Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene

by Stuart Palmer

  Miss Withers had chosen the Canterbury, at which she had entered a reservation by telephone the night before, because its rates were more compatible with her income than were those of more lavish hostelries on Nob Hill, and because, so she understood, the management was inclined to be partial to elderly ladies. She removed her crash helmet and donned her hat, and passed hatbox and traveling bag to an impervious doorman who stood by.

  “Al,” she said to her chauffeur, “I shall expect you back here in an hour.”

  “As near as may be,” said Al.

  “Are you sure you can find accommodations with your friend at SFU?”

  “No sweat, Miss Withers. I called him last night and gave him warning. I can’t say that he was exactly enthusiastic at the prospect of my visit, but he agreed to put me up.”

  “Someone,” said Miss Withers, “is always crashing someone’s pad.”

  She turned and swept into the lobby. Her bag and box, which had been transferred to the custody of a bellboy, were waiting for her side by side at the desk. The clerk, although sharing a vague posture of superiority with hotel clerks everywhere, was accommodating under a veneer of courtesy. Miss Withers’ reservation was checked and found in order. Miss Withers signed the register. Joining her bag and box in the custody of the bellboy, Miss Withers was lofted to her room, deposited, and left.

  Alone, beginning with a bath, she set about repairing the ravages of her journey. Bathed and brushed, assured that all her parts were present and in working order, she dressed and consulted her watch. Her repairs had occupied her for somewhat longer than half an hour. She had allotted more time than that, and realized that her hurry was incited by the nagging sense of urgency that had grown within her, for no logical reason that she could isolate, in the case of the Lost Lenore. She lay down for a while on the bed, forcing herself to relax physically if not mentally, and when the hour had passed and no call had come up to her from Al at the desk, she got up and adjusted her hat, an impressive creation somewhat resembling a psychedelic silo, and descended to the lobby. Al was late. Perhaps he had run into problems. She sat down and waited.

  Al was, in fact, more than half an hour late. Miss Withers, walking to meet him in the lobby, wondered why a laggard who had earned a reprimand should be looking so infernally pleased with himself. Miss Withers found out. Al, it developed, had taken the bull by the horns. He had exercised initiative and had performed an essential task, which would now relieve Miss Withers of the necessity of performing it herself.

  “Sorry I’m late, Miss Withers,” he said cheerfully, “but I’ve been doing something. I was right over there by the campus, you see, and I thought, while I was there, that I might just as well find out where this Carol Hadley chick has her pad. This friend of mine didn’t have a student directory, so I went on campus and dug one up. Hadley and another chick share a pad on Fulton Street.”

  “Good work, Al,” Miss Withers said. “You’re becoming more like Philip Marlowe all the time.”

  “You think so? Maybe this snooping bit is my thing.”

  “Thing?”

  “My calling. What I’m made for.”

  “I see. More jargon. You would save time with me, young man, if you would try to speak the King’s English, or at least a recognizable variety of American.”

  They had been moving through this exchange toward the Hog, which Al had left under the eye of the doorman with an injunction to watch it carefully. Miss Withers switched hat for helmet and crawled into the sidecar. Al straddled the saddle, and they were off. A short while later they were pulling up in front of a narrow post-Victorian imitation, two and a half stories tall, loaded with gingerbread and bulging with bay windows.

  “This should be it,” Al said, “or my name’s not Marlowe.”

  Miss Withers disembarked, made the helmet-hat switch, and marched up the walk and across a porch to a high door between narrow leaded-glass panes. She knocked briskly and got no response. Turning the knob, she cracked the door and thrust her head inside. From a narrow hall, steep stairs ran upward. On the wall to her right was what appeared from where she stood to be an improvised directory. Below the directory in a line were four mailboxes. She followed her head inside, closing the door behind her, and consulted the directory. Miss Hadley and friend, whose name was Bronson, were listed as sharing apartment number three. Assuming apartments one and two to be downstairs, Miss Withers logically assumed number three to be up. She climbed the stairs, and it was. The door was to her left as she stood on the landing. She knocked and the door opened promptly, revealing a young woman, twenty or thereabouts, dressed in a sweater and short skirt and green cotton stockings. Her blond hair, hanging loose, was parted in the middle and brought forward over each shoulder to hang down the front.

  “I’m looking for Miss Hadley,” said Miss Withers. “Are you she?”

  “Sorry,” the girl said, looking at Miss Withers’ hat with something like consternation. “I’m Bronson.”

  “Could you tell me where I could find Miss Hadley?”

  “You can find her right here if you want to wait. Chances are she’ll be back soon.”

  “Perhaps you could help me in the meanwhile. I’m really trying to locate a Miss Lenore Gregory. I understand that she visited Miss Hadley in this apartment recently.”

  Branson’s young face, shaped like a heart and dusted with freckles, remained ostensibly open and amiable, but there was, nevertheless, a sudden, subtle change. It had closed. Miss Withers was encountering again the same evasiveness that had frustrated and infuriated her all along. Was everyone more than a few years past the age of consent considered by the contemporary youngster to be a potential enemy? Was there a universal conspiracy among them to thwart intrusion and prevent the invasion, real or imaginary, of their precious privacy?

  “You had better wait and ask Carol about that,” Bronson said.

  “How long do you think I’d have to wait?”

  “It’s hard to tell. Probably not long.”

  “I feel that this matter is urgent. I’d prefer to go find Miss Hadley, if you know where she is. Do you?”

  “She said she was going over to the Panhandle. She sits on the grass and reads.”

  “Where is the Panhandle from here? I’m afraid I’m not well oriented.”

  The young woman made a sweeping gesture to indicate direction. “Go over that way three blocks, and there it is. You can’t miss it. I don’t imagine that you can miss Carol either. She’s probably the only one there, male or female, with short hair. It’s red.”

  “Thank you very much. If I should miss her there, I’ll be back. My name, by the way, is Withers. Hildegarde Withers. Miss Hadley doesn’t know me.”

  Bronson looked as if she thought Miss Withers’ name, like her hat, was hardly likely. The latter made her way downstairs and outside and back to the Hog.

  “Al,” she said, “I have a feeling that we are approaching the end of our trail. Our destination now is the Panhandle, which is a kind of appendage of Golden Gate Park. It is located, I believe, three blocks south of here.”

  “I know what it is and where it is,” Al said. “Hop in.”

  Miss Withers, of course, did nothing of the kind. She had not hopped since her nonage and was not about to resume it in her dotage. She clambered into the sidecar with as much dignity as sidecars permit, and shortly thereafter she was clambering out again. The Panhandle, a block wide and several blocks long, pointed like a slim finger at Golden Gate Park, as if directing attention to the bright green heart of the city where the hippie tribes had gathered from across the nation not long ago in response to the call of the brothers Thelin. Miss Withers, being alert to the signs of the times, had read brief reports of the event in the newspapers, but she wondered why she remembered it now, having given it then no more than passing notice. Perhaps it was the result of her recent experiences. Perhaps it was because, no more than three blocks away, Haight crossed Ashbury and gave thereby a name to an area, and to hippies
everywhere, before it began to decline in favor, a kind of psychedelic Mecca. Or perhaps it was because the thought lurked in her mind that Lenore Gregory, three thousand miles and more away, had heard a similar call from the underground. Hadn’t the girl suggested in Venice that she was heading for something big? Something out of this world?

  Miss Withers and Al had stopped and debarked about midway of the Panhandle, where Masonic Avenue slashed across the pointing finger, which left them two ways to go. As a method of conserving both time and energy, it was Miss Withers’ logical conclusion that they had better go both ways at once. Al one way, that is, and she the other.

  “You are looking for a girl with short red hair,” she said. “See that you stay alert, and if you find her, bring her to me at once.”

  “Suppose,” said Al, “she doesn’t want to be brought.”

  “In that event, come and fetch me without delay.”

  Grinning, Al promised strict attention to duty and adherence to orders. He wandered off east, Miss Withers west, and as it turned out, it was Miss Withers, by a stroke of luck, who spotted in a matter of minutes the girl they were searching for. A slight girl with short red hair, wearing sneakers and jeans and a faded blue man’s shirt. She was lying on her belly on the grass, her chin supported in her cupped hands and braced on her elbows, reading intently in the diminishing light of the late afternoon sun a thick volume of fine print that Miss Withers, approaching obliquely, took to be a textbook of some sort. Miss Withers halted, a little rearward and aside. If Carol Hadley was aware of her, she gave no sign. Miss Withers delivered herself of a small, intrusive cough. Carol Hadley did not visibly react.

  “I beg your pardon,” Miss Withers said.

  The girl swiveled her head, looking up over a shoulder. “What for?” she said.

  “For intruding, of course.”

  “You’re not intruding. It’s a public park.”

  “One is entitled to be let alone, even in a public park. I’d like to talk with you, if I may. I’ve come a long way to see you.”

  The girl dog-eared a page of her book and shut it with a slap. She rolled over and sat up, hugging her knees and resting her chin on top of them. She slanted a curious look upward, a candid inventory which politely avoided any expression of incredulity when it took in Miss Withers’ hat. “Am I supposed to know you?”

  “No. My name is Withers. Hildegarde Withers. And your name is Carol Hadley. I left Santa Monica very early this morning to look for you.”

  “If I don’t know you, how does it happen that you know me?”

  “I don’t know you, really. I learned about you indirectly. May I sit down?”

  “If you don’t object to the ground. It belongs to everybody.”

  Miss Withers lowered herself with an agility rather surprising in one who might have been suspected of brittle bones, to say nothing of rheumatism and maybe arthritis. She removed her hat and would have liked to remove her shoes.

  “What do you want to talk with me about?” Carol Hadley said.

  “I’ll come straight to the point. Within the past ten days you’ve had a visitor. A girl from New York named Lenore Gregory.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Please. Let’s not waste time parrying. I have good reason to believe that you’ve seen her, and I have good reason for wanting to find her. Won’t you help me?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because her father and mother are extremely worried and anxious to have word from her. I am, indirectly, their representative.”

  Carol Hadley was silent for a moment. She sat with head and shoulders bowed, her knees now released, and plucked at the grass. “So that’s it,” she said. “Lenore was afraid of something like this. That her parents would have the hounds after her, I mean. She suspected cops or private detectives, though. It didn’t occur to her that she would be followed by a …”

  Carol Hadley, aware of the indiscretion to which her words had led her, broke off suddenly in what was almost a display of confusion. Miss Withers, neither offended nor dismayed, finished her sentence for her.

  “By a snoopy old maid who looks rather like a fugitive from a rest home. That’s all right, my dear. Others before you have been deceived by my appearance. It has the advantage in most cases of being what you might call an effective natural disguise. Never mind, however. Let me repeat my earlier question. Will you help me find Lenore?”

  “How?”

  “Simply by telling me where she is.”

  “What if I don’t know?”

  “Do you?”

  Again Carol Hadley was silent, plucking grass. This time longer. But finally she answered. “Yes. I know. I tried to get her to contact her parents, but she was afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “Of this. That they’d try to get her back before she had time to do what she felt she must. Lenore’s very intense.”

  “She is, I understand, of age. Her parents can’t force her to return if she doesn’t wish to.”

  “That’s not the point. Actually, Lenore loves her parents, though you may doubt it. Especially her father. She was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to defy them if it came to an issue.”

  Miss Withers thought again of the words of Tennyson, that neglected Victorian, the words she had quoted in part over the telephone to Inspector Oscar Piper: What quality of fools is this, to hurt the most the ones they love the best.

  “I see. So it was easier simply to run away. Do you know Lenore well?”

  “Oh, yes. I lived in Manhattan for years before coming out here with my family. Lenore and I were in school together.”

  “Did you also know her parents?”

  “Yes. I’ve been to their apartment several times.”

  “Do you think they deserve the treatment they’re getting?”

  “I guess I don’t, really. They’re dreadful stuffed shirts, of course, but I liked them. They mean well.”

  “You would be doing them and Lenore a great favor if you were to tell me where to find her.”

  “Do you think so? Perhaps I would. To be honest, I’ve not been quite easy about what she plans to do. Something about it stinks.”

  “What does she plan to do?”

  For the third time Carol Hadley hesitated, but Miss Withers was now aware of a singing sense of triumph. She had broken through. At last she had managed to penetrate that pliable, passive resistance that had threatened constantly to defeat her.

  “All right,” Carol Hadley said, her decision made and her bridge burning behind her. “I’ll tell you, and if that makes me some kind of traitor, to hell with it. I don’t mind admitting that it will be a relief. Lenore’s going on a cruise to the Far East. To India and Japan. On a private yacht, very hush-hush. It’s supposed to be a kind of pilgrimage to the lands of Zen. There are fifteen or twenty of them going, and they’re all chipping in, whatever they can, on expenses. The owner of the yacht calls himself Captain Westering, which sounds phony, and I don’t think he knows much about sailing or navigating or anything like that. The yacht is called Karma, the Hindu word for Fate. Lenore tried to talk me into going along, and I did go down to the waterfront to talk to this Captain Westering about it, but when I saw how things were, I said no, thanks. I was sworn to secrecy, of course, but now I’ve broken my word all to hell, and I don’t care. I’m glad. The yacht is an old one that used to belong to Errol Flynn or John Barrymore or someone like that, and I doubt if it ever gets to the Far East, or even halfway, and what I’m afraid of, to tell the truth, is that it will sink.”

  “I gather from your tense that the yacht is still moored at the waterfront?”

  “Yes. It’s at a commercial dock in the bay, where it’s supposed to be getting fitted out and stowed and provisioned for the voyage. It should have sailed long before now. Lenore called me only yesterday and said they were running into all kinds of problems.”

  “Where is Lenore staying?”

  “On board the yacht. Al
l the passengers are. Most of them, at least.”

  “And where is the dock?”

  And again, for the last time, on the verge of her final revelation, Carol Hadley hesitated beside her burning bridge in the land of the enemy, clearly torn, although too late, between her better judgment and a tenacious personal loyalty. Miss Withers did not make the mistake of trying to prod her in one direction or the other. Wisely, she merely waited.

  “I suppose,” Carol Hadley said, “that I can always comfort myself with the thought that I’ve done the sensible thing like a good little girl, even though I shall have broken my word and shall feel like a louse. Having told you so much already, I may as well tell you the little that’s left …”

  And so it happened that Miss Withers stood at last, at approximately the hour of nine thirty of an April evening thick with fog, on a commercial dock in San Francisco Bay and looked up through fog at the looming rakish bulk of the yacht Karma. She had been delayed in her arrival, in spite of an almost irrational compulsion to hurry, by the compassionate act of stopping at Alioto’s on Fisherman’s Wharf to fill with broiled sea bass an aching cavity between the intestines and diaphragm of Al Fister. Al was now beside her on the dock, stoked and revived, her staunch confederate.

  In her nostrils were the salt-scent of the fog and the odor of crab pots. She could not shake an insidious sense of foreboding, an instinctive apprehension, and she found herself thinking, for no good reason, of the old and evil days of the Barbary Coast, not many miles from where she stood, when marauding, vicious crimps prowled the waterfront dives, and murder was done nightly on the dark docks. Why had she thought of murder? Faint light came from a few portholes of the aging yacht. From somewhere, behind one of the portholes, came the sound of a strummed guitar, a man’s voice singing, other voices raised now and again above the sounds of the strings and the singing. Miss Withers found herself shivering, not solely the effect of the damp fog that seeped through her clothes and laid chill, presumptuous fingers on her flesh.