Four Lost Ladies (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

  “Oh, dear!”

  “The man in the store said that Talleyrand is a Standard poodle—they come in three sizes and that is the biggest. He’s nine or ten months old and somebody gave him what they call a Dutch bob instead of the old-fashioned poodle clip.”

  “All the same, I must have the SPCA truck come and take him away. I can’t—”

  But Talleyrand was resting his chin on Miss Withers’s knee. “I shouldn’t mind having a small dog around, but—”

  Talleyrand unobtrusively slid both front paws into her lap. “And an apartment is no place for a dog anyway.” The poodle was now curled up in her lap, his gangling length somehow folded into a warm, apricot-colored cushion of feathery fur. He yawned once, showing a complete set of incredibly magnificent fangs, and was asleep.

  “Well!” said Miss Withers aghast. “He weighs a ton.”

  “Get down, you silly old thing!” Jeeps said. Talleyrand opened one eye, glanced at her coldly and stayed where he was.

  “Down!” commanded Miss Withers, in her classroom voice. Reluctantly the poodle poured himself to the floor, where he turned around twice, dropped with his chin proprietorily resting on the toe of her Oxford, and immediately went to sleep again. “I was thinking,” the schoolteacher continued, “that after all this dog is our only link with Ethel Brinker. Perhaps he may come in handy—”

  “You’re weakening,” Jeeps said happily. “You’ve changed your mind about calling the SPCA, just like you’ve changed it about sending me home and giving up the case.”

  “Of course I’m going on with it,” Miss Withers said. “It was only in a weak moment that I pretended otherwise. We failed dismally in our first attempt to storm the Hotel Grandee. But Mount Everest wasn’t climbed at the first try, you know.”

  The girl was smiling. “No. But I know a boy from Virginia who was in the Air Force, stationed at Karachi. One day when they didn’t have to fly the Hump they went up over Everest in a B-17 and dropped tin cans with messages and a Confederate flag on a weighted stick.”

  “I suppose the members of the first successful expedition to reach the top were edified to learn that Kilroy had been there.” Miss Withers sniffed. “But all the same, you’ve given me an idea. There are more ways to kill a cat than choking it to death with butter.”

  There were steps in the hall outside, and a ringing at the bell. “Maybe it’s Tad,” Jeeps whispered. “With more news!”

  But she was wrong. Jerry Forrest stood hesitantly in the doorway. “I guess this is the right place; may I come in?”

  “Of course,” Miss Withers told him, noting that the public-relations expert was not in his usual effervescent mood. “Don’t mind the dog, he won’t bite.” That was fairly obvious, as Talleyrand was jumping up and down on his hind legs, trying to lick the man’s face. Jeeps had to banish the dog to the kitchen before they could get down to business.

  “Mrs. Goggins, or whatever your name is,” Forrest began hesitantly, “I just dropped over to talk about that little misunderstanding at the hotel last night.”

  “Misunderstanding? I’ll have you know I was hustled out the back way in handcuffs!”

  “Well—yes. But Brady was only doing what he thought was his duty. Look, I’ll lay my cards on the table. You were in the wrong room, but no harm was done and if Peter Temple doesn’t want to press charges the hotel certainly doesn’t. Suppose we take an all-over view of the situation. Brady’s job as chief of security for the hotel is to keep tabs on the guests, with the help of his three flat-feet—or is it flatfoots?” Forrest laughed nervously, all by himself. “The hotel is sorry you had to spend the night in the pokey. I’ve got all your luggage and stuff downstairs in a taxi. Here’s your receipted hotel bill. If you’ll just sign a release saying that you won’t make any more trouble or bring suit against the Grandee or anything—”

  “But I never intended—” began Miss Withers. Jeeps, behind their visitor’s back, was making incomprehensible signals at her.

  “She means she never intended to make trouble for anybody,” the girl put in. “She was only trying to find a missing friend of hers, and I was helping her because that friend happens to be an aunt of mine.”

  Forrest rubbed his pudgy nose. “Why you expected to find a missing friend in Temple’s rooms—Well, never mind. I talked him into seeing what swell publicity it would be for him if we put the whole thing down as just a moon-struck fan of his trying to collect souvenirs. Now if you’ll sign this paper prepared by the hotel’s lawyers—just a formality—we’ll forget the whole thing and part friends.” He whipped out his fountain pen and she signed her name—her real name. Forrest sighed with obvious relief. “Back in a jiffy.” He turned and went hastily down the stairs.

  “Tad’s fine Italian hand,” said Jeeps importantly.

  “What?”

  “He must have hinted around the hotel office that you were going to bring suit for false arrest, so they sent their trouble-shooter to square things.” Jeeps blinked. “What are you going to do with the checkbook?”

  “Pay the hotel bill, my child. I’m not going to be beholden to anybody. Beware of the Greeks when they come bearing gifts, or anything else.” Then Jerry Forrest and the taxi-driver came clumping up the stairs to pile the living-room high with the luggage which had been window-dressing for the short and inglorious career of the spurious Mrs. Goggins. Then he handed her the receipted hotel bill, which was for an amount that staggered her. But she finished filling in the check and gave it to him. “A lady never accepts any gifts from a man except candy and flowers,” she said when he looked surprised. “Would you care for some refreshment before you leave, Mr. Forrest?”

  “No, thanks, too early in the day.” He mopped his face. “By the way, that’s a nice caniche you’ve got.”

  “Oh, yes. Perhaps you’ve seen him before. I believe you knew his previous owner, Miss Ethel Brinker?”

  Forrest shook his head. “The only Brinker I ever knew was the one in the book about the silver skates.”

  “Or Alice Davidson? She too stayed at the hotel. Or Mae Carter—or Emma Sue Atkins?”

  The pink, doughy face went blank—almost too blank, Miss Withers thought. But he shook his head again. “Sorry, I don’t get to meet many of the guests. Just the ones where there’s some publicity angle.”

  “I understand. Your job is to get the hotel in the papers.”

  “No, ma’am. A press agent nowadays is really mostly a hush-agent.”

  Miss Withers looked surprised. “It’s like this,” he explained. “With a thousand or so guests, there’s bound to be incidents now and then in a big hotel. I try to see that the newspapers handle the story with restraint, so that it’s played down and if possible they leave out the name and just say ‘a midtown hotel.’”

  “You mean, when such things happen as murder or suicide?”

  “Well, yes. Only it’s an easier job at the Grandee than it is at some hotels, because of the way Mr. Brady watches the place. We haven’t had a murder since it opened, and only one suicide. That’s a record.”

  Miss Withers frowned. “And that one suicide?”

  “Just the old story. A woman from upstate somewhere went out of a tower window one night last summer. I didn’t have to do much hushing up, because it was the same day Babe Ruth passed on, and his obituaries crowded everything else out of the papers.”

  “Harriet Bascom,” Jeeps put in suddenly.

  Forrest looked innocently surprised. “Why, that was her name. But if you’re thinking there was anything off-color about her death, you’re off base. She just ran out of dough, got despondent, and took the easy way.”

  Miss Withers’s sniff was eloquent. “I never understood why they call it ‘the easy way.’ It would seem to me that a person who does that is crowding a lifetime of misery into that terrible moment.”

  “You may be right, at that,” Forrest agreed hastily. “Well, back to the grindstone.” He flashed an easy smile at the schoolteacher, let his ey
es linger for a moment on Jeeps’s rather tight sweater, and hurried out.

  “Now what?” said the girl. “There’s a funny look in your eye.”

  “I’ve got a funny idea in my head,” Miss Withers admitted. “Perhaps we don’t have to climb the mountain.” She crossed to the telephone and dialed Spring 7-3100. There was some delay and then finally she heard the Inspector answer. “Oscar,” she cried. “Sit down and light a cigar, will you?”

  “What the—I am!”

  “Do you recall telling me some time ago that the police might show some action on this problem in which I’m interested if only you had a corpse to work on? Well—” She held the receiver well away from her ear until it had stopped cracking. “Perhaps I did say that never again would I meddle in what doesn’t concern me, but this happens to concern me very much! A lady can change her mind, can’t she?” Miss Withers told him about the phone call to La Porte. “This body that I’m speaking of—I imagine it’s been buried for some time. But perhaps there was an autopsy performed. Do you remember Harriet Bascom, the woman who committed suicide—officially—at the Grandee last summer?”

  “Of course I do. There was a routine PM. Not that we needed one, when she’d splashed herself all over the sidewalk.”

  “Spare the gruesome details, please.”

  “Nothing to it,” he told her. “For your information, I went through the entire file a day or so ago, and there wasn’t a hole in it—to speak of.”

  “What about the holes not to speak of?”

  He sighed. “I’m glad I never had to go to school to you. It was just the business about the window the woman jumped out of, but obviously the doorman made a mistake. Look, Hildegarde, haven’t you made trouble enough already?”

  “Sorry, but I can’t help it. My stern New England conscience—”

  He yelped. “You were born in Iowa!”

  “Well, I have one all the same! Oscar, I want to see that Bascom file.”

  Again his voice made the telephone buzz. “Sweet spirits of niter! You can’t come barging down here to paw through our official records. Not today especially—in a few minutes the assistant-commissioner is going to drop in and bring along the son-of-a—the officer he wants to put in my place. I haven’t time—”

  Very reasonably Miss Withers pointed out that there wasn’t anything to prevent him from dropping in on his way home from work. “Perhaps Jeeps and I will even let you stay for dinner; there’s a nice three-pound T-bone in the refrigerator.”

  “Hmmm,” said Piper. “Don’t think you can get around me with bribes. But I will drop by and give you the background on the Bascom case, just to prove to you once and for all that when we say a case is closed, it’s closed.” He hung up abruptly.

  “That man!” said Miss Withers. “Sometimes I’d like to wring his neck.”

  “Sometimes any woman wants to wring any man’s neck,” Jeeps told her. “Well, I know how to make French-fries.” She started briskly into the kitchen, then stopped in the doorway, gasping. The schoolteacher was beside her in a moment, and they both stared blankly at what would have been a most unusual camera study. The door of the refrigerator was wide open, and most of its contents had been neatly removed and laid out on the linoleum. Talleyrand lay curled on the closed porcelain top of the stove, his full round belly warmed by the comfortable glow of the pilot-light inside, snoring gently. A wisp of brown butcher’s paper sticking to his apricot whiskers was all that remained of the T-Bone.

  After dinner was over and the dishes piled in the sink that night a relative calm settled itself on the apartment. For a time Jeeps had lent her decorative presence, hovering with elaborate nonchalance around the telephone until it finally rang; then she rushed off in a dither to meet her young man.

  Talleyrand had for a while amused himself by leaping after the fat blue smoke rings which the Inspector obligingly sent spinning across the living-room, but finally the dog caught one, sneezed reproachfully, and lost all interest. Now he was stretched out upside down on the sofa, head on a silk pillow, lost in doggish dreams.

  “Far be it from me,” said Piper, “to question anything that goes on in this household. But you’re not actually thinking of keeping the dog, are you?”

  Perhaps she hadn’t decided, really, until that moment. But woman-like, she said, “And pray why not? He’s probably quite valuable. Besides, he’s sort of a psychic link with Ethel Brinker. He may be useful somehow.”

  The Inspector was amused. “Useful as a pocket in a nightshirt,” he told her. “A dog is only a dog. You don’t actually think that just because this fool pup here once belonged for a few weeks to the Brinker woman he’s going to have a flash of extrasensory perception or something and recognize her murderer if he runs into him on the street? Not that I’m admitting she was murdered.”

  “Never mind Ethel Brinker for now. I lured you here to talk about the Bascom case.”

  “Okay.” Piper tapped his cigar in the general direction of the saucer with which she had pointedly provided him. “But you’ve got to understand that it was suicide and nothing more. After years of experience with such things a police officer can spot right away whether somebody has taken his own life or not, just like—well, like a school-marm can tell whether an examination paper is cribbed. Of course there are a few borderline cases which could be one thing or the other—there are always a few killers who try to make it look like suicide, and now and then a suicide who wants to make it look like murder or accident. But they don’t get away with it.”

  “Or at least if they do, the police don’t know about it.”

  “Anyway, the Harriet Bascom case wasn’t in that category. Every detail fits—”

  “Except one. On the phone you mentioned the window she jumped from?”

  “Oh, that!” He waved his hand. “You’ll be disappointed. But I better go back to the beginning. The body came hurtling down out of nowhere and struck the sidewalk not a dozen feet from the front entrance of the Grandee, where the doorman was on duty. You probably saw him when you were at the hotel—a big, solid specimen who used to play pro football, name of Hoppy Muller. It was just about twilight—”

  “Twilight came early for Harriet Bascom, didn’t it?”

  “About seven-thirty at night,” the Inspector said literally. “The call came to us at seven thirty-eight, and the radio car was cruising only a block or so away. The officers got there and found the body of a very well-dressed woman of around forty, who’d just been touched up at the beauty parlor—”

  “She didn’t have any last words?”

  He smiled patiently. “When you dive from the thirty-eighth floor the sidewalk has the last word. Dead on arrival. One man took charge of the body and the other went into the hotel and finally managed to find out who she was. After checking at the desk, one of the umpteen assistant-managers took him upstairs and unlocked Miss Bascom’s suite for him. The window was wide open, and an automatic phonograph was playing Stormy Weather full blast. The sergeant said it gave him the willies to come into that room and hear the record moaning about ‘Can’t go on, everything I have is gone.’ There was a smashed cocktail glass on the floor. Plenty of new clothes and expensive trinkets in the place but no money—not a buck, not a thin dime in her handbag. She must have used up her last traveler’s-check that day, because the empty folder was in the wastebasket.”

  “But what about the window?”

  “Oh, yes. Well, the doorman, Muller, claimed that right after her body hit the sidewalk he ran out into the street and looked up toward the tower to see where she’d jumped from—and not a single window was open anywhere!”

  “But on a warm August night, Oscar—”

  “The entire hotel is air-conditioned, and guests are warned not to open the windows, only of course they can if they want to. Anyway, at that hour a man in the street might very well not be able to see whether a single window that high up was open or not. Especially since the fellow was probably unstrung, having a body miss
him that close.”

  Miss Withers felt somehow that it would take a good deal to unstring a professional football player, even a retired one. “But, Oscar,” she said thoughtfully, “you insist that everything in the whole affair points to suicide. Yet there wasn’t a farewell note, or you’d have mentioned it.”

  Piper sighed again. “My dear woman, we find notes in only fifty-four percent of known suicides. People who kill themselves only leave word behind when they want to comfort or accuse somebody close to them, and Harriet Bascom had nobody—”

  “Aha! She was just another woman who was lonely and middle-aged and unattached!” The schoolteacher was politely triumphant. “Just like the four others!”

  “Relax, Hildegarde! Even the hotel maid said that Miss Bascom was crying and hysterical that noon when she came in to make up the rooms. The bellboy who brought up the farewell cocktail she drank—”

  “Which showed in the autopsy?”

  “It certainly did. Slight amount of alcohol in the stomach, and traces in the brain. Anyway, the boy said she seemed keyed-up and strange, and that she surprised him with a five-dollar tip—her last five, I guess. All that is completely typical of the suicide who wants to end everything with a gesture, even to her smashing the cocktail glass after a last toast to here goes nothing. Her prints were on the glass and shaker, and nobody else’s in the place except for the maid and housekeeper.”

  “And the bellboy’s, on the tray?”

  “Sure, sure. So please, I ask you. Don’t go trying to make a mystery out of Harriet Bascom’s death. The woman was obviously at the end of her rope. She had come down to the city to have a little fun, but tomorrow morning she’d have to face a big hotel bill that she couldn’t pay. The party was over.”

  Miss Withers slowly nodded. “Who claimed her body?”

  “Nobody. She lay in Bellevue morgue for a while, and finally went to Potter’s Field or the modern equivalent. The hotel people held a claim against her baggage for their bill, as they have a legal right to do. Anyway, it all boils down to the case of a woman who inherited a little money, blew it in the big city, and then decided she’d rather die than go back home to Poughkeepsie. Maybe she had something there at that.”