“Crime like virtue has its degrees;
And timid innocence was never known
To blossom suddenly into extreme license.”
RACINE
MISS WITHERS STOOD IN the doorway of the dimly lit, smoky little bar-restaurant, sniffed disapprovingly, and then went forward bravely and sat down on a stool beside the one and only customer. “Good morning, Mr. Brown.”
Tip was studying the two glasses before him, one small and one tall, as if trying to memorize their contours. He barely looked up. “What’s good about it?”
“Why—”
“The studio closes down today, and I’m on a week-to-week basis with creditors hovering. You have no idea what it costs to be a bachelor in this town.” Then he remembered his manners. “Care to join me, Miss Withers? I know it’s a little early in the morning for boilermakers—”
“I think not. But boilermakers—isn’t that what the Polish people call ‘puddlers’? I seem to remember Janet Poole telling me that interesting fact some days ago.”
The round pink face turned toward her. “Yes, ma’am.” Tip Brown looked, she thought, as if he had been drawn through a knothole. “I suppose you’ve heard the news. Jan and her damn musician are getting married—they’re eloping.”
“Important witnesses leaving town in the midst of a murder investigation? I doubt if they’d get far.”
“Jan mentioned that when she kindly called to break the news to me,” he admitted. “They were going to drive back to Hartford and visit that snooty family of his, but I guess they’ll settle for waiting a few days and meanwhile honeymoon at the Beverly Hills Hotel or somewhere nearby—any place Jan can afford. And it’s such a waste of a lot of girl on so little guy, if you ask me.”
She nodded sympathetically. “And there’s nothing you can do about it, young man.”
He shrugged. “Except try to crawl into a bottle, as you think I’m doing. No, this is the last one. I came across the street to buy them a magnum of champagne to take on their honeymoon; it’s the last gallant gesture I can make. I can smile like Pagliacci and keep a stiff upper lip and maybe get to kiss the bride.”
“Champagne as a wedding present? I shouldn’t think that so suitable.”
“I hope he gets stinko and passes out and stays there,” said Tip Brown vindictively. “All through the damn honeymoon. I just don’t like the guy.”
“Would you be likely to like any other man who was more successful with Janet than yourself?”
“Frankly, no.” He swung around. “And the bucket-sized bottle of champagne is sort of a studio tradition; we always produce that for anybody who gets married. Usually it’s a chip-in deal, only this time I decided to do it myself. I wanted to do something, and I’m damned if I’ll go buy a waffle iron so she can make his breakfasts on it. You see?”
The schoolteacher thought she saw. This unrequited love—but as the song had it, it did take two to tango.
“You’ll get over it in time; not that that thought helps much now,” she told him. “You’ll find somebody else. Now take Joyce—”
“You take Joyce,” he came back. “She’s the kind of girl who promises everything with her eyes and then fights you for the courtesy good-night kiss at the door. She hasn’t got over Larry Reed, and probably never will.” He downed his slug, and chased it with most of his beer.
“Better make that the sublime, as Browning said,” Miss Withers suggested. “We have a hard afternoon ahead of us, in case you haven’t heard. And I understand that Mr. Cushak is looking for you.”
“Yeah, as usual. ‘His Master’s Voice.’ For two cents I’d quit and go over to Disney’s or Walter Lantz’; I’ve always liked Donald Duck and Woody Woodpecker better than this damn penguin.”
“These cartoon characters you draw and write about—they’re very real and alive to you, aren’t they?”
“Real as live people,” he said. “And a damn sight more dependable.” Tip Brown arose. “Well, it’s back to the treadmill. It’s been nice seeing you.” He went out.
“You’ll see me again,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers under her breath. “And don’t think you won’t!”
The bartender came up to her and ostentatiously wiped off the mahogany. “Well, lady, what’s your pleasure?”
She thought. “A fizz water and two aspirins, please.” He winced, but made no comment, and she sat there, back in her concentration. She was actually trying to write a script (without any real experience) for a one-act play that might still, she hoped, have at least a good curtain. But there would still have to be a lot of what stage people called “ad-libbing” and mostly by her.
It was by now lunchtime, so she paid her modest check and went back across the boulevard and into the studio again, heading toward the commissary. It was not that she felt particularly hungry at the moment, but she felt that this day at least she needed to keep up her strength. She came into the big studio restaurant and immediately set eyes upon Janet Poole and her Guy holding hands at a corner table, at least metaphorically holding hands. They were floating. Miss Withers paused beside them for a moment. “I understand that felicitations are in order.”
The happy couple looked up at her—they seemed a bit puffy and red about the eyes. “Yes, thank you,” Janet said quickly. “He gave in. We decided, after arguing about it almost all night. We’re going to Las Vegas tonight to be married, if the police will let us out of town. Otherwise we have to have blood tests and things and wait three days.” She touched Guy Fowler’s arm. “My man thinks I need his protection.”
“I said as much some days ago,” Miss Withers reminded her.
Guy nodded. “That you did. Jan convinced me that it’s silly to wait.”
“It always was silly to wait, if the thing is inevitable anyway. The Japanese have a proverb—‘The Gods bind together at birth, with invisible threads, the feet of those destined to mate.’” Her eyes fell on the vast bottle of champagne standing on the extra chair at the table, and narrowed slightly. “Oh,” she said.
“Our first wedding present,” Janet confided. “From dear old Tip.”
“A very nice gesture and no doubt well-meant—though I should think that lovers would be intoxicated enough on love alone.” The schoolteacher bent down to touch the wired golden foil on the mouth of the bottle, studying it as if she had never seen a magnum before—which in fact she hadn’t. A genie in a bottle—a genie of hangovers.
“Sit down and have lunch,” Guy Fowler suggested. “We’re just picking on sandwiches because we were up most of the night and we’re not hungry, but you can shoot the works. How about a steak? I’ll pick up the tab.”
“Who’ll pick up the tab?” Janet said to him softly, but Miss Withers’ ears were sharper than most.
“No thanks,” the schoolteacher answered. “You two have your lunch and I’ll retire to a corner; I have things to think about. Around this place I eat little and drink nothing until our mystery is solved. Which just possibly may be this afternoon.” She took her departure, feeling slight twinges of envy at the look on Janet’s face. It was the bride-look, smugly and placidly possessive, the look of a big-game hunter who has finally cornered his quarry and has it centered in his sights. And Guy Fowler, for his part, had had the faintly apprehensive and embarrassed expression of the groom in a funny-paper cartoon.
“What she sees in him—” the schoolteacher said to herself as she went on to a lonely little table in the corner, remembering at the same time that probably nobody else would ever understand what she herself saw in the Inspector, if you came right down to cases. “Everybody to their own tastes, as the old lady said when she kissed the cow. De gustibus …” Anyway, Janet had made her choice, and she appeared to be a young lady with a whim of iron, like Oliver Herford’s wife.
Anyway, if her hopes and prayers came true, the question mark that hung over the young couple—and over everybody else in the studio, for that matter—would be dissipated after four o’clock this afternoon, or she’d know the reason why. Miss Withers ordered soup and salad and just as she was finishing her tea and looking inquiringly at the grounds—not that she believed in fortune telling, actually—she looked up with a start to see Rollo Bayles seating himself across from her, looking rather like a retired zombie. He was, to put it mildly, in a state of jitters.
“Do you mind?” he said.
“Do I mind what?” the schoolteacher countered, with reason. “Certainly I don’t mind your joining me, if that’s what you’re thinking of.”
“I just want to talk to you a minute, Miss Withers. They say you’re here in the studio for just one reason—to try to solve the Larry Reed thing. I just heard from Mr. Cushak about what you expect us all to do for your stunt this afternoon—”
“Do you object to submitting to the test?”
He stiffened. “Not at all. Though I happen to be an artist, and not a cartoonist. I don’t have much experience at tracing drawings of penguins or ducks or woodpeckers. What I want to say is this. You’ve made your mind up about who the murderer is, haven’t you?”
“If I have, and I’m not saying, I’ll still have to prove it.”
“But you’re all wrong,” Bayles told her, with a certain vehemence. “I know what you’re thinking. Reed was a louse, granted. He hurt a lot of people with his so-called practical jokes. But he never pulled one of them on Janet. She didn’t kill him or anybody ever. You don’t know her as I do; she’s incapable of anything like that.”
“The ‘clear mountain stream,’” murmured Miss Withers. “No man knows what a woman is capable of.”
“Or maybe you suspect me?” he went on. “I hardly knew Reed, and certainly had no motive to kill him.”
“If my theories are right, as they often aren’t, perhaps the murderer didn’t either,” said the schoolteacher. “Truth lies deep down, at the bottom of a well….” She shrugged. “But to come back to Janet for a moment, now that we are on the subject. She denies to me that she had ever been in Larry Reed’s house, but she must have been—there was a partly finished watercolor portrait of her on his easel.”
The man’s eyes widened. “Is that all? You obviously know very little about art and artists.”
“I used to paint china, young man,” interrupted Miss Withers, slightly annoyed. “And I can tell a Holbein from a Corot, anytime.”
“Sure. But you evidently don’t know that artists engaged in portraiture often work from memory when they are especially interested in the subject as Larry Reed certainly was. I myself have drawings of Janet at home, but she never posed for one of them. He might have used a photograph, too. But if that’s all you have against her—”
“That isn’t quite all,” put in Miss Withers quietly. “It isn’t the half of it.”
But Rollo Bayles was through. He bowed and took himself off, evidently having changed his mind about having lunch today. So, Miss Withers thought, here is another young man worried about Janet, or pretending to be. Some women have the power to instill that sort of devotion.
She finished her tea, looked at the dregs without seeing any pictures or symbols except question marks, and went back to her office. On the way she passed Janet’s office. The door was open, and she caught a glimpse of Guy Fowler helping Janet bundle her belongings into paper cartons held by Mr. Cassiday; the girl was evidently pulling up stakes forever.
Art materials, pictures, papers, everything was being bundled into the boxes. “She’ll be sorry,” said Miss Withers, mostly to herself. “People have roots like trees, and they can’t pull them up without a considerable readjustment.” But she said none of this to the young couple, only nodding pleasantly in passing.
The Inspector arrived shortly after two o’clock, looking smug. He had Talley with him, on a leash, and the schoolteacher had to be greeted as though she had been away for a month of Sundays. “You took Talley with you all the way into downtown Los Angeles?” she wanted to know, busily shaking paws with the demonstrative beast.
“He was hell-bent to go,” Oscar Piper admitted a bit sheepishly. “He howled like a banshee when I started out and left him behind. And there was no extra charge for him in the taxi. The boys at Spring Street were a little surprised to see a fellow officer toting a poodle; you should have seen their faces.”
“I can imagine,” she said.
“We found Karas, by the way. Or the local police did. He was at the Los Angeles municipal airport, trying to cash a check for passage to Mexico City.”
“Really? And did you take him back to the hospital?”
Piper shook his head. “No, he didn’t appear to need hospitalization, though he looks peaked, naturally. We brought him back out here, and Sergeant Callan and some of the LA boys are quizzing him in his office.”
“Mercy me! I suppose they’ll have a confession any minute, with their rubber hoses and bright lights and things.” Miss Withers gave a disapproving sniff. “I’m surprised you people haven’t picked up the cute Russian trick of putting a pail over the prisoner’s head and banging on it until he loses his mind!”
“Oh, come off it. Third-degree stuff is out, these days. We’re bringing out the former desk clerk from Forest Lawn to identify him as the man who paid for the Wersbeck woman’s funeral and burial. That should cinch it. So what are you smiling at?”
“At the idea of Mr. Karas being Mr. P.R.F. if you must know,” the schoolteacher said, straightening her face. “All the same, I’m glad Karas is here in the studio, because in the next hour or two—”
“You’re still going ahead with that crazy idea?”
“I am, Oscar, if it’s the last thing I do.”
“This killer is too smart—”
“Exactly. Too smart for his or her own good. All through this case we’ve made the mistake of playing someone else’s game. Years ago when I was a little girl my father told me that when you get up before a concession at Coney Island or the circus or the county fair and a man wants you to bet your precious spending money on something, don’t do it. It’s his game, and he has a gimmick, and he’ll win.”
“Yes, but—”
“But me no but’s. Any killer, whoever he is, is ultra-vulnerable to suggestion; he can be forced into a situation where without knowing it he betrays himself—or thinks he has. I must have your cooperation, Oscar, and that of the local police, too, if you can wangle it. It’ll only take half an hour or so, and if it works—”
He stared at her strangely. “You actually think you know who it is?”
“I’m afraid I do, Oscar. Without a shred of any real proof, as yet. I’ll name no names now, but I’ll settle this thing this afternoon or—”
“Yes,” he interrupted wearily. “Or else you’ll go back to crocheting or painting china, which you have threatened before and never do.”
“This time I mean it. It is a mental challenge. Four o’clock, mind!”
“I’m going out for a cigar,” he muttered. Talley the poodle wagged his tail understandingly. “Okay, you can go, too,” conceded the Inspector. “But no more raw hamburgers!” He snapped the lead on Talley’s collar and went out the door, pausing to say, “Hildegarde, sometimes I think—”
“Sometimes, perhaps. But be back by four o’clock, and I think it would be well to have that nasty little pistol with you.” She relapsed into a medium dark-brown study. It was one thing to know—and another thing to prove it.