Cold Poison (11 page)

He might, of course, return at any moment. It was not the propitious time to go prowling his desk as she had Mr. Bayles’; on the other hand, there might never be another chance. She went to work swiftly and silently, and when she had finished with the last neat drawer she knew nothing about Mr. Karas that she had not known before—except that he kept a large, oddly shaped bottle of something labeled
slivowitz
in his desk, tucked in behind rolls of music manuscript. The stuff smelled somewhat of old prunes and heavily of alcohol, and it made her sneeze.

From the doorway behind her, a pleasant masculine voice said, “If you’re needing a snort, go ahead. Don’t mind me.”

The schoolteacher whirled around, almost dropping the brandy bottle, to see Guy Fowler standing there, a sheet of music manuscript in his hand and an expression of amused surprise on his face. She hastily replaced the bottle and slammed the drawer. “I was looking for Mr. Karas,” she said.

“Well,” pointed out the young man reasonably, “you’re not likely to find him in his desk drawer.” He came on into the room. “Matter of fact, I’m looking for him, too; I’ve a new number Jan wants me to try on him. But I guess he must have popped out for a cup of coffee or something.”

“He’s obviously not here, at any rate,” Miss Withers snapped. “What’s wrong?”

Guy Fowler was staring at the ash tray on Karas’ desk with a very odd expression. “I don’t know. But I never knew Karas to go anywhere without that holder; when he wasn’t smoking he kept it in his breast pocket. He surely must have left here in a tearing hurry. And he
never
hurries.”

“‘The Ides of March are here, la grippe is at the door—and many folks are dying now, who never died before.’” The schoolteacher sniffed. “So you think Mr. Karas left here in a hurry. Frightened, perhaps? Do you suppose he got another of those valentines?”

“Could be,” the young man said. “They seem to be falling like autumn leaves don’t they?” His look was wise and knowing and most sympathetic.

“So you know that I, too, received one in the middle of the night?”

His smile was faintly amused. “Of course. You don’t know this studio very well, Miss Withers. It’s one big happy family, with no secrets—especially at a time like this, with the whole lot buzzing. Secretaries overhear things and then drop a word to some pal around the water cooler or in the coffee shop—that’s the way it goes.”

“The most important secret of all seems still to be pretty well kept,” she told him. “Don’t forget that the murderer of Larry Reed is among us, laughing up his sleeve.”

“
His
?” Guy Fowler echoed softly.

“Of course. The only girl who seems to be involved in this is Janet, and certainly you’re not suggesting—”

He almost laughed out loud. “Certainly I wasn’t. Janet wouldn’t kill anybody, and if she did—by some fantastic trick of fate—she couldn’t keep the secret for ten minutes. She’s as clear as a mountain brook.”

“Hmm,” murmured Miss Withers. There were things young Mr. Fowler would be learning when he married his clear mountain brook, or she missed her guess.

“I was only thinking,” he continued thoughtfully, “that in all the books and stuff I’ve read on the subject poison is supposed to be a woman’s weapon, no?”

Here we went again. Miss Withers sighed and nodded. She could have mentioned such notable exceptions as Molineux and Carlyle Harris and Dr. Palmer and the unfortunate Crippen, but Guy Fowler still was talking. “What about Joyce Reed—Mr. Cushak’s bumptious secretary who used to be married to Larry?”

The schoolteacher looked at him. “Any special reason for bringing her name into the case?”

“No, ma’am. But when people are married, or have been—”

“They’re automatically suspect, if anything happens to one of them. I know—and it’s a sad commentary on the marital state. But frankly, Joyce doesn’t look like a poisoner to me.”

“If it really was poison.”

“It really was, and not the first time this particular poison was used, either.”

Guy’s ears perked up. “
What
?”

But Miss Withers had already, as usual, said more than she intended. “Excuse me, young man—”

She started out, but he blocked her way, looking suddenly very boyish and engaging. “Why don’t you like me, Miss Withers?”

“I beg pardon?” She drew back, staring at him. “I think I’ll answer that question with another. Why are you such a fool as to refuse to marry your Janet until you’ve paid back every last cent you’ve borrowed from her? That may take a long time and she doesn’t want money; she wants
you
. Now!”

His face set. “A man has his pride.”

“Which always goeth before a fall, or so I’ve heard.”

“You don’t understand. I’ve been dodging responsibilities most of my life, and I guess running away from things. I’m going to be standing on my own two feet from now on.”

“
Men
!” said Miss Hildegard Withers in her most spinsterly voice, and pushed past him and out of the place. But when she looked back over her shoulder, she saw young Fowler still standing there, scratching his head and looking puzzled. But it was nothing to the puzzlement that possessed her as she hurried back to her office. There she cut Talleyrand’s welcome-home scene as short as possible, shaking hands only once instead of the usual baker’s dozen, and sat herself down with pencil and notebook. “Rollo Bayles …” she wrote, and had filled hardly half a page when the telephone shrilled at her elbow like an offended bumblebee. “Yes, Mr. Cushak?” she answered wearily.

But it wasn’t Mr. Cushak at all; it was the Inspector, and his voice was jubilant. “Hildegarde? Remember I told you that I’d solve this case for you today?”

“Second thoughts, they say, are best.”

DRYDEN

T
HE INSPECTOR HAD—AS MISS
Withers guessed—paid his courtesy call at Spring Street first thing that morning, tactfully concealing, of course, his surprised amusement that the third largest and fastest-growing city in America should still be operating in quarters which even Yonkers would have considered cramped.

The chief of detectives with whom he exchanged courtesies and a cigar had very little to say about the Larry Reed case, though Piper tried to pump him gently. Poison ivy was poison ivy, and some people were more allergic to it than others, and the whole thing had been dropped.

“Yeah,” said the Inspector.

The other man stared at him through a blue haze of cigar smoke. “You out in our fair city on official business, Inspector?”

“I haven’t had a vacation in years,” said Piper truthfully if not exactly frankly. They ended at that, with a polite handshake.

And the Inspector was off for Forest Lawn. It was not, he found, as simple as it sounded. There were several Forest Lawns scattered here and there about the city of Los Angeles—and the city of Los Angeles had a strange way of becoming something else again within the confines of its own boundaries; it was Beverly Hills or Burbank or Glendale when you least expected it. But finally by the process of elimination he ran down the right Forest Lawn, a vast green place of rolling hills and trees and flowers like no other cemetery he had ever seen. It should be, he thought, more of a tourist attraction than the beaches or the Hollywood Bowl or the La Brea pits; it was sunny and pleasant and ornamented with expensive marble statuary and churches and chapels and auditoriums, but with no melancholy tombstones. It also had a very businesslike office, which he found after some difficulty. A professionally grave and sympathetic young man in a blue suit and bow tie instead of the usual funereal afternoon clothes of the undertaker’s assistant greeted him at the door. There was a slight misunderstanding of a few seconds while the Inspector explained that he did not at the moment require any professional services.

“It’s about Lucy—Lucinda Wersbeck,” he said. “You planted—I mean you buried her something more than a year ago.”

The young man nodded. “Wersbeck, Lucinda,” he said to one of the three secretaries behind the desk. “Locate it, please.”

“But I don’t—”

“It’s no trouble at all. In a place this size we have to have an efficient mapping system, or we wouldn’t be able to function. It’ll only be a minute.”

“BC-16,” spoke up the girl, who had been at the filing case.

The young man moved over to a wall map. “With those coordinates,” he said, “we can locate any place of interment in a few seconds. You see? Here it is. I’m afraid it’s well across the park. Do you have a car? If not, possibly we can arrange to have someone drive you up there.” He was indicating a rather distant point on the map.

“I don’t have a car,” said the Inspector rather testily. “And there is nothing in the world I would rather not do than visit Lucinda Wersbeck’s grave, or any grave. I am a police officer—” he showed his gold badge in its leather case—“and I only want to ask some questions.”

The young man stiffened a little. “A Los Angeles or Glendale officer?”

“New York. And—”

“If there is any question of disinterment I’m afraid we’ll have to ask for a court order or at least a request from the surviving next of kin—”

“I don’t want to dig her up. God forbid I should disturb her poor bones. I only want certain information; I want to know who paid for the undertaking fees and the burial plot.”

“Well!” said the young man. “May I ask why?”

“You may, and I’ll tell you. The Wersbeck woman was a pauper; she was struck by an automobile and later died in County Hospital. But she wound up in these plush surroundings—somebody paid for that, and it fits into a homicide investigation I’m working on. I want to find out who.”

The young man looked pained. “I’m sorry, Inspector, but you seem to have fallen in with an unfortunately widespread delusion. Our rates here are not higher than other burial parks, and sometimes lower; we adapt to the purse of the bereaved. Our funeral services, including the last services for the dead—”

“Yes, yes,” cried Oscar Piper. “But it must have cost something, and somebody paid the tab. Somewhere in your records you must have that information, and I want it.”

“I’m afraid I cannot give out that information—”

The Inspector crossed to a phone that stood on the counter. He dialed, and waited a moment. “Is this Michigan 5211? I want to speak to Chief Parker, please….”

He felt his sleeve plucked at. “There’s no need for that, Inspector. If you’ll wait just a moment, I’m sure that we can get the information you need.”

Piper hung up. “Well, get it,” he said.

The secretary went back to the filing case, and finally came forth with the information that the undertaking and burial expenses for Miss Lucinda Wersbeck had been paid for by someone who’d signed “Mr. P.R.F.”

“Initials yet!” said the Inspector. “Funny business here, if I ever saw it. Was it by cash or check or what?”

The records didn’t show, but the bill of $350 had been paid, in advance of burial. That was all they knew.

“Can I speak to the clerk who made the transaction?”

There was some more delay while an examination was made of the initials on the ledger. “I’m afraid you cannot.”

“And why not?”

“Because Miss Lotta Earle left our employ about that time. I’m sorry.”

“You’ll be sorrier if you don’t dig up her last known home address.”

It was hastily dug up, and the Inspector departed with it scribbled on a sheet of memo paper, still not entirely discouraged. The person, presumably a man, who had paid for Lucinda Wersbeck’s funeral expenses had concealed himself behind initials. “Mr. P.R.F.”—Oscar Piper wanted a description of that individual, and soon. Because he felt himself to be on one of the hottest trails in his history.

He found Miss Lotta Earle—quite obviously
Mrs.
Lotta Earle—in a little house in Burbank, nursing a beer and a fat new baby, with an older boy in sagging underdrawers hanging to her skirts or where her skirts would have been if she had worn any. She was, perhaps because of the beer and the warm influence of the sunlight on the large portions of her body showing above and beneath her shorts, quite cooperative, and offered the Inspector a seat on the lawn and a can of beer, the first of which he accepted.

“Sure, I remember the guy,” said Lotta. “It was about the last deal I handled before I left the Lawn. He wanted everything handled nice, but as cheap as possible….”

“Describe him,” Piper said.

She shut her eyes. “After so long a time—but I’ll try. He was of about medium size, nicely dressed. Not young, not old.”

“That is quite a description, young lady. It could apply to almost anybody.”

She frowned in concentration. “Well—he was smoking a cigar, and he had an accent.”

“What sort of accent? Spanish, German, or a good Irish brogue like me own granddad’s?”

The lady wasn’t sure. “It was just an accent,” she said. “That’s all I seem to remember.”

“And maybe that’s enough,” said Oscar Piper, rising from the grass. “Where’s the nearest pay phone?”

It turned out to be twelve blocks down the street, and he was out of breath when he reach it. Then he had further difficulties with the phone, being under the mistaken impression that a nickel was still legal currency. But finally he got through to the studio and to Hildegarde Withers.

“So as I said, I’ve solved it,” he insisted.

“Not really!” Her voice sounded flat.

“I saw right off when you told me the setup last night that you’d missed the essential point about Lucy. Lucinda Wersbeck died in a county hospital as a charity patient and was taken to the morgue, yet she was buried at Forest Lawn. The tab was paid by a Mr. P.R.F. Know anybody with those initials, or anybody who would use them?”

Miss Withers thought. “Not offhand, Oscar.”

“Well, somebody paid, and I’m on his trail.”

“Well, Oscar? I’m all ears.”

“All nose, you mean. Anyway, it was so long ago that nobody remembers too much about it, but I have a description of the man.” He told her.

“Good gracious!” she gasped. “But—but that description fits Mr. Karas, the music director here at the studio. Only he was in the car that killed Lucinda Wersbeck, and he was the recipient of one of the murder valentines!”