Nipped in the Bud Read online

  “Yes, but …”

  “Is Ina dead at the morgue, or unconscious in some accident ward, or locked up in some private mental institution?”

  “But, Hildegarde …”

  “Don’t but Hildegarde me, you son of Ananias!” Miss Withers flounced out of the room, closing the door behind her with unnecessary firmness. But as she went down the hall toward the stairs she suddenly smiled, shook her head, and said softly, “Bless his black Irish heart!” It was almost flattering on the whole.

  She would have been more flattered still if she had waited around to see how meticulously the two men followed her suggestions re: Ina Kell. Only one of them, however, paid off to any noticeable degree—the public library branch.

  It had been a busy Saturday evening—the clock in the inspector’s office was showing ten to midnight when the returns on Ina Kell’s literary tastes were all in. He and John Hardesty bent over the list of titles, in a blue haze of tobacco smoke, with paper cups of coffee cooling forgotten on the battered, old oak desk.

  “To sum it up,” Hardesty said, “Ina started out on novels, long sentimental novels of the Faith Baldwin type.”

  “Cinderella stuff,” Piper agreed.

  “Then about six weeks ago she switched to travel books. Books about Scotland and Norway and France and the Orient and South America, first. Then she began to narrow it down to the West Indies. In the two weeks before she disappeared she took out every book in the branch library that had to do with the Virgin Islands—which, if you don’t know, have become a very fashionable resort for important society lights who want a quiet divorce or just a nice, quiet tropical rest. It happens that the Islands are under the American flag, so there wouldn’t be any difficulty about passports.” He nodded grimly.

  “Nor about extradition, once she’s been served.” The inspector grinned.

  “That’s where she’s gone, obviously,” Hardesty said. “We could check airlines and steamship companies and so forth, but she probably used a phony name, and I think it would be quicker and simpler if I flew down there at once. I’m sure she’ll come back willingly, once I explain the situation and promise her complete protection from whatever scared her off.”

  “You better take the subpoena along, just in case,” Piper told him dryly.

  “I’ll grab the first plane in the morning,” continued the younger man eagerly. “Just as soon as I throw some lightweight suits into a bag. It’ll be warm down there, and I may have to be in the Islands some time—tracing her down, and getting her to agree to come back voluntarily.”

  “A few nights with a beautiful, starry-eyed, red-haired lovely under a great big tropical moon?” The inspector snorted. “I’d take a week or more, if it was me.”

  John Hardesty said good night and streaked out of the office, but the back of his neck, Piper noticed delightedly, was flaming red. He must remember to tell that to Hildegarde when he called the old girl up tomorrow.

  But when he rang the Barbizon just before noon he learned that Miss Withers had checked out and gone, dog and all, early the previous evening. No forwarding address, but if this was Mr. Piper there was a message. The girl obligingly read it over the phone.

  Dear Oscar,

  Don’t think it hasn’t been fun because it hasn’t. You are still in my bad graces, but you’ll hear from me. In the meantime, I suggest that you curl up with a good book—an atlas.

  Hildegarde

  An atlas! That would be one of those big, unwieldy books full of maps. And there’d be a map of the Virgin Islands in it somewhere. The inspector scratched his head, having a vague feeling that his best friend and severest critic had somehow got ahead of him again.

  8

  “Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.”

  —EMERSON

  ON MONDAY MORNINGS THE inspector’s temper was always likely to be a little uneven. The weekend’s crop of major crimes was usually heavy, and whenever Manhattan’s citizens had at one another with gun or axe or blunt instrument the reports piled up on his desk, making paperwork and still more paperwork.

  This particular Monday morning he found himself more often than not looking idly out of his window—which faced a plain brick wall. John Hardesty, that lucky young cub, must be in St. Thomas by now, combining business with pleasure and no doubt chasing a pretty redhead along the tropical beaches beneath lacy, fluttering palm trees.

  And there still had been no phone call from Miss Withers. There was no doubt of it, the old girl was showing her years at last. The time had come when she couldn’t take a joke. And, besides, the harmless little hoax which had turned out not to be a hoax at all had been only for her own good.

  His morning cigar was burning unevenly, and Oscar Piper paid only cursory attention to bright, up-and-coming Sergeant Smith, who was explaining that he had finally solved the mystery of the identity of the anonymous lady who had acted as technical corespondent in Tony Fagan’s divorce case. The photograph which had been exhibit A had shown only a curvaceous lady in a nightgown, with her arm across her face. Smitty had got a print, had it blown up to show a ring she was wearing, and had matched it with a similar ring that Thallie Gordon had worn in a studio publicity photo.

  “So she did her boss a favor,” the inspector said, “to help him get divorced. Okay, file it and forget it. That’s all.”

  Sergeant Smith said that wasn’t quite all. There was a telegram that had just come in, probably from some screwball….

  The wire had been filed at Tijuana, Baja California. Piper read it, reached into his desk drawer for his glasses, and read it again. Then he bit through the cigar.

  HAVING WONDERFUL TIME. WISH YOU WERE HERE. HAPPY HUNTING GROUND FOR AMATEUR CONCHOLOGIST. HAVE FOUND A MEASLED COWRY, A LEFT-HANDED WHELK, TWO HAIRY TRITONS, A SPIKED TREMPLETTE AND A RED HAIRY KELL. WOULD PROFESSOR HARDESTY LIKE THE LATTER FOR HIS COLLECTION?

  HILDEGARDE

  “Yipe!” cried the inspector. “When did this come in?”

  “Maybe half an hour ago, sir.” Smitty gulped. “I didn’t think it was important. It’s signed ‘Hildegarde’ but your friend Miss Withers couldn’t be there already.”

  “Damn and blast,” said Oscar Piper. “She could be. She must have caught a plane shortly after she walked out of here Saturday evening. That woman has a double-barreled intuition sometimes. She must have seen something that we missed, that’s all.”

  The sergeant had been to some extent involved in the search of the libraries to trace Ina Kell’s reading habits. “But there wasn’t a single book about Mexico in the stuff she took out of the library!”

  “That’s the point. It was a plant, a false trail carefully laid to lead us in the wrong direction. Now Hardesty is to hell and gone in the Virgin Islands, and the witness we want is in Tijuana. Out of the country, out of our reach.”

  Sergeant Smith said, “No chance of extradition, sir?”

  “There’s no treaty with Mexico. Anyway, there’s no question of extradition for a witness. She isn’t even a fugitive from justice. If she stays there below the border—” Piper stopped suddenly. “Wait a minute. That wire’s from Tijuana, isn’t it? Hasn’t that name crept into this case once before?”

  “Yes, sir. It was in the report. There was a straw toy marked ‘Souvenir of Tijuana’ that Miss Dallas Trempleau sent to her caretaker’s little boy.”

  The inspector snapped his fingers. “That’s it! The Trempleau dame didn’t really break her engagement after all; she just said she did! Suppose she has a yen for Junior Gault, and having learned somehow—we must check that leak, by the way—that the case against him rests on the testimony of one witness, she decided to make sure of saving his precious neck by taking the girl out of the country until after the trial!”

  “Could be, Inspector. The Kell girl was bought off. And she seemed like the kind you’d take home and introduce to your mother.”

  “There’s somebody smarter than little Ina behind all this. Smarter than the Tremplea
u girl. A certain high-class shyster named Sam Bordin, maybe.” Piper picked up the telephone and after some slight delay spoke briefly with John Hardesty’s superior. “That’s that,” he said, hanging up. “Bordin is being summoned to the D.A.’s office first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “He’ll wriggle out of it,” Smitty said.

  “Maybe not. Anyway, the thing to do is to somehow get the Kell girl back on U.S. territory, and then slap her with a subpoena.”

  “It would take a magician,” said the sergeant.

  “Well, I’ve seen Hildegarde Withers pull rabbits out of her funny hat several times in the past,” the inspector said softly. “She’s right there on the scene, and for once she’s on our side.” He nodded. “Say, what’s Tijuana near?”

  “Somewhere along the border, sir. Near Arizona, I think. Or New Mexico.” Eventually they did have to look it up in an atlas, to find it a tiny speck in the very northwest corner of the Republica. The map was detailed enough so that both policemen saw at once why Hildegarde had smelled a rat. Tijuana was across the border, but still only a suburb of San Diego. No real railroads, no through highways, led out of it into Mexico proper. And nobody touring through the beautiful and exotic land of the Aztecs would ever be likely to go within hundreds of miles of the place. Yet Dallas Trempleau had purchased a toy horse there.

  “Book me on the first plane to San Diego,” ordered the inspector.

  “But, sir—”

  “Don’t but me! I haven’t had a vacation in three years, and if the Commish won’t okay it I’ll pay my own way! Now get going!”

  Smitty got, but his superior officer had barely swept off the top of his desk and put on his hat when the younger man poked his head in the door. “Ten-forty out of La Guardia for Chicago, Denver, L.A. and San Diego,” he said. “Flight Six.”

  “Okay.”

  “And the Daily Mirror is on the phone.”

  “I don’t care if it’s the Times; somebody else will have to handle it.”

  “Okay by me,” said the sergeant. “Only I thought you’d want to know that it’s Walter Winchell’s Girl Friday at the Mirror. She wants you to confirm or deny a report that you know the whereabouts of Miss Ina Kell, the supposedly undercover witness in the Gault case. They’ve just had a hot tip that she’s you guess where.” Smitty nodded wisely. “There’s been a leak somewhere.”

  “A leak? The goddamn dam has burst! How’d they find out what only you and I know?”

  “The tip came from Sam Bordin, sir. He’d like to have it known that he wants to call Ina Kell as a witness for the defense.”

  “Get Bordin’s office on the phone.”

  A few minutes later inspector Oscar Piper was listening to the dulcet if slightly Brooklynesque tones of Gracie, Sam Bordin’s secretary, who was very sorry to say that Mr. Bordin was out of town and not expected back for some time. Was there any message?

  Was there! Apt and well-chosen words rose in the Inspector’s throat, but luckily he bit them off just in time.

  9

  “Everybody wants ta get inta da act!”

  —JIMMY DURANTE

  MISS WITHERS KNEW ALL about Tijuana and anticipated no difficulties whatever in proving or disproving her wild hunch about Dallas Trempleau in the first half-hour. She remembered her other visit here—it had been on her first tourist trip west shortly after her gory misadventures on Catalina Island. The little border village had been a sleepy ruin, wrecked by the repeal of prohibition in the States. She had walked the drowsy Main Street, where a few bars and restaurants and tourist traps were still trying to keep open for the yanqui dollar, had seen the Foreign Club with its roulette wheels shrouded in cobwebs, dead grass rippling on the course where the great Australian Phar Lap had triumphed and been murdered in his stall, the once-famous gardens of Agua Caliente’s dead hotel bleak and sterile in the white sunlight.

  That was then; it must be a veritable ghost town by now. American tourists would be as conspicuous as a caravan on the desert.

  Confidently the maiden schoolteacher, with Talley beside her on the front seat of a little drive-it-yourself coupe, had headed south on U.S. 101 early that Sunday evening less than an hour after she had landed at Lindbergh Field, pausing only to leave her un-unpacked suitcases in a room at the U.S. Grant. Out of San Diego the highway cut past gasworks, tuna canneries, acres of junked and rusting Navy landing craft; it wound through unlovely industrial towns, dead lemon groves, and finally into barren, open country with here and there a crowded trailer court or motel.

  Soon she found herself caught in a solid column of cars all moving in the same direction, mostly filled with uniformed sailors. Passing between ever bigger and better billboards, the parade moved steadily onward until suddenly they were all piled up at the gigantic fence of the international port of entry. At long last her turn came, and Miss Withers drove up beside a sleepy dark man in a half-unbuttoned uniform. She reached into her handbag for her passport (circa 1936), her proof of vaccination and other papers.

  “Con supermiso, señor, Yo quiero—” she began, in her high-school Spanish.

  Horns were blaring behind her. “You’re blocking trafeek!” the border guard cried, waving her on. “Get the lead out, lady!” And then, with a fanfare of crashing gears, she was suddenly in the romantic land of roses and guitars.

  Crossing the long bridge over the muddy trickle of the Tijuana River, Miss Withers sniffed sharply, remembering Coleridge’s poem about the city of Cologne and its two-and-seventy stenches. The way led up a steep, narrow street and suddenly burst into the town itself, no town at all now, but a booming city that had somehow exploded all over the surrounding hills. The glare in the hazy sky of early evening seemed brighter than that over Broadway during the theater hour; the sidewalks were spilling with humanity of all ages, conditions and colors.

  A thousand blinding, flickering neon lights offered information on mail-order marriage and divorce, girl shows, curios, licores, food and amusement—almost every conceivable kind of amusement. The spinster schoolteacher bewilderedly clung to the wheel and let herself be carried along by the tide of other cars down what she remembered as the sleepy Main Street of the town—now it had become the Avenida de la Revolucíon.

  This wasn’t Tijuana at all; it was Reno and Skid Row and Coney Island gone mad. Signs implored her to attend the jai-alai games at the Fronton Palace or the greyhound races or the Foreign Book (track odds anywhere) or to see the death-defying girl matadorables at the Torero; to purchase tax-free gasoline or duty-free perfumes; to drink half a hundred brands of beer or tequila or whiskey.

  Miss Withers was borne along for three or four blocks past blaring, blazing dance halls, honky-tonks, saloons, all interspersed with curio stores, divorce mills, arcades, more curio stores, more honky-tonks. Even on a Sunday everything was wide-open. People, mostly young males between eighteen and thirty, swarmed the sidewalks and poured recklessly back and forth across the Avenida, jaywalking with a magnificent disregard for life and limb and fender. Whenever traffic slowed or snarled dozens of hawkers rushed out from the sidewalk to offer trays loaded with junk jewelry, plaster animals, belts and billfolds and poisonously hued blankets and candies.

  As soon as possible the schoolteacher edged her rented car up a darkish side street, and pulled into the curb with a sigh of relief. Even here the blare of cantina orchestras, the mingled roar of voices and laughter and barkers’ cries and auto horns was almost deafening. It occurred to Miss Withers that finding anybody in this hurdy-gurdy atmosphere was going to take a bit of doing. “Talk about your needle in a haystack!” she murmured, and prepared to disembark.

  A smallish brown ghost materialized suddenly out of the shadows, a ghost wearing a ragged T-shirt, blue jeans, and an electric-orange jockey cap. Thrusting his face into the car window he cried, “For one quarter I watch your car, lady?” He might have been eleven or twelve, but the dark mestizo eyes were older.

  “No thank you, little boy. My dog will wat
ch the car very nicely.”

  “I watch the dog, no? Fine dog like that, somebody could steal it for the big reward.”

  “No.” She started the motor, and the car lurched backward. But the boy clung to the door. “I am Vito,” he said cheerfully. “I show you much better parking place. I show you anything you like in town, anything at all. I speak good English, because one year when my father is alive he pay to have me go across the line to American school.” He had somehow contrived to open the door, and was within. “You want nice curios, fine leather huaraches twenty percent off?”

  It was the time for Talley to play the protecting role, but he had obligingly leaped over into the back seat and was licking the intruder’s neck in welcome. “Now, young man—” began Miss Withers severely. Then she thought of something. “Do you happen to know what store here in Tijuana sells little toy horses and riders made of plaited straw?”

  “You make fun, lady.” Vito looked searchingly up into her face. “Two, three hundred curio stores here—every one sells the caballito de paja.” He lowered his voice. “Maybe you want sleepy pills, no prescription? You want Paris postcards, absinthe, maybe Mary Warners? You want dorty books? I take you to one very fine dorty bookstore, you can buy Fanny Heel and Life an’ Loves of Frank ’Arris?”

  “No! Get out, you nasty child. Must I call a policeman?”

  “But, lady, no policeman even can show you anything in thees town I can’t!” Vito insisted proudly. “Tell me, what you really come for, eh?”

  Miss Withers hesitated, looking down on her self-appointed guide with sudden compassion. He did look rather hungry. “Vito,” she said, “is there a place nearby where we can get a nice chocolate ice-cream soda?”