Authors: Stuart Palmer
“No, Oscar!” cried Miss Withers.
“Yes, Oscar!” he came back. “At least a girl driving a big blue Cadillac, wearing a scarf around her head and a fur jacket and having—the examiner happened to notice—exceptionally nice legs, came through with the first wave of the crowd from the races and the
jai-alai
games. She said she was born in New York, which matched the license plates on her car, and that she had nothing to declare, and when she got her okay she drove off up Highway 101 as if all the devils in hell were after her.”
“I thought so,” said John Hardesty, brightening.
“So Dallas is on the other side of the international border,” the schoolteacher said slowly. “Gone to keep an appointment, and I’m afraid very much I know what sort of appointment it was. Well, what are you waiting for?”
Both men stared at her blankly.
“Obviously,” said Miss Withers, “if Dallas went to meet somebody, then somebody went to meet her! Why wait until tomorrow to check alibis, or to see just who is dead or maimed or missing? There are only a few suspects. Why not check on them now, before anyone has a chance to confuse the trail?”
There were times when the inspector was surprising, and this was one of them. “Okay,” he said. “Hildegarde, if I had my hat on, I’d take it off to you. Let’s go.”
But she shook her head. “I’m getting a bit old and creaky for that sort of rushing around. And, besides, somebody ought to stay here.” She motioned toward the adjoining suite.
“You mean somebody has to keep an eye on the newlyweds?” Hardesty asked.
She nodded. “It would only pile confusion upon confusion if they got panicky and started to dash off somewhere right in the midst of things. Besides, there is always the possibility that little Ina will have a brainstorm, and let her subconscious loose. I want to be around when and if that happens.”
Oscar Piper gave her an odd look. “I think you may be up to something,” he said slowly. “Because you know darn well that if those kids tried to go anywhere, we could have them dragged back in a few hours, especially since they’d be driving in that circus wagon of his. And I somehow don’t think that you put any more stock in that poetry stuff than I do.”
“No, Oscar? You’re wrong.”
“Maybe,” he conceded. “But I still think that you have an idea that Dallas has put her head in a noose because of something she found out from Ina, and that therefore Ina is in danger too.”
“In great danger,” admitted the schoolteacher. “Whether she knows it or not.”
“But …” he protested.
“Stop butting. You two men go ahead; I’ll hold the fort. Round everybody up, and we’ll have a showdown. I hope.” Miss Withers added the last two words in a whisper. After they were gone, the schoolteacher pulled an easy chair over to the hall door, opened it a scant inch and, with all her lights turned out, settled down to wait. She knew or thought she knew what the eventual outcome must be, but not how or why or when.
She got up once to make an unsuccessful telephone call, and a little later to receive one from Vito, of all people. “Thank you for the information,” she said. “But, young man, at this hour you should be at home and in bed!”
“Is not much home since my father die,” the boy explained. “Sometimes this guide business is very good late at night, only I would rather work with you on being a detective. Besides, I have to wait for the bed until my cousin gets up early and goes to work. You have something for me to do, no?”
“I have something for you to do, yes.” And she told him.
Then the schoolteacher settled down in the easy chair again, her mind going around and around in circles, tying up loose ends, untying them again, and sometimes cutting the Gordian knot and starting over.
Eventually she must have drifted off to sleep, in spite of her good intentions. For minutes or hours later she jerked awake to see John Hardesty standing in the doorway staring at her, his finger on the light switch. The assistant D.A. looked more harried than ever, and his hair was tangled as a haystack. “You all right?” he wanted to know. “I saw your door ajar …”
“Hush!” said Miss Withers, still trying to cling to the disappearing skirts of her dream. “I want to remember something. It was a very odd dream. There were pretty girls dancing to horrible, off-key music, and singing something about ‘Things are not what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream …’”
“More poetry,” Hardesty said coldly. “And that isn’t even Byron, it’s Gilbert and Sullivan.”
“I know, I know.” The schoolteacher was suddenly worried. “Where’s Oscar?”
“He stopped off to make a phone call—to see if there’s anything new over San Diego way. Be here in a minute.”
Miss Withers relaxed. “Well, speak up. You obviously have something on your mind.”
“Yes, I have,” admitted the assistant D.A. very soberly. “This whole thing has gone to pieces.”
“But it’s always been in pieces! We only have to put them together the right way, and …”
“Listen,” he said. “With the help of the Mexican police, the inspector and I have located everybody …”
“Not
everybody!
” Miss Withers gasped.
“Everybody but Dallas Trempleau,” he corrected himself. “Ruth Fagan was in the bar and grill of her hotel on the Calle Coahuila. She was learning the samba from a sleek character with long sideburns, who, it seems, hangs around there for the purpose of entertaining lonely lady tourists. She claims to have been there all evening, but no corroboration except from the gigolo, who would swear that she’d been there since Christmas Eve if he saw the chance of a fast buck.”
“Not the best alibi,” Miss Withers admitted. “Go on, please.”
“Thallie Gordon was at Ciro’s, surrounded by a crowd of admiring sailors who had recognized her from her appearances on television, and who were almost fighting for the chance to dance with her and get her autograph and the promise of a pinup picture.”
“Understandable. And Mr. Wingfield, how was he taking it?”
Hardesty shrugged. “He had already taken it—on the lam. He wasn’t around. Thallie said they’d had a fight earlier in the evening and parted company. She said it was because he wanted to get married tonight and she didn’t, a fairly unlikely story. Particularly since according to the inspector she’d been trying to get him to make an honest woman out of her for months. As you may know, they have connecting rooms at the hotel over in San Diego, where his group is located.”
“I didn’t know,” admitted Miss Withers. “But nothing surprises me any more. Still, I can see …” She stopped suddenly. “But you said you’d located everybody.”
He nodded. “Wingfield we finally found at the Papillon Bar up the street, feeling no pain whatever and buying phony drinks made of vermouth cut with tea for a flock of the so-called hostesses. I imagine he was also promising them tryouts for television.”
“Men,” said the schoolteacher. “By the way, you didn’t happen to run into my former prize pupil, Sascha Bordin, anywhere on your search of the town, did you?”
“Bordin? We weren’t looking for him.”
“I was,” Miss Withers admitted. “I phoned his room a while ago, and he was out. I wanted to ask him if, on his visit to Ensenada, he had spilled the beans to Dallas and Ina about Junior Gault being out here, or supposedly headed here. But I guess it doesn’t matter too much.”
Hardesty rubbed both hands through his hair. “This whole case is going to hell in a handbasket. We’ve even located Junior Gault—he was picked up about an hour ago by the San Diego police, in the Greyhound bus station. Just arriving …”
“Or possibly leaving?”
“Possibly. Anyway, he’s being held.”
“He’s being held? But aren’t they all?”
The assistant D.A. looked more puzzled than ever. “No, why should they? None of them can be properly considered as suspects.”
“Everyone,” said Miss Withers firmly, “can be considered as a suspect, at this stage.”
But Hardesty wasn’t listening. He wrinkled his nose. “Excuse me,” he said apologetically. “But I keep thinking I smell something.”
“Good heavens!” cried Miss Withers. “You do! It’s exhibit A—look in the wastebasket!”
He looked, and stared down in wonderment at the smashed skull of a smallish mammal, and at a perfectly good bottle of milk, stained on the outside with blood.
“I’m not out of my mind, or much out anyway,” the schoolteacher told him. “That is the skull of a goat. I smashed it with one deft whack, using the milk bottle.”
John Hardesty drew away a little, as if he expected to defend himself.
“The murder of Tony Fagan last December,” she went on, “was a woman’s crime. He was lying there unconscious, having been beaten into insensibility, and a woman came along and did him in—using the weapon nearest at hand, a full milk bottle, just left outside the door by the milkman. Fagan had an exceptionally thin skull, I understand….”
Hardesty nodded slowly. “Felonious assault by Junior Gault, topped off with murder by—” He stopped, smiling wryly. “You remember my starting to tell you that I came out here with
two
warrants? The first was for Ina Kell, to make sure she’d come back and tell the truth. The second one was for Dallas Trempleau.”
“Ah!” said Miss Withers.
“I’ve been figuring,” he continued, “that today Dallas learned something, quite possibly from Ina when she had the poor kid practically
non compos mentis
from slugged champagne, which told her that to protect herself she had to commit still another murder. So she took off, dumped the Kell girl en route, and went to meet her next victim somewhere just north of the line.”
“An ingenious idea,” the schoolteacher admitted. “Or do I mean ingenuous?”
“Anyway,” he finished, “it’s no good. Because as far as we can find out, Dallas didn’t go across the border to meet anyone, or at least nobody went to meet her.”
“You mean, all her potential victims are still safe and sound down here in Tijuana?”
He nodded.
“Of course, there is this to be considered—” Miss Withers broke off as there came a ring at the phone. “Oscar?” she cried. “Oh, Vito!” She listened a moment, said, “Thank you, young man,” and hung up. “Just my assistant,” she explained, “reporting with interesting but not immediately important information. I was hoping it was the inspector. You know, I’m getting a little worried about him.”
She looked down the hall, to see Oscar Piper approaching. His shoulders sagged, and he looked very much as if he would have liked to be somewhere else, in some other line of business. “Oscar!” she cried, and rushed out to meet him. “Mr. Hardesty tells me that you’ve located everybody, even Junior Gault. So his theory has collapsed—”
“All our theories,” he said. “I was just on the phone to the San Diego police. Guess what they told me?”
“I’ve given up guessing,” the schoolteacher told him. Then she listened. They came back together into the room.
“Dallas Trempleau’s been found …” Piper began.
“Heading north toward the Canadian border?” Hardesty suggested hopefully.
“No,” said the inspector. “She was …”
“She’d had her skull bashed in,” announced Miss Withers quickly. “They found her at the wheel of her car, tucked away in the garage of a half-finished house in a Harborside subdivision, a couple of miles north of the border. Somebody had placed a lot of newspapers under the Cadillac and set them on fire, but the flames were seen by a Navy flyer, on a routine flight headed back for North Island, and he reported it as soon as he landed. The police got there in time to put out the fire—it’s harder to burn up a modern car than most people realize.”
There was a short silence. “God,” said John Hardesty. “Dead?”
“Dying,” the inspector admitted. “No hope.”
“Any chance,” the assistant D.A. pressed, “that she might regain consciousness for a few minutes before the end?”
“None whatever,” said Oscar Piper.
“This doesn’t look so good, for any of us—” began Hardesty slowly.
“It certainly doesn’t look good for Dallas Trempleau,” the schoolteacher reminded him. “Well, what are you waiting for? I understand that Junior Gault is already in custody. I suggest that you have him brought over here on the double, and that you have the other three major suspects picked up at once. Not one of them has any sort of alibi—they could have crossed the border, met Dallas and done her in, and still got back here in an hour. Whereupon they’d have tried to build up just the sort of alibis they had.”
“That’s a point,” Hardesty admitted slowly.
“Well, Oscar?” pressed Miss Withers.
He gave her an odd look, and then nodded. “I’ll see what I can do. It’s a little irregular, at least as far as Junior Gault is concerned. But old Ed Beekman, who runs homicide in San Diego, is a pal of mine. He’ll stretch a point. And, besides, they haven’t as yet any official connection between Junior and the Trempleau girl—” He got on the phone, and then they all waited.
“But what I want to know …” Hardesty began suddenly. Then he saw that Miss Withers had her finger to her lips. The room relapsed into silence again, broken finally by the ringing of the telephone.
“For you,” said Piper, handing it to the schoolteacher.
She said, “Yes?” listened a moment, and then, “Thanks, young man,” and hung up.
After some twenty minutes, Chief Robles of the Tijuana police arrived, with Ruth Fagan, Thallie Gordon, and Art Wingfield in tow. They were all more or less in the typical, “You can’t do this to me!” frame of mind, but the
Jefe
ushered them in with firm politeness, and stood implacably in the doorway. “Anything else, Inspector?” he offered hopefully.
“Stick around,” Piper said. “This is your territory, not mine. And they’re your prisoners, if any. Besides, this just possibly might be interesting.”
The wiry little brown man lighted a long brown cigarette, and leaned back comfortably against the wall. Two or three attempts at conversation on the part of the prisoners were cut off sharply. Everyone waited in a stiff, strained silence, and after another half-hour the phone rang from downstairs, announcing still more visitors. And then finally Junior Gault came down the hall, followed closely by two San Diego detectives. He looked impressed, unshaven, and more uncooperative than ever.