“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 signed 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 D
ick—”
“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?
But all this wasn’t getting her anywhere. There was one last resort. She picked up the phone and asked the operator to connect her with Spring 7-3100. “In New York City,” she hastily added, and sat down to wait.
Three thousand miles away a wiry, grizzled little Irishman spoke a weary “Hello” into the phone.
“I’m delighted to find you at your office, Oscar!” came the voice of Hildegarde Withers.
“I’m not at my office,” he told her. “I’m home and supposed to be asleep. But some fool down at headquarters relayed your call. What in heaven’s name are you up to now?” He yawned noisily.
“Listen carefully,” she cried across the miles of wire. “Have you got a pencil?”
“Hildegarde! I know that old gag. I say, ‘Yes,’ and then you say, ‘Well—”
“This is no gag. Oscar, I want you to have one of your men look through the files down at headquarters and see if there’s ever been a homicide case where the victim’s neck was broken without any marks and without any noise. If you find one, for heaven’s sake, wire me how it was done.”
Inspector Oscar Piper scratched his hairy chest through the gap in the front of his rumpled pajamas. Then he reached for the dead cigar that lay in the ash tray on his bed table.
“Oscar? Are you going back to sleep?”
“I’m thinking. Wait a minute, will you? About eight years ago, maybe nine. Berry … Ferry … Ferris … Harris—that’s it. Emily Harris.”
“She killed somebody that way?”
“No, Hildegarde. The Harris dame was a fat blonde living down in Greenwich Village. In those days the village was something. Artists and musicians and old maids of both sexes, well steeped in gin. Anyway, the Harris gal was found early one morning by the milkman or the paper boy or somebody, lying in a soft flower bed with her neck broken. It was only about five feet below her bedroom window.”
“But how was it done?”
“There you got me,” the inspector was forced to confess. “The fall didn’t seem hardly enough to snap her neck, so the case is still in our ‘Open’ file. There was a drunken brawl in her studio that night, and all that the other guests could tell us was that she had complained of a headache and gone to bed. We held her boy friend for a day or two but we had to let him go for lack of evidence.”
Miss Withers almost forgot to breathe. “Oscar, what was the boy friend’s name?”
“Oh—Demarest or Levy or something. Why? He was a phony poet, a skinny guy with a beard.”
“The name couldn’t have been Laval, could it?”
“That’s right! Then you did remember the case after all! It was Derek Laval.” The inspector pushed his cigar to the far corner of his mouth. “Hello? Hello, Hildegarde?” He rattled the receiver against the hook. “Hello! Operator, on that call from Hollywood you cut me off!”
III
Death is an angel with two faces:
to us HE TURNS A FACE OF TERROR,
Blighting all things fair….
THEODORE C. WILLIAMS
“I SAID NIX ON Myrna Loy,” roared Mr Thorwald L. Nincom into the telephone. “Sam, I don’t care a hoot what Metro is willing to trade her for. She can’t play Lizzie Borden. Maybe five years ago, before they sweetened her up into the perfect wife for Nick Charles, but not now. Nor Dunne either. The fans won’t take it.”
He listened for a moment, riffling through the stack of unopened morning mail on his desk. “Who? Darnell? Of course Linda is cute as a bug but she’s too damn starry eyed. No, I’ve sent for Gaynor, and we’re going to take some tests. And then I’m off for Arrowhead until the end of the week. Oh, look, Sam—one more thing. You might drop the word to stenographic that Miss Madison, Miss Jill Madison, would be happier in some other line of work outside the studio. She was my secretary up to yesterday but she’s got no sense of loyalty. You’d think she was doing you a favor by working for you. I’ve been a father to the girl, and what did I get for it?”
Sam Lothian, executive vice-president of Mammoth, hung up the phone with a smile, having heard through the studio grapevine exactly what Mr Nincom had got for it. He made a note on his desk pad: “Tell Louie B. no dice on Loy” and, beneath it, “Ax for Madison.”
Then he pressed a buzzer and said, “Send Miss Withers in. And get Sansom over here.”
He leaned back in his chair, the perfect picture of a banker about to refuse a loan, a bald, plump, prosperous banker in an unprosperous community. Or so Miss Hildegarde Withers decided when she was ushered into his august presence.
“I suppose, Miss Withers,” he began pleasantly, “you are wondering why I asked you to come over to my office first thing this morning, eh?”
“Not at all,” returned that lady. “You are about to tell me to mind my own business.”
Sam Lothian gulped. “Er-r-r, yes. I mean—well, I understand that criminology is an avocation of yours. You’ve made rather a hobby of homicide.”
“I have. And I can smell murder a mile away.”
“Sometimes, perhaps, when it isn’t there. The way some overzealous doctors always rip out your tonsils or your appendix just because they like to operate?”
The schoolteacher failed to see any connection. “Murder is murder, and it can’t be hushed up.”
“The trouble with a hobby,” said Lothian with a pained look, “is that we all have a tendency—” He looked up. “Oh, come in, Tom. You know Chief Sansom, don’t you, Miss Withers? I was just saying that the trouble with a hobby is that we all have a tendency to ride it too much. You, Miss Withers, have a hunch that a member of our writing staff did not die an accidental death last night, a hunch as yet unsupported by evidence. By the way, have you talked to any newspapermen?”
She shook her head, and the tension in the office lessened a fraction. Lothian looked at Chief Sansom who was teetering on the edge of his chair and nodded.
“Really, there can be no question of hushing anything up,” he continued. “A full report of the accident was made to the police last night. I have here”—and he picked up a sheet of paper—“I have a copy of the preliminary post-mortem report which is being filed by Doctor John Panz
er, chief coroner of the city of Los Angeles. He says: ‘I have made a complete examination of the cadaver of Saul Stafford at Lumsden Mortuary Haven, 1243 Western Avenue. Results as follows: Anterior surface of body—negative.’ That means no bruises. ‘Abdominal cavity—negative to all poisons except ethyl alcohol. Cranial cavity—negative except to ethyl alcohol, concentration of 0.184.’ That means he was moderately tight. ‘Skeletal structure—a fracture dislocation of the second cervical vertebra and lesion of the spinal cord. Conclusion: Death from brain coma and/or lung asphyxia caused by break in spinal cord, either of which alone would be sufficient to cause death. There are no evidences of violence or of suicidal intent. All symptoms listed are entirely compatible with the theory of death by misadventure.’ So you see, Miss Withers—”
“Stafford was about two thirds swacked and he fell offen a chair and busted his neck,” Sansom put in heavily.
“I’m telling you this, Miss Withers, because we want you to be perfectly satisfied,” Lothian continued. “Doctor Panzer is an experienced and conscientious man.” He rose to his feet. “And I might also point out to you that in the forty-some years since the motion-picture industry moved to California there has been no major crime committed inside the walls of any studio!”
“There’s a first time for everything,” said the schoolteacher doggedly. But she was on the spot and knew it. “Of course,” she reminded them, “there is the fact that I had a talk with Stafford before he died and he told me he was afraid of being murdered….”
“A coincidence,” Lothian told her. “If he wasn’t pulling your leg. The man had a mania for playing practical jokes and ribbing people, you know.”
“But death had the last laugh,” pointed out Miss Withers tartly, and made her exit.
Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan Page 4
