Read Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan for Free Online

“One moment,” Miss Withers said. “I’m a stranger here and I’m being Mrs Buttinsky. But there’s a hole in the chief’s theory, a hole as wide as a house.” She looked up at the dangling poster again.
    “I think I know what you mean,” Virgil Dobie admitted. “You think it was a frame.” His thick, angled eyebrows went up half an inch.
    She nodded. “Why should a man stand on a teetery chair to tack up a poster that was already firmly tacked to the ceiling when I came into this office earlier this afternoon?—answer me that.”
    He couldn’t. “Say,” Dobie thrust, “you aren’t? I mean, you couldn’t be the sleuth I read about in the Reporter?”
    “Perhaps I am. At any rate, I walked into something that smells. Tell me—you knew Mr Stafford better than anybody else—who would have a reason for murdering him?”
    Dobie didn’t answer. He was staring at her. “I thought you’d be—well, different.”
    “Never mind that. Who could have murdered your partner?”
    “Nobody. Nobody at all,” declared Virgil Dobie. “Saul lived alone in a little apartment crowded with pipes that he never smoked and books that he never read. He never chased the tomatoes—I mean girls. All he liked to do was eat and drink. And have laughs.”
    “Did anybody ever threaten him, to your knowledge?”
    “Anybody? You mean everybody! Half the people in Hollywood have threatened to break both our necks at one time or another but they always cool off. You see, Saul and I set out years ago to try to keep Hollywood from taking itself so seriously. Nobody ever murders on account of a practical joke.”
    Miss Withers said, “No? You never know just how people will react when their toes are well stepped on. And remember, young man, if Stafford was murdered, as I think, then the killer presumably has exactly the same motive for murdering you!”
    He stared at her as if the thought were not new to him. “Somebody among the victims of the practical jokes you two loved to play has taken it the wrong way,” she went on. “Where are you going, Mr Dobie?”
    He barely paused. “If I had any sense maybe I’d take a quick powder and grab the first plane for New York. But I suppose I’ll just rush out and lap up some sauce. There’s quite a bit of courage in a bottle of dark Jamaica rum.”
    “You’re not frightened, Mr Dobie?”
    “I think I am,” he told her gravely. “It could be.”
    “Wait!” she cried. “Won’t you help me try to find the killer?”
    “If what you say is true,” Virgil Dobie called over his shoulder, “then I won’t need to. He’ll find me!” And, grinning, he was gone.
    Miss Withers sat and waited. At six o’clock Gertrude Lafferty tapped at her door to tell her that it was time to close up the switchboard. “Are you going to stay late tonight?” she asked.
    “I don’t know,” said the schoolteacher slowly. She had a sudden hunch that Gertrude was thinking things that she was not willing to say, that she was more than normally interested in Miss Withers’ own plans for the evening.
    Perhaps this was the worm on the hook. During the past hour or so the schoolteacher had purposely been making noises like a detective, had pretended to be sure Saul Stafford was murdered when no one could be sure of anything. All that would be very likely to force someone’s hand. Since she was so determined to prove it a murder, a likely suspect might be handed her. She waited eagerly.
    “Because if you are going to stay late,” Gertrude went on, “I can leave you a night line through to the main switchboard. It’s no trouble at all.”
    That was not the kind of a line Miss Withers hoped for, and she indicated as much.
    “Well—good night!” And Gertrude was gone.
    “There is a young woman who will bear watching,” decided the schoolma’am. She sat at her desk, staring at the photograph of tired calla lilies which ornamented the opposite wall. Outside her Venetian blinds the twilight had