Straight ahead was a clearing, the silhouette of a swiss-roofed chalet, and a lighted window with a telescope barreled up out of the opening and aimed above the tree tops.
O’Hanna went ahead and looked in through that window. His eyes were on a level with the polished brass rods, graduated hour circles, and ball-and-crank mounting of the telescope. His glance raked down through the gleaming brass-work and the outspread wooden legs of the ’seope’s tripod. The glance became a fixed stare — fixed on the small, shrunken corpse of Charley Zane. He’d been shot dead center through the bald top of his head. There wasn’t much blood, and there wasn’t any powder burn at all.
The set-up looked as though somebody had stepped up to this window, aimed a gun, and fired as Charley Zane bent his head down over the telescope’s eyepiece.
O’Hanna closed a hand on the narrow-faced man’s arm again. “Come on. Inside.” They toured the building, went up natural stone steps to the rustic door. O’Hanna thrust the door open, was face to face with a red-haired young woman at the entry hallway phone.
The redhead was saying: “Notify the manager immediately. Mr. Zane has been murdered,” and broke off as she glimpsed O’Hanna.
O’Hanna said: “I’m the house officer. How’d it happen?”
The redhaired young woman said: “This way. I’ll show you.”
Chapter Two
Clues and Comets
This way led through the front room where a hearth fire snapped at its task of taking the chill off the night air. Somebody had dropped a poker in the middle of the peasant-style braided rug. Spica Zane was a huddled figure in a corner of the divan. She held a handkerchief balled against her mouth. The hands that held the handkerchief were tense, white-knuckled fists. Her eyes were clenched shut, too.
The red-headed girl went on ahead. She said: “I’d just got here a minute before. I’d barely taken off my coat.” She pointed at a tan cloak draped across a chair. She said: “Miss Zane was poking up the fire when we heard the shot. She ran across the room and opened this door and switched on the lights. She screamed when she—”
O’Hanna cut in: “The guy was sitting in here in the dark?”
The redhead said: “Oh, yes. His comet was barely visible through a low-powered telescope. Darkness helped his eyes focus on a barely distinguishable object.”
O’Hanna was inside the murder room. He went down on one knee beside Charley Zane’s body. He’d seen it right the first time. Burning powder hadn’t reached the dead man’s bald scalp. O’Hanna muttered: “You can say that again, sister. It worked both ways! This wasn’t a point-blank kill. The murderer did some mighty fancy focusing in the black-out, too... What’s this?”
The house dick extricated a page of crumpled memorandum paper from under the corpse’s limp hand. He puzzled over the find:
“Twenty-three hours and thirty nine minutes point five minus thirteen hours and six minutes flat leaves ten hours and thirty-three and one half minutes? Minus thirteen minutes more amounts to ten, twenty and one-half?”
The girl said: “Oh, that’s perfectly elementary. The first figure is the comet’s right ascension. The second figure is the sun’s right ascension. Deducting one from the other leaves the hour of transit, which, corrected to standard time, means the comet would be highest in the sky at ten hours, twenty minutes, and thirty seconds P.M. this evening.”
It came out Greek to O’Hanna. He peered at the redhead. “You sound like you’re another amateur astronomer yourself!”
Her smile was mock-demure. “I’m Professor Inez Martin, of the staff of Mt. Yarrow Observatory.”
O’Hanna’s astonishment widened the redhead’s smile. She said: “Gracious, don’t be so upset. Women do go in for higher education nowadays, you know. Some of them study medicine. Others practice social service or law. I can be an astronomer, can’t I, even without a long white beard?”
“You’ve got something there,” the house dick conceded. For one thing, Inez Martin had a figure there. She was the long-legged, graceful type. Her eyes were feline, her lips sultry.
He asked: “Where was the killer by the time you girls switched on the lights?”
“I’ve no idea. We saw no one at all.”
O’Hanna turned back into the front room, to the narrow-faced man. Electric illumination showed that the face wasn’t just narrow, it was knobby, too. The cheeks were sunken under knobby cheekbones. The eyes were uneasy gimlets under bony crags of brow. The nose had a bump halfway down its length.
O’Hanna asked: “Your name, sir?”
“It’s Frank Kigel.” The man’s knobby face worked. He said: “I’m a nervous case. I’m here at your hotel for a rest cure. I was merely out for a quiet stroll before bedtime. I heard that shot, so close it almost made me jump out of my skin. Then I heard the scream. It raised the hair on my head! After that, I saw a man come running at me — a great huge monster of a man with a big shiny gun in his fist! My nerves couldn’t stand any more. I turned and ran for my life!”
Footfalls at the front doorway announced that manager Endicott had arrived on the murder scene. Lighter footfalls behind him belonged to little Doc Raymond, the San Alpa house physician.
O’Hanna said: “O.K., Doc, take over and see nobody touches anything. I’ll call the sheriff and get busy running down the mysterious monster.”
Endicott quavered: “Good heavens, Mike, the man with the gun is no mystery at all. It was McGuffey, and all you’ve got to do is arrest him without bothering anybody else at all!”
O’Hanna was used to this. County Sheriff Ed Gleeson was headquartered sixty miles away. It would take him an hour to motor up the hairpin-curved, San Alpa mountain road. When crime occurred at the hotel, O’Hanna was supposed to use that hour to wrap up all the clues so the paying guests wouldn’t be annoyed by the sheriff asking them questions.
The desk clerk said Joseph J. McGuffey was registered as of Pasadena, and registered in room 234.
“Come on,” the house dick told Frank Kigel.
He didn’t get any answer, though, when he knocked on 234’s door. He fed a passkey into the lock, stepped inside. As he pressed the wall switch, ceiling light fell down onto the mounded bed coverlet.
The mound changed shape. Joe McGuffey heaved his pajamed shoulders up from the pillow, rubbed his eyes. He mumbled: “Huh, what’s the matter? I’ve been sound asleep for an hour! Is the hotel on fire or something?”
O’Hanna circled the bed, found the fat man’s garments shed on the far side. He stooped, retrieved a shoe, ran three fingers inside the footgear. He said: “The hotel isn’t on fire, but your shoe’s still warm inside. You’re a liar!”
Frank Kigel popped his narrow head around the door, pinned his gimlet gaze on the fat man, and said: “He’s lying, all right! He’s the man! I’d know him anywhere!”
“It’s a frame-up,” the fat man said. He waved off the bed coverlet, slid his stocky legs from the bed. “Charley Zane hired that guy to tell falsehoods about me.”
O’Hanna waved Kigel outside. As the door closed, he queried: “Oh, so you weren’t anywhere near the spot?”
“Certainly not! I’ve been right here in bed for the last hour.”
“You’re a low-grade liar, McGuffey. If you’d been asleep, you wouldn’t know whether it was one hour or three. If you were in bed, you wouldn’t know something wrong happened during the hour, either.”
McGuffey flushed. He said: “Why wouldn’t I know? You break into my room. You wake me up from my sleep. You call me a liar. You have another guy put the finger on me. I’d be dumb if I thought such goings-on meant everything was hunky-dory. I’d be still dumber if I didn’t realize Charley Zane put you up to all this. I’m going to hand that little guy a good swift poke in the nose—”