Cold Poison (7 page)

“Yes,” Guy Fowler said very serious. “I’m naturally most disturbed,” he admitted in a faint Ivy-League accent. “From what Jan tells me, there’s supposed to be a mysterious link between those four people. I’m fairly a newcomer here, but it occurred to me that that was one time the four were together, if that’s worth anything to you.”

“I don’t see—” began Miss Withers, slightly puzzled.

“We were together by purest accident,” Jan cut in hurriedly. “In this car from the limousine service. It was a perfectly horrible night for driving, one of those impossible deluges we have sometimes during the rainy season, and even the birds were walking. Down in some dismal street in southeast Los Angeles the driver had an accident. He hit a woman who ran out in front of him, against the lights, to catch a bus. We saw nothing of it, just felt the thud and heard a scream. The driver stopped and an ambulance came. The police asked a lot of questions, but they didn’t hold him. We went on to the preview and the woman was taken away to a hospital and lingered on and on and I guess maybe later she died though there was nothing much about her in the papers. But do you suppose, maybe—?”

“I can suppose anything,” said the schoolteacher. “But perhaps it is something to think about.”

Guy Fowler absently flicked his cigarette ash into the pot where Miss Withers’ precious African violets were growing. “I’m just wondering,” he said. “Suppose the woman who was hit had a boy friend who was knocked off his rocker by the shock of her death and set out to get even?”

The schoolteacher sniffed a prodigious sniff. “Come, come, young man! A boy friend who’d get a job at the studio with intent to murder all the people who just happened to be passengers in the car that struck her? It sounds rather farfetched to me at first glance, though I’ll confess that in my humble opinion there is never a really sufficient motive for murder. But it will stand looking into, I suppose. Was the woman’s name Lucy, by any chance?”

Jan shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“I’ll find out. We have to pursue every avenue and every blind alley. Because in spite of what it says in the newspapers, Larry Reed was murdered by the sender of those Lucy valentines.”

“But,” cried Jan, bewildered, “he died of poison ivy!”

“And I think,” observed the schoolteacher quietly, “that that will stand looking into, too; there have been wrong diagnoses before this.”

“Well, whether it’s wrong or whether it’s right,” the young man said almost belligerently, “I’m not going to have Jan left on a spot. Something drastic has to be done about it, right now. I wish the studio would call in a regular private agency like Burns or Pinkerton….”

“Guy dear!” Janet interrupted. “Please hush!”

He subsided, a bit sulkily. “She bosses him a little,” Miss Withers said to herself. But she’d learn, if she were wise. The schoolteacher pondered for a moment. “I have a suggestion. You two could get married and go off somewhere on a honeymoon right away, far out of danger.”

There was a stiffish silence. Then Janet, fumbling in her handbag briefly, said, “Guy darling, will you run out and see if I left my cigarettes in the glove compartment?”

He started to offer her his own case, but she shook her head. “You know I can’t stand those king-sized things of yours.”

“Certainly.” Guy gave her a look; then excused himself with easy politeness and went out the door, followed by Jan’s fondly possessive glance and also by Talley the poodle who was tired of all this conversation and thought it was time for a breather.

Alone with the girl, Miss Withers said, “My dear, you must forgive me if I touched on a tender subject or something, but it did seem an eminently sensible idea in the present circumstances. Eloping, I mean.”

Janet Poole frowned. “Since you know this much, you might as well know the rest of it. Guy and I are going to get married as soon as we can, but he’s a dear foolish idealist and so he stubbornly says that he won’t make an honest woman of me until he pays back every cent of the money he borrowed from me while he was on his uppers.” The girl leaned confidentially closer, her eyes warmly maternal. “You see, when I first met Guy he’d been having a rough time. His family back East had more or less thrown him out on his ear because he wouldn’t toe the line, get his degree from Yale or Harvard and come into the firm—they’ve been investment counselors or something like that since Plymouth Rock was a pebble. He had a brief, unhappy marriage that they arranged—to a high-nosed society deb next door; she finally got a divorce in Paris. Everything went wrong for Guy, with too much bossing from her and from his parents. He’d drifted out here to Hollywood and was trying to be an actor, without getting anywhere. He tried to be a writer, too—he did literally dozens of stories in the hard-boiled detective field and also some science-fiction, but he never sold anything. He was drinking too much and going to hell in a handbasket, if you’ll pardon my French. But he moved into my rooming-house, and that time I heard him play the piano I knew right away that he had something he’d never been able to find. So—”

“So you took over? Most men can stand a little intelligent guidance, I’ve heard. None of them would stand still long enough for me to try, darn it. But it’s not a bad basis for marriage, either. You’ve never met this family of his?”

Janet shivered. “No, but I will this summer. I’ll be terribly nice and refined, too. That’s why I’m studying speech and Emily Post so I won’t look to them just like a green Polack from south of the tracks, or pick up the wrong fork. Because—” the girl hesitated—“you see, while Guy is now estranged from his family, he’s terribly in awe of them and I know he’d never be happy for long without their approval of his marriage. Now that he’s found himself and become a different person and stopped drinking, now that he’s starting out to be a successful composer and another Cole Porter, maybe—”

“It should certainly make a difference in their attitude, and I hope they will see clearly enough to give you credit for the transformation. And has he met
your
family?”

Jan’s smile was glowing and proud. “Of course! And he did
beautiful
. He went down to Long Beach with me one week end; he ate my mama’s
bigos
and
kielbasa
and drank a couple of puddlers—that’s the Polish name for boilermakers—with my pop. Guy took it all in his stride; he didn’t even seem to mind pop sitting around the kitchen in his undershirt. He did disappoint by brother by refusing to go out in the back yard and wrestle, but he beat him at chess. It all went off better than we’d even dared hope; they seemed to like him really. But of course anything I do is okay with my family; I could marry King Kong and if he had a regular job and didn’t beat me too often they’d give their blessing.”

Miss Withers nodded, feeling that she, too, would be inclined to trust this long, tall, open girl. “So far so good, then,” she said cautiously. “Is your Guy the jealous type?”

“
Him
?” With quick understanding, Janet said firmly, “Don’t think what I think you’re thinking. Guy isn’t at all the jealous type; he was never jealous of Larry Reed or anybody I went out with before he came into my life. He’s got reasons to know there was never any important man for me and that I’m all his, period.”

“Period and exclamation point, eh?” The schoolteacher was inclined to believe her. These one-man women, and how well she understood them! “Sorry, but in this business we have to ask all sorts of questions. When there’s a murder, and the threat of three more, everyone is in a way suspect. I confess that I do not at the moment see a plausible motive for anybody’s killing Larry Reed, but—”

“Larry Reed was a sweet guy!” Janet protested. “A sorta wolf, but a sweet guy. Just because he pulled some practical jokes—”

“Practical jokes can cut rather deeply sometimes,” Miss Withers reminded her. “How about Tip Brown? Didn’t he have a feud with Reed?”

“Tip?” Janet laughed. “He’s a sweet guy, the second sweetest I know. He’s the sort of person who feeds the mice around his apartment, and climbs trees to put baby robins back in the nest when they fall out. I’d love Tip a little, I guess, if I wasn’t so very bespoke.”

“An excellent attitude, but—” began Miss Withers, and then looked up to see Guy Fowler returning, complete with unnecessary cigarettes and the waltzing poodle, who made it clear that he had adopted Guy as a foster father.

“It’s cold outside,” Guy apologized. “I walked your dog down to the corner, but he wanted to go seventeen blocks at double-pace and I’m not in condition. You girls are maybe through discussing me?”

Janet shook her head warningly at him, and he subsided into a chair. Miss Withers said, somewhat tactfully, “We are about through discussing everything at the moment, young man. Take that small chip off your shoulder—I am quite as interested in protecting your fiancée as you are, and just possibly in some ways better equipped. The fact remains that she has been threatened with one of these stupid but deadly valentines, and that it behooves you of all people to keep a close eye on her.”

Slightly chastened, the young man promised faithfully that Janet would be locked in her room within the hour.

“Fine. But most murders seem to take place in locked rooms,” the schoolteacher murmured.

“That’s it!” Janet cried. “Let’s us forget all about this stuff tonight, and go lose ourselves in a crowd. Mocambo, maybe?” She did a rhumba step.

“Barney’s Beanery is just as crowded and a good deal cheaper,” Guy Fowler said.

“But yesterday was payday—”

“Yesterday was
your
payday,” the young man patiently reminded her. “Not mine. I have made exactly forty-eight dollars this week, and spent sixty of it. Would you settle for a drive-in movie, maybe?”

“‘Always one perfect rose …’” Jan quoted. But the schoolteacher envied the trusting way the girl took Guy’s arm as they went out and down the steps and across the lawn to the modest black sedan of elderly vintage which waited there. She also envied the way the girl was tenderly ushered into the car behind the wheel, and wished that just once Oscar Piper would remember to open doors for her.

After the young couple had left, the room was very silent, very filled with question marks. Miss Withers was thinking of washing her hair or taking another bath—her very last expedients when things refused to happen—but the New York call came through a few minutes after eleven. The voice of her old friend and ally the Inspector, skipper of Manhattan’s homicide bureau, was a bit on the testy side. “Hildegarde,” he said, “do you happen to know what time it is back here?”

“I am much too busy, Oscar, to play guessing games. You got me into this—”

“Into what? Oh, the funny valentine thing at the cartoon studio. Yeah, I met this guy who’s at the head of it—Mantz or Lantz or something like that, a cheery soul—at one of our special meetings of the Third Avenue Schooner and Pastrami Club, and beat him a few hands of
stuss
. Somehow we got to talking and he said he had a problem and I mentioned your name and gave you a recommend. Nothing to it, I suppose?”

“Nothing, Oscar, but one corpse—which I discovered after a bit of housebreaking. One down and three to go.”

“Judas Priest in a handbasket!” Oscar Piper came wide awake. “What in—?”

“Oscar, please listen. This is running into money, and I’m not sure if I have an expense account or not. I just called to ask you if ever in your wide professional experience you’d heard of a murder being committed with
poison ivy
.”

In the long silence which ensued, she could clearly hear the scratch of a match at the other end of the line. “Oscar, if you have your cheroot lighted now,” the schoolteacher said tartly, “I’ll repeat the question. Can poison ivy kill?” She waited, tapping her front teeth with a long, unvarnished fingernail. “You there?”

“Yes,” the Inspector finally said, in a very odd tone. “Yes, to both questions, I was just floored for a minute. This poison ivy stuff—”

“‘The weed of hell’ as some poet called it,” she interposed.

“It’s generally supposed to be poisonous but not deadly to the human system, but we had a case here, three, four years ago—one that’s always rankled in my craw. A night-club dancer named Zelda Bard or Ward or something like that got an anonymous bottle of brandy in the mail as a Christmas present and died a short time after from what Doc Bloom, our medical examiner, said was a concentrated extract of poison ivy or poison oak—both the same damn thing. She must have been very susceptible, for she was swelled up like—like—”

“Like a poisoned pup?” Miss Withers said gently. “Mine, too.”

“Sweet spirits of niter!” Oscar Piper cried. “This can’t be just a coincidence. That same killer must be at work again out there!”

“It could be,” admitted the schoolteacher. “What next, Oscar?”

He thought about it. “And I had to go and get you into a thing like that,” he said ruefully, with real worry in his voice. “Poisoners are the worst of all, because they’re sneaky. This is mean stuff, a good deal out of your class, and you might easily get hurt. I think—” He hesitated again.

“
You
think? Are you really equipped for it, Oscar?”

“Stop trying to be funny. I was about to say that I think I can talk the commish into okaying a trip west for me, since he is as anxious as I am to get to the bottom of the Bard case. I’ll take the next plane for Los Angeles and straighten out the whole thing for you. Meanwhile, do nothing until I get there, understand?”

“I understand, but do not agree,” said the schoolteacher with her usual firmness. “You don’t see the entire situation, Oscar. I am in the midst of a series of four murders, one down and three to go, as I told you. The time to solve a murder is before it happens. But, of course, I’ll be glad to have your help if they let you off the hook. Wire me when to meet you.”

Remembering her driving, Oscar Piper said hastily, “No thanks, Hildegarde. I’ll not trouble you to drive all that distance. I can take a taxi from the airport.”

She sniffed again. “Very well. Good night, Oscar. And for heaven’s sake remember to put out that cigar before you go back to bed, for your own safety.” She hung up, feeling slightly encouraged about it all; poison ivy had been used at least once as a method of murder. And murderers, as she knew from bitter experience, had a tendency to repeat themselves until caught; it was like that first salted peanut. But there was also the story of the pitcher which went once too often to the fount …