Nipped in the Bud (33 page)

“A Dutch bob,” explained the schoolteacher stiffly. “The modern trim for the breed, only it’s still not accepted by the judges at dog shows. Not that I’d put my Talley into a dog show anyway.”

“Okay. And they work the poodle into the circus as a clown, acrobat, roustabout, anything. He has a hard life, but some of the other performers befriend him. We introduce a rhinoceros fat lady or, better still, a chimpanzee who plays in the band and rides a bicycle on the high wire …”

It all began to sound to Miss Withers like an off-key version of
Toby Tyler, or Ten Weeks with the Circus
, a juvenile classic of her distant childhood. But before she could say so, the phone burst into life. Tip Brown leaped hopefully to answer it, and then with some disappointment informed her that Mr. Cushak’s office was on the line and would she please be in his office for a conference at two sharp?

“Tell them I’ll be there,” promised the schoolteacher. “But I’ll make no guarantees as to sharpness.” For as yet in this mad affair there had been so little on which to whet the edge of her mind….

Talley the poodle was by this time getting restive and sniffing suggestively around the door. Tip Brown obligingly decided that he could use some outdoor action sketches and borrowed the delighted dog for a romp on the studio lawns, so Miss Withers was left alone with her thoughts, of which—as the old saying goes—she had a complete set. She must, of course, feel her way carefully on this unaccustomed, thin ice; she must try to find out what made these people tick, and for that reason she had probed a bit at Mr. Brown. He had been open enough—almost too open.

She was naturally burning also with a desire to know what was now going on in that coral-pink house up on Mulholland; police and coroners and medical examiners would be performing their grim but necessary rites. She’d have given almost anything for a front seat—because, although in her time she had seen more than a few dead bodies, she had never before seen anything like Larry Reed’s remains and never wanted to again.

Around noontime the cluttered walls of the little office began to close in upon her. She went outside on a tour of exploration, got herself thoroughly lost among the looming sound stages and outdoor standing sets, and finally located the studio commissary, where she had a modest sandwich and a cup of tea in the midst of all the tinsel glamour of stars and starlets in make-up, dress-extras in evening clothes with smudged handkerchiefs around their collars, executives and agents and office people, most of whom seemed quite normal and pleasant and everydayish at close range.

She noted that Alan Ladd was not quite as tall but certainly quite as handsome as she had previously imagined, that Abbott and Costello lunched quietly without throwing any dishes at each other, that Piper Laurie was a pixie and Esther Williams a sexy madonna. There were many other faces at the tables whom she recognized vaguely, having been an inveterate movie-goer for years; they were faces out of the past, once famous, once spotlighted, and now still working at the only job they knew. This was the present, and she had a present-day problem, a monkey on her shoulder.

Who had killed Larry Reed, and why?

There were afternoon papers on sale at the cashier’s desk when she paid her modest check, but nothing in the headlines as yet about Reed. There would hardly have been time, she realized. These papers must have gone to press long before her call to the police, notifying them of the body in the lonely house on Mulholland.

When she finally found her way back to her office she discovered it empty; evidently Tip Brown had taken Talley with him somewhere for lunch. Miss Withers hoped that the dog would remember his manners and not beg for a second raw hamburger; she had been trying vainly for years to get him to understand that grown dogs eat but once a day. Outside in the hall the cartons packed with Larry Reed’s belongings still stood; she poked absently through the fitter and found nothing that could be in the least considered a clue, though already a bit of looting had begun. She noticed the absence of an imported briar pipe, a bottle of mineral oil, and a big box of expensive antihistamine tablets that she had seen previously. Perhaps the news of Larry’s passing had got around and somebody had thought that they needed a souvenir to remember him by; most certainly somebody else had hated him enough to assist him in prematurely shuffling off this mortal coil. For she was increasingly certain that this was murder, and an odd murder.

Sitting alone at the desk, she fell to aimless doodling with pencil and pad, but her drawings insisted on taking on ugly, twisted shapes. Something in the room annoyed her, setting her teeth on edge; she finally realized that a story board on the opposite wall was tilted. Automatically she rose to set it level again; nothing bothered her more than an askew picture. But as she touched the board something slipped out from behind it to slither to the floor. It was a brown paper envelope with Larry Reed’s name in red crayon—and also bearing the drawing of a dead penguin. She gasped. So Larry Reed had had his warning after all, even though he’d never found it!

Without the slightest compunction Miss Withers tore open the envelope, discovering a heart-shaped piece of drawing paper with hastily scrawled printing as follows:

TO THE CARD-CHEAT:

YOU ARE GOING TO GET THE BIRD,

DEATH WILL HAVE THE FINAL WORD,

FANCY BOY, YOU’LL SOON BE MINE,

MY STONE STONE STONE-COLD VALENTINE

LUCY

The schoolteacher put the thing down, and wiped off her fingers with a handkerchief. Murder, as she well knew, was often nasty and distorted, but not this way—not mixed up with valentines and doggerel verse!

It just didn’t make sense. Why should a murderer take all this trouble of drawing pictures and writing verses and leaving warnings? She pondered this for a while, and came out by the same door she had entered in.

At precisely two
P.M.
she showed up at Mr. Cushak’s office. The girl at the desk looked up and smiled. “Miss Withers?”

“Yes, Joyce. A command performance.”

The girl smiled wider. “I’m not Joyce; she took off sick a couple of hours ago and I was called from stenographic to take over. I’m Mabel.”

On second look Miss Withers realized that this one was a little less lush and with a somewhat different hairdo—though they could both have been poured out of the same mold. “Well, Mabel—is he in?”

Mabel buzzed and spoke briefly into the talk box. A moment later Mr. Cushak popped out of his office.

He looked for once almost pleased with himself. “I’ve got them all waiting inside,” he said. “I mean, all the people who received those blasted valentines.”

“Oh,
no
!” she exploded.

“Why not?” His face went blank. “After all, it’s only for their own protection. And you said you wanted to meet them.”

She gave him a withering look and then explained wearily, “Mr. Cushak, I wanted to meet them individually, by seeming happenstance, under innocent auspices. I had hoped that in that manner I might just possibly ferret out some useful information. You have inadvertently tipped our hand.”

“Huh?” The man looked puzzled and a little hurt.

“Don’t you know,” she continued testily, “that every authoritative text on criminology says that in poison-pen cases the guilty party has almost invariably later been proved to have sent one to himself and made a great to-do about it? That’s the way their nasty little minds work; they think that it automatically clears them from suspicion. One of the people waiting inside your office is the murderer, or I miss my guess. Of course,” she added frankly, “I have missed some important guesses in my time, but they say that even Homer nodded. Well, we might as well go inside, and start afresh from here.”

Cushak looked at her rather strangely, and the schoolteacher had a sense that he was now even more out of sympathy with her and her quest than he had been before. He was not, it appeared, used to having his decisions and actions questioned by underlings. But he shrugged, turned, and ushered her silently into his office.

She sniffed. The smell of fear was in that room. The three people who waited there were as jittery, she thought, as a cat on hot bricks. Miss Withers was introduced to them in strict studio seniority. First there was Jules Karas, music director—a man somewhere in his fifties, stocky and leonine and intensely masculine, who bowed stiffly from the waist and smoked thin cigars in a long amber holder. His eyes told her nothing at all; he had the practiced aplomb of the European. A hard nut to crack, she thought.

Then there was Rollo Bayles, a background artist. He was a pale, somewhat wispy man with a face that might have been handsome if the sculptor hadn’t left the clay half-finished and unsmoothed. His hand, when Miss Withers grasped it, was dampish and thin—yet his nervous grip made her wince a little. A true introvert, she said to herself; a man, as the English say, with a maggot.

Finally there was Janet Poole, a warmish, most generously proportioned girl whose blue-violet eyes made one forget that she was plain—or was she really plain, after all? A young man, Miss Withers shrewdly decided, might have a difficult but no doubt most interesting time making up his mind about that. She liked the girl on sight—and at the same time she mistrusted her reaction, knowing well that a person can smile and smile and be a villain still and that no one, not even herself, had the power to see the mark of Cain.

“But I’ve seen her somewhere before,” the schoolteacher added to herself. “Or else she looks like somebody in the movies. Darken that lovely hair and she’d be a dead ringer for Loretta Young.”

Then they got down to cases. None of the three admitted taking the poison-pen valentines very seriously, now that they had had a chance to think it over. Miss Withers’ eyebrows went up, and she turned to Mr. Cushak. “You haven’t told them yet?”

“Told them what?”

“Told them that Larry Reed has been murdered—and that somebody left one of the valentines in his office, which I just found!” She told them some of the details and showed them the valentine.

The announcement fell heavily upon those in the office. Karas stiffened and Bayles quaked and Janet Poole tried to laugh and wound up almost crying. “Us four!” she cried. “One down and three to go.”

“Not necessarily,” pronounced the schoolteacher firmly. She turned to Karas. “And just what was the content of your message?”

He hesitated and drew a deep breath. “Filth,” he said. “It was all a lie.”

“What was, in particular?” Miss Withers asked reasonably.

“The nasty verse, which I do not remember. It intimates that I have abandon my wife in the old country when the Russky swine take over, and that I make my escape leaving her to disappear and probably to die in a slave-labor camp in Siberia.”

“Your wife
Lucy
?”

Her name, he stoutly maintained, had been Anastasia. He himself had been away in Italy on a concert tour when the Iron Curtain had clamped itself down on his unhappy homeland; because of his past political background it would have been sure death for him to go home. He had tried vainly through the Red Cross and all other possible sources to get word of her or to her. And he had never known anybody anywhere named Lucy and had no idea at all why that name should have been signed to the valentines.

Nor had either of the others ever known a Lucy, Miss Withers found out on further exploration. Rollo Bayles diffidently admitted that his valentine had been addressed “To the Cowardly Apostate;” some fifteen years ago while still in his late teens he had briefly studied for the priesthood to please his mother, but he had been more interested in art and other worldly affairs and at the gentle but firm advice of his superiors he had renounced his vocation before taking vows. “But who would want to drag that up now?” he complained in a high, brittle voice. “Who would even
know
?”

“Perhaps we deal with a mind reader,” Miss Withers suggested dryly. “Or perhaps you let something slip in a careless moment of conversation; people often do. A friendly bartender, or something like that?”

Bayles slowly shook his head, but he frowned thoughtfully.

Janet Poole, next in line, was less cooperative. Her soft red mouth set itself firmly. “Tell you or anybody else what was in my valentine? I think I’d rather die first.”

“The whole purpose of this meeting,” the schoolteacher reminded her, “is to see that you don’t die. Very well, we’ll respect your privacy for the time being at least. And we’ll have to skip the mysterious Lucy character for the nonce—though it would be most interesting to know if anyone of that name works here at the studio or ever did work here.” She looked inquiringly at Mr. Cushak.

“I have already checked,” he admitted. “She doesn’t and she didn’t. We had a Lurine and a Lacybelle and a Laverne, but no Lucy.”

“Really,” Miss Withers nodded thoughtfully. “Then it would appear that ‘Lucy’ is the nom de plume of somebody else, perhaps even concealing the identity of a man, and that someone who knows you all and knows enough about you to stick a pin into a tender place has a most determined grudge. So who could it be?”

“Nobody!” said Jules Karas, spouting blue cigar smoke. “Poppycock. I still think that somehow it is only a very bad joke.”

“A bad joke—with me stumbling on Larry Reed’s body in his house up on Mulholland? I think not. Somebody has painted a target on you four people—and has already hit one bull’s-eye.”

They seemed to shrink suddenly in upon themselves, but nobody said anything. The maiden schoolteacher looked severely at them. “Just how often,” she asked quietly, “have you four people worked together intimately?”

“But they haven’t!” spoke up Ralph Cushak from behind his mahogany desk. “This is a big studio, Miss Withers, with lots of different cartoon projects going all the time. These four people may have had accidental contacts around the lot, and they certainly know one another to speak to, but to my knowledge they have never been assigned to the same story or worked together in the same office. Of course, Mr. Karas here is in charge of all our music, assisted by such composers and musicians as he needs on a part-time basis. Mr. Bayles paints the backgrounds for many of our pictures, especially those involving underwater scenes or woodland stuff. But Reed works—I mean, worked—only on the Bird series, the Peter Penguin stuff, and Miss Poole here is animator on the Willy Wombat and Charley Chipmunk series, though now and then like all our people she sits in on a conference concerning one of the other characters. But these four people have had no regular contact; there is nothing whatever to link them together. The’ whole thing, if you ask me, is quite mad.”