Four Lost Ladies (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

  There was one elderly unshaven man on the aisle, wearing an outsize overcoat, who took to bidding a hopeful “One dollar!” on every item that came up, and then shaking his head sorrowfully when he lost out. Now and then, with elaborate pretensions of secrecy, he comforted himself with a pint bottle concealed under his hat in his lap.

  Any luggage that looked well-made or in new condition went to one of the professionals who stood along the wall, at what Miss Withers guessed was somewhere around half its original retail price, no doubt to appear tomorrow in some little shop window. These purchasers were obviously not counting on the contents of the articles they purchased, but their initial bids were high enough to eliminate most of the audience at once.

  Pieces good and bad, big and little, came up without any particular sequence in lot numbers, one at a time. The auctioneer was evidently mixing up the lemons with the peaches. There was nothing for Miss Withers to do but to possess her soul in patience and listen to the gross woman beside her munch chocolate peanuts. At the moment the crowd was being invited to bid on a battered wicker case which resembled an egg crate as much as anything else, and on which the only bid had been the inevitable “One dollar” from the excited little man on the aisle.

  “Dollar I’m bid, do I hear five? Four? Do I hear three?”

  “Ee-e-eek!” yelped a feminine voice.

  “Thank you, ma’am. Three dollars I’m bid—”

  But the schoolteacher was standing up. “That wasn’t a bid,” she cried. “I—I saw a rat or something.” She was pointing with trembling finger at the knitting-bag in the lap of the blond woman beside her. “It came out and sniffed at me!”

  There was, for the next minute or two, considerable commotion and craning of necks. The auctioneer stopped talking and poured himself a glass of water. But the blonde caught Miss Withers by the arm and tugged. “Sit down. You don’t need to be scared of Sugar!” she announced in a stage whisper. Then she reached into the knitting-bag and hauled out a small nude-looking creature with hyperthyroid eyes and a rhinestone collar around its skinny neck. “See? She’s a genuine Chihuahua!”

  Miss Withers sighed and sank down again. “All right, all right,” came the rasping voice of the auctioneer. “If you’re through with the kaffyklatch, ladies—one dollar was the last bid on this valuable wicker case. Do I hear two?”

  He finally knocked it down to the happy inebriate on the aisle, who had started bidding against himself, quite carried away with the spirit of the thing. But it turned out that he had no money at all. He was hustled up the aisle, clutching his hat and his bottle, and the wicker case was removed to the storeroom. Miss Withers felt her elbow joggled, and leaped nervously aside. Then she saw that she was only being offered a cigarette. “Smoke, dearie?”

  When she politely begged off, the woman lighted her own with a flourish of a gold-plated gadget monogrammed with twinkling red stones. The schoolteacher felt that the situation called for a return gesture of politeness. “Do you and er—Sugar come to these affairs regularly?”

  “Only now and then, dearie. Free entertainment. It beats sitting around the apartment and looking at dirty dishes. And sometimes you can pick up a bargain.”

  “Yes,” said Miss Withers abruptly. “Sometimes you can pick up—a bargain.” She rose suddenly and tiptoed along the aisle toward the seat from which the one-dollar bidder had been forcibly removed. Now that he was gone she could see beyond the empty seat the back of a man’s neck, a neck that looked oddly familiar. She sank quietly down in the vacated chair and peered cautiously around first on one side and then on the other. It was—it had to be!—Count Stroganyeff. Today he was dressed quietly in a business suit and chewing on an unlighted cigar.

  “Hello there!” she whispered in his ear, and the man jumped six inches straight up in the air. When he turned a pale and alarmed face toward her she smelled vodka on his breath. “Don’t you remember me?” she went blithely on. “And the revolving door at the Grandee?”

  “Oh,” he rumbled. “Oh, yes. Nice to run into you again, Mrs.—”

  “Looking for bargains in luggage?”

  “I like to go to auctions,” Stroganyeff said. “Like some people watch building excavations. The import-export business is dull these days, and I have much time on my hands. But I never buy anything.”

  “That’s good. Then we won’t be bidding against each other, will we?”

  “Certainly not. Matter of fact, I have had about enough of this auction. I have a lunch date anyway.” The Russian rose suddenly, grabbed his hat and overcoat, nodded vaguely, and then went hurrying up the aisle. Miss Withers stared after him, wondering.

  When she turned back to the business of the day she gave a sudden gasp of surprise and elation, for the next item up for sale was one of the expensive airplane-type bags that had been poor Harriet Bascom’s. No use, Miss Withers quickly decided, to send a boy to do a man’s work. “Fifty dollars!” she opened briskly.

  There was a sudden hush in the auction room. At one fell swoop she had eliminated the grab-bag customers and also discouraged the secondhand clique. “Fifty I’m offered,” cried the auctioneer approvingly. “For this fine strong lightweight bag, almost brand-new, with initials in gold. If they don’t match your own you can go to court and have your name changed to match—the initials are H.B.”

  “What did you say?” came a feminine voice from the rear.

  “The lady wants to know and I’m a-going to tell her.” The auctioneer, who worked on percentage, smelled blood. “The initials are H.B!”

  “Then I’ll just have to say seventy-five!” It was the blonde in beaverskin.

  “Eighty!” said Miss Withers, as the man looked hopefully toward her.

  “Eighty I’m bid, do I hear—”

  “Ninety!”

  “Ninety—er, ninety-one!” the schoolteacher countered.

  But it just didn’t seem to be her day. A few minutes later she stood in a drugstore phone booth and sighed with relief when at last she heard the Inspector’s voice at the other end of the line. “Oscar!” she cried. “I’m in trouble. I need money, quite a good deal of money, and I need it right away.”

  “Arrested again? Well, I’ll give you the name of a good bail-bond outfit.”

  “Please! This is no time for cheap Hibernian humor. It isn’t that kind of trouble. I know you’re miffed at me, but you’re the only person in the world to whom I can appeal, and—”

  “Judas priest in a handbasket! Don’t turn on the tears. Oh, all right. Where are you?” She told him. “Sit tight,” he said comfortingly.

  But there was a line at the teller’s window, and after Piper had made his withdrawal it took the Headquarters sedan quite a few minutes to get uptown through the mid-morning traffic, even with the sirens howling like seven banshees. When he finally leaped out on the curb, the money clenched in his fist, he found Miss Withers standing disconsolately in the doorway. “You’re all right then?” he demanded with some concern. “I thought maybe—”

  “It was good of you to come,” she told him dismally. “But it’s too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  “Oh, some awful woman with a nasty little Mexican-hairless lap dog took a fancy to Harriet Bascom’s luggage just because I wanted it, I guess. She outbid me on it piece by piece. I couldn’t go higher because they wanted cash; they wouldn’t take checks.”

  “Well, is that all!”

  “It was important to me, Oscar.”

  “Sure, sure. You had another of your hunches. What you wanted with some dead woman’s old clothes anyway—”

  “Some murdered woman’s, Oscar.”

  “Too bad, but auctions are funny. People get excited. I bet right now the dame who outbid you is wishing she hadn’t. Maybe if you offered her what she paid—”

  But the schoolteacher shook her head. “Somehow I don’t think so. She seemed as pleased as Punch. Besides, she’s gone. She had the six bags piled into a taxi and went off with them, ju
st before you got here.”

  “Well, you save money—or I do.” He put the currency back into his billfold. “Now I’m here, can I drop you somewhere?”

  “Why—yes, just a minute. I’ll be right back.”

  The Inspector was resigned to the fact that her just-a-minutes were usually at least a quarter of an hour long. This time she stretched it even a little more, but finally she came down the auction stair, staggering under the weight of a venerable cowhide valise. “And what,” he said critically, “is that thing?”

  “It’s a perfectly good bag, with plenty of wear in it!” she said defensively. “I found out that when you buy anything you have to put down your name and address, so when I signed I had a look at what that woman wrote down when she paid her four hundred and eighty dollars for the bags I really wanted. She was a Mrs. Herbert Baker, of 1117 West Fifty-Sixth Street.”

  “So she bought the bags because they had her husband’s initials, eh?” Piper pointed to the faded, almost illegible initials on the valise. “I suppose you bought this venerable relic because it had W.O.B. Jr. on it?”

  “No, Oscar, I—”

  “Then why in thunderation did you?”

  “I don’t exactly know.”

  “I do. You just couldn’t bear going to an auction and coming away empty-handed!” He held the car door for her. “How much did you invest in that antique?”

  “Seven dollars. And—”

  Offended at his derisive laughter, Miss Withers rode home the rest of the way in hurt silence, refusing even to let him lug the valise up the stairs for her.

  The thing stood in the middle of her living-room the rest of the morning, its stout old-fashioned brass lock resisting her best efforts with a bent hairpin. Talleyrand came sniffing around with considerable interest, especially when she shook it and it rattled. There was no use trying to guess at the contents—the weight of the valise itself was too considerable.

  Finally Miss Withers gave it up and had a sketchy lunch, more or less spoiled by the amazed and incredulous poodle who sat close by her knee, begrudging her every bite she took. Missing breakfast was bad enough, but this—

  “If you doubt my word,” she told him, “you can look it up for yourself in the book. You’re a grown dog. Only puppies have three meals a day.”

  Unconvinced, Talleyrand sat up and waggled his paws.

  “For the last time, no!”

  With the facility of one descended from a long line of dogs who had trod the boards and worn the buskin, Talley assumed the role of the poor little match-girl. He was an orphan dog, dying of hunger in a cold world. His cheeks were sunken, his ribs stuck out, his belly clung to his backbone.

  “Nothing at all until dinner-time tonight,” his mistress said firmly. She carefully adjusted a chain around the refrigerator door, in case privation drove the poodle to forget an earlier object lesson involving a lamb chop filled with red pepper. Then she set out to find a locksmith.

  Returning an hour or so later, empty-handed and footsore, she found Jeeps and Tad parked outside her door in a flaming red Buick convertible. “Well, you have to do something to celebrate being made fifteenth assistant-manager of the Grandee,” he said proudly.

  “I thought for a moment you’d been made fire chief,” the schoolteacher said. Jeeps suggested that she come for a ride with them. “I think not. But if you have the time, you might haul me and a suitcase I bought at the auction this morning over to the locksmith’s on Broadway. I went to several places, but they all said they were too busy to come over and pick the lock for me, and now that I’ve bought a pig in a poke I’m consumed with curiosity to see what I won.”

  Tad announced that nothing would give him greater pleasure, and the three went up the stairs together, Miss Withers giving them a brief fill-in on her morning’s fiasco as they climbed. She unlocked the door and pointed. “There’s the thing—” Then she gasped.

  The cowhide valise was beyond the help of any locksmith. It had been tipped over and neatly gutted, the ancient and cheese-rotten leather showing everywhere the marks of eager canine teeth. The oddments which had been inside were strewn about the floor, except for what had once been a large box of imported liqueur chocolates. Talleyrand lay snoozing on the sofa, surrounded by a telltale scattering of debris which included cardboard and paper lace and candy-shells. He smelled to high heaven of chocolate and of something else rich and fruity.

  “You bad, bad dog!”

  Talley opened his eyes, which appeared to be slightly crossed, hiccuped boozily, and went back to sleep again.

  Jeeps and Tad were down on their knees, straightening up the mess. “Hey, maybe you didn’t waste your seven bucks after all,” the girl sang out. “Here’s something! It’s a high-school yearbook for 1926—and guess what name is written in it!”

  “Harriet Bascom,” said the schoolteacher. “It seemed to me that she must have had some luggage with her when she came to the big city. The bag may originally have been the property of some relative—you’ll notice that there is the same last initial. But I must admit that it was something more than a lucky guess on my part. You see, there were six pieces of new luggage that the woman bid me out of, but the lot number on this was 568-7, so I took a chance and bought it as a sort of consolation prize.”

  “Some prize,” Tad Belanger observed. “Here’s a picture of her when she graduated with the senior class. Look at that boyish bob.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Miss Withers suddenly. “Harriet was class poet, and she was voted the one most likely to settle down and raise a family. You know, I feel a little like a Peeping Tom.”

  “But it’s your property now—you bought it,” Tad pointed out reasonably.

  Jeeps leaped to her feet. “Well, you may have to look through the stuff, but Tad and I don’t. Come on, fifteenth-assistant-lover-boy, let’s go out and log a few more miles on Belanger’s Folly.” Then they went clattering down the stairs.

  Half an hour later Miss Withers surveyed her notebook, in which she had made an inventory of the contents of Harriet Bascom’s valise: Five dance programs, circa 1927; eleven picture postcards, views of Mexico D.F.; racetrack program, Saratoga, summer 1948; pint silver-filigree flask, partly full; Brownie camera, no film; wooden letter-opener, souvenir of Devil’s Lake; box of liqueur chocolates, half full (estimated); deck of cards, deuce missing; five books—Po-Kip-San 1926, Numerology Can Change Your Life, 80 Ways to Play Solitaire, and Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (from Elwood, Christmas, 1925); five issues of monthly Consumers’ Guide; one worn rubber girdle; one pair of felt slippers.

  And that was all. Miss Withers studied the pathetic little collection of odds and ends for a long time. Too bad there hadn’t been a diary. But she had a very good idea that Mr. Nemo had already been prospecting here. He would have seen to it that nothing incriminating remained behind.

  There still remained the task of gathering up the wreckage of the valise, scraps of leather to be thrown out with the trash and never referred to again—except of course by the Inspector, who would probably never let her hear the last of how she had wasted seven dollars. At the moment the schoolteacher would almost have liked to throw out Talleyrand along with the rubbish. “Look at you!” she remarked. “Sleeping off your jag, and leaving me to clean up the mess! A dog who can smell candy through half an inch of solid leather—”

  It seemed as if there was enough cowhide to make several valises, but of course the case had been heavily lined, and had a double bottom besides. Then something caught her eye, and she forgot to breathe. …

  A little later, when her heart had stopped pounding, she picked up the phone. The Inspector wearily answered and she said quickly, “Oscar, tell me this! When you purchase an article at an auction like that, do you have legal title to the contents, no matter what?”

  “Why, sure, unless it could be proved stolen property. That’s why people go to those sales. Why? Don’t tell me you’ve found the original deed to Brooklyn Bridge?”

 
“The valise I bought for seven dollars,” she informed him coolly, “was the one Harriet Bascom originally brought from Poughkeepsie. It was part of the same lot, but it wasn’t put up for sale with her new luggage. It was full of mementos and keepsakes—”

  “You mean Poughkeepsakes? Look, Hildegarde, even on this desk job I have work to do. There are some people waiting outside to see me. Run along like a good girl and peddle your papers, will you?”

  “Why—why, yes!” she said, in a very odd tone. “I’ll do just that.” And she hung up. After all, this didn’t seem the time to tell Oscar that Harriet Bascom had had more than $11,000 tucked away in the false bottom of that valise.

  Besides, she had plans for it.

  “For a desperate disease, a desperate cure.”

  —Montaigne

  10

  THE STAIRS WERE DARK, NARROW AND STEEP—but Talleyrand the poodle, who would try anything once, went lunging up. Miss Withers clung somehow to the leash and arrived at the top rumpled and out of breath. The sign on the door, in a gay hodgepodge of colored letters, read simply Jonathan. She settled herself with a shake, and knocked.

  Then the artist stood in the doorway, smiling and wiping his hands on a loose linen smock. “Mrs. Goggins! You have thought about it. You have come to sit.”

  She entered a little living-room furnished and decorated with a deceptive simplicity. Those chairs, the low divan, the coffee table and lamps had all been designed by a master and made by the loving hands of a craftsman in wood. “Oh, you do remember me?” she asked. “But I didn’t ever tell you my name, did I? Though you called me by it that day on the street. At least you called me—”

  “Of course. I ask the barman your name that day we meet. You were dressed a little differently, perhaps. But the hair, the make-up, the clothes—I do not see them, I see what is underneath. Only so can one paint portraits.”