Nipped in the Bud Page 5

  “Well,” said Ruth bluntly, “there were other women. That wasn’t so bad, but finally it settled down to just one other woman.”

  “Who?”

  “I never knew, and never wanted to.”

  “Was it the girl who played corespondent in the nightgown?”

  Ruth shrugged. “I really have no idea. She gave her name as Jane Doe, they say.”

  “I see. Naturally you felt very bitter about this?”

  Ruth looked at her cuticle. “I was hurt. But I knew he’d come back to me when things went wrong. Just as he eventually did. But then I failed him when he needed me most. If only I’d been more tolerant and understanding that night! But I had expected to be here alone with him, and I couldn’t stand watching those girls putting their arms around him and calling him Darling. And dancing with him when I was playing our song on the combination! So I took a drop too much, and topped it off with the allonal tablets, so I was dead to the world when he needed me most.”

  “I heard about that,” admitted Miss Withers. “I understand that you heard nothing of the fight that preceded the actual murder?”

  The woman hesitated. “Not exactly. But I seem to remember bad dreams, very frightening dreams. I didn’t quite wake up—of course there were two closed doors and the entire length of the apartment between. But I’ll never forgive myself for not waking. If I’d got up and come in …”

  “You might easily have been murdered, too,” the schoolteacher comforted her. “But I still fail to understand one thing. Even though you were divorced, was Mr. Fagan’s will still in your favor?”

  “There was no will. Tony was too much in love with life to ever believe he would die. But, you see, we had what they call a decree nisi—a decree unless. Unless there was a reconciliation during the twelve months before the decree became final. Our spending the night in the same apartment constituted just that little thing. You see, his bed hadn’t been slept in!” There was a definite note of triumph in Ruth Fagan’s tone, even as she reached for a lacy handkerchief and dabbed at her prominent, pale-blue eyes. It had all, she seemed to feel, worked out for the best.

  “Mrs. Fagan,” said the schoolteacher soberly, “are you satisfied—do you agree with the police that Gault is guilty?”

  “What?” Ruth’s voice was flat and gritty. “But of course. Who else? I was watching television that night, and I saw Tony’s show. He got carried away—he always hated sponsors anyway. He did needle Mr. Gault, but I only hope that the jury doesn’t take that as sufficient provocation and let that awful man get away with life imprisonment. He deserves to die.”

  “It would certainly seem so,” admitted Miss Withers. “I’m sorry to have to bring up painful memories, but in my work—” She sighed. “I have no official standing, of course, but I understand that there seems to be some difficulty in bringing Junior Gault to trial.”

  “He’s trying to wriggle out of it, with the help of his money,” said Ruth slowly. “But he must pay the penalty! I have some money, too—most of my husband’s programs were transcribed, and the kinescopes are still being played around the country on a royalty basis. And if it takes my last red cent….”

  “Naturally,” agreed the schoolteacher.

  Ruth was looking at her strangely. “You’re not working on this case for the Gault family, are you?”

  “Good heavens, no!”

  “Because it would be worth a good deal to me to see Junior Gault found guilty. Say, five thousand dollars, and expenses …?”

  “My amateur standing!” murmured the schoolteacher. “But I’ll keep it in mind.” She moved toward the door, walking carefully so as not to sweep her skirt against any of the bric-a-brac. “By the way,” she said, “I understand that the police never have found the weapon. Did you notice anything missing?”

  “No,” said Ruth. “But I wouldn’t have known. Fans were sending him stuff all the time, all sorts of stuff. I have no way of knowing what loot came in after our separation.”

  “Of course not.” Miss Withers hefted a weighty alabaster vase, and set it down again. “Of course, the weapon may still be here—the room is full of blunt instruments, and Junior Gault had time to wipe off any blood or fingerprints….”

  “He was seen leaving here that morning,” the woman told her. “You know that?”

  “Oh?” The schoolteacher tried to look surprised. So much for the district attorney’s office and their carefully guarded secrets. “By the way, Mrs. Fagan, you said a moment ago that you didn’t ever know the name of the woman with whom your husband was having an affair; I mean the important one. He must have broken up with Thallie Gordon sometime before, then?”

  “Thallie?” Ruth laughed, not pleasantly. “Whatever gave you that crazy idea? Tony never messed around with the girls on the show; a bird doesn’t foul its own nest. It was somebody else, one of his worshiping little fans, I suppose. He used to get thousands of mash notes at the studio, mostly from small towns.”

  “I see,” murmured the schoolteacher, somewhat elated. She paused in the doorway. “By the way, the next apartment belongs to a dancer, doesn’t it? Odd that being neighbors and all, your husband never put her on one of his programs.”

  “Crystal Joris? Oh, but he did. A year and a half ago. The Joris girl was good as a novelty act, but, of course, tap dancers are tap dancers.”

  “Which nobody can deny,” agreed Miss Withers, suddenly anxious to leave. Ruth Fagan said if there was anything she could do to help, money or anything … “There is,” said the schoolteacher crisply.

  “What?”

  “You can call Mr. Wingfield back and thank him for preparing you for my surprise visit. Don’t bother to deny it, Mrs. Fagan—you knew too much about me, and didn’t even think to ask for my bona fides. But it has all been, in a strange sort of way, most illuminating.” She went out, smiling a smile of modest triumph.

  There was more to this case, she decided, than met the eye. And it was nearly midnight when she sat facing her old friend and antagonist, the inspector, across a booth in a little delicatessen just off Fifty-seventh and the Avenue of the Americas, over doughnuts and coffee.

  Oscar Piper was bright and chipper, and seemed very pleased with himself. “You know, Hildegarde, you’re looking better already. A new light in your eyes. But why the Mona Lisa smile?” He cocked his head. “Found Ina Kell already?”

  “No, Oscar. That will have to be up to you. I imagine that the usual hue and cry, with her picture on thousands of placards, should produce results.”

  “You out of your mind?” he cried. “Ina is a surprise witness …”

  “The surprise is on the other foot. I haven’t had time to fill in all the blanks, naturally. But I want to give you a new slant on this crime.”

  “New slant, my eye!” he yelped indignantly. “Didn’t you see the film of that broadcast? Aren’t you satisfied that that’s motive enough?”

  “Enough and to spare. The trouble is, Oscar, that too many people knew, hours before the murder, that there was a perfect case against just one person. If Fagan died by violence, Junior Gault alone would be suspected. It was therefore a perfect setup for any other enemy Fagan may have had.”

  “Oh, no!” winced Piper. “Why must you do everything the hard way?”

  “The rocky road to truth? Oscar, it never seemed to me quite sensible for a man to go to all the trouble of beating up an enemy before killing him. That would be piling Ossa on Pelion. And there is no proof that Junior Gault …”

  “No proof? But I tell you the Kell girl saw Junior leaving!”

  Miss Withers nibbled daintily at a doughnut. “Listen. Tony Fagan was a wolf; he could hardly have avoided it in his profession. His wife leaned to the opinion that he never fooled around with members of his cast; I believe she said something about a bird never fouling its own nest. Which proves that she hadn’t ever taken a good look at a bird’s nest close up. Anyway, I am reasonably sure that Fagan trespassed at least once—I refer to the bosomy Mi
ss Thallie Gordon, who otherwise could hardly have obtained or kept her job on the show.”

  The inspector shrugged. “So maybe Thallie did have an audition by courtesy of Beautyrest. She had no motive to bump off her—her meal ticket.”

  “Perhaps not. Then there’s the girl who played corespondent in the Fagan divorce, being caught with him in a hotel room with nothing on. Suppose she really wasn’t forewarned about the deal, and felt strongly about being compromised?”

  “Fiddle. Two out of three girls who hang around the TV studio would be tickled pink to be photographed anywhere with Fagan, in a nightgown or out of one.”

  “I’d still like to know who was with him that night, if you can find out. And I also suggest to you, Oscar, that Fagan had a fling with Crystal Joris, the tap-dancing neighbor who appeared on his program a year or more ago.”

  “We know all that. She did a one-shot on his show. But as for the rest …”

  “Please listen. Isn’t it possible that through Crystal he somehow met her little cousin, either on a visit here or perhaps when he accompanied the Joris girl back to the old home town? A man like Fagan, wearied by the stereotyped glamor girls of show business, might be extremely attracted to a naive little thing like Ina—who must have had unusual charms, or you and Mr. Hardesty wouldn’t speak of her as you do. But of course he was the type to grow tired quickly, a man used to orchids would soon be bored with a simple violet.”

  “Go on,” ordered the inspector with grim patience. “Say your say.”

  “I suggest to you that the reason Ina wanted to come to New York was to see Tony Fagan again, to be at least in the next apartment to the man she worshiped. Or perhaps she had revenge on her mind when she came. ‘Hell hath no fury …’”

  “Your blushing little violet is poison ivy now?”

  Miss Withers sniffed again, prodigiously. “Perhaps after the party was over Ina came tapping at his door, begging just for a kind word, and got laughed at—Fagan not even pretending that he wasn’t tired of her, through with her….”

  “You ought to write soap operas.”

  “So Ina went back to her borrowed apartment, furious. Then she heard the fight, came out into the hall in time to catch a glimpse of Junior Gault hurrying away after having given his tormentor the beating he so richly deserved, and was curious enough to investigate the open door and find Fagan lying there unconscious. He was in her power …”

  “Better and better,” conceded the inspector. “Dream on.”

  “So, having seen the television program earlier that evening and realizing that this was the perfect opportunity to revenge herself on the man who had wronged her, Ina picked up a nearby vase and finished the job. Then she washed off the weapon, covered the body, sneaked back into the other apartment and made her getaway.” Miss Withers paused, leaning back in triumph. “That would explain why she didn’t call the police. She didn’t want to appear at all, even as a witness. She was afraid that on the witness stand, with Sam Bordin cross-examining her, she might trap herself. Well, Oscar?”

  He nodded admiringly. “Nice try, old girl.”

  “What do you mean, try? It’s the only hypothesis that fits the facts.”

  The Inspector’s smile was pitying. “Now you listen!” he said.

  Some years before, during the period when Miss Withers had been devoted to the raising of tropical fish, a friend returning from Army Air Force duty at Karachi had presented her with a tiny replica of the Taj Mahal made of intricate bits of white marble; a delicate, lovely, incredible thing not five inches high. It had occurred to her how striking the little temple would be if placed at the bottom of her largest aquarium, framed by the green of the water plants and reflected in a little mirror set in sand for the foreground.

  So she had arranged it, had carefully siphoned back the warmed, cured water and replaced the hundred tiny, jeweled fish, turned on the concealed overhead fluorescent lamp and then had sat herself down in rapt admiration to gaze upon her handiwork. The betta splendens, the neon tetras, the mollies and guppies and hatchet fish and scalares had all swum inquisitively around the new addition to their green wonderland, and a snaky dojo had even writhed its way, like a minuscule boa constrictor, into a doorway …

  And then, in front of her eyes, the Taj had begun to shimmer and change, like faery gold. Nightmarishly, the thousand intricately assembled bits of marble drew in upon themselves, assumed strange, ungeometric attitudes contrary to all the rules of architecture, and then slowly, inevitably, collapsed into a pile of rubble.

  Now, as Oscar Piper talked, Miss Withers began to feel the same shock of incredulous disappointment. The case she had built up in the last few hours, like the miniature of the Taj Mahal, had lacked waterproof glue.

  The inspector, in short, was telling her not to try to teach her grandmother to suck eggs, nor the police to follow obvious lines of investigation. First of all, Tony Fagan’s love life, involved as it might have been and probably was, could not possibly have included an affair with Crystal Joris. Miss Joris was billed in nightclubs as “300 Pounds of Rhythm,” and her weakness was calories, not cuddling. Nor had she ever had a chance to introduce her little country cousin to Tony Fagan. Ina Kell had never been more than fifty miles from Bourdon, Pennsylvania—except perhaps in dreams—nor had any of her infrequent trips away from the drab home she shared with an invalid mother, a stepfather, and three half-brothers ever taken her near a city where Tony Fagan might have been making a personal appearance at some theater or night spot. Her life was an open book, and Tony Fagan—because of the business he was in—came under the same category. It was absolutely impossible that the two had ever met until that moment—la hora de verdad, as the Spanish put it—when her curiosity had led her to push open his door and look upon his bloody ruin.

  There were many times when Miss Withers had doubted her old friend the inspector, and with reason. But not about things like this. She subsided slowly, letting her coffee cool.

  Moreover, every point in Ina’s story that could be checked had been—and rang true as a bell. There had even been enough prints of her little bare feet recovered from the floor of the hallway to show that she had tiptoed cautiously from her door to Fagan’s and then had gone back considerably faster, almost running. Her fingerprints were on the Joris phone, backing her story about trying to call the police.

  “Oh,” said Miss Withers, in a very small voice indeed.

  “And just to top it all,” Piper added gently, “Junior Gault, after repudiating his confession, agreed to a lie-detector test. Like so many other smart boys who read recent articles in Esquire and True and other men’s magazines explaining how it’s so easy to beat the machine, he did his best and it wasn’t good enough.” The inspector drew one finger across his Adam’s apple. “Guilty. Of course we can’t bring that evidence into court—a man can’t be forced to testify against himself—but we’re satisfied. Gault killed Tony Fagan. But unless we can find that Kell girl and bring her back to testify, he’s going to get off scot-free.”

  The schoolteacher nodded, a very chastened nod.

  “And Gault has to be convicted. There can’t be one law for the rich and another for the poor. The Department has had enough criticism, what with the bookie scandals and all. So far homicide hasn’t been smeared with the tarbrush, and I mean to see that it doesn’t get smeared. Now, will you go out and find Ina Kell for us?”

  “I’ll do my best; angels can do no more,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers. “Obviously, with so much money and influence involved, and so much depending on her testimony, the girl is in danger. She may be out of my reach, as well as beyond subpoenas or extradition papers. It occurs to me that you and Mr. Hardesty are more interested in Ina’s testimony than in her safety.”

  Piper was reaching for his hat. “She’s safe enough, as long as Junior Gault is on ice. Now it’s late, and tomorrow is another day. How about my walking you home?”

  “You took the words right out of my mouth,” snapped M
iss Withers. “But then, as you were probably about to say, I have plenty left!”

  The inspector merely looked sheepish.

  6

  “Oh, thou child of many prayers!”

  “Life hath quicksands; life hath snares!”

  —LONGFELLOW

  “I AM NOT SEEING any clients this morning,” said Sam Bordin in as firm a tone as one dares use to an attractive employee with whom he has been rumbaing until two A.M. “Gracie, you know I’m up to my hips in the Gault thing and I’ve no time to tackle anything new—not even if it’s a beautiful widow with a smoking pistol in one hand and a fat checkbook in the other.” The tall rangy girl looked down at him fondly, in spite of the fact that the tubby little lawyer had not shaved that morning and obviously had a hangover. “If she was beautiful I wouldn’t let her in,” she told him. “This one is the intellectual type, and I don’t think she’s a client. She just wants ten minutes of your time.”

  “For some worthy cause,” Sam Bordin said, wincing. “No, Gracie!”

  The tall girl sighed, and then went out of the room with a practiced waggle of her lips. A moment later she bounced back, bearing an envelope. “The lady said perhaps you’d like to have this anyway, to look at when you’re not so busy.”

  Bordin glanced at the two sheets of yellowing paper inside, started to drop them into the basket, and then his eye was caught by something in the handwriting. He read on a bit and then cried, “What did you say her name was? Never mind—run after her! No, give me five minutes and then send her in!” Starting out, Gracie noticed that her employer was reaching hurriedly into the top right-hand drawer of his desk, where she knew he kept a loaded .38.

  The drawer also held an electric shaver, with which Sam Bordin had just finished touching up his blue jowls when the visitor entered. He stared at her for a moment, rather as if she were a ghost. “Miss Withers!” he said wonderingly. “I didn’t connect the name at first—but you haven’t changed a bit. Even the hat, and the umbrella!”

  She smiled, and nodded toward the yellowed sheets in his hand. “I thought perhaps a glimpse of your own handiwork might remind you. ‘What Being an American Means, by Sascha Bordin, aged nine.’ Prize third-grade essay of the year. I thought you might like to have it back, perhaps to show your own children?”