D. Champion - Black Mask Magazine (Vol. 30, No. 2 — July 1947)

I went on, hating myself. “Jack remembered a phrase Byerly had used, one time when he came to milk the doctor. That’s the words he put in the non-existent fat man’s mouth — ‘Just tell the doctor his conscience is here.’ When Byerly saw that in the paper, he thought Jack was trying to frame him; he could guess that Jack was the killer, himself. Byerly had an alibi, but he couldn’t find her. When did he come to see you, Jack?”

His voice was just a whisper. “Last night. He knew about Jean and me, too. He’d been watching the doctor pretty close, and he saw Jean and me, together.”

Jean was Mrs. Randolph.

It got through to Devine, finally. “You mean, there never was a little fat man? Jack did the knife work, when the girl was out to lunch?”

“That’s right. And later, Jack and Jean would probably get married. Is that the way it was, Jack?”

He nodded.

“You didn’t want to identify Byerly as the killer,” I said, “not until you knew he was dead. You couldn’t afford to.”

“Women,” Jack said, and shook his head. “If I hadn’t neglected the blonde.” He made a gesture with his hand, and suddenly there was a gun in it, a .38.

I’d told him to arm himself, I remembered. I thought, there are a lot of guns between here and the front door. He can’t get through all of them.

Then I knew he wasn’t going to try.

For the barrel of his gun was moving toward his own mouth. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Devine pull his own gun, and my hand smashed up, to, knock off Devine’s aim.

There was a hell of a racket, as both guns went off. Devine’s tore plaster from the ceiling. Jack’s blew out a good section of the top of his head.

“That was a hell of a thing to do,” Devine told me.

“If he was going to die,” I said, “I didn’t want a guy like you killing him.”

I hoped he’d make something of that, but he didn’t. The thumbprint on Byerly’s collar later proved to be that of an intern who had handled him.

The poker game was still going on when Glen drove me back to the Dusy. But I didn’t want any more poker, not tonight. I drove right home. It had stopped raining.

Kenny O’Hara new press agent for the Hotel Diplomat, was doing a bang-up job. In his very first week, with a mere murder to work on, he was getting the hostelry’s name in all the local rags. Wonderful publicity — if only they catered to a clientele of corpses!

The four men in 907 didn’t look to O’Hara like members of the Loyal Order of Bears, and, having had two days of press-agenting the L.O.B. convention for the Hotel Diplomat, O’Hara felt he was an expert on the subject of Bears.

The quartet, in his opinion, looked much more like characters in whom the District Attorney’s racket squad would be much interested.

There was a fat man with eyes cut out of polished green rock who sat in a chair by the windows and mopped sweat from the rolls at the back of his neck. There was a wiry young man, very elegant in thin black mustache and tropical white suit. He leaned against a bureau and eyed O’Hara with a cold but interested stare. Astride a straight chair, his arms hugging the back, was a small man, jockey size, who had pink cheeks and crisp graying hair against a background of plaid suit and very yellow shoes. The fourth man lounged on the bed and gazed across one narrow shoulder at the doorway without a recognizable emotion on his dark square face or in his small, dusty-black eyes. He was in his shirt sleeves and his vest, sagging, showed the brown leather strap of a shoulder holster.

The wiry man kept staring at O’Hara and at the open door behind O’Hara. He said: “And what can we do for you?”

“Excuse it, please,” O’Hara said. He flipped a large hand in a deprecatory gesture and his brown, rugged face was apologetic. “I’m looking for a photographer. A photog named Clancy. I see he isn’t here.”

The jockey-sized man giggled, said in a high-pitched voice: “He’s just looking for a photog named Clancy.”

“What made you think he’d be in here?” said the fat man. He had a husky, rolling voice and his belly moved when he talked.

“Clancy,” O’Hara said, “is the kind of a guy who is every place except where he’s supposed to be.”

The dark man on the bed rolled over, got his feet on the floor while the wiry man by the bureau said: “When you want to find Clancy, I suppose you just go around knocking on doors?”

O’Hara grinned a little. “With a convention on and drinks in every room, it’s the only sure way. As a matter of fact, one of the hops said he’d seen Clancy on this floor. Thanks, fellows, and excuse me for intruding.”

The dark man said: “Wait a minute, friend.” He moved fast but with an elusive appearance of taking his time and put himself between O’Hara and the doorway.

“Take it easy, Ernie,” said the fat man.

“I wanta find out who this guy is.”

“That’s an easy one,” said O’Hara. “I’m press agent for the Diplomat.”

“A newspaper guy, huh?” said Ernie.

O’Hara smiled a little wryly. “Real newspapermen would give you an argument about that.”

The dusty-black eyes rested on O’Hara with a sort of chill speculation. O’Hara didn’t think he had anything to worry about but, even so, the man’s blank, unimpassioned stare brought a faint breath of menace into the silent room.

Ernie put out a hand toward the door to close it but before his fingers touched the knob a very small man appeared in the frame of the doorway. He had the face of an elderly dyspeptic monkey and his brown suit was sloppy, stained in front with hypo. That was Clancy and Clancy was no drunker than he had been two hours before, which was pretty drunk. But, drunk or sober, he knew what to do with a camera.

He said in a fast, nearly undecipherable mumble: “Heard you were paging me, Kenny. ’Nother picture, huh? O.K., boys — just look pretty.”

The camera which had been dangling in his right hand was up in front of his face before he’d finished his mumble. The flash bulb in its holder spat a white flare of light into the room and Clancy said: “Thank you, boys, thank you and thank you,” and was already weaving backward into the hall.

It had all happened so fast that none of the four men had made a move. But O’Hara did. He took two long steps, said, “So long, fellows,” as he went through the door. He pulled the door shut after him, grabbed Clancy by one pipe-stem arm and hauled him along the corridor toward the elevator.

Clancy said: “Cripes, Kenny, what’s the hurry? We got the rest of the afternoon to make pix and me, I can shoot pix so fast you think my flashbulbs is a guy with a lantern running behind a picket fence. Why, once when I am on the Omaha Bee , I established a world’s record by shooting two hundred pix at the livestock show in one day.”

A down elevator showed yellow light behind the glass squares in the door and O’Hara said: “What’d the Bee do — award you the Blue Ribbon?”

He was thinking that if he was only still with the Los Angeles Tribune and not a hotel press agent, he could have some fun with that picture. Four hot lads from somewhere didn’t get together in a hotel room out on the Coast without there being a Page One story in it. But when you were a hotel press agent, you didn’t put out stories on your hotel like that; you got the picture developed and turned it over to the cops and the cops either tossed the guys in the can without undue publicity or else ran them out of town in the same way.

O’Hara had quit the Tribune a week before but it already seemed like a month. It was a swell job he had now; a hundred and fifty bucks a week and regular hours and a hotel room and half-rate meals thrown in made a reporter’s job look like small change.