“I mean, do you believe in the supernormal, the supernatural as some call it?”
“Oh, come come! In this day and age, with extrasensory perception and flying saucers and H-bombs, where is one to draw the line? Please come to the point.”
“Well,” said Natalie, “since all this happened I’ve been dreadfully lonely and miserable. I tried all the isms and numerology and sedatives, but nothing seemed to help. Then a few months ago I remembered that a friend had told me about this wonderful little woman down on Ninety-sixth Street, called Marika. You must understand that she isn’t a medium or anything, no fakery about her. She just goes into trances and talks. And she doesn’t ever charge anything, though some people leave a free-will offering …”
“Oh, dear!” murmured Miss Withers, feeling rather as if she had sat herself down in a chair that wasn’t there. This sort of nonsense went out with Sir Oliver Lodge and Margery of Boston and the later writings of the bemused Conan Doyle. Nowadays silly women had psychiatry and canasta and existentialism to make fools of themselves about.
Natalie looked at her almost shrewdly. “I can maybe guess what you’re thinking. But I’m not exactly the gullible type. In some of her trances Marika told me things about my childhood that she simply couldn’t have faked. There was the time with a boy on the high school sleighride—and she also told me about my honeymoon, my second one I mean. I met and married Andy in Paree, you know. Ah, the Tooleries, the Bois, the Champs d’Elysées, Longchamps …”
“Champs, champs, champs the bois are marching,” Miss Withers said, almost aloud.
But Natalie Rowan was back on the topic of Marika again. “… and one night a few weeks ago she went into an unusually deep trance and suddenly I heard a different voice coming out of her throat. A voice that I couldn’t possibly be mistaken about, because it was Emil, my first husband. And he told me, plain as the nose on your face, that Andy didn’t kill the Harrington girl!”
“Oh,” said Miss Withers flatly.
“Maybe you don’t believe in voices from the Beyond? But I heard what I heard!”
The schoolteacher took it in her stride, and said, “The late Mr. Fogel would hardly be considered a pertinent witness to the murder, would he? Unless, of course, he happened to be haunting this house the evening of the murder.”
“But Marika says that the Departed are now all part of the Universal Mind, and know everything that ever was or will be.”
Miss Withers could have pointed out that if this were so, then it was odd that most spirit messages were on the intellectual level of an eight-year-old child. “The dear departed didn’t happen to mention the name of the real murderer?”
Natalie shook her head. “The sitting was over—Marika couldn’t stand any more.”
“And you haven’t been back for another session?”
“I—I’ve been too busy trying to help Andy.”
“I understand. But you really have nothing else, except the message from the grave, to prove your husband’s innocence?”
“Nothing except—well, I talked with him in prison. He finally admitted that his original story about finding the girl’s body planted in his car wasn’t true.”
The schoolteacher sniffled a deep sniff. “Since the police found her fingerprints all over this living room, her cigarettes in the ashtrays, and the marks on the carpet of where her heels had been dragged out of the place after she was dead, it really wasn’t much of an admission, was it?”
Natalie said quickly, “Andy’s telling the truth now, I think. But suppose I start at the beginning. It was a year ago this August, stifling hot night even up there in the country place near Darien I’d rented for the summer. Andy had been nervous and irritable at dinner, complaining about my cooking more even than usual. I wasn’t feeling well, so I went to bed early. I was half-asleep when I heard his car drive away, but I thought he was only going out for a breath of air, so I dozed off. It wasn’t until after midnight that I woke and started calling the police and hospitals. I finally decided he was out with that girl, and must have cried myself to sleep. A little before eight in the morning the maid woke me and told me that the police were downstairs. Then I was really frantic. It was hours later when I looked into the wall safe in the library and found he’d taken all the money.”
“Money?” Miss Withers perked up her ears. “Your money, or his?”
“Ours,” said Natalie loyally. “Around $5,000 or more. I kept that much around because sometimes in those days I used to go out buying antique furniture and old glass, and money talks louder than checks with those New Englanders. But don’t you see? If Andy had had murder in mind when he left he wouldn’t have taken the money. He took it along when he went to meet the girl only because he’d decided to pay her off if that was the only way to keep her from carrying out her threats to make trouble. She was bitter about not getting a chance to be Miss America, and she blamed Andy for her failure.”
“Just what did go wrong, do you know?”
“The girl had too purple a past, I think. Anyway, she knew that her backers had paid Andy a lot of money to give her a publicity build-up, and she wanted him to kick back part of it. Andy says she threatened to tell me a lot of awful lies about how he had led her astray with liquor and drugs when she was under the age of consent, and how she now was encientay …”
Miss Withers blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“Oh, sorry. Since my trip to Paree I just can’t seem to help those Gaulish expressions creeping into my speech. I mean, that she was expecting.”
“I see.” The schoolteacher swallowed hard. “You know, Mrs. Rowan, all this sounds awfully wicked and out of character for a mere child of eighteen.”
“She was old in wickedness, that one! Oh, I know. Anyway, according to the story Andy tells now, he says he got into town around ten. He had a sort of date with the girl, at least she’d set that night—”
“A Thursday, was it?”
“Friday. She’d set it as a deadline. Andy was going to phone her from here and ask her to come up for a showdown, paying over the money as a last resort. But when he let himself into the house he turned on the lights and there was the Harrington girl dead in the middle of my Aubusson carpet!” She pointed, dramatically, to a spot near Miss Withers’ foot.
“Quiet, Talley,” ordered the schoolteacher. “This is more important than taking a walk.” She nodded thoughtfully. “Your husband may be telling the truth. Stranger things have happened—”
Words were fairly tumbling out of Natalie now, a torrent unloosed. “He says his first thought was to phone the police, so he rushed back into the hall where the instrument is.” She pointed. “As he was dialing, before they answered, he was hit over the head, and when he came to it was hours later.”
The Withers eyebrows went up suspiciously. “Pray how could he tell that?”
“The body, of course. It had been warm when he first touched her, and now it was cold. He realized that whatever alibi he had once had was gone. Andy lost his head, stripped the body to prevent identification, and somehow got her out into his car. Whoever hit him from behind had taken the envelope with the money, but he was too frightened and excited to discover that then. He drove around the rest of the night trying to find a place to leave her. That’s his story, but—”
“But there’s a catch to it, isn’t there?”
Natalie nodded. “Yes. I do so want to believe him. But you see, the phone here at the house had been disconnected for over a month.”
“The phone? That wasn’t what I meant at all. He may not have known. Even if he’d spent several evenings here with the girl they might not have had any reason to use the telephone. As for his call to the police, he may not even have waited for the dial tone, many people don’t when they’re in a hurry. But it was a worse flaw that occurred to me. Granted that his amended story is true, then just how did the girl—and her murderer—get inside?”
Natalie Rowan paused to comfort herself with a nip of cognac
from the little bar disguised as a rosewood cabinet. “Ask me something hard,” she said bitterly. “Andy kept silent because he didn’t want me to know, but now he admits that early in their love affair he’d had a key made for her!”
Miss Withers said softly, “What a tangled web we weave—” She pondered. “If your husband had taken the witness stand and told about the key it might have saved his neck.” She looked down at the dog, and then rose suddenly, still talking, and moved across the room to jerk aside the draperies in the doorway. The pretty secretary-companion was lurking there, mouth open and ears almost flapping with curiosity—and some other less obvious emotion too.
“Well!” demanded the schoolteacher with some asperity. “Do you two girls take turns at eavesdropping?”
The young woman flushed beet-red, but Natalie Rowan said easily, “She’s interested, naturally. Miss Withers, this is Iris Dunn—”
“How do you—” Then Miss Withers gaped. “Not the Iris Dunn, the roommate who identified Midge Harrington’s body?”
Natalie nodded. “You may think it odd of me, but I looked her up. Iris has been trying to help me uncover something in the Harrington girl’s past which might lead us to the real murderer. Come in, dear, and sit down. Three heads are better than one, I always say. Iris, shake hands with our new ally. She has X-ray eyes.”
Miss Withers failed to mention that her hunch about someone being behind the curtain had been based on Talley’s looking toward the doorway and wagging his tail. Wasn’t it Sherlock Holmes who always explained his deductions only to have Dr. Watson say, “Oh, yes, of course, anybody could have seen that!”?
The schoolteacher listened patiently while Natalie Rowan, warmed a little by the brandy, went on to disclose the details of a pitiful and seemingly abortive campaign, two lone women engaged in a desperate lost cause. “But after I knew Andy was innocent I had to do something!” the woman said. “You too must believe him innocent, Miss Withers, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“I certainly feel that a man in Rowan’s position is entitled to the benefit of the doubt,” admitted the schoolteacher with native caution. “And even Inspector Piper admits there are weak links in the chain of evidence. What do you think of it all, Miss Dunn?”
Iris shrugged her shoulders, and smiled a surprisingly frank, little-girl smile. “I’m only here because Mrs. Rowan is paying me,” she admitted. “And show business is tougher than usual this season. Not, of course, that I couldn’t have got an ingénue lead with some road company, only—” She stopped and smiled as if an extremely pleasant thought had just flickered through her mind. Then she said abruptly, “About the murder, I know from nothing.”
“But she’s been very helpful, anyway,” Natalie said firmly. “Now isn’t it obvious that if Andy isn’t guilty then he was framed by somebody out of Midge’s past who wanted her dead and was willing to let an innocent man suffer for it?”
“Midge was hell on men, anybody’s men,” Iris put in suddenly. “You couldn’t let her get a whiff of your date’s shaving lotion or she’d try to climb in his pocket.”
“I see,” said Miss Withers. “Very enlightening. But apart from Andy Rowan, of course, just who were the men in Midge Harrington’s life?”
Iris studied her fingernails. “During the five months we roomed together Midge wasn’t exactly the confiding type about her romances. She had lots of dates, but not many men she went out with more than once or twice. I’ve told Mrs. Rowan all I can.”
“For this sort of investigation,” the schoolteacher admitted, “one should really have professional assistance.”
“But I did go to one of the best private agencies in town,” Natalie put in. “They said they would take my money if I insisted, but it was a lost cause.”
“The masculine mind,” sighed Miss Withers. “So you two started out alone.”
“I’m afraid we haven’t got very far. After over a year, the trail is cold. Iris and I are about at the end of our rope.”
“No clues, no leads at all?” pressed the schoolteacher hopefully.
Natalie said, “When Midge Harrington was sixteen she was named correspondent in a divorce case brought by the wife of her dancing teacher, a man named Nils Bruner. A year later she got mixed up with a swing trumpet-player known as Riff Sprott, who took veronal when she walked out on him, but he didn’t die.”
“They stomach-pumped him!” put in Iris helpfully.
“Nils Bruner and Riff Sprott,” mused Miss Withers. “Something to go on.”
“You won’t go very far,” Iris said. “When Midge was through with a man she was through. I don’t think she ever saw Bruner after his wife got the divorce—she never mentioned his name when I was rooming with her. And Riff Sprott got tired of calling her up about six months before she died. Somebody said he even made an honest woman out of the canary who sang with his band. So—”
Miss Withers said, “Now don’t let’s be so quick to eliminate suspects. We must explore a little further. By the way, who was backing Midge in her fling at being Miss Brooklyn?”
“Just some old stuffy club,” Iris offered.
“The Bigger Flatbush Business Boosters,” Natalie elaborated.
“But a club is only a group of men,” the schoolteacher said sharply. “And men are putty in the hands of a beautiful animal like Midge Harrington. Now wasn’t there one who took a special interest in promoting her career?” But Iris only shook her head.
“I happened to see one of the club checks one day when I was in my husband’s office,” said Natalie. “It was countersigned by a man named Zotos, George Zotos.”
“Oh, him!” Iris laughed. “Old Georgie-Porgie, Midge always called him. He was harmless as a cocker spaniel. Besides, he was old—over forty at least.”
Miss Withers pointed out that there is no age limit on the sowing of wild oats. “We must include Mr. Zotos in our list. Bruner, Sprott, and Zotos. Too bad we can’t get the spook of Midge Harrington to point an ectoplasmic finger at the right one.”
“I’m afraid Marika can’t guarantee any such results …” Natalie began.
“I was entirely serious, though perhaps Marika will be helpful to us at some stage of the investigation, if only to throw a scare into the suspects. The murderer, of course, thinks he’s got away with it, and that when Rowan pays the penalty it will be a perfect murder. But he still must be jittery. I wonder if this might not be the time to try psychological methods? Suppose someone were to call on each of our suspects on some pretext or other and then suddenly mention the dead girl’s name? The killer might give himself away by his reaction.”
Natalie choked over another brandy. “What? Oh, I could never get by with anything like that, I’m no actress.”
“I’m an actress,” Iris admitted. “At least I’m a member of Equity. But don’t forget I saw Midge in the morgue. Not for all the tea in China would I risk my lily-white neck by snuggling up to her killer.” She shuddered elegantly.
Miss Withers arose, then stood bracing herself against the pull of Talleyrand, who was as usual eager to be off. “That rather leaves it up to me, does it not?”
Mrs. Rowan breathlessly announced that she would gladly pay a reward of ten, no twenty thousand dollars to anyone who would get to the truth of the matter!
“I’ll do my best,” promised the schoolteacher. “Not for the money—I still have my amateur standing. But I have an inbred weakness for longshots and lost causes. And justice, even in these worsening times, is justice.” She marched out of the room, dog and all, to what seemed the distant roll of drums and fanfare of trumpets. The outer door slammed.
The two women sat a little dazed in their chairs. “Golly!” exploded Iris. “I saw it but I don’t believe it! That incredible dog with a hair-ribbon in its bangs—and her hat, like a kid’s kite caught on a telephone pole!”
“It’s what’s under the hat that counts,” said Natalie Rowan thoughtfully. “She may seem to you a preposterous character, but I’ve heard that
she can wind that Inspector at Centre Street around her little finger. And somehow having her just walk in here out of thin air and offer to help, just when things seemed so terribly hopeless … Do you believe in angels?”
“Sure, the Broadway kind. They pinch you when you’re waiting for your entrance cues … Mrs. Rowan, should you? That’ll be your fourth brandy this morning!”
“I’m not having a drink, dear, I’m pouring the rest of it down the sink. Because somehow I think I’m going to need my wits about me from now on.”
Out in the foyer Miss Hildegarde Withers, who had slammed the door from the inside with the idea of doing a little eavesdropping of her own, nodded approvingly and then slipped out into the sunlight, letting the door close silently behind her.
“We boil at different degrees.”
—Emerson
3.
“GIVE A DOG A BAD NAME,” observed Miss Withers over the breakfast coffee, “and he may live up to it. Or a man either.” She had been musing over the amazing number of famous murderers who had names befitting their deeds—Cordelia Botkin, for instance. And Martin Thorn and Augusta Nack, to say nothing of Herman Mudgett, Ivan Poderjay, and Dr. Crippen …
Her companion, seated on the opposite chair, looked wistfully at the last piece of buttered toast, and then gave a faint wordless cry of anguish as she spread it with marmalade and bit into a corner.
“Since this present puzzle has to be attacked with a shot in the dark anyway, perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea to play hunches? The only available suspects are Bruner, Sprott, and Zotos. Somehow I have a fancy for the name of Riff Sprott, as a potential murderer, I mean.”
Talleyrand, the big apricot poodle, sulked in silence. He had never accepted the dictum that grown dogs eat only one meal, and that at night. His hot brown eyes begrudged his mistress every bite she took, and with the inborn histrionic talents of one descended from a long line of theatrical and circus performers, he pantomimed famishment.
To no avail. His mistress—who had inherited him along with a lot of other trouble from one of her previous attempts at minding the Inspector’s business—was intently studying a weekly magazine of theatrical news, couched in what seemed to her almost a foreign language. Now and then she stopped to commit some phrase to memory. Noting her preoccupation, Talley reached out with elaborate caution and almost but not quite closed his whiskery jaws on the topmost lump in the sugar bowl.
Four Lost Ladies (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries) Page 24
