Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (29 page)

Then he jumped, landing flat-footed like a ton of brick. His thud shook the room and tipped over half the gadgets on the desk and tables. So far so good. But for scientific purposes the test was an utter failure. Before the acoustics could be tested in so far as to their effect on the other offices of the floor Sansom’s voice rose in a mighty wail of anguish. “O-o-o-o-ow! Hell’s bells and panther tracks! What the blazing, blooming, bloody hell—”

He was wildly hopping up and down on one foot, holding the other tenderly in his hands, while Miss Hildegarde Withers covered her maidenly ears. She watched as he ruefully pulled a thumbtack from the sole of his shoe, a thin and well-worn sole. It was one of the thumbtacks with which, according to his own theory, Saul Stafford had been engaged in fastening up the poster of Josephine Baker.

That did it. Soundproofed walls or not, there was now an excited concourse of voices in the hall. The door opened, disclosing a huddle of curious faces. The denizens of the third floor had finally come to the conclusion that something was up. They wanted to know what, and the air was blue with question marks.

“All right!” Sansom was insisting. “Mr Stafford just had an accident, that’s all.”

It was Frankie Firsk, he of the cropped hair and gnawed fingernails, who got in the first word. He took a quick bite at his forefinger and said, “Staff had an accident? I thought the accidents always happened to
other
people!” He almost snickered.

“It was the gas heater, wasn’t it?” Melicent Manning pushed forward with a jingling of bracelets. “These offices are nothing but lethal gas chambers, that’s what I say!”

“No, Miss Manning, it wasn’t the gas heater!” snapped Sansom. He forgot for a moment that she was the “Grand Old Lady” of the films. “Mr Stafford just had a fall.”

“Where is he now?” Willy Abend, the wasp-waisted gentleman in the green suit, now pushed forward. “What happened? I want to know!”

“Back to your offices, everybody!” Sansom was getting near the end of his temper. “All right, all right—”

“Don’t you shove me!” Abend cried. “This isn’t Imperial Russia. I’m a U.S.A. citizen and I’ve got the Bill of Rights behind me and—”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” exploded Tom Sansom.

Doug August, the young man Miss Withers had seen coming out of Nincom’s office with clenched fists, now clenched them again. “Saul’s dead, isn’t he?” he said soberly. “I thought I heard them carry something heavy down the hall.”

“Now if you’ll all just go back to your offices …” Sansom tugged at his belt. “Just because a man has an accident does everybody in the hall have to butt in?” He indicated the door. “Now get moving, please.”

He discovered that Miss Hildegarde Withers was tugging at his sleeve. “If everybody on the floor is here,” she suggested, “why not ask them whether or not they heard the crash? I mean the first one?”

“Huh? I don’t see …” But Sansom couldn’t think of a reason for refusing. It developed that from the eight writers’ offices in this hall six persons had come running at the sound of his crash or his voice. There was no telling which. Evidently the sound had not traveled beyond Gertrude’s office into the other wing, which narrowed things down considerably.

“Okay,” said the chief. “You can all help if you will. Take the offices in order. Who’s in 301?”

Frankie Firsk pleaded guilty. No, he had heard nothing out of the way. “But I was reading poetry out loud to myself,” he admitted. “Eliot’s
Wasteland.
It always makes Hollywood seem sort of bearable….”

“Three o three?”

That was Miss Withers’ office, and she had said her say.

“Three o five? Oh, that’s this one. Well, who’s in 307?”

Lillian, the lush and bedizened, spoke up from the fringe of the little group. “That’s Mr Josef, but he isn’t in the studio today. He’s down at the Good Samaritan Hospital for his nerves. He—”

“Okay, okay. Now, across the hall. Who’s got 308?”

That was Abend. The dapper playwright swore that he had heard no suspicious sound all afternoon. “Of course, I did have my radio on. Clara and I were listening to the police calls.”

Clara, a vague and adipose member of the secretarial staff, was in agreement. Long since she had ceased to wonder at the vagaries of writers and if Mr Abend wanted the police calls taken down in shorthand she took them. “It’s for the radio play I’m doing on the side,” Abend told them defiantly. “I’m gathering color. I want to do something with real social significance.”

“Okay.” Sansom cut him short. “Three o six?”

Lillian spoke up again. “That’s Mr Dobie’s office. I work for him and Mr Stafford. But Mr Dobie wasn’t in all afternoon—he’s out on the set.”

“Oh, he is?” Sansom frowned.

“Mr Dobie usually goes out and watches them shooting when he hasn’t an assignment,” Lillian said. “Gertrude is trying to get him on the phone now, but you can’t interrupt a scene, you know.”

“All right. Number 304?”

“That’s mine,” spoke up Melicent Manning. “But I’m afraid I was so busy trying to devise a scene where Deanna gets passionately kissed and still stays sweet sixteen that I didn’t pay any attention to any noises. When I write I just lose myself!”

Chief Sansom muttered something under his breath. “Okay. Three o two?”

Doug August said that with the antique typewriter he had been issued he couldn’t hear the crack of doom. “It makes more noise than a machine gun, and I didn’t let it cool off all afternoon. I’ve got to get a whole sequence out for Mr Nincom before he leaves for Arrowhead tomorrow. And if you don’t mind, I’ll get back to it.” He turned and shouldered his way through the crowd, the others eddying after him. Sansom worked them all through the door and leaned against it.

“That’s the list,” he told Miss Withers. “So …”

“So not one person heard the crash when Saul Stafford fell. And you still insist he had an accident.”

“Well, it stands to reason.”

There was a commotion in the hall, and then the door was shoved open by a vast, gargantuan man with heavy, slashed eyebrows and the wide, innocent eyes of a child. “I’m Dobie, Virgil Dobie!” he cried. “Where’s Saul? What’s all this about? If it’s a gag it isn’t funny.”

“Your collaborator has been taken away in an ambulance,” Miss Withers told him. “With a broken neck.”

His face went chalky gray, and Dobie felt for a chair.

“He’s at Lumsden Mortuary Haven, on Western,” Chief Sansom said. “I’m sorry, Mr Dobie.”

Virgil Dobie wasn’t listening. Miss Withers thought that he looked like a man desperately frightened, frightened for his own skin. “The chief here thinks that it was an accident,” she told him. “He thinks that Stafford broke his own neck while standing on a chair to tack up that poster. But I was in the next office and I’m not so sure.”

Dobie looked up at the ceiling, frowned, and then turned toward Miss Withers. Something seemed to be puzzling him.

“I’ve got to run along and report this thing,” Sansom said briskly. “But I’ve one last word before I go.” His finger wagged in Miss Withers’ face. “If it wasn’t an accident on account of nobody heard him fall, then how could it have been—well, been anything else?”

“Such as
murder?”
she prompted softly.

He nodded. “You think that a fight in which one guy could break another guy’s neck wouldn’t make more noise than any fall?”

Miss Withers considered that. “You mean that in disproving your own case I’ve wrecked my own too?”

“That’s exactly what I mean!” insisted Chief Sansom. “So put that in your pipe and smoke it.” He went out of the room and slammed the door.

Dobie stood up as if about to follow. “One moment,” Miss Withers said. “I’m a stranger here and I’m being Mrs Buttinsky. But there’s a hole in the chief’s theory, a hole as wide as a house.” She looked up at the dangling poster again.

“I think I know what you mean,” Virgil Dobie admitted. “You think it was a frame.” His thick, angled eyebrows went up half an inch.

She nodded. “Why should a man stand on a teetery chair to tack up a poster that was already firmly tacked to the ceiling when I came into this office earlier this afternoon?—answer me that.”

He couldn’t. “Say,” Dobie thrust, “you aren’t? I mean,
you
couldn’t be the sleuth I read about in the
Reporter?”

“Perhaps I am. At any rate, I walked into something that smells. Tell me—you knew Mr Stafford better than anybody else—who would have a reason for murdering him?”

Dobie didn’t answer. He was staring at her. “I thought you’d be—well, different.”

“Never mind that. Who could have murdered your partner?”

“Nobody. Nobody at all,” declared Virgil Dobie. “Saul lived alone in a little apartment crowded with pipes that he never smoked and books that he never read. He never chased the tomatoes—I mean girls. All he liked to do was eat and drink. And have laughs.”

“Did anybody ever threaten him, to your knowledge?”

“Anybody? You mean everybody! Half the people in Hollywood have threatened to break both our necks at one time or another but they always cool off. You see, Saul and I set out years ago to try to keep Hollywood from taking itself so seriously. Nobody ever murders on account of a practical joke.”

Miss Withers said, “No? You never know just how people will react when their toes are well stepped on. And remember, young man, if Stafford was murdered, as I think, then the killer presumably has exactly the same motive for murdering you!”

He stared at her as if the thought were not new to him. “Somebody among the victims of the practical jokes you two loved to play has taken it the wrong way,” she went on. “Where are you going, Mr Dobie?”

He barely paused. “If I had any sense maybe I’d take a quick powder and grab the first plane for New York. But I suppose I’ll just rush out and lap up some sauce. There’s quite a bit of courage in a bottle of dark Jamaica rum.”

“You’re not frightened, Mr Dobie?”

“I think I am,” he told her gravely. “It could be.”

“Wait!” she cried. “Won’t you help me try to find the killer?”

“If what you say is true,” Virgil Dobie called over his shoulder, “then I won’t need to. He’ll find me!” And, grinning, he was gone.

Miss Withers sat and waited. At six o’clock Gertrude Lafferty tapped at her door to tell her that it was time to close up the switchboard. “Are you going to stay late tonight?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said the schoolteacher slowly. She had a sudden hunch that Gertrude was thinking things that she was not willing to say, that she was more than normally interested in Miss Withers’ own plans for the evening.

Perhaps this was the worm on the hook. During the past hour or so the schoolteacher had purposely been making noises like a detective, had pretended to be sure Saul Stafford was murdered when no one could be sure of anything. All that would be very likely to force someone’s hand. Since she was so determined to prove it a murder, a likely suspect might be handed her. She waited eagerly.

“Because if you
are
going to stay late,” Gertrude went on, “I can leave you a night line through to the main switchboard. It’s no trouble at all.”

That was not the kind of a line Miss Withers hoped for, and she indicated as much.

“Well—good night!” And Gertrude was gone.

“There is a young woman who will bear watching,” decided the schoolma’am. She sat at her desk, staring at the photograph of tired calla lilies which ornamented the opposite wall. Outside her Venetian blinds the twilight had deepened into black velvet night, a night shot with stars that were pale and wan above the wagging searchlights and the glaring neon signs of Hollywood.

Long ago, she supposed, the others had gone their separate ways. But she chose to sit here alone, with only one shaded light on her desk, alone with the ghostly presence of Saul Stafford who had not wanted to die. It was at once the most perplexing and the most poignant problem that Miss Withers had ever faced. Stafford had half turned to her as one human being to another. Her hands had been tied at the moment by a mistaken sense of loyalty to her employer. Otherwise Stafford might be alive at the moment.

It was a challenge that she must face. Murder next door, murder a few feet away from her….

For murder it must be. In spite of the tipped chair, in spite of the carefully arranged picture created by dangling poster and spilled thumbtacks, she could not believe that Saul Stafford had met death by misadventure.

She took up her letter to the inspector again, feeling the need of talking to someone. There was an element of humor, she realized, in her turning to him. Never once in the many times they had crossed paths on the murder trail had she failed to wish audibly that he was far away so that she might have a free hand. And now she had it.

The little wire terrier of an Irishman was three thousand miles away, and she had no one to argue with. It was not easy to form her thoughts without putting them into words.

So she tapped busily away on the keys of the typewriter for a few minutes, describing the hilarious descent of Chief Sansom upon the thumbtack. Then she stopped, her fingers poised above the keys, listening, not only with her ears, but with every pore of her body.

Somebody was in the hall outside her door, somebody who had walked as softly as a cat. Somebody was breathing out there now, breathing and waiting….

Miss Withers started to reach for the telephone. Then she realized that the line was dead. Quickly she rose to her feet and tiptoed across the room to the hatrack. With her black cotton umbrella gripped firmly in her hand, she approached the door. Forcing herself to take long, silent breaths, she reached out toward the knob. A quick pull at the door, and whoever was waiting on the other side might be jerked forward, surprised and off balance. She could get in at least one good crack with the umbrella which lent itself both to bludgeoning and stabbing.

“One—two—three!” she whispered softly, and jerked. There was nobody at all in the hall.

Miss Hildegarde Withers was not one to hold with ghosts and apparitions except in an extremely figurative sense. It was all right to imagine the ghostly presence of a murdered man standing invisibly behind her as she sought to avenge him. But ghosts who listened and breathed in doorways …