Four Lost Ladies (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

  “Really?” The schoolteacher pulled her coat a little more closely about her. “Might I see some of your work, Mr. Jonathan?”

  There was only the faintest hesitation. “But of course. One moment, one moment.” The man almost pushed her into a chair. “If you will excuse me—”

  And he disappeared into what was presumably his studio, carefully closing the door behind him. Miss Withers rose suddenly to her feet and tiptoed across the room, pressing her ear to the panel. There were faint noises—something bumped, and there was the creak of a hinge and the slam of a cupboard door.

  “I wonder just what he’s doing?” she remarked to Talley, who had chosen the eggshell divan for a throne. But the schoolteacher was back in the chair again when Jonathan returned.

  “You will come in now? I have some of my best things here—I am getting ready for an exhibition, so I borrow them back.”

  The big bare studio room was like nothing she had imagined. There was a wide skylight, and the entire north wall had been knocked out and replaced with glass, now partially covered with tan monk’s-cloth curtains that touched the floor. There was an easel of heavy wood, solid as a pedestal; there were a dozen or so ornate chairs, one of which stood on the model’s platform with a Spanish shawl draped over the back. One wall was lined with cupboards, shelves, and what appeared to be a small chemical laboratory. It was evident that the man ground his own pigments. This was a workroom, and not at all a place for Bohemian orgies as she had half anticipated.

  A dozen or so portraits, life-size or larger, leaned against the wall. They were, the schoolteacher guessed, reasonably good examples of recent portraiture, leaning perhaps a little toward the academic. The subjects were all feminine, women arranging flowers, leaning in riding-clothes against a mantelpiece, playing at a spinet, or sitting in big chairs with Siamese cats posed about them. Some of them at first glance seemed to simper a little, but on closer observation she wondered if Jonathan had not mixed a touch of acid in his paints.

  The lady with the Siamese was cool and lovely—but the cat in her lap was acutely cross-eyed and had six toes on one paw. A dark and haughty beauty arranged the flowers—but the greenery in her hands was poison ivy. The music on the spinet was written in ukulele chords, and the booted lady who leaned against the mantelpiece had a silver fork in her hand, evidently about to eat from the dinner plate reflected in the slanting mirror. Yet apart from these derisive touches there was nothing to interest Miss Withers. The women were all strangers.

  Jonathan sensed something. “You are disappointed,” he said quickly. “But I would not have painted you like these. You I would not prettify. I would like to paint you with a child’s doll in your arms for contrast, an old-fashioned rag doll—”

  Miss Withers suddenly swayed on her feet, clutching his arm. “I’m a little faint,” she whispered. “The stairs. Could I have a glass of water?”

  As soon as he had left the room she flew to the cupboard doors. Inside the first were only old costumes, rolls of canvas, bundles of picture-molding, and rags. The second held drawing-paper, tattered sketchbooks, old frames, and more rags. Talleyrand felt that it might also contain mice, and managed to get in her way. But she turned to the third door—

  “You’re getting warmer,” came an encouraging voice from the doorway. The artist came toward her, and she backed hastily behind the poodle. “Feeling better now?” There was no glass in his hand.

  “I was only—the dog smelled something—”

  “Go on, open the other cupboard.”

  “No, I—”

  “But I insist!” When she still hesitated, Jonathan flung open the door, disclosing a stack of old paintings, most of them half finished. There were three or four life studies, thin anemic-looking feminine nudes, as stylized and sexless as dummies in a store window.

  “Come, come,” said Miss Withers, rapidly regaining confidence. “Don’t tell me you went to all the trouble of hiding those chilly-looking females before you’d let me in here. You rushed in here to hide something else!”

  “And what would I have to hide?”

  “The portrait of a woman—a woman who is dead.”

  He slowly closed the cupboard, and then turned. “Who are you really, and what do you want here?”

  “Why, I—”

  “When a person feels faint, the blood leaves the head. You were blushing.”

  “Was I?” She took a deep breath. “Young man, perhaps we should have a showdown. I am not Mrs. Goggins, I am not a wealthy patron of the arts, and I have no interest whatever in having my portrait painted. I came to the Hotel Grandee in disguise, in search of a murderer who has done away with four—no, five women, and perhaps more.”

  “So? And now you come to me?” He shrugged. “You think that perhaps I hate women? If that were true, I would not need to murder them. I have my brushes, my paints. I can dissect a woman, lay her bare, reduce her to absurdity. Sometimes I paint like that. But I destroy the paintings, for they would be bad for business. And it is my ambition to be unique among artists, and to die rich.”

  “Did you,” Miss Withers fumbled in her handbag, “did you ever dissect one of these?” And she showed him four photographs.

  Jonathan looked at them, without reaction. “No,” he said simply. “None of them ever sat for me.” Then he pointed. “But I think—I am sure I made a sketch of that one. It was two or three months ago, in the hotel coffee shop.”

  “Mae Carter!”

  He shrugged. “I did not know her name. She admired the wash drawing, and then she offered me five dollars for it—as if I am a chalk-artist in a Village window!”

  “And the man who was with her?” the schoolteacher prompted.

  “She was alone. I do not sketch women with escorts; they sometimes object. But she would not have been an interesting subject anyway. None of them would.” He handed back the four photographs.

  “And why not? You don’t like the bones?”

  “It is because they all wear the same mask. It is one too many women show nowadays, a sad, silly mask. It says to the discerning eye that youth has passed by and beauty is going and they have no man. They want to get married.”

  “You mean they still dream romantic dreams of a knight on a white charger?”

  But the artist did not mean that at all. “Once, but no more. Now they just want a man of their own. They want something solid, they want security. They are starved for security, like a cat that mews at any door when winter is coming on. You, you are not like that. You have an inner completeness—perhaps it is because you are a detective.”

  “An amateur detective,” she corrected him. “A snoop, really.”

  “But you are a very brave woman,” he said. “Do you really want to see the picture that I put away before I admitted you?”

  “Of course!”

  Jonathan went back to the cupboard again and pulled out a canvas which had been tucked ’way in back, its face to the wall. Still wet and unfinished, it was an oil painting of an angular figure in a bathing-suit of the Gay Nineties, with sleeves, legs, skirt, and flounces, holding water-wings and dipping a toe gingerly in the ocean. The face was Miss Withers’s own, copied from the drawing pinned to the stretcher.

  “Ee-e-ek!” she cried out. “It’s—it’s libelous!” Then she began to laugh, until the tears came into her eyes.

  “Mr. Jonathan,” she said at last, “I think I have a commission for you, after all.”

  And so it was settled. Miss Withers followed the eager poodle down the long steep stairs again, feeling somehow that the Rubicon was crossed. The cold war between herself and Mr. Nemo was entering into its hot phase.

  She took no one except Jeeps Davidson into her confidence. It was a temptation, of course, to tell the Inspector, just to see his reaction. The man would almost certainly swallow his cigar when he heard of the money in the valise. So Harriet Bascom had committed suicide because she was destitute, eh?

  “But I know exactly what they would say
down at Headquarters,” the schoolteacher told Jeeps at lunch that day. “First off they would insist that I turn over the money to the police property custodian on one pretext or another, and I’m not going to have it tied up in red tape and put away in a safe. And that Captain Gruber who has taken the Inspector’s old job at Homicide would point out that we couldn’t prove that Harriet even knew the money was there—she might have inherited the valise from some relative who died suddenly before he could tell anybody about his hidden wealth.”

  The girl looked startled. “Say, maybe—”

  “Nonsense. The money is mostly in hundreds, current series, with no big-size bills or recalled gold certificates among them. Does that sound like a miser’s musty old hoard?” Jeeps had to agree that it did not.

  “If Oscar Piper were back at his old desk, and hadn’t lost his grip, it might be different. But his hands are tied, at the moment. However, mine are not. And if this is a poker game, then I have aces cheek-to-cheek. What’s the matter?”

  “Swallowed something the wrong way,” said Jeeps meekly, sipping water.

  “As I was saying, I am going to take the bull by the horns and drop a depth bomb that will blow the top right off this Inferno, and—”

  “Take it easy!” The girl looked at her with worried eyes. “Miss Withers, you’ve been overdoing it. Maybe you ought to take a vacation—you’ve got the money now. Why don’t you go to Bermuda or somewhere for a couple of weeks?”

  “Child, I look on that money as a sacred trust! I’m keeping a record of every penny I spend, and—”

  The telephone interrupted her. Surprisingly enough, it was the Inspector. “What have you been up to now?” he demanded. “Have you been pulling any more fast ones around the Grandee?”

  “Of course not! Except the experiment with the window that evening, and you know all about that.”

  “Well,” he said, “I just got a call from Max Brady, and he’s coming down here to see me about something—wanted an appointment for three o’clock. You’re sure you haven’t been stepping on his toes again?”

  “Quite sure,” she promised. “But it’s an idea. Did you say three o’clock?”

  “Now, Hildegarde! Don’t you go—”

  “I’m not going, I’m coming,” she interrupted. Miss Withers hung up the phone and turned to Jeeps. “My child, the watched pot is beginning to boil.”

  The reception room at the Municipal Building was large and drafty, with hard chairs and the bewhiskered portraits of ex-commissioners on the wall. Miss Withers noticed with some relief that the policewoman who was the Inspector’s secretary, while she might have blue eyes, also had a build which would have made her good material for the Notre Dame football squad. “I have an appointment,” the schoolteacher announced brightly, and went sailing on inside. It was only a few minutes past three, but Mr. Brady was already in a huddle with the Inspector, who looked oddly small and shrunken behind his vast new mahogany desk. “I hope I’m not late?” she said.

  “Not late enough,” Piper told her. “Mr. Brady, I believe you know Miss Withers, the champion gate-crasher and self-appointed gadfly to the Department?”

  Today Brady was dressed like a Wall Street partner, in a Chesterfield, imported bowler, and gray spats. He smiled and shook Miss Withers by the hand with what seemed complete cordiality. “Glad you’re here,” he told her. “You may be interested in what I came down here to report. Besides, I guess I owe you a sort of apology for blowing up the other day. But the hotel means a lot to me, and I resented the suggestion that there was any funny business going on.”

  “Even if there was—and is?” she jabbed.

  “At first,” Brady continued frankly, “I thought you were just a nut. Snooping around the hotel in a fright-wig and false eyelashes—what would anybody figure? But after we had our little run-in out in the street the other evening, I went back to my office and got to wondering—”

  “About Harriet Bascom?”

  He nodded. “I’m not saying I agree with you about the importance of whether Muller could have seen from the street whether the window was open or not. I think the reason the man had to quit pro football was because of his eyes.”

  “The doorman had 20/20 vision when it came to spotting me in the street and running to report to you!”

  “That’s as it may be. Piper here knows how trustworthy is the testimony of witnesses to any serious accident. But what I came down to say is this. I got to looking back through some of the old records and bills in the business office yesterday. And I found that on the morning of August sixteenth, the day Harriet Bascom took her dive, she—or somebody in her suite—put through a long-distance call to Santa Barbara, California, the time of the slip being eleven-thirty.”

  “Whom to?” demanded the schoolteacher eagerly.

  “The charge-slip didn’t show. It wasn’t a person-to-person call; she just asked to be connected with Information out there. But the charges were twenty-two dollars and twenty-five cents, so she must have had quite a chat with somebody.”

  “I don’t suppose,” Miss Withers put in hopefully, “that the operator listened?”

  He stiffened. “Not at the Grandee, ma’am. It would have meant her job, and besides, the girls at our switchboard are too busy to have time for eavesdropping. Anyway, a few minutes after the call was completed, the hotel maid came in to do Miss Bascom’s suite and found her crying, practically in hysterics. So there it is, if you can make anything of it.” Brady was looking at the Inspector.

  “Thanks,” said Piper. “I’ll see it gets to the captain who’s in charge now.”

  The hotel detective nodded and lighted a cigarette. “I take it then that the Bascom case is officially reopened?”

  “I wouldn’t quite say that.” The Inspector looked sideways at Miss Withers. “There’s been some commotion, but no new evidence except from the business about the window.”

  “Oscar, if you knew—” Miss Withers almost blurted out her secret then and there, but Brady was already talking.

  “I suppose it has to be,” the man said, shaking his head. “Why did that damn-fool woman have to pick our hotel anyway? Well, let’s hope it gets cleared up quickly and as quietly as possible. If there’s anything else we can do at our end—”

  “Sure, sure,” Piper told him. “But it’s not my baby. See Gruber.”

  Brady turned suddenly toward Miss Withers. “I have my car. Can I run you uptown? I don’t want any hard feelings. If you’d only come and told me beforehand, when you planned putting on that phony Mrs. Goggins act—”

  “If she’d told anybody!” Piper put in.

  “—I wouldn’t have thrown a monkey wrench in the machinery,” Brady finished.

  Miss Withers reminded him, not without a touch of bitterness, that it hadn’t been a wrench, but a pair of handcuffs. “But I suppose you meant well. Yes, I think I shall accept your kind offer of a ride uptown. Good afternoon, Oscar. You’ll be hearing from me one of these days.”

  Had there been a touch of a threat in her tone? The Inspector watched them go out together, thick as thieves. Then he grinned. “If the old girl thinks she’s going to put anything over on Brady, then she has a surprise coming.”

  But the surprise, when the time came, was on the other foot.

  “What you may not realize,” Brady was saying as they came out into the street, “is that it would be impossible for any con-man like your imaginary murderer to work a big hotel for very long. Such men are known; they have police records. All hotel detectives such as me and my men take a day off every so often and spend the time looking over the thousands of photographs down at Centre Street.”

  “I know,” admitted Miss Withers. “I put in several afternoons in the Rogues’ Gallery last week. But I didn’t find any familiar face—not anyone that I’d seen around the hotel. Which proves, does it not, that Mr. Nemo has never been muggled?”

  “Mugged,” he corrected, unsmiling. He was holding open the door of a black Lincoln se
dan, as comfortable and solid and middle-aged as its owner. “Or could it mean that he doesn’t exist, except in your fertile imagination?”

  She waited until they were under way. “Mr. Brady, I have a feeling that you know I’m correct in my suspicions—or that you’re afraid I am, which is almost the same thing. Only, being a man, you hate to admit that you may not be infallible.”

  “Ouch!” he said, and swung the sedan around the corner. “Let’s put it like this. The management of the Grandee hopes that this is a big fuss about nothing. But now the fuss is made, we want very much to get to the root of the matter, and quick.” Brady hesitated. “I have the impression that the Inspector is off the case, but that you are very much still on?”

  “Correct.”

  “I’d like to make you a little proposition. You see, I looked you up and you’ve been lucky with some important cases in the past. The hotel has a slush-fund for such purposes, and we’d like to have you represent us in getting this cleared up.”

  “Well!” gasped Miss Withers.

  “There was one bit of information I kept back,” Brady went on. “About that phone call—the charge-slip didn’t show the number that Miss Bascom finally talked to out in California, but the hotel’s monthly phone bill did.” He kept his eyes glued on the traffic ahead, driving with extreme conservatism. “I thought it was something that possibly could be better handled privately.”

  “I’m listening,” the schoolteacher said.

  “I thought that if the hotel were to assume all expenses and a reasonable charge for your time, you might consider taking a run out there.” Then Brady caught the expression in her face. “What’s the matter—something funny?”

  “It’s the second time today that somebody has suggested that I get out of town. But frankly, Mr. Brady, I don’t believe this case is going to be solved by my gallivanting off anywhere. No, I’m not having any.”

  “Sorry,” he said. All the rest of the way uptown he made polite conversation about the weather, the dirt and noise of the city, ending up with a monologue on farms and farming—a subject in which she was not in the least interested. Some day, he confided, he hoped to be able to retire to his own acreage and grow his own meat, vegetables, and flowers. “I have a green thumb,” he concluded as he set her down at her own corner.