“Miss Withers, I’d like to ask if it is your habit to wear a hatpin?”
“It’s not a habit, exactly.”
“Yet you were wearing one on the day in question?”
“I was. I always wear my mother’s hatpin with that hat, because it doesn’t stay on very well. Hats nowadays are made for bobbed hair, and mine is long. I …”
“Quite so. An unlucky chance for Gerald Lester that you wore it that day, Miss Withers.”
That didn’t seem to require an answer. Costello went on. “Where is your home, Miss Withers?”
“In New York City, on 76th Street …”
“I beg your pardon. I mean, where were you born and brought up?”
“In the city of Dubuque, Iowa.”
“You are aware that the murdered man was a native of Cedar Rapids, in the same state—that he was practically a neighbor of yours until he left to come East?”
“I am so informed, yes.”
“You did not know him back home?”
“Young man, we don’t consider people across the width of a state neighbors out in Iowa. I never …”
“Answer the question, please.”
“The answer is no.” Miss Withers was getting hot under the collar.
“You did not ever have a love affair with Gerald Lester?”
“I did not! And I’ll thank …”
The judge rapped his gavel.
Costello smiled knowingly. He ostentatiously referred to some entries in a little notebook, and then plunged on. “On the night of September first, fifteen years ago, you did not meet Gerald Lester on the eve of his departure for an eastern college and beg him to marry you?”
Miss Withers was speechless. She mantled a flaming red, and then realized that the jury would take this as the flush of guilt. She gulped.
“I did not!” she said. “Do you think I would ask a man some ten years my junior …”
“Answer the questions, Miss Withers. Did you not threaten Gerald Lester with personal injury, which was overheard by other young lovers in that Iowa park, in case he went away without taking you?”
“I did not!”
The Judge interrupted. “Really, I do not see where this is getting the defense in cross-examination. The witness is not on trial for the murder of Gerald Lester.”
Barry Costello was instantly apologetic. “Your Honor, I beg the Court’s pardon for my delay. But I assure the Court that I have a definite plan in mind, and one that will contribute to the case of my client. May I go on?”
Judge Thayer nodded slowly, and stared at his gavel.
“Miss Withers, did you not write letter after letter to Gerald Lester while he was at college in the East, begging him to come back to you?”
“I tell you, I never saw the man until I came on him in the Aquarium tank …”
“Miss Withers, you are under oath. Was it not true that you came to New York, giving up a better position in the Iowa school you left, in order to try and find Gerald Lester?”
“I refuse to answer!” Miss Withers was on her feet. “The questions all have one answer, No!”
“Very good.” Barry Costello bowed most politely, and Miss Withers swiftly realized the weight that his daring fabrications had carried. Already the jury was gazing at her with a speculative leer.
“You have told the Court, Miss Withers, that you dispatched your pupils on a hunt for your hatpin, there in the Aquarium?”
“That’s what I did.” Miss Withers was trying to regain her temper. But Barry Costello was warming up to his work.
“You lagged behind them in the search, Miss Withers? So that no one knows exactly where you were during that twenty minutes or so, and no one could be brought forward to testify as to your innocent participation in the search?”
Miss Withers thought carefully. “Yes, I did lag behind. I don’t know whether anyone saw me or not. But you’d lag behind, too, if you were riding herd on a bunch of scampering little outlaws …”
Costello nodded. “You are willing to swear that you did not have the missing hatpin tucked away in your dress or concealed in your hand at the time?”
“What? I certainly did not!”
“You had not noticed the defendant in this case, Mr. Seymour, carry the unconscious body of the man you had once loved—and then hated—in behind the tanks, and then come out and disappear toward the door? You did not seize your opportunity, send your little innocent charges on a wild-goose chase, and then dart into the runway behind the tanks to draw forth your deadly, if improvised, stiletto of a hatpin and drive it more foully and cruelly home in the right ear of the unconscious man?”
Before Barry Costello had finished, the courtroom was in an uproar, with Judge Thayer wielding his gavel right willingly, Tom Roche on his feet thundering objections, and Miss Withers tottering to her feet.
But Costello had made his point. He did not even wait for a denial of his last whirlwind, but turned and smiled triumphantly at Gwen Lester.
“Finished with the witness,” he said.
Miss Withers rose to her feet. The world stopped whirling around her, and suddenly she realized that the one tiny gap left in the Lester murder puzzle was complete.
She found her voice, and it was a strong voice, a voice used to command. It rang out above the demands of Tom Roche to have the questions stricken from the record. It rang above the murmurings of the people in the courtroom.
“You may be finished with the witness, Mr. Barry Costello,” she cried. “But the witness isn’t finished with you. So Gerald Lester was stabbed in the right ear, was he? Let them strike the rest of your question out of the record, but leave that in. Because it’s going to send you to the Chair, Barry Costello!”
Judge Thayer had his gavel poised to strike, but he did not let it fall. Perhaps the old man was weary of a Justice that wore bandages across her eyes.
Miss Withers caught her breath, and plunged on. “Only four people knew that Lester was stabbed in the right ear, young man. The medical examiner, who will testify to that when he’s called as the next witness … he’s one. Inspector Piper and I, who agreed to giving the story out to the newspapers and the public as the left ear, are number two and three.”
Miss Withers pointed her finger at the amazed lawyer, whose mouth was open. “The fourth person who knew is the murderer, and there he stands, branded by his own tongue!”
For a moment she stood there, a flaming, triumphant Brunnhilde in a serge suit. Then the scandalized courtroom rose in waves about her, but not before she saw Inspector Piper vault the rail and fling himself on Barry Costello, whose face was a twisted mask of hate and horror, and who was fumbling in the brief-case before him.
She had a glimpse of light on burnished metal, and saw the muzzle of a stubby gun press against Costello’s forehead, and then twist away under the Inspector’s strong grip. There was the click of handcuffs.
Then, for the first time since the whole affair had begun, Miss Withers allowed herself the luxury of a good, old-fashioned fainting spell.
21
And So to Bed
IT SEEMED SEVERAL CENTURIES later, though it could not have been more than ten minutes or so, when Miss Withers saw daylight again. She was lying on a davenport in a room she guessed to be one of the judge’s chambers, and Oscar Piper, Inspector of Detectives, was clumsily putting wet cloths on her forehead. She sat up suddenly.
“Don’t bother with me, man.” She pushed him away. “Get your prisoner. Get Costello.”
“You’re not to worry yourself any more about Costello,” said the Inspector with a grave smile. “He’s safely got. Mr. Barry Costello is hard and fast behind the bars by this time, and he’ll stay there until he comes out to stand trial himself for the murder of Gerald Lester, thanks to you.”
“Poor man,” said Miss Withers. “Though I suppose he deserves whatever he gets. He certainly handed me an unpleasant half hour on the witness stand. The idea of his nasty insinuations …”
�
��He found you a bad person to monkey with,” said Piper soothingly. “I don’t suppose you’d mind telling me how you got wise to him? They’ve given me credit, outside, for being in with you on this because we ran around together such a lot, and because I was the first one to light into Costello when he tried suicide.”
“Sure I’ll tell you,” said Miss Withers. “I started suspecting Costello when I saw he had a book on collecting butterflies. A man who’d spent his boyhood sticking pins through the heads of lovely insects would quite possibly think of skewering somebody to death. But that was only suspecting.”
“Go on,” said Piper.
“And then he was so anxious to promote himself with Gwen Lester,” Miss Withers explained. “He told me, and you too, about how another girl had turned him down because he lost his money. I didn’t see at the time just how the dramatic justice of killing the man who had wronged him, and then marrying the widow and inheriting the insurance, would appeal to an adventurer like Costello. But the idea remained in the back of my mind. And then after that, you must have noticed that whatever happened to incriminate Gwen, or Seymour, or Hemingway, or anybody was also incriminating to Costello, too. He was there in the Aquarium for some reason he never explained. He was supposed to have gone home with Gwen that first afternoon, but he didn’t get there, the maid admitted to your policeman. He could easily have returned to the place, or else have never even left it. He hid himself in the Men’s Room, and smoked the cigarettes that we found on the floor.”
“Sure,” said Piper. “I was figuring along those lines. But I didn’t see the ghost of a motive.”
“I’ll come to the motive in a minute,” Miss Withers told him. “Costello was just the type of man to realize that he was safest right in the limelight, where he could keep tabs on the development of the case. The main difficulties he was up against were the two accidents. He’d dropped his hat in the pool during the murder, and he had to take the dead man’s hat in order to mingle with the crowd outside. You didn’t notice that he was extra polite during the questioning in Hemingway’s office, and kept his hat always in his hand?”
“I didn’t notice,” admitted Piper.
“Well, he returned that night to get the hat out of the tank, where it had sunk among the rocks. A felt hat doesn’t sink by itself for hours, Inspector. I tried it last week for an experiment. Well, it floated in our bathtub all night. So I reasoned that if the hat was floating in the pool when the officer and Costello drew out the dead man, somebody pushed it under then. And again Costello had a chance which no one else had.”
Miss Withers was feeling much better now. She walked up and down the room.
“The other accident in what he figured to be the perfect murder was the fact that he’d been discovered behind the tanks by the pickpocket. Probably he was standing in the corner space behind the door when the little man ducked inside to escape the chase. Costello took no chances, and scared the little man out of his wits and his threats of what would happen if he talked … so much so that the pickpocket pretended to be dumb.
“Anyway, that night, while we were up on the upper level behind the tanks, Costello slipped out of the Men’s Room and after laying out Rollins, snatched his own hat out of the tank. But the band was gone, only he didn’t notice it then, or if he did it didn’t matter, because it was beyond his reach. The penguin had swallowed it.
“So far, so good. But the pickpocket—after he got safe in jail, as he thought—lost his fear of Costello, and began blackmailing him. Remember how the Irishman was trying to raise money there for a few days? That wasn’t for Gwen’s defense; that was to pay off the pickpocket! But he couldn’t get enough together to quiet the man, so he had to try something else.”
“That would explain Costello’s strange interest in the man called Chicago Lew,” agreed Piper. “I wondered if it was simply because he thought the man had information that would free Gwen. Though, as a matter of fact, he had.”
“Certainly. Then again, at the Aquarium. I brought Costello down there with me before I really suspected him. And we happened to walk in right when Hemingway was operating on the sick penguin … and Costello realized as soon as I did what that wad of silk was. He knew that it would give the head size of the murderer, and so he contrived to kick out the light plug and snatch it up.”
“I don’t see what he did with it,” objected Piper.
“Did you think of his pipe? Neither did I, at the time. But it was going furiously, and smelling even worse than most pipes smell. It was a big briar, you remember. Couldn’t the man have stuffed the hat-band, damp as it was, into his pipe and tamped it down with tobacco? That evidence did disappear into thin air, Inspector. It went up in smoke, literally.”
“I take off my hat,” said Piper.
“And then the business of the pickpocket suicide, Inspector. It struck us both funny that Costello made such a point of getting in to see the pickpocket first that morning, didn’t it? He covered himself well by claiming he was protecting Gwen’s interests. And then, when the net was closing around him, he very neatly turned our suspicions toward Seymour. He’d arranged for that by making a key that seemed to fit the cell door, and tossing it through the bars that morning as Seymour slept. The murder of Chicago Lew was done almost as Costello described it to us, except that he probably killed the man while he was inside the cell, and then after the guard had let him out into the corridor and established his alibi, he dragged on the wire and jerked the dead body into the air, to make it look like suicide.”
“And while he was inside the cell he tipped over the chair, too,” suggested Piper. “But how about the turnkey’s statement that he saw the pickpocket sobbing and heard the bunk creak after he had locked Costello out of the cell?”
“Simple,” Miss Withers pronounced. “Costello was holding the end of the wire in his hand, though the turnkey didn’t see it on account of the darkness and his own shortsightedness. And Costello simply jerked the wire and pulled the neck of the dead man from outside, to convince the guard!
“Did you ever see anything in your life as convincing as the way he demonstrated to us how Seymour must have killed the pickpocket?” she went on. “It didn’t occur to me for hours that it might have been somebody besides the accused man who did the job, for the reason suggested. And when we sprung the business of the traced copper wire on him, wasn’t he glib with the admission that he’d bought it? A less smart man would have denied it, but Costello never denied anything that we could prove.”
“I noticed, myself, that Costello, for all his full morning dress when he came to tell me about the pickpocket’s confession, which he had undoubtedly forged, hadn’t his gloves with him,” said Piper. “When I went up to have a look at Seymour’s hands, I saw that they were unmarked. And the man who dragged the body of the pickpocket up in the air by tugging on a wire must have either worn gloves or cut through his hands.”
“I didn’t get that point,” admitted Miss Withers. “But I didn’t need it. You see, the whole case was complete for me when Costello made that little pun in your office. Remember? He looked at your brightly spotted tweed suit and said that you were a regular Pied Piper?”
“That didn’t strike me as so funny,” said Piper.
“It wouldn’t. But I’ve always hated puns. They’re the lowest known form of humor. And it was then that I discovered the motive for the murder of Gerald Lester, only it was so far-fetched that I couldn’t believe it myself for sometime. Remember the mysterious client of Gerald Lester’s, a Mr. Parson? That was the man who got sold out—yes, ruined—on the market, though the transactions showed his stock was sold out before it hit bottom. In other words, a Mr. Parson had a real grudge against Lester, for it was a shady deal. Much more of a motive there than Hemingway had. A man who will pun once will pun again. He punned about your name, and when he chose a phony name to use in undercover stock transactions some months ago, Costello punned again. He called himself Parson … Mr. Parson, or, in French, ‘pe
rsonne’ meaning nobody! Mr. Nobody!”
“Then Costello was a client of Lester’s? But why the undercover business?”
“Because he was gambling with money paid in to him as Treasurer of a non-existent Be Kind to Animals Society, mostly by the rich and silly women to whom he gave bridge lessons. And that is why he couldn’t make a squawk about the undoubtedly sharp practice that Lester put over on him. Lester sold out Mr. Parson’s stocks before they dropped five points, as the quotations in the paper of that day showed, but he charged up the account with a complete fifteen point drop, which wiped it out. See?”
“I’m beginning to,” said Piper. “There is a motive.”
“Sure there is. Lester feared Costello. That’s why the broker hired a private detective to protect him for a while. That’s why the man carried a loaded stick and had a gun in his desk. And Costello didn’t confine himself to threats. He hung around Lester’s home, undoubtedly. He followed Gwen Lester to the Aquarium that day, God knows why, and then when he saw what she was up to, he called her husband out of pure maliciousness. Only I don’t see why Lester didn’t recognize his voice.”
“There’s where I can help,” said Piper humbly. “Remember the drinking tumbler in the booth?”
Miss Withers remembered it well. “That’s an old trick,” Piper told her. “In speaking over the phone, if you hold a tumbler up to the mouthpiece and speak into that, nobody on earth can recognize your voice. Remember how the switchboard girl said that the voice came from very far away, like a long distance call?”
“That fits in,” said Miss Withers. “Anyhow, up to then Costello had only meant to cause trouble to the man he hated. Then he saw Lester and Seymour fight, and saw the broker go down, and then be carried behind the tank. Seymour and Gwen made for the door by their devious ways, and Costello saw his chance. He grabbed up my hatpin which was lying there on the steps or nearby, and with it in his hand he stepped through into the runway. There lay his enemy, and he did what he had come to do. As soon as he could get out, he mingled with the crowd, but it was too late to make a getaway because I had given the alarm, and he was forced to stand by. In that event, he was egotistic enough to enjoy worming his way into the spot-light as Gwen’s rescuer, and then like a flash came the idea to him that he could get his fingers on the situation, free her and convict Seymour, and then marry her and live happily on the money. Of course, he’s a madman, but you’ve said most murderers are. Neat, eh?”
The Penguin Pool Murder (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries) Page 21