Black Cat Weekly #11

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 5ASSISTANT MANAGER ENDICOTT fluttered like a nesting hen over the fallen Fencer. It was unthinkable— a San Alpa employee swinging on another employee—and doing it in front of a roomful of surtax society.

“Mike!” he squawked. “Have you gone crazy?”

O’Hanna rubbed his knuckles pleasurably. “Wait and hear my side of it! I wasn’t the first one who interrupted Rocky Squale in 637 tonight. Fencer got there ahead of me. Rocky jumped into the bathroom when he heard him at the door. Then I came along, and Fencer ducked into the clothes-closet. When Rocky and I tangled, it was Fencer who turned out the lights and buffaloed me with a gun.”

The agency d**k sat up, nursing his eye. “You are crazy, guy.”

O’Hanna denied it. “If you’d come in from the hallway—the window was open—half the feathers would have blown outside. There wasn’t one pinfeather in the corridor. That proves you were in the room all the time, doesn’t it?”

Aghast, Endicott puzzled lamely, “But did he—”

“That seventy-five-cent grapefruit went to his head,” O’Hanna said. “He wanted the credit for capturing Rocky. He figured a few simple solutions like that one would slip him inside my shoes here.”

“And you let him—”

“For the time being. Rocky hadn’t found anything or he wouldn’t have stayed there playing pillow games until he got caught at it.” O’Hanna shrugged. “I was after the killer, not the also-rans.”

“Thanks,” Rocky said gloomily. “Thanks for the compliments. At that, I guess you throw the weight around here.”

O’Hanna suggested, “If you’ve got a load on your mind—”

“Well”—the blue-complexioned man hesitated— “he said if I’d play ball with him there wouldn’t be any rap for destroying hotel property.”

O’Hanna said he was more interested in why Rocky had destroyed it.

“I was hunting for evidence that might be worth five or ten grand,” Rocky said. “You don’t know who Kitty Beale was, I bet?”

“Don’t let me stop you,” said O’Hanna.

Rocky grinned. “She was Mrs. Ward Tolan. Hell, they’ve been in the racket for years. Tolan peddles bonds for a front, is all. His real business is making plays for rich married dames. When he hooks one, Kitty steps in and threatens to sue for a divorce. She’s got snapshots, letters, the works. She wants five or ten grand for a quiet settlement, else she’ll sue for alienation of affections. The dames are scared of the husband, so Kitty collects—or she used to.”

O’Hanna’s Irish-blue glance roved. “Where’s Tolan?”

“Gone!” Endicott gasped.

“If you’d given me back my glasses,” Fred Fencer expostulated, “this wouldn’t have happened. I’d have watched him. I could have told you he committed that murder.”

O’Hanna thrust the glasses at him. “Come on!” They ran into the hall. “Stairs,” O’Hanna said, heading toward them. “How did you figure, Fencer?”

“It’s cold, boy, cold. Tolan’s in love with Charlotte Cobb. His wife stood in the way. He doped out how he could get rid of Kitty, pin the job on Cobb, and marry a million bucks.”

“They don’t act like any two people in love I ever saw.”

“They’re trying hard not to.”

O’Hanna took two steps at a time. “It’s a theory.”

“Fact,” Fencer said. He was running out of breath. “Kitty thought—same old shakedown. Rocky, too! He was watching—his chance—steal the snapshot and love letters. Rocky saw—Palomar Room—how it worked.”

“How did it?”

“Five o’clock. Tolan—took powder— said a phone call. He beat it—elevator. Back in five minutes.”

“Take a deep breath,” O’Hanna urged.

“He’d stolen—Charlotte’s room key. Met Kitty there. Cobb—next room—too drunk to know.”

“But Charlotte says she was still there.”

“Lie. Lie for anybody she loves, she would.”

They rounded into the sixth-floor corridor. “Is this the lowdown,” O’Hanna asked, “or are you—”

“It’s on the level.”

O’Hanna asked, “On the level, how do you explain the catsup gag?”

“On the level, I don’t know.”

O’Hanna swung into the doorway of Room 637. It was already open.

He exploded, “Holy hell! Look at it!”

There was a hell of a lot of blood this time. Ward Tolan lay folded over the upset bureau drawers. He’d been stabbed in the back while he’d been bending and fumbling there.

O’Hanna grasped Fred Fencer’s lapels. “Damn you, if you’ve been two-timing me again!”

Fencer shrank. “It’s a fact. Charlotte Cobb was even in our agency. She was arranging to shadow Cobb, divorce him, mental cruelty—”

“Then you knew it all the time!”

The agency d**k swallowed, suddenly nauseated by the whole thing. He gulped, “So I stink. Well, put yourself in my shoes. I’m up against this stuff every day, all day—divorce racket. And for what? Ten bucks a day. I thought I could louse the deal up once and for all, and get a decent, permanent job.”

“Keep everybody out of here,” O’Hanna growled. He whirled, ran for the stairs again.

Doc Raymond met him at the door of Suite 400. “What is it, Mike? Operator said you wanted me in your office, but you weren’t there, so I came up here.”

O’Hanna swore and ran past the physician, swerving into Cobb’s bedroom. “Holy some-more!”

Charlotte Cobb swayed in the connecting doorway. Crimson rilled from the forearm she held close, seeping down over the silver-cloth gown.

“What is this?” she asked. “A hotel or a madhouse? I saw a man sneaking in here. He meant to kill Leland, I think. I fought him off—he had a knife—”

O’Hanna said, “It’s only a scratch.”

He stared into the living room, past her. A picture frame caught his eye. It hung twenty degrees off the horizontal, and only minutes ago, he’d seen Doc Raymond straighten it.

“Excuse,” O’Hanna said.

He wrenched the picture off the wall, dug his fingernails in, tore off the cardboard backing. There was still enough adhesive on the legal-looking paper then so that it stuck to the cardboard. O’Hanna peered at the Spanish phrases, unable to read Spanish, but making sense out of the Tijuana dateline that was three years old, and more sense out of the names—Catherine Beale, Leland Cobb.

“You fell for this?” he asked.

Charlotte Cobb came at him in catlike silence with a surgical scalpel from Doc Raymond’s instrument bag.

“Naughty,” O’Hanna said.

She kept coming. He had to hit Charlotte Cobb on her aristocratic chin….

Sheriff Gleeson said, “I had a blowout. Changed a tire on the way.” He peered around Endicott’s office. “Why, where’s O’Hanna? You haven’t fired the guy, have you?”

Endicott was embarrassed. “Nonsense. We couldn’t get along without Mike. I’ve always said so.”

Doc Raymond chuckled. “It’s all in order for you, Sheriff. Blood group tests will undoubtedly demonstrate that some of the stains on Mrs. Cobb’s dress are Tolan’s blood. You could get a conviction on that alone.”

The desk phone purred as he spoke. Endicott took the instrument, said, “For you, Gleeson.”

“Yeah—hello,” the sheriff bassoed.

O’Hanna’s voice was mixed up with strains of juke-box. “Don’t let anyone kid you about Charlotte Cobb,” that voice said. “They streamline ice-boxes nowadays, remember. She’s the type that never fell for a man in her life. She had a million reasons for marrying Cobb—all of ’em printed by the Government. Besides, she had it on good medical authority the guy wouldn’t last six months. The reason she kept going to bat for him was in the hope he’d drop dead during one of his God-awful binges. She stuck it out for two and a half years before she decided to settle for a divorce and a fat settlement.”

Gleeson gulped. “Just what the—”

“Don’t interrupt,” O’Hanna’s voice said. “This is costing me money. Say yeah, if you’ve got it so far.”

“Yeah.”

O’Hanna’s voice resumed. “Tolan’s usual racket wouldn’t work, because Charlotte wasn’t the type. So he changed the routine. Kitty followed the Cobbs to San Alpa, registered herself as a schoolma’am from Iowa, and pulled something new in the shakedown line. She told Charlotte she’d vacationed in California three years ago. She said she’d gone to Tijuana on a sightseeing jaunt, had met a guy there at the races, and their evening had turned into an all-out bender. When she woke up in the morning, she was married to a total stranger. Ashamed of the mess, she’d sneaked across the Border alone and tried to forget. It wasn’t until just now she’d found out she was married to a millionaire named Leland Cobb.”

“Wait!” Gleeson said. “Are them things legal?”

“Mexican divorces aren’t always,” O’Hanna’s voice said, “but marriage is matrimony anywhere. You can see where it left Charlotte, if true. She wasn’t even legally married to the guy, let alone entitled to a divorce and a settlement. She was over a barrel where Kitty could demand any kind of a price. Yeah, so far?”

“Yeah. So far.”

“She arranged to meet Kitty in her suite at a quarter to five. Kitty had a forged, phony Tijuana certificate taped to the underside of a bureau drawer. She took it with her. Charlotte went to the closet, supposedly to get the money, whirled, and used the ice-pick she had hidden there. She pushed Kitty’s body deep back behind the suitcases in the closet, then she hid the certificate inside a picture frame in her own room.”

“Why didn’t she destroy it?”

O’Hanna said: “She thought she was framing Cobb. She could blackmail him out of a hell of a big divorce settlement by waving that paper under his nose. People would think Kitty had been shaking him down, and that’d be his motive for murder.”

“Yeah.”

“About ten of five, she got Cobb out of the lobby. She made the frame-up more binding with that catsup gag. It isn’t hard to sell a drunk an idea and make him think it’s his own.”

Gleeson said, “That happens to plenty of sober guys. But what was her alibi?”

“A damned smooth one. She told the truth about her time table, and made everyone believe she was lying to protect her hubby.” O’Hanna laughed grimly. “She must have ducked out of the cocktail party a few minutes before six. Wanted to powder her nose, you know. Actually, she had to slip upstairs and make sure Cobb went through with his gag. He’d just got his Dutch courage up to sprinkling the catsup around. That’s when she moved the body from the back of the closet. Since she entered through her own room Cobb didn’t even see her. She hurried downstairs, then came up in the elevator with Tolan.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

O’Hanna’s voice wound up, “It blew up in her face the minute Fencer hauled Rocky in, and started talking about 637. I socked Fencer, and Tolan took a powder. Charlotte was smart enough to see then that Tolan and Kitty were in it together. Tolan had left the cocktail party for five minutes, gone up to Kitty’s room, to find out whether Kitty had collected the shakedown cash. He’d have to come clean to beat the murder rap himself, and that would involve Charlotte.”

“Why?”

“Easy. He knew Kitty was blackmailing her, not Cobb at all. She had to silence Tolan, but fast. She dived into the living room, grabbed the phone, and talked to Doc Raymond. Posing as the operator, she told Doc I wanted him downstairs in my office. She ran back, grabbed a scalpel from his instrument bag, and followed Tolan to 637. He was making sure about that certificate, you see. Tolan made a pretty bloody job, and she got stains on her dress. That’s why she scratched her arm and made up a yarn about a mystery man trying to knife Cobb. What she really went back to the Cobb suite for, though, was to get rid of the Tijuana certificate, knowing by then it was forged.”

Gleeson said, “Yeah.” He said, “But, Mike, where in hell are you, and what other angle are you working on?”

“I’m not,” O’Hanna’s voice denied. “I’m down the road a ways, grabbing myself some vacation. Before some other damned thing happens.”