Four Lost Ladies (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Brady looked at him critically. “You’re not a bad-looking kid. Just the type that a little twirp like this Gigi might fall for. If you run into her again, work on her. Find out where she lives, or spot her in a bar or restaurant, and phone me. I’ll have her picked up. I want this hotel to have the reputation of being poison for people like that, see?”

  “I—I guess so.”

  “Especially women. Eighty percent of the trouble in hotels is caused by women on the loose.”

  “You sound like a woman-hater, sir.”

  Brady shrugged. “Always been too busy. When I’m not working, I have a little farm down in Hunterdon County that keeps me busy. Week-ends this summer I’m going to dig up the pasture acreage with a tractor and then re-seed with this new ladino grass. …”

  It was twenty minutes later when Tad finally managed to break away. He stopped outside the door to mop his brow and to think. Then he went slowly back to the landing on the service stair, where Jeeps Davidson was waiting. She looked extremely small, cold, sleepy, and despondent.

  “I found out for you,” he told her abruptly. “The charge is burglary and/or grand larceny.”

  Jeeps shook her head. “That’s silly!”

  “Wait and see how silly it is. They’re going to send your friend Mrs. Goggins up to Auburn and throw the key away. And that’s not all. Somehow Brady’s got the idea that you’re in it too. He wants me to keep an eye out for you, so you can get arrested and be sent up with her as an accessory.”

  “Well, I was!” Jeeps cried. “But I didn’t dream they had mirrors set in the halls so they could spy on people. And I thought Mr. Brady was a guest because he always went around with a hat and coat on, so I didn’t sound the alarm until I saw two of his underlings coming out of the elevator, and by then it was too late.”

  “You actually admit you played lookout?” Tad’s face was pale.

  She nodded. “Of course. But wait until you hear why—”

  “I’ve heard plenty. I wouldn’t believe you if you said it was snowing. I know I shouldn’t do this, but I can’t help it. I’m going to give you ten minutes head start to get out of this place, because I haven’t the heart to see a pretty brat like you go to prison.”

  “Tad!” Jeeps came closer, smiling, a faint, sad smile. “Thank you, darling. Why couldn’t I have met you earlier, before it was too late? But try not to think harshly of me. I got into the mob when I was but a child, and now it’s too late to turn back. It’s best that you forget me.” And she kissed him.

  “Jeeps! Gigi—Alice—or whatever your name is—” he began, when he could talk. “Where’ll you go? Have you got any money? I—”

  “There’s an underworld hideout at 32 West Seventy-Fourth Street, second floor, rear,” she said out of the corner of her mouth. “Come up and see me sometime—knock three times and ask for Gentle Alice.” Then Jeeps kicked him hard on the shin and turned and ran down the stair.

  It was broad daylight when Inspector Oscar Piper awoke next morning. He arose still groggy with sleep, bathed sketchily, cut himself twice while shaving, and burned his breakfast toast. Even so, he lingered long over his coffee. So what if for once he was half an hour late? Maybe they’d find out down at Centre Street how balled up Homicide could get without him.

  Then he heard the downstairs door open, and the slow lumbering tread of his housekeeper, the doddering Mrs. McFeeters. She never arrived until ten-thirty or so. He looked at his watch, which still said five to nine. It was consistent anyway, because that was the way the hands had pointed when he got up.

  “Run down,” he said. “Sweet Judas on a trapeze!” he cried suddenly, remembering where Hildegarde Withers had spent the night. By this time the hearing would be over and done with, and the poor old girl would be on her way to Women’s Detention downtown, held over for trial in Magistrate’s Court.

  Seizing hat and coat, he ran out into the street and hailed a taxi. This was a more stringent object lesson than he had had in mind. His quick Irish rage had died in him overnight, and he felt sheepish and guilty as he ran up the steps of the Lexington Avenue station.

  “You got a Hildegarde Withers in the lock-up?” he demanded of the uniformed man at the desk.

  “No, Inspector.”

  “Well, then—a Mrs. Goggins?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “Down to Detention?”

  “Sprung.”

  Piper blinked. “By who?”

  “Don’t know, sir. Before I came on duty. Had to turn her loose—nobody showed up to make a complaint. The night wardress was sure sorry to see her go. Calmest evening in months. Before that woman was in the tank half an hour she had all those dames singing songs—Moonlight Bay and Rose of Washington Square, old corny stuff like that. She said it was a sight you’d never forget to see those old floozies singing away with the tears pouring down their faces.”

  “I bet!” The Inspector picked up the desk phone, got an outside line, and dialed a number. The “Hello?” at the other end of the line was in all-too-familiar accents. He instantly hung up. Then he called his own office. “Smitty? any calls for me?”

  “Not a thing, Inspector. All quiet on the western front.”

  “Oh,” said Piper. “That’s good—I guess.”

  “You taking the day off, sir?”

  “I’m thinking,” said Inspector Oscar Piper fervently, “of taking off in a rocket ship for Mars or someplace, with a one-way ticket.” He hung up, and went out into the street. On the subway he found an early edition of an afternoon paper conveniently abandoned on the seat, and while browsing idly through it he came on an item that he re-read three times:

  MOVIE FAN HAS LONGEST MEMORY

  “This is just like old times,” said Peter Temple, once-famous star of the silents, when he learned last night that a feminine admirer had bribed a maid to let her into his suite at the exclusive Hotel Grandee and had been caught by hotel employees attempting to carry away a photograph of him as well as other souvenirs.

  The woman, who gave her name as Josephine Moggins, 48, was held by police, but Temple gallantly refused to press charges. “I’ll even send her an autographed photo of myself,” said the still-handsome movie idol of yesteryear, “for reminding me of the good old days when at my premieres whole mobs of women used to drag me out of my Stutz Bearcat and carry me through the streets on their shoulders.” Temple is now making a comeback by way of personal appearances and television. His last motion picture was The Tattooed Duchess with Bebe Daniels, released to the public in 1926.

  A few minutes later, the clipping in his hand, the Inspector climbed the stairs of a remodeled brownstone on West 74th Street. After a slight pause to regain his breath, he rang the bell. It was opened by Jeeps Davidson, who stared at him blankly.

  “Is she in?” he asked diffidently, somewhat like a small boy who has been told by his teacher to report at once to the principal’s office.

  “Why, yes,” Jeeps answered. “But I’m afraid you can’t see her, Inspector.”

  “Okay, okay. If she wants to take it that way, I’ll run along.”

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort!” came a clarion call from somewhere in the depths of the little apartment. “Oscar Piper, you come in and take your medicine! I’ll deal with you as soon as I’ve washed the smell of that awful police station off myself, and done something about my hair. I won’t be long.”

  “Don’t hurry,” he said quietly. “I’ve got no place to go. Thanks to your SOS last night, I’m finally being kicked off my job anyway. Your phone call went over big in the Commissioner’s office last night when it was relayed to me out loud in front of everybody.”

  “What?” There was the sound of hurrying feet, and then an apparition in the doorway. Miss Withers was a pale, shocked ghost wrapped in a shapeless bathrobe, her hair dripping wet and colored in incredible streaks of brown, gray, and orange. “Oscar Piper, that isn’t true!”

  “’Fraid it is.
The new assistant-commissioner thinks that they need a younger man in charge of Homicide—somebody who can keep amateur busybodies out from underfoot and get results without outside help or hindrance.”

  Even Jeeps looked sympathetic, and Miss Withers shook her head wonderingly. “They are actually demoting you, after all these years?”

  “It amounts to that,” Piper said bitterly. “I’m to be kicked upstairs to a meaningless office job over with the Commissioner. Oh, they’ll call me Acting Chief-Inspector, and I’ll nominally be supervising three bureaus—vice, gambling, and narcotics. You know what they say about policemen assigned to vice, don’t you? They retire in a few years with a couple of safety-deposit boxes crammed full of dirty money, and their fellow cops don’t speak to them on the street.”

  “Oh, dear!” moaned Miss Hildegarde Withers. “No wonder you left me to rot in durance vile all night! And to think that I’ve caused all this trouble for everybody and accomplished absolutely nothing! It seemed such a good idea at the time, didn’t it, Jeeps?”

  The girl nodded sadly. “We were so sure it was Temple, because of his going away on those trips. But it seems he was only doing personal appearances in out-of-town night clubs and cafés.”

  “Wait a minute,” put in the Inspector. “Would somebody mind telling me what this was all about? What in the blue bloody blazes were you trying to accomplish with this impersonation act over in the hotel?”

  And so Miss Withers reluctantly gave him a brief and breathless version of their valiant attempt to beard the tiger in his lair, of how they had hoped to smoke out the mysterious murderer they called Mr. Nemo for lack of any other name, and of what a fiasco it had been from start to finish. “I was playing a hunch,” she admitted. “But, Oscar, I felt it in my bones that someone had been hanging around the Grandee and picking up those poor, lonely, unfortunate women and then somehow doing away with them. I certainly gave him every opportunity, but he just wouldn’t pick me up!”

  The Inspector was grinning in spite of himself. “It’s just like the limerick about the old maid from St. Paul who went to a birth-control ball—”

  “Oscar!”

  “Okay, okay. Well, anyway, I hope you’ve learned your lesson. Never mind how your foolishness has affected me and my career. I guess I’ll survive somehow. But for your own sake—”

  “I know, I know,” she cried contritely. “Oscar, I swear that never again as long as I live will I meddle in what doesn’t concern me!”

  He was edging toward the door. “I hope you mean it this time.”

  “But I do! And now please run along, Oscar. I want to finish my bath, and then Jeeps has promised to see what she can do about my hair.”

  The worn and weary schoolma’am had just settled herself down in the tub of warm water again when she heard a ring at the door. There were excited voices in the living-room and then Jeeps cried out, “Oh, Tad! How super-wonderful! Come quick, we’ve got to tell her!”

  “No!” commanded Miss Withers. “Is nothing sacred?” But she climbed out again, and wrapped herself in the bathrobe. “What now?” she demanded, as she poked her head into the living-room.

  “Listen to what Tad’s discovered!” Jeeps sang out. The boy, in hat and overcoat which covered his uniform, looked older, more serious.

  “I don’t think I can stand anything more,” said the schoolteacher. “Besides, I promised the Inspector—”

  “Please listen! Tad’s in it too, now. Because after I kicked him in the shins and ran away last night he caught me and made me tell. I mean about who you really are and what we were trying to find out!”

  “Go away, young man,” said Miss Withers dully. “The whole thing is a dismal failure anyway.”

  “But that’s just the point,” Tad Belanger said. “It isn’t a failure. That’s what I rushed over to tell you, Mrs. Goggins—I mean Miss Withers. After Jeeps gave me the fill-in last night, I got to thinking. I mean, thinking about what I’d do if I was your Mr. Nemo, hanging around the Grandee like a vulture waiting to pounce. I wouldn’t take any chances. So anyway, I remembered that I know this girl—”

  “You Turk!” Jeeps put in.

  “I mean, used to know her—anyway, she’s a Tau Omega. That’s what we call telephone operators, and they’re most of them a sharp bunch of cookies. I got in touch with her this morning early—she’s a long-lines operator, and has easy access to the telephone company records. She just called me back and gave me all the dope. Miss Withers, would it interest you to know that on Sunday evening, the same week you checked into the hotel, somebody put through a long-distance call from the Grandee to La Porte, Indiana? It was a person-to-person call to Mrs. Josie Goggins, the real Mrs. Goggins, and when the operator finally located her and had her on the line, the caller only said, ‘Thanks,’ and hung up!”

  “But—but from what room?” Miss Withers demanded. “Who was it?”

  “A man,” Tad said. “Just a man—from a pay-phone booth in the lobby.”

  There was a moment of utter silence. “Oh, my prophetic soul!” whispered Miss Withers. “Then there is a Mr. Nemo, just as I thought!”

  “Only he was smart enough,” Jeeps added, “to check up before he grabbed the bait!”

  “And,” the schoolteacher wailed, “while I’ve been masquerading around the hotel, he’s been watching and laughing!” She wearily pushed a damp lock of varicolored hair back from her forehead. “Oh, dear! I seem to have made the cardinal mistake of underestimating an opponent.”

  “Me, I think you’re lucky,” Tad told her. “To be alive. I don’t think Mr. Nemo is laughing. I think he’s covering up and shaking in his boots, because he knows that someone is sniffing around. Well, I’ve got to get back—I’m supposed to be on duty.” He turned toward Jeeps. “Doing anything tonight?”

  “Anything!” she said, invitingly.

  “Oh, wait!” put in Miss Withers. “Mr. Belanger, what will they do with the luggage and clothes I left at the hotel? I wouldn’t dare show my face over there.”

  He hesitated. “Your bill isn’t paid, is it? Well, then—according to the law, the police property custodian sends somebody to pack everything in the suitcases, seal ’em, and hold the lot for six months. Then it’s auctioned off at a public sale, sight-unseen.”

  “Oh, dear! And most of the stuff was rented!”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he promised her, and clattered down the stairs.

  “Like him?” Miss Withers asked Jeeps.

  “I don’t know. He certainly needs a lesson, he’s so sure of himself.”

  “Hmm,” said the schoolteacher. “Now I understand why you resist so violently when I try to send you back to Bagley’s Mills, and why you’re talking about trying to get a job here in the city. You just want to give him a much-needed lesson.”

  “Yes,” Jeeps admitted.

  There was another ring at the doorbell. “Whoever it is, whatever it is, I’m taking a bath and cannot be disturbed!” announced Miss Withers, as she fled.

  She was luxuriating in the tub again when there came a soft knock on the door of the bathroom. “Go away!” she cried.

  But Jeeps poked in her head. “It’s a man from the kennel,” she said. “He wants to deliver a dog, and he also wants forty-six dollars.”

  “Good heavens!” Miss Withers moaned. “It must be Ethel Brinker’s abandoned pet poodle. Whatever led me to say over the phone that I was her sister, and give my right address? Well, tell him to go off about his business.”

  “But—”

  “But me no buts,” ordered the schoolteacher. “Child, I’ve had about all I can stand for one day.” She climbed out of the tub and started to dry herself. Then to her utter consternation the bathroom door was rudely shoved open again and in romped a great gangling beast, barking ecstatically. It was apricot-brown in color, with a smooth shaved body and furred legs like a cowboy’s chaps, and its face beneath the tufted topknot was roguish, with a very red tongue showing through the slight beard a
nd mustache. The hot brown eyes gleamed with merriment.

  “Ee-e-k!” screeched the schoolteacher. “Take it away!”

  The fantastically absurd creature seized the towel and went galumphing off with it, to be finally cornered by a giggling Jeeps on the living-room sofa. “Don’t blame me!” she told Miss Withers. “When I said you refused to pay the bill the man said the hell with it then, and—he just pushed the dog inside and slammed the door and ran down the stairs.”

  “But—but is that enormous thing a poodle?” the schoolteacher demanded.

  “Maybe it’s king-size. Look, there’s a tag on the collar. His name seems to be Talleyrand! Well, you’ve acquired a dog.”

  “For only as long a time as it takes the SPCA truck to get here,” said Miss Withers firmly. Then she saw that Talleyrand was hopefully trying to shake hands with her, offering a delicate, clipped paw that would have fitted into a demi-tasse cup. “Don’t try to make it up with me,” she told the beast. “I’ve always wanted a Shetland pony, but not very much.”

  “Death will overtake you, although ye be in lofty towers.”

  —The Koran

  7

  HAVING HAD A NAP AND ANOTHER BATH, Miss Hildegarde Withers was feeling somewhat restored. Then suddenly the door burst open and back came Jeeps and the poodle, who had been taking each other for a walk. By the look of them neither had done much actual walking; they were out of breath and happy. “Had to stop at a pet store over on Broadway and invest in a leash,” the girl confessed. “Even then he was a problem. He likes people.”

  “Really? Most dogs do, don’t they?”

  “But when he likes people he jumps up and licks their faces. He likes toys, too. Tried to go through a plate-glass window and retrieve a mechanical train that was going round and round. And he stole a rattle out of a baby’s carriage.”