Read Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan for Free Online Page A

deepened into black velvet night, a night shot with stars that were pale and wan above the wagging searchlights and the glaring neon signs of Hollywood.
    Long ago, she supposed, the others had gone their separate ways. But she chose to sit here alone, with only one shaded light on her desk, alone with the ghostly presence of Saul Stafford who had not wanted to die. It was at once the most perplexing and the most poignant problem that Miss Withers had ever faced. Stafford had half turned to her as one human being to another. Her hands had been tied at the moment by a mistaken sense of loyalty to her employer. Otherwise Stafford might be alive at the moment.
    It was a challenge that she must face. Murder next door, murder a few feet away from her….
    For murder it must be. In spite of the tipped chair, in spite of the carefully arranged picture created by dangling poster and spilled thumbtacks, she could not believe that Saul Stafford had met death by misadventure.
    She took up her letter to the inspector again, feeling the need of talking to someone. There was an element of humor, she realized, in her turning to him. Never once in the many times they had crossed paths on the murder trail had she failed to wish audibly that he was far away so that she might have a free hand. And now she had it.
    The little wire terrier of an Irishman was three thousand miles away, and she had no one to argue with. It was not easy to form her thoughts without putting them into words.
    So she tapped busily away on the keys of the typewriter for a few minutes, describing the hilarious descent of Chief Sansom upon the thumbtack. Then she stopped, her fingers poised above the keys, listening, not only with her ears, but with every pore of her body.
    Somebody was in the hall outside her door, somebody who had walked as softly as a cat. Somebody was breathing out there now, breathing and waiting….
    Miss Withers started to reach for the telephone. Then she realized that the line was dead. Quickly she rose to her feet and tiptoed across the room to the hatrack. With her black cotton umbrella gripped firmly in her hand, she approached the door. Forcing herself to take long, silent breaths, she reached out toward the knob. A quick pull at the door, and whoever was waiting on the other side might be jerked forward, surprised and off balance. She could get in at least one good crack with the umbrella which lent itself both to bludgeoning and stabbing.
    “One—two—three!” she whispered softly, and jerked. There was nobody at all in the hall.
    Miss Hildegarde Withers was not one to hold with ghosts and apparitions except in an extremely figurative sense. It was all right to imagine the ghostly presence of a murdered man standing invisibly behind her as she sought to avenge him. But ghosts who listened and breathed in doorways …
    This ghost was now fumbling about in the office across and down the hall—306 it was. She could hear the faint creak of a drawer, the rattle of glass on metal. There was a faint luminous wavering, like a giant glowworm, beyond the frosted pane of the door.
    “Ghosts do not breathe and they do not rattle drawers,” the schoolteacher sensibly decided. “And anyone who has a right to be in that room would turn on the light in a normal fashion. Ergo and ipso facto, I have the murderer trapped. Maybe.”
    Gripping her umbrella firmly in her hand, she tiptoed down and tried the knob of 306. It was locked on the inside. Then she saw the faint light inside die away. For a moment she thought that she had been heard, but then there was a scraping sound and the flare of another match. And still the faint rattling and shuffling.
    Miss Withers waited, her lips pressed grimly together. Then a drawer banged shut inside, and someone came toward the door with quick, nervous steps. She readied her weapon.
    The door opened, and the schoolteacher started a haymaker. She managed to pull the punch, however, in the nick of time. For it was