5 Detective Novels Magazine Cover — page 64: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

64 O’Hanna turned. O’Hanna_ wasn’t amused, either. Not judging by the gleam in his eyes. “Funny!” he said. Now I’ll tell one.” He’d quit playing the streamlined, diplomatic house dick. His black Irish temper could climb like mercury under a Yuma sun. It was climbing fast now. “This will slay you,” he said grimly. “There is a body in there—a girl—and she’s dead. Dead as a dame can be!” The announcement chilled them into five-second silence. The stunned pause would have lasted longer than that, if it hadn’t been shattered by Leland Cobb’s purely alcoholic reaction. Cobb hiccoughed noisily. “Sh’ lie!” he accused O’Hanna with a dramatic gesture. “Sh’ gashly lie!” Fred Fencer moved briskly around to the closet doorway. “No, it’s a fact!” the agency dick exclaimed. “There is a girl here.” Leland Cobb arose and reeled to the closet. He, too, looked, focusing his eyes with difficulty on the victim. The low-wattage overhead bulb showed Leland Cobb’s clothing racked on hangers along one end of the gen- erous sized closet. A second door opened from the other end, and the girl sprawled on the floor in the middle. She hugged a clenched fist to the red-stained, light bodice of her dress. Leland Cobb shrank back, his gray lips a grimace of revulsion. O’Hanna asked, “Did you kill her, Cobb?” “Very funny joke! Il © oes tried hard to deny the accusa- tion with dignity. He looked indignant and solemn. Inhaling a long, sobering breath, he articulated his words with a ponderous carefulness. “No! I never saw her before! She washn’t—wasn’t—here a minute ago. I swear—” A hiccough blasted the foundations out from under his painfully preserved dignity. He caved into the nearest chair and began to babble incoherently. He’d only tried to play a joke on good ol’ O’Hanna, he protested. There wasn’t supposed to FIVE DETECTIVE NOVELS MAGAZINE be any corpse in the closet. “You said there was,” O’Hanna re- minded. That was the idea. Leland Cobb hic- coughed. The corpse he’d been talking about was imaginary, and it was sup- posed to have disappeared into thin air. He’d thought it would be funny as hell to send good ol’ O’Hanna chasing all over San Alpa in search of a non-exist- ent cadaver. O’Hanna asked, “Then how’d that girl’s body get in there?” Cobb hiccoughed violently. “I dunno. Somebody elsh put it there.” He squeezed his fingertips into his putty- colored face. “Thash-it. I gesh.” Fred Fencer turned around in the closet doorway and squinted through his glasses. “Let’s get this straight,” the agency dick said. “The guy claims he committed an imaginary murder with some catsup. And someone else made it real by planting a genuine corpse in this closet here.” “Yeah,” O’Hanna said. It was the damnedest grotesquerie of an alibi he’d ever listened to. “How could it happen?” Fencer want- ed to know. O’Hanna sighed. “It’s possible there might not have been a corpse in the closet when he telephoned.” He gestured at a doorway on the other side of the bed. “This 402 is a suite of two rooms, with connecting bath and dressing room. Somebody could have hauled the girl’s body in through Mrs. Cobb’s room and the dressing room, through the door you noticed at the back of the closet— that opens into the dressing room.” “Thin ice,” Fencer said. O’Hanna thought so, too. “Keep loo They circled the bed, went through the connecting doorway, into Mrs. Cobb’s room. O’Hanna looked at its carpeting, carefully. He examined the tiled floor of the bath, then swung through the dressing room, and on into the closet where the victim lay. He crouched beside the body. She’d been dead an hour or longer, he thought. There was a tiny circular hole in the fabric of the girl’s bodice. She hadn’t bled much, and all the blood he could eC the guy,” he told Endicott. “We'll CoOnniclooo SJ (C(O) mM