Black Cat Weekly #11

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 1AT THIS time every year, they had the same argument.

“Why anyone who’s lucky enough to be at San Alpa,” Endicott said, ruffled, “wants to go somewhere else, I can’t understand!”

O’Hanna grinned. “It’s my vacation, ain’t it?”

O’Hanna, the house d**k at San Alpa, was in his own room, packing — a process which consisted of throwing a lot of old clothes helter-skelter inside a suitcase. Heaven only knew where the guy ever got such a wardrobe. From the Salvation Army, it looked like, after the Salvation Army had had it refused by self-respecting hoboes.

It was funny. For O’Hanna, as he stood there packing the case, made such a hell of a contrast to those disreputable duds. O’Hanna was a seventy-two inch, athletic fashion plate clad in nifty pencil stripes.

Assistant Manager Endicott repeated that he couldn’t understand it. He reminded O’Hanna that San Alpa was a million-dollar, year-round resort hotel that had been built on the privately owned Southern California mountaintop for the purpose of catering to vacationists.

“What more do you want?” he demanded. “Besides ‘the magic of pine-scented breezes blowing from majestic peaks to vernal valleys? Where you can watch the sun rise spectacularly out of the nearby desert, and then, fun-filled hours later, watch it sink into the not-distant, blue bosom of the Pacific’?”

The third man in the room looked interested. He asked, “Is that a fact? You can see the desert and the ocean both from here?”

The questioner was Fred Fencer, a private agency operative from Los Angeles. He had been hired to take over at San Alpa for the two weeks of O’Hanna’s vacation. He was a short, stout, eye-glassed individual who might have been mistaken for a traveling salesman who had wandered into San Alpa by mistake, thinking the place a commercial hotel.

Endicott ignored him. Endicott was fanatic in his loyalty to San Alpa, sincerely believing that no finer resort hotel existed anywhere in the world. To prove it, he always spent his vacations right here. And he couldn’t see why O’Hanna didn’t do the same.

After all, he remarked now, San Alpa was good enough for the Hollywood film colony week-enders, the upper crust of California society, and the tourists with Wall Street addresses. “And they pay twenty dollars a day and up, for the privilege of being here.”

O’Hanna’s Irish-blue glance darkened moodily. “You said it. What I need is a vacation from other people’s gold-plated vacations.”

He admired a pair of old canvas pants, wrinkled like a map of the Balkans, before folding the pants into his suitcase.

“This chromium-fitted bird cage is slowly driving me screwy,” he said. “I’m losing my sense of humor. I’m getting so I can hear a waiter explain that half a grapefruit has gone up from sixty cents to six bits on account of national defense, and I don’t even laugh.”

Fred Fencer looked astonished. “Is that a fact? You people get seventy-five cents for half a grapefruit?”

O’Hanna said it was a fact. He said it was also a fact that the Hollywood week-enders, upper crust socialites, and Eastern refugees from Wall Street liked to pay such prices.

“They can’t enjoy anything unless it costs too much,” O’Hanna said. “It’s contagious, too. I’m getting the same kind of ideas from them.”

Endicott nudged his toothbrush of gray mustache with a thin forefinger. “Tut-tut,” he reproached. “They’re not all like that. Lots of rich people are real, genuine personalities. The majority of them are.”

O’Hanna said, “I wouldn’t know. A guy doesn’t get to rub shoulders with the real ones in this house d**k racket. It’s always the phonies who get into the jams around here.”

O’Hanna slammed his suitcase shut, bent his elbow, and consulted his strapwatch. “Six P.M. on the dot,” he said, suddenly cheerful. “Here goes! I’m heading for financial circles where a quarter is still considered spending money, instead of a tip you blush to leave for the waiter. I’m going to mingle with the social element which shaves holding hands with a safety razor instead of a manicurist, who—”

The room phone range, and O’Hanna swallowed the rest of his farewell speech. “You take it,” he told Fred Fencer. “You’re on duty, beginning ten seconds ago.”

He yanked the suitcase straps in a hurry, hauled the suitcase off the bed, and started toward the door.

“Wait a minute,” Fencer said, hand capped over the phone. “It’s for you, personally. Somebody named Leland Cobb, in 402—and he says it’s urgent, a matter of life and death.”

“Leland Cobb,” O’Hanna said. His flexible lips tailored a sudden, wide grin. “Well, I’m on my vacation—and having a wonderful time already! You tell him so, and tell him you’re in charge.”

“No!” cried Endicott, in anguish. He waved his thin hands at O’Hanna. “Please, Mike! If it was anybody else —but you know how Cobb is.”

“Nuts,” said O’Hanna.

“I’m asking you as a personal favor,” the assistant manager implored.

“No soap.”

Endicott said, “Mike, have a heart. Fencer is new here. It’s his first night. You’ll at least go along and help him, won’t you?” He clutched O’Hanna’s coat sleeve. “Where’s your spirit of noblesse oblige, your loyalty to a fellow detective?”

O’Hanna looked at Fred Fencer’s short, stout, neatly business-like self. “I’m a sap,” he said bitterly. “I deserve all the hard luck I know I’m going to get out of this. But okay—come on.”

They exited into the corridor.

“What’s it all about?” Fencer wanted to know. “Who’s Leland Cobb?”

O’Hanna growled. “A headache. A headache wrapped up in a million bucks.”

“He sounded alcoholic,” Fencer said, “as if he might be in his cups.”

“Heh,” O’Hanna said. “You’re lucky if it’s only the cups. Leland Cobb generally winds up down in the cuspidors.”

Endicott caught up with them at the elevator. “A sad case.” He sighed. “Such a burden for his wife. I feel very sorry for Charlotte Cobb.”

“Four,” O’Hanna told the elevator flunky. He scowled at the flunky’s uniformed shoulders as the panel cage climbed. “Charlotte is the aspirin in the case. The guy’d get cured a damned sight faster if she wasn’t around, soothing the edge of the headache.” He led the way along the fourth floor corridor. “If it wasn’t for her, somebody’d’ve slapped Leland down long ago, slapped some sense into him, maybe.”

“Fighting drunk?” Fencer asked.

O’Hanna said, “No. He’s got bourbon on the funny bone. He pulls gags. Last time he was here, he fished an imitation mouse out of his soup—in front of the whole dining room full of guests.”

He pulled up, drummed his knuckles on the door of 402. It opened. The man on the other side of the doorknob swayed as he stared out.

“Good ol’ ’Hanna,” he articulated thickly. “Johnny-on-a-spot ’Hanna.”

Leland Cobb was stewed like an oyster. He was even the bloodless gray color of one. His blurred, watery eyes were nondescript. Hair and eyebrows were mongrel. Life had failed to engrave any lines of character into Leland Cobb’s face. Instead, the life he led had puffed the features into bloated vacuity.

“Whew!” muttered good old O’Hanna, fending off an attempted embrace as he entered the room.

“John ’Hanna,” Cobb was proclaiming. “Besh frien’ a man ever had.”

“Baloney. You hate my guts, and always did,” O’Hanna said. “What’s on your mind, besides the corn juice?”

“Show you.”

Cobb started across the room. His gait resembled that of a man riding an imaginary rockinghorse. He bobbled and weaved and wound up clutching the foot of the bed for support. His free hand circled a couple of times, and then pointed down shakily.

“Thash it. Thash there.”

O’Hanna, Endicott, and Fred Fencer stared at the red stains on the hotel carpet. The size of pennies, the crimson spots began in the middle of the room and led to the closed clothes closet door.

“Sh’ body,” Leland Cobb blurted. “Sh’ dead body in there.”

O’Hanna cried, “Holy hell!” He whipped out a handkerchief, covered the closet door knob carefully before he twisted it open.

Endicott was suffering, aloud. “A body! Oh, my God! This is awful. The publicity—”

Leland Cobb made a sound of “wah-wah-wah.” He collapsed on the bed and hid his face in his hands. His shoulders shook.

“What the hell?” Fred Fencer puzzled. The agency d**k’s eye-glassed glance flashed at Cobb suspiciously. Then he folded his short, stout figure to its knees. He thumbnailed into one red stain, dug up a bit of crimson residue; sniffed, and finally tasted it. “It’s a good grade of tomato catsup,” he decided.

Endicott’s thin frame jerked. His Adam’s apple slid into a prolonged rumba. “C-catsup?” he faltered.

“For a fact,” Fencer said, grinning. “There ain’t any body, O’Hanna. It’s just one of the guy’s polluted gags.”

Leland Cobb rocked on the bed, his face that of a laughing gargoyle. “Joke!” gurgled. “Good joke on Johnny O’Hanna!”

Endicott wasn’t amused. He glared at O’Hanna in the closet doorway.

“Mike, you fathead! Do you realize I nearly died of heart failure because you couldn’t tell a practical joke from a murder? Thank God, one of us is smart enough to know blood from catsup, anyway.”

O’Hanna turned. O’Hanna wasn’t amused, either. Not judging by the gleam in his eyes.

“Funny!” he said. “Very funny joke! Now I’ll tell one.”

He’d quit playing the streamlined, diplomatic house d**k. His black Irish temper could climb like mercury under a Yuma sun. It was climbing fast now.

“This will slay you,” he said grimly. “There is a body in there—a girl—and she’s dead. Dead as a dame can be!”

The announcement chilled them into five-second silence. The stunned pause would have lasted longer than that, if it hadn’t been shattered by Leland Cobb’s purely alcoholic reaction.

Cobb hiccoughed noisily. “Sh’ lie!” he accused O’Hanna with a dramatic gesture. “Sh’ gashly lie!”

Fred Fencer moved briskly around to the closet doorway. “No, it’s a fact!” the agency d**k exclaimed. “There is a girl here.”

Leland Cobb arose and reeled to the closet. He, too, looked, focusing his eyes with difficulty on the victim.

The low-wattage overhead bulb showed Leland Cobb’s clothing racked on hangers along one end of the generous sized closet. A second door opened from the other end, and the girl sprawled on the floor in the middle. She hugged a clenched fist to the red-stained, light bodice of her dress.

Leland Cobb shrank back, his gray lips a grimace of revulsion.

O’Hanna asked, “Did you kill her, Cobb?”