Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene

by Stuart Palmer

  “Are you the party interested in the blue bug with a rash of daffodils?” the voice said.

  All at once the phone began to tremble in Miss Withers’ hand, for she knew instantly that this would be it. This would be the first break in what she had come to think of as the Case of the Lost Lenore, with apologies to Edgar Allan Poe. Until that moment she had not realized that the case was so important to her. Perhaps it was merely her pride, the dread of failure, however small. Clutching the phone, she responded calmly.

  “I am. Do you have such a vehicle?”

  “Not in my pocket. I know where one is.”

  “For sale?”

  “You might make a deal.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you would tell me where I could find the car. It’s most urgent that I find it. I’d pay you for the service, of course.”

  “Which makes my point. How much?”

  “A reasonable fee. After all, you agree only to put me on the track of the car. You do not agree to acquire it for me and put it into my hands.”

  “Like a hundred skins?”

  “Dollars? That’s excessive. Like fifty.”

  There was a silence during which Miss Withers heard, or imagined she heard, the whisper of breathing on the wire. Then the voice came back.

  “Why not? It’s only bread.”

  “Where can I meet you?”

  “There are all these benches lined up along Ocean Front in Venice. Go sit on one.”

  “When?”

  “Say three o’clock.”

  “That will be satisfactory. I’m an elderly lady, definitely straight. I shall wear my hat with an arrangement of flowers and a cluster of grapes.”

  With these words, Miss Withers had hung up firmly, and now here she was on the bench in Venice, and here suddenly on the same bench, having approached with no discernible sound, was the man she had arranged to meet. Miss Withers, aware all at once of his presence, looked at him from the corners of her eyes. Although he didn’t speak immediately, and in fact gave the impression that he might not speak at all, she knew instinctively that he had not sat down on her bench by chance. He was the man, all right. Probably in his late twenties, he was tall and thin and rather stooped, and despite an attitude of lethargy, there was something alert and watchful about him. His lank black hair hung over his collar at the back of the neck, but it had been trimmed, not too recently, over his ears. His sideburns grew down to his jawline, but his face was otherwise smoothly shaven. He had veiled eyes and a bold, hooked nose and a thin, cruel mouth. His skin was dark, the color of copper, and he might have had, Miss Withers thought, Indian blood in his veins. She waited for him to speak, and after a while, in his own good time, he did.

  “To begin with,” he said, “let’s drop the shuck.”

  “The what?”

  “The shuck. The phony bit. The fraud. You’re not interested in a psychedelic VW. You’re interested in the chick who was driving it.”

  “Quite true. I assumed that that was understood. And I agree that we had better abandon all pretense. I’m prepared to give up mine if you will give up yours.”

  He turned his head to look at her directly, and his veiled eyes, which seemed to be jet-black, revealed through slits a flicker of surprise. “Mine?”

  “Your pretense of being a hippie. You are, of course, nothing of the sort. You’re a spy, that’s what you are. An informer. Otherwise, you would not have called me. Perhaps you are other things that are worse, but no matter. I’m here to do business with you, however distasteful it may be.”

  His eyes glittered. His thin lips split in a wolfish grin. “Well, you have to make the scene, you know, if you want to score. You can’t learn inside when you’re outside. You want to know something, moms? You’re not such a funky straight as I thought.”

  “Thank you very much, I don’t think. But we are not here to exchange either compliments or slanders. I’m looking for a girl, and you apparently know where she is. I’ll pay you fifty dollars when you have told me.”

  “Why the hassle? Live and let live, moms. What’s the big thing about finding this chick?”

  “That is no concern of yours. However, I assure you that it’s for her own good. No harm will come to her.”

  “No trouble with the heat?”

  “If you mean the police, certainly not.” Miss Withers, being addicted to the truth, made an unobtrusive King’s-x. “The police would hardly send an elderly lady out to do their business.”

  “Well, this chick rode in here on her Volks and crashed the pad of another chick up on Ozone Court. They knew each other from somewhere, it seems. Anyhow, they had a powwow in the pad one night, and I make the scene. It didn’t take long to see that this Lenore chick offered possibilities to a cat with a little initiative. Probably a teeny bopper who’d split. A runaway with maybe pops back home ready to lay out a little bread to get her back. What’s more, she was faking it. She’d never been turned on. No grass. No acid. No nothing. The only high she ever had she got from folk rock. Oh, she was in tune, all right. She was intellectually sympathetic, I mean, full of peace and love, with a flower for everybody, but she wasn’t a member of the club. I had this feeling that she had a box full of bread, but I couldn’t get a lead on her. Not until I read your bit in the paper and made the connection. Now I’ve got a feeling I’m selling cheap.”

  “Where is the girl now?”

  “She split. Like ten days ago. Went north with her daffodils.”

  “North? Can’t you be more specific?”

  “Do I have to spell it, moms? The town by the Golden Gate. San Francisco. Is there any place else north?”

  Miss Withers felt her heart sink like a stone. It had been a dispiriting and exhausting experience searching a great city for one elusive girl, without any help whatever from the vast network of the metropolitan police, and she wondered if she had the strength or the will to carry the search alone to still another city and renew her contact there with the dim and disturbing subculture of hippiedom. Of course, she needn’t necessarily do so. Even Inspector Oscar Piper would not demand so much. She had done her job, and if she hadn’t been able to learn precisely where Lenore Gregory was, at least she had learned where she wasn’t. Why not let it go at that? Why not, indeed? Miss Withers, if asked, could not have said. All she knew, having sniffed fifty skins’ worth of scent on a trail growing cold, was that she couldn’t and wouldn’t.

  “Did she ever mention her purpose in going to San Francisco?” Miss Withers asked.

  “Well, I wasn’t exactly her guide. I mean, we didn’t huddle up and exchange secrets, or anything like that. But I’ve got big ears. I’ve got this habit of hearing things. She talked to this other chick with the pad about something big that had her flipped, a happening out of the world. Whatever it was, she was heading to make the scene.”

  “Did she mention names?”

  “She dropped one. Carol Hadley. I’ve got this habit of remembering names. You never know when they’ll come in handy.”

  “It’s apparent that you have many habits. Are they all bad? However, I must concede in this instance that your information has, as you put it, come in handy. I don’t suppose you could tell me where to find this Carol Hadley?”

  “Wrong, moms. I can. And if you’ll quit bugging me, I will. She’s doing her bit at SFU.”

  “San Francisco University?”

  “That’s what I said. This Lenore chick was planning to crash her pad for a few days.”

  “Address?”

  He shook his head sharply, whipping his lank hair. “Endsville, moms. I’m turned off. You got my load for fifty skins. Pass me the bread, and I’ll split.”

  “That,” said Miss Withers, “is a most pleasing prospect.”

  Removing from her purse a thin packet of five crisp tens, she passed it over. Her informer took it and shoved it at once, without counting, into a side pocket of a pair of dirty Levis. He stood up, looking down on her for a moment, and his thin lips split again
in a grin of wolfish derision. Without a word, he turned away and started down Ocean Front in a kind of flapping, slow-motion lope.

  Watching him go, Miss Withers knew what it was that had most disturbed her in her brief excursions into the strange underworld of the hippies. She had felt from the beginning something insidious, a dank pervading atmosphere of evil that she couldn’t understand or justify. In a way, she thought, the hippies were a manifestation of incredible innocence. Many were so young, and all were so sad. Flower children with a message of love, liberating themselves from a violent world by the power of pot and psychedelic drugs. Dedicated secessionists from an ugly establishment, flying high and always coming down in a pustule of dirt and disease and addiction. Mistaken they were, frequently infuriating and often lost. They were touched hourly by evil, but evil themselves they were not. No. The sense and smell of evil came from creatures of prey like the one now loping off up Ocean Front. It rose like a thin and fetid miasma from the avaricious who gather wherever the vulnerable are. Rising, Miss Withers made certain that her hat was securely in place and walked briskly down the promenade to the bench where Al Fister sat waiting.

  “Al,” she said, “please take me home at once. I am badly in need of a bath.”

  Al laughed and stood up and fell in alongside. “Any luck?” he said.

  “I don’t know if you would call it luck or not,” said Miss Withers. “And if you would call it luck, I don’t know if you would call it good or bad. In any event, I have learned that our young runaway has gone to San Francisco. Her motive and her precise destination remain to be discovered.”

  In a short while she was clambering out of the sidecar of the Hog and heading up the walk to her house, Al tagging behind. In the living room she veered off toward her bedroom, speaking over her shoulder as she went.

  “I must see if I can wash off the smell of that creature. I’ll be back shortly, Al. Meanwhile, if you feel inclined to spoil your dinner, you will find a piece of roast beef in the refrigerator and the remains of a chicken. I’m sure you can find something to satisfy you. It has been my observation that you have no difficulty in that respect.”

  Al accepted the invitation and kept on going into the kitchen. He constructed a thick sandwich of roast beef, lettuce and mayonnaise, and sat down at the kitchen table to eat it. He could hear the shower running in the bathroom, where Miss Withers, skipping the luxury of a tub, was scrubbing away at the stink of corruption. After a while the sound of the shower stopped. Al got up with his empty plate and served it with a drumstick and a wing, leaving half a breast out of consideration for Miss Withers. The wing was gone and the drumstick was going when Miss Withers, scoured and refurbished, appeared in the doorway.

  “It is now eight o’clock in New York,” she said.

  “In Boston, too,” said Al. “In Kansas City, though, it’s only seven, and only six in Denver.”

  Miss Withers plainly considered this embroidery too facetious to merit a response. “Inspector Piper,” she said, “will be at home by this time, if he is not still out to dinner or somewhere else.”

  “As I see it,” said Al, “that takes in all the possibilities.”

  “I mean, unless circumstances are exigent, that he will no longer be in his office in Centre Street. We shall see.”

  Miss Withers crossed the kitchen to the extension telephone and dialed from memory. She waited, drumming a rapid tattoo on the cabinet beside her. Pretty soon the voice of Inspector Piper came on.

  “Oscar,” Miss Withers said, “I was afraid you might be out carousing.”

  “No such luck, Hildy. I’ve just had my Geritol and was thinking about tottering to bed. What’s up?”

  “I merely wish to report that I’ve picked up the trail of your wandering flower child.”

  “Good for you, Hildy. I knew an expert snoop like you could run her down.”

  “She hasn’t exactly been run down. She’s in San Francisco. At least she said she was going to San Francisco when she left here.”

  “How long ago?”

  “About ten days.”

  “Did she say why she was going?”

  “No. My informant said that she was apparently excited about something big. A happening out of the world was the way he expressed it, as I recall.”

  “Did she say where in San Francisco, exactly?”

  “She mentioned stopping with a girl named Carol Hadley. A student at the University of San Francisco. Where she’s gone from there, if anywhere, remains to be determined.”

  “Well, then, that’s that. You’ve done all you can do, Hildy. I’ll get in touch with Gregory and put it up to him.”

  “Nonsense, Oscar. If you think you’re going to pull me off this case, you’re badly mistaken.”

  “You’re planning to go to San Francisco?”

  “Certainly. I’ll leave tomorrow.”

  “That’s gallantry above and beyond the call of duty, Hildy. You’d better stay home and take care of your poodle and your African violets.”

  “Poor Talley has been neglected so long that a little longer won’t hurt him. He’ll be quite comfortable in a kennel, and a neighbor can watch over the violets.” Miss Withers was silent for a moment before continuing. “I’ve been developing a feeling about this girl, Oscar.”

  “What sort of feeling?”

  “I don’t know. An uneasy feeling.”

  “Come off, Hildy. Don’t tell me you’re getting another one of your premonitions.”

  “Call it what you like, Oscar. I simply have a feeling that it’s urgent that someone find Lenore Gregory in a hurry.”

  It was Inspector Piper’s turn for a moment of silence, and when he broke it, his voice was larded with suspicion and worry. “See here, Hildy. You wouldn’t be holding something out on me, would you?”

  “Not at all, Oscar. I’ll be in touch with you again when I have further news to report.”

  “Good enough.” He sounded suddenly gruff. “And for God’s sake, old girl, try to stay out of trouble.”

  “I shall do that for my sake. Good-bye, Oscar.”

  “Good-bye, Hildy.”

  She hung up the phone and sat down at the table with Al. “And so,” she said, “to use the expression of that despicable creature in Venice, this is Endsville. Here’s where you get off.”

  Al got up and poured himself a glass of milk and sat down again. “That’s right,” he said. “Now that you’ve used me as long as you think you need me, throw me out! Don’t let me stick around when things begin to get good! Oh, no!”

  “Don’t be absurd. You’ve been a great help, and I’m grateful. There is simply no need for you to go all the way to San Francisco for something that is, after all, not your concern.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. It seems to me, when you come right down to it, that it’s as much my concern as yours. Besides, I’m getting a little tired of being a drop-out. Think of the money you could save on plane fare.”

  “Young man, are you suggesting that I ride all the way to San Francisco in the sidecar of that vehicle of yours?”

  “Why not? It would be a gas. After all, you’ve already ridden it farther right here in the county. We could go up the coast and see Big Sur on the way.”

  Miss Withers gazed at him reflectively. She was, indeed, becoming quite fond of this boy. “It might be a pleasant ride, at that,” she said.

  5.

  SAN FRANCISCO IS AN enigma. In little more than a century, a willful child among the cities of the world, it has somehow managed to become a legend and create a myth. At once raffish and sedate, vibrant and mellow, it clings to yesterday, wallows in today, and reaches for tomorrow. Nursed on gold and weaned on silver, it cherishes the cultural flowering of a ribald tradition. People who live there are sorry for people who don’t.

  San Franciscans are sophisticated. They practice, on the whole, a remarkable tolerance. Perhaps the heirs of Emperor Norton can do no less. The Italian fisherman from the waterfront condescends to
rub elbows with the nabob in tails at the Opera House, and the substantial citizen, trapped in his gig from nine to five, accepts with something like resignation, if not indulgence, the beats of North Beach and the hippies of the Hashberry. The uninhibited climate of the city by the bay seems to collect, indeed, more than its fair share of extravagant and entertaining kooks, the gifted oddballs from all over. It hatches, moreover, a considerable quota of mavericks among the natives.

  Jack London slept here. Ken Kesey still does. The arts flourish, and some of the artists even profit. Quondam madams of the tenderloin devote themselves in retirement to the production of literature or the management of sanctioned enterprises. The high priest of the Satanic Church holds weekly Sabbats for his converts and lives in a black house with a full-grown Numidian lion that sleeps at night at the foot of his bed. Where undercover cops leave off—the beatnik-busters who achieve local flame by infiltrating North Beach pot parties—the narcs take over as boyish government agents in search of addicts and pushers. Meanwhile, chemistry majors are working their way through school by making LSD and desoxyephedrine in college labs, and amateur gardeners are growing marijuana among their pretty flowers.

  The sun rises east of Berkeley and sets in the Pacific just west of the Golden Gate. If the average square sits down tonight to dinner at home, and if Mr. Cleveland Amory prepares to dine in style in the Garden Court of the Palace-Sheraton, you will also find the Diggers passing out free food in the Panhandle. San Francisco is inured to extremes and in-betweens. Variety is the spice of life. It has been called a city of perennial renaissance, and it has also been called a whacky city where almost anything can happen and generally does. It is seldom shocked, which would be naïve, and it never points, which would be rude. It is, in brief, a city in which hardly an eye was batted and nary a double-take was taken when Miss Hildegarde Withers was swept up to the entrance of the Canterbury Hotel at 750 Sutter Street in the sidecar of a Harley Hog.