Nipped in the Bud

by Stuart Palmer

He talked, or rather listened, for a few moments, and when he hung up the little Irishman was obviously in a much-improved humor. “You were right about one thing, anyway,” he said. “Ina Kell is safe and sound in Ensenada.”

  “But, Oscar,” she said wonderingly, “what fast sleuthing!”

  “You can give the credit to Chief Joe Robles. When I walked into his office a while ago he laid out the red carpet, remembering me from the last police chiefs’ convention in Chicago. Robles is a sour-bitten, hard-faced character who looks like a retired jockey, but I for one would hate to offer him a dirty dollar or a dirty peso. He’s an old-time peace officer, and a good one.”

  “He is going to cooperate, then?”

  “All the way—as soon as that warrant arrives. Meanwhile he offered to check with Ensenada. The girls are holed up in a deluxe bungalow on the grounds of the Hotel Pacifico; they registered there Monday forenoon—under phony names, of course. But the descriptions fit.”

  “Of course.” Miss Withers frowned. “I suppose that your friend Chief Robles has arranged to have a succession of thumb-fingered policemen watching that bungalow twenty-four hours a day? There would be no better way to frighten those girls into further flight.”

  “Still trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs, aren’t you? No, there’s no surveillance, by my request.” The inspector kicked the nearest suitcase. “I wouldn’t bother to unpack these if I were you,” he said. “This case is just about wound up.”

  “I hope so,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers doubtfully. “At any rate it is getting on toward dinnertime.” She edged him out into the hall. “Would you mind running along so that I can get clothed and in my right mind, if any? How about picking me up at six-thirty?”

  He went, but it was only a minute or two after six when a heavy knock came at the door. “Oscar, I said six-thirty!” she cried.

  “Is not Oscar,” came the voice outside. “Is me.” And Vito came in, swaggering, obviously pleased with himself. “These ones who are suing you with the lawsuit,” he announced, “they are not upstanding citizens. They none of them have regular jobs, they don’t even guide for a living like me. They are peddlers of junk jewelry and lottery tickets, very much lowlifes.”

  The schoolteacher nodded. “Then you would say, Vito, that none of them was likely to have been gambling heavily on the greyhound races?”

  “Not much.”

  “But somebody must be behind it all!”

  “Sure. I don’t know who that somebody is, but—well, one of the hombres whose name is on that paper has a brother who works in the garage down the street where Mr. Braggioli keeps his expensive imported automobile from England.”

  “Ah ha!” cried Miss Withers. “That was one rat I already smelled. Which reminds me that Nikki Braggioli has been conspicuous by his absence of late. Vito, would you please go out in the hall and warn me by rapping three times if you see anybody coming?”

  “Sure—on this door?”

  She shook her head, and told him what door she meant. A moment or so later the schoolteacher was out on the little iron balcony again, stepping gingerly in through the window into Nikki’s bedroom.

  There had been, she immediately noticed, some changes made. It was an empty, bare sort of bedroom, the pictures gone from the walls, the closets bare. In the middle of the living room were three big suitcases, packed and waiting. Nikki Braggioli, it appeared, was about to take off. In one wastebasket, torn in bits, was the portrait of his intended bride, Mary May Dee.

  Miss Withers was very thoughtful for a moment, and finally withdrew the way she had come. But this was the wrong time of day, she found, for balcony-prowling. In the street below somebody cried a derisive “Hola!” and a moment later a group of strolling mariachis broke into “Amor, amor,” all looking up and grinning at her. Leave it to the Latin temperament to put only one construction on things.

  Somewhat flushed, the schoolteacher hustled back into her own suite, to find that somebody was pounding rhythmically on her door. She hastily opened it, all set to remind the inspector that when she said six-thirty she meant six-thirty, but it wasn’t Oscar Piper. It wasn’t even Vito, though that young man was hovering about in the background, looking vaguely worried and very conspiratorial. She slipped him a quick wink, and then admitted her visitor.

  The inspector came jauntily down the hall at exactly six-thirty and rapped sharply on her door. As it opened he said, “Okay, I’m more than ready for that free dinner. Leave us be off—”

  Then he stopped short. Miss Withers already had company, in the shape and form of a tall, unhappy-looking young man in rumpled flannels. “Oscar,” the schoolteacher said pleasantly, “I believe you know Mr. Wingfield?”

  “That I do,” said the inspector without warmth.

  “He’s come all the way out here with a camera crew to take motion pictures of the surrender of Ina. He has two photographers and a sound man and a script girl all waiting; it seems that they are most anxious to make a big production of it all, and to supplement the actual event with background shots of Ina and Dallas at home, at the races, or just lying on the beach in Bikini bathing suits. I have been trying to explain to him—”

  “You would,” Piper told her bitterly.

  “Yes, as I said, I’ve just finished explaining that there isn’t any possibility of all that fanfare. Such publicity is out, because the situation is much too delicate—”

  “Maybe we did go off half-cocked,” Wingfield admitted. “But it would have been a great story. It wasn’t the sort of thing we could wait for confirmation on, if you know what I mean. So we took a chance.” He sighed. “Well, I guess we’ll have to go back.” He sighed again.

  The inspector swallowed, and then said, almost sheepishly, “Don’t be in too much of a hurry. Maybe we can work something out.”

  They both stared at him. “Oscar, have you got a touch of the sun?” she asked. “You mean, you actually have no objections?”

  “My personal opinion has nothing to do with it,” the inspector told them bluntly. “I talked to New York on the phone a little while ago, and some of the higher-ups think it might not be a bad idea to have this put on the air. Look at the Kefauver thing and the splash it made. The Department has had enough bad publicity in the past, with those old bookie scandals and so forth. Not that any of that mud landed on Homicide. But the Commish thinks it might be good publicity for the service.”

  “Whoops!” said Art Wingfield solemnly. “Let’s go!”

  “Not so fast, there’s a catch to it. We have to let the district attorney’s office in on the ceremony, for various reasons of protocol. So the date is Friday afternoon, say two p.m. By that time John Hardesty will be out here with his warrant.”

  “Don’t forget to invite the guests of honor,” Miss Withers said gently.

  “That’ll all be taken care of. Chief Joe Robles, with a motorcycle escort, will walk in on ’em Friday morning and give ’em a few hours to pack and get going. If they still act coy about it, they’ll ride up in handcuffs.”

  “Hope they do,” said Wingfield. “Make it all so much more dramatic.”

  “From what I have seen of Ina Kell, once she hears about the television cameras you couldn’t keep her away,” pointed out Miss Withers. “Unless—”

  “Unless what?” the inspector wanted to know.

  “Unless nothing, I guess.” But all the same, a little shiver had just gone up her spine; a rabbit must have been running over her grave.

  Art Wingfield, looking at his watch, said he’d have to run along. “Thallie hates to be kept waiting.”

  “Thallie?” said the schoolteacher wonderingly.

  “Oh sure.” He grinned. “She tagged along; I guess she doesn’t trust me out of her sight. I told her she’d only be in the way on a mission like this, but there was room on the plane and—you know how it is.”

  “I can imagine,” Miss Withers told him.

  Wingfield hesitated. “What are you two doing for dinner? M
aybe we could all eat together at one of these dives—romantic foreign atmosphere and all that?”

  “Why—” The inspector brightened, but Miss Withers shook her head.

  “Some other time,” she said, and when the young man had hurried off, “Oscar, never come between a woman and her lawful prey. Thallie Gordon didn’t come along on the trip just for the ride, you know.”

  “Huh? Oh, sure.” They went out together, and since Miss Withers was paying the check she guided him away from the hotel dining room and on down the street to a less pretentious spot. A marimba band was playing fast bullfight music, there were candles burning at each table, and a bill of fare scrawled on a blackboard was wheeled around the room. Suddenly reckless, the schoolteacher took a chance and ordered the most exotic-sounding entree on the menu. Much to her horror, cabeza de cabrito turned out to be the stewed head of a goat, one boiled and whitish eye staring up at her in mute reproach.

  “Oh,” she said quickly. “Take it away. I’m going to be …”

  “You’re not going to be sick?” the inspector chided her.

  But Miss Withers steeled herself, and picked up her fork. “I was about to say that I’m going to be very busy tomorrow. I just thought of something.”

  17

  “Get out of town before it’s too late, my dear,

  Get out of town …”

  —Popular Song

  “I’M FED UP WITH this,” remarked Winston H. Gault quietly. He threw down the gin rummy hand.

  “Take it easy, Junior,” Macklin said. He was a big, solid man with sloping shoulders, his general appearance that of a placid, competent detective attached to the district attorney’s office, which he was. “Now like I told you before,” he went on reasonably, “you can go anywhere you like and do anything you like, as long as you stay in town. Only Solly and I have to stick with you. If you get cute, you get rearrested.”

  A faint smile crossed Gault’s handsome, sulky face. “What real difference does it make? I’m going to be rearrested in a couple of days anyway.”

  Macklin said he wouldn’t know about that. Across the room Solly, a stubby man with a blue chin, looked up from his Western pulp magazine and shook his head, indicating that he wouldn’t be knowing about it either.

  “Maybe I’ll just drop in down at the Stork,” Junior suggested. “You couldn’t even get past the doorman; Sherman’s very choosy about his customers.”

  “Our badges can get in,” Macklin told him dryly. “Try it and see.”

  Solly suddenly stood up. “Now, why think along those lines, Junior? You’re getting a pretty good break as it is, a sort of vacation. The food and liquor here are a lot better’n downtown in that cell, and there’s a nicer view—” He gestured with a pudgy hand toward the front windows, fifty stories above midtown Manhattan. “There’s nothing to prevent your having a little fun. Why not call up some party girls, and make a night of it? There’s a couple phone numbers I know—with all your dough we could make with the champagne and the ersters—”

  There was only one girl on Junior Gault’s mind at the moment. “But speaking of dough,” he suggested softly, “how about each of you taking a couple of thousand and looking the other way while I step out to take care of some pressing personal business?”

  The hotel room was suddenly heavy with silence.

  “Or maybe five thousand apiece?” Junior said.

  “I’ll tell you, son,” Macklin finally spoke up. “I could use the money, and so could Solly. But if we made a deal, then he’d always have something on me, and I’d have something on him, and that wouldn’t do at all. That’s why they put two of us on you. Besides, you might forget to come back.”

  “It was just an idea,” Junior admitted philosophically. “But anyway, I’m not going to spend the evening sitting here and playing gin for a tenth of a cent. I’m going out.”

  “Sure!” Solly spoke up. “I know a guy, he can get tickets to Guys and Dolls.”

  Junior shook his head. “I suppose it will sound funny to you gentlemen, but I think I’ll go and drop in on my mother. You’re both welcome, of course.”

  They all rode uptown in the same taxicab, up Fifth past the Metropolitan Museum, and then turned right to stop at last before a stiff old brownstone house, an old-fashioned mansion crowded between looming apartments but with its own tiny yard on one side, now given over to the dry and decaying rosebushes. “You’re coming in?” Junior asked.

  Macklin hesitated, and shook his head. “I guess that won’t be necessary, as long as you don’t stay too long, and as long as there isn’t any rear entrance to the place.” Solly went to check, and there wasn’t. Both plainclothes men took up positions under the street light, flanking the front door of the Gault house. After a while it began to rain, one of the sudden, chill, blustering rains that presage autumn in Manhattan’s late summers. After what was probably an hour, but seemed considerably longer to the two sentinels, the lights went out in the front windows, and a light came on in the third-floor front bedroom.

  “Do you suppose the so-and-so’s up and gone to bed?” Solly demanded.

  “If he has, he can get up again,” Macklin said. “Give him ten minutes.”

  They gave him ten, and ten more, and then suddenly the front door of the Gault house burst open and a middle-aged woman in maid’s cap and uniform came out, crying hoarse, unintelligible sounds.

  “Help, help!” she mumbled when they got to her. “It’s Mr. Winston—oh, dear, oh, dear …”

  “What about him?” Macklin demanded, shaking her.

  “He’s gone and locked himself in his old room, and the whole house smells of gas! Come quick!”

  They pounded up the stair after her and beat on the door she indicated. Nobody answered, but the sickish-sweet smell of illuminating gas was everywhere. “We bust it down,” Solly suggested. “The both of us.”

  But the door was of honest, inch-thick oak, which only bruised their shoulders. Finally, with the help of a hall table used as a battering-ram, they burst in a panel. All the lights in Junior Gault’s boyhood bedroom were on, and the fake logs in the fireplace were hissing with escaping gas. But Junior himself was absent.

  If sometime during the melee the front door of the house softly opened and then closed again, nobody heard it.

  “I don’t mind spending my money—Tony’s money,” Ruth Fagan was saying, sitting on the edge of the couch in Miss Withers’ hotel suite. “But I want to make sure I get value received, that’s all.” The woman’s oleo-colored hair was in tight braids wound around her head, and her face was drawn and strained.

  “Your only investment so far,” the schoolteacher quietly reminded her, “is the two hundred dollars you wired me. Nothing further seems to be required from you, and if you insist I can make arrangements even to return that. There was no need, really, for you to come out here at all.”

  “Wasn’t there?” Ruth’s rather prominent eyes flickered. “That’s for me to decide, isn’t it? I want to help—and, besides, I had nothing else to do. My time right now is dedicated to seeing that Junior Gault pays with his life for what he did to my husband.”

  “To your ex-husband,” Miss Withers corrected her sweetly. “Or shall we say the latest of your ex-husbands? At any rate, I assure you that matters are well in hand.”

  “Are you so sure?”

  “Why—yes,” said the schoolteacher, and then realized that she wasn’t so completely sure after all. “Mrs. Fagan,” she went on earnestly, “would you be willing to consider the possibility that Junior Gault may not have been the actual murderer of your ex-husband, and would you be willing to cooperate financially or otherwise in pinning it on the right person?”

  “I know who killed Tony and so do you,” Ruth Fagan retorted stubbornly. “And I know that the only witness who can pin it on him is down here in Mexico, being treated like a petted pearl by you and the police and everybody. In Ensenada, isn’t she?”

  “That,” murmured the schoolteacher, “is
one of the worst-kept secrets in history.”

  “What I want,” said Ruth Fagan, “is for you and me to go down there. Give me ten minutes alone with that Kell girl—”

  “Do you think frightening her into hysterics would aid materially in solving the case?”

  “It couldn’t hurt. And I have a few things to say to Dallas Trempleau, too! It occurs to me now that maybe she’s deeper in this thing than anybody suspects. It was only a few weeks after she appeared in that charity thing on my husband’s program that he started not showing up for dinner—or breakfast.”

  “Dear me!” said Miss Withers.

  “Yes,” Ruth Fagan affirmed stoutly. “Perhaps she thought it amusing, as so many of those bored, high-nosed society girls do, to have a passing affair with a big radio and TV star. Perhaps she has personal reasons for not wanting the whole truth brought out. I’m not saying she was actually a party to the murder, but she might know more than she’s admitted. And certainly the Kell girl does. All that is necessary to wind this whole thing up is for her to come back to New York and tell the truth in court.”

  “I’m rather inclined to agree with you there. But I wonder if Ina can?”

  “What?” Ruth Fagan blinked.

  “Ina Kell seems to have had a shock, a shattering emotional experience that night last December. Perhaps what we all want to know is locked up tight in the bottom of her mind, forgotten because she wants to forget it or because she can’t accept it. If there were only some way to release her—”

  “You mean truth drugs, and all that sort of stuff?”

  “It might be worth trying, if she’d cooperate. I’m going to suggest it tomorrow.”

  Ruth rose suddenly. “But you refuse to go down to Ensenada with me tonight, and have a showdown?”

  “Frankly, I cannot see that anything would be achieved by it. I myself made the mistake a few days ago of frightening those girls into a headlong flight. I suggest you leave well enough alone. If you went there, or even telephoned, you would simply complicate matters. Truly you would.”

  Ruth Fagan nodded slowly. “Maybe. But if you want my advice, get in touch with Ina Kell and offer her a wad of dough to let down her hair and tell the whole truth, and then maybe you’ll get somewhere. Anyway, my original offer still goes—there’s five thousand dollars in it for you the day that Junior Gault goes to the electric chair.”