Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, December 1956 — page 27: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

I nodded absently, said nothing. - “Ed Williamson just got back from Rapid City. Flew in. this mornin’ in that little plane of his. Bought some cows up ‘there, I guess. He was real upset about the hangin’, a’course, an’ it didn’t help none when he walked in an’ caught the chief samplin’ some of his best drinkin’ liquor.” Sim chuckled heartily at the memory, then sobered. “By the way,” he said, “Ed says to tell you that he’s in the den and to drop aroun when you have time.” ~ We-climbed out of the jeep then, walked across the yard to the im- pressive looking white-frame-and- brick house. This country is so big that most things in it look small. The Williamson house looks big. Sim led the way upstairs to the death room. The blonde: woman in the tight-fitting green dress was hanging from the closet door. Her nylon-clad toes missed scraping the floor by perhaps four inches. The rope around her neck snaked its way over the top hinge of the door and out of sight. The door was closed. — A yard from the suspended woman lay an upended straight- back chair. Beneath her reaching, searching toes—and two feet back away from the door—lay a pair of black, high-heeled pumps, tilted over on their sides. The backs of the shoes were bent, in and down, as though they had been small for her and she’d been forced to jam DEATH OF A TRAMP. — them on without a shoe horn: In the middle of the room, his | hands on his hips, stood Charley — Bartel. Charley is a natty, smallish man of forty. He looks his age. He glanced at us briefly, muttered something under his breath, and looked away. I didn’t want to get into- a jurisdictional dispute -with him, so I didn’t ask him: what he was doing this far from town. “What doés it look like, Charley?” “Suicide, like’as not,” he said. “How do you figure it?” He transferred his hands from his hips to his back pockets and swaggered like a banty rooster around the dead woman. He re- | garded her from all angles in a queerly proud, almost possessive way, as if she were a tethered lioness and he had roped her. “She made a loop in the rope,” he-said. “Then she threaded the other end of the rope over the top hinge in the door and tied it to the inside door knob and closed the door.” He pointed to the fallen chair. “She pulled that over to the | door and climbed up on it and stuck her head through the noose. Then she kicked the chair out from under her.” He grinned _nastily. “Before it was over,” he said, affectionately, “she did a lot of kicking. That’s how she lost her. shoes.” Sim moved close to the gently undulating. form-and studied tiny scratches on the hardwood door and on the wall beside the door. 29 COMICLOOOKS.(EO)