Four Lost Ladies (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

  The young man behind the desk—not Tad, but one somewhat higher on the ladder of assistant-managerships—told her that she was expected; she was to go right up to Mr. Brady’s office. Even with full directions she had some difficulty in finding the unmarked door at the end of the mezzanine corridor, but on her tentative knock the latch clicked and Brady himself came to greet her. His smile was polite, almost painfully so, but there were dark shadows beneath his eyes.

  “I understand that you’ve been having a little turmoil over here?” she asked brightly.

  “To put it mildly, ma’am. Your methods are a little—startling. I wouldn’t have given a plugged nickel for my job yesterday, but now I think the powers that be are a little calmer. It hasn’t hurt business any, we’re full up. And one thing, it stopped people complaining about the Sphinx club.”

  Miss Withers looked blank. “Haven’t you been roped into one of those yet? It’s a variation on the Pyramid clubs that went the rounds a while back, only it pays off quicker. Sort of a chain-letter gag without the letters. Somebody started one in the hotel and it got going like wildfire before we scotched it.” Brady sat down at his desk. “Here’s that phone bill.”

  There was no mistake. There for the month of August was the Grandee’s account with the New York Telephone Company, and she read, circled in red ink: Aug. 16. … St Barb Cal Arroyo 184. … $22.25

  “That’s the number I called,” she confessed. “But it was only the Chamber of Commerce. And you can’t tell me that Harriet Bascom committed suicide because of grapefruit!” She told him about the rest of it.

  Brady shrugged. “Well, forgetting the Bascom thing for a moment, I’m more interested in the four others.” He pointed to a great stack of looseleaf ledgers on his desk. “There are the hotel records for the last seven months. Buried in that heap is what information we have on the four women and their stay here, plus the records on all other guests. Some of them are in and out, but keep their suites. But we can tell when they were away because there won’t be any room-service or telephone charges, valet service, and so on. I thought maybe if you and I went through it, and found that some male guest had been away for a few days about the time our missing women checked out—”

  “Mr. Brady, I’ve misjudged you!” she cried.

  “I told you we’d co-operate. Besides, it’s the owners’ orders. I get this thing cleared up in one week, or I get me another job.”

  “You too!” she said, sighing. “Well, let’s get to work. Shall we start with Mr. Peter Temple?”

  “I thought you’d eliminated him,” Brady said, blankly surprised.

  “I haven’t eliminated anybody!” Miss Withers said grimly. Then they bent their heads over the ledgers, working in silence. It was the telephone which interrupted.

  “Brady speaking—I thought I left orders—” Then his voice suddenly softened, and became as a cooing dove’s. “Hello, J.K. Of course. Yes, we—certainly, J.K. Not yet, but—yes, J.K. Yes, right away.”

  The schoolteacher confidently expected him to hang up and then turn to her and say, “That was J.K.,” as they used to do it in the old vaudeville skit. But Brady only grabbed his hat and coat. “Have to leave for a few minutes. You won’t be disturbed here. Ring if you want anything.” And he was gone.

  An hour or so later, her head spinning from an effort to remember a dozen or so dates, suite numbers, and figures all at once, Miss Withers wearily pushed the ledgers aside. The masculine residents of the Grandee seemed to have been as erratic as jack-rabbits in their comings and goings, but as far as she could see no one of them had been out of town for any appreciable length of time on the important days.

  But how long need it take to commit a murder and dispose of a body? It might even have been done between sunset and sunrise—there were, she knew, lonely swamps and beaches even out on Long Island, thickly wooded parks and forest preserves only a few miles upstate, and even parts of Staten Island in the City itself where at this season of the year a body—or four bodies—might go undiscovered for months.

  And there was always the tide, helped by the might of the Hudson, carrying so much of the waste of the city, its unwanted, out through the Narrows to the sea. …

  She hastily scribbled a note of thanks to Mr. Brady and left it on the desk. Hurrying out through the lobby, she caught sight of a massive, rather hairy figure standing before the bulletin board, staring as if fascinated at the posters. Impulsively she turned and came up behind him.

  “Count Stroganyeff!” she cried. “How nice to run into you again!”

  The bulky Slav blinked at her warily. “I do not think—”

  “Don’t you remember our meeting in the revolving door, and at the auction the other day?”

  “Of course. Madame Goggins.” He bent over her hand, but this time to her faint disappointment he skipped the kiss.

  “And how is the caviar business, and the Borzois?” she asked politely.

  “Tarrible. And getting worse. Anything Russian these days is a drag on the market—even Russian dressing. You would not be interested in a wolfhound puppy at a very great bargain?”

  “I think not,” said the schoolteacher. “Wolfhounds are so sad. Perhaps now a poodle—do you think you could find me an apricot-colored Standard French poodle like the one you got for my friend Ethel Brinker?”

  The blood drained from his face. “Brinker?” he whispered hoarsely. His eyes flashed to the pictured face on the poster, and back again. “Her?”

  “Yes, that’s just what I meant.”

  Stroganyeff smiled, with his thick lips only. “You are mistaken. I had no business dealings with Miss Brinker.”

  It was time for a finesse. “But you were seen with her!”

  “Perhaps—perhaps I suggest to her one day here in the hotel, very casually, that a wolfhound would be something to set off her looks, her charm. I say that to many people.”

  “Then you admit that you knew her?”

  “Nyet!” he exploded suddenly. “Are you the one who is responsible for this business with the posters? Are you the one that circulates a drawing that looks like me, and the description, so that my friends all avoid me?”

  “If the shoe fits—” remarked Miss Withers.

  “Bah!” Stroganyeff said, and went stalking off, muttering dark Russian curses.

  Miss Withers realized that he had actually admitted nothing at all. She came closer, studying the drawing on the second poster very critically. “Hmmm,” she said.

  “Does look like him, doesn’t it?” Tad Belanger, in new tweed jacket and dark flannels, and obviously off duty, stood beside her.

  “The Count? I can’t see it.”

  “No, Jonathan himself. Portrait of the Artist.”

  The schoolteacher stepped back and squinted critically. At first the idea seemed ridiculous. The features certainly didn’t match, but come to think of it there was something about the eyes, something mocking. … “You are very discerning, young man,” she said.

  “Am I?” He hesitated. “Er—how’s things?”

  “She’s fine,” Miss Withers told him pointedly. “We’ve missed you.”

  Thaddeus Belanger III looked suddenly flushed and sulky. “Oh, I’m afraid that Judge Davidson’s lovely daughter is a little high-nosed to miss anybody, and me least of all.”

  “Really? I haven’t seen that side of her. Of course, far be it from me to try to give anyone advice, especially about affairs of the heart, but if you want my very candid, disinterested opinion. … ”

  He didn’t, but he got ten minutes of it anyway. Then Miss Withers abruptly left him and went hurrying down the Avenue. Men, she thought, were all alike—proud, stubborn, completely unreasonable creatures who were perpetually falling into a state of the sulks. And speaking of that, how was the Inspector today? With some temerity she stepped into a Lexington Avenue cigar store and dropped a coin into the pay phone.

  “Oscar?” she said, almost expecting him to hang up on her.

  Sh
e very nearly fainted with surprise when she was received with open arms and a hearty invitation to lunch. “But don’t come here,” Piper added hastily. “There’s a little beanery around the corner. …”

  Miss Withers, even before they had had a chance to order, sensed that there was a subtle change in the Inspector. But he only leaned back in the booth with a deep sigh and ordered corned beef and cabbage. “It’s good to get away from those telephones,” he told her. “Those flyers of yours have made it necessary to put on two extra men at the switchboards.”

  “Oscar! You mean we’re getting results?”

  “We got twenty-four calls yesterday and one hundred and seven this morning. A lot of ’em long-distance, collect.”

  “But that’s wonderful!”

  Piper showed a flash of his old spirit. “Wonderful, is it? Every nut in the country has been on the phone, trying to chisel in on the reward. A lady in Texas, with a Mexican accent you could cut with a knife, claims she’s Mae Carter and wants me to wire her funds for a ticket to New York. Two or three more claim to be Emma Sue Atkins, please remit ditto. One old lady out in Omaha, who must be ninety, thinks that Alice Davidson was her missing twin sister, and a sailor just released from a veteran’s hospital thinks maybe he married Ethel Brinker under another name four years ago in Frisco, just before he shipped out. A medium in Los Angeles claims she has talked to all four of the women in a séance—and so on and so on.”

  “Oh, dear.” She looked at him cautiously. “Then why aren’t you more annoyed than you are, Oscar? Are you by any chance coming around to my way of thinking?”

  He shook his head. “Not about the four women. I think we’ll hear from them. But about the Bascom case. I keep coming back to that. Remember the empty folder of traveler’s checks in the hotel wastebasket? It was one of the things that made the boys who investigated the death so sure it was suicide because she was broke. Well, yesterday I got in touch with the ABA and had them look at their records. On the second day of August one of their member banks at Columbus Circle issued one thousand dollars worth of checks to Harriet Bascom, Hotel Barbizon, in denominations of fifty dollars. Of that amount exactly seven hundred dollars is still outstanding. And nobody who cashes a traveler’s check holds it for eight months.”

  “So Mr. Nemo destroyed them! He couldn’t have cashed them without forging the duplicate signature on each one, so—”

  “I’m afraid you’re right,” Piper said. “Anyway, I’m personally reopening the Bascom case, on the quiet. Of course, it’s a cold trail—”

  “Not quite as cold as you think, Oscar. It was only last week, remember, that the nasty bleached blonde with the nastier dog dropped in at the auction and snatched Harriet Bascom’s luggage away from me. You suggested at the time that maybe she wanted the bags because the initials were the same as those of her husband, but those were women’s cases. I went scouting for Mrs. Herbert Baker and found that the address she gave would have been at the bottom of the Hudson River. On top of it all, when she sat beside me in the auction place she flashed a gold cigarette lighter, and the initials of the monogram didn’t have a B in them. I seem to remember something about an angle and a circle—such as E.O.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Lots of people give phony addresses and carry cigarette lighters they’ve picked up somewhere.”

  “Yes, Oscar. But look at it this way. As I see it, Mr. Nemo knew that he had only a few minutes in Harriet’s hotel suite before the police would be there, even though he had closed the window to make it less easy to identify the room from outside. He set the stage as best he could, put on the gloomiest record he could find in Harriet’s collection, but he didn’t have time to go through all her luggage thoroughly. He must have had a suspicion that she had money hidden away, so he sent somebody to the auction to buy up everything that was hers. Only the woman missed the old valise that was off by itself, and I got it.”

  “Not much to go on. The town is full of synthetic blondes with lap dogs.”

  “Age about forty-five, weight one hundred sixty, height five feet six. A big loose smiling mouth, and mean, muddy eyes like tiny chips of glacier ice. Something gross and familiar in her manner, a way of calling people ‘dearie’ that sets your teeth on edge, and the look of having put on make-up and powder without washing first. She seemed—shopworn.”

  “Hildegarde, you’re wonderful. Too bad you didn’t notice the taxi she hailed.”

  “Stop trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs. It was a new black and yellow Interborough.”

  “Well, now! Cab companies have to keep trip tickets, and there’s just a faint chance, if I pull a few strings—”

  “I already did—or rather, I pulled a twenty-dollar bill on the cab company dispatcher. That was the day after I found the woman had given a false address. They located the driver, but he had only taken the woman, bags and all, to Grand Central. The bird has flown.”

  “An old trick. She went in and then out another entrance into a different cab, knowing that it’s impossible to trace hauls out of the terminal. You know, this blonde of yours sounds like a wronggo. People don’t usually switch over to the shady side of the law all at once. Maybe there’s something on her over in the files. With your description—”

  “Oscar, what are you up to? Don’t get yourself into any more trouble.”

  He grinned boyishly. “If I’m going to have a hearing and be accused of acting in excess of orders, infringing on the territory of another bureau, and otherwise gumming up the S.O.P. of the Department, I might as well give them something to chew on.” Piper rose suddenly. “Run along home. I’ll see you there later. And get ready to go calling this evening.”

  The wiry little Irishman strode jauntily away, walking on his toes. “So Caesar is himself again!” observed the schoolteacher, much to the mystification of the waiter who hovered near by with the unpaid check.

  It was nearly six o’clock when Inspector Piper finally showed up at her apartment, with a brown envelope under his arm and a new light in his eye. “Hey, what’s the matter?” he greeted her. “Did the dog eat up the steak again?”

  She shook her head. “No, it’s nothing. I’m silly to let it upset me, but it was my great-grandmother’s table, and you can’t find soft velvety walnut like that any more. I wouldn’t mind it so much if the girl would admit that she did it, but of course she’s so emotionally snarled-up over that young man that she doesn’t know what she’s doing half the time.”

  “Back up and start over,” Piper told her.

  “Look!” and she showed him a blackened furrow on the edge of her dining-room table, where a cigarette had burned its entire length.

  “Too bad,” he said. “Jeeps?”

  “Who else? Talley chews, but he hasn’t taken up smoking yet!”

  “Well,” said the Inspector, “maybe this will make you forget it. Want to look at some pretty pictures?”

  They were starkly candid shots of half a dozen women who wore numbered cards instead of jewelry. There was a certain family resemblance between them all, but Miss Withers seized unhesitatingly on the third she looked at. “That is she!”

  “Well, her happens to be one Flora alias Flower Quinn, a Jersey lily born in Hackensack in 1908, graduated from an industrial school for wayward girls in ’24, worked awhile in various beauty parlors, got into the massage racket and finally ended up with a string of auto courts between here and Phillie. Up for transportation in May of 1945 but nolle prossed. She was also—”

  “Oscar, I don’t understand.”

  “She was barred from the Navy Yard, as the song goes. Those auto courts were equipped with hot and cold running hookers.”

  “She was a Magdalene?”

  “Spelled M-a-d-a-m. Anyway, our faded Flower dropped the racket after she beat that rap in ’45, and presumably went legit.”

  “Flower Quinn,” murmured Miss Withers. “Initials F.Q.—yes, those could have been what I saw on her lighter. Then she’s still using her own name
.”

  “Maybe. But she’s not listed in any phone directory in greater New York—I had the boys check down at Centre Street. But now that you’ve identified the photo I’ll order a sort of unofficial dragnet. Don’t worry—we’ll locate Flower Quinn in a day or so. And then”—he rubbed his hands together—“this case busts wide open.”

  “I think, Oscar,” said Miss Withers, “that for once you’re right.”

  The Inspector refused an invitation to dinner and went hurrying off. A little later Jeeps came in, loaded down with sandpaper, varnish, wax, and stain as well as a library book on refinishing furniture.

  “Never mind that, child,” said Miss Withers. “I’m thinking.”

  “What about? Can I help think?”

  The young face was so hopeful, so eager to make amends, that the schoolteacher relented, and told her about Flower née Flora Quinn.

  “But what can we or anybody do until the police locate her?” Jeeps wanted to know.

  “I don’t quite know—but I’m going to do it. In this case all trails keep leading back to the Grandee. And Madam Quinn started off in life as a beautician. Give me that phone.” Hastily she dialed the number of the Grandee and demanded to be connected with the Cathedral de Beauté. “Hello! I’d like to make an appointment for a hairdo and a massage, please. Yes, tomorrow—and I’d like the same girl I had last time, Flora. What?” Miss Withers held a hand over the mouthpiece and said over her shoulder, “Hasn’t worked there since October.”

  Then into the phone: “Well, could you give me her home address? I—I owe her something.” Another long pause. “Well, I don’t care what your policy is, I want that address. Do I have to call my friend Mr. Max Brady and—Very well. Thank you. I’ll call later about the appointment.”

  She hung up. “Get it?” Jeeps begged.

  “Got it. Alta Apartments, on Barrow Street in the Village. Wait until I tell the Inspector that! Him and his police dragnets!”

  But the Inspector’s line was busy, and stayed busy. Finally Miss Withers gave it up and dished out a sketchy dinner for the three of them. But only Talleyrand had a satisfactory appetite.