Four Lost Ladies (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

  Jeeps’s eyes widened with admiration. “Good, good! Some man will take pity on you. And it’ll get around the hotel in no time that you’re the original Mrs. Richbitch.”

  Half an hour later Miss Withers was ready, or as ready as she would ever be. The diamond and sapphire bracelets on her arm would stand anything short of inspection through a jeweler’s eye-piece, and Jeeps’s deft young fingers had softened her hair a little, subtly changed the lines of her lip-rouge. “Not bad,” she said. “I wish the Inspector could see you now.”

  “I’d rather be burned at the stake! Child, I do wish you were coming with me, for moral support.”

  “It wouldn’t look natural to take a maid along, and besides I might scare Mr. Nemo away. I was thinking that perhaps I could make a little time with the hired help—that cute bellboy with the crew-cut. They always know everything that goes on in a big hotel.”

  “From the way he stared at your legs when you came in, I shouldn’t think you’d have much trouble in reducing him to a quivering jelly. But be careful, child. This place frightens me somehow.” Miss Withers sighed. “If I had but known! as the ingénue was always saying in the old mystery dramas. My, my, the things my stern New England conscience leads me to do!” She hitched up her paste bracelets, preparatory to taking the plunge—and then there came a ringing at the door.

  Jeeps had been sprawled in her favorite position on the carpet, her long pajama-clad legs in a chair. But she somehow managed to get to the door before Miss Withers had even started.

  It was a man neither of them had ever seen before, but he came briskly in, shook the girl enthusiastically by both hands, and said, “So glad to meet you! I’m Jerry Forrest. It’s all fixed, you don’t need to worry about a thing.”

  “Oh?” said Jeeps blankly. He could have been anywhere between thirty and forty-five, rather resembling a young and beardless Santa Claus—big pink blob of a nose stuck in a doughy face, clothes that had probably been made by an expensive tailor and certainly had been slept in, a wide, fixed smile, and a way of speaking in short, breathless blasts like a German burp-gun.

  “Say, you’re not Mrs. Goggins or Mrs. Anything,” he caught himself smoothly. “Should have known.” He turned and saw the schoolteacher across the room. “Ah, there you are! Mrs. Goggins, I’m happy to meet you. Good news, you luckiest of lucky ladies. It’s all fixed.”

  “I—I didn’t know that anything needed fixing.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Among other things, I’m public relations man for the hotel. Soon as I saw your name on registry I remembered the publicity stories. So you’re a natural.” He came toward her, walking lightly for all his heft. “We have Blues Sandman, one of the biggest band-leaders in town, here at the Emerald Room. You, Mrs. Goggins, are going to be interviewed on the air by him. At your table tonight, between numbers. Ten to eleven, nationwide hookup. How does it feel to win a big radio jackpot? What’s been your biggest thrill since then, apart from staying here at the Grandee of course? Got to get that plug in.” He jabbed at her with his finger. “What’s your favorite song?”

  “Song? Why—er—I think the Bell Song, from Lakmé.”

  “Very well, whatever it is, the boys will whip up a bebop arrangement and play it while you dance around the floor with Blues Sandman himself. Every other woman in the place turns green with envy, that’s for sure.”

  Miss Withers took a deep breath. “It all sounds very—”

  “Sure it does! And the tab for you and your lovely daughter, up to a hundred bucks, will be on the cuff. Compliments of the management.”

  “But—”

  “It’s all set. You girls’ll have the best ringside table with orchids and a magnum of laughing-water. Look for you at nine-thirty.” He was backing out of the door, still talking. For once Miss Hildegarde Withers, caught between her real and assumed personalities, had nothing to say. Through her mind went nightmarish visions—the horrible idea of a bebop version of the Bell Song, herself being danced willy-nilly around the ballroom floor by some bobby-sox idol known as Blues Sandman, while out in La Porte, Indiana, the real Mrs. Goggins was no doubt listening at her fireside. The schoolteacher shuddered helplessly.

  But Jeeps leaped, like Horatius to the bridge, “Just a minute, Mr. Forrest. I’m not Mrs. Goggins’s daughter, I’m—I’m her companion and business agent. Her fee for a personal radio appearance is twenty thousand dollars.”

  The smile froze on Jerry Forrest’s pudgy face, and he reached for the doorknob. “What—wha—” he gargled.

  “She got more than that in money and merchandise last time,” Jeeps continued with sweet reasonableness. “It will be cash in advance.”

  There was a long, stiff silence. “I—I’ll have to let you know,” he mumbled, then turned and fled. Miss Withers sat down in a big chair, fanning herself.

  “Thank you,” she said softly. “What a tangled web we weave—”

  “You just have to know how to handle men,” the girl announced. “You know, I think this is going to be thrilling!”

  “Our tastes differ,” the schoolteacher pointed out. “But never let it be said that Hildegarde Withers flinched from her bounden duty.” She hitched up her bangles for the second time, and then grimly stalked out and down the corridor.

  Like a lamb going to the slaughter, she said to herself. Only this lamb has teeth and claws—I hope.

  She already had in her mind a rather clear picture of what Mr. Nemo would be like, a composite of the dreams of all women past girlhood: tall and smelling faintly of tobacco and soap, with the easy, smooth manners and the quiet dress of the high-class confidence man. He would be sure of himself, and wary—he would hold aloof, keeping his fire like a big-game hunter scorning smaller stuff and looking only for a prize head to add to his collection.

  As the elevator reached the lobby floor Miss Withers stepped out briskly, not noticing that the operator had brought the car to a stop a fraction of an inch below the floor level, and forgetting that she was wearing heels twice the height to which she was accustomed. She gave a lady-like squeal as she fell forward—and then was caught in a man’s arms.

  “My dear lady, are you all right?” His voice was high but pleasant, with a mocking undercurrent of laughter in it. He was tall, gray at the temples and black at the mustache, with a profile still handsome though perhaps somewhat ravaged by time, and he was in formal day attire which Miss Withers had up to this time seen worn only by undertakers.

  “Yes, thank you so much!” she gasped, as she got her balance again. Then, as he smiled engagingly and went on into the elevator with the rest of his party, she said softly to herself under her breath, “Beginner’s luck!”

  “Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein.”

  —Proverbs

  5

  NO TELEVISION SET RENDERS ITS flickering entertainment in the Hotel Grandee’s Platinum Lounge. In place of a juke-box there is a languid marimba band from south of the border that breaks occasionally into a paso doble or a tango. The décor leans heavily toward polished chrome and black mirrors, and the diffused lighting is in so low a key that sometimes passers-by drop in not to drink but just to load their cameras.

  Yet during the cocktail hour, which is nowadays anywhere between noon and nine p. m., the lounge is heavily patronized by guests of the hotel and by the general public—or at least that level of the general public which can relax over drinks priced at $1.25 and up. Into this crowded, dark, sweet-smelling saloon marched Miss Hildegarde Withers the afternoon of her second day at the Grandee, feeling more than ever like a jackdaw in peacock’s plumes.

  She found a table and ordered white wine and seltzer from the brisk Filipino waiter, then settled down to a critical study of the place and its denizens. More women than men, unfortunately, but that was to be expected at this hour. Bits of brittle laughter, fragments of unrelated conversation came in a confusing medley from all directions. People talked of baby-sitters, high prices, income-tax refunds, and the worsening condition of
their friends’ morals or politics, with now and then an unfavorable word for psychoanalytical movies, those fellows down in Washington, or the Long Island Railroad.

  Nobody mentioned murder at all.

  For a long, long time Miss Withers sat there, while the ice slowly melted in her glass. Like the Skeleton at the Feast! she said to herself. Only nobody spoke to her, nobody noticed her.

  Once she caught the eye of a pale and balding man across the room who seemed to be staring in her direction, but he immediately looked away and after a moment fell busily to scribbling on the back of the wine-list. A poet, she told herself. He has descended from his ivory tower, taken a job with an advertising agency, and now comes every day to mingle with the hectic throng in search of inspiration.

  She wished, suddenly, that she had brought along something to read. But perhaps that would have been out of character. And besides, the light was bad.

  “Madam!” said a gentle masculine voice at her shoulder, and she looked around hopefully, trying to smile an alluring smile. But it was only the waiter. “Would madam mind moving to a smaller table over there? I have a party of four—”

  So she moved, a little flustered. It was a move that brought her closer to her poet with the wine-list, who now was staring at her again. She noticed out of the corner of her eye that he wasn’t a poet at all, but something much more interesting. The man had dumped some of the ink from his pen into the dregs of his highball, and now with the end of a match was busily engaged in doing a rapid wash drawing.

  A few minutes later Miss Withers realized with a start that he was doing a drawing of her!

  She caught her breath, and took a good sip of the white wine and seltzer, choking a little. Could this be it? Somehow she had seen Mr. Nemo as a somewhat different type, handsomer, more debonair. But the sketch artist was striking, in a way. The nose was remarkable, jutting out like a jib. He was well-dressed, too—though colorlessly. He had a soft mouth, like a child’s, and long, stained fingers.

  The next time he looked up from the drawing she stared him full in the face, and smiled brightly. “May I see it when it’s finished?” she said in a stage whisper. The direct approach.

  He hastily began to gather up his belongings. I’ve scared him off! she told herself.

  And then he came over to her table. “You can see it now,” he said in a voice that was spiced with a dash of south-European accent. “Hope you don’t mind my taking the liberty—”

  “Not at all!” she cried. The drawing was strangely provocative, an excellent likeness in spite of all it left out, and subtly flattering. “How nice,” Miss Withers told him.

  “Of ordinary models I am tired,” he said simply. “Your bones are beautiful.”

  “My—my bones?”

  “Yes. Have you ever sat?”

  “Sat? Why, I’m sitting now—oh, you mean for a portrait?”

  The man nodded. “My name is Jonathan, not Jonathan anything, just Jonathan. I pick it myself because my original one sounds like something scrambled. I am a Czech. In the old country I paint murals, but here—one needs money. So I paint portraits. I have a garret on East Forty-Ninth near the river. All day long I paint portraits of beautiful, simpering women. You come see my place sometime, no? I paint you.”

  “Really? How very flattering!”

  “Yes,” he told her. “Because you have beautiful bones, I want to paint you.” He looked at her, like a numismatist studying a blackened old Etruscan coin. “I charge the others five thousand dollars because they simper. You I paint for half price, because of the bones.” He handed her a business card, bearing only a pen self-portrait and an address.

  “Why—I’ll have to think about it.”

  “Think—and come soon,” Jonathan told her, and abruptly left, taking the wine-card sketch with him. Miss Withers wondered if his hasty departure had anything to do with the fact that a burly man whom she correctly took to be one of the hotel’s house detectives had just entered the lounge and was strolling between the tables with elaborate unconcern.

  Dear me! she said to herself. For a minute I almost thought—

  The waiter left a service tray on her table for a moment and she managed to get rid of her own drink by dumping it into an empty popcorn bowl. Then she caught sight of a familiar profile approaching. Today, she noticed approvingly, he was wearing a dark pin-stripe suit and a bright boyish tie, with the inevitable fresh gardenia. Summoning her courage, she waved and cried, “Yoo-hoo!”

  There wasn’t another unoccupied chair in the place except the one at her table, and the big man sank into it gratefully. “What ho!” he said. “No ill effects from yesterday?”

  “No, but I do want to thank you properly for your gallantry. Last night I’m afraid I was too shaken up and upset—”

  “Not at all!” He snapped his fingers with quiet authority. “Waiter, a double brandy and water for me. And what are you drinking, Mrs.—?” He’d noticed the Woolworth wedding ring, then.

  “Sherry,” she said quickly. “I’ll have a dry Goggins. I mean, I’m Mrs. Goggins and I’ll have a dry sherry.” This was no time to get buck fever.

  “Amontillado,” he told the waiter. “Haven’t we met before somewhere, Mrs. Goggins? I’m Peter Temple.”

  His high, pleasant voice lingered so lovingly on the name that Miss Withers took a chance and said, wide-eyed, “Not the Peter Temple?”

  It was a snap shot, but dead on target. Even in the semi-darkness she could see the handsome, ravaged face light up like a neon sign. “Dear lady! Don’t tell me you remember? Not everyone does, nowadays.”

  “Oh, yes!” she gushed. “I thought so last night—but I wasn’t quite sure, and I hadn’t my glasses.” Staring raptly into his face, she probed her excellent memory and finally out of the ghosts of the departed past there came scenes like bits of film from the dust of the cutting-room floor, flashes of the profile on magazine covers and billboards, glimpses through the smeared windshield of a Time Machine. Of course! Along with Francis X. Bushman and Norman Kerry and Charlie Ray, one Peter Temple had swaggered his brief hour and made his pantomimic love to Clara Kimball Young and Norma Talmadge and Mary Miles Minter, in the days of the Silents.

  Good heavens, isn’t he dead? was her first thought. But no, he was here, waiting for her to say something. “You were wonderful in uniform,” she sighed softly. That ought to be safe; in those early movies the leading men wore costume most of the time.

  Temple smiled approvingly, and toasted her with what was left of the brandy and water. “Dear lady! Then you remember Hearts of the Mounted, Soldier of the Legion, and Singing Swords—?”

  “They don’t make pictures like that any more,” sighed Miss Withers with complete truthfulness. “By the way, Mr. Temple, perhaps the reason you thought we’d been introduced somewhere was that you’ve seen some of my publicity. I too was in Arcady—”

  “Remember that duel I fought with Jack Gilbert in Nights of Madness?”

  “You see,” she continued with polite persistence, “I’m the Mrs. Goggins, who guessed that Miss Whosit on that radio program was really Elizabeth Arden with a cold. Now I’m here in the big city for a sort of spree—I guess you could call me a merry widow!”

  Peter Temple put down his glass and turned to her suddenly, shaking his head. “No, dear lady. I wasn’t in Merry Widow. Perhaps you’re thinking of She Loves a Captain, that Graustark story I did for Essanay before I went over to Imp?”

  So it went. Miss Withers found that she didn’t have to worry about what to say, nor about disposing of her sherry. All that was required of her was to sit quietly and listen while Peter Temple put away one double brandy after another and wandered in a happy monologue down Memory Lane.

  Nor was there any end, apparently. At long last the thwarted schoolteacher looked at her watch and cried, “Oh, heavens! I’ve a ticket for the theater, and I don’t want to miss the first act or I’ll never know what it’s all about.” She beckoned to the hovering Filipino, conc
ealing in her lap the folded five-hundred-dollar bill with which she hoped to cinch the impression she had made. “Now don’t say no, Mr. Temple. This just must be my party!”

  His smile was quick and easy. “But I wouldn’t think of it!” From his pocket Temple produced a black pin-seal wallet heavy with gold initials, and took out a single currency note. “Take it out of this, waiter. Sorry I have nothing smaller.”

  It was a thousand-dollar bill. The Filipino shied away from it, shrugging helplessly. Then Temple rose. “They’ll do it for me at the desk,” he told Miss Withers. “You’ll excuse me a moment?” He went out of the room, walking with rigid balance like a trapeze artist.

  But he did not return, steadily or otherwise. After a lapse of time the schoolteacher fished around in her handbag and found a ten and a five, for which she got back from the waiter only a broad grin of thanks. It had been her party, after all.

  That was on a Wednesday. On Monday next Inspector Oscar Piper, looking a little more worn than usual from a week-end of worrying about how best to roll with the next punch thrown by the new assistant-commissioner over in the Municipal Building, came down to his office with an additional maggot gnawing away in the back of his mind. He pressed the talk-box key on his desk. “Smith!”

  “Good morning, Inspector,” came the offensively cheery greeting.

  “Smitty, you remember that dame who smeared herself all over the sidewalk outside the Grandee up on Park one night last summer? Barton, her name was.”

  “Sure I do. There didn’t seem to be anything that wasn’t kosher about it, so we marked the file Closed and sent it down to Records. The name was Bascom, Harriet Bascom.”

  “So it’s Bascom!” Nowadays the Inspector was continually having bits of unimportant detail slip his mind, but he didn’t especially relish being corrected. “Get the file,” he ordered.

  “Okay. Something new on the case? I didn’t think—”

  “No! I just want to refer to it in my memoirs I’m writing!” He hit the key savagely, cutting off the conversation. Back when he was a sergeant there hadn’t been any back talk when an inspector gave an order, not to his face anyway. But that had been twenty—well, never mind how many years ago it had been.