They were, the three of them, Miss Withers and the captain and Inspector Piper, bellied up to a table, with red-and-white-checked bibs tied around their necks. On the table were rosy lobsters and fragrant pots of drawn butter, of which they were making, despite the captain’s threatened indigestion, a zestful mess. Miss Withers speared a generous bite of succulent tail, dunked it in her pot, and lifted it dripping to her mouth. Minding her manners, she chewed and swallowed before she spoke.
“Gladly,” she said. “First, however, I must grant that you were right on a crucial point. The intended victim was Captain Westering.”
“Thanks. That helps. It makes me feel useful.”
“Yes. Well, when I reluctantly accepted that at last, the solution was quite clear. It leaped, so to speak, to the mind’s eye. Alura O’Higgins, of course. She suffered no delusions, as the other women did, concerning the character of Captain Westering. She saw him clearly for what he was—a monstrous fraud capable of infinite corruption. And she stood to lose, from his current fantastic venture, the two people she cherished most in this world. Aletha, her sister, whom she loved and pitied, and Leslie Fitzgerald, her protégée, whom she loved and admired. Even if these two had gone on the pilgrimage they contemplated, and had by some miracle returned safely from it, the captain would still have been there, like a lingering infection in their lives, and to Alura O’Higgins there was only one cure. In many ways she was a remarkable woman. She was tough, direct, ruthless when necessary. The captain had to be eliminated. The use of hemlock, the instrument of execution among the ancient Greeks, was probably incidental, selected for the reasons we have already noted, but it suggests, nevertheless, a kind of poetic justice. Captain Westering was indeed executed as an almost impersonal judgment. Just as Hoffman-Wagner was disposed of when he was rash enough to try to blackmail her.
“But there was one great danger from the beginning, and Alura O’Higgins recognized it. The danger, in brief, that Aletha Westering would be accused of the murder. She appraised the danger and took the risk, knowing that she would never let her sister pay the penalty if it came down to it. In my evaluation of the character of Alura, I was certain that this was so, for there was nothing false in her devotion to those she took to herself. And so, inasmuch as there was no tangible evidence on which to arrest Alura herself, I argued you into arresting Aletha as a way of getting Alura indirectly.”
“Not argued,” said Captain Kelso succinctly. “Conned.”
“Very well. If you prefer. For a brief while I began to doubt. It looked as if, after all, Alura might be willing to let Aletha pay the penalty for her. But she was, as we now know, only biding her time. Waiting to be sure we weren’t running a bluff. Aletha’s confession settled it. The only course left then was the grim one of telling the truth, and, after that, of taking her own way out. I must say that I find a certain solace in the way she chose. You called it the grand gesture, did you not? It was somehow appropriate for Alura. It seems prophetic, looking back—that entertaining little lecture you delivered to me on the statistics of suicide by leaping from your beautiful bridge across the Golden Gate.”
“There!” Captain Kelso pounced as if he had been waiting in a crouch for the right time. “That phony confession of Aletha’s! That was actually what broke things open. And that was something you couldn’t have counted on. By God, you couldn’t!”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Miss Withers was offensively smug. “I was convinced, at any rate, that she was highly susceptible to suggestion. Alura herself, if you recall, implied as much. But I shan’t press the point. Let us accept the confession of Aletha as a welcome bonus.”
“Sure,” said Captain Kelso. “I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
When he said this, he was staring across the table into the general area of Miss Withers’ physiognomy that included the specific feature mentioned. Inspector Oscar Piper suddenly choked on a chunk of lobster tail and began to cough violently and rudely into his napkin.
Miss Withers stared at him coldly. “Oscar,” she said, “must you be such a glutton? Try to eat more slowly and chew more thoroughly.”
The inspector, red in the face and gasping for breath, reached for his wineglass and held it aloft. “Here’s to Hildy,” he wheezed. “God’s gift horse to all dumb cops.”
It was by way of being a farewell dinner. Al and Lenore, on the principle that two’s company and five’s a mob, had gone elsewhere by themselves. Tomorrow morning early the inspector and the latter would be on a jet headed east. Miss Withers and the former would be on a Hog headed south. Captain Kelso, stuck, would remain. He was already lonely. To the bleak and closed compartments of his leathery heart, where others had been and were gone forever, including himself as he used to be before he became what he was, there would now be added another, aching and empty, where a certain exasperating spinster had briefly dwelt. He reached for his glass.
“I’ll drink to that,” he said.
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Copyright © 1969 by Random House, Inc.
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THE HILDEGARDE WITHERS
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Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene Page 19