Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan Page 8

  “Just a tiny chill,” Jill admitted. “As if—as if somebody were walking over my grave.”

  Lake Arrowhead, a fresh and lovely blue mirror, hangs high in the mountains above San Bernardino, reflecting white, fleecy clouds, tall pine trees and the French provin­cial château which Mr Thorwald L. Nincom built three years ago as a refuge from Hollywood. Once built, Mr ` Nincom discovered that his house was too close to the water and the merry putt-putt of motorboats, so he had it soundproofed. Likewise, the scent of pine trees reminded him unpleasantly of a throat spray he had once been forced to use, so he sealed the windows and installed an air-conditioning plant. The last remaining step was to install a swimming pool which could be heated to tepidity, and then—with the large projection room and a twice-daily courier from the studio—Mr Nincom felt that he was away from it all.

  At the moment we find him in the projection room, sitting in utter blackness on a deeply upholstered leather chair and staring at the white screen. Beside him his corps of writers sit and fidget, and, in the row behind, a stenographer waits with poised pencil.

  They were watching an old gentleman in side whiskers who snored on a haircloth sofa, with his shoes on the floor beside him. Then Miss Priscilla Lane slunk into the room, holding a hatchet upraised. As she bent over the old gentleman the camera swung toward the window where a curtain bellied outward as if to show the passing of a rather tangible soul.

  The screen went black, and then the lights came on. “Well?” demanded Mr Nincom.

  “She was swell in the love scenes,” said Frankie Firsk politically.

  “I don’t like the hatchet,” quavered Melicent Manning, adjusting her brooch. “It makes me think of red Indians and scalping.”

  “The real Lizzie Borden used a hatchet, just the same,” Mr Nincom said. “Willy, what do you think?”

  Willy Abend put out his cigarette. “They’re all good tests,” he began. “Ban was the best. She makes you feel something of the turmoil, the conflict, that must have been in Lizzie’s heart. Gaynor was good too. As a playwright I feel that you should always cast a murderer as unheavy as you can so that the audience won’t guess ahead of you.”

  “Why not Pitts for the part then?” suggested Doug August with a wicked glint in his eye.

  Mr Nincom took it seriously. “We tried that once—gave her a sympathetic mother part. The audience laughed at the preview, and we had to reshoot half the picture. She’s too typed.” He stood up. “No, there’ll have to be some more tests taken. In the meantime you can all go back to the scenes you’re on. I’m going to spend the afternoon looking at locations if that technical adviser of ours ever gets here.” He picked up the phone on the control desk. “Hello? Any word of the courier car yet? What? WHAT? Of course I’ll talk to the sheriff’s office. Get ’em….”

  He hung on for a moment, waiting. “Yes, this is Mr Nincom. Yes. Yes. What? Say it again.” His mouth dropped open, and he listened in silence for a long moment. Then he hung up.

  “Amazing!” breathed Mr Nincom. “They just found the courier car—at the bottom of Lost Lizard Canyon, six hundred feet beneath the highway!”

  The writers surged forward. “And—and the people in the car?” asked Frankie Firsk. “Miss Withers—and the driver?”

  Nincom shook his head. “The sheriff said they were trying to get them out now, but it’s an awful job. Ambulances are coming from San Bernardino. As for my mail and my test film, everything is scattered to hell and gone.” Mr Nincom pouted. “Everything,” he told them, “hap­pens to me!”

  For a moment nobody spoke. Then Melicent Manning shivered and said, “Another accident.”

  “They usually go in threes, don’t they? Like deaths among famous people?” Frankie Firsk bit savagely at his forefinger.

  Doug August said, “We’re all thinking the same thing. Why did it happen to her?”

  It took a long time to get down into the canyon and up again with the stretchers. And when it was done the intern beside the ambulance refused to do anything about it. “He’s dead as a duck,” said the doctor. “Sawed his throat when he went through the window of the car. And she won’t last much longer. I’m not going to have a ‘Died in Ambulance’ chalked up against me.”

  Sheriff Truesdale said: “You better take the woman.”

  “I’ve already given what first aid I can. It’s mostly a matter of minutes.”

  “Take her,” repeated the sheriff. He was a big, soft man with hot, hard eyes that blazed easily. “Get going.” He waved his hand. “You never know. She lived this long, didn’t she?”

  The victims were carted away. A county officer took a picture of the skid marks. “Looks like the road turned, and the car didn’t,” was his verdict. “No sign of any collision or anything. Unless somebody was coming around the turn on the inside, and they’d have probably stopped.”

  Sheriff Truesdale nodded. “It could happen. Seems like it would happen at night though. Have somebody put a flare against that busted guardrail.” He started toward his car.

  “About that wreck down there,” a uniformed trooper wanted to know, “do we do anything about it?”

  “It belongs to that picture studio. Let them get it. If they can. For all of me, it can stay at the bottom of the canyon.” Sheriff Truesdale spat his tobacco over the rim, watching it splatter downward toward the bottom of Lost Lizard Canyon. Then he climbed wearily into his car and drove off after the ambulance, his siren screaming bloody murder.

  There wasn’t much in the papers next morning. The Times said: “ANOTHER FATALITY ON ARROWHEAD ROAD,” and the Examiner: “ONE DEAD, ONE HURT IN SPECTACULAR PLUNGE,” and printed a neat and wholly imaginative drawing showing the studio car hurtling over the edge with a man and woman floating downwards beside it.

  “Miss Withers’ condition is very critical,” spoke the crisp feminine voice of San Bernardino Hospital into the long-distance telephone. “There are multiple fractures of pelvis and both legs, concussion, trauma and serious internal injuries.”

  “Apart from that, your client is in fine shape,” Mr Lothian reported to Harry Wagman. “The studio, of course, is doing everything that can be done. Our insurance policies cover us rather thoroughly in the matter.”

  At least Mr Lothian hoped that they did.

  “Funny, it’d happen to her,” Wagman said.

  “Daniels has been one of our drivers for two years, a very capable young man. Never showed up tight or anything. He was supposed to be a pushover for a cute girl, but I don’t suppose he was driving with one hand in this instance.”

  Harry Wagman didn’t smile. “No, I don’t guess so. You know, Mr Lothian, it’s funny about Miss Withers happening into that thing the other day and then this right on top of it.”

  “Some people are always getting into jams. The woman is a troublemaker anyway. Have you notified her family?”

  If Miss Withers had a family, Wagman indicated, he was completely in the dark about it. “She blew out of her hotel last night, and nobody knows where she moved to. So I can’t dig into her luggage.”

  Mr Lothian frowned. “She’s from New York City, isn’t she?”

  “BUREAU IDENTIFICATION NYC POLICE CENTRE STREET’ the message came in over the teletype, “REQUEST AID IN LOCATING RELATIVES OF HILDEGARDE MARTHA WITHERS AGE APPROX FORTY FIVE WHITE AMERICAN SAID TO BE NEW YORKER INJURED SERIOUSLY HERE TODAY COMMUNICATE SAN BERNARDINO SHERIFF’S OFFICE.”

  The sergeant at Centre Street glanced at the communication, yawned mightily and stuck it on a spindle. He started back to his can of coffee, raised it to his lips and then set it hastily down. “Withers,” he muttered. “Withers….”

  He tore the message off the spindle and ran down the hall toward the Homicide Bureau.

  “I thought this might interest you, Inspector, on account of—”

  Inspector Oscar Piper had spent the day in court. Now he leaned back in his swivel chair, his brogans on the desk and fat blue smoke rings rising steadily from his pursed lips
.

  “Tomorrow, Sergeant.”

  “Yes sir. Only—”

  “Tomorrow is another day. Write that in your manual and look at it when your feet hurt.” Piper sighed a deep, philosophical sigh.

  The sergeant nodded and laid the teletype message on the desk. Then he started to withdraw. There was a thundering crash behind him, and he turned to see the inspector kicking his chair aside, a strangely grim inspector.

  “He didn’t look as much shocked, exactly, as he looked mad,” the sergeant confided to one of the boys in the wardroom later. “For the next five minutes he had everybody going nuts getting him a plane reservation and cashing checks. And then he jumps into a squad car and goes hell-bent for Newark Airport.”

  “You mean he went to California without any baggage?”

  “All the baggage he took with him,” admitted the sergeant, “was a bench warrant charging homicide for some guy named Derek Laval.”

  Next morning the “Rambling Reporter” column in the Hollywood Reporter announced:

  “It seems that there’s an amusing sequel to the recent rumpus in the Nincom unit at Mammoth. As the result of a gag pulled by Dobie and the late Saul Stafford, both former Nincom writers, the most beauteous blond secretary in the unit got delusions of grandeur and razz-berried herself right out of a job. Virgil Dobie learned this and squared things by putting her back on his own personal pay roll, which so touched and amused Mr Thorwald L. Nincom that he is insisting that Dobie, secretary and all, be reassigned to Nincom Productions’ new superspecial. It’s a ring-around-a-rosy, and everybody is happy.”

  In the Times Jimmie Fidler wrote: “Memo to staff: Find out if Mammoth is riding for a fall. They’ve lost two writers by falls this week.”

  The inspector was unable to read these or any other news notes, being deep in a study of the meager file on the Emily Harris case and somewhat plane-sick besides. He couldn’t sleep at all.

  “Not that I’m worried about Hildegarde,” he kept telling himself. “She’s got into some roaring muddle but she’ll be all right. She wasn’t born to be smashed up in an auto—not her!”

  She had probably got too close to the trail of this Laval fellow, and he’d made a desperate attempt to silence her forever. The inspector thought back over the various cases he knew in which the automobile had been used as an intentional instrument of death.

  The Torrio mob used to put about three sticks of high-test dynamite under the floor boards of a car, wire it to the ignition and wait for the owner to turn the switch. That was old stuff in the East, but hadn’t there been something about a grand-jury investigator named Clinton out there in California? But the bomb-in-car gag didn’t fit in exactly. Of course, a good driver—or one in desperation—could force another car off the road. And perhaps off the cliff to hurtle down.

  There were tricks that could be pulled with tires, too—and with the exhaust so that the driver of a completely closed car would pass peacefully off to sleep from too much carbon monoxide.

  Hildegarde herself, the inspector decided, would be able to put her finger on the probable manner in which it had been accomplished. If she were conscious and able to talk. He smiled at that. Hildegarde would be able to talk, conscious or not.

  The big transport plane slipped along westward into the early-morning sunlight at Albuquerque, over the endless frozen waves of the desert. More mountains, more desert, and then they were above the metallic, glossy green of orange groves, slanting down to the coastal plane of southern California.

  It was a day among days, the sort of weather that Californians love to call climate. A cloudless sky of soft blue hung over Burbank Airport, and the glow of the sun made the inspector wish he had left his topcoat back in Manhattan along with his toothbrush.

  The weather was a good omen, thought Oscar Piper. Nobody could get bad news on a morning like this. His spirits were undampened even when he discovered that the plane had flown him almost straight over San Bernardino and that now he had a good two-hour drive back to the eastward.

  There was a cheerful young man with a car for hire at the airport, and the lights were with them all the way out on Foothill Boulevard. And then finally they were in sleepy little San Bernardino; they were pulling up outside the flat little white hospital on the far edge of town. To the north hung a mountain, scarred with a great pale arrowhead, but the inspector had no eye at the moment for scenic beauty.

  He walked up the sidewalk toward the hospital door with his fingers crossed. At the steps he paused, studying the green lawn intently, and then pounced. Inspector Oscar Piper had found a four-leafed clover in the grass, a symbol of good luck everywhere but a thousand times more so here and at this time. It was as good as a true shamrock, at least.

  Piper stuck it in his lapel and then went inside. At the desk a starched little nurse sat prissily reading the afternoon paper from Los Angeles. “I want to inquire about an accident case you have here,” he said. “A Miss Hildegarde Withers?”

  “Miss Withers?” repeated the girl.

  “Yes!” He nodded. “I’ve come a long way and I haven’t got all day to—”

  “Member of the family?”

  “No. I mean yes. Why—?”

  “Her father?” pressed the nurse.

  “Father?” he repeated wonderingly. “No, it’s just that I need a night’s sleep and a shave. Come on, where is she?”

  “She isn’t here,” he was told.

  “Discharged already, huh?” The inspector took a deep sigh for himself.

  But the nurse was shaking her head. “I’m sorry, but there was no hope for her from the first. Miss Withers died this morning about six.”

  The inspector just stood there, not even breathing.

  “Everything that could be done for her was done,” the nurse continued. “I have her bill right here.”

  The inspector took it, stared at it as if the long column of figures were Chinese. Automatically he reached for a checkbook.

  As he started to scribble the check the girl went on: “The moving-picture studio she worked for sent an ambulance to take the body back to Los Angeles. You must have passed it on the way over. I’m sorry, Mr Laval.”

  That snapped Oscar Piper out of it as nothing else in the world could have done. “Say that again!” he challenged her.

  “I said that I was sorry it turned out—”

  “No, the name!”

  “Laval? Aren’t you him? Because he was calling long distance every hour or so yesterday to ask about Miss Withers. And I thought—”

  “Derek Laval, was that the name?”

  She nodded, then began to look worried. “Hadn’t you better sit down? Would you like a glass of water?”

  The inspector flashed his gold badge, and his questions suddenly became crisp and official, impersonal as a robot’s. “Did Mr Laval leave a number where you could call him back?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “Did Miss Withers make any statement before she died?”

  “She didn’t recover consciousness at any time.”

  “Do you happen to know where the automobile accident took place?” She told him.

  As Inspector Oscar Piper came down the steps of the hospital he saw that a gray bank of fog was drifting over the sky from the west. He walked back to his hired car, his fingers twisting the four-leafed clover into a green pulp.

  The driver stared at him. “Say, you better have a drink before we start back to Los Angeles!”

  The inspector climbed in. “We’re not going back to Los Angeles. Do you know the mountain road to Lake Arrowhead?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “Then get going—and go slow.” He leaned back in his seat, realizing that if Miss Hildegarde Withers had been sitting beside him she would have corrected his grammar. “Slowly,” he said under his breath.

  The car turned right and swung up toward the mountain. “Don’t you worry about my going slow on this road,” the driver opened up cheerfully. “You can’t d
rive it any other way because of the curves. Why, only the other day there was an accident up here.”

  “Was there?” said the inspector through set teeth.

  VI

  If the red slayer think he slays

  Or if the slain think he is slain.

  They know not well THE SUBTLE WAYS I KEEP, and pass, and turn again.

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  MR NINCOM WAS IN the groove. After three days of story conference, broken only by the hours of sleep, he had worried and fretted his corps of writers to the point where he was almost certain to get something spectacular out of them. He worked on the oyster plan—irritate enough and you may get a pearl.

  He had them all grouped in the long living room of his mountain hideaway amid dozens of leering animal heads, stuffed and painted sailfish and similar trophies of the hill and the deep. Ash trays were heaping full, pencils were stubby and there wasn’t a decent fingernail in the entire squad.

  Nincom marched up and down before the ten-foot fireplace, one hand clutching his little rosewood baton. He stopped, aimed it at nothing.

  “I’m not satisfied with the setup, not satisfied at all,” he told them. “This has got to be a big picture. Now what”—and he aimed at Melicent Manning—“what does it need to make it big?”

  “It’s the theme that’s weak,” she ventured nervously. “We’ve got a wonderful love story between Lizzie and the lawyer. But it comes to nothing. If we could take out the murders and build up the love …”

  Nincom turned to Frankie Firsk. “What do you think of that?”

  Firsk hesitated, trying vainly to get a clue to what the great man was thinking. “It’s not a bad idea,” he ventured. “Maybe Lizzie didn’t kill her father and her stepmother. Maybe the stepmother killed the father and then committed suicide. And Lizzie wanted to keep the family name clear and she …”

  “Sewage,” interrupted Mr Nincom.

  “Take out the love story,” suggested Doug August. “Build up the murders. Make it a story of hate. Lizzie murders three or four other people. Townspeople fear her but they’re afraid to talk. A sort of ‘M’ character.”