“Of course he will.” Dick opened the door of his car and got in. “I think I’ll take a ride out to the hospital and see how Lloyd is getting along before I turn in. Can I drop you anywhere, Homer?”
“Thanks, no. Hank and I have rented a jalopy.”
“How about you, Inspector Buttikoffer?”
“I’m hanging around, Mr. Piper.”
Threadgill went off to his car and drove out.
Dick started his motor.
“Hold on,” said Homer. “Maybe I’d better offer you a lift, Dick. Your right rear tire is flat.”
“Is it?” Dick Piper’s face was dark with annoyance. He got out of the car and examined the wheel. “I think I can get home on it—it’s not all the way down.”
We heard Buttikoffer’s lusty laugh from the other side of the ear. “If you think that shoe’s bad, Mr. Piper, come over here and take a look at this one. It’s flatter than a pancake.”
Dick surveyed the other tire. “This is funny. All my tires are new. I wonder how—”
“It looks like a gag, Dick,” said Homer. He was bent over the wheel, examining the rubber. “You haven’t got a sign of a puncture on this one. Maybe some kids got into the lot and tried their favorite practical joke on your car.”
For a few moments Dick Piper studied the tires. If he was angry, he controlled his emotions masterfully. The silence grew.
“You got a spare?” Buttikoffer asked. “One of my men could change this in a jiffy.”
“Never mind! We’ll leave it here. I want to speak to the gate-man.”
“No trouble at all, Mr. Piper.” The inspector whistled into the dawn. “Hey, Sam!”
I heard Sam’s flat feet begin to slap the cinders across the lot. Then Homer did a queer thing. He slid into the driver’s seat and came out with the key ring, which he handed to Buttikoffer.
“I’ll have it opened in a jiffy,” said the inspector, bending over the lock on the huge luggage carrier. He muttered a curse at the keys. “Which one of these fits the damn lock? You got over a dozen of ’em here.”
“Maybe it isn’t on the ring, Inspector. I may have lost it.”
He stepped forward to retrieve his keys, but at that moment Buttikoffer grunted with satisfaction and we heard a key click home in the lock. “There she is!”
Dick Piper put his hand on the lock knob. “I’ve changed my mind, Inspector,” he laughed nervously. “I’ll take a cab to the hospital. By the time we get these tires fixed it’ll be late in the morning.”
But Buttikoffer was insistent. “Here, Sam! Open this door and change Mr. Piper’s tire. And make it snappy—I’m beginning to feel like Hank and eggs.”
I was standing opposite Buttikoffer, Homer and Dick Piper, when the red-faced cop jerked the handle on the door to the luggage carrier. Sam pulled the door open, and groped inside for the spare tire. Then, with a sudden start, he leaned far into the compartment. We heard him say, “I’ll be blowed! Look what we got here, Inspector!”
We crowded around the rear of the car and looked. It was a large luggage carrier, the largest I’ve ever seen on any car. It was deep and roomy and wide. And curled up in the back of it was a man.
It was P. D. Quillan!
Dick Piper’s eyes were fixed on the body with the bug-eyed stare of a nut in a strait-jacket. His mouth hung half open. His teeth showed. He was registering surprise, or fear, or sudden shock, or horrified amazement. It was hard to tell on that lean dull face of his.
Homer and Buttikoffer bent over Quillan’s figure.
I said, “Is he dead?”
“Dead drunk,” said Homer.
Buttikoffer whistled. “Lucky that luggage compartment had a couple of air holes near the lock or this monkey would be as stiff as a dead herring. Get me a bucket of water, Sam. Fast!”
Sam waddled off toward the main building.
Homer got up and sat on the running board. Buttikoffer stepped behind Dick Piper.
Homer said, “This might have been murder.”
Dick Piper ran his tongue over his lower lip. “Lucky you made me change my tire, Inspector. Poor P.D.Q. might have suffocated. I wonder how he got in there? Someone must have taken my keys from my jacket. It seems possible.”
“It could have been done easily,” said Homer. “The keys were taken from your jacket early in the evening, perhaps just after you returned from dinner. This thing was planned—planned carefully. Then, after Quillan was put in your car, the keys were carefully returned to your pocket while you weren’t looking. Any amateur could have done the job.”
“That’s it,” said Dick. “That’s the way it must have happened. I remember now—I took my coat off several times tonight.”
Homer paused to light a cigarette. When he struck a match I saw his lips curve in a slow smile. “It almost worked, didn’t it, Dick?”
Piper shifted his weight uneasily. “I can’t understand all this. So many people were near me tonight. Any one of them might have slipped those keys in my jacket.”
“In your jacket?”
Dick nodded dumbly. “It must have been when I was in the conference room with the boys. It was crowded in there for a while.”
“In your jacket?”
Confusion twitched Dick Piper’s lips. “What are you getting at, Homer?”
“Your jacket, Dick—your jacket. Habits are sometimes silly. We do certain things without thinking, you know. I couldn’t, for the life of me tell you which shoe I put on first in the morning. That is a functional habit, needing no thought at all. It’s pretty much the same with keys and things. We have special pockets reserved for such items, Dick. That’s why, when you got into your car, you took your keys out of your pants pocket. You never have kept them in your jacket, have you?”
“That’s a lie!” Dick stepped forward angrily. “What are you trying to do, frame me?”
Homer stood. “You’ve framed yourself, Dick. Inspector Buttikoffer is going to arrest you for the murder of Mark Richmond and the attempted murder of P. D. Quillan.”
Buttikoffer put a heavy arm on Piper’s shoulder, but the tall man swept it off and backed away from us nimbly. Then he ran toward the main building in huge bounding strides. Buttikoffer blew his whistle. It was a wasted gesture. Officer Sam came around the back path with his bucket of water and met Dick Piper in a head-on collision. The bucket and the water went up. Piper and Sam went down, hard.
It was the most elegant pratt fall I’d seen since that perfect gag the Piper Studios used in an animated cartoon, called “Benny Takes the Count.”
CHAPTER 19
There Goes Benny
The big round table in the corner of The Grotto was overloaded, but the rest of the place was empty, save for a few morning alcoholics loading up at the bar. It was almost lonely in the place. Even to me, who had lunched only once before in this hangout of the Piper men, this seemed strange at lunch time.
Eph De Cluny told me the reason. “They have tacked up a big sign at the main gate to the parking lot. The studio is closed temporarily, it says.” He shrugged. “So we must wait until they give us the sign to come back to work. Maybe Monday it will be so.”
Buttikoffer looked up from his third portion of Hank and eggs.
“That’s what you think, Frenchy. It’ll take longer than that.” He threw a morning paper across the table. “It may take years for this stink to blow over.”
Louie Cianchini fingered the front page, heavily headlining the affair at Piperland. “There goes Benny’s box-office rating.”
“There goes Benny,” said Mose Kent.
“You may be right, at that,” said Louie. “I’ll bet we have to invent a new character when they reorganize the place. People have funny ideas about the bear. He’s a national celebrity—a national personality.”
Jimmy Boomer leaned over Louie’s shoulder
. “You got something there, Louie. Look at that picture under the headline. They got Benny and Dick over the same caption: ‘Confessed murderer and character he brought it to life.’ Now when they see Benny flash across the screen, the kids’ll only think of murder.
“It’s a good thing for business,” said Mose. “I’ve been sick and tired of Benny for the past two years. We’ve been typing him with a phony personality and building our gags around his cute little fanny. He had too much personality and too little humor. Let him rest in peace!”
“Amen,” said Louie.
Jimmy Boomer slapped his palm down hard and laughed. “That gives me a terrific idea, boys! It’ll kill you! Listen—we could murder Benny in the last short we make. How’s this for a title: ‘Benny Bows Out’?”
“Or ‘Who Bumped Benny Off?’” said Mose.
The suggestions came thick and fast.
“‘Benny Takes a Bromide.’”
“‘Arsenic and Old Benny.’”
“Benny Takes a Powder.’”
“‘Bang! Bang! Benny.’”
Nobody laughed. Hollywood gag men are funny that way. Ever on the alert for animated themes, your gagging friend will milk humor from horror and try for belly laughs at his best friend’s funeral. This has very little to do with grief. The group around the table were deeply moved by the events of the previous night. But the sudden escape from studio routine didn’t mean a let-up in the business of slapstick. Manufacturing humor is habit forming.
The gag session stopped as suddenly as it began when Homer walked in. He had left the room to phone the hospital.
“How is Lloyd?” asked Ellen.
“He’s regained consciousness. He should be out of that place in a few days.”
“That’s wonderful news, Homer. I like Lloyd.”
Buttikoffer stopped dunking an oversize cruller in an undersized coffee cup. “Did he spill anything about who knocked him out, Bull?”
“I didn’t talk to Lloyd. But I have a pretty good idea who knocked him out.”
Jimmy Boomer said, “So have I. It was stinker Sugarfoot, wasn’t it?”
Homer shook his head and smiled.
“Then it must have been Hugh Pentecost,” said Louie. “He’s had it in for Lloyd—”
Mose interrupted. “Hugh Pentecost wouldn’t raise an arm to defend his wife.”
“I’ve seen him angry, Mose. I tell you he’s a dangerous guy when he let’s go.”
“You’re just guessing, Louie,” said Homer.
“Then it really was Quillan?”
I said, “Let’s stop playing Professor Quiz. Maybe if we gave Homer a chance, he’d start from the beginning, or shall we let him keep it to himself?”
“The hell with the beginning?” said Buttikoffer. “What’s this business with Griffin got to do with the murder?”
“Everything,” said Homer. “If we start at the beginning we’ll see how important Griffin’s slugging was. It all began when Hank and I learned about the adverse publicity mystery. The idea of somebody sneaking out bad news about the studio to the Eastern papers fascinated me, though it was impossible to conjure up the macabre events it foreshadowed.”
“That’s what made me suspect Sugarfoot,” said Boomer. “He was Gestapo agent number one, but he hated Lloyd’s guts.”
“Sugarfoot wasn’t the only person involved in the mess. For a while I suspected everybody.” He drew a piece of paper out of his pocket, and I recognized the list we had found in Lloyd Griffin’s office. “Quillan, of course, was first on the list of suspects. Everybody suspected poor old P.D.Q.”
“That’s silly,” said Ellen. “Because everybody knew he had been framed.”
Homer smiled. “You must remember, Ellen, that I had no background knowledge of the studio. Hank and I were members of the staff for half a day when things began to happen.”
“I could have told you, if you had asked me,” she said.
“I’m sorry I didn’t, Ellen. It wasn’t long, however, before I crossed Quillan off my list. By the same token, I soon eliminated you, Jimmy.”
“Me?” Jimmy Boomer almost dropped his glass. “Why should those Himmler bums suspect me?”
“You had newspaper contacts back East. So did you, Eph and Mose. Then again, Hugh Pentecost might have been involved because of his publicity connections, though I couldn’t imagine his reason for blackmailing the studio. At any rate, I eliminated all of you for lack of evidence. There was only one person whose personality suggested that he might be involved. That man was Sugarfoot.”
“Impossible!” said Mose. “Sugarfoot hasn’t guts enough for that kind of a job. He’d spy, yes, but I don’t think he’d dare to send reports out of the studio.”
“I’m leading you up a false trail, Mose. Sugarfoot was not the man who sent out those gossipy tidbits. He was mixed up in this affair in a different way. He was ambitious, you see. Sugarfoot wanted, more than anything else, to regain his status as a story man.”
Cianchini frowned. “Some status! He was the worst story man ever to sit in on a conference.”
“Story men have enlarged egos, Louie. Sugarfoot would have done anything to be returned to creative work. He became a Gestapo man—a number one spy for Lloyd Griffin. He prowled around the place looking for intrigue. He reported regularly to his chief officer. For a long time he worked with Lloyd on the publicity scandal. In spite of all this, however, he found himself getting no nearer his promised land—the story department: That was why he decided to work both sides of the road when Mark Richmond came to him with his proposition.”
Buttikoffer interrupted. “I don’t get it, Bull. Which side of what road was Richmond on?”
“The other side. Mark Richmond always yearned for control of the studio. He was that type of man. But he found his way blocked by the division of the stocks. Dick Piper had voting control, and always would have so long as things went well with Benny at the box-office and Piper Pictures showed its huge annual profit. There was only one way to wipe out Dick Piper, and Mark set about arranging the ten-strike.”
“Now I can really start hating that guy,” said Mose bitterly. “He was a much bigger rat than I thought.”
“And smarter,” said Cianchini.
Homer went on. “It was Mark’s idea to somehow release evil stories about the studio to the press men back East. Mark sent these yarns in personally—probably even typed them himself, at home. But while he shipped along his weekly news reports, he was smart enough to plant suspicion among the hired hands in the studio. He kept after Dick to organize a man hunt. He went further by organizing Lloyd Griffin’s department and priming it for the capture of the mysterious reporter. Then, as a master stroke, he contacted Sugarfoot to be his personal secret agent in Lloyd’s department.”
“Making Sugarfoot a double stooley,” I said.
“He must have offered old Sugarfoot plenty for that job,” said Mose.
“He did,” said Homer. “Mark promised him a job in the upper studio set after control had shifted his way.”
“Then Sugarfoot was the man who framed P.D.Q.,” said Ellen. “My woman’s intuition told me that long ago.
“You shouldn’t keep your intuition to yourself, Ellen. It would have helped me a lot if I had known about Sugarfoot earlier. He admitted to me a while ago that he framed Quillan. I began to suspect it last night when he showed us some clippings in his own room and claimed they had been planted there. But he couldn’t quite explain why he was so anxious to find Quillan yesterday afternoon. As a matter of fact, he didn’t really know the reason. He had been instructed to find P.D.Q. I think that Mark wanted to see him. Mark was very much interested in the slugging episode and probably thought Quillan was an eye witness at the affair. If he could get a story from Quillan, he might name the slugger in his exposé to the New York papers—a juicy story for the gossip colu
mns. Sugarfoot, however, never found Quillan. Hank and I discovered him in the projection booth, after which we warned him to keep quiet. He got drunk again and disappeared for good.”
I said, “That still doesn’t explain who conked Lloyd in Quillan’s old office, Homer.”
“I’m getting to that. But you won’t believe me if I tell you the yarn without the build-up, Hank. Remember, you showed me the light of day on this case when you reported on Shmendrick.”
Buttikoffer looked at me down his fat nose and grunted.
I grunted back at him proudly.
“After your trip to the La Jolla Apartments I began to think about that scrap of paper—the doodling we found in Clark Threadgill’s office.” Homer laid the scrap on the table for the boys to examine. “Do you notice anything odd about those numbers?”
We studied the numbers: 31-9-8-9.
Cianchini said, “It looks like a combination to a safe.”
“That’s too easy, Louie,” said Homer. “Hank and I thought of tougher solutions to Threadgill’s little number game. They’re almost meaningless until you add them and subtract the total from 100. The result is 57. Again, if you subtract 57 from 100, you get 43. It dawned on me, suddenly, that the number might be very important if it represented the amount of shares some single person owned in the Piper Studios. From that point on, I began to estimate the shares each stockholding member might own. Obviously, either Mark Richmond or Threadgill owned the 31. Next came Shmendrick with either 9 or 8. I figured the 43 shares belonged to Dick Piper.”
I began to understand. “That meant Shmendrick was important to Mark.”
Homer nodded. “Katie Hinds told us that Mark had given her eight shares when they were engaged. Mark himself, then, must have owned 39 in all, originally. Clark Threadgill had 9 and Shmendrick the same amount.”
“How did that gorilla Shmendrick Schultz buy into the business? Don’t tell me that dumb ox was smart enough to know a good investment.”
“Clark Threadgill will have to tell you that, Inspector. Possibly he paid a debt to Shmendrick long ago with those shares. Or Shmendrick might have blackmailed him, somehow. The important thing to remember is that Shmendrick owned nine shares in Piper Pictures.”
He Died Laughing Page 15
