*See The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree, Crime Club, 1933.
II
I have been through the gates:
I have groped, I have crept
Back, back. There is DUST
IN THE STREETS, AND BLOOD
CHARLOTTE MEW
“YOU CERTAINLY CAN LIE LIKE a rug!” Lillian said half admiringly. For the umpteenth time that day she had listened to plump, pleasant Gertrude, arbiter of the switchboard on the third floor of the Mammoth Writers’ Building, as she told somebody at the other end of the line that Mr Josef was working at home today.
“Why don’t you break down and tell ’em the truth?” Lillian demanded. “Why don’t you say he’s in Good Sam Hospital with the screaming what-have-yous?”
Gertrude only smiled. For some time she had been acting as house mother to a menagerie of Mammoth writers and she was necessarily the custodian of many secrets. Her world consisted of this little office with its switchboard and stationery cabinet, with a view only of the upper half of the elevator door across the hall, but very little went on in the building—or, for that matter, in the studio—that she did not know about.
“Those hoodlums, Dobie and Stafford!” Lillian went on virtuously. “Setting fire to people!”
“Listen, dearie,” Gertrude told her. “Dobie and Stafford are your bosses. And they’re one of the highest-paid writing teams in the business. When you get more than fifteen hundred a week you’re not a hoodlum—you’re the life of the party.” Suddenly Gertrude noticed a fresh slip pinned under one slot in the tier of mailboxes. “What’s this, somebody new?”
“Oh, I most forgot. While you were out to lunch the front office sent over a new Nincom writer. I meant to tell you. Somebody I never heard of—probably an importation from back East. Looks just the type to write purple passion stories.” Lillian lighted a cigarette. “I put her in 303.”
Gertrude smiled. “Another sob sister?”
“That’s her. She looks like a mixture of Edna May Oliver and Charlotte Greenwood….”
“With just a dash of Hedy Lamarr, I trust?” spoke a quick, excited voice from the hall.
Lillian blushed fiery red, but Miss Hildegarde Withers was not interested in apologies. “Now, don’t get hysterical,” she advised them. “Just do as I say. Put through a call to the police and tell them that there is a dead man in the office next to mine.”
They gaped at her.
“Must I spell it for you?” snapped the schoolteacher. “A d-e-a-d man!”
In the room where the dead man lay the swift twilight of southern California deepened, casting into heavier shadow the faces of those who watched. Now the studio medico, a wizened little man in a crumpled white jacket, was squatting on his hunkers beside the body. Dr Evenson would have felt more at home back up the studio street in his neat little infirmary with its normal routine of cut thumbs and smashed toes and minor burns afflicting the army of Mammoth workers.
“Nothing I can do,” he declared. “He’s dead all right.” Dr Evenson rose to his feet and seemed to feel that his verdict lacked emphasis, for he repeated it. “Dead!”
Somebody finished it for him: “… my lords and gentlemen, stilled the tongue and stayed the pen”—in a low whisper. It was only the hatchet-faced woman who had discovered the body and who now lurked behind the tennis umpire’s chair in the corner.
Burly Tom Sansom, built like a brick icehouse, stood by the door with his thumbs hooked into his Sam Browne belt and a scowl on his face. As chief of the Mammoth police force his duties were ordinarily confined to keeping children with autograph books from sneaking through the gates and to confiscating candid cameras on the studio sets. But he took this in his stride.
“All right, Jack,” he ordered, turning to the other uniformed man behind him. “You and the doc better take him downstairs. The ambulance is at the back door.” It was all over as easily as that.
But not for the lady in the corner. “I’m not one to speak out of turn,” put in Miss Hildegarde Withers, “but isn’t this a matter for the police?”
“Lady,” Sansom explained wearily, “I am the police! The studio pays my salary, but I’m a sworn member of the police force of the city of Los Angeles. Just like a guard in a bank is. I’ll make a report of this accident at the proper time.”
“Accident?” Miss Withers sniffed.
Sansom winced. His assistant and the doctor who had been attempting to lift the body of Saul Stafford onto a stretcher now stopped and stared up at him, suddenly uncertain.
“That’s what I said. Plain as the nose on your face.” Miss Withers’ head reared a little higher at the metaphor, but he went on. “Look, lady. Stafford was trying to tack up that poster onto the ceiling and, not being able to reach it, he tried to stand on the arm of that desk chair. The chair bucked and threw him and he was unlucky enough to light with his neck twisted. See?”
“That’s about it, Chief,” chimed in Dr Evenson. Not without some pushing and hauling the two men finally raised their grim burden and carried it out through the door, Saul Stafford’s own overcoat covering him.
Sansom faced Miss Withers. “Like this!” He placed his thick hand on the back of the righted chair and pushed so that the chair leaned and then popped back upright with a jerk.
She still looked doubtful. “A man could hardly fall that far and that hard without making a noise that would wake the dead.”
“Look, lady.” Sansom’s official politeness was curdling. “It doesn’t mean anything that you didn’t hear a noise. Your phone could’ve been ringing or you could’ve dozed off to sleep.” He jerked his thumb toward the wall. “These offices are pretty well soundproofed, you know.”
“I’m not the only person on this floor. Besides, suppose I were to tell you that earlier this afternoon Stafford hinted to me that he was afraid of somebody?”
“Huh? Oh, half the writers in this town are screwy. They got delusions, roaring d.t.s and so forth.” He edged her politely toward the door. “Thank you very much, Miss Withers.”
But she was not so easily convinced. “One moment, please. Will you do something for me? Just to make sure that this was an accident will you stand on that chair and jump off?”
Chief Sansom stared at her blankly. She told him, “Oh, I don’t mean on the back or arm of the chair, just on the seat. And don’t fall head first.”
“I get it,” he said doubtfully. “You want me to re-enact the thing and see how much noise it makes. Why—?”
“I want to find out whether anybody in the neighboring offices will hear you,” she admitted. “It might settle this whole question once and for all.”
He hesitated. “Okay, I guess.” But he gave her a sidelong glance which made it clear that he thought she was as crazy as a bedbug. “Here goes.” As ponderously as one of Ringling’s brown elephants mounting a pedestal drum in the middle of the center ring Chief Tom Sansom climbed into the teetery swivel chair. He poised there a moment, obviously anxious not to re-enact the passing of Saul Stafford with too much exactness.
Then he jumped, landing flat-footed like a ton of brick. His thud shook the room and tipped over half the gadgets on the desk and tables. So far so good. But for scientific purposes the test was an utter failure. Before the acoustics could be tested in so far as to their effect on the other offices of the floor Sansom’s voice rose in a mighty wail of anguish. “O-o-o-o-ow! Hell’s bells and panther tracks! What the blazing, blooming, bloody hell—”
He was wildly hopping up and down on one foot, holding the other tenderly in his hands, while Miss Hildegarde Withers covered her maidenly ears. She watched as he ruefully pulled a thumbtack from the sole of his shoe, a thin and well-worn sole. It was one of the thumbtacks with which, according to his own theory, Saul Stafford had been engaged in fastening up the poster of Josephine Baker.
That did it. Soundproofed walls or not, there was now an excited concourse of voices in the hall. The door opened, disclosing a huddle of curious faces. The den
izens of the third floor had finally come to the conclusion that something was up. They wanted to know what, and the air was blue with question marks.
“All right!” Sansom was insisting. “Mr Stafford just had an accident, that’s all.”
It was Frankie Firsk, he of the cropped hair and gnawed fingernails, who got in the first word. He took a quick bite at his forefinger and said, “Staff had an accident? I thought the accidents always happened to other people!” He almost snickered.
“It was the gas heater, wasn’t it?” Melicent Manning pushed forward with a jingling of bracelets. “These offices are nothing but lethal gas chambers, that’s what I say!”
“No, Miss Manning, it wasn’t the gas heater!” snapped Sansom. He forgot for a moment that she was the “Grand Old Lady” of the films. “Mr Stafford just had a fall.”
“Where is he now?” Willy Abend, the wasp-waisted gentleman in the green suit, now pushed forward. “What happened? I want to know!”
“Back to your offices, everybody!” Sansom was getting near the end of his temper. “All right, all right—”
“Don’t you shove me!” Abend cried. “This isn’t Imperial Russia. I’m a U.S.A. citizen and I’ve got the Bill of Rights behind me and—”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” exploded Tom Sansom.
Doug August, the young man Miss Withers had seen coming out of Nincom’s office with clenched fists, now clenched them again. “Saul’s dead, isn’t he?” he said soberly. “I thought I heard them carry something heavy down the hall.”
“Now if you’ll all just go back to your offices …” Sansom tugged at his belt. “Just because a man has an accident does everybody in the hall have to butt in?” He indicated the door. “Now get moving, please.”
He discovered that Miss Hildegarde Withers was tugging at his sleeve. “If everybody on the floor is here,” she suggested, “why not ask them whether or not they heard the crash? I mean the first one?”
“Huh? I don’t see …” But Sansom couldn’t think of a reason for refusing. It developed that from the eight writers’ offices in this hall six persons had come running at the sound of his crash or his voice. There was no telling which. Evidently the sound had not traveled beyond Gertrude’s office into the other wing, which narrowed things down considerably.
“Okay,” said the chief. “You can all help if you will. Take the offices in order. Who’s in 301?”
Frankie Firsk pleaded guilty. No, he had heard nothing out of the way. “But I was reading poetry out loud to myself,” he admitted. “Eliot’s Wasteland. It always makes Hollywood seem sort of bearable….”
“Three o three?”
That was Miss Withers’ office, and she had said her say.
“Three o five? Oh, that’s this one. Well, who’s in 307?”
Lillian, the lush and bedizened, spoke up from the fringe of the little group. “That’s Mr Josef, but he isn’t in the studio today. He’s down at the Good Samaritan Hospital for his nerves. He—”
“Okay, okay. Now, across the hall. Who’s got 308?”
That was Abend. The dapper playwright swore that he had heard no suspicious sound all afternoon. “Of course, I did have my radio on. Clara and I were listening to the police calls.”
Clara, a vague and adipose member of the secretarial staff, was in agreement. Long since she had ceased to wonder at the vagaries of writers and if Mr Abend wanted the police calls taken down in shorthand she took them. “It’s for the radio play I’m doing on the side,” Abend told them defiantly. “I’m gathering color. I want to do something with real social significance.”
“Okay.” Sansom cut him short. “Three o six?”
Lillian spoke up again. “That’s Mr Dobie’s office. I work for him and Mr Stafford. But Mr Dobie wasn’t in all afternoon—he’s out on the set.”
“Oh, he is?” Sansom frowned.
“Mr Dobie usually goes out and watches them shooting when he hasn’t an assignment,” Lillian said. “Gertrude is trying to get him on the phone now, but you can’t interrupt a scene, you know.”
“All right. Number 304?”
“That’s mine,” spoke up Melicent Manning. “But I’m afraid I was so busy trying to devise a scene where Deanna gets passionately kissed and still stays sweet sixteen that I didn’t pay any attention to any noises. When I write I just lose myself!”
Chief Sansom muttered something under his breath. “Okay. Three o two?”
Doug August said that with the antique typewriter he had been issued he couldn’t hear the crack of doom. “It makes more noise than a machine gun, and I didn’t let it cool off all afternoon. I’ve got to get a whole sequence out for Mr Nincom before he leaves for Arrowhead tomorrow. And if you don’t mind, I’ll get back to it.” He turned and shouldered his way through the crowd, the others eddying after him. Sansom worked them all through the door and leaned against it.
“That’s the list,” he told Miss Withers. “So …”
“So not one person heard the crash when Saul Stafford fell. And you still insist he had an accident.”
“Well, it stands to reason.”
There was a commotion in the hall, and then the door was shoved open by a vast, gargantuan man with heavy, slashed eyebrows and the wide, innocent eyes of a child. “I’m Dobie, Virgil Dobie!” he cried. “Where’s Saul? What’s all this about? If it’s a gag it isn’t funny.”
“Your collaborator has been taken away in an ambulance,” Miss Withers told him. “With a broken neck.”
His face went chalky gray, and Dobie felt for a chair.
“He’s at Lumsden Mortuary Haven, on Western,” Chief Sansom said. “I’m sorry, Mr Dobie.”
Virgil Dobie wasn’t listening. Miss Withers thought that he looked like a man desperately frightened, frightened for his own skin. “The chief here thinks that it was an accident,” she told him. “He thinks that Stafford broke his own neck while standing on a chair to tack up that poster. But I was in the next office and I’m not so sure.”
Dobie looked up at the ceiling, frowned, and then turned toward Miss Withers. Something seemed to be puzzling him.
“I’ve got to run along and report this thing,” Sansom said briskly. “But I’ve one last word before I go.” His finger wagged in Miss Withers’ face. “If it wasn’t an accident on account of nobody heard him fall, then how could it have been—well, been anything else?”
“Such as murder?” she prompted softly.
He nodded. “You think that a fight in which one guy could break another guy’s neck wouldn’t make more noise than any fall?”
Miss Withers considered that. “You mean that in disproving your own case I’ve wrecked my own too?”
“That’s exactly what I mean!” insisted Chief Sansom. “So put that in your pipe and smoke it.” He went out of the room and slammed the door.
Dobie stood up as if about to follow. “One moment,” Miss Withers said. “I’m a stranger here and I’m being Mrs Buttinsky. But there’s a hole in the chief’s theory, a hole as wide as a house.” She looked up at the dangling poster again.
“I think I know what you mean,” Virgil Dobie admitted. “You think it was a frame.” His thick, angled eyebrows went up half an inch.
She nodded. “Why should a man stand on a teetery chair to tack up a poster that was already firmly tacked to the ceiling when I came into this office earlier this afternoon?—answer me that.”
He couldn’t. “Say,” Dobie thrust, “you aren’t? I mean, you couldn’t be the sleuth I read about in the Reporter?”
“Perhaps I am. At any rate, I walked into something that smells. Tell me—you knew Mr Stafford better than anybody else—who would have a reason for murdering him?”
Dobie didn’t answer. He was staring at her. “I thought you’d be—well, different.”
“Never mind that. Who could have murdered your partner?”
“Nobody. Nobody at all,” declared Virgil Dobie. “Saul lived alone in a little apartment crowded wi
th pipes that he never smoked and books that he never read. He never chased the tomatoes—I mean girls. All he liked to do was eat and drink. And have laughs.”
“Did anybody ever threaten him, to your knowledge?”
“Anybody? You mean everybody! Half the people in Hollywood have threatened to break both our necks at one time or another but they always cool off. You see, Saul and I set out years ago to try to keep Hollywood from taking itself so seriously. Nobody ever murders on account of a practical joke.”
Miss Withers said, “No? You never know just how people will react when their toes are well stepped on. And remember, young man, if Stafford was murdered, as I think, then the killer presumably has exactly the same motive for murdering you!”
He stared at her as if the thought were not new to him. “Somebody among the victims of the practical jokes you two loved to play has taken it the wrong way,” she went on. “Where are you going, Mr Dobie?”
He barely paused. “If I had any sense maybe I’d take a quick powder and grab the first plane for New York. But I suppose I’ll just rush out and lap up some sauce. There’s quite a bit of courage in a bottle of dark Jamaica rum.”
“You’re not frightened, Mr Dobie?”
“I think I am,” he told her gravely. “It could be.”
“Wait!” she cried. “Won’t you help me try to find the killer?”
“If what you say is true,” Virgil Dobie called over his shoulder, “then I won’t need to. He’ll find me!” And, grinning, he was gone.
Miss Withers sat and waited. At six o’clock Gertrude Lafferty tapped at her door to tell her that it was time to close up the switchboard. “Are you going to stay late tonight?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said the schoolteacher slowly. She had a sudden hunch that Gertrude was thinking things that she was not willing to say, that she was more than normally interested in Miss Withers’ own plans for the evening.
Perhaps this was the worm on the hook. During the past hour or so the schoolteacher had purposely been making noises like a detective, had pretended to be sure Saul Stafford was murdered when no one could be sure of anything. All that would be very likely to force someone’s hand. Since she was so determined to prove it a murder, a likely suspect might be handed her. She waited eagerly.
Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan Page 3