Cold Poison (10 page)

“There’s only one Jan,” he said soberly.

She nodded, “And, of course, there are two of Mr. Karas and two of Mr. Bayles?” As Tip Brown flushed pinker still, she added, “And by the way, Mr. Brown, can you tell me if all three of our potential victims are safe and sound in their offices this morning?”

Hesitantly Tip Brown admitted that while he knew nothing about the two men he had just happened to look in on Janet a little while ago and had found her working on the animation for
Peter Penguin’s Sea Serpent
, with a certain so-and-so piano player practically breathing down her fair white neck. “That fellow!” he said. “He’s one that could standing watching; I’ve never liked musicians and never trusted ’em.”

“I have noticed that musicians are apt to be like other people. Does your antipathy to musicians extend to Mr. Karas?”

Tip Brown snorted. “That swell-headed maestro? Why, he actually thinks that the cartoons we make here are only backgrounds for his music instead of the other way around. Besides, the old goat is always making eyes at our sweater girls—at his age!”

“Including Janet Poole?” The schoolteacher smiled. “Relax, young man. I quite understand why you are interested in her, and I don’t blame you. Love is a wonderful thing, they tell me—even unrequited love. But it is also often blind.”

He blinked. “Well, I’m not blind enough to kid myself about my chances there; that piano player with the phony Boston accent has her hypnotized.”

“Perhaps not as completely as you think,” Miss Withers said wickedly. “You know, of course, about Jan’s posing—?”

“What
?” The round pink faced paled. “Who told you? Who’d dig that up now?”

“I mean about her posing for Larry Reed, at his home,” she probed quietly on.

“Oh,” he said in a different tone. “I don’t care who says it, it’s not true. Sure, Jan went out with him a little when she first came to work here, but she’d never go up to that wolf-den of his alone—not even then.”

“But she did, and it must have been quite recently, too,” continued the schoolteacher with elaborate casualness. “Because there was a half-finished water color of her on his easel when he died.”

Tip Brown, who had been idly stroking Talleyrand’s fuzzy topknot, twisted the wool so hard that the poodle gave a reproachful yipe and scooted over to his corner. Tip carefully lighted a cigarette. “So? Well, you never know, do you?” He waved his hand in a casual farewell gesture, and went hastily out.

“Well!” said Miss Withers to the dog. “He either didn’t know—or else he didn’t know that anyone else knew. I’m talking about Jan’s posing for the art class, of course. Her deep dark secret, like most secrets, was no secret at all. But he jumped at the idea of her posing for Larry Reed, even just for a portrait. That young man will bear watching—as who in this case won’t? Among them a person named Rollo Bayles.”

Talley wagged his almost nonexistent tail.

“No,” said Miss Withers firmly and shut him in the office, setting off briskly like a prospector looking for diamonds or gold, but willing to settle for any sign of ore anywhere.

She found out that Bayles had a workroom in a long building at the end of the studio street, and finally discovered a door with his name blazoned on it. She pushed inside without knocking, and found herself alone in a high narrow room smelling strongly of oil paints and lighted only from above; most of the wall space was given over to large-sized paintings in various stages of completion. They were all delicately, breathtakingly beautiful, if a bit on the vague side. The vagueness came, she realized, from the fact that in the compositions there were no central figures at all, no foci of interest; the paintings were all backgrounds against which someday the animated cartoon figures would perform their antics.

At the far end of the room a door bore a sign,
Color Lab
. A man’s hat and raincoat hung on a hook near the door, though that was no proof that Rollo Bayles was on deck today—it might be only office camouflage, a permanent exhibit. Certainly the man was nowhere around; the place was silent as the proverbial tomb. She went immediately to the big paint-stained desk and without a qualm began to search it. Miss Withers long ago had come to the conclusion that a man’s office desk—like a woman’s handbag—is the key to his character.

Rollo Bayles, she thought, must be rather a messy type; he kept no order whatever and seemed to have spilled ink and paints rather freely about, even for an artist. There were no knickknacks, no personal letters, but in one bottom drawer was a pile of ancient
Saturday Reviews
. For a moment the schoolteacher beamed, thinking that she and Mr. Bayles had similar tastes. Then she discovered that most of the magazines were open to the personal columns, with a neat check mark against such choice items as “Is there a Costals for this lonely Solange, fond of outdoor sports and Existentialism? Write Box 233B.”

“Dear me!” murmured Miss Withers, shaking her head. “He’s one of
those
.” But there were no evidences that Rollo Bayles had ever actually answered any of the lonely-heart ads. Probably, she thought, he had simply gloated over them, toyed with the idea of actually writing to one of those itching, waiting females; he had dreamed of wonderful new friendships and romances and at the same time had realized somewhere in the back of his mind that fairy princesses do not have to advertise for suitors.

As a last resort the schoolteacher looked under the blotter—men, she knew, always tucked things away under desk blotters—but there she found only a clipping from
Time
about a supposed new way to restore fading hair by means of a vitamin-complex pill, her own name and address and phone number on a scribbled bit of paper, and a print of the justly famous calendar pin-up picture posed for by a certain young movie star in the altogether.

But in spite of these sad, lonely indications of “the dreams of fair women” there was nothing at all to indicate any connection between Bayles and the late lamented Larry Reed—or any connection with the other recipients of the cross-eyed valentines. The thing just didn’t fit together; Miss Withers felt somewhat like the audience at a magician’s show, sitting back and watching things that weren’t where you thought they were.

“Misdirection,” she decided. And then her musings were interrupted by the sound of scuffling in the room behind the closed door, and she hastily withdrew from the vicinity of the desk and tried to look as if she weren’t there. It was none too soon, for the door of the color lab burst open and a pretty auburn-haired lass of perhaps eighteen came loping through. She wore the blue uniform of a studio messenger, and she giggled as she ran. Close behind her but losing ground steadily was Rollo Bayles, already a bit winded.

The girl made the front door with a lead of five lengths, scooped up a pouch of still-undelivered mail, and slipped out into the sunshine with a last peal of merry laughter. Bayles stopped short, staring after her with an extremely odd expression on his face. He looked, Miss Withers thought, like a thwarted child—a tormented, unhappy problem child who might stamp his feet or smash something any minute. Then he turned and saw that he had an audience.

“
Mister
Bayles!” said Miss Withers dryly. “At this hour of the morning!”

The man regained control of himself quickly. “I suppose you think—” he began. “Well, it isn’t like that at all. You see, I was only blending some colors to show her the exact shade of lipstick she should wear with that hair, and one thing led to another and—”

“And that isn’t the point, young man. I’m not interested in your extra-curricular activities, if any. I just came here to return something of yours.”

“Mine?” Bayles stared blankly at the statuette of the sacred bird. “You’re mistaken, ma’am.”

“The mistake was made by the person who hurled it through my window last night.”

Bayles stiffened warily. Searching his face, Miss Withers thought that she saw guilt there. But then people could feel guilt about so many different things. He blinked his rather protruding eyes, took a deep breath, and said, “But why on earth—? Are you intimating that I’d do a thing like that? I’m supposed to be one of the targets of this crazy plot, remember?”

“This was the mistake that was made, Mr. Bayles,” she went on coolly. “While in the case of Larry Reed’s murder there was no question of alibis—since we cannot know where and when and how he got the poison—now we
do
know that the murderer was in a car outside my bungalow at a certain time last night, leaving me a warning to lay off.”

“Oh?” he said cautiously.

“Yes.” She smiled brightly. “You see what it means? This automatically eliminates everyone who has a good alibi for that hour. Immediately after the car roared away and before the driver had a chance to get home, I telephoned everyone involved in the case, just to check.
You
didn’t answer your phone, by the way.”

“What? Oh, I can explain that. I’d taken a couple of seconal tablets to knock myself out. The phone could have rung all night and I wouldn’t have heard.”

“Then,” she persisted wickedly, “you say you
were
home and in bed at
three
o’clock this morning?”

“Certainly. I came home shortly after two, and I can prove it. I always turn on my bedside radio for a little owl music before I go to sleep, and the people in the next apartment heard it and pounded on the wall, so that proves—”

“That proves something, at any rate.” The schoolteacher felt a surge of secret triumph, though she also wished with all her heart that she
had
actually thought of making those phone calls. She turned to go, and then as Bayles relaxed in obvious relief she whirled back on him again. “Just one thing more,” she said. “The sender of those poison-pen valentines knew too much about the past of his potential victims. Perhaps we can pursue that line a little. Mr. Bayles, how did
your
secret leak out?”

The man shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know, honestly. It’s nothing I’d be likely to talk about.”

“Not even to an old friend, or an affable bartender—or—?” Bayles shook his head. “For years I’ve put it out of my mind, completely. I wouldn’t let myself think of it. You see, I promised my mother on her deathbed that I’d become a priest, and—and—” His eyes were wet and shining.

“I understand.” The schoolteacher took her departure, fearing that the man would break into
Mother Machree
—or into tears of self-pity. He was, she thought, a small loss to the Church of Rome. Miss Withers was beginning to form a picture of the real Rollo Bayles in her mind’s eye, and it was not as pretty as his paintings by any means.

Yet a man could be an apostate, he could break a deathbed promise to his adored mother, and still—could he be a murderer, could he kill, and kill with the subtle, sneaky method of poison?

The schoolteacher walked thoughtfully back along the sunlit studio street, past hurrying cutters with their precious cans of film, past cute little uniformed studio messengers with their languorous starlets’ walk and their wondering starlit eyes—each remembering that Lana Turner had been a soda jerk when she was discovered—past secretaries and electricians and executives and all the myriad denizens of this gold-plated anthill. From the open window of a sound room came the last line of the
alma mater
anthem—“G-g-g-gawk-wak—that’s Peter Penguin’s song….” repeated over and over again as the sound men ironed out indistinguishable errors in the track.

Miss Withers even ran into the gnomish janitor she had met on her first day here, who gave her a roguish wink. On an impulse she caught his sleeve. “Mr. Cassiday, you know more about this place than almost anyone. You knew Larry Reed and all the others involved. Did he have any enemies? Who, do you think, would have a motive to poison him?”

“Poison?” The old man stiffened suspiciously. “But the paper said—”

“The newspapers can be wrong, and so can the police.”

Mr. Cassiday scratched his head. “Well, if you ask me I’d say that Larry Reed was his own worst enemy. Coming into the studio with hangovers so bad that I had to go out and get him a pint so his hand would be steady enough to hold a pencil. Carrying a torch for some dame, he was.”

“His former wife?”

“Joyce—Mr. Cushak’s secretary? I don’t think—”

“Janet Poole?”

“Maybe. I dunno. But, ma’am, if Larry really was poisoned, I say they should look for a woman—because any fool knows that poison is a woman’s way.”

Miss Withers thanked him and went on, more thoughtful still. Everyone nowadays seemed to be an amateur criminologist; everyone knew that poison is usually a feminine weapon, that writers of poison-pen letters always send one to themselves, and that the murderer
never
returns to the scene of his crime. All truisms. She remembered
Porgy and Bess
—“It ain’t necessarily so.”

She came at last to the music stage and went up the steps, then through wide doors and into a good-sized hall, its walls draped with heavy cloth. Two bare overhead bulbs gave a dim glow—enough light so that she could see at one end a raised platform with a baby-grand piano, folding chairs and music stands. The place was very empty and still, almost too still for her present mood. As the doors swung automatically shut behind her, they cut off all the cheerful noisy bustle of the studio, and the room was suddenly heavy with brooding silences; the dangling microphones and the hulking electrical equipment seemed to glare at her, reminding her that she was an intruder here.

Miss Withers almost expected the various complicated mechanisms to break into raucous music; she found herself holding her breath and tiptoeing as she went forward into the cool gloom. But all remained silent, too silent. She could see a smaller door at the far end of the place, and as she came closer she could make out that it bore the legend,
Jules Karas, Music Director, Private.
She knocked once, and entered.

It was an office even larger than Mr. Cushak’s, though somewhat less ornate. There was a movieola, a big record player, a bookcase stuffed with music sheets and orchestrations, and another case with stacks of phonograph records and albums. Under the one window was a desk; it was a very clean desk that bore only an onyx fountain-pen set, a plaster statuette of the bird similar to the one she had in her hand, and an ash tray in which rested a half-smoked cigar in a long amber holder. Miss Withers felt somewhat relieved; at least all three of the people in whom she was most interested had shown up at the studio safe and sound this morning. The ash of the cigar in the tray was still warm to her exploring fingers, so she figured that she must have missed Mr. Karas by seconds.