Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene

by Stuart Palmer

  “Are you kidding? Do I look like the kind of hero who goes around annoying possible murderers?”

  “Do you swear that you’ll behave like a sensible coward in all ways?”

  “Gladly.”

  “In that case, let’s go.”

  “Let’s?”

  “Certainly, let’s. After all, I’m the one with most at stake. Do you think I intend to let you go off and be cowardly all by yourself? You needn’t argue with me about it, for it will do you no good whatever.”

  Al could see that it wouldn’t, so he didn’t. Besides, truth to tell, the prospect of separating from Lenore any sooner than absolutely necessary was not a happy one. They left Lupo’s and mounted the Hog, and were soon dismounting in a dark street near the building with the four upstairs pads. They went the short remaining distance afoot, holding hands for comfort if nothing else. Al tried the street door opening onto the narrow staircase, and found it unlocked. Together they crept up the stairs, a long and tortuous mile or more, and into the narrow hall lighted only by a dim bulb at the landing.

  “Wait a minute,” Al whispered, impelled unconsciously to this show of stealth by the simple knowledge that they were where they probably had no business being.

  “What’s the matter?” Lenore whispered back.

  “Nothing’s the matter. Look.” Al gestured down the dark hall, growing darker as it extended farther from the dim light at the landing, and Lenore, clutching his near hand, obeyed.

  “Look at what? I don’t see anything.”

  “Look at the floor under the doors. Do you see any cracks of light from inside the rooms?”

  “There’s one from the bathroom at the far end. And one from the room just to the right at the rear. It’s very dim, and I probably couldn’t see it at all if the hall wasn’t so dark down there.”

  “Right. That means only the one room is occupied.”

  “How clever of you to think of that.”

  “Oh, well, it’s nothing. Just a little trick we private-eyes pick up with experience.”

  “On the other hand, it may be a sign that the occupants of the other rooms have merely turned out their lights and gone to bed early.”

  “Don’t spoil things. I like it better when you’re properly admiring.”

  “Or it might mean that the occupant of that particular room merely went out and left his light burning behind him.”

  “Damn it, are you trying to destroy my self-confidence? Come on.”

  They moved down the hall. The boards beneath their feet shrieked with what was surely animated vindictiveness. They stopped before the door. Simultaneously, they were suddenly aware of the utter, unnatural silence of the old building. Al took a deep breath, which whistled softly into his lungs, and rapped sharply on the door. It moved. With a brief creak of hinges, it swung an inch or two into the room. Al’s pent breath was released in a long sigh.

  “You were right,” he said. “He’s not only gone out and left his light burning behind him, but he’s left his door unlatched besides.”

  “Well, that’s that,” said Lenore. “We may as well leave.”

  “Wait a minute. I’m being tempted.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a character fault. I never come across an unlocked door without feeling an irresistible urge to look behind it.”

  “Wouldn’t that be illegal entry or something?”

  “Who’s going to enter? I just want to look.”

  “What would be gained by it?”

  “Are you trying to be reasonable with an irresistible urge?”

  “Oh, go ahead. Get it over with. Just a quick peek, though. That’s all.”

  Al placed fingertips against the door and pushed gently, slowly revealing the room beyond. He stepped across the threshold and stopped. It was a shabby, impoverished little room, furnished with odds and ends collected from here and there. On the floor a faded rug with the pile worn completely off where traffic had been heaviest. A metal bed with blue paint chipped off in large, ugly patches. A sagging overstuffed chair with dirty brown velour rubbed thin and shiny on arms and seat. Beside the bed, a rickety table painted blue to match the bed, chipped like the bed. On the table, a small bedside lamp from which came the weak light that had seeped under the door. On the floor, on his back in a puddle of blood between bed and door, the body of a stocky man, about thirty years old, with pale blond hair.

  Al, standing frozen, recognized the man who had opened the door to him two days ago. After several terrible seconds, he whirled around to face Lenore, seeking to block her view with his body. Too late. She was already staring at the body on the floor. On her face was an expression of almost ludicrous incredulity. Slowly the expression was washed away by a greenish pallor of sickly horror. Her voice was a ragged whisper in her constricted throat.

  “Bud!” she whispered. “It’s Bud Hoffman!”

  At no cost to her pristine reputation, a fact which would have secretly disappointed her if she had seriously thought about it, Miss Withers had just brought Inspector Piper via recapitulation to the dark and foggy dock in the bay when the telephone began to ring. The sound somehow possessed an urgency that shot Miss Withers from her chair in a second and had her speaking into the mouthpiece in two. After speaking, she listened. After listening, she spoke. “Where are you?” she said.

  She listened again and spoke again. “Stay where you are,” she said. “We’ll try to get in touch with Captain Kelso and be there immediately.”

  She hung up, took a deep breath and turned to Inspector Piper. “Those crazy kids,” she said.

  Inspector Piper had watched and listened with a growing sense of foreboding and despair. Now he spoke with resignation, secure in the knowledge that what had been bad enough was suddenly worse. “What kids?” he said.

  “Lenore and Al Fister. All they started to do was have dinner together, but it seems that they have somehow, in the process, stumbled across a corpse. That was Al on the phone. He was talking from a sidewalk booth in North Beach. Don’t just sit there, Oscar. Use the phone and see if Captain Kelso happens to be at headquarters at this hour. If he is, ask him to pick us up here. Meanwhile, I’ll put on a hat.”

  Luckily, having nothing else to lure him home but an empty bed, Captain Kelso was at headquarters. In a remarkably short while, his siren dying to a whimper, he was pulling up in front of the Canterbury, where Miss Withers and Inspector Piper, despite his swift arrival, had been waiting for some minutes. Kelso was in the back seat, behind a driver. Miss Withers piled in beside him, Inspector Piper following, and they were off again with the siren coming to raucous life. Miss Withers passed precise directions to Captain Kelso, who relayed them to his driver, who followed them precisely to the North Beach building where Al and Lenore were waiting as instructed. They were huddled together on the sidewalk at the foot of the dark, narrow stairs leading to the narrow hall and the shabby little room where death had been before them.

  No one uttered a word. Captain Kelso was out of the car and pounding up the stairs before the siren’s whimper had faded away, Inspector Piper and Miss Withers right behind, Al and Lenore trailing. When Miss Withers entered the murder room, Captain Kelso was already on one knee beside the body.

  Miss Withers was also looking at the dead man’s face with a sense of deflation. She had expected a familiar face, one of the amateur Argonauts from the Karma, a clear and indisputable connection between the murder there and the one here, and she was totally unprepared for a coincidence. She was about to speak when another voice intruded.

  “It’s Bud. It’s Bud Hoffman.”

  Miss Withers and Inspector Piper turned in unison. Captain Kelso rose from his knee and turned slowly, with a kind of rigid restraint, just after them. Lenore stood pressed against the wall beside the door, as if to keep as much distance as possible between her and the body, now partially screened by Kelso’s upright bulk. Her face was composed, held together by the inner discipline that Miss Withers had noted with s
atisfaction aboard the Karma, and only in her dark eyes could one see the depth of her shock. Al, apparently reading a threat into the concerted attention, suddenly focused on Lenore, edged closer to her along the wall and fumbled protectively for her hand.

  “Who the hell,” said Captain Kelso with dreadful mildness, “is Bud Hoffman?”

  “He was this man I knew back East. In New York. We worked together for CAP. The Committee of Artists for Peace. I told Miss Withers about him.” Lenore’s voice was quiet, betraying her wonder by only an odd lilting quality. “I wrote to him and told him where I’d gone and what I planned to do, but the letter was returned unopened. Another man at CAP who told me about Captain Westering’s voyage in the first place must have guessed where I’d gone, and he probably told Bud Hoffman afterward. That must be the way it was. How else could Bud have followed me?”

  “Why would he follow you at all?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t imagine.”

  “You didn’t know he was here? You haven’t seen him?”

  “Not until Al and I found him here tonight.”

  “Don’t you think it’s strange that he’d follow you across a continent and then not contact you?”

  “Yes. It’s queer. I can’t understand it.”

  “What the devil were you and Al doing in this place, anyhow? What brought you here?”

  The question was directed to Lenore, but it was Al who answered it. He picked it up with vague truculence, as if it were a club that he intended to use, if necessary, in defense of true love.

  “This is the building I tailed the hippie type to. You remember. The one I saw slipping off the yacht the night Captain Westering was murdered. I saw him again the next day and tailed him here. Only, when I came in after him and tried to find him, he wasn’t here at all.”

  Captain Kelso shifted his attention to Al with a slightly pained expression, mildly surprised, as if he were a Great Dane who had been attacked by a Chihuahua. “So far as I can see,” he said, “he still isn’t. Whatever this fellow was, this Bud Hoffman, he wasn’t a hippie type by a long shot.”

  Miss Withers, perversely, seemed to have lost all interest in the proceedings at that precise point when they became most revealing. Immediately after Lenore suddenly identified the body on the floor, which lay grotesquely in the puddle of blood that had flowed from a knife wound in his back, she had turned away and begun to prowl the room with apparent aimlessness, poking here and snooping there. No one paid any attention to her except Inspector Piper, who knew her from long experience. He was watching her closely when she opened a narrow closet door and reached up, after a moment, to explore a shelf above her head. When she turned around, her hands were behind her back.

  “Lenore,” she said, “you have stated that your letter to Bud Hoffman was returned to you.”

  “Yes, I have, and it was.”

  “Then it’s obvious that he didn’t learn of your whereabouts from a letter that he never read. Perhaps he was told, as you suggest, by the second man, the one who told you about Captain Westering’s plans in the first place, but somehow I doubt it. I am beginning, in fact, to get an altogether new slant on Mr. Bud Hoffman.”

  Inspector Piper grunted and made a short slapping gesture of exasperation. An unofficial kibitzer, he nevertheless butted in. “All right, Hildy! I know you. You’ve got something on your mind as well as in your hands. Let’s have it!”

  “I am beginning to suspect,” said Miss Withers, “that Bud Hoffman was able to follow Lenore because he knew where she was going before she ever left. Indeed, I am beginning to suspect that he knew of her plans before he ever went to New York and deliberately cultivated her acquaintance. He would have had no trouble getting on with the Committee of Artists for Peace, surely. Such committees generally operate on a shoestring. They are happy to get workers as they can, cheap or gratis, with few questions asked.”

  “Come off it,” Captain Kelso growled. “How the hell could he have known that Lenore was with the Committee? And even if he’d known, why the hell should he want to join her there?”

  “I can only speculate, of course. But it is speculation clearly indicated by what I’m now certain of. Later, no doubt, we shall learn if I am right or not. In the first place, I submit that he learned where Lenore was working, and of her plans to join the voyage, right here in San Francisco. In fact, aboard the Karma. Probably from Lenore’s correspondence with Captain Westering. Surreptitiously, of course. As a trespasser and a spy on the Karma, unknown to the captain or Aletha or Alura. In the second place, I submit that he went East to New York to intercept Lenore. To try to prevent her joining the voyage and giving it the financial support it desperately needed. He must have learned or guessed from her correspondence that Lenore was from a wealthy family, and possibly he had an exaggerated idea of the amount of support she could have contributed. But this scheme developed complications, for he became emotionally involved with Lenore, as we know from what we have been told, and he could take no approach with her that would incriminate himself and ruin his own chances. In brief, he wanted to marry her, a development, if he could have brought it off, which would have offered the double satisfaction of a profitable alliance for himself and revenge on the captain.”

  “Revenge!” Captain Kelso, almost frantic in his frustration and impatience, was on the brink of a jig. “Why the hell would he want revenge?”

  Miss Withers slowly brought her hands from behind her back and held them out in front. In her right hand, dangling by an earpiece, was a pair of dark glasses. In her left, a limp object somehow obscene, was a cheap, shaggy wig.

  “Unless I am greatly mistaken,” she said, “you will find that Al’s hippie and Bud Hoffman and Bruno Wagner are one and the same person.”

  18.

  MISS WITHERS FLOATED IN strange and shadowed lassitude in that dreamy half-life between waking and sleeping. She was aware of her body and where it was, but she had no conviction that it would respond to her will. She knew where it had been and how it had gotten to its present place and condition, and she had a notion that it was now late in a day following a long, bad night, but she seemed to be perversely indifferent to all that had been or might be, and to any faint proddings of her mind that she ought to be up and doing something about something. She remembered the North Beach murder, she remembered the hours afterward through which Captain Kelso lumbered in a kind of controlled and icy rage, and she remembered being delivered to her hotel and her bed at a pale hour when rational citizens were beginning to stir and rise. She could now hear, in the other twin, the deep and cadenced breathing of Lenore, who had long ago tumbled, with all the enviable resistance of the young to adversity, into a deep sleep of exhaustion.

  Independent of her body’s lassitude, Miss Withers’ brain teemed with antic thoughts. They tumbled over one another in a feverish rush to be recognized. A little discipline was indicated, Miss Withers decided. She began deliberately, without disturbing her delicious sensation of basic indifference, to introduce order into her thinking, and to line up her thoughts in some kind of sequence. Well, then …

  Bruno Wagner was Bud Hoffman. Aletha Westering, called into service, had verified that. Reconstruction of the recent past, based on that double identity, was not difficult to imagine in its essentials. After the ignominious collapse of the nefarious Latter Day Vigilantes, Wagner-Hoffman must have been driven by a consuming desire to track down his traitorous leader. In time, no doubt after many false scents and dead ends, he had indeed finally caught up with Martin Dormer, now Captain Westering, currently master of a conglomerate crew of dubious Argonauts, leader of a pilgrimage to lands of Zen and Ho Chi Minh.

  In the beginning, when he first arrived at the end of his long trail, Wagner-Hoffman had clearly let Westering remain ignorant of his presence. He had made no threats, taken no action, and had, indeed, apparently been at pains to remain obscure. Obviously, as some of Miss Withers’ more unsavory contacts would have put it, he was casing the job, what
ever the job would turn out to be. In his stealthy invasions of the Karma, reading correspondence and gathering bits of information from whatever informant, he had surely come to the conclusion that Westering’s tainted funds had been dissipated in his current venture, and that the voyage was, indeed, in critical financial straits.

  It was then that he had devised the scheme of striking at Westering through Lenore Gregory, or at least of discovering for himself if such a strike could be made. He had headed east. He had attached himself to the Committee of Artists for Peace, and had cultivated Lenore. But what had started out to be a cold-blooded scheme of revenge had backfired. Lenore, in the beginning a means to an end, had become in the end an end herself. But no matter. His bad luck. She was not quite the gullible romantic he had assumed, and had proved impervious to his charms. It must have been a cruel blow, added as it was to his other injuries, for he was surely, like all who cast themselves in roles like his, a man of monstrous vanity. When she disappeared without word or warning, he knew at once where she had gone. Soon afterward he had followed. This time, indirection abandoned, for a head-on confrontation with his apostate Fuehrer.

  Why? To seek restitution? If not restitution, retribution? Had Wagner-Hoffman, wearing his shaggy wig and dark glasses, slipped aboard the Karma and spiked Captain Westering’s liquor supply with hemlock? It was certainly possible. Anyone, with a minimum of caution, could have come and gone almost at will on that undisciplined vessel. And it was probable that the quondam lieutenant of vigilantes, apparently a young man of varied experience in a checkered past, was familiar with seagoing vessels, and may even have become acquainted with the Karma’s scheme of hatches leading from the hold to the captain’s stateroom and to the deck. Moreover, it was not to be discounted that he had a contact aboard, someone who passed information and gave assistance. But vastly more important psychologically, would an embittered man seeking revenge on a traitor resort to poison instead of a more direct and satisfying method?

  Which brought her to the girl now sleeping deeply, if not peacefully, a few feet from her. Had Wagner-Hoffman indeed intended to poison her along with the captain? If he had a motive of revenge for the murder of the captain, it was at least possible to postulate a similar motive for the murder of the girl who had, in his own mind, shamed and deserted him. It was true that the motive did not seem as compelling to the rational mind, but the minds of murderers, Miss Withers had learned, were not always rational. In brief, had Wagner-Hoffman been an economy-minded murderer? Had he tried for two birds with one stone? It did not demand too active an imagination to conceive of the rage and the hatred that must have consumed him when he found the man who had betrayed him and the girl who had deserted him in circumstances with apparent connotations. Finding insult added to injury, so to speak, had he meant, as Miss Withers had previously speculated, to kill them both?