick wall of the cellar and I saw Kennedy lurch forward, one hand clutching wildly at the thin air as Trixie pulled the switch and the whole cellar was in darkness. I heard his gun clenched in the other hand strike the cement floor and clatter on it.

CHAPTER XIII
A SHOT IN THE DARK

COME what might, I leaped in the darkness as nearly as I could at the spot where I had seen Kennedy fall and heard the clatter of his gun on the wet cement of the cellar floor.

I groped about frantically in the dark. There was no body there; there was no body there.

The next instant a shot rang out from an entirely different and unexpected angle, followed by an oath and gasp.

"Hands up! I give you my word we are not raiding you. All Kennedy and Jameson want is to locate Ryder Smith. It's all I want, too, men! There's a Lewis gun at every window of the cellar. But not another shot will be fired at anyone else if you will tell. He's not one of you, really."

Lights flashed up instantly in the cellar, revealing Kennedy with Trixie's two wrists locked in his vise-like grip, while with the other hand he had turned the switch.

THERE was silence. On the floor by the wall where McNaught with cat-like eyes had seen him in the murk lay the Big Boy, sprawled unconscious with a bullet-hole in his chest.

"I'll be damned!" This was from Don the Dude. "I fired point-blank at that man Kennedy. He must have sensed it, dropped to the floor the instant Trix shot the lights out, then crawled along the floor and got Trix. He's got her now between me and him! What d'yer say, boys? Big Boy's out. I'll take yer up on that. McNaught, if Kennedy promises. I trust him."

"I'll promise!" repeated Kennedy. "Not a shot—and we'll leave just as we are if you'll put us next to Ryder Smith."

Donato came from behind a door in a cellar arch. He stuck forth a grimy paw toward Kennedy, who grasped it and they shook hands.

There was a tense moment. Was the gangster playing fair or was he making unscrupulous sport of us? The two men stood for an instant in the middle of the cellar floor under the light looking into each other's eyes, sizing each other up.

Whatever it was he saw it must have satisfied Craig. "All right. I'll take your word. Find out."

"Say!" There was a trace of injured dignity in Donato's tone. "What d'yer think I am—a gentleman?"

A smile played around Kennedy's mouth. "You love like one." He cast a sidewise look at Trix that suggested he was thinking of Mazie. "But you act according to the code. No; I don't think you're a gentleman. I trust you. When will you let me know?"

"As soon as I can locate him," Don was quiet. He appreciated the compliment Kennedy was paying him. "I will locate you wherever you are and let you know. You know I can do that." There was bravado in it, but there was also that new sincerity bred of the racketeer code modernizing the old legend of "honor among thieves."

"I AM satisfied." Craig relaxed his hold on Trixie's wrists and turned to us. "Come, McNaught; come on, Walter. We'll make our exit through that cellar window McNaught broke to get in. Of course, we don't know a thing about the Castle. It wouldn't do much good—tomorrow, say, anyway. Everything would be changed, even the real headquarters. We'll give you a break. You give us a break. The next move is yours—locate Ryder Smith. Then the next move is mine. Whatever happens it'll be a square deal. You know that."

"It will be I," assured Kennedy. "You heard him, McNaught? This is my case from now on."

Kennedy stood and waited for us, first McNaught, then myself to scramble up through the narrow slit of a window.

"Say—you got some grip—Craig!" This was Trixie. The familiarity was that of the feminism of the gun girl, fifty-fifty in crime, pay and punishment. There was frank admiration for Craig, the man, in it.

To that extent Trixie enjoyed it. It was evidence of her unbroken hold still of Don in spite of the untoward events of the night before. But there was a wistfulness, too. She knew she never could have the hold on Kennedy that would put these two in conflict over her. She strove with herself and was a good sport.

"Well, so long—Mister Kennedy!" She said it with a mock obeisance toward Don. "But it's some way you have of holding hands, let me say!"

Kennedy smiled and bowed. "They're some hands, Trix. If they were mine, I'd know they were mine—no one else's. So long, Trix—everybody." He swung himself up and followed Judy Hancock whom he had already lifted so that McNaught and I could pull her through the window with a minimum of cobwebs and grime.

McNaught turned to call off the small army he had posted about the Castle, while Judy, Kennedy and I trudged around the gravel path to the car Craig had parked in front.

He started the engine, released the brakes and we could almost coast down the long winding road to the flat level along which we sped a few miles to the dock where the "All Alone" was tied up.

"I don't think I'll ever forget, if I live a hundred years, the sinking sensation, Mr. Kennedy, when I was there in the dark surrounded by them and I thought you were dead on the floor. But—" She paused.

She looked at Kennedy reproachfully. "But why did you come away defeated, when McNaught had them covered at every angle? In the cellar I didn't believe it. I thought it was a bluff. But I saw them outside."

"Yes. You could have cleaned up the whole bunch and then by one of your scientific third degrees you could have found what you wanted from them. But now—we don't know a thing more about Ryder Smith or anything else than we did when we were last on this dock."

"Suppose I had rounded up the lot of them," remarked Craig looking at her like an elder brother. "I would have been playing the Government's game—perhaps. But I would have lost my case. I am not in this to fight the battles of prohibition enforcement. I am here to bring to justice the slayer of that little girl, Lola Langhorne, whom we found dead in the cabin of your friend, Ev Barr's boat, the 'Gigolo.' And I am here to set you straight, too, my dear, for the sake of your father for whom I have a genuine regard. Do you think I would have accomplished either of my purposes if I had played McNaught's game?"

"No 'perhaps' about it. I don't even know whether those above McNaught want the rum-runner gang to slip between his fingers. But I do know that just now if McNaught tried a round-up he would get a lot of small fry. The leaders would slip through the net. There wouldn't be an indictment; or, if there was, not a trial. Then at the same time shipments of the stuff would be diverted to other ports in safety. There might be a couple of small fines, but the cases of most of the small fry, even, would be dismissed because of lack of evidence. McNaught's whole case would collapse. The net result would be that Deitz and others like him would lose a few thousand dollars. They would figure that in as if it were a customs duty or a liquor license, and on the total of their transactions by a process like insurance the public would foot the bill by paying the cost that is passed along to the ultimate consumer. Who then would pay?"

"I don't mean that. What I mean is that the gang would shut up like clams. There wouldn't be a word from them that would involve any one of them. They would talk a lot, give a lot of dumb answers to wise questions—and in the end we'd find Judy Hancock and Ev Barr and all of you that are honest so involved that it would take a lot of money and a lot of influence to set you straight, while the gang cases would be thrown out of court for lack of evidence. Then I would have one failure tacked to my name. I would have one unsolved case, the 'Gigolo' murder of Lola Langhorne. I can't afford it. I have to show results. I have to put my hands on the murderer of Lola. I have to get you out of this mess and set your feet straight. No one is going to make a speech in Congress and no people are going to march grimly to the polls to vote their confidence that black is white for me."

"I don't think it—I know it. Within less than twenty-four hours I will have Ryder Smith or know where he is."

CHAPTER XIV
ANOTHER GREEN DEATH CLUE

I SAW that Kennedy was looking at Judy from the corner of his eye. "There's just one thing more you can do."

She met Craig's eye frankly. "If it's something to help Ev, I'll do it. Ev would do it for me."

"That's the proper gang spirit," he smiled. "At least society isn't any worse than the rum-runners and racketeers—at heart. Thanks, lots, Judy. I want to leave a message here for McNaught. I'll put it in a note. Then we'll get back in the car and shoot across to Staten Island and the Brooklyn ferry."

Kennedy nodded as he hastily penned his message and left it with the revenue man in charge of the "All Alone."

There was nothing eventful or worth noting in the long ride from the Highlands to Harbor County. Comparatively little was said by either Kennedy or Judy. But I felt sure, long before the journey was half over, of just what was in Kennedy's mind. It was a safe conclusion that Judy might know where Ev. Barr had disappeared. The only question was: Would she tell?

I was as much in the dark as to Kennedy's next move as was Judy and I know I was quite as surprised when we swung along the north shore road at last into the little harbor town and Craig turned along the Beach Road until he pulled up before a basin on the west side where we could see several yachts—among them the 'Gigolo' which had been floated and towed in to the basin where it was being held by the Government.

Judy was inclined to hang back as we entered the enclosure of the yacht basin, parked the car and started forward down the dock where the 'Gigolo' was being held.

"I thought it was time I came to see what had happened to your friend Ev Barr's boat." commented Kennedy, building. I knew, to some effect on little Judy. "To say nothing," he added casually, "as to just what they might have on him."

Judy winced at the very thought contained in the last remark. Craig knew she would but paid no attention to it.

As we came aboard and started down the steps that led into the cabin of the 'Gigolo' Judy stopped and with a little cry clutched my arm.

"I can't help it, Mr. Jameson," she cried, "but I'm thinking of poor Lola all the time!"

"I suppose so. But it's awful. Those last hours of Lola—last minutes, I mean, maybe seconds, must have been terrible. When you know a person as I knew Lola and something dreadful like this— this murder happens to her, with all her experience, there must be something, some Power, that protects me, with all the things I don't know! Oh, I wish I could have been there to help her!"

"You can thank your stars you weren't," rejoined Kennedy grimly. "What do you suppose you could have done?"

"I don't know," she replied helplessly. "I don't know, even, what happened. Do you?" she appealed.

"I am not going to tell—yet." Kennedy was evidently building up his chain of evidence, link by link. Some links were not yet welded into the chain. "Now, that's the chair in which she was slumped forward over the table at this point—and a plate of grapes, half eaten, before her." He paused.

Judy steeled herself to look. I knew her type. She was one whose active, vivacious mind saw pictures; not mere abstract words. She saw Lola in the chair, dead, and the grapes.

"D-do you think that had anything to do with the Green Death, Mr. Kennedy?" she asked. "I mean the grapes?" She wrinkled her brow in perplexity.

"Grapes before her, half-eaten, seeds and all," continued Craig. "Then, to cap it all, the doctor out here best qualified to perform an autopsy finds in her stomach not a trace of poison—yet she has been poisoned!"

Judy was silent. That was a mystery. It had baffled me. I had thought of it a great many times. Poisoned—and yet no trace of a poison by what seemed to be the simple and most direct means of administering it!

We looked about the boat, in the hold, on the decks, in the cabins, the still wet lockers, the ruined kitchenette, at the cases that had not yet been removed, the contraband that had motivated this mad escapade. It seemed that we had looked everywhere. But we could find nothing that suggested to me at least even a clue to the crime. As far as one could discover there was nothing that seemed to have happened, nothing that had been left behind or that had been touched or removed that had the least relation to the crime.

"Yes," nodded Kennedy, thinking aloud for our benefit, "it's bad that we could not have given Captain Ryder Smith the third degree right here in this cabin that night. There isn't much here to clear up a mystery, is there?"

"No." I was forced to agree with him. My own spirits which had risen with my faith in him at the handling of the ticklish raid on the Castle had cooled considerably now when I saw the paucity of the evidence against anyone for the murder of Lola and what a prima facie case there was against little Judy Hancock as far as it went.

Judy was very quiet, answering, very docilely, all Kennedy's questions, some personal ones at that. She was harried. Without a word she took his admonishment, his criticism, and I thought sometimes when I saw her lips tremble that he was rubbing it in- But he meant it to be a good lesson to her. And something else, finally he played his trump.

WE climbed back into the car and motored up to the business part of the town. Judy paled again as he set his brakes before an undertaking establishment.

She got out slowly and thoughtfully. With heavy feet she followed us across the sidewalk and into the reception foyer. Only once she looked at me and gasped, "Must I?"

I shrugged. I was following Kennedy. I knew he must have a purpose back of it all. Always Craig was kindliness and chivalry personified to women. I fancied I saw in this his higher kindness to her.

After a quiet word to the undertaker, he took Judy by the arm gently and led her into a darkened rear room that was the private morgue.

AGONY was written on her face. There, by an open window, was all that was mortal that had once been poor, beautiful Lola Langhorne. Judy uttered a little cry, then buried her face in her hands, sobbing. I think Kennedy never felt more sorry for anyone than for that little girl that moment. But he had promised her father to do something. And he had his own purpose.

Craig put his arm around Judy. "There," he said in a hushed tone, "is a girl who defied the law, defied the rules of society, defied all the things that have come down to us as good breeding for women through the world's experience. There she lies, little July.... Such defiance, such disrespect isn't very happy or successful, is it? Your father asked me to do this. It is the best sermon he can think of."

Holding tightly to his arm, the girl shook with sobs. Craig patted her shoulder and led her back into the fresh air, to the car.

We sat there a moment, apart from the curious. "Judy," he almost whispered, "do you know where Ev Barr would go after he left the 'All Alone'?"

"I want you to take my car and find him. See. I trust you. If he comes clean now, and helps me, it will help you both. Later—is too late. It must be now. Remember, I am the only friend either of you has among all these men." He waved his hand at some of the government officers who were now teeming in the town. "When you find him," he added, "take him to the bungalow, your bungalow. I shall go there and I will expect to meet you there—both of you."

We watched her drive away. I looked longest, marveling at Kennedy's influence over the young folks. When I turned I was surprised to see that Kennedy was looking in the other direction.

There was McNaught and with him were Warner Davis and Jean Bartow. Kennedy crooked his finger at McNaught.

"Glad you got my note and did as I asked. It was as I told you, wasn't it, Mac?"

McNaught nodded. "This time," he said under his breath, "it isn't just plain rum-running. The Admiralty is interested in piracy and crime committed on the high seas. Besides, I have our position protected because the English consul-general joins in asking to have the criminals apprehended."

McNaught smiled. "I didn't know it myself. They are underground agents, with a commission from Washington. Down there they have a lot of them—to make examples of rum-runners and bootleggers!"

CHAPTER XV
BROADCASTING

MCNAUGHT was leading the way with Kennedy down to the steamboat dock at the foot of Main street and I was on the other side of him. Back of us only a few feet, but out of earshot, followed Warner Davis and Jean Bartow.

I was thinking of Jake Merck and Mazie Mellish as well as of Captain Ryder Smith, the three we had not yet located, when by what seemed at first to be just some queer quirk cf coincidence one of McNaught's cutters docked. Three men came up with Jake Merck and Mazie, sullen and silent captives from a "huckster" boat, who had been taken and brought 'way around here. Only it was really no coincidence. It was the logic of the situation which had of course occurred to McNaught already, who had simply ordered the combing of the harbor waters for them the moment Kennedy suggested it.

Apart, Kennedy and McNaught questioned the sullen couple, who now and then glared sidewise at their former partners. Davis and Jean, as if they could cheerfully have shot them. Finally Craig looked at his watch.

Judy, of course, had Craig's car. Therefore it was necessary that we should ride in McNaught's with Warner Davis and Jean Bartow down to the Hancock bungalow, followed by a couple of operatives in another car with Jake Merck and Mazie. For it seemed to be Craig's idea, as he covered it with them, to go down along the shore to see the wireless and the shore end of the rumrunning plot, which we had had no chance to visit in the rapid-fire events of yesterday.

As we drove up the private road leading to the bungalow, I was impressed by the size and probable comfort of it. Except for its style of architecture no one would ever have called it a bungalow. I would have called it a one-story mansion. A huge porch was all around and the main entrance led into a spacious hall that extended through to a garden in the rear. Big rooms opened off the hall and a narrow hall divided the rooms front and back and opened into a wing built on either side.

My first idea was the incongruity of such a case taking such a house as a background. It was essentially homelike, built for love and quiet and children—not for lust and rum-runners. Now people were gathered there who should never have polluted its hospitality.

As we searched the empty bungalow on the bluff above the beach, I watched Warner Davis and Jean Bartow narrowly. I had not much respect for prohibition agents, anyhow. But the agent provocateur is just a little bit worse. I hate stool-pigeons.

I think they sensed their position in my mind. Red spots on Warner's cheeks showed it as he faced the others. He had declined to ride with Jake and Mazie, in spite of the officers. Jean Bartow dropped her gaze, even when she was speaking with McNaught.

I imagine they wished they had been taken off this and immediately assigned to some other case. In court it might have been different. But here they were forced to stand the gaff, accusing former' pals.

McNaught, however, was inexorable. There had been so much criticism of his office lately that he was going to do anything in his power to bring this case out successfully, no matter how distasteful it might be to any mere secret agents. Besides, I don't think he had any too much respect for secret agents.

We were searching about and had found that no trace of the cases of hootch had been left, save where trucks had run up the cinder drive to load it in the night.

Suddenly the sound of a car up the drive. Craig's car—and Judy and Ev Barr—had driven in.

Barr's look of happiness at being with Judy vanished as he caught sight of McNaught and the others. Coming up the steps he had had his arm through Judy's and they had been smiling at each other. Now he suddenly turned to the girl with a hurt look.

"What have you let me in for, Judy?" he said, dropping her arm. "I trusted you when you came over to Barney Emmet's and I let you coax me to take a ride over here. Barney was always a good old sleuth in college; he said to be careful. Why—why did you do such a thing?"

Half laughing, half crying, almost hysterical, Judy put her hand on his arm again. "You got me into it, Ev—now I'm getting you out of it!"

"It wouldn't have been long before they would have found you anyway, Ev. By coming clean and saving them the delay and trouble you only make your case better. Mr. Kennedy is my friend. He advised me—and I am advising you."

"Mr. Kennedy?" Barr recognized the name and looked sheepishly at Craig and me as he recognized "Mr. Kendrick" and "Mr. Johnson." He said nothing to us, but, turning to Judy, he asked her how long Craig Kennedy had been helping her.

"Carrying hootch in your car?" he repeated. "Why, I ordered everybody to keep you out of danger that way. Who got you to carry it? I'll break him!"

"Nobody, Ev. It was a plant. But it worked. I was pinched. It really looked as if the dry agents were waiting for me!"

Barr looked over menacingly at Merck, sullen and silent. He was about to say something when there was a noise outside as of another car that came to a stop.

"I told you, Kennedy, I'd find you when I had the info!" Don the Dude had a studied, bored, theatrical look as he and Trixie Dare entered the living-room of the bungalow. "Now I leave it to you to play fair—as you gave your word, this morning!"

Donato had not been prepared, however, to see Merck and Mazie, who had turned the tables on them the night before. Still he had no difficulty in brazening that out.

Trixie's face, in the night now, showed the marks of Mazie's fingers. But she wore a veil that concealed the powder and paint that hid the scratches pretty well as just make-up. Her animation increased and even Don's spirits took a jump when he caught side of those who had caused them all the humiliation.

As she passed Mazie, Trix turned a moment, just long enough to shoot out sarcastically, "Why don't you beat it?... Why don't you make me walk the plank?"

Mazie maintained her silence. Jake's hands clenched, but he said nothing. They had made it up, I figured, out of their low cunning. It was their protection. Jake Merck now and then looked at Kennedy and me sullenly. We had seen the fight and he knew it. He knew we could swear to their boarding the "All Alone," even if we hadn't actually seen him take any of the stuff off.

Gradually we got their story. It seemed that Mazie and Jake had been put ashore just as daylight was breaking. The devils on that other Rum-Row boat to which Jake had gone out first had chosen to throw them over, hoping they might be caught—and not without reason. As for those on the "All Alone," after it had been pirated they had put in to shore anyhow. Warner Davis and Jean, it seemed, had got up to their headquarters in the city by train as fast as possible to square themselves by reporting at the enforcement office. Barr had hired a car and had speeded across to the Island to the home of his former room-mate to hide. Don and Trixie did not say so, but we knew that they had gone up to the Castle to get Trixie's face fixed up. It was there that we had run across them. The very thing that otherwise would have involved them was what Was now protecting them, until Craig made the next move, as had been agreed.

"Say!" This was Ev Barr. "Who put that case of hootch in Judy's car under the rumble sea?" Barr demanded it generally, but particularly of Merck.

Judy had been looking at Mazie. "It doesn't seem right," she murmured aside to me, "to have that awful girl sitting with her legs up in mother's favorite chair!"

With a smart smirk at the rest Don the Dude whispered aside to Kennedy. Kennedy motioned to him to stay where he was. He was now tinkering with Judy's wireless outfit, a mighty good amateur station set, too, in an alcove near the French doors that opened out on a secluded angle of the porch.

As in subdued tones, by two and two, we were whispering. I fancy as we looked each other over, practically all of us were by a process of elimination discussing the one missing member of the memorable society rumrunning plot, Captain Ryder Smith.

Kennedy turned to McNaught. "What one of your Coast Guard patrols is out nearest Rum Row now, Mac?"

We were all too tensely serious to appreciate the humor of a rum racketeer vouching for the honor and accuracy of a prohibition officer. But it was a commentary on the topsy-turviness of today when reformers have us all literally standing on our heads.

"Only Captain Ryder Smith can clear this thing up now—quick," snapped out Craig, still adjusting. "You certainly had an excellent land station here, with Judy, for your whisky wireless, Barr," he added. "What's the wave length of the 'Gerónimo,' McNaught?"

Before McNaught could answer, Donato had glibly recited the wave length, the frequency and the code call. Kennedy ignored the ethics, whether it was legal or extra-legal that he was asking. He twisted and adjusted some more. "They're on!"

A moment, now, and Craig would have the last link in the chain of evidence he had been quietly forging.

Who killed Lola Langhorne? What is the secret of the Green Death? Next month Craig Kennedy unfolds the secret of this ghastly mystery. Don't miss the startling revelations in this last installment of the Gigolo Mystery in the March Radio Digest.

PART VI

CHAPTER XVI
THE LAST LINK

THERE was a tenseness in the atmosphere in the big living-room of the Hancock bungalow as if it were charged with the very electricity that was on the air. What would Kennedy ask? There was the man he had been seeking—somewhere, some twelve or twenty miles, out on the ocean—the missing link in his chain of evidence.

"I have the 'Geronimo'—they're standing by!" announced Craig with the wireless apparatus over his ears. He turned to us.

"Walter—McNaught—cover every door and window— no one must get out of his room—no one. Now, Don—come across—make good! Where is he?"

Donato smirked around at the rest of them in the room. He was not in any hurry to surrender the center of the stage.

"Cut the dramatics, Don." urged Kennedy sharply. "Everyone in this room is covered by McNaught's men outside, and McNaught and Jameson are at the doors. You are perfectly safe. Only you've got to be on the level, yourself, with me. I've got enough on you—and the Rum Castle is the least of it. I'm holding you only long enough to see that what you tell is the real goods. Where's Ryder Smith?"

Kennedy shot something off on the air, then turned to Don impatiently. "Yes; but where? What boat? You know!"

"On the 'Owlet,'" he said grudgingly as if unwilling to give up what was both making him the center of the picture and was at once also his trump card of protection for himself.

Donato smiled. "British registry. Sailed from Halifax and has just come up with a cargo from Nassau."

Kennedy studied his face a moment. "That's not a frank answer, Do,. although it sounds like one. Where is the real ownership of the 'Owlet'—in New York?"

Don the Dude studied Kennedy's face. It might have been a poker face. But it was also the face of a player who might hold the cards. Kennedy had surprised him before with the extent of his information. He was not to be trifled with.

Don agreed. "I don't need to remind you. Mr. Kennedy, you have a certain moral obligation yourself in this."

Kennedy smiled. "No; you don't. And you need not worry. I am merely trying to keep this matter straight in case anything ever involves the United States Department of State. If it's British soil honestly that is one thing. If it's as it is, that's another. As for Deitz and you and the Syndicate, they're not interested, except," he added, "they might be better off without having this man on one of their boats, of course, in case anything should happen. Nothing will happen as far as I am concerned. I'm interested only in Captain Ryder Smith—and you."

JAKE MERCK was looking at Mazie, then he shot a look at Trixie. There was nothing by which I could get an inkling of what was passing in their minds.

"That's right," broke in Jake, "he's on the 'Owlet' and that's how the 'Owlet' sizes up, too."

"I see." Kennedy nodded. I knew that Craig was not betraying any of the satisfaction he felt. These people were cracking up under the strain, and ready to run to cover, tell all they knew, each to save himself.

He turned to the sending apparatus and there was an interchange of messages between himself and the revenue boat.

"The 'Geronimo' knows just where the 'Owlet' is located. They'll get Ryder Smith off it—and have him ashore tonight. In the meantime they will let me know." Kennedy was discarding the apparatus. "Now, McNaught, all we need to do is to take care of these people I have gathered here, until Ryder Smith supplies the missing cut-outs in this cut-out puzzle. I suppose this is just as good a place as any in which to entertain them."

"But, Mr. Kennedy," interposed Judy, a bit alarmed. "Suppose father should come in? What will he say?"

"He'll be pleased to see you getting out of such company," replied Craig quickly.

"It's something you'll have to settle with Mr. Hancock, not with me. I know what I'd do if Judy was my daughter or sister or anything to me. I'd see that she exercised better judgment in picking her intimates so that they wouldn't get her involved with people who took possession of my house and planted Scotch in her car and—"

"Score one! You got me on that. Kennedy. But I'm sorry. I just didn't think. Besides, it's my loss as far as money is concerned."

"How about me?" cut in Merck. "Didn't I put more in it than you did? It was all I had!"

"There's no one payin' me for the time I'm losing at the hotel," asserted Mazie.

"And you got me in bad with the enforcement; how about that?" sullenly observed Warner Davis, turning to Jean Bartow, "to say nothing of her, too."

Jean nodded her head vigorously. "We might have known what would happen with a lot of amateurs! I'd say we're the heavy losers. We stand to lose a good living."

"I think Lola's the one we ought to be thinking about most," put in Judy. "At least we're all alive. But Lola lost her life. Whatever any of us lost we can get back. But Lola—"

There were tears in Judy's voice as she broke off. There was a silence: nothing much to say to that. "It's an extra hazardous occupation," growled McNaught from the porch doors. "I don't mind a guy going into it if he can afford to lose what he's got—his money, or his life or his reputation, or whatever it is. But you've got to be a sport about it—or stay out. It's just put up and shut up. Anyone who wants to go into it from your end is welcome, as far as I'm concerned. Only I don't see it. Maybe, if you're a racketeer you might as well get bumped off or do a stretch in the stir this way as well as any other. But it's my personal experience that the same amount of brains and money and work put into something legitimate would make a fortune for those that are putting it in. I'm not saying what I may think of the law and the general idea back of it. That's not for me to say. I'm just a prohibition cop. And yet," he shook his head, "every day there are more going into it in one way or another. It you feel that way about it, why not get into the distilling of commercial industrial alcohol—and let someone else take the risks of getting the denaturing out of it, and so on? There are others I could name right in Barr's own class who are doing it decently and without risk. Or maybe you'd like to become a grape grower and ship the juice from your presses by refrigerator cars all over the country, with high pressure salesmen who can tell you how to use your two kinds of patent corks, and even carbonate the stuff and make it champagne. Anything's better than the gag you're playing!"

McNaught shook himself as he finished the delivery of his long indictment of conditions as they were.

"I agree with McNaught," remarked Kennedy quickly. "You are a fine bunch of oil-cans! You wanted a thrill and you've got it. I'm supposed to unscramble the eggs—only there's a rotten egg in the omelet, somewhere. I'm supposed to get that, too. But it won't any of it bring back Lola."

"No," nodded Barr sadly. "I could stand the money loss and the loss of the 'Gigolo'—all but getting little Judy here in bad—if it hadn't been for the—the tragedy. Lola was so sure of herself and her ability; you couldn't keep her out of things. But little Judy—that's different. I could kick myself that I ever let her come in. That was my fault, just my fault, pure and simple. Yes. Kennedy, you said something. If you had a daughter or a sister —or a—a little girl you thought the world and all of, you ought to cut off your right hand before you'd drag her into a mess like this—just because we all thought it was smart and a thrill and all that bunk. I—I—"

"Well, that's mighty handsome of you to say it, Ev," interrupted Judy Hancock, her eyes sparkling and her fine young face animated. "But it seems to me I went into this when I ought to have known better. I haven't anyone else but myself to blame. No one made me do it, as I told Mr. Kennedy. I don't blame you, no matter what anyone else may say or think. It was strictly up to me and I-could have—"

I was watching the faces of both Judy and Barr with a great deal of interest and did not see Kennedy raise his hand for silence as he grabbed the receiving paraphernalia of the radio.

We waited breathlessly, as Kennedy consulted his watch several times in the interchange over the air.

"They got Ryder Smith off. They were glad to give him up. One less to divide with, I suppose. They're bringing him ashore and I'll have him by six o'clock. Meanwhile he has made a part of his statement—and it will enable me to tie up the one loose end there is left in my case!"

CHAPTER XVII
TYING LOOSE ENDS

"TIE a loose end?" repeated McNaught. "And that is—?" He paused in the question.

"Possession," answered Kennedy. "Most cases fall down on that. Possession of the poison. It's all very well to prove that a person has been poisoned, to prove that there was a motive and an opportunity and all that for another person to poison them. But prove that that person actually had the poison in question with which to do it. Many an otherwise perfect case has broken down on that."

"Well, seeing that I don't know what the poison was nor who the person was, I must say I am as much in the dark, Kennedy, now as I was when I looked through the port of the Gigolo and saw that beautiful girl in the cabin, alone, dead." McNaught looked around at me reproachfully as if I had been holding back something from him.

"I can assure you, McNaught," I hastened to alibi myself, "I am in pretty much the same position myself."

Kennedy smiled. "In fact I think Dr. Gibson, the coroner, knew no more about it than either of you." He paused, looking around keenly at them all. "Of course," he resumed, "I am going to leave you all in the custody of McNaught and his men until six o'clock when they assure me they will have landed Captain Ryder Smith and turned him over to me. That being the case, I can see no harm that will come of revealing at least some part of what this missing link of possession of the poison may be.... Who is 'the Turk?' Donato—no, perhaps you. Merck, can answer best. Taxi drivers know everyone. Who is 'the Turk'?"

"Go on, Jake, you tell 'em," urged Don with a sort of fiendish glee. "I had to tell about Ryder Smith. Now you tell!"

"Come across, Merck. Who is the Turk? I will find out—but you might save me a half hour or perhaps an hour."

It was not so much that Jake did not want to tell as it was that he revolted against having to tell. It was the instinct of the gunman and racketeer who would rather die than reveal even who it was who shot him.

I could well imagine what was going on in Merck's mind. He would never have breathed a syllable any more than Don the Dude would have done about Ryder Smith had the Turk been a member of his gang.

"Come across," repeated Kennedy. "There's nothing you can gain by shielding him—much you can lose."

Merck scowled. "Of course you're right. He ain't even in the city—much less in the gang. You know the little fruit store on East Main Street?"

"Yes. We all call him the Turk. He's swarthy and looks like one, anyhow. That's the fellow."

Kennedy nodded. "I gathered as much from what Ryder Smith just told me. Runs a speakeasy back of the fruit store, eh?" Merck nodded.

Kennedy was considering something. "I suppose he has to know you pretty well if you are going to get in."

"Oh, yes. No strangers get in there. He just grins and doesn't know aching when you talk about wine."

"I thought as much. The surest way to find a drink is always to get in the good graces of a taxi driver. Naturally, they know them all. Well, McNaught. Merck, is one you will have to release to me for a little while, after I have committed him to your care. I will be responsible. Come on, Jake. Walter and I haven't become so well known here yet that we mightn't be a couple of good thirsty fares for whom you can vouch."

"Yeah," pulled back Merck. "But what am I gettin't out o' this? Maybe a knife in my back some dark night, later?"

Kennedy shook his head reassuringly. "No; there's nothing the Turk has done that incriminates him. He was an innocent tool in the affair." Merck was at last bestirring himself. Kennedy leaned over and whispered something to McNaught. "It just means you'll have to be doubly careful with them all, Mac. Keep your eye on them, every one. There's enough authority for holding them—material witnesses, and all that."

"Oke!" agreed McNaught. "I don't know what you expect to get but I hope you get it."

OUTSIDE we departed in one of the cars and as we came into the town Kennedy signed to Jake to stop and park the car around the corner on Main Street. "We'll walk there. Then he won't see you're not driving a taxi. Pin your taxi badge on your coat. There. Now, Walter, just a little bit exhilarated—as if we had to have more!"

"Hello, you big Turkey!" greeted Merck as we came to the fruit stall around the corner. "I got a couple of good spenders—all the way out from the city. The sky's the limit. O.K., Turk. I know 'em for years." He turned and introduced us.

The fruit vendor sized us up carefully. We certainly did not look like cellar smellers or even secret agents. His scrutiny seemed to satisfy him. He paused in the back of the shop for a couple of muttered remarks to pass between him and Merck, then unlocked what looked like a closet door but was really a cellar door. We followed him down, not into a cellar exactly but into a basement, almost on the level with a yard in back of the store, due to the slope of the land.

HERE was as complete a bar as I had ever seen, brass rail and everything, even to the mirror back of the bar with a landscape painted on it with soap and Epsom salts.

We had a drink, and another. The Turk proved to be not a bad sort of boniface. He bought and treated on the house. We began to get chummy, so much so that Kennedy was emboldened to rally him on his nickname and his looks.

"My mother, she was a Turk," he confided. "You know my father was in the army." He was off to a proud recital of the family's military prowess.

A nudge from Kennedy once when the Turk was away back of his bar and I gathered that Merck and I were on any pretext to become so chummy that we left Craig and the Turk to themselves.

There was nothing to do but to overcome my curiosity and give Kennedy his chance, for he was getting along famously apparently with the fruit vender.

Merck and I started to roll the bones, much to my discomfort, for I found he shot them very much too well for me and I was lighting off the danger of being cleaned by him into the bargain.

"White grapes—and you were to put them in a basket." I caught wafted over from Kennedy once in a lull in the game.

I knew he was getting somewhere. These must be the grapes we had discovered on the table before Lola in the cabin of the "Gigolo." halt eaten, seeds and all.

We resumed our rolling the bones. But that made it twice as difficult as before for me. For not only was I feeling the potency of the Turk's liquid refreshment, but I was consumed with curiosity to catch some next fleeting remark from Kennedy.

THE next interchange was lost to me. Kennedy and the Turk were becoming more and more confidential.

"Shut up!" I ground out between my teeth. "You're taking my money fast enough without any side-bets—while I'm trying to get an earful of this. Now, shut up—and shoot!"

"...sure. Mister, and everything looks yellow to them... sure... turn green.... I have seen them with my own eyes...."

"Don't snap your fingers, so, Jake. You can buy baby a new pair of shoes without making all that noise over it. Come to papa! There, now match that! Only don't wag that infernal tongue of yours so loud when you do it!"

"...over there last year. I brought some back... just curiosity... all of it yet except that little bit I told you about.... I don't care if I do... if you pay me...."

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the Turk go back of the bar and bend down. I rose to light a cigarette. He was on his knees twirling the combination of a country safe. I did not dare look longer, but as I resumed the crap game I saw him return to Kennedy with a little paper of something, hand it to Kennedy who in turn passed over a crisp Treasury note, regarded the white paper in his hand as he unfolded it, looked in at something, then folded it again.

"... three of them... that one... the one you have... and I have the other in the safe.... Oh, I collect strange things wherever I go abroad. In Syria... a little silken cord... you know that was an idea they brought back during the Crusades and in Spain they made what they call yet the Garrote Chair.... I could go on all day about the strange customs of the East.... Have another, gentlemans?"

Kennedy agreed. But I understood now why he was watching us all so closely but covertly. A good part of what was supposed to have slipped down his throat had slipped surreptitiously into the spittoon under the table. It is one very successful way of keeping your head when the drinks are coming fast. And Craig was only at the beginning of a big job.

He glanced at his watch. "Oh, by Godfrey, Merck! Look at the time I And I had an appointment at six. If I'm paying you to drive me I'm paying you to think for me, too! So long, Tony! I'm coming, out to see you again. I like to talk to you. I learn so much!"

CHAPTER XVIII
THE GREEN DEATH

Bitterly and distinctly, even if he was muttering, Captain Ryder Smith ground out the words, the first he uttered as he saw us driving up the steamboat dock to which the "Gerónimo" had tied up only a few minutes before we appeared driven with taxicab recklessness by Merck.

"Just a moment, Walter. Now, Captain, not a word until we get over to the Hancock bungalow. I have them all there, with McNaught, all but Merck, of course."

"I did. That's what made me a little late. Having too good a time with the Turk." Kennedy took the little white paper packet from his breast pocket, then replaced it carefully, patting his pocket. "I could have proved it by my own autopsy, of course. I knew what to look for. You knew where. This makes it perfectly open and shut."

Merck was burning up the road. Now and then his lips moved. I could not catch a word. But I knew that he, too, had a hate in his heart and was perfectly willing to pay off an old score.

"This road would break a snake's back!" I gritted as I clung to the seat as Jake took the curves between the Port and St. James.

It seemed merely a matter of seconds before we were let into the big living room of the Hancock bungalow.

"There, Mr. Kennedy, it happened just as I told you it was going to happen! Dad did come in!" Reproachfully Judy greeted us, and behind her Mr. Hancock, while over in the corner a very crestfallen Eversley Barr was slumped in a big chair and a much subdued group of amateur and professional rum-smugglers were draped nervously about the room.

Kennedy swung about and forcibly interposed his weight between Ryder Smith and those in the room.

"Now, not a word. Smith, until I ask you to speak, not a word! You know, you are a partner in the crime, in one sense. The rum-running case against you is perfect. And here's McNaught. Please, just a minute."

"Hardly," replied Craig. "Cocaine would hardly account for the strange effect that the drug had on her."

No one betrayed even by a look knowledge of what Kennedy was driving at, although I knew that someone must know. All were looking keenly at him now.

"IT was a queer poison from the Levant," he said suddenly. "It was a poison that a speakeasy proprietor brought over on his last vacation abroad. It was santonin, which has the strange effect of making the victim literally see yellow and green—and finally turning the victim himself yellow, then green!"

"But I was talking to Dr. Gibson," put in Hancock. "He told me he could find no trace of any poison in the stomach contents!"

"Perhaps not. Nor in any scratch or wound. But Dr. Gibson failed to remember something that should have been obvious to him as a physician. If he were treating intestinal disease there is one kind of capsule he would use, a coating that is not dissolved by the acids of the stomach juices but which is dissolved only by the digestive fluids of the intestine. He fell into an obvious trap!"

His little audience seemed literally to gasp as Kennedy proceeded with the elucidation so simply of what had been insoluble. He drew the little white paper packet from his pocket and balanced it carefully between his finger and thumb.

"There I have one of three packets of this strange poison, santonin, brought back by a certain person from the Near East. One packet he still has in his safe. The third he sold to the murderers of Lola Langhorne! Carefully, that poison was placed in the seeds of a bunch of white grapes, purchased from this same person by these same murderers. I am prepared to show the poison in some of the seeds that were eaten and found in her intestines with the coating over the seeds still undissolved by the intestinal juices. I am prepared to show the poison in the seeds that had been carefully extracted from some of the still uneaten grapes and replaced, coated with the same intestinal capsule coating. It is a perfect case—all but the possession of the poison with which to perpetrate the murder. And within the last hour I have been with the one person in the world who unwittingly sold both the poison and the grapes to parties on whom now I am able absolutely to prove possession—the one rock upon which so many poisoning cases have been wrecked. This case will not be wrecked on that rock!"

"It's all right, Cap'n," smiled Kennedy. "I know that, I know also that you are eager to clear yourself of the murder, whatever else may be hung on you. Go ahead! Now is your time. Tell it!"

"THEM double-crossin' devils!" The old sea-dog drew himself up to his full height. The withering scorn of his voice was as nothing to the withering scorn of his eyes. Whatever he might have done in his life he had the scorn of the sea for a traitor.

It was like a burst of a searchlight through the darkness as one sails a boat or of the headlights of a car as one rounds a curve in the blackness. Here was the hidden motive for the murder of the beautiful girl as plain and simple as daylight.

"What double-crossing devils?" demanded McNaught leaning forward eagerly as if he had suddenly half outguessed the old seaman.

Captain Ryder Smith drew back, uncertain whether not to include McNaught himself in the contempt he felt.

"Them revenooers!" he boomed viciously. "That there Warner David and the gal. Jean Bartow! You ought to know who I mean! They was goin' to get the lion's share of that cargo for theirselves before it was over. They took me and Jake Merck and his gal, Mazie, in, they did. But I switched and I switched quick when I seen they done that murder on that Lola Langhorne, I did,—just because she got on to them and they knowed their game of double-crossin' was up if she lived to get to shore. They double-crossed Ev Barr, they double-crossed all the rest of us, they double-crossed the Government that was payin' 'em—and I just beat it out to Rum Row where it was safe. I did, until I heard how things really was from Mr. Kennedy. Then I was perfectly willin' to come back an' tell what I knew."

"How it was done?" he repeated. "Easy enough! You've told 'em more'n I could tell about the poison. I didn't know nothin' 'bout that, 'cept that there was a poison of some kind and it was given in some way and I knowed they hung out with the Turk and you might get a line on it that way."

"Well, it was like this. You know Mr. Barr places me in charge of the Gigolo with Mis' Lola, bringing in as much stuff as we could carry each trip from the 'All Alone.' This Davis and the Bartow woman was in the dory doin' the same thing. They was comin' back from shore empty and passed me with Mis' Lola comin' in with a load. They musta been lookin' for us in the Sound, for they signaled and I slowed up and they got aboard.

"Now, Mis' Lola was always eatin' grapes, white grapes mostly. She loved 'em. We all knowed that. And she was in the cabin havin' her lunch, which was mostly grapes, as usual. They has a little basket of grapes. I don't know what they done. Maybe they switched the grapes. Maybe they just give 'em to her. I wasn't there.

"But, by and by, I hears loud voices in the cabin. So I slows down again and goes aft to it. I couldn't help hearin'. She was accusin' them of bein' what they was—double-crossers. Some friend o' hers had put her wise and she was just waitin' to face 'em out when she saw 'em. They musta knowed it. She was nervous and eatin' grapes kinda rapid and they was all talkin' at once.

"Alla sudden I hears her say, 'And you look yellow to me' and she stops, kinda startled like. Then she catches sight of me. 'Cap'n,' she says and her voice was funny, 'there's somethin' wrong with me—get me to shore—and to a doctor—things are turnin' green!' I looked and her face was green. Before I knowed what to say, this Davis had a gun poked at me. I ducked just as he fired and, bulieve me, I didn't waste no time goin' overboard, I can tell ye! Some gal, that Mis' Lola. None o' the rest of yer knowed it. But she's wise.

"They fired at me a couple of times in the water, but they didn't get me. When I dropped overboard I was swimmin' around and I cut a tender loose. But I didn't dare get in it. They was still lookin' and firin'. Then they seen somethin' and they got off in the dory right smart. I was swimmin' toward the little tender when I see what it was they seen. It was the revenoo boat. I don't know why the revenoo boat don't see me, but they don't. They was lookin' for the 'Gigolo' so hard, I guess. I made the little skiff and there I was tossin' about until a huckster goin' out to the Rum Fleet seen me, and picked me up. They musta set the 'Gigolo' headed for shore when they got back in the dory and started out to the 'All Alone' for an alibi. Anyhow, I didn't want to go ashore and this huckster took me out to the boat where he was goin', the 'Owlet,' and I stayed there. I figured it was safer till this blowed over, or somethin'. I lets Don and Jake know where I was and to tell Deitz the fake revenooers ain't in it no more if they tries to shake him down."

Slowly, as Captain Ryder Smith told it, with some show of pride and virtuosity at what he wouldn't stand for. I saw it, the double-crossing planned by Warner Davis and Jean Bartow and discovered by Lola. They had removed her, as they thought, with no suspicion on themselves. It was they that had done the informing on Ev Barr, to appear on the job while plotting to get the stuff for themselves. It was they on their last trip, that planted the case in Judy's car and tipped off the officers to get her.

The relief of Judy and Ev Barr was overwhelming as the two thoroughly frightened young people now stood beside Kennedy, begging him to intercede with old Mr. Hancock for them.

McNaught was a tableau to watch. He stood, arms akimbo, one clenched fist on each hip, legs wide apart, as he faced the cowering Davis and Jean Bartow.

"I'll—be—damned!" he bellowed at the top of his voice. "Who's going to reform the reformers!"

ARTHUR B. REEVE

THE GIGOLO MYSTERY

A RECONSTRUCTION OF THE RADIO DIGEST SERIAL

Serialised in Radio Digest, Oct 1929-Mar 1930 (6 parts)

First e-book edition in this format:
Roy Glashan's Library, 2021^©
Version Date: 2021-01-16
Produced by Roy Glashan

All content added by RGL is proprietary and protected by copyright.

Click here for more Craig Kennedy stories

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART I

CHAPTER I
[UNTITLED]

CHAPTER II
VOLCANIC YOUTH

CHAPTER III
THRILLS AND CHILLS

PART II

CHAPTER IV
THE DANCING MAN

CHAPTER V
FLAPPERS AND BOOTLEGGERS

CHAPTER VI
RUM ROW

PART III

CHAPTER VII
THE TWELVE-MILE LIMIT

CHAPTER VIII
SUSPICIONS

CHAPTER IX
HIJACKERS!

PART IV

CHAPTER X.
JUDY PLAYS STOOL-PIGEON

CHAPTER XI
THE RUM CASTLE

PART V

CHAPTER XII
TRAPPED!

CHAPTER XIII
A SHOT IN THE DARK

CHAPTER XIV
ANOTHER GREEN DEATH CLUE

CHAPTER XV
BROADCASTING

PART VI

CHAPTER XVI
THE LAST LINK

CHAPTER XVII
TYING LOOSE ENDS

CHAPTER XVIII
THE GREEN DEATH

THE END

ARTHUR B. REEVE

THE GIGOLO MYSTERY

A RECONSTRUCTION OF THE RADIO DIGEST SERIAL

Serialised in Radio Digest, Oct 1929-Mar 1930 (6 parts) First e-book edition in this format: Roy Glashan's Library, 2021© Version Date: 2021-01-16 Produced by Roy Glashan All content added by RGL is proprietary and protected by copyright. Click here for more Craig Kennedy stories

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART I

CHAPTER I [UNTITLED]

CHAPTER II VOLCANIC YOUTH

CHAPTER III THRILLS AND CHILLS

PART II

CHAPTER IV THE DANCING MAN

CHAPTER V FLAPPERS AND BOOTLEGGERS

CHAPTER VI RUM ROW

PART III

CHAPTER VII THE TWELVE-MILE LIMIT

CHAPTER VIII SUSPICIONS

CHAPTER IX HIJACKERS!

PART IV

CHAPTER X. JUDY PLAYS STOOL-PIGEON

CHAPTER XI THE RUM CASTLE

PART V

CHAPTER XII TRAPPED!

CHAPTER XIII A SHOT IN THE DARK

CHAPTER XIV ANOTHER GREEN DEATH CLUE

CHAPTER XV BROADCASTING

PART VI

CHAPTER XVI THE LAST LINK

CHAPTER XVII TYING LOOSE ENDS

CHAPTER XVIII THE GREEN DEATH

THE END

Serialised in Radio Digest, Oct 1929-Mar 1930 (6 parts)

First e-book edition in this format:
Roy Glashan's Library, 2021^©
Version Date: 2021-01-16
Produced by Roy Glashan

All content added by RGL is proprietary and protected by copyright.

Click here for more Craig Kennedy stories

CHAPTER I
[UNTITLED]

CHAPTER II
VOLCANIC YOUTH

CHAPTER III
THRILLS AND CHILLS

CHAPTER IV
THE DANCING MAN

CHAPTER V
FLAPPERS AND BOOTLEGGERS

CHAPTER VI
RUM ROW

CHAPTER VII
THE TWELVE-MILE LIMIT

CHAPTER VIII
SUSPICIONS

CHAPTER IX
HIJACKERS!

CHAPTER X.
JUDY PLAYS STOOL-PIGEON

CHAPTER XI
THE RUM CASTLE

CHAPTER XII
TRAPPED!

CHAPTER XIII
A SHOT IN THE DARK

CHAPTER XIV
ANOTHER GREEN DEATH CLUE

CHAPTER XV
BROADCASTING

CHAPTER XVI
THE LAST LINK

CHAPTER XVII
TYING LOOSE ENDS

CHAPTER XVIII
THE GREEN DEATH