O’Hanna stemmed the tirade. “Cut out the kidding, McGuffey. You know damned well a poke in the nose won’t hurt Zane a bit. He was shot dead tonight, and an eye-witness saw you running away after the killing.”
The fat man blinked. He said: “Zane was killed? Hell, I never knew that. I ran away because I thought that was Zane shooting at me!”
“Now it comes out. Now you admit you were there.”
McGuffey said: “Yeah. Sure. I told you why. I was going to keep that crook from stealing my comet. I crawled in a back window and went through some papers in his suitcase. That’s why I quick crawled in bed here. I thought Zane saw me crawling out of that window, took a shot at me, and was going to have me arrested for stealing his will. That’s what I figured you was after when you came in here.”
O’Hanna asked: “His will?”
The fat man said: “Yeah. I found a copy of a brand-new last will and testament in his suitcase. He was leaving a hundred-thousand-dollar bequest to Mt. Yarrow Observatory.”
O’Hanna brightened. “Now you’re getting down out of the stars to something I can understand. Let’s see the document.”
“I was afraid to bring it here to my room,” McGuffey said. “I hid it in the fork of a tree down there.”
“Pull on your pants. Show me where.”
Five minutes later, Joseph McGuffey slowed to a stop under the trees. He pointed his arm and said: “That’s the back window I used. It leads into Zane’s bedroom. His suitcase is in the closet there. I hear the shot just as I crawled out of the window, and I headed straight for the lights of the hotel.”
He’d brought a flashlight with him. He aimed the light on the ground and said: “See? There’s my footprints.”
The leaf mold and pine needle carpet hadn’t taken any clear footprints. There were vague marks that might have been left by striding shoe leather.
The fat man said: “That’s my trail. I remember it was about the third oak tree I passed.” He swung, pointed his light. “Why, that’s it right there. I remember the fork — I remember I had to stand on tiptoe to reach up there—”
He walked to the tree, threw the flashbeam up into the crotch. The light showed oak bark, and that’s all.
McGuffey made swallowing sounds. “I guess it must have been the next tree.”
It wasn’t the next tree, or the one after that, or the one on either side of these trees. The fat man complained: “It’s mighty funny. I can’t understand this at all!”
“Maybe it wasn’t a last will and testament you had to hide. Kigel says you were toting a gun in your fist.” The house dick’s tone hardened. “If it was a gun, no wonder you don’t want to locate it.”
“I was toting a flashlight,” McGuffey protested. “You’re not playing fair, O’Hanna. You’re believing everybody but me.”
“I don’t trust you, that’s a fact. I’m going to let you help Doc Raymond sit up with the corpse.” O’Hanna decided, “while I sashay up a few clues on my own.”
The lobby clerk said Professor Inez Martin’s room number was 312. O’Hanna eased the passkey into the lock, gingerly twisted the knob. The red-haired lady astronomer was at home. She’d pulled up a chair to the room’s writing desk, was brooding over a sheet of San Alpa stationery. Drowned by her own thoughts, she didn’t hear the sleuth enter.
O’Hanna stared at the sheet of hotel paper on the desk. He asked: “More mathematics? What’s the answer add up to this time?”
“Why... why—!” She gasped, came to her feet. She said furiously: “Do you make a habit of marching into the privacy of a lady’s room without so much as knocking?”
O’Hanna said: “Only when I’m solving murders.” He tapped a finger on the page of figures. “What’s all this mean? Ten twenty equals zero, so nine twenty equals plus fifteen degrees, or nineteen degrees equals nine zero four?”
Professor Martin nibbled her underlip. “I’ll try to make it simple for you. In order to place a location on earth, it’s customary to use latitude and longitude. Those are the lines you see crisscrossing a map. In the heavens, we use the corresponding lines of ascension and declination. I’d been invited to see that comet tonight, so earlier tonight I calculated its declination. Now, are you satisfied?”
The house dick shrugged. “Frankly, the answer is no! I don’t savvy this business of amateurs like Charley Zane and Joe McGuffey finding comets at all. I don’t see how they can compete with you professionals with your fifty and hundred inch telescopes.”
Inez Martin sat down again, crossed her shapely knees, tugged her skirt into place. She said: “Oh, dear, you really are an ignoramus. In the first place, it’d take the largest telescope in existence two hundred years to completely map the stellar universe on film. In that time, literally scores of comets could appear and disappear while the telescope was pointing somewhere else. In the second place, the large observatory telescopes are used for specialized scientific research. We concentrate on studies of the component stars, the hydrogen carbide theory, and so on. Actually, it’s the amateur astronomers with the low-powered glasses who make most of the comet discoveries.”
“Yeah?”
The lady astronomer said: “It’s like the difference between a famous banker and a sharp-eyed newsboy. The banker knows all about international finance, but the boy is more apt to find a dime on the sidewalk.”
“O.K., let’s suppose I found a comet myself. Would you name it after me? So a thousand years from now, my great-great-great-grand-childen could point up in the sky and say there’s the comet their great-great-great-granddaddy discovered?”
Inez Martin thought this was funny. She giggled. “I wouldn’t want to bet on it. Your comet probably wouldn’t be a periodic one.”
“A how-much?”
“Periodic comets, like the famous Halley and Donati, return at stated intervals. The others are mere wanderers which flash through our solar system once, and may never be seen again.”
O’Hanna asked: “What about this one out there tonight? Who were you going to name it after — Charley Zane or Joe McGuffey?”
The lady astronomer hesitated, smoothed her fingers over her auburn hair. “That’s the sixty-four dollar question. It’s the queerest mix-up! You see, those men are practically next door neighbors in Pasadena. Each has an observatory fitted up over the garage at the back of his property. Each insisted he saw the comet first. Each rushed off a telegram the same night, at almost the same moment, a week ago. Ever since, they’ve been bombarding the observatory with threats of lawsuits to establish their claims. Then Mr. Zane mailed a check for traveling expenses, inviting a representative of the observatory to come to Pasadena and settle the matter. I can’t imagine why, but the staff decided I was the one to go.”
“They probably figured you could soothe the situation with some sex appeal,” the house dick flattered. “So what did you find out in Pasadena?”
Inez Martin shook her head. “Oh, I never went there. Mr. Zane wired that his plans had changed, and I was to meet him at San Alpa, instead. I had a suspicion he didn’t want me to hear Mr. McGuffey’s side of the story, so I telegraphed Mr. McGuffey to meet me here, too.” She shook her head again. “I’m sorry I did. Mr. Zane turned out to be an entirely different sort of man than I’d expected. He proved to be deeply interested in pure science. He was making arrangements to bequeath a large sum of money to the advancement of scientific research.”
O’Hanna grinned. He braced back his shoulders, bent up his left arm, made cranking motions with his right hand.