Free Cold Poison by Stuart Palmer Page B

haircut. You also need some hair on top.”
    “I also need a new lead on the Bard case,” he said soberly. “Maybe just through blind luck you’ve stumbled on it. Get anything new today?”
    She hesitated. “Perhaps. I don’t quite know. This is a crazy mixed-up case. But I’ll tell you about it after I give this ravening hound his dinner.”
    “You might make mine the same,” said Oscar Piper hopefully. “Up to now I have eaten six sticks of chewing gum today.”
    Some time later, over a plate of scrambled eggs with chicken livers, he said, “So far there’s actually nothing to link the two cases except the poison, which is rare enough to make it all very interesting. Your case out here seems to come down to a matter of motive. We can eliminate one thing—your Larry Reed wasn’t killed out of revenge for one of his so-called practical jokes; you just don’t poison a man because he leaves a wheelbarrow full of water in your car.”
    “Practical jokes—a misnomer, Oscar, if there ever was one, as I’ve said before. But I suppose you have a point—unless one of his stunts backfired and really hurt someone, of which we have no direct evidence.” She rose. “More coffee?”
    “You might just warm it up a little,” he said as he handed her an empty cup. “But to get back to cases. I’m interested in this Lucy angle.”
    The schoolteacher nodded. “Yes, Lucy. ‘She lived unknown, and few could know when Lucy ceased to be; but she is in her grave, and, oh the difference to me.’ Wordsworth.”
    “The difference to her , you mean. Did you actually get on her trail?”
    “That I did. And it’s a most tantalizing thing.” Miss Withers shook her head dubiously, then produced her notebook. “Full name Lucinda May Wersbeck, also known professionally as Lucy LeMay, white, well-nourished female, age about 34, was struck by a sedan owned by the Hollywood Limousine Rental Service and operated by one Arthur Johnson, age 22. The accident took place on the corner of Orient Boulevard and Sixteenth Place in the midst of a howling rainstorm at seven-thirty on the evening of January 14 a year and more ago. Witnesses said that the accident was unavoidable.”
    “ All accidents are avoidable,” pronounced the Inspector, officially.
    “Anyway, she was admitted to the emergency ward of County Hospital at 7:55 on that night—with internal injuries and multiple fractures; she lingered on and finally managed to die there on February 11.”
    “Well!” said Oscar Piper. “Now maybe we’re getting somewhere.”
    “Now maybe we’re getting nowhere,” Miss Withers corrected. “Lucy was by profession a B-girl and taxi dancer; hardly the type of girl to arouse the grand passion in the hearts of men except perhaps temporarily in lonely sailors. She had presumably had a prime, but she was well past it. Who on earth would want to avenge her accidental death a year and more later after it happened—and not on the driver who killed her, but on the passengers? It just doesn’t make sense any way you look at it. And all the time she was in the hospital she never had a visitor, a bouquet, or even a phone call inquiring about her condition; I checked it with the office.”
    The Inspector carefully set his cigar alight again. “Maybe her boyfriend didn’t know—?”
    “Stuff and nonsense. Anybody who wanted Lucy could have located her with one phone call. That’s the puzzle—why should somebody wait so long to avenge her, if that was the motivation at all, which I somehow wonder at?”
    “He was out of town, out of the country. In the Army, maybe. Came back a year later and went off his trolley—”
    “He must have gone off his trolley, as you put it, long before. Because Lucy was no rose, nor any violet by a mossy stone, either. On the contrary.”
    “She was pretty, though?”
    Miss Withers sniffed. “Perhaps in her day, but not recently at any rate, though the records show that years ago she worked off and on in