Cold Poison (3 page)

“Farther than you think,” murmured Miss Withers. “You see—well, I’ll have to begin at the beginning and go on to the end and then stop, as it says in
Alice
. As usual, I have been leaping to conclusions. Last night I had it all figured out that Larry Reed could have found ways to strew the poison-pen valentines around without actually being present in the studio; that his absence could have been contrived. A girl friend, an accomplice, perhaps.”

Cushak thought, and shook his head. “I doubt it. Though from what I understand he has girl friends enough around the place and even an ex-wife—Joyce Reed—who happens to be my secretary and a good one, too. They divorced a couple of years ago, but they seem to have stayed on reasonably friendly terms. But not that friendly—if Reed did think of anything so demented as sending out vicious valentines to people in the studio, he wouldn’t have taken her or anybody else in on the deal. And for all his twisted sense of humor, I don’t think that he or any of our people would possibly have thought of drawing Peter Penguin
dead
. His mind just wouldn’t work that way.”

She nodded. “I live and learn. But at the time Reed did seem like the most promising suspect. So bright and early this morning I looked up his home address in the phone book and then took pains to pay him a call, a surprise visit, working on the old but sound theory that people wakened from a sound sleep are usually very poor liars when confronted with a sudden accusation. I thought that I might by that means solve our little mystery ahead of time, but—” She sniffed.

“Well, I see that the ruse didn’t succeed.” Cushak shrugged his well-padded shoulders. “Anyway, you have eliminated Reed, which is that much gained.”

“Correction, please,” said the maiden schoolteacher gently. “I didn’t eliminate Larry Reed, but I’m afraid that someone else did. Because I found him dead.”

*
The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan
, Crime Club, 1941.

“Life so strange,

so sad the sky …
”

SWINBURNE

I
T HAD BEEN LIKE THIS
. Shortly after dawn Miss Withers had located Larry Reed’s home on the eastern fringes of Mulholland Drive, that winding pathway atop the low brush-covered mountains that divide Beverly Hills and Hollywood from the Valley, and had turned her sputtering little coupé into a long driveway leading down to a coral-pink house perched precariously on the edge of a canyon. It was a lonely house without a neighbor in view, its modern cracker-box lines stark and bare in the bright white light of the morning.

A big Buick convertible of recent date had been parked hastily or carelessly with one wheel in the petunia beds, its keys still dangling from the dashboard. Yet the mud on the tires was dry. Outside the front door were newspapers and bottles of milk and yoghurt. Nobody answered Miss Withers’ ring at the bell, but when she put her sharp ear to the panel she could hear far away inside a muffled intermittent yowling, as of some trapped animal in pain.

“A cat is in trouble,” decided the schoolteacher. The dog Talley was elaborately disinterested, perhaps because sad experience had taught him that anything happening to cats was much too good for them. Leaving the poodle to investigate some interesting bushes, she made her way around to the other side of the house, which was really the front. The place gave onto a wide brick patio on the very brim of the canyon, cluttered with barbecue equipment and ping-pong tables and summer furniture all covered with leaves and dust. There was a breath-taking view of the whole San Fernando Valley and of the Santa Rosa Mountains to the north. It was a place someone had loved and then neglected; the roses should have been cut back and the grass of the tiny lawn sadly needed mowing.

Through picture windows Miss Withers could glimpse a big living room, cold and empty now. The french doors were locked, but locks could sometimes yield to a deft bit of work with a bent hairpin. It was, of course, technically breaking and entering, but to the’ schoolteacher the piteous appeals of an animal in distress could excuse a great deal. The distant yowling still went on, a tired mechanical sound now. She hesitated only for a second.

The lock gave easily, and she went inside. “Is anybody home?” she cried, and when there was no answer she advanced into the living room. It was completely a man’s room, smelling of stale tobacco, furnished expensively and haphazardly with more than the usual complement of lamps and lounge chairs and ash trays. The books on the shelves were mostly texts on art or bound art studies, etchings and reproductions of Picasso and Klee and Degas and Dali, an oddly assorted lot which told the curious schoolteacher nothing in particular. In one corner was an easel holding an unfinished water color, the bust portrait of a girl with interesting cheekbones and unusual eyes; she thought it rather remarkably good. Nearby were other stacked pictures finished and half-finished; drawings, oils, pastels, all splashy and improvised and short on technique according to her conservative tenets, but showing that Larry Reed had moments when he wanted desperately to be something more than a comic cartoonist.

The place was silent now, but she kept on exploring. On the left was a kitchen, full of labor-saving gadgets but a bit dusty. There were the remains of a breakfast on the dinette table, relics of ham and eggs, potatoes and toast and orange juice and coffee—not, she judged, today’s vintage nor yesterday’s. It was typically a bachelor’s kitchen, the contents of shelves and refrigerator leaning largely toward beer and fizz water and the makings of breakfast and late midnight snacks; it had only known the casual ministrations of a part-time cleaning woman who hadn’t been in recently.

“Men who live alone!” sniffed Miss Withers. She doggedly continued her explorations, still seeking the source of that muffled howling. Turning from the kitchen, she came into a little hallway opening into a sybaritic bathroom with a black sunken tub, with big fuzzy towels marked “His,” “Theirs” and “Its,” and a wall cabinet overflowing with medicines, ointments, mouthwashes and vitamin pills—a veritable pharmacopoeia. The roll of toilet tissue was imprinted with gay jokes, purple limericks and La Parisienne drawings.

There remained only the bedroom, which she entered with mounting apprehension. It was a big room, dim even in this early morning sunshine since the blinds were all drawn tight. The bedside phone suddenly started to yowl again; belatedly Miss Withers recognized it as the signal the telephone exchange sends out over the line when a receiver is left off the hook. No cats in trouble, anyway, she said to herself with relief. And then she saw
it
.

On an oversized, rumpled bed a man was lying, twisted and contorted. He was fully dressed in expensive, carefully chosen sports clothes; he had evidently ended the hard way. He was a big man in his thirties with curly, rumpled hair; he had died strangling, groping blindly for the telephone. “Swelled up like a poisoned pup,” whispered the schoolteacher, backing sensibly and hastily out of the room and hoping that she had left no fingerprints anywhere. She tiptoed out of the lonely house of death and made her way hastily back to her car, collecting Talley on the way.

“Here we go again,” she said to the dog. “Hold onto your hat.”

At any rate, as she told Mr. Cushak in his office a little later, it was no false alarm.

The studio executive swallowed, looking rather pale around the gills. “But—I can hardly believe it. This is impossible. No signs of violence, you say? Then it must just be an unfortunate coincidence; Reed had a heart attack and died a natural death.”

“The death,” Miss Withers advised him coldly, “was most unnatural from where I sit. I have no pretensions to being a pathologist, but the evidence is fairly clear. Reed was in excellent health and appetite and ate a copious breakfast day before yesterday. He came in to work, was suddenly taken ill, and rushed home to die there alone.”

“But—but how can this tie in? I mean, Reed didn’t even
receive
one of the valentines!”

Miss Withers shrugged her shoulders, then pulled Talley the poodle out of Mr. Cushak’s wastebasket, where the dog had been hopefully foraging. “There is more to this than meets the eye,” she said. “But I would very much like a chance to snoop around Larry Reed’s office or studio or whatever you call it before the police get here.”

Cushak winced. “Why—his office was Number 12 in the building across the street, on the second floor. His name is on the door. But—”

“And I want a chance to meet all the people who got the poison-pen valentines.”

“Very well. Of course. But—but you just mentioned the police. I suppose—yes, I must call them and report this.”

She gave him a mildly withering look. “I’ve already taken care of that; I stopped and phoned them on my way here, somewhat anonymously. Naturally I didn’t care at this particular time to be locked up as a material witness and I had no real right to be in the house anyway, so I’m afraid I intimated that I was the cleaning woman. Anyway, they have been alerted, and will do what has to be done. Now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll have a look at that office.”

Cushak nodded slowly. “Very well. You might even take over the office as a base of operations. I’ll arrange it. And I’ll assign one of our best writer-artists to work with you on the poodle story. If there’s anything else you need—”

There was a great deal else, but the schoolteacher wasn’t sure just what. Leaving Mr. Cushak staring moodily at his desk blotter, she led Talleyrand out of the office. They crossed Cartoon Alley, the wide street already bustling with a bewildering complexity of activities, and entered the boxlike office building across the way. It took Miss Withers some time to locate the cubicle that had been Larry Reed’s, for his name had already been erased from the door. An elderly gnome in coveralls was turning out the place at the moment. Pictures, books, pipes and tobacco—art materials, an amazingly complete collection of handy home remedies such as cough syrup and mineral oil and bicarbonate of soda and milk of magnesia and vitamin pills—everything was all being tumbled into paper cartons, helter-skelter.

“So soon?” gasped Miss Withers from the doorway.

The old man looked up in ghoulish glee. “Well, he got fired, didn’t he?” He nodded wisely. “They all get it sooner or later, and from where I sit the sooner the better. Playboy parasites, all of them.”

“You sound bitter, Mr.—?”

“Cassiday it is. Pop Cassiday, they call me now when they send me on errands. Once it was Jonathan H. Cassiday and I had my own bungalow on this lot. I been with the studio since it started with Uncle Carl working on a shoestring and making better pictures than anybody knows how to do nowadays, with all their wide screens and three dimensions and stuff. But they ruined movies when sound came in.” He came closer, a gap-toothed grin on his face. “Lady, I was a director in those days, believe it or not. Sound came in and they threw away action and pantomime for talk, talk, talk—they went and hired directors from Broadway plays and I went out with a knife between my shoulder blades. But everybody in this business gets that sooner or later.” He deftly slid the two filled cartons out into the hall. “You the new one coming in?”

Miss Withers started. “Why—why yes, in a way I suppose I am.”

“It’s a sorta madhouse,” confided the old man. “But maybe you’ll get used to it, if you last long enough. Most don’t.” He went out, leaving Miss Withers and the poodle alone in the bare little office. She sat down at the big tilted desk, switched the light off and on, and almost reached for the phone. Then she hesitated. Would her somewhat anomalous position here at the studio justify the expense of a long-distance call to New York?

Yet it was a time when she would have much appreciated the advice of her old friend and sparring partner, the Inspector. She thought about it from all angles, but it was hard to concentrate here in this little room, its walls crowded with great oblong sheets of framed cardboard on which there had been pinned hundreds of rough pencil sketches of something called
Peter Penguin’s Nightmare
, a thing full of sharks and crocodiles. This cartoon world seemed to have a different set of laws and traditions and a language all its own; to the schoolteacher it was an uncharted sea with rocks just beneath the surface, inhabited by anthropomorphic monsters leering crazily at her. Yet as she studied the drawings it all seemed to be beginning to make a sort of twisted sense; it was a world of A, with new rules.

One of the cartoon characters swallowed a pistol, and every time he hiccupped a shot was fired, never of course hitting anybody. A hippopotamus in green pants walked the plank of a pirate schooner; walked straight out into thin air and then back again to shout, “Avast, ye squabs!” at his bewildered persecutors. A scared rabbit, startled from its little “ramble-shack” in the hills, turned its ears into propeller blades and took off gaily into the wild blue yonder.

Never-never land. How on earth could a retired schoolteacher cope with people who thought in these formalized, wildly exaggerated terms? If they were capable of this, they’d be capable of anything….

It was a real relief to her some time later when her solitude was broken by the advent of a large, wholesome-looking man who introduced himself as Tip Brown. He was a bulky, solid, pink-faced man in his late thirties with a militantly boyish haircut and blunt, clever hands; he explained a bit diffidently that for his sins he had been sentenced to drop everything else and work here with her. Miss Withers liked him on sight—and for that reason mistrusted him, too, not being overly sure of first impressions.

After him came two studio workmen carrying a story board still grimy from the dust of the cellar vaults, and entitled
The Circus Poodle
. It was hung on the wall facing her desk, replacing one of the others.

Tip Brown looked at her quizzically. “You an old hand at this business?”

“A very new hand, a neophyte,” Miss Withers confessed.

“Then I guess I’d better explain,” he said. He did explain, with painstaking weariness, that each of the drawings pinned to the story board in this preliminary stage was supposed to represent a master scene in the picture, a high spot in the story. Other artists would later fill in the blanks between, which was why they were called “in-betweeners.” There were also the animators, who made the drawings that the original creators hadn’t bothered with—making things move and come alive.