Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene

by Stuart Palmer

  “I recognized her. I wonder why she chose herself as a subject?”

  “Why not? She was a superb model. Besides, I am sure it amuses her to see herself there on the wall. Alura is an exceptional woman. Like all exceptional women, or exceptional men, for that matter, she is not without vanity.”

  “How long had you known Alura O’Higgins before she commissioned you to do the murals?”

  “Not long. We met at a cocktail party. She seldom goes to such things, and neither do I, but we both happened to go to this one. It gave us a kind of common ground. We met and had quite a long conversation, and a week or so later she showed up here at the studio. She looked at the work I had available, and before she left she had given me the commission for the murals. Since then she has been instrumental in getting me numerous lucrative commissions.”

  “You’re too modest. Surely your work sells itself.”

  “It’s good to think so.”

  “You’ve remained her friend?”

  “I’m very fond of her. And she, I think, of me.”

  “Was it she who persuaded you to make the pilgrimage with Captain Westering aboard the Karma?”

  “Not at all. I learned of the voyage through Alura, but she didn’t urge me to join. I feel very strongly about the war in Vietnam, as all sensitive people should, and it was my own decision to go. I felt it was my duty to help make such a grand gesture. It was a kind of commitment, and even when it began to look as if it were surely an illfated effort, I was determined to go through with it. To tell the truth, Alura was opposed to my making the voyage. She said it was more important for me to stay here and dedicate myself to my art. After peace talks were arranged, she was particularly insistent. She said the whole point of the voyage was gone, and perhaps it was. Nevertheless, I was committed. If the Karma had sailed, I’d have sailed with her.”

  “What did you think of Captain Westering?”

  Leslie Fitzgerald did not answer. She got up and hefted an electric percolator, which was unplugged and seemed to be empty. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a cup of coffee?” she said.

  “Quite sure, thank you.”

  “I believe I would, if you don’t mind. I’m quite addicted to coffee, I’m afraid.”

  “It’s a much more innocent addiction than others you might have.”

  “That’s true, isn’t it? If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go brew a pot.”

  Carrying the percolator, she disappeared through a door into what must have been a small kitchen. Miss Withers, in a moment, could hear the sound of running water. Leslie Fitzgerald would have to empty the basket of old grounds, rinse the basket and the pot, refill the one with fresh grounds and fill the other with water. It would take a minute or two. Miss Withers was up in a flash, thumbing through a disorderly litter of preliminary sketches on an ancient library table near the wall where the canvases leaned. Her action was not directed toward a specific objective. Indeed, the action was almost instinctive. Miss Withers, in brief, was an insatiable snoop who had learned from experience that curiosity, although it may have killed the cat, often paid unexpected dividends to uninhibited spinsters. Which was, as it turned out, true in this case. She was holding the dividend in her hands at arm’s length, inspecting it intently, when Leslie Fitzgerald returned, plugged in the percolator, and sat down again on the couch.

  “Make yourself at home,” Leslie said.

  “Forgive me.” Miss Withers failed miserably to make herself sound properly contrite. “I’m afraid that I’m hopelessly curious.”

  “It’s all right. There’s nothing there of great interest.”

  “On the contrary, I find this sketch very interesting indeed.”

  “Really?”

  “It looks like the head of Captain Westering.”

  “That’s because it is.”

  “I asked you what you thought of the captain. I don’t believe you’ve answered.”

  “It depended on whether I was with him or away from him. Now that he’s dead, I think he was a fraud. More. He was a conscienceless opportunist.”

  “And yet you would have sailed with him?”

  “Yes. After all, many prophets have been largely frauds. It’s the cause that counts, not the leader.”

  “I understand that you did not stay aboard the Karma with the others.”

  “That’s right. I stayed here and did my work.”

  “Apparently your work included a portrait of the captain. I assume that this sketch was preliminary to a portrait. Was it?”

  Leslie Fitzgerald shrugged her slender shoulders as if the subject of discussion, a tolerable invasion of her private affairs, was more boring than offensive. “Yes. In the beginning he came merely to discuss certain details of the voyage. Ostensibly, at least. But when he had seen some of my work, he became very eager for me to do a portrait of him. I was just finishing a portrait when he first came, and I suppose that’s what gave him the idea of having one done of himself. Captain Westering was a monstrously vain man. At any rate, he prevailed upon me to do it, and after that he came for sittings. To tell the truth, I wanted very much myself to do the portrait. It was a challenge, you see. How can I explain it? It was a matter of painting him exactly as he was on the surface, and at the same time, somehow, of letting the inside man, the hidden character, show through.”

  “Did you finish the portrait?”

  “Practically. There were a few finishing touches to be done when he died. They can be done without him, but I haven’t touched it.”

  “Is it here? I’d like very much to see it.”

  “If you wish. I’ll put it on the easel.”

  She stood up, hesitated a moment uncertainly, and then went over to a stack of canvases inclined against a wall. She took up the uppermost canvas without looking at it and carried it to the easel. After it was in position, she stepped back and turned away with an air of indifference, almost of apathy. Miss Withers went over into the flood of light, standing a few paces back from the portrait, and looked at the face, trapped in oils, of the late Captain Westering.

  She sucked in her breath with a sharp hiss, feeling as if she had been prodded in the solar plexis. Leslie Fitzgerald had caught the captain in all his flamboyance. Dark hair curling slightly above the ears, where it was touched with premature gray. Thin dark face with a bold nose and dimpled chin betraying a trace of weakness. The eyes were veiled, shining in the slits of lids, and on the full lips was surely the most enigmatic smile that any artist had caught and fixed since Leonardo had done the Mona Lisa. But the total effect was far from glamorous. By a kind of miraculous combustion of pigments and genius, the face was a mask behind which was only a terrible and terrifying emptiness. The portrait was a devastating and devilish piece of work.

  “Paint me as you see me,” Miss Withers said.

  “What? Oh. It was Oliver Cromwell who was supposed to have said that, wasn’t it, when he was sitting for his portrait?”

  “Yes. Supposedly. I doubt that you received the same instructions from your subject.”

  “Hardly. Captain Westering wished to be painted as he saw himself.”

  “Did he understand what you had done in this portrait?”

  “He never saw it. I can’t tolerate having anyone look at my work in progress. Perhaps I’d have shown it to him when I had finished. Perhaps I’d have destroyed it.”

  “To avoid destroying the captain himself?”

  “I don’t know. I doubt it. As I said, he was a vain man. I doubt that he would have let himself see in the portrait what you have just seen. No matter now. He’s dead.”

  Leslie Fitzgerald went back to the couch. Miss Withers followed.

  “You saw the captain clear and saw him true,” she said. “In spite of this, I take it, you found him charming?”

  “I did. Strangely enough, there was a poignant sort of charm in the contrast of what he was with what he pretended to be. Can you understand that?”

  “I confess that I find it difficult. Bu
t it’s your effect, not mine. When the captain was sitting for you, it must have made for circumstances of considerable intimacy.”

  Leslie Fitzgerald smiled. She rid herself of her cup and dug into a pocket of her Levis for a mashed pack of cigarettes and a book of paper matches. Miss Withers watched her as she lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply. So far as the spinster could tell, Leslie Fitzgerald’s amusement was genuine and untroubled.

  “Are you being delicate, Miss Withers? If you’re trying to ask if the captain ever scored with me, as the hippies put it, the answer is, of course, none of your business. However, you are welcome to speculate. Here was the glamorous captain, and here was I. Circumstances, as you point out, were intimate. I have known other men in other times and places, Miss Withers, and I have never been able to consider the nature of my relationships with them to be a cardinal issue of ethics. I live as I please, and the pill has set me free.”

  “I suppose,” said Miss Withers a little sadly, “that I am hopelessly old-fashioned. If I seem to be prying, I’m sorry. Do you know Lenore Gregory?”

  “Isn’t she the girl who showed up from the East somewhere? Yes, I’ve met her. A lovely girl. The marks of good breeding. Why?”

  “I understand that Captain Westering betrayed considerable interest in her.”

  “Captain Westering betrayed considerable interest in all attractive girls. The captain, to put it bluntly, was something of a stud.”

  “Nevertheless, his interest in Lenore Gregory seemed to be exceptional. For instance, he kept a supply of sherry for her in his cabin. Did you know that?”

  “I did not. Why should I?”

  “I merely wondered. The sherry was poisoned. As you must know, it was the sherry that killed the captain.”

  “I understood you to say that he kept the sherry for Lenore Gregory.”

  “My point precisely. It is possible that the captain died by accident. It may have been Lenore who was intended to die.”

  Leslie Fitzgerald sat staring for a moment at Miss Withers as though she found it impossible to believe what she heard, or to draw from it the implications that seemed to be meant. Then she suddenly burst into laughter, and the laughter, like her smile a while ago, had the quality of genuine amusement.

  “I get it,” she said. “I am suspected of having tried to eliminate, in a fit of deadly jealousy, the hated female who supplanted me in the captain’s rather seamy favor. Surely you can see how absurd that is. In the first place, I am not a murderer. I lack that kind of egotism which would make me believe that I could ever get away with it. In the second place, my relationship with the captain, shameful as it may seem to you, was no more than casual. An indulgence, if you will. In the third place, no man on earth could be important enough in my life to make the losing of him traumatic. At the risk of sounding corny, I’m in love with my work. Men are sometimes satisfying, even necessary, but they are always incidental.”

  Miss Withers got to her feet in a semblance of confusion, managing by art and prior practice to look somewhat foolish. “Please forgive me,” she said. “I think I have intruded long enough. Thank you for putting up with me.”

  She let herself out of the loft and descended to the Embarcadero. Returning as she had come, past bars and shops and haberdasheries, she found Al and Lenore waiting faithfully, if not patiently, in front of the Ferry Building.

  16.

  THAT EVENING CAPTAIN KELSO called.

  “How about a date?” he said.

  “I could,” said Miss Withers, “be coaxed.”

  “Dinner at Bardelli’s. The minestrone is a dream. The filet of sole is out of this world. A little chunk of yesterday surviving in today. It’ll bring back the years of our youth.”

  “I’m wavering.”

  “And I’ve got a little surprise for you.”

  “That will be quite a trick. I’m seldom surprised, nowadays, by anything.”

  “I’ll pick you up in an hour.”

  He rang off, and Miss Withers turned to Lenore, who was watching her with poorly dissembled curiosity.

  “Captain Kelso,” Miss Withers said. “He’s taking me to dinner.”

  “Miss Withers,” Lenore said, “how do you do it? You’re a real enchantress, I mean. I do believe you have the poor captain in your spell.”

  Miss Withers snorted. “Don’t talk rubbish. He wants to pick my brains, that’s all, and pay me off with a plate of minestrone. You will have to fend for yourself this evening, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s all right. I’ve just been working myself up to asking you if it would be all right for me to go out to dinner with Al?”

  “Are you prepared to pay the check?”

  “We’ll go Dutch.”

  “Just as I suspected. Not that Aloysius is parsimonious, you understand. It’s just that you can’t get water from a dry well.”

  “Is it all right, then?”

  “If you can stand it, why should I object?”

  “Well, I’ve been put in your custody, more or less. I wouldn’t want to break jail.”

  “Consider yourself a trustee. And don’t drink any sherry.”

  With this remark, which was not entirely without serious intent, Miss Withers turned to the business of bathing and dressing. There being very little these days that she could do or wanted to do to improve what was naturally hers, she was finished long before her allotted hour was up, and to save the captain a call from the lobby, she went downstairs and took up a position with a view of the entrance. Soon the captain lumbered in. At his shoulder, trailing half a pace, was a small, wiry man with grizzled hair. Miss Withers’ heart jumped, lifting her bodily from the chair. She advanced to be recognized, fighting to show a proper lack of enthusiasm in order to disguise her exorbitant joy. “Oscar Piper,” she said, “I thought I told you specifically that you were not needed.”

  “I’m so used to getting you out of messes that I can’t break the habit.” Inspector Piper took her hand and held it a moment longer than was called for. “How are you, Hildy?”

  “I’m quite well, thank you. I suppose that you and Captain Kelso have put your heads together and solved our murder by this time.”

  “Not exactly, Hildy. It’s Kelso’s baby. He’s been good enough to let me butt in a little. Briefed me and all. You picked a lulu this time, old girl. How the devil do you manage it?”

  “It’s easy. I happen to know a certain Inspector of Homicide who is constantly yelling for help.”

  “Time!” said Captain Kelso, who clearly felt that the inspector needed it to recover from Miss Withers’ haymaker. “What do you say that we continue this amiable chat over a plate at Bardelli’s?”

  “An excellent suggestion,” Miss Withers said.

  They left the lobby, Miss Withers like a belle between the two. Soon thereafter, on O’Farrell Street, they had stepped from the sixties backward forty years into the twenties and were being escorted through the jazz age to a table. Captain Kelso had not exaggerated. The minestrone was a dream. The filet of sole was out of this world. Inasmuch as dreams and nightmares should not be mixed, in this world and out of it, murder was not mentioned until coffee had been served.

  “This Dwight-Donner-Westering,” Captain Kelso said, “was something for the books. I’ve been in touch with the police back in Illinois. Our Aletha may be some kind of constitutional liar, but all the weird stuff about the Latter Day Vigilantes was straight. There actually was such an outfit, and its founder and leader was a guy who went by the name of Donner. Our late Captain Westering, no less. It apparently flourished for a while. There are just as many kooks on the right as on the left. And just as dangerous. At its peak the organization seems to have had several thousands of members. It was a secret organization, of course, and no accurate records are available. Because of the arms angle, it got quite a lot of official attention, and it was believed that there were a number of small arsenals hidden away in barns and whatnot in the southern part of the state, but none were ever uncov
ered. At any rate, quite a treasury was accumulated through donations or dues, often coughed up under pressure, and this treasury seems to have disappeared, by a remarkable coincidence, at the same time that der Fuehrer did a St. Paul and went over to the flower children.”

  “You mean,” said Inspector Piper, “that the grand pilgrimage of peace to the land of Ho Chi Minh would have been financed, at least in part, by a gang of little Hitlers? I like that. There’s a rare element of poetic irony in it.”

  “Well, it seems likely. I’ve wondered right along where Westering got the cash to invest in an old yacht. Even selling for scrap, yachts come high. But that’s not all. The Vigilantes were supposed to be a rough lot, of course. Bully boys. Storm Trooper stuff. The vigorous life and the ruthless heart. All this was to condition them for the day when they’d take up arms against subversive pinks like Eisenhower and the Kennedys and Earl Warren, taking pot shots with .22’s and B-B guns from behind every hedge and haystack between Cicero and Cairo. One day, while the gang was still active, a bank in a small town in the southern part of the state was robbed by two men. Word got circulated that the robbery was a kind of Vigilante exercise. Supposed to provide an ultimate test of leadership or something. The two men involved, it was whispered, were Westering and this young lieutenant who called himself Bruno Wagner, and who showed up the other night in Sausalito full of threats. Nothing could be pinned on them, however. If they were guilty, they got clean away with it.”

  “Do I detect in your voice,” Miss Withers asked, “a note of conviction that the captain was killed by his quondam lieutenant?”

  “It seems likely. Could you ask for better motivation? Especially if the captain took a powder with all that bank loot. Better than ten grand, it was.”

  “I don’t quarrel with the motivation. I question the method. Poison, it seems to me, is hardly the weapon that would be used by an angry man seeking retribution. Then there is the problem of how he could have gotten it aboard the yacht and into the decanter of sherry.”