Four Lost Ladies (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

  “Perhaps.” Miss Withers poured out more coffee for them both, her long upper lip pursed tightly.

  “Still not convinced? The police have to be wrong, because you’ve got a hunch?”

  “To be a successful detective, Oscar, one has to have something more than a knack of observation and deduction. One needs to be able sometimes to come to the right answer without going through all the laborsome preliminaries. Call it intuition or extrasensory perception if you will—”

  “But two and two still make four!”

  “Two and two what? If you mean numerals they can just as well make twenty-two or zero, depending on how they’re arranged. And two apples and two notes on a bugle don’t make four of anything.”

  “Metaphysics, yet!”

  “And in spite of everything,” she concluded firmly, “I still think that Harriet Bascom was murdered, along with the others.”

  Piper looked at her. “Those four women are beginning to haunt you, Hildegarde.”

  “Exactly! Their poor ghosts are always with me, these days.”

  “Along with a pretty bobby-soxer and a big silly French poodle! Must get pretty crowded in a small apartment.”

  “Oscar, this isn’t funny. I tell you, somewhere behind the disappearance of these women there’s an evil intelligence at work, a human spider who preys on a certain type of lonely, susceptible woman with a little money. Not content with the cash, he takes their lives, too. It doesn’t seem like mass murder to him, because he’s really only killing the same woman over and over again, like Jack the Ripper.”

  “This psychological stuff! So you’re looking for a homicidal maniac?”

  “Only in the sense that all murderers are a little insane. He is a realist, rather. The money is his main interest, and after he’s got it he wants to make sure the victims keep silent, so he puts them quietly away. Harriet Bascom was his first try, and something went wrong. But he learned by his mistake, and knocked the others off one-two-three-four, like sitting ducks. He’s a tiger with a taste for blood.”

  “Tigers and ducks! It was a spider a minute ago—”

  “You know what I mean. Oscar, can’t you see that Indian summer is the most dangerous time for a woman? This man has managed somehow to represent to a certain type of woman all the things she has missed in life. I can almost visualize him. He’s tall and masculine and well-groomed, a little past middle age but not soft or fat. He’s a composite of all the matinee idols of yesterday, the men they dreamed of but never met. He dresses beautifully, and has a way of looking at a woman that makes her feel like a girl again.”

  “You sound,” said the Inspector, “like something out of the confession magazines.”

  She sighed. “Always the Philistine, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe. But what does it add up to? You’ve been sleuthing around for weeks, and all you’ve got are a lot of little bits of things that don’t go together and never will.”

  “Then you never saw anyone make a patchwork quilt,” Miss Withers told him. “They accumulate hundreds of scraps—all materials, all shapes, all colors. And then it’s sewn together, blending into a harmony, a pattern.”

  “Uh-huh,” he yawned. “This Philistine is ready for a little shut-eye.”

  “Sometimes,” she told him, “I don’t think your eyes are really open. Oscar, what will happen to Harriet Bascom’s things?”

  He looked at her curiously as he struggled into his overcoat. “Auctioned off after they’ve been held six months. Anyone who’s interested can call the police property clerk and find out. Why, do you think you can find some clue our men overlooked?” He grinned. “Oh, I get it. You want to acquire something that was hers, just as you’ve got hold of the Brinker woman’s dog and Miss Davidson’s favorite niece. What is this, voodoo or mumbo-jumbo?”

  “Not quite,” said Miss Withers softly. “Of course, there is among primitive people a widely held belief that there is a sort of psychic aura that attaches itself to a person’s possessions. And some soothsayers can tell fortunes at a distance if they are given a trinket that belonged to the person.”

  He looked worried. “You actually believe that?”

  “I can believe a great many impossible things before breakfast.”

  At that moment Talleyrand, awakening with a start, realized that someone was going outside. He proceeded to make it clear that he intended to attach himself to the expedition. “No,” said Miss Withers firmly. “Go away. Go back to sleep.” But the dog cocked his head, blinked, and then suddenly rushed to the hall closet. Opening the door with some difficulty and a grating sound of teeth on metal knob, he plunged in and then came bounding joyously out with his new leather leash in his jaws, offering it first to one and then the other. Finally he laid it down on the schoolteacher’s feet, whining hopefully.

  “Oh, perhaps on second thought,” she said, “I’ll walk as far as the subway—it’s such a fine night.”

  At any rate it was a fine night for Jeeps Davidson, otherwise known as the wrong Alice. The schoolteacher returned to the apartment half an hour later, feeling rather like the ground crew of a captive balloon, and found the young couple occupying her sofa, their heads close together. There were potato chips and empty coke bottles in front of them, and the radio was blaring forth a rich and dissonant polyphony which she took to be jazz or whatever they called it nowadays.

  Jeeps looked so bubbly, so glassy-eyed and ecstatic that Miss Withers wondered if she should try to smell her breath. But the girl had not been looking at the world through cocktail-colored glasses. “Tad here has something to say to you,” she cried.

  The schoolteacher backed away. “Heavens, child! I don’t stand to that degree in loco parentis. If he wants to ask for your hand he should talk to your father.”

  There was a sudden, brittle silence. Jeeps said quickly, “He wants to speak to you about Harriet Bascom.”

  “It’s only that I guess I was the last person to see her alive,” Tad said very gravely. “You see, in this kind of job-training I have to take my turn at everything, and it happened that the night she died I was on room service and had to take the cocktails up to her suite.”

  “You? Good heavens, why didn’t you say so before?”

  “Who asked me? I didn’t even know until tonight that you were interested in her.”

  “Very well.” Miss Withers frowned. “Did I understand you to say just now that you took up cocktails, plural?”

  “Yes, a shaker of daiquiris, but only one glass. I figured her date must be on the wagon.”

  “Her date?”

  “Sure. She was good-looking, I mean for an old girl like her, but that night she really was loaded for bear. Had on a red dress without any shoulders, and everything. Naturally I figured she had a date.”

  “A date with death,” said Miss Withers slowly. “An appointment in Samarra. But did you notice anything else, anything at all, that might help us?”

  Tad Belanger frowned. “Only that she was wound up tight, as if she was full of benzedrine or something. She didn’t say much, though. Just thanked me, and handed me five dollars.”

  “An unusual tip, even for the Grandee?”

  “You said a mouthful and I don’t mean teeth. It was a big tip, especially from a woman. Sometimes when there’s a convention in town or something a man will get a little happy and throw money around. It doesn’t make much difference to us trainees one way or the other—we have to turn over most of it to the bell-captain. He bears down hard on us G.I.’s, because we’re bucking for promotion and he’s got where he’s going. It’s like officer candidates under a tough first sergeant.”

  “I see. And was the tip in dollar bills and small change?”

  Tad shook his head. “No change. Just a fin—I mean a five-dollar bill.”

  “Oh,” said Miss Withers. “That’s different.” She chatted with them for a few minutes and then excused herself. “I need my beauty sleep,” she said. “Turn the radio back on if you like—nothing can
disturb me after last night.”

  Ten minutes later she suddenly popped up in the bedroom doorway, a brush in her hand and her hair, still a little varicolored, over her shoulders. “Please excuse me,” she said. “But I just thought of something important. Jeeps, would you mind very much if I made a date with your young man for some night soon?”

  The girl said, “Huh?” and Tad’s mouth fell abjectly open.

  “Perhaps tomorrow night?”

  “Why, I guess so,” the girl managed. “I mean, why should I mind?”

  “If it’s a clear day, of course,” continued Miss Withers. “For the most propitious time I’ll have to consult the almanac. It should be here in this bookcase—”

  Jeeps came toward her, almost warily. “I don’t get it.”

  “Oh? It’s really very simple, child. But don’t worry, I’m not trying to steal your beau. My Mrs. Goggins days are over. You may even come along on the date if you like, and I thought we might ask Inspector Piper too.”

  “But what’s the almanac got to do with it?”

  “For this particular date,” Miss Withers said absently, “the stars must be in the right conjunction or whatever they call it. Ah, here we are!” She studied the page for a moment and then turned to smile at them brightly. “Shall we say tomorrow at five-thirty, if it doesn’t rain or snow or anything?”

  “Not a picnic!” Tad cried. “In the winter time?”

  “A sort of picnic,” the schoolteacher admitted. “But no sandwiches, no hard-boiled eggs, and no ants.”

  “The waking have one and the same world, the sleeping turn each aside into a world of his own.”

  —Heraclitus

  8

  HE SAT LIKE A MAN BORN TO THE SADDLE, though under him the spirited bay mare now and then danced skittishly, impatient at being kept down to a walk on so fine a summer morning. Though it was only June, the corn was almost waist-high and already beginning to tassel, due partly perhaps to the new hybrid seed but more as a result of the fertilizer he had blended from the farm’s organic waste, straw and leaves and a few chemicals, in the great concrete-enclosed compost heaps behind the dairy barns. Along the slope of the hill strips of dark blue-green alfalfa and legumes contrasted with yellow oats, lying in contoured curves so that even after yesterday’s heavy rain there was no sign of gullying.

  He chirped to the mare and they trotted on almost to the whitewashed rail fence. Beyond browsed the vast herd of his cattle, milking-Shorthorns crossed with the sacred Brahma cattle of India to produce mammoth beefs that were almost all rib roast and tenderloin. Each of his full-uddered cows had a plump calf or two tagging at her heels. Farther on, all scattered over the lush grass like bits of black wool, were his thousand Karakul sheep, and a little to the right were the red Berkshire swine, each sow surrounded by a litter as fat and smiling as piggy banks in a store window.

  Turning back home again at the touch of a rein against her dark sweating neck, the mare cantered easily and then suddenly reared as a cottontail burst from a clump of weeds almost under her forefeet. She took the bit in her teeth and bolted. He tried to pull her in, and then felt a bridle-strap snap. At a headlong gallop they swept back along the cornfield, then down the farm lane. He realized with a flicker of panic that the hired man who had neglected to mend the bridle had remembered to close the five-barred gate leading into the barnyard. Too late to check or turn, the big bay gathered herself for the jump, but at the moment of take-off her foot slipped in a hog-wallow full of rainwater. There was a sickening crash, and then he found himself flying through the air, straight toward the redolent, steaming mass of the compost heap.

  Max F. Brady landed sprawled across the top of his office desk, fingers clutching at toppling piles of seed catalogues and farm manuals. His swivel chair had bucked out from beneath him, and his face was resting almost in the overflowing ash tray.

  Someone was hammering heavily on his door. Still a little dazed from his nap, Brady dusted himself off, set up the chair again, and then pressed the release button and called, “Come in!”

  His visitor was a field marshal in the Imperial Army of the Czars—up as far as the collar. Above that was the battered, incongruous face of Hoppy Muller, the doorman. “Excuse me, Mr. Brady. But they said you wanted to be told.”

  “Told what?”

  “If she showed her face around here again. I mean that Mrs. Goggins or whatever her real name is.”

  “Oh, no!” muttered the chief of security. He came suddenly wide awake, and rushed out of the door. A moment later he went jaywalking straight across the late afternoon traffic of the Avenue, to come up beside an illegally parked taxicab from which two women and a driver were gaping up at the sky. “Just what’s going on here?” Brady demanded.

  “We’re only window-shopping, officer,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers placatingly. Then she recognized him. “Oh?”

  “I know you,” Brady said coldly. “In spite of the low-comedy disguise.”

  “Disguise?” She looked blank. She was wearing her own face and hair, plus a plaid raglan coat that had stood her in good stead for five years and was equal to five more. And her second-best hat, too—the one the Inspector always said looked like an abandoned bird’s-nest. “Really, Mr. Brady!”

  “I want it strictly understood—” he began.

  “Hush! Look, Jeeps!” Miss Withers was excitedly pointing up toward the Grandee tower, a great looming shadow against the sunset winter sky.

  “Yes, I can see it too!” the girl sang out.

  Up on the thirty-eighth floor of the hotel a window stood unmistakably open, a tiny vacant oblong as apparent as a missing tooth in a smiling mouth. “Of course!” There was firm triumph in Miss Withers’s voice.

  “I demand to know,” Brady said, “why you’re still hanging around here? If you think you’re going to make any more trouble for Mr. Temple—”

  “Only an experiment,” the schoolteacher explained. “You see, it’s the same time of day, at least in relation to the setting of the sun, as it was August sixteenth, when Harriet Bascom died. I do wish the Inspector had accepted our invitation to come along. But this might convince him.”

  She was tilting a miniature camera up into the air. “I never can remember if it should be one-ninth of a second at f:50 or the other way around.” The shutter clicked.

  “Wait a minute! Just what are you up to?” Brady was almost burbling. “Are you trying to dig up that old suicide and hint that there was something wrong with it?”

  “Hinting? I’m saying it right out loud.”

  “The police made a full investigation, and said it was suicide. So did the deputy medical examiner. I myself said so—and I’ve been a cop all my life. Muller was mistaken, that’s all, about the window.”

  Miss Withers sniffed resoundingly.

  “Look, lady, I don’t see that it’s any of your business. But it so happens that there’s a small ornamental ledge outside the hotel windows. She could have perched there and pulled the window shut behind her before she let go. A person who is screwy enough to kill theirself is screwy enough to do anything.”

  “Herself,” corrected the schoolteacher automatically. “Then I suppose her ghost came back and opened the window later, the way it was found by the police?”

  “Look, ma’am. If you don’t get away from this hotel and stay away, I’m going to have you put under a peace-bond for malicious mischief!”

  “Make a note of that, Miss Davidson,” cried Miss Withers brightly. “Driver, you too are a witness. The hotel authorities first tried to bribe me by offering to cancel my bill, and then when that failed they resorted to threats!”

  Now Brady’s face was lobster-red. He leaned closer into the open window of the taxicab.

  “Godalmighty!” he roared. “I don’t give a damn in hell—”

  He had recently been eating onions, and Miss Withers sank back into the seat, trying at the same time to hold a handkerchief to her nose and both hands over her ears. Her withdr
awal gave Talleyrand the opening he was looking for. A whiskered brown avalanche erupted suddenly from the floor of the taxi, plunging with reckless abandon half out of the window toward Brady’s face, an attack all the more startling because it took place in absolute silence, without any warning. The man threw himself instinctively backward, one arm held up to protect his throat, and an oncoming station wagon had to swerve sharply to avoid hitting him.

  “Talley!” gasped the startled schoolteacher, as with the girl’s help she managed to haul the dog back inside the taxi again. “Shame on you, you bad dog!”

  But it was Mr. Brady who looked ashamed, or at least considerably abashed. He stood there, pale and shaken. “That dog—” he started to say. Then: “But I guess I asked for it, didn’t I? Talking out of turn. Sorry.” He started to lift his hat, found that he wasn’t wearing one, then bowed stiffly and went back toward the hotel.

  “Well, I never!” said Miss Withers.

  Jeeps looked at the poodle with a new respect. “Our hero!” she cooed. “Him wasn’t going to let the nasty mans shake his fist and swear at us, was him? I guess maybe this better be the last time I tie a ribbon in your topknot, no matter how cute and French it looks.” She firmly removed the bit of jade-green silk and dropped it out of the car window as they started toward home.

  “Perhaps,” Miss Withers told her gently, “you didn’t notice that Talley was wagging his tail all the time. Before you award him any medals for valor, you ought to know that the silly animal was only trying to lick Brady’s face.”

  Yet it had been on the whole a minor triumph all around, and the schoolteacher felt pleased and encouraged. Her hunch about Harriet Bascom was rapidly solidifying into a certainty.

  “Do you suppose,” Jeeps spoke up suddenly later that evening, from where she sprawled on the floor in front of the fireplace, “that Mr. Brady could recognize Tad standing up there in that open window?”