The Penguin Pool Murder (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

This time she shook her head emphatically. “No, it wasn’t one of those accents. It sounded sort of far away, because I thought it was long distance at first. The way a voice sounds when it comes over the hook-ups from Los Angeles. Only it was a local call.”

  “It couldn’t have been a woman, could it? A woman disguising her voice?”

  Once more Miss Maggie Colton was positive. It couldn’t have been a woman. Piper told her she could get back to her switchboard. “And get Spring 3100 for me while you’re at it,” he told her. “On this phone. And you don’t need to put the call through Miss Templeton.”

  A few minutes later he was in connection with Police Headquarters. Miss Withers listened as he asked impatiently for a report from Doctor Bloom.

  “Well, call him back and tell him that I want to know if he thinks this is a murder case or a Tammany Hall investigation? I want some service, see? An autopsy doesn’t need to take more than a week, as a rule!” said Piper to the invisible copper at the other end of the line.

  “And something more. Tell Lieutenant Keller to send down a couple of his operatives who know something about Wall Street offices and accounting to go through the books and files of White and Lester, here in the Fleming Trust Building. Yeah, this morning. Yeah. And I want another operative, I’d prefer Taylor but any man will do, to get a search warrant blank and come down here. Okay. If Bloom reports, shoot his call here to me. Yeah. Yeah. G’bye.” He turned to Miss Withers. “At last we’re getting somewhere.”

  “Are we?” She was poking about the file cases. “It looks more and more complicated to me.” Then … “What’s this?”

  She was reaching down behind the file, groping in the dark. Then her fingers touched the bit of bright metal which had caught her eye. It was a silver vase, of the type which holds a single rose.

  Piper came over to look at it. “Well, you don’t think Lester was killed with that, do you?”

  Miss Withers shook her head. “All the same, as a rule people don’t throw silver vases behind filing cabinets. And I’ve heard you say several times that if we could only notice all the things around us that were unusual, we’d stumble on the mystery. Well, here’s something unusual.”

  “More likely it simply fell down there, and was forgotten,” said Piper. But he placed the vase on Lester’s desk and stared at it reflectively. “Looks like it belonged there,” he observed. “Matches the ashtrays and the rest of it.” He dropped into the chair again.

  “We’ve got to wait here for a while,” he told Miss Withers. “We might as well check through those notes you took in the inquiry yesterday, and refresh our memories.”

  They were still at it when a knock came on the door, and the three plain-clothes operatives were shown in by Miss Templeton. Piper did not introduce them to Miss Withers.

  He waited until Miss Templeton was well out of the room, and then spoke shortly to the biggest of the three, a man who looked like a truck-driver, except for his mobile hands and fingers. “Taylor, did you see the little girl who let you in?” He spoke in a low voice. “Name’s Marian Templeton. Lives in a Greenwich Village apartment on Morton Street, number 19. I want you to give her place a look-see sometime today before she leaves the office here. Then I want you to tail her, unless you find out something worth reporting to me by phone at the office. She’s private secretary to Gerald Lester.”

  “Okay,” said Taylor. He was gone.

  Piper lifted the phone. “Will you ask Mr. Fairchild to step into this office, if you please?”

  In a few minutes there came a timid knock on the door, and a young man entered. Frederick Fairchild was a tall, somewhat gangling young dandy with a carefully waxed moustache and what was meant to be an ingratiating smile. He wore a double-breasted blue suit, light pearl-gray spats, and a bosomed shirt that matched his tie.

  “I didn’t know you’d be down today,” observed Piper slowly, “after your talk with Lester yesterday morning. You know what I’m here for, of course. These people with me are my assistants. Can you help us any?”

  Fairchild twisted his eastern moustache tip vigorously. “Don’t know that I can,” he said. “Fact is, I didn’t intend to come back today, after Gerald gave me the works yesterday morning. But he didn’t come back to sign my check, so here I am waiting for the dough. If I can tell you anything to help you in this business …”

  “Have a sort of brawl with Lester when he gave you the sack?”

  Fairchild looked up quickly. “Good Lord, you don’t think I had anything to do with it, do you? They’re whispering that he was killed, and that it wasn’t suicide at all. But I didn’t have a brawl with him. Nothing like it. He just told me that the company wouldn’t keep me any longer. I knew it was coming. I’m the only customer’s man here who gets any dough; the others draw fifty a week against their commissions. I draw four times that, but then, I’ve been with the outfit for three years, and I had the clientele. Up until the October crash, there wasn’t a week when I didn’t have a check coming to me in advance of what I’d drawn on the drawing account. But since then all my customers, like everybody else, took a rap on the chin and don’t trade. No trade, no commissions. No commissions, no use for a big drawing account like mine. Lester asked me if I wanted to drop down to fifty a week with the rest of the boys just a year out of Yale and I said no. So that’s all.”

  “And you didn’t have a fuss with Lester yesterday?”

  Fairchild shook his head. “Of course not. I knew it was coming. It was strictly business, nothing personal at all.” Miss Withers noticed that he was twisting the fingers of his left hand, the hand away from Piper. They fingered invisible objects, nervously.

  “All right,” said the Inspector finally. “By the way, these gentlemen are from my office. I want them to go through the books and the files of the company. Here is a search warrant if you insist. All I want from them is a list of the biggest losers in the late unpleasantness of October among your customers. I’ll appreciate it, Fairchild, if you’ll introduce them to the treasurer and so forth.”

  “Gladly,” said Fairchild. He had almost reached the door when Piper’s voice halted him.

  “Oh, by the way, Fairchild! Where did you have lunch yesterday, and with whom? Just for our records?”

  Fairchild hesitated. “The-the truth of the matter is that I didn’t eat lunch yesterday. It was sort of a shock, finding out that I was tossed out on my ear. I walked by myself in Battery Park….”

  Piper looked at Miss Withers, wonderingly. “You know that Battery Park is at the steps of the building in which your employer was killed yesterday?”

  Fairchild nodded. “I know it. But I didn’t go in.”

  “All right,” said Piper casually. “And one thing more. Ever see this before?” He pointed to the silver rose vase that stood now on Lester’s desk.

  The customer’s man stared at it, and then nodded. “Sure I have. That’s what we used to call Lester’s burnt offering. The little girl, Miss Templeton, you know … she used to keep a fresh rosebud in that vase, on the boss’s desk. They used to kid her about it, because she bought them out of her own salary. Lately I haven’t seen her coming in with the rosebud wrapped in green tissue paper as she used to do. I guess she got over her crush on the boss.”

  Piper nodded, sticking out his lower lip. “Sort of an office-wife, huh?”

  “Yeah, something like that. The little girl’s been with him a long time, you know. He wouldn’t have another secretary, not even when … not at all.”

  “Not even when Mrs. Lester objected to Miss Templeton?” Piper hazarded.

  “Not even then. I didn’t know you knew about that. Yeah, Mrs. Lester had an idea that her husband ought to have one of these plain, efficient ladies around. But nothing doing. Gerald Lester knew his women. Why, he even had Miss Templeton sewing buttons on his overcoat one day, I remember. She was sewing them on with the thread she keeps to mend silk stockings with. And they certainly did kid her about it!”

  “All right, Fa
irchild. That’s all I need to know now. I may want to talk to you again one of these days. Now you can show these two gentlemen around a bit.”

  The two detectives who had stood motionless beside the door all the time moved obediently after the customer’s man. Even to Miss Withers they looked more like baseball players than either accountants or detectives. But detectives usually did look like that, she knew now.

  “That’s that,” said Piper to her. “Well, how do you figure this case now?”

  “I don’t figure it,” confessed Miss Withers. “But I’m just a woman. You’re the master-mind. And suppose you tell me just what track you’re on?”

  Piper burst out in hearty laughter. Miss Withers had never seen him laugh before, and it was pleasant. “Good Lord, woman. I’m not on any track. I’m like the man in Leacock’s book who jumped on his horse and rode off in all directions. This is a real case, not a puzzle out of a story magazine. I’m a detective, not a super-sleuth. Sherlock Holmes would know all about this case in no time, what with a magnifying glass and his knowledge of the bone structure of Polynesian aborigines. Philo Vance would solve it between puffs of a Regie cigarette, from simple deductions based on the squawks of those penguins we met up with yesterday. But not me. I don’t know any more than you do. Maybe less, only I know how to act wise. I’m just blundering ahead, trying not to miss any of the more apparent lines of approach. Sooner or later the murderer will leave something open, and I’ll stumble in. It works, lady, where the gum-shoes and the shag-tobacco and violin combination don’t. Remember this one thing, the sleuth has one tremendous advantage always. It’s that sooner or later the criminal will get either scared or reckless, and show his hand thinking that we know as much as we pretend to know. Then we nab him.”

  “I see,” said Miss Withers. Piper lifted the phone again. “I’m making one phone call, and then we’ll get under way,” he told her.

  Into the phone—“Spring 3100 again, baby.” He waited a moment, and then asked for his office.

  “Hello, lieutenant? Well, what do you hear from Doc Bloom? Is that sawbones still trying to find out what killed Lester, or did he give it up and call in a chiropractor? Oh, he did, did he? Well, tell him … no, I’ll have them get him on the phone for me. Hello? Sure I’ll talk to Casey. Hello, Mike? Did you get to first base with the maid? Yeah. You got the socks? Well, send ’em down for analysis. Particularly the left leg, about half way up, on the outside. Sure. Sure. Save the rest of it till you see me, or make a written report. Sure. Now have them transfer this call to Doc Bloom, will you?”

  There was a long pause, and much clicking over the line. Piper put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Remember my sending Casey last night to snoop around the Lester apartment? Well, he got to be pals with Mrs. Lester’s second maid, and he got the stockings the dame wore yesterday. I noticed a stain on them. Interesting if they show traces of blood that she might have washed off in a hurry, huh?” Then he suddenly burst forth into the mouthpiece. “Hello, Bloom? Yeah, this is Inspector Piper, Doctor. Yeah. How you coming? I can’t go ahead until you give me some more dope on the stiff. Yeah.”

  He listened for a few minutes. “Well, that’s your end, Doctor. But you know and I know that heart failure is the cause of every death. It’s the question of what makes the heart stop. And I don’t believe that a big husky like Lester would pass out cold from a crack on the chin. Sure, go ahead. If a cranial autopsy will show anything more, try that. Yeah, call me back. Headquarters will let you know where to find me. Sure. And hurry, will you?”

  He crashed the receiver and lit another cigar. Lester’s silver tray now held four, each practically intact except for a quarter inch of ash on one end and two inches of chewed pulp on the other.

  “Can you beat that?” He looked up at Miss Withers, and his face was contorted with a puzzled frown. “Bloom, the smartest medical examiner that the department ever had, can’t find anything wrong with the corpse. No water in the lungs, no poison in the intestinal tract, no wound … what do you make of that?”

  “Perfectly clear to me,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers. “Gerald Lester was frightened to death by seeing his own face in the glass of the penguin tank. Or maybe somebody was giving him an absent reverse-action treatment in Christian Science. Possibly somebody shot him with an icicle from a cross-bow, so that the weapon melted and left no trace. Oh, I can think of a dozen causes of death. And judging by the number of people you figure might have been in that runway with him, maybe he was trampled to death in the traffic!”

  “Well, anyway we’ve done all we can hope to do here,” Piper told her. “We might as well run down and confront Hemingway with the news that we know he got taken for plenty in the recent market crash. Funny he wouldn’t tell us about that, wasn’t it? Claiming that his friendship with Gerald Lester was so casual and all that….”

  Miss Withers took a last look around the room. “Just about twenty-four hours ago Jerry Lester hurried out of this room bound for the Aquarium, and a destination a lot farther than that, if he’d known. I wonder if that phone call that the girl put right through to him as so important regarding Mrs. Lester had anything to do with his going?”

  “Nothing else but,” Piper told her. “Somebody called him up and told him where to find his wife and another man in tête à tête. And I’m going to know who did that calling before I get through. Maybe the call could be traced. I hadn’t thought of that.” Again he picked up the instrument.

  “Hello, baby. Give me the chief operator, will you? What exchange? I don’t know what exchange. I want to trace that call that came in to your boss yesterday morning. They keep a record of calls somewhere, don’t they, so they can bill ’em? Why do you have to know the exchange the call came from? Oh, yeah? Well, give me the supervisor, then.”

  He waited for some time, and then succeeded in explaining what he wanted. “Listen, madam. This isn’t fooling. I’m Inspector Piper of the Homicide Squad and I’ve got to have that number traced. I don’t care if it takes fifty clerks all night to dig it out. Somewhere you must have a record of that call to this number. Yeah, twelve o’clock noon, yesterday. Yeah. No, it was a local call, somewhere on Manhattan Island. Yeah. Well, when you find it, call me at Headquarters. Yeah. Yeah.”

  He put down the phone. “That’s that,” he observed to Miss Withers, who was beginning to think that detective work wasn’t as interesting as she had hoped. “Somebody warned Jerry Lester about his wife, maybe one of the servants at his house, maybe not. If that call came from …”

  “Br-r-r-r-ring….” The phone jangled under Piper’s hand. He snatched it. “Yes, this is Inspector Piper. Yes. Who, Bloom? Get him back for me, for God’s sake. Yes, I’ll hold on. Yes … hello, Doctor. What’s up now?”

  There was a long silence, and then Piper said good-bye. His voice was at once relieved and constrained as he spoke to Miss Withers, who waited for him beside the door.

  “That was the medical examiner, Dr. Bloom,” he told her. “He knows how Lester was killed. He …”

  “Then it was murder! Go on!”

  Piper seemed reluctant to spill it. He fished for another cigar, and then finding his own vest pocket empty, took one from the mahogany humidor on Lester’s desk, and bit off the end appreciatively.

  “Until he started the cranial autopsy he couldn’t find a thing wrong,” Piper went on. “But as soon as he started to work on the brain, he found …”

  “Don’t be so dramatic,” Miss Withers insisted tensely. She was holding her breath. “Out with it … I won’t faint.”

  “All right,” said Piper. “I’m telling you. Gerald Lester was killed by some sort of a devil’s skewer forced through his right ear, eardrum, skull, and into the brain for at least two inches. Death must have been instantaneous, for he didn’t struggle and there was practically no flow of blood. The weapon was removed without leaving an apparent trace of its entry, and if I hadn’t insisted on a cranial autopsy Lester would have been put down as heart failure.
Doc Bloom says that the weapon was smaller than a stiletto, since it made a hole less than one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter in the bone of the skull. It takes good steel to break through like that, without snapping or turning on itself, even though the ear is a vulnerable spot.”

  “I’ve got an idea,” said Miss Withers after a moment. “Is there any regulation that you have to give full and correct details about this business to the press and to the public?”

  “I don’t get you,” Piper admitted.

  “Well, the medical examiner makes his report to you and to nobody else, doesn’t he?”

  “Quite right. Of course, he appears as a witness in the trial, at which time he is under oath and has to tell the whole truth.”

  “Splendid.” Miss Withers was aglow with enthusiasm. “I’ve got a wonderful idea. Then there are only three people who know that Lester met his death just that way … the medical examiner, you, and myself?”

  “One other person knows,” said Piper softly. “Have you forgotten the murderer?”

  “Exactly,” said Miss Withers. She explained what her grand idea was.

  Piper whistled. “Can’t do it, ma’m. It would be bound to get out. I have to report everything to the Prosecutor, Tom Roche. He’d skin me alive if I did what you suggest.”

  “Not if it caught the murderer, or the murderers,” Miss Withers reminded him. “And something might happen before the case comes to trial. Will you do it?”

  Piper reached for the phone. “You just bet I’ll give the story out that way, Miss Withers.” Then he hesitated, staring at the blue beaded hat which the school-teacher was wearing again today.

  She became very thoughtful. “A skewer, you say … or a stiletto? Why then, Lester might have been killed with my hatpin!”

  Piper looked at her, and the friendliness was gone from his face. His lower lip came further out, and he tossed his cigar out of the open window.

  “That occurred to me just now,” he said softly.

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