The Penguin Pool Murder (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

  “Not a cent, Fink. You didn’t know this guy was wanted anywhere.”

  “Half, I tell you. Why, do you think I’m maybe going to let fifty dollars slip out of my hands like nothing?”

  “Not a cent, Fink. I saw him, and I knew him …”

  “Stop quarreling, you two!” The sharp and commanding voice of Miss Withers cut in with unmistakable authority. “Stop it, I say! Don’t you realize that this man is hurt? He ought to be on the way to the hospital, and you know it. Suppose he should die while the two of you fight over the reward?” Miss Withers gestured dramatically with her umbrella. “You can’t leave him there on the floor—”

  Her voice died out in a thin whisper … for he wasn’t on the floor….

  The pickpocket had vanished!

  The spot where he had lain, so lifeless and inert, was very very bare. The crowd moved uneasily, each man staring into the face of his neighbor, and the surprised eyes of Donovan stared into everyone’s … but Chicago Lew had made himself scarce.

  Somehow, while the two of them had wrangled over his body, he must have come to his senses and wormed his way, like the scared rabbit he was, out of these walls which had been his Happy Hunting Ground all morning. But nobody had seen him go.

  Donovan reached the door in two great strides, upsetting an onlooker and several of the school children in his dash. But Battery Park stretched empty before him … empty of Chicago Lew, if not of the usual crowd of idlers.

  “He’s gone,” observed Donovan. “Damned if he isn’t gone.”

  “He’s gone, and the reward with him,” moaned Fink. He mopped his brow.

  Miss Withers marshaled her thrilled and delighted charges into line. “We’ll go now, children,” she ordered. “Isidore, there’s no use trying to make that policeman believe that you own one of the watches in his hand, because both he and I know that you don’t. Jimmy Dooley, stop whispering. It’s time to go home, and you can’t play around here any longer. We came to see fish, not anything so exciting as this. I …”

  Her hand went, out of habit, to arrange the blue beaded hat which rested like the stopper of a bottle on her angular frame. And Miss Withers gasped.

  “Children, my hatpin! It’s gone!” Her fingers felt feverishly through her hair. “It’s the most treasured possession I have, and I wouldn’t lose it for the world. My mother gave it to me years ago, and it has a genuine garnet set in it. It’s the pickpocket, that’s what it is. He took it!”

  Donovan, who had been standing disjointedly at the door, shook his head ponderously. “A pickpocket wouldn’t go for stealing anything like that, mum. He couldn’t hide it, you know, and it wouldn’t go in his pocket. They don’t bother with such junk as that, just watches and money….”

  “And a fine lot you know about it, to let one slip out of your fingers like that,” Miss Withers pointed out acidly. “If the pickpocket didn’t take it, I’d like to know who did?”

  “Teacher!” A plump hand waved wildly above a dark bob. “Teacher …”

  “What is it, Becky?”

  “Teacher, I saw your pretty red pin when we were coming in this morning, and it was sticking way out of the hat on one side….” Becky subsided. “Maybe you lost it?”

  “Maybe I did,” said Miss Withers. “Well, I certainly wouldn’t ask either of these gentlemen in uniform to find it for me. Because if they did, they’d lose it again in an argument. Children, you’ll have to help me. Use your bright little eyes, and go on back over everywhere we’ve been here in the Aquarium and try to find it. And the first to spy it gets a prize!”

  “What sort of a prize, Teacher?” The question came as a chorus.

  Miss Withers thought a moment. “How about a brand-new dictionary?” There was a silence which denoted a certain lack of enthusiasm.

  “Well then, if you’d rather, the prize might be a ticket to any play the finder would like to see,” amended the wily lady. She knew her children. They scattered with a rush, but she called them back.

  “That’s not the way to look,” she explained. “You must go, all together, starting just where we did when we came in this morning. Then we’ll be sure to find the hatpin unless someone has picked it up.” She cast a suspicious look at the crowd, which was already melting away. Donovan and Fink still eyed one another hostilely.

  “At least you won’t have to fight over the reward any more,” she gave as a parting shot, and then the search began. The children went eagerly on ahead, while Miss Withers dropped back.

  Slowly they moved across the vast circle of the Aquarium, stopping at each tank and showcase just as they had done on the first round of the place, when Miss Withers had given a brief lecture on every point of nature study which she wished to bring out. Past the eels, past the flaming tropical fish, past the tortoises, the crocodiles, and the flashing schools of minnows. Across the great circle of the room, up the stair, along the great half-moon of a balcony, and down again….

  Still no hatpin. No bright flash from the garnet stone which had once been given to the middle-aged teacher in the days when she was beginning to be a teacher and not even beginning to be middle-aged. No sign of the old-fashioned, beloved hatpin. A dozen pairs of eager eyes scoured the floor and the corners.

  Down the balcony stairs again, with little black Abraham going on his hands and knees. Abraham had been stage struck ever since his mother’s cousin played the part of the Lord God in Green Pastures, and he was determined to find the hatpin if it was to be found. It must be somewhere, and he wanted to win the prize.

  Eureka! There it was, at the bottom of the steps! The dark-red stone was intact, the shiny steel undimmed. Miss Withers remembered, as she hurried up, that she had put back a wisp of her hair as they passed this way before. She made a mental apology to the absent Mr. Chicago Lew, who certainly hadn’t picked her as a victim after all, in spite of appearances.

  She graciously accepted the relic from the hand of proud Abraham Lincoln Washington and replaced it carefully in her blue beaded hat.

  “Good boy, Abraham. The prize is yours,” she announced. “And now we’ve got to hurry, children. It must be nearly one o’clock, and I’m getting hungry….”

  Rapidly she counted noses, and found a considerable lack. “Isidore!”

  There was no answer. She heard the hum of voices and movements through the building, and from the main doorway the excited tones of Fink, still explaining to the departing back of Officer Donovan why he was entitled to the reward if there was one and if the prisoner hadn’t escaped.

  Miss Withers called again. “Isidore! Isidore Marx!”

  “Yis, teacher.” A piping voice sounded from behind the stair. Miss Withers peered into the corner.

  Isidore was staring at the penguins again. “Come along, Isidore. We’re half an hour late now. This nature study class isn’t supposed to take all day, you know. Hurry!”

  But Isidore didn’t budge. His nose was pressed tight against the glass of the last tank in the line, the tank hidden in the shadow of the stair down which they had come.

  “Teacher, dese ducks act so funny!”

  “I told you before, Isidore, that those are not ducks, they are penguins. See, they don’t look like ducks! Those are black penguins, from the Galapagos Islands down off the western coast of Central America. Now don’t bother about them any more, come along….”

  But Isidore didn’t move. “Look teacher how dese penguins hop up and down!”

  Miss Withers was unusually tolerant, for she had just recovered a treasured keepsake. But she had arrived at the limit of her patience.

  “Isidore Marx, you mind me!” she ordered in a voice that would ordinarily have sent any one of her group into tremors. And Miss Withers advanced, her umbrella held ready for action. But even as her hand fell on Isidore’s shoulder, something caught her keen eye.

  The little black penguins were swimming as they had not done when she pointed them out to the group of children an hour before. They were dashing madly arou
nd the tank, now and then leaping high out of the water to squawk and snap their pointed bills in the darkness of the hidden space above them. Miss Withers, peering through the glass, could only sense that something had excited them….

  She stared up through the water, into the obscurity of the inner chamber. As she watched, something happened which made her wipe her glasses furiously.

  The two little black penguins were fighting something, snapping and biting viciously at something … something which was beginning to slide down upon them….

  A dark and shapeless horror lowered itself with a rush, amid the frightened squawking of the frantic birds … a dark horror which crashed into the water of the square tank like an awkward diver … a twisted, nameless horror that made the water boil and the penguins scramble madly up the steep sides of the tank….

  The water subsided and became clear again. Miss Withers realized that her lips were very dry, and quick as thought she pushed Isidore behind her. For she realized that she was staring into a human face … a face in the water….

  That face had something wrong with it. Something very wrong with it, she knew. It was the face of a dead man, and it was upside down. From the right ear a blur of blood, like a misty coral earring, was dissolving slowly….

  2

  Behind the Glass

  THE OFFICE OF Bertrand B. Hemingway is on the left side of the main entrance of the Aquarium as you come in, just beyond the little cubby-hole sacred to the guards, Fink and his mates. It conforms to the general circular shape of the old building, with two high windows that open out, one toward lower Manhattan and one to the docks of the Battery. There are also two doors, half leaded glass, that open into the big auditorium itself.

  Within this office were three people. Gwen Lester comes first. Gwen had always come first, even as a child. It was mainly a matter of appearance. Even as a baby, Gwen had been a beauty. Now, as a woman, she was possessed of an uncomfortable sort of magic, compounded equally of figure, face, hair and bearing. A cynic would have said that Gwen Lester was sex-conscious, though she would have been offended at the words. However that may be, nature had produced in her a creature eminently fitted to attract. Women hated her, and wanted to be her friend. Dogs and children adored her, even when she was admittedly bored with them. Men’s eyes clung to her whether she wanted them or not.

  The eyes of two men were on her now. But she sat there on the very edge of her chair, only making the faintest little pretense of listening. Her fear-numbed brain side-stepped the problems that were before her. Idly she spelled out the inscription which showed in reverse on the door. “Bertrand B. Hemingway, Director …”

  Then this fussy, pompous, excited little man must be Hemingway. Where in the world had she met him, and why had it been her luck to be remembered, as she was always remembered, and pounced upon by this impossible person?

  Probably at one of Athelea’s teas or dinners … Athelea was always having impossible grubby people at her house, people who climbed mountains or swam through the Panama Canal or wrote senseless verse. She did not remember his face, but that high, nervous voice sounded a little familiar. Only it was so hard to think, so dangerous to think, now. She only wanted to run away, and that was the one thing that she could not do.

  It was just as bad for Philip, but he was a man. He was watching her now, pretending to listen to Hemingway just as she was pretending. But his gray eyes were narrow. Philip was getting off with it better than she was, but then he was more of an actor. He looked almost interested.

  “Now this just arrived yesterday,” Hemingway was saying. “This is the famous Gyppi fish, Mrs. Lester. Notice the delicate coloring of the caudal appendage. Notice the long trailing fins, and the superb canary yellow of the belly….”

  “How perfectly lovely,” Gwen found strength to murmur. She crossed and recrossed her slim silken ankles. Her pink-tipped fingers held one Camel after another. The blue-gray ash spilled like snow in her lap. Her kid slipper was pressing hard against the Scotch-grain oxford that was Philip’s.

  “Perfectly, perfectly lovely,” she murmured. “But really, we must …”

  “Notice, if you will, how the little Gyppi swims around and around,” went on Hemingway, wrapt in his subject. “Of course, you think that she is lonely?”

  With a mighty effort, Gwen focused her attention on the small square tank of glass in which one sad-looking, goggle-eyed little fish swam in a grimly monotonous circle.

  “You think of course that she is lonely! You think that perhaps she longs for her mate, far away in some distant tropic river? Then you are wrong!”

  He tapped the glass with a triumphant forefinger. “It is the end of the mating season, and she has no use for her mate. Only this morning he was swimming happily with her. Now she is alone. She may regret him, but I doubt it. For this morning, while I was preparing a separate tank for him, she killed and ate him, bones, fins and all. Nowadays the bored wife, here in New York, gets a divorce or uses a revolver. Among the equally enlightened Gyppi, the little lady uses her teeth to get rid …”

  Hemingway tittered at his own joke, but Gwen rose unsteadily to her feet. She knew that her face was white as death, but she tried not to cry out. Philip caught at her hand warningly.

  The goggle-eyed fish was making fervent if abortive attempts to make away with the tip of the Director’s stubby forefinger. Hemingway looked up.

  “You’re not going? And it’s only one o’clock. Must you really tear yourselves away? It is such a pity. So seldom do we scientists have an opportunity to show our work to anyone really sympathetic. If I had only known that you were coming, I would have arranged to take you through the place, behind the tanks and everywhere.”

  Philip Seymour started slightly at the words “behind the tanks.” Hemingway was to remember this afterward.

  But now he went on. “Do come again soon, Mrs. Lester—and you too, Mr. …?”

  “Seymour is the name,” said Philip bluntly. Their host dried his finger on a towel and moved toward the door, the glass jar still in his hand.

  “Remember, Mrs. Lester, to tell that busy husband of yours that I haven’t heard from him in weeks and weeks. Ask him when he is going to pay me that visit he promised me. Though ever since I met you, Mrs. Lester, I’ve understood why Gerald has neglected his friends during the past few years.”

  Then this persistently babbling person was a friend of Gerald’s, Gwen thought. “So happy to have seen you,” she lied.

  Then the door flew open, and Fink, the guard, burst in. He was babbling, and out of his breathless incoherencies gradually one sentence made itself clear.

  “A man … a man in the penguin tank!”

  “Didn’t I tell you never to bother me when I have visitors? What’s a man doing in the penguin tank? Who let him through the door into the runway, anyhow? Make him get out, at once!” Hemingway raised his voice. “I won’t have men in the penguin tank!”

  Fink gulped twice. “But this man is dead.”

  The Gyppi crashed to the floor, bowl, water, and all. A miniature tidal wave scattered toward the four corners of the room.

  Hemingway fumbled for his glasses, and then got into action. “Come on,” he shouted, and shoved aside the dazed Fink. For a moment, a long moment, Gwen Lester searched the eyes of the young man who faced her, and she did not like what she saw there. Then the two of them ran out of the office and down the corridor after the fleeing Director. It was but a step past the stair and across part of the rotunda … back to the corner under the stair, the tank of the penguins.

  On the dampened floor of the office, neglected and annoyed, a goggle-eyed little fish made the supreme atonement for its cannibalistic habits.

  The bulk and nervous energy of Bertrand B. Hemingway cut a swath through the gathering crowd. “Get this mob back,” he was shouting. “Get all these people out of here, send for an ambulance, somebody….”

  “Stop shouting, young man.” He came suddenly face to face with a tall,
bony woman who glared at him from beneath a hat faintly reminiscent of those created for Mary Queen of England. An authoritative voice issued from firm, unrouged lips.

  “The police have already been sent for. And instead of trying to get this crowd out now, young man, you’d better have somebody shut the front doors, so that every Battery Park loafer doesn’t drift in to see what the shouting is about.”

  Dazedly, Hemingway turned to obey. Fink was dispatched to the door, with orders to allow only the police to enter. “What’s next?”

  Miss Withers stared at the melee of chattering, gasping people who blocked the way to the penguin tank. “How does one get back of that tank?” she wanted to know. “Where is the entrance?”

  Gwen Lester stole a look at Philip, but he was not watching her. His eyes were wide open, and he was staring at the door.

  Hemingway’s finger pointed it out. There was a large sign, lettered “Public Not Admitted Here,” and it was ajar.

  “That is the only way in,” he said slowly. “It’s always kept locked except when somebody is working back there. But do we have to go in there now?”

  Miss Withers shook her head as he moved toward the door. “Don’t touch anything,” she warned him. “That’s for the police to do when they get here, if they ever do. It’s too late to do anything for the man who’s in the water. Anyone can see that he’s dead.”

  Anyone could see that. Even Gwen Lester, who pushed past the shoulders of those who hid the thing she feared to look upon.

  The two little black birds had battled their way up the sides and out of sight, although their hysterical protests still sounded from somewhere in the rear. But their tank was not empty. The body moved in the circulating current with a faint and horrible suggestion of piscine life, and the face showed itself as that of a fattish, well-kept man of about thirty. His brown hair floated in the water like clipped seaweed.

  It was Gerald, her husband. But the pale face bore an expression of mild wonder, almost ludicrous in comparison with the way he had been staring at her ten minutes or a century ago.