Cold Poison (4 page)

“It’s a sort of complicated business, in case you didn’t know,” Tip Brown confided. “We do it over and over again, and never know just where we’re coming out.” He slumped into an easy chair by the window, a cold pipe dangling from his mouth, eyeing Miss Withers and Talley, too, with a certain amount of puzzled wonder. But he was game and shook Tally’s paw as often as it was offered. “So we’re going to have another whirl at the
Circus Poodle
headache,” he said. “It’s a mystery to me why the front office wants to dig up this one; it was a good story idea but somewhere it curdled. Anyhow, here we go, you and I and the pup. Do you
have
to sit in my lap, dog?” He gently shoved Talley to the floor. “And we’re in Larry Reed’s old office, too. He got the quick axe, I heard.”

“So I understood,” said the schoolteacher cautiously.

“And now
you
get your name on the door, eh? You must know where the body is buried.”

“But it isn’t even—” The schoolteacher bit her lip, realizing that the man was only speaking the vernacular, trying to put a newcomer at her ease. He had already taken out sketch pad and pencil, and was studying Talleyrand.

“You supposed to work with me on the new story line, or are you just here with the pup?” Tip wanted to know. Miss Withers cautiously admitted that she was not quite sure what her duties at the studio would amount to. The artist wryly said that sometimes nobody was sure. He prodded the poodle gently with an expensive oxford. “Can the beast do any tricks?”

Talleyrand, who like all his breed had been born to the grease paint and cap-and-bells of the clown, was delighted to show off his not inconsiderable repertoire. Tip Brown, somewhat visibly impressed, dashed off half a hundred sketches, pure simplified line and mass that got the big dog down on paper as no camera could ever have done; it was, Miss Withers realized as she peeked over the artist’s shoulder, the veritable essence of poodle. Evidently the young man liked to talk while he worked. “You see, ma’am, the story of
The Circus Poodle
is this; we start with this pampered pooch who belongs to a rich woman, elderly and eccentric, a sort of Hetty Green type….”

The schoolteacher suddenly realized that he was now sketching her, and not the dog at all. She bristled a little, but Tip Brown went blithely on. “This old biddy with her millions, she’s practically on her deathbed and because she may pop off any minute her ever-loving nieces and nephews begin to cluster around like vultures, none of them worth a hoot in hell but all hot-pants after a legacy. She can’t stand ’em, so on a whim she makes a will leaving everything in trust to the dog, who sleeps on a featherbed and eats only caviar and porterhouse steaks.”

“Yes, I see. But—”

“In this first sequence the poodle is clipped in the old-fashioned phony way, with pompoms on its legs and a ribbon in its hair—pampered darling stuff.” Tip’s pencil was flying, illustrating his words. A pile of discarded sheets began to pile up untidily on the floor beside him. “The heirs—I mean the ones who thought they’d inherit—don’t care much for losing out to a lap dog, so they have a conference and decide to slip Cuddles or whatever his name is some Rough-on-Rats in his afternoon tea. Only they forget the family parrot is in the room where they foment the dire plot. He is a character, a busybody, and he waits his chance and gleefully tips off the whole thing to the dog. So the poodle does a double take and saves his precious skin by turning down the tea and jumping headfirst out of the window. He goes off on the town, where he has a rough time of it, too.”

“Porterhouse steaks are difficult to come by these days,” admitted Miss Withers.

“Check, sister. Even at my salary I eat at hamburger joints, mostly.”

“You’re not married, Mr. Brown?”

He looked up from his pad. “No, ma’am, not currently.”

“What a shame to have a nice eligible bachelor going to waste, so to speak. Of course, I speak only as a confirmed spinster who abhors that sort of thing. No prospects?”

“Huh? Why—” Tip Brown hesitated.

“There are lots of pretty girls around the studio. The secretary in Mr. Cushak’s office seemed to me to be the type who’d be attractive to men….”

“Joyce?” He laughed. “The man-eater? Oh, I admit that once I gave her a slight whirl. But it’s my private opinion that underneath it all she’s still carrying a torch for Larry Reed; she was married to him for a while some time back. Anyway, we had a lot of laughs but we didn’t hit it off. But I’ll admit—” here Tip Brown grinned almost sheepishly—“I’ll admit that there is a long tall blonde on this lot with whom I would willingly make a trip to the altar on ten minutes’ notice. But she seems to prefer musicians, dammit.” He sighed.

“‘Faint heart …’” quoted Miss Withers, ever the hopeful matchmaker. “Why don’t you send her flowers?”

“I’d rather send that musician some henbane blossoms,” Tip said fervently. “Him and his fancy Harvard accent! But enough of my broken heart. To get back to the epic—the poodle lives out of garbage cans and picks up a few pennies by dancing on street corners. His coat grows out so he looks like a sheep dog. Winter is here and he almost freezes; comedy-pathos stuff with icicles goes in here. Comes early spring and it’s time for Jingling Brothers Circus to open at Madison Square Garden—or maybe we have it somewhere in the suburbs under the big top. Anyway the pup drifts in and hangs around the mess tent, half-starved and looking for a handout. Comedy scene where he looks at an elephant and thinks he could swallow it whole. Finally the ringmaster sees him and figures an angle. I guess the ringmaster would be Willy Wombat—no, Harry Hawk would be better, with a sneer and a black-snake whip. Sam and Sally Sparrow are aerialists, Herman Hippo is the clown. The poodle is given a new screwy haircut like this one—”

“A Dutch bob,” explained the schoolteacher stiffly. “The modern trim for the breed, only it’s still not accepted by the judges at dog shows. Not that I’d put my Talley into a dog show anyway.”

“Okay. And they work the poodle into the circus as a clown, acrobat, roustabout, anything. He has a hard life, but some of the other performers befriend him. We introduce a rhinoceros fat lady or, better still, a chimpanzee who plays in the band and rides a bicycle on the high wire …”

It all began to sound to Miss Withers like an off-key version of
Toby Tyler, or Ten Weeks with the Circus
, a juvenile classic of her distant childhood. But before she could say so, the phone burst into life. Tip Brown leaped hopefully to answer it, and then with some disappointment informed her that Mr. Cushak’s office was on the line and would she please be in his office for a conference at two sharp?

“Tell them I’ll be there,” promised the schoolteacher. “But I’ll make no guarantees as to sharpness.” For as yet in this mad affair there had been so little on which to whet the edge of her mind….

Talley the poodle was by this time getting restive and sniffing suggestively around the door. Tip Brown obligingly decided that he could use some outdoor action sketches and borrowed the delighted dog for a romp on the studio lawns, so Miss Withers was left alone with her thoughts, of which—as the old saying goes—she had a complete set. She must, of course, feel her way carefully on this unaccustomed, thin ice; she must try to find out what made these people tick, and for that reason she had probed a bit at Mr. Brown. He had been open enough—almost too open.

She was naturally burning also with a desire to know what was now going on in that coral-pink house up on Mulholland; police and coroners and medical examiners would be performing their grim but necessary rites. She’d have given almost anything for a front seat—because, although in her time she had seen more than a few dead bodies, she had never before seen anything like Larry Reed’s remains and never wanted to again.

Around noontime the cluttered walls of the little office began to close in upon her. She went outside on a tour of exploration, got herself thoroughly lost among the looming sound stages and outdoor standing sets, and finally located the studio commissary, where she had a modest sandwich and a cup of tea in the midst of all the tinsel glamour of stars and starlets in make-up, dress-extras in evening clothes with smudged handkerchiefs around their collars, executives and agents and office people, most of whom seemed quite normal and pleasant and everydayish at close range.

She noted that Alan Ladd was not quite as tall but certainly quite as handsome as she had previously imagined, that Abbott and Costello lunched quietly without throwing any dishes at each other, that Piper Laurie was a pixie and Esther Williams a sexy madonna. There were many other faces at the tables whom she recognized vaguely, having been an inveterate movie-goer for years; they were faces out of the past, once famous, once spotlighted, and now still working at the only job they knew. This was the present, and she had a present-day problem, a monkey on her shoulder.

Who had killed Larry Reed, and why?

There were afternoon papers on sale at the cashier’s desk when she paid her modest check, but nothing in the headlines as yet about Reed. There would hardly have been time, she realized. These papers must have gone to press long before her call to the police, notifying them of the body in the lonely house on Mulholland.

When she finally found her way back to her office she discovered it empty; evidently Tip Brown had taken Talley with him somewhere for lunch. Miss Withers hoped that the dog would remember his manners and not beg for a second raw hamburger; she had been trying vainly for years to get him to understand that grown dogs eat but once a day. Outside in the hall the cartons packed with Larry Reed’s belongings still stood; she poked absently through the fitter and found nothing that could be in the least considered a clue, though already a bit of looting had begun. She noticed the absence of an imported briar pipe, a bottle of mineral oil, and a big box of expensive antihistamine tablets that she had seen previously. Perhaps the news of Larry’s passing had got around and somebody had thought that they needed a souvenir to remember him by; most certainly somebody else had hated him enough to assist him in prematurely shuffling off this mortal coil. For she was increasingly certain that this was murder, and an odd murder.

Sitting alone at the desk, she fell to aimless doodling with pencil and pad, but her drawings insisted on taking on ugly, twisted shapes. Something in the room annoyed her, setting her teeth on edge; she finally realized that a story board on the opposite wall was tilted. Automatically she rose to set it level again; nothing bothered her more than an askew picture. But as she touched the board something slipped out from behind it to slither to the floor. It was a brown paper envelope with Larry Reed’s name in red crayon—and also bearing the drawing of a dead penguin. She gasped. So Larry Reed had had his warning after all, even though he’d never found it!

Without the slightest compunction Miss Withers tore open the envelope, discovering a heart-shaped piece of drawing paper with hastily scrawled printing as follows:

TO THE CARD-CHEAT:

YOU ARE GOING TO GET THE BIRD,

DEATH WILL HAVE THE FINAL WORD,

FANCY BOY, YOU’LL SOON BE MINE,

MY STONE STONE STONE-COLD VALENTINE

LUCY

The schoolteacher put the thing down, and wiped off her fingers with a handkerchief. Murder, as she well knew, was often nasty and distorted, but not this way—not mixed up with valentines and doggerel verse!

It just didn’t make sense. Why should a murderer take all this trouble of drawing pictures and writing verses and leaving warnings? She pondered this for a while, and came out by the same door she had entered in.

At precisely two
P.M.
she showed up at Mr. Cushak’s office. The girl at the desk looked up and smiled. “Miss Withers?”

“Yes, Joyce. A command performance.”

The girl smiled wider. “I’m not Joyce; she took off sick a couple of hours ago and I was called from stenographic to take over. I’m Mabel.”

On second look Miss Withers realized that this one was a little less lush and with a somewhat different hairdo—though they could both have been poured out of the same mold. “Well, Mabel—is he in?”

Mabel buzzed and spoke briefly into the talk box. A moment later Mr. Cushak popped out of his office.

He looked for once almost pleased with himself. “I’ve got them all waiting inside,” he said. “I mean, all the people who received those blasted valentines.”

“Oh,
no
!” she exploded.

“Why not?” His face went blank. “After all, it’s only for their own protection. And you said you wanted to meet them.”

She gave him a withering look and then explained wearily, “Mr. Cushak, I wanted to meet them individually, by seeming happenstance, under innocent auspices. I had hoped that in that manner I might just possibly ferret out some useful information. You have inadvertently tipped our hand.”

“Huh?” The man looked puzzled and a little hurt.

“Don’t you know,” she continued testily, “that every authoritative text on criminology says that in poison-pen cases the guilty party has almost invariably later been proved to have sent one to himself and made a great to-do about it? That’s the way their nasty little minds work; they think that it automatically clears them from suspicion. One of the people waiting inside your office is the murderer, or I miss my guess. Of course,” she added frankly, “I have missed some important guesses in my time, but they say that even Homer nodded. Well, we might as well go inside, and start afresh from here.”

Cushak looked at her rather strangely, and the schoolteacher had a sense that he was now even more out of sympathy with her and her quest than he had been before. He was not, it appeared, used to having his decisions and actions questioned by underlings. But he shrugged, turned, and ushered her silently into his office.

She sniffed. The smell of fear was in that room. The three people who waited there were as jittery, she thought, as a cat on hot bricks. Miss Withers was introduced to them in strict studio seniority. First there was Jules Karas, music director—a man somewhere in his fifties, stocky and leonine and intensely masculine, who bowed stiffly from the waist and smoked thin cigars in a long amber holder. His eyes told her nothing at all; he had the practiced aplomb of the European. A hard nut to crack, she thought.