Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan

by Stuart Palmer

  Back in the bar Buster Haight fell off his stool, but not from stingers.

  It was no optical illusion. Miss Hildegarde Withers, in a neat dotted swiss, was arguing with the headwaiter. Beside her the inspector fidgeted, aware of how his trousers bagged.

  “I am very sorry, madame, but without the reservation—”

  “Speaking of reservations,” Miss Withers plunged in, “can you tell me if Mr Derek Laval has a table for this evening?”

  The dapper little man winced. “I am sorry, madame—”

  “Flash it, Oscar,” she suggested. The inspector flashed his badge, cupping it in the palm of his hand.

  “Oh, I see,” said the headwaiter. “No, I am glad to say, Mr Laval will not be among our guests. There is the matter of the checks, madame and monsieur, that he wrote last time. The bouncing checks.”

  That established, Miss Withers finally prevailed upon the man to give them a table, using all her persuasion and that of the inspectors badge and one of his five-dollar bills. This table, too, was set up on the edge of the rapidly diminishing dance floor.

  Thus it was that the schoolteacher made her dramatic return from the wrong side of the river Styx into the middle of Shapiro’s ballroom on a gala Sunday night, surrounded by the stars, starlets, executives and creators of Never-Never Land.

  As they sat down she nodded and smiled at Mr Nincom and his guests who returned greetings as blank as those of a tableful of Humpty Dumpty toys.

  And at a cozy table against the farther wall Jill Madison had to speak sharply to Virgil Dobie who kept on pouring priceless Krug ’28 into her already brimming glass. On every side Miss Withers was making exactly the splash that she intended. It was a lovely idea, and one which she was to regret sincerely all the rest of her life.

  But for a time all went serenely, with the vast roomful of diners hurrying through the fourteen courses of the table d’hôte—on which the inspector discovered spaghetti Caruso tucked in between the soup and the fish.

  He also discovered, as have so many other tourists in Hollywood, that in real life Miss Irene Dunne looks smaller than on the screen, while Miss Myrna Loy looks larger, that Miss Greer Garson’s beauty cries out for the color camera, that Mickey Rooney and Jackie Cooper are grown up now in some ways, especially as regards blondes, and that John Barrymore wears built-up heels and still looks considerably shorter than his current wife.

  While the inspector was making these firsthand notes Miss Hildegarde Withers waited hopefully for the pay-off that she had been so sure of.

  “I don’t see why you think so,” Piper objected when he learned her thoughts. “Suppose everybody else is here—the one man you want isn’t around. Certainly the headwaiter would know—and he has reason for looking out for Derek Laval.”

  “Never mind Derek Laval,” the schoolteacher said. “Watch.”

  The orchestra had left the stand, and now a committee of waiters were rearranging things so that a big square screen hung on the platform. When it was set in place they disappeared, and the band leader returned, held up his hand for attention.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “you all know why we’re here and you know that half of the cover charge and take tonight goes to a very worthy cause. And now for the special event on the program.”

  “If it’s a torch singer I’m going,” Piper whispered.

  “By special arrangement with the newsreel companies and with the gracious permission of the Racing Commission for the sovereign state of California, we present a rerunning of the greatest horse race of all time, the Santa Anita Handicap!”

  “That’s Hollywood for you,” Miss Withers whispered to the inspector as the lights slowly started to go dim. “Ninety per cent of the people in this room work in pictures all day. They have projection machines in their own homes, most of them. And for a special treat when they go to a night club they look at more motion pictures.”

  “Shhh!” grunted the inspector.

  At the bar Lillian Gissing turned in dignified slow motion to her companion. “I think I’m pretty brave now,” she announced heavily. “I think I’m as brave as I can get. If I have any more drinks …” She burped.

  “You’re sick,” Buster said, mildly disinterested.

  “I am. I’m pretty near as sick as I am brave. Maybe sicker….”

  “It’s up there,” Buster helpfully advised her, pointing. “At the head of the stairs and to the left along the balcony. Where it says ‘Mesdames.’”

  Lillian started away, careening slightly in the current. Then she rang for full speed astern and came back to pick up her handbag which she had left on the bar. She opened it, with a thickly suspicious glance at Buster, and made sure of something deep inside. Young Haight said later that he thought it was a piece of paper—maybe a card or an address, he couldn’t tell.

  Anyway, Lillian folded something into the palm of her hand, put the bag back on the bar to hold her place and went tacking off toward the stairs. The bar lights were very dim now, and Buster whirled on his stool to watch the screen in the larger room….

  The voice continued: “Not just one race, mind you, but each running of the Hundred-Thousand-Dollar Handicap, the richest race in the world, caught imperishably upon the silver screen as a record of thoroughbred stamina and—and—Well, anyway, we’ve got the films up in the projection booth, and they’ll be run off in sequence. Take it away….”

  The room was dark now except for the pale red exit lamps, and time suddenly turned backward to a day in March 1935 when sixty thousand people filled the new grandstand at Arcadia and watched a field of thorough­breds thunder down across what was once the peaceful pasture of Lucky Baldwin’s breeding ranch. Head Play and Twenty Grand and Mate….

  Again on the screen the greatest horses in America fought for racing’s richest prize, and again a rank outsider, a reformed jumper of no repute, came tearing out in front to stay in front. That was Azucar’s year.

  Virgil Dobie looked at Jill. “That was the day I had a hundred and eight dollars in the world, and the hundred was on Twenty Grand to win.” He shuddered. “I think I’ll feel my way out to the bar and see a man about a brandy and soda.”

  On the big screen in the ballroom it was 1936 now, with a landscaped infield at Santa Anita, more grandstand, more people and more sunshine. Discovery and Time Supply and old Azucar again….

  And the recorded voice of Joe Hernandez booming out his unforgettable “Ther-r-r-r-r-re they go!” with the crowd roaring, the thunder of hoofs as the field came into the homestretch….

  Again on the screen the front-running son of Peanuts was pulled to the rail to foul three challengers and win a hollow victory, with Time Supply, a faster horse, running up his heels. That was the year that Top Row stole the “hundred grand.”

  At Mr Nincom’s table the great man spoke into the darkness. “I have an idea,” he cried. “It’s about time for another race-track epic. We’ll call it—we’ll call it ‘Kentucky.’ No, not ‘Kentucky.’ Why plug those Eastern states? We’ll call it ‘Santa Anita’!”

  “Marvelous!” came Frankie Firsk’s voice. “A real honey….”

  “Swell,” chimed in Doug August. “Only I thought you said that race-track pictures always lose money because the women don’t like era?”

  Nincom coughed. “Did I? Well—” He brightened.

  “We’ll build the story around a woman handicapper—get the woman’s angle that way. She has a running battle with a gyp owner and trainer, a hard-boiled Gable type. She loves horses; he thinks of them as meal tickets only. But when he tries to pull a sneak and win the Handicap with a horse he flies in from south of the border …”

  The people at the side tables and in the benches along the wall were crowding forward now, taking up positions on the dance floor and steps for a better view. A few moved back and forth from the murky bar. Another year, another field of horses—and gallant Rosemont slipping past in the last eighth of a mile to grab the race from little Seabiscuit.
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  Still another year, with the grandstand stretching farther up the track and the infield festooned with geometrical flower beds. And a Latin-American thunderbolt, named Kayak II, chalking up his win. Then a Sande-trained three-year-old, weighted with a feather, flew down the homestretch as Seabiscuit, the unlucky, coasted in for a win and nipped him at the wire. Stagehand wore the flowers that day…. The entertainment committee realized by now that the program was being a tremendous failure as well as a howling success that night at Shapiro’s. It was a failure in that nobody was remembering to keep on ordering drinks or food, a success in that for that brief hour every guest and every employee in the place lost himself completely.

  There on the screen were flashing the most breathtaking moments of the turf’s last six years, the summit of man’s gambling urge and horses’ courage and endeavor. It was a program all of climaxes, one which wrung its audience out and left them limp as dishrags.

  Afterwards nobody knew what time it was. Nobody knew exactly where he had been sitting or whose glass he had drained. By the time homely little Seabiscuit, twice cheated of his triumph, romped home on his gimpy old legs to win the Handicap for 1940 and become the greatest money winner of all time there was not—as the saying goes in Hollywood—a dry seat in the house.

  When the lights came on everyone was applauding. Miss Withers and the inspector, Thorwald Nincom and his whole tableful—even Virgil Dobie and Jill were clapping, his right against her left, because at the same time they were holding hands under the table. The crowd kept on applauding as if they were going to insist on Seabiscuit’s taking a bow on the stage.

  Then the roar of clapping hands died away, an audible silence spreading from the doors out and across the ballroom. Heads turned, people frowned, jerked back to reality….

  There was something wrong out in the bar, some false note. The whisper ran from table to table, and people began to rise uncertainly. Photographers deserted their celebrities and ran across the dance floor, screwing fresh flash bulbs into their cameras….

  It seemed that when the lights came back on somebody had noticed a girl lying on a big divan at the far side of the bar—a lush, dark girl partially undressed in red and gold. At first they thought that she was simply blotto and then they saw the red-gold rag caught on the balcony rail thirty feet above.

  Nobody had seen her come out of the powder room. Nobody had heard anything, which wasn’t odd, considering the volume to which Mr Hernandez’ voice had been amplified. Nobody had noticed anything out of the way at all. And yet there she was.

  All that anybody could be sure of was that Lillian’s neck was broken.

  IX

  And I HAD DONE A HELLISH THING,

  And it would work ’em woe….

  SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

  “LOS ANGELES POLICE … calling car 17 … car 17…. Call your station. That is all.”

  The radio sergeant called Hollywood substation, speaking a bit thickly because he had one of Shapiro's “Special Blend” cigars in his mouth.

  “Yeah, we come out here. Nothing to it. A dame just got lit up and fell offen a balcony. Name, Lillian Gissing; age, 24; address, Studio Club. Dead on arrival. What?”

  The sergeant chewed deeply into his cigar, a frown creasing his smooth brown forehead. “Huh? Oh. Well, we talked to the maid who hangs out in the powder room. That’s what they call the can. Yeah. Big jigaboo right outa Gone with the Wind. She says she remembers this dame coming into the place spiffed. Tried to get her to take a fizz but all she could get down her was aspirin. A little while later while they were running some films downstairs she notices that the Gissing dame is sitting on a bench out on the balcony, about passed out. So she goes down to the kitchen to get her a cupa cawfee and when she comes back she’s gone. Yeah. Musta got dizzy and fell over. Left a hunka her dress caught on the balcony grillwork. Okay?”

  He was about to hang up, but a question from the station stopped him cold. “Huh? No, of course nobody seen her. The lights in the place was turned down way low, and everybody was looking at the films. Nobody heard nothing neither. But they had the amplifier for the picture sound track turned way up high, and, besides, the Gissing dame lit on a big overstuffed couch. Yeah, only her head musta hit the back or something. Yeah. The way I figure it is—”

  No matter how the sergeant figured it, matters were almost immediately taken out of his horny hands. For now the short, angry snarl of a squad-car siren sounded outside the glittering portals of Shapiro’s, and two serious-looking men entered without handing their hats to the checkroom girl. Or, for that matter, without taking their hats off. They were followed by a uniformed detail.

  The sergeant recognized them at once as a lieutenant and a sergeant from Homicide Bureau downtown and realized that the case which he had just washed up so neatly and so much to the satisfaction of the management was reopened again. But good.

  “Somebody phoned in a beef,” was all the information he received as the lieutenant sent him back to cruising.

  It must have been a very convincing beef because a few minutes later Coroner Panzer arrived, wearing the top of his pajamas for a shirt. He, too, looked extremely serious.

  The management was annoyed. The guests were annoyed, those of them who had remained after the unfortunate accident which now appeared to be something else again. Most annoyed of all the guests was Thorwald L. Nincom when he was advised that the presence of himself and his party was requested upstairs in the banquet room. Mr Nincom threatened to telephone to Mayor Bowron; he threatened to telephone to Governor Olson. “Do you know who I am?”

  The officer knew and he was very unhappy about it. But it would take only a few minutes.

  When Mr Nincom and his guests reached the small banquet room upstairs they found that a number of other interested, and interesting, parties were there. Among them were Virgil Dobie and Jill, young Buster Haight and Mr Wilfred Josef.

  “I’m not going to say anything without a lawyer present,” Willy Abend was insisting. “According to the Bill of Rights—”

  “Willy, be quiet!” cried Melicent Manning. “Don’t you see what’s happening? We’re being murdered off, one by one….”

  Mona Firsk leaned close to her husband. “Frankie, you don’t think that one of us is—you know, the murderer?”

  He shrugged.

  “I don’t suppose it’s you,” she whispered, a faint note of disappointment in her voice. “You wouldn’t have the nerve.”

  Douglas August said nothing, but sat and picked quietly at the edge of his bandage.

  Harry Wagman, the agent, made one or two futile attempts to draw Mr Nincom into a conversation about the abilities and charms of the hyperthyroid redhead who sat beside him with her hands folded and stared wonderingly at everything. After a while an officer came and told her that she could go. Which she did, briskly. It was quite obviously no time to work on Mr Nincom, no matter how suitable she might be for the part of Lizzie Borden.

  And the door of the manager’s office remained firmly closed, though now and then the faint rumble of voices sounded within. Finally a fat and self-righteous colored woman emerged, then hurried out as if the bloodhounds were after her.

  Virgil Dobie and Jill stared at each other, and Buster Haight stared at Jill. The silence grew thicker and thicker.

  From the ballroom downstairs they could hear the orchestra for a while, and then that, too, died away. Festivities at Shapiro’s were definitely over for the evening. A waiter came up past the bored officer who guarded the door and wanted to know if anybody wanted to order a drink or anything before they closed the bar.

  “If it’s all right … ?” Frankie Firsk said dubiously, looking at the law.

  “Go ahead—my only instructions is to keep you here.” So they all had drinks, with the exception of Virgil Dobie.

  “I think I’ll stick to ginger ale,” he said to Jill, and did.

  There was a little flush of conversation while the drinks were being tossed off, a
nd then the silence was heavy upon them again. Josef, he of the singed beard, broke it momentarily when Buster Haight struck a match to a cigarette close beside him. “Don’t do that!” shrieked Mr Josef. “I can’t stand being near fire again.” And he gave a sidelong glance at Virgil Dobie.

  “Sorry,” Dobie said. “Well, I—I’m sorry.” There didn’t seem to be much of anything more to say. Buster took his cigarettes and matches to the other side of the room and resumed his close study of the way Jill’s eyelashes swept upward from her cheek.

  Then suddenly the office door opened, and out came the two homicide detectives, the lieutenant still wearing his hat. With them, and evidently on good terms, was Inspector Oscar Piper. And Miss Withers.

  A great light dawned on Mr Nincom. “I might have known it!” he cried accusingly. “You’re responsible for our being kept here while everybody else went home. You and your fantastic ideas—”

  “All right, all right,” said the man with the hat. “We won’t keep anybody long….”

  Mr Nincom turned to Harry Wagman, his face mottled with red. “She’s fired!” he gave out in a stage whisper.

  “She’s got a contract,” Wagman retorted. “Iron bound.”

  “Staying away two days voids the contract!”

  “All right, please!” said the lieutenant again. “That can wait. All we want to know is, what do you know about this Lillian Gissing?”

  Nobody said anything.

  “Who saw her last?”

  Again nobody said anything. Buster Haight put his cigarette out and deposited the butt neatly in the cuff of his trousers. Then he realized that somebody was pointing at him. It was Virgil Dobie.

  “I saw her with that kid at the bar,” he said.

  Buster answered questions for ten busy minutes. All he knew was that Lillian had been drinking pretty heavily because she wanted to get brave. And she’d taken something out of her purse and gone upstairs….

  He hadn’t seen her again. But he’d been watching the pictures. Like everybody else.

  “Do you think she had an appointment with somebody?” the inspector put in.