Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan by Stuart Palmer Read Free Book Online

the schoolteacher waved her away.
    “Thank you very much,” she said. “For nothing,” she added after the girl was gone.
    Things were beginning to happen though. The schoolteacher began to whistle a little tuneless tune. Lillian had built up a very nice straw man. Suspect Number One, the well-known straw man about town, Mr Dick Laval. Even the name was artificial sounding.
    Long since Miss Withers had learned to beware of the Greeks bearing gifts. She had also discovered that the police were more or less right in never paying any attention to information that they did not have to drag out of an unwilling witness.
    It was murder! Her feeling was more than a hunch. Of course, there remained the pressing problem of the “how.” Necks, she thought, must be rather difficult to break. It would take a bit of doing, as the Britishers say. In fact, she could not remember another case in which death had been brought about in just that way. Or was there one long since and far away?
    She worried that problem as a cat worries a ping-pong ball across a carpet all the way out of the darkened studio, kept it tossing in the air as she rode back to town in a taxi. It was a long haul, and she decided that it might be a good idea to seek closer lodgings.
    But there was time enough for that later. Now she studied her problem through a trayful of dinner in her hotel room. Somehow Saul Stafford had been murdered. He had feared auto accidents and poison in his drinking water and instead had received a neatly broken neck. Miss Withers tried to remember about the classic murder methods. The thuggees of India, for instance. They used a silken noose, didn’t they?
    But all this wasn’t getting her anywhere. There was one last resort. She picked up the phone and asked the operator to connect her with Spring 7-3100. “In New York City,” she hastily added, and sat down to wait.
    Three thousand miles away a wiry, grizzled little Irishman spoke a weary “Hello” into the phone.
    “I’m delighted to find you at your office, Oscar!” came the voice of Hildegarde Withers.
    “I’m not at my office,” he told her. “I’m home and supposed to be asleep. But some fool down at headquarters relayed your call. What in heaven’s name are you up to now?” He yawned noisily.
    “Listen carefully,” she cried across the miles of wire. “Have you got a pencil?”
    “Hildegarde! I know that old gag. I say, ‘Yes,’ and then you say, ‘Well—”
    “This is no gag. Oscar, I want you to have one of your men look through the files down at headquarters and see if there’s ever been a homicide case where the victim’s neck was broken without any marks and without any noise. If you find one, for heaven’s sake, wire me how it was done.”
    Inspector Oscar Piper scratched his hairy chest through the gap in the front of his rumpled pajamas. Then he reached for the dead cigar that lay in the ash tray on his bed table.
    “Oscar? Are you going back to sleep?”
    “I’m thinking. Wait a minute, will you? About eight years ago, maybe nine. Berry … Ferry … Ferris … Harris—that’s it. Emily Harris.”
    “She killed somebody that way?”
    “No, Hildegarde. The Harris dame was a fat blonde living down in Greenwich Village. In those days the village was something. Artists and musicians and old maids of both sexes, well steeped in gin. Anyway, the Harris gal was found early one morning by the milkman or the paper boy or somebody, lying in a soft flower bed with her neck broken. It was only about five feet below her bedroom window.”
    “But how was it done?”
    “There you got me,” the inspector was forced to confess. “The fall didn’t seem hardly enough to snap her neck, so the case is still in our ‘Open’ file. There was a drunken brawl in her studio that night, and all that the other guests could tell us was that she had complained of a headache and gone to bed. We held her boy friend for a day or two but we had to let him go for