Nipped in the Bud

by Stuart Palmer

  “Just a minute, sister!” barked the customs inspector. “Open it up, please.”

  So, for the lack of a piece of paper, they turned back to Tijuana. “Exiled!” cried Miss Withers in deep vexation of spirit. “And all because you couldn’t keep quiet for another little minute!” Talleyrand, who had been talked into the luggage compartment deal much against his better judgment, sulked alone in the back seat.

  There was nothing for it but to stop and pick up some of the immediate necessities of life in the shopping section of the town; one couldn’t go on indefinitely without dog food, a toothbrush, and certain articles of wearing apparel. There was no telling how long she would have to stay down in Mexico—unless she disposed somehow of Talley, which was unthinkable. Perhaps someday another veterinary would open up an office.

  Miss Withers came back into the lobby of the Hotel Primero, loaded down with parcels and dragging or rather dragged by the poodle, and then was surprised by a hail from the desk clerk, who even managed a toothy smile. It seemed that a phone call had come in for her but one momentito ago….

  “Vito, already?” she gasped. “What was the message?”

  No message. Considerably disappointed, the schoolteacher climbed the stair, opened a can of dog food for Talley, and then proceeded to bathe and change into her new garments. They were, perhaps, a bit on the gay side. But she had certain plans, and in this town the only way to be inconspicuous was to be as conspicuous as possible. She left the poodle polishing the bottom of his dish and was just starting out again when here came Vito up the stairs under full steam, obviously bursting with excitement. “No!” she cried. “You haven’t located—”

  His finger was to his lips, and with a wary glance behind him he motioned toward her door. Once inside, the boy said in a most conspiratorial air, “Careful! Somebody is snooping, I think.”

  “What?”

  “I just come in and ask for you at the desk. And suddenly a man comes up and offers me a dollar to tell him what it’s all about and what errands I run for you.”

  Miss Withers gasped. “Why, the nerve of that clerk!”

  Vito shook his head. “Not the clerk, another man. A curly-haired, good-looking foreigner in a fancy shirt. I took the dollar—”

  “You accepted a dollar bribe from Nikki Braggioli? Why, Vito!”

  “Sure. More better this way. I tell him you send me to find out where you can see dorty movies from Havana.”

  The schoolteacher sat down suddenly in a chair, spluttering. Finally she said, “Very well, Vito. What’s done is done. Come tell me, what did you find?”

  In a stage whisper, he told. This time it hadn’t been so easy. The girls hadn’t taken a train out of town, because there was none to take. They had not chartered a plane at the little local airport. Nor had they gone back across the line into the United States, because Vito had a wide acquaintance among the peddlers who hawked pottery pigs and bulls and horses on the bridge twenty-four hours a day, and would certainly have noticed two little girls in a big Cadillac….

  “Young man, will you please come to the point? I don’t want to know where they’re not!”

  He nodded. “Finally I check the filling stations. The gorls stop at the gas station on the corner by the Foreign Club very, very early this morning, and fill up their car with much gas and oil, also extra cans of gas and water.”

  “But where could they drive to?” she demanded. “I know they couldn’t have set out for Mexico City or anywhere, because the only motor roads in Baja California peter off in the desert, leading nowhere.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But they also ask for a road map, and want to know about the new highway that runs just south of the border all the way to Mexicali and San Luis. The cousin of a friend of mine wipes their windshield.”

  “Mexicali?” Miss Withers frowned.

  “Yes. But the new highway it is to be built soon, it now exists only on paper. The old road is passable for a jeep perhaps, more better for burros. Much sand. I do not think—”

  “I see, Vito! Good work. It’s obvious that they took a chance, but that they will get stuck in the sand and have to be pulled out. Probably then they’ll be heading back here sometime this evening, very worn out and weary and perhaps in a more vulnerable mood.” She nodded. “It would hardly be worthwhile setting out after them—”

  Vito shook his head emphatically. “It would not! Because—”

  But Miss Withers was making new plans. “I must gather reinforcements. Perhaps I’ll even have to try to put through a long-distance phone call from here. And speaking of phone calls, why didn’t you leave a message when you called me earlier?”

  Vito stoutly denied that he had ever called her. He wouldn’t take that much chance of someone listening in. “Then it must have been Nikki Braggioli,” she said. “Checking up to see if I had actually left town or not.” Miss Withers hastily rearranged her plans. “You stay here,” she told the youth, “and act as baby-sitter for Talley. When he’s alone in a strange place he has a way of howling softly, and I don’t want to get thrown out of the hotel.”

  She set forth again, with a very grim and unpleasant light in her eye. It was now after five o’clock in the afternoon, but the summer sun was high and hot in the sky and she thought it more than likely that Ramón Julio Guzman was still in his office.

  The waspish licenciado greeted her oddly. “Miss Withers, you have almost made me lose a bet with myself. I thought surely you would come calling on me earlier.”

  “Really? Why?” The schoolteacher followed him into a small inner office, sparsely furnished but meticulously clean. Photographs of Presidente Alemán and the late Franklin Roosevelt grinned toothfully at each other from opposite walls, and there was also a calendar depicting a buxom brunette, exceedingly nude, quaffing Tecate beer.

  Guzman held a chair for her. “I thought,” he said wisely, “that you might come to the conclusion that you need assistance.”

  “Assistance? To find my nieces?”

  Smiling, he showed strong gold-crusted teeth. “Your interest in the two young ladies seems hardly that of an aunt.”

  “Really? I must brush up on my acting. You are quite right. They are not relatives of mine, except to the extent that all women are sisters under the skin. But I am very interested—” She paused. “The girls haven’t made another attempt to reach you, by any chance?”

  He shook his head. “But I understand that they have left town, no?”

  “No. Or maybe yes. If they’ve gone anywhere I’m sure they’ll be back. I want to prevail upon them, or force them if necessary, to return to New York. Is there any way?”

  “You mean legal means? There is no treaty of extradition between our countries. Sometimes in the case of a fugitive from justice, it is possible to have him very quietly picked up and deported; turned over to the United States authorities at the border as an undesirable alien. Are the American police interested in these young ladies, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps. But—”

  “But there are no charges against them?” Guzman nodded wisely. “Then there would have to be a strong request, and even so—” He put out one cigarette and lighted another. “Of course, here as everywhere, money talks. But in this particular case there is the added difficulty that the officials with which we would have to deal are hombres, in the gallant Spanish tradition. It is unlikely that they would be hasty in pronouncing either of those young ladies undesirable.”

  “You mean, they are young and pretty?” said Miss Withers a little wistfully.

  “They are young, and pretty, and rich. They spend well. To have them deported as you suggest, especially since there are no criminal charges against them, would take a considerable amount of dollars.” His voice lingered on the last word.

  The schoolteacher thought about that for a moment. Then she said, “Thank you very much, Mr. Guzman. We’ll see what is to be done. And what is your fee for this advice?”

  “Nothing now, I think,” he said with quie
t deliberation. “Perhaps later, after you have had an opportunity to contact your principals in New York, shall we say five per cent of the dollars, for handling charges?”

  Miss Withers was reminded of the few crumpled currency notes left in her purse, and of the thinness of her book of traveler’s checks. This was all getting to be more complicated than ever she had expected when she so merrily dashed off to prove to Oscar Piper that she still had a shot or two left in her locker. And yet it still seemed increasingly important to her that the one who had smashed out Tony Fagan’s brains be brought before the bar of justice, and equally important that innocent persons came out unscathed.

  Or just perhaps that one little pink-haired girl from the country be just a trifle scathed, preferably with a hairbrush in Miss Withers’ own firm hand. Because there was really no legitimate excuse for Ina Kell having behaved as she had; Junior Gault was nothing in her young life. Or had the girl somehow been persuaded against her will—perhaps by that nasty little pistol?

  Thinking dark thoughts, Miss Withers came back to the hotel again, where she found Vito happily engaged in teaching Talley the poodle to roll over and play dead in Spanish. “I am also keeping one eye out of the window,” the boy told her. “No blue Cadillac.”

  “Do you suppose that somehow they actually managed to get through to Mexicali?” she wondered. “Or perhaps they’re still stuck somewhere in the sand.”

  But Vito shook his head firmly. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you before you rush off so fast just now. Those gorls don’t go to Mexicali, they don’t even start.”

  “What? Why do you say that?”

  “Because they make too much fuss about it at the filling station, where they must be smart enough to know that sooner or later somebody comes asking. I think it is a phony; I think they go any place but.”

  “Vito!” she cried. “You do have the makings of a detective. But where else could they have gone?”

  He shrugged, the all-expressive shrug of the Latin. “Good paved auto road to Rosarito Beach; nice fishing there.”

  “I doubt that the young ladies are avid anglers.”

  “That same road, it goes on down to Ensenada. Very beautiful, Ensenada. Right on the Bay, high-class hotel. Then on inland to Real de Castillo, very famous ruins.”

  But Miss Withers wasn’t listening. “That telephone call!” she gasped, and then turned and hurried out of the place and down the stairs. The desk clerk, putting aside his inevitable newspaper, informed her in a hurt tone that he had never said the phone call was from a little boy. As a matter of fact, it had been only the voice of the long-distance operator, and the call had been canceled a moment later—even before he had had a chance to ring her room and find out if she was there or not.

  “Long distance!” she whispered. “It wasn’t—it wasn’t Mexicali?”

  “Oh, no, senorita. From Ensenada.”

  The schoolteacher gave a little shiver. Somehow, one of the girls had managed to slip off alone for a moment and put through a call. An apology, perhaps, or a word of explanation, or even an appeal for help. According to the guide book on the hotel desk, Ensenada was the southernmost and prettiest of the resort towns on the Pacific side of the peninsula, located a little more than sixty miles to the south and boasting one of the finest hotels in all Mexico, a showplace of the West Coast.

  Even in headlong flight, Dallas Trempleau would gravitate to something like that, to a haven with the plush-lined service to which she had always been accustomed; a hotel where well-trained flunkies would fend off inconvenient queries if necessary.

  Now Miss Withers understood what the phone call had been meant to convey. There had been no intention, no need, of its ever being actually completed. Its only purpose had been to send that one-word message—the name of a town.

  13

  “Women are the baggage of life: they are

  Troublesome, and hinder us …”

  —SIR JOHN SUCKLING

  “SO NOW WE GO to Ensenada, yes?” spoke up Vito hopefully, his dark eyes alight with the thrill of the chase.

  “So now we do nothing of the kind,” said Miss Withers. Her birds had luckily alighted in a distant but identified thicket, and she had no intention of flushing them again—not at least until she was better armed.

  The inspector, even with the best of plane connections, could hardly be expected to arrive in San Diego until sometime tomorrow morning. She still had time to take certain steps, even though she could not hope to offer him everything tied up neatly in a paper sack. Undoubtedly he would consider what she was about to do as nothing more than flinging monkey wrenches into the machinery.

  But this was a somewhat more complex machine than even Oscar Piper realized, a Rube Goldberg machine which a flung wrench couldn’t hurt and might help. At any rate, detectives, like criminals tend to repeat their modus operandi, and the method had worked rather well for her once or twice in the past. She sent Vito out to walk the poodle—a long, long walk was indicated, she said—and over a sketchy meal sent up from the restaurant she settled down to pulling strings. Or rather to the pulling of long-distance telephone wires.

  At first everything went like greased clockwork. The switchboards seemed to be as quiet as everything else in Tijuana on a Monday evening, and she was also lucky enough to fall into the hands of a telephone operator who spoke English quite as good as her own. Her first call got through to New York in a record fifteen minutes; then she struck the first snag.

  Attorney Sam Bordin was not in his office. That, since it must now be after ten o’clock in Manhattan, was not to be wondered at. But he was not at home either.

  Neither Mr. Winston H. Gault, Sr., nor his wife was at home, according to the maid. She would not accept the call or take a message.

  Mrs. Ruth Fagan had a private and unlisted number, which could not be given out to anyone.

  By now the Tijuana operator’s voice was getting noticeably patient and strained, but in desperation Miss Withers remembered that the people who worked in the world of television were strictly nocturnal creatures, so she asked for just one more New York number. And then at last she heard the nervous pseudo-Harvard accents of Art Wingfield, back at Station WKC-TV. He seemed to have some difficulty in remembering just who she was, and why.

  “Hildegarde Withers!” she cried, and then spelled it out. “I’m in Tijuana, and it’s terribly important that I talk to Ruth Fagan, only she seems to have a private number and the operator won’t give it to me. What is it?”

  “Her number?”

  “Yes, the number of her telephone in the apartment on East Fifty-fifth. I know you have it, because when I went over to see her the other night you had already called her on the phone and warned her. Please cooperate, Mr. Wingfield; you have no idea how important this is.”

  “Important to who?”

  “Whom—I mean to her! In fact it’s important five thousand dollars’ worth to her, which is the amount she offered me to mix into this affair.”

  He hesitated, and for a moment Miss Withers thought the man had hung up. Then he said, in a rather dubious voice, “Well, really—”

  “Oh, stop stalling, young man. I know all about you and her.” When necessary the schoolteacher could show her claws. “Everything!”

  “Huh?” His gulp could be heard across the miles.

  “You wouldn’t want all that to come out, would you? Well, then!”

  “Come out where?” he asked, in a rather dazed voice. “Oh, skip it. Can’t you tell me just what this is all about? It wouldn’t do you any good if I did give you her number; Ruth’s not at home tonight, anyway. But I guess I could take a message, and then she could contact you—”

  Miss Withers didn’t hesitate at all. “Very well. Tell her that if she still is interested in seeing the murderer of her husband brought to justice, I am now in a position to help her. But it will take money, a great deal of money—perhaps even the whole amount she specified, though I don’t want any of it for mys
elf. Only I think I can promise immediate and interesting results. If she’s really serious, have her send the money to me at the Hotel Primero here.”

  “I’ll certainly tell her,” Wingfield promised, but she sensed that his tone had changed; that he was thinking hard about something else. “What town did you say?”

  She told him, and he echoed, “Tijuana! I didn’t get it at first! Then you’re down there on the track of that missing witness?”

  Miss Withers had nothing to say.

  “It was in the gossip columns!” he went on excitedly. “Is Ina Kell going to give herself up and come back voluntarily to testify? Is it true that she admits she knows something about the murder that might pin it on somebody else besides Gault? Are the authorities actually on their way out there to pick her up?”

  “Listen in again tomorrow night for the next chapter of Tony’s Other Murderer,” said Miss Withers under her breath. “I really can’t tell you that at the moment, Mr. Wingfield.”

  “But it’s true? The girl wants dough before she’ll surrender, is that it?”

  “Not exactly—”

  “Wow!” he said. “Think of the angles—”

  “Never mind the angles. All I asked you for was a phone number. This call is costing a fortune.”

  “Sure, sure. I’ll give Ruth your message. Sit tight and don’t worry about a thing, not a thing.” He hung up.

  “‘Don’t worry about a thing,’ he tells me,” said the schoolteacher. “Except that I’m running up bills in two hotels at once, not to speak of car rental and all the rest of it, including phone bills for long-distance calls that had come to nothing.”

  Because she was more than reasonably sure that Mr. Wingfield had no intention of giving her message to Ruth Fagan. “Men!” said Miss Withers.

  Which reminded her that the inspector would arrive tomorrow morning, blithely confident that she had landed and had the situation well in hand. When actually, as she would be the first to admit, she was no forrader. Except, of course, for some very nebulous questions and answers that were beginning to take shape in the very bottommost levels of her mind, questions and answers that didn’t connect with each other.