The Penguin Pool Murder (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

  “Very good, Casey. If you remember to give your testimony accurately and fully in court I’ll try to have you put on my squad permanently, and in plain clothes. That’s all.”

  The big cop swung proudly out of the door. Piper pressed the button again. “Is Von Donnen out to lunch? Fine, will you ask him to step in here at once?”

  Piper turned to Miss Withers. “Max Van Donnen is the finest laboratory expert that any criminal bureau ever had,” he assured her. There was a rap at the door, and a little wizened man crept in, peering from behind thick lenses at the Inspector. He looked rather more like a push-cart peddler than a laboratory chemist. But his speech was low, resonant, and richly guttural.

  “I haf the stockings analyzed,” he announced when introductions had been completed.

  “Great,” shouted Piper. “And you found traces of blood on the left one? People are always trying to wash away blood with warm water, and it never takes it all out….”

  “Nein … there wass no blood on this stockings,” corrected Herr Von Donnen. “No sign of blood. But something more stranger. That spot was stiff with dried water … water faintly tainted with the excreta of fish!”

  Piper lit a cigar to hide his honest astonishment. “Tell me, then, Herr Von Donnen, was this substance similar to that which might reasonably be expected to accumulate in an Aquarium tank?”

  The little man nodded so hard that his glasses slid along his nose. “To tell you the truth, Inspector, an Aquarium tank is the only place in the wide, wide world where such an accumulation could occur.”

  “Very good,” said Piper slowly, throwing away his cigar. “You’ll be called upon, I fancy, to testify to that in court. Turn the stockings over to the Property Clerk downstairs again, and thank you very much. Good day….”

  When the little man had gone the Inspector turned to Miss Withers. His lower lip protruded, as it always did when he was excited.

  “I guess that busts up Mrs. Gwen Lester’s story that she didn’t go inside the door of the tanks,” he announced triumphantly. “Why, that report is twice as good as one of bloodstains!”

  Miss Withers saw his point. “Maybe … then maybe Philip Seymour is right in saying Gwen did it,” she said thoughtfully. “Unless …”

  “Unless nothing,” Piper told her. “This case is ripe for the grand jury already.”

  11

  The Tumbler in the Booth

  IN THE LONG SILENCE that followed the Inspector’s words, the telephone buzzed like an angry snake. Miss Withers jumped nervously as Piper lifted the receiver. “Hello,” he shouted.

  “Is this Inspector Piper?” came a sweet voice from over the wire.

  “You must have asked for me in order to get put on this line, so you already know that this is Inspector Piper,” said the detective testily. “What do you want?”

  “Are you the gentleman that asked us to trace a phone call that was made yesterday noon to White and Lester at Worth 4438? This is the supervisor of central telephone office speaking….”

  “Yes, yes … of course, madam. You got the number?”

  “Excuse it please, but I was not allowed to give out the number until the manager had made sure who you were. You see, so many unauthorized persons attempt to have numbers traced …”

  “My God, madam, I don’t want a history of your life. Have you got that number?”

  “… that we have to be very, very careful,” continued the serene young voice at the distant end of the wire. “Please excuse it, Inspector Piper. The call you referred to came from Hanover 0200, which is a pay station …”

  “A pay station where?” pleaded the Inspector.

  “A pay station located in a booth in the New York Aquarium in Battery Park,” cooed the voice. “Thank you, please.”

  “Glug,” said Piper incoherently as he replaced the instrument. He told Miss Withers what he had just heard, and they looked at each other for a moment.

  “I think we’d better go down to the Aquarium anyway,” said Miss Withers.

  “I think we better had, too,” said Inspector Piper.

  Half an hour later they stood before the single public phone booth of the Aquarium. It was of stained oak, of the general shape and size of an upended coffin, with a glass door behind with a young man was at the moment attempting to convince an unseen young woman of something or other. Then he grew restless under the unwavering gaze of the Inspector, and shortly afterward hung up the receiver and left.

  The Inspector waved the door back and forth a few times, and after the air had cleared he stepped inside. For the sake of anyone who might be passing he lifted the receiver from the hook, but all the time with a pocket flash he was scrutinizing the walls of the little cell.

  Then he opened the door. “I was hoping to find a scribble on the wall above the phone,” he told Miss Withers, “possibly of the Lester office number, or something. You can learn a lot from scribbles sometimes, but there weren’t any here. They’ve tacked oilcloth over the wall, to keep people from writing there.”

  He saw Miss Withers’ eyes glisten, and smiled. “No, it’s not new oilcloth, either. It’s been there for years. But there is one thing of interest there. Take the flash and see if you notice it.”

  Miss Withers took the flash, and entered the booth. A moment later she came out. “Nothing there unless you count this as something,” she said, and she showed Piper an ordinary tumbler, a water glass. “It was down behind the door….”

  Piper’s face was dark. “And so you had to handle it and get your prints all over it, yes?” He took it gingerly from her, and wrapped it in a handkerchief. “I don’t know what it may mean, but it means something. People don’t need a glass in a phone booth. Unless they plan on a long chat in the stuffy place, and take a glass of ice water along, which seems doubtful to me. Of course, it may be nothing …”

  “Anyway,” Miss Withers announced as they went in search of Hemingway, “we’ve seen the spot where the phone call originated. Somebody stood there and called Lester to warn him that his wife was in the building, meeting another man. Now if we knew who that somebody was …”

  “If wishes were fishes we’d have some fried,” scoffed the Inspector. “We’ve got to find out who made that phone call. And we will, or my name isn’t Oscar Piper. At least, we know it was a man….”

  He stopped short. “Let’s have another look at Hemingway, for luck.”

  Bertrand B. Hemingway, they were informed by a chastened looking Fink, was not in.

  “Very well,” said Piper politely. “We’ll just wait for him.” And he shouldered his way through the door marked “Bertrand B. Hemingway, Director.” Miss Withers followed, and they came face to face with the Director. He was picking up bits of glass from the floor.

  “Just a broken fish bowl,” he explained quickly. “I was afraid I’d get the soles of my shoes cut. And what can I do for you today? I’d hoped that we were through with all this awful publicity. If it hadn’t been for your men at the door of this place today the reporters would have run me ragged….”

  Miss Withers understood why the few visitors in the Aquarium were posed so nonchalantly against the pillars.

  “You can help the course of justice,” said Piper in his sweetest voice, “by answering just one question.”

  “Gladly, gladly,” said Bertrand B. Hemingway. “Have a chair first, won’t you? Sorry that I haven’t a Camel to offer, you … wasn’t that what you asked for last night? Would a Lucky do? Now, what’s the question?”

  The little man had struck an attitude. Miss Withers glanced around the long room. She could never feel at ease here, she knew.

  “The question? Oh, yes.” Piper smiled as if in amusement at its unimportance. “The question? Yes, I wanted to ask you, Mr. Hemingway, to ask you … just why you concealed your stock deals with Gerald Lester, yesterday? Why it was necessary, or why you thought it necessary, to claim you hadn’t seen him in months when he sold out your account three weeks ago and ruined you?”


  Bertrand B. Hemingway collapsed like a pricked balloon. He gasped like one of his own fish out of water.

  “Come clean, Mr. Hemingway. Why was it?”

  The little man puffed vigorously on a dead cigarette. “I was afraid,” he finally admitted. But his strength and self-possession had returned.

  “Afraid of what? Afraid of suffering the consequences for what you did to …”

  “No, not that. I didn’t kill him, and you shan’t trick me into confessing. You shan’t! I was afraid that you would question me and drag me to jail and to court, and dig into my life and stir up all sorts of trouble. I hoped that if I didn’t mention the stock deals that you wouldn’t find out about them …”

  “We find out about everything,” Piper told him. “Go on.”

  “And most of all I was afraid of losing my Directorate here. Not for this murder investigation. That is considered an unfortunate accident. But if the Board of Trustees should learn I’d been gambling on the Stock Exchange, they’d oust me in two seconds. You don’t know my Board of Trustees, Inspector.”

  “I have no desire to know them,” Piper told him. “We’ll talk about this another time, Mr. Director. I advise, however, that you rack your brain and try to remember any more details affecting this case which you haven’t told us.”

  Hemingway showed astonishment. “But I thought the case was settled? With the Seymour fellow pleading guilty, and so forth. The late papers said so!”

  “The papers say what they guess or what I tell them,” said Piper. “I’m not so satisfied that Gwen and Seymour did the job. Tell me …” he was very casual … “tell me, can you remember any details about how they looked when you glad-handed them into your office yesterday noon? Any little detail that might help the investigation? Did they look guilty? Any marks of a struggle on either of them?”

  Hemingway paused, but he did not fall into the trap. “No, I can’t say that they showed any signs of a struggle, or looked particularly guilty. They were both upset, I realize now, but not panicky. They seemed polite, and interested …”

  “Yes, of course.” Piper rose from his chair. “Please don’t leave town, Hemingway. You’ll testify at the grand jury hearing shortly, and at the trial if there is one. Good day.”

  But instead of leaving the gloomy and almost deserted place, Piper led Miss Withers to the little tank under the stair. It was empty now, and the penguins swam merrily in their own rightful pool in the center of the big hall. Before the door that led to the tanks lounged a plain-clothes man. Miss Withers realized that she was getting to be an insider, for she could recognize a plain-clothes man a block away. Whenever one sees a man who looks as if he had a trade, but weren’t working at it, and a man who hangs about as if he had a place to go if he only wanted to, that man is a detective, she told herself.

  The plain-clothes man did not salute, but simply strolled on. Piper and Miss Withers stared for a few minutes into the empty tank. With the water drained away, and the circulating current shut off, it was just a square tank, lined on the back and both sides with cunningly painted plaster and rock to simulate the natural habitat of some fish or other. There was an inlet pipe at the bottom and an outlet at the top. Now that the water was gone they could look through and see the cat-walk, and the tangle of pipes above, faintly in the dim light of the runway.

  “They went over the bottom with a fine-tooth comb this morning,” Piper told Miss Withers. “But my boys found only fish slime.”

  They went through the door, up the fatal steps, and stared at the curving runway. “And if only we’d searched the place instantly on finding the body,” Piper said ruefully, “we’d have caught the murderer somewhere back here….”

  “All you’d have caught would have been the big Swede ichthyologist and the pickpocket,” Miss Withers told him. “And neither of them did it.”

  “But what dumped the body of Lester down into the tank, while you watched just outside?” Piper wanted to know.

  “Ten to one it was the meddlesome penguins,” she told him. “Anyway, it wasn’t the murderer, because he was outside and far away by then.”

  “Perhaps he was outside,” Piper hazarded, “but I doubt if he was far away. That’s the devil of this case. The murderer is right here, among us, so to speak. And I can’t lay my hand on him, or her. Everything points at Gwen and Seymour. They had motive and opportunity. Everybody else, it seems, had opportunity, and a lot of them had motive. I’m not satisfied …”

  He went on, leaning against the door. “In most murder cases, we have definite things to work with. A murder is premeditated. The victim is lured to a certain place, murder is committed with tools which can be traced, and a good clue or two is left. The whole thing is a matter of finding out who had a reason to bump the victim, who had an opportunity, and how he did it. But here …”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “No premeditation, because nobody could have known that Gerald Lester would be lying unconscious in this little hideaway. Not even Philip Seymour, supposing that Philip did make that phone call to lure his girl’s husband down to the Aquarium, which seems impossible. Nobody would plan to commit a murder here. It was a case of seizing an unusual opportunity … and of seizing a god-sent weapon which you had provided, Miss Withers. That hatpin made things a thousand times easier for the killer. He had only to drop it, and everything was clear for him but the getaway. He could never be traced through it.”

  “How do you know for sure that Gerald Lester was killed while unconscious?” Miss Withers wanted to know.

  “First, because it would be practically impossible to stab a man in the ear if he were conscious. The victim would struggle and break away. No, it would take a swift, sure blow. After the pin had been punched in by some heartless devil, and then driven home with a whack from the flat of the hand, it was drawn out, dipped in the penguin pool to cleanse it … accounting for the few traces of blood there … and then returned to the stair where it had been found. Somebody was doing all that while you hunted for the hatpin. You haven’t a vague memory of anyone at the foot of the stair?”

  “Let me think,” Miss Withers said quietly. “I believe I’ve got something. Not just what you hoped for. It’s the opposite, in fact. But I know this fact. We were up on the balcony, the children and I, hunting the pin for at least twenty minutes before we got to the foot of the stair where it turned out to be. The stair is visible from any part of the balcony, you know.

  And during all that time I kept my eyes open, for the pickpocket episode had made me restless, and I was afraid that someone would find the hatpin and take it away before we found it.

  “And I know this one thing, that all during that time, up to and including the moment when little black Abraham found it, there wasn’t another person on these stairs above us, nor near the foot of them, though of course there were visitors among the tanks and cases downstairs … is that any help?”

  “I don’t know,” Piper admitted. “That would go to show that the murder was committed earlier than I thought … long before the body was pushed into the tank, if you saw it fall. The murder must have been committed during the pickpocket chase, or even before!”

  They were leaving the murder scene. Miss Withers started to follow Piper down the three high steps and then suddenly she vented a gentle scream.

  Her eyes had accidently turned upward at the rough, unfinished bottom of the stairs above. And they had been caught and held by a ribbon of light….

  As Piper whirled in the doorway she searched her purse for a pencil. She found a colored automatic one, and poked it upward at the thin crack in the wood through which blazed illumination….

  “Go around to the stair and see which step this comes out on,” she whispered. Piper left her, and she poked the pencil up through the narrow crack and then let it fall from her fingers. She was soon at the Inspector’s side, at the foot of the stair.

  He was staring down at her red and black eversharp, which lay on the bottom step. The c
rack was hidden by an overhang.

  “How big was the garnet on your hatpin?” He wanted to know.

  “No bigger than the eraser on this pencil.” She picked up the little writing instrument and replaced it in her bag.

  “It was on this step, the bottom one, that little black Abraham found my hatpin,” Miss Withers remarked soberly.

  “I thought of that,” said Inspector Piper. He fumbled for another of his everlasting cigars, but he did not light it.

  “Then the murderer needn’t have come out on the stair at all, or even approached the foot of the stair,” Miss Withers reasoned. “He might possibly have been in behind the tanks, or perhaps in the doorway where Olaavson hung his denim overalls, when I saw the body fall into the tank.”

  “I also thought of that,” Piper said.

  There was a long silence. “Do you think that the murderer could have hidden behind those overalls, or just stood back under the steps in the darkness, while we all pushed in behind Donovan to look at the corpse … and then walked out innocently with the rest of us when you got here?”

  Piper shrugged his shoulders. “I think we ought to have a couple of cups of coffee,” he said at last. And they left the Aquarium.

  12

  The Patch in the Lute

  NEITHER MISS WITHERS NOR the Inspector was to have much solid comfort from the steaming coffee and sandwiches which soon appeared before the two weary sleuths. For on the heels of the coffee there arrived in the little waterfront cafe—an indistinguishable wailing, which shortly resolved itself into “Extry paper … read all about it … Lester murder solved….”

  Then a grubby-faced urchin poked his head in the door, brandishing a sheaf of poisonous-looking green tabloids. “Paper, mister?”

  The Inspector bought two of them, handing one to Miss Withers. “I know what this is,” he told her wearily. “Leave it to the D.A.’s office to mangle things all up.”