“Our family skeletons,” the red-head stated, “happen to be our affair, and not this hotel’s.”
“Then why don’t you keep them at home, why unload ’em on San Alpa?” O’Hanna gave a dour headshake. “Everything about your family is my business from here on in. I’ll begin by asking you just what accounts for this gathering of the clan, this rush of your relatives to San Alpa?”
Belle snapped: “That’s impertinent. You operate a public resort, don’t you? You advertise in the newspapers, you put up posters in the travel agencies, you supply publicity folders in every hotel rack on the West Coast. You practically beg the public to patronize the place. Is it a crime to rent a room here?”
O’Hanna handed it back to her. “Yes, it’s a crime — and we found the body.”
It took the starch out of Belle Kuhn. “You found what?” she managed.
Lucas Kuhn chipped in. “He’s not kidding, Belle. Oscar Mullet is dead downstairs.” He cleared his throat. “And there’ve been two attempts on my life in the last hour.”
O’Hanna asked: “You knew nothing about this, Mrs. Kuhn?”
“No... nothing—” Her broomstick figure spun half around at the sound of her brother’s giggling. She screamed: “Johnny, stop that! It isn’t funny!”
Johnny Taine’s eyes were blank, and he might have been looking at a moving picture nobody else could see.
O’Hanna stared at the fair-haired playboy. “What in hell ails you, anyhow?”
The red-headed woman said: “He isn’t himself. He’s been drinking. Johnny has been ill, unable to attend to his own affairs. I have a court order, a kind of power-of-attorney.”
Johnny Taine snickered. “I’m a dipso. Belle’s my guardian. It’s a good joke on that guy Janathan.” All by himself, he enjoyed a laugh over the good joke.
The skin at the back of O’Hanna’s neck crawled a little. Johnny Taine’s tittering laughter was nice to have around, if you had to choose between it and the noise a rattlesnake makes.
He asked: “What about Janathan?”
“Janathan’s a racketeer,” Belle said indignantly. “He’s the one who got my brother roaring drunk tonight. He was trying to persuade Johnny to sell him some extremely rare historical papers for a song.”
Johnny Taine gave with the giggles. Tears of merriment formed in his eyes. “It’s a hot one, huh? Imagine the guy pouring all that free firewater into me when I can’t even legally sign my own name!”
“It’s side-splitting,” O’Hanna agreed. He conned the red-headed Belle. “And where were you during this firewater frolic?”
Her expression was venomous. “The professor fooled me, too. He expressed an interest In buying my share of Grandfather’s collection of holographia. I was in my own room, drawing up a list of the items and figuring out an asking price. When I had decided, I tried to telephone Janathan’s room. When he didn’t answer, I became suspicious. I stepped across the hall and found him trying to take advantage of my brother with alcohol.”
“Yeah? What time was that?”
“Shortly before one o’clock in the morning, perhaps five minutes to one.”
Lucas Kuhn figured and said: “That’s about right. It was just about one A. M. when Janathan got downstairs and found—”
O’Hanna cut in. “Let me worry about the time-table, Mrs. Kuhn, where are these documents Janathan wanted to buy?”
“Locked up in a bank vault, of course. Many of them are extremely old and fragile. Besides, I’m not fool enough to run around with priceless, irreplaceable papers in my handbag. Once was enough. I do have a catalog—”
O’Hanna interrupted. “Once was enough?”
Color died from Belle Kuhn’s face, left her face the hue of over-exposed Kodachrome. She said: “We once lost part of the collection through carelessness. I was saying, Grandfather’s collection is catalogued, but of course prices change. Roughly speaking, the value of a man’s handwriting corresponds to his fame. But fame is fleeting, people are famous today and forgotten tomorrow — and vice versa, they’re forgotten today and famous tomorrow—”
Johnny Taine giggled.
O’Hanna swung on his heel and left 431. Entering the elevator, he saw Lucas Kuhn shagging in pursuit. The house dick growled: “The hell with him, don’t wait.”
Nobody tried to lasso him as he plunged from the hotel doors across the darkened grounds.
He followed his flashlight until he heard the voices. By that time, he didn’t need the flash-beam. He could be guided by Eva Taine’s window light.
Eva Taine’s voice carried farthest, being shrill. It said: “No! You’re insane! I didn’t!”
The other’s was a man’s voice, low and threatening. “You killed him, girlie. But you didn’t kill him dead enough! It was shock that dropped him, not death. He was still alive, and he regained consciousness, he got to his feet. He staggered out into the hall, and that’s where I found him. He had breath enough left to moan out a name — your name.”
From the sound of it, she was a very frightened girl. “He didn’t mean I killed him. He couldn’t have meant that.”
There was the noise of a doorknob clicking. The man said: “Think it over.” He opened the door, and the light shone through his bowed legs. “Think it over good. ‘Fourscore and seven years ago’ — that’s all I ask.”
“You’re crazy. It’s gone. There were only a few charred pieces about as big as a postage stamp.”
“Nuts,” Professor Alexander Janathan said. “He showed it to me. Think that over, too.”
He pulled the door shut and came down the chalet steps. His eyes gleamed like red hot coals. He was in too much of a hurry to notice O’Hanna in the darkness. O’Hanna was in too much of a hurry to stop him. O’Hanna fidgeted until he disappeared among the trees, then he ran up the chalet steps.
She hadn’t locked the door, hadn’t even stirred out of the chair where Janathan had left her twisting her hands. She didn’t even look up as O’Hanna came in.
“I didn’t kill him,” the blonde said. “He didn’t mean that.”
O’Hanna said: “ ‘Fourscore and seven years ago’ — the original draft of the Gettysburg Address in Abraham Lincoln’s handwriting. You can name your own price — you can even beat a murder rap with it.”
Eva Taine stared through dazed, poker-chip eyes. “Who told you?”
“I picked it up in pieces. I’ll let you put the pieces together. I’ve gathered Grandpa Taine collected rare old historical papers. You take it from there.”
“He had the Gettysburg Address. It was in the briefcase — that day,” the girl said. “It was blown up in the dynamiting. So you see, Janathan is just lying—”
“Not so fast. Why was it in the briefcase?”
“He was going to have it examined to make sure it was authentic.”
“I don’t remember reading that angle in the papers at the time,” the house dick put in.
Eva Taine said: “It wasn’t in the papers. Grandfather didn’t tell anyone. He bought it for a few thousand dollars — five, I think. It was undoubtedly worth ten times that. In other words, there was something peculiar about the deal.”
“It was hot?”
“I suppose it’d been stolen. Grandfather couldn’t possibly get it back, and he didn’t care to advertise his dealings with the thief.”
“So he didn’t tell the cops?”
“No.”
O’Hanna said: “He just sent a big floral offering to the chauffeur’s funeral? A great guy, Grandpa. I don’t wonder he can’t rest easy in his grave.”
Eva Taine protested: “Oh, but Jacques was involved, too.”
“Jacques was the chauffeur’s name?”