Four Lost Ladies (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

  Indicating a chair, he said, “Mrs. Rowan? Sit down, please. I’m Warden Boyington.”

  “How do you do?” she said a little weakly, as she refused a proffered cigarette.

  “May I say, Mrs. Rowan, that you don’t look quite as I expected?”

  “Oh yes, yes of course!” She even managed a wavering smile. “I am a little older than my poor husband, but—”

  The warden held a gold lighter to his own cigarette. “I didn’t mean that. You seem,” he went on gently, “to have aged considerably, and also to have grown some three or four inches taller, since you were up here a couple of weeks ago.”

  “But—why, naturally I’ve been sick with worry, and perhaps I’m not looking my best. And these high heels I’m wearing …” She stopped, and there was a long uncomfortable silence. Then Miss Hildegarde Withers hitched up her diamond bracelets and said, “Well, warden, it was worth trying anyway!”

  Warden Boyington suddenly hit his desk so hard that all its accumulation of pens and little ornaments and vases of flowers leaped up into the air and did a little samba dance. “Damn it to hell, ma’am, I hate reporters!”

  “But warden—”

  “You’re under arrest. Now laugh that off.”

  “Man, a hybrid of plant and ghost.”

  —Nietzsche

  2.

  LAUGHTER WAS AT THAT moment farthest from Miss Wither’s thoughts. There were a number of things she would have liked to say, but the warden wasn’t giving her the chance. “It’s time one of you people had a lesson,” he remarked with some bitterness. “Once, before my term of office, a reporter sneaked a camera into the execution chamber, and next day the world was edified by a portrait of Ruth Snyder when the current scorched her. I suppose, ma’am, you thought it would be an equally smart scoop to get a sob-sister interview with a man in the condemned block by pretending to be his wife. You might just possibly have got away with it, if Keeper Huff hadn’t been on his toes.”

  Miss Withers hastily took in sail and ran her true colors up to the masthead, only it turned out that the warden didn’t like amateur detectives either! “But warden, just suppose this man Rowan is really innocent,” she demanded during the next lull.

  Warden Boyington looked at her with ill-concealed aversion. “They’re all innocent, to hear them tell it. We’ve hardly ever had a convict in this place who didn’t claim he was framed. Every man in the condemned block sits day after day puzzling over law books and trying out writs and briefs and appeals, figuring that the rest of his mates will have to die but he’s different. I tell you—”

  “Tell me this,” she said. “Rowan has been up here almost six months. You must know him, must have talked to him. Does he impress you as a guilty man?”

  The warden shrugged. “How would I know? We’ve never had an ‘innocent’ man in the condemned cells, to my knowledge. They’re as good as dead when they go in. I’ll admit Rowan is confident, or claims to be, that some miracle will save him, but that’s not uncommon.”

  “Only that odd will he made—”

  “How’d you get wind of that?” Warden Boyington hit his desk again. “If Huff let that out of the bag—”

  She shook her head. “I can’t reveal my sources of information.”

  “Well, I’ll reveal something to you. It is my unpleasant duty to inform you that it’s a misdemeanor to enter a state prison under false pretenses, and a felony to forge a false name in the visitors’ book. Let’s see you fast-talk your way out of that!”

  Miss Withers closed her eyes, having a clear vision of months in a dungeon cell on dry bread and water, surrounded by large slimy rats. As a desperate last resort she had to swallow what was left of her pride and implore the man to check on her bona fides with a long distance call to Spring 7-3100. “You can even reverse the charges,” she offered hopefully as a clincher.

  It took some persuading, but finally Warden Boyington put through the call. He listened, relaxed a little, and then passed the instrument across the desk to her. After it was all over he painstakingly hung up the phone again and silently indicated the door. So it was with her ears still burning from the Inspector’s caustic “I told you so!” that Miss Withers gathered together her borrowed and rented finery, clinging to what little dignity was left to her.

  Yet she could not resist one last attempt. “Warden,” she said, “as man to man, tell me what you think about that last will and testament of Andrew Rowan’s!”

  “I think it’s a practical joke, that’s what I think! Men in the condemned row sometimes develop an odd sense of humor. They love to send comic valentines and doggerel poetry, sometimes to me and sometimes to the police or the district attorney or whoever on the outside they blame for their being here. There’s the old unfunny gag about the convict who had one last little request as they led him to the chair—he said he wanted the warden to sit on his lap.”

  She frowned. “And how would you feel about executing an innocent man?”

  “I wouldn’t feel any different. I’m only a servant of the people, carrying out orders of the court. Personally I am opposed to capital punishment, and my wife sneaks sedatives in my coffee at dinner every day we have an execution. But I’m not an individual, I’m an instrument.”

  “Monsieur de Paris at least wore a black mask!” snapped the schoolteacher, and stalked out of the place.

  “Almost!” she sighed dismally to herself as the gates clanged. But almost was to no avail, almost was but to fail. And with the one question she had wanted to ask Andy Rowan still unanswered. Eight days from now he might not be alive to answer it. She had no very clear idea of what “the week of September twentieth” really meant, of whether they executed a man on Monday or kept him around until the following Sunday night, but to all intents and purposes it worked out the same. Judging by the progress she had made so far, Rowan would surely die for the Harrington girl’s murder—and the Inspector, the only man in her life even though she detested him one day and mothered him the next, would be pilloried in the press when the news of the will got out.

  Immediately after a murder the press was always crying for the blood of the fiend who had perpetrated it, but after somebody had been found guilty and sentenced to death the papers were equally avid to reopen the story with a suggestion that an innocent man had been crushed under the Juggernaut of Justice. And this time, the exception that proves the rule, it might very well be true.

  Somewhat baffled, the schoolteacher suffered herself to be borne back to Manhattan in her hired limousine. Then, as they went through the outskirts of Yonkers, she suddenly cried aloud, “Of all the unmitigated idiots!”

  The driver, having just won a narrow victory in a brush with a truck trying to make a left turn, turned an irate face. “What was that crack, lady?”

  “Not you—me!” Miss Withers said hastily. “I forgot about the money!”

  Which naturally made the man leap to the conclusion that she was trying to get the charges put on the cuff. But the schoolteacher paid him off, adding a very modest tip, outside her little apartment on West 74th, and then rushed inside to divest herself of her borrowed plumage and to make peace with Talleyrand, her French poodle. Talley was a gregarious canine, He liked regular meals and more than food he liked companionship, both of which had been denied him all day long. He welcomed her as one returned from the dead, then rushed to open the closet door. It was one of his self-taught tricks, and he had to turn the knob very carefully with his teeth, but he came triumphantly galumphing back with his leash.

  “Very well,” said the schoolteacher. “But it will be a very short walk indeed, for I have work to do. The game is afoot.”

  They went once around the block, with Talleyrand pausing now and then to investigate a new smell or to grab up a scrap of secondhand chewing gum, but as they came back to the familiar steps of the brownstone his mistress paused, tapping her prominent front teeth with a fingernail. “On second thought, perhaps you may as well come with me after all,”
she decided. “Any woman anchored to a big silly apricot-colored beast like you will be taken at sight for an eccentric of the first water. Which is the exact impression I wish to convey.”

  Talley vibrated what there was left of his tail, and showed an incredibly red tongue in a doggish laugh. He was a home-loving dog, but not very.

  So the retired schoolteacher and her gamboling Standard poodle set out on the quest. It was a search filled with ups and downs, and required the pulling of many strings and the taking of certain liberties with the truth, but she eventually discovered that the present owner of the house on Prospect Way was a Mrs. Emil Fogel. There was a very slim chance indeed that she would have any information about the previous owner, but it was worth a try. At ten o’clock next morning Miss Hildegarde Withers, still complete with dog, went out by appointment to see about buying a house.

  The shades were still drawn, the windows still unwashed, but this time the door opened at her first knock. There stood a shapely girl in slacks, whose sultry mouth and bright strawberry hair suggested that somewhere farther downtown, perhaps Times Square, would have been her more natural habitat,

  “You’re Mrs. Fogel?” demanded the schoolteacher.

  “She couldn’t make it,” the girl said. “I’m her secretary-companion.” She looked dubiously down at Talley, who was straining at the leash and curling a black lip to bare one gleaming fang. “Does it bite?” Miss Withers told her of course not. “But it looks as if he’s snarling.”

  “Nonsense, child, he’s only chewing leftover gum again. A terrible habit, but I’m thankful he hasn’t found out about tobacco. So Mrs. Fogel couldn’t keep the appointment, after all? I guess she isn’t very anxious to sell the property.”

  “Oh, but she is! I can give you all the details—”

  Miss Withers had already infiltrated the front hallway, furnished sparingly with a telephone table, a hard bench, and an ancient upright victrola, circa 1910. It was but a step past heavy draperies into the big living room, whose French doors would have looked out into the garden if the blinds had been opened. The girl touched a switch and a bowl-shaped chandelier glowed feebly overhead. It was a somber room, filled with ponderous overstuffed chairs and fumed-oak tables, and the gilt-framed portrait on one wall of a scowling man with a toothbrush moustache did not brighten it.

  “The asking price is $28,000-$30,000 if you take furniture and all.”

  “I see,” said Miss Withers, casually ruffling the poodle’s silky topknot. “But isn’t that a little high? Shouldn’t there be some reduction because of the possibility of the place being haunted? There was a very gruesome murder committed here last year, you know.”

  The young woman winced, as if somebody had hit a very sour chord on a piano. Then she said, too quickly, “Oh, was there? I hadn’t heard.”

  “But surely the present owner must have heard? Perhaps that’s why she’s so anxious to sell?”

  “Yes, but—Mrs. Fogel’s only owned the place a short time, and—”

  “Fiddlesticks. That “For Sale’ sign on the lawn has been weathering there too long for the house to have changed owners very recently. And someone is living here right now, even though the door isn’t opened except by appointment.”

  “But Mrs. Fogel—”

  “Suppose we stop playing games, and call her by her real name. Mrs. Fogel wouldn’t have any reason for hiding out, but Natalie Rowan might. Ask Mrs. Rowan to step in please!”

  It was a direct hit, on target. The young eyes were wide as saucers. “But Mrs. Rowan isn’t—I mean Mrs. Fogel isn’t seeing anyone, I mean—”

  “You little fool, you don’t know what you mean!” interrupted a hoarse feminine voice from the hallway. The woman who abruptly pushed through the draperies was somewhere in her early forties, though her eyes were older. She was handsome still, yet there was something about her that suggested a comely turtle, a turtle vulnerable and trying hard to pretend it hadn’t been pried out of its shell. She said, “Iris, well excuse you!”

  Iris hesitated, shrugged her firm young shoulders, and then walked out of the room in a reasonably good imitation of Miss Tallulah Bankhead making an exit from a stage overcrowded with bit players.

  Natalie Rowan said firmly, “I really have no statement whatever for the press.” She pointedly did not sit down.

  Miss Withers found that in spite of herself she liked the woman. She was always drawn to lame dogs and beggars, and here was a soul in desperate trouble but keeping a stiff upper lip. Besides, it was a little flattering to be taken for a member of the Fourth Estate. “Goodness, I’m not a reporter,” confessed the dowdy middle-aged schoolma’am. “Though I’m being mistaken for one so often these days I’m beginning to think I should take out a card in the Newspaper Guild. Mrs. Rowan—”

  “And if you don’t mind, I prefer to use the name of my first husband at this time. To avoid as much unpleasant notoriety as possible. You cannot imagine how heartless the photographers and so on can be!”

  For all her assurance, the woman was tense and afraid; pulled up taut as an Estring. But Miss Withers was already over her quota on mercy that day. “Never mind your first husband,” she probed briskly. “Your present husband has barely seven more days to live.”

  Another hit, below the belt. Twisting her rings, Natalie whispered, “And—and just what is that to you?”

  “I’m glad you asked me that question,” said the schoolteacher with a wry smile. “Because I’ve been asking it of myself for some time, without finding an answer. However, there’s always this. Shouldn’t any good citizen be interested in preventing a possible miscarriage of justice, especially when the regularly constituted authorities are simply sitting around like bumps on a log?”

  It was all a little over Natalie’s head. “You’re not from the police, then?”

  “Far from them indeed at the moment,” said Miss Withers with a disarming frankness. “Though I am perfectly willing to admit that I may have been of some slight assistance to Inspector Piper once or twice in the past.” The schoolteacher introduced herself, and gave a rather sketchy explanation of how she had come to be interested in the affair. She even went so far as to mention the will.

  “Andy did that?” cried the woman blankly. “I don’t understand. Why didn’t he leave it to—not that I need the money at all, only—”

  “Only your pride has taken a considerable beating already, is that it? Shall we forget that angle for a moment? Your husband has made a will which seems to be aimed at clearing his name of the taint of murder, posthumously. That proves he still loves you.”

  “It—it does?” Natalie looked doubtful.

  “Of course. He wants to have you remember him as an innocent man, as he may well be. But the time to do something about it is now, not after the execution. This is an unusual situation and requires unusual measures, of which I have a complete set or so the Inspector often tells me. To come right down to cases, steps have to be taken—and you have to help. You can’t just sit here and wash your hands of the man you married.”

  “Why, I—”

  “And I have an idea that, even while you refused to stand by your husband at the trial, you still must have cared enough about him to pay his lawyers—or else he wouldn’t have $3500 left in his bank account after the costs of the trial and appeal. Wasn’t that because you still had a sneaking fondness for him?”

  The woman dropped into a chair, soft and helpless as an opened oyster. She nodded slowly. “Yes,” she whispered, “I arranged for his defense. It was a firm who used to represent my first husband, Emil Fogel.” Her eyes flickered toward the portrait on the wall. “He manufactured cotter pins, you know. I still think the lawyers did their best for Andy, but he was a very noncooperative client. Anyway, I did all I could for him, just as any woman would have.”

  “But you didn’t show up to sit beside him at the trial, even though the lawyers must have told you that it might help him considerably. You kept aloof from him all through his orde
al—”

  Natalie cried, in a tortured voice, “But he had told me that girl meant nothing to him, that she was only a client, and all the time—” She gulped. “All the time they were having secret trysts right here in our—in my house, where we’d been so happy!”

  “My dear woman,” said Miss Withers, “a man may be a liar and a philanderer, but still be innocent of murder.”

  There was a silence so complete that the schoolteacher could hear Talley’s soft snoring beside her foot, and the ticking of a little ormolu clock across the room. Then Natalie Rowan drew a deep shuddering breath, like someone about to dive off the high board into cold water. “I know he’s innocent,” she whispered. “Now.”

  “So that’s why you went up to the prison to see him? How splendid!” cried Miss Withers cheerily. “Now at long last we have something to go on. If you’ve run across anything in the line of proof—”

  Natalie hesitated, looking across the room. “I’m afraid it isn’t anything the police, or even you, would take any stock in.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” said Miss Withers, still confident. “In my time I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Then she added, as the other woman stared at her blankly, “That’s from Alice.”

  “Miss Withers, do you believe in the Hereafter?” Natalie asked suddenly.

  “Why—as a member in good standing of the Parkway Unitarian Church, I suppose I must, though I couldn’t offer scientific proof of the fact.”