Miss Withers Regrets

by Stuart Palmer

  Montague had her to thank for that. Well, it was now or never, if she was to do anything in his behalf. She gathered herself together, clamped upon her head a hat which somewhat resembled a frigate under full sail, and took off. Ten minutes later her taxicab deposited her at the gateway of the Cairns house.

  “You want I should wait for you like yesterday?” the driver wanted to know.

  She thought and then shook her head. “No, thank you. I may be some time—I hope.” She headed for the front door, to find Officer Ray Lunney guarding it, sprawled out in a bright green-and-yellow canvas deck chair.

  “Nobody home, ma’am,” he announced importantly. “They’re all down to the inquest, even the jigaboo servants.”

  “The what?”

  “The jigs—I mean niggers.”

  “The word is ‘Negro,’ ” corrected Miss Hildegarde Withers firmly. “And when a lady is speaking to you, young man, you might have the courtesy to stand up. By the way, are you the heavy-handed lout who searched my cottage yesterday afternoon?”

  Lunney blinked and stood up. “Why—why, no, ma’am. That was the sarge. He’s down at the inquest. If you want to look in, it’s being held at the Magee Funeral Home on Middle Street. It’ll likely take all day, unless they adjourn it,” he added hopefully.

  “Thank you so much,” said the schoolteacher. “I’m afraid that I have too much else on my mind.” She hesitated. “It must be very boring for you, officer, to be stuck up here when so much is going on down at the inquest.”

  He blinked and nodded. “Especially since I was one of the first to answer the alarm after Searles phoned in. But Sergeant Fischer is testifying for us both.” It was evident that she had touched on a sore spot, and Miss Withers decided to probe a bit further.

  “I should think they’d want your testimony,” she said.

  He flushed. “They say I done too much talking already. But all I said to the reporters that come out from the city was that Joe Searles was a criminal type, that’s all.”

  “Really, officer? Tell me, how do you spot a criminal type?”

  Lunney brightened. “Well, it’s like this. A criminal type is like when it’s late at night on a lonely street and a cop is walking along and he sees somebody coming. You follow me?”

  “At a distance, yes.”

  “Well, the regular citizen, Joe Doakes, who’s been to lodge meeting or working late or whatever, he goes along on the brightest side of the street, and he’s probably whistling out loud to himself for company and maybe to keep his spirits up. When he sees a cop on the corner he feels good about it and he says, ‘Evenin’, officer,’ or something. But the criminal type, he slouches along on the dark side of the street, maybe talking to himself in a low mumble, and when he sees a cop he walks faster and keeps his face down so he can’t be seen so easy.”

  “I see. And Searles is the latter type?”

  Officer Lunney nodded. “I seen him, night after night, when I used to walk a beat. He just don’t like cops, and when a person don’t like cops he’s got a reason not to like cops.”

  “It all sounds sensible to me,” Miss Withers told him. “And it certainly sheds a new light on the character of one of the principals in this case. Have you had a chance to transmit this to your superiors?”

  Lunney shook his head. “Sheriff Vinge, he’s playing hands off this case. Too much local dynamite involved, especially for election year. That’s why he called for a hotshot homicide man from New York, who throws his weight around plenty. That’s why I’m stuck here. According to the inspector, somebody always has to stay on duty any place where there’s a murder, for a couple of days, anyway. He says that’s the way they do it in New York.”

  “Imagine that!” sympathized Miss Withers. “Well, good morning, officer.” She headed for the highway again, followed by shouted directions as to the shortest way to get to Middle Street and the inquest.

  Then Officer Lunney sank back into the deck chair, so that the hot June sun bit into the underside of his jaw, the only portion of his anatomy which he had never been able to get satisfactorily tanned. He lighted a cigarette, stuck it into his mouth at an angle, and was a perfect picture of repose some time later when a police sedan rolled quietly into the driveway and stopped.

  Inspector Oscar Piper swung out, carefully not slamming the door, and came up to the front entrance, walking on the balls of his feet. His face wore an expression of hopeful inquiry.

  Lunney opened his eyes, nodded meaningly, and started to speak, but the inspector only scowled and pressed a finger against his mouth. He soundlessly asked, “How many?”

  The officer held up one stubby forefinger and would have risen had not the inspector shaken his head and gone on into the house alone, making no noise whatever in the process. In the side pocket of his coat he felt the sag of a police-positive, borrowed from Sheriff Vinge for the occasion. The inspector was not in the habit of packing a pistol, his theory being that a cop who couldn’t handle his job without a heater didn’t know his business. But there were exceptions to everything.

  Piper tiptoed along the hall, through the big modern drawing room, and was about to mount the stairs when he thought he heard a sound—a mouselike, shushing ghost of a sound—in the direction of the library. He went silently and grimly across the thick broadloom carpet, through the library doors, and then stopped stock still.

  “Judas Priest in a bathtub!” he roared. “Don’t you ever stay home?”

  Miss Hildegarde Withers, who had been carefully studying a row of books on the bottom shelf, straightened up with a small squeak of alarm. “Oscar! What in the world are you doing here?”

  “I’m here because everybody thought I’d be at the inquest, and I had a sort of trap baited, with that fool of a Lunney half-asleep out front and the rear door open and unguarded, hoping somebody …” He stopped, shaking his head angrily. “Why do I have to explain it to you? You’d better tell me why you’re housebreaking.”

  “I was just looking around,” Miss Withers said.

  “So I see.” The inspector nodded towards the strewn papers around the big library desk, the half-open, rifled drawers, the overturned waste-basket.

  “I hope, Oscar, that you don’t think I’m responsible for that mess!”

  He shook his head wearily. “Of course not. But you’re responsible for scaring away whoever was searching this room!”

  “Then,” retorted Miss Withers triumphantly, “Pat Montague is cleared. Because if he’s in jail he couldn’t have sneaked in here—”

  “I didn’t say it was him. He could have sent somebody—”

  “But why would he need to do that? He was never inside the house, so he couldn’t have left his cuff buttons or anything behind. Besides, the only friends he has are the people who live in this house, and Helen and Lawn wouldn’t need to sneak in to do any searching. They live here.”

  “I still say it’s a simple triangle,” the inspector insisted wearily. “Just two men who wanted the same woman. It’s ABC.”

  Miss Withers shook her head so hard that the frigate almost let loose a spinnaker. “No, no, Oscar! It isn’t a triangle; it’s a much more complicated figure, a pentacle or a pentagon or something. It would all be very much simpler if I could find that red book—only maybe it’s just a red herring. Anyway, young Beale overheard enough in here to realize that Commander Bennington and Nicolet and Mrs. Boad were very excited about a book in a red jacket—”

  “That’s easy,” Piper decided. “It’s natural that the local gentry were interested in finding out what sort of neighbor they were going to have—whether Huntley Cairns would fit into the dog-loving, horse-show, country-club set or not. Go ahead and look for the book with the red jacket that Nicolet was so excited about. Ten to one it’s something with some bearing on Cairns’s tastes or background—something that proves he once played polo at Meadow Brook or won a blue ribbon with a bird dog.”

  Miss Withers sniffed. “It’s not as easy as all that. Bes
ides, I have been looking. I’ve peeked into every book with a red jacket in this library, and I don’t see anything for any one to get excited about. Here they are—look for yourself, and if you can see what interested Jed Nicolet you have better eyes than I have.”

  The inspector obediently took up the volumes one by one. “Six Who Boil While the Lentils Pass, the stirring story of a man who was allergic to himself, by somebody named Weatherby.” He ruffled the pages. “Nothing here.” He picked up the next one. “Art of the Dance, by Señor Pablo Miltberg. Old Man Gordy’s System—or how to make money at the greyhound races. That couldn’t be it—or could it?”

  Miss Withers thought not. There were no notes or enclosures in any of the volumes, no scribbled messages or marginal writings. “It must be something else,” she insisted.

  There was only one other volume which by any stretch of the imagination could have been said to have a red jacket, and that was something called Sea-Rimes, a little book of outdoor, masculine verse illustrated by the author, whose tastes had run to ships and storms and spouting whales. “That simply cannot be it,” Miss Withers complained. “Oscar, I’m afraid that the person who searched this room took the book we want with him.”

  Piper doubted it and said so. “If he’d found it in the shelves he wouldn’t have torn up the desk. Besides, I can see that there’s no gap in the shelves. The books are crowded, not scattered, and they just fill up the cases.”

  It was, Miss Withers had to admit, a point well taken. Not even the schoolteacher could visualize the shadowy intruder bringing along a volume to substitute for the one he intended to take. Of course, he might have shoved the books along to fill the gap, but he really hadn’t had time for that.

  “Well, Hildegarde, is there anything else you’d like to look for before we get out of here?”

  The sarcasm went over her head. “There is,” said Hildegarde Withers. “I’d like to look for the murderer, or whoever it was that was here. Because he’s probably lurking somewhere in the house, waiting for a chance to continue his job of ransacking the place.”

  “Okay,” the inspector said. “Let’s go.” And he searched the Cairns house from top to bottom, Miss Withers tagging along at his heels. But while he was pulling open closet doors and looking under beds, the schoolteacher turned her sharp scrutiny on the rooms themselves, the furniture, the personal possessions scattered around. It was, she felt, necessary for her to know Huntley Cairns and the rest of his household better than she did at the moment, and this was one way.

  Her first impression of Huntley Cairns’s room was that it was aggressively masculine, interior-decorator masculine, with heavy oak furniture, sporting prints and La Vie Parisienne pictures on the walls, and an unusually large collection of shaving lotions, hair remedies, deodorants, and the like. He also had three straight razors, three electric shavers, and one battered silver safety which seemed to have carried most of the burden. There was a large framed photograph of Helen on the bureau but no other sign of her in the room.

  Helen’s domain, consisting of bedroom, dressing-room, and bath, was surprisingly simple, the schoolteacher thought. There was but one bottle of perfume, and that nearly empty. Too, there were fewer dresses in the closet than Huntley Cairns’s wife would be expected to possess. A large floppy doll, reminiscent of Josephine Baker, sat at the head of the bed, and nearby was a little bookcase filled with travel books, cookbooks, several eyewitness accounts of the war, and some sentimental poetry. None of the books had a red jacket, or any jacket at all, for that matter.

  To Miss Withers’s disappointment, there were no letters, no knick-knacks, but that was to be expected when one realized that the family had only just moved into the place and hadn’t had time to accumulate the usual flotsam and jetsam. “She hasn’t even a mink coat,” Miss Withers said. “I don’t think that Helen made the most of her opportunities.” She briefly studied the weekend case which Helen had kept packed on a shelf at the rear of the closet, but there was nothing in it except a few light rayon and cotton dresses, underwear, and two pairs of nylons.

  “Come on.” the inspector urged. “What do you expect to find that the police haven’t found?”

  “I won’t know until I find it,” she told him. “But, Oscar, how odd of the girl to pack a bag during a family quarrel and then forget to unpack it!”

  “There is,” said the inspector, “no telling what any woman will do.” He led the way on into Thurlow Abbott’s room, small but luxurious, and crammed with photographs, old clipping books, mash letters, and other relics of his theatrical past. There was a bottle of cognac tucked away in a riding boot in the closet, another in the bottom bureau drawer beneath his winter underwear, and a third stuck in behind a cabinet photograph of himself in hussar’s uniform which stood on the chest of drawers.

  “He certainly takes no chances of being caught in a drought,” Miss Withers observed.

  Last of all the master bedrooms, whose windows opened on the balcony, was Lawn’s room, but by this time the inspector was getting so impatient that Miss Withers had only time to gain the impression that, for all her straightforward simplicity, the girl did herself rather well. There were silk sheets on the bed, the bedside table had a portable radio-phonograph with a great many records, and the pictures were reproductions from the Museum of Modern Art of Picasso’s Clown and two or three of Marie Laurencin’s dreamy pre-Raphaelite girls.

  High on the chest of drawers sat a worn, furry monkey grinning down enigmatically, and beneath it was a silver candlestick well guttered with wax, a large incense burner, and a dozen or so bottles of perfume. Miss Withers’s personal tastes ran to rose and violet toilet water, but she realized that most of these scents were rare and expensive, almost unobtainable now.

  While the inspector fidgeted impatiently she took a peek into the closet. It appeared that Lawn’s wardrobe was largely confined to evening dresses, slacks, and riding-habits. Along one wall was a rank of riding-boots, jodhpur shoes, and fragile high-heeled slippers, but a pair of rubber-soled sneakers appeared to have received the most wear.

  A wispy scarf and panties of blazing crimson were drying on a hanger. That would be the bathing suit that Lawn had worn in her private investigation of the pool yesterday morning.

  A little reluctantly Miss Withers followed the inspector out of the room. “That’s the works,” he said. “Except for the servants’ room over the kitchen.”

  “What, no nursery?”

  “Cairns probably figured he had family enough with his wife’s father and sister on his hands.”

  Miss Withers had a quick look at the servants’ room and bath, which was so neat and impersonal that it might have served as a model bedroom in a department-store exhibit. There was a chessboard set up on the bedside table, an armful of fresh red roses in a big vase on the bureau, and a tiny shelf of books which included John Donne, Walter Pater, George Crabbe, Emily Post, and Countee Cullen. None of the books had a red jacket.

  “So that’s that,” said the inspector.

  “We’ve settled one thing, at least,” the schoolteacher announced. “From none of the bedroom windows, not even Helen’s, is the swimming pool visible. The bathhouse cuts off the view.”

  The inspector said he already knew that. None of the guests at the party could have known that Huntley Cairns was alone at the pool. They went downstairs again, came finally into the kitchen, where an elderly man in filthy overalls was placidly making himself a sandwich out of canapés left over from the party, putting a whole slab of them between two slices of bread.

  “Searles!” cried the inspector. “What are you doing here?”

  “Eating,” said Searles. He kept on.

  “You’re supposed to be down at the inquest.”

  “I was down to the inquest,” admitted the gardener wearily. “I was the first witness called, and when they got through with me I came back to work. Nobody said anything about my being fired, and gardens gotta be watered, whether folks die or not. More I
see of people, more I like plants, anyway.”

  Questioned further by the inspector, Searles emphatically denied seeing anybody or hearing anybody prowling around the place. But he had been busy turning on sprinklers.

  “And don’t go looking at me fishy-eyed because I’m in the house,” the old man went on. He showed a key. “I have the run of the place because it’s my job to keep fresh flowers in all the rooms. I’m supposed to have my lunch, too, but with the help gone, I had to make my own.”

  The inspector took Miss Withers’s arm and showed her into the dining room. “That’s reasonable enough,” he said to her. “No point in getting the old man riled up—he’s plenty sore at everybody for being arrested. You know how it is.”

  “Gardens do have to be watered,” admitted the schoolteacher thoughtfully. “But, Oscar—”

  “Save it,” the inspector told her. “I want to get back down to the inquest before it’s over and done with. Come on, I’ll give you a ride home—and will you please stay there and keep from throwing monkey wrenches?”

  Miss Withers didn’t answer him. She pulled away, heading towards the library. “Just a minute, Oscar. I have an idea—a wonderful idea. It’ll only take a minute.”

  Grumbling, he followed her into the library. “What’s this, a retake?”

  “Listen, Oscar. It was late in the afternoon when Mr. Beale and the others were in here—”

  “Suppose it was?”

  “The windows face to the east. It must have been quite dark, so the lights would have been on, wouldn’t they?”