Nipped in the Bud (19 page)

She got the wires off and then leaned weakly back in a chair and took off her shoes. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep, not in the least, but suddenly she found herself mixed up in a dream; struggling in a little-girlish, frightening dream. In the past she had liked to think that sometimes her subconscious chose that means of bringing light on a problem, but even as she dreamed she realized that there could be no sense in this melange of nonsense, of great clumping feet that made no sound, of Kermanshah carpets and alabaster vases and milk bottles, of gold cigarette lighters and yammering telephones and what the ancients used to call “bare-head and bones,” like a pirate flag.

Miss Withers woke suddenly, to find that by her watch it was half past twelve. The hotel suite was clammy and cold. Another sea fog had rolled in tonight, and she was shivering in the bright sport clothes she had purchased last afternoon. And she shivered a little more as she realized that Vito and her poodle were still out for a walk, and nobody could be walking this long.

“What in the world—” she started to say. But then the phone rang again, and the schoolteacher realized that was what had awakened her. She seized the instrument.

“Allo? Allo, Mees Weethers?”

“Vito?” she cried, a little doubtfully.

“Yess, Vito,” came the voice. “Vito García, eet is about heem, and your
perro
—”

“My pair of what?”

“Your
perro grande,
your beeg dog. I am Vito’s cousin—”

“Not another one! But never mind, never mind. Where are they? What has happened?”

“Notheeng ’as ’appen,” was the answer. “Except, I am sorry to tell you, that your dog and my leetle cousin, they are down at the
Jefatura,
in the
cárcel
—how you say, the jail?”

“What on earth—” began the schoolteacher. “That child, in jail? And the dog? But what for?”

“Is better you come,” said Vito’s cousin. “And bring some money.”

“Immediately,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers. Then she hung up, and began to put on her shoes as if they were armor.

“The horrid tale of perjury and strife,

Murder and spoil …”

—WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

N
O BEDS ARE PROVIDED,
even in the female ward, of the detention cells of the Tijuana
cárcel.
Miss Hildegarde Withers had spent most of what was left of the night alternately stalking up and down like some caged, ungainly bird of prey or dozing in a hard wooden chair. Her watch had been taken away, but pale squares of filtered sunlight moved imperceptibly across the worn stone floor of the cell, and she guessed that it must be around nine o’clock in the morning when she heard heavy steps in the corridor and someone rapping sharply on the chilled steel bars.

“Go away,” snapped the schoolteacher. “I don’t care for any breakfast.” The jailer, a rotund brown man with luxuriant mustaches and a two-day beard, laughed appreciatively, since everyone knew that almost no meals were served here except to such guests as were able to make their own outside arrangements with some nearby restaurant. Then he unlocked the door, with much clattering of an immense iron key, and flung it creakingly open. “
Adelante!
” he said, with a gesture.

“I demand the right to make a phone call!” Miss Withers said. “I want the American ambassador or the consul or somebody …”

“Is here,” announced the jailer with jovial inaccuracy. He moved politely aside, and she looked into the quizzically sardonic face of the last person in the world she had expected, or wanted, to see at the moment. Inspector Oscar Piper had a long greenish-brown cigar cocked in one corner of his mouth; his eyes were distant and disapproving.

“Oscar!” she cried quickly, and then bit her lip. “I—er—words fail me.”

“Do they, now?” said the little Hibernian coldly.

“I’m very glad to see you. I meant to meet you at the airport, but—”

He looked her up and down, very critically. “Get yourself arrested at a costume ball, or a Hard Times party?”

Suddenly the schoolteacher realized that she was still wearing the outfit she had purchased in the shops along the market arcade; voluminous greenish-pink wraparound skirt, lavender sweater, wide leather belt studded with bits of colored glass, and even the straw hat with the incredibly extensive brim that ran off into unfinished fringes. “Only protective coloration, Oscar,” she said with forced lightness as she marched out into the corridor. “In this town the only way to be inconspicuous is to be as conspicuous as possible.”

“Is it, now?” There was no warmth in the man at all; he was all New York cop.

“Yes. How—however did you find me?”

He took her arm, not affectionately. “Went to the hotel, discovered you’d been out all night. Tried the hospital first and the calaboose second.”

“Thank heavens. I might have rotted there for weeks.”

“You might at that,” he said. “It’s an idea. But I figured I owed you at least something for old times’ sake. Now listen. They say the
magistrado
isn’t such a bad guy. All you have to do is to talk soft and plead guilty.”

“
Guilty?
” she cried indignantly.

“Well, you did knock a police officer down with your handbag last night, didn’t you? With all that stuff you carry around in it, it could be assault with a deadly weapon, only they’ve been nice enough to reduce the charge to disorderly conduct.”

She sniffed. “How was I to know the man was a policeman, in that sport shirt and slacks? I thought all detectives wore blue suits and bump-toed shoes and smoked cigars. And I was so furious when I found out that they’d had the nerve to pick up that nice Mexican boy and my own poor Talley and whisk them off in the black Maria over nothing at all …”

“Maybe it isn’t as nothing at all as you think,” the inspector told her. “This is another country, and they have their own laws down here. But the boy and your dog don’t enter into this hearing; I suggest you leave them out of it.” He indicated a door, where the broadly smiling jailer was waiting invitingly. “You’re on. Remember what I said, and don’t make it any worse than it is.”

Miss Withers was led into the tiny magistrate’s court, where with the help of a bored young interpreter Miss Withers listened to the charge, refused legal assistance, refused a jury trial and quietly pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. After a long stern lecture in Spanish, which the interpreter boiled down to three sentences, she was fined five dollars. Magistrate, interpreter, and clerk were all very polite to her, and she got the impression that they all thought her queer in the head but harmless on the whole. Finally her watch and handbag were returned to her and she was told that she was free to go.

“Not so fast!” she cried. “What about Talley?”

The inspector nudged her and shook his head. Edging her out the door, he said, “That’s what I was trying to tell you. The dog is impounded.”

“
Impounded?
Just because he doesn’t have a license that I tried all day to get?”

He shook his head, leading her along. “They have a local rule down here. They can impound the property of any Americano who gets mixed up in a lawsuit. I mean, if you bump fenders with a local car, yours is locked up until the case is settled.”

“But I didn’t bump anybody—”

“Your dog did. You took him to the races, and he jumped the fence and upset one of the greyhound sprints. The complaint was filed yesterday, and the police had orders to pick up the dog on sight. A group of insulted sportsmen who had tickets on the favorite got together and decided to sue.”

“So
that’s
what they were jabbering about last night! Why, it’s perfectly silly. A thing like that would be laughed out of any court.”

“I hope you’re right,” the inspector said. “Anyway, you’ll be served with the papers sometime later today. The boys want to be recompensed for whatever they might have won if old Talley hadn’t tripped up their picks.”

“And I didn’t take Talley to the races; I left him in the car! I even have a witness to prove it!”

“Fine, fine,” said Piper. “You’ll have your day in court. Meanwhile—”

But she pulled at his sleeve. “Oscar, that poor boy—the one who was walking Talley for me last night. Are they still holding him, too?”

The inspector shook his head. “Nope. They grilled him awhile and then had to let him go when he swore that he’d only found the poodle loose on the street, and was trying to locate the owner for a possible reward. The night desk sergeant said that the boy hung around a little while and finally went home.”

“Thank goodness! Poor Vito needs his sleep. And where is Talley now?”

“I told you,” said Oscar Piper wearily. “He’s impounded, and until the case comes up he’ll be maintained at public expense somewhere—”

“But you don’t understand!” cried Miss Withers. “There’s only one
somewhere,
just one veterinarian in the town. Which means Dr. Doxa, a man I’ve already had difficulties with. We’ve got to go over there right away, and if that nasty man won’t give my dog back at least we must furnish some decent dog food—”

“No,” the inspector told her, as they came out of the grim official building into the bright morning sunlight. “Your dog can wait. Have you forgotten that this is a murder case?”

She sniffed eloquently. “I’m certainly having it proved to me, more clearly every day. You may find out before we’re through, Oscar Piper, that everything is tied up together. It should be obvious, even to the most limited intelligence, that this trumped-up lawsuit is an attempt at frightening me off, or at least at keeping me from any further sleuthing. These are deep waters, deeper than you think.”

“So you’re still trying to upset the applecart, eh?”

“You should know by now that it’s easier to get me started than to stop me. Can’t you see yet that there is a whole lot more to the Fagan murder than meets the eye? I imagine you must think so too, deep down inside, or you wouldn’t have come rushing out here to pull John Hardesty’s chestnuts out of the fire.”

Piper wearily told her why Hardesty had not come out in person, being stuck somewhere off in the Virgin Islands.

“Of course!” the schoolteacher cried. “Virgin Islands … Mexicali … both of them are red herrings. I seem to see a pattern emerging.”

“Pattern-schmattern,” he said. “Where’s the Kell girl, Hildegarde?”

“Quite—quite safe.”

“Safe where?”

“I’ll tell you all about it. But—but first couldn’t I have some coffee or something? It was rather a hard night, on the whole.”

“Okay,” he conceded, grudgingly. She bristled at his tone, and then, womanlike, decided to wait for another time. Something was gnawing at the inspector’s vitals, but as she well knew he was not a man to meet head-on.

They wound up in a little lunchroom on the Avenida, the same lunchroom. But today where was no sign of Nikki Braggioli around, and Miss Withers ventured to ask the counterman if she could have her
huevos rancheros
without the
rancheros.
While they ate, and drank innumerable cups of coffee, she brought the inspector up to date on her adventures below the border, or nearly so.

“I’ll admit, Oscar, that pride goeth before a fall. When I sent you that telegram early Monday morning I was drunk with success. I had won my point, proved my hunch about Dallas Trempleau being here only for one special reason—to hide the important witness. Through Vito I’d found the girls and I thought I had both of them convinced that they should start back to New York with me next day.”

“You should have a guardian,” the inspector said. “Or a keeper.”

“I’ll frankly admit that something went wrong. All the time the girls were obviously pulling my leg, I see it now. I’m more than half-convinced that they even put sleeping pills in my coffee. I’ve always prided myself on being a judge of people, but I just don’t understand Dallas and Ina, I really don’t.”

Piper, still obviously unmollified, waved his hand. “It’s perfectly simple. Take Ina Kell, just a little girl from East Nowhere, Pennsylvania, who always had wondered what it would be like to dwell in marble halls and wear mink underwear. She stumbled into a murder, found herself in the catbird’s seat, got tempted by the glories of this world, and fell. She had the world by the tail with a downhill drag when you came waltzing in, and she suddenly realized that the ball was about over and it was almost midnight, and she couldn’t face riding home in a pumpkin.”

“Oscar, I do wish your reading would progress beyond
Cinderella.
”

He didn’t smile. “Anyway, the girl rushed off in a panic, just to put off the evil hour of reckoning. As for Dallas Trempleau—”

The schoolteacher nodded complacently. “She’s more complicated, eh?”

“Not if you understand the type. You don’t think she’s doing all this just out of the goodness of her heart, do you?”

“There’s such a thing as love, Oscar—”

“What does a spoiled Park Avenue brat know about love? She doesn’t really love Junior Gault. She’d probably never go through with the marriage if by some miracle he did beat the rap. But she just doesn’t want it said that she was once engaged to a man who got sent to the chair. So when Sam Bordin got this bright idea of luring away the one important witness, she put up the money and her own time. Probably she’s getting a big thrill out of it.”

Miss Withers frowned. “You’re sure, Oscar, that it was Bordin who pulled the strings? Wouldn’t he, as a lawyer, have known how dangerous it could be for him?”

“It adds up. Lawyers like him follow a certain tradition—Fallon, Darrow, Steuer. There’s more ham actor in them than there is law. They take cases that look hopeless and then somehow get the client off. But they must maintain a reputation for infallibility. Bordin found, after he accepted the Gault case and the publicity involved, that it was red-hot. With that motive, and with Gault pinned on the scene of the crime at the right time, he didn’t have any out in court. Yet if a big-name client of his got the chair, he would lose his stock in trade. So he pulled a fast one.”

The schoolteacher said, “But both girls deny that it was his idea.”