by Unknown
He led them down the side of the lobby, into the service hallway where foodstuffs from the kitchen streamed to the dining-rooms and the Palomar Bar. The Palomar was on the left, this dining-room to the right. O’Hanna raised knuckles to knock, but Eva Tarkey was in no mood to stand on ceremony. She went right ahead, shoved the door open, was greeted by alarmed squeals.
A soprano shrilled, “Oooh, a man!” and started a chorus of squeals, of frantic whisking of beach wraps and dressing gowns around tanned, trim figures.
Eva Tarkey said scornfully: “Can the comedy. I told you I’d call a cop, and it’s going to go hard with whichever one of you tramps pulled this stunt.”
“Which is your bag?” O’Hanna asked.
“Right here.” She aimed a kick at a scuffed suitcase, one that looked as if it had been kicked around plenty.
“Unlock it.”
“I lost the key years ago.” She stooped, unstrapped the suitcase, hinged open the top. “It’s a bra-top that matches this,” holding up cream-tinted bathing briefs.
“And your bag?” O’Hanna turned to Lola Lofting.
“It’s the next one, right here. I had it locked.”
The redhead’s was an overnight case, and O’Hanna ignored the need for a key. He tried, and all he needed was his thumbs to spring the lid free.
Straightening, he peered around the room. “Any of the rest of you missing anything?”
Nobody was. It seemed to be just these two bags, and they had been near the door, one unlocked and the other as good as unlocked. So it almost looked like sneak thievery, except, naturally, a sneak thief wouldn’t have wanted a swim-suit and a half.
“Well”—O’Hanna shrugged—“come on, we’ll see what we can do about it.”
It would probably break Endicott’s economical heart, but he marched the pair across the lobby, this time to the sport clothes shop—one of the classier Wilshire Boulevard establishments in Los Angeles found it profitable to run a branch shop here. O’Hanna hailed the manager: “Here, Baudry, fix ’em up and charge it to the house.”
Baudry’s eyes lit up behind their spectacles. “Yes? And what will it be?”
He heard what it would be, and his eyes dulled, his hands dropped. “Mr. O’Hanna, I’m sorry. I haven’t a single swim-suit in stock. A Mr. Walther came in this morning and bought every last bathing suit from the shelves.”
O’Hanna thought and said: “You girls wait here.”
He headed to the lobby desk, asked: “Who the devil’s this guy Walther?”
The desk clerk was owl-eyed. He exhaled. “She’s beautiful, she’s gorgeous, she’s damned near almost divine, ain’t she?” He hadn’t seen O’Hanna, hadn’t even heard the house dick’s voice.
O’Hanna’s Irish-gray glance shifted, followed the owl-eyed stare. Something blond had just stepped from the San Alpa elevator. For a moment she paused, almost as though she was going to dive into a pool. She was dressed for it, with just a golden cloud of diaphanous wrap that drifted away from her shoulders. The rest was vivid, scarlet swim-suit and a pearly complexion.
O’Hanna said: “Quit drooling, man!”
The clerk snapped out of it, colored. “That’s Tra-La Brown, Mike, and I bet everybody drools when she walks up on the judge’s stand today. If she doesn’t win, there’s something fishy about this contest, I’d say.”
“There’s plenty fishy about it already. Including a guy named Walther getting a corner on the swim-suit market.”
The clerk seemed shocked to hear it. “You can’t mean Jeremiah Walther? Why, he’s a paragon of respectability.”
“Where’ll I find him?”
The clerk said in one of the chalets. A-10, San Alpa followed the California style and had private guest cottages scattered about the landscaped grounds. Jeremiah Walther had to be a paragon of high finance to afford A-10, since it rented for twice the room rate of the costliest suite in the main building. O’Hanna wondered, sometimes, how Endicott got away with it. After all, the chalets under their imitation Swiss roofs were only glorified tourist cabins.
e climbed the steps to this one, punched the bell. The man who answered was obviously that paragon of respectability, Jeremiah Walther. The old boy wore his white, silky whiskers in the mutton-chop fashion of the Gay Nineties. He was bald-headed down to a half-circle of white fuzz at ear level. He wore a hearing aid plugged into his left ear, eyeglasses with gold rims. A gold watch-chain sported its massive links across his black broadcloth vestfront.
He had hobbled to the door with the aid of a gold-headed cane. Leaning on the cane, he blinked waterily at O’Hanna, quavered his reply to the detective’s question.
“Yes, young man, I bought those bathing dresses. I put them in the fireplace.”
O’Hanna was fascinated. He wasn’t old enough to remember, but he had an idea “bathing dresses” had gone out with bustles. He asked: “You mean you burned them?”
Jeremiah Walther aimed his cane at the front room fireplace. “That I did, and it wasn’t much of a fire they made.”
The sleuth went in, peered at close range. There remained a few smoldering rags, mostly where the Lastex-threaded fabrics had melted down.
He marveled: “I’ll be damned if you didn’t. Now would you please tell me why?”
With creaking-joint care, Jeremiah Walther lowered himself into a chair: “I had to protect my niece,” he disclosed. “I’m Selena’s only living male relative, so it was my bounden duty to act.”
“Come again.”
The white-whiskered man said: “Selena’s a headstrong brat. She made up her mind she was going to participate in this contest today. I had to prevent it, naturally.”
“Naturally?”
Jeremiah Walther bounced his cane on the floor for emphasis. “Young man, I’ll have you understand our family tree has its roots ’way back in Pilgrim times. We’re descended from God-fearing pioneers, sturdy whaling captains and even a few town councilmen. Our forefathers and foremothers would turn over in their graves at the thought of a Walther girl showing her unclad limbs in this noisome exhibition. It’s down-right degrading to think of a civilized young lady strutting around in front of folks in a next-to-naked condition!”
O’Hanna mused: “Selena doesn’t share your old-fashioned views?”
“No. The only way I could stop her was by destroying her bathing dress, and all the other bathing costumes she might have bought at the last minute.” Abruptly, he tugged at his watch-chain, fished forth a family-heirloom style timepiece. “Speaking of the last minute, reminds me we better get a hurry on or we’re liable to miss the parade. It’s five minutes to starting time, and I’m a mighty slow-walking man.”
The house dick stared. “You’re going to degrade yourself by looking at such a shameful sight?”
Chuckles shook the white-whiskered man. “You’re durned tootin’ I am! Don’t tell Selena I said this, but secretly I’m the black sheep of the family. I ran away from home at the age of eighteen to hunt for diamonds in darkest Africa. The family made up a fable I was a missionary, and that’s what Selena thinks, but actually I’ve seen and done things that’d make your hair curl. I wouldn’t miss these doings if it killed me to go.”
He headed out the chalet door, hobbled down the steps, made off at a mile-an-hour clip. He was going to need all of the five minutes to reach the judging stand that had been built at one end of the outdoor pool, and from the size of the gathering crowd it looked as though he would be lucky to find a chair when he got there.
O’Hanna swung wide of the assemblage, circled a movie-news truck with a cameraman on its top. Gus Lambert, a pale dwarf with a giant Corona-Corona in his mouth, had already mounted the judge’s throne. Manager Endicott was doing a mother hen act on the hotel driveway, trying to shoo two hundred swim-suited sirens into line. “And for heaven’s sake, please, girls, quit chewing gum!” Endicott kept pleading frantically. Midway down the line, O’Hanna noticed Tra-La Brown peel the diaphanous golden wrap from her s
houlders, hand it to a pinch-faced man with pince-nez who gave the wrap a shake, folded it neatly into an alligator leather bag at his feet.
O’Hanna had a cold, unhappy hunch about Tra-La Brown, and no time to ponder it. He made for the lobby sport clothes shop, found Baudry watching the proceedings through the shop front window.
“What became of the two girls I left here?” the house dick quizzed.
“They’re gone, Mike. They left as soon as the line started forming.”
It sent O’Hanna outside again. Eva Tarkey and Lola Lofting weren’t in the line. He had not expected any such miracle, but he had to check, and by the time he had made sure, the parade had started around the pool to the judging stand.
O’Hanna thrust his way through the standing onlookers who had been unable to find chairs. He couldn’t spot the brunette or the redhead anywhere in the audience, either. It worried him a little, remembering Eva Tarkey’s threat. But if she really thought she could break up the contest, he reasoned, she’d have to reach the judging stand to do it.
He started that way. Polite applause was dying down as one contestant carrying a card marked 14 quit the stand. It became genuine applause as No. 15 came to pirouette before Gus Lambert’s throne. No. 15 was platinum-haired, sun-tanned, and clad in what looked to O’Hanna dangerously like just a couple of bandanna handkerchiefs. Mixed with the handclapping, the sleuth caught a few whistles of male appreciation.
“The hell!” O’Hanna exclaimed, and leaped for the stand.
The redheaded Lola Lofting must have been hiding under the platform! He couldn’t see any other way she could have instantly scrambled from complete invisibility into the center of the stage.
But there she was, waving her arms at the crowd, trying to drown the handclapping with her high-pitched soprano appeal: “Stop it! Hold everything, folks! I want to tell the world I’m getting a raw deal—”
Endicott was on the platform, plunging toward her. Gus Lambert got there first, with one wiry bound down from his throne. Lambert’s was a foghorn voice that dated back to the era when he had directed silent epics via a megaphone.
He brayed, “Shuddup, you!” and grabbed at the redhead.
Crack! They all heard it, and half the crowd looked quickly back toward the hotel. The other half saw Gus Lambert stagger, spin half around, and flop on his face. They jumped up then, and they could see the red wet spot forming on the planks under his arm.
CHAPTER TWO
THE SOUND OF THE SHOT
here he stood, on the edge of the judging stand, O’Hanna could see it was an arm wound, and he swung to stare across the crowd. He didn’t see a glimpse of a gun, or of anyone who looked in a hurry to leave. On the platform, things were happening fast. Gus Lambert’s plump, male secretary was up there, and the Mogul news-reel cameraman, with the sound technician, beside the fallen producer.
“He’s out cold!”
“He fainted, all right.”
“Somebody call a doctor.”
Endicott rushed the redhead over to O’Hanna. “I got this one, Mike. All you got to do is find that Tarkey girl. She threatened she’d break up the contest, remember?”
Lola wailed: “I don’t know anything about this, honest! Why, that shot could’ve killed me—just as easy!”
O’Hanna asked: “Where’s Eva?”
“I don’t know that, either. I never saw her before today. You can’t blame me if she was crazy enough to pull this stunt!”
A voice of a newcomer on the platform was authoritative, “Break it up, boys. We’ll carry Mr. Lambert inside. Don’t discuss this with anyone until Lambert himself decides what our line will be.”
O’Hanna swung around, found himself confronting a pinched face with pince-nez panes bridging the narrow nose.
“You represent Mogul Films?” the house dick queried.
Pinched-face admitted it. “I’m Harry Farneye, in charge of casting.”
“I’m Mike O’Hanna, in charge of crimes. Tell your crowd to let Lambert lie until our hotel staff doctor—yeah, here he comes now.” Little Doc Raymond, the San Alpa house physician, was squirming his way up to the platform.
O’Hanna said: “Stick around, Farneye. I’ve got some questions you’d probably rather answer in strict privacy.”
Something hard poked the house dick’s leg. His Irish-gray glance dropped, irritably, and discovered the hard object was a cane. Jeremiah Walther was behind it. Walther quavered: “Young man, you tell Selena to come down from up there! Tell her she’s shaming her own flesh and blood!”
O’Hanna followed the indignantly pointing cane, and it steered him to the other side of the platform and to the platinum-haired No. 15. “You’re Selena Walther?”
“Yes. Why?”
O’Hanna confided. “I’m surprised. I understand your uncle burned your bathing dress to keep you out of this competition. Where’d you dig up this outfit?”
He had made exactly the right guess about her outfit. Selena Walther said: “It’s just a little item I stirred from a few bandanna handkerchiefs. I know Uncle Jerry burned my swim-suit, and once and for all, I’m going to teach him he can’t dictate my life to me! The fact that he’s my long-lost uncle gives him absolutely no right to suddenly appear on the scene and start ordering me—”
O’Hanna wasn’t listening to her. He had wheeled at the strained sound of little Doc Raymond’s voice.
“The man is dead.”
Endicott had heard it, too. He loosed his hold of the redhead, and strode over, with consternation spread across his thin features.
“You’re crazy!” the manager protested. “He can’t be dead! It’s just a slight flesh wound in his arm.”
Doc Raymond had slashed the sleeve away from the producer’s arm. O’Hanna went to one knee beside the little medico and said: “It’s a flesh wound, but it isn’t slight. I saw a deer brought in that way last fall. It’s one of those super-velocity jobs; the slug blows to powder when it hits, the shock kills whether it’s a vital place or not. Right, Doc?”
“Technically, it’s hydrostatic pressure,” the physician confirmed. “The impact of such a projectile sets up a pressure wave away from the wound area. The blood literally recoils in the arteries so that it flows backward and halts the heart action.”
Perspiration bathed manager Endicott’s forehead. High-velocity ballistics and hydrostatic physics he savvied as little as he understood the principle of the atomic bomb, but he knew what murder meant to the hotel business. This wasn’t a death that could be hushed up—it had happened in front of too many people. The newspapers weren’t in the habit of hiding Hollywood celebrity slayings in their classified ad pages, either.…
Endicott breathed raspily. “Mike, quit standing here gawping at it. Go get that girl! The crazy little fool did this out of sheer, hell-cat spite!”
O’Hanna corrected: “If it was Eva Tarkey, she didn’t do it out of off-the-cuff spite. This job was premeditated murder.” His stare rested glumly on the frightsome mess the wildcat slug had made of Gus Lambert’s arm. This killer was dealing with death by means of lead whipping along at upwards of four thousand foot seconds. It spelled a slayer who was really tooled for destruction!
Yet there might be a catch in it. O’Hanna dug for the catch: “Anybody here know of a gun crank in our midst?”
No cigar. Nothing but headshakes and blank looks all around.
Selena Walther, though, moistened her lips. “I can tell you one thing. That shot came from one of the hotel windows. I’m absolutely sure of it.”
“Which window?” Endicott panted.
“I don’t know, but I heard it come from that direction,” the platinum-top insisted, pointing toward the hotel.
The cameraman chimed in. “She’s right. I heard it behind me, too. That was from the hotel.”
O’Hanna asked hopefully: “You got a picture on that film?”
“No, damn the luck! The camera wasn’t rolling. I was waiting for Farneye to tip me the word.”
He choked up, blushed.
O’Hanna turned to the pinch-faced casting man. “You can tip me the word. Suppose we drift on up to your room and chat.”
Farneye kept a glacial silence as they moved through the crowd, into the lobby. In the elevator they were alone except for the operator, and he fixed a hostile, pince-nez-framed stare on the house dick. “You’re wasting your time hounding me, O’Hanna. You ought to be checking all the rooms on this side, the front of the building.”
“I ought to be hounding the hell out of everybody else, and let you cover up your tracks?”
O’Hanna rejected the plea, scowling. “How do I know? Maybe your little racket started the shooting.”
They came out on the third-floor corridor. “My racket?” Farneye was testy-toned. “What’s that?”
“Don’t stall, chum. I’m hep to the fact that only one of those girls had a chance to win today. I mean your candidate—the blonde with the professional make-up and the press-agent name you cleverly concocted for her—Tra-La Brown.”
Farneye said: “My God, don’t blame me for her. Tra-La Brown was Gus Lambert’s idea exclusively.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure. He’s been grooming Tra-La as a possible starlet. Your San Alpa beauty show came along at the opportune moment. By winning it, she could start her career on a wave of favorable publicity.”
O’Hanna gibed: “You mean on the necks of two hundred simon-pure amateurs who never had a chance?”
“You’re right. Of course, nobody but Tra-La had a look-in, with Gus doing the judging. But blame him, not me.” The pinch-faced man pulled up at 318, fitted a key to the door, seemed surprised the door wasn’t locked. He muttered, “That’s funny,” and stepped quickly inside.
The terrorized wail came shrilly: “Harry! Look out! He’s got a gun!”
O’Hanna saw the gun, a moving mass of nickeled metal that seemed to leave a blur as it streaked. The blow was aimed at Farneye’s head. O’Hanna couldn’t stop it. The best he could do was pump out an arm, plant a hand between the casting man’s shoulder blades. He planted it there so hard that Farneye went down on his face, skidded, plowed up a billow of rug in front of him.