Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (3 page)

“Sorry, but there is no soliciting in the building!” was the greeting.

“I beg your pardon?” The Withers eyebrows went up.

“Oh, aren’t you with the Community Chest?”

Miss Withers explained that she would like an office. The sultry girl surveyed her long purple fingernails dubiously. “I don’t know about that,” she said. “Gertrude usually takes care of that and she’s out to lunch. I’m Lillian Gissing from the secretarial department. I don’t—Excuse me.” A light flamed red on the board, and she pressed a key. “Third floor, Writers. Who? I’m sorry, Mr Josef is working at home today. Yes.” She turned back to Miss Withers confidentially. “The lies I have to tell! If I really said where he was—wow!”

“Really? But about my office?”

Lillian tapped purple fingernails against her rather prominent front teeth. “There’s 303—Mr Dinwiddie has it but he’s on his layoff. He won’t be back for six weeks….” She looked at the schoolteacher, making it plain that she did not think she’d last that long. “I’ll stick you in 303.” She slid a key under the window. “Next to the last door on the right.”

It was a nice office. Miss Withers made up her mind to that the very instant she walked in. There was a big oak desk, a typewriter on a stand, two chairs and an uncertain-looking lounge. · The one window was covered with a Venetian blind, but since the view consisted only of the flat roofs of studio sound stages, with some round brown hills beyond, that was small loss.

Connecting doors, both locked, opened right and left, and there was a radiator in the corner which she turned on at once.

The desk was bare and empty except for stationery, paper clips and some badly chewed pencils. Well, the powers that be were paying her ten dollars an hour to sit here, so she sat. After a while she took a sheet of letter paper from the desk and under the imposing letterhead she began typing a note to her old friend and sparring partner, Inspector Oscar Piper, back in Manhattan.

It began: “My dear Oscar, guess where I am! You wouldn’t believe it if I told you! But Hollywood is the sort of place about which anything you can say, good or bad, is true. It is also a place where surprisingly novel things happen….”

At that moment there was a click, and then the connecting door on her right opened suddenly. “Hey, Stinkie!” came a masculine voice.

Miss Withers blinked and looked up to see a short, blue-chinned man in the doorway, a man with a leonine head and wide, surprised eyes. He was holding a glass of water in a hand which trembled.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Saul Stafford, backing away. “I heard the typewriter and I thought old Dinwiddie was back.”

“I’m afraid not,” she confessed. “But since we’re to be neighbors—” She introduced herself.

“Neighbors, eh?” He cocked his head, then spoke in a strange, excited voice. “This may sound funny to you, but would you mind tasting this water? To see if there’s anything funny about it?”

She took the glass, sipped it. “It tastes like water to me. Why—you don’t think it’s poisoned, do you?” The remark was intended as a pleasantry, but when she saw his face she knew that it had rung the bell.

“Maybe,” he said hoarsely. Then he shrugged. “Don’t mind me. I’ve worked on so many quick B epics that I’m probably trying to live the part of Charlie Chan in the Death-Ray Tunnel or something. All the same, a lot of funny things have been happening to me lately.”

“Such as?”

He shrugged. “Oh, near accidents to my car and funny-tasting drinks and so on. It’s all a headache. By the way, you don’t happen to have any aspirin kicking around, do you?”

Miss Withers was sorry. “Tell me more about these things that have been happening to you,” she pressed.

But Stafford wisely shook his head. “There’s probably nothing to it. I’m maybe a mild case of paranoia. But, anyway, I saw something in the
Reporter
just now—Nincom is importing a famous New York detective as technical expert on his new picture, and when the guy gets here I’m going to retain him and lay the whole thing in his lap!”

“But—” began Miss Withers, and stopped. She had given her word to Mr Nincom not to divulge the nature of her assignment.

“It’s probably Ellis Parker,” Stafford went on. “Or he’s in jail, isn’t he? So maybe it’s William J. Burns or one of the Pinkertons.”

He stood in the doorway nodding—a man supremely confident that he could see powerful assistance in the offing. Miss Withers followed, eager and unhappy. “I wonder—” she began, and stopped. For she was looking into Saul Stafford’s office, into a room crowded with incredible objects, large and small. She noticed a typewriter stand equipped with an endless roll of paper, a high chair of the type used by tennis umpires, tables and desks covered with china animals, advertising statuettes, ship models, pipes and tobacco and every other imaginable object. The walls were covered with vast twenty-four sheets advertising the Folies Bergères, the Midland Railways and old Mammoth gangster pictures. One tremendous poster, an artist’s conception of Josephine Baker wearing a G string, ran up one wall and halfway across the ceiling.

“No wonder,” said the awed schoolteacher. “That room is enough to give anyone the jitters.”

“We got started and we couldn’t stop,” Saul Stafford admitted. “It got so crowded in here that Virgil had to move across the hall, and still we keep collecting things.” He shook his head. “Well, it’s nice to have met you, Miss Withers. Drop in any time. I think I’ll lie down and try to sleep off this headache.”

With the connecting door closed again, Miss Withers returned to stare at the virgin expanse of her desk blotter. But she had no heart to continue her letter to the inspector. All she could think of was that frightened man next door who saw—rightly or not—the shadow of death all around him.

She had no idea of just how seriously Mr Nincom intended the pledge of secrecy to be taken, but he had been very pointed about it. It was a nice problem in ethics, complicated still further by the fact that Stafford would probably be very surprised to find that the famous New York detective he expected was really only the inquisitive spinster next door.

Should she tell him? Would he put any faith in her if she did tell him? Impulsively Miss Withers picked up the telephone and got through to Nincom’s office where a bored young man answered and told her that the great man was out on the test stage. “Will you please ask him to call me the moment he is free?” she demanded, and the faraway voice promised to leave the message.

So she waited. There was something soothing and hypnotic in the air, but of course she couldn’t go to sleep at the switch—not on her first day. She leaned back in the chair, staring at the opposite wall and a photograph of some tired-looking calla lilies, funeral lilies. She found herself slipping finally into a sort of waking dream in which that sheaf of lilies rested across the chest of Mr Thorwald L. Nincom. She, herself, a disembodied spirit, floated above the great man’s funeral pyre, while around it, in a vast, wavering circle, danced his writers and secretaries and assistants, chanting a wordless, tuneless dirge.

The voices rose to a hideous cacophony. There was something she must do immediately, but she was bound in the dreadful paralysis of nightmare, bound and drowned and floating. Then she woke up suddenly to find that she was being shaken unmercifully by a tall and moderately frightened youth. It was Buster, the boy she had seen making calf’s eyes at Mr Nincom’s secretary. “Excuse me,” he said, and slapped her face.

She tried to slap back, but her strength was gone. There was a sweetish-sick taste in her mouth, as if a stale lemon drop had died there.

“It’s the gas,” Buster was saying. “You have to light these heaters when you turn them on or else the room gradually fills up with natural gas. You all right, ma’am?”

“Of course I’m all right.” She took deep breaths in front of the opened window, refused Buster’s offer of a visit from the studio doctor, of a glass of water, of anything. “Though I’m very grateful to you, young man,” she told him, “in spite of your rather drastic methods.”

He grinned engagingly. “Confucius say, ‘Better to wake up being slapped than sleep forever under tombstone.’”

Miss Withers frowned at him. “Sometimes I think Confucius say too much. By the way, young man, do you mind a well-meant suggestion? The next time you want a blond young lady to go out to lunch with you why not forget about these synthetic Confucius sayings and quote something more powerful? Such as:

“Can such delights be in the streets

And open fields, and we not see’t?

Come, well abroad, and let’s obey

The proclamation made for May….”

Buster looked at her, nodded. He said slowly, “I remember….

“And sin no more, as we have done, by staying;

But, my Corinna, come, let’s go a-Maying.”

Yes, before I set out to learn the motion-picture business I was exposed to things like that. But I still think Confucius is more suitable to this town.” He produced a large envelope, made Miss Withers sign for it. “From the Research Department,” he explained, and hastened away.

Miss Withers shook her head. Hollywood, where messenger boys quoted Herrick and everything was topsy-turvy. She opened the envelope, found three books dealing with the Borden case. One was from the
Famous Trials
series, and she opened it at a paragraph discussing the theory that Lizzie Borden had stripped herself to the buff to save her blue calico dress before taking the ax to Ma and Pa.

She hastily turned a page. But after a moment she pushed the books away. Lizzie Borden was cold potatoes at the moment.

It was getting well on into the afternoon, and still no call from Mr Nincom. On a sudden impulse Miss Withers went over to the door leading into Stafford’s office, knocked and tried to open it. The latch had been caught on the other side. That was odd. She knocked again. “Mr Stafford? It’s I—Miss Withers.”

Frowning, she went out into the hall and knocked on the main door to Stafford’s office. Then she tried the knob and found that it turned. She went inside.

No, her neighbor had not gone home. The room was just as she had seen it before, except that now the gigantic poster of Josephine Baker hung from the ceiling by only one thumbtack, except that Saul Stafford himself lay sprawled akimbo upon the carpet.

There was a half-filled glass of water on the table beside a large bottle of aspirin tablets. The desk chair had been overturned, and three thumbtacks lay on the floor. Stafford was beyond all help. She forced herself to make sure of that, felt the heavy leonine head roll loosely upon its broken neck, before she turned and ran out of the room.

*
See
The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree,
Crime Club, 1933.

I have been through the gates:

I have groped, I have crept

Back, back. There is
DUST

IN THE STREETS, AND BLOOD

CHARLOTTE MEW

“Y
OU CERTAINLY CAN LIE LIKE
a rug!” Lillian said half admiringly. For the umpteenth time that day she had listened to plump, pleasant Gertrude, arbiter of the switchboard on the third floor of the Mammoth Writers’ Building, as she told somebody at the other end of the line that Mr Josef was working at home today.

“Why don’t you break down and tell ’em the truth?” Lillian demanded. “Why don’t you say he’s in Good Sam Hospital with the screaming what-have-yous?”

Gertrude only smiled. For some time she had been acting as house mother to a menagerie of Mammoth writers and she was necessarily the custodian of many secrets. Her world consisted of this little office with its switchboard and stationery cabinet, with a view only of the upper half of the elevator door across the hall, but very little went on in the building—or, for that matter, in the studio—that she did not know about.

“Those hoodlums, Dobie and Stafford!” Lillian went on virtuously. “Setting fire to people!”

“Listen, dearie,” Gertrude told her. “Dobie and Stafford are your bosses. And they’re one of the highest-paid writing teams in the business. When you get more than fifteen hundred a week you’re not a hoodlum—you’re the life of the party.” Suddenly Gertrude noticed a fresh slip pinned under one slot in the tier of mailboxes. “What’s this, somebody new?”

“Oh, I most forgot. While you were out to lunch the front office sent over a new Nincom writer. I meant to tell you. Somebody I never heard of—probably an importation from back East. Looks just the type to write purple passion stories.” Lillian lighted a cigarette. “I put her in 303.”

Gertrude smiled. “Another sob sister?”

“That’s her. She looks like a mixture of Edna May Oliver and Charlotte Greenwood….”

“With just a dash of Hedy Lamarr, I trust?” spoke a quick, excited voice from the hall.

Lillian blushed fiery red, but Miss Hildegarde Withers was not interested in apologies. “Now, don’t get hysterical,” she advised them. “Just do as I say. Put through a call to the police and tell them that there is a dead man in the office next to mine.”

They gaped at her.

“Must I spell it for you?” snapped the schoolteacher. “A d-e-a-d man!”

In the room where the dead man lay the swift twilight of southern California deepened, casting into heavier shadow the faces of those who watched. Now the studio medico, a wizened little man in a crumpled white jacket, was squatting on his hunkers beside the body. Dr Evenson would have felt more at home back up the studio street in his neat little infirmary with its normal routine of cut thumbs and smashed toes and minor burns afflicting the army of Mammoth workers.

“Nothing I can do,” he declared. “He’s dead all right.” Dr Evenson rose to his feet and seemed to feel that his verdict lacked emphasis, for he repeated it. “Dead!”

Somebody finished it for him: “… my lords and gentlemen, stilled the tongue and stayed the pen”—in a low whisper. It was only the hatchet-faced woman who had discovered the body and who now lurked behind the tennis umpire’s chair in the corner.

Burly Tom Sansom, built like a brick icehouse, stood by the door with his thumbs hooked into his Sam Browne belt and a scowl on his face. As chief of the Mammoth police force his duties were ordinarily confined to keeping children with autograph books from sneaking through the gates and to confiscating candid cameras on the studio sets. But he took this in his stride.