Cold Poison (6 page)

“And so everybody took Larry Reed’s jokes in good humor? You yourself, when he forwarded all your mail to Horsecollar, Arizona?”

He stiffened. “At the time I could cheerfully have strangled him, sure. But in this business you have to go along with a gag. Finally I saw the joke, and laughed as hard as any of them.”

Miss Withers had her own ideas about that, but she kept them to her maidenly bosom. “Then Larry Reed must have had great personal charm, to be so readily forgiven for his fun-loving Rover-boy tricks.”

“Wait a minute!” Tip’s face was strange. “I—I begin to get it. You’ve been talking about Larry in the past tense for the last half-hour. He’s
dead
, isn’t he?”

“You don’t seem especially surprised at that, young man.”

But he wasn’t listening. “Something’s happened to Larry, and you know all about it—that’s why you’ve been asking all these questions!”

“Yes. He was murdered by somebody in this studio. Statistics show that murder happens every twenty minutes in these United States. I ask you now, have you any idea who it could be?”

Tip Brown seemed perceptibly to withdraw within himself, like an alarmed turtle. He was suddenly all carapace, unreachable. “No,” he said hollowly. “No, no ideas at all.” Quickly he pinned up the rest of his sketches and then said that he guessed he would call it a day. He went out of the office with a vague farewell gesture which indicated to the schoolteacher that he would see her around sometime but preferably not soon.

That young man, she thought, knows more than he is telling—and he has told more than he meant to tell.

Miss Withers sat alone—except for the somnolent Talley in his corner—for a long, long time in the little office which had so much to tell her if walls could only speak, which they never seemed to do. Finally she switched on the light under the glass of the drawing board, inserted a gelatin of the bird and a sheet of paper over it, and started experimenting. After a few minutes she decided that with these aids even she could produce a fairly recognizable sketch of Peter Penguin; certainly very nearly as good as the one on the poison-pen valentine. She fell into a light brown study, from which she was aroused by Talley’s enthusiastic welcome of a visitor. The girl she knew as Janet Poole was standing in the doorway, looking uncertain and lost.

“May I see you for a moment?” Jan asked. “I—I just thought of something.”

Janet came in and sat down, crossing a rather remarkable pair of legs. But she found it hard to talk.

“Well?” said the schoolteacher.

“A while ago in Mr. Cushak’s office you asked if there was anything to link the three of us—I mean the four of us, if you count Larry Reed….”

“Speak up, young lady. What is it?”

The girl carefully pleated her tweed skirt. “It couldn’t, of course, have had anything to do with what happened to Larry, I’m sure of that. But I’ve been thinking it over, and I guess I ought to tell you. You see—when I first came to the studio a couple of years ago I—I went out sometimes with Larry. I went out with Rollo Bayles, too—and even once or twice with Mr. Karas, who may be old but has some young ideas. All the bachelors around the place give a new girl the rush, you know.”

“I wouldn’t know, never having been in that happy situation. But you are trying to say that you played the field, eh?”

“A girl has to do something with her evenings,” said Janet defensively. “I was living in a boardinghouse and bored to tears.”

“Say no more, my dear. It’s my life story in a nutshell. But do go on.”

“There was never anything actually romantic,” Jan protested almost too quickly. “Mr. Karas was very gallant and continental and awfully sweet, really. He taught me a lot about food and wines and he kissed my hand. That’s all he ever kissed—I expected more and was all ready to say no, but it stopped there; I’m sure that he’s really in love with that lost wife of his. Rollo Bayles—well, Rollo is a lonely, confused sort of guy; I think he’s never got over a sort of guilt complex about leaving the priesthood, though heaven knows he was no more fitted for it than I am to be a—a steam fitter. But he’s a jazz fan and we used to go out to a little place on Ventura Boulevard and sit there and nurse our beers and listen to Pete Daily and the other hot five-man combos….”

“I have heard them on the radio,” admitted the schoolteacher. “They take tunes apart and put them back together sideways. But what about you and Larry Reed?”

“Larry was the nicest and most exciting of the lot, in most ways. But his divorce wasn’t final then and I didn’t want to get serious about a man who was at least technically married. We went dancing to Mocambo and Ciro’s and places like that, but before the thing got really final—” The girl hesitated.

“Yes—” prompted Miss Withers.

“Before his divorce got final, something happened,” said Janet a bit dreamily. “But you must understand; we all stayed friends.”

“Somebody didn’t stay just friends,” observed Miss Withers, nodding toward the diamond on Janet’s ring finger.

A warmish, crooked, little-girl smile illumined Jan’s face. “Guy,” she said softly. “All this I’m telling you about happened before Guy came to stay at my boardinghouse. He was a piano guy, a crazy mixed-up kid as they say, but there was a piano in the place and I heard him play and suddenly I woke up and there I was—engaged to be married. It’s going to be this summer.”

“You are referring to the musician, I gather?”

“Guy? Yes, he plays the piano and makes arrangements. But he’s really a composer.”

“How nice,” said Miss Withers a bit absently. “Musicians and artists—aren’t they supposed to be the jealous type? Do you suppose there could possibly be the shade of a jealousy motive here?”

Janet laughed out loud. “Heavens, no! Do I look like a
femme fatale
?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Miss Withers. “Never having for obvious reasons been accused of it myself.” But all the same, the schoolteacher was wondering a little; there was something about this long tall blond girl which could perhaps have been very disturbing to the right man—or the wrong one. “Your fiancé works here at the studio?” she pressed.

“Guy? Why, yes, when he works. He’s a song writer, and going to be one of the best. He wrote
Lullaby for a Pink Elephant
, a wonderful novelty number that’s just been published in New York! This music arrangement thing he’s doing here is fairly new to him, but he’s always fooled around with the piano. He played at the boardinghouse when he didn’t know anybody was listening, and I grabbed hold of him and introduced him to Mr. Karas, who gave him a job. Believe you me—” She smiled, her eyes clear and confident. “Somebody just had to take over that boy and straighten him out; he has so much talent and ability. This music arrangement thing is just for now. Guy’s finished two new songs,
Flitterbug Jump
and
Lady Bewitched
, and when they come out—” her face was lighted up like a neon sign—“Guy is really going places. His publishers say he’s going to be another Cole Porter!”

“‘I know where I’m going, and I know who’s going with me …’” Miss Withers softly hummed the old Scottish ballad. “How nice for you, my dear. Tell me, Miss Poole, just between us girls, what was in your poison-pen valentine to make you tear it up?”

Janet set her firm chin. “I—I couldn’t!”

“You
must
. And I promise it won’t go any further.”

“It—it was just something dirty and unfair! It brought up my one dark secret. You see, years ago when I was an art student at Otis here in Los Angeles I had to work most of my way. My father is a steam fitter down in Long Beach and he couldn’t always pay the rent on time at home and buy the groceries, much less help me in what I laughingly called my career. If you must know, I—I did some posing for the life classes at art school, that’s all. In the nude.” She swallowed. “I thought I’d lived it down, but—”

“It has never seemed to me,” interposed the schoolteacher, “that there is anything evil about the human body—especially a body like yours—unless thinking makes it so. It shouldn’t make any difference to your young man—”

“It didn’t!” Janet flashed. “I told Guy, of course, and he never batted an eye. But if it ever got back to his snooty family in Hartford, don’t you see? There’d never be a chance in the world of their accepting him and his bride.” She shuddered. “Not that it especially matters to me, but it matters so much to him. He wants me to walk into the family mansion like a fairy princess….”

“Most men do. But let us get down to cases. Who else could know about this deep dark secret of yours?”

“But
nobody
!” Janet insisted. “It all happened years ago, when I was a green kid from the wrong side of the tracks and before I changed my name; it was Janiska Pszky then, believe it or not.”

“I can believe it easily,” said the schoolteacher. “Poole is easier to spell than Pszky. What else is the melting pot for? We are all descended from parents who got tired of their homelands and came here to do it differently, and many of them simplified their names. My great-great-grandfather was named Witherspoon, by the way; somewhere along the line the
poon
got lost. So I wouldn’t take it too seriously. And I wouldn’t worry too much about your young man’s family finding out about your having posed for an art class of fellow students; there’s nothing dishonorable in that. But speaking of posing—just when did you pose for Larry Reed, or sit for him?”

Janet looked blankly innocent. “Never, of course!”

The schoolteacher nodded noncommittally, remembering the unfinished water color on the dead man’s easel. Now she remembered why Jan’s face had looked so familiar on their first meeting in Mr. Cushak’s office. But, as she also knew, the innocent could he as well as the guilty. “I still suggest, young lady, that you lock your door and windows tonight, and that if you get a gift box of candy or anything else in the mail, you don’t eat any of it.”

“But nobody ever sends me anything,” Janet confessed. “The Hollywood swains never give out with anything but their time. And besides, everybody knows I’m bespoke. As us Polacks say—I been
friending around wit’
Guy for over a year.” She smiled a dreamish smile. “And he’s not one for presents, either. He’s saving his money for a very important purpose. Oh, maybe a rose on my birthday….”

“‘Always one perfect rose—never one perfect Cadillac,’” quoted Miss Withers. “I know. All the same, my dear, I think that extra precautions are indicated for you. Those valentines aren’t in the pure spirit of fun, you know.”

Janet nodded slowly. “I
do
know. But I still can’t really believe it, somehow. Nobody in the studio would do a thing like that, nobody at all. If they get mad at somebody they think it over and then pull a gag, a practical joke, and let it go at that. This—this sort of thing is evil and mean!”

“It is, indeed. But—”

“Oh, heavens!” Janet had looked at her watch. “My man’s waiting at the gate.”

“Never keep them waiting,” advised the schoolteacher. “At least not very long. I lost one that way.”

But the girl had already sailed out of the door. Something impelled Miss Withers to shadow her and see this shining young man of hers, but the phone suddenly came alive. It was Mr. Cushak.

“Miss Withers? Put your mind at rest,” said the studio executive. “I have good news. It’s all just a false alarm!”

“What?” she gasped indignantly.

“Reed’s death was natural, or at least accidental, according to the Los Angeles county coroner’s office. They just reported that he died from the effects of poison ivy.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Miss Withers, but she said it under her breath.

“Death stretched out his long hand toward the delicate little flower….
”

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

I
T WAS ALL ON PAGE THREE
of the early edition of tomorrow’s
Times
, out that evening. Lawrence Reed, 36, studio cartoonist, had been found dead in his home on Mulholland Drive, the victim—according to the coroner’s office—of acute poison-ivy poisoning. Investigation by police had shown that the weed grew profusely on parts of his canyon property, and it was thought by authorities that, not knowing himself to be abnormally susceptible to poison ivy, Reed had inadvertently chewed on a twig of it while working around the place.

“Stuff and nonsense again,” said Miss Withers to the poodle. “That doesn’t explain anything; it’s just a convenient cover-up. Reed hadn’t been gardening, he was all dressed up and had just got home from the studio. He parked his car hastily in the flowerbeds and rushed inside leaving his keys in the dashboard, indicating that he was very ill.” She nodded to herself and then put through a long distance call to New York City; it was a time for action and she needed all the help she could get. All the circuits were at the moment busy, of course, but she had barely finished making a frugal supper for herself and opening a can of horse meat for Talley when the bell rang—not the phone as she had hoped, but the doorbell.

“Who on earth—?” she said. She opened the door and found that it was Janet Poole.

“Excuse me—I mean us—for disturbing you,” the girl was saying in the doorway. And then the schoolteacher saw that close behind her was a tall, palely handsome young man who must obviously be her musician; he looked just as a pianist-composer should look, only perhaps with a neater haircut and more expensive if well-worn clothes. Yes, Janet introduced him as her fiancé, Guy Fowler, somewhat pridefully. “We’re here because Guy put his foot down and insisted. There’s maybe something you ought to know.”

“There are many things I ought to know,” admitted Miss Withers ruefully. “Most of which I don’t.” She found them chairs and ash trays, forcibly cut short the poodle’s usual fanfare of welcome, and settled herself down. “Well?”

Jan looked at her young man for comfort, evidently found it, and plunged on in. “You must understand—this was something I had completely forgotten. I don’t see what it could have had to do with the valentines, but—well, about a year ago the studio decided to preview a cartoon feature and three short subjects out at Santa Ana, down in the orange country. Of course, everybody who’d worked on the pictures wanted to see the preview, but the studio staff cars were all busy so they sent some of us down in rented limousines. Just as it happened, Mr. Karas, Rollo Bayles, Larry Reed and I all went in one. I’d forgotten about it, but Guy reminded me at dinner tonight.”