by Unknown
The house dick hooped his eyebrows. “You’re paying him an allowance? I don’t get it. If you’re supporting him, how come he can forbid you to enter a bathing beauty contest?”
“He’s got me over a bicycle.”
O’Hanna stared. “You mean, like over a barrel?”
“I mean a bicycle. My grandfather was a manufacturer of bicycles back during the nineties. Uncle Jerry ran away to Africa—he says to become a missionary, but I don’t believe it. Neither did Grandfather. Grandfather wrote him a furious letter, called him a wastrel and a moron, and declared he was cutting Uncle Jerry out of his will. However, he did enclose fifty shares of the bicycle company stock. This was in 1895, the year Grandmother died, and the fifty shares were ones she had bequeathed to Uncle Jerry. Somehow, I suspect Grandmother never did get along too well with Grand—”
O’Hanna cut in. “Somehow, Grandma doesn’t interest me. Let’s get back to the bicycle business.”
The girl said: “Grandfather became interested in gasoline motors. He took out a patent on a little novelty called the horseless carriage. You can guess the rest. The patent was an asset which made the bicycle company shares immensely valuable.”
“Including Uncle Jerry’s shares?”
“Exactly, but we all assumed Uncle Jerry was long since dead. You can imagine my surprise when he turned up fifty years later with Grandfather’s old letter and that bundle of faded stock. At a conservative estimate, he has half a million in accumulated dividends due him.” Selena Walther shook her platinum hairdo helplessly. “The hell of it is, we buried the family’s financial genius in Grandfather’s grave. My father mismanaged the company horribly. I inherited little more than a pile of debts. I’d be hopelessly bankrupt if Uncle Jerry took his claim to court. Originally, I told him the excess profits tax would eat up the value of his stock if he forced the company to liquidate immediately. So far, I’ve been able to stall him along with a pension check now and then. I’m afraid I can’t get away with it much longer. He’s a moron in financial affairs, just as Grandfather said, but even he must know the excess profits tax has been repealed. He’ll hire a lawyer and take my last dime. Probably he’ll pay me an allowance then—provided I wear long dresses, stop smoking, cut out the cosmetics, and wait on him hand and foot. His ideas haven’t changed since fifty years ago, when men were men and women were washing machines.”
“And you figure that’s a fate worse than death,” O’Hanna summed up. His eyes narrowed. “Why spill the deep, dark secret to me?”
Selena Walther said: “It all leads back to my insistence that this beauty contest go through on schedule. I’ve got to find a job of some kind when things explode. I’d like a job in the movies. I’ve got brains, a nice body, and a fair singing voice. I’m sure I can win this contest, get a contract, and make good. Then I can tell Uncle Jerry to sue and be damned.”
“It’s lucky you told me. I know just the guy for you to see.” The house dick snared her arm. “His name’s Harry Farneye, and we’ll find him in suite 318.”
arry Farneye was in 318, and he remembered Selena Walther. The pinch-faced man welcomed: “Oh, yes, you were on the platform when the shooting happened, weren’t you,” and guided the platinum-haired girl to an armchair.
Selena sat down, said, “Ouch!” and jumped, fast.
Farneye squinted through the one good lens of his pince-nez. “Good God, O’Hanna, look at this!”
The blued-steel hammer of a gun stuck up between the cushioned seat and the upholstered back of the chair.
O’Hanna came over, looked, asked: “Yours?”
“No, it isn’t mine! I don’t own a gun.” Farneye’s voice climbed. “O’Hanna, I was right! I told you Benny undoubtedly owned a gun! The damned little rat planted it here after he shot Lambert. I’ll bet anything there’s an empty shell—”
O’Hanna caught the casting man’s dropping arm. “Don’t touch. Fingerprints.” He stepped across the room, plucked a decorative scarf from a desktop, covered his hand with that to fish up the weapon.
“Belgian,” he said. “Shoots a .38 load.” He sniffed at the gun’s snout. “Shot recently, too.” He wrapped up the gun, tucked it under his arm. He said: “But it isn’t the murder I’m here about at all.”
The pinch-faced man stared.
O’Hanna said: “It’s about Miss Walther. It seems she’s a hard-luck heiress. To be frank about it, she needs a job acting in the movies so she can support herself in the style she’s accustomed to. I thought you wouldn’t mind arranging for her to have a screen-test, giving her a headstart toward the career she craves.”
Harry Farneye looked horrified. He said: “Good Lord, man, a movie career doesn’t start with a screen-test. Anyway, the day is long past when stage-struck Cinderellas can break into pictures on their looks alone. Nowadays, it takes voice lessons, dramatic coaching, months and months of preliminary training. Miss Walther might go through all that at her own expense, and still not find a studio interested enough to spend the thousand dollars it costs before a camera can roll on a testing stage. I’d advise her to take up something practical, like stenography or—”
“That’s what I thought when you gave me your spiel about Tra-La Brown,” O’Hanna stemmed the other’s flood.
The casting man tightened up. “Tra-La’s different.”
“Like hell she’s different. She’s a nice-looking blonde, I’ll admit. But she’s got a voice like a saw cutting pine-knots. Her theatrical experience consists of being manhandled to music by that cheap hoofer, Benny.”
“You’re discussing my business, snooper.” Farneye was trying the quick-freeze method. “I think I’m the one who’s qualified to judge Tra-La’s talents.”
O’Hanna said: “You’re in the business, but I think you do a little wolfing on the side. Tra-La was dumb enough to devour that old line that you’d make a star of her. I don’t doubt you gave her a screen-test—but that’s as far as you could go without Lambert’s O.K. Her test was nothing you’d dare show him, though. And she was demanding results. She was even toting around a .32, and it wasn’t loaded with blanks. I say she packed that rod for you. I say you were going to wind up a wolf with lead poisoning mighty quick.”
The quick-freeze was thawing, coming out in sweat on the pinch-faced man’s forehead. “If that little tramp told you this, she lied!”
“You lied to her, Farneye. The contest hadn’t been fixed so Lambert would let her win. For Gus Lambert, this show was strictly for publicity. Some girl would get thirteen weeks work as an extra, and Mogul Films would get a scrapbook full of favorable newspaper clippings. You simply gambled that only a handful of contestants would show up, and Tra-La would be an easy, walk-a-way winner.”
“You can’t prove that, O’Hanna.”
The house dick grinned. “I can’t prove that this Belgian gat is your gun, either, and you yourself parked it there!”
“I never saw it before in my life!”
“That’d better be true, Farneye, because naphthionate of sodium doesn’t happen to be a test for smokeless powder. It’s really a stop-thief powder,” O’Hanna said happily. “I keep a supply on hand to discourage petty picking up of other folks’ property. The stuff doesn’t wash off, and the tiniest trace of it shows up under ultra-violet light. If you’ve naphthionate on your fingers, you’re a trapped wolf.”
Farneye threw his pince-nez and caution aside with an angered-bull headshake. He sprang at the house dick. He thought, possibly, O’Hanna could only use one hand, since the tell-tale gun was being treasured under the sleuth’s right arm. If he thought so, he was right. O’Hanna licked him with one hand, with one punch, a left hook to the chin.
Selena Walther, wide-eyed and wordless up to this point, said now: “Was that contest fixed? If it was, I want to kick his teeth out.”
O’Hanna said: “Nurse him back to health, then when he comes to, remind him you witnessed all of this. If you play it right, you might get that screen-test. But make him put the promise in wri
ting.”
Downstairs, Endicott was fretful. “Judas Particular Priest, Mike, the sheriff’s due here any minute. You’ve found nothing—”
“I found this.”
The manager snatched the Belgian gun. His thin features worked. “Thank God, it’s been fired. That means—”
“It means nothing. Farneye followed a little hint of mine. He removed a slug from a cartridge; then probably he wrapped the gat in a towel and fired a virtually soundless shot. He’s trying to cover up by framing Benny. Actually, what he’s done is prove they’re both innocent.”
Endicott displayed outraged emotions. “Mike, that’s wonderful. The possession of firearms makes them innocent, I suppose!”
“You suppose right,” said O’Hanna. “They don’t seem to know it, but a high-velocity load of the kind that killed Gus Lambert would make a mighty ruptured duck of any pistol.”
He crossed the grounds, went back once more to chalet A-10. Without knocking, this time, he entered and tiptoed his way to the second rear bedchamber. Uncle Jeremiah Walther was peacefully bedded down, whiskers pointed ceilingward, chest lifting the coverlet in rhythmic rise and fall. O’Hanna stepped into the room, began opening bureau drawers.
Uncle Jerry sat up abruptly. “What the tarnation are you up to, young man?”
“I’m just looking for something to read.” The house dick spread his hands, smiled. “To be frank about it, my job is often downright boring. Whole days pass when nobody commits a murder or steals a diamond necklace. Sometimes, just to kill time, I even read good books such as Mencken’s classic on the American language. You ought to read that one yourself.”
The white-whiskered man waved aside the covers, laboriously engineered his legs out of bed. He sat there, swathed from neck to ankle in an old-style striped-flannel nightshirt. “Cops have changed since my day,” he complained. “You don’t make sense to me.”
O’Hanna said casually: “The language has changed, too. The word ‘moron’ is one Grandfather Walther couldn’t possibly have penned in a letter dated 1895. It’s a coined word, coined nearly ten years later. I’m forced to conclude that letter is a rank forgery.”
Jeremiah Walther shrank inside his nightshirt as the sleuth swung to the bedside. O’Hanna scooped up the gold-rimmed spectacles from the bedside table, glanced through them, said: “These are window glass. I’ll bet your beard is bleached, too. Everything about you is phony.”
He stepped to the clothes closet, hauled out a pair of suitcases. Tossing them on the bed, he said: “Correct me if I’m wrong, but your name can’t really be Jeremiah Walther. You’re merely a shrewd operator who tumbled to the fact a member of the Walther family had disappeared fifty years ago. You boned up on the family genealogy, forged the letter to identify yourself, and forged some shares of stock. Confronted with a facsimile of her long-lost uncle Jerry, you figured Selena would make a quiet, out-of-court settlement.”
The white-whiskered man gained his feet angrily. “If you’re looking for any such letter, I have it in a bank box.”
“The letter isn’t really important to me. You’d never have dared submit it or the stock certificates to a showdown test.” O’Hanna finished with one suitcase, found the next one locked. He paused, said: “You were bluffing, but so was Selena. You assumed she meant she’d actually have the company legally liquidated. That’s why you tried to kill her.”
“I tried to—!”
“Yeah. You tried to kill her. As the only other relative, you’d get the dough without any lawsuits. That’s so clear that you had to try and make this mess look like the work of some lamebrained fanatic. It explains that phony note parked at Lambert’s door, and the silly theft of a swim-suit and a bra-top from the girls’ dressing-room. That was all build-up for killing Selena during the contest.”
The other scorned: “Perfectly preposterous. You know I did my level best to keep Selena out of that show.”
“Phooey. You knew she’d do her level best to get in it, regardless. She’d beg, borrow, or make herself a costume, and you counted on it. Then, after she’d been shot dead, you could say you didn’t even know she’d be there on the stand.”
The bearded man protested: “But Selena wasn’t shot.”
“She wasn’t—because Gus Lambert jumped into your line of fire.” O’Hanna drummed his fingers impatiently on the locked suitcase. “Do you want to give me a key, or shall I break this thing open?”
“You touch that and I’ll sue the hotel—”
O’Hanna whipped out his penknife, sank the blade into the leather. He slashed, plunged two fingers into the opening, wrenched.
A gun lay tucked in there, diagonally, from corner to corner. To make it fit, the rifle barrel had been hack-sawed down to carbine length; the stock had been dismounted. Above the bolt action, a ’scope fitted the metal.
“A wildcat .25,” O’Hanna said. “You carry it to plink butterflies, huh?”
“It’s—it’s a souvenir of my African hunting days.”
“You’re a liar. You ran back to the chalet, opened a window, and took a potshot intended for Selena. Squinting through the ’scope, you failed to see Gus Lambert and the Lofting girl.” O’Hanna’s Irish-gray stare grew bitter. He intoned harshly: “Now comes the really stinking part. Eva Tarkey had heard it said you’d cornered the local swim-suit supply. Tired of waiting, she came down here to demand one of them. The poor kid walked in just as you fired the shot. You strangled her, and later, you carried the body off into the bushes. It was risky, but not as risky as explaining a corpse in your chalet.”
The other frowned. His voice was edgy. “There’s only one answer to this rigmarole.”
“Yeah, you’re guilty as hell.”
“Nonsense. The answer is, literally hundreds of people heard that shot. They’ll all testify it came from the hotel.” The white-whiskered man stepped over to the clothes closet door. “Now, if you’ll kindly leave the room, I’ll get dressed. I’m going to see Mr. Endicott and complain about your insulting behavior.”
O’Hanna said: “You can get dressed, but you’re going to see the sheriff. It happens that nobody in the path of a high-velocity bullet ever hears the gun go off. What they hear is something else, the bow-wave report of the slug traveling faster than sound. It isn’t a whizz or a whine; it’s a sharp crack of the slug splitting the air. It drowns the actual shot and causes an auditory illusion. The fact that everybody ‘heard’ the shot come from the hotel proves the gun was off at a different angle. A ballistics shark can measure the distance and figure the angle—”
The white-whiskered man whirled from the closet doorway, and he had the gold-headed cane in his fist. He had suddenly lost a third of his supposed seventy years, and he was cat-fast as he slammed the cane at O’Hanna’s skull. The house dick ducked back, barely in time. There was plenty of muscle wrapped up inside that nightshirt, too. The cane head cracked down on the suitcase-bedded rifle, broke in pieces. The man tried to stab O’Hanna with the piece left in his hand. O’Hanna weaved away from that one, lashed out a punch. It was no one-handed tussle this time. The pair traded a dozen wallops before O’Hanna got in the finisher.
He stepped back, peered at the shattered cane. Now that the gold head lay in pieces, he could see telltale stains—Eva Tarkey’s blood—that the killer hadn’t been able to wash off when the thing was whole. Blood had seeped in under the gold fitting, discolored the wood. O’Hanna felt like gagging, and felt like beating the bleached white whiskers off the phony.
Flaming Angel
Frederick C. Davis
FREDERICK C(LYDE) DAVIS (1902–1977) was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, and graduated from Dartmouth College. The one word that is most conspicuously connected to his name as a pulp writer is prolific. In a career that covered more than forty years, he produced an astonishing one thousand short stories and fifty novels, under his own name and using several pseudonyms.
As Curtis Steele, he wrote the first twenty novels about James Christopher�
�Operator 5 (later Secret Service Operator 5), one of the great superheroes in pulp fiction. Virtually all novels in the series featured a massive invasion of America against pitifully small but brave forces led by Operator 5. The most popular stories under his own name featured Steve Thatcher, better known as the Moon Man—a policeman by day but a shady Robin Hood who wore a globe over his head to obscure his identity; fourteen of the stories were collected in The Night Nemesis (1984). As Stephen Ransome, he produced more than twenty semihard-boiled novels that many regard as his most accomplished work. A Ransome novel, Hearses Don’t Hurry (1941), was filmed as Who Is Hope Schuyler? (1942), starring Joseph Allen, Mary Howard, and Ricardo Cortez. A Davis short story, “The Devil Is Yellow,” was filmed as Double Alibi (1940), with Wayne Morris, Margaret Lindsay, William Gargan, and Roscoe Karns; another, “Meet the Executioner,” was filmed as Lady in the Death House (1944), with Jean Parker and Lionel Atwill.
“Flaming Angel” was published in the March 1949 issue.
Flaming Angel
Frederick C. Davis
SUSPENSE-CHARGED NOVELETTE
Out of the burning flames of his ghastly crime came the searing realization that he would have to kill the same woman twice.
CHAPTER ONE
LAST GOOD-BY
THIS IS A DAY I WILL NEVER FORGET, Rhea, my darling, because on this day I cremated you. Do you remember, Rhea, sweet, the night you whispered to me in a serious moment while I held you in my arms in the dark,
“When I die, Johnny, please don’t bury me. It makes me shiver to think of lying deep down in that heavy black earth, all alone through all eternity. Instead, let me rise off the earth in a glow of lovely dancing light. Make me what I’ve always yearned to become, Johnny—a shining, hot fire. Just a brief one, Johnny, but bright and beautiful before it goes out forever.”
It was that way today, my sweet Rhea—just the way you wanted it.
We stood with our heads bowed in the crematory chapel—the nicest crematory in the city, Rhea, the one out on Rendezvous Road, which direction you knew so well—and watched the attendants rolling your casket into the iron door of the great oven. I talked to you then, silently in my mind, just as I began to do the night you died and just as I am talking to you now.
