Nipped in the Bud (16 page)

“But it is something,” Dallas put in stoutly. “And whoever it was wouldn’t necessarily have gone both ways, not right then. He could have been in the apartment, perhaps hiding somewhere, and on his way out paused to finish Tony. Or he could have come in after the fight, found Fagan unconscious and killed him, and been waiting inside—maybe washing his hands or something—when Ina found the body, and left afterwards.”

Miss Withers looked doubtful. “Too complicated, I’d say.” She turned to Ina. “Are you sure that Fagan was actually dead when you found him?”

“
Wha-a-at?
”

“It’s not easy for a layman to tell. Did you feel his pulse, or hold a mirror to his lips, or anything?”

“I—I touched him. He was dead.” Ina barely whispered it.

“Even so, not everyone knows where a pulse is located. He was unconscious and covered with blood, and you leaped to the obvious conclusion that he was dead so you ran back to your own apartment—”

“Yes, to call the police!”

“Fiddlesticks. There your story falls to pieces. You couldn’t possibly have held a dead phone for ten or fifteen minutes; everyone who has ever attended the movies knows about dial tones. We know what you were actually up to.”

Ina looked scared, confused, bewildered and guilty, all at once.

“Relax, child. What you were actually doing was getting yourself into a more becoming negligee and brushing out your hair and fixing yourself up to be the belle of the ball; it’s nothing to be so ashamed of. Only you took so long primping that the boy delivering papers came along and found the body before you were ready, so you missed your big scene. Isn’t that the truth?”

“Yes.” Ina swallowed.

“And if Fagan wasn’t dead but only unconscious when you found him, then the actual murderer—always conceding for the sake of argument that it wasn’t Gault—could have done his nefarious work after you went back to your apartment to get yourself all prettied up for the police and the photographers?”

“No!” said Ina. Then she nodded. “Well, just maybe.”

“Exactly!” Miss Withers nodded triumphantly. “That settles that. Your secret is out, and not much of a secret at that—though perhaps Sam Bordin can use it to plant a seed of doubt in some juryman’s mind. You say that at the moment he knows nothing of it?”

Both girls shook their heads, but Ina said, “I did try to phone him once. But he wasn’t in.”

“Perhaps not
that
time,” said Miss Withers to herself. Yet this was no time to ask too many of the wrong kind of questions, not with these wild creatures eating almost out of her hand. Abruptly she changed the subject. “By the way, why on earth did you girls want to get in touch with a private detective here in Tijuana?”

Ina looked blank and bewildered, but Dallas Trempleau said calmly, “Oh, yes. The man Nikki was going to find one for me.”

“A bodyguard, eh?” said the schoolteacher.

“Yes. A bodyguard.” Dallas turned quickly to the younger girl. “I didn’t want to alarm you, dear. It was just a wild hunch of mine.”

“But whatever for?” Ina whispered.

“She was undoubtedly thinking,” put in the schoolteacher, “that you girls might be in some danger here. Which explains the pistol she left under the pillow.”

Dallas said nothing, but there was an odd expression on her face, as if she had swallowed something lumpy. “You’ve both been taking certain risks,” went on Miss Withers. “But running away is never the answer to anything. I know what I’d do if I were as sure of Junior Gault’s innocence as you both claim to be. Suppose for the sake of argument that Junior was guilty only of assault and that somebody else found Fagan unconscious and killed him. That somebody is still at large, confident that he is getting away with it. But deep within him he must carry a weight of apprehension. Suppose we could prevail upon the inspector and Mr. Hardesty to cooperate with us to the extent of playing a little game? It is no secret back in New York that there’s a surprise witness; that somebody was eavesdropping in the apartment house hallway that morning. Suppose that accidentally on purpose it leaked out that she had caught a glimpse of somebody else in the hall, and had kept silent up to now because of fear? The real murderer, if any, would then have to come out of his silence and make an attempt at erasing Ina, wouldn’t he?”

Both girls were wide-eyed as she explained. “It’s the old East India trick for shooting tigers. You tie a calf or goat to a tree in the jungle, and then wait. There’d be some risk, of course, but perhaps less than you’re running now. Back in New York the authorities could see to it that you’re surrounded by stalwart detectives night and day.”

“Wow!” breathed Ina softly, eyes shining. “It would be the thrillingest thing!”

“Thrilling to have all those handsome young detectives around?” Dallas smiled.

But Ina didn’t hear. “I bet I could do it,” she said, in a voice that would have done credit to her favorite movie star in the role of Joan of Arc. Then she added, “Do you suppose that if I agreed to a stunt like that maybe John Hardesty would forgive me for running away?”

The schoolteacher thought privately that the assistant D.A. would forgive Ina for any misdemeanor and most felonies. “He would certainly forgive you if it worked,” she admitted cautiously. “Neither he nor the inspector would relish pinning a murder on the wrong man.”

“I’d be a sort of heroine, huh?”

“You might be a dead heroine,” Dallas put in. “I’ve read about how they hunt tigers in India, and I never heard of the calf or goat winning the decision.”

“I’m not worried in the least,” said Ina stoutly. “I mean, not very.” She smiled, a brave, secret smile; one that probably had been practiced in front of a mirror.

Miss Withers found herself yawning, and remembered that it was after two-thirty. “‘Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof….’” she said. “I suggest we let the final details go until morning.”

For reasons of her own the schoolteacher insisted that the girls take the bedroom and leave her the couch in the living room. After the lights were out she heard low voices in the other room, then whispering which died away to absolute silence. She was incredibly weary, but somehow she spurred herself into getting up again and composing a telegram. Sketchily attired, she slipped silently out and down the stair, where she found a night
portero
who promised to send it for her.

Five minutes later she was back on the couch again. “If I do close an eye tonight,” she told herself, “I’ll undoubtedly have something special in the line of nightmares.”

But the nightmare was waiting for her when she awoke shortly before noon. She was stiff as a board from the cramped bed, and her mouth tasted as if the whole Russian Army had marched through barefoot. Someone was hammering on the door and she tottered over to open it, intending to ask the maid to come back and clean up later. But it was the desk clerk, with a telegram. His eyes bugged out at the sight of the borrowed nightgown, but she snatched the message and slammed the door in his face. She read:

WONDERFUL WORK. I TAKE MY HAT OFF TO YOU. YOU ARE A BETTER SLEUTH THAN HARDESTY AND I PUT TOGETHER. HANG ON TIGHT TO YOUR SEA SHELLS, I AM TAKING FIRST PLANE AND BRINGING A BIG SURPRISE FOR BABY. LOVE.

OSCAR

“Bless his heart!” she whispered. It was quite the warmest and most enthusiastic message she had ever received from the man.

She folded the telegram up tenderly and put it safely away in her purse. Talley was dancing around her, whining softly and indicating
out,
but she patted him absently and then knocked on the bedroom door, singing cheerfully, “Come, girls, time to rise and shine.”

They had already risen and shone, as she found out a moment later. The bedroom window was open, and outside on the dusty balcony were marks of small feminine feet.

“If I were not every inch a lady,” said Miss Withers, “I would say
damn!
”

“The next day is never so good as the day before.”

—PUBLILIUS SYRUS

N
IKKI BRAGGIOLI AWAKENED FROM
pleasant dreams of signing millions of autograph books for worshiping fans. He sat up in bed, gave a shrill yelp, and clutched the sheet around him. In through his bedroom window was coming a great brownish beast which resembled nothing so much as a bear on whose fur some madman had run riot with a pair of clippers, followed by the apparition of a gaunt and graying female wearing only a black lace nightgown and a blanket, Indian style.

“
Madonna mía!
” he whispered. It had been an evening, but not
that
much of an evening. He shook his head hard, as if to clear it, and then fervently wished that he hadn’t. But perhaps if he took an aspirin they’d go away.

“
You!
” cried Miss Withers accusingly. “I might have known it! Where are they, where have you hidden them?”

Nikki slid cautiously over to the far side of the bed, and denied everything. It all took considerable explaining, and the schoolteacher even looked into the living room, the bathroom, and both closets before she gave up. He had an ancient, well-used portable phonograph, a new television set, riding boots and fishing rods and piles of old magazines (mostly
Punch,
photo publications featuring nudes, and hot-rod racing magazines) but he most certainly was not concealing any young ladies in the suite. The closest thing to it was a cabinet photograph of a not-too-young woman hung with costume jewelry, who appeared to have a most determined jaw. That, the schoolteacher decided, would be Mary May Dee, and it served him right.

Nikki was insisting that if anybody had come in his window and gone out through his door he knew nothing about it, nothing whatsoever. Besides, he hadn’t come home until broad daylight….

Miss Withers murmured hasty apologies, and then—remembering her dishabille—dashed for the hall. A moment later she also remembered that her own door was locked and bolted on the inside, and came back through his bedroom again. There was nothing for it but that she and Talley would have to return via the balcony. She half-expected to see a crowd gathered below in the street, but no. Tijuana, on a Monday noon after a hard week end, was as deserted as Coventry during Lady Godiva’s ride. “Thank heaven,” she said to herself. It was the only thing she had to thank heaven for that day.

Half an hour later, fully clothed and in her right mind, she held open the door of the little rented coupe and said, “Come, Talley, the game is afoot.” But as the poodle scrambled in she added, “Only those vixens
aren’t
afoot at all, they’re in a big fast car. We’ve lost them, and a fine pair of detectives we are.”

Talley wagged his tail apologetically. “You have even less excuse than I,” she said severely. “Because you didn’t drink any of that odd-tasting coffee last night.” She started the motor, and then killed it. There was no use leaping into the car and driving off in all directions; even if she were to catch up with her quarry again, what else remained to be said?

The sensible thing, of course, would be to wash her hands of it all. She had done her duty and more than her duty in just locating the missing witness that was going to hang—or electrocute, if you must be fussy—a certain ill-favored young man who had shouted obscenities after her in a Manhattan jail. It would serve Oscar Piper right if she left him to pull his own chestnuts out of the fire.

And would there be, the schoolteacher asked herself, any great miscarriage of justice even if the case against Junior Gault had to be dropped, and that unpleasant young man went free? He had certainly had extreme provocation; there was no real proof that the murder had been premeditated. Junior had already rotted in jail for eight months, and in one sense at least he would keep on paying for the rest of his life.

But even as Miss Withers told herself all this, she realized that she simply had to go on, if for no other reason than that the faint shadow of a doubt had been planted in her mind. Those sounds that Ina Kell had heard, or fancied she heard, in the hall that night—after Junior staggered out of the place and before the girl found the body—might have been the real murderer.

It would have to have been someone who knew of the feud between Junior Gault and Fagan, somebody who had been hanging around or perhaps even following Junior, and waiting for this golden opportunity; who had seen him come out of the place nursing his bruised knuckles.

And, having once set her shoulder to the plow, how could the schoolma’am stop now—with Oscar Piper winging his way out here, confident in that smug way men had that she had solved his immediate problem?

“I think,” Miss Withers told the poodle, “that it’s time to go back to San Diego and start sending wires.”

Talley intimated that it was also time for breakfast and whined hopefully as she drove up into town. It was a different place now, sun-bleached and empty. Like vampires, Miss Withers decided, the people of Tijuana slept by day and prowled by night. She stopped the car outside a little lunch counter with the intention of picking up a raw hamburger for the dog, and then suddenly a smallish brown ghost re-materialized beside her, obviously out of breath from running. “Watch your car, Miss Withers?”

“Vito!” she cried accusingly. “You little imp of Satan!”

But when the boy found out what it was all about, he almost tearfully denied, in a torrent of two languages, that he had betrayed the confidence of a client. “It was my cousin Carlos, the busboy, I think,” Vito insisted. “Sure, that’s it. He takes your good money and then sends us off on a goose chase to the greyhound races. And all the time, I think maybe, he knows the gorls are across the street at the
jai-alai.
So he slips across and warns them, for the big tip. I disown him, he is no longer a relative of mine.”

“You’ll have plenty left,” she said. “But never mind.” Somewhat mollified, she went on to explain that she had found the two young ladies anyway—or rather been found by them only to lose them later. “They may have left town; they may even have crossed the border though I somehow doubt it. But now it is more important than ever that I locate them, and at once!”