Four Lost Ladies (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

  “Why not?” He turned to the phone again, while Miss Withers waited with her fingers crossed, hardly daring to breathe. In a moment he looked up and announced, “She says it was a beige wool suit with peplum jacket and knife-pleated skirt. She left it because she changed her mind. And she says she has one hundred and eighty-five dollars in her deposit account at Macy’s and thanks for reminding her.”

  There was a long silence. “Well?” Piper demanded.

  The schoolteacher nodded. “Scratch Mae Carter,” she said in a small sad voice.

  And he hung up. “That’s that.”

  The two ancient antagonists stared at each other. Miss Withers spoke first. “There’s still one left—Emma Sue Atkins,” she said without much conviction.

  Piper snorted. “Would you like to bet an old Dewey button against a new hat that we don’t hear from her too before the week is out?”

  She didn’t take the bet. What would she want with a new hat anyhow? She was going to be wearing sackcloth and ashes from now on. And it was only five days until the Inspector’s hearing, when he was going to be dragged up before the board to answer for her sins. Suddenly it was impossible for her to sit here and look at the man. So far he had avoided actually saying, “I told you so!” but he positively radiated it.

  She started toward the door. “Oscar, I—I’ll be at home if you should want me for anything.”

  “Good-by—please!” Oscar Piper said fervently.

  Wearily she dragged herself back uptown. There were two men sitting in a small maroon coupé a little way up the street from her door, but she was too despondent even to care.

  Talleyrand tactfully tried to shake her out of the dumps by putting on his entire repertoire of tricks—playing dead, sitting up, walking on his hind legs, and tossing his rubber ball up into the air and catching it again. But he was for once playing to an unresponsive audience.

  It is always darkest just before the dawn, Miss Withers reminded herself. And also, when it is darkest you can see the stars. But she could see no stars anywhere, nor any glimmer of light in the enfolding gloom. Jeeps Davidson came home from the nursery school a little after noon, but for once she was in a mood that quite matched Miss Withers’s own.

  “I decided this morning that I’ve been very silly,” she announced gravely. “I thought it all over and then called up Tad.”

  “Very sensible of you, child.”

  “I called him four times,” Jeeps confessed.

  “And he wouldn’t talk to you?”

  “He wasn’t there. He wasn’t working, and he wasn’t upstairs in his little room on the top floor where the bellboys and assistant-managers sleep. He’s gone.”

  “Gone? Gone where?”

  The girl shook her head. “All I could find out was that yesterday he just got in his car and left. You don’t look very surprised!”

  “Nothing,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers, “could surprise me now.” And she told the girl about the events of the morning—the telephone call and the letter. “So you see, your aunt says she is happily married and that she will communicate with you sometime later.”

  “Gosh!” said Jeeps. “That—that rather ties it, doesn’t it?”

  The schoolteacher nodded. “It does indeed. I suppose it’s un-Christian to be disappointed because somebody isn’t dead. But I feel as the husky-driver must have felt who mushed his sled-dogs over a thousand miles of Arctic waste to carry the antitoxin to Nome and then found that there wasn’t any epidemic there after all.”

  “There—there couldn’t be any mistake, could there?”

  Miss Withers took the black looseleaf notebook from its hiding-place behind the bookcase. “Nobody but your aunt would know that she used to have a pair of lovebirds named after a cat and dog because they always fought. Nobody but Mae Carter would know all about that suit she left at Altman’s, and about the account at Macy’s. Nobody but Ethel Brinker would have had Talley’s papers and could have signed that letter. See? It’s all down here, in black and white.”

  “And you’re in the red!”

  The schoolteacher nodded. “But not as badly as I would have been if anyone had claimed the reward, as they had a perfect right to do. But they all had reasons for wanting it hushed up.”

  Jeeps said, “I just will have to get used to the idea of Auntie being alive all over again. I—I can’t really believe it yet.” She looked hard and long at the poster pinned to the wall—the four faces. “Anyway, there’s still the Atkins woman.”

  “Wait and see,” said Miss Withers. “When troubles come, they come not singly, but in bucketsful.”

  The phone rang at five o’clock. “Inspector Piper is calling you, just a minute please.”

  “Yes, Oscar?” Hope sprang eternal in Miss Withers’s breast. “Have your men picked up Flower Quinn?”

  “What? Oh, no. Nothing like that. Nobody home. She must have got wind of something and ducked out. What I called about—well, just for the record—”

  “Go on. I can take it.”

  “Well, a woman who claims to be Mrs. Emma Sue Atkins is on the other phone calling from Sun Valley, Idaho—collect of course.”

  “Yes, Oscar?”

  “The same story, almost. It seems that she is very embarrassed at all the fanfare and will we please call off the dogs? She’s married, but her husband’s interlocutory decree isn’t final and she’s afraid his first wife will make trouble. Sounds genuine all right, but just to button it up tight, have you got anything I can ask her, so we’ll know she isn’t another nut?”

  After a quick reference to the notebook, Miss Withers made a couple of suggestions, completely without hope. “Call you back,” the Inspector said.

  Jeeps and Miss Withers sat like wooden images, waiting. Then the phone rang again. “Scratch Atkins,” Piper told her bluntly. “It’s her all right. The connection wasn’t very good, and her voice sounded sort of mushy—”

  “Was it a southern accent? She was from Baltimore.”

  “Maybe so. Anyway, she says she’s going to pay that fifty-dollar pledge she made to the Red Cross one of these days—she just hasn’t got around to it. And she eloped in such a hurry she didn’t bother to close out the bank account at the Fifth Avenue Trust and Savings, but she’ll write to them. She didn’t say as much, but I gathered that one of the reasons she’s trying to stay anonymous is that she’s afraid the income-tax people will try to take a big bite out of the settlement she got from the cab company, or else she hasn’t paid her lawyer. So—”

  “Miami, Phoenix, and Sun Valley, all heard from in one day. And Santa Barbara a couple of days ago.”

  “There go your four missing women,” Piper reminded her unnecessarily. “Everybody heard from but the dream man on the other poster. Shall I stick around and see if Mr. Nemo calls up too?”

  “No, Oscar. Don’t rub it in. I’d ask you over for dinner, but we’re having crow tonight, with a side order of humble pie.”

  “Hmmmph! I’ve got to sit down now to the pleasant job of making a full report to my superiors on this rat-race. It’ll sound good at the hearing. Might as well have an accused man write out the brief for the prosecuting attorney.”

  “Must you, Oscar? Report it, I mean?”

  “Of course. The calls came through the official switch board, and Fink knows all about ’em. The story’s all through the Department already. You can hear Dan Kiley laughing and sharpening his ax all the way down the hall.”

  There was nothing Miss Withers could say but “Good-by,” so she said it and hung up.

  “Joan of Arc, was I?” she told Jeeps. “Don Quixote, rather. And Mr. Nemo was only a windmill.”

  The girl looked worried. “Are you—quite all right?”

  “I was the little boy who cried ‘wolf!’ in the story. I was Horatius, chopping down the wrong bridge. I was the football player in the Rose Bowl who grabbed the ball and galloped ninety yards to make a touchdown for the other team. I—”

  But Jeeps led her
into the bedroom. “You’re going to take an aspirin and lie down!” A little later the girl sat on the edge of the bed. “Feeling better?”

  “What do you think!”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t leave you alone, then.”

  “Leave me? Are you going out?”

  “Home,” Jeeps said. “Where else?”

  “Of course, of course.”

  “I feel just as badly about it as you do,” the girl continued. “But there isn’t anything to keep me here now. The quest is finished and done with. And if Tad had cared anything about me at all he wouldn’t have just disappeared without saying a word.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “I do. I’m going back home to Bagley’s Mills and forget about him. There are just as good fish in the sea as ever were caught, and some of them aren’t born liars—or worse. I’ll hide my broken heart behind a smile and be the femme fatale of the soft-coal country.”

  “Tell me, child. Is there a boy back home?”

  “Several. The best ones got away years ago and went to the city, but there’s the boy who dishes sodas in the Bon Ton, and the one who works for the milk company. The competition’s tough, though—I have twelve sisters, you know, and four of them getting to the predatory age.”

  “It doesn’t exactly sound idyllic.”

  “It’ll be a good place to lick my wounds. Men! You can have them!”

  The schoolteacher shook her head. “There’s only one I ever cared anything about, and I’ve jinxed him forever and ever. Oscar Piper will never speak to me again, and I can’t say that I blame him!”

  Jeeps said she guessed she’d run out and get a dress she’d left at the cleaners, go up and make her apologies to the woman who ran the nursery school, and pick up the rest of the odds and ends.

  “Go ahead, child. I’ll try to take a nap.”

  As she drifted off she felt the lurch of the bed as the poodle, intrigued by the idea of anyone taking a daytime nap, leaped onto the bed and lay down at her feet. Then surprisingly, now that all hope was lost, she slept—murmuring to herself something about, “Sleep that knits the raveled sleave of care.”

  To wake suddenly, with a terrible silent scream. The dream had come again, and this time she had gone down under the weight of the maddened beasts who hemmed her in. She lay choking. …

  It was only Talley, who had crept up on the coverlet and then rolled over so that one careless outflung paw was across her face.

  “Down, you silly fool!” she cried in her classroom voice. Brown eyes saddened with puzzled reproach, the poodle slid reluctantly off the bed. Then she sat up suddenly. It was almost dark, but the stars were shining—one star, anyway.

  “Mad dogs! Of course! My subconscious wasn’t very subtle, after all.” Hastily the schoolteacher flung on a dress, paused only to put Talley’s long-awaited dinner in his pan and give him a forgiving pat, and then seized coat and hat and rushed out of the apartment.

  Fast as a taxi could take her she hurried to her old stamping-ground in the periodical reading-room of the public library at Fifth and Forty-Second. Feverishly she went through the out-of-town papers for November, eliminating city after city as she went. Nothing in Los Angeles. Nothing in San Francisco. Nothing in Philadelphia, or Boston, or Chicago, or Seattle. …

  Finally she bumped her head against a stone wall. Then she cried, “Of course!” so loudly that several of the musty little old men who haunt the place glared at her. But she didn’t care. Naturally, a woman who was planning a trip wouldn’t send on ahead for copies of the local papers. Most cities, especially those depending on tourist trade, minimized news of such things anyway. If Ethel Brinker had seen in some newspaper that there was a rabies epidemic where she was going—as she had told Harris when she turned Talleyrand over to him for board—then she must have read it in some New York daily!

  And there it was, in The Times for November 14th—two days before Ethel had called the boarding-kennel. Under an AP dateline, the schoolteacher read: Rabies Scare Hits Miami Beach—Order Compulsory Pet Inoculations.

  Now she knew where Ethel Brinker had gone—or rather, where the poor woman had thought she was going. And it was a long way from Santa Barbara.

  More bits and pieces for the patchwork—and it wasn’t going to have to be a crazy-quilt, either. A harmony of shapes and colors, a patterned design, was beginning to form. It just needed stitching together, and one big scrap for the middle.

  What was it that Jonathan had said, about cats mewing at any door when winter was coming on? To be warm—and secure—the bait hadn’t been glamour but coziness. …

  An hour later, with fumbling, excited fingers Miss Withers dropped a coin into a pay-phone and dialed Spring 7-3100.

  “Extension 36—Inspector Piper. And hurry.”

  But she heard only the policewoman’s flat Brooklyn accents. “Probationer Fink speakin’. He’s not in his office.”

  “Oh, dear!” The schoolteacher frowned. There was so much she had to tell him, and yet it had to be couched so that the real message would be for his ears alone. “Will you take a message, please? I’m afraid it will be quite a long one, so take your notebook.”

  “Okay, shoot,” said Fink wearily.

  “Just tell him that everything is going to be all right because I had the same dream four times running and finally it dawned on me what it meant. Ethel Brinker isn’t Ethel Brinker at all, she isn’t even alive—”

  “A little slower, please.”

  “Very well. Tell him I went over to the Kennel Club and found out that they send out blank pedigrees and application blanks for registration to anybody who writes in for them. And it wasn’t the Pillicoc signature on the papers—”

  “Howdja spell that?”

  “Never mind. And of course a registered nurse doesn’t put the initials RN after her name when she signs a letter, particularly not when she signs her married name. And if the Brinker thing falls to pieces, they all fall. And I think I see how Mr. Nemo worked it.”

  “What’s that name?”

  “Nemo—it means ‘Nobody’ in Latin. Tell the Inspector that there’s been a traitor in my own camp, I’ve been nursing a viper to my bosom, and my little black book was opened to the enemy.”

  “Is that all?” Miss Fink said, in a very odd tone indeed.

  “All for now. Oh, you might add this. Pick up Flower tomorrow, especially if she has false teeth. Have you got that?”

  “I’ll give your message to the Inspector,” said Fink, and hung up. The policewoman shook her head. “Now who’da thought that a respectable old coot like her would get hopped to the gills on marihuana?”

  But after she had transcribed her notes, she corrected herself. “Heroin, more likely.”

  Down the hall Inspector Oscar Piper was sitting uncomfortably in the Commissioner’s office, with the Old Man behind the desk, Kiley standing beside him, and Rawlinson, the police surgeon, across the room. “You’ve read the report,” Piper was saying. “It wasn’t until I had finished that I realized the deadly similarities between the four cases. Poor Miss Withers was wrong about the four women being murdered, but she blundered into a clear case of bigamy. They all married the same man—he gave each of them a variation of the same cock-and-bull story about the reasons why they weren’t to communicate with friends or relatives. With plane travel what it is today, he’s probably jumping back and forth, keeping them all happy—”

  Dan Kiley made a rude noise.

  “There have been cases like that,” the Old Man put in. “I remember fourteen years ago out in Chicago—” It was a long story, but it finally came to an end. “He got ten years, and all five of his wives said they’d wait for him. What-a-man Hinkle, we called him.”

  “Then you see why I want police protection for Hildegarde Withers,” the Inspector said. “Because she uncovered this thing and will keep on digging. The smart guy who married those four women he met in the Hotel Grandee last fall very possibly pushed Harriet Bascom out of a hotel w
indow there last summer. He may or may not be intending to knock off the four wives when their money runs out, but it’s almost a cinch that he’ll come roaring back to New York and try to quiet Miss Withers. The Department hasn’t shown up too well in this whole thing, and that’s largely my fault. But if it all winds up with the murder of a well-meaning private citizen who’s only, after all, been trying to do our work for us—”

  The Old Man shifted uneasily and coughed behind his hand. “I see your point, Piper. But what we asked you to step in here about—”

  There was an interruption then, as Fink appeared suddenly in the doorway with the typed telephone message in her hand. “For you, Inspector. Miss Withers said it was very urgent.” She was smiling, very smugly.

  “I think I’ll take that,” Dan Kiley spoke up suddenly. He read the message to himself, and then again aloud. “So it’s dreams, and pollywogs, and vipers in her bosom, and enemies.” He turned to Rawlinson. “Doctor, don’t you agree with me that this is up your alley?”

  “Wait a minute!” the Inspector started to say.

  “That’s not all,” Kiley put in. “We have a copy of another telephone message from the same party, that came in last night. Your friend Miss Withers informed you that she was going out picking flowers. In February!”

  “If you’ll just shut up and listen a minute, Mr. Kiley—”

  “And we happen to know that a little while ago you received a telephone call from a young woman who acts as companion to Miss Withers. She said that she was worried, because the woman was talking wildly about not being Joan of Arc any more, she had switched to being Don Quixote, and also she thinks she’s a football player and Horatius at the wrong bridge.”

  “Wire-tapping, eh?” Piper suddenly stood up.

  “At my orders,” Kiley told him. “I thought it was time we found out about what was going on. It’s pretty clear, isn’t it?”

  “Listen! This is ridiculous. If any of you knew the old girl like I do—” The Inspector waved his hand. “If you understood—”

  “We understand better than you think,” said Dr. Rawlinson. “Offhand I’d say it’s a fairly clear case of dementia praecox with delusions of persecution. She talks about enemies that are after her little black book. For her own sake I recommend that Miss Withers be sent over to Bellevue for observation.”