Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan Page 14

  Buster didn’t think so. “She just wanted to get brave….”

  The two local detectives looked at each other and nodded. Oscar Piper nodded, too, though not quite as firmly. “Seems pretty clear that she was trying to get brave enough to commit suicide, then,” said the sergeant.

  “Yeah, and that would account for her not screaming when she fell. People don’t yell when they know they’re going to fall.”

  “Are we to be kept here all night while we listen to the reasons why a stenographer took her own life in a fit of drunken melancholia?” burst in Mr Nincom.

  The officers looked at each other and then at the inspector. “Well,” said the lieutenant slowly, “much as we’d like to play ball with you fellows in the big town…”

  Piper looked around for Miss Withers, but she wasn’t in view. A moment later they heard from her in the shape of a commotion outside on the balcony, the sound of running feet, the irate voice of a policeman and then a tremendous crash.

  Miss Withers’ voice came triumphantly above everything else. “Look!” she was crying. “Look at that!”

  When Piper got out onto the balcony he looked down into the empty bar, straight down where an ornamental pot holding a small orange tree now reposed in the center of a collapsed divan.

  “She threw it over—” began the guardian of the door in a very injured tone. “Just ups with it, and over it goes!” He held Miss Withers’ arm with a firm grip.

  “Of course I did!” insisted that lady, still triumphant. “That pot couldn’t have weighed over a hundred pounds, or I wouldn’t have been able to lift it. But look—it was heavy enough to break the legs of that divan downstairs. And you mean to stand there and tell me that a hundred-and-thirty-pound girl could land on it without any damage at all?”

  “Leave go of her,” said the lieutenant wearily as he took off his hat and mopped his head. “I’m afraid she’s right.”

  “She didn’t fall,” agreed his partner slowly. “She didn’t jump and she wasn’t pushed.”

  “And somebody tore off a piece of her dress and hooked it on this balcony so it would look as if she fell!” the schoolteacher continued. “Which makes it add up to murder.”

  Behind them, from the door marked “Mesdames” appeared Dr Panzer, with his sleeves rolled up. “She’s right,” said the coroner. “About the girl not falling anyway. She hasn’t got a bruise on her body, so she didn’t fall thirty feet. But her neck’s broken.”

  “Or, in other words,” interrupted Miss Hildegarde Withers dryly, “she has a fracture dislocation of the second cervical vertebra and lesion of the spinal cord?”

  Coroner Panzer stared at her. “Why—yes,” he admitted. “I mean—But—”

  “I’m only quoting your own report from your examination of the body of Saul Stafford,” the schoolteacher explained. “I can remember the rest of it too. Let me see—‘Anterior surface of the body—negative. Abdominal cavity…’”

  “Wait a minute,” cut in Dr Panzer. “Lady, I don’t know who you are or how you got in this thing—”

  “Neither do I,” grinned the lieutenant. “But go on, Doc.”

  “Anyway,” said Dr Panzer, “there’s one difference between the Stafford case and this Gissing girl. I’ll show you.”

  He beckoned, led the way back through the door into the powder room where the body of Lillian Gissing was laid neatly out on a lounge. Briskly and impersonally Dr Panzer drew back the sheet to disclose the dead girl’s face. “Notice the marks on the cheek,” he said, pointing with his pencil. “One, two, three, four—four fingernail scratches on her left cheek, running from jawbone to ear.”

  “Meaning violence?” demanded the lieutenant.

  Panzer shrugged. “It could be. Or the girl could have clutched her own face”—he demonstrated—“like this.”

  “She couldn’t break her own neck, could she?” demanded Inspector Oscar Piper.

  The lieutenant hastily introduced them. “Inspector Piper is out here from New York on account of an old case of his—where a woman got her neck broken from a five-foot fall.”

  Panzer frowned deeply. “Three cases, eh? Well, maybe. But I don’t believe that it is physically possible for any person to break another’s neck. The neck muscles are too strong—”

  The inspector nodded. “That’s what our own medical examiner has always maintained.”

  “It could be done with an iron bar or some such device,” the coroner went on thoughtfully. “But no matter how you’d pad it, that would leave contusions, rupture blood vessels underneath the skin. No, outside of a hard fall, I don’t see how such injuries as these could be caused.”

  “Well,” pointed out Miss Withers, “the scratches on her left cheek were not caused by Lillian Gissing herself. Because there are four of them—and look at her hands.”

  They looked and saw that Lillian’s fingernails were long and heavily coated with geranium polish—all but one nail on the left hand and two on the right which had been broken off short and repaired by pasting the broken nail back again. “Any strain on that repair job would have torn the pasted nail off, “she said, and demonstrated.

  “Maybe this job was done by a woman!” spoke up the sergeant hopefully.

  Oscar Piper shook his head. “Men have fingernails too. And whoever Derek Laval may be, we know he’s a man.” He explained to the local officers. “We had him in the clink once on suspicion and had to let him go for lack of evidence.”

  The lieutenant said that he would put out a general alarm on Derek Laval right away. “That ought to bring him in within twenty-four hours unless he’s skipped town.”

  Miss Withers wasn’t so sure. A strange conviction about Mr Laval was beginning to grow in her mind. A new and surprising and somewhat preposterous conviction that she could not get rid of.

  A uniformed man appeared, saluted and told the lieutenant that the people in the banquet room were about at the boiling point and that the manager of the place wanted to know how long he would have to keep open for them.

  “I guess we’d better turn ’em loose,” said the lieutenant. “Eh, Inspector? We haven’t got enough on anybody to hold them and we can always pick up any of this crowd of celebrities.”

  “I think you’re right,” Piper agreed.

  But Miss Withers was in the throes of an inspiration. “Just one more minute!” she breathed. “Did I hear somebody say that the manager was still around?” She dusted her hands together. “Then it’s easy! Why didn’t I think of it before! All we have to do is to make each of those people in the other room—suspects, I suppose you’d call them—write down his own name and address….”

  It took her ten minutes to win her point. Getting the signatures was easy enough, except for Douglas August who displayed his bandaged hand. “I’ve never cultivated the knack of writing with the left,” he explained.

  “Mr August was injured practicing polo this morning,” Melicent Manning explained somewhat unnecessarily.

  For a moment everything spun around Miss Withers like a maelstrom. She remembered a photograph of two men riding hell-bent down the Riviera field…. And one was Derek Laval.

  “Relax, Hildegarde,” the inspector whispered to her. “Suppose the guy can’t give you the sample signature you’re looking for? With only one hand he certainly didn’t commit any murders today!”

  “Hmmm,” said the schoolteacher, her eyes narrowing. “Watch, Oscar.”

  And she bore down upon Douglas August, pretended clumsily to trip and clutched at his bandaged hand. Whatever result she had expected was not the one she got, for that gentleman closed both eyes and let out an anguished bellow of pain.

  It was no job of acting. August really did have an injured hand—that much was sure. She made hasty apologies and withdrew.

  The ruffled little herd of suspects filed down the stairs past the wrecked divan and out through the darkened and deserted bar.

  Buster Haight watched Jill hopefully, but she showed no signs of r
equiring a ride home. In fact, she climbed into Virgil Dobie’s red cut-down Packard with a happy, childlike eagerness and snuggled against his arm as they roared away.

  “Now that that’s over,” Dobie said to the girl as they slipped along Sunset, “suppose I feed you? I can’t sleep now and I don’t suppose you can either.”

  “No,” said Jill in the smallest of voices.

  “Where would you like to eat? The Derby? A drive-in somewhere?”

  She shook her head. “Somewhere far,” said Jill.

  Virgil Dobie thought a minute. “I know a swell place,” he said. “And it’s far.” He slid his arm along the back of the seat, and her head settled firmly against his big shoulder.

  Far behind them, in the little office on the second floor of Shapiro’s, three officers and a maiden schoolteacher were poring over a problem in handwriting identification. Before them reposed samples of every signature but one among tonight’s suspects plus two checks, signed “Derek Laval” and stamped “NSF” in large red letters inside a black square, which the manager had produced from his safe.

  It was evident from the beginning that none of the samples matched the checks. Even the sergeant knew enough about the fundamental handwriting characteristics to see that the variance was wide as a barn door.

  “It’s that guy August, all right,” decided the lieutenant. “We’d better pick him up—”

  “Wait a minute,” muttered Miss Hildegarde Withers. “Please wait a minute!” She was staring at the two worthless checks. Suddenly she put them down, turned to the officers. “As if it weren’t bad enough that none of our handwriting samples matches the checks—has it occurred to any of you that the checks don’t even match each other?”

  She was right; they were forced to admit that. Among his many other accomplishments it appeared that Derek Laval had the ability to sign his name in two entirely different and distinct handwritings!

  That, at least for the time being, brought the investigation up against a stone wall.

  It was a stone wall against which, all the rest of that night, Miss Withers butted her head. She was haunted by that well-known will-o’-the-wisp about town, Mr Derek Laval. He materialized and dematerialized. He made telephone calls and wrote checks and played polo and got raided in night clubs. He went jitterbugging with young ladies, and his past included a session in New York’s Greenwich Village during which he wrote poetry and lost his sweetheart through a broken neck.

  And yet he never existed. Not really. When she got anywhere near him he dissolved into shadows. When she was about to touch him he went screaming off with the wind, like the terrible windigo of the North Woods, the phantom thing that runs above the tops of the pines.

  X

  We shall know what the darkness discovers

  IF THE GRAVE-PIT BE SHALLOW or deep….

  ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

  AFTER A NIGHT SPENT IN EXERCISING a particularly virulent variety of nightmares Miss Hildegarde Withers finally drifted off into a sodden, peaceful sleep, deep in which Professor Jastrow calls the “universal unconsciousness.”

  And, as was usual with that lady when she went to sleep with a problem occupying her mind, she woke up with an answer. Perhaps not the answer. But, then, it was not given to her to look in the back of the book as if this were an algebra problem or a mystery story and find out for sure.

  Yet an answer, even the wrong answer, was something at this stage of the game. It was the beginning of the end—she could sense it; she could feel it in what she was wont to describe as her bones.

  The schoolteacher seized the telephone and got through to the inspector at the Hotel Tareyton.

  “But, Hildegarde!” he protested. “I haven’t even had a cup of coffee yet, and you want me to start sending wires to New York. Besides, the boys back at headquarters will think I’m out of my mind….”

  “It’s hardly a sleeper jump,” she said acidly. “Oscar, will you please do as I say? Because I have a hunch.”

  Before the inspector had even been allowed a decent length of time in which to be wheedled she had hung up. Miss Withers had other calls to be made this morning, and the most important one was to Dr John Panzer, chief coroner of the county of Los Angeles.

  “You want me to what?” demanded that worthy gentleman when she had finally run him down.

  “Not to what. I want you to have the body of Saul Stafford exhumed. That isn’t such a complicated matter, is it? People get exhumed every day.”

  “But, my dear lady, there is a lot of red tape—”

  “Red tape, fiddlesticks. Why, I was reading only the other day about a case in Philadelphia. They dug up a body in the middle of the night, and the murderer horned in and performed the autopsy on his own victim. It was a man named H. H. Holmes….”

  “I know, I know,” said Dr Panzer wearily. “His real name was Herman Mudgett. But that was years ago. Nowadays it takes an order from the district attorney—which Mr Buron Fitts isn’t likely to hand out to somebody he doesn’t know—or an order from an immediate member of the family. And Saul Stafford had no immediate family. So—”

  “But that body has to be exhumed,” cried Miss Withers. “I insist! I—”

  Then she stopped talking long enough to learn that exhumation would not be necessary for the reason that the mortal remains of Saul Stafford had not yet been consigned to their last resting place. Instructions from distant relatives in British Columbia were still being awaited.

  “Then you can take his fingerprints!” Miss Withers cried happily.

  Dr Panzer explained very wearily that the fingerprints of a person who died mysteriously were always taken in the morgue as a matter of course. Saul Stafford’s prints were on record. For that matter, the doctor thought that he had them right here on his desk. Which he did.

  “Well,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers. “Doctor Panzer, do you know enough about fingerprints to know what a lateral pocket loop might be?”

  Dr Panzer thought that he did.

  “I don’t suppose,” she continued, “that Saul Stafford had a lateral pocket loop on any finger of his right hand?”

  “Why”—and there was a longish pause—“as a matter of fact, he has. Or had, if you prefer. Why?”

  “Thank you so much,” said Miss Withers swiftly, unconsciously quoting Mr Charlie Chan. And she hung up.

  What with one thing and another, it was nearly noon before she heard from the inspector. But his news was worth waiting for.

  “Hildegarde, what do you think!” he chortled. “It’s been checked and double checked. And, strange as it seems, believe it or not, the boys report from Centre Street that every officer who had anything to do with the arrest of Derek Laval in the Harris case eight years ago and every turnkey and guard and warden who had anything to do with the jug where he was kept swears that photograph number three is the guy they held!”

  Miss Withers caught her breath sharply but she didn’t say anything.

  “Hildegarde, do you realize what that means?” he cried. “We’ve got positive evidence that Saul Stafford and Derek Laval were one and the same guy. In other words …”

  “In other words, Saul Stafford was the man who murdered him. He was his own victim and his own murderer. Is that it?”

  “Well,” Piper admitted, “it looks that way now—”

  “This wasn’t suicide,” said the schoolteacher gently.

  “And they weren’t one and the same person. No man in this world could break his own neck, Oscar.”

  Now it was the inspector’s turn to be silent.

  “I’m still trying to figure out how a man could break another’s neck without leaving a mark,” she went on. “If we could figure out that we’d be at least somewhat forrader.”

  She hung up on the inspector and called the studio again. When she finally got through to Gertrude at the third-floor Writers’ switchboard she asked once more for Virgil Dobie.

  “He hasn’t come in yet,” was the answer.

&
nbsp; “Very well,” said Miss Withers. “When he does would you ask him to call Miss Hildegarde Withers at—?”

  “Oh, Miss Withers,” Gertrude cried. “We’ve been trying to get in touch with you all morning. You’re wanted in the front office….”

  “I know—they want to advise me that I’m fired,” said the schoolteacher. “Never mind that. I only want to get in touch with Mr Dobie. Have him call me at Bowling Green 5-1123.”

  The phone buzzed back almost immediately, but it was not Virgil Dobie as she had hoped. Miss Withers heard the voice of her erstwhile agent, Harry Wagman.

  “Listen,” he greeted her, “get down to the studio as quick as you can. Mr Lothian wants to see you.”

  “But I was fired last night. You heard Mr Nincom say—”

  “He was mad,” Wagman said. “You haven’t had as much contact with genius as I have. He didn’t mean it, and, besides, Mr Lothian can buy and sell Nincoms by the dozen. So get down there.”

  She got. Mr Lothian saw her at once in his private office, looking more than ever like a small-town banker. Only now he was a banker with stomach ulcers.

  Finally he worked his way around to the point. “This is very hard to put into words—” he began.

  “Not at all,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers. “You want to tell me that I’m fired from my job as technical adviser and you want to point out that the police are in charge and that it would be a good idea for me to stop sleuthing—”

  “No,” said Mr Lothian. He fiddled with the pens on his desk. “On the contrary. The police are investigating. But they think the whole thing is a cock-and-bull story. What is a cock-and-bull story, by the way?”

  Miss Withers said that she would look it up in Aesop’s Fables for him. “Anyway,” continued Mr Lothian, “they point out that everything that happened is capable of a natural explanation. Saul Stafford could have broken his neck falling off the chair. Our studio driver and his passenger who was. mistaken for you could have gone off the road into Lost Lizard Canyon by accident. Lillian Gissing could have fallen off that balcony by accident….”