“They had no right to do this to you and your friend, Jimmy, even though you were the cause of her death. The excitement was too much for her, she’d been so carefully brought up. She got this heart attack and died. She was already unconscious when they brought her back—from wherever it was you ran off with her to.
“I don’t know why I’m helping you. You’re a reckless, bad, fortune-hunting scoundrel; Mr. Hastings says so. The marriage wouldn’t have been legal anyway; she didn’t use her right name. It cost him all kinds of money to hush everyone up about it and destroy the documents, so it wouldn’t be found out and you wouldn’t have a chance to blackmail her later.
“You killed my baby! But still he should have turned you over to the police, not kept you tied up all ni—”
At this point she finally got through, and Ainslie’s gag flew out of his mouth like one of those feathered darts kids shoot through a blow-tube. “I am the police!” he panted. “And your ‘baby’ has been murdered, or will be within the next few minutes, by Hastings himself, not this boy here! She was still alive in that coffin at two o’clock this morning.”
She gave a scream like the noon whistle of a factory. He kept her from fainting, or at any rate falling in a heap, by pinning her to the wall, took the knife away from her. He freed me in one-tenth of the time it had taken her to rid him of his own bonds. “No,” she was groaning hollowly through her hands, “her own family doctor, a lifelong friend of her father and mother, examined her after she was gone, made out the death certificate. He’s an honest man, he wouldn’t do that—”
“He’s old, I take it. Did he see her face?” Ainslie interrupted.
A look of almost stupid consternation froze on her own face. “No. I was at the bedside with him; it was covered. But only a moment before she’d been lying there in full view. The doctor and I both saw her from the door. Then Mr. Hastings had a fainting spell in the other room, and we ran to help him. When the doctor came in again to proceed with his examination, Mr. Chivers had covered her face—to spare Mr. Hastings’s feelings.
“Dr. Meade just examined her body. Mr. Hastings pleaded with him not to remove the covering, said he couldn’t bear it. And my pet was still wearing the little wrist watch her mother gave her before she died—”
“They substituted another body for hers, that’s all; I don’t care how many wrist watches it had on it,” Ainslie told her brutally. “Stole that of a young girl approximately her own age who had just died from heart failure or some other natural cause, most likely from one of the hospital morgues, and put it over on the doddering family doctor and you both.
“If you look, you’ll probably find something in the papers about a vanished corpse. The main thing is to stop that burial; I’m not positive enough on it to take a chance. It may be she in the coffin after all, and not the substitute. Where was the interment to be?”
“In the family plot, at Cypress Hill.”
“Come on, Cannon; got your circulation back yet?” He was at the top of the stairs already. “Get the local police and tell them to meet us out there.”
* * *
—
Ainslie’s badge was all that got us into the cemetery, which was private. The casket had already been lowered out of sight. They were throwing the first shovelsful of earth over it as we burst through the little ring of sedate, bowing mourners.
The last thing I saw was Ainslie snatching an implement from one of the cemetery workers and jumping down bodily into the opening, feet first.
The face of that silver-haired devil, her guardian Hastings, had focused in on my inflamed eyes.
A squad of Lake City police, arriving only minutes after us, were all that saved his life. It took three of them to pull me off him.
Ainslie’s voice was what brought me to, more than anything else. “It’s all right, Cannon,” he was yelling over and over from somewhere behind me. “It’s the substitute.”
I stumbled over to the lip of the grave between two of the cops and took a look down. It was the face of a stranger that was peering up at me through the shattered coffin lid. I turned away, and they made the mistake of letting go of me.
I went at the secretary this time; Hastings was still stretched out more dead than alive. “What’ve you done with her? Where’ve you got her?”
“That ain’t the way to make him answer,” Ainslie said, and for the second and last time throughout the whole affair his voice wasn’t toneless. “This is!”
Wham! We had to take about six steps forward to catch up with the secretary where he was now.
Ainslie’s method was all right at that. The secretary talked—fast.
* * *
—
Alice was safe; but she wouldn’t have been, much longer. After the mourners had had a last look at her in the coffin, Hastings and the secretary had locked her up for safekeeping—stupefied, of course—and substituted the other body for burial.
And Alice’s turn was to come later, when, under cover of night, she was to be spirited away to a hunting lodge in the hills—the lodge that had belonged to her father. There she could have been murdered at leisure.
When we’d flashed back to the New Hampshire Avenue house in a police car, and unlocked the door of the little den where she’d been secreted; and when the police physician who accompanied us brought her out of the opiate they’d kept her under—whose arms were the first to go around her?
“Jimmy”— She sighed a little, after we took time off from the clinches—“he showed up late that night with Chivers, in that dinky little room you left me in.
“They must have been right behind us all the way, paying all those people to say they’d never seen me.
“But he fooled me, pretended he wasn’t angry, said he didn’t mind if I married and left him. And I was so sleepy and off guard I believed him. Then he handed me a glass of salty-tasting water to drink, and said, ‘Come on down to the car. Jimmy’s down there waiting for you; we’ve got him with us.’ I staggered down there between them, that’s all I remember.”
Then she remembered something else and looked at me with fright in her eyes. “Jimmy, you didn’t mind marrying little Alice Brown, but I don’t suppose Alma Beresford would stand a show with you—?”
“You don’t-suppose right,” I told her gruffly, “because I’m marrying Alice Brown all over again—even if we’ve gotta change her name first.
“And this ugly-looking bloke standing up here, name of Ainslie, is going to be best man at our second wedding. Know why? Because he was the only one in the whole world believed there really was a you.”
The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl
STUART PALMER
THE STORY
Original publication: Mystery, November, 1933; first collected in Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Stories (Norfolk, VA, Crippen & Landru, 2002). Note: The book has Riddles on the dust jacket but Stories on the title page.
ONE OF THE PRIMARY CHARACTERISTICS of the golden age of the detective story (1920s–1940s) was the series protagonist, and Charles Stuart Hunter Palmer (1905–1968) wrote one of the most popular series of stories and novels of the era about Hildegarde Withers, a schoolteacher who retires during the series, largely to devote her time to helping Inspector Oscar Piper (of the New York City Police Department) to solve murder cases. Miss Withers, infamous for her choice of odd, even eccentric, hats, was based partially on Palmer’s high school English teacher, Miss Fern Hackett, and partially on his father. Palmer, a frequent contributor to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, wrote to Frederic Dannay (half of the Ellery Queen collaboration and the editor of the magazine) about the way in which Miss Withers came to be such a significant character:
The origins of Miss Withers are nebulous. When I started Penguin Pool Murder (to be laid in the New York Aquarium as suggested by Powell Brentano then head of Brentano’s Publishers) I wo
rked without an outline, and without much plan. But I decided to ring in a spinster schoolma’am as a minor character, for comedy relief. Believe it or not, I found her taking over. She had more meat on her bones than the cardboard characters who were supposed to carry the story. Finally, almost in spite of myself and certainly in spite of Mr. Brentano, I threw the story into her lap.
Although Miss Withers retires at some point during the series, she is still teaching when she makes her debut in The Penguin Pool Murder (1931), having taken a class of third-graders on a field trip to the New York Aquarium. A thief has attempted to steal a purse from a woman and is making his escape when she throws her omnipresent umbrella in his path to trip him.
She appears to be fearless, pragmatic, no-nonsense, helpful. She retains her unchanging personality throughout a series that ran for eighteen books: fourteen novels and four short story collections, notably The Riddles of Hildegarde Withers (1947), which Ellery Queen selected for his landmark work, Queen’s Quorum, a bibliography of the one hundred six greatest short story collections in the history of detective fiction.
THE FILM
Title: The Plot Thickens, 1936
Studio: RKO Radio Pictures
Director: Ben Holmes
Screenwriters: Jack Townley, Clarence Upson Young
Producers: Samuel J. Briskin (executive producer, uncredited), William Sistrom (associate producer)
THE CAST
• Zasu Pitts (Hildegarde Withers)
• James Gleason (Oscar Piper)
• Owen Davis Jr. (Robert “Bob” Wilkins)
• Louise Latimer (Alice Stevens)
Some elements of the original story remain in the film script, though precious few. Both involve the theft of the priceless Cellini Cup. The screenplay provides a different motive for the murder, different suspects, and a different murderer, though it retains the comic tone of the original story and, indeed, the entire series.
The unfortunate casting of Zasu Pitts entirely changes the character of Hildegarde Withers, who had been so admirably played in previous films by Edna May Oliver. In order to accommodate the ditzy, fluttery style of Pitts, Miss Withers is transformed from Palmer’s bright, acerbic, poised schoolteacher to a loon who makes it difficult to share Piper’s confidence in her abilities as a rational, clear-thinking sleuth.
This is the fifth film in the Hildegarde Withers series and it had the working title The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl during production.
THE RIDDLE OF THE DANGLING PEARL
Stuart Palmer
RUSHING THROUGH THE WIDE DOORS of the Cosmopolitan Museum of Art came Miss Hildegarde Withers, out of the blinding sunlight of Fifth Avenue in August into a hushed, dim world. Pausing for a moment to sniff the musty odors which cling to the vast treasure house wherein men have gathered together the objects saved from vandal Time, the angular school teacher went on, sailing serenely past the checkroom to be halted by a gray-uniformed guard at the turnstile.
“Have to check your umbrella, ma’am.”
“Young man,” she advised him sharply, “can’t you see that I need it?” She leaned on the umbrella heavily, and the guard, with a shrug of his shoulders, let her through. She was not lying, even by implication, for this day she was to need her only weapon as never before in all her assiduous, if amateur, efforts at crime detection.
It had been some months since Miss Withers had last found occasion to visit the museum, and today there seemed to be fewer guards and more visitors, particularly juvenile visitors, than formerly. She threaded her resolute way through the crowd, entering the Hall of Sculpture and pushing on toward the staircase at the rear of the building. In this hall the visitors were fewer, and only a solitary art student here and there was copying a painting, lost to the rest of the world.
“You’ll find Professor Carter somewhere in the Florentine Wing,” the Inspector had told her over the telephone. “You can’t miss him, he’s a tall, dried-up old fossil with a big round head bald as an egg.” But at this moment Miss Withers had no idea how, and where, she was to find Professor Carter, associate curator of the Cosmopolitan. For all her haste, she paused for a moment beside a crouching marble nude labeled “Nymph—by Hebilly West.” Using her dampened handkerchief, Miss Withers frowningly removed a penciled mustache from the classic stone face, shaking her head at the laxity of the guards. Then suddenly she looked up.
From somewhere came the patter of light footsteps—the quick steps of a small man or perhaps a woman—fading away down some distant corridor. As they passed, she heard a hoarse masculine scream, thin with surprise, which set a thousand echoes ringing in the vaulted halls. After the school teacher turned and ran on down the hall, turning toward the stairs, she stopped short.
A man was coming, slowly and horribly, down the hundred marble steps—a man whose hoarse scream had almost become a bellow, and who clutched unavailingly at thin air. His body was bent forward almost parallel with the slope of the steep steps…
Miss Withers was frozen with horror, for at the foot of the stairs loomed a gigantic statuary group upon a granite base. As she watched, powerless to move, the plunging man collided headlong with the base of the statue, and his screaming stopped.
There was no doubt in Miss Withers’s mind as to the identity of this man. Inspector Oscar Piper had told her that Carter, the man she had come to see, was a tall and dried-up “fossil” with a head like an egg. And like an egg the round hairless skull of Professor Carter had cracked against the implacable stone.
Almost instantly the hall was filled with gasping, curious onlookers. Here and there a guard began to push his way through. But Miss Withers turned swiftly away, and moved up the stairs. She was looking for something, and when she reached the top step she found it. Then, and not until then, did she rejoin the murmuring, excited group at the base of the stairs.
A small, almost dandyish man in morning clothes was approaching from the opposite corridor, and the guards made a path for him. Miss Withers heard one of them whisper—“It’s the curator!”
Willard Robbins, chief curator of the museum, resembled a young and bustling businessman more than the custodian of a large share of the world’s art treasures. He was not one to waste time upon adjectives. “Quick, Dugan—the canvas and stretcher.” He looked around, through the crowd, for a uniformed figure which was not there. “Burton! How did this happen? Where is Burton?”
“Probably studying art again,” said one of the uniformed men, softly.
But the curator went on. “Please move back, everybody. Back, out of the hallway. Everybody…”
Miss Hildegarde Withers stood her ground. “Young man, I want a word with you!”
Curator Robbins looked annoyed. Then one of his men whispered something to him. His face cleared. “So you’re the lady who saw the accident? Won’t you step this way, to my office?”
They faced each other across a bare mahogany desk. “Well?” said the curator.
“It wasn’t an accident,” said Hildegarde Withers. “Someone tied this”—she produced a loose ball of twine—“across the top step. That was murder.”
“Impossible,” gasped Robbins. He handled the string gingerly. “And you mean to tell me that poor Carter stumbled over this, and plunged to his death—you expect me to believe that?”
“I expect you to believe what I say,” she told him tartly. “Because the police will, if you don’t. You may not know that Professor Carter was afraid of something like this. He telephoned Inspector Piper at Headquarters this morning, asking for police help. The Inspector was busy, so he called me and asked me to drop in, because I live just across the Park, and I’ve been of service to him at times in the past. Now do you believe me?”
Robbins nodded slowly. “All except that Carter phoned for police protection for himself. The old man never thought of his own safety. He lived for
the Cellini Cup, which as you perhaps know is the most valuable single art object in the world. He was always dithering for fear bandits would grab it, although we have a burglar-proof system here to protect it. He’d been reading reports from France that a gang of super crooks stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, substituting a copy. Why, he even used to spend most of his time in the Florentine Wing, watching over his Cup…”
Miss Withers nodded. “Then there was some reason behind his dithering!”
But the curator shook his head. “Carter had outlived his usefulness here. He had ceased to distinguish between major and minor matters. Indeed, his chief worry was that small boys would do some harm to the Cellini. He used to drive them away from the Florentine Wing religiously, and in turn they teased him…”
The curator smashed his fist against the desk. “That’s it! This was no murder plot. Anyone wanting Carter out of the way could have managed it without going to this extreme. Don’t you see? It was only a thoughtless prank on the part of some of the little hoodlums who play about here on free days. They tied the cord there to give him a bad fall, as a joke, never dreaming of the possible consequence…”
Miss Withers remembered the light, running footsteps. Yet she was somehow surprised that she could not agree with the curator’s easy explanation. Perhaps—yet it was too pat.
“I’m going to find Burton, the guard who was supposed to be stationed near the head of that staircase,” explained Robbins. “Then we’ll have every child in the building searched to find the rest of that string. It was probably taken off a kite string.”
“Probably,” agreed Miss Withers. “I have two favors to ask. First, please don’t let anybody know that I’m anything but a visitor here. Second, let me go in search of this Burton. I think I can guess where he is.”
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 69
