Nipped in the Bud (31 page)

“How gay and delightful,” murmured Miss Withers. “But not very.”

“And Larry Reed pulled another gag,” Cushak went on in an aggrieved tone. “He’d had a slight run-in with Tip Brown, one of the other top artists at the studio, and got even with him by filling out a phony change-of-address slip at the post office. Brown didn’t get any mail at all for weeks. He missed his bills, and had his utilities cut off for nonpayment. He also, I believe, missed certain important letters of a romantic nature. Finally he checked and found that everything had been forwarded to Horsecollar, Arizona, to be held until called for. Of course, Brown got all his mail eventually, but he was somewhat bitter about it at the time.”

“I see,” said the schoolteacher thoughtfully. “Practical jokes—and they’re usually most impractical, too. Like pulling a chair out from somebody about to sit down, and perhaps fracturing a pelvis.”

He nodded. “The artistic temperament, blowing off steam. Sometimes I feel like the keeper in a snake pit. But I still don’t see how Reed could have had anything to do with our present problem, because as it happened he checked out of the studio early yesterday morning, pleading illness. Probably just another of his hangovers, but he certainly wasn’t around where he could have planted those nasty valentines.”

Miss Withers said nothing, but she looked very thoughtful. “Anyway,” the studio executive said firmly, “the big boss wants very much to find out who is responsible for this latest and most unfunny gag—if it is a gag. And it’s clearly an inside job; it must be attacked from inside. My instructions are to hire you, to add you to our staff on some plausible pretext or other, and get you inside the gates where you can have a free rein.

“You actually mean that you want me to pass as a regular studio employee?” She brightened. “I used to paint china in my girlhood days; perhaps I could make like one of your artists?”

Mr. Cushak looked politely dubious; “There is,” he said, “a considerable difference between china-painting and drawing cartoons. Do you happen to play any musical instrument? We often hire outside musicians. And sometimes we hire actors too—but no, I don’t think your voice would do even for Wilma Wombat. We’ll have to hit on something else—” He broke off, looking toward the patio door. “What on earth,” he gasped, “is
that
thing?”

Something large and brownish, rather resembling a bear that had got caught in a buzz saw, was standing outside on its hind legs and trying to twist the doorknob with its teeth. After a moment the creature succeeded and came scampering in, a great, galumphing beast; on closer view it was a dog, but a dog fearfully and wonderfully made. It was about to hurl itself upon the visitor when Miss Withers spoke sharply. “Talley, mind your manners! This is Mr. Cushak—Mr. Cushak, this is Talleyrand, my Standard French poodle.”

The dog, a sworn friend of the entire human race, restrained himself with difficulty from climbing into the visitor’s lap and licking his face; he compromised by sitting down and offering a hopeful paw. Cushak shook it, murmuring an automatic “How do you do?” and then his face slowly lighted up with inspiration.

“I have it!” he said.

“You have what?” queried the schoolteacher blankly.

“An idea! This makes everything easy. A poodle—we’ll hire
him
and you can come along as chaperone.” Cushak went on to explain that for some years the studio had been fooling around with the idea of a feature-length cartoon which would have a poodle as its hero; the project had been shelved but it could be ostensibly taken out of moth balls and put back into production, with Talley as the model for the artists to work from.

“A
live
model?” gasped Miss Withers. “For cartoons?”

Mr. Cushak explained that it was common practice in the business; that in the past they had had kangaroos and raccoons and even a baby alligator on the lot for the artists to sketch. “Nobody in the studio,” he said firmly, “will think anything of it. The dog is a natural comedian, anyway. You’ll both be there at nine?”

“Wild horses,” decided the schoolteacher, “couldn’t keep us away.”

“Good, good.” So it was settled with a handshake.

It wasn’t Miss Withers admitted to herself after the man had taken himself away in his shining Cadillac, exactly the sort of case she would have chosen. But at least it was one where her services had been requested and would presumably be paid for—a very pleasant novelty in her career as a sleuth. And she felt that she was coming up with one of her famous hunches. “It would be rather a feather in our caps, wouldn’t it,” she asked the adoring poodle a little later, “if we could walk into Mr. Cushak’s office at the studio bright and early tomorrow morning with this case all neatly tied up in a bag? We shall set the alarm for seven.”

At nine o’clock next morning Miss Hildegarde Withers appeared at the main entrance of Miracle-Paradox Studios complete with leashed poodle and also an unleashed headache, a headache beyond all aspirin. She went through the necessary formalities at the gate—getting inside the studio was about as difficult as getting into Fort Knox—and then the private policeman behind the wicket found her pass and she was guided by a cute blue-uniformed messenger girl past looming sound-stages, past bungalows and office buildings and standing sets all beautiful in front and plaster and chicken wire behind, until finally they came to the back corner lot and the street called Cartoon Alley. She was led up to Mr. Cushak’s office in a smallish modernistic two-story building and plunked down in a reception room decorated with brightly colored pictures of animals wearing pants—prominent among them was the engaging bird known as Peter Penguin….

The schoolteacher cooled her heels and whiled away the time by watching Mr. Cushak’s secretary, a lush, slightly overblown girl with midnight hair and a most plunging neckline, who juggled the phone and the interoffice communicator deftly and at the same time managed to open the morning mail and write half a dozen letters. Now and then she went out to the coffee-vending machine in the hall, as if she needed it. There were dark shadows around her eyes.

“Burning the candle at both ends and in the middle, too,” thought the schoolteacher.

And then a buzzer sounded, and she was told that she might go on into the Presence. It was something like an audience with the Pope, she gathered, except that, of course, you didn’t actually have to wear a veil and a black dress. She tiptoed gingerly inside and found Mr. Cushak smiling his usual thin smile. “Fine, fine,” he said. “You’re here.”

There was no denying that, so she didn’t try. But she took a deep breath. “Mr. Cushak, there’s something—”

“Oh, yes,” he interrupted. “The remuneration. Shall we say $250 a week for the poodle and $100 for you as caretaker, with a bonus, of course, if successful? We’ll make it a three-week guarantee; you should be able to wind it up in that time, no?”

“But—” Miss Withers began protestingly.

He waved his hand. “Okay, make it $200 for you, and that’s as far as we can go. Motion-picture studios have their problems today, dear lady, what with switching to three-dimension and with television breathing on our necks.” He spoke the word “television” as if it had four letters and was something written by nasty children on walls and sidewalks.

“Thank you, the stipend is thoroughly adequate,” she said hastily. “I was not holding out for more money; the novelty of being paid anything at all for my humble services is enough. But you see, Mr. Cushak, I thought last night that I might wind up your little mystery in one day. ‘Pride goeth …’ It seemed obvious to me that the person we sought was somebody on your staff, one of your wild Bohemian artist-writers who had slipped a cog. In other words, a habitual practical joker who had gone too far and ventured across the line of good sense and good taste. You yourself mentioned one name.”

“Larry Reed?” Mr. Cushak looked blank. “But I told you that Reed was home sick that day, and yesterday, too. It would have been impossible for him to have planted those nasty valentines. Which reminds me.” He pressed a button on his talk box. “Joyce? Get me the cashier’s office.” There was a moment’s pause, and then, “Cushak here. Larry Reed hasn’t reported for work again today, or phoned in. No hangover should last three days, so I want him terminated and a final check made out as of today…. That’s right.” He hung up and turned back to his visitor with a look in his eye which indicated that he was remembering a certain wheelbarrow full of water in a certain automobile. “We have to be firm with these people sometimes,” he explained. “And Larry Reed has finally gone too far.”

“Farther than you think,” murmured Miss Withers. “You see—well, I’ll have to begin at the beginning and go on to the end and then stop, as it says in
Alice
. As usual, I have been leaping to conclusions. Last night I had it all figured out that Larry Reed could have found ways to strew the poison-pen valentines around without actually being present in the studio; that his absence could have been contrived. A girl friend, an accomplice, perhaps.”

Cushak thought, and shook his head. “I doubt it. Though from what I understand he has girl friends enough around the place and even an ex-wife—Joyce Reed—who happens to be my secretary and a good one, too. They divorced a couple of years ago, but they seem to have stayed on reasonably friendly terms. But not that friendly—if Reed did think of anything so demented as sending out vicious valentines to people in the studio, he wouldn’t have taken her or anybody else in on the deal. And for all his twisted sense of humor, I don’t think that he or any of our people would possibly have thought of drawing Peter Penguin
dead
. His mind just wouldn’t work that way.”

She nodded. “I live and learn. But at the time Reed did seem like the most promising suspect. So bright and early this morning I looked up his home address in the phone book and then took pains to pay him a call, a surprise visit, working on the old but sound theory that people wakened from a sound sleep are usually very poor liars when confronted with a sudden accusation. I thought that I might by that means solve our little mystery ahead of time, but—” She sniffed.

“Well, I see that the ruse didn’t succeed.” Cushak shrugged his well-padded shoulders. “Anyway, you have eliminated Reed, which is that much gained.”

“Correction, please,” said the maiden schoolteacher gently. “I didn’t eliminate Larry Reed, but I’m afraid that someone else did. Because I found him dead.”

*
The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan
, Crime Club, 1941.

“Life so strange,

so sad the sky …
”

SWINBURNE

I
T HAD BEEN LIKE THIS
. Shortly after dawn Miss Withers had located Larry Reed’s home on the eastern fringes of Mulholland Drive, that winding pathway atop the low brush-covered mountains that divide Beverly Hills and Hollywood from the Valley, and had turned her sputtering little coupé into a long driveway leading down to a coral-pink house perched precariously on the edge of a canyon. It was a lonely house without a neighbor in view, its modern cracker-box lines stark and bare in the bright white light of the morning.

A big Buick convertible of recent date had been parked hastily or carelessly with one wheel in the petunia beds, its keys still dangling from the dashboard. Yet the mud on the tires was dry. Outside the front door were newspapers and bottles of milk and yoghurt. Nobody answered Miss Withers’ ring at the bell, but when she put her sharp ear to the panel she could hear far away inside a muffled intermittent yowling, as of some trapped animal in pain.

“A cat is in trouble,” decided the schoolteacher. The dog Talley was elaborately disinterested, perhaps because sad experience had taught him that anything happening to cats was much too good for them. Leaving the poodle to investigate some interesting bushes, she made her way around to the other side of the house, which was really the front. The place gave onto a wide brick patio on the very brim of the canyon, cluttered with barbecue equipment and ping-pong tables and summer furniture all covered with leaves and dust. There was a breath-taking view of the whole San Fernando Valley and of the Santa Rosa Mountains to the north. It was a place someone had loved and then neglected; the roses should have been cut back and the grass of the tiny lawn sadly needed mowing.

Through picture windows Miss Withers could glimpse a big living room, cold and empty now. The french doors were locked, but locks could sometimes yield to a deft bit of work with a bent hairpin. It was, of course, technically breaking and entering, but to the’ schoolteacher the piteous appeals of an animal in distress could excuse a great deal. The distant yowling still went on, a tired mechanical sound now. She hesitated only for a second.

The lock gave easily, and she went inside. “Is anybody home?” she cried, and when there was no answer she advanced into the living room. It was completely a man’s room, smelling of stale tobacco, furnished expensively and haphazardly with more than the usual complement of lamps and lounge chairs and ash trays. The books on the shelves were mostly texts on art or bound art studies, etchings and reproductions of Picasso and Klee and Degas and Dali, an oddly assorted lot which told the curious schoolteacher nothing in particular. In one corner was an easel holding an unfinished water color, the bust portrait of a girl with interesting cheekbones and unusual eyes; she thought it rather remarkably good. Nearby were other stacked pictures finished and half-finished; drawings, oils, pastels, all splashy and improvised and short on technique according to her conservative tenets, but showing that Larry Reed had moments when he wanted desperately to be something more than a comic cartoonist.

The place was silent now, but she kept on exploring. On the left was a kitchen, full of labor-saving gadgets but a bit dusty. There were the remains of a breakfast on the dinette table, relics of ham and eggs, potatoes and toast and orange juice and coffee—not, she judged, today’s vintage nor yesterday’s. It was typically a bachelor’s kitchen, the contents of shelves and refrigerator leaning largely toward beer and fizz water and the makings of breakfast and late midnight snacks; it had only known the casual ministrations of a part-time cleaning woman who hadn’t been in recently.