“I wonder.”
“Well, why wouldn’t she come?”
“That isn’t quite it.” The schoolteacher walked across the room, then turned abruptly. “Oscar, I wonder if she took that nasty little .28 revolver with her on her mysterious excursion? Or, if not, what happened to it?”
“Well!” he said. “You don’t really think—”
“I’m afraid you’re all too right,” Miss Withers interrupted bitterly. “Or if I do, I don’t think clearly. Somewhere along the line I’ve accepted a false premise; I’ve been misdirected. You know, don’t you, that magicians perform their tricks by misdirection? I only hope that tonight some innocent person doesn’t get murdered because of my stupidity.”
“Horsefeathers. You’re worse than John Hardesty.”
“What about him?” she asked quickly.
“Oh, just a wild idea.” The inspector looked at his watch. “He can tell you when he gets here—he only stopped off to send some telegrams.”
Miss Withers winced slightly at the word “telegrams.” “All the same,” she insisted, “I still think that a murder has been arranged and will take place—will take place just about now, somewhere under our very noses. Meanwhile we only sit here and twiddle our thumbs.” The schoolteacher sighed. “Oscar, if we only had an inkling of what was behind Dallas Trempleau’s phone call.”
He shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“My guesses are much better than yours, as you very well know. But we’ve got to do something. Why don’t you ring Sascha Bordin’s room again and see if he’s come in yet?”
“Okay,” Piper said wearily. “But, as I told you, a man his age isn’t very likely to be back in his hotel room at this hour on his first night in Tijuana.” But he tried, and surprisingly enough Bordin answered his phone, and, his hair tousled, even obligingly joined them a moment later in shirt sleeves. “I was just sitting down to type out the notes I made on my interview with the elusive Miss Kell this afternoon,” he confessed. Bordin looked at the inspector warily. “I suppose our official friend here thinks I stole a march on him?”
“Not at all,” Piper said. “It’s the assistant D.A.’s toes you’re stepping on, if anybody’s. Though I’d be interested in learning how you knew the Kell girl was in Ensenada at all.”
“Why—” Bordin began.
Miss Withers remembered the little trap into which she had fallen, and said hastily, “Not an unnatural inference, since the girls weren’t here and there was no other place for them to go. Anyway, Sascha, there was no harm done. And …”
“No harm,” said Piper, “except you tipped them off to what was planned for tomorrow.”
“I did,” the lawyer admitted. “With a purpose. I thought that if anything would shock the Kell girl into telling the whole truth—” But he shook his head. “I got nothing new. You can even read the notes if you want. If the case ever does come to trial, I’ll make all I can of the fact that now Ina thinks she heard somebody in the apartment hallway after she saw my client leave; but it’s not what I’d hoped for.”
“Perhaps,” suggested Miss Withers brightly, “you didn’t use enough of the right technique—the in vino Veritas approach.” She told him about Dallas’ plying the girl with wine and cognac.
Bordin looked completely incredulous. “What? You mean to say that alcohol would work like scopolamine and pentothal to release buried memories?”
“The only answer to that is that it seems to have worked, in Ina’s case at least,” the schoolteacher pointed out. “Only unfortunately we don’t have the slightest idea of what it was that Dallas managed to uncover.” She told her former prize pupil all or almost all of the phone conversation that had set all this spinning.
“Now,” the inspector took over, “what we want to know is this. What was dropped during your interview with those girls down in Ensenada this afternoon that might help us figure out where they’ve gone?”
Bordin thought, and slowly shook his head.
“No names were mentioned at all?”
“Not in front of me. I found it hard to get anything out of Ina Kell with the Trempleau girl around. It was almost as if—”
“As if Ina were afraid?” the schoolteacher pressed.
Bordin nodded slowly. “Or under some sort of strain. When I bore down on her too hard she burst into tears.”
“A woman’s refuge. Well, thank you, Sascha.”
“I wish I could help you further,” the lawyer told them. “Honestly, I can’t.”
“Thanks,” Piper told him. “That’s all, I guess. Oh—unless you have some idea of where your client, Junior Gault, might be at the moment?”
Bordin said, “My guess is that he’s on his way to Tahiti, or Baffin’s Bay or Guatemala, or any place where he might get lost and stay lost. But I have no direct information—I don’t even know where to send my bill.” He nodded pleasantly and went out.
“I still don’t like him,” the inspector said.
“At the moment I don’t like anybody or anything,” Miss Withers snapped back. She stalked up and down the room. It was now more than three hours since the phone call. “Oscar,” she said finally, “it’s getting on for twelve o’clock. No word from the Mexican police and, what’s worse, no word from either of the girls.”
“Women,” he pointed out sensibly, “are usually late for appointments.”
“I’m not that sort of woman,” the schoolteacher reminded him, “and neither is Dallas Trempleau if I judge her aright. She wouldn’t have asked me to have you here at midnight if she hadn’t expected to meet us here at midnight. Unless—”
“Unless what?”
“Unless she wanted us both to stay put, where we couldn’t possibly get in the way of something she’d planned!” She shook her head. “That’s too farfetched, isn’t it?”
“Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t …” he began. Then there was a knock at the door.
“Eureka!” cried Miss Withers, and rushed to fling it open. But instead of the girl she had expected she stared into the pleasant, surprised face of John Hardesty, assistant D.A., far off his beat but still clutching his briefcase.
“Just looking for the inspector,” he explained. “The hotel is full up, and I thought maybe he’d let me bunk in one of the beds in his room.”
“There’ll be no sleeping for any of us this night,” said Miss Withers grimly, and told him why. “Not until we find out what’s happened to the Trempleau girl.”
“You think something may have happened to her, then?” Hardesty sat down, and began to ask quiet, probing questions. “You gathered from the phone call that she wanted the inspector here at midnight in his official capacity? You thought that she intended to come here and denounce the actual but hitherto unsuspected murderer of Tony Fagan, or maybe even lure him up here and hand him over for arrest?”
“Why—something like that, I inferred at the time.” The schoolteacher was very thoughtful. “Now just what did she say? She said, ‘I know, now!’”
“That could mean several things,” the D.A. pointed out. “She could have known something important about the murder, or she could have known that somebody else—somebody other than Ina, presumably—knew. In other words, that the jig was up.”
“Yes, maybe she wanted to come here,” put in the inspector, “and give herself up!”
“You’re not especially funny,” snapped Miss Withers.
“Nobody was trying to be,” Piper said. “Tell her, John.”
Hardesty nodded. “Well, you see, Miss Withers—Junior Gault’s escape wasn’t exactly a surprise to us.”
“What?” she gasped. “You mean it was a put-up job?”
“Not exactly. He was at least technically quite in the clear at the moment, and properly speaking he isn’t a fugitive at all. But it was the idea of some of my superiors to let Gault have a taste of freedom, to see what he’d do with it.”
“And he certainly did, didn’t he?” Piper grinned.
“A guilty man would flee, and an innocent one remain; is it that simple?” Miss Withers looked dubious.
Hardesty looked very wise. “Anyway, don’t worry about Gault.”
“You mean to say you know where he is now?”
“Just about. He’s been watched every step of the way since he walked out of his family’s house. We had a report on him from Kansas City, and Albuquerque, and he was recognized getting off a TWA plane around noon today at Los Angeles airport. Not easy for a man to disguise that slight limp he has, you know. He hasn’t been reported since noon, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d be arriving in San Diego on one of this evening’s late flights.”
“Oh, no!” gasped Miss Withers.
Hardesty nodded. “Junior has something on his mind, and we intend to find out what it is. Maybe plant a bug—a concealed microphone—in his room when the time comes.” The inspector nodded.
Two little boys playing with gadgets, the schoolteacher thought. Looking for miracles, for the easy way, for the answer in the back of the algebra book. “You mean you think Junior Gault is coming out here to meet somebody?” she demanded.
“Yes,” said the assistant D.A. “We think it’s very possible. And just in case it’s needed, I happen to have brought along a warrant for—” He stopped suddenly, and they all turned their heads toward the hall door. Outside there was unwonted commotion, sounds of heavy footsteps, of gay feminine laughter, and voices raised in singing something about potatoes being cheaper and tomatoes being cheaper and now’s the time to fall in love.
“Well!” cried Miss Hildegarde Withers, and rushed to the door just in time to see Nikki Braggioli engaged in carrying a slight, redheaded miss into his suite.
“Ina!” gasped the schoolma’am, in a very schoolma’amish tone. “Ina Kell!”
The young couple broke suddenly apart, but their eyes were still shining. “It’s all right,” Nikki said hastily. “We want you to be the first to know. We’re in love.”
“How very interesting,” said Miss Withers coldly. She pushed through the door after them. “But there is a time and a place for everything.”
Nikki gaily picked up the song cue, and in his high tenor rendered something about now being the time for love, honey, because you’re near me.
“Now’s the time to make some sense!” snapped the schoolteacher. She faced the girl. “Young lady, where have you been? What’s been going on? Where is Dallas?”
“Don’t know,” Ina said. “Don’t care.”
Miss Withers had had, she felt, just about enough. She grasped the girl firmly by one shell-pink ear, much as she might have taken one of her third-graders down the hall to the principal’s office, and led her out.
“Hey!” Nikki cried indignantly. “I mean to say, really!” He followed after, but the schoolteacher pushed him firmly in the brisket with her free hand and shoved him back inside. Then she led the bewildered but unresisting girl into her own suite and slammed the door.
“Oscar!” she cried. “Mr. Hardesty! See what I’ve found!”
“Bingo!” said Oscar Piper, putting down his cigar.
“Great Godfrey!” said Hardesty. “If it isn’t little Ina—”
“Hello,” the girl murmured feebly, and then whirled on her captor. “You can’t do this …”
“I can and I am,” Miss Withers assured her. “Now you just come clean, young lady. Do you mean to tell us you actually don’t know where Dallas Trempleau is?”
Ina nodded, and then shook her head.
“You don’t have any idea whom she went rushing off to see?”
“Did she go to see anybody?” Ina looked scared, and bewildered. “She was acting awfully oddly, but—”
The inspector quietly took over. “Ina, you remember me, don’t you?”
She nodded. “Yes, I do. You were the policeman who threatened to spank me once.”
“And I may still do it, unless you cooperate. Do you …”
Nikki Braggioli was hammering outside on the door. “Go away!” Piper ordered. “Get lost.” He turned back to the girl. “You were living with Dallas Trempleau at a hotel down in Ensenada, weren’t you? And this afternoon Sam Bordin, attorney for Junior Gault, came down to see you and asked you a lot of questions?”
“Yes, Inspector.”
John Hardesty turned fire-red with anger, but Piper waved him aside. “And after that, Ina?”
“Dallas and I got tight,” Ina admitted softly. “At least I did.”
“And then she asked you a lot of questions?”
The girl frowned. “I—I guess so. But I don’t remember much about it; it’s all a blur. I’m not used to drinking.”
Miss Withers couldn’t hold off any longer. “You certainly must remember what it was she forced you to remember about the morning when Tony Fagan was killed. It was something terribly important, so think hard.”
Ina thought. “Honestly, I can’t remember. I guess I sort of blacked out. If I told her anything more than I told you, or Mr. Bordin, I just don’t recall it. I’m—I’m sorry.” She smiled apologetically in the direction of John Hardesty.
There was a moment of silence, broken at last by Miss Withers. “Oscar,” she said firmly, “we’ve got to get to the bottom of this. For a desperate disease, a desperate remedy. Will you please send downstairs for a bottle of champagne and another of brandy?”
“What the …” he began.
“If it worked once, it may again.”
“Oh, no!” cried Ina desperately. “I can’t go through that again. I don’t think I’ll ever take another drink as long as I live. And I promised Nikki …”
“Bother Nikki.” Miss Withers was not in one of her gentler moods. “Can’t you remember anything you said to Dallas, anything at all? Think carefully; lives may depend upon it.”
Ina shook her head, so that the fire-colored curls swung wildly. “Nothing. Except … But that’s silly—”
“Except what?”
The girl looked lost and helpless and rather desperate. “I’m trying to think. I seem to remember something about poetry—Byron and stuff like that. But I can’t remember any more.”
“‘There was a sound of revelry by night …’?” prompted Miss Withers hopefully. “‘The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, and his cohorts were gleaming …’? ‘Maid of Athens, ere we part …’?”
Ina Kell frowned with concentration, and then shook her head again.
“All right, now,” John Hardesty said gently, pulling his chair a little closer toward the girl, who was perched on the edge of the couch again as if to take off at any moment. “Never mind that poetry stuff for me. Just tell us everything that happened this evening, in your own way.”
“All right, I’ll try. I—I finally took a nap, or maybe I passed out. It’s not a nice thing to admit, but …”
“Never mind, you weren’t the one to blame for it. And when you passed out, was Dallas Trempleau there in the cottage? And did she stay there?”
Ina nodded. “As far as I know. Maybe she went out when I was asleep; neither of us had had anything to eat since brunch. Or maybe she went out to make a phone call; she was always slipping away to make phone calls where I wouldn’t hear.”
“Very well,” Hardesty conceded. “Miss Trempleau might have made or received a phone call other than the one we know about. Maybe that can be traced later, only it may be too late then. And afterwards?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember anything until Dallas suddenly woke me up by shaking my shoulder and slapping my face; she said she had to drive up to town right away and I had to come along. She barely gave me time to throw on a coat and get into the car, and off we went. She was driving like a madwoman, I remember that. As if nothing mattered any more, taking the corners on two wheels and like that. I asked her to slow down and she just laughed at me, a wild kind of laugh.”
“And then?”
“She had to slow down a little, there where the highway curves coming into
Rosarito. I wasn’t feeling so well, and I guess I went to sleep. The next thing I remember, we were parked a couple of blocks from here on the Boulevard Agua Caliente, and she was shaking me. ‘This is Tijuana, you get off here!’ she said.”
“But, Ina …” began Miss Withers. The inspector caught her arm, shaking his head warningly.
“And that’s all she said?”
“Not quite. She was in a state; out of her mind almost. She told me I could have all the clothes and stuff back at the cottage. She handed me a hundred dollars—here it is right in my coat pocket—and she gave me my return ticket back to New York. Then she almost pushed me out of the car and drove on….”
“In which direction?” the inspector put in patiently.
“Just—just up the street, the same way we were headed. But I think … Yes, she turned right at the next corner.”
Miss Withers was already referring to her map. “There does seem to be a road turning off there, that cuts across the dry riverbed and across to the athletic field and the park, cutting off the town and ending at the port of entry.”
The two men looked at her. “So?” Piper said.
“So it would appear that Dallas wasn’t bound for Tijuana at all—or else she wouldn’t have said to Ina, ‘This is Tijuana, you get off here.’ That implies that she was going farther.”
“A point,” admitted John Hardesty judicially.
“She was going to San Diego, or in that direction,” put in the inspector. He faced the girl. “Ina, this is of the greatest importance. Can you tell us just what she was wearing?”
Ina concentrated. “She wasn’t fixed up for a party, if that’s what you mean. I think … Yes, she had on a slack suit, and she was wearing a red scarf tied around her hair, and she had on her beaver cape and—oh, yes, her sunglasses.”
“Sunglasses, in the evening?” questioned Miss Withers.
The girl nodded. “She had a special pair that she said cut out the glare of other headlights or something.”
“Excuse me,” said Oscar Piper, and picked up the phone. A moment later he was dictating a description of the missing girl, to be broadcast to all San Diego, National City, Chula Vista and San Ysidro prowl cars and to the California Highway Patrol.
Nipped in the Bud Page 20