Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan

by Stuart Palmer

  That was the booty, that and an insurance policy which she found at the bottom of the drawer, a policy to the amount of five thousand dollars, with double indemnity for sudden death, on the life of Virgil Dobie. The agent’s name was listed as Harry Pape, and the beneficiary was Saul Stafford.

  There was certainly nothing bearing the name of Derek Laval. Perhaps, after all, Lillian had been telling the truth.

  Miss Withers frowned. In spite of herself she could not get over the feeling that she was being blind to something right in front of her nose.

  Of course there was the tobacco humidor, a vast earthenware container flanked by rows of pipes. Miss Withers gingerly lifted the lid and was immediately greeted by the loud and tinkling musical strains of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” She replaced it hastily.

  At that moment the phone rang. She looked at it. If the inspector were here he would pick it up, pretend to be Virgil Dobie and hope for some bit of information to be dropped into his lap. Well, the inspector wasn’t here. But she could try.

  She picked up the phone, said “Hello!” in as gruff a tone as she could manage.

  There was a long wait at the other end of the line. “Lillian?” said a man’s voice, cautious and muffled. Hawaiian music came faintly.

  “No, this isn’t Lillian!” she said. “Is there a message?”

  Another wait. “Just tell Mr Dobie that Laval called, Derek Laval.” And the line clicked as he hung up.

  Miss Hildegarde Withers sat back and thought that one out. The straw man was getting awfully real. He cashed checks and talked over the telephone. And he liked Hawaiian music.

  Five minutes later Miss Withers was back in her own office, inditing a telegram to the inspector which, she thought, might make him put one of those long, greenish-brown cigars into his mouth hot end first. She wrote:

  INSPECTOR OSCAR PIPER

  HOMICIDE BUREAU CENTRE STREET NYC

  DEREK LAVAL HAS COMMITTED ANOTHER IMPOSSIBLE MURDER. ALL I KNOW OF HIM IS HE SEEMS FOND OF HAWAIIAN MUSIC AND BLACKMAIL. LETTER FOLLOWS.

  HILDEGARDE

  She had barely finished putting this into code when her door burst open, and in came the lush and livid Lillian, her stocking seams crooked, her hair askew and her lipstick smeared upward from one corner of her mouth in a rakish and unhumorous grin.

  “Listen!” the girl exclaimed. “Have you got that list I gave you earlier?”

  “Of course,” said the schoolteacher. “Do you want it back?”

  “Do I!” snapped Lillian. “I want to add something.” She snatched up the piece of paper, and for a moment Miss Withers thought that the girl meant to destroy it.

  “What’s all this about?” she wanted to know.

  “What’s it about? I’ll tell you what it’s about! Virgil Dobie`s gone and hired Jill Madison as his private secretary after the studio fired her. And he says that if they won’t pay her salary, he will! And I can just go back to the department and take my chance on getting another writer or just copying, copying all day long….”

  “But why?” Miss Withers asked, because she obviously was expected to do so. “Why did he?”

  “How should I know?” Lillian’s full lower lip curled. “How should I understand anything a writer does! But if he thinks I’m going to go on sticking up for him—” She whirled on Miss Withers. “Virgil Dobie told you he didn’t come up into this building at all yesterday afternoon, didn’t he? I mean, until after the body was discovered?”

  Miss Withers nodded. “He was out on the lot, or the set, or whatever it is they call it. Where they make movies.”

  Lillian nodded. “He was! But not all afternoon. He came up because his tobacco pouch was empty and he wanted to fill it. I was in his office, doing some filing, and he came in and went right out again. So I guess that smashes his pretty little alibi!” She carefully inserted “4:18—Mr Dobie in” and “4:28—Mr Dobie out” on the list. “That’s the way the original reads. But when I copied it off for you I left his name out. I was going to do him a favor!”

  Miss Withers looked dubious. “You mean you think that Mr Dobie could have come into his own office, filled his tobacco pouch, crossed the hall and killed Mr Stafford and then gone back out to the set all in ten minutes?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” Lillian said as she moved toward the door. “How long does it take to do a murder anyway?”

  IV

  Fear and amazement heat upon my heart.

  Even as A MADMAN BEATS UPON A DRUM….

  THOMAS HEYWARD

  GERTRUDE LAFFERTY SAT ALONE in the little office beside the switchboard, chewing some rather tasteless caramels and thinking her own thoughts. They were not, it would appear, especially pleasant thoughts, judging by the expression she was wearing when Miss Hildegarde Withers dropped in for a chat.

  “I wonder if you’d be willing to help me,” said Miss Withers hopefully. “Please try, because, placed as you are here in the very nerve center of everything, you know what goes on.”

  Gertrude looked dubious.

  “What I really want to know is, did Virgil Dobie come up here yesterday afternoon? At about four-eighteen?”

  “I don’t think I ought to talk about that,” Gertrude objected. “Mr Stafford is dead, and no one can help him by making trouble.”

  “No? Well, remember, that if it was murder the murderer is right here among us. Walking up and down, smiling and saying good morning, maybe planning something else—”

  Gertrude paled perceptibly. “I don’t—”

  “And, of course,” Miss Withers prodded pleasantly, “you are in a certain amount of danger. Because you may know something, you may have overheard something through the switchboard that you don’t even know that you know!”

  The plump girl didn’t say anything but she contrived to look a bit haggard.

  “There is no safety for anybody once a murderer has killed and gone scot free. Because he always strikes again and again….”

  “Wh-what do you want to know?” Gertrude said weakly.

  “About Mr Dobie?”

  Gertrude nodded. “Yes, he came up yesterday. I don’t know the exact time. He just yelled, ‘Hello, Mother Goddam’—he always calls me that because I have charge of the secretaries—and went on down the hall. But he was only on the floor for a minute or two, and then he went right back to the set.”

  “A minute or two? You don’t think it was longer?”

  “Ten minutes maybe.”

  “Murders have been committed in less time than that,” Miss Withers observed.

  Gertrude’s eyes widened. “Oh, but—but he couldn’t have done that! He couldn’t have—have done anything to Mr Stafford!”

  “And why not? Just because the men were inseparable?”

  “I don’t mean that. But when Mr Dobie came out—he was filling that big meerschaum pipe, I remember—he stopped in the office here for a moment. Just to play a rib on Mr Stafford, like they were always doing. He had me call Stafford’s phone and tell him that Mr Josef was coming after him with a baseball bat!”

  The schoolteacher frowned. “Mr Stafford answered the phone—you’re sure of that?”

  “Sure I’m sure. Mr Stafford just laughed because he caught on it was a rib. I was giggling, I guess. Anyway, they both knew Mr Josef wouldn’t hurt a fly, no matter how mad he got. You see, both Mr Dobie and Mr Stafford were sort of hilarious over the gag they’d played on Mr Josef the night before when they scared him. They were always calling each other up and leaving funny messages.”

  “I can imagine,” said Miss Withers. “And when Dobie left to go back to the set you are willing to swear that Stafford was alive and well?”

  Gertrude nodded, then: “Except for a headache. He said he had one of his roaring headaches and please leave him alone.”

  “I think I feel one coming on, myself,” Miss Withers observed.

  The girl was sympathetic. “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off, Miss Withers? I don’t think
anybody would know. Your boss is up at Arrowhead, they say. So he won’t be calling you.”

  “It’s an idea,” mused the schoolteacher. “It really is. I could slip away now and look for a place to live. The hotel isn’t too conveniently located for me.”

  Gertrude, always helpful, said that it was possible to lease a house in Brentwood or Westwood for two hundred dollars a month. “Without a pool, of course.” She hesitated. “I could get in touch with a real-estate agent that I happen to know, and—”

  “Perhaps a house would be a bit more than I need,” Miss Withers said. “Do you know of any furnished apartments that can be rented by the week?”

  Slightly disappointed, Gertrude said that the town was full of them. “But the Laguna Plaza and the Pelham are close to the studio. There are three or four others on that street too.”

  Miss Withers made a careful note of it. “I think I will run along,” she said. Gertrude wrote “3:15—Miss Withers out” on the pad. “By the way,” added the schoolteacher, “if a Mr Derek Laval calls—”

  Gertrude’s head snapped around. “What?”

  Afire with secret triumph, Miss Withers said casually, “Oh, do you know him?”

  “Yes. I mean, not exactly. Is he a friend of yours?”

  The schoolteacher shook her head. “I’ve never met him,” she said. “But I’ve heard of him. What is he like?”

  Gertrude looked at the switchboard. “Oh, just a Hollywood playboy, I guess. I’ve seen his name in gossip columns for getting into a fight at the Trocadero bar, and things like that. And—and one of my sister’s girl friends picked him up at the Palomar one night last summer. That’s where the kids go to jitterbug, you know. She said he was a good dancer but not so good on the way home. Just another wolf, I guess. The kid had to walk from Vermont Avenue to La Brea.”

  “The more I hear of Mr Laval the less I care for him,” Miss Withers decided. Suddenly her voice trailed away. She was staring over Gertrude’s shoulder through the window out into the hall. Across that window was moving something furry—something zoologically horrible, for there was a yellow feather growing out of the fur.

  “Good gracious!” said the schoolteacher, pointing.

  Gertrude looked. Then she leaped from her chair and rushed out into the hall where she came upon a small, brisk woman who moved awkwardly yet swiftly along on hands and knees.

  “Mame!” Gertrude ordered. “None of that!”

  The lady in the furry headpiece stood up, still clutching a heavy suitcase. She smiled a breezy smile. “Darn this hat,” said Mame. “I’d have got past you if it weren’t for this confounded feather.”

  “Outside!” Gertrude ordered. “I’ve had enough complaints from my writers about you bursting in without being announced.”

  “Business is business,” said Mame. Then she caught sight of Miss Withers and instantly set upon her as a potential victim. The case snapped open, disclosing vast skeins of varicolored neckties.

  “They’ve got Charvet and Sulka lashed to the mast, and only six dollars!” She whipped out a particularly striking number in brown and blue. “Want to get your boy friend something exquisite in French ties? Or, if you haven’t got a boy friend, lure one with—”

  “Outside!” Gertrude repeated. “And I mean it!”

  Unabashed, Mame bade them good afternoon and departed. “Her husband was a prop man here years ago,” Gertrude explained. “So after he was killed in an accident Mame took to peddling ties around the studio. Only they’ve gone up in price from fifty cents to six bucks, and Mame has to high-pressure it a bit.”

  “There’s no man alive for whom I’d buy a six-dollar tie,” said the schoolteacher severely, and took her departure.

  The list of apartments was in her handbag, but Miss Hildegarde Withers let it stay there while she consulted a Los Angeles telephone directory. No, there was no Derek Laval. Possibly he had an unlisted number. She would have liked to try a city directory, but there was none in the little drugstore where she had stopped.

  Well, there still remained the newspapers. After a trip which seemed to take her in wide circles around Robin Hood’s entire estate a taxi deposited her outside the gingerbread grandeur of the Herald-Express building. There were bound copies of the paper in the lobby, and she started methodically to read back through them. But the search for the well-known needle in the haystack was simple by comparison.

  After half an hour of this she gave it up. Another and a better idea suggested itself to her. She crossed to the advertising department, pondered for a moment and then gave orders for a “Personal” to be inserted in tomorrow’s paper and run until canceled. “Derek (Dick) Laval—please communicate regarding settlement of an estate—Box …”

  That was not entirely a fabrication. Saul Stafford’s estate must be settled. “And a murderer’s hash, if possible,” she told herself.

  She started out of the newspaper office and then stopped. “How stupid of me!” she said aloud, and headed back to the elevators. The City Room was on the fourth floor, and, from her reading of newspaper stories, she realized that all she had to do was to march inside as if she had business there, find the morgue and read at her leisure everything that had been printed about the elusive Mr Laval.

  Nobody stopped her. The City Room was calm, as one might expect of an afternoon paper at this hour. She even came upon the morgue without difficulty, saw the tall filing cases, cabinets and bookshelves bulging with yellow envelopes. A peaceful old man sat in a hard chair with his feet on a table, clipping things out of the last edition.

  “May I have the file on Derek Laval?” requested Miss Withers briskly.

  He looked at her, went back to his clipping.

  “Laval, please!” she repeated. “May I have it?”

  “Sure,” he said. “But there’s a formality or two first.” She waited expectantly. “Yes,” he said. “You got to go four years to some college and major in journalism. Then you got to get a job on your hometown newspaper and forget all the nonsense they taught you in college. Then you got to get two or three jobs on big-town papers and forget some more and finally you get a job on the Herald, and I’ll be tickled pink to stop my work any time and go hunt up the stuff you want.” He indicated the door with a long, skinny finger. “Until then, nix.”

  There was nothing left for Miss Withers to do but take a dignified departure. Or was there? She found a ten-dollar bill in her handbag, waved it thoughtfully. “If I could just have a look at that envelope,” she mused. “Just a glimpse of a picture of this Laval person….”

  “Save your money,” said the keeper of the files. “Any picture that appeared in this paper you can buy a print of it down at the INS office. Those news services keep all that stuff. And dollars is their price, not ten.” He went on placidly clipping.

  Miss Withers found the INS office. They had no pictures of Derek Laval. They thought that Acme might.

  Acme didn’t. But she could try AP.

  “I’m getting warmer,” said Miss Withers. So she was.

  AP had Mr Laval down twice on their list. A young man searched through the files, finally produced two old prints. One was a flashlight picture of a police raid on the Swing Club, an emporium devoted to the sale of drinks after two-o’clock curfew, with a number of somewhat startled customers crowding out of the doorway. “DEREK LAVAL, LOCAL PLAYBOY, FLEES RAIDED HOT SPOT” was the caption. The picture was not too good, for the flashlight cast a glaring and unnatural light on the men in the doorway, and the one man who faced the camera, presumably Mr Laval, was holding his arm up in front of his eyes. He reminded Miss Withers of somebody she had met in the last day or two, but who it could be she had no idea.

  The other picture was captioned “JIMMY GRANT SCORES WINNING GOAL FOR RIVIERA IN SPITE OF HEROIC RIDINC OFF BY DEREK LAVAL.” It showed two men on two galloping horses, both waving whippy polo mallets at a round ball which seemed to float in the air. The face of the farther man, who was trying to block the player with his pony,
was turned so that the schoolteacher could see only that he wore dark glasses.

  Miss Withers bought both pictures and carried them off with her. It was an odd, backhanded way to track down a murderer. But she felt that she was hot on the trail of the straw man, the little man who wasn’t there….

  The taxicab carried her back toward Hollywood, winding its way through the mazes of Los Angeles streets, past the big open-front markets with their jeweled displays of shining fruits and vegetables, past the little junky mission-type bungalows, the boxes in stucco with near-Spanish lines and brilliant coloring, past new white apartment houses with formal gardens and oval swimming pools, past cocktail bars and churches with neon lights….

  Vast smooth boulevards that narrowed suddenly into little bottlenecked streets with car tracks, red lights and green lights and semaphores and amber lights …

  And then Miss Withers chanced to see an apartment sign—“The Pelham.” That had been one of the places on the list Gertrude gave her. On an impulse she had the driver pull up on the corner of Cowbell Canyon Drive. It was late in the afternoon, but haply not too late to see about arranging for a place to live.

  The Pelham had no vacancies.

  Down the street she saw the sign of Laguna Plaza. That was another on the list, she remembered. So she strolled along. The Laguna Plaza had only two apartments available, both with three bedrooms and with a lease desired.

  So she went on along the pleasant drive with its towering palm trees which looked to the Manhattan schoolteacher as if they had been set out this morning and would be hauled away at any moment.

  The apartments that she saw were all either unfurnished or else the halls smelled of cooking cabbage or else the living rooms had blind fireplaces and large imitation oil paintings of an evil-looking Spanish gentleman in a red ruff. All but the one on the corner—a pleasant-looking three-story building in a modified ranch-house style with a long balcony set with brightly colored pots stretching across the front.