Four Lost Ladies (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

  “Why are you afraid of me,” he was saying to her, in a voice that was only a hoarse whisper. It startled Harriet out of the paralysis that had held her helpless for those few interminable moments, and sanity came back with a rush. After all, it wasn’t as if she were alone with him in the jungle or on a desert island. She was in the midst of the largest city in the world, in a hotel with a thousand rooms filled with people who would rush to help her. She had only to raise the window and call.

  Harriet turned and ran to the nearest window, tugged at it savagely, and finally raised it to the top. He was very close to her now, but he made no move to prevent her. He only said, “Poor Harriet!” and she felt the warmth of his cheek on her naked shoulder, his arm at her waist. Betrayed by her own body, her own nerves, she felt a rush of blind unreasoning relief sweep over her. She relaxed limply in his arms, eyes closed, lips waiting with parched impatience for the kiss that would make an end of their first quarrel and give her back her soap-bubble dream again.

  “Out of sight … out of mind.”

  —Thomas à Kempis.

  2

  BY THIS TIME INSPECTOR OSCAR PIPER was resigned to the fact that a policeman’s lot is not a happy one. Moreover it seemed to the grizzled little Irishman that nowadays he was continually running into added proof that things weren’t what they used to be. Except Manhattan’s climate, of course. For the second straight day snow was falling heavily upon the city, great soft flakes that threatened to surpass the blizzard of ’47, and as usual during storms the crime index had taken a sharp rise.

  Just to add to his burdens he found himself forced into the rocky and unfamiliar paths of literary endeavor, and had spent most of the afternoon composing on his ancient upright a memorandum which began: Departmental Bureaus, Realignment of, Objections Thereto in various equally unsatisfactory versions. By six o’clock, when the Homicide Bureau was quieting down for the day, he was rattling along at a great rate. Then the whirlwind struck.

  The door of his sanctum-sanctorum burst open and in sailed an angular figure in a damp blue cape, carrying a dripping umbrella and crowned with a headpiece which resembled a model of Bikini Island complete with palm trees, just after the detonation of the atomic bomb.

  “Oh, no!” he cried, wincing like a startled leprechaun. “Take it away—the hat, I mean. It is a hat, isn’t it?”

  Miss Hildegarde Withers sniffed disdainfully. “I suppose you’re annoyed because I’m late, but in this weather—”

  “Late?” He looked blank.

  “Surely you haven’t forgotten that we’re having a bite to eat together and then going to hear the Don Cossack Chorus at Carnegie Hall?”

  “Why—why of course not! It’s right here on my desk-pad.” He dug down beneath several layers of discarded memoranda, and showed her the note. “Be with you in a jiffy, just let me finish this thing—it’s got to get over to the Commissioner’s office first thing in the morning.”

  “Of course.” The maiden schoolteacher perched herself in a chair, watching while he hammered out the last paragraph, signed his name, and stuffed the memo in a big brown envelope. Then she cocked her head and asked, “Been busy, Oscar?”

  “Yes and no. A lot of homicides reported, but all dull routine stuff that can be just as well handled by the precinct men and usually is. ‘Two blockheads to kill and be killed—’”

  “Why, you’ve taken up reading!” she gasped.

  “Now and then, though I don’t let it get generally known through the Department. Shall we go?” He grabbed his hat and coat. “I know a little place over on Broome Street where they dish a pretty fair plate of minestrone.”

  The oddly assorted couple came out into the storm, facing into the feathery flakes that poured endlessly down. They walked on for several blocks, and then the Inspector turned toward her. “You’re very quiet tonight—for you.”

  “I was thinking,” said the schoolteacher. “About the snowflakes. Oscar, isn’t it a little frightening to realize that a human being can slip away like one of these snowflakes, to disappear forever?”

  “Judas priest in a bathtub!” the Inspector exploded. “What makes you think they disappear? They pile up in the streets and cost the City millions of dollars to haul away. Those snowflakes you’re talking about are practically indestructible!”

  “You know what I mean,” she told him.

  “I do not,” said Piper. “But you can tell me—after we’ve ordered. Here’s the place, watch yourself on those steps.”

  They came into a dark, steamy little basement, fragrant with the odors of spices and olive oil and Chianti, and managed to tuck themselves into a vacant booth in the rear. Miss Withers barely looked at the menu. “You order,” she said. “Anything at all.”

  “Okay, what is this?” he demanded when the waiter had left them. “What’s biting you?”

  “I was thinking of the line from Burns,” she said. “‘Or like the snow falls in the river, a moment white, then gone forever.’” Miss Withers began absently to fold and refold her napkin. “Oscar, do you happen to know just how many lonely, middle-aged, unattached women disappear right here in this city every year?”

  “Not nearly enough,” Piper answered promptly.

  She let that one go by. “More than three thousand, according to recent estimates by the YWCA and the Travelers Aid Society.”

  “Why don’t you drop down to Centre Street tomorrow morning and break the news to Missing Persons? Tell Captain Mastik I sent you.”

  She sniffed. “I might have known you’d say that. But there’s a possibility that you, as head of Homicide, should be interested. Isn’t it more than likely that some of those who drop out of sight are victims of foul play, only because they haven’t any influence—?”

  Now the Inspector had to grin. “So who has influence when they’re dead?”

  “You know very well what I mean. They haven’t importance enough to be missed, they haven’t any close friends or near relatives, so nothing is ever done about it.”

  He put a bread-stick in his mouth and chewed it as if it had been one of his favorite panatelas. “Relax, Hildegarde. Why do you always have to go around appointing yourself a citizens’ committee of one? Believe me, we make quite a commotion down at Centre Street when a dead body shows up under suspicious circumstances. Only we don’t get three thousand unidentified female stiffs in the city morgues in the course of a year—no, nor a tenth that number. Almost all the ones we do get are victims of accident, disease, or suicide. No, you’re barking up the wrong tree again. Those women you’re so worried about, they probably just got bored with the big city and went home. Or else they wanted to skip out on a husband or boy-friend, or beat some bills.”

  Miss Withers shook her head. “It would be a different thing, wouldn’t it, if three thousand children disappeared? It happened over in Hamelin, Germany, long ago and they’re still talking about it. Yet think—each of those missing women was a child once, somebody’s fair-headed baby daughter!”

  But trying to get the Inspector excited about statistics was uphill going at the best of times. “Look, Hildegarde, as an old friend and admirer I advise you to quit worrying your head about all this. Stick to your three R’s and your goldfish.”

  “They were tropical fish,” she corrected indignantly. “And I finally had to give them up. Also you know very well that I retired from teaching when the spring term ended, though I do substitute sometimes when somebody is ill. But—”

  “But there isn’t really very much for a retired schoolma’am to do with herself, is that it?” The Inspector’s voice was for him surprisingly gentle. “There haven’t been any important murder cases for you to kibitz on like you used to, so you’re trying to drum up trade.”

  “What would you expect me to do, sit home and crochet?”

  He shook his head. “Hildegarde, I’ve got to hand it to you. You’re unique. The guides on the rubberneck busses ought to point you out as a landmark, the way they do Grant’s Tomb an
d Radio City. See the woman who wanted to solve three thousand murders all at once! But seriously, down at the Department we’re realistic. We have to start from autopsies and reports and complaints and things like that. Now if we had a nice fresh corpse—”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she promised him tartly. Unfortunately, at the moment, she had no premonition whatever of how close one of these days that dead body would come to being her own.

  “Just as a personal favor,” he begged, “don’t come around Headquarters throwing monkey wrenches. This is no time to go stirring up trouble. We’ve got enough. I’ll be blamed for any toes you step on, and they’re out to nail my hide to the barn door as it is. Reorganization is being discussed again—there’s a new assistant-commissioner, you know—and Homicide is the only bureau in the Department to have an inspector in charge; all the rest get along with a captain.”

  “Mercy, Oscar! They’re not actually trying to demote you?”

  He hesitated. “Something like that. Maybe it will blow over; it has before.”

  “I hope so. Of course I wouldn’t for the world do anything that would add to your troubles, unless I felt it my bounden duty. All the same—”

  Then the soup arrived. “Thanks,” said the Inspector. “I knew you’d see it my way. As for this wild idea of yours, remember that while once in a blue moon a Tufverson case comes along, as a rule people don’t get murdered without a corpse being left around.”

  “Yes, I know. Physicists say that matter is indestructible. And I’ve also heard somewhere that when you drop a stone into a body of water the ripples go out widening and diminishing forever.”

  “You can’t see ’em, so what’s the difference? Eat your soup.”

  “There are stars, Oscar, too far away for us to see with the naked eye, but we can measure the heat they give. When a person drops out of sight, like a stone in water, it must start ripples of another sort, ripples invisible and yet—”

  “Crackers?”

  “What? Oh, no, thank you. Oscar, you must excuse me. I just happened to think of something. You’ll have to hear the Chorus by yourself—I must rush home at once.” She was scrambling to her feet.

  “But why?” He stared at her, open-mouthed.

  “Every single Christmas card I received this year is standing on the mantel above my fireplace, and—” Gloves, bag, and umbrella in her hand, the schoolteacher was already hurrying out of the place.

  The Inspector started to rise, and then sank back into his seat. He sighed and shook his head. Since their first meeting beside a corpse in the penguin pool of the old Aquarium, more years ago than he liked to remember, an odd friendship had existed between the professional policeman and the eccentric, irrepressible schoolma’am. The bond had deepened in spite of—or perhaps because of—a series of sparring-matches between them, with no holds barred and with honors to date about even.

  But snowflakes! Murder victims by the thousand, ripples that rippled on forever, and finally the old girl rushing off in a dither because she’d left her old Christmas cards, the most useless objects known to man, unguarded on the mantel. I hate to admit it, Piper said to himself, but she’s slipping fast. A little sadly, he settled down to the job of finishing two dinners.

  The unknowing object of all this solicitude climbed resolutely up the steps of the respectably dingy brownstone on West 74th Street, carefully knocked the snow from her overshoes, and then entered her own little apartment. For the first time in months she felt herself again.

  Miss Hildegarde Withers had long looked forward to the frabjous day when she could retire from P.S. 38 and its generations of grubby urchins on a modest pension and devote the rest of her days to her chosen avocation of being self-appointed gadfly to the police department. But now when that time had come she hadn’t quite known what to do with herself. She seemed no longer to happen luckily in on the scenes of murder—the laws of Probability and Coincidence were belatedly beginning to take effect—nor did she now manage as in the past to beat the paddy-wagon and the medical examiner to the most interesting corpses and then affix herself like a burr to the Inspector’s coat tail. What few cases the little man did discuss with her when he dropped in for a visit were solved already by routine methods, or else were trite and uninteresting.

  Not for her were the mild aseptic activities and amusements available to a woman of her age, income, and position in society; welfare groups and improvement clubs bored her to tears. And yet there hadn’t seemed to be anything else.

  For a while she had thrown herself with characteristic enthusiasm into her recently acquired hobby of raising tropical fish, and the glass breeding-tanks had multiplied in the little apartment until the load of their necessary heaters, aerators, and lights had kept blowing the fuses and she had at last been forced to give away every one of the tiny jeweled fish. No pet had replaced them. After Dempsey, the effervescent wire-terrier who had shared so many of her earlier adventures, breathed out his span of life it had seemed somehow disloyal to think of getting another dog. Cats always gave Miss Withers a sense of inferiority, they were so aloof and self-sufficient. Canaries made her nervous with their twittering.

  What she had really been yearning for was a knotty problem on which to try the sharp edges of her mind. Now she squatted on the floor, happy as a clam in a tide-pool, riffling through the basketful of Christmas cards which in the old tradition she always kept around, like her little spruce tree and the mistletoe and holly, until Twelfth Night. There were almost two hundred of the greetings, many of them from former pupils now gone out into the world. Cheery bits of cardboard, she thought, though she wondered as always just what covered bridges and baby rabbits and elves and palm trees had to do with the Nativity. There were cards embossed and printed and engraved, cards a composite of family snapshots, hand-painted cards and comic cartoon cards and cards painfully printed in Crayola by sticky little fingers.

  But in all the lot there was no card from Alice Davidson.

  Though she might have been sitting down to a table loaded with spicy Italian delicacies, Miss Withers had no regrets as she made herself a frugal meal of tuna-fish salad and tea. This problem was not one for the Inspector’s official mind, at least not yet. He would never in the world understand why Alice was one of the people to whom the sending of Christmas cards was almost a compulsion-neurosis, as inevitable as death and taxes.

  There had been one from her every year for seven years, until this Christmas. Indeed, her not sending a greeting was a tangible thing, like the not-striking of a familiar clock that has run down.

  The schoolteacher filled up her teacup again, frowning with concentration as she tried to remember everything possible about Alice Davidson. It was little enough. The girl (every female a few years younger than herself was a girl to Miss Withers) had lived in the apartment directly across the hall. She’d been a friendly, shy little thing, anxious to please. They had drifted into a casual, neighborly sort of friendship unusual in New York, which involved the occasional borrowing of a cup of sugar or an egg, the signing for each other’s telegrams or packages, sometimes the sharing of a meal or tickets to a concert.

  Miss Withers had been happy to oblige by slipping in to feed the lovebirds (a pair named Tabby and Towser because they fought like cats and dogs) when Alice was away for the week-end, and Alice when she felt like a breath of air had sometimes borrowed Dempsey and the leash and let the madcap terrier drag her around the Park.

  All that had taken place back in a happier, pre-war era, when apartments were available and most New Yorkers obeyed a sort of lemming-like urge to pull up stakes at least once a year. Alice too had moved away, and the two women drifted out of touch so that at last there was only the exchange of Christmas cards with a scribbled note inside which remained as the last tenuous link between two ships that had passed in the night.

  Miss Withers shook her head. She was an avid reader of the Vital Statistics column in the Times, and Alice’s name hadn’t appeared there among the
deceased or married. Call it intuition or extrasensory perception or just an old-fashioned hunch, she felt it in her bones that Alice Davidson would have sent her a Christmas card again this year if she hadn’t been—prevented.

  Alice had always made so much of the holiday season, clinging to the old forms and observances like most lonely people who remember a happy, small-town childhood.

  Here at last, she felt, was something to go on. Not quite of course the nice fresh corpse that the Inspector had asked for. But he was involved in his own problems at the moment anyway. She would have to carry on her own investigation, very quietly. Picking up the Manhattan telephone directory, she began by making three calls. From the first she learned that the number listed for Alice Davidson had been discontinued. From the second she discovered that Miss Davidson had given up the lease on her furnished apartment on East 47th Street October first, and moved to a big hotel on Park Avenue. The third call, to the Hotel Grandee, finally produced the information that Alice Davidson had checked out October 11th last, and that the only address they had was what she had written when she registered, and that was 47th Street again. She was right back where she had started.

  The street noises from outside and from Central Park West were hushed now by the heavy snowfall so that after an hour or so Miss Withers began to feel that she was floating in a void, as alone as Beebe in his bathysphere, and almost expected some great curious monster to come bumping its nose against her window pane. Finally she snapped out of the mood and prepared for bed, giving her hair its requisite hundred strokes. It took her a long time to get to sleep that night, and when she did she immediately found herself helplessly drifting, then moving faster and faster at breathless speed down winding, formless avenues of oblivion. No, it was a taxicab she was in, and she dared not speak to the driver for fear he might turn his head.

  She tried to catch a glimpse of the signs on the lamp posts that hurtled by, but they all read Dead End Street. Faster and still faster they plummeted toward their destination, which suddenly turned out to be a vast mausoleum of black marble bearing the sign Dead Letter Office, and then somehow she was inside, watching the dead letters being shoveled into open graves marked Dead Storage. The faceless attendants in white were about to shovel her in along with the letters, but Miss Withers said firmly to herself, This is only a nightmare and I must wake up at once! So she did.