Cold Poison (9 page)

TO THE SHARP-NOSED SNOOP:

TAKE IT EASY, TAKE IT SLOW

ONE IS DOWN AND THREE TO GO,

IF YOU’VE GOT TO MESS AROUND

YOU WILL SOON BE UNDERGROUND

WITH LUCY

“The nerve of him!” cried Miss Withers, in considerable indignation.

The Inspector managed to be official, even in his gaudy pajamas. “Very significant,” he pronounced sagely. “We know now that Lucy is not the sender of these valentines, since this admits she is dead. And we also know that the murderer is worried. Once you’ve got ’em off balance the battle is half-over. But what’s with the duck?”

Miss Withers studied the plaster image. “It’s not a duck, Oscar. It’s a figurine of Peter Penguin, who is the sacred Bird around the studio; he plays the lead in most of the feature pictures. There was a drawing of him dead in the other valentines, now he’s in third dimension. An attempt to scare me off, and a rather childish one.” She frowned. “Unless it’s all part of a pattern of simulated idiocy….”

The Inspector yawned, shivered and pointedly climbed back between the sheets “Pattern-schmattern,” he said. “Go back to bed, Hildegarde, and I’ll have this thing solved for you by sometime tomorrow.”

She stared at him. “Oscar Piper, you sound awfully confident. What do you know that I don’t?”

“Not too much, about this end of the case,” he said wearily. “Only that you just muffed one essential clue, that’s all. The difference between the talented amateur and the seasoned pro, that’s all. I’ll gladly bet you a week’s pay—”

“I’m opposed, as you know, to gambling in all forms,” the schoolteacher said stiffly. “Besides, I’m not at all sure you’re not right; at the moment this case is a complete puzzle to me. Mr. X is obviously somebody inside the cartoon studio—yet nobody there could possibly descend to this level; they’re all just crazy in a nice pixieish sort of way. These valentines—” She shook her head and moved toward the doorway, then turned back to say, a little wistfully, “Oscar?”

“Yes, Hildegarde. What is it now?”

“Oscar, it just occurred to me. This is the first valentine I’ve received since I left high school—and it had to be a left-handed one!”

“… a
tissue of absurd mistakes, arising from the confusion of the different characters one with another….
”

HAZLITT

T
HE LONG TALL BLOND IN
the cherry-red robe came striding like a Valkyrie along the hall of the boardinghouse, armed with soap and towel. Her eyes were full of sleep, but she looked determined and resolute and about sixteen years old. She paused to put her ear to a mighty oaken door and then entered without knocking, closing it carefully behind her.

She crossed quickly to the tumble of blankets on the bed, sought for and found a masculine face, and kissed it enthusiastically. “Awake!” cried Janet Poole cheerfully. “‘Awake, for morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight….’ That’s FitzGerald.”

“Wau-ugh?” Guy Fowler muttered, and turned over.

She sat down on the edge of the bed, rumpling his hair—not that it needed it. “‘And lo! the Hunter of the East has caught the sultan’s turret in a noose of light.’ See how I remember?”

Guy granted again.

“I like FitzGerald,” she confided. “Not as much as Shakespeare, but I still like him—even if
Fitz
means ‘descended from an illegitimate son.’ Why aren’t there any
Mac
Geralds, huh?” She kissed him again. “There! That’s supposed to wake any sleeping beauty. Though you’d look more like one if you’d shave and comb your hair, darling. Come, it’s almost eight.”

“Thanks for the time signal. Now please go ’way; I want to sleep some more. I was up late last night.” He caught her swift, worried look at the wastebasket. “No, no empties there. I promised you, didn’t I? And haven’t I kept my promise for months?” He looked hurt. “I was working.” Guy gestured toward the battered old piano in the bay window, now covered with music manuscripts. “Got a new one—I’m calling it
Variations on a Melting Snowflake
. Very Debussy, with boogie undertones.”

He tried to retreat beneath the covers again, but Jan’s firm hand shook his shoulder. “Get up anyway, darling, and come to the studio with me. What if Karas didn’t give you a work call? You can play him the new number and maybe he’ll get them to buy the song for the next
Bird Symphony
; they need one.”

Guy rubbed his eyes and frowned. “But dear, I don’t want—”

“Sure, sure. You don’t want to be in cartoons, you want New York publication and someday a recital and you’ll have it. But we need money now, remember? And—and—” Jan’s blue-violet eyes clouded a little. “I thought you’d want to be around, for a day or so anyway.”

“Oh God,
that
!” He sat up stick-straight, looking shamefaced. “I’d completely forgotten those nasty valentines and all the rest of it. Of course I’ll come, and watch you like a hawk, too.”

“I was never watched by a hawk,” she said. “By a wolf now and then, maybe, but never by a hawk.”

“Oh Lord,” he muttered. “To be clever so early in the morning.” He sighed. “Okay. Hurry up with the bath, will you please?”

“You first,” said Janet magnanimously. “I can dress in half the time it takes you, remember?”

“I remember.” He suddenly pulled her toward him, but Janet twisted away, laughing.

“Too early in the morning, dear,” she said, and went hastily out of the room. Guy Fowler stared after her, sighing and muttering. There were times—and this was one of them….

“Women!” he said and gingerly slid out of bed.

“Women!” said Mr. Ralph Cushak somewhat later that morning, when he was advised by a pink-eyed Joyce that Miss Hildegarde Withers was outside and demanded to see him at once, with an A priority. “Let her cool her flat heels for a minute,” he said. Then he looked at his secretary. “Powder your nose or have a coffee or something. Didn’t I tell you you could take the week off, by the way?”

“I’d rather be working,” the lush girl confessed, “than sitting around home thinking about what happened to Larry. He was a heel, but a sorta sweet heel. And I always thought that sometime—sometime maybe—” She choked.

“Yes,” said Cushak, embarrassed.

“Mr. Cushak?” Joyce came closer. “It was an accident, wasn’t it? That’s what the police and the newspapers say. Is this Miss Withers trying to make something more of it?”

“She can’t make anything more of it than it really was,” he pronounced. “Your ex-husband died from the effects of poison ivy, and nothing else. There’s no question of—of—”

Joyce looked extremely relieved. “Shall I show her in, then?”

He nodded.

Miss Hildegarde Withers marched into the office with blood in her eye. Without any preliminaries she plunked down the statuette of Peter Penguin on his desk. “And just what, Mr. Cushak, do you know about
this
?”

He winced, and flushed a guilty flush. “Plenty, as it happens.” Then he went on to explain. He had, some years ago when the big boss was on another business trip, ordered ten thousand of the bird replicas from a persuasive ceramics salesman, as a sort of promotional giveaway venture. After all, the idea had worked out with Donald Duck and Woody Woodpecker and why not here? Only it hadn’t. The thing hadn’t gone over and most of the figurines were still in boxes down in the basement. A few gross had been distributed throughout the studio or given to salesmen; by this time most of them had been taken home by studio employees for their children or else broken. There was no use trying to trace this particular one; anybody in the studio could have picked one up easily from somebody’s desk or from the boxes in the basement. Cushak still didn’t see why she was interested.

“I’m interested,” said the schoolteacher tartly, “because it happens that this particular bird came flying in my window early this morning, with a personal valentine attached.” She showed it to him.

Cushak’s hands trembled just a little as he held the thing up to his bifocals and read aloud the doggerel verse. “Good Lord!” he said, not irreverently. “This grows more serious by the minute. Do you know, Miss Withers—I’m getting more and more convinced that this is no job for a lady, and I thought yesterday when you didn’t show up that you must have somehow come to the same conclusion. Now I’m absolutely sure that if you continue at all you’ll have to have competent assistance. Such as—”

“Such as some Mickey Spillane character from Pinkerton’s? Perish forbid, young man. Besides, I have that assistance, in spades, doubled and redoubled.” Miss Withers had been hoping to bring the Inspector down to the studio this morning to get the lay of the land and meet the ostensible suspects, but Oscar Piper had chosen to high-tail it off into Los Angeles immediately after breakfast. He was, she thought, probably punctiliously reporting in at Spring Street as visiting policemen are traditionally supposed to do.

Anyway, there would be time for introductions later. Now she told Mr. Cushak how she had spent yesterday. “You see, young man,” she concluded, “there
was
a Lucy, and she
was
run over by a car en route to one of your studio previews. You still insist that you never heard of her?”

Blankly he said, “Of course I heard about the accident, but I never heard the poor woman’s name and if I did I’ve forgotten it. The studio was not in any way involved, legally or morally—any more than you’d be if your maid was a passenger in a traffic accident.”

“
Maid
?” Miss Withers smiled. “A little woman named Hildegarde Withers comes in daily to do my housework. But I do see your point. I wish I saw the point of the murder—or perhaps it’s
murders
now? Did everyone show up for work this morning, I hope?”

Cushak shrugged, and then went on to explain that most studio employees had a way of trickling in anywhere between nine and eleven. “I’ve always thought,” he said, “that we should have a time clock for all artists to punch. But I suppose I could have Joyce check—”

“Never mind,” she interrupted hastily. “It’ll give me an excuse to snoop around a bit. Come, Talley.” Starting out, she whirled and came back to pick up the statuette of the bird. “I’ll just keep this for evidence,” she said.

“But—but you can’t find fingerprints on plaster,” Cushak told her.

She looked at him. “Oh, so
you’re
interested in criminology, too? Then you must know that there are all sorts of evidence. Sometimes when in desperate straits I’ve had to manufacture it out of whole cloth.” She smiled, and went briskly out.

As schoolteacher and poodle came into the office which she now called her own, there was Tip Brown patiently waiting and whiling away the time by studying the penciled sketches, the doodles she had left on her desk day before yesterday. He looked up with a start. “Oh, hello,” he said. “You know, Miss Withers, some of these aren’t bad at all. That frog swallowing a snake, and the tree with bottles of poison for fruit, and the skull with vines growing out of the eye sockets—”

“Really?” she said, not displeased.

“Yeah. Maybe you missed your calling. The stuff is a bit macabre for cartoons, though.”

“Miss Macabre, they call me. Or perhaps you never read Dickens?” She sat down. “I’m surprised to see you today, Mr. Brown. Surely you got drawings enough of my dog the other day to inspire a dozen movies?”

Tip Brown hesitated. “It never does any harm to get plenty of action sketches.” Then he saw the cold look in her eye. “Okay, ma’am. It wasn’t entirely that. I just—I just wondered if you had anything new on the murder.”

“The Reed death?” she countered cagily. “But whatever would I know—”

“Don’t kid me, lady. You’re not here to work on
The Circus Poodle
—you don’t give a damn about the story you’re supposed to be assigned to. You’re been asking sixteen thousand questions….” Tip looked faintly belligerent. “Tell me, are you a private detective or something?”

“A private detective or nothing,” she said. “But I didn’t think it was so obvious; I must remember in future to wear dark glasses and a false beard.” She nailed him with her eye. “By the way, since we’re on the subject, I’d like to ask you a few more questions. Mr. Brown, when the late Larry Reed played his perfectly hilarious practical joke on you and sent your mail out of town where it was lost for a month or so, just what important letters did you miss until too late?”

“Oh, so you heard about that caper? I must have more un-friends around here than I thought. Well, it was—it was just that at the time I was somewhat married and my wife was in Reno getting the cure. She lost her money at the crap tables at Harold’s Club or got tight and sentimental in a bar or something—anyway, she wrote me that she wanted to come back and start over. It was a letter I’d sorta been hoping for, because I was carrying a torch at the time. By the time I finally got the letter she’d changed her mind and figured I wasn’t interested, and had up and married a singing cowboy who’s master of ceremonies at a dude ranch. It was all settled, which was just as well because, believe me, she was no bargain to live with and if she had come back it would just have been all to do over again. Larry didn’t know it, but he accidently did me a big favor with that corny gag.”

“Um—and did you realize your good fortune at the time?”

“Naturally not. I blew my top and said a lot of things—the same things somebody’s repeated to you. But I cooled off….”

“Larry Reed got cooled off, too, to use the vulgar phrase. Forgive the personal questions, but somebody has to do something about it and I seem to be the one appointed. So—”

“So somebody has to do something about Jan!” he cut in. “Isn’t she actually in danger, real danger?”

Miss Withers shrugged. “Perhaps, and perhaps not. It may be that the murderer is finished with his nefarious plans—or has been frightened off. It would appear that somebody wanted to kill Larry Reed, and built up this valentine thing and all the rest of it to cover the real motives.”

“Smoke screen, huh? Or else a nut.” Tip nodded, and then frowned. “But you must admit that Jan may be on the spot?”

“Certainly she may. And just why are you so much more worried about Miss Poole than the rest of your friends and associates who have been equally threatened?”