The Cases of Hildegarde Withers

by Palmer, Stuart

  Up the stairs, all three flights of them, went Miss Hildegarde Withers. She opened the door of the top floor apartment, and entered. Instantly the pleasant smile with which she had been intending to greet her future home was erased by a quick gasp. She walked slowly forward into the big living room, stepping gingerly like a cat on a damp floor.

  It was the walls. On the creamy white of the smooth surface someone had painted a great blue eye, which wept red tears on the baseboard. Beside it was a pink tree with a mermaid’s tail instead of roots, and across one branch, limply twisted like a piece of warm butterscotch, was a curious object which was—which must be!—a pocket watch with hands pointing to five o’clock.

  Miss Withers drew back and sniffed. This was not even good surrealist art. Then she realized that she was not alone. There was a man standing beside her, breathing rather warmly on the back of her neck. He wore streaked white coveralls and carried a pail of paint. His face, too, was well smeared.

  “Now tell me honestly what you think!” he begged, waving at the wall. “Have I got something there, or not?”

  “Why—” Miss Withers backed away a little, not sure whether a laugh or a scream was indicated. The man wasn’t drunk, because the rank smell about him was linseed oil, not alcohol.

  “You mustn’t go,” he said thickly. There was pleading in his voice. “I have to explain about the white, white walls. Nobody can go on forever painting white, white, white…” He stopped suddenly. “I’d like to paint you. I’d like to do you all pale blue, with your hair a rich yellowish-green.” His smile faded, and the dreamy, puffy eyes widened. “It won’t hurt!”

  There was no getting past him to the door. Miss Withers had her umbrella, and now she raised it like a lance. “Stand back!”

  “Don’t scream, lady!” But she did scream, a goodly yip. Her voice echoed hollowly in the empty room. “Don’t do that, lady!” he shouted, raising the pail of paint as if to hurl it.

  “Mister Leach!” shrieked Miss Withers. There was the pounding of footsteps on the stair. The painter, ignoring the paralyzed schoolma’am, turned toward the door, waiting. An expression of innocent enjoyment marked his face. He lifted the pail.

  “Look out!” Miss Withers cried. “Don’t!” But poor Leach came rushing into the room. His eyes took in the scene, his brain reacted, but his legs of their own volition took him three steps closer before they stopped. And by that time the pail of paint was over him. He lurched back, reeling and pawing at his eyes. Then he turned, stumbled, and half fell down the stair.

  The painter turned back toward Miss Withers, but that lady had seized her opportunity and was now disappearing into the bathroom. The lock clicked behind her.

  “Come on out, lady!” howled the painter. “The paint won’t hurt you. If you don’t like it you can wash it off!” He pounded on the door, kept on pounding until Leach came back up the stairs with two other painters and the nearest patrolman. Miss Withers even then did not unlock the door, not until the painter had been overpowered and. pinned to the paint-covered floor. An ambulance arrived, and the doctor took one look and whipped out a hypodermic needle.

  “Two minims of hyoscine m.c.,” be observed cheerily. “And sleepy-by is what he needs.”

  “Do they ever get over it?” Miss Withers wanted to know.

  “Lead poisoning? Why, sure. Give him a nice stomach wash of magnesium sulphate and he’ll be good as new in a week, maybe sooner. Lots of painters get it—the lead in paint, you know. Delusions and so forth. It often takes the form of mild mania.”

  “Mild!” said Miss Withers bitterly. She gathered herself together as best she could, waded through the pools of spilled paint, and then stopped short in the doorway as Inspector Oscar Piper thundered up the stairs, followed by the young sergeant and a policeman. Piper was curious.

  “What’s that ambulance doing outside, and what’s going on here, and—”

  “How nice of you to drop over,” said the schoolteacher sweetly. “You’re only about ten minutes late.”

  The Inspector listened to what had happened, and shook his head. “You know, Hildegarde, wherever you are, there’s trouble. You breed it, like stagnant water breeds mosquitoes.”

  “Hmmp!” Miss Withers started down the stair, stood aside to let the stretcher go past her. The Inspector followed her, almost amused now.

  “It must have been funny, though,” he observed. “Your walking in on that screwball painter, it could happen to nobody but you, nobody in the world.”

  They came into the lower hall. “At least,” she said tartly, “you can’t blame me for what happened up on Fifty-seventh Street today. So lightning struck twice in the same place, eh? And is your dragnet working?”

  He shrugged. “We can’t tell yet. I think we’ll get the guy—in spite of your tipping off the whole thing to the papers.”

  “I hope you do,” she said sweetly. Then her head jerked back, like a startled horse. “What?”

  Doggedly, he repeated it. And she stood there, rigid with indignation, while the Inspector turned to confer with his aides and with the doctor. There was some question, it seemed, about the identity of the ambulance patient. “Book him at the hospital as John Doe for the time being,” he ordered. “Mains, you can check with the employment office and the painters’ union and find out who he is.” He turned back to Miss Withers. “Hey, where are you going?”

  “Home!” said that lady, very definitely.

  “Well, you better let me send Sergeant Mains to pass you through the cordon, or—”

  “I want no favors from you!” she snapped. “The idea of your thinking I blabbed to the papers!”

  “Well?” shrugged Piper. “Nobody knew about the dragnet, outside of the department, except you and the Commissioner.”

  “I knew—and the Commissioner!” she exploded. “Of course, I must be the one. I have so many reporters in my outer office, and I’m in politics and need the good-will of the papers, and…” The Inspector was trying to talk, but she was not in the mood to listen. “And all right for you, Oscar Piper. You stood me up for dinner the other night. Well, now you can stew in your own juice. Go back to your precious dragnet, and see what it brings you. And when it fails, don’t come to me!”

  “That, my boy,” said the Inspector slowly, “is what they call giving somebody a piece of one’s mind.” Sergeant Mains stood beside him, looking dubiously after the departing schoolma’am. “The sad part about it is that she’s right,” Piper finished.

  Consciousness of rectitude gave Miss Hildegarde Withers no inner feeling of satisfaction whatever on her homeward march, which was interrupted for nearly twenty minutes while she stood in line to have her handbag searched. The cordon was tight, no doubt about that.

  She flounced back into her own apartment in the west Seventies, the apartment which she had decided to vacate in a month. In spite of herself she spent the rest of the afternoon listening in on the police wave-length. At six o’clock she turned back to the regular news broadcast and heard an announcer declaim that today New York had seen its most spectacular man hunt since the capture of Two-gun Crowley—a man hunt which was by this time admittedly a failure.

  “I told him so,” Miss Withers snapped at her mirror, without pleasure. By the time she had picked at her dinner and done up the dishes, she was definitely uneasy. Somewhere, deep down in the bottom of her mind, the schoolteacher sensed that a signal light was burning, as it had burned so many times before, to tell her that she had missed something. It was an angry red signal. …

  At nine o’clock the boys cried an extra through the streets, with headlines

  “COP-KILLER RETURNS—GETS REST OF LOOT.”

  There were remarks about butter-fingered police, and the need for a shakeup at Centre Street.

  Much to her surprise, Miss Withers was not surprised at all when her doorbell rang some time later, and she found the Inspector outside. He was a very tired and gray and deflated Inspector.

  “Oh,” she said
. “Come in.”

  He hesitated. “I thought of sending you flowers, only all the florists are closed. And I was going to have a Western Union messenger come up and sing you something, only they don’t know the songs with the right words.” He smiled wanly. “You see, it was the Commissioner that gave out that story to the press.”

  “Come on in!” she insisted. “For heaven’s sake, come on in.” She stared at him. “Oscar Piper, have you eaten anything today?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t remember.” But he came inside, sank into a chair. “I’m not hungry,” he insisted. “Would you be hungry if they were going to take away your badge tomorrow morning? I’ll be back at a precinct desk, see if I’m not.”

  “No luck at all with the dragnet?”

  “None. We picked up three or four crooks we’d been looking for, but none of them is up to this sort of crime. And no trace anywhere of that emerald—that hunk of green ice!”

  She fed him scrambled eggs, made him clean up the plate. She even insisted on his smoking one of his long greenish-brown cigars, a privilege hitherto denied him in her domain. Oscar Piper stared unhappily at the smoke as it rose.

  “It’s the same crook,” he observed. “With the same twisted sense of humor. He made a laughing-stock out of me and the entire force.”

  “An egomaniac,” agreed the schoolteacher. Now the red bulb in the back of her mind was flashing and glowing like a neon sign. “A maniac—” She gulped. “Oscar! Suppose that your dragnet didn’t fail! Suppose that it didn’t catch your crook because he rode through in an ambulance!”

  Piper tensed, then relaxed again. “I checked all that, Hildegarde,” he told her. “The painter, you mean. No, he was a real painter, registered and everything. And I called Bellevue and he was really brought in there to the emergency ward, booked for lead poisoning.”

  “When?”

  The Inspector thought it was about an hour ago.

  She rose suddenly and headed for the bedroom, where her telephone was installed. Oscar Piper puffed unhappily, and she was back before the long gray ash had fallen from his cigar. “Oscar!” she announced, “Bellevue released that man twenty minutes ago, to a nurse from the Painters’ Union Clinic!”

  “Well? What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing at all. Except that I called Information, and there is no Painters’ Union Clinic.”

  The Inspector rocked back on his heels as if he had run into a haymaker. “That does it! Now I know I ought to quit the force and get a job as understudy to an idiot!” He started pacing the floor. “We had him! We had him, and just because he put on an act with a bucket of paint we sent him off in an ambulance with our blessing! Good gravy!”

  “What about the emerald?” Miss Withers suggested.

  “He swallowed it, probably. Anyway, it’s gone and so is he…”

  She shook her head. “A man as smart as that wouldn’t risk swallowing the jewel, not when he faced the prospect of stomach pumps at the hospital. No, Oscar.”

  “Well, then?”

  The red light flared again in the back of her mind, flared into an electric sign as clear as the messages which went twinkling around the Times Building.

  “Oscar! The deadline or dragnet or whatever it is—it’s all over?”

  He nodded. “We had to order the men back to their regular duty, after they’d all met in the middle of the area and reported a blank.” Miss Withers was grabbing her hat. “Hey—”

  “Come on!” she cried. “Get a taxi.”

  The taxicab was not necessary, as it developed that young Sergeant Mains and a Headquarters car waited below. They piled in and Miss Withers gave an address. “And please, no siren!” she begged. “I know you all love the things, the way small boys love a whistle, but just this once. …”

  They cut south along Central Park West, red lights blazing, and then left at the Circle. …And then they were outside the remodelled brownstone, with its “Unfurnished Apartments” sign. “Wait here,” ordered Piper, looking at the sergeant. Miss Withers was already pushing up the steps, and he hurried after her. The front door was half open, and in the lower hall with its muddle of equipment one pale light bulb gleamed. Most particularly did it gleam down upon Miss Marcia Lee Smith, who seemed a bit startled.

  “Still looking for the rental agent?” quizzed the schoolma’am.

  Marcia Lee gasped, blinked, and answered. “Oh, it’s you! I—why—I—” She was peering toward the door. “You ’member when we were here this afternoon? And I spilled my bag? Well, I lost eighty-five dollars somehow. I must have, because it’s gone. You didn’t see it, did you?”

  Miss Withers said that it had been years since she had seen that much money all at one time. The Inspector pushed into the scene. “What makes, anyway?”

  “You remember Miss Smith,” said the schoolteacher. “She and I were looking for apartments the other day, and we met again today. Our paths are always crossing.”

  “You haven’t seen anybody hanging around upstairs?” Piper demanded of the girl.

  “I haven’t been upstairs,” the girl admitted. “It was so dark and lonesome—I had just about decided I’d run along home and come back and look for my money in the morning.”

  “A very good idea,” agreed Miss Withers. “It’s a bit late for you to be out. But, by the way—” she lowered her voice—“there’s a friend of yours outside in the car.”

  The Inspector was already on his way up the stair, and Miss Withers hurried along after him. They approached the top floor apartment on tiptoe, entered softly in the wake of the round beam cast by Piper’s flashlight. The big living room was empty, except for the half-dried puddles of paint not yet cleared away. The kitchen, the bath, the bedroom, the closets—all empty.

  “Maybe we’re too late,” Piper said. “Maybe he’s been and gone, with the emerald.” But Miss Withers thought not. They began to search. An empty apartment offers few hiding places. Piper looked under the drain in each bit of plumbing. He looked up the flue of the fireplace, and behind the Venetian blinds. He even raised each window, making sure that the emerald had not been hung outside on a thread.

  Finally they both admitted failure. “I wonder,” Miss Withers began, “if we might not get some information from that girl. Of course she’s outside talking to your handsome sergeant.”

  Of course she was—they could look down from the window. But even as Piper started to lead the way out of the place, Miss Withers froze. “My ankles!” she whispered. “They feel a draft.”

  Oscar Piper halted, looking dubious. “Oscar, the back door! Somebody just opened it…” she insisted.

  He nodded. Then, motioning her to stay behind him, Oscar Piper went softly back into the apartment. He crossed the living room, came into the kitchen. The rear door was closed and locked, but that didn’t prove anything. He started to turn. …

  “Up!” came a voice behind him. “Up high—higher than that!” The bathroom door opened, and a man came out, a smallish man, no more than five feet six. He was in his middle thirties, and his mouth was twisted in a curious smile. He held an automatic pistol in his right hand.

  “Back up!” was the order. “Now go on—both of you!” It was the mad painter, only he wasn’t really mad. It was the jewel thief, the murderer of Sam Bodley, the man in the tan raincoat who had jumped so lightly to the waiting car. …

  “Don’t make any moves, copper!” he said.

  “What do you think this will get you?” asked Inspector Piper slowly, as he backed into the living room. “Why don’t you drop that gun and give yourself up? I know you. You’re Joe Swinton…Swinnerton?…Swinston, that’s it!”

  There was a difficult pause. “That’s too bad,” said the man with the gun. “Sorry you recognized me, copper. Because now I’ve got to knock you over, and I wasn’t going to do that…”

  Oscar Piper may have been worried, but he did not show it. “You haven’t nerve enough to shoot.”

  “I’ve got more nerve than yo
u,” Swinston told him, and looked it. Miss Withers, who had been edging imperceptibly toward the front window, realized that of all the tough spots they had ever been in, this was about the toughest.

  The Inspector’s body was as tense as a coiled spring, but he kept his voice easy. “Come on, Joe, where did you stash the emerald?”

  Swinston didn’t take the bait. “What good would it do you to know, copper? You aren’t going looking for that hunk of green ice. …” His mouth was smiling, but his eyes squinted narrowly, and he tightened in preparation for the recoil of the gun. It’s now or never, said Hildegarde Withers to herself, and grasped the cord of the Venetian blind. It fell with a most terrific clatter. Swinston, caught off guard, turned and fired blindly. At almost the same instant he was kicked most deftly in the stomach by Oscar Piper, who had his own ideas about the amount of courtesy which should be extended to cop-killers.

  “Not exactly sporting, Oscar, but well-timed,” observed the schoolteacher, as the Inspector slipped bracelets on the writhing bandit.

  He looked up at her. “You all right?”

  “It’s about time you wondered,” she told him, eyeing the neat round hole in the wall beside her left ear. But what interested her most was the sequence of events down on the sidewalk. The Inspector came up beside her at the window, and they both stared down, wide-eyed.

  Far below them, beside the Headquarters car, Sergeant Mains was em- bracing Marcia Lee Smith. And a curious embrace it was, for he had her arm pinned behind her back and was, at the moment, twisting it.

  “When the shot went off she tried to swing a sap on me!” complained the bewildered young sergeant later, as they waited at the curb for the Black Maria, prisoners handcuffed together.

  Piper grinned. “You’ve been monkeying with a buzz saw, Romeo. This dame is the one who drove the getaway car, in blonde wig and glasses. Then she hopped out and came back to give us a wrong steer on the description of her boy friend. Didn’t you, honey chile?”

  Marcia Lee swore at him in a south Brooklyn accent. “Don’t talk,” Joe Swinston told her.