Nipped in the Bud Read online

A big flashing-eyed brunette appeared, in a dress whose plunging neckline had turned into a high dive. While she rendered a comedy number, “I Come Here to Be Kissed With,” in what she fondly imagined was a Pennsylvania Dutch accent, Fagan nodded encouragement and then toasted her in panther milk.

  “Thallie Gordon,” Wingfield said. “A regular on the show.” Miss Withers thought the girl had a voice like a rusty hinge, and said as much. “Voice?” the young man came back. “Who cares about her voice?”

  Miss Gordon obliged with “Careless Hands” as an encore, and the schoolteacher sighed. “By any chance does she do imitations, too?”

  “You guessed it. In just a minute she does impressions of Dinah Shore and Merman and, of course, one of Hildegarde—”

  Miss Withers sat up straight, and then realized that of course he meant the other one, the girl with the gloves and the handkerchief and the Milwaukee French accent. With the impressions finally over, the camera returned to Tony Fagan, who took a last hearty pull at the emptying milk bottle and said, “It is time for a brief word about our sponsors, bless their black, money-mad little hearts.”

  “He always panned his sponsors,” Wingfield explained. “It was supposed to be all in fun, but he’d lost several good contracts that way before. This time he’d been out of work a good while, M.C.ing around the hinterland in supper clubs, and he’d sworn to be good. But just listen.”

  “… because Gault Zero Foods are really deep-freeze frozen, folks, cold as a well-digger’s armpit, locking in all the nice fresh vitamins and calories. Why, I don’t suppose there’s anything in the world colder than Gault Foods unless it’s the heart of their first vice-president in charge of paper clips and advertising, who happens to be Junior Gault himself. You must have heard of Junior, folks; you’ve probably all seen his picture in the funny papers—oops, I mean on the society page, standing next to his polo pony.” From his desk Fagan produced and held up before the camera an enlarged photo of a smiling, almost too handsome young man dressed for the ancient sport of the maharajahs, white breeches, helmet and all, evidently in the act of changing mounts between chukkers.

  “That’s Junior there. No, no, not that one. That’s the south end of a northbound horse. But there is a sort of family resemblance, isn’t there?” There was a lot more of the same, with the comedian building Gault up as a sort of half-witted Lord Fauntleroy grown to man’s estate and playing pint-sized dictator with the family business and bankroll to back his play. Fagan spoke of the nose bob Junior had had performed by a celebrated beauty surgeon, of his special shoes with built-up heels, of his wartime 4-F status, and of a showgirl named Bubbles something, to whom had been given a diamond bracelet and who had settled a breach of promise suit out of court. It was all sophomoric, but fast and barbed and really rather funny.

  “Funny,” Wingfield conceded, “if you didn’t happen to be Junior Gault, who was paying for all this. An estimated six million sets that night were tuned in to this channel—it would have been ten million if the coaxial cable had been extended all the way to the Coast.”

  Fagan was still talking very fast, with a wild light in his eye. He had the bit in his teeth and evidently couldn’t or wouldn’t stop. He lowered his voice and confidentially let the audience in on the secret that Junior Gault was engaged to Miss Dallas Trempleau of the Social Register and Dun and Bradstreet Trempleaus, a very lovely girl who fancied herself as a singer, and as a singer she was certainly a very classy girl to look at. He delicately held his nose.

  “She wasn’t that bad,” Wingfield put in. “Even appeared on this program once, for some Junior League charity or other. That was when Gault met her.”

  Behind her Miss Withers fancied she heard the door open and close again, and took her eyes from the screen long enough to notice that a young woman had come into the room and was blindly feeling her way along in the darkness toward the nearest chair. “Art?” came a throaty contralto. “You in here? They said—”

  “Yes, darling, I’m busy—”

  Which evidently gave the newcomer time to recognize what was on the screen. “Art, what are you running that old thing for, tonight of all nights? Do you know who was snooping around the studio just a few minutes ago?”

  “Excuse me,” murmured Wingfield, and bounced quickly out of his chair to seize the tall girl by the arm and lead her out into the hall again. But not before Miss Withers, whose eyes had become adjusted to the dimness, had seen who it was.

  On the screen Tony Fagan, the smile frozen on his face, was asking the TV audience to send in twelve Gault Food box tops as a wedding present to Junior and Dallas, obviously improvising desperately. But even the sheeplike studio audience had stopped laughing now, and suddenly in the middle of a sentence the screen went blank. The room lights picked up and Art Wingfield came back in alone, looking more harried than ever. “Women,” he said, thus disposing of the interruption. “Well, Miss Withers, you’ve seen the picture, what—”

  “That particular young woman who just came in was Thallie Gordon, wasn’t she?”

  “That’s right. She just wanted to tell me that there was somebody from a rival agency hovering around, probably trying to steal one of my clients …”

  “Young man,” said Miss Withers with a look, “I have been lied to by experts. We both know to whom she referred.”

  “Okay,” Wingfield said easily. “So Thallie doesn’t like our good friend, the inspector. I guess her mother was scared by a badge before Thallie was born.” He grinned. “Well, so you see what I meant about Fagan’s last program?”

  “Yes, but I don’t see why he wasn’t cut off the air much sooner.”

  “You have a point. But all of us there in the control room—”

  She perked up her ears. “You were there?”

  “Ma’am, you didn’t know?” Wingfield shuddered. “I was monitoring the program. I sat in the control room, and I was the one who should have done something about shutting Fagan up, even if I had to go down on the sound stage and hit him over the head with his own milk bottle. Only I got buck fever. It was just too awful to believe. And of course for a while we all kept thinking that he would work himself out of it somehow as he had always done in the past, and wind up by saying a lot of nice things about Junior, taking out the sting.”

  “You were an eyewitness, and you just sat there?”

  “Believe me, cutting a show off TV isn’t like it is on radio. You don’t have a standby studio orchestra to carry on with. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing and hearing. The stunt was likely to finish off Fagan’s career, but I guess he just didn’t give a damn.”

  “A sort of compulsion, an irresistible impulse?”

  “Right. All radio and TV people hate sponsors, the necessary evil of this crazy business.” Wingfield looked at his watch.

  “I’ll not keep you, young man,” said Miss Withers. “I suppose that Miss Gordon is waiting? Romance is a wonderful thing, or so I’ve heard. Do you have an understanding with her?”

  “Yes,” he said glumly. “But we understand it two different ways.” He went up the steps to the door of the projectionist’s booth and took back the can of film.

  “By the way,” asked the schoolteacher, “I suppose that the district attorney has a print of this picture, and plans to show it to the jury at the trial?”

  “If he does,” Wingfield told her, “he’s apt to get a verdict of justifiable homicide, don’t you think?” They came out into the corridor, Talley in the lead.

  “In your opinion, what we have seen would constitute motive for murder?”

  “But definitely. I could have strangled Fagan myself. Only don’t get any ideas; I didn’t. It wasn’t until the next day that I found I’d lost my job over this wing-ding, and even then I didn’t think it would take four months to get back on salary.”

  “But the things that Fagan said about Junior were true, weren’t they?”

  “Basically,” Wingfield admitted slowly. “Or else they wouldn’t have h
urt so much. Only Fagan put them in the worst light. And, you see, Junior was sitting there in his big duplex over on Park, with the Virginia-born blue-blood, Miss Dallas Trempleau, and some other café-society pals, and of course they’d tuned in the program. Junior saw what was happening and came busting over here with blood in his eye, but by the time he arrived the show was over and Fagan had taken a powder. Young Gault was really frothing at the mouth—he even took a poke at me and then rushed out looking all over town for Tony.”

  “And found him, or so I gather?”

  “Other way around. Some of us got hold of Fagan first and fed him some black coffee and straightened him up. We made it clear to him that the only hope for his career was to square himself quick, even if he had to eat dirt. A few strategic phone calls to headwaiters around town produced the information that Junior had wound up at the Stork, one of his old hangouts, so we rushed Fagan over there and sent him in to apologize. Only you know what happened, don’t you?”

  Miss Withers nodded. “Mr. Fagan added insult to injury by landing a sucker blow to Mr. Gault’s chin. Then he went home and threw a party. I’m interested in that party, by the way.”

  “So were the police at the time. But it was perfectly natural that Fagan wouldn’t want to be alone at a time like that. I can’t tell you much about it, though I dropped in for a while, along with Thallie and the three Boyle sisters and a couple of writers and some other riffraff. But it wasn’t very gay. Most of the people there made their living one way or another out of Tony Fagan. It was like dancing on deck after the ship has hit an iceberg, and it didn’t help any to have Tony’s ex-wife there, mooning over him and patting his shoulder. Ruth is one of the ‘this is our song’ girls, solid schmaltz and sentiment. Pretty soon I got tight and went home, or vice versa.”

  “Taking Miss Gordon with you, of course?”

  “N-no, Thallie wouldn’t leave. I guess she thought she had to stick around and play loyal, just in case Fagan got another sponsor sometime. She was a regular on the show, remember—and she didn’t realize yet just how badly Tony had loused up his prospects.”

  “So she stayed to the bitter end?”

  “How should I know?” said Wingfield cautiously. “Thallie said later that they all left around four. Except Ruth, of course, but she’d disappeared earlier and everybody took it for granted that she’d gone home. Actually, according to the newspapers she was only asleep in the spare bedroom, where the police found her next morning and gave her a rather bad time of it, I expect.” He fidgeted a little, looking at his watch again.

  “Just one thing more, young man. What is Mrs. Fagan’s present address?”

  “Her address? How should I know? I suppose she’s in the book. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m overdue at a rehearsal.”

  This vein of high-grade ore had petered out. She thanked him for his trouble, and departed. But young Wingfield couldn’t have been in too much of a hurry to get to his rehearsal, for when she stole a quick look back from the other end of the long hallway he was still standing there by the projection-room door, scratching his head. Miss Withers went out into the reception room, thought a moment, and then went back to the doorway and peeked again. Art Wingfield was just disappearing into a phone booth at the other end of the hall, a rather queer place to hold a rehearsal.

  “All of which has been fairly informative,” the schoolteacher observed to Talleyrand the poodle as they came out of WKC-TV again onto the avenue, after pausing by the phone booths in the lobby long enough to make sure that no Mrs. Ruth Fagan was listed in any of the Greater New York directories. “But we are still no forrader in finding out what happened to little Ina Kell, are we?”

  Talley answered only with a wide yawn, being a dog of regular habits—at least as far as eating and sleeping were concerned. He would, however, have enjoyed the long walk uptown, and was somewhat less pleased than his mistress to find that the inspector had gallantly left the official limousine waiting. Miss Withers sank gratefully into the cushions and murmured, “Home, James.”

  “The name is Patrolman Gerald Van Dusen, ma’am.”

  “Very well. The Barbizon Hotel for women, Gerald—I mean Officer.” But being Miss Withers, she changed her mind again. After all, it was only a little after ten o’clock. She rapped on the glass and asked to be taken to the Graymar Apartments, on East Fifty-fifth.

  By the time they arrived, Talley was curled up in a fuzzy brown ball and fast asleep. His mistress left him so, not knowing just what might be in store for her inside. There was a canopy outside the entrance of the somewhat forbiddingly plain building, but no doorman in sight. Inside was a marble lobby, but nobody at the desk. Miss Withers found the mailboxes, and on one of them a card reading “Joris, Miss Crystal—803,” and was about to resort to the old dodge of pressing a number of other bells in order to get in when suddenly an effervescent party of four came out, dressed to the teeth and swaying slightly. The schoolteacher had no difficulty whatever in getting the toe of her number-ten Walkover in the door before it quite closed.

  Junior Gault could have gained admittance this same way on that fatal morning, she realized. Taking the little automatic elevator to the eighth floor she went down the hall to the Joris apartment—and then ran bump up against a stone wall, for nobody answered the bell. “Tarnation,” murmured Miss Withers. She was about to turn away, somewhat more than baffled, when she remembered that she must be standing at this particular moment only a few feet from the actual scene of the murder. From this doorway Ina Kell must have peeked out and seen—it could only have been the door of the farther apartment, the door on which the corridor ended. And the door held on its upper panel a small brass frame and a card….

  Surprisingly enough, the card was lettered “Fagan.” Miss Hildegarde Withers nodded sagely. She had had a hunch that something would come of this, and her hunches were of iron. “‘There is a destiny …’” she quoted to herself happily. It was time she had a break. Somehow the murder apartment had been kept vacant all this time. It couldn’t have been at the behest of the inspector or of any authorities; not this long. Possibly the place had been tied up in litigation, or else it might have been proved unrentable because of the tragedy.

  The schoolteacher could not have explained, if pressed, just what she hoped to find out on a trail so cold. But all the same she listened outside the door of the Fagan apartment for a moment, just in case. Everything was as still as death inside.

  Miss Withers gave a furtive look behind her, making sure that for the moment the long corridor was deserted, and when she found that she was really alone the impulse to have a quiet peek at the murder scene was too great to be resisted. She felt in the recesses of her capacious handbag and came up with a bit of metal, her mouth set in a grim line of satisfaction. Oscar Piper was always ribbing her about trying to open locks with a hairpin, but this flattened, slightly straightened-out button-hookish device had once been the property of a professional thief. The inspector had made the mistake of showing it to her and explaining its purpose, then leaving it unguarded on top of his desk.

  Miss Withers had practiced with the gadget and read up on the subject. There was really nothing to picking the average lock. All one had to do was to line up the tumbrels, or whatever they were. The maiden schoolteacher worked busily, making soft, clicking noises like the romping of a dozen or so metal mice, yet in spite of her best efforts the lock refused to cooperate. “Drat it all,” vented Miss Withers in an angry whisper. “One might as well try saying ‘Open sesame’!”

  And the door opened.

  5

  “The third day comes a frost, a killing frost …”

  —Henry VIII

  THE DOOR OPENED, AS Miss Withers immediately realized, not from her success with the picklock nor as a result of any supernormal forces invoked by Ali Baba’s ancient gibberish, but simply because the knob had been turned from the inside. It was a comely young woman of about thirty wearing pajamas obviously designed to be slept
in rather than admired. Her hair had been arranged for the night in two flaxen braids the color of oleomargarine, she wore no makeup whatever, but still there was something about her.

  Frankness, perhaps. “You didn’t need to go to all that bother,” she was saying. “You could have just knocked.”

  The best defense is a good offense, or so the schoolteacher had always heard. She pointed an accusing finger and said, “Then you must be Ruth Fagan!”

  “Of course.” The voice was a little nervous, but not very. Miss Withers elbowed her way forward into the foyer, a small bare room whose floor was covered with a fine Kermanshah rug. A moment later she was seated on a large and almost too comfortable divan in a heavily overfurnished room; a man’s room filled with knickknacks, oddments, strange weapons, curios, pictures, objets d’art—a jumble of types and periods and schools. Tony Fagan, the schoolteacher thought, must have been the sort of man who could never bear to throw anything away.

  “My name is Withers,” she said. “I didn’t expect to find you living here!”

  “It isn’t so strange, really,” Ruth Fagan was saying. “A gal has to live somewhere. This was my late husband’s apartment and after his death it came to me so I stayed on, the housing shortage being what it is.”

  There was really no arguing that. “But you were divorced, were you not?”

  “Not really. Only the interlocutory.” Ruth’s gesture indicated that interlocutories were accidents that could happen in the best-regulated marriages.

  “An interlocutory—in Reno? Come, come.”

  “Oh, I didn’t go through with the Nevada thing. I changed my mind. I’d been to Reno once before and it’s grim. But later I got my decree back East, because Tony insisted. He even got some girl to be photographed with him in her nightgown in a hotel room—I don’t mean that, I mean she was in her nightgown. I never wanted the divorce, but Tony was very difficult sometimes. These artists—”

  “Difficult how, Mrs. Fagan?”