Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan Read Online Free PDF Page B

today. He’s down at the Good Samaritan Hospital for his nerves. He—”
    “Okay, okay. Now, across the hall. Who’s got 308?”
    That was Abend. The dapper playwright swore that he had heard no suspicious sound all afternoon. “Of course, I did have my radio on. Clara and I were listening to the police calls.”
    Clara, a vague and adipose member of the secretarial staff, was in agreement. Long since she had ceased to wonder at the vagaries of writers and if Mr Abend wanted the police calls taken down in shorthand she took them. “It’s for the radio play I’m doing on the side,” Abend told them defiantly. “I’m gathering color. I want to do something with real social significance.”
    “Okay.” Sansom cut him short. “Three o six?”
    Lillian spoke up again. “That’s Mr Dobie’s office. I work for him and Mr Stafford. But Mr Dobie wasn’t in all afternoon—he’s out on the set.”
    “Oh, he is?” Sansom frowned.
    “Mr Dobie usually goes out and watches them shooting when he hasn’t an assignment,” Lillian said. “Gertrude is trying to get him on the phone now, but you can’t interrupt a scene, you know.”
    “All right. Number 304?”
    “That’s mine,” spoke up Melicent Manning. “But I’m afraid I was so busy trying to devise a scene where Deanna gets passionately kissed and still stays sweet sixteen that I didn’t pay any attention to any noises. When I write I just lose myself!”
    Chief Sansom muttered something under his breath. “Okay. Three o two?”
    Doug August said that with the antique typewriter he had been issued he couldn’t hear the crack of doom. “It makes more noise than a machine gun, and I didn’t let it cool off all afternoon. I’ve got to get a whole sequence out for Mr Nincom before he leaves for Arrowhead tomorrow. And if you don’t mind, I’ll get back to it.” He turned and shouldered his way through the crowd, the others eddying after him. Sansom worked them all through the door and leaned against it.
    “That’s the list,” he told Miss Withers. “So …”
    “So not one person heard the crash when Saul Stafford fell. And you still insist he had an accident.”
    “Well, it stands to reason.”
    There was a commotion in the hall, and then the door was shoved open by a vast, gargantuan man with heavy, slashed eyebrows and the wide, innocent eyes of a child. “I’m Dobie, Virgil Dobie!” he cried. “Where’s Saul? What’s all this about? If it’s a gag it isn’t funny.”
    “Your collaborator has been taken away in an ambulance,” Miss Withers told him. “With a broken neck.”
    His face went chalky gray, and Dobie felt for a chair.
    “He’s at Lumsden Mortuary Haven, on Western,” Chief Sansom said. “I’m sorry, Mr Dobie.”
    Virgil Dobie wasn’t listening. Miss Withers thought that he looked like a man desperately frightened, frightened for his own skin. “The chief here thinks that it was an accident,” she told him. “He thinks that Stafford broke his own neck while standing on a chair to tack up that poster. But I was in the next office and I’m not so sure.”
    Dobie looked up at the ceiling, frowned, and then turned toward Miss Withers. Something seemed to be puzzling him.
    “I’ve got to run along and report this thing,” Sansom said briskly. “But I’ve one last word before I go.” His finger wagged in Miss Withers’ face. “If it wasn’t an accident on account of nobody heard him fall, then how could it have been—well, been anything else?”
    “Such as murder?” she prompted softly.
    He nodded. “You think that a fight in which one guy could break another guy’s neck wouldn’t make more noise than any fall?”
    Miss Withers considered that. “You mean that in disproving your own case I’ve wrecked my own too?”
    “That’s exactly what I mean!” insisted Chief Sansom. “So put that in your pipe and smoke it.” He went out of the room and slammed the door.
    Dobie stood up as if about to follow.