The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

Ronald Kayser (1905–1988), who wrote under the pseudonym Dale Clark, was born in a small town in the Midwest. At various times, he took jobs as a lumberyard worker, reporter, private detective, house-to-house salesman, editor, and creative writing teacher, but remained throughout his life a prolific writer.

In addition to more than a half dozen novels — Focus on Murder (1943), The Narrow Cell (1944), The Red Rods (1946), Mambo to Murder (1955), A Run for the Money (1956), Death Wore Fins (1959), and Country Coffins (1961) — Clark wrote more than four hundred stories for both the pulps and the more prestigious slick magazines such as Collier’s, Liberty, and This Week.

Many of his stories are set in Southern California, where he spent most of his writing life. Although he inevitably created a wide range of characters, an unusually high percentage of them have an interest in contemporary technology. A forest ranger’s station is jammed full of highly technical devices; Doc Judson, a detective-cum-criminalist, speaks frequently of the need for scientific methodology, though it is mainly limited to ballistics; the best-named of Clark’s series characters, Highland Park Price (High Price), has amassed a collection of high-tech toys that seldom work because he is too cheap to buy new ones or reputable brands. In these comical private-eye yarns, High Price gouges his clients, frequently using blackmail.

“The Sound of the Shot” was published in the September 1946 issue.

Manager Endicott was in a spot — his Hollywood beauty contest had turned into a frame-up flesh show. Someone had brought in a murder package, all wrapped up in a special hand-loaded wildcat cartridge. The movie moguls were muttering, the beauties were bothered, and he was sure the paying guests were saying: “Oh yes, San Alpa — what a lovely place to come and get yourself murdered!”

Chapter One Pin-Ups on Parade

She was a stunning brunette swathed in a form-hugging beach coat, Eva Tarkey. Her eyes were sultry, incensed. She stormed, “I’ve been robbed! Somebody stole the top to my bathing suit! I’m being cheated out of my chance for the movie contract!”

The girl with her was a stunning redhead named Lola Lofting. She was just as angry. She said: “I was robbed worse. I came to get undressed, and somebody had stolen my entire swim-suit — and I’m the one who was practically a cinch to win the movie contract!”

Both girls were standing in the San Alpa resort hotel office, telling their troubles to Endicott, the thin-faced, graying manager of the million-dollar California mountain-top spa.

Endicott reared back in his swivel chair, and made motions like a man fighting bees. “I can’t help it! I can’t be responsible for lost swim-suits. You girls will have to argue that out with Mr. O’Hanna here — he’s the head of the stolen goods department.”

Mike O’Hanna was the house dick. He pointed this out. “I’m hired to be a hotel detective. This pin-up parade happens to be your pet baby.”

This was true. Endicott had dreamed up the bathing beauty contest as a publicity stunt. He figured half the Sunday papers in the land would run rotogravure shots of the lucky lass who got crowned Queen of San Alpa. It would tie in nicely with the management’s advertising campaign to extol the colossal San Alpa golf course, warmed salt-water plunges, and miles of scenic horseback and hiking trails. Eventually, it would lure flocks of well-heeled tourists into the de luxe fifteen-dollar-a-day-on-up hotel rooms.

Moreover, Endicott had foreseen this publicity stunt would cost hardly anything. San Alpa’s clientele included lots of Hollywood film folks who came up for the week-ends, and Endicott had buttonholed Gus Lambert, the Mogul Films producer, and talked him into providing a thirteen-week contract for the winning girl. Endicott had argued astutely that a lot of free publicity in the newspapers and news-reels wouldn’t hurt Mogul Films, either.

Gus Lambert had fallen for it, had even consented to act as judge of the beauty and talent on display. Endicott planned to have an afternoon promenade in swim-suits around the outdoor pool, and then in the evening the contestants could don low-cut gowns and go on as a special attraction instead of the usual Palomar Room floorshow. That way, the management would gain two entertainments for the paying guests.

As for the girls, naturally it wouldn’t be necessary to hire them to try to win a crack at a movie career. Several dozen ambitious lovelies, Endicott had hoped, would be glad to pay their own expenses to San Alpa.

That’s what he had hoped. What he actually got was several hundred of them. From early morning, girls had been unloading out of buses, or chugging up in jalopies, or arriving as hitchhikers. It had been necessary to close off one of the big dining-rooms and convert it into an emergency dressing-room where two hundred contestants could primp, powder and change into their costumes.

But it hadn’t been possible to lock them up in that room until the three p.m. parade started, of course. What happened was, they had parked their overnight cases or suitcases in the dressing-room and then turned themselves loose on the lobby, the grounds and the golf course. Quite a few of them had brought picnic lunches, littering the practically hand-manicured lawns with waxed paper and Dixie cups. Others had just trusted to luck, figuring some of the gold-plated, male paying guests would be glad to buy a girl a lunch.

Endicott had heard complaints about the lunch papers being wind-wafted over the golf course. He had listened to other complaints from the female paying guests — the idea of turning San Alpa over to a flock of painted hussies, common car-hops or worse, making eyes at decent women’s husbands and fiancés and sons in the lobby! There had been complaints about chewing gum parked on the hotel furniture, too.

And now this — this stolen swim-suit business...

Endicott had taken about all he could take. He glared at O’Hanna, said: “O.K., it was my idea, but you don’t have to rub it in! You’ll have to attend to these minor details, Mike. This thing’s due to start in fifteen minutes, and I have to see Gus Lambert, I have to—”

The redheaded Lola Lofting cut in: “Yeah, and what about me? What happens if my swim-suit isn’t found in the next fifteen minutes?”

Endicott shrugged. “You’ll have to drop out of the contest, that’s all. You certainly can’t take your place in the parade without a bathing suit on.”

“That’s what you think.” Her voice was deadly.

Endicott was appalled. “Why, you wouldn’t dare — you couldn’t — Mike, you gotta stop her!”

Eva Tarkey tossed her brunet head. “Maybe she won’t dare, but I’m telling you — there’ll be no beauty contest today unless I’m in it.”

O’Hanna’s Irish-gray eyes hardened a trifle. In the swank, snooty elegance of San Alpa, an old-style hard-hatted lobby cop would have been as out of place as muskets in a modernized army. O’Hanna wore casual flannels like any paying guest, and could have passed as a vacationing playboy — until trouble started.

He said: “Let’s drop the melodrama, you’re not being screen-tested for a B picture yet. Suppose you just tell me what happened, and I’ll go to work on it.”

“How do we know what happened?” the redhead griped. “We left our stuff in the dressing-room, and when we came back it was gone — swiped, so we couldn’t enter the contest.”

The brunette’s dark eyes gleamed. “And, big boy, I meant what I said. I paid bus fare all the way down from San Francisco, and either I’m in the parade — or the whole damn thing is coming to a quick, sudden stop.”

This time he ignored the threat, used the opening instead. “You’re from San Francisco, too?” O’Hanna asked the redhead.

Lola Lofting denied it. “No, I’m a Diego girl.”

“You two’d never met before? So it probably wasn’t a case of somebody trying to get even with the pair of you,” O’Hanna mused. “Well, come on.”

He led them down the side of the lobby, into the service hallway where foodstuffs from the kitchen streamed to the dining-rooms and the Palomar Bar. The Palomar was on the left, this dining-room to the right. O’Hanna raised knuckles to knock, but Eva Tarkey was in no mood to stand on ceremony. She went right ahead, shoved the door open, was greeted by alarmed squeals.

A soprano shrilled, “Oooh, a man!” and started a chorus of squeals, of frantic whisking of beach wraps and dressing gowns around tanned, trim figures.

Eva Tarkey said scornfully: “Can the comedy. I told you I’d call a cop, and it’s going to go hard with whichever one of you tramps pulled this stunt.”

“Which is your bag?” O’Hanna asked.

“Right here.” She aimed a kick at a scuffed suitcase, one that looked as if it had been kicked around plenty.

“Unlock it.”

“I lost the key years ago.” She stooped, unstrapped the suitcase, hinged open the top. “It’s a bra-top that matches this,” holding up cream-tinted bathing briefs.

“And your bag?” O’Hanna turned to Lola Lofting.

“It’s the next one, right here. I had it locked.”

The redhead’s was an overnight case, and O’Hanna ignored the need for a key. He tried, and all he needed was his thumbs to spring the lid free.

Straightening, he peered around the room. “Any of the rest of you missing anything?”

Nobody was. It seemed to be just these two bags, and they had been near the door, one unlocked and the other as good as unlocked. So it almost looked like sneak thievery, except, naturally, a sneak thief wouldn’t have wanted a swim-suit and a half.

“Well” — O’Hanna shrugged — “come on, we’ll see what we can do about it.”

It would probably break Endicott’s economical heart, but he marched the pair across the lobby, this time to the sport clothes shop — one of the classier Wilshire Boulevard establishments in Los Angeles found it profitable to run a branch shop here. O’Hanna hailed the manager: “Here, Baudry, fix ’em up and charge it to the house.”

Baudry’s eyes lit up behind their spectacles. “Yes? And what will it be?”

He heard what it would be, and his eyes dulled, his hands dropped. “Mr. O’Hanna, I’m sorry. I haven’t a single swim-suit in stock. A Mr. Walther came in this morning and bought every last bathing suit from the shelves.”

O’Hanna thought and said: “You girls wait here.”

He headed to the lobby desk, asked: “Who the devil’s this guy Walther?”

The desk clerk was owl-eyed. He exhaled. “She’s beautiful, she’s gorgeous, she’s damned near almost divine, ain’t she?” He hadn’t seen O’Hanna, hadn’t even heard the house dick’s voice.

O’Hanna’s Irish-gray glance shifted, followed the owl-eyed stare. Something blond had just stepped from the San Alpa elevator. For a moment she paused, almost as though she was going to dive into a pool. She was dressed for it, with just a golden cloud of diaphanous wrap that drifted away from her shoulders. The rest was vivid, scarlet swim-suit and a pearly complexion.

O’Hanna said: “Quit drooling, man!”

The clerk snapped out of it, colored. “That’s Tra-La Brown, Mike, and I bet everybody drools when she walks up on the judge’s stand today. If she doesn’t win, there’s something fishy about this contest, I’d say.”

“There’s plenty fishy about it already. Including a guy named Walther getting a corner on the swim-suit market.”

The clerk seemed shocked to hear it. “You can’t mean Jeremiah Walther? Why, he’s a paragon of respectability.”

“Where’ll I find him?”

The clerk said in one of the chalets. A-10, San Alpa followed the California style and had private guest cottages scattered about the landscaped grounds. Jeremiah Walther had to be a paragon of high finance to afford A-10, since it rented for twice the room rate of the costliest suite in the main building. O’Hanna wondered, sometimes, how Endicott got away with it. After all, the chalets under their imitation Swiss roofs were only glorified tourist cabins.

He climbed the steps to this one, punched the bell. The man who answered was obviously that paragon of respectability, Jeremiah Walther. The old boy wore his white, silky whiskers in the mutton-chop fashion of the Gay Nineties. He was bald-headed down to a half-circle of white fuzz at ear level. He wore a hearing aid plugged into his left ear, eyeglasses with gold rims. A gold watch-chain sported its massive links across his black broadcloth vestfront.

He had hobbled to the door with the aid of a gold-headed cane. Leaning on the cane, he blinked waterily at O’Hanna, quavered his reply to the detective’s question.

“Yes, young man, I bought those bathing dresses. I put them in the fireplace.”

O’Hanna was fascinated. He wasn’t old enough to remember, but he had an idea “bathing dresses” had gone out with bustles. He asked: “You mean you burned them?”

Jeremiah Walther aimed his cane at the front room fireplace. “That I did, and it wasn’t much of a fire they made.”

The sleuth went in, peered at close range. There remained a few smoldering rags, mostly where the Lastex-threaded fabrics had melted down.

He marveled: “I’ll be damned if you didn’t. Now would you please tell me why?”

With creaking-joint care, Jeremiah Walther lowered himself into a chair: “I had to protect my niece,” he disclosed. “I’m Selena’s only living male relative, so it was my bounden duty to act.”

“Come again.”

The white-whiskered man said: “Selena’s a headstrong brat. She made up her mind she was going to participate in this contest today. I had to prevent it, naturally.”

“Naturally?”

Jeremiah Walther bounced his cane on the floor for emphasis. “Young man, I’ll have you understand our family tree has its roots ’way back in Pilgrim times. We’re descended from God-fearing pioneers, sturdy whaling captains and even a few town councilmen. Our forefathers and foremothers would turn over in their graves at the thought of a Walther girl showing her unclad limbs in this noisome exhibition. It’s down-right degrading to think of a civilized young lady strutting around in front of folks in a next-to-naked condition!”

O’Hanna mused: “Selena doesn’t share your old-fashioned views?”

“No. The only way I could stop her was by destroying her bathing dress, and all the other bathing costumes she might have bought at the last minute.” Abruptly, he tugged at his watch-chain, fished forth a family-heirloom style timepiece. “Speaking of the last minute, reminds me we better get a hurry on or we’re liable to miss the parade. It’s five minutes to starting time, and I’m a mighty slow-walking man.”

The house dick stared. “You’re going to degrade yourself by looking at such a shameful sight?”

Chuckles shook the white-whiskered man. “You’re durned tootin’ I am! Don’t tell Selena I said this, but secretly I’m the black sheep of the family. I ran away from home at the age of eighteen to hunt for diamonds in darkest Africa. The family made up a fable I was a missionary, and that’s what Selena thinks, but actually I’ve seen and done things that’d make your hair curl. I wouldn’t miss these doings if it killed me to go.”

He headed out the chalet door, hobbled down the steps, made off at a mile-an-hour clip. He was going to need all of the five minutes to reach the judging stand that had been built at one end of the outdoor pool, and from the size of the gathering crowd it looked as though he would be lucky to find a chair when he got there.

O’Hanna swung wide of the assemblage, circled a movie-news truck with a cameraman on its top. Gus Lambert, a pale dwarf with a giant Corona-Corona in his mouth, had already mounted the judge’s throne. Manager Endicott was doing a mother hen act on the hotel driveway, trying to shoo two hundred swim-suited sirens into line. “And for heaven’s sake, please, girls, quit chewing gum!” Endicott kept pleading frantically. Midway down the line, O’Hanna noticed Tra-La Brown peel the diaphanous golden wrap from her shoulders, hand it to a pinch-faced man with pince-nez who gave the wrap a shake, folded it neatly into an alligator leather bag at his feet.

O’Hanna had a cold, unhappy hunch about Tra-La Brown, and no time to ponder it. He made for the lobby sport clothes shop, found Baudry watching the proceedings through the shop front window.

“What became of the two girls I left here?” the house dick quizzed.

“They’re gone, Mike. They left as soon as the line started forming.”

It sent O’Hanna outside again. Eva Tarkey and Lola Lofting weren’t in the line. He had not expected any such miracle, but he had to check, and by the time he had made sure, the parade had started around the pool to the judging stand.

O’Hanna thrust his way through the standing onlookers who had been unable to find chairs. He couldn’t spot the brunette or the redhead anywhere in the audience, either. It worried him a little, remembering Eva Tarkey’s threat. But if she really thought she could break up the contest, he reasoned, she’d have to reach the judging stand to do it.

He started that way. Polite applause was dying down as one contestant carrying a card marked 14 quit the stand. It became genuine applause as No. 15 came to pirouette before Gus Lambert’s throne. No. 15 was platinum-haired, sun-tanned, and clad in what looked to O’Hanna dangerously like just a couple of bandanna handkerchiefs. Mixed with the handclapping, the sleuth caught a few whistles of male appreciation.

“The hell!” O’Hanna exclaimed, and leaped for the stand.

The redheaded Lola Lofting must have been hiding under the platform! He couldn’t see any other way she could have instantly scrambled from complete invisibility into the center of the stage.

But there she was, waving her arms at the crowd, trying to drown the handclapping with her high-pitched soprano appeal: “Stop it! Hold everything, folks! I want to tell the world I’m getting a raw deal—”

Endicott was on the platform, plunging toward her. Gus Lambert got there first, with one wiry bound down from his throne. Lambert’s was a foghorn voice that dated back to the era when he had directed silent epics via a megaphone.

He brayed, “Shuddup, you!” and grabbed at the redhead.

Crack! They all heard it, and half the crowd looked quickly back toward the hotel. The other half saw Gus Lambert stagger, spin half around, and flop on his face. They jumped up then, and they could see the red wet spot forming on the planks under his arm.

Chapter Two The Sound of the Shot

Where he stood, on the edge of the judging stand, O’Hanna could see it was an arm wound, and he swung to stare across the crowd. He didn’t see a glimpse of a gun, or of anyone who looked in a hurry to leave. On the platform, things were happening fast. Gus Lambert’s plump, male secretary was up there, and the Mogul news-reel cameraman, with the sound technician, beside the fallen producer.

“He’s out cold!”

“He fainted, all right.”

“Somebody call a doctor.”

Endicott rushed the redhead over to O’Hanna. “I got this one, Mike. All you got to do is find that Tarkey girl. She threatened she’d break up the contest, remember?”

Lola wailed: “I don’t know anything about this, honest! Why, that shot could’ve killed me — just as easy!”

O’Hanna asked: “Where’s Eva?”

“I don’t know that, either. I never saw her before today. You can’t blame me if she was crazy enough to pull this stunt!”

A voice of a newcomer on the platform was authoritative, “Break it up, boys. We’ll carry Mr. Lambert inside. Don’t discuss this with anyone until Lambert himself decides what our line will be.”

O’Hanna swung around, found himself confronting a pinched face with pince-nez panes bridging the narrow nose.

“You represent Mogul Films?” the house dick queried.

Pinched-face admitted it. “I’m Harry Farneye, in charge of casting.”

“I’m Mike O’Hanna, in charge of crimes. Tell your crowd to let Lambert lie until our hotel staff doctor — yeah, here he comes now.” Little Doc Raymond, the San Alpa house physician, was squirming his way up to the platform.

O’Hanna said: “Stick around, Farneye. I’ve got some questions you’d probably rather answer in strict privacy.”

Something hard poked the house dick’s leg. His Irish-gray glance dropped, irritably, and discovered the hard object was a cane. Jeremiah Walther was behind it. Walther quavered: “Young man, you tell Selena to come down from up there! Tell her she’s shaming her own flesh and blood!”

O’Hanna followed the indignantly pointing cane, and it steered him to the other side of the platform and to the platinum-haired No. 15. “You’re Selena Walther?”

“Yes. Why?”

O’Hanna confided. “I’m surprised. I understand your uncle burned your bathing dress to keep you out of this competition. Where’d you dig up this outfit?”

He had made exactly the right guess about her outfit. Selena Walther said: “It’s just a little item I stirred from a few bandanna handkerchiefs. I know Uncle Jerry burned my swim-suit, and once and for all, I’m going to teach him he can’t dictate my life to me! The fact that he’s my long-lost uncle gives him absolutely no right to suddenly appear on the scene and start ordering me—”

O’Hanna wasn’t listening to her. He had wheeled at the strained sound of little Doc Raymond’s voice.

“The man is dead.”

Endicott had heard it, too. He loosed his hold of the redhead, and strode over, with consternation spread across his thin features.

“You’re crazy!” the manager protested. “He can’t be dead! It’s just a slight flesh wound in his arm.”

Doc Raymond had slashed the sleeve away from the producer’s arm. O’Hanna went to one knee beside the little medico and said: “It’s a flesh wound, but it isn’t slight. I saw a deer brought in that way last fall. It’s one of those super-velocity jobs; the slug blows to powder when it hits, the shock kills whether it’s a vital place or not. Right, Doc?”

“Technically, it’s hydrostatic pressure,” the physician confirmed. “The impact of such a projectile sets up a pressure wave away from the wound area. The blood literally recoils in the arteries so that it flows backward and halts the heart action.”

Perspiration bathed manager Endicott’s forehead. High-velocity ballistics and hydrostatic physics he savvied as little as he understood the principle of the atomic bomb, but he knew what murder meant to the hotel business. This wasn’t a death that could be hushed up — it had happened in front of too many people. The newspapers weren’t in the habit of hiding Hollywood celebrity slayings in their classified ad pages, either...

Endicott breathed raspily. “Mike, quit standing here gawping at it. Go get that girl! The crazy little fool did this out of sheer, hell-cat spite!”

O’Hanna corrected: “If it was Eva Tarkey, she didn’t do it out of off-the-cuff spite. This job was premeditated murder.” His stare rested glumly on the frightsome mess the wildcat slug had made of Gus Lambert’s arm. This killer was dealing with death by means of lead whipping along at upwards of four thousand foot seconds. It spelled a slayer who was really tooled for destruction!

Yet there might be a catch in it. O’Hanna dug for the catch: “Anybody here know of a gun crank in our midst?”

No cigar. Nothing but headshakes and blank looks all around.

Selena Walther, though, moistened her lips. “I can tell you one thing. That shot came from one of the hotel windows. I’m absolutely sure of it.”

“Which window?” Endicott panted.

“I don’t know, but I heard it come from that direction,” the platinum-top insisted, pointing toward the hotel.

The cameraman chimed in. “She’s right. I heard it behind me, too. That was from the hotel.”

O’Hanna asked hopefully: “You got a picture on that film?”

“No, damn the luck! The camera wasn’t rolling. I was waiting for Farneye to tip me the word.”

He choked up, blushed.

O’Hanna turned to the pinch-faced casting man. “You can tip me the word. Suppose we drift on up to your room and chat.”

Farneye kept a glacial silence as they moved through the crowd, into the lobby. In the elevator they were alone except for the operator, and he fixed a hostile, pince-nez-framed stare on the house dick. “You’re wasting your time hounding me, O’Hanna. You ought to be checking all the rooms on this side, the front of the building.”

“I ought to be hounding the hell out of everybody else, and let you cover up your tracks?”

O’Hanna rejected the plea, scowling. “How do I know? Maybe your little racket started the shooting.”

They came out on the third-floor corridor. “My racket?” Farneye was testy-toned. “What’s that?”

“Don’t stall, chum. I’m hep to the fact that only one of those girls had a chance to win today. I mean your candidate — the blonde with the professional make-up and the press-agent name you cleverly concocted for her — Tra-La Brown.”

Farneye said: “My God, don’t blame me for her. Tra-La Brown was Gus Lambert’s idea exclusively.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure. He’s been grooming Tra-La as a possible starlet. Your San Alpa beauty show came along at the opportune moment. By winning it, she could start her career on a wave of favorable publicity.”

O’Hanna gibed: “You mean on the necks of two hundred simon-pure amateurs who never had a chance?”

“You’re right. Of course, nobody but Tra-La had a look-in, with Gus doing the judging. But blame him, not me.” The pinch-faced man pulled up at 318, fitted a key to the door, seemed surprised the door wasn’t locked. He muttered, “That’s funny,” and stepped quickly inside.

The terrorized wail came shrilly: “Harry! Look out! He’s got a gun!”

O’Hanna saw the gun, a moving mass of nickeled metal that seemed to leave a blur as it streaked. The blow was aimed at Farneye’s head. O’Hanna couldn’t stop it. The best he could do was pump out an arm, plant a hand between the casting man’s shoulder blades. He planted it there so hard that Farneye went down on his face, skidded, plowed up a billow of rug in front of him.

The gun missed, finished down around the knees of the lad who had swung it. O’Hanna dived for the weapon, pinned the wrist, and got cuffed around the head by the other’s free fist. He ignored it, closed his own free hand on the elbow above the pinned wrist. The two circled in a slow, straining dance, with O’Hanna pulling at the elbow, twisting on the captive wrist.

They waltzed around once, and then O’Hanna was behind the gunsel, was bending the gun-hand in a high, vicious hammerlock.

He heard the shrill, wailing voice again. This time it screamed: “Stop! You’re breaking Benny’s arm, you big brute!”

Benny was bent over double, the hammerlocked wrist shoved so near the nape of his neck that, as pain-wracked fingers let go, the gun fell over his shoulder in front of him instead of behind. He made one grab for it with the other hand — and O’Hanna’s knee socked into the seat of his pants, sent him plowing on his face, raising another wave in the rug.

The sleuth picked up the gun — a nickeled, 32-caliber revolver that had apparently been fired and never cleaned, from the look of its fouled barrel.

Now the shrill voice said: “I tried to take it away from him myself, but he was too strong for me...”

Staring at Tra-La Brown, O’Hanna could see that she really looked as if there had been an earlier struggle over the gun. Her blond hair was mussed; the make-up from her lips and eyes made smears on her face now. The scarlet wisp of bathing beauty attire had taken a beating, too. She was trying to tug up the bra-top with one hand, trying to tug down the brief panty-skirt with the other.

O’Hanna said: “Everybody explain!”

Tra-La made her pretty lips into a pout. “You can count me out. This is absolutely all Benny’s fault. He’s jealous of me. That’s why he’s acting this way.”

“Who’s Benny? Your husband?”

“I’d die first!” the blonde scorned.

Harry Farneye had struggled to his feet. The pinch-faced man propped himself against a wall, tremblingly tried to fit the pince-nez back on his narrow nose. He didn’t come very close, and anyway, one lens was missing. He said: “The punk’s name is Benny Walsh, and what ails him is professional jealousy. He and Tra-La were in vaudeville up to a few weeks ago, and he’s sore because she’s going on up the ladder of success, and he definitely isn’t.”

“She was slinging hash in a Denver beanery until I gave her a job in my act, and now she’s running out on me.” The youth sat up, gave Tra-La the double-whammy with his hate-filled eyes.

The blonde came back at him. “And what was I doing when I walked out on you? I at least got my three squares a day when I was slinging hash. My God, you can’t expect a girl to go on playing the haylofts when she’s already passed a successful screen-test!”

Benny worked rust-colored eyebrows into a scowl. “I at least expect a dame to live up to her contract with the guy that learned her how to hoof!”

She screamed something at Benny, Benny yelled something before she was through, and Farneye drowned them both out. “Tra-La wasn’t of legal age when she joined your act!”

O’Hanna waved the three of them to silence.

“O.K., O.K., I get it,” O’Hanna said. He peered at the young guy. “You found her in Denver, you took her on the stage, and she quit the act when she saw a chance to sign up with Mogul Films. So what did you figure you could do about it?”

Tra-La said: “He was going to louse up my chances today, damn him. He said I could either come back in his act, or he’d get up there and tell the crowd I was really a ringer.”

“So—?”

She shrugged bare shoulders. “What could I do? I had to shut him up, didn’t I? I brought him up here, and I thought I could give him the slip by going in the next room to change clothes.”

Benny said sourly: “She’s lying. She got me up here and pulled that gat on me!”

O’Hanna waggled the nickel-plated weapon. “Oh, this is yours, Tra-La?”

The blonde went wary. “Oh, it’s just an old prop. It’s to shoot blanks, see, in the act. What we had was one of those Apache numbers — you must’ve seen ’em? You know, I come on wearing one of those short French skirts and smoking a cigarette — and then Benny comes out. First he pretends to shoot the ciggy out of my mouth, then he knocks me down, then he picks me up, then he throws me down and walks over me, after that he throws me around by my heels. It’s done to music, so he calls it a dance—”

“Five times a day, and six shows Saturday,” O’Hanna finished it for her. “I was asking about the gun, remember?” The house dick broke out the cylinder, shook out the hulls. Darkly he queried: “You load in new police metal points, and it shoots out blanks? Bunk!”

Tra-La’s eyes made circles of surprise. “I didn’t know it was loaded!”

O’Hanna shook his head at the old classic line. “Coming from you, a screen-test ought to be good!” He half-turned at a sound of labored swallowing.

Harry Farneye was having throat trouble. “But, but,” the pinch-faced man babbled pallidly, “you don’t think Tra-La killed Gus Lambert?”

If she was acting now, the blonde maybe did have a career in pictures ahead of her. Her lovely features showed just the right shading of stunned incredulity. “Killed...what are you trying to give me?”

The casting man gave stiffly: “Lambert was shot dead a few minutes ago. They’re trying to pin it on one of the girls in the contest. The shot was fired from inside the hotel, too.”

The blond beauty seemed to soak Farneye’s words in slowly, and then they spelled a different meaning to her. She turned to Benny. “You stinking little rat. You pulled that job. That’s what I heard when I went in the next room here—”

Benny didn’t let her finish. He was on his feet and he was yelling. “You mean that’s what I heard when you went in the next room! How the hell could I shoot somebody? You had the gat, baby, I didn’t!”

“You dumb hoofer, why’d I want to take a potshot at Lambert?” Tra-La raged. “He was the man that was going to make me a star!”

Farneye said: “She’s right, O’Hanna. She wouldn’t have killed the goose before it laid the golden egg. Benny may have been packing a gun of his own. He could have thrown it out the window after firing the shot.”

The house dick’s eyes lighted up with speculation. “I’ll buy that. Anyway, I’ll take an option on the idea. It’s no sale unless we ultimately find the gun he threw away.”

Benny seemed unworried. He sneered: “Jeez, you birds are dumb. The doll opens her big blue peepers, and says daddy when you squeeze her, and you think she’s as sweet as she looks. That dame’s dynamite. She’d cut your throat for a dime.”

“Gus Lambert isn’t worth a dime to me dead,” the blonde countered.

“I don’t say you tried to kill him. You aimed to wound the guy, I figure.” The hoofer snapped his fingers. To O’Hanna, he said: “Hey, it plays perfect that way! Look what happened. I dragged her out of that pin-up parade. If she wasn’t in it, one of those other girls had to be named the winner of a Mogul movie contract. She couldn’t stop two hundred of them, but what she could do was wing the judge. The show couldn’t go on if Lambert was wounded, and that’s what she tried to do.”

“I’ll buy that, too.” O’Hanna’s grin was impartial; the wave of his hand included everybody. “We’ll all hustle downstairs. Tra-La can tell one of our public stenographers all the reasons she thinks Benny fired the fatal shot. Benny can tell a different stenographer why he thinks Tra-La is a murderess. While you two are having fun, Farneye can be figuring out a statement on this frame-up flesh show that won’t read too badly when it comes out in the newspapers.”

Downstairs, he distributed them. He left the blonde to dictate one statement in the cashier’s office, left Benny to dictate another in Endicott’s office. Harry Farneye he led into his own, smaller office. The pinch-faced man was worry-gnawed.

“O’Hanna, what you’re suggesting isn’t a bit smart at all. A statement about that frame-up won’t hurt Lambert, because he’s dead, but it will backfire on you and injure your hotel’s reputation.”

O’Hanna said: “I agree. That wasn’t what I really wanted of you. Look here.”

He tugged open a desk drawer, ransacked around in it, came up with a vial labeled naphth. sodium. From another drawer, he lifted a San Alpha envelope. He swung out the cylinder of the revolver, laid the gun aside, opened a penknife blade. With care, the house dick uncorked the vial, trickled a spill of white powder onto the blade, balanced it cautiously there while he used the other hand to lift the gun, barrel pointing down.

“I’ve only got two hands. Hold the envelope down here and catch this.” He tilted the knife blade, tried to run the white powder from the knife into the gun’s breech. It didn’t work too well, and he pursed his lips and blew at it. Most of it went down the barrel then, the rest settled in a miniature white cloud.

O’Hanna said: “O.K., seal the envelope. Write your name and the date across it.” He was tugging open a third drawer, stowing the weapon away in there.

“What the hell is it supposed to prove?”

O’Hanna said: “It’s a residue test. Tra-La claims that gun was used only for shooting blanks. Blank cartridge powder is pure guncotton mixed with an adhesive such as gum water. That’s why it goes off with a bang, whereas ordinary smokeless powder would merely fizzle without being confined behind a bullet. Smokeless powders contain nitroglycerin, and this white stuff we poured through the barrel is a harmless little chemical which reacts with nitrous residues by slowly turning blue. In other words, what we’re doing is finding out whether Tra-La’s gun was used to shoot anything besides blank loads.”

The pinch-faced man whisked out a handkerchief, mopped particles of clinging naphthionate of sodium from his fingers. “I see. You’re one of those scientific Sherlocks.”

“I’ll tell you something, Farneye. I don’t favor science at all. I’d really rather take my suspects down cellar and apply the rubber hose method.”

“You don’t mean it!”

“I can’t get away with it.” O’Hanna slammed and locked the desk drawers. “I can’t even get away with searching those rooms for concealed firearms, as you suggested. If I did that, probably a hundred paying guests would resent being suspected and they’d check out. At the minimum room rate, I’d be costing the management fifteen hundred bucks. And that’s just figuring this week-end. It makes no allowance for the fact that they’d never come back here again.”

“It’s a tough life you lead.”

“You haven’t heard the half of it. I’ve only got an hour before Sheriff Gleeson and the county coroner take this thing out of my hands. I’m racing against time with my feet hobbled. I’m desperate for a quick clue.”

The house dick thrust his fingers through his hair, twice, irritably. “Furthermore, I’m not so damned sure this bathing beauty contest isn’t sliced herring. Maybe somebody just grabbed a nice, confusing opportunity to take a shot at Gus Lambert. Tell me, he had enemies, surely?”

Farneye’s thin lips grinned. “Every Hollywood producer has enemies, O’Hanna. But picture feuds aren’t fought out with guns. There are so many more refined ways to knife a man in the ribs, and they’re all on the safe side of the law.” He toyed with the broken pince-nez. “I don’t think it was that — any more than it was the note, for instance.”

The sleuth went open-eyed. “What note?”

“It isn’t important. Just some crank propped a crazy letter up against Lambert’s door, so he’d find it when he came back from lunch.”

O’Hanna asked: “Why doesn’t somebody tell me these things? What became of it?”

“You’ll probably find it in the wastebasket; that’s where he threw it.”

Chapter Three Kill Riddle

Lambert’s was a fourth-floor suite, a de luxe layout on the building corner, with window exposures facing two views. The Mogul producer had had the big shot’s habit of taking his office with him when he traveled and the suite’s sitting room was littered with scripts, sketches, and such incidentals of the cinema industry. O’Hanna walked into a quiet little wake, where the news cameraman was tapping Gus Lambert’s box of Corona-Coronas, the sound man was tapping Lambert’s supply of Scotch, and the male secretary was talking long-distance on the phone. Obviously, none of the three were shedding any tears.

The note lay balled up at the wastebasket’s bottom. O’Hanna smoothed it out, saw a sheet of the San Alpa stationery the management supplied in all the paying guests’ rooms. My dear Mr. Lambert, the scrawled script began politely enough, but from there on the going got rough shod: It’s fiends in human form like you that are responsible for juvenile delinquency in this country! What is the use of parents trying to raise our younger generation to be respectable when men of your ilk put a public premium on immorality? Shame on you for luring young girls by dangling the bait of a movie career in front of them! Now, you either put a stop to this carnal exhibition, or I’ll take steps myself. This was signed, I. M. Disgusted. Then came a P.S.: Think of the good effect you will have, standing up and denouncing the idea of girls winning fame and fortune by shedding off their clothes. They might catch cold and sue you, too.

O’Hanna folded this away into his pocket, stepped over and tapped the secretary’s shoulder. The secretary said: “Go away, I’m talking to the front office—”

“Talk them into sending us a print of Tra-La Brown’s screen-test,” the house detective requested.

He had no more than set foot out of the elevator into the congested lobby than Endicott rushed him. The manager was pallid. “Great Judas, Mike, where have you been? Haven’t you located that Tarkey girl yet?” He came close, said thinly: “There’s another one now — I told you she’d strike again.”

“Another bod—”

“Hush, hush!” Endicott’s head jerk was for the crowded lobby. “They don’t know about it yet. It’s outside — out in the bushes beside the golf course. One of the gardener’s helpers found it while he was picking up that wastepaper on the grounds. Raymond’s down there now.”

O’Hanna headed out past the swimming pool again, this time swinging wide of the chalets. For the utmost in privacy, the chalets had been landscaped into the mountain slope, tucked into the natural cover of pines and black mountain oak. Then came the manzanita, head-high treelets of native shrub, a tangle of misshapen, red-barked boughs and branches. The groundskeeper stood by a gunnysack half stuffed with paper he had speared up on his spiked pole. He gestured with the pole as O’Hanna approached. “It looked to me like a paper napkin that had blowed in there, so I fished for it, and I started pulling out cloth — kay-ripes, with blood on it!”

O’Hanna thrust his way into the tangle, joined Doc Raymond over the No. 2 corpse. There had been a hasty effort at concealment, a shallow trench scraped among the manzanita roots, soil and decaying leaves scattered over the body.

“Strangled,” the medico muttered, “and then beaten to hell and gone just to make sure.”

O’Hanna peered at the battered features, at the beach-wrap the groundskeeper had speared and dragged from the body. His guts bucked, he tasted salt and acid in his throat. “Endicott can quit worrying about Eva Tarkey running amok,” he said. “This is Eva.”

Striding back through the black oak and pines, he found he could swallow the salty, retching taste — and he found it condensed into something else, a cold inner weight that was deadly, and not very logical. Gus Lambert’s death hadn’t affected O’Hanna like this. Lambert was a man, an elderly man to whom life had been immoderately kind. You could figure death had been kind, too, so instant he had probably never known what hit him. Eva Tarkey was only beginning to live her life, and her dying had been an anguish of choking horror. There was the feeling, too, that Gus Lambert had been a chess-master, and the girl had been merely a pawn on the board lured into this contest that hadn’t been a contest at all, snatched off the board because she had got in the way of the killer’s move.

He took the cold wrath up A-10’s steps with him. Selena Walther had changed from the improvised bandanna swim-gear to form-fitting black. Her platinum hair fell down to her shoulders; her throat was roped with pearls. The black dress left her arms bare, was v’d down to the swell of her breasts in front, ended in a fish-tail train around her high, spiked heels. She said: “Don’t look so startled. This is my costume for tonight. I’m taking no chances on Uncle Jerry repeating that little trick he pulled this morning.”

O’Hanna was genuinely startled. “You expect the beauty contest to go on tonight in spite of all?”

“Why not? You know the old saying — the show must go on. Mogul Films can’t welch on that offer of a movie contract. It was a legal offer, an inducement to two hundred girls to invest their time and money in this thing.” She was as solemn as a Supreme Court decision. “If you’ve come here to try to talk me out of it, you’re wasting your breath.”

“I came here to see your uncle.”

“Uncle Jerry has taken to his bed. The excitement proved more than his doddering constitution could bear.”

“Then maybe you can tell me.” The house dick delved into his pocket. “Did he write this?”

Selena Walther scrutinized the anonymous missive. “It sounds like his brain child, but unfortunately his handwriting looks more like drunken rabbit tracks than anything else. I’ll show you a specimen.” She crossed into one of the chalet’s bedchambers, returned with a green oblong of canceled bank paper. “That’s his signature on the back.”

O’Hanna peered at the trembling Jeremiah Walther that wiggled lamely over the check. He turned it over, caught a quick peep at the face. The draft was for one thousand dollars, was signed Selena Walther and bore the notation, Pension to date in full.

The house dick hooped his eyebrows. “You’re paying him an allowance? I don’t get it. If you’re supporting him, how come he can forbid you to enter a bathing beauty contest?”

“He’s got me over a bicycle.”

O’Hanna stared. “You mean, like over a barrel?”

“I mean a bicycle. My grandfather was a manufacturer of bicycles back during the nineties. Uncle Jerry ran away to Africa — he says to become a missionary, but I don’t believe it. Neither did Grandfather. Grandfather wrote him a furious letter, called him a wastrel and a moron, and declared he was cutting Uncle Jerry out of his will. However, he did enclose fifty shares of the bicycle company stock. This was in 1895, the year Grandmother died, and the fifty shares were ones she had bequeathed to Uncle Jerry. Somehow, I suspect Grandmother never did get along too well with Grand—”

O’Hanna cut in. “Somehow, Grandma doesn’t interest me. Let’s get back to the bicycle business.”

The girl said: “Grandfather became interested in gasoline motors. He took out a patent on a little novelty called the horseless carriage. You can guess the rest. The patent was an asset which made the bicycle company shares immensely valuable.”

“Including Uncle Jerry’s shares?”

“Exactly, but we all assumed Uncle Jerry was long since dead. You can imagine my surprise when he turned up fifty years later with Grandfather’s old letter and that bundle of faded stock. At a conservative estimate, he has half a million in accumulated dividends due him.” Selena Walther shook her platinum hairdo helplessly. “The hell of it is, we buried the family’s financial genius in Grandfather’s grave. My father mismanaged the company horribly. I inherited little more than a pile of debts. I’d be hopelessly bankrupt if Uncle Jerry took his claim to court. Originally, I told him the excess profits tax would eat up the value of his stock if he forced the company to liquidate immediately. So far, I’ve been able to stall him along with a pension check now and then. I’m afraid I can’t get away with it much longer. He’s a moron in financial affairs, just as Grandfather said, but even he must know the excess profits tax has been repealed. He’ll hire a lawyer and take my last dime. Probably he’ll pay me an allowance then — provided I wear long dresses, stop smoking, cut out the cosmetics, and wait on him hand and foot. His ideas haven’t changed since fifty years ago, when men were men and women were washing machines.”

“And you figure that’s a fate worse than death,” O’Hanna summed up. His eyes narrowed. “Why spill the deep, dark secret to me?”

Selena Walther said: “It all leads back to my insistence that this beauty contest go through on schedule. I’ve got to find a job of some kind when things explode. I’d like a job in the movies. I’ve got brains, a nice body, and a fair singing voice. I’m sure I can win this contest, get a contract, and make good. Then I can tell Uncle Jerry to sue and be damned.”

“It’s lucky you told me. I know just the guy for you to see.” The house dick snared her arm. “His name’s Harry Farneye, and we’ll find him in suite 318.”

Harry Farneye was in 318, and he remembered Selena Walther. The pinch-faced man welcomed: “Oh, yes, you were on the platform when the shooting happened, weren’t you,” and guided the platinum-haired girl to an armchair.

Selena sat down, said, “Ouch!” and jumped, fast.

Farneye squinted through the one good lens of his pince-nez. “Good God, O’Hanna, look at this!”

The blued-steel hammer of a gun stuck up between the cushioned seat and the upholstered back of the chair.

O’Hanna came over, looked, asked: “Yours?”

“No, it isn’t mine! I don’t own a gun.” Farneye’s voice climbed. “O’Hanna, I was right! I told you Benny undoubtedly owned a gun! The damned little rat planted it here after he shot Lambert. I’ll bet anything there’s an empty shell—”

O’Hanna caught the casting man’s dropping arm. “Don’t touch. Fingerprints.” He stepped across the room, plucked a decorative scarf from a desktop, covered his hand with that to fish up the weapon.

“Belgian,” he said. “Shoots a .38 load.” He sniffed at the gun’s snout. “Shot recently, too.” He wrapped up the gun, tucked it under his arm. He said: “But it isn’t the murder I’m here about at all.”

The pinch-faced man stared.

O’Hanna said: “It’s about Miss Walther. It seems she’s a hard-luck heiress. To be frank about it, she needs a job acting in the movies so she can support herself in the style she’s accustomed to. I thought you wouldn’t mind arranging for her to have a screen-test, giving her a headstart toward the career she craves.”

Harry Farneye looked horrified. He said: “Good Lord, man, a movie career doesn’t start with a screen-test. Anyway, the day is long past when stage-struck Cinderellas can break into pictures on their looks alone. Nowadays, it takes voice lessons, dramatic coaching, months and months of preliminary training. Miss Walther might go through all that at her own expense, and still not find a studio interested enough to spend the thousand dollars it costs before a camera can roll on a testing stage. I’d advise her to take up something practical, like stenography or—”

“That’s what I thought when you gave me your spiel about Tra-La Brown,” O’Hanna stemmed the other’s flood.

The casting man tightened up. “Tra-La’s different.”

“Like hell she’s different. She’s a nice-looking blonde, I’ll admit. But she’s got a voice like a saw cutting pine-knots. Her theatrical experience consists of being manhandled to music by that cheap hoofer, Benny.”

“You’re discussing my business, snooper.” Farneye was trying the quick-freeze method. “I think I’m the one who’s qualified to judge Tra-La’s talents.”

O’Hanna said: “You’re in the business, but I think you do a little wolfing on the side. Tra-La was dumb enough to devour that old line that you’d make a star of her. I don’t doubt you gave her a screen-test — but that’s as far as you could go without Lambert’s O.K. Her test was nothing you’d dare show him, though. And she was demanding results. She was even toting around a .32, and it wasn’t loaded with blanks. I say she packed that rod for you. I say you were going to wind up a wolf with lead poisoning mighty quick.”

The quick-freeze was thawing, coming out in sweat on the pinch-faced man’s forehead. “If that little tramp told you this, she lied!”

“You lied to her, Farneye. The contest hadn’t been fixed so Lambert would let her win. For Gus Lambert, this show was strictly for publicity. Some girl would get thirteen weeks work as an extra, and Mogul Films would get a scrapbook full of favorable newspaper clippings. You simply gambled that only a handful of contestants would show up, and Tra-La would be an easy, walk-a-way winner.”

“You can’t prove that, O’Hanna.”

The house dick grinned. “I can’t prove that this Belgian gat is your gun, either, and you yourself parked it there!”

“I never saw it before in my life!”

“That’d better be true, Farneye, because naphthionate of sodium doesn’t happen to be a test for smokeless powder. It’s really a stop-thief powder,” O’Hanna said happily. “I keep a supply on hand to discourage petty picking up of other folks’ property. The stuff doesn’t wash off, and the tiniest trace of it shows up under ultra-violet light. If you’ve naphthionate on your fingers, you’re a trapped wolf.”

Farneye threw his pince-nez and caution aside with an angered-bull headshake. He sprang at the house dick. He thought, possibly, O’Hanna could only use one hand, since the telltale gun was being treasured under the sleuth’s right arm. If he thought so, he was right. O’Hanna licked him with one hand, with one punch, a left hook to the chin.

Selena Walther, wide-eyed and wordless up to this point, said now: “Was that contest fixed? If it was, I want to kick his teeth out.”

O’Hanna said: “Nurse him back to health, then when he comes to, remind him you witnessed all of this. If you play it right, you might get that screen-test. But make him put the promise in writing.”

Downstairs, Endicott was fretful. “Judas Particular Priest, Mike, the sheriff’s due here any minute. You’ve found nothing—”

“I found this.”

The manager snatched the Belgian gun. His thin features worked. “Thank God, it’s been fired. That means—”

“It means nothing. Farneye followed a little hint of mine. He removed a slug from a cartridge; then probably he wrapped the gat in a towel and fired a virtually soundless shot. He’s trying to cover up by framing Benny. Actually, what he’s done is prove they’re both innocent.”

Endicott displayed outraged emotions. “Mike, that’s wonderful. The possession of firearms makes them innocent, I suppose!”

“You suppose right,” said O’Hanna. “They don’t seem to know it, but a high-velocity load of the kind that killed Gus Lambert would make a mighty ruptured duck of any pistol.”

He crossed the grounds, went back once more to chalet A-10. Without knocking, this time, he entered and tiptoed his way to the second rear bedchamber. Uncle Jeremiah Walther was peacefully bedded down, whiskers pointed ceilingward, chest lifting the coverlet in rhythmic rise and fall. O’Hanna stepped into the room, began opening bureau drawers.

Uncle Jerry sat up abruptly. “What the tarnation are you up to, young man?”

“I’m just looking for something to read.” The house dick spread his hands, smiled. “To be frank about it, my job is often downright boring. Whole days pass when nobody commits a murder or steals a diamond necklace. Sometimes, just to kill time, I even read good books such as Mencken’s classic on the American language. You ought to read that one yourself.”

The white-whiskered man waved aside the covers, laboriously engineered his legs out of bed. He sat there, swathed from neck to ankle in an old-style striped-flannel nightshirt. “Cops have changed since my day,” he complained. “You don’t make sense to me.”

O’Hanna said casually: “The language has changed, too. The word ‘moron’ is one Grandfather Walther couldn’t possibly have penned in a letter dated 1895. It’s a coined word, coined nearly ten years later. I’m forced to conclude that letter is a rank forgery.”

Jeremiah Walther shrank inside his nightshirt as the sleuth swung to the bedside. O’Hanna scooped up the gold-rimmed spectacles from the bedside table, glanced through them, said: “These are window glass. I’ll bet your beard is bleached, too. Everything about you is phony.”

He stepped to the clothes closet, hauled out a pair of suitcases. Tossing them on the bed, he said: “Correct me if I’m wrong, but your name can’t really be Jeremiah Walther. You’re merely a shrewd operator who tumbled to the fact a member of the Walther family had disappeared fifty years ago. You boned up on the family genealogy, forged the letter to identify yourself, and forged some shares of stock. Confronted with a facsimile of her long-lost uncle Jerry, you figured Selena would make a quiet, out-of-court settlement.”

The white-whiskered man gained his feet angrily. “If you’re looking for any such letter, I have it in a bank box.”

“The letter isn’t really important to me. You’d never have dared submit it or the stock certificates to a showdown test.” O’Hanna finished with one suitcase, found the next one locked. He paused, said: “You were bluffing, but so was Selena. You assumed she meant she’d actually have the company legally liquidated. That’s why you tried to kill her.”

“I tried to—!”

“Yeah. You tried to kill her. As the only other relative, you’d get the dough without any lawsuits. That’s so clear that you had to try and make this mess look like the work of some lamebrained fanatic. It explains that phony note parked at Lambert’s door, and the silly theft of a swim-suit and a bra-top from the girls’ dressing-room. That was all build-up for killing Selena during the contest.”

The other scorned: “Perfectly preposterous. You know I did my level best to keep Selena out of that show.”

“Phooey. You knew she’d do her level best to get in it, regardless. She’d beg, borrow, or make herself a costume, and you counted on it. Then, after she’d been shot dead, you could say you didn’t even know she’d be there on the stand.”

The bearded man protested: “But Selena wasn’t shot.”

“She wasn’t — because Gus Lambert jumped into your line of fire.” O’Hanna drummed his fingers impatiently on the locked suitcase. “Do you want to give me a key, or shall I break this thing open?”

“You touch that and I’ll sue the hotel—”

O’Hanna whipped out his penknife, sank the blade into the leather. He slashed, plunged two fingers into the opening, wrenched.

A gun lay tucked in there, diagonally, from corner to corner. To make it fit, the rifle barrel had been hack-sawed down to carbine length; the stock had been dismounted. Above the bolt action, a ’scope fitted the metal.

“A wildcat .25,” O’Hanna said. “You carry it to plink butterflies, huh?”

“It’s... it’s a souvenir of my African hunting days.”

“You’re a liar. You ran back to the chalet, opened a window, and took a potshot intended for Selena. Squinting through the ’scope, you failed to see Gus Lambert and the Lofting girl.” O’Hanna’s Irish-gray stare grew bitter. He intoned harshly: “Now comes the really stinking part. Eva Tarkey had heard it said you’d cornered the local swim-suit supply. Tired of waiting, she came down here to demand one of them. The poor kid walked in just as you fired the shot. You strangled her, and later, you carried the body off into the bushes. It was risky, but not as risky as explaining a corpse in your chalet.”

The other frowned. His voice was edgy. “There’s only one answer to this rigmarole.”

“Yeah, you’re guilty as hell.”

“Nonsense. The answer is, literally hundreds of people heard that shot. They’ll all testify it came from the hotel.” The white-whiskered man stepped over to the clothes closet door. “Now, if you’ll kindly leave the room, I’ll get dressed. I’m going to see Mr. Endicott and complain about your insulting behavior.”

O’Hanna said: “You can get dressed, but you’re going to see the sheriff. It happens that nobody in the path of a high-velocity bullet ever hears the gun go off. What they hear is something else, the bow-wave report of the slug traveling faster than sound. It isn’t a whizz or a whine; it’s a sharp crack of the slug splitting the air. It drowns the actual shot and causes an auditory illusion. The fact that everybody ‘heard’ the shot come from the hotel proves the gun was off at a different angle. A ballistics shark can measure the distance and figure the angle—”

The white-whiskered man whirled from the closet doorway, and he had the gold-headed cane in his fist. He had suddenly lost a third of his supposed seventy years, and he was cat-fast as he slammed the cane at O’Hanna’s skull. The house dick ducked back, barely in time. There was plenty of muscle wrapped up inside that nightshirt, too. The cane head cracked down on the suitcase-bedded rifle, broke in pieces. The man tried to stab O’Hanna with the piece left in his hand. O’Hanna weaved away from that one, lashed out a punch. It was no one-handed tussle this time. The pair traded a dozen wallops before O’Hanna got in the finisher.

He stepped back, peered at the shattered cane. Now that the gold head lay in pieces, he could see telltale stains — Eva Tarkey’s blood — that the killer hadn’t been able to wash off when the thing was whole. Blood had seeped in under the gold fitting, discolored the wood. O’Hanna felt like gagging, and felt like beating the bleached white whiskers off the phony.