Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (20 page)

“In the first column, under picks, you put down the horses that your handicapper selects to come first, second and third. And you bet two bucks on each to win. Suppose they all run out of the money. Then you bet the same in the next race, writing down a code number equal to your bet—two bucks. Suppose Lady Play, the first pick, wins. You write the price out in the ‘Take’ column.

“Now the system begins to work. In the third race you drop back to a two-dollar bet for the first horse because that number won last time. But on the other two you figure out a new code number, which is the old code number for that position plus the money wagered on the two losing horses you had in the previous race. You only bet half your code number—which is four bucks on the second and third picks. We’ll say they all run out….

“So in the fourth race you have codes of twelve, eighteen and eighteen. You bet six, eight and eight because there’s no nine-dollar window at the track. The second horse wins with eight on his nose, and you take fifty-four dollars. And so on and so on. See how easy it is?”

Miss Withers nodded slowly. “If I understand you correctly, this system is a sure way of making a hundred dollars a day?”

He shrugged. “Pretty near that. Of course, you have to make some big bets—up to thirty-six dollars a race, and sometimes more. It’s not so easy to stick to a system. You see everybody else betting on the favorite and you know he’ll win and you hate to put all that dough on a horse that hasn’t a chance. But if you stick to this system you’ll do pretty good.” He nodded. “So much so that I’ll give you fifty bucks to tear up that sheet of paper. If it gets around the studio I’m a ruined bookie.”

“Thank you, but I’ll keep it,” Miss Withers told him. “I will also promise you not to play it, either with you or any other bookie.”
*
She folded up the slip of paper and put it carefully away. Where it fitted into her puzzle she could not at the moment imagine, but one never knew.

Mr Parlay Jones was growing very restless, but she had one question more. “When a client of yours gets behind and owes you a lot of money just what steps do you take to collect?”

He hesitated. “Steps? Oh, you mean, do we turn on the heat?” He shook his head. “It’s funny about that, but we never lose much, unless somebody dies like this guy Stafford. People will let their dentist and doctor go hungry, they’ll stall the department stores and the landlord, but they’ll almost always pay up on a gambling debt. Especially to a bookie, because they want to keep betting with him. See?”

Miss. Withers finally parted company with Mr Parlay Jones and was immediately advised that a Mr Pape was outside to see her.

He turned out to be an effervescent and youngish man in gray-green tweeds, and at the expense of taking out a small annuity policy which she probably needed anyhow, she learned that Mr Pape had written straight life policies for both Saul Stafford and Virgil Dobie to the amount of five thousand dollars, naming each other as beneficiary. “I do that for a number of writing teams in the business,” he explained. “It’s fine protection for them in case something happens….”

“As it did in the case of Mr Stafford?” she inquired.

Pape shrugged. “Too bad about that. He let his policy lapse. If he’d kept up the payments Virgil Dobie would collect five thousand dollars. There’s a lesson for all of us—never let your insurance lapse.”

Miss Withers doubted if Saul Stafford was uneasy in his grave—or on his marble slab—because of the fact that his former collaborator was not to collect five thousand dollars but she did not say so.

When Mr Pape took his departure she made a number of neat notations on a sheet of paper. The case was winding up—she could see that. Only there were still so many, so very many, loose ends.

She called up the inspector, advised him that Virgil Dobie owed his bookie $1742, and that he had expected to collect five thousand from the policy carried by Saul Stafford.

“That’s good enough for me,” Piper told her. “I’m sticking right here with the lieutenant, and we’ll soon track the guy down. They just wired that the plane stopped at an airport fifty miles this side of Albuquerque.

To gas up, I suppose. But it took off again before anybody could pick ’em up.”

“Oscar, did anybody report a girl’s being on that plane?”

The inspector didn’t think so. And therefore Miss Hildegarde Withers’ grim certainty became more certain than ever.

Something had happened to Jill Madison.

It was a bitter pill for Miss Withers to take. Sleuthing was fun, right enough, but she had no patience with detectives who let people go on being murdered under their very noses. She might have seen the light earlier—she might have prevented this last tragedy.

That was water over the dam anyway. “Oscar,” she said into the telephone, “I want you to meet me as quick as ever you can get there at Jill Madison’s apartment. What? No, she won’t be there. Never mind how I know.”

The place turned out to be a small, neat apartment house with yellow shutters, located on a side street between Beverly Hills and Hollywood. Oscar Piper arrived just at the moment when Miss Withers had identified the separate entrance of Jill’s apartment by its folded
Examiner,
the bottle of Grade A on the stoop and the feeble electric light burning over the door.

“The first thing the police do when anybody disappears or is murdered is to search their apartment,” she told the inspector. “I wanted to beat them to it. Now all we have to do is to get in….”

She made tentative experiments with a hairpin, but the lock was modern. She looked under the door mat, beneath a flower pot and on top of the doorjamb, but found no key cached there. And there was really no satisfactory excuse that they could give to the manager of the place.

“Unless you could flash your badge,” Miss Withers suggested hopefully. But that fell through, too, because there was no resident manager here.

“I’d better go back downtown and get the lieutenant and some skeleton keys and a search warrant,” the inspector said. “Or, better still, we could drop the whole thing and—”

“Eureka!” cried the schoolteacher happily, discovering that the side window was partially open. It was easy enough to pry through the screen, raise the window higher….

They were finally inside, standing in the middle of a little living room crowded with books and furniture and ash trays. Even the goldfish bowl was crowded with weird, goggling fish.

Into the bedroom—in which quite evidently someone had dressed in a hurry. Two evening dresses had been tried and found wanting, left lying on the bed. Several pairs of dance sandals lay scattered about, a costume-jewelry bracelet hung on the bedpost and a faint film of powder floated in the air.

“Just what in blazes are we looking for?” the inspector demanded unhappily.

“I’ll know it when I find it,” Miss Withers said grimly. And then they heard the sound of a key in the front door. It opened, and Virgil Dobie stood in the doorway, as surprised as they.

For a moment time stood still. Then: “You’re under arrest,” Oscar Piper greeted him. “Come clean, what did you do with her body?”

Dobie’s thick eyebrows went up almost to his hairline.
“What
body?”

“Jill Madison’s, of course!” cut in Miss Withers.

“Nothing, yet,” said Virgil Dobie seriously. “But I was just going to carry it across the threshold. Tradition and good luck and all that….”

They realized, a bit late, that Jill stood behind him—Jill Madison, alive and well and covered with orchids.

“We flew to New Mexico,” Dobie began to explain. “Is that any reason for—?”

“You can be the first to congratulate us!” Jill greeted them, her voice faintly shrill and strained. “We’re married!”

*
See The Puzzle of the Red Stallion. Crime Club, 1935.

*
N.B. All the same. Miss Withers followed it for the last week of the 1940 race meeting at Santa Anita, using the picks of Mr Oscar Otis of the Los Angeles
Times,
and had (paper) profits of $1675.
Verb. sap.

The Tale must be
ABOUT DEAD BODIES,

Or very wicked people, preferably both….

DOROTHY SAYERS

B
OTH MR AND MRS DOBIE
wore the dazed and brittle look which passes for ecstatic happiness among newly married couples. “We were married by a justice of the peace in Mesa City at nine o’clock this morning,” the groom informed their uninvited callers. “Then we climbed right back into the plane.”

“Congratulations, I’m sure,” offered Miss Withers. Her mind was going around and around. The entire jigsaw was stirred up as if some mad simian had swung down by his tail and maliciously mangled it into
pi.
“I should hate to confess to you the suspicions that we’ve been sharing. After what’s been happening—”

Virgil Dobie said he understood. “Maybe you think this isn’t just the proper and fitting time to get married?” He put his arm around the bride. “Well, it seemed to me that Jill might possibly need a little protection. With people getting murdered all around her …”

The inspector nodded.
“We
had no business busting in here in the first place, and I guess we’d better be going now. Come on, Hildegarde, let’s find another tree to bark up.

“Just a minute,” said the schoolteacher absently. “I don’t—” Then she whirled on Virgil Dobie. “Young man, would you mind answering two or three questions for me?”

“Why—that depends on what they are.”

“Here goes,” said the schoolteacher. “First, just how much money do you owe your bookie, Mr Parlay Jones?”

“Not a dime. Next question?”

“Aha!” cried Miss Withers. “You’ll be surprised to know, young man, that I had a talk with him this morning and that he said your account was seventeen hundred and something—”

“It is,” Virgil Dobie assured her. “Only he owes it to me. I’ve been beating him about a hundred bucks a day, and it’s piled up.”

“You know, Hildegarde,” put in the inspector, “sometimes bookies
do
owe people.”

“Tell it to Ripley,” she snapped. “But, Mr. Dobie, isn’t it true that Saul Stafford was in debt to the bookie?”

“Sure he was,” said Dobie. “He didn’t have the system I use. Saul tried to pick horses on form and because he liked the color of their eyes. I’ve got a system that’s as good as an annuity any day. When I get tired of Hollywood I’m going to take my system and try it at every track in America. Pittsburgh Phil the Second—”

“But Saul Stafford never used your system?” she went on.

“No, and that’s why he died owing his bookie.”

“Of course, if you wanted to be nice you could pay off Saul Stafford’s account with Parlay Jones, using the insurance money that you are going to get as beneficiary!”

Virgil Dobie blinked. “Insurance money? Oh, you mean Saul’s policy?” He shook his head. “That would be a nice idea, only there isn’t any insurance money. Saul let his policy lapse months ago.”

“You knew that? When did you find it out?”

“At the time, of course. Harry Pape wrote me about it, not wanting to lose an account. He thought maybe I could talk Saul into keeping up the premiums, but I couldn’t.”

“If you’re quite through,” Jill began desperately, “I—”

But Miss Withers wasn’t. “Just one question more, and then we’ll leave you two lovebirds alone. I just want to ask you, Mr Dobie—
who
is
Derek Laval?”

There was a short pause. “Laval? Why, everybody knows him. He’s at every cocktail party and premiere in town. Sort of Hollywood fixture, like Prince Mike Romanoff or Sy Bartlett or…”

“Or George Spelvin?” said Miss Withers softly.

It was almost a full minute before Virgil Dobie remembered to take a breath. But the expression which came over his face was almost one of relief.

“Yes, like George Spelvin,” he admitted.

The inspector looked so blank and bewildered at this point that Miss Withers turned to him. “George Spelvin, the well-known actor,” she reminded him. He nodded, vaguely remembering the name.

“Thank you both so much,” Miss Withers was saying briskly. “I’m sorry we interrupted you, and I hope you’ll forgive us for housebreaking. But there have been several murders, and I think it would be awfully nice if there weren’t any more.”

She was about to herd the inspector out of the place, but Jill would have none of that. “Please!” she cried. “This isn’t just an ordinary day. It’s supposed to be a happy day, a celebration. Won’t you drink a toast with us—please?”

Swiftly from the tiny, crowded kitchenette she produced a small bottle and four glasses. “It ought to be champagne,” she explained. “But this will have to do—it’s California brandy.”

The inspector accepted his glass somewhat reluctantly, feeling that he was inside this apartment under somewhat false colors. Miss Withers also shied off somewhat from the idea of drinking even this small thimbleful of spirits.

But it was a wedding day. “Er—to the bride!” she managed, and then took a tentative sip of the fire water.

The inspector was equally conservative. Only Jill Madison—now Jill Dobie—did full justice to the toast. For the groom barely wet his lips.

“I’m sorry,” said Virgil Dobie when he saw that they were all looking at him. “But I just made a resolution. I’m on the wagon, for good and all. I’ve seen too much of what effect this sauce—I mean alcohol—has on people. Look what it did for Saul Stafford. Two drinks, and he’d talk your arm off. And I have an idea he’d be alive and with us today if he hadn’t hit the bottle.”

Jill stared at her husband, extremely amazed. “But—but that’s
wonderful!
If you really mean—”

Virgil Dobie really meant it. “I’m a new man,” he informed them. “Watch me. Eight hours’ sleep a night, up bright and early and to the studio by nine o’clock, no more gags, plenty of yeses for Mr Nincom….”

“Speaking of Mr Nincom,” Miss Withers put in, “he feels very strongly about your disappearance today. In fact, he seemed to infer that you were fired. Shouldn’t you telephone him or something?”

“Wait!” Jill interrupted. “I know that man better than any of you. There’s still time enough. It would be better if we walked in on him. The happy couple and so forth—he couldn’t resist being nice about the whole thing.”