Black Cat Weekly #11

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 3WORRY seamed Endicott’s thin face. He didn’t approve of crime at San Alpa. But if these things had to happen, the management wanted them cleaned up in a hurry—silently, without annoyance to the paying guests.

It was O’Hanna’s job to keep these things quiet. So the sheriff could just call at the back door and be handed this case, all neatly solved.

The suggestion that maybe this case wasn’t solved distressed Endicott.

But not Fred Fencer. “Ah, the guy’s a dipso,” the agency d**k said, “and dipsos don’t need motives. All they need is a good, ugly, homicidal impulse.”

Endicott looked immensely cheered. Fencer watched the assistant manager, and took his cue from Endicott’s expression, apparently.

“There’s no argument,” he declared flatly. He removed his glasses and breathed on them leisurely, managing to look cocksure as hell. “The girl was alive at four-thirty when he invited her upstairs. Half an hour later, she was dead in his clothes closet. He’s the only one who could have done the deed.”

Assistant Manager Endicott nodded. It needed no crystal ball to read his thoughts, either. He felt sorry for Charlotte Cobb, of course. But after all, Cobb was a rotter who drank and caroused and disgraced the upper classes. The best people didn’t approve of Leland Cobb and wouldn’t resent his being locked up. So the publicity couldn’t hurt the hotel, particularly.

Fencer polished the spectacles with his handkerchief. “The rest is easy. He’d killed her, but how was he going to get rid of the body? And even if he carried the body out, or threw it from the window at night, he was probably worried about bloodstains on his carpet. Well, he got the drunken idea of calling Room Service for some catsup. He thought he could make a gag of the whole thing, and pretend to be surprised as hell when we found a genuine corpse there. But the big thing, he could sprinkle the catsup around and cover up the bloodstains on his carpet.”

O’Hanna said stubbornly, “Maybe.”

Fencer laughed. “Forget that motive angle. The girl was a schoolma’am, and pretty strait-laced. Cobb made a pass at her, she cold-shouldered him, and he got sore. Why, I’ve seen drunks pick a fight just because someone refused to have a drink with them. Or because they didn’t like another guy’s looks.”

He hooked his glasses onto his ears, and gave O’Hanna a patronizing glance.

“It happens all the time,” he said. “Half the murders in this country are committed by drunks acting on impulse. They grab a gun or a shive and let the victim have it.”

O’Hanna spread his muscular, tanned hands and said, “But he grabbed an icepick.”

“So what?”

“So he had an ice-pick,” O’Hanna said.

Fencer didn’t follow the logic. “I still say so what?”

O’Hanna shrugged. “People don’t generally carry them in their pants pockets. Room Service doesn’t supply ice-picks with orders of tomato catsup. Are you trying to tell me that Cobb knew in advance he was going to have a homicidal impulse, so he brought an icepick with him?”

That stopped Fencer. “Well-l,” he hesitated.

“It shows premeditation,” O’Hanna said. “And how could Cobb premeditate the murder of a girl he’d never even met yet?”

“It’s a detail,” Fencer admitted, without enthusiasm.

“Sure, Mike. It’s just a detail.” Endicott moistened his lips, ran a hand over his thinning hair. “Don’t worry about it. Fencer will have all those little angles cleared up when you get back, two weeks from now.”

O’Hanna’s Irish-blue eyes whetted down to blued steel slits. “When I—Huh?”

The assistant manager said, “We won’t let it spoil your vacation. You’ve been overworked lately, Mike. You need a rest, a change of scenery.”

“A brush-off is a brush-off,” O’Hanna said dangerously, “in any kind of language.”

Color climbed in Endicott’s thin face. He warned, “Now, Mike! You’re not going to turn this perfectly simple murder into a mystery. Good Lord, you know what Gleeson will do, if anybody gets him to thinking about this ice-pick angle.” He perspired. “Why, that dumb county sheriff would come down on San Alpa’s neck with both feet. He’d turn the hotel inside out. Our paying guests’ personal affairs wouldn’t be safe from his third-degree methods. We might just as well try to run a resort inside a police station!”

O’Hanna said there were worse places than police stations. “Morgues, for instance.”

“There won’t be any more trouble unless you make it,” Endicott asserted. “We’ve got the guilty party—Fencer has proved that to my satisfaction. And I must say I consider he made a darned good job of it, too.”

Fencer looked pleased, pushed out his lower lip modestly, and disclaimed, “Oh, it was nothing.”

O’Hanna ignored the agency d**k. “Meaning you don’t like my methods?” he asked Endicott.

The assistant manager smiled thinly. “I didn’t say that—yet.” He paused, let the last word sink in. “But, after all, Fencer’s been on duty since six o’clock, and he’s responsible to the management. You’re not, Mike. So if you insist on interfering, if you make a mess of things, I’ll have to explain to the owners that it wasn’t his fault. A word to the wise, Mike.”

O’Hanna’s Irish-blue stare peered straight down into Endicott’s single-track mind. “You’d be in favor of firing me and hiring him.” He got up and strode to the door. “Thanks for the advice,” he said. “Now I’ll tell you exactly what you can do with the job,” and he did.

Endicott’s face took fire. “You don’t have to be vulgar!”

“I didn’t have to,” O’Hanna said, “but it was a pleasure.”

He slammed the door. He was sore as hell. It wasn’t the job, altogether, although O’Hanna liked the job well enough. He’d called San Alpa a chromium-fitted bird cage, true, but he happened to regard it as his own personal bird cage, and he’d grown used to carrying its master pass-key around in his pocket.

What he didn’t like was Endicott’s attitude. Or Fencer’s. In fact, he didn’t like Fencer.

He decided Fencer was a so-and-so. “I only stayed around as a favor to the guy, and here he’s trying to show me up, trying to muscle me off the pay-roll! The nerve of the son!” It made O’Hanna’s black Irish temper boil.

Steaming over the injustice, he descended to the lobby desk and inquired about Kitty Beale. She had registered as Miss Catherine Beale of Indian Prairie, Iowa, and she had been assigned Room 637.

O’Hanna said, “Well, try long-distance—get hold of her family or her friends.” He added over his shoulder, going away, “If you get them, I’ll take the call in her room.”

O’Hanna didn’t push around easily. “We’ll see,” he brooded, “who’s the house d**k around here.”

He still had the pass-key, anyway. Using it, he entered Room 637.

“Hell on wheels!” he choked.

It was as if a panzer division had laid down a perfume barrage, and then played blitz games in here. The cloying reek of perfume came from an overturned bottle, saturating a confusion of spilled silk scanties and similar intimate lingerie. Bureau drawers had been jerked out and overturned. That for a beginning. The vandal had shucked the pillows out of their cases, slashed the ticking, and scattered goose feathers and down over the scene. The mattress, in shreds, showed its coil-springed anatomy.

O’Hanna hurried to open a window. That started a young blizzard of feathers blowing, scudding about his ankles as he crossed to the far side of the room. Something about one of the overturned bureau drawers caught his eye. Two white daubs that looked like thin paint from a distance, but clearly weren’t he saw as he drew closer. He stabbed a finger at one of them, testing the fresh, gummy touch of the white substance.

“Adhesive,” he murmured. He wondered what Kitty Beale could have kept taped to the underside of this drawer.

The creak of tip-toeing shoe leather cut through his puzzlement. O’Hanna whirled—a man was emerging from Kitty Beale’s bathroom. A hell of a big man, pointing a gun that looked big enough to mount on a battleship.

O’Hanna dived, crashing into bone-and-muscle so solid it didn’t yield an inch, yet managing to snare the gun and twist it floorward. They locked, strained, struggled over the weapon. The big man’s blue-complexioned face turned purple with effort, but he went to the wall, backed against it by O’Hanna’s sinewy strength. Wrestling there, he must have rubbed up against the wall switch.

For the lights clicked out. Like that.

In the darkness he tried butting O’Hanna, then brought up a knee that felt like a sledge-hammer. O’Hanna doubled up, which was a feint on his part, and lashed his right with all its power at the big man’s middle. It was a swell idea but it didn’t work—didn’t work at all. The right never landed. What did land was a wallop out of nowhere that almost blasted O’Hanna’s head off his shoulders, knocked him cold.

But in a minute or so O’Hanna rolled on the floor, sat up, and spat out a feather as a voice asked cheerfully, too cheerfully: “Well, well, well! What happened to you?” The cheerful voice, the smile, and the flashing eye-glasses belonged to Fred Fencer.

“Where’d you come from?” O’Hanna mumbled.

Fencer said he’d thought he’d better check up on the Beale girl a bit. “I opened the door and turned on the lights and there you were.”

“You didn’t meet a guy barging out of here?”

“Nope.”

“Then he got away!”