The Withdrawing Room

by Charlotte MacLeod

Miss Smith drank off the last of her sherry and set down the glass. And now I must go along, and thank you very kindly.”

  “No,” said Sarah. “I can’t simply let you go like this, after what you’ve told me. First, you’ve got to promise that you won’t make any further attempt to tell anybody else, this story. If someone did in fact push Mr. Quiffen under that train and you’re the only person who’s willing to come forward and say so, then don’t you see that you constitute a threat to the murderer?”

  “Why, I—”

  “You say you didn’t see the face, but how can he be sure of that? How can you, for that matter? You might remember more than the gloves and the coat sleeves once you’ve got over your shock and had a chance to think about it. You’ve already called attention to yourself by trying to tell somebody in authority what you saw. I hope you realize that being brushed off as a crank was the luckiest thing that could have happened to you. If your name had appeared in the papers along with mine, you mightn’t have stayed alive long enough to come here this afternoon.”

  Miss Smith laughed incredulously. “You make me sound pretty important.”

  “You are important. Decent citizens who have the courage to act on their convictions are always important. Miss Smith, you must listen to me. You may think I’m trying to shut you up because I don’t want the story to get around that one of my lodgers has been murdered, but believe me, I’m not. If this boardinghouse business flops, I stand to lose my property, but I could live with that. What I could not bear is the thought that I’d sent you out into the dark and got you killed.”

  “Mrs. Kelling!”

  “I’m speaking from experience. Give me your address so that we can keep in touch. I’ll let you know anything I can find out, but I most earnestly beg you, for your own protection, to keep acting like a harmless crank and trust me to handle the matter from now on. Will you promise?”

  “I might as well, I guess. At least you stand a chance of getting somebody to pay attention, which is more than I do. Look, have you got a back door I can sneak out by? I don’t want to embarrass you by running into one of your other boarders.”

  “You wouldn’t embarrass me, but there’s always the nasty little odd chance one of them might recognize you and guess what you’re doing here. I’ll call you a taxi.”

  “No, don’t do that. I live over in the project. If anybody around there saw me coming home in a cab, they’d think I must have money hidden in my room. Let me go on the subway same as I always do.”

  “All right, if you must, but you’re not going alone. I can’t go with you myself right now because I have to cook dinner, but you must wait till I see what I can arrange.”

  Sarah touched the bell and Charles came running.

  “Charles, fetch Miss Smith’s parcels from the vestibule and her wraps from the closet, and show her down to the back door. She is doing valuable secret research for the Ecological Commission and we mustn’t let anybody know she was here. I’m sure I needn’t explain, Miss Smith, that you can rely absolutely on the discretion of my staff. You’d better wait inside until your escort arrives. We sometimes have prowlers in the alley, I’m sorry to say, and Charles’s duties will keep him upstairs. I’ll try not to keep you too long, but I beg you to be patient.”

  Charles couldn’t resist this appeal to his sense of drama. He led Miss Smith and her bags of ecological research down the back hall in furtive majesty. Now Sarah’s problem was to find the woman an escort.

  Cousin Dolph had already done his good deed for the day. Anyway, Sarah couldn’t see him tootling out to the project with a woman who looked like a walking ragbag. Uncle Jem couldn’t go because he was already booked to show up for dinner and keep the boarders’ minds off Mr. Quiffen. He was no doubt getting decked out in his antique soup-and-fish right now, thinking up a few more picturesque skeletons to hang on the family tree and warming his vocal cords with a couple of quick martinis, knowing he’d get no cocktails from his impecunious niece.

  Egbert might possibly be persuaded, but Jem’s valet was getting on in years himself, and had enough to cope with as it was, riding herd on his wayward employer. Mr. Lomax would be just the person, but he was. an hour’s drive away at Ireson’s Landing. Miss Smith couldn’t be left dithering in the alleyway door all evening. There was only one person Sarah could think of who might realistically be asked to perform such an errand.

  If only he wasn’t in Hong Kong or Uxbridge or some other outlandish place! No, he was at home. Sarah, could have cried with relief when she heard his voice on the phone.

  “Mrs. Kelling! I’ve just been—”

  “I know, reading about me in the papers. I’m terribly sorry to bother you again, Mr. Bittersohn, but I’m in a desperate rush to find somebody willing to escort an elderly lady wearing six sweaters and a balaclava helmet home to a very tough neighborhood without getting her killed on the way. I don’t suppose you could possibly—”

  “Where is she?”

  “Right now she’s waiting down at the alley door. You remember, the one you were guarding that night when Great-uncle Nathan’s campaign chair collapsed under you?”

  “I have tender memories of that occasion. Will you be with her?”

  “I doubt it. I have to cook dinner for my boarders. But I’ll nip down and tell her you’re coming. Would you mind giving her your name and telling her Sarah Kelling sent you? If you’ll come to lunch with me tomorrow, I’ll be glad to explain what it’s about. Mariposa has the day off and Charles will be working so I’ll be able to talk freely. Charles thinks she’s a spy for the Ecological Commission, by the way, so if you run into him, please don’t disillusion him.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. Who’s Charles?”

  “Charles C. Charles, my butler. That is, he’s—oh, I’ll have to explain when I see you. You will come?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  The line went dead, and Sarah hung up, not without a twinge of regret. It had been rather pleasant talking to Mr. Bittersohn again, even under such circumstances as these. But what other sort of circumstance did she exist in lately? She did wish she could at least wait with Miss Smith until he came, but she was already late with her dinner.

  Sarah did take a moment to run down to the shabby, ill-lit back entry with a hastily collected plate of hors d’oeuvres and tell her strange guest, “Mr. Max Bittersohn, a very kind, trustworthy man, is coming to take you home. He’ll give you his name and say Sarah Kelling sent him. Don’t go with anybody else. Here’s something to nibble on while you’re waiting. I’m sorry to leave you, but something’s boiling over on the stove.”

  “Think nothing of it. What’ll I do with the plate?”

  “Leave it on the chair.”

  Sarah was already halfway up the stairs as she spoke, for the cooking was indeed in a perilous state and her food budget too tightly calculated to allow for calamities. Alexander would be proud of the way she was managing. Darling Alexander! Why was she thinking of him at this hectic moment? Was it because she felt the tiniest bit disloyal at being so glad Mr. Bittersohn was again coming to the rescue?

  Chapter 6

  “MR. BITTERSOHN, HOW VERY nice to see you again.”

  Sarah’s greeting was conventional enough, but her voice held a degree of warmth that Cousin Mabel would undoubtedly consider excessive. As Cousin Dolph had remarked, who gave a damn about Mabel anyway? Furthermore, Mabel wasn’t here. It occurred to Sarah that she’d made rather a point of telling her guest that nobody else would be, either. Her cheeks were pinker than they’d been for weeks as she shook his warm, square hand.

  “I’ve been meaning to drop you a note of thanks for all you did—”

  “After you solved my case for me?” His smile was as attractive as she’d remembered it, not the teeth-showing kind but an amused curve of unusually well-shaped lips. Mr. Bittersohn was not so handsome as the late Alexander Kelling, no man could be that, but his somewhat rugged features were still pleasant to look at. Sarah notice
d with inward amusement that his exuberant waves of dark brown hair were springing up again where he’d tried to slick them down, and she still couldn’t make up her mind whether his eyes were gray or blue.

  “I did no such thing,” she protested. “Here, come into the library and let me give you a drink. I never dare bring out the whiskey when my boarders are around for fear they’ll all want some. Like the gentleman dining at Crewe who found a large mouse in his stew.”

  She was babbling and she knew it, but what did one say to a man who’d saved one’s life and. gotten his reward by being asked at a moment’s notice to escort Miss Mary Smith and her shopping bags back to the project? “You like scotch with a twist and lots of ice, don’t you?”

  “Great.” He didn’t seem to know what to say, either.

  “My Uncle Jem taught me to bartend when I was six, so I’m quite good at it. How’s that?”

  Bittersohn took a sip. “Perfect. Aren’t you going to join me?”

  “I certainly am.”

  Sarah poured herself a smaller drink, and added water. “You know, when Miss Smith told me yesterday about what happened, I was so taken aback that I don’t think it sank in properly. Then I had dinner to cope with, and Uncle Jem joined us and stayed and stayed as he always does once he gets over the agony of pulling himself together to come. Naturally everybody was egging him on because he really is a marvelous storyteller in a highly censorable sort of way, so it was awfully late by the time I got to bed and I went right to sleep. This morning of course there was breakfast to fix so I honestly hadn’t time to think about what she said till a little while ago. Do you think she could possibly be telling the truth?”

  “I might if I knew what you’re talking about”

  “But didn’t she tell you?’

  “Miss Smith told me a good deal about her one-woman save-the-environment plan but I don’t suppose that’s what you’re referring to. She did mention something when we got to that dump she lives in about being glad I was with her and not having realized what she might be letting herself in for till Mrs. Kelling pointed it out to her, but Mrs. Kelling told her not to say anything to anybody else so she wasn’t about to.”

  “But I didn’t mean you. Here, have one of these cheese things while they’re hot. I appear to be in my accustomed state of utter confusion. I expect I ought to start at the beginning, which is the financial mess you know all about. Probably you weren’t surprised to read in the paper that I’d turned this place into a boardinghouse. I couldn’t think of any other way to keep afloat till this business with the High Street Bank gets settled, if it ever does. I couldn’t bear to knuckle under without putting up any kind of struggle, and keeping up appearances on a shoestring is all I’m trained to do.”

  “I thought you were a commercial artist.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose I am but I’ve never made any real money at it. I do intend to look for work, but so far I haven’t had time to get a portfolio together. I’m always having to rush off and call the plumber or whatever just as I think I’m going to start.”

  “Don’t you have any help in the house?”

  “Oh yes, I’ve been awfully lucky there. Mariposa, that darling woman who used to clean for us, has come to stay.”

  “The one with the dog and the boy friend?”

  “You remembered! The dog has gone to live with her brother in the country, I’m happy to say. Rover was the sort that needs lots of roving space. The boy friend is still with us. He’s the Charles I mentioned on the phone. Charles is really an actor but he’s resting, as they say, so he’s keeping his hand in by doing a superb impersonation of a butler. I don’t even have to pay him, except room and board, because he also has a job on some assembly line attaching gadgets to widgets. I must say I dread the day when Charles’s agent finds him another role. Can I fix your drink?”

  “I’m fine for the moment, thanks. So where does Miss Smith come in?”

  “She showed up out of the blue yesterday about tea-time. Tell me, Mr. Bittersohn, what was your general impression of her? I know one might assume at first glance that she must have a bat or two loose in the belfry, but do you honestly think she does?”

  “A crowded subway train isn’t the best place to judge,” he replied, “but my off-the-cuff impression is that Miss Smith is a gallant old sport trying to make the best of a lousy deal. She told me she worked all her life for one of those upper-crust department stores that have been driven out of business by inflation and the big chains. They paid peanuts and she had an invalid mother to support, so she never got a chance to put much away. By the time her job folded she was too old to get another, and the Social Security check that was supposed to take care of her declining years doesn’t stretch beyond a ten-by-ten room in a fleabag and a can of sardines once a week.”

  “Then how on earth does she live?”

  “Makes a game of survival. Collects newspapers out of trash cans and reads up on who’s doling out free meals to senior citizens. Then she peddles the papers to a junkman for carfare to get to the grub. She told me she has some very nice clothes she wears when she goes out in company; I’d just happened to catch her when she wasn’t dressed up. And she insisted on paying her own dime for the subway. I was tempted to ask her out to dinner and a show, but I thought I’d better not try to get fresh on such short acquaintance. Miss Smith looks as if she might be a stickler for the proprieties.”

  “Don’t you believe it,” said Sarah. “She’d have taken you on like a shot. She told me she’d got beyond any nonsense about false pride. So have I, that’s why I was so brazen about hurling you into the breach. There simply wasn’t anybody else, and I didn’t dare let her go off alone. I think she’s perfectly sane, too, so when she told me her story I couldn’t take the risk of not believing her.”

  Sarah drank a little of her scotch. “I’m sorry. I thought I’d be able to talk about this easily enough, but it’s—I’m just so sick and tired of horrors!”

  “That’s okay, Mrs. Kelling. Take your time. Maybe I can guess. Putting the newspapers and the subway together, would I be correct in assuming that Miss Smith’s story had something to do with this Mr. Quiffen who boarded with you and fell under the train yesterday?”

  “Have you ever been wrong? Miss Smith’s story is that she and Mr. Quiffen were standing next to each other at the front of the platform. They were more or less exchanging glares because he didn’t like being near someone who—well, you saw her last night—and she didn’t take kindly to being regarded as a walking pestilence. Would you?”

  “Was he that sort?”

  “Oh yes, very much so. I got him foisted on me by some old friends who thought they were doing me a big favor, but I realized he was a mistake from the beginning. If he couldn’t find an excuse to be nasty, he’d go looking for one. If I’d had him on my back for another week or so, I daresay I might have been tempted to do what—what Miss Smith claims she saw somebody else do.”

  “Shove him under the train?”

  “So she says. She insists she distinctly saw two hands wearing brown leather gloves reach out from the crowd and deliberately push him onto the track at the moment the train came out of the tunnel.”

  “Is that all she saw, just the hands?”

  “That and an impression of dark coat sleeves. Of course the train wouldn’t have been able to stop the instant it hit him, and she was right next to it with everyone milling and shoving. She was afraid she’d be pushed under the wheels herself. You know what it’s like in the rush hours. I expect whoever did it just stepped back and got lost in the crowd.”

  “Or turned to the guy behind him and yelled, ‘Quit shoving,’ so that in case anybody else happened to be looking he could claim it wasn’t his fault. It’s unlikely anyone would have paid any attention. People are concentrating on the train, or maybe guarding their handbags and wallets for fear of getting their pockets picked, or trying to keep their bundles and briefcases from getting knocked out of their hands. It’s not a
bad way to get rid of somebody if you have the nerve. You’d simply give him the push, let the crowd close in around you, step back and get on the first train going in the opposite direction, and be away before anybody realized what was happening. Did Miss Smith report what she saw?”

  “She tried hard enough. I gather she must have made quite a scene. She claims she told the starter, the conductor the police, and even some reporters, but none of them would pay attention to her. That’s why she eventually came to me. She happened to pick up a newspaper that had one of those ‘Tulip Street Curse Strikes Again’ stories with my name and photograph. She took it for divine guidance or something and beetled straight on over here, shopping bags and all. It was a dreadfully reckless thing to do, and naturally I was terrified for her after what happened that other time.”

  “You know that wasn’t your fault.”

  “I know it wasn’t, but I can’t help feeling it was. Anyway, Miss Smith was totally oblivious of the fact that she’s a noticeable sort of person with her shopping bags and all those ragged clothes peeking out from under one another. And Mr. Quiffen’s heirs, or what I presume are his heirs, had been here earlier like wolves on the fold, and my boarders were due in for dinner. I had to get her out of here and I couldn’t think what else to do, so I called you. After this episode I daresay you’ll be having your “telephone number changed.”

  Bittersohn smiled again. “Don’t bet on it. Let me ask you an embarrassing question. Did you want to keep your boarders from seeing Miss Smith because she looked so crummy or because you were afraid one of them might recognize her as having been the witness who made the fuss? I take it you’re ready to believe Miss Smith’s story yourself.”

  “I have to, don’t I? As to the boarders, I couldn’t have cared less about how she looked. I could always have introduced her as one of my rich relatives. I was only concerned that one of them might recognize her as the person who’d tried to be a witness.”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  “No, but you see, I don’t know them. They all came with recommendations of one sort or another, and we had preliminary interviews and all that, but what does that prove? I haven’t seen enough of them yet to form any valid opinions about what they might or might not be capable of, and Mr. Quiffen had got everybody’s back up at one time or another. We haven’t actually been pelting each other with mashed potatoes at the table, but that’s mainly because Charles and I and Mrs. Sorpende, who’s a darling woman, have been ganging up on him whenever he threatened to become totally unbearable. What sort of relationship he might have had with any of them outside the house, of course, I have no idea and couldn’t very well ask.”