Nipped in the Bud (3 page)

“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.”

“…
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….”

“And with stars in her eyes,” said John Hardesty dreamily, and blushed at the look the schoolteacher gave him.

“Anyway,” continued Oscar Piper, “little Ina turned out to be deeper than she looked. At first she got into a panic and denied everything, even her own name. You can’t be rough with a girl like that; it took the whole bag of tricks before I could get her to let down her hair and admit that she’d spent the night in the Joris apartment. I had to threaten to turn her over my knee and spank her before she confessed that she’d been awake and heard the fight, and had got up and gone out into the hall to see what was going on. The murderer had left the door ajar, and she peeked in and found the body. Then, according to her, she covered it up with a rug because ‘it looked so lonely and terrible and messy!’”

“Poor child! And then she tried to run away because she was afraid of being accused of the murder?”

“Wait a minute,” cut in Hardesty. “You must understand that Ina was as green as—as chlorophyll. All she knew of life was what she’d got from romantic movies and soap operas and sensational fiction. She wanted to play it heroic. Nobody could get her to admit that she’d seen Junior Gault actually leave the scene of the murder until she knew he’d already been arrested and had confessed—even though we found his gold cigarette lighter in her handbag, that he’d dropped on the scene and she’d picked up as a sort of souvenir, I guess.”

“She should have been spanked,” Miss Withers observed firmly.

“Ina claimed,” continued the assistant D.A., “and I for one believe her, that after covering the body she went rushing back into the Joris apartment to phone the authorities. But Crystal had had the phone disconnected before she left, and Ina either didn’t know it or had forgotten it. She kept trying to get the operator and of course she couldn’t. Probably the only phone she had ever seen was one on the kitchen wall, with a crank. Meanwhile outside in the hall the paper boy had looked in the half-open door and rediscovered the body, or at least the feet that were sticking out from under the rug. He sounded the alarm, and then suddenly the place was swarming with cops. She realized she had missed the boat, and …”

“Ah!” objected the schoolteacher. “But even if the paper boy arrived just as Ina popped back into her own apartment, it still must have taken him some time to sound the alarm, and five or ten minutes more before the police could get there. A rather long time to sit and jiggle the phone, don’t you think?”

“Not for her,” Hardesty said. “Don’t forget she’d probably never seen a dial phone; probably she was expecting the operator to say, ‘Number, please.’ Anyway, when she heard the police arrive she realized that matters were out of her hands. She thought she might get into trouble for not being the one to report the body, so her only thought was to run and hide.”

“A funny kid,” Piper agreed. “After we picked her up she claimed that twice that morning after she had thought it over she started to call Headquarters and confess, and each time she hung up because she got cold feet. There’s evidence that she did try to make a couple of phone calls in the restaurant. But down at my office she finally identified Junior Gault’s photograph out of a dozen others as the man she’d seen leaving Fagan’s apartment after the fracas.”

“So, you see, Ina Kell is really the key witness for the prosecution,” John Hardesty pointed out. “She’s the one person who can actually put Gault at the scene of the murder at the right time. We didn’t dare take chances with her, for fear of showing our hand. We got a signed statement, but she wasn’t allowed to testify at the preliminary hearing or before the grand jury; we kept her under wraps and strictly away from the press and everybody. I got her a place to live at a nice respectable rooming house out in Brooklyn Heights; I even got her a job as a file clerk down at the Hall of Records.”