Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan Page 10

  “Of course, you have the privilege of refusing. That refusal can be taken only one way. So—”

  Melicent Manning stood up with a clatter of bracelets. “Of all things! I’ve never in my life been so grossly insulted! If—”

  Things were rapidly getting out of hand. “Wait a minute,” put in Sheriff Truesdale sensibly. “The inspector here is looking for a man. So you’re really not one of the suspects at all.” She sat down, somewhat mollified.

  Willy Abend murmured something about “Cossacks.” “My fingerprints are my own affair,” he insisted. “The Bill of Rights guarantees the freedom and sanctity of the individual. One of the unalienable privileges—”

  “Okay.” Piper cut him short. “Save the speech.” He looked toward Virgil Dobie. “Well?”

  “I’m with Willy on that point,” Dobie said. “I don’t know why, but I’ve always had a dislike of giving out my fingerprints. I wouldn’t even let them put my print on my driver’s license when I had it renewed. But I’ll give you an autographed copy of the X ray of my arm the time I broke it.” The inspector failed to smile.

  Frankie Firsk said, “I don’t see why I should be the only one. I mean, if everybody else did it I wouldn’t mind. But now—”

  Douglas August was the only one left. “How about you?” Piper demanded.

  August smiled sweetly. “It’s a waste of time,” he said.

  “Why?” snapped Piper.

  “Because you’ve already got our fingerprints. On those highball glasses. You see, Inspector, I’ve written Mr Moto and Bulldog Drummond into the same situation so many, many times that it’s old stuff.”

  The silence in the room grew very brittle. “So that’s why Uncle Remus snatched the glasses!” exploded Virgil Dobie. “Not bad, Inspector. Not bad at all.”

  Piper nodded. “I confess that I’d hoped that the man I want—and only the man I want—would refuse to have prints taken. But thank you all just the same.” He nodded at Mr Nincom.

  “That will do,” said Nincom. “Back to your typewriters.”

  Puzzled and uneasy, the little conclave of writers started out of the room. Sheriff Truesdale went to the kitchen door and said, “Okay, Uncle. Bring back the glasses.”

  “Comin’!”

  Through the doorway came Uncle Remus, proud and happy, holding the tray of empty glasses high on one palm. His ebony countenance was alight with excitement—and then he tripped over the sill and slid into the room amid a crash of glassware.

  Then the startled laughter of the writers came back to mock the unhappy inspector, Frankie Firsk’s nervous giggle above the deep boom of Virgil Dobie. The door closed behind them.

  “Tough luck,” said the sheriff. “Seems like this isn’t your day, Inspector.”

  Piper was talking to himself, fervently and sulphurously. There wasn’t a piece of glass on the floor bigger than a dime. Uncle Remus picked himself up but, instead of the apologies one might have expected, he still wore a happy smile.

  “Nice work!” congratulated Mr Nincom.

  Piper whirled on him. “You told him to do that? Why—”

  Nincom nodded. He crossed to the door, made sure that the writers were out of earshot on their way upstairs. Then he came back. “A little touch of my own,” he admitted. “There was no use letting any of them think you had their prints. So I had my man stage the spill with some fresh glasses.”

  “Here’s the real ones,” offered Uncle Remus, reappearing with a duplicate tray. “They start right here at this end, just like everybody sat. Mr. Firsk and Mr Dobie …”

  Inspector Oscar Piper took a deep breath, shook his head and sat down at the table. Mr Nincom and the sheriff watched with deep interest as he borrowed a small brush, a saucer and a candle from Uncle Remus.

  “This might make a very good scene in a picture,” Nincom decided as he watched the inspector smoke up the saucer, whisk off soot enough to stain the fingerprints. But it was a slow and painstaking job, and Mr Nincom, used to having his results all worked out beforehand, soon began to fidget impatiently. “Well,” he demanded finally, “which one is it?”

  “Don’t know yet,” murmured Piper.

  Mr Nincom began to stalk up and down. “If I were casting this I think I’d pick Virgil Dobie for the killer. He’s the best type in the bunch,” he hinted hopefully.

  “Murderers in real life look like just anybody else,” the inspector said. “Judd Gray was the most harmless-looking little guy you ever met. And Hauptmann—you’d pick him any day for an honest German carpenter.” He dabbed soot on another glass, held it up to the light.

  “Really!” burst forth Mr Nincom a bit later. “After all, Inspector, I have given you every opportunity. It can’t possibly take this long. If for any reason you’re playing for time—”

  “I’m only beginning,” Piper told him.

  At that point Mr Thorwald L. Nincom obviously lost all interest in the game. “If you gentlemen will excuse me,” he said, “I usually take a siesta before dinner.”

  He edged himself out of the room. Unimpressed, the inspector fiddled away with brush and powder and glasses while Sheriff Truesdale snored softly in a big easy chair.

  Finally Piper pushed away his utensils and mopped his forehead. “Hell’s fire!” he said.

  The sheriff woke up at once. “No good?” he inquired eagerly.

  Piper hesitated. “Too good, really. Remember I said that the man I’m looking for had a lateral pocket loop on one finger of his right hand?”

  The sheriff nodded. “Uh-huh. And now I s’pose that you found that every one of the suspects has that kind of a loop, is that it?”

  It was a good guess, but the inspector shook his head. There was deep bitterness in his tone. “No, nothing like that. None of them has it—except the one person who can’t be the man I’m looking for.”

  Sheriff Truesdale pursed his lips. “You don’t mean him? It ain’t Nincom?”

  “The only person in this house with a lateral pocket loop on a finger of the right hand is Melicent Manning, the old lady with the bracelets.”

  “Say!” breathed the sheriff. “I betcha—”

  Piper shook his head. “And don’t you leap to the conclusion that she was in New York eight years ago, disguised as a man. Because the guy I’m looking for had a beard, and I doubt if she could manage that. Moreover, this Laval was held a couple of days on suspicion in the precinct station. And I don’t think that those boys would miss a masquerade like that. No, it’s a blind alley. All you can do when you strike a snag like this is to start all over again. I’m heading back.”

  “Back to New York?” inquired the sheriff, almost too eagerly.

  Piper shook his head. “I’m not going back to New York until and unless I can take a certain guy’s scalp with me.” He stood up. “I meant back to Los Angeles.”

  “Sure, I’ll drive you as far as San Bernardino,” Sheriff Truesdale said.

  “I suppose we ought to say something to Mr Nincom,” Piper observed. “After all, he did stage the thing for us.” He found the bell, rang it and spoke to Uncle Remus.

  The darky promised to take a message to his employer. “Mr Nincom’s not in his room right now,” he said. “But I tell him.”

  “Tell him it’s still up in the air,” Piper said. “But I’ve got a couple of hot leads.”

  “Sure, I tell him,” Uncle Remus said again. He turned to the sheriff. “Your office, they want you to call. I didn’t like to disturb you, but maybe you better call back, Sheriff.”

  Sheriff Truesdale nodded. “You can use that phone right there,” Uncle Remus offered.

  As he went to make his call the inspector walked slowly out into the chilly air of the early evening. Wisps of fog moved overhead, some of them slipping through the very tops of the trees. Automatically he put a cigar in his mouth and lighted it, finding it dry and bitter, as all cigars had been since the news about Hildegarde had reached him.

  Finally the sheriff came out. “Oh, he
re you are!” he said. “Thought for a minute that I saw you heading down the path toward my car. Say, Inspector, would you mind very much if I didn’t give you that lift after all? On account of I have to spend some time here in Arrowhead.”

  “Crime wave?” Piper asked.

  The sheriff smiled. “Nothing that would seem like much back where you come from. It’s just a family matter. The cook up at the big hotel thinks that his wife run off with some other guy. I got to do some investigating.” Sheriff Truesdale led the way to where his little sedan was parked on Nincom’s shaded driveway. “I can drop you off at the bus station, Inspector.”

  So it happened that Inspector Oscar Piper slept fitfully in the rear of a big Greyhound bus as it wound downwards from Lake Arrowhead that night while the sheriff busied himself with official errands around the little mountain resort. The missing wife thing was a dud, as he had known it would be. Those hotel cooks were always having trouble with their wives. On account of they kept such funny hours. And what woman would want to try to cook for a chef?

  Finally Sheriff Truesdale found that the man with whom the missing wife was supposed to have eloped was deep in a stud poker game in the back room at the tavern. “The woman’s probably sneaked down to L.A. for a toot,” was his final verdict. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  He might just as well have driven that New York inspector down the mountain, Sheriff Truesdale was thinking. It would have meant pleasant company on the way home, and once in a while a man can pick up something new from those big-city men. Like smoking up a saucer to make soot for fingerprint tests. He swung his little car up the steep grade from the village, swung around through the hotel park, heading for home.

  No, not for home. Because at the last sharp turn the steering wheel gave in his hands and then spun foolishly. The road turned, but the sheriff and his little black sedan kept going straight ahead down through the flower gardens and off a sort of steep toboggan slide of underbrush and across a rocky beach into five feet of water. Lake Arrowhead was colder than death.

  Sheriff Truesdale climbed out on the roof of his sunken sedan and howled for help like, a trapped wolf.

  VII

  I must become A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT

  For a dark hour or twain….

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  RAIN IN CALIFORNIA IS like rain nowhere else in the world. Let it come down for half an hour, and it seems that it has been raining forever and ever. And that it must continue until half-past Eternity.

  Over the lovely if artificial landscape, over the bright houses and the round brown-green hills comes a deathly gray pallor, a gloom of low clouds and everlasting chilly downpour. The color seems to seep out of everything, as if the projection machine in a motion-picture theater had suddenly switched from technicolor to ordinary black-and-white film.

  And it rains!

  In Hollywood Santa Monica Boulevard becomes a river dotted with little islands that are stalled and abandoned cars. Where Eastern elms and maples would toss and dance delightedly in the deluge, the palms drip and shiver in the streets, tall, lonely anachronisms, geological freaks which seem to have been left out by some forgetful florist after a wedding.

  The gutters run full, higher than the curbs. And there are few children to run up and down barefoot, screaming and sailing their boats of shingle, for mothers remember the little boy a year or so ago who was washed down into the sewer and out to sea….

  So it rained that Sunday, the morning after Inspector Oscar Piper’s return by bus from Lake Arrowhead. It rained without wind, without thunder or lightning and without a pause.

  Especially fitting weather, the inspector thought, considering the grim errands he had to do. At the little mortuary on Western Avenue he was hard put to it to avoid a salesman for Woodbine Acres who kept pointing out the unequaled charms and attractions of that celebrated burial ground. Piper finally voted against purchasing either a “view lot” close by an everlasting fountain or a cubbyhole in the “Chamber of Eternal Peace” where each niche bore the name of its occupant in letters of solid bronze and where a concealed organ played Brahms twenty-four hours a day, presumably until drowned out by the Last Trump.

  Miss Hildegarde Withers, he was certain, would care neither for the everlasting fountain nor the ever-playing organ, so he made preliminary arrangements to ship her mortal remains back to Manhattan.

  The undertaker led the conversation gently around to the subject of photographs. “If you had a picture of the departed it would aid our staff of lady morticians in restoring a perfect likeness. The accident, you know …”

  Piper said there was no portrait available and got out of there as quickly as possible. But not quite quickly enough. As he came out of the place a brawny man fell into step beside him, shouldered him expertly back into a comparatively dry doorway. It was a flat-footed technique that the inspector recognized.

  “All right, bud,” said the man in a heartily unpleasant tone. “Why all the interest in that stiff in there?”

  The inspector considered for a moment. He was in a mood to throw a punch. This flat-footed moron would be a sucker for a left, especially if you stood on his foot when you threw it. On the other hand, he was presumably doing his duty.

  “Will you take a ride down to headquarters or talk here and now?”

  “Relax,” said the inspector. “Show your authority if you have any.”

  “Tom Sansom, special officer,” he was told. A badge was flashed.

  Piper grinned and showed his own. “I’ve heard of you,” he said. “You’re the one who jumped on the thumb­tack.” Sansom suddenly looked like a dog who has been playing a game with a balloon and has had it pop in his face.

  “Why are you so interested in what’s inside there?” Piper demanded. “I thought all you local masterminds had decided it was an accident?”

  “Sorry, Inspector,” Sansom said. “But after I heard from Sheriff Truesdale up at Arrowhead this morning I began to wonder. So I put a man on the mortuary here….”

  “Truesdale? But he didn’t think that I was on the right track,” Piper began.

  “He does now. After what happened to him last night. His steering gear went haywire, and he got dunked in Lake Arrowhead. The sheriff thinks it was meant for you and him both. If he’d driven you down the mountain as he planned to do—” Sansom shrugged.

  “Yeah, I see. That might convince even the sheriff.”

  “Myself, I’m not convinced,” Sansom said. “I think it’s all phony. Sounds like one of the `B’ thrillers our studio writers turn out in two weeks. But it’s my job to leave no stone unturned….”

  “Save the speech. It’s murder all right. I’m out here to do what I can. Do we co-operate or not?”

  Sansom hesitated. “Look here, we know our business. The coroner said—”

  “Coroners can make mistakes. Hildegarde Withers was killed because she was too close to the murderer. It was an accident on purpose. Do you know a man named Derek Laval, sometimes known as Dick Laval?”

  “I’ve heard the name,” the studio cop admitted. “Don’t know as I’ve ever met him.”

  “I’m going to meet him. And when I do—” Piper’s hand clenched into a fist. “Miss Withers sent me several letters and telegrams. Not much to go on, but enough so I know she was close on Laval’s trail. She figured that he was using another name, a sort of nom de plume in the studio.”

  Sansom considered that. “What are you going to do about it, Inspector?”

  “I’ll figure out something. First of all, I want to find out where Miss Withers was living. She checked out of her hotel Wednesday and didn’t leave an address. Has the studio got the new one?”

  “No. All the address we have is just the Roosevelt. We tried to find out where she’d gone and didn’t get to first base.” Sansom took off his hat, shook the water from the brim. “Funny she didn’t put her address on the letters she wrote to you.”

  “She did. The studio address. Which puts us right b
ack where we were.” The inspector frowned. “Of course, there’s always the chance that she wrote me a letter that didn’t arrive at Centre Street until after I left night before last. She might have put the new address on that.”

  “What do you figure on finding in her apartment?”

  “Don’t know,” Piper admitted. “Maybe some notes on the case. Maybe something that points in the direction she was moving.” He nodded. “I’ve got a notion to call my office in New York and see if anything’s come in. Care to wait around?”

  Sansom looked at him oddly. “Sure,” he said. “I’d like to watch how you big-town fellows work. Pick up some hints maybe.” The inspector saw only a blandly innocent face but he had an idea that this man and he would never become bosom friends.

  All the same, they climbed into Sansom’s car and splashed through the streets to the hotel. The studio officer sat on the edge of the bed while Piper put through a long-distance call to Centre Street. There would be a crew, a very slim skeleton crew, on duty at Homicide on a Sunday afternoon.

  Finally the inspector heard the familiar voice of Lieutenant Georgie Swarthout. “Oh, hello,” said that worthy young officer. “How’d you find our friend Miss Withers?”

  “Never mind,” Piper snapped. “Georgie, go up to my desk and see if there is any mail. I mean letters from out here in California. I’ll hold on.”

  The minutes ticked away, and Piper had an unjust suspicion that Swarthout was looking through his desk to see if he kept any cigars about. Then the line clicked. “No, no letters,” was the report. “But there’s a big brown envelope with a California postmark that came in yesterday. It’s marked ‘Fragile and Personal.’”

  That sounded very much like Hildegarde’s work. “Open it,” Piper said. He looked over his shoulder and saw that Officer Sansom was trying very hard to read one of Miss Withers’ old telegrams upside down. “Don’t strain your eyes,” he said to the man over his shoulder. “Go on, help yourself!”

  Officer Sansom, unabashed, picked up the message, puzzling over the first word. “JSBR MPY … ” he tried to pronounce. “Oh, code!”