Nipped in the Bud
Authors: Stuart Palmer
A Hildegarde Withers Mystery
Stuart Palmer
To NED GUYMON,
With affectionate appreciation.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Ina Kell.
A pretty little redhead from the sticks, newly arrived in Manhattan.
Inspector Oscar Piper.
A short, capable, cigar-smoking police detective.
Hildegarde Withers.
An angular, inquisitive retired schoolteacher who’s both the light of Oscar’s life and the bane of his existence.
Winston H. “Junior” Gault.
The playboy vice president of Gault Foods, on trial for murder.
Tony Fagan.
An outspoken television personality who didn’t live to regret his intemperate ribbing of his show’s sponsor, Junior Gault.
Dallas Trempleau.
A socialite, as blue-blooded as she is beautiful, who’s engaged to Junior.
Art Wingfield.
An up-and-coming young television producer.
Thallie Gordon.
A bosomy singer who appears on Tony Fagan’s show. She and Art Wingfield are an item.
Ruth Fagan.
Tony’s most recent ex-wife, who was also once married to Wingfield.
John Hardesty.
An assistant district attorney and Oscar Piper’s friend.
Sam Bordin,
aka Sascha Bordin. A crafty lawyer and former pupil of Hildy’s.
Gracie
. Sam’s secretary.
Vito.
An enterprising street urchin who becomes Hildy’s unofficial assistant.
Nikki Braggioli.
A scheming young actor, half-Italian and half-English.
Ramón Julio Guzman y Villalobos.
A Mexican private eye and lawyer.
Crystal Joris.
A 300-pound tap dancer.
Talleyrand.
An independent-minded apricot poodle, the apple of Hildy’s eye.
Plus assorted cops, bureaucrats, relatives, clerks, and passersby.
“From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggitted beasties
And things that go Boomp in the night
Oh Lord deliver us!”
—
Old Scottish Book of Common Prayer
T
HE NOISES WERE UGLY
and a little unreal, like sound effects left over from a nightmare. Only Ina knew she hadn’t been sleeping. She had been too highly charged with the wonder of it all to close an eye, because tomorrow—if it ever dawned—would be her first day in the city, the beginning of a new life all in glorious Technicolor.
She had been lying awake hour after hour, listening to the night symphony of Manhattan and from each chord weaving dreams in which a certain little girl with fire-blonde hair played the starring role. Every foghorn on the Hudson or the East River was from a luxury liner taking her to Capri or the Bahamas; every siren was clearing the way for a squad car full of personable young policemen coming to rescue her from some vague but deliciously shuddery doom; the planes that roared overhead to and from La Guardia were bearing her to Casablanca or Carcassonne. Even the rattle of the milkman’s cart and the tinkle of his bottles lent themselves to the game, for Ina saw herself and a Gregory Peckish young man in white tie and tails sitting on the rear step of that homely vehicle, singing “Shall I Wasting?” and “Mavourneen” and the rest, and splitting a quart of homogenized Grade A as an antidote against hangovers. So had passed the night, the happiest of her life.
Left behind forever was Bourdon, Pennsylvania (1950 pop. 3,495) where nothing ever happened except the biweekly change of program at the Bijou. Ina had come to the greatest, noisiest, cruelest, dirtiest, most generous city on earth to seek her fortune, equipped with a reasonably nice face and figure and quite exceptional hair and skin, some sixty dollars in cash, and no training or experience of any sort; but still filled with the firm conviction that she was a very unusual girl destined for a wonderful and exciting future, starting now.
The hand of her watch had crawled past six, though there was still no sign of dawn at the east windows. She had been lying there in the strange bed in the borrowed one-room apartment, loving the night and loving the city as she never could again. At the moment all Manhattan, down to the last sooty snowflake, belonged to her by a sort of divine right. Above her the heavy future hung like a rain cloud over the desert, like ripe purple fruit ready to be plucked.
“Just let things happen to me!” Ina prayed to her own special deity. “Anything at all as long as it’s different and exciting and soon!”
At the same time something warned her that if she intended making the proper impression on the men who interviewed models and showgirls and mannequins and perhaps (heaven forbid) even secretaries and receptionists, she really ought to be getting some sleep. Only maybe dark shadows around her eyes would be intriguing. Girls weren’t supposed to look too innocent these days, even if they were. Oh, she thought, to be like the wise, dreamy minxes in the Marie Laurencin paintings she had seen reproduced in the art magazines back in the Bourdon Carnegie Free Library; those girls so faintly but definitely dissolute!
They looked as if they wouldn’t be surprised at anything. They wouldn’t have popped up in bed like a jack-in-the-box at hearing strange muffled noises in the night. The sounds must be coming, Ina decided suddenly, from the next apartment, where a late party had been going on until a couple of hours ago. She had eavesdropped shamelessly, straining her ears in an attempt to catch the words of the tantalizing songs they were singing, the point of the long involved jokes they told. All she had been sure of was that they sang, and laughed. Finally they had broken it up and gone home, with much slamming of doors and many loud farewells. But that party
couldn’t
be reviving itself, not now.
Then she realized what she was hearing. It was almost too simple. Men were fighting there, on the other side of the wall—at a quarter past six of a winter morning!
Perhaps Ina was the only one in the entire apartment house to hear the battle, though it is fairly certain that any seasoned New Yorker, wakened in the night by noises up to and perhaps including the Last Trump, would only have turned over and gone back to sleep. Not Ina. Wild horses could not have kept her a moment longer in bed.
She smiled in the darkness, wondering just how wild horses could possibly keep anybody anywhere. Slipping out of the warm covers, a slim white naked virginal ghost, she found her old wool bathrobe. Then she pattered barefoot across the room, holding out her arms so she wouldn’t stub a toe on the television set or on Crystal’s little spinet piano, and finally made the hall door without mishap. With an ear pressed to the panel she could hear that the fight was still going on.
Dry smack of hard fists on soft flesh…. Feet stamping like the hoofs of rutting stags…. Wordless exclamations, smothered gaspings for breath. Once a male voice blurted out a name coupled to a black obscenity. Whoever they were, they weren’t fooling.
Ina was trembling now, and not with cold. But she softly turned the knob. Just as the latch clicked there was a muffled crash, louder than anything before, and then silence as thick as cold molasses.
With one eye against the tiny crack in the door she waited, filled with an unreasoning impatience. She shivered there for what seemed an hour, and was never able later to swear whether it was really only a few minutes, or ten, or thirty. But she never took her eyes from the door at the end of the hallway, and at long, long last it opened and a man came out.
He was a stocky, youngish man in rumpled dinner clothes—what Ina called a
tuck
—hatless, and carrying a dark overcoat. His face was paper-white, his dark hair plastered across his damp forehead, and his bow tie was loose. He looked utterly spent, breathing heavily through swollen lips, his eyes blank and unseeing. Indeed, he almost threw his exit into low comedy by stumbling over the milk bottles outside the door.
As he came forward Ina saw that his right fist was jammed into his coat pocket; his left held a gold lighter, its flame inches from the cigarette dangling from his mouth. He went past and on down the hall, walking like a zombie, limping a little. Like Lord Byron, Ina thought. His face was something like the engravings of Byron, too—handsome, arrogant, demon-haunted. It was only as he reached the elevator at the other end of the hall that he succeeded in setting fire to his cigarette, and then he absently tossed the lighter into an urn filled with sand, as if the golden toy had been only a burnt match. Then the door of the automatic elevator slammed shut behind him. Curtain.
Excited and disappointed at the same time, Ina closed the door. But this couldn’t be all. Maybe he would come back. Maybe …
Pausing before the bathroom mirror, she decided that the tiny red spot on her nose wasn’t going to be a pimple after all. And a good thing the fascinating young man hadn’t turned and seen her peeking around the door, with her hair this way. She came back into the room again, surprised to find that she was listening so hard that her ears ached, listening for something she’d heard … or almost heard. Were there sounds outside, sounds anywhere? Even the city seemed suddenly muted.
And especially was everything quiet in the next apartment. The other man in the fight should have been up and around, ministering to his cuts and bruises, pouring a comforting drink or straightening up the wreckage.
Then she suddenly remembered. The man she had seen leaving
hadn’t
shut the door behind him, or she would have heard the click. It must be—it was!—ajar. Ina started impulsively out into the hall just as she was, and then almost too late remembered to stop and release the lock so that she wouldn’t be trapped out in the open with no retreat. A few steps and she was just outside that other door. No light showed inside. “Hello?” Ina said softly.
There was the ghost of a sound somewhere inside. It could have been a groan or a snore, the rustle of a Venetian blind in the morning breeze or an inner door softly closing. She touched the panel, which swung easily inward, and a fan of yellow light from behind her began to widen across a formal foyer, across a scuffed and rumpled rug. She saw the slipper first, and then a man’s leg.
“Excuse me, but is anything wrong?” Ina waited a moment and then pushed the door hard, and then the hall light blazed in on the body of a man wearing cerise pajama pants. The upturned face was not recognizable, even though she had seen it a hundred times in her own stepfather’s living room back home. Blood and bruises had altered it, smeared it inhumanly.
Ina didn’t move. She knew she had to do something, but what? She was missing her cue. Here she was forced into the role of heroine, standing before the footlights in front of a waiting, if yet invisible audience, not knowing what the tragedy was about or what lines she ought to be improvising. She was caught like a fly in amber, stiff with stage fright, unable to take her eyes from the thing smashed against the wall. It was a bloody atrocity, crying mutely to have its limbs decently composed, to be covered up….