Miss Withers Regrets

by Stuart Palmer

  “Forget it,” Piper said. “None of them showed more than a few dead bugs, and none of them had been recently cleaned, either. Come on, the investigation is about to begin.”

  “It’ll be a complete waste of time,” Miss Withers told him firmly. But she followed him down the hall. It appeared that the impending inquisition was to be held in the magistrate’s room at the rear of the building. Sergeant Fischer, his arms folded, stood guard at the doorway, but he only nodded brusquely towards a seat in answer to her pleasant “Good morning.” She plumped herself down in one of the very front pews and turned back to survey her fellow sufferers. She would have enjoyed calling the inspector’s attention to one or two items, but he had hurried out again.

  A majority of the official suspects in this case were already here, perched on hard folding chairs in the blaze of the summer sunshine which poured in through the high eastern windows. Commander Bennington had missed his morning shave, and beside him his wife was pale beneath a suntan makeup. Over in a corner Dr. Radebaugh sucked on an empty pipe, near where the Beales were sitting arm in arm.

  Farther to the front Mame Boad was fanning herself with a folded newspaper, her shoes slipped off for greater comfort. Jed Nicolet was beside her, his fox face wary and alert. In the front of the room, on the other side of a wooden railing, stood a tall, curly-haired, cadaverous young man who must be Loomis, the district attorney. A court reporter was beside him, indicating that this was serious.

  The inspector reentered, avoiding Miss Withers’s beckoning gesture. He hurried through the barrier to confer with the district attorney.

  Loomis glowered and then suddenly pulled out his watch and demanded loudly, “Well, what’s keeping them? Get on the phone—”

  Then there was a commotion in the hallway and all eyes turned to see Officer Lunnery enter very importantly with Thurlow Abbott in tow. The ex-matinee idol’s eyes were heavy and bloodshot, but he seemed to perk up and draw himself together like the old campaigner he was as he made his entrance.

  “Where are the others?” Piper demanded of the officer.

  Lunnery hesitated. “Well, you see, it’s like this—”

  “My daughter Helen is not at home,” Abbott interrupted in his froglike croak. “So she didn’t receive the summons to appear here. She didn’t even come home last night.”

  “And why not?” Loomis barked.

  “I don’t know. You see, we were expecting someone, a lawyer from Chicago, to arrive at nine-thirty, only he didn’t say which airport or which line. So Helen took the sedan and went to La Guardia—I mean New York airport—and I took the roadster and went over to Newark, just in case. But I had the trip for nothing, because Mr. Malone arrived, I understand, at La Guardia, and Helen brought him here and delivered him. A short time later she disappeared, and I’m very worried about her.”

  “I’m not,” said Miss Withers to nobody in particular.

  “Okay,” Piper said, taking the play away from the D.A. for the moment. “What about the other daughter?”

  Thurlow Abbott shrugged expressively. “My daughter Lawn is locked in her room. She said that she’s expecting a telephone call and that she doesn’t feel like coming down right now. She says that if you want her you can swear out a warrant and serve it, and arrest her—”

  “She said a lot more than that,” chimed in Officer Lunney, “through the locked door.”

  “Good for her,” observed Miss Withers, who had always wanted to see somebody call the police bluff on one of these so-called voluntary questionings. Let the minions of the law conform to the letter of the law, she always said.

  The inspector seemed unperturbed. “I don’t think that matters very much,” he pointed out to the district attorney. “We don’t really need Miss Abbott because as it happens we have proof that she was at home talking on the telephone at the exact time this second crime must have been committed. The hotel desk confirms this time, too, which was two minutes of twelve.” His glance fell momentarily upon Miss Withers, and then he turned back to the D.A. “Shall we go ahead, Mr. Loomis, or wait for the sheriff?”

  “Your party,” said the D.A. with a wave of his hand and a smile which indicated clearly that it might be somebody else’s party at any moment.

  The inspector leaned on the wooden rail, facing the audience. “I suppose all you people know why you’re here,” he opened bluntly. “Huntley Cairns was murdered last Saturday afternoon and Joseph Searles last night. In case the exact connection isn’t clear, I’ll call on Mr. Beale.”

  Midge Beale stood up, stiff and perspiring, and after some prompting he related basically the same story of his adventures at the cocktail party that he had already confessed to Miss Withers.

  “Thank you,” said the inspector. “I might add that we know what book it was that you people were so interested in and how it fits into the picture. Some of you may think that dog poisoning is grounds for murder, or that it makes killing into justifiable homicide. The law doesn’t look at it that way. Last evening, an hour or two before Searles was killed, it was brought to your attention that Huntley Cairns couldn’t have been the dog poisoner but that Searles could have—and probably was. I want to know the movements of each of you people for the time between your conference at the Bennington home and say one o’clock this morning—”

  Miss Withers closed her eyes and tried to think, shutting out as much as possible the righteous voices which kept insisting that they had all gone directly home to bed from the Benningtons’ last night. Which meant, as the inspector went on to point out very clearly, that none of them had an alibi worth a nickel. “Not,” he went on, “that alibis mean much in a case like this one. Any more than do fingerprints. It’s pretty clear that the killer wore gloves—”

  “And it’s absolutely clear that he wore size 8½-B shoes, isn’t it?” Miss Withers chimed in softly.

  That let the cat out of the bag. Also, in theory at least, it cleared everyone in the room. The men’s shoes were all too large, the women’s too small, to have fitted the footprint which the schoolteacher had immortalized in pancake flour.

  Everyone relaxed—everyone but Miss Withers. And, of course, District Attorney Loomis, who was chafing at the bit.

  “What about Pat Montague?” he inquired of the inspector. “I don’t suppose he’s been picked up yet? Slipped through your fingers, I suppose?”

  Miss Withers started to smile and then saw the look on the inspector’s face. “We traced Montague to a Turkish bath down the street,” he admitted. “He checked in there last night, but the attendants are a little hazy on the time. The rubber thought it was around midnight, but he clammed up when he found out why we were asking. They’re very clear, though, on the time Montague left, which was at six-twenty this morning. It is possible that somebody warned him, as he was seen in a telephone booth just before he left.”

  “Why, Oscar Piper!” Miss Withers gasped. “If you’re insinuating that I—”

  The inspector paid her no attention whatsoever. “We’re doing out best to locate him, Mr. Loomis,” he went on. “Since he’s out on a writ, we’ll have to go easy—”

  “It seems to me that the police have done nothing but go easy on this entire case!” Loomis snapped. “If this is a sample of the way you metropolitan cops investigate a homicide, then”—he smiled a thin smile—“I think that from now on we can handle our own affairs.”

  “I’ll say we can!” spoke up a cheerful voice from the door, and everyone turned to see Sheriff Vinge entering, a broad beaming smile on his face. “Sorry I’m late, gentlemen, but something came up that puts an entirely different complexion on this case!”

  He strode forward, and in his wake was Dr. Farney, looking tired and important. They both went through the railing. “We may as well have all this right out in the open,” Sheriff Vinge continued. “This is Dr. Farney, everybody. He just got through examining the body of Joe Searles.” He turned towards the doctor. “Can you tell us the cause of death in ordinary layman�
�s language?”

  “Asphyxia—that means strangulation—caused by drowning.”

  “Just like Mr. Cairns died?”

  “I didn’t post Cairns. From what I hear from my medical colleague”—and here Dr. Farney nodded towards Radebaugh—“it was the same sort of thing. Only when Searles died he was under the influence of fourteen ounces or more of methyl alcohol, plus sixty grains or so of seconal.”

  “Translate for the folks, Doctor?” Vinge asked.

  “It is supposed to be a safer form of veronal and is sold on prescription only in this state. It’s a sleeping powder, one of the barbiturates. The taste is bitter, and so it’s usually given in capsules. Searles’s liver showed 254 milligrams of barbital under Fabre’s test. Not enough to poison the man, even tied up with the alcohol, which usually heightens the effect of the barbiturates, but enough to make him pretty dopey. His blood showed a good three hundredths of one per cent alcohol.”

  “Which means he was drunk, doesn’t it, like you thought last night?” Sheriff Vinge was enjoying all this.

  Farney nodded gravely. “He was very drunk.”

  “Question,” said the inspector. “Any chance he could have taken the seconal to make him sleep?”

  “The usual dose, and Dr. Radebaugh will bear me out, is one five-grain capsule. He had twelve times that in him.”

  Sheriff Vinge nodded. “Thank you, Doctor. Please sit down, we may need you later.” He turned to the inspector and the D.A. “Now, gentlemen, I’m going to lay it on the line. The suggestion was made by somebody else last night, and at the time I didn’t pay much attention. Guess I owe somebody an apology. …” He nodded towards Miss Withers, who sat up stiffly and blinked.

  “Yes, sir,” Sheriff Vinge continued. “It’s been proved to my satisfaction that Joe Searles was the dog poisoner that ran riot around here a while ago. Looks to me like Huntley Cairns got wise to it—maybe from that same book in his library that upset you folks so much—and he let on to Searles that he knew. And so the old man up and drowned him in his own pool, maybe using a couple of garden rakes tied or fastened together—”

  Somebody in the room let go with a long, heartfelt sigh, but Miss Withers couldn’t tell who it was. She sat stiffly on the edge of her seat and wondered what was coming next.

  “Joe Searles thought he had got by with it, and he did his best to pin it on a young man who came in on the scene just after he’d finished murdering his employer. But his conscience was worrying him. He knew that the case against Montague was collapsing and that he himself was next in line. He was a proud old goat—his folks were once big shots around here, and he didn’t intend to be tried and executed for murder. So day before yesterday he went down to the hardware store and bought him an old .38 revolver—”

  “But there wasn’t any gun in his cottage!” Miss Withers burst in.

  Sheriff Vinge bowed politely. “Right, ma’am. He prob’y threw it in the Sound. Blowing out your brains is a hard way to go. Besides, he musta felt that he owed it to society to go the same way he sent Cairns. So he got hold of a bottle of sleeping powders, poured ’em into some whiskey, and tossed off the mixture so he wouldn’t feel any pain. Then he got a pail of water, balanced himself on the edge of his couch, and shoved himself in!”

  The silence in the room was so thick it could have been sliced, Miss Withers thought, with a butter knife.

  “Dr. Farney admits,” the sheriff continued, “that death could have been accidental or suicidal. Men have drowned themselves in bathtubs and in shallow streams.”

  The doctor, seated close beside Sheriff Vinge, looked up and nodded gravely. “Possible,” he said. “Quite possible.”

  “I can believe any number of impossible things before breakfast,” murmured Miss Withers. “But not that.”

  “And that ain’t all!” continued Vinge. “Like the doctor told you, seconal can be traced because it’s sold on a prescription. Well, the only bottle of the stuff sold in Shoreham in six months was on a prescription by somebody in this room—”

  Dr. Harry Radebaugh stood up, smiling nervously. “I’ll admit that I signed that prescription,” he admitted. “But it wasn’t for Searles, who was no patient of mine. It was for Mr. Thurlow Abbott!”

  Abbot said something, his voice hardly more than a whisper, but it was Sheriff Vinge who took the floor. “We know that,” he said. “It’s on the records down to the drugstore. But remember that Joe Searles had the run of the Cairns house, and he could easy enough have gone up to Mr. Abbott’s bathroom and borrowed the sleeping pills.”

  Dr. Radebaugh sat down again. Thurlow Abbott took a deep breath and tried to speak, but this time it was the district attorney who drowned out his feeble effort. “Then,” Loomis said, “you’re satisfied, Sheriff, that the whole thing can be written off as murder and suicide?”

  Vinge nodded. “I’m not sorry to save Knight’s County the expense of further investigation and a big expensive murder trial.” He turned to the crowd. “Folks, I’m sorry you all had to be dragged out of bed at this hour and brought down here. But we had to investigate every possible lead and eliminate everything we could. You can all go now.” He turned to the inspector and held out his hand. “Thanks, Mr. Piper, for your help. Guess we all have our off days.” He turned his head. “I really should be thanking that schoolteacher friend of yours because she sort of accidentally put us on the right track.”

  But Miss Withers was not waiting for congratulations. She had caught Midge and Adele Beale as they went out of the door. “I’m so happy to see you two young people reunited,” she said.”

  “Sure.” Midge grinned.

  “There was no reason to quarrel just because Huntley Cairns gave your wife a pension, was there?”

  Adele blinked. “What? Oh, you know about that? Well, it wasn’t as simple as that. It was just that I was responsible for inspiring Huntley’s business. You see, years ago when we were going around together, we heard Thurlow Abbott complaining one night about his lack of luck in getting back on the stage. He was wishing that his public would write letters to the producers demanding his return, and half-kiddingly I said that we ought to get together and write a thousand or so, signing any old name. Huntley seized on that right away. It didn’t work for Mr. Abbott, because his voice was really gone, but it worked for other people in show business.”

  “And Mr. Cairns was grateful to you? It sheds a new light on his character.”

  “He was scared,” Adele corrected. “He didn’t want me to let the secret out. There’s millions in it. Why only recently Huntley started in on Congress. You see, congressmen love to be photographed beside a great pile of letters, supposedly from the voters back home, upholding their filibuster on the Fair Employment Practices Act, or their stand on abolishing the OPA, or whatever. Anyhow, Huntley paid me twenty-five a week to keep quiet.” She smiled. “You see?”

  “I do indeed,” said Miss Withers. She beamed at them as they hurried out of the place and inwardly wished that she could somehow unite a certain other young couple as Midge and his Adele were united.

  The schoolteacher waited patiently in the hallway until at last the inspector came out, his shoulders sagging. “Go ahead and crow,” he told her bitterly.

  “Don’t be silly,” she snapped. “Hens don’t crow. They cackle when they’ve laid an egg, but this time the egg was laid by the sheriff—”

  “I’m afraid not,” Piper told her. “The whole thing’s washed up, anyway.”

  “Is it?”

  “For me, at least.” He went on, and she fell into step beside him.

  “Oscar, didn’t you notice a few minutes ago that Thurlow Abbott was trying to say something? Nobody gave him a chance—but I stopped him in the hall, and I listened. What if he’s telling the truth and that bottle of sleeping powders is still in his medicine cabinet at home?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “YOU ONCE ACCUSED ME,” Miss Withers reminded the inspector, “of being a self-appointed gadfly to
the police. This is one time, I warn you, when I intend to admit the soft impeachment. Oscar, this case is not settled, and you know it! In spite of Sheriff Vinge’s neat little house of cards. He’s only trying to get out of it the easy way, without stepping on anybody’s toes. Don’t you see? His theory leaves too many things unaccounted for.”

  “Such as?” Piper yawned widely

  “The footprint, for one thing.”

  Piper nodded wearily. “We talked about that. It’s his theory that it was your own footprint, and that the pancake flour you dumped on it moistened around the edges for a little way—enough to add a few sizes.”

  She sniffed. “Of course he didn’t test it? I thought not. Besides, what about the missing bottle from which Searles drank his whiskey cut with sleeping powders? What about the missing revolver?”

  “All right, all right. But what can I do? I’m off the case.”

  “Officially?”

  “It amounts to that. I suppose Vinge will phone the commissioner that they have no further need for me, and I’ll be ordered to report back to my desk at Centre Street.”

  “But you haven’t been so ordered, have you?”

  The inspector admitted that he hadn’t. “Well, then!” Miss Withers sniffed. “And am I still in technical custody?”

  He shook his head. “That was Loomis’s idea in the beginning. He asked me to apologize to you.”

  “And well he might! Mr. District Attorney Loomis will be apologizing to both of us before this day is through. Oscar, will you take me up to the Cairns house right now?”

  He shook his head. “No, definitely no. Look, I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night, and I’m out on my feet, and I don’t give a hoot in hell—”