Miss Withers Regrets

by Stuart Palmer

  According to the ancient gold watch pinned to her bosom, it was almost the witching hour of twelve. Miss Withers put on her hat again, took up her umbrella, and was about to head out into the night when the telephone rang.

  With a sudden sigh of relief she seized upon it and cried, “Oscar! Hallo!”

  Only it wasn’t Oscar, it was Lawn Abbott, and her voice was hushed, a little strained. “They shoved a note under my door a while ago—that you’d stopped by. Anything wrong?”

  “Almost everything,” Miss Withers admitted. “What I stopped by to tell you was that I crashed the meeting and dropped my bomb. But that doesn’t seem to matter now. Or hadn’t you heard? Pat Montague has confessed.”

  “That’s a lie!” came the girl’s voice in an angry whisper.

  “I’m afraid not,” Miss Withers said a little stiffly. “I had it straight from the best sources.”

  “I mean the confession is a lie, no matter what Pat said!” Lawn was fiercely confident.

  “Oh! Well, I agree with you. I think that the murderer lies in an entirely different direction. I was just about to start out, in the hope of making a surprise attack. Care to play Watson to my Sherlock?”

  “Love to. But where, and how?”

  “I intend to call on Mr. Joe Searles at once,” Miss Withers told her. There was a strange gulp at the other end of the wire. “What?”

  “Nothing. I just swallowed a damn. You see, I’m afraid I can’t get into town. Helen and father went off somewhere earlier—I think they took both cars, and if they didn’t, still Helen has the keys to the roadster. My sister and I aren’t on very good terms. I could try to catch a ride—or—”

  “Never mind,” Miss Withers said.

  “But I’d like to … Oops! I hear somebody coming. More trouble.” The receiver clicked.

  “ ‘So I’ll do it myself’ said the little red hen,” observed the schoolteacher. Emerging from her cottage, she found both taxis away on calls. Searles’s address, however, should lie within walking distance, almost on the edge of town and near the shore. She set out sturdily, her sensible heels tapping on the side walks like drumsticks.

  It was a pleasant, reassuring sound at first, and then it seemed to grow louder in the stillness, so that the repetitious tap-tap-tap filled the narrowing streets and echoed from the walls and buildings. The street lights seemed to grow dimmer and farther apart.

  It was a very silent night. Once or twice an automobile rushed past her, making everything quieter by contrast. Far away a dog barked, and there was the lonely, banshee wail of a railroad engine’s whistle, drawn thin by distance.

  She found herself walking on the brightest side of the street, and—since she could not whistle satisfactorily—humming to herself. At last she understood what Officer Lunney had meant about the difference between a criminal type and a solid citizen on a lonely street at night, and the way each acted when an officer appeared. She would certainly have given any one in uniform a hearty greeting and probably tried to engage the man in conversation besides, only tonight there was no sign of a patrolman.

  The street lights ended, but the street kept on, and so did Miss Withers. Pier Lane turned out to be an unpaved alley leading off to the right, but she determinedly trod its sandy ruts, beneath ancient signs promising “All Kinds Baits” and “Used Marine Hardware and Gear,” until she was brought up short against a whitewashed picket fence. There was a station wagon parked in the side yard, its dead headlights softly reflecting the lights of the town like a pair of blind eyes, so this must be the place.

  Miss Withers came softly up a board sidewalk towards the front door of the one-story shack, her umbrella held like a lance. Then she relaxed. There was no danger of a watchdog here, at least. She came up on the porch, littered with garden tools and old rubber hose, and approached the door on tiptoe.

  Even with the help of the tiny pencil flashlight in her purse she could see neither bell nor knocker. She took a deep breath, made a fist, and knocked sharply.

  The little building seemed to roar and rattle with the sound, but nobody answered. Then Miss Withers caught her breath, for the door had been ajar and now it was softly swinging inward. She sniffed sharply, trying to classify the scents which poured out of the pitch-blackness.

  “Alcohol,” she whispered. “Fish … tobacco … cabbage … hamburger …” But was there something else, something more subtle, more frightening?

  She cast the thin gleam of the flashlight into the room so that it played over walls decorated with pages torn from the Sunday supplements, over a stove and table crowded with dirty pans and dishes, across a floor marked with a wide, dark stain.

  The stain came from behind a couch on which Joe Searles was lying, his stockinged feet sticking out all akimbo. He was still in his overalls, and his hands clutched the tangled blankets in a frozen spasm of agony.

  “Mr. Searles!” she whispered once, and tiptoed forward. She started to breathe more easily when she saw that the stain on the floor was only water. Then she found that the water had overflowed from a full pail of water standing on the floor at the end of the couch. The reason it had overflowed was that Joe Searles’s head had been shoved down, jammed tight into the pail, and left there.

  The pail had a capacity of four gallons, but he was as dead as if he had been at the bottom of all the seven seas.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE IMMEDIATE REQUIREMENT, MISS Withers decided, was more light on the subject. She finally found and pulled the dirty string which turned on the glaring overhead bulb, and then looked at the old-fashioned gold watch pinned to her old-fashioned bosom and noted that it was just seventeen minutes past twelve.

  The important thing was to keep perfectly calm. After all, there was no real reason why her knees should be quaking or her throat too dry to swallow. This was, she reassured herself, an amateur detective’s dream come true, because here was a still-warm corpse and a murder room unsullied and untrampled by the myrmidons of the police, its clues crying to heaven to be discovered.

  It was really only a matter of where to begin. Looking for clues in this cottage was going to be on the difficult side, she realized. The place was disordered, but it appeared to be a disorder of long standing. The door had been left ajar, but there was nothing to show that the murderer had entered or left that way, for both the rear windows were open, and one of them was unscreened.

  True, there were a few footprints damply imprinted on the linoleum. But, she thought, it would have been simpler if there had been an exotic Turkish cigarette still burning in the ashtray. There was not, however, even an ashtray, as Searles had evidently smoked a pipe and let the refuse fall where it may. There wasn’t even an initialed gold cuff-link glistening on the floor, or a scented lace handkerchief clutched in the dead man’s hand. She thought of looking through Searles’s pockets and then backed down. It had seemed ghoulish enough to approach the pail and lift his head so that she could be sure that it was Searles and that he was beyond help.

  There was a great deal of difference, Miss Withers was discovering, between standing on the sidelines and gently heckling the police as they performed their routine investigation, and trying to work all by her lonesome.

  More than that, she still felt jittery, although Joe Searles was certainly past harming any one. And she knew that the murderer would be anywhere else in the world besides in the neighborhood of his deed. All the same, she tiptoed over to the antique bathroom and peered within, surprising some cockroaches and a beetle or so, and then looked into the clothes closet, which contained nothing except the dead man’s Sunday suit of shiny serge. An empty holster hung nearby on a nail.

  At the other end of the room was the alcove fitted out as a kitchen, and this she found more to her liking as a spot for scientific deduction. The first notation she made was that Searles had dined that night upon hamburger patties, fried potatoes mixed with onions, rye bread: with bacon grease as a substitute for butter, and a bottle of beer.

 
; “The condemned man ate a hearty meal,” she observed softly. Worst of all, she had a feeling that it was dollars to doughnuts that she herself had condemned him, however unwittingly. She decided, after a close study of the remains of the meal and the hardness of the grease on the dishes, that Searles had eaten early in the evening. She made a most detailed inspection of the cupboards and shelves and then looked into the garbage can, which sadly needed emptying. From that Miss Withers turned her attention to the wastepaper basket, which held several daily newspapers, metropolitan and local, with all wordage on the Cairns murder clipped out, also some onion peels, the bloodstained paper in which the hamburger had been wrapped, and an empty beer bottle. She emptied all this trash out upon the newspaper, having other uses for the basket.

  Miss Withers was holding a container of pancake flour in her hand when she first heard the sound of the car turning into the alley Her first natural feminine impulse was to lock herself into the bathroom and scream, but then she noticed that the approaching automobile had a red spotlight and that as it stopped two men got out with a flash of brass buttons.

  “Oh, dear!” cried the schoolteacher as she turned out the light somewhat tardily. But by the time the two officers from the police radio car were crowding into the doorway, guns out and flashlights blazing, she was calmly seated at the telephone, dialing the number of the Shoreham police station. “I’d like to speak to Inspector Oscar Piper,” she was saying. “I want to report a murder—”

  That call was doomed from the start never to be completed. But as Miss Withers tried to explain to the inspector some time later, it was the officer’s own fault if he tripped over the wastebasket. “Because he needn’t have been in so much of a hurry to snatch the phone away from me when I was only trying to report the murder!”

  They were standing now on the porch of Searles’s cottage, where until a moment or two ago the maiden schoolteacher had been in police custody. Inside the cottage there was now a considerable hubbub going on, with much flickering of flashlights and the rumble of official masculine voices, where Joe Searles had taken on in death an importance that could never have been his in life.

  “Just relax, Hildegarde,” the inspector said patiently. “I want you to answer one or two questions. Why did you put the wastebasket in front of the door?”

  She sniffed. “Because of the flour, of course.”

  “I see. That makes it simple. Thanks very much. It’s just as clear as crystal to me now. And do you mind telling me why you poured all that pancake flour on the floor?”

  “Your men coming so belatedly to arrest Searles startled me. I only meant to put down a little flour.”

  “A little flour! But for God’s sake, why?”

  “Go blow on it, and see,” she told him.

  The inspector peered at her, his eyes suddenly sharp and fixed with a new worry. “Hildegarde, are you feeling all right? We’d better get you home—”

  “Oh, stop it! I’m not out of my mind. I asked you to go blow on the spilled flour, just as I told you. You see, I poured the flour on the clearest footprint. The murderer must have stepped into the water that overflowed from the pail when he stuck Searles’s head in. It was evaporating very fast, and I didn’t see how else to protect it, so I poured the flour over it and then put the wastebasket on top.”

  “The idea being, if I may ask?”

  “A reverse-action moulage, of a sort. I thought that perhaps the flour would stick to the damp spot and give the outline of the footprint.”

  The inspector suddenly left her and hurried inside. After a moment there was the sound of flapping newspaper, and then Sheriff Vinge’s voice. “There she is, damn if she ain’t. Come here, you with the camera. And who’s got the tape measure?”

  After some time the inspector came back out on the porch, mopping his brow. “It’s a man’s shoe, medium-narrow toe, size 8½ B,” he admitted. “That ought to be of some help, unless, as the sheriff just suggested, you made the print yourself—”

  “Does that look like an 8½ B?” demanded the schoolteacher, exposing her stout oxford and a thin if slightly bony ankle. He shook his head. “And,” she continued, “just where does Sheriff Vinge come in on this case? Isn’t it out of his jurisdiction?”

  Piper shook his head. “City or country, it’s all the same. The local chief of police is a political relic, seventy years old, and Vinge operates as deputy chief. He seems inclined to take the reins back in his own hands—I guess he doesn’t like the way I’m handling things. As a matter of fact, I don’t like the way I’m handling things either.” The inspector broke off as a stubby, competent-looking little man came out of the door, jamming a straw hat down over his bald head. “Oh, Doctor!”

  The inspector introduced them. “Dr. Farney, can you tell us anything about the time of death?”

  “Not much. His body temperature’s 97.5, which on a night like this means he’s been dead not more than two hours and not less than half an hour. It’s just a case of simple drowning—a man can drown in a pail or an inch-deep puddle, for that matter, just as easy as in an ocean.”

  “I see. Any chance of suicide or accident?”

  The doctor stuck out his lower lip. “Can’t rule out the possibility. But offhand I’d say that somebody jammed the man’s head under water and held it there.”

  “Which would mean, wouldn’t it,” Miss Withers excitedly put in, “that the murderer must have been an exceptionally powerful man?”

  Farney was openly amused. “I think, ma’am, that you yourself could have done it if you were mad enough. You see, Searles was asleep, apparently in a drunken stupor. He was unconscious before he knew what was happening to him.”

  “And you can’t narrow the time element down any?” Piper asked.

  Dr. Farney shook his head. “Well, I can!” insisted Miss Withers. Both men turned to stare at her. “Because I called Searles on the phone a few minutes before twelve—it rang and rang and rang and finally he answered. And I discovered the body at twelve-seventeen.”

  “You phoned Searles?” Piper demanded. “But why?”

  “I was worried,” she admitted. “I felt that earlier this evening I had started something, and I didn’t know what. I was sure that Searles hadn’t told all he knew, so I phoned him. When he answered his voice was thick, and his language—”

  The inspector said dryly that he could understand about Searles’s language after being awakened at midnight. “You recognized his voice?”

  She shrugged. “It sounded like Searles, only his voice was all gummy and thick.”

  The doctor agreed that that would be natural, with Searles in the besotted condition in which he had gone to sleep. “It’s a wonder he woke up at all,” Farney continued. “Well, if you’ll excuse me—”

  “Wait, Doctor,” the inspector said. “How soon can you post him?”

  “Why—won’t he keep?” Dr. Farney scowled. “I’ve got to take out kids’ tonsils all morning. How about getting another man—young Radebaugh or somebody?”

  Miss Withers jabbed the inspector sharply with her elbow, and as he turned in surprised indignation the doctor settled the problem by giving in. “Oh, all right, I’ll do it as soon as you can get the body up town. Medicos aren’t supposed to need any sleep, anyway.” Mumbling quietly to himself, Dr. Farney hurried off towards his car.

  “Just a minute, Hildegarde,” the inspector said. “I’ll see if Vinge has ordered the ambulance yet. Don’t go away, I want to talk to you.”

  He was back in a moment. “I want to talk to you, Oscar. I want to explain why I came over here—” She broke off as she found that he had taken her arm and was leading her down the steps.

  “Tell me on the way back,” he said. “I want to get you out of here before Vinge arrests you for the murder.”

  “Why—” she gasped.

  “You have a talent for getting into trouble,” he went on. “How’d you know Searles was going to be killed?”

  “But I didn’t! I thought
he was the murderer, and I was going to surprise him into a confession” She smiled. “Don’t look so glum and disgusted, Oscar. Because this second murder proves one thing, anyway. Pat Montague is innocent.”

  They came out of the alleyway, away from the slow hushing sound of the breakers on the shore. The inspector laughed bitterly. “You may as well know all,” he said. “We let Montague loose a little after eleven o’clock.”

  Miss Withers gasped again. “But, Oscar!”

  “We had to. The confession was no good at all. As soon as he signed it we put him back under the lie detector and it all fell to pieces. Not one thing in the confession was on the level, except that he hated Cairns and wanted him dead. Of course, he may have been tricking the machine, but that’s awfully roundabout.”

  “But, Oscar, isn’t it true that when the machine does give a false reading it is because the suspect has built up a false sense of guilt about unimportant things, in a way hypnotized himself into concealing things that don’t matter so he’ll confuse the issue?”

  “Something like that. Anyway, we were up a tree. Then finally Loomis, the D.A., suggested that we forget the lie detector and try a truth serum, or whatever you call it.”

  “Not that scopolamine stuff again?”

  “No, twilight sleep is out of date. We were talking about that new drug they developed in the Army medical corps to loosen up the subconscious of bad cases of battle fatigue. When anybody’s had enough sodium betapentalin he’ll answer questions truthfully, he can’t help it. Only—”

  “Only Pat Montague refused his permission?”

  “Permission hell. There’s a new type of the drug you can give through the mouth, in coffee or anything. Taste’s faintly salty, like all pentothalic derivatives, that’s all. We were going to try it on Montague first and ask his permission later. By that time maybe we’d better have had a real confession instead of a fake one like he gave us earlier.”