Ed Gleeson advanced his jaw. “So Mullet wasn’t in the hall! Then how did you happen to find his dead body at all? Answer that!”
“I guess I’ll have to.” Janathan cleared his throat. “It all started ten days ago. This man Mullet approached me in my Los Angeles office. He claimed to have an exceedingly valuable historical document for sale — a first draft of the Gettysburg Address. It was his story that it hadn’t really been destroyed in the dynamiting after all. He said he’d found the briefcase almost uninjured after the explosion. Realizing its value, he hid the document. After that, he cut up the briefcase and sprinkled the pieces around where he found the thing.”
O’Hanna asked: “But you wouldn’t buy?”
“Hell, no. I’d never heard of such a first draft ever belonging to Colonel Taine. That’s why I opened negotiations with the family. I figured I could find out from them, under cover of pretending to want to buy the Catlin Papers.” He grinned. “They’re a close-mouthed lot, but tonight I got Johnny drunk enough to babble some secrets. So I went to Mullet’s room, found the door unlocked and the guy dead.”
O’Hanna nodded. “You assumed he’d been killed for that Gettysburg paper, that the murderer had the document. So you started making the rounds, you told everyone Mullet had come to and named them as the killer. Your theory was that the guilty person would buy your silence by surrendering the so-called sample of Lincoln’s handwriting.”
“So-called, did you say?”
“You’re not quite that dumb, Janathan. You knew the thing was a forgery. Eva told me the story — a bunco yam any cop would smell a mile away. The technique never changes, always the sucker buys something cheap because it’s hot, and always it turns out to be a phony. And almost always the victim keeps his trap shut — he’s ashamed to admit his share in a crooked deal. The chauffeur peddled Grandfather Taine an ersatz historical document, figuring the old man would be ashamed to haul him into court. Of course, the colonel woke up — they always do when it’s too late — and decided to have the paper examined by an expert.”
Lucas Kuhn asked: “So the chauffeur tried to blow him sky-high, and killed himself in the process?”
O’Hanna said: “No. The chauffeur had a confederate — who’d have been hurt then, and could be hurt now if that phony came to light. Five years isn’t long enough for the Homicide and Bomb Squads to forget a case. The cops had nothing to work on before. Colonel Taine himself clammed up on the main clue. But given that forgery, they could dig in and find a suspect who was in stir when the chauffeur was, who served time for penmanship then, and maybe is wanted somewhere right now.
“For my money, the dynamiter didn’t care whether he killed Grandfather Taine or not. He wanted to destroy the evidence, the fake Gettysburg Address, and he thought he had. But then Mullet turned up with it — and got killed so the evidence could be burned.”
Uneasy-eyed, Gleeson asked: “Burned? Where does that leave us?”
Mike O’Hanna got down to business. “We’ve still got the modus operandi, as the high-powered criminologists say. The killer wasn’t satisfied just to bump off Mullet, he had to be smart and make it look as if Mullet got shot playing ghost.”
“That’s the part that doesn’t make sense to me!” the sheriff growled.
“It made sense up to a point. Somebody tried to poison the caretaker’s five thousand-dollar-a-year cat. Then a ghost played Grandpa Taine in Eva’s bedroom. The same ghost put on a performance for Lucas Kuhn. If we’d found Mullet’s body the next morning, we’d have had every reason to assume Kuhn plugged him, and the coroner’s verdict would have been — it served Mullet right. Getting shot at is a chance ghosts have to take! And by that time, medical testimony couldn’t set the time of death any closer than an hour or so.
“But,” O’Hanna swung to Alexander Janathan, “you had to butt in and find the corpse too soon! And Doc Raymond had to pronounce the guy dead half an hour too early! The theory of justifiable homicide was no good. The killer had to think of something else, had to get busy and resurrect the ghost. He had two sets of whiskers and flash-guns, one that he planted with Mullet’s body, the other he used in Eva Taine’s chalet. He had to make it appear there was some mysterious party at work—”
The house dick paused. “Oh, the hell with this ‘he’ stuff. It was Kuhn, of course.”
Lucas Kuhn’s pink face turned to chartreuse. “You’re accusing me? You’re crazy—”
“I knew there’d be an argument the minute I named the name. O.K., I’ll argue with you.” The house dick dug into his pocket, came up with the .38. “Here’s the give-away — you were too damned anxious to talk me into giving this back to you! That it matched the slug in Mullet’s body was fine and dandy, so long as you could claim you fired at a prowler. The same bit of ballistics wasn’t so good when you had to pin it on somebody else. Unable to talk me out of the gat, you went to work on the corpse instead.”
O’Hanna put the other hand into the other pocket. He said to Gleeson: “Here’s what the guy was after.” He opened his palm, showed a bloodstained pellet of lead. “It’s lucky — I broke down the door before he finished turning the corpse inside out. I completed the autopsy for him, dug this slug out of Mullet’s left lung. All we have to do is compare it with his gun, and it’s clear who murdered the guy.”
Lucas Kuhn exploded, “You dirty stinking rat! It’s a Goddamned frame-up! You lying louse, you couldn’t’ve found that slug in him because I already took—”
It took him that long to realize what he was saying. He stopped saying it.
Johnny Taine giggled for pure joy.
“Damn!” Lucas Kuhn said. “Get that tripe-brained hyena out of here, and I’ll talk.” He thought and waved a hand at his red-haired ex-wife. “Her, too.”
Sheriff Gleeson turned and said: “All right, you two run along and—”
O’Hanna snapped, “Ed!” and jumped as Lucas Kuhn tugged a gun up from behind his belt buckle. O’Hanna still had the .38 in his fist, and he clipped it across Lucas Kuhn’s jaw.
“Where in hell did that come from?” Gleeson asked.
“He’s a two-gun man. He had this other gun loaded with an E C, blank powder cartridge and hooked up with his chalet door chime,” O’Hanna said. “He knew Eva would holler for help. He’d left a plain trail to his own doorstep, and figured I couldn’t help following it. Figured I’d press the button — and rush in when I heard the shot.
“He wasn’t in bed, see? He was right there waiting in the hall — he jumped and barreled me as soon as I got through the door. Then he wheeled and ran back and pretended he’d been knocked down in the bedroom.
“You want to know why? Here’s why. There was another trail planted from his window — but he had to hold me up so’s to allow time for Mullet’s imaginary escape with an imaginary bullet in him.”
Ed Gleeson pointed and said: “What about that bullet you got in your hand there?”
“It’s really from his gun. It’s one of a pair I shot through the door.”
Endicott said now: “Good heavens, Mike! You really were framing the man—”
“Shucks,” said O’Hanna. “That was nothing. Just the regular San Alpa hotel service.”