Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (15 page)

Piper didn’t answer that. “Some one of our suspects,” he insisted, “is dodging back and forth between two identities. Jekyll and Hyde, or whatever it is. He’s Derek Laval when he wants to be and then he’s somebody else—some sober, respectable citizen that couldn’t possibly do anything wrong.”

The inspector scratched a match with his thumbnail and held the flame to his cigar. Outside it was twilight, a deep and murky twilight, but there was still light enough in the room to see Tom Sansom’s face, thick and disbelieving.

“Well?” said the inspector.

Sansom shook his head. “I’ve about made up my mind that it’s all goofer feathers. A guy falls off a chair and breaks his neck, and a driver goes off the road and kills himself and his passenger. Listen, Inspector, if we tried to work out a murder case whenever there’s a fatal traffic accident in California…”

“I can’t see that you’re trying much in this case,” Piper retorted.

“All right, all right. I’m not making trouble if I can help it. So far everybody’s been talking murder and nobody’s showed ten cents’ worth of proof.”

Piper looked at him quizzically. “Here then,” he said. “This is just about ten cents’ worth.” And he took a small envelope out of his pocket, handed it to the studio officer.

Sansom looked inside. “Well? It looks like some sort of wax.”

“It is. Sealing wax. I climbed down into Lost Lizard Canyon and ruined a suit of clothes to get that. Out of the death car.”

“Now, listen, Inspector! You’re not going to say that the brakes on the courier car were sealed with sealing wax, are you?”

“Uh-uh. Not the brakes. But I found that somebody had taken the locking pin out of the steering post of that bus and substituted a hunk of sealing wax. That fitted right into the slot and it must have worked for quite a while. Then it cracked, degenerated into powder, and the wheel just spun around. Perhaps coming up into the higher altitude and the colder air would help. Anyway, one hard yank as they were turning a corner, and—” The inspector shut his eyes for a moment as if he had a sudden attack of headache.

Sansom still shook his head, but without real emphasis. He looked down at the contents of the envelope.

“The inspector is right,” came a voice from behind them.

“Of course I’m—” Piper jerked his head around in a perfect double take. The hall door was ajar. Now it slowly, silently opened. In the doorway, clothed in something shimmery, silvery and unreal as moonbeams, stood Hildegarde Withers. She spoke.

“So
that’s
how I was murdered!”

There will be time to prepare

A face to meet the faces that you meet,

THERE WILL BE TIME TO MURDER….

T. S. ELIOT

P
LOP! PLOP! PLOP! THE
drops of rain water fell from Miss Withers’ cellophane raincape upon the hardwood floor. She came inside, shut the door behind her with a good, solid bang and switched on the light.

Tom Sansom, holding tight to the back of a chair, muttered something, but nobody was paying any attention to him. The inspector was just about the angriest man in the world at that moment, and his face was the shade of a plate of borsch.

“Oscar,” said the schoolteacher gently, “you can’t hold your breath forever, really you can’t.”

“I—” he began. “You—”

“I know, Oscar, I know,” she went on quickly. “I’m not at all dead, and you’re really very relieved about that. But also you’re furious at me because you had that long trip out here and all the fuss and worry for nothing.”

He still found it hard to say anything. “I’m sorry,” Miss Withers went on. “I wired you not to worry no matter what you heard. I sent the wire to your home because I thought that somebody might open and read it down at headquarters….”

“I didn’t even go home,” he admitted. “I just hopped the first plane….”

“Don’t act like that. I
was
murdered, to all intents and purposes. Only I was lucky enough to pull down a folding bed on top of my head and knock myself cold. I was only unconscious for a few minutes, but it was long enough to make me miss connections with that studio car. Afterwards—”

“But listen, lady!” Tom Sansom objected. “Your body—I mean, the report and everything. How did you get the sheriff and the hospital to cover up for you? That doesn’t make sense.”

“They
didn’t
cover up for me,” she went on. “There was a woman in the studio car. A friend of the driver possibly. Or a hitchhiker that he picked up….”

“Or the hotel chef’s missing wife!” Piper interjected, remembering. “Of course!”

“Anyway, she was identified as being
I.
That was too good an opportunity for me to miss, because I had a strong feeling that the accident was not an accident and that someone was trying to get rid of me. So I kept out of sight and started sleuthing in earnest.”

Piper said, “And you got—?”

She hesitated. “I don’t quite know, Oscar. I can’t tell yet.” But she turned a little away from Tom Sansom, and her eyelid dropped.

“If you made any notes on your progress, somebody’s been here and got them,” Piper told her. “Because we’ve searched the place thoroughly, hoping against hope that you left something behind.”

“Really, Oscar?” Miss Withers headed hastily for the kitchen. She threw open the refrigerator, took out a double boiler filled with cooked string beans and lifted the top. In the lower pan reposed a small notebook. “Perfectly safe, as I knew it would be. Besides, I haven’t been gone long enough—”

“A man was in here,” Piper insisted. “Those tracks on the kitchen floor”—he pointed—“and the apple.”

“I’m afraid the tracks are mine,” Miss Withers admitted, displaying her feet. She was wearing galoshes. “And I ate an apple just before I went out.”

“Did you smoke a cigar just before you went out?” queried Tom Sansom.

The inspector told her about that. “No,” said the schoolteacher, “I didn’t smoke any cigar.” She frowned. “I don’t see how anybody could have left it there. I’ve had no men callers—and nobody even knows I’m living here.”

“We found you,” Piper said. “So someone else could.”

He was looking for the cigar. But it wasn’t in the wastebasket. It wasn’t in any of the ash trays. “The thing’s gone,” he cried.

Then he saw the direction of Miss Withers’ glance. She was staring at the cigar butt in his fingers.

“Good Lord! I must have lit it and smoked it without realizing—” Oscar Piper sat down suddenly in a chair, feeling foolish.

“Smoking is automatic for most people,” Miss Withers reminded him. “It becomes such a habit that you have no idea of what your fingers are up to. Ten to one that is how the cigar got here in the first place. It smells just like those awful greenish-brown things you are so fond of.”

Tom Sansom began to laugh. Once started, he found it hard to stop. Oscar Piper glared at the man and then could not help chiming in. He laughed until the tears filled his eyes.

“There’s a time for everything.” Miss Withers finally cut them short. “Have your hysterics, gentlemen, but remember that we are still faced with the problem of a murder. Right now, somewhere in this town, a man is congratulating himself on having perpetrated another successful crime….”

“That’s right,” admitted Sansom soberly. “And I’d better get busy and report to Mr Lothian that you weren’t killed in that wreck like we thought.” He edged toward the door. “Maybe we can all get together for a conference sometime tomorrow?”

“Maybe we can,” agreed the inspector.

When they were alone Miss Withers turned to him. “Oscar, it was sweet of you to drop everything and come rushing out here because you heard I was hurt. I do appreciate it—especially after the way we’ve always fought….”

“What’s wrong with a good fight?” he demanded. “It was this guy Laval I was after anyway. I hate having a case remain in the ‘Open’ file.”

She smiled. “Of course, Oscar. By the way, I may have your case solved for you. I took a chance and dug up some photographs and set them to New York….”

“I know,” he told her. “That’s what I was really hoping to find in your apartment—your notes on which picture was which suspect. Because I’ve already got a report on them from Centre Street.”

She brightened. “Oscar! Did they manage to identify the man?” `

“Captain Nichols remembers the case. He thinks it is number three in your retouched photos that looks most like the guy he arrested in the Harris case. Why, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter,” she said slowly. “Except that number three can’t be the murderer of Saul Stafford—even if he does look well in an India-ink beard.”

“Why not?”

“Because I decided that the experiment needed a control,” she told him. “There weren’t pictures enough. So I put in a photograph of Stafford himself—and
that was number three.”

The inspector gnawed absently at the dead end of his cigar. “Saul Stafford himself. Another blind alley.” He told her about the abortive experiment at Lake Arrowhead. “That ended with Melicent Manning as the only suspect with the right type fingerprint.”

Miss Withers was doubtful. “From what you tell me, there was plenty of time for the colored man, Uncle Remus or whatever they called him, to switch glasses, substitute his own prints or anything else. Oscar, I’m afraid we haven’t eliminated as many suspects as we had hoped.”

“Now, Hildegarde—”

“They can be faked, as somebody or other proved last year with a gelatin process. Moreover, I myself saw the fingerprint evidence proving that both Sacco and Vanzetti handled the gun that killed the paymaster.”

“That was Boston!” Piper snapped back.

“What can be faked in Boston can be faked in New York or Hollywood or anywhere else!”

Suddenly they both realized that they were yelling at each other. “Relax, Hildegarde, relax,” Piper told her. “You’re too het up for a ghost.”

“Relax yourself, Oscar Piper,” she came back. But she stopped, put her hand for a moment on his shoulder. “Say, how would you like to take me out to dinner tonight?—to celebrate my return from the Valley of the Shadow?”

He brightened. “Swell! Just like old times—nice, quiet place where we can talk this thing out over a dish of spaghetti and a bottle of red ink.”

“Yes,” Miss Withers said, smiling faintly, “spaghetti, by all means.” She turned toward the bedroom door, then stopped. “Oscar, while I’m slipping into my best dress you might look at these letters I just got in answer to my ad in the newspaper. I asked for information about Derek Laval, hinting that it was to settle an estate.”

The inspector took them. “Laval? I was beginning to think that his middle name was Yehudi. The little man who wasn’t there.”

Speedly Miss Withers brought him up to date on her research in the newspaper files. “Laval exists, as you see—and very active is the existence he leads. Any man who plays polo, stays up until dawn in the Swing Club, jitterbugs with young girls, et cetera and so forth—”

“It must be the climate,” Piper told her, and settled down to a study of the new exhibits. The first letter was unimportant, being only from a moving-picture extra player, named Jules Lavalliere, who thought that his name might originally have been Laval and who hoped for a modest share in the supposed Laval estate. The second was from the mother of a young lady, named Cecily, who had gone to San Francisco for the Labor Day week end with Derek Laval and had not been heard of since. Said mother would like a forwarding address so that she might send along Cecily’s clothes, her parakeet and the small child which remained as a souvenir of Cecily’s last elopement.

The third was even more puzzling, being from the editor of a local magazine,
Script.
He had, it seemed, several dozen manuscripts, mostly of verse, which had been submitted during the past year by Derek Laval, with no return address. Some of the titles were listed as
The Sterilized Heiress, The Self-Appointed Bastard, The Face on Mona’s Floor
and
Owed to a Casting Couch.

Mr Wagner, the editor, had found these poems not only unsuited to publication, but hesitated to undergo the risk of putting them back into the United States mail and would like the author to call for them in person.

“Obviously,” Miss Withers announced as she swept out of the bedroom in her best dotted swiss, “Derek Laval is a person who ought to have his typewriter washed out with soap.”

“Well, now—” objected the inspector.

But Miss Withers was frowning. “That’s funny. He didn’t have a typewriter when I searched his apartment downstairs….”

The inspector did a double take on that. “You mean Laval
lives
in this building?”

“He did, but he doesn’t any more. He called up the landlady yesterday and announced that he was going to give up the place. You coming, Oscar?”

Vaguely baffled, the inspector procured a taxicab and got her into it. And that was the end of their council of war, at least for the time being, because inevitably the driver smelled that they were visitors to southern California and set himself up as a guide. He even drove several blocks out of his way—or theirs—to point out Mae West’s apartment house.

Finally, at an hour well past twilight, they whisked along that section of Sunset Boulevard which is known as “The Strip,” from which vantage point all of western Los Angeles twinkled and sparkled below them like an illuminated map.

Even the inspector, not normally prone to enthuse about views, was forced to admit, “Maybe I’ve been wrong about the place.” Then they slowed up for a traffic jam outside a great pink modernistic box of a building outlined with blue neon lights.

There was a gauntlet of sight-seers on either side of the velvet carpet leading to the door, cheering and waving autograph books. Flash bulbs popped steadily as the limousines and sport roadsters and motor scooters of the stars rolled up to the place.

“Big night at Shapiro’s tonight,” the driver told them. “It’s the only place in Hollywood anybody important ever goes since the Trocadero folded. Tonight they’re having a benefit dinner and special show—to buy ambulances to send to England….”

“They need planes and tanks and destroyers, so we send ambulances,” observed Miss Hildegarde Withers. Then, on an impulse—“Stop here, driver!”