Cold Poison (14 page)

“All of which proves little or nothing, anyway,” Miss Withers pointed out. “You both seem to accept the idea that Zelda Bard was poisoned by somebody in Manhattan. The poisoned brandy that came to her through the mails could have been sent from anywhere—even from the local post office. Or Burbank, or Glendale, or any of the branches of the Los Angeles system.”

“Huh?” said Sergeant Callan.

“Jealousy is a terrible thing, and it can work long distance.”

The Inspector thought for a moment, and nodded. “She’s right on this, sergeant. And the Bard girl had appeared all over the country in her act, vaudeville and burlesque and night clubs. She could have made enemies anywhere, and she was just the type to do it. We can’t even be sure it’s a man we’re looking for; she could have stepped on a lot of women’s toes, too.”

Callan nodded slowly. “Could be a dame. They say dames tend to use poison when they want to get rid of somebody.” He turned to Miss Withers. “What’s that?”

“I said ‘
You
too!’” she murmured. “Forgive me, but I am rather up to here with clichés. Perhaps—” she stopped, and bit her lip. It was not the first time when she had been talking when she should have been listening.

“But,” said Mr. Cushak suddenly, “there’s nothing actually to prove that the cases are related—Miss Zelda Bard didn’t receive a poison-pen valentine, did she?”

“No,” admitted Oscar Piper. “Not that we know of, anyway. There’s no connection except that a very rare, hitherto unknown poison seems to have been used in all three cases. And it’s likely to be used again right here in your studio unless something is done.”

Mr. Cushak bit his lip. “Then—then I’ve no choice but to close down the place, as of tomorrow night. We can’t make funny pictures with this hanging over our heads. We don’t want to lose any more of our people, and we can’t stand any more of this publicity. You just don’t know what certain newspapers do with anything that happens out here in Hollywood.”

“My heart bleeds,” said the Inspector unsympathetically.

Miss Withers spoke up. “So you close down the studio and the murders never get solved. This new flare-up of the poison-ivy thing centers here, and here it must be resolved, if anywhere. If you ask me, which I admit nobody has—”

“Excuse me,” interrupted Mr. Cushak. “I’ve got to go and arrange to bank the fires and put the place on a stand-by basis.” He looked at Sergeant Callan. “Is it all right if I go now?”

Callan waved his hand. As far as he was concerned they could all go, and though he didn’t say where, his attitude was clear. The sergeant was in over his head, and knew it. But as Cushak left, he nodded to the officer at the door to bring in the next one.

It turned out to be Joyce Reed. The lush, bumptious brunette had recovered from her earlier nervousness, Miss Withers noted. She turned her eyes on Sergeant Callan with obvious confidence; he was a man and she knew what to do about men. Joyce sat down, crossed her legs with a sort of maidenly immodesty, and waited.

She answered the preliminary questions without hesitation. Yes, she knew Mr. Karas—naturally she knew him, through her job in the studio. She had never been out with him or had anything to do with him outside of business. She knew that he sometimes nipped on something alcoholic, because she had smelled it on his breath. She had no idea—

“What about your ex-husband, Larry Reed?” Miss Withers cut in. “What were the circumstances of your divorce?”

“Larry? But I thought—”

“The cases are obviously related, my dear. Larry Reed is dead and Karas is dying, and we’ve got to put an end to this.” Miss Withers moved closer.

The girl shivered. “I—I see what you mean, I guess. Well, Larry and I just didn’t get along. I took all I could, and then—”

“Other women?” demanded Sergeant Callan.

“No!” Joyce said proudly. “It wasn’t that at all. Larry was sweet, but he was a born bachelor; he didn’t want to be married, not really. When I wanted to go somewhere he’d insist on sitting home and painting things—hours on end he’d paint things.”

“And, of course, you objected to his gambling?” Miss Withers put in.

Joyce’s big eyes widened. “But he didn’t, not that I ever knew of. He was very proud of his membership in the Society of Magicians or whatever they call it—he could do wonderful card tricks, but he always said that they had a house rule or something which made it a point of honor not to play cards for money when they knew so many tricks. It wouldn’t be fair, he said.”

“That,” said the Inspector, “doesn’t fit in with what we know about his valentine.”

Joyce shrugged. “I can’t help that. But while I lived with Larry I never knew him to gamble, and he’d only play bridge when I insisted, for a quarter a corner.”

Miss Withers frowned. There was a point here, if she could only put her finger on it. Something rang sour, like a cracked bell. “I wonder—” she began.

“You can wonder later,” said Sergeant Callan. He turned to Joyce. “You were pretty bitter about your divorce, no?”

“No,” said Joyce calmly. “He’s—he
was
—a very sweet guy, but no husband. We parted fairly amicably, and we sometimes had lunch or dinner afterward, because we stayed friends. And if you’re trying to suggest that
I’d
poison him—”

“Nobody suggested that,” put in Miss Withers. “But somebody did, you know. We’re just trying—”

“Okay, okay,” said Sergeant Callan, mopping his brow. “Shut up, will you?” He turned back to Joyce. “You got any idea who might want to poison your ex-husband?”

She shook her head. “
Nobody
would. He played a lot of practical jokes and stuff like that, but it was all in fun. Nobody ever stayed mad at him—I certainly didn’t. And I’ll tell you, if it’s any of your business, that if he’d crooked a finger I’d have come back and gone to bed with him any time after the divorce; I’d have remarried him any time if he’d promised to drop the paint brushes now and then and go dancing with me. He was a dear guy and sometimes, believe it or not, it’s easier to get a divorce than to get rid of memories….” Joyce was crying again.

“But on the other hand …” began Miss Withers.

Sergeant Callan waved her down. “That’s all, Mrs. Reed.”

“You mean I can go now?” Her eyes were shining.

“Yes, you can all go now!” Callan had had about enough. “I’m getting so much help with this case I can’t hear myself think. Inspector, get in touch with me later, huh?”

Oscar Piper winked at him understandingly and then assisted the bristling schoolteacher out of the room. They made their way through the music stage with its rows of fretting people, and then paused at the main doors to look back. Janet Poole was being summoned into the inquisition—her shoulders squared and lips tight and bitten—for her turn at questioning. “I would like to be there,” said Miss Withers.

“You were there, in spades,” Oscar Piper said. “Vocally, too.”

“I was only going to suggest to the sergeant,” she countered defensively, “that he ask some very pointed questions of one Rollo Bayles when the time comes.”

“Bayles? But you said he was a pipsqueak character.”

“Yes, and no. Bayles is the inhibited sort of man who could quite possibly love and then hate a woman—or two women. He could also hate the men whom he thought to be more successful with them than he’d been. He’s all twisted up inside, like—”

“Like a pretzel?”

She sniffed. “Never mind, Oscar. Perhaps sometimes I am talking when I should have been listening, but I was only trying to help the sergeant, even if he didn’t want it.” They came out into the sunlit studio street, and each drew a deep breath.

“You mustn’t mind Callan,” Oscar Piper told her. “He’s just a cop, trying to do his job, and a bit befuddled—that makes him touchy. He’s naturally confused—”

“He’s not alone in that,” Miss Withers said with a sideways glance. “Not that I really minded being given a brush-off just now; if this case is ever solved it will not be in that stuffy office, with that bumbling moron in charge. But, Oscar, I’m really worried; the murderer is having things entirely his own way, he’s calling all the turns. If,” she added thoughtfully, “it is a
he
at all.”

The Inspector stopped short. “Huh? What d’you mean? Outside of pretty office secretaries and messenger girls who don’t really count in the picture, what shes have you got to suspect—unless you mean the Poole girl?”

“I don’t know exactly what I mean, at the moment. But it’s certainly within the realm of possibility that your Zelda Bard was killed by a jealous woman, and Larry Reed, too. Karas could have been a smoke screen to confuse the issue—as if it needed it. And it comes to my mind that at the time Janet happened to discover her poison-pen valentine she also happened to have a loyal friend and admirer at hand to hear her scream, and to testify later as to her shock and surprise. It could be—” She frowned. “No, I’m going too fast. I have a phone call or two to make before I try to come to any final conclusions.”

The Inspector said that he had a fistful of cigars to buy before he went any further and departed in search of the studio commissary, promising to rejoin the schoolteacher in her office in a minute or so. It was twenty minutes at least before he appeared in her doorway, looking somewhat pleased with himself. He fended off the affectionate advances of Talley, found the most comfortable chair, and said, “Hildegarde, I have news—”

“So have I,” said the maiden schoolteacher glumly. “I finally got through my long-distance call to New York. It was a call to a friend of mine in the bursar’s office at Columbia University, in an attempt to find out just when Guy Fowler studied chemistry there.”

“Yipes!” said Piper.

“No yipes. He didn’t, not ever. Not even post-graduate work or summer school or anything. Columbia seems to be about the only school Guy failed to matriculate at and be kicked out of. Which brings me back to a distasteful probability—”

“So,” the Inspector said, “you’re back on the idea that it’s a woman.”

“You men are all alike. To you, women are either goddesses or else tramps. But no woman is ever the ‘clear mountain brook’ that Guy Fowler so fondly thinks his Janet is; he’ll learn that the hard way one of these days. But I was just thinking that every one of the trick valentines had within it a singularly nasty dig, something out of the recipient’s past that was buried and not generally known—and yet which might have been confided to a pretty girl over a few cocktails. Remember, every one of the three men immediately involved in this case took Janet out for a fling when she first came to the studio, and I have noticed that sometimes men talk very freely to a woman—”

“Some men never get a chance to; they can’t get a word in edgeways,” said Oscar Piper, not without some bitterness. “I only—”

“Yes, Oscar. I suppose you’ll go on to say that I’m barking up several trees at once, like the man in the Stephen Leacock story who leaped on his horse and rode off in all directions. Part of it, I’ll admit, is in sheer desperation. The studio is going to be closed down tomorrow; meanwhile, this is one of the very few times in my life when I have actually been retained to solve a murder. I want very much to succeed. I also don’t want this nasty murder cycle to continue; there’s no sense in waiting until everybody in the picture is dead and then to arrest the corpse—which seems to be the masculine procedure.”

The Inspector looked at her with exasperated fondness. “You through? Because if you are, I have something for you. I, too, made a phone call. I called the hospital.”

“Karas is dead, then?”

“Wrong, Hildegarde. He’s improving miraculously under antihistamine injections; he’s recovered consciousness and is officially off the critical list. Whatever he got in his bottle of
slivowitz
or elsewhere, it wasn’t enough to do the trick.” Oscar Piper jabbed his cigar at her. “See what that means?”

“Perhaps,” she said thoughtfully, “he could have dosed himself, but—”

“Tie it up with the description of the man who paid Lucinda Wersbeck’s funeral expenses and left only his initials, undoubtedly phony—”

“Yes, Oscar, yes. But we can’t eliminate the other male suspects because of that description; it’s a simple thing for a young man to make up as an older one, to gray his hair and pad his tummy and adopt a phony accent. Though why anybody would have gone to all that bother, so long ago, I don’t at the moment see.” She shook her head. “Lucy’s name was signed to the valentines and Lucy is undoubtedly dead. She may be the key to this whole thing, but I still smell red herrings somewhere.”

“Then
why
was her name brought into it?”

“When we find the reason for that we’ll have the whole secret. But the nurse who took care of Lucy at the hospital remembered her as being singularly unattractive; I believe her words were that ‘the Wersbeck woman had a face like a meat axe.’ Faces like that do not launch a thousand ships nor burn the topless towers of Ilium, nor do men commit murder for them. It just doesn’t make sense.”

“Yes, but—”

“All you policemen are alike; you get a theory and stick to it, rejecting everything else. Take your firm belief that what has been happening here is linked with your precious Zelda Bard case—it may only be the work of an imitator of that earlier success. You see, one of my phone calls was to the Los Angeles Public Library, and I found that they happen to have on file in their medical section a copy of the pamphlet on poison ivy published by Columbia University—a pamphlet all about the poison-ivy concentrate and the methods of producing it. Any one of our suspects could have chanced on it and made notes.”

The Inspector nodded, looking glum. “That throws it wide open. I might as well go back home.”

“And I might as well go back with you, wearing sackcloth and ashes, if something doesn’t break before tomorrow night.” The schoolteacher tapped thoughtfully with a fingernail at her rather prominent front teeth. “But, Oscar, I have a sort of hunch….”

“Well?”

“You know my methods, Watson.”

He grinned. “Yeah, Hildegarde, I know too well. When the watched pot refuses to boil, you throw a monkey wrench into it.” He looked at his watch. “It’s past time to be hungry, speaking of pots. Let’s go see what’s cooking in the studio restaurant!”