Cold Poison (15 page)

But Miss Withers shook her head. “You’ll have to excuse me for lunch today, much as I would like to eat on your expense account, if any. Take Talley with you if you like, and buy him the usual raw hamburger. I’m going to be very busy.”

He started, and looked at her suspiciously. “What,” he said, “do you know that I don’t?”

“In this particular case, only a glimmering. But sometimes they say that in hunting a shotgun is more useful than a rifle.”

“How cryptic can you get?”

“Oscar, you’d be surprised. Run along, will you?”

The Inspector stared at her for a moment, shook his head, and then with a long-suffering smile bent down to snap the lead on Talley’s collar and allowed himself to be dragged out of the office. At moments like this, he knew full well, there was nothing to be done with Hildegarde except to watch and wait and try to catch her if she stumbled. When she got that glint in her eye—

Miss Withers sat down at the drawing board, switched on the light, and picked up a monkey wrench. It was in the shape and form of a red pencil, but it was a monkey wrench all the same. And if she threw it into the watched pot …There was an odd smile on Hildegarde Withers’ face as she started to draw a picture.

“The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way …”

SAMUEL BUTLER

T
HE CORAL-PINK HOUSE ON
Mulholland Drive was gray and lonely in the moonlight as Miss Hildegarde Withers wheeled her little coupé into the driveway and turned off the ignition. For a long moment the schoolteacher sat there, building up her courage. This was risky business, she knew; she hadn’t even the flimsy excuse of rescuing an imaginary trapped cat this time if she were to be caught at housebreaking.

The Inspector would have no part of it, so she had left him to pore over his Zelda Bard files and come alone. On second thought it looked safe enough; there was no light anywhere in Larry Reed’s house, and there was no parked car in the vicinity. She knew that, contrary to popular belief, the police do not always post an officer for several days at the scene of a murder; they hadn’t enough available men. But she moved cautiously all the same, around the house to the patio and the french doors. A bit of work with a hairpin—more difficult now because she had only the beam of a pen-sized flashlight to guide her—and she was again inside.

The prize she sought still stood on the easel, but something—perhaps only an old maid’s curiosity—impelled her to move through the house, looking and sniffing. Evidently the electricity had been turned off; the refrigerator gave forth noisome stenches from spoiled food when she opened it.

But there was nothing which she could recognize as a clue, not anywhere. The bed where Larry Reed had died was still rumpled and unmade; she had a momentary desire to set it straight and then prudently resisted it. She came back into the living room, and turned to the desk. There were only bills, paid and unpaid; no personal letters, no diary, no nothing.

Larry Reed had not been addicted to writing, she gathered. Or at least he hadn’t kept carbons of his letters. There was a little heap of address books through which she skimmed briefly—Reed evidently had got a new one whenever the old numbers got too obsolete. She found Janet Poole’s name in most of them.

“Our ‘clear mountain brook …’” murmured Miss Withers. She could not resist the feeling that Janet was the key to this whole thing, somehow. Janet was the person most likely to have learned the personal secrets of Larry Reed, and Rollo Bayles, and Mr. Karas. And yet—

“Dear me,” said Miss Withers to herself and moved toward the easel. Then she froze as she heard a car pull up outside, and a key turn in the lock. She hastily beat a retreat to the kitchen and tried to make herself invisible behind a cabinet. This was something she hadn’t bargained for.

Larry Reed’s relatives or heirs or whatever, she decided. It certainly wasn’t the police, or there would have been a fanfare of sirens; the authorities out here always advertised their coming well ahead of time, no doubt to make sure that there would be no burglars around when they got there.

Anyway, the schoolteacher was considerably uncomfortable, taking one thing with another. There was the sound of soft, almost furtive footsteps in the other room; they went on down the hall and a moment later came back again. The reflected glow of a flashlight showed momentarily.

Miss Withers would have liked to leap out suddenly and say “Boo!” but held herself back; she was without even a hatpin for a weapon since she had gradually come around to the California custom of wearing no hat. But the sounds in the other room intrigued her; eventually her curiosity got the better of her and she tiptoed to the kitchen door. At that moment there was the sound of crashing and tearing, and a dull thud.

She gasped audibly, and then was caught in the white glow of a flashlight, pinned down like a moth. A woman’s voice exploded in the room. “My God, it’s
you
!”

“It is,” said Miss Withers, advancing. Her small flashlight reached out and limned Joyce Reed.

“Do you haunt houses?” the girl demanded, her voice shaking.

“From time to time. And just what are you doing here, young lady?”

“I—I had a reason to come. I still had my key, and there was something I wanted to get, if you must know!”

“What?” asked Miss Withers quietly.

Joyce came closer, looking confused and frightened and angry all at once. “It’s none of your business, but I happened to want this!” She showed it, and it was an album of photographs, against a background which even the schoolteacher in this light could recognize as Palm Springs. There was a young couple on the edge of a swimming pool, there was Larry Reed on a motor scooter, there was Joyce looking lusher and lovelier than ever, in a beach chair….

“So I forgot to take this with me when I left Larry,” the girl said. “But it doesn’t have any value nor any interest to anybody but me now, so I came back to get it. Any objections?”

“No,” said Miss Withers softly. “My objections are to your tearing up the water color I came here to get, which I see is missing from the easel. Why?”

“So I tore it to shreds,” Joyce said. “The hell with that long tall cold blonde. I just couldn’t resist the impulse.”

Miss Withers nodded. “So she broke up your marriage?”

“Janet Poole? Larry didn’t even know her then. He just wasn’t fitted for matrimony, that’s all. I wanted children, and he thought they were a horrible responsibility or something.”

“But you stayed interested enough in him to resent his romance with Janet?”

“No! There wasn’t any romance, and that’s what I resented. Janet went out with him and teased him on and then never even kissed him; she’s cold as a Christmas goose except for that musician of hers. Larry was impressionable; he was so terribly in love with her for a while, but she never even gave him the correct time! Who does she think she is, anyway? Larry was worth four of her silly Guy Fowlers with the stuffy accent; I bet she still supports him, too.”

Miss Withers ruefully surveyed the wreckage of the water color strewn in the fireplace, now beyond any reclaiming. “I wish you hadn’t done that,” she said. “I had plans.”

“I’m sorry,” Joyce told her. “Honestly. I didn’t know it mattered. But as we say in the South where I come from, it
pleasured me some
to rip it to shreds. It did it, and I’m
glad
! But then, I’m just a crazy mixed-up kid….”

“Cliché me no more clichés,” said Miss Withers. “Mrs. Reed, who do you think killed your ex-husband?”

Joyce froze. “I don’t know. He never had a real enemy. Nobody could have wanted to kill Larry, not even me and at times I had more reason than most. It just doesn’t make sense, any sense at all. It’s as if—as if he got something meant for somebody else.”

“So we come out by the same door at which we came in, which is nowhere.”

“Yes,” said Joyce. “Do you mind if I go now, and take my photograph album? I’ve got a boy friend waiting outside, and I think he takes a dim view of my being sentimental over stuff like this.”

“I don’t mind,” said Miss Withers. “The only thing I mind is that this case gets more complicated by the hour, with no sense to it at all. And I have only tomorrow in which to solve it, since they’re shutting down the studio.”

“And I’m going off salary,” Joyce admitted. “Which I can’t afford. If I can help in any way—”

“You’ve helped a lot, in reverse,” said the schoolteacher, looking at the ruined bits of the water color. “That was to have been Exhibit A. Good night.”

They departed by their separate entrances, leaving Larry Reed’s house lonely and desolate again. Miss Withers came home and prepared for bed, giving her hair its requisite one hundred strokes, and feeling no confidence whatever in the morrow. Unless her trap worked….

The next morning the sun’s slanting rays slid down a certain side street in West Hollywood, crept through a Venetian blind and then awakened Miss Hildegarde Withers as no alarm clock could have ever done. She sat up straight in her bed—no, this wasn’t either her bed, it was an uncomfortable pallet made on the floor behind the bed, and she ached in every bone. Her bed was occupied by a lumpy recumbent figure made up out of blankets and pillows, with a gray beret and an old transformation arranged on the pillow; it was a classic device borrowed straight out of Sherlock Holmes.

But the trap hadn’t worked. She had spread out her valentines, and left her window invitingly open, too. She gave out with a disappointed sigh, for this was the last day.

The maiden schoolteacher creakingly arose and put on a flannel robe; she gave her hair a lick and a promise and then went out into the living room where she found the Inspector and Talley both sound asleep on the sofa in positions which could not have been particularly comfortable for either of them. Both were snoring gently, and Oscar Piper gripped a nasty-looking police-positive .38, which she prudently removed from his hand before she jogged his shoulder.

“Rise and shine, my two heroic protectors,” she said with some acidity.

Talley woke first and wagged his stump of a tail, staying exactly where he was. “Sweet spirits of niter!” murmured the Inspector. “In the middle of the night, yet?”

“It happens to be all of seven o’clock in the morning,” she said firmly.

The little Hibernian policeman sat up, arranging his disheveled shirt and tie. He yawned copiously. “So it was a dry run and nothing happened. I could have told you. Well, I did my part—I stayed awake until after five o’clock and there were no intruders, nobody even tried to try the door.”

“So I gather. But
why
not, Oscar?” She shook her head. “I was so sure—”

“Probably just because the murderer of Larry Reed is under wraps in the hospital, recovering from his own dosage.”

“Mr. Karas? Stuff and nonsense. The trap didn’t work because somehow the killer failed to be fooled by my attempt to throw the monkey wrench into the watched pot, as you are always saying.” Miss Withers frowned. “But it did seem so presumable at the time; the murderer knows that senders of poison-pen letters are traditionally supposed to send one to themselves, so he carefully refrained. And then when he did get one—”

“Maybe he’s somebody not on your list?”

“Stuff and nonsense again. I sent my little missives to everybody involved in the case, hinting that I know all. He was supposed to make an overt act, as the saying goes.”

“So he didn’t, or she didn’t. You and your valentines! How about some coffee?”

But she wasn’t listening. “They weren’t jingles. I think the poem I used will at least match in literary merit the compositions of the original writer. May I quote? It went:

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN—

NOW WE END THE DANGEROUS GAME

DO A MURDER—TAKE THE BLAME

FACE THE MUSIC, SOUND THE DRUMS

LOOK OUT, KILLER, HERE IT COMES

and I signed it Lucy and Zelda, just in case you’re right in thinking that the cases are linked.”

The Inspector yawned. “Maybe your drawings of the dying penguin weren’t convincing enough.”

“What has that got to do with it? The guilty party would still get the idea that somebody was stealing his stuff, and close on his tail—or do I mean trail? Besides, I can trace as well as anybody, which is all that was required. The studio is full of pictures of the Bird, in every conceivable position.”

“It sounds nuts to me. Sending the things out broadcast—”

“Yes, I sent them—or poked them under the office doors—to everybody. To Mr. Cushak, and Cassiday, the janitor, and to Guy Fowler, whom you dislike so much because of his manners and his Boston accent; I even sent a valentine to my collaborator on
The Circus Poodle
story, the effervescent Tip Brown. I was trying to use the psychological approach, Oscar. The receipt of the valentine should have aggravated the killer into intending to eliminate me, as the one person who knew his guilty secret.”

The Inspector stared at her, shaking his head. “And how, for heaven’s sweet sake, would he know for sure who sent it? It wasn’t as if you’d signed your name or anything.”

“If I’d signed my name,” she snapped back, “the whole thing would have smelled like a rat, or worse. That’s what I tried to get around by this subtle touch; I had Talley put a smudgy paw print on each valentine, as if the page had been left on the floor and he had stepped on it accidentally. Everybody in the studio knows that I have a poodle around day and night and all over the place, so that should have led our murderer straight to me. Only it didn’t.”

“Yeah. You slept on the floor and I sat up all night with a roscoe handy, and nobody came to the party. You and your bright ideas. What do we do next—surrender?”

“It was a good idea anyway, and if I knew just why it didn’t work—” She nodded. “But I have one shot left in my locker. When we get to the studio today—”

“Breakfast first,” the Inspector said firmly.

She came back to present reality with a start. “Of course, Oscar. Would you like a slice of Persian melon and some eggs Benedict, with guava jelly on the side?”