Cold Poison (19 page)

And then a light appeared on the control panel. The schoolteacher pressed the go-ahead button and a moment later the auditorium lights gradually faded into what seemed an inky darkness in which you couldn’t see your hand before your face. Then suddenly on the big screen before them appeared the original poison-pen drawing of the dead bird, more atrocious and obscene now than ever, since it was magnified to the dimensions of a giant ostrich. What sort of mind, the schoolteacher wondered, could think of strangling Peter Penguin? It was like stabbing Tinker Bell. The picture on the screen moved over to the left, and stopped.

“This is Exhibit A, Professor,” she spoke up. “It’s from one of the original valentines, by the hand of the murderer. The next picture will be from one of our test drawings.” She pressed the button again, and suddenly drawing number one appeared on the right side of the screen. There were two enormous dead penguins illumined—two sketches, but were they identical in technique? It was beyond Miss Withers to decide.

It was Mr. Cushak’s drawing on display; magnified, it looked like something done by a six-year-old child. “Very interesting,” came the professor’s voice. “Hold it, please.” The projectionist held, echoes of dead lost laughter filling the room. “Lights,” said the professor, and the lights came on. He wrote very busily in his little notebook. “Next, please.”

Miss Withers pressed the go-ahead button again, and again they were in darkness thick as pitch. Another drawing replaced the first, sliding jumpily into place beside the master picture. It was Joyce’s, the schoolteacher recognized, and no professional job, either.

“Amazing!” said the professor. “Lights, please. It reminds me of one case I had in Stockholm—”

“Next!” prompted Miss Withers, a little desperately. “I mean—” She suddenly realized that she had to press the button, and did so. The room was in utter darkness again. And the cup of coffee remained on the arm of her seat; it was another invitation to the murderer, or was supposed to be one. She would have died rather than drink that coffee; if her suspicions were right she would have died if she drank it. One could only hope.

Meanwhile the proceedings went on, with drawing after drawing displayed briefly on the screen. Meanwhile the professor was hamming it up, interrupting the affair to discuss handwriting and its allied fields, and dragging the ceremony out
ad infinitum
. “I could
strangle
that man,” the schoolteacher whispered, still waiting.

At the next break Mr. Cushak came up to her, looking worried. “Perhaps I shouldn’t mention it now,” he said almost apologetically, “but just how much is this famous professor of yours going to cost the studio—I mean his fee?”

“I think it’s seventeen-fifty,” she whispered back. Mr. Cushak almost swooned. $1750 was a lot of money, even if it was somebody else’s money. Cushak went away, looking most unhappy.

“I meant seventeen dollars and fifty cents—” she sent after him, but too late. Everything was too late at the moment. The party was going to hell in the proverbial handbasket, and the murderer somewhere in the audience still sat on his thumbs, in spite of all the attractive baits she had laid out.

The schoolteacher turned to Oscar Piper beside her. “Why doesn’t something happen?” she demanded.

“Because,” he confided, “you’re barking up seventeen wrong trees all at once. I take a dim view of this whole thing, and always have.” Which was no comfort.

So the session went on and on interminably, the professor taking longer and longer to study the exhibits, and making longer and longer notes during the periods when the lights were on between exhibits. He also seemed to have an irresistible tendency to make little speeches about his previous experiences in the field of graphology. Miss Withers usually managed to cut him off with a polite firmness which got thinner and thinner.

The group, the captive audience, grew more and more restive. They went out for drinks, for coffee, for cokes. They drifted hither and yon, but nobody drifted out of the picture; the officer at the door saw to that. But they were all seemingly bored with it all; there was a very real question in Miss Withers’ mind as to how long they could be held here under her extremely moderate authority. And then somebody—a smallish man in sport shirt and slacks—came to sit down beside her.

“If you don’t mind—” he began.

“I do very much mind,” she snapped. She had noticed him hovering in the background for some time, a jollyish, frivolous-looking man who rather resembled a shaved Santa Claus. “I’m busy, and nothing works, and they’re all about to walk out on me.”

“No, ma’am,” he told her. “They won’t leave if I say not to, only we try not to do things around here that way; we like to think it’s one big happy family.”

She did a double take. “
What
?”

And the man introduced himself. “I just got in on the plane half an hour ago, and I guess it’s high time. I just talked to Cushak, and he told me what you’re up to.”

“Oh, heavens!” The schoolteacher was flustered. “I suppose you think—”

“It’s not such a bad idea, really,” he interrupted. “This party, I mean. Maybe it isn’t going as badly as you think. If you don’t mind one small suggestion—”

“I’m afraid it’s too late for that,” Miss Withers said mournfully.

“Maybe not. But this is what occurs to me.” And he told her.

“Good gracious!” She set her coffee cup down on the aisle, so that she could lean closer to the big boss of the studio, the man behind the men behind the pencils and brushes and cameras. “I thought I noticed everything, but that escaped me.

You mean only four fingers,
always
?”

“Four fingers,” he repeated. “Counting the thumb. We don’t know where it started, exactly—maybe back with Disney’s
Steamboat Bill
or before. But you look at Woody Woodpecker or Donald Duck or any other cartoon character. It’s a solid tradition in the business. None of us would ever dream of doing it otherwise.” He sat back placidly and lighted a cigarette. “You take it from here, lady. You’re doing all right—and I don’t think we’re going to have to shut down, after all.”

The lights came on again as the professor finished another of his monotonous dissertations, and the schoolteacher started to rise. Then she suddenly noticed that Talley the poodle, who had interested himself in her coffee cup in the hope that it might hold cream and sugar, was busily kicking imaginary dirt over it, in the ancient canine gesture of disgust and revulsion.

“So!” said Miss Withers. She picked up the cup and handed it to the Inspector. “But don’t drink it,” she hastily added. “Save it for analysis.” Then she girded her loins and went down the aisle to where the professor was still gallantly stalling for time—if ever a man earned his $17.50, it was this one.

“Cut,” said the schoolteacher. She took the center of the stage, with considerably more confidence. “Good people, the party’s almost over,” she announced. “You can all go home—except just one of you, of course. I mean the murderer, the original sender of the poison-pen valentines, who made the mistake of drawing Peter Penguin with
five
fingers, when everybody who has ever worked in the film cartoon field knows that it’s a tradition to draw only four.”

There was a frozen silence in the room. “Our murderer,” Miss Withers continued carefully, “was a person who had moved in and used the studio and its facilities and conventions for his own foul designs—but he didn’t know that one thing. However, he knew a lot of other things; he knew, for instance, that the field of murder investigation is full of truisms. The murderer is always supposed to return to the scene of his crime, poison is a woman’s way, and writers of poison-pen letters always send one to themselves. To quote Mr. George Gershwin again, ‘It ain’t necessarily so.’”

She paused, and the Inspector came up beside her. “Let’s give up, and go home,” he suggested. “You aren’t getting to first base.”

“Hold onto your hat, Oscar.” She turned back to the assemblage. “In this case, we have a murderer who
knew
all these clichés, these truisms, and who took special pains to do the exact opposite. He
didn’t
return to the scene of the crime, and he used poison though he wasn’t a woman, and he
didn’t
send a poison-pen valentine to himself—though he eventually got one, concocted by myself, and that resulted in the overt act of putting a bit of the poison into the coffee cup I’d left handy. Since you are all involved, and your jobs are at stake, I’d like you to see it for yourselves.”

She went back to the control table and pressed a buzzer. “Can we have number six again?” she asked.

“In a minute, lady,” said the projectionist through his little porthole.

“It makes no sense—” Tip Brown began, restively.

“It certainly doesn’t!” put in Guy Fowler. “How long does this go on? Janet and I still want to get to Las Vegas tonight, and do we have to listen forever to this claptrap? It’s almost five o’clock.” Jan shook her head and tried to pull him back into his seat, but he shook her hand off and stood erect again. “Well?”

“You aren’t going to Las Vegas, or anywhere,” Miss Withers told him coldly. “Watch the screen.”

The lights went out again, and again there were two drawings of the dying penguin, side by side. “The original poison-pen valentine and the replica,” said Miss Withers. “Both of the drawings you see are Mr. Guy Fowler’s, and both have certain interesting variations in the fingers. Too many, for cartoons—for Never-never land. I have it on excellent authority.”

Back came the lights.

The room was gelid. And then Guy Fowler broke the stiffness by coming up the aisle, his face stiff and ugly. “All right,” he said. “When I was practically forced to draw a picture of a picture of a dead penguin I drew it with five fingers instead of four. How silly can anybody get? Try making something of that in court.”

“Everyone else in the place knows the conventions about cartoon characters’ fingers,” said Miss Withers softly. “I could never believe from the beginning that
this
was really an inside job—nobody who had ever worked on Peter Penguin would possibly conceive of drawing him dead; he’s as immortal as Mickey Mouse or Popeye the Sailor. The valentines were drawn by somebody who had complete access to the studio, but who didn’t know all the rules. You, Mr. Fowler.”

He still came forward, and in such a manner that for the first time in his doggish existence Talleyrand the poodle stood up and growled at a human being. “So you’re trying to make
me
the patsy,” Guy Fowler cried. “Just because I drew too many fingers on the penguin.”

“And there were too many fingers on the dead penguin in the original valentine,” Miss Withers reminded him.

There was still fight in him. “So
I’m
supposed to have killed Larry Reed, a man I hardly even knew?”

“But he was a man who had played a rather rude practical joke on you, as he had on many others, so you disliked him enough not to care particularly whether he lived or died. And it appears that you didn’t care much for Mr. Karas either, even though he’d been kind enough to give you a part-time job at music arrangement. You knew about Larry Reed’s hypochondria and his bottle of mineral oil that he kept in his desk; you knew about Mr. Karas’ bottle of
slivowitz
. Easy places to plant poison, I should think. As in my coffee cup just now—because you knew that I knew. You thought you’d covered yourself by discovering Mr. Karas in the washroom and giving him first aid—but it was all part of that phony pattern you’d tried to assemble, the one you luckily hadn’t yet quite time to accomplish.”

The schoolteacher advanced at him belligerently, and Guy Fowler backed away, not entirely from the effect of Talley’s growls.

“I saw you come up the aisle in the darkness,” said Miss Withers. “It’s an old trick, really. I kept my eyes shut when the lights were on, and so in the darkness I could see you deftly dosing my coffee. We’ll hold that for the police laboratory people. You’re gone, young man.”

Guy Fowler seemed to shrink, suddenly. “I want a lawyer,” he said.

“You can have ten lawyers,” said the schoolteacher. “But it will all come out. They can perhaps make it sound preposterous—taking the life of a fellow human being is never sensible at any time—but the facts are the facts. You were a would-be pulp writer a few years ago, and possibly this is your supreme achievement. But the whole thing, the murder of Reed and the attempted murder of Karas, was a blind, wasn’t it? Just because four people happened to be in a car that happened to hit a girl you never knew.”

Guy Fowler reeled back, his mouth working. But no words came out.

“You were building all this thing up, with the valentines and all, to cover the fact that you wanted to kill Janet—weren’t you?”

He froze, standing in the aisle. There were no words to say.

“You thought, young man, that you could conceal one murder underneath several others, all linked to a completely phony premise. We were supposed to hunt for an imaginary Lucy or for a boy friend of hers just because of an accident which was purely that and nothing else, a link in a nonexistent chain. It all was leading up to your real murder, the one you haven’t yet had quite time to accomplish. Though I imagine you’d have managed it quite neatly, perhaps with the help of the magnum of champagne which you’d have made sure that Janet drank.”

“Oh,
no
!” said Tip Brown, coming forward.

But Janet had fainted, collapsed in a huddle under her seat.

“Prove it—prove any of it!” challenged Guy Fowler. “My family’s lawyers will tear this apart in a minute—”

She smiled, a mirthless smile. “Your precious family—and your precious first wife who you thought might take you back into her arms now that you’re starting to be a successful song writer with your
Meditations on a Melting Icicle
or whatever the title is! It won’t work, young man.”

He said nothing. Mr. Cushak arose, obviously worried. “I don’t think this is really getting anywhere, and—”

“Oh, shut up, Ralph,” said the studio boss. “Go back and sit down.” He nodded to Miss Withers. “Say it all, ma’am.”