Nipped in the Bud

by Stuart Palmer

  When finally there was still another knock at her door, the schoolteacher resisted the impulse to say, “Come in, Oscar.” She crossed the room and said very cautiously, “I’m not sure I’m home. Who is it?”

  “It’s me, teacher—Sascha Bordin!” came the surprising answer.

  Hastily Miss Withers threw the door open. Bordin today was turned out in lightweight gabardine, sea-green in color, and he held in his manicured hand the sort of Panama hat which is never made in Panama at all, but woven underwater by Peruvian mermaids or something along those lines—the schoolteacher was never sure about men’s clothing. But she was sure about English grammar. “You might have said, ‘It is I,’” she reminded him.

  “Okay, so I’ve backslid,” said the lawyer cheerfully. “Things are bad all over, and getting worse. May I come in?”

  He already was in. Miss Withers shook hands warily. “Just how did you find me, and what do you want?”

  “I happened to phone my office a little while ago, and Gracie gave me your message. I also learned that my client has been turned loose—”

  She sniffed. “And did you also learn that Inspector Piper is down here with a first-degree murder warrant for Ina Kell? I suppose that, having lost the chance to defend one client, you’re down here looking around for another?”

  “You wrong me, Miss Withers,” said Bordin easily.

  “You mean to say you wouldn’t defend Miss Kell?”

  “From all I’ve heard of the girl, I’d gladly defend her for free if only she’d go out to dinner with me afterwards.” He sat down, asked for and received permission to light a cigarette, and then patiently explained, “So you don’t get the point yet, Miss Withers. The D.A.—and your friend the inspector—don’t really want Ina Kell in the dock. But they do want a warrant to hold over her head, a warrant strong enough to force the Mexican authorities to deport her in case the girl still refuses to return willingly. If she surrenders peaceably they’ll later reduce the charge to accessory, or even drop it if she testifies just the way they want.”

  “Sascha, that isn’t true!”

  “You think not? Those things go on all the time.”

  “But whom is she supposed to testify against, now that Gault is free?”

  He laughed. “My client is released from custody only because the D.A.’s office couldn’t very well hold him while they were asking for a murder warrant, even a phony one, against someone else. But the moment they have her tied up tight and scared half to death, they’ll rearrest Gault and then off we go to trial.”

  “Oh,” said Miss Withers.

  “I’m down here,” Bordin continued briskly, “because I’m determined to talk to the Kell girl before anybody else gets their hands on her. I’m asking your help, because I think you believe in justice and fair play. She’s left this hotel—but do you know where I can find her?”

  The schoolteacher hesitated, and he said quickly, “I see that you do know. Look, all I want is a chance to get a deposition out of her before she’s taken into custody. Is that asking too much?”

  “Perhaps not,” Miss Withers admitted cautiously. “But, Sascha, who are you to ask for fair play when you yourself sent her down here?”

  His eyes clouded. “I sent her?”

  “You knew she was here, or else why did you rush down to Tijuana?”

  “If you must know,” he said wearily, “it’s because last Sunday night—Monday morning, rather—I got yanked out of bed by a long-distance phone call from here. It was Ina Kell—”

  “Whose voice you recognized, even though you’d only heard it once or twice?”

  If that was a trap, Sam Bordin neatly sidestepped it. “Correction. I was called by a girl who said she was Ina Kell, missing witness in the Fagan murder. I’d never talked to her, though I knew in a general way that she existed, and somebody by that name called my office once when I was out. The girl wanted me to give her some free legal advice about how she could avoid being dragged back to testify against my client. It seemed that somebody—presumably you—was on her trail and getting close. I told her that she was mistaken in thinking the defense wanted her out of the country; that I wanted her brought back as much or more so than the prosecution did. So she gasped and hung up. I thought it over and then next morning I tipped off the press, having a feeling that a little publicity would bust this thing wide-open. Not that I expect your friend the inspector to believe me.”

  “But tipping off the press was supposed to prove that you’d previously known nothing about Ina’s being in Mexico.” The schoolteacher sniffed. “What was her voice like, over the phone? Was it a finishing-school voice or a high-school voice?”

  “Just a voice. Like most voices over three or four thousand miles of wire; why do you ask?”

  “I’m just asking questions at random these days. Sascha, where are you rushing off to?”

  The lawyer had risen and was moving toward the door. “Things to do,” he told her. “I see now that you’re not going to tell me where the Kell girl is. I guess I’ll have to start combing the town for her.”

  “Save your breath, she isn’t here.”

  “Gone? But she’s nearby?” he asked quickly, his eyes searching her face. “A few miles away—say, half-an-hour’s drive, or an hour, or—”

  Miss Withers tried valiantly to immobilize her features, and pressed her lips tight together.

  Bordin was smiling. “I’ll find her,” he promised, his hand on the knob.

  “Wait, Sascha. I’m beginning to think that we’re not really at cross-purposes, after all. Stay here until the inspector gets back, and perhaps I can convince him—”

  He shook his head. “Inspector Oscar Piper wouldn’t give me the correct time. You know something? It would serve him and the D. A. right if I got word to Junior Gault advising him to put on a wig and a set of false whiskers and sneak out of town for good. I think I might even be ethical in telling him that; after all, he’s technically in the clear for the moment. It might save his neck.”

  “What?” The schoolteacher gasped. “You’re that sure he’ll be rearrested? But—but that must mean that you really do think the man is guilty!”

  Bordin started to open the door, then turned with a confiding smile. “This is off the record, but strictly between you and me and the fencepost, who doesn’t?” He waved his hand. “Thanks for your help, anyway.” The dapper lawyer winked at her over his shoulder and then stepped briskly out into the hall, falling over two suitcases and into the arms of Inspector Oscar Piper, who had been standing frozen there with his fist upraised to knock.

  “This,” murmured Miss Withers helplessly, “just isn’t my day.”

  16

  “These two hated with a hate

  Found only on the stage.”

  —BYRON

  IT WAS SOME TIME before Miss Withers, who hadn’t giggled in forty years, could quite contain herself. The picture of the two hereditary enemies struggling to extricate themselves from their accidental embrace outside her door had been a little too much, even for her. Of course it had all been over in a second or two; Sam Bordin had regained his hat and something of his aplomb and taken himself hurriedly off. The inspector brought the suitcases inside, kicked the door shut, and slammed them down before her.

  “Oh, dear,” murmured the schoolteacher. “Thank you, Oscar. And don’t glower so. How long had you been listening outside the door?”

  “What makes you think—” he began indignantly. “Only a couple of minutes, why?”

  “I just hoped you’d eavesdropped on the entire conversation, so I wouldn’t have to repeat it all. But I will.” And she did.

  Unmollified, Piper said, “I don’t believe it. I mean I don’t believe it when Bordin says he didn’t have any idea Ina Kell was down here until that phone call—if there ever was a phone call.”

  “There could have been,” Miss Withers offered hopefully. “The girls could have put it through when they were hastily packing to get out of here, just
after they learned someone had been asking about them. Or Ina could have done it when she was taking so long to get the coffee and sandwiches.”

  “So what? We have only his word for it as to what was said.”

  “Yes, Oscar. But when Sascha was a little boy, back in my class at P.S. 38, he never cheated. He argued a lot, but he never cheated.”

  “You mean you never caught him. Besides, people change with the years.”

  “Some of them don’t change enough. You are overly suspicious, Oscar. If he had known where Ina is, Bordin wouldn’t have come here to the hotel asking me. That should be obvious, even to a professional policeman. I’m disappointed in you.”

  “Disappointed!” he exploded. “You listen to me! I only came back here because I thought it over and decided that for old times’ sake I ought to forgive you for making a mess of everything. I was all ready to admit that maybe you meant it for the best even when you inaugurated this fantastic fund-raising campaign to get money to grease the local authorities. That dopey idea was only planted in your gullible mind by this shady lawyer you were telling me about. It wouldn’t have worked. He probably would simply have put the dough in his own pocket, and then given you the horselaugh.”

  “Perhaps,” she admitted meekly, thinking dark thoughts about Lic. Guzman.

  “I was going to tell you how everything’s fixed up—I made a courtesy call at San Diego police headquarters. The warrant hasn’t come yet, but they’ll let me know here when it does, and they’re willing to give me any cooperation on that side of the line that I need, even to lending me a policewoman to escort the Kell girl back to New York. I was going to tell you about the warm welcome I had from Chief of Police Joe Robles over at the Jefatura—”

  “Oscar, how splendid!”

  He wasn’t listening. “And then I have to walk in and find you hand-in-glove with a high-class shyster from our own side of the border who’s trying to get Junior Gault off by fair means or foul even though he admits he knows his client is guilty. I suppose you had to go and blab to him about where Ina is?”

  “I didn’t tell him—at least I hope I didn’t! And, Oscar, nobody’s hand was in anybody’s glove. Was it so wrong to chat with an old pupil of mine?”

  “Sealed-lips Hildegarde!” he said bitterly.

  “Well,” she snapped with some asperity, “there have been too many lips sealed around here; it’s high time we had a touch of frankness. Has it ever occurred to you that there are a lot of unanswered questions in this Fagan case?”

  “Sure,” the inspector said wearily. “There always are. Everybody has an axe to grind, and everybody has something to conceal.”

  “The truth lies deep down, but sometimes a ruthless stirring will bring it to the surface. Worse even than unanswered questions are the ones nobody remembered to ask. Oscar, while you were gone I’ve been doing a little ratiocination of my own, and I’ve made a sort of list. Sit down, won’t you?”

  “Oh, lord, here we go again,” said Oscar Piper. But he sat down, crossed his legs, and lighted a fresh perfecto.

  “Oscar, can’t you imagine for a moment that after Junior Gault, with considerable provocation, beat Fagan to within an inch of his life, some other and more subtle enemy came along and completed the job?”

  “We don’t use imagination in police work; we use facts.”

  “Perhaps you should use both. Here’s another question. Why did Arthur Wingfield turn green that evening when you came up behind him and touched his shoulder and asked if he’d come along quietly?”

  “Why …”

  “Wait. What is there between Wingfield and Ruth Fagan?”

  Piper laughed. “A big-bosomed thrush named Thallie Gordon, mostly. He’s going to marry her.”

  “Why did Wingfield call Ruth on the phone and warn her that I was likely to come snooping around?”

  “And why shouldn’t a man be on speaking terms with his ex-wife?”

  “What? You never told me that Ruth was once Mrs. Wingfield!”

  “You never asked me. Sure, we knew all about it. They were married for a year or two, back in the forties. She was his first secretary when he came to New York from WGN in Chicago. They had a friendly split.”

  “Is there such a thing? Of course, I wouldn’t know.” The schoolteacher frowned. “Of course, Ruth did admit to me that she’d been to Reno once before. But Oscar, isn’t there a possible motive—”

  “I don’t see it,” he objected sensibly. “It proves nothing, especially in show business where a divorce is only a dropped option anyway. I can’t go along with you when you suggest that Wingfield might commit murder over a woman he’d lived with and already outgrown. Try again.”

  Miss Withers sighed and stole a look at her notes. “Well, there’s Ruth herself. How do you think a woman would feel, after having got a divorce only because her husband insisted on it, if he called her back—and then when she came, she found instead of the warm reconciliation she had expected, only a gay party? Ruth had never fitted into the bourbon and Benzedrine group; she didn’t like any of his friends except possibly Wingfield, so she walked out boiling mad. Couldn’t she have come back later after the party was over for one last try, found him unconscious and finished him off?”

  “And then went to bed in the spare bedroom, so she’d be handy for us to find next morning?” The inspector blew a large smoke ring, and another smaller one through it. “No dice.”

  “I’m not through. What was the murder weapon, Oscar?”

  He shrugged. “We figure it was one of those heavy vases.”

  “And yet the walls of the Fagan apartment were hung with better weapons—with primitive battle-axes and krisses and spears. Wouldn’t it seem reasonable …”

  “Murderers are never reasonable, or they wouldn’t commit murder.”

  “I wonder, Oscar. It has always seemed to me that they were reasonable, according to an odd, twisted logic of their own. This was an unusual murder, too—with a very unusual victim. A man who drank milk, laced with whisky, even on his television show. Where did that bottle of milk come from?”

  “That’s easy,” said the inspector. “Fagan brought it from home. He had a standing order with his milkman. So what?”

  “I’m not through. Why did Thallie Gordon come rushing into the projection room when Wingfield was showing me that film, to warn him that you were snooping around? That would certainly indicate a guilty conscience.”

  “Or else indicate that she was smart enough to realize that some kinds of publicity are no good for an actress or a singer. Of course, she was afraid that the Fagan case was being reopened—she didn’t know that Wingfield was only doing me a favor by running that old film. She and he both had been out of work for months after the murder. They were both reestablished, and she was afraid of new headlines.”

  “But you will admit that she had been mixed up with Tony Fagan?”

  “Sure.” For the first time that day the inspector grinned. “Why should she make an exception in his case? Thallie is like the girl in the limerick, the young lady named Gloria, who went out with Sir Gerald du Maurier, and then with some men, then Sir Gerald again, then the band at the Waldorf-Astoria. At least she had that reputation until she started getting serious about Art Wingfield. Fagan was her meal ticket; she had no motive.”

  Miss Withers eyed him coldly. “Well, then, I know somebody else who did. What about the girl who played corespondent in the Fagan divorce case, the one who got surprised by a raid on a certain hotel bedroom and had her picture taken in a nightgown? That’s one of my questions—I think I asked you once before to try to find out who it was—”

  “Judas priest on a hayride, I did!” Piper confessed. “Forgot to tell you. It was only Thallie, though, doing her boss a slight favor.” He told her about the photo Sergeant Smitty had enlarged so that it showed the telltale ring.

  “And you sit there with your bare face hanging out and say that isn’t a possible motive?”

  Piper shook
his head. “No. Even if Fagan played a dirty trick on her and didn’t tell her the detectives were scheduled to break in and take pictures, Thallie wouldn’t be really sore. A nightgown is practically working uniform for a girl like her. Her name wouldn’t be mentioned, and even if it was—that sort of publicity doesn’t hurt a singer.”

  “I’ll thank you to stop talking like a—like a policeman,” Miss Withers said. “Anyway, I hope I have made it obvious to you that, apart from Junior Gault, there are four perfectly good suspects—”

  “Three,” he reminded her. “But who’s counting?”

  The schoolteacher frowned. “Yes, that’s right. Now I wonder, why did I say four? An unconscious slip of the tongue, I suppose.”

  “Maybe you’re trying too hard,” the inspector prodded her gently. “You’re so intent on proving that Junior Gault is innocent that you’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel. Were you thinking of Dallas Trempleau? Maybe she was so mad at having her voice kidded on Fagan’s last program that she did him in. Only I doubt it, because we checked with the servants at her family home out on Long Island, and she drove her car into the garage hours before Fagan got killed. Or there’s Ina Kell, your favorite suspect as of last week, who had never met Tony Fagan in her life but still—you said—must have killed him out of unrequited love.”

  “You’re not especially funny, Oscar.” Miss Withers flushed slightly.

  “Well, whatever suspects have you got? Do you suppose that teacher’s pet Sam Bordin was so hard up for a client that he went out and committed a murder that would be pinned on a guy he knew would have plenty of money for a big fee, knowing that anybody in that income-tax bracket would automatically come to him? Or maybe our friend John Hardesty is a homicidal maniac—”

  “Be quiet, or go,” the schoolteacher snapped. “I won’t say where you can go, but you guess.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Oscar Piper, subsiding. He looked at his watch. “Say, can I use your phone? I was supposed to call the Chief’s office about now.”