O’Hanna shrugged, let his keen gray glance drift around the room. He asked suddenly: “You don’t see any bullet holes in here, do you?”
“That old gag won’t buy you anything.”
“Gag?”
“Sure. Like the one boxer says to the other, ‘Your shoelace is untied,’ ha-ha.” It wasn’t a loud ha-ha, just a whispered giggle slipping through Lucas Kuhn’s plump-lipped leer. Vastly condescending, he gibed: “Hell, you don’t think I’m going to be dumb enough to take my eyes off you and start looking around for bullet holes?”
A wise-guy. O’Hanna said: “Now I’ll tell one. Like the boy on the merry-go-round, I can see you’ve been around — but it’s not getting you anywhere. Suppose you stop and think what no bullet hole means.”
Kuhn said: “It was just a wild shot. It went out the window, I guess.”
“Out the window is right,” the house dick mused. He changed tactics abruptly. “Mr. Kuhn, how long since you’ve been bothered ha’nts?”
The lard-faced man forked his eyebrows. “I’ve been what?”
“Pestered by ghosts.”
“You’re nuts. What in hell put such a screwy notion as that in your head?”
“You sound as if you don’t believe in spooks.”
“You’re right, I don’t,”
O’Hanna asked: “You wouldn’t go for the theory that this intruder wasn’t a sneak thief — but somebody trying to play on your fears by posing as the spirit of Colonel H.C. Taine?”
The other’s rotund, shiny features alerted. “Is that your theory? How do you figure it?”
“This way. Within the last half hour, somebody broke into Eva Taine’s chalet below here and staged a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t act. From there, the trail led straight to your door. Pardon me for asking, what’s the connection?”
Lucas Kuhn batted his eyes. He said: “Why, Eva is a sister-in-law of mine. But I didn’t even know she was here at San Alpa. The rest of it throws me for a total loss.”
O’Hanna said: “Let me make a suggestion. Ghosts hardly ever bring good news! As a rule, they dish out punishment or warnings. Maybe you and Eva had done something to make Grandfather Taine get up out of his grave and start walking?” He broke it off as footfalls hurried into the chalet and brought a round-eyed and breathless Endicott into the doorway.
Endicott said: “Good heavens, Mike! What on earth—”
Lucas Kuhn interrupted. “He really is the house dick? I guess that leaves me holding the bag — with a horselaugh inside it.” Lowering the gun, he addressed fulsome apologies to the detective. “If I hadn’t butted in, no doubt by this time you would have had the prowler caught! Thanks to my bullheaded blundering, I’m afraid he’s got the headstart on us! I could kick myself all over the mountain...”
O’Hanna’s mood was nasty. “Yeah, and if the dog hadn’t stopped to lap up the spilled milk, he’d still have caught the rabbit. Let’s drop the Alphonse-and-Gaston act and get going.”
Flashlight in hand, the Irishman swung himself over the window sill. The footprints across the wet grass made a nice trail for a hundred feet, but then they merged into one of the paths — and there was no way of telling which direction the fugitive had taken.
O’Hanna swore as he turned back to the chalet. Inside, Lucas Kuhn was barreling his plump legs into his britches while Endicott hovered over him and said: “It was a perfectly natural mistake, Mr. Kuhn. You can’t blame yourself a bit. Anybody waking up and finding strange men running around in his bedroom has a perfect right to be suspicious.”
Kuhn grumbled: “All the same, I’ll never forgive myself if the crook gets away.”
“He got away,” O’Hanna reported, “so we’ll have to play it the hard way with questions and answers—”
He hadn’t time to fire a question, though, before the bedside phone rang. Kuhn’s hand reached out, but the house dick got there first.
It was for O’Hanna, anyway. Little Doc Raymond, the house physician, was on the other end of the wire. Doc said he was in 207, and continued: “You better hurry. There’s a dead man here with a bullet hole in him.”
O’Hanna told Lucas Kuhn: “Pal, you were right. Your shot went through the window — inside the guy you hit. So let’s have the gun.”
Kuhn handed it over, and O’Hanna swung out the .38’s cylinder. There was one exploded hull in the chambers, and four live ones. O’Hanna took up the phone again: “Operator, give me the desk... Hullo, it’s Mike. Who’s registered in 207?”
The night clerk’s voice came back: “A man named Oscar Mullet.”
O’Hanna relayed it to Lucas Kuhn. “Mean anything to you?”
“Mullet?” Kuhn jammed his pajama sleeves into a street coat. “Sure. He’s the caretaker — the cat’s caretaker. You see, Grandfather Taine left an income to keep his pet cat, Lochinvar, supplied with milk for the rest of its life.”
O’Hanna cut in: “Let’s travel while we talk.” He snared the pink-faced man’s arm, steered him toward the door. “O.K., he’s the cat’s caretaker. So what?”
“Nothing — only Lochinvar has been ailing lately. Mullet’s got the damned fool idea some of us are trying to poison the kitty!”
“Why?”
“It’s the money he’s worried about. When that cat dies, Mullet’s going to have to find himself some other means of support. While the cat’s alive, the caretaker has free room and board plus the income from the trust fund.”
O’Hanna asked: “And when the cat dies, you and Eva Taine split the hundred grand?”
Kuhn denied it, said: “I’m only related by marriage. It’d be my wife who’d do the splitting, along with Eva and her brother, Johnny Taine.”
The trio crossed the hotel grounds, entered the lobby this time by way of its twin plate-glass front doors.
O’Hanna opened 207 and was a little surprised to encounter a tense, tight-faced, bow-legged citizen all dolled up in a tuxedo and cummerbund.
The detective asked: “Dr. Raymond?”
The bow-legged man said: “He’s in there — with it.”
A thumb jerk went with this, directed the house detective to the bathroom door.
A pair of shoes pointed their water-soaked soles through this doorway. Bits of lawn-mowered grass were dew-plastered onto the soles. O’Hanna stepped closer, and legs swam into view, then a crumpled arm angled out from the torso.
Doc Raymond was crouched over a profile on the bathroom floor that showed a wide-open eye as bright and shiny as a piece of liver.
O’Hanna asked: “Who called you, Doc?”
Bow-Legs supplied: “I did. I found this man out in the corridor a few minutes ago, apparently either sick or drunk. He asked me to please help him to his room, and I did so. Then he asked me to unlock his door, so I unlocked it. He requested me to help him to the bathroom, which I did. He told me to go away, but immediately afterward he fell unconscious on the floor, and I took it upon myself to call for medical assistance.”
“You didn’t notice he was bleeding?”
“No, sir.” Bow-Legs was the sallow, fiftyish type. Thinning brown hair parted from a middle stripe lent his hatchety features a scholarly, professorial look. “He was so doubled-up that I couldn’t see his shirtfront. I did notice that he kept one hand pressed there, as if suffering from severe indigestion.”
“Your name?”
“Why, I’m Alexander Janathan.” Alexander Janathan seemed slightly surprised he had to tell anybody who he was.
“Room number?”
“I’m directly down the hall — in 218.”
“OK., Mr. Janathan. You can go, but you’d better not discuss this with anybody before Sheriff Gleeson talks to you.”