Nipped in the Bud (24 page)

“Guilty or not?” queried the schoolteacher.

“You and I both know who’s guilty!” Ruth suddenly thrust a copy of today’s San Diego
Union
under Miss Withers’ nose. “See that? Junior Gault gave the slip to two New York detectives last night and disappeared into thin air. Would anybody who was innocent do that?”

“Possibly not,” admitted Miss Withers calmly. “But I’ve often found that there are degrees of innocence—and of guilt. Nothing in this world is ever completely black or white.”

“Phooey,” Ruth said, “if you’ll pardon the expression.”

“And if you’re still of the opinion that Miss Ina Kell is being treated like a petted pearl, I suggest that you try to be on hand at the San Ysidro port of entry at two o’clock tomorrow afternoon, and watch her turned over to the American authorities, perhaps in handcuffs.”

“Really?” gasped Ruth Fagan.

“Really and truly.”

The blonde woman’s face set into a mask. “I’ll stick around and see,” she announced. “I’ll be at the Hotel Angel, up the street, if you want me for anything.”

Miss Withers made a mental note of it, though she could think of nothing more unlikely than that she would want Ruth Fagan for anything. After the woman was gone, she sat down and carefully reread the A.P. dispatch in the San Diego paper. Finally a faint smile of amusement crossed her face. Junior Gault had taken advantage of the complicated situation to make himself scarce, and she could hardly blame him.

Inspector Oscar Piper knocked at her door later in the afternoon, in an unwontedly good mood. “Stop looking so pleased with yourself, Oscar,” she told him tartly. “There is no reason for you to be grinning like a Cheshire cat. With the chief suspect in your pet murder case now a fugitive from justice—”

Oddly unperturbed, Piper said, “We’ll pick up Gault any time we need him.”

“Really? Ruth Fagan just dropped in, throwing her weight around like anything. Which means that everyone—and I do mean everyone—who has had anything to do with the Fagan case is for one reason or another out here in our midst. Oscar, I don’t like it; it’s like seeing vultures gathering.”

“Relax,” said the inspector easily. “That’s just human nature. This is the most dramatic and exciting thing that has ever happened to any of them. And everybody wants to get into the act, as Jimmy Durante used to say….”

“‘To get into the act,’” the schoolteacher echoed. “Oscar, I do believe that you have a point. Moreover, I notice that you have a new crease in your trousers, your hat has been reblocked, and I think you are wearing a brand-new polka-dot bow tie. Isn’t that in honor of your appearance tomorrow before the television cameras?”

Oscar Piper looked faintly sheepish. “Well,” he said, “these things only happen once in a blue moon.”

“Yes, Oscar, how true.”

“It’s been a funny case. But after two o’clock tomorrow everything will be over but the shouting.”

“In which I can hardly be expected to join. I’m still not entirely satisfied, Oscar.”

“Which doesn’t matter,” he pointed out, “as long as the jury is satisfied. Stop worrying. What are you doing for dinner?”

The schoolteacher explained that she had thought of just sending out for a sandwich or something in that line.

“Forget it,” Piper told her jovially. “You can’t spend your life sitting around here waiting for the phone to ring. Better come on over to San Diego with me. I’ve got to meet John Hardesty at seven at Lindbergh Field, and then we can all have dinner somewhere on his expense account.”

“Ah?” she said, interested. “So our bright young district attorney is finally joining us, complete with warrant, no doubt?”

“Sure thing.”

“I only hope he finds somebody to serve it on,” Miss Withers remarked, half to herself. She hesitated. “It’s a very attractive invitation—I’d like a few words with Mr. Hardesty right now, and my social life and my financial condition are neither one in such a state that I can afford to turn down a dinner date. Will you be patient while I make myself a bit more presentable?”

She disappeared into the bedroom, and returned half an hour later resplendent in her best dotted Swiss, beneath a hat which looked—the inspector thought—like disaster in a florist’s window.

“You had a caller,” the inspector told her. “I sent him on his way.”

“Oscar! It wasn’t—”

“It was a small Mexican boy with a big bag of groceries, which you will find over there on the table. A very suspicious boy, who wouldn’t turn over the package to me until I explained that you were dressing, that I was an old friend, and then I still had to flash my badge.”

“Vito is a very bright boy,” Miss Withers told him.

“Evidently,” Oscar Piper admitted. “I tried to pay him for the delivery, but he said it had already been taken care of. He also said to tell you that he had some confidential information about your lawsuit, but he’d report back on that later in the evening.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “I’m glad to hear it. Then—”

“We ended on a friendly but strictly professional note,” the inspector went on to explain. “The boy showed me his Dick Tracy Junior Detective Badge and then left, giving me a snappy salute.”

“A good boy is a good boy in any language,” Miss Withers said. “Oscar, on second thought I believe I’ll have to forgo the pleasure of dinner. Some other time—”

He looked blank. “Hey, what’s up? Just because you got a grocery delivery—” Suddenly the inspector pointed. “Your groceries are bleeding through the sack.”

“Mind your own business!” the schoolteacher told him, and hastily picked up the package. But he had already had time to glimpse that the provisions from which she had ostensibly planned to make a light snack consisted of a bottle of milk and the raw and bloody head of a goat, fresh from the butcher’s.

“Okay, okay, I’ll see you later maybe,” said Inspector Oscar Piper hastily. There were times in the past when he had thought that his old friend was deep in her dotage, but never quite so much as now.

“When you see Mr. Hardesty,” she asked, “please try to remember to ask him what make of television set Crystal Joris has in her New York apartment, and whether or not he ever saw one of Tony Fagan’s milk bills, because four quarts a day at twenty-two cents a quart runs into money, and—”

“Three!” he corrected savagely. “As if it made any difference. I distinctly remember there were three bottles of milk outside Fagan’s door the morning of the murder. They show up in the official pictures, too. But are you insinuating now that he was done to death by poisoned milk or something?”

“Never mind,” said Miss Withers wearily. “Run along, Oscar.”

Piper hesitated in the doorway. “You’re feeling all right? No spots before the eyes, or dizziness or anything?”

The schoolteacher sniffed, and closed the door firmly in his face. Thereupon she became very busy indeed. In fact, she was in the midst of a scientific but somewhat gruesome experiment when the telephone rang.

“Bother!” said Miss Withers. “Hello?”

It was the voice of the clerk downstairs. “It is a long-distance call for you, senorita. From Ensenada.”

“I withdraw the word
bother
,” she said under her breath. “Go ahead, please!”

“Just a
momentito
.” It was a long
momentito,
even longer than most, that Miss Withers had to sit beside the telephone.

“The watched pot,” she told herself. “I will read a magazine, I will think of the names of vice-presidents, I will count to a hundred.”

Then it happened. “Here is your party,” said an operator in Spanish.

There was a faint whispering, far, far away. “Hello,” cried Miss Withers. “Hello, Ina?”

The line clicked and buzzed. “Is this Miss Withers?” came in Dallas Trempleau’s expensive and cultured accents, muffled by distance.

“Yes, yes!” But the schoolteacher felt an odd sense of disappointment.

“Oh, I’m so glad you’re still there at the hotel,” the girl continued. “Please listen carefully, it’s most frightfully important and I have only a minute. Do you know where I can locate that police inspector from New York?”

“Why—” Miss Withers almost dropped the phone. “What did you say?”

“This Inspector Piper, or whatever his name is. The one who’s supposed to take Ina and me into custody tomorrow.”

“You
know
about that?”

“Of course. That lawyer of Junior’s let it out of the bag when he was here this afternoon, trying to get a statement out of Ina. Will you please …”

“Not so fast, young woman,” snapped the schoolteacher. “What’s happened? Is Ina there with you now, and is she all right?”

A moment’s hesitation. “She’s in the next room. I wouldn’t say she’s all right exactly—she’s going to have the worst hangover in Baja California when she wakes up tomorrow, but—”

“I don’t understand half of what you’re saying, and I’m not sure you do either. Did Bordin trade information with you girls, or what? Did he finally get the truth out of Ina? Is that what you’re hinting?”

“Why—no. He got a sort of statement, but he didn’t uncover much new except that Ina is sure she heard somebody go along that apartment-house hallway when she was just coming out of the bathroom that morning. But Bordin was very nice about it all, and insisted on buying us champagne cocktails at the hotel bar before he left. Ina hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, and for some reason or other it hit her—so I remembered something you said the other night when we all sat up so late. That gave me the key!”

“It did, really?” Miss Withers felt a little unreal, as if caught in some puppet show where a mad, invisible Tony Sarg pulled the strings. “The key to what?”

“You remember—
in vino Veritas.
After Bordin left I simply plied Ina with champagne spiked with brandy. She got so plastered that all her mental blocks and inhibitions and everything just simply dissolved, and she finally spilled it. I
know,
now!”

“Well, for heaven’s sake, tell me!” cried the schoolteacher.

“Not over the phone, where somebody could hear. But if you can locate Inspector Piper and have him meet me somewhere in Tijuana tonight, perhaps at your hotel about midnight—”

“I’ll do nothing of the kind. No, no, Dallas. You stay right there and I’ll bring him to you.”

“Please listen a minute. I know what I’m doing. Before I make any accusation I’ve simply got to see somebody and ask one important question. That’s only fair—”

“See who?”

“I can’t—I won’t tell you over the phone.” The voice was stubborn. “But if you’ll find the inspector …”

“Most certainly not!” cried Miss Withers desperately, trying somehow to inject a note a common sense into things. “If by any chance you have got hold of something it’s simply insane to try to handle it by yourself. This is a murder case, do you understand? We’re dealing with a person who has killed once, and may kill again. You mustn’t go putting your head in a noose.”

“I’m not afraid.” The girl laughed, a light Vassar or Sarah Lawrence laugh, but there was an odd echo of bitterness in it. “What happens to me is most unimportant now.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. And don’t you dare go driving off anywhere alone. You and Ina lock the doors and windows and pull down all the shades and—”

“I’m sorry, but that’s quite impossible. And I know what I’m doing. I’m driving up immediately.”

“Well, then, for heaven’s sake don’t leave Ina Kell alone and unguarded for a single moment, do you understand? Don’t let her out of your sight; bring her with you if you must come up to town, but—” The schoolteacher suddenly realized that she was talking to a dead phone.

Nettled, she put through a call of her own. But unfortunately she did not know what name the girls had been living under at the Pacifico. The desk clerk was very uncommunicative, but at long last he admitted that the bungalow in question did not answer. “The young ladies, they jus’ drive away, I think,” was his final word on the subject. “Is there any message?”

The only message that Miss Withers thought would fit the circumstances would be the one word “Goodbye.” Dallas and Ina had evidently gone roaring off somewhere in the big blue Cadillac to ask the wrong question of the wrong person.

“
Yet, should I murder you,

I might before the world take the excuse

Of madness
…”

—BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER

T
HE AVENIDA TONIGHT WAS
a river at flood, a wide stream of slowly moving automobiles packed bumper to bumper and fender to fender, threatening at any moment to overflow onto the sidewalks. The Camino Nuevo and the Calle Larroque and some other side streets absorbed part of the overflow, but the main tide moved northward to push against the dam of the high iron gates at the port of entry.

It had been a big evening at the Fronton, with
jai-alai
players featured who were advertised to be fresh over from Spain, from the Basque mountain valleys, and thus perhaps a little less likely to win and lose their matches by prearrangement with certain cold-eyed gentlemen in Mexico City. It had been a bigger evening at the
Hipódromo de Lebreles,
the greyhound races, where a $10,000 derby had been run off. Over six thousand automobiles with United States license plates had come down to Tijuana for the two sporting events, and now—with the exception of those driven by members of the armed forces and others who had left their wives at home—were headed back across the border.

From the crowded street arose an almost unbearable cacophony, a dissonant medley of dins. Auto horns shrieked and beeped and honked, sidewalk vendors of leather goods and
dulces
and trinkets and lottery tickets raised their plaintive cries,
mariachis
banged their guitars and wailed their syrupy old songs of unrequited love. From a hundred
cantinas
and honky-tonks rose the amplified blare of dance orchestras, or women’s singing and men’s shouts and raucous laughter. Everything seemed raised in pitch, shrill and strange and a little off-key.

From somewhere far away a burro hitched to one of the street photographers’ gaudy prop carts lifted its painted head and brayed a lost, derisive heehaw. The animal might very well have been laughing at Miss Hildegarde Withers, who looked down on the street from the balcony of the suite at the Hotel Primero, feeling less hopeful with every passing moment. She turned back inside, closed the window with a slam, and said for the dozenth time that evening, “If I were only a man, I’d do something!”