Nipped in the Bud

by Stuart Palmer

“You see, Oscar?” said the schoolteacher.

  He nodded, and then moved a little, his hands held low. But suddenly the little .28 was centered at his midriff. “I’m not fooling,” Ina said. “Stay there.”

  The inspector stayed, though he didn’t look very worried. Miss Withers realized that as a policeman he must have had guns pointed at him many times before. “You surprise me, Ina,” he said easily.

  It was a cue, in a way. The girl laughed, and not pleasantly. “Oh, so I surprise you! You thought you knew it all, didn’t you? I was just a dumb, innocent kid from the country, who could be scared into saying almost anything when you were so fatherly and kind and threatened to spank me! I bet you’d have enjoyed it, too!”

  “I might even enjoy it now,” said the inspector softly. “So now, sister, you’ve got the gun. It won’t do you any good in the long run, but you’ve got it. People who try to get what they want with guns are stupid. You’ve been stupid all along, haven’t you?”

  The girl looked suddenly gaunt, hungry, and ten years older, her mouth drawn against her teeth.

  “You people who always had everything you want and need don’t know anything,” she said slowly. “This is a world of dog-eat-dog. It never occurred to you that maybe I was hard and smart, maybe I once saw my chance to shake down Junior Gault with the gold cigarette lighter he left behind, if only I could have got hold of his phone number and talked to him before he got arrested.”

  “So that was it,” said Miss Withers softly. “The fingermarks on Miss Joris’ phone, and the calls you tried to make in the lunchroom.”

  “Now you’re smart,” Ina said easily. “You’re so smart about everything that you don’t realize I’m smarter. And I’m going to put you both away in a minute and get away from here—far away from here. And don’t think I’ll be caught. My hair can be a different shade in an hour, and all I have to do is to stand on the highway and raise a thumb.”

  “The way you got back to Tijuana, after you finished—or thought you finished Dallas Trempleau,” said the schoolteacher. “You were listening on the balcony, of course, when you heard that she was finished. As a matter of fact, she will probably recover—with a silver plate in her skull.”

  “Platinum,” said the inspector, who was edging slowly along the wall. “When she regains consciousness, Ina, you’re dead.”

  “You’re lying,” said the slight, redheaded girl in the doorway. But she said it without conviction. Then the phone rang. It rang again and again.

  “Young lady,” said Miss Withers. “You’re in the catbird’s seat, holding the gun. What happens?”

  “Answer it,” Ina decided suddenly, her face set in a sort of skull-like mask. “Go on, answer it.” It was obvious that the inspector had won his point, that his appeal to her vanity had worked, and that she had decided that this last hour of triumph must be wrung out to its last drop. “Answer it carefully,” Ina concluded.

  Miss Withers gravely picked up the phone, and said, “Yes?”

  It was a familiar voice. “I am still watching,” Vito said. “Was somebody once again out on your balcony, I thought you might like to know.”

  “Thank you,” said the schoolteacher, her voice quavering a little. “Thank you very much.”

  “Get rid of it!” came the brittle voice of the girl in the doorway.

  “Good night, Vito,” Miss Withers said hastily. “I’ll call you at home in the morning. The number is Ayuda 564, isn’t it? Oh, Ayuda 465.” She hung up.

  “I know what you’re both thinking,” said the girl with the gun. “You think that given a chance, or even half a chance.”

  She waved the little pistol, and Oscar Piper relaxed again.

  “Very well, Ina,” said the schoolteacher. “You have two murders to your credit already, and you think you can handle two more. You’ve outsmarted the police and the district attorney’s office and everyone. I must give you credit for the Virgin Islands thing—it was quite brilliantly planned, in its way.”

  Ina brightened a shade, and then her face hardened. “You’re not going to get around me so easily. Stand over there by the couch, both of you.” She motioned with the little gun.

  The inspector looked toward Miss Withers, and moved slowly.

  “Of course,” said the schoolteacher, not moving at all. “But you’ll not really begrudge us a little last-minute information, will you—since you hold all the trumps? Since Junior Gault was arrested before you could reach him, you thought of calling his lawyer and, failing that, of calling his fiancée, didn’t you? So she could take you out of the country, and maintain you in the style to which you had always wanted to be accustomed. Isn’t that it?”

  “Over there,” said Ina grimly. “I’m not fooling now.”

  “You’ve had a rather high time down here, haven’t you? You’ve called the turn, you’ve done the heavy gambling, and you got the mink coat and the Paris nightgown. You even made Dallas leave here and rush off to Ensenada, on the threat of going back and testifying against her sweetheart. And you even convinced poor, foolish Nikki Braggioli that you were the wealthy one and that you could make all his dreams come true.”

  “Does that matter now?” Ina said softly. “Get over there.”

  “You hit her over the head right there in Ensenada, didn’t you?” Miss Withers went on. “Because she was getting on to you. And then, before you tumbled her into the luggage compartment of the car and rushed her up across the line, you phoned me in a rough approximation of her voice. But you made so many mistakes—” She stopped.

  The girl with the gun, obviously enjoying herself, stiffened. “What mistakes?”

  “There were dozens,” said the schoolteacher pleasantly. She held up her fingers, and dutifully counted them off. “You thought you had Nikki tamed, so he’d say anything you wanted him to say. You even had him so engaged in trying to get me involved in lawsuits that I could no longer be a possible menace to you. But Nikki learned tonight that he hadn’t married the millions he counted on, so he left.”

  “The heel,” Ina said slowly. “He doesn’t have a contract at Metro, or anywhere.”

  “The next mistake,” explained Miss Withers, “was when you displayed your legs in crossing the border. It was a fairly good way of making the border guards turn their attention away from your face, even concealed as it was by a scarf and by the dark glasses, plus Dallas’ beaver coat you were wearing and then draped around her when you left her for dead. It never occurred to you that a girl in slacks, which Dallas was wearing, couldn’t show her legs at all. And then your biggest mistake was to think that just because you had once killed somebody with a whack over the head with a milk bottle you could repeat it—was it a champagne bottle this time? Most people have good, thick, solid skulls, not at all like poor Tony Fagan’s. You put Dallas in a coma, you gave her a bad case of concussion, but she’ll still be able to be at your trial.”

  “Shut up!” cried the girl in the doorway.

  “Don’t, Oscar!” Miss Withers sensed that the inspector was about to make a rush for it. “It isn’t necessary, really,” she said hastily. “Because, you see, when I found that nasty little weapon under the other pillow in this bedroom, I made a point of taking all of the shells or cartridges or whatever you call them out of the thing and throwing them away.” The schoolteacher beamed. “So, you see, Ina, you are rather making a fool of yourself.”

  “No!” cried Ina Kell, from the depths of her heart. “Oh, no!” But she stared down at the gun, at the glittering little symbol of her authority, her power, as if it could tell her something. She stared at it for just a moment, but in that moment the inspector moved forward to twist it out of her hand, leaving her wrist wrung and aching.

  “Goddamn it,” he said after a moment, one hand imprisoning the girl against the wall in an arm lock. “Hildegarde, what are you trying to get by with? This thing is loaded, as loaded as any gun can ever be.”

  The schoolteacher had collapsed into a chair. “Yes, Oscar. But
it’s not any more loaded than the guns of the lovely, beautiful, delightful Mexican policemen who ought to be—and who are coming down the hall. You see,” she explained hastily as she went to open the door, “my little friend Vito hasn’t any telephone, so he realized I wasn’t making a date to call him. Besides, ayuda, in Spanish, means ‘help’!”

  And that was that.

  21

  “Nor look through the eyes of the dead,

  Nor feed on the spectres in books …”

  —WALT WHITMAN

  THEY WERE PARKED JUST on the southern side of the port of entry, and the television thing was over. Ina Kell Braggioli had been formally turned over to the custody of the United States authorities, with John Hardesty much in evidence and waiting to take her back to New York.

  “What happens to Junior Gault?” Miss Withers wanted to know.

  The inspector shrugged. “He’s got a felonious assault rap over his head, but nobody is going to press it. I guess he can stick around here, as long as Miss Trempleau is in the hospital. She doesn’t smell the flowers he brings, but he brings them anyway. They say she’ll be all right, eventually.”

  “With a platinum plate in her skull,” the schoolteacher said. “Everyone seems to be in the clear but me.”

  “What are you beefing about?” Piper wanted to know. “They dropped the lawsuit, didn’t they, when your little Mexican friend proved that the father of one of the litigants was a porter who swept up the grandstand after the dog races, and that he obviously supplied the pari-mutuel tickets that the boys were offering in evidence? What are we waiting for?”

  Miss Withers shook her head. “Not yet, Oscar.”

  “Look,” he said. “I have to get back to New York. I can’t spend the best years of my life sitting here on the fringe of Mexico, waiting …”

  “Oh, hush!” she said. “I’m waiting for Vito.”

  “So what’s with Vito? You’ve already fixed it up for him, haven’t you, so he can go back to school across the border in San Ysidro, at fourteen bucks a month, thanks to Ruth Fagan’s check? And the boy is going to take care of your dog, so what …”

  “This is what,” said Miss Withers, looking over her shoulder. She waved in the direction of a small, brown boy who had just appeared across the park, holding a large, brown poodle on a leash. “Very well, Oscar.” And she drove the little rented coupé up to the gates.

  “Born?” said the first man in uniform. The inspector divulged that he was born in Brooklyn, and Miss Withers admitted she was born in Iowa. They were waved ahead.

  “You again!” said the second man. He looked into the back seat, and then made Miss Withers open up the trunk compartment. “No tricks this time? No dogs anywhere?”

  There were no dogs. Miss Withers was waved ahead, and drove on for perhaps a block.

  “My plane leaves in half an hour—” began Oscar Piper impatiently. But she still waited.

  Suddenly, wonderfully, there came a brown streak up the road, passing through immigration and customs as if they had not been there. Talleyrand was in high gear, all jets open. The big poodle put on his brakes as he came up to the little rented car, but still took a few yards farther to bring himself to a halt.

  “I told Vito to hold him there until we were well across, and then let him go,” confessed Miss Withers. She opened the car door, and the dog sailed in, covering her and the inspector with unwanted kisses, shaking hands with them both, and frantically waving an almost nonexistent tail. Talley was in the seventh heaven of delight.

  “My plane …” said the inspector finally.

  “Do you suppose,” Miss Withers remarked surprisingly, “that there is another seat on the plane—and a place for a poodle?”

  “New York?” Oscar Piper looked bewildered. “But your asthma—”

  “What asthma?” demanded the schoolteacher scornfully. With a lurch, and a screech of gears that set the Inspector’s teeth on edge, she took off.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Hildegarde Withers Mysteries

  1.

  “Morning and evening,

  maids hear the goblins cry.…”

  CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

  DARKNESS WAS FALLING WHEN the girl who called herself Janet Poole came back into her tiny cubicle of an office and pulled the Venetian blinds on the dripping California afternoon. From somewhere off across the Valley came the rumble of thunder; she shivered, remembering the classic Greek belief that thunder on the left presaged great and terrible events. Or perhaps, she thought, a rabbit must have just run over her future grave.

  No, not a rabbit. It would have to have been a bird, a very special bird. She sighed. It had been a long session downstairs in what they all called the sweatbox; for four hours Jan and a dozen other kindred spirits had been watching a screen on which thousands of pencil sketches moved and jumped and blended. They had been watching the rough animation of what was to be someday Peter Penguin’s Barn Dance.

  They had watched in deadly seriousness the pictured antics of a mad, antisocial penguin in everlasting conflict with an obese but sportive hippopotamus, a malignant hawk wearing a six-shooter and a ten-gallon hat, a fantastic cat with Adolphe Menjou moustaches—all of them born of the ink bottle, anthropomorphic inhabitants of this Never-never land.

  One day, with some luck and the expenditure of much sweat and tears, all this would take shape and color and come alive, come wondrously alive, to sparkle for a few minutes on the nation’s movie screens. To that end more than two hundred artists and directors and writers, animators and in-betweeners and cameramen and musicians and cutters labored endlessly.

  “Don’t ever ask me why!” Jan whispered to herself. But she actually loved being a part of it all, and when she left this pixie world forever sometime next summer—oh, frabjous day!—it would be with tears in her eyes and a lump in her throat.

  She switched on the lights and then plumped her longish, pleasantly shaped body down before the drawing board, which was really a tilted desktop with a revolving glass plate in the center now illuminated from beneath. She took a pocket mirror from the top drawer and looked most carefully at herself—the self she had somehow created out of nothing more than good bones and a pair of eyes. This life was hard on the eyes, especially on big blue-violet, slightly myopic eyes. But Jan had made her mind up that she wasn’t going to break down and wear glasses until she was thirty—still a reassuring distance away. All the same, it might be a good idea to find out about those contact lens things that did the work and didn’t show….

  The watch on her slim brown wrist said that it was almost six, six o’clock in the evening of a long day which seemed even longer because of last night. They had stayed much too long parked up there in her car on the top of Lookout Mountain in the incredible white moonlight of Southern California, watching the fabulous jeweled lights of Hollywood and Beverly Hills splashed out beneath them and arguing as only people who know and love one another very dearly can argue. That wonderful, stubborn man! Jan smiled, a warm little-girlish smile that transformed her strong-boned Polska face into momentary loveliness, and then she leaned back and pushed at her mop of ash blond hair in a gesture that was all sensuous. “‘Haply I think on thee …’” she whispered, making the words sound new and exciting. The Shakespearean sonnets were all new and exciting to Jan; she had learned about them only recently. Thanks to Guy for opening that door for her, and so many, many other doors, too.

  But there were certain things she would have to prove to him, too; things that he could and must learn even from a Polish peasant girl if they were ever to make a good marriage out of it. Jan had few if any delusions, and as her grandmother had said, “There is more to marriage than four legs in a bed.”

  That wonderful, unpredictable man!

  Then it was that Jan heard a familiar step coming along the hall, and quickly resumed her usual business-like expression. She looked up with assumed surprise to see a roundish masculine face, topped by a ridiculous red beret, pee
ring in her doorway. “Time to knock off, my sweeting,” it said. “You are maybe joining us over at the Grotto for a couple of quick ones and perhaps a small steak, which I will gladly buy?”

  Janet smiled, with carefully rationed warmth. “Not tonight, Tip. I’m bushed.”

  Tip Brown had been top artist and story-man at the cartoon studio for a decade; he was one of the best in a fiercely competitive business, but from where she sat he was as nourishing and dull and wholesome as a dish of oatmeal. Long ago Jan had decided that she liked him the way you like an oversized mongrel puppy who keeps trying to crawl into your lap and lick your face. “No, really,” she said gently.

  “Do you good to laugh and play a little.” Then, as she shook her head, he came closer. “Okay, can I walk you out to the gate? Want to talk to you about things and stuff.”

  “No, Tip. Tonight it’s just no dice.”

  “Oh? I wonder why. As a matter of fact, I know why. Hark!” Tip put his hand to his ear and pantomimed The Listener … and then from across the stretches of the studio street Jan could actually hear the faint tinkle of the piano in the music stage, with an individual touch that she knew full well. It made her heart leap up, and it must have showed in her eyes, for Tip Brown subsided a little and said wearily, “So that piano player of yours is on the lot, scoring again, is he? And you’ve got to wait around and drive him home?”

  “I don’t gotta, I wanna,” Jan flashed. “And, Tip dear, please don’t be like that. You’d love Guy if you’d only take the time to know him. Just because he doesn’t drive a car is no sign he’s not a man, and a lot of man. This part-time music work is terribly important to him; it’s already resulted in his getting two songs published in New York based on things he’s done here. If you’d only get to know him—”

  Tip Brown shook his head. “My quota of charming young gentlemen is filled,” he said firmly. “Well, baby, maybe someday you’ll learn about musicians the hard way. They eat their young, if any. But everybody to his own taste.”