Black Cat Weekly #11

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 4THE agency op wasn’t sympathetic. He scrutinized the vicious bruise that began on O’Hanna’s cheek-bone and angled up into his haircut. “What are you, anyway? A house d**k or the tin duck in a shooting gallery?”

O’Hanna hated him. He didn’t say much, for just then the phone rang. “Never mind, I’ll take it.”

Fencer shrugged, and brushed at the goose down adhering to his conservative business suit. “I shouldn’t have said a tin duck. They don’t grow feathers.” He stepped over and hauled down the window sash.

“Hello?” O’Hanna was saying.

The operator told him, “We called Indian Prairie. Miss Beale hasn’t any friends or family there. It’s one of those things—the Indian Prairie Central says no one there even knows anybody named Kitty Beale.”

“Bad news?” Fencer questioned.

O’Hanna said, “So-so.” He walked to the door. “Oh, hell, I won’t hold nut on you. If we’re both running for the office of house d**k here, I’m willing to start from scratch with you.”

“Well?”

“Kitty Beale isn’t a schoolteacher from the Corn Belt,” O’Hanna said. “Now we can go on from there, and may the best man win.”

Fencer looked genuinely grateful. “That’s white of you. Maybe sometime I can give you a break. I hope so.”

O’Hanna nodded, opened the door, and came to a dead stop. His Irish-blue eyes explored the sixth floor corridor, in both directions, incredulously.

“Anything wrong?” Fencer’s tone was friendly, now.

“No.” O’Hanna marveled that his voice sounded friendly, too. “Not a thing.”

There wasn’t, either—visibly. The corridor looked as fresh and tidy as the day it had originally been painted and carpeted.

“Well,” the agency d**k said, “good luck to you, old chap.”

“Same to you,” O’Hanna said. He stepped out, pulled the door shut and glared at it. “Rat!” he remarked under his breath. “Louse!”

He was probably taking a damned fool chance, O’Hanna told himself. He hurried back to the Cobb suite anyway.

Doc Raymond, with shirt sleeves rolled to his elbows, sat beside the patient who was in bed in his bedroom.

“How is he?” O’Hanna asked.

Raymond turned both thumbs down. “With his heart, he’s lucky to be alive. Another six months on his brand of liquid diet, and he’ll be a dead man. In his condition, he might just as well drink embalming fluid in the first place —cheaper and quicker.”

Cobb’s voice issued through the towels which swathed his face. “Nuts, Doc. Higher-priced specialists than you gave me that song-and-dance years ago. I can kill a quart a day and still outlive all of you sour-pussed sawbones.”

Doc Raymond shrugged, walked across the room, and straightened a picture on the wall. “Your mistake. The quart a day is killing you.”

O’Hanna peeled layers of towels, cold ones, off the patient’s putty-colored features. “What about the girl?” he demanded.

“I can’t remember,” Cobb said vaguely. “That’s always the way after a binge. I can’t ever remember what I did. Was there a girl?”

“You picked her up in the lobby,” O’Hanna said.

“That wasn’t any girl—that was my wife,” Cobb said. “It’s the last thing I do remember.”

“Ice-pick,” O’Hanna suggested hopefully.

“It’s no use. It’s gone from me. Absolutely gone.”

“Catsup?” O’Hanna asked.

Leland Cobb shook his head and groaned. “That damned stomach pump sucked everything outa me, even the marrow in my bones. Why don’t you slip the girl ten bucks and get rid of her?”

“She isn’t interested in ten dollars.”

“Okay, slip her twenty. Fifty. Anything so I can rest.”

O’Hanna gestured Doc Raymond into the other room. “Is that guy kidding me?”

“It’s hard to say. I’m a practicing M.D., not a psychiatrist specializing in dipsomania.” The physician eyed O’Hanna with professional concern. “I’d be more at home working on that face of yours.”

“It doesn’t hurt any more than a mule-kick,” O’Hanna said.

He snapped on the closet light, knelt beside the dead girl, and attempted gently to open her clenched right hand. Not all the way. He’d seen enough when he found the trace of white adhesive gum on the index finger.

He straightened, smiling. “It doesn’t hurt at all now.”

Doc Raymond said this was a marvelous cure. “I’ll write it up for the Journal of American Medicine. Prescription for a black eye—hold hands with a corpse.”

O’Hanna was amazed. “Is my eye black?”

“It’s hardly noticeable,” Raymond said reassuringly, “the way the whole side of your head is puffing out.” He became serious. “Did you notice her hair, Mike?”

“Yeah. Blonde.”

“I looked a little closer than that,” the physician said. “I wanted to make sure there wasn’t a head injury, indicating she’d been slugged before she was stabbed. There’s a well-defined streak of road dust in that blonde hair.”

O’Hanna stared.

“Cobb’s suitcases at the back of the closet are dusty. From being packed in the rumble of his car, I’d imagine.”

O’Hanna applauded. “I’ll be damned. If Endicott really wants to hire a new house d**k, you’re the guy for the job.”

The physician said, “No. Any M.D. would have looked for a scalp injury under the circumstances. I’m a stickler for details, so I looked around and noticed the suitcases, too.”

O’Hanna wasn’t listening. “Where’s the guy’s wife?”

“In the suite next door. She sent word I was to telephone her in case of any change in Cobb’s condition.”

“Sent word?”

“By Endicott,” Doc Raymond said. He adjusted the hang of a bridge lamp shade. “Endicott came in to fetch a dress from the closet in her room.”

“Hunh.”

“Women like to keep up appearances at such a time as this,” Doc Raymond volunteered….

Ward Tolan opened the door of the suite next door to the Cobb rooms. There were half a dozen couples in the living room, the men in tuxedoes and the women in attractively low-cut dinner gowns.

O’Hanna said, “You’re here—good. I want to ask a few questions about that cocktail party you told us about.”

“Go right ahead.” Tolan’s jaw had a hostile set. “Those are the people. Charlotte had invited us all to dinner. Of course, that’s off now.”

“I don’t see why.” Charlotte Cobb advanced defiantly. Her silver-cloth gown was a knockout. She held her chin high. “As soon as the sheriff arrives, all this mystery will be cleared up instantly.”

“You sound sure of it,” O’Hanna said.

“I am.”

“Why?”

“It’s very simple,” Charlotte Cobb said. “I’ve learned that girl was killed at five o’clock, within ten minutes either way.”

“You learned that—how?”

“I told her.” Assistant Manager Endicott came out of another room of the suite, steering his thin length through the tuxedoes. He glared at O’Hanna truculently. “Mike, this is disgraceful! Disgraceful! An employee of San Alpa running around with a shiner!”

O’Hanna sighed. “Go on, Mrs. Cobb.”

Her breasts lifted. “Leland has an alibi. He couldn’t have been with that girl. I was with him myself, at that time.”

“I understood,” O’Hanna pointed out, “the cocktail party started at four-thirty.”

Charlotte Cobb nodded brightly. “It did, but I waited for Leland for twenty minutes. In our suite, where he’s supposed to have been murdering this girl. Then, on my way to the Palomar Room, I found him in the lobby. He was— well, he was ill.” She made her voice determined. “That delayed me more, getting him upstairs. You can ask the elevator operator. He helped me get Leland into the suite. It must have been nearly five then. I stayed quite a while longer. We had—well, an argument. I reminded Leland that we’d invited these people to dinner. I begged him to get some sleep, and then take a cold shower.”

She looked around. Her jet eyes blazed from face to face. “Isn’t that true, all of you? I came late to the party—didn’t I arrive about a quarter past five?”

“You were late,” Ward Tolan acknowledged, “but not that late.”

Charlotte Cobb gave him a stormy, long-lashed look. “How do you know, Ward? You weren’t even there when I arrived.”

O’Hanna spun around to the large-jawed bond salesman. “What the hell, guy?”

Tolan sulked. “The only table reservation I could get was on the mezzanine. We were trooping up and downstairs all the time between drinks, to the dance floor. But I’m sure Charlotte came in by five o’clock, or even earlier. Even though I probably was dancing with another lady at the exact moment.”

“Which lady?”

“I wouldn’t remember. I danced with all of them.”

O’Hanna asked, “Are you sure it was a lady? And not your big, blue-jawed friend you were waltzing around with?”

That jaw of Tolan’s dropped like a trap-door. He gaped at O’Hanna in abrupt, doom-shadowed fright. “That sounds like Rocky’ Squale!” he choked. “But Rocky isn’t here!”

In Tolan’s distress, he wasn’t aware that the door had opened.

“Oh, yes, he is. Take a look.”

There stood Fred Fencer, beaming. He wasn’t alone. He had the big, blue-jowled man in tow.

Tolan quavered, “Rocky. Oh, my God!”

“Yeah,” the agency d**k sparkled. “The guy that socked you, O’Hanna. I caught him. It was simple.” In high good humor, he slapped O’Hanna’s shoulder. “I’m surprised you didn’t see through it. You’d been knocked out only a few seconds, judging by the way you acted. I hadn’t seen anybody getting away when I came down the hall, so it was a cinch this guy was still there. He’d heard me coming, and dived back into the bathroom.”

O’Hanna had taken the chance deliberately, he reminded himself. He’d held pretty good cards in Room 637— a pair, in fact. And he’d thrown them in, tried to fill an inside straight instead. But he was damned if he was going to stand here and let Fencer play those pasteboards.

“Simple.” The agency d**k grinned. “I merely opened and closed the door, as if I’d left, too. Rocky barged out unsuspecting—and there I was, with a gun and the drop on him.”

The black Irish boiled in O’Hanna.

“You dirty doublecrossing son of scum!” He reached, plucked the spectacles off Fencer’s nose. His fist followed, crackingly. He socked Fencer, right in the eye.