Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan Read Online Free PDF

exactness.
    Then he jumped, landing flat-footed like a ton of brick. His thud shook the room and tipped over half the gadgets on the desk and tables. So far so good. But for scientific purposes the test was an utter failure. Before the acoustics could be tested in so far as to their effect on the other offices of the floor Sansom’s voice rose in a mighty wail of anguish. “O-o-o-o-ow! Hell’s bells and panther tracks! What the blazing, blooming, bloody hell—”
    He was wildly hopping up and down on one foot, holding the other tenderly in his hands, while Miss Hildegarde Withers covered her maidenly ears. She watched as he ruefully pulled a thumbtack from the sole of his shoe, a thin and well-worn sole. It was one of the thumbtacks with which, according to his own theory, Saul Stafford had been engaged in fastening up the poster of Josephine Baker.
    That did it. Soundproofed walls or not, there was now an excited concourse of voices in the hall. The door opened, disclosing a huddle of curious faces. The denizens of the third floor had finally come to the conclusion that something was up. They wanted to know what, and the air was blue with question marks.
    “All right!” Sansom was insisting. “Mr Stafford just had an accident, that’s all.”
    It was Frankie Firsk, he of the cropped hair and gnawed fingernails, who got in the first word. He took a quick bite at his forefinger and said, “Staff had an accident? I thought the accidents always happened to other people!” He almost snickered.
    “It was the gas heater, wasn’t it?” Melicent Manning pushed forward with a jingling of bracelets. “These offices are nothing but lethal gas chambers, that’s what I say!”
    “No, Miss Manning, it wasn’t the gas heater!” snapped Sansom. He forgot for a moment that she was the “Grand Old Lady” of the films. “Mr Stafford just had a fall.”
    “Where is he now?” Willy Abend, the wasp-waisted gentleman in the green suit, now pushed forward. “What happened? I want to know!”
    “Back to your offices, everybody!” Sansom was getting near the end of his temper. “All right, all right—”
    “Don’t you shove me!” Abend cried. “This isn’t Imperial Russia. I’m a U.S.A. citizen and I’ve got the Bill of Rights behind me and—”
    “Oh, for God’s sake!” exploded Tom Sansom.
    Doug August, the young man Miss Withers had seen coming out of Nincom’s office with clenched fists, now clenched them again. “Saul’s dead, isn’t he?” he said soberly. “I thought I heard them carry something heavy down the hall.”
    “Now if you’ll all just go back to your offices …” Sansom tugged at his belt. “Just because a man has an accident does everybody in the hall have to butt in?” He indicated the door. “Now get moving, please.”
    He discovered that Miss Hildegarde Withers was tugging at his sleeve. “If everybody on the floor is here,” she suggested, “why not ask them whether or not they heard the crash? I mean the first one?”
    “Huh? I don’t see …” But Sansom couldn’t think of a reason for refusing. It developed that from the eight writers’ offices in this hall six persons had come running at the sound of his crash or his voice. There was no telling which. Evidently the sound had not traveled beyond Gertrude’s office into the other wing, which narrowed things down considerably.
    “Okay,” said the chief. “You can all help if you will. Take the offices in order. Who’s in 301?”
    Frankie Firsk pleaded guilty. No, he had heard nothing out of the way. “But I was reading poetry out loud to myself,” he admitted. “Eliot’s Wasteland. It always makes Hollywood seem sort of bearable….”
    “Three o three?”
    That was Miss Withers’ office, and she had said her say.
    “Three o five? Oh, that’s this one. Well, who’s in 307?”
    Lillian, the lush and bedizened, spoke up from the fringe of the little group. “That’s Mr Josef, but he isn’t in the studio