Four Lost Ladies (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

  Peter Temple, favorite in the Mr. Nemo stakes, was presumably headed for the theater, as Jeeps reported that she had seen the man, in full tails and white tie, go through the lobby and out into a taxi.

  In her handbag Miss Withers carried a pencil-sized flashlight, and a ring of keys—the last item representing the greatest triumph of all. In her travels around the hotel she had noticed that the housekeepers and floor-maids when doing up a suite of rooms usually left a ring of keys stuck in the lock of the half-open door. So tonight it had only been a matter of cruising up and down the halls until they found a linen-cart parked outside an open door, which meant that some guest had made a late departure and that the stand-by housekeeper was readying the rooms again. All that was required was a brief pause to make sure that the women were working out of sight in the bedroom, a touch of nimble footwork and light fingers, and a triumphant departure with the keys.

  Jeeps looked at Miss Withers with a new respect. “You’re rather good at this sort of thing,” she said. “Lucky for society you lined up with law and order.”

  There were a dozen keys on the ring, but the first one opened the door of 12C30. “A good omen,” Miss Withers whispered, as she handed the ring back to Jeeps. “Now you scoot and replace these before they’re missed.”

  “But I want to—”

  “Never mind. You’re the lookout. Sit yourself down with a magazine in one of the chairs in the little foyer by the elevators, right by the house phone. If Peter Temple comes back, or if one of the house detectives ambles by, grab the phone and ring this room. That will give me a chance to get out—I hope.”

  “And what if you don’t?”

  “Then it’s every man for himself and devil take the hindmost. You slip out of the hotel and grab the first train for Bagley’s Mills. Hurry, now.”

  So it was that Miss Withers entered the lair of the tiger. Her memories of the place were always to be somewhat vague and confused, perhaps because she dared not turn on the lights and had to depend on the tiny flash. She retained an impression of a room filled with dozens of photographs, mostly of Temple himself, whose eyes seemed to follow her. Even the walls had been papered with old three-sheets advertising bygone films—all around the room Peter Temple marched across the sand dunes with the French Foreign Legion, rode horseback into the Arctic with the Mounties, and crossed rapiers with Richelieu’s hired assassins. Here and there were signs of past or present affluence; the big portable bar in the corner was well stocked, and there was a mammoth phonograph-television set between the windows. The only lethal weapons were a pair of crossed sabers above the fake fireplace, but the blades showed no more signs of actual use than did the polo mallets and pith helmet casually standing in the entrance.

  It isn’t a room, it’s a stage set, Miss Withers decided, and went on into the bedroom. It was very like her own upstairs, except that in place of twin beds there was an oversized double. Two fat trunks stood against the far wall, and there was a desk loaded with bundles of letters in feminine handwriting. She pounced eagerly, but they turned out to be mash-notes, written in purple adolescent prose. One began My shiek! Several held snapshots of young pretty girls with hair bundled oddly around their ears, bathing-suits running to skirt and flounce, dresses which hung straight from shoulder to knee, making them look like something drawn by a cartoonist of yesterday—was it John Held Jr.?

  Miss Withers blinked, and then looked at the envelopes. The stamps were the wrong color. Then she saw that the most recently mailed letter had been postmarked May 4th, 1929.

  One look told the schoolteacher that the trunks were full of scrapbooks, of interest only to Peter Temple or possibly his mother. The desk drawers were a magpie’s nest of old bills, canceled checks, cigarette lighters that didn’t work, and similar trinkets. In one, pushed far to the rear, was a little box containing a small-sized ring cut of some dull green stone and bearing the initials C.L.A. Miss Withers caught her breath. Could that A just possibly stand for Atkins, which was one of the four names engraved on her memory?

  There were pictures of Peter Temple here too, on desk and bureau, one or two showing him as he was today. She more or less expected to find more in the gleaming black bathroom, but here she drew almost an absolute blank. Not only were there no pictures, there were no little boxes or bottles with a druggist’s label which might suggest where Temple went when he was out of town. Only the usual shaving materials, a toothbrush which told her that the man wore store-teeth, a bottle of aspirin, and a tiny mascara brush with which presumably he darkened that tiny mustache.

  She came back into the bedroom again, pausing uncertainly. There must be something that she had overlooked.

  Then a key clicked in the outer door. Conquering an impulse to scream, she whipped instantly into the nearest closet, working her way far back among the masculine suits and coats, and breathing a compound of cleaning fumes and tobacco and dust. She waited there, trembling, for a long time.

  Someone was moving around in the parlor, someone with a heavy male tread. She racked her brains trying to think why Peter Temple could have left the theater in the middle of the second act to rush back home. Of course he might have forgotten something. But why hadn’t Jeeps sounded the alarm? Unless the switchboard, with the satanic malignity of all inanimate objects, had chosen this moment to jam itself up with calls.

  Miss Withers heard the bedroom door open, and the click of the light. She squeezed herself still farther back into the recesses of the closet, trying to look as much as possible like an old overcoat.

  There was an eternity of suspense, and then the light snapped out again, the door closed. She waited, and then there was the wonderful relief of hearing the outer door slam. The schoolteacher uncrossed her fingers and came out of the closet. My guardian angel must be working full time, she told herself.

  Then the phone rang. “Now she tells me!” Miss Withers said, and continued picking her way out of the place. She was following the feeble beam of her flash across the parlor, three or four steps from the hall door and safety when the lights came on. She whirled in shocked surprise to face the muzzle of a very nasty-looking pistol held casually in the hand of a man who only a day or so ago she had thought too diffident even to speak to her. Now, through the amber lenses, his eyes were cold and ophidian.

  “What’s your hurry, sister?” he said, and his voice was like old sandpaper. “You’ve been where you’re going.”

  “He who lies down with dogs gets up with fleas.”

  —Mexican proverb

  6

  FOR ALL THE STUDIED INFORMALITY OF the evening conference, the open boxes of cigars, and the comfortable leather chairs grouped around the table, the air in the Commissioner’s office snapped with tension. The Old Man himself blew a fat smoke ring, sent another deftly through it, and said, “Of course, we won’t make a final decision without considering all your objections.”

  Of which the Inspector had a complete set.

  “Look at it this way,” put in Kiley. The new assistant-commissioner was a blue-blood, still retaining a good deal of Harvard Law School and of Harvard accent, and Oscar Piper hated him cordially. “You’ve been a bureau chief for a good many years. It’s a grueling job on Homicide, with lots of night work.”

  “I’m not complaining. Is anybody else?”

  The Old Man answered that. “No! But none of us is as young as we used to be. It’s about time you thought about taking it easy. This new job that Mr. Kiley has created seems tailored just to fit. You’ll have nominal authority over—”

  Piper muttered something impolite and unprintable.

  “You’ll have to admit that times are changing,” Kiley went on.

  “Murder hasn’t changed,” the Inspector said. “Not since Cain.”

  The Old Man coughed, and Kiley smiled with his thin lips only. “Yes, yes, of course. Let’s see, how long have you got to go for retirement, Inspector?”

  As if he didn’t know, with the papers there in front of him.
“Four years and three months,” said Piper. “And if you think I want to waste it sitting around doing administrative work, signing my initials to other men’s reports—”

  A chief inspector at the other end of the table said, “But it isn’t a demotion, Oscar. And the time has come when we have to think of streamlining the Department.”

  It was Oscar Piper’s private opinion that there had been too damn much streamlining of things already in this world we live in, but before he could say so he was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. Dan Kiley, nearest the desk, picked it up. He listened for some time, and then turned toward the Inspector. “It’s your office,” he announced, in a cool, amused tone. “Sergeant Smith says that he hates to interrupt, but there’s a certain protégé of yours, whom he doesn’t need to mention by name, who’s been held up at Lexington Avenue station under the alias of Josephine Goggins. The charge will be prowling rooms in the Hotel Grandee, illegal entry, and larceny. She’s on the other phone, he says, and she wants to be sprung right away.”

  The Inspector almost tore the phone from Kiley’s hand.

  “Smitty?” he roared. “Just forget it!”

  “You don’t want me to—”

  “No!”

  “But what’ll I tell her?”

  “Tell her I’m out of town!” Piper crashed down the instrument in its cradle and stalked back to his chair, ears and neck flaming. “Sorry. Where were we?”

  “I was speaking of the possible advantages of new blood in the Homicide Bureau,” Kiley went on. “Speaking of methods, Inspector, it’s been brought to my attention that sometimes in the past you’ve shown an inability to keep amateur busybodies out from underfoot. Of course, results are all that count in investigation work, but all the same we ought to get those results without outside help or hindrance. Now from what I’ve seen on my comparatively brief tour of duty down here—”

  The Old Man coughed. “All right, Mr. Kiley. I think we’d better leave this up in the air until tomorrow. Maybe when the Inspector here sleeps on the idea he’ll come around to our way of thinking.”

  “That’ll be the day the bands play Rule Brittania for the St. Patrick’s Day parade,” said Inspector Oscar Piper, but he said it to the revolving doors as he came bursting out of the Municipal Building. He was so hot under the collar that he walked uptown all the way home, arriving there still sore as a boil and with aching legs and feet. He was not by nature a vindictive man, but he couldn’t help feeling that it was high time that Hildegarde had a much-needed lesson. Exposed all night in the station-house tank to the screams of alcoholics and hopheads and to the raucous jibes of water-front Magdalenes, the schoolteacher might once and for all get a bellyful.

  Such was his mood that the Inspector hunted around the place until he found a fifth of rye still in its Christmas wrappings, poured out a stiff four fingers into a tall glass, and filled it up with lemon juice, a dash of sugar and hot water. Then he went to bed with the toddy and Gulliver, getting little enough comfort from either.

  Meanwhile, over on Park Avenue where the tower of the Grandee shoots its light-riddled bulk up into the sky, a girl in a trench-coat and a young man in a tight brass-buttoned jacket were sitting close together on the steps of a service stair. Tad Belanger, being a stubborn young man, was deeply involved in an argument. Jeeps Davidson, being a reasonable and clear-sighted young woman, saw no use whatever in prolonging the discussion, as she had long ago made up her mind that he was going to give in anyway.

  “All I want to know,” he repeated doggedly, “is this. What’s it all about? What was she doing in his rooms, and how did she get there?”

  “That’s beside the point. Are you going to do what I ask, or not?”

  “You’re only a woman,” Tad said.

  “So I’m a woman? Is that bad?”

  “You don’t understand these things. It—it’s a matter of echelon. If you’d been in the Army, God forbid, you’d see that it’s like telling a corporal to walk in on the colonel and ask the old boy how the battle maneuvers went today.”

  Jeeps leaned a little closer. “There’s a way you could get by with it. You’d have to pretend that you came to bring information, not to get it.” And she explained. Then she leaned toward him, so that their mouths almost but not quite touched, and she blew her warm breath in his ear and flicked her eyelashes shamelessly against his cheek.

  Tad leaped away, as from a hot stove. “Jeepers, Jeeps!” Then he drew a deep breath. “All right, all right! Don’t cry, little girl. I’ll buy your damn violets. But to think that you’re the type of woman who has to resort to mere physical appeal—”

  He shook his head and departed. Jeeps happily held up thumb and forefinger in a good-luck gesture. Then her eyes widened. “What do you mean, ‘mere’?”

  Tad Belanger went briskly down to the mezzanine floor and then walked to the extreme end of a long hallway, pausing at last before a door whose panels were bare of any identifying mark. He hitched up his pants, sucked in his stomach, and then knocked. Almost immediately there was a clicking sound as the lock was released, and he went in wishing fervently that he was someplace else.

  It was one of the Grandee’s regular two room-and-bath suites, except that what should have been the living-room had been fitted up with plain oak office furniture and metal filing-cabinets. Through an open door could be seen the bedroom, fitted out as bachelor living-quarters. All the lights were blazing.

  There was a big flat-topped desk in the middle of the room, now piled high with books, pamphlets, catalogues, two telephones, and a sign reading Max F. Brady, Chief of Security. Behind the desk, reading a flower catalogue without his glasses, sat a stocky, well-fed man somewhere on the sunny side of fifty, wearing boiled shirt, black tie, and suspenders. His tuxedo jacket hung neatly on the back of a chair within easy reach, but he stopped going through the motions of putting it on when he saw who his visitor was.

  “I didn’t ring,” Brady said, without any expression at all.

  Tad was standing more or less at attention. “I know, sir. But I wanted to see you about the trouble we had on the twelfth floor tonight.”

  The older man put down the catalogue, which was open to a page filled with color photographs of incredible giant asters and zinnias. He wasn’t exactly frowning, but his features leaned a little in that direction. “Just how did you happen to know about the incident, Belanger? It is Belanger, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Mr. Brady.” Tad swallowed. “You know how rumors get around in a big hotel.”

  “I do indeed. Go on.”

  “I heard about it only a few minutes ago, from one of the boys. And I thought there was something you ought to know—something that may have a bearing on the case.”

  “Couldn’t you have reported it to your bell-captain?”

  “Ordinarily I would, Mr. Brady. But I thought this was something you ought to know first-hand.”

  “You thought, did you? Since when have bellboys been thinking? Oh, yes. You’re one of those G.I. on-the-job trainees, sweating it out for assistant-manager. Well, Belanger, I’m listening.”

  The man spoke with that patronizing, Olympian condescension that some adults use with small children, but Tad bit his lip and went bravely on. “It was Mrs. Goggins in 19A22 who got arrested, wasn’t it? Well, I’ve been suspicious of her and her maid since they checked in last week. They’re both as phony as a three-dollar bill.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “When they arrived the maid was laying it on thick with a stage French accent—the oo-la-la, oui-madame stuff. The next day she was talking like anybody else. And she bunked in a twin bed right in the room with her mistress, and ate off the same tray. That didn’t look kosher to me.”

  “Sit down, Belanger.” Brady waved his hand toward a chair. “Go on.”

  “So I took Gigi—that’s what she calls herself—to the movies the other night. I was off duty, and I thought I might find out something. Anyway, I learned that she�
��d never been in France in her life. She claimed to come from Los Angeles, but she didn’t know the Hollywood Bowl from the La Brea tar pits.”

  “Neither do I,” Brady admitted. “But I gather there’s a difference.” He nodded slowly. “Yes, we should have picked ’em both up. That must have been the maid, then, who was hanging around the elevators on the twelfth floor, while the Goggins woman was in Temple’s rooms. Is this Gigi a kind of pert, kittenish jailbait, blond and running to legs?”

  “Yessir,” Tad admitted slowly. “You might describe her that way.”

  Brady rubbed his chin. “Playing lookout, of course. Only she didn’t figure me—she was looking for somebody a little more on the house-dick type.”

  “They weren’t professionals, were they, sir? I figured the old girl was just a harmless nut of some kind.”

  Brady seemed to think that was funny. “Harmless! That Goggins woman has been making a nuisance of herself around the hotel ever since she arrived. Man-crazy, I guess. But now she’s going up the river for a long stretch on a larceny rap. Look here.” He took a brown envelope out of his desk drawer, opened it, and showed Tad a ring of green stone and a small framed picture. “Here’s what she was trying to get away with, out of Peter Temple’s bedroom. A solid-gold picture frame and a jade ring worth several hundred dollars.”

  “But the initials are C.L.A.,” Tad said, puzzled.

  “Caspar L. Augspieler is Temple’s real name, though naturally he doesn’t want it known.” Brady put the exhibits away again. “When he comes home tonight I’ll have him identify this stuff, and then it goes to the District Attorney’s office.”

  “Oh,” said Tad a little flatly. He started to rise.

  But the older man held up his hand. “One of the most important things about running a big hotel successfully is to be able to judge people, and to spot the wrong kind of guests. I used to be on the detective division over in Jersey City—fourteen years in plain clothes—and that’s why when this hotel opened last spring I was offered the job of second assistant-manager, in charge of security. You’ve shown that you’re on your toes, Belanger. I guess you won’t be hopping bells much longer.”