“That would take care of your worry about her personal safety, wouldn’t it?” put in the Old Man. “You see, Piper, whether they find anything basically wrong with her or not, she’d be safe there.”
The Inspector took out a cigar, thoughtfully broke it up into inch lengths, and put it into the ash tray. “I don’t know what to say. The woman’s as sane as I am. This whole thing—”
Then the phone rang. The Old Man answered it, and then said, “It seems to be for you, Inspector.”
“Piper speaking.”
The clear, Bostonian accents were loud enough so that they could all hear every word Miss Withers said, clustering closer as they were: “Oscar, did you get my message? Isn’t it wonderful? I only have a minute, so listen carefully. Tell Jeeps to take Talley with her to Bagley’s Mills for a few days. I’m flying, but dogs can’t fly!”
“Wait—” But the connection was broken, and so, apparently, was the Inspector. He hung up automatically and then stood there for a moment, his shoulders slumping.
“Dogs can’t fly,” said Kiley softly. “But she can. Doctor, I think this cinches it. We’re all agreed that this lady’s wings will have to be clipped so that a straitjacket will fit over them.”
Even the Old Man nodded. Piper turned to face him. “Then sure and is there any reason why I can’t be relieved of duty, as of now?”
“Of course not, but—”
Even now the assistant-commissioner had to butt in. “Until the hearing Tuesday, you mean. You’ll be there?”
“You be there!” the Inspector growled. His Irish was up. “Because, faith and when it’s over and I turn in the badge I’ve worn for—for too many years, I’m going to take you outside and so help me, I’m going to lower the boom!”
“There’s a bat or two in every belfry.”
—Yankee proverb
14
THE WRONG ALICE HAD HER suitcase packed and waiting by the door. It was nearly midnight, but the girl still sat perched in a big chair in Miss Withers’s little living-room, as stiff and proper and bewildered as a child at a funeral. Talley the poodle sat pressing against her shin for comfort, sensing that something was wrong with his world.
“But there must be something we can do!” Jeeps said, for the dozenth time.
The Inspector, who had been pacing up and down the room gnawing cigars, suddenly stopped and faced her. “Sure there is. You can take the dog, like she asked me to tell you, and go back home to wherever it is. You’ll do her no good here, and neither will the pup.”
“But to think of her wandering around somewhere, in her condition—”
“Her what?”
“Oh,” the girl said hastily, “I don’t mean that I think there was anything the least wrong with her mind. I’d sort of got used to the way she talks—you know, sometimes in a sort of shorthand, and with a lot of poetic allusions and stuff. It was me, I mean, I who called her Joan of Arc—”
“I know what you mean,” Piper said dryly. “Joan of Arc crossed with Carrie Nation, and a dash of Evangeline Booth.”
“But she was terribly discouraged, mostly because she’d got you into so much trouble. When sensitive people get gloomy and morbid—”
“Pish! I’ve known Hildegarde Withers for sixteen years, and she’s no more morbid than a—a canary bird. She wouldn’t contemplate taking her own life under any set of circumstances whatever. And besides, she wasn’t gloomy when she phoned my office, either time. She was riding high—so happy and excited that she bubbled over. She must have found out something, or else at least thought she saw the answer. Of course she sounded incoherent to anybody who didn’t know her.”
“Could I see the message she left for you?”
Piper hesitated. “Haven’t got it with me,” he lied. “Anyway, it didn’t say much that made sense even to me. Of course Fink probably garbled it up some in transcribing her own notes. She has the mind of a gnat. All I made out of it was that Hildegarde knew Ethel Brinker was dead, and if she was dead then so were the other three—dead as mutton. Oh, it’s your aunt, isn’t it? I’m sorry.”
Jeeps said, surprisingly, “I know my aunt is dead. I’ve known it for weeks. Besides, she wouldn’t have written a telegram like that. ‘My niece and namesake Alice D.’ phooey! She’d have called me Allie.”
“Some people freeze up when they write a telegram.”
“Maybe! But on top of that, my aunt never sent a collect telegram to anybody in her life! She was too—too polite. And there wasn’t a mean streak in her, about money or anything else.”
The Inspector nodded. He looked at his watch. “What time is the last train?”
“Twelve-thirty. It gets me in in the morning.”
“Take it,” he ordered. “You and the pup. I’ll handle things at this end, and let you know. There’s nothing much either one of us can do. She’ll be picked up and taken over to Bellevue whenever she pokes her face out in the street.”
Jeeps got up and started to put on her coat. “Okay. Only—I do hope they’ll be gentle with her.”
“I hope she’ll be gentle with them! Any psychiatrist trying to poke around in Hildegarde Withers’s mind is going to have his ears pinned back flat. It’ll probably be like the night she spent in the station-house tank—she’ll be leading them in community singing.” But there was almost too much confidence in his voice.
“But if something’s happened to her—”
He almost smiled. “Things don’t happen to Hildegarde, she happens to them. But I’ll try to take care of that end of it. Scoot now.” He picked up her bag. “I’ll take this down to a taxi for you.”
“But you’re going to stay here all night?”
“Yes. She might come back, and the Old Man said I could break it to her. And if they pick her up, they’ll phone me here. When she—when she’s safe.”
“Oh, that’s just swell, isn’t it?” The girl snapped the leash on the puzzled poodle’s collar and ran lightly down the stairs. But when the Inspector put her into the taxi he saw that her cheeks were wet.
He said to himself, as he went wearily back up the stairs, If that girl played traitor to Hildegarde in any way I’ll march in the next St. Patrick’s Day parade with an orange ribbon in my buttonhole.
Oscar Piper took off his shoes and sat down in the big chair near the silent telephone. After a while his head slipped back and he slept fitfully, waking up in the morning as stiff as a board.
He stood up, rubbed his aching muscles, and then washed himself and warmed up some stale coffee. Before he drank it he called Bellevue and then Headquarters, but there was nothing to report.
For Hildegarde Withers to vanish, with every cop in New York looking for her, was a manifest impossibility. With the clothes she wore, the cotton umbrella, and the voluminous handbag—and the hat—she must stand out, wherever she was, like a hawk in a henyard. He checked her bedroom closet and decided that the bonnet she had gone out in had been the one that looked like a bon-voyage basket ten hours after sailing time.
Her blue cape was gone, but he didn’t know enough about the rest of her clothes to do any guessing. Likewise about the money—Jeeps had said that sometimes she kept it in the bottom of a double boiler in the cupboard and sometimes under the folded newspapers in the bottom of the garbage can in the kitchen, but both were empty. Her toothbrush was in its proper place in the bathroom, but she very well might have had a spare.
The Inspector wandered back into the dining-room and sat down at the table with the famous black notebook before him and another cup of bitter second-run coffee at his side. Too many people had been vanishing, at least for his taste. Not three thousand, as Hildegarde had argued in the beginning, but still too many. Besides the four whose messages had been so oddly unsatisfactory, there was Tad Belanger at the Grandee, Flower Quinn from down in Greenwich Village. And now Miss Withers herself.
Probably the answers were all here in the notebook, somewhere. Because the old girl was thorough in her way. He read throu
gh the dossiers on the four women, the notes on Harriet Bascom, and Miss Withers’s penciled impressions of the various men whom at one time or another she had suspected of being Mr. Nemo—or at least of knowing something about his activities. Peter Temple, Count Stroganyeff, Jonathan the artist, Jerry Forrest, and the rest—Piper suddenly wished that he had them all in the back room at some precinct station where he could beat the truth out of them with a rubber hose and the toe of his boot. But those days were gone forever.
Today the Department put its faith in gadgets—in lie-detector tests and truth serums and laboratory tests and wire-tapping devices. Hardly anybody even walked a beat any more, and when they did call on the few remaining mounted units, the horses and men were rushed to the scene in a van. They even had three planes and a Bell D-47 helicopter out in Brooklyn. …
I’m going about this thing the wrong way, the Inspector told himself angrily. I’m thinking like a cop, and if eighteen thousand cops haven’t found Hildegarde yet, then I’m not going to either. What would she do, now?
There was the old saw about the yokel who could always find lost cows because he thought where he would go if he was a cow and he went there and there she was. But Piper found himself completely unable to put himself in the state of mind of a spinster schoolteacher with a bee in her bonnet and a pocketful of money. Hildegarde was as unpredictable as the weather. He took out Fink’s transcription of the telephone message and read it over carefully:
Tell him everything is going to be all right because I had the same dream four times running and finally it dawned on me what it meant. Ethel Brinker isn’t Ethel Brinker at all, she isn’t even alive. I went over to the Canal Club and found that they send out blank filigrees and blanks to anybody who writes in. And it wasn’t the pollywog’s signature on the papers. Of course a registered nurse doesn’t put aren’t after her name when she signs a letter, particularly not when she signs her married name. If the Brinker thing falls to pieces they all fall. And I think I see how Nobody worked it. There’s been a traitor in my own camp, I’ve been nursing a viper to my bosom, and my little black book was opened to the enemy. Pick a flower tomorrow especially if it has false teeth.
Inspector Piper sighed. He had already checked, and there wasn’t a night spot or any other place in town known as the “Canal Club.” But the rest, except for bits here and there, was gibberish.
It wouldn’t have looked so bad if it hadn’t been for the other phone call, when Hildegarde had announced that she was flying, but that dogs can’t fly. There was no getting around that.
Finally Piper gave it up and walked across town to his own home. He needed a bath and a shave, but more than that he needed a new brain. The old one was very definitely getting rusty.
“And he that stands upon a slippery place
Makes nice of no vile hold to stay him up.”
—Shakespeare
15
IT WAS LATE IN THE AFTERNOON WHEN the Inspector, weary with fruitless checking of hospitals and morgues, put down the phone and fared forth into the wind and storm. Anything at all was better than inaction. From force of habit he took the subway down to what had been, until yesterday, his office. After all, he had a box of cigars and a lot of other personal stuff in the desk.
Probationer Fink followed him into the inner office. No, there was nothing new on Miss Hildegarde Withers. She had dropped out of sight as a stone drops into the water, only not even a ripple remained. Her disappearance was total and complete, though every policeman in greater New York was supposed to be looking for her.
“No messages?” he demanded.
“No personal ones,” the woman said. “Mr. Kiley’s orders were that anything official was to be referred to him or to Captain Gruber over at Homicide.”
Piper demonstrated to her that he still carried his gold badge. “Come clean, Fink. What came in?”
“Well, there were two telegrams,” she admitted reluctantly. “And a couple of phone calls. But it’s just stuff for the Nut file, like the rest of the stuff that poured in after those Wanted flyers went out. Captain Gruber said that it wasn’t important.”
“Give!” he said. “That’s an order, too.”
The first telegram had been filed at Miami Beach, Florida, at eight-thirty that morning, prepaid. It was short and sweet: DISREGARD PREVIOUS MESSAGE. LOVE. ALICE DAVIDSON.
“Sweet spirits of turpentine!” exploded the Inspector.
Then there had been the telephone call from Phoenix, Arizona shortly before ten that morning. It had been person-to-person, but the party had been willing to leave a message. “Just tell Inspector Piper that I didn’t mean what I said yesterday. This is Mae Carter speaking, Mae with an e.”
Piper shook his head, somewhat dazed. Next was a prepaid telegram from Los Angeles which had come in a little after noon, signed Ethel Brinker: PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE LETTER. And finally there was another phone call from Sun Valley, station-to-station, which had been taken a few minutes ago by one of the men at the switchboard. Mrs. Atkins said to tell Inspector Piper that all bets were off.
“And you say that Captain Gruber took no action on these?”
Fink nodded, and then shook her head. “No, he didn’t.”
Three messages yesterday—and a letter last week—from widely differing parts of the country. And today four more canceling out the first—from the same people and, except for Brinker, the same times and places. But in that mad garbled message that Miss Withers had dictated to Fink she had made one thing clear. Ethel Brinker was dead.
That, and one thing more. The last line about Pick a flower tomorrow, especially if it has false teeth. Allowing for Fink’s peanut brain, could that have originally been Pick up Flower tomorrow?
Piper made a quick check and found that Captain Gruber on his own authority had rescinded the order to have the Quinn woman brought in for questioning. The Department had no further interest in her.
“But I have,” said the Inspector. He paused to fill his pockets with cigars and then went out of the place. Playing a longshot, he went across town to the Village, wondering how you could ask a woman if she wore a denture. Finally he located Flora Quinn’s apartment, where nobody answered his knock and there was a quart of milk and a newspaper on the mat. These things in themselves might not have meant anything, but he noticed the tiny end of a paper match-stub stuck into the crack of the door jamb at eye level. One of the boys who came down yesterday to try to take the woman in for questioning must have been an old-timer, for it was a trick Piper had learned in his first year in plain-clothes and still sometimes relied upon. If the door had been opened by anybody the stub would have fallen. Flower was still among the missing.
And Hildegarde had been gone for more than twenty-four hours. Even though there was nothing to report, the Inspector remembered that he had promised to let Jeeps Davidson know the situation sometime today. When he reached home he put through a call to Bagley’s Mills.
“Jeeps isn’t home!” a clear girlish voice announced. “No, we don’t know where she is.”
“Another one!” Piper said, and hung up.
He tried for a while to read, and found that he was going through the same paragraph over and over without understanding it. Then he turned on the radio, catching the nine o’clock news. The body of an unidentified woman had been recovered from the Hudson by state police.
Immediately he called Headquarters. “But, Inspector,” protested the man at the switchboard, “that body was found ’way up the river, near Kingston. It couldn’t be Miss Withers.”
“Why not? She’s just contrary enough so if she fell in the river you’d naturally have to look upstream for her!”
But a flash had just come in—that body had been identified as a missing ice-skater. The Inspector poured himself a triple whisky and water, sniffed it, and then threw it glass and all into the sink and went to bed.
All the way across the country, while the big airliner bucked and dipped in the winter turbulence, Flora Q
uinn killed time in her seat by the window, working herself up to the point. She was dressed in a brown gabardine suit that had been Harriet Bascom’s, plus the mutation mink stole that had been part of the lovely loot in the six suitcases, and though she gaped a little at the seams and had difficulty in breathing, she felt somehow arrayed in courage and confidence. Manners may make the man, but clothes make the woman.
Half an hour before landing time she took out her handbag and put on fresh make-up over the old, but all the time her mind was busily rehearsing. It was important that she start off on the right foot—let him know who’s boss. He wasn’t going to have a chance to get set.
She remembered something that she had seen long ago just outside her apartment window—a fierce striped hornet had blundered into a spiderweb and then buzzed angrily, stinging at nothing and entangling itself deeper and deeper. And then finally the fat little spider had come sidling closer—and pounced.
Flora practiced her opening speech over and over to herself, with variations. There was the man-to-man approach: “Well, I’ve pulled it off for you, dearie. Just like you said, letter perfect. Now let’s find a quiet place and sit down and talk about a different cut for little Flower, huh?”
Or she could make it sweet: “I did it for you, big boy. I’d do anything for you, you know that. We’ve been good pals for a long, long time. Gonna take care of Flower so she never has to go back and work in a damn beauty parlor again?”
The main thing was to make him know right off that he hadn’t fooled her with his phony reasons for what she’d had to go and do. She was on to him, and in it all the way. And she’d let him see that she didn’t care, that in fact she really admired him for it. Only of course, now she was in the know the payoff would have to be stepped up. Nobody could be expected to take the risks she had for just peanuts.
Four Lost Ladies (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries) Page 19