Nipped in the Bud (28 page)

“What do you think you are getting away with?” the sulky young man demanded. “Dragging me into jail and then out again and down across the border—”

Chief Robles looked at him. “The border, senor, is only a line on the map,” the Mexican officer said quietly. “We have one of our men permanently assigned to the San Diego police, and they have one down here. We don’t like very much to have criminals jumping back and forth across the line. You want to make something?”

“I’m not talking without my lawyer,” Junior said.

“That’s an idea,” spoke up Miss Withers brightly. “Would someone step down the hall and ask Mr. Bordin to join us? He certainly should be back by now.”

So he was, but just. They found Sascha Bordin on his knees in the middle of his hotel room before an open suitcase, trying to get three cubic feet of assorted souvenirs and curios into a one-and-a-half-cubic-foot bag. “Decided at the last minute to do a little late shopping,” he explained. “I’m planning to leave in the morning.”

He was not at all unwilling to join the rapidly increasing crowd in Miss Withers’ suite. Immediately he took his place beside his client. “Don’t say a word,” he advised, “unless you are charged …”

“This is my town,” said Chief Robles. “You will shut up, please?”

There was a thick silence, broken at last by John Hardesty. “Well—” he said.

“It’s not well at all,” said Oscar Piper wearily. “But I’ll handle this.” He faced the group. “If you don’t know,” he said abruptly, “Miss Dallas Trempleau was struck over the head by a blunt instrument and fatally injured sometime last evening.”

Junior suddenly rose to his feet. “
What?
” he cried.

One of the San Diego officers shoved him back into his chair. “Just listen to the man,” he said.

“We have reason to think,” the inspector went on, “that somebody in this room had an appointment to meet Miss Trempleau last evening—did meet her, in fact, and took advantage of the meeting to assault her….”

His voice trailed away as there was a sudden hammering at the door. Miss Withers pounced like a hawk, and opened it to disclose Ina Kell waiting there, wearing garments hastily thrown together, her bright young face alight. “I just remembered,” she cried. “I mean, I remembered what it was I told Dallas. I heard someone coming down the hall, and it all came back to me.”

“Come in, child,” said the schoolteacher.

The girl entered, and suddenly froze as she saw all the expectant faces.

“Never mind all this,” pressed the schoolteacher. “Tell us what you remembered. It was something about Byron’s poetry….”

“Oh, no!” said the girl. “Just about Byron,
himself.
He limped, you remember? Well, when I heard somebody coming down the hallway just now, limping just a little, I remembered that the morning of the murder, just as I was coming out of the bathroom, I heard someone going down the hall—somebody who limped.” She looked at Junior Gault. “You didn’t kill him the first time, did you?” she said in almost a whisper. “You came back a second time, and
that’s
the time you killed him!”

“Judas priest in a monsoon!” muttered Oscar Piper.

Ina Kell Braggioli was still looking at Junior Gault. “I’m sorry!” she said.

Junior said nothing, being suddenly involved with policemen who were trying to keep him from breaking loose and committing some overt act, presumably one that would have involved his slugging everyone on the jaw and then walking out of the place.

“Dream on,” said Miss Withers softly, to nobody in particular.

“Now you begin

When crimes are done, and past, and to be punished,

To think what your crimes are….”

—BEN JONSON,
The Fox

“S
O, THAT WINDS IT UP
very neatly,” said the inspector complacently, as he put down his coffee cup. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning, but neither he nor Miss Withers was in the mood for sleep. “Gault will be held in San Diego until we extradite him—did you see his face when they took him away?”

“Yes,” admitted the schoolteacher softly. “Yes, I did—”

“The fight certainly went out of him, didn’t it? Once we made it clear that he’d murdered Tony Fagan in collusion with his girlfriend, instead of solo. No wonder Dallas took such pains to get hold of the only possible witness and spirit her out of the country—she was saving her own neck as well as Junior’s. Except for you she might have got by with it.”

“I wouldn’t say that, Oscar …”

“I’ll say it, then. You dragged the thing out into the open. When Dallas discovered that you were on her trail, and learned that Hardesty and I were both out here, she found herself on a spot that she hadn’t planned for. Letting Junior out of jail was a big help, I’ll admit. One time when the D.A.’s office was on the ball. When two people conspire to commit a murder, or conspire to cover one up, it’s always a good idea to allow them enough rope. It worked out perfectly. He came hellbent out here and got in touch with Dallas, presumably by telephone. She came up to meet him. But he was just smart enough—or dumb enough—to figure that Dallas would eventually crack under pressure, so as soon as they met he gave her the same treatment he’d already given Tony Fagan.”

“It’s very neat, isn’t it?” said Miss Withers, a little absently.

“Neat? It’s perfect. Gault met her, knocked her on the head with a blunt instrument, and left her dying in her own car—after running it into an empty garage in a new subdivision. Then he stuck a lot of newspapers under the car and set them afire, but due to a lucky tip from a low-flying naval aviator homeward bound for North Island, the fire was reported before it could destroy any traces. Does that wrap it up, or doesn’t it?”

“Exactly,” said the schoolteacher. “Only, Oscar …”

He waved his spoon at her. “This is one case you should be very satisfied with. Everybody’s happy. John Hardesty is going to go to court and get a conviction against Junior Gault. Ruth Fagan feels that she had a part in revenging her husband—or ex-husband—and she’s going to pay you the five thousand dollars in the morning. Art Wingfield and his Thallie have made it up—you can’t blame her for refusing to have one of these phony Mexican long-distance contract marriages, and I’ll bet you they do it back home the right way. Sam Bordin has his day in court and gets a big fee, and he has a good out when his client gets convicted, because everybody can see it’s a hopeless case trying to defend Junior after what happened last night. Little Ina is happily married to her handsome movie actor, and I doubt that now we’ll even insist on her coming back to testify.” Oscar Piper yawned prodigiously. “You and your happy endings—this time you hit the jackpot.”

“Did I?” said the schoolteacher absently.

“Hildegarde, you’re not even listening!”

“Yes, I am. But not to you,” she said.

The inspector stared at her. “What’s wrong? You’re not sleepy, after all this coffee?”

She shook her head.

“Well,” he said, “I am. I guess I’d better be running along.”

“No, Oscar. You’ll have little sleep tonight.”

He did a slow double take. “
What?
”

“Wrong, all wrong,” she said.

“What’s wrong?”

“Wrong handcuffs, for one thing. Wrong jurisdiction, Oscar. Whatever happened to Dallas Trempleau happened down here in Mexico. You should have turned Junior Gault over to Chief Robles, if anyone.”

The little Irishman glared at her. “Now what …”

“Dallas never went anywhere,” Miss Withers tried to explain. “Don’t you see? She didn’t drive her car across the international border. A girl who was born in Virginia, as Dallas Trempleau was, would never have told the immigration man that she was born in New York.”

He looked at her strangely. “Go on,” he said. “Pull some rabbits out of your hat.”

“No rabbits,” said the schoolteacher. “And I’m taking no bows for this case. The answer was there before me all the time—I had all the proof right in my hands and didn’t see it.”

“You didn’t see what?” he cried. “What is this? We get a case all cleaned up and you start switching!”

Miss Withers shook her head. “It hasn’t worked out just as I planned, Oscar. When you arrived with the news about Dallas, and I asked you to say that her case was even more hopeless than it was, I had a purpose.”

“You were fishing, weren’t you?” the inspector said. “Trying to make somebody think there wasn’t a chance that the girl might pull through. But for whose benefit?”

“The very walls have ears,” murmured the schoolteacher. “Oscar, I’m trying to tell you, but …”

“You’re trying to tell me a lot of damn nonsense,” Oscar Piper said. “You say that Dallas phoned you she was driving up here; she brought Ina along and dropped her off with a hundred dollars and a return ticket to New York, then suddenly got bashed on the head here—and wound up across the line in somebody’s garage! Now what sort of talk is that?”

“Double-talk, Oscar. Only I didn’t say all those things. Don’t you see? The phone call was as queer as a three-dollar bill—I mean the one from Dallas, asking me to have you here at midnight. It was her voice, it was exceptionally plausible in every way, but there was a catch to it. In it she mentioned something about
Junior
Gault, and while everyone else but perhaps his mother so refers to that unfortunate young man, it happens that his fiancée never once did—perhaps one of the major reasons he loves her. She always called him by his right name—Winston.”

“Holy Saint Paul and Minneapolis!” breathed the inspector. “So you’re trying to tell me that that phone call—”

She nodded. “It was made by the one person who had lived long enough with Dallas Trempleau to copy her accent, at least passably enough to fool someone over the long-distance phone. Who else but the little girl from the country who came to New York to make her fortune—and thought she had it made the first night?”

“I’ll be damned,” said Oscar Piper. There was a long silence, during which Miss Withers heard a door somewhere open and close again.

“Everybody wants to get into the act,” the schoolteacher continued. “Just as my poor Talley did at the greyhound races.”

“Ina!” he said. “Ina Kell!”

“Yes, Oscar. But you needn’t rush out next door and start arresting, because it’s too late. Flight is the best possible proof of guilt, and our newlyweds have flown. But, listen a moment …”

“You’re completely and utterly nuts,” the inspector told her. “I think.”

“You don’t think. That’s the trouble. Ina Kell, you see, knew all about Tony Fagan. She’d seen him many times on television. That night, her first night in New York, she came into her borrowed apartment and, of course, her first thought was to turn on the television set. She watched Tony Fagan’s last show. Then she went to bed, but not to sleep. She lay awake, listening, her ears fairly flapping. Of course she knew—her cousin must have told her—who it was that had the next apartment. She listened to the noises of the party, listened hungrily.”

Oscar Piper was gnawing slowly at the wreck of his cigar. “Go on,” he said. “You may have something, after all.”

“I have everything. You see, Oscar, the Kell girl told the truth and almost all of the truth, in her original story. She lay there in bed and heard the party end, and some time later she heard the fight. She got up and saw Junior Gault leave, and of course recognized him—he had been, after all, rather featured on the television show. Curiosity brought her down the hall, and she found what she thought was a dead body. Immediately she envisioned herself in a major dramatic role, the most photographed witness in a big murder case. Only one thing was wrong—the victim wasn’t quite dead. So she attended to that, with a nearby milk bottle, something she could take back with her and wash off and leave.”

The inspector shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”

“You can’t believe that a young and innocent girl can commit a murder, driven by vanity? How about Madeline Smith, and a dozen others? The girl had already painted a picture, had written a screenplay, of a murder investigation and trial where she was the heroine. She picked up the milk bottle and corrected a minor error—the fact that Junior Gault had only knocked out his adversary, not killed him.”

Oscar Piper almost grinned. “Go on—you almost make it good.”

“It’s the only way it could have happened. Ina went back to her own apartment to get prettied up for the photographers, and then everything was ruined. The boy came down the hall delivering morning newspapers, and found the body—her own body. Ina had missed her cue.”

“That isn’t it,” came a voice from the bedroom behind them. Miss Withers and the inspector both whirled around to see Ina standing in the doorway, clad as they had seen her last, but with a little pistol in her hand.

“But this can’t be!” gasped the schoolteacher. “You
left
…”

“Nikki left,” the girl said. “He walked out on me, just because he found out that he’d married the wrong girl…. He wanted the one with money, and he thought I had it.”

“It’s your own fault,” Miss Withers began. “You spent the money, you had the mink coat …”

“Never mind that,” Ina said, her voice flat and brittle as slate. “I’m still in the clear. I’m going to take care of you both—I believe that’s the phrase—and then get out of here. You can’t do anything about it. Neither one of you is very smart, not in front of a gun. You forgot there was a balcony out here, didn’t you? A place from which anybody could hear anything that was said inside.”

“You see, Oscar?” said the schoolteacher.

He nodded, and then moved a little, his hands held low. But suddenly the little .28 was centered at his midriff. “I’m not fooling,” Ina said. “Stay there.”

The inspector stayed, though he didn’t look very worried. Miss Withers realized that as a policeman he must have had guns pointed at him many times before. “You surprise me, Ina,” he said easily.

It was a cue, in a way. The girl laughed, and not pleasantly. “Oh, so I surprise you! You thought you knew it all, didn’t you? I was just a dumb, innocent kid from the country, who could be scared into saying almost anything when you were so fatherly and kind and threatened to spank me! I bet you’d have enjoyed it, too!”