Black Mask Magazine (Vol. 27, No. 2 — September 1945)

Chapter One Haunted Hotel

Blond Eva Taine was tousle-headed and panic-eyed. She wore a negligee a little thicker than a cobweb, and a blue-and-gold bellhop’s coat. The negligee was what she’d been wearing when she rushed screaming into the lobby. The coat was what they’d covered her up with as they hustled her into manager Endicott’s private office.

She said: “I tell you, I saw it with my own eyes! I woke up and it was bending right over my bed! It was Grandpa’s ghost, and it tried to strangle me!”

The thin-faced, graying Endicott listened in tsk-tsk disapproval. Endicott didn’t believe Eva Taine’s spook story, and he didn’t think the paying guests at the fifteen-dollar-a-day-on-up resort hotel would believe it, either. He was afraid the Hollywood week-enders and West Coast socialities would figure there was a real life, flesh-and-blood stranger on the loose at San Alpa.

It doesn’t do the luxury hotel business any good to have crimes committed against its clientele, and Endicott argued against the whole idea.

He spoke curtly: “You were just dreaming, Miss Taine.” Then he turned to O’Hanna, the San Alpa house dick, and asked him: “Wasn’t she just dreaming, Mike?”

O’Hanna was a tall Irishman, and a long hop-step-and-jump from the average, toothpick-eating lobby cop. Hired to keep the California mountain resort an upper-class playground instead of a happy hunting ground for crooks, O’Hanna was supposed to squelch wrong-doing before the paying guests even knew anything had happened.

Of course, he couldn’t help it if they had bad dreams. But — was this just a dream?

O’Hanna’s Irish-gray glance rested on the negligee that did almost nothing to keep the blonde from catching her death of cold. The part of it which interested him most was the lacy neck of the garment. Nothing about Eva Taine’s slim, rounded throat showed any signs of struggle with a strangler.

“I don’t know,” the house dick admitted. “What makes you so sure it was your grandfather, Miss Taine?”

“It had a beard — a white beard. Even in the dark I could see that. And then there was the way it breathed.” Eva Taine shivered inside the negligee and the borrowed bellhop’s jacket.

“Breathed?”

“As if it had a tin whistle in its throat. I’ll never forget Grandpa Taine breathing like that when he had his attacks of asthma.”

O’Hanna said: “Still, ghosts don’t just happen! There’s generally a reason why they come back—”

Endicott interrupted sharply. “You’re crazy. Ghosts don’t happen at all, for any reason whatsoever.”

“I’m asking her. Did the ghost say what he wanted, beside strangling you?”

She moistened her lips. “I... I’m not sure. He muttered something about the cat, about teaching me to let the cat alone...”

O’Hanna caught the cat on the first bounce. “You grandfather didn’t happen to be old Colonel H. C. Taine?”

The blonde said: “Yes.”

“Rubbish,” Endicott fumed. “It wasn’t any of her dead relatives. It was probably the lobster thermidor on the table d’hote dinner—” and stopped, did a double-take with his mouth muscles as if he’d just suddenly remembered Colonel H. C. Taine.

Endicott said: “Colonel Taine? The one who left a hundred thousand dollars to his pet cat?”

O’Hanna recalled the newspaper publicity at the time. Both times, in fact. It had all started when a black kitten, belonging to one of the servants, had crossed the path just as the old gentleman was coming out to his limousine. Colonel Taine had been superstitious enough to turn back to his front door and start the trip all over again. The chauffeur, standing there beside the open limousine door, had thought his employer had changed his mind about the drive, so he closed the door. When he did, four sticks of dynamite under the back seat had blown the cushion clean through the top.

It had been necessary to bury the chauffeur, as O’Hanna remembered the story. That made it murder, but the Los Angeles police had never been able to pin the dynamiting on anybody else. As for the black kitten, it had been adopted into the family and — when the old gentleman died of heart failure — there’d been a clause in his will setting up a trust fund to support the cat as long as it lived.

O’Hanna asked: “What’d he mean, let the cat alone?”

“I... I’m not sure. I screamed and sat up in bed and tried to turn on a light.” The blonde widened her eyes at O’Hanna. “There was a blinding flash, and Grandpa turned to smoke before my eyes!”

Endicott swallowed a word. After all, she was a paying guest and the granddaughter of a millionaire.

The girl said: “It’s the truth! It scared me so I jumped out of bed, and the next thing I knew I was running across the hotel grounds toward the main building.”

O’Hanna looked his surprise.

Eva Taine explained: “I’m staying in one of your hotel cottages — chalets, you call them.”

O’Hanna had known she was registered in one of the chalets — tourist cabins, he privately called them. Chalet was just the fifty-dollar word, coined by Endicott to justify the super-duper price charged for these accommodations. For in the swankiest California resort hotels, a cottage on the grounds is considerably classier — and costlier — than a suite in the hotel itself. A chalet at San Alpa spells what a penthouse apartment means in New York or Chicago.

It wasn’t the chalet that surprised O’Hanna. He put it in words: “But you stopped to put on the negligee?”

“No, I wore it to bed. I curled up with a book and must have fallen asleep over it.”

Endicott sniffed. “A book of ghost stories?”

O’Hanna ignored Endicott, said: “Then, when you fell asleep reading, there was a light burning in the room?”

“No — I mean yes. I remember half waking up with the light bothering my eyes. I switched it off and turned over and went back to sleep.” She sighed. “It sounds silly, but I’m afraid to go back there alone...”

O’Hanna said: “Let’s sneak out the back door.”

It didn’t prove her story was true, but O’Hanna heard the blonde catch her breath as they stepped out onto the night-cooled concrete driveway circling from the service door — she hadn’t stopped for mules, she’d come barefoot. Past the driveway, though, the hotel lawn was as perfect as a golf green. The steep-roofed, Swiss-styled chalets were farther down the slope, hidden among black oak and pine trees.

She didn’t like the pine needles. It didn’t prove her story exactly, but as he threw a flashlight under the trees he could see she hadn’t stopped to dodge needles the first time. There was dew enough to take a footprint. And she’d left footprints across the grass instead of following the picturesquely curving paths.

She’d left the chalet door open, too. They climbed stone steps to reach the threshold, snapped on lights in a knotty-pine paneled hallway, opening on the left into a paneled living room with peasant footstools scattered around the floor and sporting prints scattered around the walls. On the right, doors opened into bed chambers.

The blonde said: “This one.”

O’Hanna went in first, pressed a wall switch, and lit up a chandelier. The light she’d reached for was a reading lamp that had a chain dropping from the bed head. That bulb didn’t light. He touched it and it was loose in its socket.

The open window hadn’t blown away a strong smell of burnt match around the bed.

O’Hanna went to this window, aimed the flashlight onto the grass outside, and saw tracks in the dew. He said, “Excuse me while I play bloodhound,” and forked a leg over the sill.

The footprints ran upslope, about as easy to follow as U.S. No. 1. They led O’Hanna to the front steps of a chalet fifty yards above Eva Taine’s.

He climbed the steps, thumbed a bell button.

A chime rang two notes, immediately followed by a gun crash.

O’Hanna threw the door open, but the other man had a running start, and he had a fistful of something to help clear the way. He clipped O’Hanna like the Notre Dame backfield carrying hand hatchets.

The house dick went down, groveled, and rose on one knee. His back teeth vibrated in their sockets. His left eye ached. He was conscious, though, and he didn’t have to pinch himself to make sure. He knew the backfield had bounced off him and whirled and run the other way.

Apparently it ran into somebody else because a voice said, “Ow!” loudly and there was a sound of falling.

O’Hanna stood up. This took time. The trouble was in his legs. His legs buckled and he had to grab at the wall. He knew tears were trying to wash hot needles out of his eye. He took careful, weaving steps with his hand braced against the wall.

There was a sound of swearing. Then a light snapped on, turning a doorway yellow. O’Hanna reached the doorway and stopped, leaning a shoulder against the jamb.

In front of him, a man in bright green pajamas was down on his knees reaching for a gun under the bed. Addressing O’Hanna, he said: “Hell, he got away.” He rescued the gun from under the bed, pointed it at the open window and said: “He jumped out there. But I got a shot at him, anyway.”

O’Hanna lurched to the window. The shadow cast by his body stopped him from seeing anything. He moved to one side and peered down to the spill of window light on the grass.

There were footprints in the dew.

O’Hanna started to slide a leg over the sill. The green-pajamaed man came and grabbed the house dick’s shoulder. “Hey, not so fast!” He punched a revolver at O’Hanna’s face.

O’Hanna had been clipped over the left ear, and it hurt. Up close, it looked as if two hands and two revolvers were pointed at him. He had an idea it would hurt a lot more if one of them went off.

“Not so fast,” Green Pajamas said. “Just kindly say who the hell you are and what you’re doing here.”

He was a fattish man, the skin of his face pink and shiny and filled out with lard. There was a kind of slick dampness about the pink skin, like the fat sleek toadstools which pop up under mountain trees after a rain.

O’Hanna said: “Let go, you fool — I’m the house officer.”

“Yeah? Says you.”

“There’s a badge in my pocket.”

“Keep away from your pockets.” The fat pink face floated back. He kept the gun pointed. He lifted a phone from the bedside table.

“Operator,” the man said, “this is Mr. Lucas Kuhn in chalet 21-A I’ve got a prowler here who claims to be your house dick. Ask the manager to come down and see if he can identify the guy.”

O’Hanna said: “Ask her what I look like, sap.” But Lucas Kuhn had hung up.

O’Hanna stood and cooled off with the window behind him. It wasn’t as good as an icepack, but it helped. He fingered the spot. There was a little blood on his fingers and a little blood on the floor. His?

“Stand still, you,” Lucas Kuhn warned.

O’Hanna stayed still. He figured he had but one life, and why wager it on the whimsy of a trigger-happy paying guest? He said: “O.K., you’ve got me stopped, but it doesn’t mean we have to stall our brains. What’d the fellow look like?”

“That’s just the trouble. I couldn’t see in the dark.” Lard creases half-closed the pajama-clad man’s eyes. “It might even have been you!”

“Me! You said he went through the window!”

“You could have jumped out the window and run in the front door again,” Lucas Kuhn said. He thought it over and said: “Or there could have been two prowlers — the other guy and you.”

He kept the gun pointed. He said: “I’m playing it safe. You’re staying put until the manager identifies you.”

O’Hanna shrugged, let his keen gray glance drift around the room. He asked suddenly: “You don’t see any bullet holes in here, do you?”

“That old gag won’t buy you anything.”

“Gag?”

“Sure. Like the one boxer says to the other, ‘Your shoelace is untied,’ ha-ha.” It wasn’t a loud ha-ha, just a whispered giggle slipping through Lucas Kuhn’s plump-lipped leer. Vastly condescending, he gibed: “Hell, you don’t think I’m going to be dumb enough to take my eyes off you and start looking around for bullet holes?”

A wise-guy. O’Hanna said: “Now I’ll tell one. Like the boy on the merry-go-round, I can see you’ve been around — but it’s not getting you anywhere. Suppose you stop and think what no bullet hole means.”

Kuhn said: “It was just a wild shot. It went out the window, I guess.”

“Out the window is right,” the house dick mused. He changed tactics abruptly. “Mr. Kuhn, how long since you’ve been bothered ha’nts?”

The lard-faced man forked his eyebrows. “I’ve been what?”

“Pestered by ghosts.”

“You’re nuts. What in hell put such a screwy notion as that in your head?”

“You sound as if you don’t believe in spooks.”

“You’re right, I don’t,”

O’Hanna asked: “You wouldn’t go for the theory that this intruder wasn’t a sneak thief — but somebody trying to play on your fears by posing as the spirit of Colonel H.C. Taine?”

The other’s rotund, shiny features alerted. “Is that your theory? How do you figure it?”

“This way. Within the last half hour, somebody broke into Eva Taine’s chalet below here and staged a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t act. From there, the trail led straight to your door. Pardon me for asking, what’s the connection?”

Lucas Kuhn batted his eyes. He said: “Why, Eva is a sister-in-law of mine. But I didn’t even know she was here at San Alpa. The rest of it throws me for a total loss.”

O’Hanna said: “Let me make a suggestion. Ghosts hardly ever bring good news! As a rule, they dish out punishment or warnings. Maybe you and Eva had done something to make Grandfather Taine get up out of his grave and start walking?” He broke it off as footfalls hurried into the chalet and brought a round-eyed and breathless Endicott into the doorway.

Endicott said: “Good heavens, Mike! What on earth—”

Lucas Kuhn interrupted. “He really is the house dick? I guess that leaves me holding the bag — with a horselaugh inside it.” Lowering the gun, he addressed fulsome apologies to the detective. “If I hadn’t butted in, no doubt by this time you would have had the prowler caught! Thanks to my bullheaded blundering, I’m afraid he’s got the headstart on us! I could kick myself all over the mountain...”

O’Hanna’s mood was nasty. “Yeah, and if the dog hadn’t stopped to lap up the spilled milk, he’d still have caught the rabbit. Let’s drop the Alphonse-and-Gaston act and get going.”

Flashlight in hand, the Irishman swung himself over the window sill. The footprints across the wet grass made a nice trail for a hundred feet, but then they merged into one of the paths — and there was no way of telling which direction the fugitive had taken.

O’Hanna swore as he turned back to the chalet. Inside, Lucas Kuhn was barreling his plump legs into his britches while Endicott hovered over him and said: “It was a perfectly natural mistake, Mr. Kuhn. You can’t blame yourself a bit. Anybody waking up and finding strange men running around in his bedroom has a perfect right to be suspicious.”

Kuhn grumbled: “All the same, I’ll never forgive myself if the crook gets away.”

“He got away,” O’Hanna reported, “so we’ll have to play it the hard way with questions and answers—”

He hadn’t time to fire a question, though, before the bedside phone rang. Kuhn’s hand reached out, but the house dick got there first.

It was for O’Hanna, anyway. Little Doc Raymond, the house physician, was on the other end of the wire. Doc said he was in 207, and continued: “You better hurry. There’s a dead man here with a bullet hole in him.”

O’Hanna told Lucas Kuhn: “Pal, you were right. Your shot went through the window — inside the guy you hit. So let’s have the gun.”

Kuhn handed it over, and O’Hanna swung out the .38’s cylinder. There was one exploded hull in the chambers, and four live ones. O’Hanna took up the phone again: “Operator, give me the desk... Hullo, it’s Mike. Who’s registered in 207?”

The night clerk’s voice came back: “A man named Oscar Mullet.”

O’Hanna relayed it to Lucas Kuhn. “Mean anything to you?”

“Mullet?” Kuhn jammed his pajama sleeves into a street coat. “Sure. He’s the caretaker — the cat’s caretaker. You see, Grandfather Taine left an income to keep his pet cat, Lochinvar, supplied with milk for the rest of its life.”

O’Hanna cut in: “Let’s travel while we talk.” He snared the pink-faced man’s arm, steered him toward the door. “O.K., he’s the cat’s caretaker. So what?”

“Nothing — only Lochinvar has been ailing lately. Mullet’s got the damned fool idea some of us are trying to poison the kitty!”

“Why?”

“It’s the money he’s worried about. When that cat dies, Mullet’s going to have to find himself some other means of support. While the cat’s alive, the caretaker has free room and board plus the income from the trust fund.”

O’Hanna asked: “And when the cat dies, you and Eva Taine split the hundred grand?”

Kuhn denied it, said: “I’m only related by marriage. It’d be my wife who’d do the splitting, along with Eva and her brother, Johnny Taine.”

The trio crossed the hotel grounds, entered the lobby this time by way of its twin plate-glass front doors.

O’Hanna opened 207 and was a little surprised to encounter a tense, tight-faced, bow-legged citizen all dolled up in a tuxedo and cummerbund.

The detective asked: “Dr. Raymond?”

The bow-legged man said: “He’s in there — with it.”

A thumb jerk went with this, directed the house detective to the bathroom door.

A pair of shoes pointed their water-soaked soles through this doorway. Bits of lawn-mowered grass were dew-plastered onto the soles. O’Hanna stepped closer, and legs swam into view, then a crumpled arm angled out from the torso.

Doc Raymond was crouched over a profile on the bathroom floor that showed a wide-open eye as bright and shiny as a piece of liver.

O’Hanna asked: “Who called you, Doc?”

Bow-Legs supplied: “I did. I found this man out in the corridor a few minutes ago, apparently either sick or drunk. He asked me to please help him to his room, and I did so. Then he asked me to unlock his door, so I unlocked it. He requested me to help him to the bathroom, which I did. He told me to go away, but immediately afterward he fell unconscious on the floor, and I took it upon myself to call for medical assistance.”

“You didn’t notice he was bleeding?”

“No, sir.” Bow-Legs was the sallow, fiftyish type. Thinning brown hair parted from a middle stripe lent his hatchety features a scholarly, professorial look. “He was so doubled-up that I couldn’t see his shirtfront. I did notice that he kept one hand pressed there, as if suffering from severe indigestion.”

“Your name?”

“Why, I’m Alexander Janathan.” Alexander Janathan seemed slightly surprised he had to tell anybody who he was.

“Room number?”

“I’m directly down the hall — in 218.”

“OK., Mr. Janathan. You can go, but you’d better not discuss this with anybody before Sheriff Gleeson talks to you.”

The bow-legged man coughed behind a sallow hand, corrected: “Professor Janathan.”

“O.K., Professor.” O’Hanna waved him away, beckoned Lucas Kuhn closer. “Identify him?”

Kuhn was shaken. “It’s Mullet, all right. My God, I’d give my right arm if I hadn’t fired that shot!”

Endicott made reassuring sounds. “It isn’t your fault. Besides, he shouldn’t have run away after he was shot. If he’d surrendered, probably prompt medical attention could have saved his life.”

Secretly, Endicott was reassuring himself that it wasn’t really a case of murder at all. Violent death is never welcome in a resort hotel, but at least this wasn’t a murder mystery involving the paying guests in an unpleasant slay-scandal.

“Frankly,” the manager pronounced verdict, “it’s nobody’s fault except his own. It’s just a case of a guy playing ghoul and getting knocked for a goal.”

O’Hanna had swung to study the corpse. A metal object bulked out one of Oscar Mullet’s coat pockets. O’Hanna knelt, tugged forth a T-shaped metal trough supported by a trigger-equipped handle.

Endicott peered and said: “Why, that’s a photographer’s flashgun — the kind they used before flash-bulbs were invented. It explains the flash and the smoke cloud in Miss Taine’s chalet.”

Endicott looked like Sherlock Holmes as he said it, and Lucas Kuhn played an admiring Dr. Watson. “I guess you’re right. Mullet thought one of us was trying to poison the cat, and he evidently thought dressing up like Grandpa’s ghost was the way to stop us.”

Little Doc Raymond gestured. “Lend a hand, Mike.”

O’Hanna helped lift the corpse. The other hand had been under the body, and now as they turned the corpse they saw this hand clutched a Santa Claus style set of whiskers. It had been a white beard once. It was red now from ’having been pressed to the bullet wound, and the blood was stiffening the whiskers as it dried.

“That absolutely proves it,” Endicott settled the case for keeps. “There’s the disguise he wore to scare Miss Taine.”

O’Hanna eyed the clue skeptically. He challenged: “Yeah, but how long has this blood been drying, Doc?”

The house physician tossed his diagnosis like a hand grenade. “Mike, it’s screwy, but in my opinion he’s been dead at least half an hour.”

O’Hanna’s wristwatch said it was 1:10. It’d be 2:10 by the time the sheriff covered sixty miles of mountain road to get here. By the time he picked up the phone to call Sheriff Gleeson, Endicott was making a speech over the corpse.

Chapter Two Holograph Hunter

Endicott took it tough. He’d had it all wrapped up as accidental homicide, and now the thing was turning into a cold-blooded kill. He contradicted: “Half an hour is impossible! It’s hardly been that long since Eva Taine saw this guy playing ghost. It’s not more than ten or twelve minutes since Kuhn fired the fatal shot. So how can you stand there and say he was dead before any of those things happened?”

The medico protested: “I don’t say it. The blood on the beard says it.”

Endicott scowled. “Another thing. It’s not more than five minutes since Professor Janathan found this man out in the corridor. Good heavens, why would he lie about a thing like this?”

O’Hanna nodded. “Why would he? You’re taking the words right out of my mouth.”

The house dick swiveled to the staring Kuhn. “Who the hell is this guy Janathan, anyway?”

“Search me. I never heard of him before.” Lucas Kuhn stretched a.fleshy hand. “I guess it’s OK. if I take my gun back now.”

O’Hanna said: “That’s your guess. Mine’s different.”

The pink-faced man didn’t like it. He put up an argument. He said: “Look, if Oscar Mullet has been dead half an hour, that shot of mine didn’t kill him, and my gun can’t possibly be legal evidence.”

O’Hanna said: “That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is, if you didn’t shoot him — how do we know you didn’t shoot somebody else. There’s a chance of another corpse turning up with a slug in it, and I’m keeping the gun.”

Keeping the weapon in his pocket, the house dick headed down the corridor to 218. Professor Alexander Janathan had switched from tux and cummerbund to a corduroy, velvet-collared smoking jacket. Affably, he waved a corncob pipe as he greeted O’Hanna. “Excuse the Missouri meerschaum, but frankly I’m just a farm boy at heart! You can have your coffin-nails and Corona Coronas, for my part I’ll take my nicotine barnyard style. I find it’s cooler on the tongue that way—”

O’Hanna interrupted. “Were you really born on a farm, Prof?”

“As a matter of fact — no. I’m actually a scion of Chicago. I was raised in the shadow of the old Historical Museum on North Dearborn. I suppose that’s how I got interested in my specialty. From the time I was knee-high to a glass showcase, I used to hang around the exhibits in there. I practically cut my teeth on the old-fashioned dragoon pistols, the whaling harpoons, the ship’s models and so on.”

O’Hanna queried: “Your specialty? What’s that?”

“I’m a dealer in holographs.”

“Holy-whats?”

Alexander Janathan chuckled. “It means handwritten documents, especially those from the pens of important historical and literary personages. For instance, if you had a letter written by Mark Twain in your pocket, I’d cheerfully pay you a hundred dollars for it — and no questions asked. From there the rates go on up, and you could practically write your own ticket for the original copy of the Gettysburg Address as inscribed by Abraham Lincoln. I don’t mean the second copy he dashed off later and gave to Horace Greeley, but the genuine, original, first draft. It would be worth — well, thousands and thousands.” The hatchety man waved his corncob pipe, said: “But pshaw! I’m dreaming. What would a house detective be doing with the Gettysburg Address in his pocket? It’s a ridiculous idea, isn’t it?”

O’Hanna confided: “The only handwritten document I’m interested in is a murder confession, telling how Oscar Mullet got killed half an hour ago.”

Professor Janathan cocked an eyebrow. “Did you say half an hour ago?”

“The doctor said half an hour ago. I’ll tell you a secret — the blood was partly dried on the false beard Mullet had clutched to his wound.”

The other took it calmly. “I’ll tell you a secret right back. You’ll never be able to prove it in court!”

“No?”

“No, and here’s why. There’s no way to keep that clue intact! There’s no process for preserving a bloodstain in the exact condition you find it. It’ll be a lot drier by the time the coroner arrives, and it’ll be just caked blood when the case comes to trial — if there is a trial.”

Janathan came up out of his chair, balanced himself on his bow-legs, aimed the pipestem at O’Hanna. He declared: “So the jury would have only your house physician’s word — and he’s no pathologist — any smart defense lawyer would tear him to pieces. A smart lawyer would simply hire half a dozen experts to drive the jury nuts with their double-talk. It’d wind up the way expert testimony usually does, with the jury not knowing who to believe.”

O’Hanna asked: “And there’d be you, swearing you saw and talked to Oscar Mullet twenty-five minutes after his supposed death.”

Alexander Janathan swung his pipe-stem to a comer of his thin mouth, made a sound with his pipe like frying an egg. Innocent-eyed, he queried: “Me? Why drag me into it? I don’t want to be the ruin of your case! All I ask is to be left alone! I’m a sleeping dog that bites only when kicked.”

The detective conceded: “You could go even farther and say you’re a lowdown, mangy, hound-dog. To that I’ll agree — the rest of it, I’ll argue to a finish.”

The holographist showed no alarm — quite the contrary, he grinned. “I’ll surprise you, shamus. If Mullet died half an hour ago, you’ve got absolutely nothing on me. My alibi is ironclad.” The grin curled derisively. “Here’s why — I was sitting up with Johnny Taine tonight.”

O’Hanna reflected. It’d been Eva Taine first, then Kuhn, now there was yet another heir in the air. “Johnny? So he’s here, too?”

“He’s here, period, as far as I’m concerned.”

O’Hanna quizzed: “And just how are you concerned?”

“It’s commercial. Johnny’s grandfather, old Colonel Taine, left a rather large collection of holographia to his family. Johnny’s different — he collects night club chorines, and he’s spent plenty of money,” Janathan enlightened. “I’ve been trying to trade him my autograph on a check for some of those rare old historical documents he inherited.”

“Trying? You mean he wouldn’t sell?”

“He’s too willing — he wants to sell the works, lock, stock, and barrel. It just so happens Colonel Taine wasn’t a discriminating collector. His was the old story of the millionaire and a hobby-horse. A man as rich as he gets no thrill out of Packards and pearls — too many other millionaires can have those things. There aren’t enough George Washington and Thomas Jefferson holographs to go around — that’s what makes them valuable. I’m trying to say, the colonel had the bankroll, but he didn’t have the expert judgment. He owned some really rare items, but most of his collection was just plain junk.” The bow-legged man paused as if suddenly thought-struck. “But, shucks! I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. The Catlin Papers couldn’t mean anything to a hotel detective.”

O’Hanna protested: “But I am interested in cats.”

Alexander Janathan fried another egg in his corncob. “I didn’t say cats, I said Catlin. It goes ’way back in American history. George Catlin was a famous artist who took to studying the American Indians. His letters command a high value on account of the sketches he drew in the margin.”

“Yeah. Now let’s bring the history down to date. You say Johnny Taine inherited these Catlin letters from his granddad, and you’ve been trying to buy them from him. Where did this ironclad alibi take place?”

“You’ll find Johnny in 431. I was returning from his room when I found Mullet in the hall down here.”

O’Hanna scorned: “Pardon me for not laughing, but I’ve heard you tell that one before.” But the house dick’s eyebrows were battened down in a perplexed scowl as he walked away from the bow-legged holographist. That Janathan had lied, he didn’t doubt — the question was, why? It sounded as though the professor wanted to pin the murder rap on himself! He was doing his damnedest to fix the slay schedule so he wouldn’t have an alibi!

O’Hanna reached the battery of elevators, punched an UP button. Glumly, he reminded himself — Alexander Janathan hadn’t cooked up his cockeyed yam just to stick his neck in a noose. The professor stood to gain from his fable about the corpse living half an hour longer than it really had.

Twin elevator doors slid apart — and Lucas Kuhn bolted out between them, lurched headlong into the detective’s arms.

“Help!” the plump man sobbed. “Oh, it’s you! Thank God! I just had the most hair-raising experience!”

“Such as?”

Lucas Kuhn breathed hard. “I started back to the chalet, Mr. O’Hanna. I’d no sooner set foot in the darkness than the killer tried to lasso me!”

“Lasso you? For God’s sake!” the house dick exploded his open disbelief.

“That’s right. He looped a rope right around my neck. It’s only by dumb, blind instinct I managed to throw it off and run for my life.”

O’Hanna doubted aloud: “I know. You want your gun back.”

Lucas Kuhn said hoarsely: “You’re damned right I want my gun back. There’s a murderer on the loose. I can see it all now — he killed Mullet first, then he tried to strangle Eva, and this makes twice he’s tried for me. My blood’s on your hands if he strikes again and I’m not armed to defend myself.”

Irritably, O’Hanna sighed: “Oh, come on. I’ll be your bodyguard.”

He waved Kuhn back into the elevator, and said to the wide-eyed operator: “Fourth floor.”

“Fourth... You aren’t even going to investigate my story!” the pink-faced man accused bitterly.

“I’m investigating it my own way.” O’Hanna led the way out into the fourth-floor corridor. “Let’s be logical about it. How do you explain this wholesale vendetta against your entire household?”

“I can’t, but I’m getting a hunch it all goes back to the first time — the attempt to dynamite Grandfather Taine and me.”

O’Hanna was surprised. “You were in the dynamite deal, too?”

“Certainly. I was supposed to be right there in the back seat — with the old man. I’d already chucked my briefcase and topcoat into the car, then I remembered a letter I was supposed to mail. I went back into the house after it, otherwise I’d have been blown to bits.” Lucas Kuhn shuddered and said: “You know, the biggest piece of that briefcase we ever found wasn’t any larger than an inch square.”

“I didn’t know, but I’ve been wondering. How could the killer be sure Colonel Taine was inside when the dynamite blew up?”

Lucas Kuhn said: “It was clever — hellishly clever. The Bomb Squad figured it was a double switch, wired to work when the car door closed, but also wired so contact was impossible without a weight pressing down the seat cushion. Apparently the topcoat and briefcase supplied just enough weight so the juice fed to the dynamite cap without a human being inside the car.”

They’d reached 431, and found the door unlocked.

Startled exclamations came from the pair in 431 — a man and a woman. The man — Johnny Taine — was fair-haired and puffy-faced, pallid-skinned except for the alcohol crimsoning his fleshy nose.

Johnny Taine had been hitting the hooch, and there was whiskey on the breath he whooshed at O’Hanna in the doorway.

“Whyinell don’cha knock before you come barging into wrong rooms?” he yelped.

“It’s the right room. I’m the house detective.”

Johnny Taine giggled. “You’re off-base this time, snooper! This lady happensh to be my sister, so pfooey on you!”

O’Hanna looked at the sister. She wasn’t Eva Taine. This one was red-headed, and she was older, and she was so thin she could almost have used a broomstick as a dress form.

The explanation came as Lucas Kuhn bobbed around O’Hanna’s elbow, and gurgled: “Good Lord, it’s Belle — my wife.”

That seemed to make the family reunion complete, thought O’Hanna.

The red-haired woman said to Lucas Kuhn: “Your ex-wife, you mean, you beast.”

“You two are divorced?” O’Hanna surmised.

Lucas Kuhn said: “She has an interlocutory decree, but it isn’t final yet.”

The divorce angle was new, and it was the last straw on the camel’s back. O’Hanna’s black Irish streak flashed as he exploded: “Holy— Well, if you folks have got any more heirs, in laws, cat caretakers, and grandfathers’ ghosts — let’s hear about them now. I’m tired of bumping into a brand-new Taine family skeleton every time I open a door!”

Johnny Taine wrapped up a giggle in bourbonized breath, tossed it at O’Hanna. “Snooper, you sound higher’n I feel...”

Belle Kuhn said freezingly: “Johnny, keep out of this. I’ll attend to the man.” She turned to the detective, a prim, grim expression on her blade-thin face.

“Our family skeletons,” the red-head stated, “happen to be our affair, and not this hotel’s.”

“Then why don’t you keep them at home, why unload ’em on San Alpa?” O’Hanna gave a dour headshake. “Everything about your family is my business from here on in. I’ll begin by asking you just what accounts for this gathering of the clan, this rush of your relatives to San Alpa?”

Belle snapped: “That’s impertinent. You operate a public resort, don’t you? You advertise in the newspapers, you put up posters in the travel agencies, you supply publicity folders in every hotel rack on the West Coast. You practically beg the public to patronize the place. Is it a crime to rent a room here?”

O’Hanna handed it back to her. “Yes, it’s a crime — and we found the body.”

It took the starch out of Belle Kuhn. “You found what?” she managed.

Lucas Kuhn chipped in. “He’s not kidding, Belle. Oscar Mullet is dead downstairs.” He cleared his throat. “And there’ve been two attempts on my life in the last hour.”

O’Hanna asked: “You knew nothing about this, Mrs. Kuhn?”

“No... nothing—” Her broomstick figure spun half around at the sound of her brother’s giggling. She screamed: “Johnny, stop that! It isn’t funny!”

Johnny Taine’s eyes were blank, and he might have been looking at a moving picture nobody else could see.

O’Hanna stared at the fair-haired playboy. “What in hell ails you, anyhow?”

The red-headed woman said: “He isn’t himself. He’s been drinking. Johnny has been ill, unable to attend to his own affairs. I have a court order, a kind of power-of-attorney.”

Johnny Taine snickered. “I’m a dipso. Belle’s my guardian. It’s a good joke on that guy Janathan.” All by himself, he enjoyed a laugh over the good joke.

The skin at the back of O’Hanna’s neck crawled a little. Johnny Taine’s tittering laughter was nice to have around, if you had to choose between it and the noise a rattlesnake makes.

He asked: “What about Janathan?”

“Janathan’s a racketeer,” Belle said indignantly. “He’s the one who got my brother roaring drunk tonight. He was trying to persuade Johnny to sell him some extremely rare historical papers for a song.”

Johnny Taine gave with the giggles. Tears of merriment formed in his eyes. “It’s a hot one, huh? Imagine the guy pouring all that free firewater into me when I can’t even legally sign my own name!”

“It’s side-splitting,” O’Hanna agreed. He conned the red-headed Belle. “And where were you during this firewater frolic?”

Her expression was venomous. “The professor fooled me, too. He expressed an interest In buying my share of Grandfather’s collection of holographia. I was in my own room, drawing up a list of the items and figuring out an asking price. When I had decided, I tried to telephone Janathan’s room. When he didn’t answer, I became suspicious. I stepped across the hall and found him trying to take advantage of my brother with alcohol.”

“Yeah? What time was that?”

“Shortly before one o’clock in the morning, perhaps five minutes to one.”

Lucas Kuhn figured and said: “That’s about right. It was just about one A. M. when Janathan got downstairs and found—”

O’Hanna cut in. “Let me worry about the time-table, Mrs. Kuhn, where are these documents Janathan wanted to buy?”

“Locked up in a bank vault, of course. Many of them are extremely old and fragile. Besides, I’m not fool enough to run around with priceless, irreplaceable papers in my handbag. Once was enough. I do have a catalog—”

O’Hanna interrupted. “Once was enough?”

Color died from Belle Kuhn’s face, left her face the hue of over-exposed Kodachrome. She said: “We once lost part of the collection through carelessness. I was saying, Grandfather’s collection is catalogued, but of course prices change. Roughly speaking, the value of a man’s handwriting corresponds to his fame. But fame is fleeting, people are famous today and forgotten tomorrow — and vice versa, they’re forgotten today and famous tomorrow—”

Johnny Taine giggled.

O’Hanna swung on his heel and left 431. Entering the elevator, he saw Lucas Kuhn shagging in pursuit. The house dick growled: “The hell with him, don’t wait.”

Nobody tried to lasso him as he plunged from the hotel doors across the darkened grounds.

He followed his flashlight until he heard the voices. By that time, he didn’t need the flash-beam. He could be guided by Eva Taine’s window light.

Eva Taine’s voice carried farthest, being shrill. It said: “No! You’re insane! I didn’t!”

The other’s was a man’s voice, low and threatening. “You killed him, girlie. But you didn’t kill him dead enough! It was shock that dropped him, not death. He was still alive, and he regained consciousness, he got to his feet. He staggered out into the hall, and that’s where I found him. He had breath enough left to moan out a name — your name.”

From the sound of it, she was a very frightened girl. “He didn’t mean I killed him. He couldn’t have meant that.”

There was the noise of a doorknob clicking. The man said: “Think it over.” He opened the door, and the light shone through his bowed legs. “Think it over good. ‘Fourscore and seven years ago’ — that’s all I ask.”

“You’re crazy. It’s gone. There were only a few charred pieces about as big as a postage stamp.”

“Nuts,” Professor Alexander Janathan said. “He showed it to me. Think that over, too.”

He pulled the door shut and came down the chalet steps. His eyes gleamed like red hot coals. He was in too much of a hurry to notice O’Hanna in the darkness. O’Hanna was in too much of a hurry to stop him. O’Hanna fidgeted until he disappeared among the trees, then he ran up the chalet steps.

She hadn’t locked the door, hadn’t even stirred out of the chair where Janathan had left her twisting her hands. She didn’t even look up as O’Hanna came in.

“I didn’t kill him,” the blonde said. “He didn’t mean that.”

O’Hanna said: “ ‘Fourscore and seven years ago’ — the original draft of the Gettysburg Address in Abraham Lincoln’s handwriting. You can name your own price — you can even beat a murder rap with it.”

Eva Taine stared through dazed, poker-chip eyes. “Who told you?”

“I picked it up in pieces. I’ll let you put the pieces together. I’ve gathered Grandpa Taine collected rare old historical papers. You take it from there.”

“He had the Gettysburg Address. It was in the briefcase — that day,” the girl said. “It was blown up in the dynamiting. So you see, Janathan is just lying—”

“Not so fast. Why was it in the briefcase?”

“He was going to have it examined to make sure it was authentic.”

“I don’t remember reading that angle in the papers at the time,” the house dick put in.

Eva Taine said: “It wasn’t in the papers. Grandfather didn’t tell anyone. He bought it for a few thousand dollars — five, I think. It was undoubtedly worth ten times that. In other words, there was something peculiar about the deal.”

“It was hot?”

“I suppose it’d been stolen. Grandfather couldn’t possibly get it back, and he didn’t care to advertise his dealings with the thief.”

“So he didn’t tell the cops?”

“No.”

O’Hanna said: “He just sent a big floral offering to the chauffeur’s funeral? A great guy, Grandpa. I don’t wonder he can’t rest easy in his grave.”

Eva Taine protested: “Oh, but Jacques was involved, too.”

“Jacques was the chauffeur’s name?”

“Yes. He had a police record. He was the what-do-you-call-it? — the contact man. It was through him that Grandfather bought the Gettysburg Address. He told Grandfather he’d been approached by some man he’d known in prison.”

O’Hanna pondered. “Lucas Kuhn. Where’d he fit in?”

“He had no motive for trying to kill Grandfather. He was only Grandpa’s secretary at the time — that was before he married my sister Belle.”

“And Oscar Mullet?”

“Mullet was our gardener then. I’m sure Grandfather never suspected him, either. Why, he named Mullet in his will.”

“As the cat’s caretaker. Why was that?”

Eva Taine said: “Because the kitten belonged to Mullet before Grandfather adopted it. And I suppose because Lochinvar would get the best of care so long as it paid Mullet about five thousand dollars a year to keep the cat alive.”

O’Hanna shrugged. “The best of care won’t keep a cat alive forever. Mullet was playing for bigger stakes, and playing for keeps—”

Chimes concealed in the hall closet went tra-la-la. The caller didn’t wait for an answer. He threw the door open. It was Endicott, wild-eyed and quivering. The manager panted: “Mike, for God’s sake, the ghoul’s come back! I saw it myself! It tried to strangle me!”

Chapter Three The Ghoul Rush

“Pull yourself together, man!” O’Hanna commanded the trembling, ashen-faced manager. “Where’d you see it?”

“In that chalet, you know, Mr. Kuhn’s...”

The house dick stared. “What were you doing in Kuhn’s chalet?”

“I got to thinking, Mike. You see, if there happened to be some bloodspots there, it’d prove Raymond was wrong about the time—”

“Playing detective. Butting into my department.”

Shaken up and humbled, Endicott gestured helplessly. “Mike, I’m trying to tell you! The lights suddenly went out, and the thing came at me! It was ghastly — that white beard and those cold hands closing around my throat.”

“Go on. What else?”

“I... I tore myself loose. I got to the window and fell — jumped out. I ran for my life.”

O’Hanna said: “Come on.” He led the way to Lucas Kuhn’s chalet. Reaching the darkened building, the detective detoured to look under the bedroom window. An outline in the heavily dewed grass showed where Endicott had measured himself flat, footprints showed how he’d lit out a-running. There weren’t any other footprints. The ghoul had left by the front door and the path, or he was still inside.

O’Hanna swung around, and Endicott was ahead as they climbed the chalet steps. A lifetime of hotel training — never open a paying guest’s door without knocking — made the manager automatically thumb the doorbell button.

Tra-la-la, the chimes inside pealed.

O’Hanna scoffed, “Hell, we don’t have to be polite about—” and grunted as the memory and meaning hit him hard. “Hell’s fire! It only chimed twice before!”

He punched the front door open, and felt for the inner wall switch. O’Hanna took two long steps, tugged at a doorknob.

Endicott said: “No, that’s the coat closet. I was in the bedroom looking for a clue.”

O’Hanna aimed his flashlight up, ringed it onto the triple-tubed door chime screwed high upon the wall. He intoned: “You looked in the wrong place, then. See here.”

The arrangement was the usual one. Pressure on the outside button juiced a coil magnet. Magnetism lifted three small hammers, the lifted hammers broke the circuit, and then in series they fell. The first chime said tra when its hammer hit, the second said la a split second later, and the third had said nothing because something had been in the way. It was something that had left a dark, discolored streak along eight inches of the wall.

O’Hanna aimed the flashlight down, spread its beam over the floor. He crouched, wet the tip of his finger, picked up a particle of charred pasteboard.

Endicott gaped: “What on earth?”

“It’s E C,” vouchsafed O’Hanna.

“Easy?” Endicott blinked.

“Yeah. Easy if you know how, if you’ve ever dabbled in explosives.” Then, abruptly: “Come on!”

He made for the main building and the front desk, Endicott trotting at heel. “Mrs. Kuhn’s room number?” O’Hanna demanded of the room clerk. “K-u-h-n.”

The clerk looked it up, or tried to. “I’m sorry, but we have no Mrs. Kuhn registered. There’s a Mr. Kuhn in one of—”

“Wait. She’s divorced, maybe she’s using the name Belle Taine,” the house dick said on second-thought.

This time he got it, number 434. She’d said a room across the hall from 431, but he had to be sure. He fed a passkey into the lock, turned it and the knob gently.

The red-haired woman had company. The visitor’s voice flowed out as O’Hanna opened the door a slow inch.

“You killed him,” the voice accused, “but you didn’t kill him quite dead enough! He was still alive, and half an hour later he regained consciousness. He got to his feet and staggered out into the hall where I found him. He had breath enough left to sob out a name — and the name was Belle!”

The house dick tugged the door shut “Let’s pay the professor a call while he’s away from home,” he said to Endicott.

But there was nothing in 218 — nothing, anyway, O’Hanna could turn up in five minutes’ searching.

He shrugged. “The corpse, then.”

The passkey fitted 207 the same as any other. The knob turned like any other knob. The difference was that this door still wouldn’t open because it was night-locked on the inside. O’Hanna piled his shoulder against the panel. It hurt his shoulder but it didn’t bother the door.

He cursed, tugged Lucas Kuhn’s .38 up out of his coat pocket.

Endicott moaned: “Mike you mustn’t! You’ll wake up the whole hotel!”

O’Hanna said, “He’s killed dead enough. Mullet sure as hell didn’t lock himself in here,” and jammed the muzzle to the panel. San Alpa’s night-lock bars were six inches above the key-lock, and he crashed two shots in there before he drew back and baled his shoulder against the panel again. The door gave.

Endicott blurted: “The window, look!”

A rope fed from the bedpost out over the window sill. It sagged so O’Hanna knew there was no weight sliding down the rope.

A false Santa Claus beard and another T-shaped flashgun lay spilled on the floor. O’Hanna dived past these objects to the bathroom door. He gulped, “Don’t look,” to Endicott.

Endicott had to look, of course, but he didn’t look long. The manager jumped back, squeezed his eyelids shut, and put his hand over his closed eyes. He gagged: “Mike, that’s horrible!”

O’Hanna said: “Yeah. Somebody performed a premature autopsy. The sheriff’s gonna be mad!”

Sheriff Ed Gleeson was mad, hornet-stinging mad. He’d been a sergeant in World War I, and his sergeant’s bellow filled Endicott’s office as he glowered at the suspects gathered there. “It wasn’t enough to just kill the guy — you had to turn him inside out, huh?”

Lucas Kuhn said, “It’s his fault,” pointing a forefinger at O’Hanna. “I told him the killer had a rope. I told him I was lassoed, and he wouldn’t believe me!”

O’Hanna said sadly: “That’s right, Ed. He told me, and I wouldn’t believe it. But I think I know why the rope was used.”

Endicott supplied: “Certainly. The ghoul slid down it while we were breaking in the door.”

“It was used before that. Mullet wasn’t killed in 207 — the killer couldn’t risk the shot being overheard. Mullet was taken for a walk, he was killed outside, but the murderer couldn’t carry a corpse back through the lobby. That body was hauled up through 207’s window on the end of the rope.” O’Hanna leveled In Irish-gray stare at Professor Alexander Janathan. “It was a corpse, too, not a living man. I’ll prove Mullet never revived, never stumbled into the hall looking for help. He’d have rubbed the grass clippings off the soles of his shoes, had he gone stumbling around.”

Ed Gleeson advanced his jaw. “So Mullet wasn’t in the hall! Then how did you happen to find his dead body at all? Answer that!”

“I guess I’ll have to.” Janathan cleared his throat. “It all started ten days ago. This man Mullet approached me in my Los Angeles office. He claimed to have an exceedingly valuable historical document for sale — a first draft of the Gettysburg Address. It was his story that it hadn’t really been destroyed in the dynamiting after all. He said he’d found the briefcase almost uninjured after the explosion. Realizing its value, he hid the document. After that, he cut up the briefcase and sprinkled the pieces around where he found the thing.”

O’Hanna asked: “But you wouldn’t buy?”

“Hell, no. I’d never heard of such a first draft ever belonging to Colonel Taine. That’s why I opened negotiations with the family. I figured I could find out from them, under cover of pretending to want to buy the Catlin Papers.” He grinned. “They’re a close-mouthed lot, but tonight I got Johnny drunk enough to babble some secrets. So I went to Mullet’s room, found the door unlocked and the guy dead.”

O’Hanna nodded. “You assumed he’d been killed for that Gettysburg paper, that the murderer had the document. So you started making the rounds, you told everyone Mullet had come to and named them as the killer. Your theory was that the guilty person would buy your silence by surrendering the so-called sample of Lincoln’s handwriting.”

“So-called, did you say?”

“You’re not quite that dumb, Janathan. You knew the thing was a forgery. Eva told me the story — a bunco yam any cop would smell a mile away. The technique never changes, always the sucker buys something cheap because it’s hot, and always it turns out to be a phony. And almost always the victim keeps his trap shut — he’s ashamed to admit his share in a crooked deal. The chauffeur peddled Grandfather Taine an ersatz historical document, figuring the old man would be ashamed to haul him into court. Of course, the colonel woke up — they always do when it’s too late — and decided to have the paper examined by an expert.”

Lucas Kuhn asked: “So the chauffeur tried to blow him sky-high, and killed himself in the process?”

O’Hanna said: “No. The chauffeur had a confederate — who’d have been hurt then, and could be hurt now if that phony came to light. Five years isn’t long enough for the Homicide and Bomb Squads to forget a case. The cops had nothing to work on before. Colonel Taine himself clammed up on the main clue. But given that forgery, they could dig in and find a suspect who was in stir when the chauffeur was, who served time for penmanship then, and maybe is wanted somewhere right now.

“For my money, the dynamiter didn’t care whether he killed Grandfather Taine or not. He wanted to destroy the evidence, the fake Gettysburg Address, and he thought he had. But then Mullet turned up with it — and got killed so the evidence could be burned.”

Uneasy-eyed, Gleeson asked: “Burned? Where does that leave us?”

Mike O’Hanna got down to business. “We’ve still got the modus operandi, as the high-powered criminologists say. The killer wasn’t satisfied just to bump off Mullet, he had to be smart and make it look as if Mullet got shot playing ghost.”

“That’s the part that doesn’t make sense to me!” the sheriff growled.

“It made sense up to a point. Somebody tried to poison the caretaker’s five thousand-dollar-a-year cat. Then a ghost played Grandpa Taine in Eva’s bedroom. The same ghost put on a performance for Lucas Kuhn. If we’d found Mullet’s body the next morning, we’d have had every reason to assume Kuhn plugged him, and the coroner’s verdict would have been — it served Mullet right. Getting shot at is a chance ghosts have to take! And by that time, medical testimony couldn’t set the time of death any closer than an hour or so.

“But,” O’Hanna swung to Alexander Janathan, “you had to butt in and find the corpse too soon! And Doc Raymond had to pronounce the guy dead half an hour too early! The theory of justifiable homicide was no good. The killer had to think of something else, had to get busy and resurrect the ghost. He had two sets of whiskers and flash-guns, one that he planted with Mullet’s body, the other he used in Eva Taine’s chalet. He had to make it appear there was some mysterious party at work—”

The house dick paused. “Oh, the hell with this ‘he’ stuff. It was Kuhn, of course.”

Lucas Kuhn’s pink face turned to chartreuse. “You’re accusing me? You’re crazy—”

“I knew there’d be an argument the minute I named the name. O.K., I’ll argue with you.” The house dick dug into his pocket, came up with the .38. “Here’s the give-away — you were too damned anxious to talk me into giving this back to you! That it matched the slug in Mullet’s body was fine and dandy, so long as you could claim you fired at a prowler. The same bit of ballistics wasn’t so good when you had to pin it on somebody else. Unable to talk me out of the gat, you went to work on the corpse instead.”

O’Hanna put the other hand into the other pocket. He said to Gleeson: “Here’s what the guy was after.” He opened his palm, showed a bloodstained pellet of lead. “It’s lucky — I broke down the door before he finished turning the corpse inside out. I completed the autopsy for him, dug this slug out of Mullet’s left lung. All we have to do is compare it with his gun, and it’s clear who murdered the guy.”

Lucas Kuhn exploded, “You dirty stinking rat! It’s a Goddamned frame-up! You lying louse, you couldn’t’ve found that slug in him because I already took—”

It took him that long to realize what he was saying. He stopped saying it.

Johnny Taine giggled for pure joy.

“Damn!” Lucas Kuhn said. “Get that tripe-brained hyena out of here, and I’ll talk.” He thought and waved a hand at his red-haired ex-wife. “Her, too.”

Sheriff Gleeson turned and said: “All right, you two run along and—”

O’Hanna snapped, “Ed!” and jumped as Lucas Kuhn tugged a gun up from behind his belt buckle. O’Hanna still had the .38 in his fist, and he clipped it across Lucas Kuhn’s jaw.

“Where in hell did that come from?” Gleeson asked.

“He’s a two-gun man. He had this other gun loaded with an E C, blank powder cartridge and hooked up with his chalet door chime,” O’Hanna said. “He knew Eva would holler for help. He’d left a plain trail to his own doorstep, and figured I couldn’t help following it. Figured I’d press the button — and rush in when I heard the shot.

“He wasn’t in bed, see? He was right there waiting in the hall — he jumped and barreled me as soon as I got through the door. Then he wheeled and ran back and pretended he’d been knocked down in the bedroom.

“You want to know why? Here’s why. There was another trail planted from his window — but he had to hold me up so’s to allow time for Mullet’s imaginary escape with an imaginary bullet in him.”

Ed Gleeson pointed and said: “What about that bullet you got in your hand there?”

“It’s really from his gun. It’s one of a pair I shot through the door.”

Endicott said now: “Good heavens, Mike! You really were framing the man—”

“Shucks,” said O’Hanna. “That was nothing. Just the regular San Alpa hotel service.”

“Hotel service?” the manager gulped.

“Sure. The management is strictly responsible for stolen articles left in our care. The corpse was in our care, so I made good the loss,” O’Hanna said modestly.