Nipped in the Bud

by Stuart Palmer

  “I’m not worried in the least,” said Ina stoutly. “I mean, not very.” She smiled, a brave, secret smile; one that probably had been practiced in front of a mirror.

  Miss Withers found herself yawning, and remembered that it was after two-thirty. “‘Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof….’” she said. “I suggest we let the final details go until morning.”

  For reasons of her own the schoolteacher insisted that the girls take the bedroom and leave her the couch in the living room. After the lights were out she heard low voices in the other room, then whispering which died away to absolute silence. She was incredibly weary, but somehow she spurred herself into getting up again and composing a telegram. Sketchily attired, she slipped silently out and down the stair, where she found a night portero who promised to send it for her.

  Five minutes later she was back on the couch again. “If I do close an eye tonight,” she told herself, “I’ll undoubtedly have something special in the line of nightmares.”

  But the nightmare was waiting for her when she awoke shortly before noon. She was stiff as a board from the cramped bed, and her mouth tasted as if the whole Russian Army had marched through barefoot. Someone was hammering on the door and she tottered over to open it, intending to ask the maid to come back and clean up later. But it was the desk clerk, with a telegram. His eyes bugged out at the sight of the borrowed nightgown, but she snatched the message and slammed the door in his face. She read:

  WONDERFUL WORK. I TAKE MY HAT OFF TO YOU. YOU ARE A BETTER SLEUTH THAN HARDESTY AND I PUT TOGETHER. HANG ON TIGHT TO YOUR SEA SHELLS, I AM TAKING FIRST PLANE AND BRINGING A BIG SURPRISE FOR BABY. LOVE.

  OSCAR

  “Bless his heart!” she whispered. It was quite the warmest and most enthusiastic message she had ever received from the man.

  She folded the telegram up tenderly and put it safely away in her purse. Talley was dancing around her, whining softly and indicating out, but she patted him absently and then knocked on the bedroom door, singing cheerfully, “Come, girls, time to rise and shine.”

  They had already risen and shone, as she found out a moment later. The bedroom window was open, and outside on the dusty balcony were marks of small feminine feet.

  “If I were not every inch a lady,” said Miss Withers, “I would say damn!”

  12

  “The next day is never so good as the day before.”

  —PUBLILIUS SYRUS

  NIKKI BRAGGIOLI AWAKENED FROM pleasant dreams of signing millions of autograph books for worshiping fans. He sat up in bed, gave a shrill yelp, and clutched the sheet around him. In through his bedroom window was coming a great brownish beast which resembled nothing so much as a bear on whose fur some madman had run riot with a pair of clippers, followed by the apparition of a gaunt and graying female wearing only a black lace nightgown and a blanket, Indian style.

  “Madonna mía!” he whispered. It had been an evening, but not that much of an evening. He shook his head hard, as if to clear it, and then fervently wished that he hadn’t. But perhaps if he took an aspirin they’d go away.

  “You!” cried Miss Withers accusingly. “I might have known it! Where are they, where have you hidden them?”

  Nikki slid cautiously over to the far side of the bed, and denied everything. It all took considerable explaining, and the schoolteacher even looked into the living room, the bathroom, and both closets before she gave up. He had an ancient, well-used portable phonograph, a new television set, riding boots and fishing rods and piles of old magazines (mostly Punch, photo publications featuring nudes, and hot-rod racing magazines) but he most certainly was not concealing any young ladies in the suite. The closest thing to it was a cabinet photograph of a not-too-young woman hung with costume jewelry, who appeared to have a most determined jaw. That, the schoolteacher decided, would be Mary May Dee, and it served him right.

  Nikki was insisting that if anybody had come in his window and gone out through his door he knew nothing about it, nothing whatsoever. Besides, he hadn’t come home until broad daylight….

  Miss Withers murmured hasty apologies, and then—remembering her dishabille—dashed for the hall. A moment later she also remembered that her own door was locked and bolted on the inside, and came back through his bedroom again. There was nothing for it but that she and Talley would have to return via the balcony. She half-expected to see a crowd gathered below in the street, but no. Tijuana, on a Monday noon after a hard week end, was as deserted as Coventry during Lady Godiva’s ride. “Thank heaven,” she said to herself. It was the only thing she had to thank heaven for that day.

  Half an hour later, fully clothed and in her right mind, she held open the door of the little rented coupe and said, “Come, Talley, the game is afoot.” But as the poodle scrambled in she added, “Only those vixens aren’t afoot at all, they’re in a big fast car. We’ve lost them, and a fine pair of detectives we are.”

  Talley wagged his tail apologetically. “You have even less excuse than I,” she said severely. “Because you didn’t drink any of that odd-tasting coffee last night.” She started the motor, and then killed it. There was no use leaping into the car and driving off in all directions; even if she were to catch up with her quarry again, what else remained to be said?

  The sensible thing, of course, would be to wash her hands of it all. She had done her duty and more than her duty in just locating the missing witness that was going to hang—or electrocute, if you must be fussy—a certain ill-favored young man who had shouted obscenities after her in a Manhattan jail. It would serve Oscar Piper right if she left him to pull his own chestnuts out of the fire.

  And would there be, the schoolteacher asked herself, any great miscarriage of justice even if the case against Junior Gault had to be dropped, and that unpleasant young man went free? He had certainly had extreme provocation; there was no real proof that the murder had been premeditated. Junior had already rotted in jail for eight months, and in one sense at least he would keep on paying for the rest of his life.

  But even as Miss Withers told herself all this, she realized that she simply had to go on, if for no other reason than that the faint shadow of a doubt had been planted in her mind. Those sounds that Ina Kell had heard, or fancied she heard, in the hall that night—after Junior staggered out of the place and before the girl found the body—might have been the real murderer.

  It would have to have been someone who knew of the feud between Junior Gault and Fagan, somebody who had been hanging around or perhaps even following Junior, and waiting for this golden opportunity; who had seen him come out of the place nursing his bruised knuckles.

  And, having once set her shoulder to the plow, how could the schoolma’am stop now—with Oscar Piper winging his way out here, confident in that smug way men had that she had solved his immediate problem?

  “I think,” Miss Withers told the poodle, “that it’s time to go back to San Diego and start sending wires.”

  Talley intimated that it was also time for breakfast and whined hopefully as she drove up into town. It was a different place now, sun-bleached and empty. Like vampires, Miss Withers decided, the people of Tijuana slept by day and prowled by night. She stopped the car outside a little lunch counter with the intention of picking up a raw hamburger for the dog, and then suddenly a smallish brown ghost re-materialized beside her, obviously out of breath from running. “Watch your car, Miss Withers?”

  “Vito!” she cried accusingly. “You little imp of Satan!”

  But when the boy found out what it was all about, he almost tearfully denied, in a torrent of two languages, that he had betrayed the confidence of a client. “It was my cousin Carlos, the busboy, I think,” Vito insisted. “Sure, that’s it. He takes your good money and then sends us off on a goose chase to the greyhound races. And all the time, I think maybe, he knows the gorls are across the street at the jai-alai. So he slips across and warns them, for the big tip. I disown him, he is no longer a relative of mine.”<
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  “You’ll have plenty left,” she said. “But never mind.” Somewhat mollified, she went on to explain that she had found the two young ladies anyway—or rather been found by them only to lose them later. “They may have left town; they may even have crossed the border though I somehow doubt it. But now it is more important than ever that I locate them, and at once!”

  Vito’s face lighted up like a lantern. “If they’re here, I’ll find.”

  “It won’t be so easy this time, now that they’ve got the wind up. Probably they’ve hidden the car in some garage and then holed up in an apartment or motel. Perhaps now they’ll even go to the extremes of doing their own cooking.”

  The boy grinned. “Nobody hides a big blue Cadillac where I can’t find.”

  “Very good. And remember, this time they mustn’t guess that we’re on the trail, or everything is ruined.” She reached in her handbag for the inevitable five-dollar bill, but Vito informed her that on a slack day like Monday, and especially for such an old and valued customer, he would accept a retainer of only two dollars. As he tucked the money away she added, “If you do get any clues, leave a message for me at the Primero.”

  He nodded and was gone. The schoolteacher went on inside the lunchroom, feeling just a shade more hopeful now that she had set her little brown bloodhound on the scent again. She sat down at the counter to wait while the chef made up Talley’s snack, and a moment later was surprised to see a familiar face in the doorway. It was Nikki Braggioli again, now dressed—or undressed—in red shorts and a brownish-yellow flowered Hawaiian shirt, quite unbuttoned.

  “Looking for me?” she sang out.

  Obviously he hadn’t been; his face fell and for a moment it seemed that Nikki would turn and bolt. But he recovered himself and graciously accepted her apologies for the surprise visit earlier and an invitation to sit down. “I was looking for some huevos rancheros” he confessed. “Wonderful for hangover, and have I got one! You too?”

  “Certainly not—” Miss Withers began. Then, “Yes, perhaps in a way I have.”

  “Two on the huevos,” Nikki sang out to the man at the grill. “Muy calor.” He lowered his voice. “I had a good time last night, they tell me. Last thing I remember, I was dancing the cancan at the end of the chorus line at the Bali Hai.”

  The schoolteacher said she was sorry to have missed it.

  “I am sorry not to have stayed home.” He sighed. “Not one but two pretty girls in my bedroom, and I have to be out!”

  Miss Withers sniffed. “Perhaps it is just as well. Though if you’d been at home they might have at least dropped a hint about where they were running off to.”

  “Then you’re still set on making them go home? Why must you drive away my playmates?”

  “You can find other playmates,” she said tartly. “I haven’t noticed any shortage of young women hereabouts.”

  “Ah, but none so pretty, so gay—and so rich!”

  “You are really fond of them, young man?”

  He held up three fingers close together. “We’re like this. On weekends, of course, I’m in love with my fiancée, but weekdays I take turns being in love with those girls. Though I think perhaps the turn of one comes oftener than the other.”

  “Naturally,” agreed the schoolteacher. The huevos had been set down before her, and turned out to be eggs fried in liquid brimstone. As she gulped down a bit of the fiery concoction she brushed away a tear and said, “It would be too bad if something unpleasant happened to her, wouldn’t it?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “She is in grave danger here, unless I miss my guess.”

  Nikki considered that. “Because of all that money?”

  “Money enters into it, but—”

  “You think somebody wants to kidnap her?”

  Thinking of John Hardesty and the inspector, Miss Withers smiled wryly and nodded. “I know it. Those girls shouldn’t be cruising around down here alone. They need more protection than a little pistol can give them. They weren’t joking when they wanted you to find them a good private detective for a bodyguard, you know.”

  “A strong right arm, you think, is indicated?” A very, very thoughtful look came into Nikki’s eyes.

  “Exactly. I think they’d both be very grateful, and appreciative—” She rose suddenly. “Well, I must be getting back to San Diego. Thanks very much for the eggs.” Miss Withers marched out to her car and drove away—but instead of heading toward the border she simply drove around the block. Sure enough, as she came down the Avenida again she saw Nikki, easily spotted in his flaming red shorts, coming out of the lunchroom. He hurried off down the street in the opposite direction, and she cruised slowly along at a very respectful distance. This was almost too good to be true.

  It was. Down at the far end of the block Nikki Braggioli suddenly stepped off the sidewalk and slid in behind the wheel of a battered, but serviceable looking British MG roadster, whipped it out into the street and took off with a tremendous roar. A moment later, in spite of all she could do, he was out of sight. All that Miss Withers had discovered was that Nikki knew, or thought he knew, where Ina and Dallas had gone.

  There was nothing more to be done here at the moment, the schoolteacher realized. But she suddenly remembered that certain formalities were in order before she could cross the line. She drove back to the veterinary’s office, and this time found Dr. Doxa in, a smiling, beady-eyed beanpole of a man in last week’s white jacket.

  Breathlessly she stated her business, adding that she was in a great hurry. And anyone with half an eye could see at a glance that her dog was free of rabies or hoof-and-mouth disease or anything else. She put down two one-dollar bills on the desk.

  “But, señora—beg pardon, señorita—if the animal has been bitten—”

  “Talley hasn’t been bitten by anything, unless possibly a local flea, since I made the fatal mistake of bringing him down across the border with me yesterday!”

  “As you say.” Dr. Doxa nodded, then hunted through the drawers of his desk and came up with a printed form. He picked up a fountain pen, and then put it down again. “First, may I see the bill of sale for the dog, please?”

  “I am not in the habit of carrying it about with me!”

  “You can then show me the registration papers?”

  “They’re at home, not here. But you can see the tag on his collar….”

  The man sighed and shook his head, but his eyes shone with the innocent delight of a child beginning a favorite game. “Señorita Weethers, what can I do? There is nothing to show that the dog, he is your property.”

  Even then a five-dollar bill tactfully slipped across the desk would probably have sufficed. But Miss Withers had got up on the wrong side of the wrong bed that morning, she was suffering from incipient indigestion and what was very possibly sleeping-pill hangover—remembering that coffee last night. “Is this a racket?” she demanded. “How much are you trying to squeeze out of me?”

  There was a short, stiff silence. Dr. Doxa’s dark eyes clouded, and his face set like concrete. “I can do nada for you,” he said, with a formal little bow that pushed her miles away. “Perhaps at the Ayunamiento …?”

  The schoolteacher retired, in some confusion. But she gathered herself together. After several false starts she found the city hall; she stood in line at five separate windows before finding the right one, and finally located a clerk who thought he remembered an ancient ordinance about dog licenses. Yes, here it was. Dogs owned by foreigners visiting or traveling in the Territory must be registered and licensed, at a fee of innumerable pesos per annum, under a law passed at the time the first greyhound track had opened.

  “But my dog isn’t—” she began, and then realized that the less said about Talley and greyhounds the better. It came to a little less than five dollars, American, and she reached into her purse. But it was not to be that easy. Before the license could be issued she must show a certificate from the Jefe de Policía showing that no
animal of Talleyrand’s description had been reported during the last six months as lost, or strayed, or stolen.

  The policeman at the Jefatura, after she had cooled her heels outside his office for over an hour, bit his pencil and smiled and said that all her troubles were over. He would be most happy to make an immediate search of the records, and if she would come back tomorrow at this very same hour, or perhaps the day after—of course, bringing with her a veterinary’s certificate that the animal was in good health.

  So passed the afternoon. Miss Withers was caught in a complex Rube Goldberg machine of Latin bureaucracy; she was the unhappy sparrow in the old story who flew over Beverly Hills and somehow got into the goddamndest badminton game!

  So this was what they meant when they talked about “a Mexican standoff’! But, she finally remembered, there were more ways than one to skin a cat.

  Finally she drove up across the long bridge to the port of entry, at the last minute drawing out of the line of traffic and pretending to inspect a tire until she saw one of the northbound cars ahead of her getting its spot check. That should mean, if her deductions were correct, that the next two or three vehicles would pass through Customs with a minimum of formality. And at this hour it was unlikely that her particular red-faced Nemesis of yesterday’s night shift would be on duty.

  She pulled back into line, and when her turn came she told the first inspector that she was born in Iowa, and the second that she had purchased nothing in Tijuana. She was waved on, and her heart leaped within her. The coupé leaped too as she hastily let out the clutch, only somehow she had put it into reverse instead of first, and the car slammed smartly backward against the next in line. The collision was noisy, but not hard enough to damage the bumpers. And then suddenly from the rear of her rented vehicle came fearful though muffled howls, and the frantic scrabbling of paws trying to dig their way out.