Nipped in the Bud

by Stuart Palmer

  “And with stars in her eyes,” said John Hardesty dreamily, and blushed at the look the schoolteacher gave him.

  “Anyway,” continued Oscar Piper, “little Ina turned out to be deeper than she looked. At first she got into a panic and denied everything, even her own name. You can’t be rough with a girl like that; it took the whole bag of tricks before I could get her to let down her hair and admit that she’d spent the night in the Joris apartment. I had to threaten to turn her over my knee and spank her before she confessed that she’d been awake and heard the fight, and had got up and gone out into the hall to see what was going on. The murderer had left the door ajar, and she peeked in and found the body. Then, according to her, she covered it up with a rug because ‘it looked so lonely and terrible and messy!’”

  “Poor child! And then she tried to run away because she was afraid of being accused of the murder?”

  “Wait a minute,” cut in Hardesty. “You must understand that Ina was as green as—as chlorophyll. All she knew of life was what she’d got from romantic movies and soap operas and sensational fiction. She wanted to play it heroic. Nobody could get her to admit that she’d seen Junior Gault actually leave the scene of the murder until she knew he’d already been arrested and had confessed—even though we found his gold cigarette lighter in her handbag, that he’d dropped on the scene and she’d picked up as a sort of souvenir, I guess.”

  “She should have been spanked,” Miss Withers observed firmly.

  “Ina claimed,” continued the assistant D.A., “and I for one believe her, that after covering the body she went rushing back into the Joris apartment to phone the authorities. But Crystal had had the phone disconnected before she left, and Ina either didn’t know it or had forgotten it. She kept trying to get the operator and of course she couldn’t. Probably the only phone she had ever seen was one on the kitchen wall, with a crank. Meanwhile outside in the hall the paper boy had looked in the half-open door and rediscovered the body, or at least the feet that were sticking out from under the rug. He sounded the alarm, and then suddenly the place was swarming with cops. She realized she had missed the boat, and …”

  “Ah!” objected the schoolteacher. “But even if the paper boy arrived just as Ina popped back into her own apartment, it still must have taken him some time to sound the alarm, and five or ten minutes more before the police could get there. A rather long time to sit and jiggle the phone, don’t you think?”

  “Not for her,” Hardesty said. “Don’t forget she’d probably never seen a dial phone; probably she was expecting the operator to say, ‘Number, please.’ Anyway, when she heard the police arrive she realized that matters were out of her hands. She thought she might get into trouble for not being the one to report the body, so her only thought was to run and hide.”

  “A funny kid,” Piper agreed. “After we picked her up she claimed that twice that morning after she had thought it over she started to call Headquarters and confess, and each time she hung up because she got cold feet. There’s evidence that she did try to make a couple of phone calls in the restaurant. But down at my office she finally identified Junior Gault’s photograph out of a dozen others as the man she’d seen leaving Fagan’s apartment after the fracas.”

  “So, you see, Ina Kell is really the key witness for the prosecution,” John Hardesty pointed out. “She’s the one person who can actually put Gault at the scene of the murder at the right time. We didn’t dare take chances with her, for fear of showing our hand. We got a signed statement, but she wasn’t allowed to testify at the preliminary hearing or before the grand jury; we kept her under wraps and strictly away from the press and everybody. I got her a place to live at a nice respectable rooming house out in Brooklyn Heights; I even got her a job as a file clerk down at the Hall of Records.”

  “And,” suggested Miss Withers hopefully, “you took her out now and then?”

  Hardesty stiffened. “Oh, no. I knew then that I would probably handle the prosecution when the Gault case came to trial. It would be unethical for me to have any personal contact with a witness. Until after the trial, of course.” He sighed. “Maybe I should have held her in custody as a material witness, or required her to put up a bond. But if you’d seen Ina Kell you’d realize why nothing of the kind was ever thought of. She was—different.”

  “I am,” observed the schoolteacher, “growing more intrigued with little Ina every moment. For a simple, unsophisticated little girl from the country she seems to have done a pretty good job of winding you men around her pinky. And to top it all, she had suddenly disappeared? How and when and why?”

  “She was fine and dandy,” said Hardesty, “when I last phoned her a couple of weeks ago. Just to check up, you understand, nothing personal.”

  “Of course not!” Miss Withers beamed.

  “Our operatives were keeping an eye on her, too, though we didn’t have men enough to spare so we could have her shadowed twenty-four hours a day. It wasn’t as if her story had got into the papers—nobody knew about her at all. And then last Monday when we tried to serve a subpoena on her, we found her gone.”

  “Gone? Gone where?”

  “Just gone. Quit her job and moved out of her room, the preceding Saturday. Told her landlady she’d write and give her the forwarding address, but she hasn’t. So if you can help us on this thing in any way …” Hardesty smiled brightly. “Of course, there mustn’t be any fanfare. I don’t mind so much having it known that I let an important witness slip through my fingers, but we’re still hoping to bring her back and spring her as a surprise on the defense when the case comes up again.”

  “I see,” said Miss Withers slowly. “I suppose you yourself talked to her landlady and the other roomers? Was her room searched?”

  Piper nodded. “Nothing.”

  “Her friends?”

  “She seems to have been a shy little thing; kept pretty much to herself. No dates. When she wasn’t at the office she was either at a movie or window-shopping along Fifth and Madison or with her nose buried in a library book.”

  “Probably scared stiff, and after what happened on her first day in the city I hardly blame her. I see I shall have to start from scratch. But three heads are better than one, and you gentlemen had the advantage of meeting the young lady. Mr. Hardesty, yours is the first guess. Where would you say little Ina has gone?”

  The assistant D.A. paused to light a cigarette, his big hands surprisingly dexterous. “I think she’s in hiding,” he said. “Probably not far away. Ina has a powerful imagination, and I think she brooded over the impending trial until she just couldn’t stand it. She may have had a sort of long-distance crush on Junior Gault—many nice girls are fascinated by scoundrels—and she couldn’t face swearing his life away on the witness stand. Since she wouldn’t lie, and anyway could hardly retract her own sworn statement, I think she just decided to drop out of sight until after the trial.”

  “The girl would have to have a heart soft as butter, to say nothing of her head. But, very well. Oscar, what is your hypothesis?”

  “I hate to say it,” pronounced the inspector, “but it’s possible she was bought off. The girl was dying to get into the big time, and maybe being a file clerk in New York wasn’t much improvement over the home town. Somebody got to her—there could have been a leak somewhere in the D.A.’s office or mine. Junior Gault, or his family, or his attorney, could have learned how important Ina’s testimony would be to the prosecution. A few thousand bucks and a plane ticket dangled in front of Miss Ina Kell …” Piper grinned. “Maybe those stars our young friend here saw in her eyes were only star sapphires!”

  “You’ll eat those words,” Hardesty said quickly, “when we find her.”

  “If we find her,” put in Miss Withers. “Of course, we are all aware that there are still other possibilities. Ina might have been frightened away, or kidnapped, or even worse.”

  “Relax, Hildegarde,” advised Piper. “She hasn’t been murdered. The only person with
the faintest motive is still safe behind bars.”

  “Relax, yourself,” she countered snappishly. “And, speaking of motives, I am still far from convinced that Junior Gault really had sufficient reason to kill Fagan. Just because of a poke in the jaw, and some snide remarks on the air….”

  “Well, now!” The inspector nodded genially at Hardesty. “Listen at her! And only a couple of hours ago in my office she was swearing that this time she had no intention of upsetting any applecarts. John, don’t you agree with me that this is the time for us to fix it up so Miss Withers here has a look at exhibit A?”

  The assistant D.A. shrugged, but Miss Withers sat up straight. “If you’re thinking of showing me a lot of gruesome photographs of a dead body …”

  “Not at all, Hildegarde. You’re going to have a look at the motive, and then you can decide for yourself if it’s sufficient or not. Know anything about television?”

  She looked blank. “From what I’ve seen it’s mostly wrestlers and puppet shows and old Hopalong Autry movies seen through a blinding snowstorm.”

  “Forget the good old days of the family stereoscope, will you? Time marches on.” The inspector winked at Hardesty and rose from the table. “Come, Hildegarde…. Just a minute while I make a phone call, and we’ll be on our way.”

  “Hmm,” Miss Withers said. “Oscar, I think you’re up to something. But I’m just curious enough to trail along.”

  “You’ll get curiouser and curiouser,” he promised, with a too-innocent smile.

  4

  “What will you do to yourself, who have added insult to injury?”

  —PHAEDRUS

  THE POLICE LIMOUSINE WAS turning east toward Madison, though, as Miss Withers pointed out, the Barbizon was straight uptown. “Who said I was taking you home?” the inspector countered. “This is New York, and the night is young.”

  “But I’m not. And it’s getting on toward my bedtime.”

  “Nonsense. Tomorrow may be too late. You want to help us find the Kell girl, don’t you? Hardesty wants her found pretty bad, and not only because she’s an important witness. I think he’s a little sweet on her, don’t you? Not that I blame him. She had a pixie face and hair the color of a Wyoming sunset, and there were times—”

  “Times when you found yourself wishing you were thirty years younger and had all your own teeth and hair? Well, Oscar, you aren’t and you haven’t. Face facts.”

  “Okay, you face some! I found out over the phone that young Wingfield is still over at WKC-TV. He’s one of the bright young men of television, and if he isn’t too tied up I’ll get him to show you a film which is now something of a collector’s item. When you see it you’ll realize why.”

  They pulled up outside that vast cathedral on lower Madison Avenue which is consecrated to the dream-makers, to a nation’s collective, commercialized escape from reality. Piper, Miss Withers and Talley the poodle were all whisked up to the twelfth floor, and as they approached the information desk the brittle blonde on duty took one look at the schoolteacher and said, “Sorry, no casting tonight.” Miss Withers started an indignant sniff and then warmed at the implied compliment, having always felt that she had latent Thespian talents.

  “Dogs,” the receptionist continued, “are auditioned only at ten Monday mornings. He talks, of course?”

  The schoolteacher recovered quickly. “Yes—and sings baritone.” Then she flounced off after the inspector, who across the room had just caught sight of a thinnish young man in well-cut but rumpled flannels, coming through a doorway. Piper slipped quietly up behind him and put a heavy hand on his shoulder. “This is it, Wingfield. Will you come quietly or do I use the handcuffs?”

  The young man jumped as if somebody had given him a hotfoot. “Yipe!” he cried, and then managed a feeble sort of grin. “Please, Inspector. My nerves!”

  Oscar was getting corny, Miss Withers felt. The feeble joke had made poor Mr. Wingfield turn quite green for a moment. He was obviously relieved when they were introduced and he learned the reason for the visit. “Why, certainly,” he said in a rather threadbare Harvard accent, “I’ll dig up a print of that thing somewhere and get you set in a projection room right away; no trouble at all.”

  Piper said they could count him out, as he’d seen the film several times, and besides he had to get back down to the office and start some wheels turning at Missing Persons. “See you later, Hildegarde. And thanks, Wingfield—I’ll fix your next two parking tickets.” He waved cheerily and was gone.

  Miss Withers found herself being ushered down a wide corridor filled with scurrying people, vaguely suggestive of a disturbed anthill. She was a little worried as to Talley’s welcome, but, as Art Wingfield pointed out, in a television studio she could have been walking a saber-toothed tiger on a leash and nobody would have given a second look. She and the poodle were soon deposited in a small, slanting room where a dozen or so big leather chairs faced a screen, and left briefly alone. Then their guide and mentor was back, with a flat, round tin can about the size of a pie plate. “You want to see the whole thing, ma’am, or just the last reel with all the fireworks?”

  “All or nothing. But first could you tell me just what it’s all about?”

  “The background? Yes, yes, of course.” Wingfield must have trained for his job, she thought, on Benzedrine and jumping beans. “You’re about to see a kinescope, which is a TV program recorded on film. This particular broadcast, the last one Tony Fagan ever made, was a live show—but there was a studio audience and also a recording on film, to be used later on the West Coast.” He mopped his forehead. “Sit tight, Miss Withers. There never was a program like this before, and God grant there never will be another.” Wingfield shuddered, and then signaled the projectionist.

  The room darkened, the screen lightened, and then after a few identifying credits and numbers had flashed past they were suddenly looking at a big, balding man who sat sprawled elaborately at ease with his feet on a desk littered with papers, props, and even a bottle of milk. If this was Tony Fagan, Miss Withers decided, he had a most unusual face, vaguely suggesting a personable gargoyle, with the peaked eyebrows and the wide slit of a mouth. “He’s smiling, but he’s nervous as a cat on hot bricks,” the schoolteacher murmured.

  “Was” corrected Wingfield. “Tony Fagan’s been in a box for eight months, remember. I went to his funeral, and he drew twice the house he ever had at any other personal appearance.”

  “The Gault Foods Show!” came the offensively booming voice of an invisible announcer, and then a fanfare of distant trumpets. Fagan looked up, nodded, and slid his feet off the desk. Then he picked up a small package with the firm’s name prominently displayed. He ostentatiously dropped the box and blew on his fingers with elaborate pantomime. “Cold!” he confided, shivering.

  Over applause from the studio audience, Fagan said easily, “All right, as if you good people out there didn’t know, this is old Mother Fagan’s little boy Tony back again, brought to you tonight through the courtesy of Gault Zero Foods, which are the very best frozen foods, it says here in the script….”

  “He’d learned about an hour before this broadcast that the Gault people had decided not to renew his contract,” Wingfield explained.

  The man on the screen was smiling his wide thin-lipped smile, chatting about one thing and another, smoking a dollar cigar and tossing off quips about current events—current last December. Now and then, as casually as if they had just dropped in for an impromptu audition, he introduced his guest talent—an Italian boy who worked himself into a lather squeezing opera from a mammoth piano accordion, and a little later three lush, dead-panned girls who wore sunbonnets and Gay Nineties bathing suits and harmonized “Silver Dollar.” While they were giving their all, Fagan leaned back in his chair and nodded approvingly, now and then taking a swig from the bottle on his desk. “A milk addict, wasn’t he?” observed Miss Withers.

  Art Wingfield snorted. “Panther milk,” he told her. “Nobody susp
ected it then, but Fagan had spiked the bottle with a pint of bourbon. Cute kid, Fagan.”

  The program rambled along in a breezy, informal sort of way, and it was hard for the schoolteacher to realize that for all its cheery glibness, its carefully calculated lightness, the Dark Angel was already beating his wings overhead. Now an earnest, ferret-faced little man who whistled duets with a bedraggled canary had his crowded moment and withdrew in confusion, with Fagan holding his nose and crying for “the hook.”

  “That was poor Joe Fernando,” Wingfield explained. “Always trying the amateur shows, and always getting laughed off. Takes himself seriously, too.” He lighted a cigarette from the end of the one half-burned in his mouth. “Anything went on Fagan’s show—his stuff was out of Henry Morgan by Arthur Godfrey with a dash of the old Major Bowes routine, but it went over.”

  Next the three lovelies returned, dressed in wispy French bathing suits, to render a slightly purified version of that Dixie college classic, “Cold as a Fish in a Frozen Pool,” after which the studio orchestra continued the theme with variations while the cameras swung to a brisk young woman miraculously preparing dinner for four out of different Gault Food packages, the only part of the program so far which Miss Withers enjoyed. Even Talley, who had been snoozing comfortably in his chair, perked up his ears and then subsided as his nose told him that the steak and pheasant and lobster and so on were only phantoms after all.

  The first commercial over, they were back with Tony Fagan again as he told a couple of long and fairly funny stories about what happened to him on the way to the studio tonight. “Those papers on the desk in front of him were supposed to be a script,” Wingfield explained. “But Fagan was his own producer and director, and he always ad-libbed most of his stuff anyway, switching it all around. Nobody ever knew what was coming next.”