Nipped in the Bud Page 2

  “It’s a very mild interest, Oscar. You wrote me about the case at the time, and even sent me some laudatory press clippings. I gathered you handled the investigation personally, and that it was one of your major triumphs?”

  The inspector nodded, almost complacently. “I knew from the first moment that Gault was guilty. His alibi didn’t stand up for ten minutes, and almost as soon as we arrested him he made a confession. No rubber-hose stuff either, so don’t go getting any ideas.”

  “Relax, Oscar. I have no intention of trying to upset any applecarts; my days of sleuthing are over. And if it’s too much trouble getting me admitted to the courtroom, no matter. I can while away my lonely hours here in town by going up to the American Museum of Natural History and studying their sea shells. Since I’ve been out in California I’ve become something of an amateur conchologist, you know.” She reached into her handbag and produced visual evidence. “Here is a Hairy Triton I found at Malibu, unusually well-marked. This is a Ravenal’s Scallop, and the spotted one is a Junonia.”

  “Snail shells, yet!” muttered Oscar Piper, with ill-concealed distaste. Something had to be done for poor old Hildegarde, and soon. If he could only keep aflame this one feeble flicker of interest in her old-time pursuits…. He reached for the telephone and dialed a number. “John Hardesty, please. Piper, Headquarters. Hello, who’s this? … What? You people keep banker’s hours, don’t you? Where’s John, out getting warmed up for the big court job tomorrow? … What?” He listened for a moment, said “Judas!” and hung up. “No dice, Hildegarde.”

  “Oh, dear. No seats left?”

  “No trial. That was one of the other assistant D.A.’s. He says that Hardesty is going to get up in court tomorrow and ask for a postponement.”

  “But why?”

  “The fellow either didn’t know or couldn’t tell me over the phone.”

  “Oscar, is it true that Sam Bordin is the defense attorney?”

  Piper nodded. “With all the Gault dough, Junior would only hire the best. Further proof that he’s guilty, as if we needed any. Innocent men don’t retain Bordin, a legal magician who’s a combination of Darrow and Steuer …”

  “With a dash of John J. Malone, who never lost a client either?”

  “You’ve heard of him, then. Yeah.” Piper sighed. “The trial can be set back on the docket for thirty or maybe sixty days, but Bordin will be hoping to get a nol-pros. Somebody’s slipped up somewhere.” He shook his head, scowling.

  “Well, Oscar,” said Miss Withers, shrugging, “let me know sometime how it all comes out.” She edged toward the door again. “And do give me a ring when you’re not so tied up. I’ll be at the Barbizon.”

  “Sure, sure,” said Oscar Piper. “Just for my own satisfaction I’d like to get the lowdown on this new development. Hardesty will probably be dropping in at the club tonight as usual, and I’ll twist his arm.”

  But Miss Withers and the poodle were gone. The inspector gnawed on his cold cigar for a moment, then cleared his desk by shoving all the official papers helter-skelter into a top drawer. In three minutes he was on an uptown subway.

  “Botheration!” remarked Miss Hildegarde Withers somewhat later that evening. She had just lowered her angular frame into a steaming tub, and of course there was no surer way on earth to make a telephone ring. Swathed in an insufficient towel, she made her moist and dripping way out into the little hotel bedroom, stepped over Talleyrand, picked up the offending instrument and said wearily, “Yes, Oscar?”

  “How’d you know it was me?” was the blank response.

  “I,” she corrected absently. “Perhaps it was ESP and perhaps it was just that you’re the only person in town who knows where I’m staying.”

  “Okay, okay.” His voice was jumping. “Had dinner yet?”

  “Why, I was just going to order up a tray …”

  “Don’t. Hell’s a-popping. How about meeting me and John Hardesty somewhere for a bowl of soup?”

  “But, Oscar, I’m tired from the trip, and …”

  “This is right up your alley, and we really need your help. That poor girl … But I can’t tell you any more over the phone.”

  Curiosity had always been her besetting sin, and Miss Withers hesitated only a maidenly moment before she said, “Very well. But after months of Los Angeles cooking you’re very much mistaken if you think I’ll settle for anything less than duckling bigarade at La Parisienne or perhaps sauerbraten at the Blue Ribbon.”

  “Anything!” conceded the inspector. “A car will pick you up in ten minutes.”

  So it was that theater-bound Manhattanites that evening were amused by the spectacle of a large and whimsically-plucked French poodle, with a bit of green hair ribbon in his topknot, sitting regally enthroned beside the uniformed driver of a police limousine illegally parked half a block off Times Square. Talleyrand was not in the least bored with the long wait. He listened with interest to the radio as it droned forth interminable lists of the license numbers of stolen cars; he shared with polite enthusiasm the lunch of the embarrassed policeman beside him; hamburgers, onion, pickle and all. Talley was a dog who took things as they came, especially food.

  Inside the pleasant old Bierstube the dog’s mistress had been slowly paying less and less attention to her excellent sweet-and-sour pot roast while she listened to the official tale of woe. “You see, Hildegarde,” the inspector was saying earnestly, “it’s a matter of my personal pride. They’re always saying around town that a rich man can get away with anything, even murder. If Gault goes free the wise-guys will nod and wink and whisper that the fix was on. He’s simply got to be tried and found guilty and take his punishment, or the law and the department and my whole career are just so much dust and ashes. Isn’t that so, John?” His voice trembling faintly, Oscar Piper busied himself with his bratwurst.

  “That’s—that’s right,” John Hardesty agreed, swallowing. He had turned out to be a tall, snub-nosed man in his thirties with unruly hair and large hands, who looked somewhat like a prosperous farmer. “Now, none of what I’m going to tell you must go any farther,” was his cautious beginning.

  Miss Withers tossed her head indignantly. “The inspector here will bear witness that when necessary I can be twice as silent as the grave.”

  Oscar Piper choked suddenly on a bit of sausage, but Hardesty was already outlining the highlights in the Fagan murder, on the surface at least a black-and-white, open-and-shut case if there ever was one. It seemed that at eight-thirty on the evening of December 17 last, Tony Fagan had started his eleventh weekly video program for Gault Foods. While on the air he had said certain unkind things about his sponsors under the thin guise of humor, the barbs particularly aimed at Winston H. Gault, Jr.

  The same evening a little after midnight, Fagan had run into Gault sitting alone at a table in a well-known night club, and had gone over to apologize. Gault had refused to accept the apology and had said something indicating an intention to assault Fagan, but as the younger man was rising from his chair and off-balance, the comedian had swung first and lucky-punched him colder than Kelsey.

  Fagan had then left for his apartment at the Graymar, on East Fifty-fifth, where he was later joined by some friends and business associates, including his divorced wife Ruth, the party breaking up around four. A little after six in the morning Gault had shown up and, when Fagan made the mistake of answering his door, had given him a severe beating and then smashed his skull with something heavy—possibly a blackjack. Or it might have been a vase or a piece of bric-a-brac from the apartment, which was as crowded as a museum. With Fagan dead, there was no way to check whether or not anything was missing.

  “No fingerprints,” put in Piper. “But everybody knows about them nowadays. And Gault had plenty of time to clean up his traces afterwards.”

  Hardesty nodded, and went on to say that Junior had then walked home to his bachelor apartment on Park and had given the night elevator man fifty dollars to say—if anyone asked—that he�
��d come home about two. When arrested next morning just before noon he had said, “Then I really did go kill the bastard—I thought it was only a bad dream. Well, he had it coming …” or words to that effect.

  “If you can prove all that—” Miss Withers nodded thoughtfully—“I don’t see what the prosecution has to worry about. Why postpone the trial?”

  “When you go up against a smooth defense lawyer like Sam Bordin,” the assistant D.A. explained patiently, “you’ve got to have something more than just motive and circumstantial evidence. You need witnesses.” He rubbed his high forehead, imparting still more disorder to his hair. “There were three important witnesses against Gault, like the three legs of a milking stool. Our case rested on them. First was Ernest Pugh, the waiter at the Stork Club who saw the one-punch battle—”

  “But Pugh happens to be a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve, and got called back to active duty six weeks ago,” the inspector put in. “Now he’s on the U.S. Boxer, somewhere in the Pacific.”

  “Second leg,” Hardesty went on, “was the taxi driver, Maxfield Berg, who picked Gault up outside an after-hours bottle club on Second Avenue around six that morning and drove him to Fagan’s apartment house. Berg swore that his passenger was crazy drunk; that the young man told him to wait, he’d just got to run upstairs a minute and beat somebody’s brains out. Hearsay evidence, but valuable since it shows intent, and thus is properly part of the res gestae …”

  “Only it was discovered that Berg had spent time in a mental hospital a few years back,” Piper said. “You can’t put a former schizophrenic on the witness stand; Sam Bordin would tear his testimony to shreds.”

  The schoolteacher looked puzzled. “But if you have their sworn statements …?”

  The two men exchanged a knowing fraternal smile. “Of course,” Hardesty went on wearily, “depositions, and also any testimony given at the hearing or before the grand jury, are admissible. But they don’t carry much weight even when they are read into the record. Juries always have a feeling that if the prosecution has witnesses they should be right there in court, so that the defense can cross-examine.”

  “I see.” The schoolteacher nodded, frowning. “But what about the third witness? Perhaps a milking stool should have three legs, but from my girlhood days out in the Middle West I seem to remember some stools with only one.”

  “Sure,” said Hardesty bitterly. “The third and most important witness of all was one Ina Kell, a little country cousin camping out in the next apartment who heard the fight, peeked out into the hall and saw Gault sneaking away after the murder, and then who went on in and discovered the body. Only …”

  “Only what?” demanded Miss Withers. “You don’t mean that something’s happened to her? She’s not—?”

  “Disappeared,” Hardesty said flatly. “Like a soap bubble. Now you see it shining and floating, and then—pouf!”

  “Well!” said the schoolteacher, in a tone that Oscar Piper had not heard her use in a long time. “A fine kettle of fish! So a brutal, ruthless killer is going to get away with it because you men hadn’t sense enough to keep an eye on an important witness. Why, she may even be dead!”

  “I thought of that,” nodded the inspector solemnly, avoiding Hardesty’s eye.

  “More details,” demanded Miss Withers after a moment’s deep thought. “And more coffee.”

  3

  “… There ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand …”

  —I Kings

  “I KNEW YOU’D BE interested,” the inspector was saying. He took the perfecto out of his mouth and smiled wryly. “I was telling John here earlier about the Bascom case and how you set out to solve the disappearance of three thousand women all at once.”

  “And ended up by disappearing myself?” Miss Withers sniffed modestly. “But never mind the good old days just at the moment. Do go on. If you want me to try to help find Miss Ina Kell, I’ll have to know more about her than just the fact she reported finding Fagan’s dead body.”

  “That’s just the point,” Hardesty put in. “She didn’t.”

  “But you said—”

  “Inspector, you take it from here, will you?” The lawyer gestured. “After all, you were on the scene and everything.”

  “Okay,” said Oscar Piper. “It was the boy on that paper route on Fifty-fifth who phoned in and reported that he had just discovered a dead body while in the act of leaving the usual copy of the Herald Tribune outside the door of Fagan’s apartment. The door had been left open, so naturally he peeked in. Our radio car got there in a few minutes, the precinct men soon after, but I was called over on account of the victim being a sort of public character. The body was a mess of blood and brains, but I learned that it had been found partly covered by a Persian rug. Right away I concluded that somebody else must have found it before the paper boy—presumably a woman.”

  “Mercy,” said Miss Withers. “I’ve seen several corpses in my time, but I never had the slightest impulse to throw rugs over them.”

  “A certain type of woman,” the inspector explained, “always wants to cover up horrible things, to get them out of sight. Of course, when the rest of Fagan’s apartment was searched and Ruth Fagan, the ex-wife, was found asleep in a back bedroom, we figured it was her. Only she claimed that she had just had too much to drink at the party, had wandered off alone and fallen into a deep sleep.”

  “A likely story!” Miss Withers decided.

  “But it stood up. We found that Ruth Fagan had never wanted to go to Reno in the first place. She still loved her husband and hoped to get him back someday; carried his picture around in her handbag and saw all his video programs. Besides, she got nice fat alimony that of course would cease at his death. She must have been under considerable strain that night, to be suddenly called up and asked to come over and then find that all he wanted was for her to help celebrate a sort of wake over the corpse of his television career. Because after that broadcast, and then popping the sponsor on the jaw, it was a cinch that Tony Fagan would be blacklisted on the air waves. He knew by then that he was through, and of course he wanted to cry on her shoulder. And she came running.”

  “The more fool she. She should have spat in his eye!”

  Piper shrugged. “Anyway, it seems that Ruth wasn’t used to drinking—she’s the pleasant, housewifely type—and she had little or nothing in common with the entertainers and radio and television people who were there. She’d never fitted in with that crowd, which was one reason for the divorce. So in self-defense she drank more than she could handle, and instead of getting gay she got sleepy. It actually took the boys ten minutes to wake her after they discovered her in bed, and they’re pretty good at spotting fakes. Besides, there was enough concentration of alcohol in her blood when we tested it that morning to indicate that she was absolutely blotto.”

  “But, Oscar, mightn’t she have knocked herself out with liquor after she found and covered the body, or for that matter even after she did away with …”

  “Stop leaping at conclusions, Hildegarde! She had no motive. Anyway, by that time we’d found small, presumably feminine fingerprints on the outside of the door of Fagan’s apartment, which the murderer had evidently left ajar. The prints weren’t Ruth Fagan’s, they didn’t belong to any of the people who had been guests at the party earlier. It was apparent that somebody else in the building, somebody who wasn’t dead to the world like poor Ruth, must have heard the fight and come over to see what was wrong. But who?” Piper sighed. “Because the apartment underneath was vacant, being redecorated. The people upstairs were in Florida for the winter. The only adjoining apartment belonged to a tap dancer named Crystal Joris, and the manager of the building told us that the girl had closed it up a week before and gone out to Hollywood to test for a role in a musical picture.”

  “Aha!” cried the schoolteacher. “I’m away ahead of you!”

  “Wrong again,” Piper told her. “We checked immediately with
the Los Angeles police, and Crystal was out there all right, registered at the Beverly Wilshire.”

  “Then who—”

  “I decided,” said the inspector, “that the woman we were looking for must be very young and unsophisticated, probably fresh from the sticks, or else she wouldn’t have gone barging out into the hall to see what was wrong. Anybody who’d lived in New York for any length of time would have minded their own business, or at most would have called SPring 7-3100 and reported a disturbance. So, anyway, on a hunch I phoned Miss Joris long distance, finally locating her on a test stage at Mr. Zanuck’s studio. Sure enough, she admitted that she had lent the key of her New York apartment to her cousin when she stopped off for a day’s visit at her home town out in Pennsylvania on her way west. So now we find out about Ina Kell, a kid who wanted to try her luck in the big city.”

  “And you mean to say that all during the hullabaloo the Kell girl had been playing possum in the next apartment, unbeknownst to your detectives?”

  “She had not. Ina was playing a different game. It turned out that she’d arrived in town on a bus the previous evening, and come to the apartment after the manager had left the lobby. Little Ina went in and upstairs, using her borrowed key, unseen by anyone. But sometime next morning she made up the bed, removed all traces of her ever being there, took her bag and sneaked out. It must have been while the boys were busy inside the Fagan apartment and before anybody had time to post an extra man on the front door of the building.”

  “But why would the child decamp like that? It seems out of character—”

  “Wait. We had the girl’s description from Miss Joris, and a cute little redhead wandering around the city that early in the morning is as easy to trace as a circus parade. We found the coffee shop where she had breakfast, and the counterman remembered she’d been carrying a suitcase and studying the want ads while she ate. So we checked the Rooms for Rent columns and that same day we picked her up, a wispy, eager, scared little girl from Bourdon, Pennsylvania, with hayseed in her hair….”