Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene

by Stuart Palmer

  “She went to find a friend. You might ask the friend to verify it.”

  “We’ll do that. Don’t worry. If the friend does, it will be something, but not enough. The girl could have put the poison, whatever it turns out to be, in the sherry before she went away. Or, for that matter, any time before that.”

  “In the sherry she was going to drink herself?”

  “There you go again. She says. Only she.”

  “Others may have known about the sherry.”

  “They may have.”

  “Anyone could have slipped in here and put the poison into it.”

  “They could have.”

  “If someone else knew about the sherry being Lenore’s, and if the poison was put deliberately into the sherry and not something else, it seems to me that our inference should be perfectly clear.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “Why, Lenore was the intended victim, of course.”

  Again Captain Kelso took time to look at her. He sighed and wagged his massive, naked head. “You’ve got a devious mind. You’re tricky. You should have been a criminal lawyer.”

  “Not at all. My mind is quite direct, I think. It goes straight to the palpable, but it is not necessarily deluded by what only appears to be palpable.”

  “You said if the poison was put deliberately into the sherry and not something else. What makes you so sure that something else wasn’t poisoned?”

  “What else was there? I saw nothing else when I was in here immediately after the captain’s death, and I see nothing now.”

  “You didn’t look hard enough. Maybe you were pressed for time. There was a bottle in the captain’s locker. Scotch. Two bottles, as a matter of fact. One hadn’t been opened, and so you can eliminate it. The other bottle was half full.”

  “Had it been poisoned?”

  “I don’t know. My nose must not be as sharp as yours.”

  “Mine is at your service. Where’s the bottle?”

  “Gone with the sherry. I sent it off for analysis.”

  “The report should be most significant.”

  “When I get it, I’ll pass it along.”

  “By the way, it was hemlock.”

  “What?”

  “The poison in the sherry. It was hemlock.”

  “How do you know? Are you a toxicologist or something?”

  “Nothing of the sort. I am no more than a retired schoolteacher with a reasonably broad range of interests and a respectable fund of information. I know that the poison was hemlock because I could smell parsnips.”

  “I see. That is, I think I do. If you’re right, it will make things a little tougher. No registered purchase or anything like that. You can’t trace a poison that was dug up in a field or a backyard or along some road.”

  “Unfortunately, there are many such poisonous flowers and plants. Meadow saffron, mushrooms, monkshood, foxglove, thorn-apple. Some are even cultivated deliberately in gardens for their decorative qualities. Much is made these days of marijuana’s easy availability, but there is an abundance of far deadlier plants growing everywhere around us. Any amateur botanist and chemist can supply himself with more poisons than the Borgias dreamed of.”

  “Well, lots of kooks go on pot for their kicks, but damn few go in for making hemlock highballs. Lucky for us. Anyhow, you may be right. The medical examiner will let us know after he’s done the post-mortem. Maybe I’d better point him, though. Let him know what to look for.”

  “It would be advisable. I think he’ll find that I’m right.”

  “Do you know something?” Captain Kelso’s gravelly voice contained a note of incipient resignation, perhaps similar to that earlier detected in the voice of Inspector Oscar Piper. “I’ve got a sneaking suspicion myself that he will.”

  He began again a lumbering, pointless prowl about the stateroom. Miss Withers, watching him, decided that she would be interrupting no cogent train of thought or vital course of action if she were to speak. She spoke.

  “Not only could anyone have poisoned the sherry,” she said, “but he could have done it, whoever he was, at any opportune time.”

  “Sure. That’s the beauty of murder by poison. Murder by remote control, you might say. It’s not like using a gun or a knife or a bludgeon. The guilty party can be somewhere else when it happens—in bed, at the movies, or even in church.”

  “Then why, may I ask, would you assume for a moment that Lenore Gregory would have come here tonight, poisoned the sherry while she was here, and then remained very accommodatingly to become a prime suspect?”

  “Maybe she didn’t have an opportunity to spike the sherry beforehand.”

  “Nonsense. This vessel is crawling with amateur Argonauts, no doubt eating out of cans and sleeping like pigs and wandering about as they please on and below deck. There would certainly have been no lack of opportunity for any of them. Moreover, let us remember that the poison was in the sherry. Sherry, I understand, was not Captain Westering’s usual drink. If she were going to spike anything, as you put it, for the purpose of killing the captain, she would surely have spiked something he would have been more likely to consume.”

  “She could have done it after it became apparent that he was going to have a glass with her.”

  “Then why put it in the decanter? It’s absurd on the face of it. Besides, only one glass had been used.”

  “It is, at that, isn’t it? Absurd on the face of it, I mean. But who knows? She’s a kid. Green as grass. No experience with murder. Maybe she just made an unholy botch of the job. Lots of murderers have, you know. On the other hand, maybe not. Maybe she’s a devil of a lot cleverer than she’d have us know. Maybe she wanted us to think just what you are thinking.”

  “Poppycock! The girl is neither a fool nor a devil. She is a frightened and disillusioned idealist.”

  “Well, I’ll hand her one thing. She’s made a good friend in short order.” His sour little eyes gave Miss Withers points for friendship, however misplaced. “Remember, though, that you showed up, according to your own story, at an inopportune time, to say the least. She might have been planning to get out of here in a hurry, but you blocked her escape. She had to improvise.”

  “If you imagine that she has the capacity for that kind of improvisation, you are badly mistaken. Anyhow, cicutoxin, the deadly substance in hemlock, does not work that fast. It is fatal, as I recall, in not less than fifteen minutes, and may not be so for much longer. Assuming that it worked in Captain Westering in the minimum time, Lenore Gregory would have had fifteen minutes after ingestion to make her escape. As it was, she was here when I came, and Captain Westering had just died.”

  “All right. Let’s concede for the moment that your girl Lenore is nothing more, as you claim, than a dewy-eyed idealist, still wet behind the ears, who is guilty of nothing but idiocy that has got her into a very nasty spot. Where does that leave us?”

  “It leaves us, I should say, where we started. That is, with a murdered man on a vessel packed with a passel of suspects from here, there and everywhere, about half of them young women, and all of them living in cramped quarters that would breed intimacies and animosities and all sorts of abnormal relationships, any one of which might explode at any time.”

  “I’m sorry I asked. It’s a bloody, unholy mess, that’s what it is. Why can’t anything stay simple, the way it seems when it starts?” He glared at Miss Withers with a venomous flicker in his eyes, as if she were somehow to blame for complicating things. “I suppose I’ll have to question all these kooks. Every last damn one of them. It makes me sick to my belly to think of it.”

  “It is, I believe, the accepted procedure in murder investigations to question the suspects. Meanwhile, you might see what can be done about finding the person who slipped off this vessel and disappeared immediately after the murder.”

  “What!”

  “Now, don’t get belligerent because I haven’t told you sooner. I only found out about him myself a few minutes ago.”


  “Is that so? You seem to have a remarkable facility for finding out things. Is it your motherly appearance or do you have a network of spies?”

  “I’ve had no experience as a mother, and have no notion of what a motherly appearance might be. Nor do I have a network of spies. I have only one spy. His name is Al Fister, a young neighbor of mine who has been working with me in trying to locate Lenore Gregory. At present he is waiting in the next stateroom, but earlier I left him to keep watch on the dock while I came aboard. It was he who called the police. Before that, just after I left him, he saw someone slip ashore and vanish in the fog. He is certain that this person was a man. He had long hair and was wearing dark glasses.”

  “Hippie type. My God, do you have any idea how many hippies infest San Francisco?”

  “Approximately as many, I imagine, as infest Los Angeles. What amazes me is how I failed to encounter this person aboard. If he was down here, as I suspect, I must have missed him by seconds, and Lenore Gregory must have missed him by even less, inasmuch as she was in the passage, returning from finding her friend, seconds before I was.”

  “In the first place, maybe he wasn’t down here at all. You’re only guessing that he was. In the second, even if he was right here in the stateroom and slipped a lethal dose of hemlock into the sherry, which I doubt, he could have got away without using the passage, just as he could have come without using it. See here.”

  Captain Kelso took two lumbering, swift steps and with an enormous foot kicked back the edge of the worn rug, revealing a hatch.

  “This leads down into the hold and the bilges,” he said. “From the hold there are half a dozen other hatches opening into the cabins, a mess hall, and out on the deck. All of them can easily be opened from above or below. So, you see, Captain Westering was available for murder. And the murderer, if he needed it, had an easy exit from the scene.”

  “He would have needed to be familiar with the vessel.”

  “True. This one or one similar.”

  Miss Withers had been conscious for some seconds of a kind of muted commotion in the passage outside, and it now terminated in a brisk, somehow official, rapping on the door. Captain Kelso barked, and the door swung open, pushed by the hand of a stocky man in conservative, conventional clothes who carried the aura of headquarters about him as surely as he carried, somewhere on his person, his official credentials.

  “Here they are, Captain,” the man said to Kelso, “the pair of them.”

  “Good enough, Carney,” Captain Kelso said. “Close the door and wait in the passage.”

  Carney touched the brim of his hat in a pseudo salute and backed out, pulling the door shut behind him, as directed, and leaving on the inside, in his own words, the pair of them. Either of them singly would have been impressive enough; as a pair they were close to overwhelming. Miss Withers, having weathered the Prophet Onofre, had been prepared to believe that no apparition was left aboard to disturb her aplomb, however suddenly, or in whatever place, it should materialize. Now, when she had caught her breath, she conceded her error. The striking pair standing side by side before the closed door made the poor Prophet seem common by comparison, a dull charlatan living in lunacy on a diet of locusts and babbling dreams. The comparison, however, was a comparison of extremes. Whereas the Prophet Onofre was as distorted as an El Greco figure, a vision of obscene ugliness, these two were a double dose of stunning beauty in almost regurgitative quantity.

  Amazon, thought Miss Withers, was the word. Or, she amended, perhaps Valkyrie. One of them was about an inch taller than the other, the taller being about six feet flat-footed, and about five or ten pounds heavier, weighing out, at a practiced guess, at about 140 pounds stripped. Not one of the pounds was surplus, nor, so far as Miss Withers was a judge, misplaced. The magnificent epidermis of both creatures was a dull golden color, seeming to glow softly in the dim light of the cabin, but there the sameness ended and the differences began. The gold motif was carried throughout the taller of the two. Golden skin; long golden hair gathered softly behind in a bun; even, incredibly, long golden eyes with the slightest oriental slant. She wore a flowing robe of pure white from throat to feet, which wore golden sandals, and the robe, which seemed in fact to be composed of several layers of sheer material, clung to the long lines of her superb body as if it were charged with static electricity.

  The second, slightly shorter woman was dark. Miss Withers, still reeling mentally, found herself thinking romantic nonsense. If one was morning, she thought, the other was twilight. Long dusky hair gathered softly behind in a bun; even, incredibly, long dusky eyes with the slightest oriental slant. She wore—in sharp contrast to the Greco-oriental-whatnot garb of her companion—a dark red suit of conventional design, almost mannishly severe, with a short skirt in the current fashion.

  “I am Aletha Westering,” the golden one said in a clear voice, not so much soprano as tenor. “We have been brought here in the night without explanation. May I ask why?”

  9.

  IN TRIBUTE TO THE breathless effect of the occasion, a long and gusty sigh broke through the lips of Captain Kelso. His voice, when he spoke, was larded with muted despair. “I’m Captain Kelso, Mrs. Westering. San Francisco police. Homicide Bureau. I’m afraid that I have bad news for you. Perhaps you’d better sit down.”

  Aletha Westering nodded and sat down in the chair that Kelso indicated. Her companion, whom Miss Withers correctly took to be the sister from Sausalito, assumed, standing, a position to the side and slightly behind the chair. She crossed her bosom with her arms and gave, withal, the impression of an attendant upon a queen. The queen sat with quiet grandeur on her throne, her back straight, her golden head lifted and a little canted, her hands folded in her lap.

  “You wish to tell me that Captain Westering is dead,” she said serenely.

  “As a matter of fact, yes. I must say that you take it very well.”

  “I am not a demonstrative person. I strive for perfection in an imperfect world. Adversity must be met with serenity.”

  “How did you know he was dead?”

  “It was a fair assumption. Captain Westering was the kind of man who incited misunderstanding and reprisal. He was a fabulous figure, larger than life. He lived by his own law. He was too big for this world.”

  “Looking at it another way you might say that the world was too small for him and some other person. You have apparently jumped to the conclusion that he was murdered. Why?”

  “You said you’re from Homicide. Why else should you be here?”

  “Of course. As you put it, another fair assumption. Do you know of anyone who might have had reason to kill your husband?”

  “I have told you that Captain Westering was a remarkable man. He created turbulence. He was a catalyst. He aroused powerful emotions. Anyone who knew him might have killed him. Anyone, that is, with the capacity to kill at all.”

  “In my experience that includes most of us, given the right time and place. Your husband, however, died of a lethal dose of poison. Not exactly the method of a person driven by strong emotion. It suggests a deliberate and calculating killer. I might even say that it suggests a woman.”

  “Captain Westering knew many women. They found him fascinating.”

  “If you’ll excuse me, let’s take that in reverse. Was Captain Westering susceptible to the women who found him so fascinating?”

  “He was a man of strong appetites.”

  “Do you know specifically of any women he was involved with?”

  “There are seven women on this yacht. All are young. All are attractive. Captain Westering could not abide ugly women. They disturbed him.”

  “Maybe the pretty ones disturbed him, too. In a different way. But you evaded my question. I asked if you knew of any women specifically.”

  “I can name no names. I do not indulge in jealousy and spite, Captain Kelso. The relationship between Captain Westering and me was an exalted one. Passion is purified by love. If it isn’t, it
is not significant.”

  “That’s exalted enough for anybody. But what purifies murder? Your husband was murdered, Mrs. Westering. He was poisoned. Don’t you want his murderer found and punished?”

  “That’s not my affair. It’s yours.”

  “I’m bound to say that you’re pretty casual about it.”

  “In the midst of life we are in death. He who doesn’t die today will die tomorrow.”

  “I’ll take tomorrow. I’m sure Captain Westering would have preferred it, too. What’s more, it’s against the law to push. The poison that killed Captain Westering was in a decanter of sherry. It could have been put there any time between his death and the time that wine was last drunk from the decanter, which is uncertain. Anyhow, it means that anyone on this vessel had plenty of opportunity. Or anyone in this area, for that matter. The murderer obviously didn’t have to be at the scene of his crime when it took place, and it makes it difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to establish an alibi. Tough luck for me. No easy way to cull this flock of rare birds. You’ve been staying, I understand, with your sister in Sausalito. Just for the record, when were you last aboard this vessel?”

  “Today. Or is it now yesterday?”

  “Still today. Just barely. Did you come alone?”

  “No. Alura brought me.” She turned her golden head and looked back and up at her sister, who reached out a hand and lightly touched for a moment Aletha Westering’s shoulder. “This is Alura.”

  Miss Withers was conscious of a feeling of delicious completion, a delighted sense of absolute rightness. Aletha and Alura. Golden morning and dusky twilight. She would have been disappointed if the sister’s name had turned out to be, say, Sarah or Gertrude. It would have marred the comic-opera character that this absurd affair was beginning, in a grim sort of way, to develop. Not, of course, that she ascribed anything but the sheerest fantasy to the libretto. It was surely the creation of a lunatic imagination.