“Do what?”
“Murder Johnny Lawton and make it look like suicide?”
Rockley chuckled, sipped his highball. “If I told you, it’d spoil all the fun you’ll have guessing, I’m admitting nothing. You know I was in Kerr’s office when it all happened.”
O’Hara said, “Maybe I can guess, at that.”
Inez Dana spat out, “Will you shut your big yaps, you two? What the hell is keeping Davenport? If he tries a runout—”
She was nervous, getting more nervous by the moment. But her gun didn’t waver.
“Don’t worry about him, baby,” Rockley said. “He knows better than to run out. And there’s nobody in the house to touch off an alarm. He’s sent the servants and the family out for the night. As for O’Hara, let him talk. He’s a friend of mine and I’ve got a lot of things to thank him for. As for you, baby, slipping over here ahead of me... You didn’t have a double-cross in mind, did you, my sweet?”
The girl looked sullen but she didn’t say anything.
O’Hara said slowly, almost absent-mindedly, “It was all there for me if I’d used my head, wasn’t it, Rock? The fact that as publicity man for Station KGP, you might know something about radio. And that leather-padded chair in Kerr’s office and the table-tennis bat you were fooling with when I dropped in there.”
Rockley lost his grin a bit. Kerr looked puzzled, said, “This is all over my head, O’Hara.”
“Do you happen to know, Kerr,” O’Hara asked, “how they produce the effect of a gunshot on the radio?”
“No.”
“I do. They can’t use a gun, it’d blow out the tubes, so they smack a leather cushion with a flat stick. I think when we get around to checking up, Rock, we’ll find you borrowed a mike hook-up from KGP on some pretext.”
Rockley, sweetening his highball, interrupted to say, “If I were admitting anything, Ken, I might admit you were getting warm.”
“You had the mike hidden in Kerr’s office. Where, Rock?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rockley said, languidly amused. “However, if there had been anything like that around, a good spot for it would have been under the leather chair where a nimble guy could reach for it in a hurry if he needed something like that.”
“Yeah,” O’Hara said, “that would have been as good a place as any. With that point cleared up, Rock, the rest of it isn’t hard to figure. Johnny Lawton had tumbled to your extortion plot against Davenport, perhaps not enough to print but enough to make it dangerous for you if he kept on digging. So you had to shut him up. By last night you had the mike hook-up wired to the radio in Dana’s apartment. That wouldn’t have been hard to arrange. You had the run of the club, the place is practically deserted until late afternoon, and these days nobody gets curious about wires tacked up here and there. So it was all set. Dana got Johnny up to the apartment, used some gag to get his gun from him and shot him through the head, the sound of the shot being covered by the swing band downstairs.”
Rockley grinned over the rim of his highball glass. “What kind of cigars do you like, Ken?”
“Why?”
“I’ll send you a box — from some far-distant place — if you can guess the rest of it. I understand the cops found by the paraffin test that Lawton had fired a gun and his prints were found on his rod. How d’you get around that?”
Inez Dana’s bright brown eyes had been shifting venomously from O’Hara to Rockley, back to O’Hara again. She snapped, “Rock, you’re a fool to keep blabbing like this.”
Rockley chuckled. “Baby, with what O’Hara has already figured out, we’re as good as hung if they ever catch us. And I like to watch O’Hara’s mind work. He’s one of the few really bright guys I’ve found in this town, outside of myself. Go ahead, Ken.”
“Either Dana here knew,” O’Hara said, “or else you’d told her that the cops might try the paraffin test on Lawton’s hand to see if he’d shot a gun. So to cover that angle, she wiped her prints from the gun, got his dead hand around the butt and managed to pull the trigger while the gun was in that position. That shot went into the picture by the door. It would account for the positive reaction of Johnny’s hand to the paraffin test, for his prints on the gun and for the bullet the cops found in the wall, the one that Johnny was supposed to have fired at Dana. Meanwhile you had everything set downstairs. When Dana ran down, you got ready for action. You timed it and when you were certain the witnesses were just outside the door of the apartment, you smacked the leather chair with the table-tennis bat. The mike picked up the sound. Dana’s radio was probably turned on full and it came through the loud speaker with all the effect of a shot. Then you disconnected things at your end and sat back with everybody resting pretty except poor Johnny Law-ton.”
“I ought to be sore at you, Ken,” Rockley said, still cheerfully. “If you didn’t have such a nice set of brains, I wouldn’t have to be powdering out of this fair burg. Ah, well, as some philosopher observed, life is very often like that.”
“There’s one thing I don’t get,” O’Hara said. “What made you send those two punks after me last night?”
“Not guilty. That was our girl friend here. She heard the fuss Shuford made about you taking some of Lawton’s papers. She made an excuse to go down to her dressing-room when you went downstairs and put them on your tail. However, I’d like to have credit for tonight’s fast thinking. Luckily I’m somewhat of an insomniac and I’d just had a prescription filled and with me and I got a double dose into your drinks after the bartender put them out to be picked up by the waiter.”
“Who were these punks?”
“That’d be telling,” Rockley grinned. “They’ll feel bad enough without being pinched when they find out I’ve gone places without them.”
Dana said impatiently, “For God’s sake, you love to talk, Rock. Go see what’s holding up Davenport. I can watch these guys. We’ve got to get away from here.”
Rockley took a big swallow of the highball and got out of his chair. He was less than half-way across to the door when the floor in the hall creaked to the tread of heavy feet in a hurry. Inez Dana swung her head a little and Rockley halted.
The curtains were swept aside by a big paw and Detective Shuford stepped between them. His face was red and his eyes were bloodshot and staring. If he saw anyone in the room except O’Hara he gave no sign of it. He had a long, blue-barreled revolver in his big hand and he bawled at O’Hara, “So I got you now, by Gawd. I’ll learn you to slug me!”
O’Hara said, “Watch yourself!”
“You slugged me and knocked me out in the car. By Gawd, I’ll learn you to pull that on me.”
O’Hara saw Inez Dana’s set, white face, the glitter of her dark eyes, the tightening of her trigger finger as she swung the gun around toward Shuford. He yelled at Shuford but the booming crash of her gun rode over his words.
Shuford staggered, caught at the curtain with his left hand. He seemed to see the girl for the first time and his voice didn’t believe what he saw. He said, “Inez... you—”
He swayed toward her and she shot again, deliberately and with a vicious jerk of her mouth. Shuford pulled the curtain down on top of him, began to fall forward. He groaned thickly and his hands pawed blindly at the air, at the girl.
He still hung onto his gun and, pawing with it, he brought it down heavily on Inez Dana’s chest. It sent her weaving back against the wall, stumbling and off balance.
Rockley cursed in a high, panic-stricken voice and started for the door. As he passed, O’Hara swung, connected with the pink jaw and Rockley did a cartwheel across Shuford’s body out into the hall. O’Hara spun, threw himself toward Inez Dana who was pushing herself away from the wall, straightening up.