Unperturbed, it was Trimble who asked the next question. “Layton says that about half a minute before you went back on the air you ran over to him and asked him to try and find King. Hadn’t you tried?”
“Okay, I’ll play,” Lola said in a grim voice. “Yes, Sergeant, I tried. On my way back to the studio I knocked on Tutter’s door — it was closed — then I looked in. He wasn’t there. When I got to the studio I went around checking with everybody in sight about if they’d seen Tutter. By then it was almost air time. I spotted Super-Newsman here, and I sent him hunting for Tut because I knew I’d have to take over the balance of the show if Tut didn’t make it. Is everybody happy?”
“Where are you going?” the one-eyed detective; said suddenly to Layton.
“Curses,” Layton said. “I thought I’d get to those two kids before you remembered you sent that cop after them.”
“Well, think again.” Trimble stalked out into the anteroom followed by Winterman, Layton meekly in their wake. They appeared to have forgotten Lola. The redhead hesitated. Then she went into the anteroom, too.
Trimble opened the door to the hall. The uniformed man was waiting outside with the bespectacled boy and the plump girl. “Okay, kids. In here.”
The anteroom began to look crowded. Hubert Stander and George Hathaway were perched on corners of the unmanned secretarial desk. Nancy King was still occupying the chair against the wall. Lola Arkwright had chosen a chair at the opposite wall. The two detectives and the two teenagers faced one another in the middle of the room. When the policeman went out at Trimble’s nod, Layton leaned against the door. He was wondering why the one-eyed sergeant proposed to question the boy and girl in the hearing of the others; but then he remembered that Trimble had a departmental reputation for doing the unorthodox. Maybe he was playing a hunch.
“You know what’s happened?” Trimble asked the teenagers. His voice was very friendly.
“Yes, sir.” Wayne Mission swallowed, the Adam’s apple in his thin neck jumping, like a fish. He seemed fascinated by Trimble’s scar. Nora Perkins, pressed against the boy as if for protection, was staring at Trimble’s glass eye. “Tutter’s committed suicide.”
“Oh?” Trimble said. “Where’d you hear that, Wayne?”
“It’s all over the place,” the boy said. “Why, isn’t it true?”
Trimble glanced over at Hathaway and Stander. The two station executives returned the glance defiantly.
“It could be,” the detective said in a kindly way. “We’re not sure. Is something the matter, Nora?”
She blanched and looked away, guiltily. “No, sir!”
“It’s the eye, isn’t it?” Trimble said with a smile. “Don’t worry about it, Nora — I don’t give it a thought any more. I know it makes me look like a monster from outer space, but I’m just a policeman doing his job. It was my duty once to stop a fight between a drunk and his wife. The ax he was aiming at her got me instead. No,” he went on, turning back to the boy, “we’re not sure just how Tut died. I thought maybe you two could help us.”
Layton could only admire Trimble’s technique. By adopting a fatherly tone and couching his explanation of the scar and the glass eye in modest terms, he evoked a hero image calculated to gain the teenagers’ confidence. Layton realized suddenly how desperate Trimble must be for a lead.
“Well, sure, sir,” Wayne Mission said. “Anything!”
“If we only could help,” Nora Perkins said fervently.
“Maybe you can, kids. I understand you both left Studio A through the employees’ door during the newscast intermission. Where were you going?”
“To Tutter’s dressing room,” Nora, said promptly.
“You knew him that well, did you?”
“Oh, sure,” young Mission said. His voice held a note of sad pride. “Nora and I are president and vice president of Tutter’s L.A. fan club — I mean, I’m president and she’s vice president. So Tutter allowed us special privileges. We often went back during the news break to talk to him.”
“Did you find him today?”
The boy shook his head. “He wasn’t there.”
“We figured he was in Lola’s dressing room,” Nora chimed in, “but of course we wouldn’t dream of going in there.”
Lola Arkwright’s head jerked to attention.
“No?” Trimble asked in a surprised way. “Why not, Nora?”
The teenagers immediately looked down at the floor. The boy muttered something to his companion, and her plain face flushed scarlet.
“You know, kids,” the one-eyed detective said gently, “I don’t like embarrassing people any more than you do. But after all, Tutter is dead, and we’ve got to find out everything we can. Why wouldn’t you dream of looking for Tutter in Miss Arkwright’s dressing room, Nora?”
“Wayne thinks I oughtn’t to say,” the girl mumbled.
“Why not, Wayne?”
It was the boy’s turn to flush. “Well, sir... it’s kind of disloyal to Tut.”
“What they don’t want to tell you,” Lola said unexpectedly, “is that one time, when they came back during the break — months ago — and looked for Tut in my dressing room, they caught us kissing. Big deal.”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Miss Arkwright!” Nora Perkins said indignantly. “Admitting a thing like that right out in public!”
“And what’s more,” Wayne Mission added, “you got Tut mad at us. He wouldn’t let us visit him during the break for weeks after that.”
But Lola was not listening. She was staring in bitter triumph across the anteroom at Nancy King.
“I suppose my husband was as vulnerable as any other man would be,” Nancy said slowly, “to the advances of an attractive tramp. But it wouldn’t have meant anything to him. Not really.”
Lola was on her feet, her face as flaming as her hair. “You — calling — me — a tramp?”
She sprang.
Sergeant Winterman’s simian arms wrapped themselves around her just in time to keep her razor-edged fingernails from raking Nancy King’s pale face. The woman with the massed black hair had not moved a muscle.
“You wouldn’t want me to run you in for attempted assault,” Winterman said, holding the redhead fast. “Come on, stop it before I learn to like it.”
As suddenly as she had sprung, Lola Arkwright went limp. And pale, like Nancy King. Winterman cautiously released her. She bit her lip and turned away.
The teenagers were looking stunned. The Perkins girl said to Nancy King, “Did you say... your husband?”
“Yes,” Nancy said, as if nothing had happened.
“Tutter?”
She nodded. The girl’s unlovely jaw dropped.
“Tutter and Mrs. King have been married since you were about six years old, Nora,” Layton said. “He kept it a secret for professional reasons.”
The teenager shut her mouth with a snap. Then she said in an outraged voice, “How do you like that, Wayne? To think Tutter would do a thing like — that!” She might have been speaking of cannibalism.
Young Mission nodded in a dazed way.
So long, Tutter, Layton thought. You committed the unpardonable sin. He began reshaping in his mind the follow-up story he had to phone in, while he kept one ear mechanically open. Trimble was establishing that the teenagers had noticed Hubert Stander, as they came out of Studio A, walking down the hall toward the control room of Studio B and C; that they had actually seen him enter the control room; that they had returned to Studio A after finding King’s dressing room unoccupied.