Black Cat Weekly #11

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2COBB tried hard to deny the accusation with dignity. He looked indignant and solemn. Inhaling a long, sobering breath, he articulated his words with a ponderous carefulness.

“No! I never saw her before! She washn’t—wasn’t—here a minute ago. I swear—”

A hiccough blasted the foundations out from under his painfully preserved dignity.

He caved into the nearest chair and began to babble incoherently. He’d only tried to play a joke on good ol’ O’Hanna, he protested. There wasn’t supposed to be any corpse in the closet.

“You said there was,” O’Hanna reminded.

That was the idea. Leland Cobb hiccoughed. The corpse he’d been talking about was imaginary, and it was supposed to have disappeared into thin air. He’d thought it would be funny as hell to send good ol’ O’Hanna chasing all over San Alpa in search of a non-exist-ent cadaver.

O’Hanna asked, “Then how’d that girl’s body get in there?”

Cobb hiccoughed violently. “I dunno. Somebody elsh put it there.” He squeezed his fingertips into his putty-colored face. “Thash it. I gesh.”

Fred Fencer turned around in the closet doorway and squinted through his glasses. “Let’s get this straight,” the agency d**k said. “The guy claims he committed an imaginary murder with some catsup. And someone else made it real by planting a genuine corpse in this closet here.”

“Yeah,” O’Hanna said. It was the damnedest grotesquerie of an alibi he’d ever listened to.

“How could it happen?” Fencer wanted to know.

O’Hanna sighed. “It’s possible there might not have been a corpse in the closet when he telephoned.” He gestured at a doorway on the other side of the bed. “This 402 is a suite of two rooms, with connecting bath and dressing room. Somebody could have hauled the girl’s body in through Mrs. Cobb’s room and the dressing room, through the door you noticed at the back of the closet— that opens into the dressing room.”

“Thin ice,” Fencer said.

O’Hanna thought so, too. “Keep an eye on the guy,” he told Endicott. “We’ll look.”

They circled the bed, went through the connecting doorway, into Mrs. Cobb’s room. O’Hanna looked at its carpeting, carefully. He examined the tiled floor of the bath, then swung through the dressing room, and on into the closet where the victim lay.

He crouched beside the body. She’d been dead an hour or longer, he thought. There was a tiny circular hole in the fabric of the girl’s bodice. She hadn’t bled much, and all the blood he could see was on her dress. The red stain on the closet floor was more catsup.

“Oh-oh,” Fencer breathed.

O’Hanna saw it, too. Leland Cobb’s shoes were aligned on a slanted shelf along the side of the closet, and in one of the brown brogues was something that wasn’t a shoe-tree.

O’Hanna carried that brogue into the bedroom, emptied it out onto the blotter on the desk there.

“Know where this came from?” he asked Leland Cobb.

Cobb peered at the implement — an ice-pick, five inches of wickedly sharp steel thinly filmed with a stain that wasn’t catsup.

Cobb hiccoughed again, and shook his head.

O’Hanna reached for the ivory-enameled phone on the desk. “Operator, send Dr. Raymond up to 402. And put through a call for Sheriff Glee-son.” He stopped, swallowed, and stared at Cobb’s wife.

Charlotte Cobb coming into the suite at this exact moment made a dramatic entrance. But then, she’d probably never walked into a room in her adult life and not made a dramatic entrance. She couldn’t help it, with her white-skinned, raven-haired statuesque beauty. She had a complexion like vellum stationery, the eyes and hair drawn in startling, India-ink black.

“What in the world!” She stared at O’Hanna. She knew him, because of the many times Leland Cobb had been in hot water at San Alpa. “What in the world has he done now?”

Endicott was at her side. “Permit me.” The assistant manager snared Charlotte Cobb’s arm in solicitous fingers and steered her to a chair. “Be a brave little woman,” he begged asininely. “Wait—I’ll fetch you a glass of water.”

He’d practically hauled Charlotte away from her escort by main force. The escort, who’d followed her in, stood near the door, open-mouthed.

O’Hanna knew the guy slightly. He was Ward Tolan, a bond salesman who spent an occasional week-end at San Alpa. Apparently he sold most of his bonds to women, wealthy ones who fell for his somewhat aggressive good looks. He had just a little bit too much jaw, and it unbalanced his face, gave him a definitely pugnacious appearance.

One glance at that jaw, and any Hollywood casting director would have tabbed Ward Tolan for the villain of the piece.

Tolan scowled. “Say, what is all this?”

“Yes,” Charlotte Cobb worried, “what?”

O’Hanna told her. “A playful prank, according to your husband. He says he dunked some catsup around here, trying to kid me that a murder had been committed.”

Cobb’s wife gasped. “I’m so sorry! It’s all my fault!”

Endicott almost fell over with the tumbler he was fetching from the bathroom. “Your fault?” he faltered.

“I’m afraid it is.” She was a hell of a beautiful woman when she wanted to look appealing and conscience-stricken, as now. “I’d heard that Mr. O’Hanna was leaving on his vacation. I mentioned it to Leland. I said”—she hesitated—“wouldn’t it be too bad if something happened so he couldn’t go. If a murder were committed in the hotel, for instance.”

O’Hanna wondered at her. On every one of those previous occasions, he’d asked himself the same question: why she didn’t simply walk out on Leland Cobb? It couldn’t be for lack of other offers, considering her looks and her charm.

It might have been some obscure, thwarted maternal instinct. Anyway, here she was — up to bat for the guy again.

“That’s it,” she reproached herself. “I gave you the idea, didn’t I, darling?”

Cobb peered at her stupidly. And Fencer laughed. “But who gave him the idea of stabbing this poor kid with his ice-pick?”

Leland Cobb reacted as if the agency d**k had held a lighted match to his breath. He blew up. He staggered off his chair, making for Fred Fencer in sudden, howling rage. “Why, you dirty—”

“Give me that.” Charlotte Cobb snatched the tumbler from the surprised Endicott, and sloshed its contents full into her drunken spouse’s distorted face. “You keep still, darling! I’ll see you through this. I always have, haven’t I?”

Leland Cobb subsided into O’Hanna’s arms. It must have been the reaction. His alcohol-punished heart couldn’t take it. He crumpled in a dead-weight, flaccid torpor.

Cobb’s wife turned to Fencer. She was an aroused sss, feverish with defensive energy.

“Now!” she said determinedly. “What did you mean by that remark about a poor kid and—and an ice-pick?”

“Come over here and see for yourself.” The agency d**k shrugged.

Charlotte Cobb stopped abruptly in front of the closet. She didn’t faint or scream or even shudder. She took it like a thoroughbred, with only the tiniest perceptible tightening in her manner. Her voice was lower, but perfectly under control.

“You intend to charge Leland with this murder?” she asked.

“Murder?” Ward Tolan echoed.

He strode across the room, took a look into the closet, too. He damned near folded to the floor. His knees sagged, and he saved himself by clutching the open door for support. That oversized jaw worked, bunching muscles the size of marbles in his cheeks.

Fred Fencer pounced like a hawk. “You know her, don’t you?”

“Yes,” the bond salesman admitted. He shot a quick look at Charlotte Cobb. The back of his hand came up and rubbed his chin. “She’s Kitty Beale, a schoolteacher from the Middle West. This is a hell of a shock. I was talking to her in the lobby downstairs, only a couple of hours ago.”

Fencer wasn’t convinced. “A schoolteacher?”

“That’s right,” Ward Tolan said. “It’s a rural school, and they close it for two weeks in the fall. Corn-picking vacation, she called it. It seems the jaspers keep their kids home to help get in the crop, so school can’t keep, anyway.”

“Go on,” Fencer said.

“Well, she is—was—young, pretty, high-spirited. She’d got fed up with ABC’s and Saturday night swims in a wash tub. Like a lot of those cow-pasture queens, she had delusions of glamour. She wasn’t content to graduate from teaching school to being some clodhopper’s wife, not without having her fling first.

“She knew there were fast trains that made it to and from California in four days each way, and that’d leave her almost a week in San Alpa.” Tolan shrugged. “She’d been reading the travel folders. She thought her twenty bucks a day would entitle her to have breakfast right across the table from Gary Cooper, I guess. Then she’d go dunk herself in the same pool with the Junior League, and probably wind up the evening by dancing with Cesar Romero. She’d been sitting around the lobby all day, waiting for somebody to give her a tumble.”

Cynicism spread across Fencer’s face. “And you did.”

Tolan was equally cynical. “What the hell? I peddle bonds for a living. Anybody who can afford the rates here is a pretty fair prospect. I thought she was a prospect, so naturally I went over and asked if we hadn’t met in Miami last winter.”

O’Hanna asked, “She told you this story and so you bowed out?”

“Yeah. I had a cocktail party date for four-thirty, in the Palomar Room. I’d invited about a dozen guests, the Cobbs included.”

“Both of them?”

“I invited both.” Tolan nodded. “But when Charlotte came in she apologized for Leland, said he wasn’t feeling well, and had decided to stay in his room.”

Fencer grinned. “Maybe it was something the guy drank, huh?”

“No.” The bond salesman hesitated, stroked the outline of his jaw with thoughtful fingers. He looked worriedly at Charlotte Cobb. “I’m sorry as hell, but this is murder. I’ve got to tell them the truth.”

She stared.

Tolan said, “It was about four o’clock when I talked to Kitty Beale. Half an hour later, when I crossed the lobby on my way to the Palomar Room, I saw her again. Cobb was there, trying to pick her up. As I walked by, I overheard him invite her upstairs for a little private, cozy drinkie. . . .”

The San Alpa was an hour’s drive, over the steeply winding mountain road, from the county seat, so there was a long wait before Sheriff Ed Gleeson arrived. But Dr. Raymond, the house physician, took a look and said the murder had happened around five o’clock, give or take ten minutes. He was busy in the other half of the suite now, trying to sober up Leland Cobb. Doc Raymond wasn’t too hopeful, but he thought maybe a stomach pump and cold towels would have the suspect in shape to talk by the time the sheriff arrived.

O’Hanna and Fencer and Endicott were taking a minute to talk over matters.

“You know,” O’Hanna said, “I think maybe Charlotte’s got something on the ball.”

Endicott stared. “You mean she might get him off?”

“Maybe he didn’t do it,” O’Hanna said.

That got them.

“Well,” O’Hanna asked, “if he did, why did he? What’s his motive for killing this girl, this schoolteacher he’d never even laid eyes on before?”