Cold Poison (5 page)

Then there was Rollo Bayles, a background artist. He was a pale, somewhat wispy man with a face that might have been handsome if the sculptor hadn’t left the clay half-finished and unsmoothed. His hand, when Miss Withers grasped it, was dampish and thin—yet his nervous grip made her wince a little. A true introvert, she said to herself; a man, as the English say, with a maggot.

Finally there was Janet Poole, a warmish, most generously proportioned girl whose blue-violet eyes made one forget that she was plain—or was she really plain, after all? A young man, Miss Withers shrewdly decided, might have a difficult but no doubt most interesting time making up his mind about that. She liked the girl on sight—and at the same time she mistrusted her reaction, knowing well that a person can smile and smile and be a villain still and that no one, not even herself, had the power to see the mark of Cain.

“But I’ve seen her somewhere before,” the schoolteacher added to herself. “Or else she looks like somebody in the movies. Darken that lovely hair and she’d be a dead ringer for Loretta Young.”

Then they got down to cases. None of the three admitted taking the poison-pen valentines very seriously, now that they had had a chance to think it over. Miss Withers’ eyebrows went up, and she turned to Mr. Cushak. “You haven’t told them yet?”

“Told them what?”

“Told them that Larry Reed has been murdered—and that somebody left one of the valentines in his office, which I just found!” She told them some of the details and showed them the valentine.

The announcement fell heavily upon those in the office. Karas stiffened and Bayles quaked and Janet Poole tried to laugh and wound up almost crying. “Us four!” she cried. “One down and three to go.”

“Not necessarily,” pronounced the schoolteacher firmly. She turned to Karas. “And just what was the content of your message?”

He hesitated and drew a deep breath. “Filth,” he said. “It was all a lie.”

“What was, in particular?” Miss Withers asked reasonably.

“The nasty verse, which I do not remember. It intimates that I have abandon my wife in the old country when the Russky swine take over, and that I make my escape leaving her to disappear and probably to die in a slave-labor camp in Siberia.”

“Your wife
Lucy
?”

Her name, he stoutly maintained, had been Anastasia. He himself had been away in Italy on a concert tour when the Iron Curtain had clamped itself down on his unhappy homeland; because of his past political background it would have been sure death for him to go home. He had tried vainly through the Red Cross and all other possible sources to get word of her or to her. And he had never known anybody anywhere named Lucy and had no idea at all why that name should have been signed to the valentines.

Nor had either of the others ever known a Lucy, Miss Withers found out on further exploration. Rollo Bayles diffidently admitted that his valentine had been addressed “To the Cowardly Apostate;” some fifteen years ago while still in his late teens he had briefly studied for the priesthood to please his mother, but he had been more interested in art and other worldly affairs and at the gentle but firm advice of his superiors he had renounced his vocation before taking vows. “But who would want to drag that up now?” he complained in a high, brittle voice. “Who would even
know
?”

“Perhaps we deal with a mind reader,” Miss Withers suggested dryly. “Or perhaps you let something slip in a careless moment of conversation; people often do. A friendly bartender, or something like that?”

Bayles slowly shook his head, but he frowned thoughtfully.

Janet Poole, next in line, was less cooperative. Her soft red mouth set itself firmly. “Tell you or anybody else what was in my valentine? I think I’d rather die first.”

“The whole purpose of this meeting,” the schoolteacher reminded her, “is to see that you don’t die. Very well, we’ll respect your privacy for the time being at least. And we’ll have to skip the mysterious Lucy character for the nonce—though it would be most interesting to know if anyone of that name works here at the studio or ever did work here.” She looked inquiringly at Mr. Cushak.

“I have already checked,” he admitted. “She doesn’t and she didn’t. We had a Lurine and a Lacybelle and a Laverne, but no Lucy.”

“Really,” Miss Withers nodded thoughtfully. “Then it would appear that ‘Lucy’ is the nom de plume of somebody else, perhaps even concealing the identity of a man, and that someone who knows you all and knows enough about you to stick a pin into a tender place has a most determined grudge. So who could it be?”

“Nobody!” said Jules Karas, spouting blue cigar smoke. “Poppycock. I still think that somehow it is only a very bad joke.”

“A bad joke—with me stumbling on Larry Reed’s body in his house up on Mulholland? I think not. Somebody has painted a target on you four people—and has already hit one bull’s-eye.”

They seemed to shrink suddenly in upon themselves, but nobody said anything. The maiden schoolteacher looked severely at them. “Just how often,” she asked quietly, “have you four people worked together intimately?”

“But they haven’t!” spoke up Ralph Cushak from behind his mahogany desk. “This is a big studio, Miss Withers, with lots of different cartoon projects going all the time. These four people may have had accidental contacts around the lot, and they certainly know one another to speak to, but to my knowledge they have never been assigned to the same story or worked together in the same office. Of course, Mr. Karas here is in charge of all our music, assisted by such composers and musicians as he needs on a part-time basis. Mr. Bayles paints the backgrounds for many of our pictures, especially those involving underwater scenes or woodland stuff. But Reed works—I mean, worked—only on the Bird series, the Peter Penguin stuff, and Miss Poole here is animator on the Willy Wombat and Charley Chipmunk series, though now and then like all our people she sits in on a conference concerning one of the other characters. But these four people have had no regular contact; there is nothing whatever to link them together. The’ whole thing, if you ask me, is quite mad.”

“Almost too mad,” said Miss Withers slowly. “Just why should a supposed homicidal maniac train his sights on these four? It’s a sort of methodical nor-nor-west madness—the misquotation is from Hamlet, in case you’re interested—and there’s a link somewhere if we can only find it.” She pointed to the brown envelope addressed to Larry Reed. “This drawing, and this printing—would you people say that they are the work of one of the regular studio artists?”

The thing was passed around again. They were of various opinions. The printing itself was sketchy and impersonal, of the type used by almost everyone in the place. Then when you came to the drawing of the murdered, strangled bird—

“Was it drawn by a competent studio artist, or not?” Miss Withers demanded.

Nobody could immediately answer that. Of course, every desk in the place was equipped with a tracing board designed to make it easy to reproduce the original
gels
—the master drawings—with whatever minor changes of action were immediately indicated. Anyone in the place could, given time and access to one of the desks, have taken one of the myriad gelatin prints of Peter Penguin which overflowed the studio, tilted it horizontally and then traced it, adding his own ghoulish touches. This particular drawing, they agreed, was a trifle crude—but perhaps purposely so.

“Then it must have been done,” the schoolteacher decided wisely, “by an amateur who was trying to draw like a professional who was trying to draw like an amateur, which gets us exactly nowhere.”

“Except that we know by the stationery and everything that it must have been done by somebody right here in the studio,” said Mr. Cushak sadly. “One of our own people has gone bad—”

“Like the rotten apple that must be nipped in the bud,” put in Miss Withers a bit wickedly. Again she stared at the three marked victims; if the books were right, one of them was the murderer of Larry Reed. None of them looked at all like a murderer; of course, she knew to her sorrow that murderers rarely did. Lombroso and his criminal types had long been discredited; the murderer often looked like and
was
the nice person next door who borrowed your lawn mower and lent you an egg or a cup of sugar when you were short. For once the schoolteacher had no intuition, no hunch, no touch of extrasensory perception to guide her. Yet she was much inclined to the belief that two of these people in the office were honestly scared for their very lives and that one was a very fine actor and a deep-dyed villain.

“I suggest,” she said quietly, “that for the next few days each one of you takes exceptional precautions; we are in the midst of something ugly and dangerous. And if any one of you should happen to remember anything about anyone named Lucy—” She nodded good-by at them and made her way out and back to her own office, where she found Tip Brown pinning up new drawings on the story board facing her desk. Talley erupted from his favorite spot in the corner and greeted her as if she had been away for a year; almost equally enthusiastic was Tip, whose face was boyishly alight.

“Hi!” he said. “I think I got it. This story was originally developed too straight-line. It’s gotta have a zany, Milt Gross touch—and your Talley dog suggests it. He had lunch with me, by the way. I hope it was all right.”

“I hope so, too,” she said. “One raw hamburger?”

“Two,” he admitted. “And the beastie sat up and begged for more, so I bought him an ice-cream cone for dessert.”

“Talleyrand has gone Hollywood,” said the schoolteacher, shaking her head. “He’ll have to reduce—”

“Anyway, he’s type-casting for this part—if ever. You see, we’ve got to wring out all the boffs and yaks we can from the situations where the circus poodle tries to ham it up and get into every act in the show and outclown the clowns and out-fly the acrobats. I’ve got a swell idea for a sequence where he tries to take over and peddle toy gas balloons to the audience, only he gets hold of too many and they lift him right up to the top of the big top—”

“Splendid,” said Miss Withers absently. “But—”

“And for a climax,” continued Tip Brown, “we pull a switcheroo. The rich old lady in sequence one, she doesn’t die after all, she gets better. There’s publicity in the circus ads about the poodle and back in the big house on Fifth Avenue the parrot recognizes him—he’s the type of parrot who always reads the morning paper, natch—and he flies out the window and comes over to the circus hell-bent to bring the good news and say hello to an old friend and tell the poodle that he can come home again, the relatives have been thrown out on their respective behinds. Only the pup doesn’t go for it. Suddenly he realizes that he likes the circus better than the plush spot in the big house, and he doesn’t want to go back. He’s now a featured performer and the ringmaster has to treat him with respect. He’ll stay there—and, he mentions, there happens to be an opening for a barker in the side show—”

“I was thinking,” began Miss Withers hopefully, “about—”

“So we dissolve to the parrot outside the side show, yelling ‘Hurry, hurry, hurry—get your tickets for the prime attraction of the midway …” or whatever it is. The parrot got into the act too, see? Happy ending, with the spotlight on the poodle in the center ring of the circus, juggling something ten times his size and having a hell of a time. He’s found himself; he’s among friends, see?”

“I like it fine,” said the schoolteacher judicially. “But speaking of friends, what about Larry Reed? What sort of person would you say he was?”

Tip looked vaguely puzzled. “Larry? Good artist, full of fun and games. The type who would put itching powder in your bath salts if he had a chance, or slip rubber sausages into the hors d’oeuvre. He used to pick up copies of cheap magazines and then spend hours filling in the advertising coupons with his friends’ names, so that for months afterwards they’d have their mailboxes stuffed with home-tattooing sets and patent remedies for baldness and lost manhood and stuff like that. Oh, Larry’s a card.”

“And speaking of cards,” she pressed closer, “did he win a lot from you and the boys at poker?”

“But—” Tip looked bewildered. “He never plays it. He does a lot of card tricks, he’s even a member of the American Society of Magicians, but he says it isn’t fair for him to compete across the table. I’ve never known him to gamble, except maybe a little on a Christmas Eve crap game or on a horse at Santa Anita. I think he spends most of his evenings at the easel painting things; he is hell-bent on being a real artist and having exhibitions in New York and a spread in
Life
.”

“And what about the other evenings, when he didn’t paint? Was he interested in women?”

Tip grinned. “Who isn’t? As the fellow said, ‘It’s me hobby!’ Yes, Larry gets around, but he never sticks to anyone long. I guess that’s why Joyce pulled out and left him.”

“Was there much bitterness in that divorce?”

“None, that I know of. He had a sense of humor and she didn’t. He used to carry a little gold bell and ring it at her when there was a gag and she didn’t get it, to show he was only kidding.”

“Any man who would ring a pocket bell at
me
…” said Miss Withers. “But do go on.”

“There’s not much more to it,” Tip Brown said. “They just didn’t fit, and there weren’t any children to complicate things, so he gave her the car and the TV set and he took the house and they parted amicably—they still have dinner every now and then. Very modern and all that.”

“How charming,” said Miss Withers, without warmth. “Is there anybody else whose toes Larry Reed might have stepped on?”

Tip Brown stared at her. “Not that I know of. Larry’s not the type to make a play for married women; there are enough luscious unattached young females around this town for anybody. They’re mostly dying to get a studio job, and they cluster around anybody who works for a studio like flies around a garbage can.”

“I see,” said the schoolteacher. “But didn’t Larry make some enemies with his practical jokes?”

“Not really. Oh, he carried a sort of torch for Janet Poole, the blond lovely here in the studio, after she turned him down for her musician. But leave it to Larry to get even in his own boyish fun-loving way—he knew this fellow had ambitions to be an actor, so he sent him a fake phone message supposedly coming from Sam Goldwyn’s office asking him to come over for a screen test. The poor guy pawns his watch to buy a new suit and then spent half a day at the Goldwyn studio trying to get past the gatemen.”