Nipped in the Bud (34 page)

“Almost too mad,” said Miss Withers slowly. “Just why should a supposed homicidal maniac train his sights on these four? It’s a sort of methodical nor-nor-west madness—the misquotation is from Hamlet, in case you’re interested—and there’s a link somewhere if we can only find it.” She pointed to the brown envelope addressed to Larry Reed. “This drawing, and this printing—would you people say that they are the work of one of the regular studio artists?”

The thing was passed around again. They were of various opinions. The printing itself was sketchy and impersonal, of the type used by almost everyone in the place. Then when you came to the drawing of the murdered, strangled bird—

“Was it drawn by a competent studio artist, or not?” Miss Withers demanded.

Nobody could immediately answer that. Of course, every desk in the place was equipped with a tracing board designed to make it easy to reproduce the original
gels
—the master drawings—with whatever minor changes of action were immediately indicated. Anyone in the place could, given time and access to one of the desks, have taken one of the myriad gelatin prints of Peter Penguin which overflowed the studio, tilted it horizontally and then traced it, adding his own ghoulish touches. This particular drawing, they agreed, was a trifle crude—but perhaps purposely so.

“Then it must have been done,” the schoolteacher decided wisely, “by an amateur who was trying to draw like a professional who was trying to draw like an amateur, which gets us exactly nowhere.”

“Except that we know by the stationery and everything that it must have been done by somebody right here in the studio,” said Mr. Cushak sadly. “One of our own people has gone bad—”

“Like the rotten apple that must be nipped in the bud,” put in Miss Withers a bit wickedly. Again she stared at the three marked victims; if the books were right, one of them was the murderer of Larry Reed. None of them looked at all like a murderer; of course, she knew to her sorrow that murderers rarely did. Lombroso and his criminal types had long been discredited; the murderer often looked like and
was
the nice person next door who borrowed your lawn mower and lent you an egg or a cup of sugar when you were short. For once the schoolteacher had no intuition, no hunch, no touch of extrasensory perception to guide her. Yet she was much inclined to the belief that two of these people in the office were honestly scared for their very lives and that one was a very fine actor and a deep-dyed villain.

“I suggest,” she said quietly, “that for the next few days each one of you takes exceptional precautions; we are in the midst of something ugly and dangerous. And if any one of you should happen to remember anything about anyone named Lucy—” She nodded good-by at them and made her way out and back to her own office, where she found Tip Brown pinning up new drawings on the story board facing her desk. Talley erupted from his favorite spot in the corner and greeted her as if she had been away for a year; almost equally enthusiastic was Tip, whose face was boyishly alight.

“Hi!” he said. “I think I got it. This story was originally developed too straight-line. It’s gotta have a zany, Milt Gross touch—and your Talley dog suggests it. He had lunch with me, by the way. I hope it was all right.”

“I hope so, too,” she said. “One raw hamburger?”

“Two,” he admitted. “And the beastie sat up and begged for more, so I bought him an ice-cream cone for dessert.”

“Talleyrand has gone Hollywood,” said the schoolteacher, shaking her head. “He’ll have to reduce—”

“Anyway, he’s type-casting for this part—if ever. You see, we’ve got to wring out all the boffs and yaks we can from the situations where the circus poodle tries to ham it up and get into every act in the show and outclown the clowns and out-fly the acrobats. I’ve got a swell idea for a sequence where he tries to take over and peddle toy gas balloons to the audience, only he gets hold of too many and they lift him right up to the top of the big top—”

“Splendid,” said Miss Withers absently. “But—”

“And for a climax,” continued Tip Brown, “we pull a switcheroo. The rich old lady in sequence one, she doesn’t die after all, she gets better. There’s publicity in the circus ads about the poodle and back in the big house on Fifth Avenue the parrot recognizes him—he’s the type of parrot who always reads the morning paper, natch—and he flies out the window and comes over to the circus hell-bent to bring the good news and say hello to an old friend and tell the poodle that he can come home again, the relatives have been thrown out on their respective behinds. Only the pup doesn’t go for it. Suddenly he realizes that he likes the circus better than the plush spot in the big house, and he doesn’t want to go back. He’s now a featured performer and the ringmaster has to treat him with respect. He’ll stay there—and, he mentions, there happens to be an opening for a barker in the side show—”

“I was thinking,” began Miss Withers hopefully, “about—”

“So we dissolve to the parrot outside the side show, yelling ‘Hurry, hurry, hurry—get your tickets for the prime attraction of the midway …” or whatever it is. The parrot got into the act too, see? Happy ending, with the spotlight on the poodle in the center ring of the circus, juggling something ten times his size and having a hell of a time. He’s found himself; he’s among friends, see?”

“I like it fine,” said the schoolteacher judicially. “But speaking of friends, what about Larry Reed? What sort of person would you say he was?”

Tip looked vaguely puzzled. “Larry? Good artist, full of fun and games. The type who would put itching powder in your bath salts if he had a chance, or slip rubber sausages into the hors d’oeuvre. He used to pick up copies of cheap magazines and then spend hours filling in the advertising coupons with his friends’ names, so that for months afterwards they’d have their mailboxes stuffed with home-tattooing sets and patent remedies for baldness and lost manhood and stuff like that. Oh, Larry’s a card.”

“And speaking of cards,” she pressed closer, “did he win a lot from you and the boys at poker?”

“But—” Tip looked bewildered. “He never plays it. He does a lot of card tricks, he’s even a member of the American Society of Magicians, but he says it isn’t fair for him to compete across the table. I’ve never known him to gamble, except maybe a little on a Christmas Eve crap game or on a horse at Santa Anita. I think he spends most of his evenings at the easel painting things; he is hell-bent on being a real artist and having exhibitions in New York and a spread in
Life
.”

“And what about the other evenings, when he didn’t paint? Was he interested in women?”

Tip grinned. “Who isn’t? As the fellow said, ‘It’s me hobby!’ Yes, Larry gets around, but he never sticks to anyone long. I guess that’s why Joyce pulled out and left him.”

“Was there much bitterness in that divorce?”

“None, that I know of. He had a sense of humor and she didn’t. He used to carry a little gold bell and ring it at her when there was a gag and she didn’t get it, to show he was only kidding.”

“Any man who would ring a pocket bell at
me
…” said Miss Withers. “But do go on.”

“There’s not much more to it,” Tip Brown said. “They just didn’t fit, and there weren’t any children to complicate things, so he gave her the car and the TV set and he took the house and they parted amicably—they still have dinner every now and then. Very modern and all that.”

“How charming,” said Miss Withers, without warmth. “Is there anybody else whose toes Larry Reed might have stepped on?”

Tip Brown stared at her. “Not that I know of. Larry’s not the type to make a play for married women; there are enough luscious unattached young females around this town for anybody. They’re mostly dying to get a studio job, and they cluster around anybody who works for a studio like flies around a garbage can.”

“I see,” said the schoolteacher. “But didn’t Larry make some enemies with his practical jokes?”

“Not really. Oh, he carried a sort of torch for Janet Poole, the blond lovely here in the studio, after she turned him down for her musician. But leave it to Larry to get even in his own boyish fun-loving way—he knew this fellow had ambitions to be an actor, so he sent him a fake phone message supposedly coming from Sam Goldwyn’s office asking him to come over for a screen test. The poor guy pawns his watch to buy a new suit and then spent half a day at the Goldwyn studio trying to get past the gatemen.”

“And so everybody took Larry Reed’s jokes in good humor? You yourself, when he forwarded all your mail to Horsecollar, Arizona?”

He stiffened. “At the time I could cheerfully have strangled him, sure. But in this business you have to go along with a gag. Finally I saw the joke, and laughed as hard as any of them.”

Miss Withers had her own ideas about that, but she kept them to her maidenly bosom. “Then Larry Reed must have had great personal charm, to be so readily forgiven for his fun-loving Rover-boy tricks.”

“Wait a minute!” Tip’s face was strange. “I—I begin to get it. You’ve been talking about Larry in the past tense for the last half-hour. He’s
dead
, isn’t he?”

“You don’t seem especially surprised at that, young man.”

But he wasn’t listening. “Something’s happened to Larry, and you know all about it—that’s why you’ve been asking all these questions!”

“Yes. He was murdered by somebody in this studio. Statistics show that murder happens every twenty minutes in these United States. I ask you now, have you any idea who it could be?”

Tip Brown seemed perceptibly to withdraw within himself, like an alarmed turtle. He was suddenly all carapace, unreachable. “No,” he said hollowly. “No, no ideas at all.” Quickly he pinned up the rest of his sketches and then said that he guessed he would call it a day. He went out of the office with a vague farewell gesture which indicated to the schoolteacher that he would see her around sometime but preferably not soon.

That young man, she thought, knows more than he is telling—and he has told more than he meant to tell.

Miss Withers sat alone—except for the somnolent Talley in his corner—for a long, long time in the little office which had so much to tell her if walls could only speak, which they never seemed to do. Finally she switched on the light under the glass of the drawing board, inserted a gelatin of the bird and a sheet of paper over it, and started experimenting. After a few minutes she decided that with these aids even she could produce a fairly recognizable sketch of Peter Penguin; certainly very nearly as good as the one on the poison-pen valentine. She fell into a light brown study, from which she was aroused by Talley’s enthusiastic welcome of a visitor. The girl she knew as Janet Poole was standing in the doorway, looking uncertain and lost.

“May I see you for a moment?” Jan asked. “I—I just thought of something.”

Janet came in and sat down, crossing a rather remarkable pair of legs. But she found it hard to talk.

“Well?” said the schoolteacher.

“A while ago in Mr. Cushak’s office you asked if there was anything to link the three of us—I mean the four of us, if you count Larry Reed….”

“Speak up, young lady. What is it?”

The girl carefully pleated her tweed skirt. “It couldn’t, of course, have had anything to do with what happened to Larry, I’m sure of that. But I’ve been thinking it over, and I guess I ought to tell you. You see—when I first came to the studio a couple of years ago I—I went out sometimes with Larry. I went out with Rollo Bayles, too—and even once or twice with Mr. Karas, who may be old but has some young ideas. All the bachelors around the place give a new girl the rush, you know.”

“I wouldn’t know, never having been in that happy situation. But you are trying to say that you played the field, eh?”

“A girl has to do something with her evenings,” said Janet defensively. “I was living in a boardinghouse and bored to tears.”

“Say no more, my dear. It’s my life story in a nutshell. But do go on.”

“There was never anything actually romantic,” Jan protested almost too quickly. “Mr. Karas was very gallant and continental and awfully sweet, really. He taught me a lot about food and wines and he kissed my hand. That’s all he ever kissed—I expected more and was all ready to say no, but it stopped there; I’m sure that he’s really in love with that lost wife of his. Rollo Bayles—well, Rollo is a lonely, confused sort of guy; I think he’s never got over a sort of guilt complex about leaving the priesthood, though heaven knows he was no more fitted for it than I am to be a—a steam fitter. But he’s a jazz fan and we used to go out to a little place on Ventura Boulevard and sit there and nurse our beers and listen to Pete Daily and the other hot five-man combos….”

“I have heard them on the radio,” admitted the schoolteacher. “They take tunes apart and put them back together sideways. But what about you and Larry Reed?”

“Larry was the nicest and most exciting of the lot, in most ways. But his divorce wasn’t final then and I didn’t want to get serious about a man who was at least technically married. We went dancing to Mocambo and Ciro’s and places like that, but before the thing got really final—” The girl hesitated.

“Yes—” prompted Miss Withers.

“Before his divorce got final, something happened,” said Janet a bit dreamily. “But you must understand; we all stayed friends.”

“Somebody didn’t stay just friends,” observed Miss Withers, nodding toward the diamond on Janet’s ring finger.

A warmish, crooked, little-girl smile illumined Jan’s face. “Guy,” she said softly. “All this I’m telling you about happened before Guy came to stay at my boardinghouse. He was a piano guy, a crazy mixed-up kid as they say, but there was a piano in the place and I heard him play and suddenly I woke up and there I was—engaged to be married. It’s going to be this summer.”

“You are referring to the musician, I gather?”

“Guy? Yes, he plays the piano and makes arrangements. But he’s really a composer.”

“How nice,” said Miss Withers a bit absently. “Musicians and artists—aren’t they supposed to be the jealous type? Do you suppose there could possibly be the shade of a jealousy motive here?”