Four Lost Ladies (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

Miss Withers looked up from the black leather notebook with its grim dossiers on the four missing women. She was engaged in filling in a separate page for Harriet Bascom—although of course Harriet was missing in a different way. “I doubt it,” she said firmly.

  “But he’ll know that somebody in the hotel got a passkey and opened a window for us, by arrangement,” the girl went on stubbornly. “If Brady finds out that it was Tad, he’ll have him fired.”

  “Child, they wouldn’t discharge anybody for that.” Or would they? Miss Withers bit her pencil. “I hope not, anyway. But it had to be done. You can’t make an omelet without breaking an egg.”

  “Yes,” said Jeeps with a feeble smile. “But you always break them over somebody’s head.”

  “What? Oh, you’re implying that I failed to handle Mr. Brady with kid gloves?”

  The girl nodded.

  “Perhaps you’re right. But I don’t like to be dragged around in handcuffs and put in jail overnight. Nor do I like to be yelled at by policemen, even retired ones.”

  “You made an enemy of him, though. He could have been a valuable ally.”

  “Stuff and nonsense, girl. Do you suppose that a self-satisfied egotist like Brady is going to admit even to himself that right under his infallible nose a slick confidence man has been preying on women? The man’s as stubborn and opinionated as the Inspector. And speaking of him—”

  She picked up the phone and called Piper’s home, but there was no answer. “Out again,” she said. “That man keeps the hours of a tomcat.” Just on a chance she dialed Spring 7-3100. “Let me speak to Inspector Oscar Piper, please.”

  “You mean Acting Chief-Inspector Piper,” came the gruff voice of the uniformed man at Headquarters switchboard. “You can reach him at his office in the Municipal Building. The extension is—”

  “Never mind,” Miss Withers murmured, and hung up the phone. So it had happened, then! This was certainly no propitious moment to discuss anything with Oscar, not until he had had time to cool down a little.

  During the next few days she tried to telephone him at his new office several times, only to be told by a glib female secretary that Acting Chief-Inspector Piper was out, or in conference, or on the long-distance phone. “Was there any message?”

  There was, but she preferred to give it to him in person.

  She also began to note a faint but definite dissension in the ranks. Jeeps Davidson, still looking worried and a little reproachful, had started job-hunting, announcing that the money she had saved to repay her loan to Aunt Alice was running low and that she didn’t intend to be a burden on anybody.

  Miss Withers also found herself continually reminded of the limitations which went with being a retired teacher on a minute pension. Not for her was the unlimited expense account of the private detective, or the vast resources of the police machine. Her junket at the Grandee had run into a great deal more money than she had planned, even though the chinchilla coat and most of the other props had only been rented for the occasion. Sleuthing, she felt, was difficult at best—without having to count the pennies every time you wanted to jump into a taxicab.

  With very few chips, she was trying to play a lone hand. “I seem to have got myself in wrong with everybody!” she murmured sadly. Then Talleyrand, sensing her mood, slid off the sofa and came over to put a sympathetic chin on her knee, gazing up with warmly adoring eyes. “Everybody but you,” she told him. “You silly beast, why can’t you talk?” For he could, she thought, tell her everything that she wanted to know.

  But Talleyrand only told her in unmistakable sign language that it was time to go for another walk.

  Later that night the schoolteacher sat alone at her desk for a long time, reading over and over again the all-too-skimpy biographies of the four—no, five—women who had been victims of Mr. Nemo. The deadly parallels were still there, but they seemed to lead nowhere but into a dead-end street—or down the garden path. She frowned and racked her brains and waited hopefully for a flash of inspiration, but it did not come. The bits of cloth which she had been so laboriously collecting refused to fit themselves into a pattern.

  After all, what did she actually know about the man she called Mr. Nemo? He had made a long-distance call to La Porte checking up on the real Mrs. Goggins, and had thriftily hung up when they got her on the wire. And he had closed a hotel window, and after a little while had opened it again. Why?

  She even washed her hair that night at bedtime, the last resort of the lonely or frustrated woman anywhere, but even that was to no avail. Much later she half-awoke to hear Jeeps come tiptoeing in, and there were sounds of the refrigerator door being opened as the girl and dog shared a late snack. There went the liverwurst that was supposed to be tomorrow’s lunch. The schoolteacher turned over and drifted off to sleep again. It was, luckily, not often that she dreamed—or at least remembered her dreams on waking. But this one was a dilly.

  She was walking forlornly along a sandy shore in a thick sea-fog, past great black jagged rocks that rose above her head. Some birds were crying and mewling in the sky, and tired waves lapped almost at her ankles. She was aware of a hullabaloo of voices in the distance, crying wordless, terrible things. There was the baying of hounds, coming closer.

  She began to run, but the sand was soft and heavy and her limbs were drained of strength. Looking back over her shoulder she saw through the breaking fog a wild advancing mob of men armed with guns and pitchforks and scythes, some carrying torches. Chased by the armed rabble, and by a pack of great hairy slavering hounds as black and terrible as that infamous beast of the Baskervilles, came poor Talleyrand, with a bedraggled ribbon tied in his topknot and a tin can rattling behind his stub of a tail.

  “Mad dog! Mad dog!” rang the terrible cry. More terrible still was the baying of the great wolf-dogs. Guns blasted, and a bullet went screaming overhead.

  The poodle came leaping blindly toward her and then scrambled up into her arms as the hell-hounds, their jaws foaming, eyes glowing like flames, ringed her round. Talley squirmed in her arms, whining desperately.

  There was something she could do, something she could say. But like Ali Baba at the cave entrance, she had forgotten the words. The poodle whined again. “This—this is only a dream!” she managed to moan, and woke at once to see that it was morning and she was in her own bed where she belonged. But somehow in the night the poodle had managed to solve the problem of the locks and guards they placed on the kitchen door, and he was now curled up across her feet. He shivered a little in his sleep, and whined softly.

  “Oh, dear!” cried Miss Withers, with the pixilated logic of the half-asleep. “I’ve saved myself and left poor Talley back in the dream! Here, fellow—wake up!”

  The poodle blinked, raised his head, and then slid sheepishly off the bed and trotted back to the kitchen. “It was probably just that he was dreaming about rabbits,” Jeeps suggested cheerily at the breakfast table, as she sneaked the dog a bit of hot muffin. Which was close, but not the exact truth. Talleyrand had been city-born and raised, and had no knowledge of rabbits. When his mistress interrupted his dream he had been joyfully chasing after a toy electric train.

  Anyway, so much for dreams! thought Miss Withers sensibly. They were only fantasies, tricks played on you by your subconscious during the second or two it took to wake up. Talley had whined in his sleep, and that had set her off. Her fertile imagination had borrowed from Conan Doyle, from that terrible last chapter of David Garnett’s Lady into Fox, and from memories of Laguna Beach in winter. As dreams went it was strictly a B-budget quickie.

  The morning was bright, with the eaves already dripping. And Jeeps Davidson was humming to herself, and for once putting away something more than her usual “Mexican breakfast” of black coffee and a cigarette. “You seem a different girl this morning,” Miss Withers observed.

  “Do I? Same old face, same hairdo. Same dress—dammit.”

  “Same boy-friend? I gather that your fears of his being fired were unfou
nded?”

  The girl smiled proudly. “Dreamboat is to be fifteenth assistant-manager starting the first of the month.”

  “I’m delighted to hear it!”

  “And that’s not all. I think he’s found me a job. You see, he happens to know a girl who runs a nursery school—”

  “You mean, he used to know her,” corrected Miss Withers wickedly.

  “That’s right, he used to know a girl who runs a nursery school up on University Heights, and she needs an assistant in the mornings. It’s just wholesale baby-sitting, only I don’t guess you sit much. Anyway, maybe when payday comes, I’ll be able to chip in my share of the rent and groceries.”

  “Oh,” said Miss Withers. “Not that you aren’t welcome as the flowers in May. But I was afraid that if you got a job you’d want a place of your own.”

  Jeeps said that wild horses couldn’t drag her away, that she was staying until the last-act curtain—which would be curtains for Mr. Nemo—and that besides, her mother would never hear of her being in New York on her own. “Besides, you mustn’t be alone here, because you’re the one and only person the murderer has to fear. He might decide to eliminate you, and come sneaking in here some night—”

  “There’s Talley to protect me.”

  “He’s the kind of dog who’d hold the flashlight for the burglars and show them through the house!”

  Which was quite true. Still, Miss Withers had her own opinion of how useful in a free-for-all like that would be this ninety-eight pounds of teen-age girlhood. “I suppose you could help scream,” she admitted.

  “I can do lots,” Jeeps said firmly. “I haven’t been wasting my time. Even with Tad—” She cocked her head thoughtfully. “Do you know, sometimes I get the feeling that my swing-swain hasn’t told us everything he knows. Oh, I don’t mean he’s actually holding out purposely. But there’s something he knows, only he doesn’t know that he knows it.” The girl looked at her watch, and shrieked. “’By—I gotta rush out and prove that I can teach kids how to string colored beads. Wish me luck.” And she was gone.

  Slowly and thoughtfully Miss Withers did up the breakfast dishes, trying not to be annoyed at the cigarette ashes in Jeeps’s cup which ruined the suds and made it necessary to draw another sinkful of hot water. “Youth!” she observed philosophically.

  Shortly before eleven o’clock the telephone rang, and the schoolteacher rushed to answer it. It was about time the Inspector returned her call, she felt.

  But it was only Jeeps, reporting that she had the job and wouldn’t be home until later.

  The morning’s mail was equally disappointing, consisting only of a plaintive bill from the Elysian Fields Doghaven to the amount of forty-six dollars board bill, addressed to Miss Ethel Brinker care Miss H. Withers.

  When Jeeps Davidson came bouncing back to the apartment early that afternoon she found Miss Withers down on the floor with a box of dog-candy and a thick book from the library on French poodles, trying to lure Talleyrand into learning some parlor tricks. “But I don’t know who is teaching whom,” the schoolteacher admitted. “He’s ’way ahead of me at this sort of thing.”

  Jeeps seemed a little subdued, for a girl who has just landed a job. “Does it tell anywhere in the book how to train him to be a watchdog?” she asked.

  “It does. I mean it tells why you can’t. For generations the poodle has been the circus and carnival performing dog of Europe. They bred them for brains, just as other dogs have been bred for looks or fighting ability or keenness of scent. But somewhere along the line they bred the fierceness out of them, and you can’t put it back. It says here that with his high I.Q. the Standard poodle should have been perfect material for the Army K-9 corps during the war, but that it was practically impossible to savage them up so that they would attack a human being. That’s taboo with them. They just get embarrassed.”

  Poodles also get bored, as Talleyrand immediately demonstrated by yawning rudely in their faces and then withdrawing from school. He trotted out into the kitchen, stood balancing on his hind legs until he was sure that the porcelain top was closed over the gas stove, and then leaped to his favorite perch as gracefully as any cat. Turning around a couple of times—due, the book said, to an atavistic desire to frighten away any snakes which might be lurking in the tall grass—he dropped down into a furry, apricot-colored bundle and was immediately asleep.

  “The reason I asked about watchdogs,” Jeeps confessed to Miss Withers, “was that on the way home I got to thinking. If we’re right about Mr. Nemo he’s already done away with five women. He was too cautious to make a pass at Mrs. Goggins—but as soon as he finds out that Miss Withers is still on his trail—”

  “If he came around here we could always scream,” the schoolteacher suggested.

  “The others didn’t!” Jeeps was very serious. “How about a pistol? I can shoot.”

  “My child, there happens to be a law called the Sullivan Act, here in New York, which restricts the use of firearms to the underworld. I doubt very much whether the Inspector would recommend my getting a pistol permit.” She brightened. “But it is an excuse to call him up, all the same!”

  This time she found the long-suffering Inspector, by some miracle, in his office. But he seemed cold and aloof and not at all interested in pistol permits, or in windows on the thirty-eighth floor of the Grandee, open or shut. “You might take the matter up with Captain Gruber,” he told her. “He runs Homicide now, you know.”

  “Oscar, don’t be like that. I’ve called you up several times—”

  “To congratulate me on my so-called promotion?”

  “No, to say I was sorry.”

  “Well,” the Inspector told her, only slightly mollified, “you can’t be any sorrier than I am.”

  There was a lull. “Oscar, what does your new secretary look like?”

  “Lovely as the dawn,” he said wickedly. “With eyes as blue as the lakes of Killarney. She has pretty shell-pink ears, one of which is probably glued to the extension at the moment.” There was a soft click on the line.

  “Well!” said Miss Withers. “By the way, Oscar. You must come up for dinner one night soon.”

  “Nix,” he said firmly. “Last time you promised me steak and I got hash.”

  “He hung up on me!” said the schoolteacher. “Just for that I won’t let him take me to the auction tomorrow!”

  “A straight line is the shortest distance between two points.”

  —Euclid

  9

  BY EIGHT-THIRTY A. M. THE BIG square room on the second floor of the Ninth Avenue Auction and Storage Company was well filled, though most of the people looked as if they had come in just to get warm. There were a few wise-looking, beady-eyed old men who appeared to be pawnshop proprietors or secondhand dealers, a sprinkling of youths in leather jackets with the aimless look of the unemployed about them, and numerous housewives with shopping-bags and the hopeful expression of waiting for the bingo game to commence. A dozen or so rows of folding chairs had been set up facing the platform, but most of the crowd were moving about, filtering in and out of the smaller storeroom where behind a wire barrier were stacked the various articles to be sold. The luggage which had belonged to Harriet Bascom, though piled in helter-skelter with the rest, stood out like a rose among thorns. Besides, each of the six shiny pieces bore the neat initials H.B. in gold. They were tagged Lot 568.

  Miss Withers seized upon a uniformed patrolman who stood by the door and demanded to know when the luggage would be opened for inspection. “It won’t,” he said wearily. “The whole idea of the auction, ma’am, is that it’s sight-unseen. That’s the law. Anyone skips a hotel and leaves baggage or personal property, it gets sealed and turned over to the auction company as is, to be held six months and then sold.”

  “Then the suitcases might be empty—or filled with articles of value?”

  “Sure, sure.” His voice echoed with deep professional disillusionment. “Once in a while you hear about somebody ma
king a haul. Last month a lady here bid five dollars and got a sample case filled with eight hundred shoes.”

  “My, she was lucky!”

  “All she has to do now is marry a one-legged man. They were all for the right foot, size nine. Look, lady. Almost everything that comes here for sale originally belonged to somebody who had to leave a hotel without paying. Stands to reason they wouldn’t leave much of value behind. Usually old phone books or bricks wrapped up.”

  But the auctioneer, a wiry little man in shirt-sleeves and a grayish derby, was hammering with his gavel. “Let’s get the show on the road, folks. Hurry-hurry-hurry …”

  Miss Withers found herself hurrying into one of the last remaining chairs in the back row, next to a large, very synthetic blonde in a beaver coat, who looked half asleep. She had evidently come here for a place to rest her feet and eat chocolate-covered peanuts.

  A massive metal-bound trunk, which was so heavy that the auctioneer suggested it must be filled with gold-dust, was put up for sale and swiftly knocked down for sixteen dollars. Accustomed to the dignity and decorum of the antique and art-gallery sales with their expensive catalogues and silent, coded bidding, the schoolteacher found herself a little out of her depth over here on Ninth Avenue. It might almost have been a country auction in Vermont or Iowa, except for the microphone of the public-address system beside the auctioneer, and the Minsky flavor of his jokes. Hardly pausing for breath, the man sold in rapid succession a hatbox, a wooden case of what might have been carpenter’s tools, a bicycle, and several ratty suitcases of fiber or imitation leather, for prices ranging from two to twenty dollars.

  After a while Miss Withers felt that she was beginning to get the hang of it. Most of the customers had obviously drifted in to invest a few dollars in a grab-bag, just as they might have taken a chance on a longshot at Hialeah or a ticket in the Irish Sweep. The bidding was usually brisk and competitive up to ten or fifteen dollars and very definitely bogged down at twenty. Any piece of luggage which looked old or different was fought for on the low level, presumably on the theory that anyone queer enough to own it might have absent-mindedly left the family pearls inside. Most of the successful bidders departed at once, clutching their prizes to their bosoms, eyes fired with the hope of something for nothing.