Cold Poison (2 page)

“I see,” said Mr. Cushak cautiously. “Well, as to the warnings or threats or whatever they were, the recipients claim to have destroyed them. However, from what I can learn the messages seem not to have been actually obscene. But I gather that there was something of a most unpleasant nature in each one, some personal stab below the belt.”

“But why come to me?” Miss Hildegarde Withers asked, not unreasonably. “You have said that the paper and envelopes were studio stationery. It is obviously an inside job, and I know little or nothing about movie studios. You see, I’m only an amateur snoop at best; I have no license or anything.”

“Yet you seem to have been highly recommended by the police.”

Miss Withers’ long lantern-face was quizzical. “And since when have the Los Angeles police, with whom I had a slight disagreement some years ago,
*
gone around recommending retired schoolteachers for this sort of delicate assignment?” She sniffed audibly.

“They didn’t,” Cushak admitted. “Our studio is located outside of the legal limits of Los Angeles, anyway, and the local force is no worse and no better than one would expect. If we called them in they’d rampage through the place, browbeat a lot of our people, and get absolutely nowhere. The story would also leak out to the newspapers. In the motion-picture industry we try to wash our own dirty linen without any fanfare of trumpets, and if sometimes we do happen to have a rotten apple in the barrel, we feel it should be quietly nipped in the bud without spotlights or the setting off of Roman candles….” He ran out of words and out of breath, hopelessly lost amid his own metaphors.

“Well, then?”

“The mention of your name came from New York,” he admitted. “You see, our cartoon studio is really a separate entity inside Miracle-Paradox. They release our pictures, but our shop is independently owned and managed, with our own buildings on a corner of the big lot. Our big boss—” here Cushak paused and seemed about to genuflect three times toward the east—“our big boss is back in New York on a business trip. He was advised of this situation over long distance, and he told me to contact you; it seems he had heard of you through some big-shot police official he met at a luncheon.”

“
Dear
Inspector Oscar Piper,” said the schoolteacher, brightening visibly. “He’s always trying to throw a job my way, as long as it keeps me out of
his
way. But please do go on.”

Mr. Cushak came straight to the point. “This sort of problem is supposed to be right up your alley. Of course, at the studio we have our own security force—mostly retired cops—but they’re trained to handle pilferers and gate-crashers, nothing like this. You’ll have to be there on the lot to be able to function. Would it be convenient for you to report to the main gate at nine o’clock tomorrow morning? There’ll be a pass waiting.”

“Not quite so fast,” objected Miss Withers sensibly. “While I admit that I like to meddle in problems of a criminal nature as a sort of mental exercise, I have in the past worked almost entirely on murder cases. I’m not at all sure—”

“We need you,” Cushak told her, obviously remembering his orders. “And there was really a very definite death threat in each of the poison-pen valentines. Perhaps there is no actual danger to anybody, but we want to find out who is responsible for this, and quick.”

The schoolteacher was still dubious. “From my experience and from what I have read on the subject, I’d say that murderers rarely rattle before they strike. A person intending to commit homicide doesn’t draw silly pictures and write warning messages to put his victims on guard. This looks to me like a bad practical joke.” She cocked her head. “Do you have any practical jokers at your studio?”

Cushak’s tight mouth tightened tighter. “We are lousy with them, ma’am—if you’ll pardon the expression. It’s practically an occupational disease among our artists, gagmen, directors and writers; their minds are frivolous and run in that channel for some reason. Irresponsible children, all of them.” It was fairly clear that Mr. Cushak sincerely wished that movie cartoons could somehow be put together by bright young certified public accountants who punched the time clock on the dot and always cleaned up their desks before going home at night. “They are always raising some sort of hell,” he told her. “Like putting gin in the water coolers. You might not believe it, but one day last winter after I had had to announce that there would be no Christmas bonus because of retrenchment, I came down to my brand new Cadillac on the studio parking lot and found a wheelbarrow brimming full of water in the back seat! What, may I ask, can one do with a wheelbarrow full of water? It took me over an hour to dip it out with a tin can, and I was late for an appointment with my analyst.”

With some effort Miss Withers restrained a smile, but this was no time to indoctrinate the man about the principle of the siphon. “And have you any idea as to the identity of the culprit?”

“I have. I can’t prove anything, but it’s just the sort of thing that Larry Reed would think of. He’s a very brilliant artist or he wouldn’t stay on the payroll, but he’s erratic and temperamental and always pulling fast ones.”

“Such as?”

“Well, one year we had an efficiency expert on the lot, not very popular with our personnel, as you can imagine. Reed took it upon himself to insert a newspaper ad on the twenty-sixth of December, giving this poor chap’s home address and offering a dollar apiece for used Christmas trees. All over greater Los Angeles gullible people saw the ad and pulled off the decorations and the tinsel and hauled their trees out to his house, and when they found it was a false alarm some of them became rather violent. They also dumped the unwanted trees in his front yard; I believe he wound up with several hundred of them.”

“How gay and delightful,” murmured Miss Withers. “But not very.”

“And Larry Reed pulled another gag,” Cushak went on in an aggrieved tone. “He’d had a slight run-in with Tip Brown, one of the other top artists at the studio, and got even with him by filling out a phony change-of-address slip at the post office. Brown didn’t get any mail at all for weeks. He missed his bills, and had his utilities cut off for nonpayment. He also, I believe, missed certain important letters of a romantic nature. Finally he checked and found that everything had been forwarded to Horsecollar, Arizona, to be held until called for. Of course, Brown got all his mail eventually, but he was somewhat bitter about it at the time.”

“I see,” said the schoolteacher thoughtfully. “Practical jokes—and they’re usually most impractical, too. Like pulling a chair out from somebody about to sit down, and perhaps fracturing a pelvis.”

He nodded. “The artistic temperament, blowing off steam. Sometimes I feel like the keeper in a snake pit. But I still don’t see how Reed could have had anything to do with our present problem, because as it happened he checked out of the studio early yesterday morning, pleading illness. Probably just another of his hangovers, but he certainly wasn’t around where he could have planted those nasty valentines.”

Miss Withers said nothing, but she looked very thoughtful. “Anyway,” the studio executive said firmly, “the big boss wants very much to find out who is responsible for this latest and most unfunny gag—if it is a gag. And it’s clearly an inside job; it must be attacked from inside. My instructions are to hire you, to add you to our staff on some plausible pretext or other, and get you inside the gates where you can have a free rein.

“You actually mean that you want me to pass as a regular studio employee?” She brightened. “I used to paint china in my girlhood days; perhaps I could make like one of your artists?”

Mr. Cushak looked politely dubious; “There is,” he said, “a considerable difference between china-painting and drawing cartoons. Do you happen to play any musical instrument? We often hire outside musicians. And sometimes we hire actors too—but no, I don’t think your voice would do even for Wilma Wombat. We’ll have to hit on something else—” He broke off, looking toward the patio door. “What on earth,” he gasped, “is
that
thing?”

Something large and brownish, rather resembling a bear that had got caught in a buzz saw, was standing outside on its hind legs and trying to twist the doorknob with its teeth. After a moment the creature succeeded and came scampering in, a great, galumphing beast; on closer view it was a dog, but a dog fearfully and wonderfully made. It was about to hurl itself upon the visitor when Miss Withers spoke sharply. “Talley, mind your manners! This is Mr. Cushak—Mr. Cushak, this is Talleyrand, my Standard French poodle.”

The dog, a sworn friend of the entire human race, restrained himself with difficulty from climbing into the visitor’s lap and licking his face; he compromised by sitting down and offering a hopeful paw. Cushak shook it, murmuring an automatic “How do you do?” and then his face slowly lighted up with inspiration.

“I have it!” he said.

“You have what?” queried the schoolteacher blankly.

“An idea! This makes everything easy. A poodle—we’ll hire
him
and you can come along as chaperone.” Cushak went on to explain that for some years the studio had been fooling around with the idea of a feature-length cartoon which would have a poodle as its hero; the project had been shelved but it could be ostensibly taken out of moth balls and put back into production, with Talley as the model for the artists to work from.

“A
live
model?” gasped Miss Withers. “For cartoons?”

Mr. Cushak explained that it was common practice in the business; that in the past they had had kangaroos and raccoons and even a baby alligator on the lot for the artists to sketch. “Nobody in the studio,” he said firmly, “will think anything of it. The dog is a natural comedian, anyway. You’ll both be there at nine?”

“Wild horses,” decided the schoolteacher, “couldn’t keep us away.”

“Good, good.” So it was settled with a handshake.

It wasn’t Miss Withers admitted to herself after the man had taken himself away in his shining Cadillac, exactly the sort of case she would have chosen. But at least it was one where her services had been requested and would presumably be paid for—a very pleasant novelty in her career as a sleuth. And she felt that she was coming up with one of her famous hunches. “It would be rather a feather in our caps, wouldn’t it,” she asked the adoring poodle a little later, “if we could walk into Mr. Cushak’s office at the studio bright and early tomorrow morning with this case all neatly tied up in a bag? We shall set the alarm for seven.”

At nine o’clock next morning Miss Hildegarde Withers appeared at the main entrance of Miracle-Paradox Studios complete with leashed poodle and also an unleashed headache, a headache beyond all aspirin. She went through the necessary formalities at the gate—getting inside the studio was about as difficult as getting into Fort Knox—and then the private policeman behind the wicket found her pass and she was guided by a cute blue-uniformed messenger girl past looming sound-stages, past bungalows and office buildings and standing sets all beautiful in front and plaster and chicken wire behind, until finally they came to the back corner lot and the street called Cartoon Alley. She was led up to Mr. Cushak’s office in a smallish modernistic two-story building and plunked down in a reception room decorated with brightly colored pictures of animals wearing pants—prominent among them was the engaging bird known as Peter Penguin….

The schoolteacher cooled her heels and whiled away the time by watching Mr. Cushak’s secretary, a lush, slightly overblown girl with midnight hair and a most plunging neckline, who juggled the phone and the interoffice communicator deftly and at the same time managed to open the morning mail and write half a dozen letters. Now and then she went out to the coffee-vending machine in the hall, as if she needed it. There were dark shadows around her eyes.

“Burning the candle at both ends and in the middle, too,” thought the schoolteacher.

And then a buzzer sounded, and she was told that she might go on into the Presence. It was something like an audience with the Pope, she gathered, except that, of course, you didn’t actually have to wear a veil and a black dress. She tiptoed gingerly inside and found Mr. Cushak smiling his usual thin smile. “Fine, fine,” he said. “You’re here.”

There was no denying that, so she didn’t try. But she took a deep breath. “Mr. Cushak, there’s something—”

“Oh, yes,” he interrupted. “The remuneration. Shall we say $250 a week for the poodle and $100 for you as caretaker, with a bonus, of course, if successful? We’ll make it a three-week guarantee; you should be able to wind it up in that time, no?”

“But—” Miss Withers began protestingly.

He waved his hand. “Okay, make it $200 for you, and that’s as far as we can go. Motion-picture studios have their problems today, dear lady, what with switching to three-dimension and with television breathing on our necks.” He spoke the word “television” as if it had four letters and was something written by nasty children on walls and sidewalks.

“Thank you, the stipend is thoroughly adequate,” she said hastily. “I was not holding out for more money; the novelty of being paid anything at all for my humble services is enough. But you see, Mr. Cushak, I thought last night that I might wind up your little mystery in one day. ‘Pride goeth …’ It seemed obvious to me that the person we sought was somebody on your staff, one of your wild Bohemian artist-writers who had slipped a cog. In other words, a habitual practical joker who had gone too far and ventured across the line of good sense and good taste. You yourself mentioned one name.”

“Larry Reed?” Mr. Cushak looked blank. “But I told you that Reed was home sick that day, and yesterday, too. It would have been impossible for him to have planted those nasty valentines. Which reminds me.” He pressed a button on his talk box. “Joyce? Get me the cashier’s office.” There was a moment’s pause, and then, “Cushak here. Larry Reed hasn’t reported for work again today, or phoned in. No hangover should last three days, so I want him terminated and a final check made out as of today…. That’s right.” He hung up and turned back to his visitor with a look in his eye which indicated that he was remembering a certain wheelbarrow full of water in a certain automobile. “We have to be firm with these people sometimes,” he explained. “And Larry Reed has finally gone too far.”