The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original)

by Unknown

  The gun missed, finished down around the knees of the lad who had swung it. O’Hanna dived for the weapon, pinned the wrist, and got cuffed around the head by the other’s free fist. He ignored it, closed his own free hand on the elbow above the pinned wrist. The two circled in a slow, straining dance, with O’Hanna pulling at the elbow, twisting on the captive wrist.

  They waltzed around once, and then O’Hanna was behind the gunsel, was bending the gun-hand in a high, vicious hammerlock.

  He heard the shrill, wailing voice again. This time it screamed: “Stop! You’re breaking Benny’s arm, you big brute!”

  Benny was bent over double, the hammerlocked wrist shoved so near the nape of his neck that, as pain-wracked fingers let go, the gun fell over his shoulder in front of him instead of behind. He made one grab for it with the other hand—and O’Hanna’s knee socked into the seat of his pants, sent him plowing on his face, raising another wave in the rug.

  The sleuth picked up the gun—a nickeled, .32-caliber revolver that had apparently been fired and never cleaned, from the look of its fouled barrel.

  Now the shrill voice said: “I tried to take it away from him myself, but he was too strong for me.…”

  taring at Tra-La Brown, O’Hanna could see that she really looked as if there had been an earlier struggle over the gun. Her blond hair was mussed; the make-up from her lips and eyes made smears on her face now. The scarlet wisp of bathing beauty attire had taken a beating, too. She was trying to tug up the bra-top with one hand, trying to tug down the brief panty-skirt with the other.

  O’Hanna said: “Everybody explain!”

  Tra-La made her pretty lips into a pout. “You can count me out. This is absolutely all Benny’s fault. He’s jealous of me. That’s why he’s acting this way.”

  “Who’s Benny? Your husband?”

  “I’d die first!” the blonde scorned.

  Harry Farneye had struggled to his feet. The pinch-faced man propped himself against a wall, tremblingly tried to fit the pince-nez back on his narrow nose. He didn’t come very close, and anyway, one lens was missing. He said: “The punk’s name is Benny Walsh, and what ails him is professional jealousy. He and Tra-La were in vaudeville up to a few weeks ago, and he’s sore because she’s going on up the ladder of success, and he definitely isn’t.”

  “She was slinging hash in a Denver beanery until I gave her a job in my act, and now she’s running out on me.” The youth sat up, gave Tra-La the double-whammy with his hate-filled eyes.

  The blonde came back at him. “And what was I doing when I walked out on you? I at least got my three squares a day when I was slinging hash. My God, you can’t expect a girl to go on playing the haylofts when she’s already passed a successful screen-test!”

  Benny worked rust-colored eyebrows into a scowl. “I at least expect a dame to live up to her contract with the guy that learned her how to hoof!”

  She screamed something at Benny, Benny yelled something before she was through, and Farneye drowned them both out. “Tra-La wasn’t of legal age when she joined your act!”

  O’Hanna waved the three of them to silence.

  “O.K., O.K., I get it,” O’Hanna said. He peered at the young guy. “You found her in Denver, you took her on the stage, and she quit the act when she saw a chance to sign up with Mogul Films. So what did you figure you could do about it?”

  Tra-La said: “He was going to louse up my chances today, damn him. He said I could either come back in his act, or he’d get up there and tell the crowd I was really a ringer.”

  “So—?”

  She shrugged bare shoulders. “What could I do? I had to shut him up, didn’t I? I brought him up here, and I thought I could give him the slip by going in the next room to change clothes.”

  Benny said sourly: “She’s lying. She got me up here and pulled that gat on me!”

  O’Hanna waggled the nickel-plated weapon. “Oh, this is yours, Tra-La?”

  The blonde went wary. “Oh, it’s just an old prop. It’s to shoot blanks, see, in the act. What we had was one of those Apache numbers—you must’ve seen ’em? You know, I come on wearing one of those short French skirts and smoking a cigarette—and then Benny comes out. First he pretends to shoot the ciggy out of my mouth, then he knocks me down, then he picks me up, then he throws me down and walks over me, after that he throws me around by my heels. It’s done to music, so he calls it a dance—”

  “Five times a day, and six shows Saturday,” O’Hanna finished it for her. “I was asking about the gun, remember?” The house dick broke out the cylinder, shook out the hulls. Darkly he queried: “You load in new police metal points, and it shoots out blanks? Bunk!”

  Tra-La’s eyes made circles of surprise. “I didn’t know it was loaded!”

  O’Hanna shook his head at the old classic line. “Coming from you, a screen-test ought to be good!” He half-turned at a sound of labored swallowing.

  Harry Farneye was having throat trouble. “But, but,” the pinch-faced man babbled pallidly, “you don’t think Tra-La killed Gus Lambert?”

  If she was acting now, the blonde maybe did have a career in pictures ahead of her. Her lovely features showed just the right shading of stunned incredulity. “Killed … what are you trying to give me?”

  The casting man gave stiffly: “Lambert was shot dead a few minutes ago. They’re trying to pin it on one of the girls in the contest. The shot was fired from inside the hotel, too.”

  The blond beauty seemed to soak Farneye’s words in slowly, and then they spelled a different meaning to her. She turned to Benny. “You stinking little rat. You pulled that job. That’s what I heard when I went in the next room here—”

  Benny didn’t let her finish. He was on his feet and he was yelling. “You mean that’s what I heard when you went in the next room! How the hell could I shoot somebody? You had the gat, baby, I didn’t!”

  “You dumb hoofer, why’d I want to take a potshot at Lambert?” Tra-La raged. “He was the man that was going to make me a star!”

  Farneye said: “She’s right, O’Hanna. She wouldn’t have killed the goose before it laid the golden egg. Benny may have been packing a gun of his own. He could have thrown it out the window after firing the shot.”

  The house dick’s eyes lighted up with speculation. “I’ll buy that. Anyway, I’ll take an option on the idea. It’s no sale unless we ultimately find the gun he threw away.”

  Benny seemed unworried. He sneered: “Jeez, you birds are dumb. The doll opens her big blue peepers, and says daddy when you squeeze her, and you think she’s as sweet as she looks. That dame’s dynamite. She’d cut your throat for a dime.”

  “Gus Lambert isn’t worth a dime to me dead,” the blonde countered.

  “I don’t say you tried to kill him. You aimed to wound the guy, I figure.” The hoofer snapped his fingers. To O’Hanna, he said: “Hey, it plays perfect that way! Look what happened. I dragged her out of that pin-up parade. If she wasn’t in it, one of those other girls had to be named the winner of a Mogul movie contract. She couldn’t stop two hundred of them, but what she could do was wing the judge. The show couldn’t go on if Lambert was wounded, and that’s what she tried to do.”

  “I’ll buy that, too.” O’Hanna’s grin was impartial; the wave of his hand included everybody. “We’ll all hustle downstairs. Tra-La can tell one of our public stenographers all the reasons she thinks Benny fired the fatal shot. Benny can tell a different stenographer why he thinks Tra-La is a murderess. While you two are having fun, Farneye can be figuring out a statement on this frame-up flesh show that won’t read too badly when it comes out in the newspapers.”

  Downstairs, he distributed them. He left the blonde to dictate one statement in the cashier’s office, left Benny to dictate another in Endicott’s office. Harry Farneye he led into his own, smaller office. The pinch-faced man was worry-gnawed.

  “O’Hanna, what you’re suggesting isn’t a bit smart at all. A statement about that frame-u
p won’t hurt Lambert, because he’s dead, but it will backfire on you and injure your hotel’s reputation.”

  O’Hanna said: “I agree. That wasn’t what I really wanted of you. Look here.”

  He tugged open a desk drawer, ransacked around in it, came up with a vial labeled naphth. sodium. From another drawer, he lifted a San Alpha envelope. He swung out the cylinder of the revolver, laid the gun aside, opened a penknife blade. With care, the house dick uncorked the vial, trickled a spill of white powder onto the blade, balanced it cautiously there while he used the other hand to lift the gun, barrel pointing down.

  “I’ve only got two hands. Hold the envelope down here and catch this.” He tilted the knife blade, tried to run the white powder from the knife into the gun’s breech. It didn’t work too well, and he pursed his lips and blew at it. Most of it went down the barrel then, the rest settled in a miniature white cloud.

  O’Hanna said: “O.K., seal the envelope. Write your name and the date across it.” He was tugging open a third drawer, stowing the weapon away in there.

  “What the hell is it supposed to prove?”

  O’Hanna said: “It’s a residue test. Tra-La claims that gun was used only for shooting blanks. Blank cartridge powder is pure guncotton mixed with an adhesive such as gum water. That’s why it goes off with a bang, whereas ordinary smokeless powder would merely fizzle without being confined behind a bullet. Smokeless powders contain nitroglycerin, and this white stuff we poured through the barrel is a harmless little chemical which reacts with nitrous residues by slowly turning blue. In other words, what we’re doing is finding out whether Tra-La’s gun was used to shoot anything besides blank loads.”

  The pinch-faced man whisked out a handkerchief, mopped particles of clinging naphthionate of sodium from his fingers. “I see. You’re one of those scientific Sherlocks.”

  “I’ll tell you something, Farneye. I don’t favor science at all. I’d really rather take my suspects down cellar and apply the rubber hose method.”

  “You don’t mean it!”

  “I can’t get away with it.” O’Hanna slammed and locked the desk drawers. “I can’t even get away with searching those rooms for concealed firearms, as you suggested. If I did that, probably a hundred paying guests would resent being suspected and they’d check out. At the minimum room rate, I’d be costing the management fifteen hundred bucks. And that’s just figuring this week-end. It makes no allowance for the fact that they’d never come back here again.”

  “It’s a tough life you lead.”

  “You haven’t heard the half of it. I’ve only got an hour before Sheriff Gleeson and the county coroner take this thing out of my hands. I’m racing against time with my feet hobbled. I’m desperate for a quick clue.”

  The house dick thrust his fingers through his hair, twice, irritably. “Furthermore, I’m not so damned sure this bathing beauty contest isn’t sliced herring. Maybe somebody just grabbed a nice, confusing opportunity to take a shot at Gus Lambert. Tell me, he had enemies, surely?”

  Farneye’s thin lips grinned. “Every Hollywood producer has enemies, O’Hanna. But picture feuds aren’t fought out with guns. There are so many more refined ways to knife a man in the ribs, and they’re all on the safe side of the law.” He toyed with the broken pince-nez. “I don’t think it was that—any more than it was the note, for instance.”

  The sleuth went open-eyed. “What note?”

  “It isn’t important. Just some crank propped a crazy letter up against Lambert’s door, so he’d find it when he came back from lunch.”

  O’Hanna asked: “Why doesn’t somebody tell me these things? What became of it?”

  “You’ll probably find it in the wastebasket; that’s where he threw it.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  KILL RIDDLE

  ambert’s was a fourth-floor suite, a de luxe layout on the building corner, with window exposures facing two views. The Mogul producer had had the big shot’s habit of taking his office with him when he traveled and the suite’s sitting room was littered with scripts, sketches, and such incidentals of the cinema industry. O’Hanna walked into a quiet little wake, where the news cameraman was tapping Gus Lambert’s box of Corona-Coronas, the sound man was tapping Lambert’s supply of Scotch, and the male secretary was talking long-distance on the phone. Obviously, none of the three were shedding any tears.

  The note lay balled up at the wastebasket’s bottom. O’Hanna smoothed it out, saw a sheet of the San Alpa stationery the management supplied in all the paying guests’ rooms. My dear Mr. Lambert, the scrawled script began politely enough, but from there on the going got rough shod: It’s fiends in human form like you that are responsible for juvenile delinquency in this country! What is the use of parents trying to raise our younger generation to be respectable when men of your ilk put a public premium on immorality? Shame on you for luring young girls by dangling the bait of a movie career in front of them! Now, you either put a stop to this carnal exhibition, or I’ll take steps myself. This was signed, I. M. Disgusted. Then came a P.S.: Think of the good effect you will have, standing up and denouncing the idea of girls winning fame and fortune by shedding off their clothes. They might catch cold and sue you, too.

  O’Hanna folded this away into his pocket, stepped over and tapped the secretary’s shoulder. The secretary said: “Go away, I’m talking to the front office—”

  “Talk them into sending us a print of Tra-La Brown’s screen-test,” the house detective requested.

  He had no more than set foot out of the elevator into the congested lobby than Endicott rushed him. The manager was pallid. “Great Judas, Mike, where have you been? Haven’t you located that Tarkey girl yet?” He came close, said thinly: “There’s another one now—I told you she’d strike again.”

  “Another bod—”

  “Hush, hush!” Endicott’s head jerk was for the crowded lobby. “They don’t know about it yet. It’s outside—out in the bushes beside the golf course. One of the gardener’s helpers found it while he was picking up that wastepaper on the grounds. Raymond’s down there now.”

  O’Hanna headed out past the swimming pool again, this time swinging wide of the chalets. For the utmost in privacy, the chalets had been landscaped into the mountain slope, tucked into the natural cover of pines and black mountain oak. Then came the manzanita, head-high treelets of native shrub, a tangle of misshapen, red-barked boughs and branches. The groundskeeper stood by a gunnysack half stuffed with paper he had speared up on his spiked pole. He gestured with the pole as O’Hanna approached. “It looked to me like a paper napkin that had blowed in there, so I fished for it, and I started pulling out cloth—kay-ripes, with blood on it!”

  O’Hanna thrust his way into the tangle, joined Doc Raymond over the No. 2 corpse. There had been a hasty effort at concealment, a shallow trench scraped among the manzanita roots, soil and decaying leaves scattered over the body.

  “Strangled,” the medico muttered, “and then beaten to hell and gone just to make sure.”

  O’Hanna peered at the battered features, at the beach-wrap the groundskeeper had speared and dragged from the body. His guts bucked, he tasted salt and acid in his throat. “Endicott can quit worrying about Eva Tarkey running amok,” he said. “This is Eva.”

  Striding back through the black oak and pines, he found he could swallow the salty, retching taste—and he found it condensed into something else, a cold inner weight that was deadly, and not very logical. Gus Lambert’s death hadn’t affected O’Hanna like this. Lambert was a man, an elderly man to whom life had been immoderately kind. You could figure death had been kind, too, so instant he had probably never known what hit him. Eva Tarkey was only beginning to live her life, and her dying had been an anguish of choking horror. There was the feeling, too, that Gus Lambert had been a chess-master, and the girl had been merely a pawn on the board lured into this contest that hadn’t been a contest at all, snatched off the board because she had got in the way of the kil
ler’s move.

  He took the cold wrath up A-10’s steps with him. Selena Walther had changed from the improvised bandanna swim-gear to form-fitting black. Her platinum hair fell down to her shoulders; her throat was roped with pearls. The black dress left her arms bare, was v’d down to the swell of her breasts in front, ended in a fish-tail train around her high, spiked heels. She said: “Don’t look so startled. This is my costume for tonight. I’m taking no chances on Uncle Jerry repeating that little trick he pulled this morning.”

  O’Hanna was genuinely startled. “You expect the beauty contest to go on tonight in spite of all?”

  “Why not? You know the old saying—the show must go on. Mogul Films can’t welch on that offer of a movie contract. It was a legal offer, an inducement to two hundred girls to invest their time and money in this thing.” She was as solemn as a Supreme Court decision. “If you’ve come here to try to talk me out of it, you’re wasting your breath.”

  “I came here to see your uncle.”

  “Uncle Jerry has taken to his bed. The excitement proved more than his doddering constitution could bear.”

  “Then maybe you can tell me.” The house dick delved into his pocket. “Did he write this?”

  Selena Walther scrutinized the anonymous missive. “It sounds like his brain child, but unfortunately his handwriting looks more like drunken rabbit tracks than anything else. I’ll show you a specimen.” She crossed into one of the chalet’s bedchambers, returned with a green oblong of canceled bank paper. “That’s his signature on the back.”

  O’Hanna peered at the trembling Jeremiah Walther that wiggled lamely over the check. He turned it over, caught a quick peep at the face. The draft was for one thousand dollars, was signed Selena Walther and bore the notation, Pension to date in full.