He discovered that Miss Hildegarde Withers was tugging at his sleeve. “If everybody on the floor is here,” she suggested, “why not ask them whether or not they heard the crash? I mean the first one?”
“Huh? I don’t see …” But Sansom couldn’t think of a reason for refusing. It developed that from the eight writers’ offices in this hall six persons had come running at the sound of his crash or his voice. There was no telling which. Evidently the sound had not traveled beyond Gertrude’s office into the other wing, which narrowed things down considerably.
“Okay,” said the chief. “You can all help if you will. Take the offices in order. Who’s in 301?”
Frankie Firsk pleaded guilty. No, he had heard nothing out of the way. “But I was reading poetry out loud to myself,” he admitted. “Eliot’s Wasteland. It always makes Hollywood seem sort of bearable….”
“Three o three?”
That was Miss Withers’ office, and she had said her say.
“Three o five? Oh, that’s this one. Well, who’s in 307?”
Lillian, the lush and bedizened, spoke up from the fringe of the little group. “That’s Mr Josef, but he isn’t in the studio today. He’s down at the Good Samaritan Hospital for his nerves. He—”
“Okay, okay. Now, across the hall. Who’s got 308?”
That was Abend. The dapper playwright swore that he had heard no suspicious sound all afternoon. “Of course, I did have my radio on. Clara and I were listening to the police calls.”
Clara, a vague and adipose member of the secretarial staff, was in agreement. Long since she had ceased to wonder at the vagaries of writers and if Mr Abend wanted the police calls taken down in shorthand she took them. “It’s for the radio play I’m doing on the side,” Abend told them defiantly. “I’m gathering color. I want to do something with real social significance.”
“Okay.” Sansom cut him short. “Three o six?”
Lillian spoke up again. “That’s Mr Dobie’s office. I work for him and Mr Stafford. But Mr Dobie wasn’t in all afternoon—he’s out on the set.”
“Oh, he is?” Sansom frowned.
“Mr Dobie usually goes out and watches them shooting when he hasn’t an assignment,” Lillian said. “Gertrude is trying to get him on the phone now, but you can’t interrupt a scene, you know.”
“All right. Number 304?”
“That’s mine,” spoke up Melicent Manning. “But I’m afraid I was so busy trying to devise a scene where Deanna gets passionately kissed and still stays sweet sixteen that I didn’t pay any attention to any noises. When I write I just lose myself!”
Chief Sansom muttered something under his breath. “Okay. Three o two?”
Doug August said that with the antique typewriter he had been issued he couldn’t hear the crack of doom. “It makes more noise than a machine gun, and I didn’t let it cool off all afternoon. I’ve got to get a whole sequence out for Mr Nincom before he leaves for Arrowhead tomorrow. And if you don’t mind, I’ll get back to it.” He turned and shouldered his way through the crowd, the others eddying after him. Sansom worked them all through the door and leaned against it.
“That’s the list,” he told Miss Withers. “So …”
“So not one person heard the crash when Saul Stafford fell. And you still insist he had an accident.”
“Well, it stands to reason.”
There was a commotion in the hall, and then the door was shoved open by a vast, gargantuan man with heavy, slashed eyebrows and the wide, innocent eyes of a child. “I’m Dobie, Virgil Dobie!” he cried. “Where’s Saul? What’s all this about? If it’s a gag it isn’t funny.”
“Your collaborator has been taken away in an ambulance,” Miss Withers told him. “With a broken neck.”
His face went chalky gray, and Dobie felt for a chair.
“He’s at Lumsden Mortuary Haven, on Western,” Chief Sansom said. “I’m sorry, Mr Dobie.”
Virgil Dobie wasn’t listening. Miss Withers thought that he looked like a man desperately frightened, frightened for his own skin. “The chief here thinks that it was an accident,” she told him. “He thinks that Stafford broke his own neck while standing on a chair to tack up that poster. But I was in the next office and I’m not so sure.”
Dobie looked up at the ceiling, frowned, and then turned toward Miss Withers. Something seemed to be puzzling him.
“I’ve got to run along and report this thing,” Sansom said briskly. “But I’ve one last word before I go.” His finger wagged in Miss Withers’ face. “If it wasn’t an accident on account of nobody heard him fall, then how could it have been—well, been anything else?”
“Such as murder?” she prompted softly.
He nodded. “You think that a fight in which one guy could break another guy’s neck wouldn’t make more noise than any fall?”
Miss Withers considered that. “You mean that in disproving your own case I’ve wrecked my own too?”
“That’s exactly what I mean!” insisted Chief Sansom. “So put that in your pipe and smoke it.” He went out of the room and slammed the door.
Dobie stood up as if about to follow. “One moment,” Miss Withers said. “I’m a stranger here and I’m being Mrs Buttinsky. But there’s a hole in the chief’s theory, a hole as wide as a house.” She looked up at the dangling poster again.
“I think I know what you mean,” Virgil Dobie admitted. “You think it was a frame.” His thick, angled eyebrows went up half an inch.
She nodded. “Why should a man stand on a teetery chair to tack up a poster that was already firmly tacked to the ceiling when I came into this office earlier this afternoon?—answer me that.”
He couldn’t. “Say,” Dobie thrust, “you aren’t? I mean, you couldn’t be the sleuth I read about in the Reporter?”
“Perhaps I am. At any rate, I walked into something that smells. Tell me—you knew Mr Stafford better than anybody else—who would have a reason for murdering him?”
Dobie didn’t answer. He was staring at her. “I thought you’d be—well, different.”
“Never mind that. Who could have murdered your partner?”
“Nobody. Nobody at all,” declared Virgil Dobie. “Saul lived alone in a little apartment crowded with pipes that he never smoked and books that he never read. He never chased the tomatoes—I mean girls. All he liked to do was eat and drink. And have laughs.”
“Did anybody ever threaten him, to your knowledge?”
“Anybody? You mean everybody! Half the people in Hollywood have threatened to break both our necks at one time or another but they always cool off. You see, Saul and I set out years ago to try to keep Hollywood from taking itself so seriously. Nobody ever murders on account of a practical joke.”
Miss Withers said, “No? You never know just how people will react when their toes are well stepped on. And remember, young man, if Stafford was murdered, as I think, then the killer presumably has exactly the same motive for murdering you!”
He stared at her as if the thought were not new to him. “Somebody among the victims of the practical jokes you two loved to play has taken it the wrong way,” she went on. “Where are you going, Mr Dobie?”
He barely paused. “If I had any sense maybe I’d take a quick powder and grab the first plane for New York. But I suppose I’ll just rush out and lap up some sauce. There’s quite a bit of courage in a bottle of dark Jamaica rum.”
“You’re not frightened, Mr Dobie?”
“I think I am,” he told her gravely. “It could be.”
“Wait!” she cried. “Won’t you help me try to find the killer?”
“If what you say is true,” Virgil Dobie called over his shoulder, “then I won’t need to. He’ll find me!” And, grinning, he was gone.
Miss Withers sat and waited. At six o’clock Gertrude Lafferty tapped at her door to tell her that it was time to close up the switchboard. “Are you going to stay late tonight?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said the schoolteacher slowl
y. She had a sudden hunch that Gertrude was thinking things that she was not willing to say, that she was more than normally interested in Miss Withers’ own plans for the evening.
Perhaps this was the worm on the hook. During the past hour or so the schoolteacher had purposely been making noises like a detective, had pretended to be sure Saul Stafford was murdered when no one could be sure of anything. All that would be very likely to force someone’s hand. Since she was so determined to prove it a murder, a likely suspect might be handed her. She waited eagerly.
“Because if you are going to stay late,” Gertrude went on, “I can leave you a night line through to the main switchboard. It’s no trouble at all.”
That was not the kind of a line Miss Withers hoped for, and she indicated as much.
“Well—good night!” And Gertrude was gone.
“There is a young woman who will bear watching,” decided the schoolma’am. She sat at her desk, staring at the photograph of tired calla lilies which ornamented the opposite wall. Outside her Venetian blinds the twilight had deepened into black velvet night, a night shot with stars that were pale and wan above the wagging searchlights and the glaring neon signs of Hollywood.
Long ago, she supposed, the others had gone their separate ways. But she chose to sit here alone, with only one shaded light on her desk, alone with the ghostly presence of Saul Stafford who had not wanted to die. It was at once the most perplexing and the most poignant problem that Miss Withers had ever faced. Stafford had half turned to her as one human being to another. Her hands had been tied at the moment by a mistaken sense of loyalty to her employer. Otherwise Stafford might be alive at the moment.
It was a challenge that she must face. Murder next door, murder a few feet away from her….
For murder it must be. In spite of the tipped chair, in spite of the carefully arranged picture created by dangling poster and spilled thumbtacks, she could not believe that Saul Stafford had met death by misadventure.
She took up her letter to the inspector again, feeling the need of talking to someone. There was an element of humor, she realized, in her turning to him. Never once in the many times they had crossed paths on the murder trail had she failed to wish audibly that he was far away so that she might have a free hand. And now she had it.
The little wire terrier of an Irishman was three thousand miles away, and she had no one to argue with. It was not easy to form her thoughts without putting them into words.
So she tapped busily away on the keys of the typewriter for a few minutes, describing the hilarious descent of Chief Sansom upon the thumbtack. Then she stopped, her fingers poised above the keys, listening, not only with her ears, but with every pore of her body.
Somebody was in the hall outside her door, somebody who had walked as softly as a cat. Somebody was breathing out there now, breathing and waiting….
Miss Withers started to reach for the telephone. Then she realized that the line was dead. Quickly she rose to her feet and tiptoed across the room to the hatrack. With her black cotton umbrella gripped firmly in her hand, she approached the door. Forcing herself to take long, silent breaths, she reached out toward the knob. A quick pull at the door, and whoever was waiting on the other side might be jerked forward, surprised and off balance. She could get in at least one good crack with the umbrella which lent itself both to bludgeoning and stabbing.
“One—two—three!” she whispered softly, and jerked. There was nobody at all in the hall.
Miss Hildegarde Withers was not one to hold with ghosts and apparitions except in an extremely figurative sense. It was all right to imagine the ghostly presence of a murdered man standing invisibly behind her as she sought to avenge him. But ghosts who listened and breathed in doorways …
This ghost was now fumbling about in the office across and down the hall—306 it was. She could hear the faint creak of a drawer, the rattle of glass on metal. There was a faint luminous wavering, like a giant glowworm, beyond the frosted pane of the door.
“Ghosts do not breathe and they do not rattle drawers,” the schoolteacher sensibly decided. “And anyone who has a right to be in that room would turn on the light in a normal fashion. Ergo and ipso facto, I have the murderer trapped. Maybe.”
Gripping her umbrella firmly in her hand, she tiptoed down and tried the knob of 306. It was locked on the inside. Then she saw the faint light inside die away. For a moment she thought that she had been heard, but then there was a scraping sound and the flare of another match. And still the faint rattling and shuffling.
Miss Withers waited, her lips pressed grimly together. Then a drawer banged shut inside, and someone came toward the door with quick, nervous steps. She readied her weapon.
The door opened, and the schoolteacher started a haymaker. She managed to pull the punch, however, in the nick of time. For it was Lillian, the lush and bedizened Lillian, who came rushing out of the office. She opened her mouth as if she contemplated a good, rousing scream.
“Don’t!” said Miss Withers sharply. The mouth stayed open. “What were you doing in Virgil Dobie’s office?”
“Why! I have a perfect right—” Lillian burbled. “I work for Mr Dobie and Mr Stafford.”
“Do you always work in the dark?” pressed Miss Withers. “What were you after? I judge that you didn’t find it, as your hands are empty.”
“None of your business!” the girl snapped.
“I’m afraid it is. Of course, if you’d rather I called Chief Sansom …”
“Call ahead.” For some reason Lillian was amused.
“Or the regular police perhaps?”
Lillian said nothing, but her dark eyes were warier. The schoolteacher took her arm. “Child, this is no time for such goings on. You didn’t kill Saul Stafford. Why try to protect the one who did?”
“Protect?” the girl gasped. “Do you think I’m crazy? I’m not protecting anybody. I sneaked back here to look for something in Mr Dobie’s desk. Something that I thought would maybe be—I mean—”
“Come on into my office and tell me all about it,” pressed Miss Withers, trying hard not to sound too much like a police matron on a juvenile delinquency case. Lillian suffered herself to be led inside, took a chair and lighted a cigarette, but there was still considerable resistance in the square of her shoulders and the set of her lower lip.
“I’m not just being meddlesome,” Miss Withers explained. “But you’ve probably heard by now who I am, and a thing like this is naturally a challenge. If Mr Stafford was murdered right under my nose I want to find out why and by whom. I’m a fine technical expert on murder if I can’t solve one next door. As one woman to another, won’t you help me?”
Lillian frowned. “Are you really a detective?”
Miss Withers nodded. “Detectives, like murderers, often look like quite ordinary people. Now what were you looking for in Virgil Dobie’s office?”
Lillian said, “You’re not interested in the reward, if there is one? You wouldn’t—”
“I’ll not contest it with you,” said the schoolteacher, amused. “Provided there is one. Sometimes there isn’t, you know.”
Lillian’s deep eyes shone. “But sometimes there is! And I need the money. With money I can get hairdressers, costumers, voice coaches—maybe a nose operation. I can have screen tests made!”
“I see,” said Miss Withers. “What was it you hoped to find in Dobie’s office? Was it evidence that he killed Saul Stafford by any chance?”
That was a shot in the dark and it missed clean. Lillian looked confused. “What? Oh no, nothing like that. But I just remembered something I’d seen when I was filing some of Mr Dobie’s personal papers. I think that both he and Mr Stafford were being blackmailed!” Lillian lowered her voice. “Because when I helped make out their income-tax reports last year I know that Mr Stafford reported over three thousand dollars in bad debts, all loaned to the same person. And the other day, in Mr Dobie’s personal file, I found an I.O.U. for two thousand dollars signe
d by that same man—and a canceled check for five thousand dollars that had been paid to him!”
Miss Withers digested that. “Blackmailers don’t give I.O.U.s as a rule. Or accept checks. But it might be a lead. Was that what you were looking for just now?”
Lillian nodded. “I thought maybe—about the reward, like I told you. But the I.O.U. and the canceled check are gone.” She was looking at the toe of her slipper.
“And the name of the man?”
“I don’t remember.” Lillian frowned. “It was Dick—”
“Come, come—you remember something about it. Was it a long name? Was it Smith or Jones or—?”
“It was Laval, I think. Something like that. But the stuff was gone, I tell you!” Lillian was breathing hard now and about ready to snap. So the schoolteacher waved her away.
“Thank you very much,” she said. “For nothing,” she added after the girl was gone.
Things were beginning to happen though. The schoolteacher began to whistle a little tuneless tune. Lillian had built up a very nice straw man. Suspect Number One, the well-known straw man about town, Mr Dick Laval. Even the name was artificial sounding.
Long since Miss Withers had learned to beware of the Greeks bearing gifts. She had also discovered that the police were more or less right in never paying any attention to information that they did not have to drag out of an unwilling witness.
It was murder! Her feeling was more than a hunch. Of course, there remained the pressing problem of the “how.” Necks, she thought, must be rather difficult to break. It would take a bit of doing, as the Britishers say. In fact, she could not remember another case in which death had been brought about in just that way. Or was there one long since and far away?
She worried that problem as a cat worries a ping-pong ball across a carpet all the way out of the darkened studio, kept it tossing in the air as she rode back to town in a taxi. It was a long haul, and she decided that it might be a good idea to seek closer lodgings.
But there was time enough for that later. Now she studied her problem through a trayful of dinner in her hotel room. Somehow Saul Stafford had been murdered. He had feared auto accidents and poison in his drinking water and instead had received a neatly broken neck. Miss Withers tried to remember about the classic murder methods. The thuggees of India, for instance. They used a silken noose, didn’t they?
Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla Page 23
