Cold Poison (8 page)

Miss Hildegarde Withers gave her graying hair its requisite one hundred strokes and then sought her maidenly couch, hoping that in her sleep her subconscious mind would come up with a hint or two about the problem which plagued her. She slept—finally—but her dreams were only a photomontage of cracked pitchers and half-done water colors, of clowning poodles floating from balloons and bottles of mineral oil and shoes and ships and sealing wax, all to the accompaniment of the tuneless maniacal laughter of a dying penguin….

Back in New York City, Inspector Oscar Piper, one of the three people who could get the police commissioner up out of bed at this hour, did so. “I’m going out to California,” he said.

“Huh?” The commissioner was still half-asleep. “Okay, but why?”

“Zelda Bard.”

“She’s there? Oh no, she’s dead, isn’t she? You got something?”

“Hildegarde Withers has. I threw a case to her, just to keep her from brooding, and it turns out to be something. Same deal—the poison-ivy stuff. I don’t mind these murders we get with knives and guns, but when they start using new stuff—”

“Exactly.” The commissioner was wide awake now. “Go ahead. Swarthout can take over your office while you’re gone. You want a plane?”

The air wing of the New York police department consists of two Bell D-47 helicopters, capable of no more than a modest one hundred miles an hour with favorable winds. “No thanks,” said Piper hastily. “I’ll go by regular airline—I’ve gotta get out there before Hildegarde gets herself into trouble. Because I’m fairly sure that he’s at work again out there in California….”

“He?” said the commissioner.

“Maybe
she
. Zelda Bard could have been killed by a jealous rival, but I always had a hunch it was one of her multitudinous boy friends who sent her the poison-ivy brandy. We’ll see.”

“Okay, Oscar. Take all the time you need—take two or three days if necessary.”

“Thank you, sir,” said the Inspector and hung up. He looked ruefully and wistfully at the rumpled bed in which he had had only a couple of hours, and then got on the phone to arrange plane passage and money. He had eight dollars in his wallet, and he remembered the old story—California is the land of gold, and you’d better bring the gold with you.

There was finally a friendly bartender on Third Avenue who thought he could dig up a quick $500….

Back on the lower left-hand corner of the nation, Miss Hildegarde Withers awoke at dawn, feeling somewhat like a worn-out dishrag and very disappointed with her dreams; it was so often true that the watched subconscious never boils. She had an increasing feeling that somehow she had been maneuvered into playing somebody else’s game with somebody else’s rules.

A worthy antagonist—if this were only a battle of wits. But four people had been promised death, and one of them had received it. Somebody was playing for keeps. Over her breakfast coffee the maiden schoolteacher made a sudden decision; she would play hooky from the studio today. Her quarry lay there, but she had a feeling that the mystery would be solved, if at all, from a completely different angle.

There had been a woman who had died under the wheels of a rented limousine—or what amounted to the same thing, though it had taken weeks to make an end to that grim cycle. Perhaps it was too late to ask questions, but Miss Withers was determined to ask them all the same. She dressed herself in a conservative blue serge suit and donned a hat which the Inspector had once said reminded him of an abandoned owl’s nest; she locked Talleyrand in the patio with a pan of water and some dog biscuits and took off. A moment later she turned back again, to write a note and pin it to the door.

Inspector Oscar Piper, slightly pale around the gills from a fast and bumpy plane trip across the country and from an almost equally fast and bumpy taxi ride into Hollywood from the Los Angeles municipal airport, found the note at around eight o’clock that evening. The grizzled little Hibernian read it by the flickering light of a match, bit through his ever-present cigar, and read it again. “Oscar, the key is under the mat. If I’m not back when you get here, look for me at the Morgue.”

“Savage I was, sitting

in my house, late, lone….
”

BROWNING

O
SCAR PIPER DID A
double take, spat out his cigar, and then—knowing Hildegarde of old—sighed and bent down and found the key, then went inside. Turning on the lights, he suddenly was reminded that he was not alone; the worried bewhiskered face of Talleyrand the poodle appeared in the pane of the patio door, emitting plaintive sounds. The Inspector let the dog in, shook hands and paws half a dozen times, and finally managed to get loose and find the phone directory. He drew a deep breath when he discovered that Hildegarde had been at the Morgue and evidently made somewhat of an impression on the attendants, as was only to be expected, but had not remained there permanently on one of the marble slabs.

He plunked himself down in an easy chair, lighted a fresh perfecto, and took out the file on the Zelda Bard case. It had been a very special murder, and one in which for various reasons he had a very special interest; not very many victims of homicide had been so beautiful or had lived so fully or died so terribly. There was a long list of her boy friends, the potential suspects, all of whom had been more or less cleared. That lady had certainly got around….

Miss Withers returned home somewhat after nine to find the Inspector and Talley both sound asleep, the dog upside down on the couch and Oscar sprawled uncomfortably in the chair, snoring gently. “Well!” the schoolteacher observed tartly. “Men sleep while women work; so runs the world away. Hello, Oscar.”

He sat up, blinking. “Huh? Oh, hello. What have you been up to until this hour—riding your broomstick around the rooftops?”

“I’ve been up to plenty.” She came closer and observed him critically. “Oscar, you need a haircut. You also need some hair on top.”

“I also need a new lead on the Bard case,” he said soberly. “Maybe just through blind luck you’ve stumbled on it. Get anything new today?”

She hesitated. “Perhaps. I don’t quite know. This is a crazy mixed-up case. But I’ll tell you about it after I give this ravening hound his dinner.”

“You might make mine the same,” said Oscar Piper hopefully. “Up to now I have eaten six sticks of chewing gum today.”

Some time later, over a plate of scrambled eggs with chicken livers, he said, “So far there’s actually nothing to link the two cases except the poison, which is rare enough to make it all very interesting. Your case out here seems to come down to a matter of motive. We can eliminate one thing—your Larry Reed
wasn’t
killed out of revenge for one of his so-called practical jokes; you just don’t poison a man because he leaves a wheelbarrow full of water in your car.”

“Practical jokes—a misnomer, Oscar, if there ever was one, as I’ve said before. But I suppose you have a point—unless one of his stunts backfired and really hurt someone, of which we have no direct evidence.” She rose. “More coffee?”

“You might just warm it up a little,” he said as he handed her an empty cup. “But to get back to cases. I’m interested in this Lucy angle.”

The schoolteacher nodded. “Yes, Lucy. ‘She lived unknown, and few could know when Lucy ceased to be; but she is in her grave, and, oh the difference to me.’ Wordsworth.”

“The difference to
her
, you mean. Did you actually get on her trail?”

“That I did. And it’s a most tantalizing thing.” Miss Withers shook her head dubiously, then produced her notebook. “Full name Lucinda May Wersbeck, also known professionally as Lucy LeMay, white, well-nourished female, age about 34, was struck by a sedan owned by the Hollywood Limousine Rental Service and operated by one Arthur Johnson, age 22. The accident took place on the corner of Orient Boulevard and Sixteenth Place in the midst of a howling rainstorm at seven-thirty on the evening of January 14 a year and more ago. Witnesses said that the accident was unavoidable.”

“
All
accidents are avoidable,” pronounced the Inspector, officially.

“Anyway, she was admitted to the emergency ward of County Hospital at 7:55 on that night—with internal injuries and multiple fractures; she lingered on and finally managed to die there on February 11.”

“Well!” said Oscar Piper. “Now maybe we’re getting somewhere.”

“Now maybe we’re getting nowhere,” Miss Withers corrected. “Lucy was by profession a B-girl and taxi dancer; hardly the type of girl to arouse the grand passion in the hearts of men except perhaps temporarily in lonely sailors. She had presumably had a prime, but she was well past it. Who on earth would want to avenge her accidental death a year and more later after it happened—and not on the driver who killed her, but on the passengers? It just doesn’t make sense any way you look at it. And all the time she was in the hospital she never had a visitor, a bouquet, or even a phone call inquiring about her condition; I checked it with the office.”

The Inspector carefully set his cigar alight again. “Maybe her boyfriend didn’t know—?”

“Stuff and nonsense. Anybody who wanted Lucy could have located her with one phone call. That’s the puzzle—why should somebody wait so long to avenge her, if that was the motivation at all, which I somehow wonder at?”

“He was out of town, out of the country. In the Army, maybe. Came back a year later and went off his trolley—”

“He must have gone off his trolley, as you put it, long before. Because Lucy was no rose, nor any violet by a mossy stone, either. On the contrary.”

“She was pretty, though?”

Miss Withers sniffed. “Perhaps in her day, but not recently at any rate, though the records show that years ago she worked off and on in the movies as an extra—a dress-extra, wearing evening gowns and supplying atmosphere for night-club scenes with a champagne glass full of fizz water in her hand. She never got up to the point where a director would let her read a line. More recently she had made a precarious living up and down Main Street, the Skid Row of this town, presumably working at the oldest profession—though she never was convicted. I talked to one of the nurses who attended her after the accident, and she confidentially told me that Lucy could best be described as having a face like a meat axe with a fright-wig on top. Oscar, how on earth could a woman like that have any friend, relative or lover who would set out more than a year later to avenge her accidental death by trying to kill off all the people who happened to be riding in the car that struck her?”

“Yeah,” he said slowly, “you got a point. You’d think if anybody did go out for revenge he’d aim at the driver.”

“Do you think I’d neglect that most obvious angle? Arthur Johnson left the limousine company last November to accept—in the words of the old joke—a very important position as private in the United States Army. He is now in Korea, but I checked with his parents and up until the time he left at least nobody seems to have made any threats against him.”

Oscar Piper thought about it. “Maybe Mr. X only got back to Los Angeles recently and learned what happened to Lucy last year?”

“Yes, Oscar, a possibility. But this afternoon I also made a trip out to Forest Lawn in Glendale and found that I was the first visitor there to do homage to Lucinda Wersbeck since her interment. Wouldn’t you think that anyone interested enough to commit murder for her memory would at least first have made a pilgrimage to carry a bouquet of flowers to her grave?”

He said nothing, pointedly.

“Oscar, I said—wouldn’t you think—?”

“Sometimes I do,” the Inspector said slowly. “Forest Lawn, is it?” He leaned back and blew one smoke ring through another, a faint smile on his face. “Yes,” Oscar Piper continued thoughtfully, “this murder is a complicated business; you can’t really expect anyone foolish enough to risk his life committing a murder to act reasonably about anything, except perhaps through some twisted logic of his own. But catching a murderer is somewhat like training a dog; the first rule is that you have to be smarter than they are.”

“How true.” Miss Withers nodded wryly, with a side glance toward the sleeping poodle. “Sometimes with Talleyrand I’m inclined to wonder who’s training whom.” She looked at the watch she wore, a watch that had been her mother’s—a maidenly watch pinned to her maidenly bosom. “At any rate, sufficient to the day is the evil thereof, and we have discussed enough evil for now. It’s late. You’re staying here, of course. You can share the spare room with Talley, who won’t mind at all.”

“But I’d planned to go to a hotel—” he protested.

“Nonsense. If he snores, just hit him with a pillow or something. Besides, I’d rather like some protection around the house, the way things have been going. Do you mind? I don’t think I’ll be at all compromised, if that’s what you’re worrying about.”

So it was that the Inspector somewhat unwillingly bedded down on a flouncy feminine bed in the front bedroom of Miss Withers’ little rented bungalow that night. He slept fitfully, unused to the setting and also unused to the weight of a forty-pound French poodle spread lovingly across his feet. It was therefore not until very very late that the weary little Hibernian really got a stranglehold on Morpheus—and even that hold was rudely broken around 2:00
A.M.
when something came smashing through the window and the Venetian blind to thud against his bed.

He woke instantly, groping blindly for the lamp—and heard the sound of a car motor racing away. Talley, startled out of doggish dreams, added little or nothing to the situation by bursting into a frenzy of barking. By the time Oscar Piper found the light, Miss Hildegarde Withers was in the doorway, an apparition in a gray flannel bathrobe and with her hair in incredible braids. She surveyed the Inspector and the poodle with disfavor. “You might try to be a little more quiet, you two!” she was saying.

“Look,” he said, pointing.

Then she saw the wrecked window and what lay on the floor. “Whatever in the world,” she gasped, “has been going on?”

They saw it together—it was a small plaster statuette of an engaging penguin in evening clothes and yellow shoes, a fantastic, cartoon-world penguin with a noose of string about its throat to which was tied a folded note in the shape of a heart, a valentine. They read the valentine, unbelieving….