Nipped in the Bud (9 page)

“Perhaps you don’t. But listen a moment. Junior Gault has been in prison for months. During that time he has been questioned and interviewed and heaven knows what. Do you suppose there is any possible harm I could do with my innocent queries?”

“But why?”

“Ina Kell,” she pointed out, “is still missing.”

The inspector frowned. “She’ll turn up. It’s only a question of time.”

“Time, Oscar, is of the essence. I have a hunch—”

There were moments, and this was one, when Oscar Piper could be surprising. “Okay,” he reversed himself reasonably. “Go ahead. Some of your hunches have worked out in the past. We have Gault over in Detention. He has as yet been convicted of no crime; he is technically innocent until proven guilty. He can write checks, he can vote, he is still a citizen. We certainly can’t prevent him from having an interview with a representative of the press, for instance.”

“Why, Oscar!”

“I can fix it up for you to be taken to his cell, introduced to him as Miss Whoozis of the Daily Whatzis, and from then you are strictly on your own. What more can you ask? After all, you’re on the other side.”

The maiden schoolteacher had given him many an askance look in her day, but this was one of the askancest of all. “
Et tu, Brute?
Everybody takes it for granted that I’m necessarily on the other side, even when I’m only trying to get at the truth!”

The interview with Junior Gault took place that same afternoon in a grim and ill-smelling building overlooking the scummy waters of the East River. The warder escorted Miss Withers through two gates, down a long hall, motioned to a particular cell, and then withdrew almost but not quite out of earshot. And then at long last the schoolteacher was face to face with Junior, or at least with such portions of him as could be seen through heavy steel grillwork.

It was not quite as she had expected. In the back of her mind she had been romantically anticipating something like Bert Lytell in the famous old one-act play, the one where he denied his identity to his long-lost sister and then walked off bravely to the electric chair, saying, “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.” Here before her was a pasty-faced, sullenly handsome young man smoking a cigar bigger and blacker than any the inspector had ever sported. There was nothing heroic about him, no trace of graciousness in his manner. He did not even bother to stand up.

“So you’re a reporter,” Junior greeted her. “What paper do you write for, the
Hobo News?
”

“Frankly, I am not a reporter at all,” Miss Withers broke the news to him. “I only said that so I could get in. I’m here to help you.”

“Okay,” he told her. “Leave the Bible tracts with the warder and run along.”

She sniffed. “I don’t happen to be passing out tracts, though it would appear that you are in need of some. You seen very bitter, young man, which is quite understandable. I’ll come to the point. You have already caused one death—with some provocation, I’ll admit. But isn’t that enough to have on your conscience?”

“Maybe you know what you’re raving about,” Gault said. “I don’t.”

“Just who would kidnap or perhaps even murder a key witness in a misguided attempt to save your skin, young man?”

“What?” Now he stood up.

“Just what has happened to the young lady who was unfortunate enough to happen to see you leaving the scene of the crime?”

“There wasn’t anybody—” he began quickly, and stopped. “Nobody has yet proved that I was even there!”

“Whatever happened to your gold cigarette lighter, by the way?”

“Whatever happens to all cigarette lighters? They get lost. You couldn’t get lost too, could you?”

“But if you will only listen—”

Junior Gault was calling to the waiting man in uniform. “Look, isn’t it bad enough to be locked up in this crummy cell without having you turn loose one of the Whoops sisters on me?”

The warder approached, jerking a grimy thumb. “All right, ma’am.”

“I was just leaving,” vented Miss Withers indignantly. “And I’ll remember to send you the tracts, young man. I also hope to have a front seat at your trial for murder!”

“Don’t count on it.” Junior Gault was smiling, not pleasantly. “And if there is a trial I’ll bet a thousand bucks against your bustle that I get an acquittal.” He said a good deal more too; as she took her hasty departure the schoolteacher kept both hands pressed over her maidenly ears.

“What did you expect, chimes?” demanded the inspector reasonably when he heard about it. The two ancient friends and sparring partners were holed up in a little spaghetti joint a few blocks from Headquarters, over plates of scallopini of veal and tossed green salad redolent of olive oil and garlic and grated Parmesan cheese. “Of course Junior Gault is a louse. Murderers aren’t nice people—and murder isn’t a chess problem; it’s a cruel, ugly mess. You should have stuck to your conchology or whatever it was.”

“Yes, Oscar. I wanted to, but you seemed anxious to have me return to the fray. Anyway, I feel sorry for that young man.”

“Sorry? But I thought you wanted to wash his mouth out with soap?”

“That, too. But he is a soul in torment, or he wouldn’t talk and act as he does. Even in my classrooms, Oscar, I never made the mistake some teachers do of saving all my attention and affection for the teacher’s pets. The problem children need help much more. And so what if Junior Gault did commit a murder? It was in hot blood, and he had unusual provocation.”

“Sure, the television ribbing he got. But …”

“It went deeper than that. Rich men’s sons can have inferiority complexes too. Junior was born to a stern, rock-ribbed father who must have been more than fifty when his one child was born, with an almost insurmountable gap between. Junior was only trying to express his individuality in all his early life—in his college athletics, his polo, his fling with the chorus girls. He finally found himself in business and even then they called him the Wonder Boy, the boss’s fair-haired son. But he was going great guns, he had made a success of the moribund family business and was even engaged to a glamorous postdeb. And then he was cut down by ridicule, the oldest and cruelest weapon known to man.”

“I thought Cain used a stone,” murmured Oscar Piper.

“The stone was no sharper than Tony Fagan’s gibes. Remember, Junior was sitting with his new fiancée and some of their—meaning
her
—friends when he had his mildly vulnerable past dragged out and held up for half the world to laugh at. Everything that Fagan said about him was cleverly calculated to hurt, to strike below the waist …”

“Belt,” corrected the inspector.

Miss Withers’ sniff was almost a snort. “Don’t quibble. I happened to notice during the interview in the prison that Mr. Gault actually does wear built-up shoes, but one of them is built up an inch or so more than the other. I checked with the newspaper files—and he had a triple fracture of one leg in a spill from a wild horse some years ago. That would account for his wartime 4-F status. And the crack about the beauty doctor—according to an old picture of him taken during his junior year at New Haven, when he played the last five minutes of a Yale-Army game, he had a very Byronish profile, quite like his father’s, even then. The nose must have been rebuilt after some other smashup, or one might even say restored. Don’t you see? Fagan’s ribbing, which even had to include cracks about Dallas Trempleau’s nice but presumably untrained voice, was all what my children at P.S. 38 used to call ‘dirty pool.’”

“So maybe the charge should be reduced to second-degree murder,” Oscar Piper said with a medium-sized shrug. “That’s out of my hands. You should talk to Jack Hardesty about that—we just catch ’em and assemble the evidence.”

“I might just do that,” Miss Withers told him. “Except that I’m not sure about Mr. Hardesty. For a vigilant assistant district attorney, who also makes it clear that he has a slight crush on an important, but missing witness, he isn’t half enough worried about Ina Kell. Mr. Bordin’s secretary, whom I shamelessly pumped at lunch yesterday, is of the opinion that it is the prosecution which has spirited Miss Kell away, under the impression that she has come around to the idea that perhaps Junior Gault isn’t guilty after all!”

“Forget it,” said the inspector seriously. “Hildegarde, I mean it. You know I cut corners sometimes, and so does the D.A.’s office, but nothing like that. We don’t hide witnesses. And Junior Gault, as you well know, is guilty as sin.”

“I know,” said Miss Withers. “Only I’m still sorry for him.”

“You women are all alike. Always full of mawkish sympathy for some no-good killer—”

The schoolteacher frowned. “Oscar, during that few minutes when Junior Gault sat in front of the television screen, watching his own program that he was paying for, he lost just about everything he had to lose. Including his girl. Miss Trempleau, I understand, couldn’t take it and bowed out.”

“Sure. Out of town.”

“Hmm. Then it wasn’t just a polite excuse? Dallas is really traveling abroad?”

“Sort of. She’s traveling in Mexico. Europe probably looked a little hot to her, with the political situation what it is.”

Miss Withers peered into her coffee cup, as if looking for tea leaves with which to read a fortune. “I can understand that. The whole world is hot, and I wouldn’t exactly blame her if she had taken off for the moon. But, Oscar, how do you
know
she’s in Mexico?”

“Relax, we’re sure. If you must know, one of the D.A.’s men went out to check on Miss Trempleau; he’s a smart, curly-haired laddie who makes friends easily. The place on Long Island is closed down, except for a caretaker and his wife who’ve been with the family for years. But their little boy was found playing with a horse and rider made of plaited straw that still bore a tag, ‘Souvenir of Tijuana.’ The young mistress had remembered to send it along for his sixth birthday a few days before.”

“Oh,” said the schoolteacher flatly. “Then what about the Gault Foods offices? What did his business associates think of Junior?”

“About what you’d expect them to think of the boss’s 4-F son who’d shot up to being practically head of the firm in a few years, and tripled the business. Grudging admiration, respect, some jealously and resentment. He had no close friends….”

And at that moment Emilio, who usually stayed put behind the cash register, came waddling toward their table. It was the custom of the genial host to pour out for favored visitors a few drops of
strega,
a particularly vile cordial which the inspector thought must have been aged in an old kerosene can. He was about to explain that the lady didn’t drink and that he himself was still on duty, when Emilio said, “Signore Inspector, it is your office on the phone—a Sergeant Smeety. You are here,
sí?
”

“I am here,
non!
” snapped Piper. “Can’t a man finish his
zabaglione
in peace?”

“But he said to tell you, if you happened in, that it is a
twenty-three
.”

The inspector suddenly stood up, almost knocking over his chair. “Sorry, Hildegarde,” he mumbled, and was gone. Leaving Miss Withers with his dessert, his almost-unsmoked perfecto, and the check.
Twenty-three
obviously meant “skidoo” in his private office code.

Oscar Piper was a fast walker, but in spite of his lead she drew up alongside before he was halfway down the block, and came across the finish line at the entrance to his office a length and a half in the lead, just galloping. John Hardesty, his hair rather more windswept than usual, was pacing up and down the room, giving a better-than-average imitation of a cat on hot bricks.

“Well?” demanded the inspector.

“It’s Ina Kell!” blurted out the assistant D.A.

“Oh, my prophetic soul!” cried Miss Withers. “They’ve found her body?”

“No!” the young man barked. “She’s
gone!
”

Piper sat down wearily at his desk, looking dazed. The schoolteacher said brightly, “I think this is where I came in? Hasn’t she been missing for a week or so?”

Nobody answered her. The inspector was staring at Hardesty. “You mean your man who went out to Ebensburg to get her let her get away?”

“It
wasn’t
her,” confessed the younger man. “Just a nightclub floozie who’d been stranded in Pittsburgh and who was working her way back here. Had the right colored hair, except at the roots, and fitted the general description. A smart cookie, too. Somehow she found out what it was all about, and accepted service of the subpoena and the free trip back to New York, laughing up her sleeve. She was
really
named Mary Smith—she proved that, and also the fact that she’d never heard of Ina Kell, in my office just now. Nothing we could hold her on.”

“Judas priest on a merry-go-round,” gurgled Oscar Piper. “So all this time you’ve been so sure you could lay hands on Ina whenever you wanted her—” He stopped short. “Hildegarde, I’m feeling woozy. Would you mind running down to the drugstore and getting me a bromo?”

“I would be happy,” the schoolteacher snapped, “to run and get you a dose of Rough-on-Rats. But you’re not getting rid of me until I have a full explanation. What’s all this, Mr. Hardesty, about little Ina?”

“Don’t blame John, blame me,” put in the inspector, squaring his shoulders. “I meant it for the best. It was for your own good. You were so determined to die a slow death out there in California among your silly snail shells or sea shells or whatever they are—”

“Never mind the conches. Just exactly
what
was for my own good?”

“The little act we put on. Getting you all worked up over the Gault case and the missing witness.” Piper studied the cigar butts in his ash tray, and selected the most promising. “I figured it was a natural for you to amuse yourself with—and you were interested in it anyway on account of the defense attorney being a former pupil of yours. You couldn’t do any harm or get into any trouble, because we already had the murderer locked up. Even if you succeeded in tracing Ina Kell back to Pennsylvania, where we had her—we
thought
we had her located and under surveillance, it wouldn’t have mattered. We could have had a good laugh over it.”