Puzzle of the Silver Persian

by Stuart Palmer

  “What good would that do?” almost wailed Candida. She drew away, and on an impulse turned and cast letter and envelope into the blazing grate behind her. “There’s been too much trouble and unhappiness already. That’s where anonymous letters belong!”

  “In most cases,” said Miss Withers with a faint sniff, “I should be inclined to agree with you. But right now I should like very much to know who was responsible for sending you that cruel and nasty note.”

  “He would only have denied it,” said Candida.

  “True enough. But Andy Todd is not as deep as a well—nor as wide as a church door, for that matter. It seems to me that a clever young woman could find out, in an hour’s conversation, the truth—if he should happen to know it. My advice to you, young woman, is to try trapping flies with honey instead of vinegar.” Miss Withers showed her interest a little too plainly.

  Candida looked dubious and thoughtful. Then suddenly her eyes narrowed. “You think there’s something more in this than a practical joke! Then—then you don’t believe, as the police do, that Noel was the one who killed Rosemary, and that his suicide was a confession. You think that someone…”

  “I haven’t come to the thinking part yet,” said Hildegarde Withers. “I’m simply wondering.”

  The two women stared at each other for a little while. Candida broke the silence: “I’m wondering too.”

  Miss Withers nodded. “And now, if you’ll excuse my interfering, I suggest that you comb your hair and slip on your prettiest dress and come down and have late luncheon or early tea or whatever it is. I’ll meet you in the lobby—I have an errand to do first.”

  Candida hesitated, but Miss Withers was firm. After winning a reluctant nod from the distraite young woman, the school teacher marched out into the hall. Oddly enough, her errand took her to the desk downstairs in the lobby, and then to a room at the end of the third-floor hall.

  She knocked, receiving no answer, and then knocked again. She was just about to try the knob when a cheerful voice sounded behind her.

  “Hello there!”

  It was Andy Todd himself, wrapped in a heavy flannel bathrobe and with his hair plastered over his eyes. In one hand he bore a towel, and in the other a large bar of hotel soap.

  “Just having a bit of a soak,” Todd continued, giving Miss Withers a chance to compose herself. “Er—won’t you come in and have a drink or something?”

  He was fairly oozing friendliness. Miss Withers saw him holding the door invitingly open. Inside she saw three bottles of Scotch on the bureau, one open.

  “I just came down to ask you,” she improvised, “if you’ve received one of the anonymous letters that are going the rounds.”

  Andy Todd was either amazed or a better actor than Miss Withers had thought him. “What? Why—is the mystery of the American Diplomat still running wild? I thought it was all quiet now. No—I haven’t got any letters, anonymous or otherwise.”

  “Thank you,” Miss Withers told him, preparing to back out of the door. “Sorry to have disturbed you.”

  “Not at all.” Todd brightened. “Say—that Reverson chap and his S.P.C.A. aunt have rooms down the hall. You might try them.”

  “I might,” said Miss Withers. But she stared very intently past the looming young athlete. Beside the bottles of whisky on his bureau was a little heap of letters.

  Todd turned and saw them. “Say! They must have just been brought up, while I was across the hall in the tub. Didn’t expect any yet—but of course, the Bremen and the Île de France did pass us on the way over…”

  “I think you have one letter that didn’t come to London by fast mail,” Miss Withers advised him. She passed out into the hall again, leaving Andy Todd holding in his large wet hands a white envelope. It bore only his name, in a vague round handwriting—and it was bordered with a neatly inked black band.

  “How in blazes did that get here?” Andy Todd inquired very loudly. Miss Withers heard his tenor through the door, which she had softly closed behind her. But she did not see another emotion replace the look of friendliness on his face.

  Miss Withers plodded down the long hall, past the elevator doors with their “Out of Order” placard, and finally descended to the ground floor, where she made the long trek back down the hall and found Candida Noring waiting for her in the foyer.

  At least, it looked like Candida Noring. Except that this vision wore a neat and very feminine fur-trimmed suit, and even a splash of red across the lips. The long ordeal that Candida had gone through was no doubt responsible for the becoming thinness of her cheeks, and the added shadows above her eyes. “Rosemary cast her into the shade,” Miss Withers told herself. “But now she’s opening up her petals a bit. It’s an ill wind…”

  The two women had hardly greeted one another before they were interrupted by a cultured, eager voice. “I say!”

  Behind them was Leslie Reverson, beautifully attired in a soft heather lounge suit. “Thought it was you!”

  He almost stared at Candida. “Hello,” she said coolly. “This seems like Homecoming at college.”

  “What? Right-oh. But I thought—I mean to say, there’s a ripping American cocktail bar here. Won’t you pop in and have one, as old shipmates together and all that rot?” He smiled at Miss Withers. “You too, of course.”

  “I’m sorry—” began that lady. She made an abrupt volte face. “Thank you, we will,” she told the young man. “If I can get an orangeade.”

  It was after hours, but as guests of the hotel the barman could serve them, even to a tall orangeade, for which Leslie Reverson paid—or signed for—the sum of two shillings and six.

  Candida downed a Martini. “Have another, do,” urged Leslie, delighted at playing host. “It goes on my aunt the Honorable Emily’s bill, y’know. Dear lady, she’s upstairs luxuriatin’ in a hot tub, and reading all the back numbers of the Times since we left England.”

  Miss Withers sipped her orangeade and made a polite inquiry as to the health of Tobermory and the bird.

  “Toby’s not here yet,” Reverson chatted on. “But the robin’s not doing so badly. Aunt’s named him Dicon, after King Henry the Eighth or somebody—”

  “Wasn’t it Richard?” Miss Withers interposed.

  “Right you are. Anyway, he’s hopping around in his new cage in grand style, though he won’t sing.”

  Candida suggested that robins or other wild birds rarely were songsters in captivity, and the conversation languished. The three of them received freshly filled glasses from the obliging barman and sank into tremendous leather chairs around a richly carved table with a somewhat unstable top.

  “I feel very wicked and ribald,” observed Miss Withers, taking a deep pull at her orangeade. “So this is London!”

  The girl beside her shared a smiling look with Leslie Reverson. If the two of them had known the mind of the eccentric spinster they might not have smiled so easily.

  “Oh, there’s that Todd fellow,” said Leslie after a moment. Andy Todd was coming down the hall. He paused in the doorway of the American Bar, half nodded at the three of them, and rumbled with his cigarette case.

  “Why don’t you ask him to join us?” suggested Miss Withers mischievously. Reverson brightened, being slightly warm with two gin-and-its.

  “Of course,” he said quickly, “if Miss Noring doesn’t mind.”

  “Call me Candy,” said Miss Noring evenly. “Why should I mind? I’d like it.”

  So it was that a rather ill-at-ease Andy Todd made a fourth in the party, knocking over the table and Miss Withers’ orangeade as he sat down. He ordered a rye and sat brooding over it.

  “Staying in London long?” asked Candida brightly.

  Todd for the first time noticed that there had been something of a transformation in one who had been on shipboard just another girl. After all, Candida Noring’s features were more even than Rosemary’s, though a bit less piquant. And this was a becoming suit that she wore.

  “I’m afraid a coupl
e of days—I hope,” he garbled. “I’m supposed to be up at Oxford now, but the police told me not to leave London until after the inquest. Sorry, I didn’t mean to mention—” Candida’s pale face became a little paler.

  “Never mind, we’re all in the same boat,” Miss Withers comforted the Rhodes scholar.

  The barman collected the glasses somewhat ostentatiously, and Reverson overruled Todd and ordered another round.

  “As long as these are going on my bill,” said a pleasant, brisk voice behind him, “suppose that you count me in?”

  The Honorable Emily was herself again, after an hour in the tub. She only needed one thing to make her perfectly contented, and that was due to happen soon. She polished her eyeglass vigorously.

  Outside the twilight deepened, and the roar of traffic on Trafalgar Square increased. Miss Withers realized how typically American she was in seeing London through the bottom of a cocktail glass.

  The Honorable Emily, amiably conscious that she was in the presence of three strangers to the city that she considered almost her own property, became at once a combined guidebook and char-a-banc lecturer. “You simply must see the changing of the guard tomorrow morning,” she said. “And tonight—you ought to have your first view of London night life at the right place. Not a night club or a variety show.”

  Leslie Reverson nodded. “Dinner at Lyons Corner House and an educational cinema,” he whispered to Candida. He had had bitter experience of his aunt’s ideas of a gay London evening.

  “After all, there’s no place like London,” the Honorable Emily continued.

  “Then why do you always insist on dragging me back to Cornwall?” demanded Leslie. “If it wasn’t for this bloody inquest…”

  Miss Withers sat watching them, filled with a premonition that fate had brought them all together with some definite purpose in view. She saw Andy Todd, ill at ease and trying to cover it with too many ryes. She saw Leslie Reverson, for the first time making a definite protest at his aunt’s calm management of his life, and waxing bolder and bolder under the calm gaze of Candida. It was the girl, rather than Reverson’s drinks, who was making him become somehow older, more a man than a boy.

  Miss Withers purposely engaged the Honorable Emily in a discussion of the relative merits of the Victoria and Albert and the British museums. The three younger persons drew a little apart.

  “Say,” began Andy Todd, in his high tenor voice. But as Candida turned toward him, Reverson spoke quickly in her ear.

  “Wouldn’t you let me take you to the Trocadero or somewhere this evening?”

  “That’s what I was going to say!” Andy Todd objected. The two young men glared at each other.

  There never was a woman who disliked such a scene. Candida by this time had quite lost her hunted look. She smiled happily. “Then why don’t you both take me?”

  “Say—” began Todd again. “That’s not so good.”

  “I’ve got a better one than that,” said Reverson. “Let’s leave it to chance.” He produced an American quarter from his pocket. “Heads you have the honor, and tails Miss Noring—”

  “Candy, please,” said Candida.

  “And if it’s tails, Candy goes with me. Bargain?”

  “Sure,” said Todd. Reverson sent the coin spinning in the air and caught it neatly on his wrist. He showed it, in obvious triumph, to them both. “Tails!”

  Andy Todd looked like a small boy who has been told that he may not go to the circus. “But I wanted to talk to you,” he began to protest to Candida. “I wanted to explain about what happened on the boat…”

  Miss Withers was staring over the Honorable Emily’s shoulder and was surprised to see Candida, with a motherly tact which the school teacher had never imagined she possessed, lean towards Todd and touch his lapel. There were understanding and forgiveness in that touch, and in the smile with which she whispered something in his ear that made Andy Todd brighten. He had instantly regained, Miss Withers thought, his air of having swallowed the canary. Buoyed up by some inner secret, he mumbled a farewell to them all and swaggered down the hall.

  “Nasty bounder,” was the murmured verdict of the Honorable Emily.

  “If I’m going out to dinner with you I shall have to get a gown pressed,” Candida told Leslie. “I’ll rush and dress, and meet you here in an hour.”

  The others rose also, and Reverson gave the barman what he thought was a shilling. Miss Withers, who was last to go, saw the man scrutinize it and grin. Leslie took it back, replacing it with another coin, but not before the school teacher had noticed that the quarter dollar bore, surprisingly, the American eagle on both sides.

  She nodded to herself. Evidently Leslie Reverson had seen something at the Chicago Fair besides the fan dancer and the Hall of Science.

  He hurried on ahead to dress and left his aunt and Miss Withers to stroll together down the long red carpet of the hall. The Honorable Emily suddenly clutched Miss Withers’ elbow.

  “Wasn’t there something you wanted to ask me on board ship?”

  The school teacher, who had been trying to lead up to an opening during the last half hour, took the plunge.

  “There was,” she admitted. Then she felt like hedging. “Oh, I know it isn’t any of my business. Don’t mind me, I’m just a self-appointed busybody. But I’m not as satisfied as the police seem to be with the murder-suicide theory about those deaths on board. And I can’t help wondering…”

  “Quite right, too,” said the Honorable Emily. She looked at her wrist watch. “Can you come up to my room for a few minutes? I might have something to show you.”

  They crossed the foyer and proceeded silently down the long hall, past the out of order elevators, and finally were lifted to the third floor. The Honorable Emily had a room facing the street, of the same general design as Candida’s. Miss Withers took a chair near the blazing hearth, near where a bright new cage dangled containing the somewhat bedraggled form of the robin. Dicon showed no inclination to sing, and his manner showed very clearly that he still expected to be eaten at any moment.

  “Poor Dicon-bird,” said the Honorable Emily comfortingly. Then to her guest: “I had to smuggle him off the boat wrapped in a handkerchief in my pocket. We have a strict quarantine on incoming livestock, you see…”

  Miss Withers felt ill at ease. “I came up here to find out why you bribed the stewardess,” she said softly.

  Something flickered unpleasantly behind the monocle of the Englishwoman. Then she smiled, very warmly indeed.

  “I was about to say—”

  At that moment there came a knock on the door. The Honorable Emily answered it and admitted a solid person in a ratty fur coat, who turned out to be Mrs. Snoaks, stewardess of the American Diplomat. In one hand she bore a case of imitation leather. Miss Withers stared blankly at both stewardess and case. The woman set it down with a defiant “Here ’e is, the howling brute,” and fled.

  The Honorable Emily was on her knees, fumbling with the catch. The case opened, and Tobermory emerged as if shot from a gun. As his mistress tried to clasp him to her bosom he slashed in the general direction of her hand with a vicious uppercut, and leaped to the bed, from which vantage point he proceeded to stare fixedly at the caged bird. Tobermory was not a cat who easily forgot.

  “You see?” said the Honorable Emily.

  Miss Withers did not see.

  “Tobermory is a home-loving cat,” explained the Englishwoman. “He is dying to get back to my place in Cornwall, where he has a whole island to himself. He’d have died of boredom if I’d put him in quarantine for six months, as the law insists. He was too large to go in my coat pocket, so I paid the stewardess four quid to smuggle him off the ship for me. Members of the crew of a ship that docks here regularly every four weeks never have to worry over Customs.”

  Miss Withers made a note of that. She felt that she had made a fool of herself. “I see,” she said. “Please understand that I didn’t…”

  “Of course not.” Th
e Honorable Emily was fairly purring now. “No offense meant, none taken, I always say. By the way, don’t feel that you must rush off. I’m all alone tonight, since my nephew has taken it into his silly head to turn Lothario. Though I suppose it’s only natural at his age. He’s twenty, and I can’t keep him in an Eton collar forever. But if you’d care to join me in dinner at the Corner House and a movie afterward?”

  Miss Withers was still too conscious of the fact that she had made a mountain out of a molehill. She declined, pleading a headache, a previous engagement, letters to write, or some similar excuse, and edged toward the door. She glanced down at the leatherette case as she passed it, noticing the lining of newspapers and silver cat-hairs.

  The Honorable Emily shoved the case beneath her bed. “Poor Toby does hate it so!” she said. Some inner amusement showed itself in her face. “Do drop in again if you have any more questions,” she finished quite cordially.

  Miss Withers was back in her own room again before it occurred to her that there very well might have been something besides newspaper and silver cat-hairs in the bottom of that imitation leather case. And then, of course, it was too late.

  She had dinner brought to her room, and spent most of the evening in making meaningless little marks upon a sheet of notepaper. Once or twice she was very nearly at the point of sending a cablegram to her old friend Oscar Piper, inspector of the New York homicide squad, but she resolutely thought better of it.

  At nine o’clock the maid entered, rattled at the fire, and turned back the bed. Miss Withers admitted, upon being pressed, that she would like to be called at ten o’clock in the morning.

  The hotel, quiet enough at any hour, gradually took on the stillness of the grave as the few other guests retired. Yet Miss Withers could not bring herself to go to bed.

  Somehow she felt in her bones that the events of the day had not been brought to a close. She left her door ajar, and shortly after eleven she heard voices in the hall. Peering out, she saw Candida Noring, chaste and resplendent in a white dinner gown, silhouetted against the dark of Leslie Reverson. Their soft laughter chimed in oddly with the trend of Miss Withers’ thoughts, and she drew quickly back. But they did not notice her. After a moment she heard the door close, and peering forth again saw Reverson, walking very proudly erect, as he departed in the direction of the only working elevator.