Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan Read online

  VIII

  There will be time to prepare

  A face to meet the faces that you meet,

  THERE WILL BE TIME TO MURDER….

  T. S. ELIOT

  PLOP! PLOP! PLOP! THE drops of rain water fell from Miss Withers’ cellophane raincape upon the hardwood floor. She came inside, shut the door behind her with a good, solid bang and switched on the light.

  Tom Sansom, holding tight to the back of a chair, muttered something, but nobody was paying any attention to him. The inspector was just about the angriest man in the world at that moment, and his face was the shade of a plate of borsch.

  “Oscar,” said the schoolteacher gently, “you can’t hold your breath forever, really you can’t.”

  “I—” he began. “You—”

  “I know, Oscar, I know,” she went on quickly. “I’m not at all dead, and you’re really very relieved about that. But also you’re furious at me because you had that long trip out here and all the fuss and worry for nothing.”

  He still found it hard to say anything. “I’m sorry,” Miss Withers went on. “I wired you not to worry no matter what you heard. I sent the wire to your home because I thought that somebody might open and read it down at headquarters….”

  “I didn’t even go home,” he admitted. “I just hopped the first plane….”

  “Don’t act like that. I was murdered, to all intents and purposes. Only I was lucky enough to pull down a folding bed on top of my head and knock myself cold. I was only unconscious for a few minutes, but it was long enough to make me miss connections with that studio car. Afterwards—”

  “But listen, lady!” Tom Sansom objected. “Your body—I mean, the report and everything. How did you get the sheriff and the hospital to cover up for you? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “They didn’t cover up for me,” she went on. “There was a woman in the studio car. A friend of the driver possibly. Or a hitchhiker that he picked up….”

  “Or the hotel chef’s missing wife!” Piper interjected, remembering. “Of course!”

  “Anyway, she was identified as being I. That was too good an opportunity for me to miss, because I had a strong feeling that the accident was not an accident and that someone was trying to get rid of me. So I kept out of sight and started sleuthing in earnest.”

  Piper said, “And you got—?”

  She hesitated. “I don’t quite know, Oscar. I can’t tell yet.” But she turned a little away from Tom Sansom, and her eyelid dropped.

  “If you made any notes on your progress, somebody’s been here and got them,” Piper told her. “Because we’ve searched the place thoroughly, hoping against hope that you left something behind.”

  “Really, Oscar?” Miss Withers headed hastily for the kitchen. She threw open the refrigerator, took out a double boiler filled with cooked string beans and lifted the top. In the lower pan reposed a small notebook. “Perfectly safe, as I knew it would be. Besides, I haven’t been gone long enough—”

  “A man was in here,” Piper insisted. “Those tracks on the kitchen floor”—he pointed—“and the apple.”

  “I’m afraid the tracks are mine,” Miss Withers admitted, displaying her feet. She was wearing galoshes. “And I ate an apple just before I went out.”

  “Did you smoke a cigar just before you went out?” queried Tom Sansom.

  The inspector told her about that. “No,” said the schoolteacher, “I didn’t smoke any cigar.” She frowned. “I don’t see how anybody could have left it there. I’ve had no men callers—and nobody even knows I’m living here.”

  “We found you,” Piper said. “So someone else could.”

  He was looking for the cigar. But it wasn’t in the wastebasket. It wasn’t in any of the ash trays. “The thing’s gone,” he cried.

  Then he saw the direction of Miss Withers’ glance. She was staring at the cigar butt in his fingers.

  “Good Lord! I must have lit it and smoked it without realizing—” Oscar Piper sat down suddenly in a chair, feeling foolish.

  “Smoking is automatic for most people,” Miss Withers reminded him. “It becomes such a habit that you have no idea of what your fingers are up to. Ten to one that is how the cigar got here in the first place. It smells just like those awful greenish-brown things you are so fond of.”

  Tom Sansom began to laugh. Once started, he found it hard to stop. Oscar Piper glared at the man and then could not help chiming in. He laughed until the tears filled his eyes.

  “There’s a time for everything.” Miss Withers finally cut them short. “Have your hysterics, gentlemen, but remember that we are still faced with the problem of a murder. Right now, somewhere in this town, a man is congratulating himself on having perpetrated another successful crime….”

  “That’s right,” admitted Sansom soberly. “And I’d better get busy and report to Mr Lothian that you weren’t killed in that wreck like we thought.” He edged toward the door. “Maybe we can all get together for a conference sometime tomorrow?”

  “Maybe we can,” agreed the inspector.

  When they were alone Miss Withers turned to him. “Oscar, it was sweet of you to drop everything and come rushing out here because you heard I was hurt. I do appreciate it—especially after the way we’ve always fought….”

  “What’s wrong with a good fight?” he demanded. “It was this guy Laval I was after anyway. I hate having a case remain in the ‘Open’ file.”

  She smiled. “Of course, Oscar. By the way, I may have your case solved for you. I took a chance and dug up some photographs and set them to New York….”

  “I know,” he told her. “That’s what I was really hoping to find in your apartment—your notes on which picture was which suspect. Because I’ve already got a report on them from Centre Street.”

  She brightened. “Oscar! Did they manage to identify the man?” `

  “Captain Nichols remembers the case. He thinks it is number three in your retouched photos that looks most like the guy he arrested in the Harris case. Why, what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter,” she said slowly. “Except that number three can’t be the murderer of Saul Stafford—even if he does look well in an India-ink beard.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I decided that the experiment needed a control,” she told him. “There weren’t pictures enough. So I put in a photograph of Stafford himself—and that was number three.”

  The inspector gnawed absently at the dead end of his cigar. “Saul Stafford himself. Another blind alley.” He told her about the abortive experiment at Lake Arrowhead. “That ended with Melicent Manning as the only suspect with the right type fingerprint.”

  Miss Withers was doubtful. “From what you tell me, there was plenty of time for the colored man, Uncle Remus or whatever they called him, to switch glasses, substitute his own prints or anything else. Oscar, I’m afraid we haven’t eliminated as many suspects as we had hoped.”

  “Now, Hildegarde—”

  “They can be faked, as somebody or other proved last year with a gelatin process. Moreover, I myself saw the fingerprint evidence proving that both Sacco and Vanzetti handled the gun that killed the paymaster.”

  “That was Boston!” Piper snapped back.

  “What can be faked in Boston can be faked in New York or Hollywood or anywhere else!”

  Suddenly they both realized that they were yelling at each other. “Relax, Hildegarde, relax,” Piper told her. “You’re too het up for a ghost.”

  “Relax yourself, Oscar Piper,” she came back. But she stopped, put her hand for a moment on his shoulder. “Say, how would you like to take me out to dinner tonight?—to celebrate my return from the Valley of the Shadow?”

  He brightened. “Swell! Just like old times—nice, quiet place where we can talk this thing out over a dish of spaghetti and a bottle of red ink.”

  “Yes,” Miss Withers said, smiling faintly, “spaghetti, by all means.” She turned toward the bedr
oom door, then stopped. “Oscar, while I’m slipping into my best dress you might look at these letters I just got in answer to my ad in the newspaper. I asked for information about Derek Laval, hinting that it was to settle an estate.”

  The inspector took them. “Laval? I was beginning to think that his middle name was Yehudi. The little man who wasn’t there.”

  Speedly Miss Withers brought him up to date on her research in the newspaper files. “Laval exists, as you see—and very active is the existence he leads. Any man who plays polo, stays up until dawn in the Swing Club, jitterbugs with young girls, et cetera and so forth—”

  “It must be the climate,” Piper told her, and settled down to a study of the new exhibits. The first letter was unimportant, being only from a moving-picture extra player, named Jules Lavalliere, who thought that his name might originally have been Laval and who hoped for a modest share in the supposed Laval estate. The second was from the mother of a young lady, named Cecily, who had gone to San Francisco for the Labor Day week end with Derek Laval and had not been heard of since. Said mother would like a forwarding address so that she might send along Cecily’s clothes, her parakeet and the small child which remained as a souvenir of Cecily’s last elopement.

  The third was even more puzzling, being from the editor of a local magazine, Script. He had, it seemed, several dozen manuscripts, mostly of verse, which had been submitted during the past year by Derek Laval, with no return address. Some of the titles were listed as The Sterilized Heiress, The Self-Appointed Bastard, The Face on Mona’s Floor and Owed to a Casting Couch.

  Mr Wagner, the editor, had found these poems not only unsuited to publication, but hesitated to undergo the risk of putting them back into the United States mail and would like the author to call for them in person.

  “Obviously,” Miss Withers announced as she swept out of the bedroom in her best dotted swiss, “Derek Laval is a person who ought to have his typewriter washed out with soap.”

  “Well, now—” objected the inspector.

  But Miss Withers was frowning. “That’s funny. He didn’t have a typewriter when I searched his apartment downstairs….”

  The inspector did a double take on that. “You mean Laval lives in this building?”

  “He did, but he doesn’t any more. He called up the landlady yesterday and announced that he was going to give up the place. You coming, Oscar?”

  Vaguely baffled, the inspector procured a taxicab and got her into it. And that was the end of their council of war, at least for the time being, because inevitably the driver smelled that they were visitors to southern California and set himself up as a guide. He even drove several blocks out of his way—or theirs—to point out Mae West’s apartment house.

  Finally, at an hour well past twilight, they whisked along that section of Sunset Boulevard which is known as “The Strip,” from which vantage point all of western Los Angeles twinkled and sparkled below them like an illuminated map.

  Even the inspector, not normally prone to enthuse about views, was forced to admit, “Maybe I’ve been wrong about the place.” Then they slowed up for a traffic jam outside a great pink modernistic box of a building outlined with blue neon lights.

  There was a gauntlet of sight-seers on either side of the velvet carpet leading to the door, cheering and waving autograph books. Flash bulbs popped steadily as the limousines and sport roadsters and motor scooters of the stars rolled up to the place.

  “Big night at Shapiro’s tonight,” the driver told them. “It’s the only place in Hollywood anybody important ever goes since the Trocadero folded. Tonight they’re having a benefit dinner and special show—to buy ambulances to send to England….”

  “They need planes and tanks and destroyers, so we send ambulances,” observed Miss Hildegarde Withers. Then, on an impulse—“Stop here, driver!”

  He looked amazed. “But, lady, I was driving you out to Peppino’s. This ain’t no spaghetti joint. You don’t want—”

  “But I do.”

  Before the inspector could register a practical protest he found himself dragged willy-nilly through the gauntlet where Miss Withers had the surprising experience of being mistaken for Edna May Oliver and asked for an autograph.

  “I think Shapiro’s is going to be very interesting tonight,” the schoolteacher told Oscar Piper, and drew him firmly inside.

  Jill Madison, an unripe orchid pinned in her hair because her silver gown had no shoulders, was dancing with Buster. They danced very close, moving as one person, not only because they were both young and felt the music all the way down to their toes but also because the dance floor at Shapiro’s is always so crowded that all dancing is cheek to cheek. Almost any cheek.

  “That’s all, Buster,” Jill said, and dropped her arms.

  He held her resentfully. “You don’t like the way I rhumba?”

  “That wasn’t a rhumba; it was a conga. And I haven’t forgotten that I’m here with somebody else.”

  “With that Virgil Dobie!”

  “That’s right,” she told him sweetly. “Now, don’t be difficult. I’m trying to tell you to run along and peddle your papers.”

  “But, Jill—”

  She stopped on the edge of the floor and for one moment she seemed to be relenting. But she wasn’t—not Jill. “Now listen, sophomore,” she said severely, “just because I run into you in the bar I dance with you. Can’t you understand why? You’re an awfully nice boy, and I’m sure that some awfully nice girl would just love to have you fall in love with her….”

  Buster’s neat dinner coat suddenly seemed to shorten at the sleeves and hunch up at the back of the neck. “If you’d only—”

  “I won’t only! Please go away and stay away. I’ve got to get back to Virgil or—”

  “So it’s ‘Virgil’ now, is it?”

  “Yes,” Jill said. “I danced with you because I wanted to be nice. Our last dance together—like in Browning’s poem.”

  “It was the last ride, not the last dance. ‘We ride, and I see her bosom heave, There’s many a crown for who can reach …’”

  “Well!” exploded Jill, reddening under her make-up. She turned swiftly and marched toward the table where, under Virgil Dobie’s approving stare, a waiter was spinning a bottle of Krug ’28 in its silver bucket.

  Buster shrugged and made his way back into the bar. People were lined up behind the brass rail like bettors outside the two-dollar win windows at Santa Anita, but he elbowed his way forward and eventually found himself standing beside a large, sultry girl in red and gold.

  “Have a drink,” he muttered, and then saw that it was Lillian from the studio. “Well, do have a drink.”

  “Oh, hello, Buster,” she greeted him, a shade more warmly than usual. “I don’t mind if I have a drink. I don’t mind if I have six drinks. Stingers.”

  They began on the six stingers. Buster tried talking but he discovered that Lillian was not listening to him. He would have moved away, but she held him, putting her hand appealingly on his shoulder. “Stay with me for a while,” she begged him. “I’ll—I’ll go Dutch on the drinks.”

  Somewhat puzzled. Buster wanted to know why. “You’re not stagging it, too, are you?”

  “No, I made old Josef bring me. He had two double martinis and folded up right in the middle of telling me a limerick about the young man from Khartoum….”

  Buster brightened, waiting.

  “He’s at the table in there,” Lillian said. “If you want to hear the rest of it wake him up.”

  “Why not call a taxi and go home if he’s that dull?”

  Lillian drained her glass with a brisk intentness. “Oh no. I’m not going to walk out on my new boss. Wilfred Josef would never forgive that. Besides”—here she stopped and looked carefully around before continuing—“I came here to do something. Buster, tell me, how many drinks does it take to make you brave?”

  “A good many, I should think. It might vary with the individual.”

 
She nodded. “Then I’m going to stay right here and drink until I’m brave as anything.”

  The young man loosened his necktie. “I’m with you,” he agreed. “At least until I fall off the stool.”

  He was nowhere near falling off the stool some time later when Thorwald L. Nincom arrived with a party of seven. There was Melicent Manning, Mona and Frankie Firsk, Harry Wagman the agent, a lovely hyperthyroid redhead whom Wagman hoped to sell for the part of Lizzie Borden, Willy Abend, wearing an American flag for a boutonniere, and Douglas August with his right hand in a vast white bandage.

  “Nincom and his poops,” Buster observed as the party swept past toward where a headwaiter guarded the door of the dining room. “I bet they have no reservation and I bet they get a table.”

  Buster was right. Mr Nincom and his party were awarded the signal privilege of having a table set up for them on the edge of the dance floor, but in spite of this they all seemed moderately unhappy.

  Melicent Manning tried to make conversation, steering carefully away from topics which might upset Mr Nincom’s digestion. “Do tell us about how you injured your hand, Douglas,” she begged of Doug August. “I just know it was something romantic. You devil-may-care young men!”

  “If you must know,” August said, “it happened out on the polo field this morning Oh, not in the game,” he hastily added, realizing that Nincom was glaring at him. “I know I promised not to play while I’m on assignment. I was just practicing some stick and ball.”

  “Polo!” breathed Melicent Manning.

  “But it was romantic,” August continued. “You see, I dropped my mallet and got off my horse to pick it up, and the horse stepped on my hand.”

  There was a lull. “I knew a man once a horse sat on—” began Mona Firsk, and then her husband shushed her. Mr Nincom was about to speak. Or else choke to death with half a stalk of celery in his mouth. He was pointing over their heads, pointing toward the doorway, and emitting small gargling sounds.

  “Look!” he finally got out.

  Willy Abend peered. “Oh, it’s Miss Withers, the lady who got killed….” His voice trailed away into silence, and they all forgot to breathe for some seconds.