Four Lost Ladies (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

  The Inspector turned to the boy and girl, who were eating enough for all of them. “I might have known it. Half the time she talks in riddles, and then when I think she’s talking in riddles she means just what she says. She can fly, but dogs can’t.” He faced the schoolteacher. “Hildegarde, there’s a pickup order out for you, in spite of all I could do. How did you get here? Didn’t you have any trouble at the airport?”

  “Trouble? What trouble would I have? As it happened, there was almost no ceiling here, so they set us down at Newark. I took the tube, and then a taxi home. There wasn’t any use trying to trace the Quinn woman, though she had left a wide trail as far as Philadelphia. So I stopped to send a telegram—you see, I knew it was time that Mr. Nemo was forced out into the open.”

  They all stopped eating and watched her, doubtful again.

  “You mean there’s uncertainty among you as to who he is? It was obvious enough all the time, or should have been. I simply visualized him wrong. Remembering my own susceptible, introspective girlhood, I looked for a glamour man. But women like Harriet Bascom, and Jeeps’s Aunt Alice and the rest, were only looking for security. Jonathan the artist saw that, in their faces. They wanted a husband, they wanted a solid sort of citizen who had a grapefruit grove in Santa Barbara, or its equivalent in some equally attractive vacation spot. Only Harriet had a critical, canny side to her nature—she even subscribed to Consumers’ Guide, remember? So before she eloped with Mr. Nemo she checked up on him by calling the Chamber of Commerce out there where he claimed to have his grapefruit groves. And then she made the mistake of confronting him with what she had discovered. So he killed her, then and there. Instead of doing it quietly somewhere else later, as he did with the others.”

  “If you know this much,” the Inspector said, “what’s his name?”

  Miss Withers shook her head. “You always say you don’t want guesswork, you want proof. I knew that it would take only a little pinch of a catalyst to make the reaction take place—so I sent the telegram. It was to Mr. Brady at the Grandee. I asked him to get in touch with the valet at the hotel and find out who among the guests or employees had sent a suit or overcoat out to be cleaned last Tuesday—one that was covered with apricot-colored dog hairs.”

  Piper set down his coffee cup with a bang. “Now, listen—”

  “I know,” she went on, “that Mr. Nemo himself came here and peeked into the looseleaf notebook Tuesday morning, and Talley was here. You know how he acts toward people, strangers or old friends, especially when he’s lonely? And he does shed, just terribly.”

  “Kiley’s right, after all,” said the Inspector. “You’re crazy, or I am.” Even Jeeps and Tad looked doubtful, and only Talleyrand was loyally confident. He lay with his chin on Miss Withers’s foot, his eyes alight with love and his jaws drooling at the smell of bacon.

  “But, Oscar, if you’ll only listen—”

  “You can’t prove a murder—much less five murders—with dog hair, I don’t care what color.”

  “Who’s trying to? That’s incidental. There was something else in the telegram. I asked Mr. Brady who among the people in the hotel knew about his farm, or had been invited out there or permitted to use it for week-ends.”

  Tad Belanger suddenly strangled on a piece of muffin, and Jeeps had to pound him between the shoulder blades.

  The Inspector was tapping his fingers on the table, with a baleful patience. “So—?”

  “So less than half an hour after I sent that telegram, Mr. Nemo himself came rushing over to pay a call,” continued the schoolteacher. “In the flesh. I presume that he had intentions of silencing me forever.”

  “Not a bad idea,” said the Inspector wholeheartedly. “Will you get to the point? I suppose he came in and cut you up into little bits, and now we’re talking to your spook or something?”

  “It might have been,” she told him. “Only I was prudently hiding out across the street, in the areaway, trying to look like an old garbage can in the half-light of the early morning. He came upstairs, and was gone rather a long time, so I presume he searched the place rather thoroughly.”

  “Who?” demanded Piper. “If you saw him that close—”

  “You still don’t know?” Miss Withers turned to the others. “Class?”

  Tad looked blank, but Jeeps caught her breath and said, “Brady!” very softly.

  Miss Withers turned back to the Inspector. “Oscar, don’t you see yet why it was that the death of Harriet Bascom looked so much like a suicide to the official eye? It was because during the brief interval while the window was closed the stage was being set by a man who’d been a police officer himself most of his life, a man who knew all the tricks and the formulas. Yet now he had an executive job in a big hotel, with nobody to watch his comings and goings. Most of the guests thought he was one of themselves, because he dressed well, usually wore a hat and coat, and was the direct antithesis of the traditional hotel dick. He made his own hours, and had every opportunity to pick his victims, meet them casually somewhere else, and convince them that he was the man they had been looking for all their lives. Because he simply epitomized security—”

  “He should, his title was chief of it,” Tad put in.

  “And yet,” continued the schoolteacher, “he had opportunity of knowing Flower Quinn when she was in her heyday out in New Jersey, being on the Jersey City detective force. He of course recognized her when she tried to go legitimate and went back to her old trade of beautician and masseuse in the Grandee’s Cathedral de Beauté. So when things got tough and he needed her, he used her.”

  The Inspector was sitting on the edge of his chair, an unlighted cigar in his mouth and a look of complete incomprehension on his face. “I must be nuts,” he said. “You’re trying to tell me that Brady actually came over here a little while ago, came up to this apartment—”

  She nodded. “I know it goes against the grain, Oscar. But the worst sheep-killer is the shepherd dog who goes wrong.”

  “You knew he was the murderer, and you let him get away?”

  She nodded again. “But he had to get away, don’t you see?”

  “No, I do not see.”

  Miss Withers sighed. “It was proof enough for me just to see him come running over here, a gun sagging in his pocket, because I had sent him that telegram hinting that I knew a little and not quite enough. But I realized that you needed a great deal more than that if you were going to arrest him. So—I used the paint.”

  The Inspector turned to the young couple. “So she used the paint! Does this make any more sense to you than it does to me?”

  “On the top of his car, Oscar! While he was up here in the apartment I took a can of paint that I had left over from doing the kitchen shelves, nice white paint, and I painted a big white circle on his Lincoln sedan. It’s a big, old-fashioned car, built high enough so that I don’t think he noticed it when he got in. And now he’s driving it helter-skelter to wherever it was he disposed of his victims, no doubt.”

  “To Canada, you mean. Or else—”

  “No, Oscar. He doesn’t know how much I know, and his first thought will be to move those bodies somewhere else, where they won’t point at him. And besides, his loot must be hidden there too. It wasn’t in his suite at the Grandee—I looked through it when he left me there that day.”

  Piper stood up. “Maybe you’re right. I hope so. But what good is a white circle on the top of his car? If he couldn’t see it when he got in, then how can police spot it from the ground or from a cruise car? And when we don’t even know which way he’s headed?”

  She told him, a little hesitantly, what she had in mind. And she showed him a road map, with a route marked in red. “His farm is in the Sourland Hills country of southwestern New Jersey, I believe. And this is the most direct route. He left here an hour and seven minutes ago, so it shouldn’t be difficult.”

  “Judas priest in a jug!” muttered the Inspector softly. He teetered on his toes for a moment, weighing the
possibilities one against the other. Then a slow, leprechaunish smile came across his face, and he went to the telephone.

  And so it was that as Max F. Brady dug frantically at the one unfrozen spot in his 300 acres of barren, abandoned farm land—the great steaming compost heap behind the dairy barn—the awkward dragon-fly plane which had been hovering in and out of the overcast during the last twenty miles of his frenzied drive finally came out into the cold winter sunlight and began to settle down over him, its great windmill wings circling slower and slower.

  It had landed in his barnyard before he could make out the insignia of the New York Police Department on the fuselage of the Bell D-47 helicopter. And then it was too late to run. There was no time even to throw the mingled lime and chemicals and organic refuse back over the bodies of the five women partially buried there, with Flower Quinn on top and still a little warm.

  It was all very irregular. The Inspector had no right—even though he still held the nominal rank of Acting Chief Inspector—to order out the Department’s helicopter and send it on so long a mission. New York police had no authority to arrest Max Brady or anybody else in the sovereign state of New Jersey. But they did it just the same.

  When all the returns were in down at the Municipal Building the Old Man was very nice about the whole thing. He blew one smoke ring thoughtfully through another and said, “Well, after all, results are what count. It’s a nice case, and we’ve got our man. Your name was signed to those Wanted flyers. Piper, what do you want? I mean anything at all. Want Dan Kiley’s job? I believe that he’s going back to the private practice of law.”

  “That I do not, sir,” said Oscar Piper. And he announced his choice. Next morning he was back at Centre Street with the teletype making music in the corner and a fine view of a bare brick wall from the one window. Phones were ringing without pause, detectives and informers and stoolies and suspects marched through the corridors, and over it all was the throbbing hum of the vast police machine that rattled and hitched and missed a beat now and then but never stopped turning day or night.

  Back at the old familiar oaken desk, his first official act was to light up a long greenish-brown panatela and then call Miss Hildegarde Withers. “You are speaking to the new skipper of Homicide,” he announced.

  “Oh, Oscar! I’m so glad.” Then she hesitated. “But what about me?”

  “Huh? Oh, I fixed that. The heat is off. You don’t have to go to Bellevue for psychiatric observation, after all.”

  “This is no time for cheap Hibernian humor. Oscar, do you remember my telling you about those men that took turns lurking outside my door, spying on me? Well, they finally pounced. They’re from the Department of Internal Revenue and they’ve been tracing the money that Harriet Bascom won at the racetrack and hid in her old valise. They tracked me down through the address I left at the auction, and now they want thousands and thousands of dollars.”

  “Why—” And he thought a moment. Then he made a suggestion.

  “Thank you, Oscar. I—I couldn’t do without you, and I hope I never have to try.” She hung up and turned to face the two stern gentlemen who sat in her living-room, stiffly trying to ward off the impetuous advances of Talleyrand the French poodle. “Of course,” said the schoolteacher brightly, “I understand that all income, even that from gambling, must be reported.”

  “Gambling?” said the thickset man.

  “But of course. I gambled seven dollars at the auction and won. I intend to report my winnings in my return March fifteenth. But there were expenses—” And she got out the expense account. “It’s all here, down to the last penny.”

  The young man in the glasses took the sheet and read it carefully. Then he read it again and looked up, his face flushed. “Fifty dollars for a poodle—five hundred for a drawing—a dollar for false eyelashes—”

  “I have all the receipted bills, too—”

  His voice rose. “Rental of chinchilla coat—hotel bill—taxicabs—printing, mailing, and advertising—a reward to Hoppy Muller, and others to Alice Davidson and Tad Belanger—traveling expenses, taxicabs, phone calls. … ”

  “All gambling losses,” she informed them. “I gambled on bringing a murderer to justice, and the grand jury found a true bill against Max Brady only last Monday. I’m afraid the total is almost the whole eleven thousand dollars, isn’t it?”

  A little later the two revenue men arose, trying vainly to dust apricot-colored dog hairs from their severely neat blue suits. They were outside in the street before they stopped. “She can’t do that!” said the tall man with glasses. Then he added, “Or can she?”

  “There isn’t any precedent—” put in the other. They stood there in a huddle for a little while.

  But finally, when Talley came plunging joyously down the steps to take Miss Withers for a walk which was eventually to lead them to an inspection of Jeeps Belanger’s new one-room apartment, the men were gone.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Hildegarde Withers Mysteries

  “Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out.”

  —John Webster

  IF THERE ARE EVER nights for murder, this was one. All through the previous day a blazing August sun had blasted Manhattan’s concerte anthill, and now in the early morning walls and pavements still radiated the heat, baking hapless inhabitants in their damp wrinkled beds. Even on Staten Island, that queer lost borough of New York City which except for the turgid ditch called the Kill van Kull would properly have been part of New Jersey, the heat lay like a solid but invisible sweatshirt over the land.

  On such a night tempers wear thin. There is an unexplored link between variations in the temperature curve and the murder index. In certain parts of southern Europe there are laws still extant on the statute books which forbid indictments for capital crimes committed during the time of the mistral, that hot searing wind off the wastes of the Sahara. History tells us that it was a stifling summer day when Lizzie Borden took her famous ax in hand, a steaming June morning when Joseph Elwell, the bridge expert and aging gallant, got a bullet through his bald head, and a sultry Fourth of July when Augusta Nack cut up the romantically tattooed Willie Guldensuppe. And so on and so on.

  At three o’clock Saturday morning Hylan Avenue, lifeline of Staten Island, was lonely and deserted except for a blue sedan, headed south a little faster than the law allows. At that hour, in the sparse traffic of the suburbs, such infractions are usually winked at. But Lady Luck is a woman, and as Porgy used to sing, “A woman is a sometime thing.” It happened that the car whisked past two police officers just as they came out of an owl restaurant full of Denver sandwiches, coffee, and renewed zeal. They watched it ignore the stop-signal at the corner of New Drop and spin left toward the lonely Atlantic beaches.

  So the officers threw away their toothpicks and took off after it in the prowl car, with one brief wolf-wail of the siren. As they drew alongside their red spotlight cast a bloody glow over the lone man at the wheel, who obediently cut his speed and pulled sharply over to the curb. But then instead of hitting his brakes he let the big Buick coast slowly along until it smashed into the rear of a parked delivery truck, with a musical tinkle of headlight glass. The officers had only intended to give the driver a warning and send him on his way, but now a ticket was indicated—a ticket and a minor accident report.

  But he was slumped down behind the wheel, with nothing to say for himself. A flashlight in his face disclosed a handsome, slight fellow of around thirty, whose eyeballs had rolled upward so that only the whites were showing. He had fainted dead away; “Wilted like a lily,” was the policemen’s phrase.

  The officers were no great shakes at investigation, or else they wouldn’t have been cruising a bicycle-beat in uniform, but they soon discovered that there was something crammed against the back seat of the Buick, under an old army blanket. At first they took it for a store-window dummy, so white and waxen and artificial it was. Then they realized that window dummies come apart at the shoulders an
d waist, they do not bend their long legs up jackknife fashion. The pale flesh under the cop’s exploring hand was clammy, and he jerked back as if he had touched a hot stove.

  “A dame!” he whispered. “A great big dead beautiful naked dame!”

  His partner shook the driver’s shoulder. “Wake up, bud, we want to talk to you.” It was the prize understatement of the week.

  Behind the wheel Andy Rowan moaned in the grip of a nightmare. They brought him back to consciousness, but the nightmare went on. It went on for over a year.

  “Who can refute a sneer?”

  —William Paley

  1.

  THE JOKER IN ANDREW Rowan’s last will and testament, a document witnessed by the prison chaplain and one Paul Huff, keeper in the death-house, was supposed to be a secret. But there are few secrets long kept from the warden at Sing Sing. That earnest official got wind of it through the prison grapevine, swore efficiently if a bit rustily, and then put through a long distance call to Centre Street, which happens to be the headquarters of the New York police department.

  Inspector Oscar Piper, grizzled and long-suffering skipper of the homicide bureau, muttered incoherent thanks for the tip-off and then crashed his desk phone into its cradle and yelped, “Judas Priest in a mixmaster, why does everything have to happen to me?”

  He was talking to himself, but at that singularly inauspicious moment a certain spinster schoolma’am crashed the gates of his private office on business connected with the sale of tickets to a charity bazaar for the Fresh-Air Fund, and from his last words drew a natural but quite erroneous conclusion. “Oscar!” cried Miss Hildegarde Withers indignantly, “will you never tire of casting rude aspersions at my taste in hats?”

  The Inspector looked up at his old friend and erstwhile sparring-partner without welcome or warmth. He could have said with some reason that the bonnet she wore today appeared to have had old fruit and vegetables cast at it already, but at the moment he was in no mood for badinage. “Oh, it’s you again!” he said, shoulders sagging. “Whatever’s on your mind I don’t want any. Goodbye please!”