Cold Poison (16 page)

“Yes!”

“So would I. But give me a moment or two to dress, and I’ll put on the oatmeal.”

Resignedly, the Inspector ate his oatmeal and drank his coffee, two cups of which were not enough to make him alert. Miss Withers looked on him with some compassion, realizing that he must actually have kept awake in her protection most of the night, which at his age was something. But now he was coming all apart at the seams.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t have any benzedrine tablets,” she said. “I suggest, Oscar, that you go back to your bed in the guest room and knit the raveled sleave of care; there is no need for you to come out to the studio until later. The little ceremony I have in mind can’t take place until late this afternoon anyway, if it takes place at all.”

“Don’t I get any briefing beforehand?” He yawned copiously.

“You won’t need it. Things will happen as they happen and I very much want your reactions without your having any preconceived notions. The general idea is to fight fire with fire—in fighting artists you use art. See?”

“Dimly,” he confessed. “Maybe you’ll pull a rabbit out of your hat—with the hats you wear you could pull anything out—but at the moment I think this whole thing is a dry run, and how I’ll justify my trip to the commissioner….”

“Sleep on it,” she advised. He yawned again, and submitted. Leaving him and Talley in the spare bed—Talley being a poodle who could take a nap anytime anywhere with anybody—and leaving the breakfast dishes in the sink with a reasonable conviction that they’d be there when she returned, the schoolteacher set out for the studio in her modest little coupé, thinking dark thoughts. It would have been so much easier for everybody concerned if the killer had only obligingly come forward and trapped himself by blasting the dummy planted in her bed! But this murderer was like none other she had ever run across.

When she did get to the studio, she found it a place of deepest gloom, the cloud centering over Cartoon Alley. Little groups of writer-artists, animators, filler-inners, cutters and sound technicians had formed here and there along the walks and in the hallways, soberly discussing the personal economic problems of a studio shutdown. Most of the secretaries were at their desks, calling one employment agency after another. Pretty little messenger girls hovered like birds gathering for migration, debating whether to take up car-hopping in a drive-in restaurant or to tackle a rivet gun at Lockheed or one of the other aircraft factories. Nobody was doing any work; the pictures in production were stillborn and forgotten.

Miss Hildegarde Withers passed through all this feeling more than ever like an alien, a stranger in a strange land. Her problems were not theirs. Yet she had come to feel, in her few days here inside the gates, a certain real fondness for the people of Never-never land. It seemed impossible that Peter Penguin’s laugh should be stilled, even temporarily—not when the outside world was starved for laughter.

But what to do about it? How could one go about finding one rotten apple in a big barrel—without overturning the barrel? The identity of the murderer was almost as much a mystery now as in the beginning; he struck without reason or rhyme. No, he used rhymes enough, on second thought. But there was still no reason.

She climbed the stairs and went down the hall to her office, somewhat sick at heart. Times were few and far between when she actually was invited to participate in an investigation, and to fail now …

She sat down at her desk and stared at the wall, at the hundreds of whimsical drawings depicting the adventures of
The Circus Poodle
. The story board was askew again—something that always rasped her nerves was any picture not straight on the wall—and she rose to set it right. Then with a start the schoolteacher realized something. On her first day in this office, after Mr. Cassiday had removed Larry Reed’s belongings and after this particular story board had been hung in place, a poison-pen valentine had fallen out from behind it, addressed to Reed.

Then the murderer had put it there
later
, after Reed was dead! He had never intended to give Reed his warning—the snake had struck first and rattled later! That proved that the killer was somebody with free access to this and the other offices, free to dose a bottle of mineral oil and then make away with it, destroying the evidence. And it proved something a great deal more revealing. The Lucy thing was a hoax, as she had long suspected. It was purely by accident that Lucinda Wersbeck had died; it was by accident that four studio people had been riding as passengers in the rented limousine that killed her.

And the crack about Larry Reed’s being a cardsharp—it lacked the barb of the other jabs, because all the evidence went to show that Reed had never played cards for money, and didn’t even have a deck of cards in his house! The murderer had been improvising then, knowing that it wouldn’t matter anyway because Reed would never read the jingle.

Miss Withers realized that she, the police, everybody, had been sucked into the act of a deft magician, who had effectively used the old device called misdirection. Things were not what they seemed; it was the right hand the audience watched and the left hand that did the trick.

“How red can our herrings be?” said the schoolteacher aloud. But there was no earthly reason why four people here in the studio should be singled out for death warnings in the form of ridiculous poison-pen valentines or for death itself, unless—

There was but one possible answer. The murderer was acting with a dreadful logic of his own which only now she was dimly beginning to glimpse. The schoolteacher, faintly elated, considered it from all angles for a considerable time, spent half an hour with the telephone directory and ten minutes on two calls, hanging up with a faint smile on her face. Then she girded her loins and went across the street to Mr. Cushak’s office, where Joyce sat as usual at the reception desk.

“Is he in?” Miss Withers demanded.

“Yes, but—” Joyce rose suddenly. “I’m awfully sorry about last night, and that picture. I was way out of line, and—”

“Don’t give it a second thought,” the schoolteacher assured her. “We’ll just have to go around through a different door, and I have one in mind. Just be a good girl and see if you can get me into the Presence.”

There was, surprisingly enough, practically no wait at all. She found the studio executive at his desk, eating aspirins as if they were popcorn. He was, it appeared, a man beside himself and not liking the company much. “I think my ulcers have ulcers,” he confessed.

She murmured something commiseratingly.

“You don’t know the half of it,” he continued glumly. “The big boss is flying back from New York today. Sharpening an axe, with designs on my scalp. And do you know I myself actually received one of those fantastic valentines yesterday afternoon?
Me
!”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” she started to confess.

But the man went on. “The Los Angeles police are on our necks about the Larry Reed thing, which is now officially declared murder. They have officers digging into the files of the public library downtown, trying to find the names of anybody who signed out for the Columbia pamphlet on poison-ivy concentrate—”

“It will take weeks and prove nothing,” Miss Withers prophesied. “The slip was probably signed Lucy—or Mr. P.R.F.”

Cushak rubbed his aching head. “And the local police have been fearing up the studio looking for the
slivowitz
bottle that disappeared. They practically accuse me and everybody else here of having spirited it away.”

“An empty bottle with the label soaked off is like any other bottle. It could have been disposed of by putting it among the other bottles of cleaning fluids in the janitors’ cupboards, or in a trash can, or by hurling it over the fence into the Los Angeles river bed, where I’ve noticed that such dead soldiers are no rarity. The police are welcome to spend their time looking for it, which may keep them out of our way. Because we have work to do.”

“Work!” he echoed bitterly. “Who can work around here? The wheels have stopped.”

“You might listen a minute,” she said. “I have a sort of plan.” And she explained, in some detail.

“
No
!” he cried.

“Listen. If it works, as I feel in my very bones that it will, the studio won’t have to close down tonight—though you may lose a valuable employee to the gas-chamber. It’s really not difficult—”

“
No
again! If you think I’m going to be a party to any such mad, theatrical scheme as this, you’re crazy.”

“But this is a mad, theatrical place, and a mad theatrical series of killings. I was hired to do a job and I’m sure the head of the studio would want you to give me all cooperation as long as there is the faintest chance of success. Of course, you personally have nothing to fear?” She looked at him critically.

“
Me
?” He gasped like a fish.

“I was only asking. But I want to make a point that you and everybody else in the studio is under suspicion until this is cleared up. So I want a projection room and this equipment….” She went on to elaborate. “I also want this list of people there at 4:00
P.M.
each with a drawing of Peter Penguin in his or her own hand.”

“They’ll refuse to do it, even if I did ask them.”

“They wouldn’t dare to refuse the police, and besides a refusal to cooperate in the test would be a confession in itself. Don’t you see?”

Mr. Cushak definitely didn’t see, but he was no match for Miss Withers when her dander was up. “After all, you can say the police insisted on it, can’t you? At least I know a member of the New York City police force who would be willing to be quoted, so it wouldn’t be an out-and-out lie. And I imagine the local authorities would go along with it, too, if called upon. It can’t hurt, and it may help.”

Finally Cushak gave in, and bowed his head. “Very well,” he said. “But you must still understand—”

“I wish I did, and intend to. And, of course, you’ll be the first to take the test, as a sort of bellwether to the flock?”

“
Me
?”

“Yes, you. The whole thing would be pointless otherwise.”

“The whole thing, if you ask me, is pointless anyway. But I’ll try, if you’re making an issue of it. Though, believe me, I never drew anything in my entire life. Believe it or not, I hate art—even cartoon art.” He rubbed his forehead, and took another aspirin. “I like figures, figures that balance. That, madam, is a rare thing in this industry.”

“I can quite imagine, from what I’ve seen of it,” the schoolteacher admitted. “Everything seems to me to be slightly off-key, though amusing and entertaining. But the main point is that you will set up the stage and have the things there this afternoon?”

Mr. Cushak, obviously acting against his better judgment, said that he would. “But when the big boss gets here—”

“I will cope with him when he arrives,” said the schoolteacher firmly. “After all, he asked me to take this thing in hand.” She thought a moment. “Actually when he asked me to take over it was only a scare and not a series of particularly nasty murders, I must admit. But the principle remains the same. I consider it a sacred trust.”

Cushak muttered something that sounded like “My God!” But he nodded, with obvious resignation, and ushered her out of the office.

She crossed the studio street with her head held high and her hat slightly over one eye, but with high hopes in her maidenly heart. When she got back to her own cubicle she found the phone ringing lustily. It turned out to be the Inspector at the other end, and for once in his life he got in the first word. “Hildegarde, I couldn’t sleep after all, so I got up—”

“Very sensible of you, I should say.”

“Listen, I just called the hospital and your Mr. Karas is gone.”

She digested this. “The poor man—and they said he was getting better!”

“Not gone dead, just gone. He flew the coop. Got his clothes and slipped out of the hospital when the nurses were changing shifts this morning.”

“No!” the schoolteacher gasped. “But—but how could he, in that condition?”

“They say you recover from these allergy things very quickly, or else you die. But he was supposed to have been kept there several days more for observation, at least. Obviously the man’s taken a powder.”

“Nonsense. Maybe he just doesn’t like hospitals.”

“Nonsense right back at you, old girl. The man must have just taken a trace of his own poison as a blind—”

“Or maybe
slivowitz
is the antidote for poison ivy.”

“—and he’s getting the hell out of town, because he knows the thing is about to bust wide open. Cold feet, I guess. Anyway, I’ve alerted Spring Street. We’ll pick him up. ’By, Hildegarde.”

“Wait, Oscar!” she cried. “I want you out here. If you find Mr. Karas you can bring him, too. The ceremony is set for four o’clock.”

“’By, Hildegarde. I gotta get downtown.” And he hung up.

Trust Oscar Piper to go off on a wild-goose chase when she had planned an important supporting role for him in her drama. Well, as she had said before, there were more ways to kill a cat than stuffing it to death with butter. She thought a moment, then called a telephone number she had called before, and finally was put through to a very charming gentleman who listened, thought about it, laughed merrily, and said he would be glad to have a date with her.

“Cutaway and striped trousers?” he asked. “Or a plain business suit?”

She thought the latter. She thanked him and hung up, then sat back in her chair, thinking long thoughts and being ever more sure that this—the wildest of her many hunches—was right. The whole trouble with the case was that in the beginning she had started off with the wrong premise. It was like Abraham Lincoln’s courtroom story about “If you call a tail a leg, how many legs has a dog got?”—the answer being that no matter
what
you call a tail that still doesn’t make it a leg.

Misdirection—a most effective use of misdirection. Well, two could play at that game. If her plan worked …

She looked up to see Joyce Reed in the doorway. “May I come in?” she asked, and did. Then she sank into the comfortable chair. “Well,” said Joyce, “it’s—”