Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene (13 page)

Silversmith: You wouldn’t try to frame me, would you, Captain?

Kelso: Frame? Who said anything about frame? It’s possible, of course, that I might be fooled by circumstantial evidence or something like that. Anybody can make an honest mistake.

Silversmith: Are you sure Westering was murdered at all? Maybe he died of botulism. God knows we’ve been eating enough garbage out of cans. After all, this is supposed to be a gathering, as you said, of doves. Sweetness and light. Peace, brother, peace. Ho Chi Minh, here we come, bearing the olive branch. Who here would do violence to his brother? Even a brother with the faults of a Westering? At least, without leaving a flower on his chest?

Kelso: I think I may puke. Get out of here, Silversmith. And don’t go off smelling any more oyster pots until I say you can.

Silversmith got. Captain Kelso pushed away from the table, heaved to his feet and lumbered across to a porthole, where he inhaled a chestful of wet air scented with sea-salt and oyster pots and all the other enchanting smells of San Francisco at the shag end of a long night.

“When you’ve had enough,” said Miss Withers, “I’d like a turn.”

Captain Kelso, pulling his nose out of the porthole, turned and tried a sympathetic grin, but it didn’t come off. His face and scalp were the greenish color of bile, and the bitter taste of bile was plainly in his mouth. He looked sick. Returning to the table, he sat down again.

“I know Mr. Silversmith from time past,” he said. “Maybe you drew that conclusion.”

“And until you see into his eyes,” Miss Withers said, “he looks such an ordinary, pleasant young man.”

“He’s neither ordinary nor pleasant nor very young. How old would you say? Thirty? He’s nearer forty.”

“You accused him of killing his wife. Why?”

“Because he killed her, that’s why.”

“Then why is he free?”

“No proof. Just the knowledge that he did. He’s a clever lad, our Nathan Silversmith. A smooth operator. After the Korean War he turned up in San Francisco with a ruptured duck. Or were ruptured ducks only after World War II? I don’t remember. Anyhow, an honorable discharge. He’d been in the Military Police, and he had a very bright idea in his head. He conned someone into putting him on the force as an undercover cop. The beats were infesting North Beach then. What he’d do, he’d disguise himself with a wig and dark glasses and appropriate rags and crash their pads. He even learned to fake a blast. Pretend to get high, I mean, on pot or some drug. Ostensibly, the idea was to get leads on the mainliners and the pushers of the hard stuff, heroin and such, but actually nothing ever came of it except the arrest of a lot of relatively harmless characters whose real crime was not liking the rest of us and showing their dislike by dressing different and living different.

“Well, most of the time I don’t like the rest of us much, either. But let that go. Silversmith was an undercover cop. An informer. Trouble with him was, he was never quite sure which side he was on. If he’d been in international espionage, he’d have been what’s known as a double agent. What’s more, he was a sweet little sadist. He had the moral convictions of an alley cat. None at all. He didn’t really care a damn what the beats did, but he got his kicks from seeing them raided and harassed and knocked around by the more enthusiastic boys on the raiding squads. As a matter of fact, he found some of their habits so satisfying that he began to adopt them. For example, he discovered that it was a lot easier to have a blast than to fake one. There were other things, but let them go too. He didn’t last long. He was dropped from the force. No formal charges. Just dropped.

“Meanwhile, somewhere along the way, he’d picked up a girl. He married her. She was a pretty kid, about twenty when he married her, with nice eyes and long brown hair that she let hang free. You know the kind. They’re all over the place. Holding love-ins in the Panhandle and sit-ins at Berkeley. Bucking the Establishment, whatever that is, however they can. There wasn’t any harm in her, and what’s more important to me, as a member of the so-called Establishment, no harm had
come
to her. Not until she married Nathan Silversmith, that is. I don’t know what he taught her. I’d rather not. Anyhow, she got onto acid. LSD. You know how LSD affects you? Sister, it sets you free. It makes you a swinging, soaring cat, ten feet tall. It makes you want to fly. That’s what it did, one night, to young Mrs. Silversmith. So he says. Mr. Silversmith says. They were standing on a little balcony outside their pad, three floors above the pavement, and all of a sudden she said, he says, “Nathan, I’m going to fly,” and over she went like a swinging bird. A little later we scraped her off the pavement and carried her away in a basket.

“Well, you get bruised, taking a header three floors onto the pavement. Bruises and abrasions. But you don’t get them in all the places she had hers. She’d been beat up, I know that. She could have been tossed off that balcony, and she was. I know that, too. But how could I prove it from a few extra bruises? Besides, she was only a disinherited kid peddling flowers in a psychedelic dream. No great loss.”

All this while, for the duration of Captain Kelso’s bitter monologue, Miss Withers, like a good therapist, had sat quietly and listened. Now that it was over, catharsis complete, she was quiet a few moments longer before she spoke.

“I wonder,” she said, “what’s he’s doing here? Surely a man like that has no interest in oriental philosophy or world peace or anything of the sort.”

“Who knows? God and the devil and Nathan Silversmith. Maybe, like I said, he was planted, though I doubt it. Maybe he’s just sick of San Francisco, and just wanted to take a long ride to anywhere. He’s that kind of crumb. He doesn’t give a damn which side of anything he’s on, the law or anything else, just so long as he gets out of it the kind of kicks he needs. A long voyage like this was supposed to be, thousands of miles on an old tub in what showed promise of being a sort of marathon love-in, must have offered a lot of pleasant prospects to sweet Nathan.”

T
HE LONG HOURS OF
inquiry diminished slowly in a fantasy of distortions brewed in minds made erratic by corrosive fatigue. Captain Kelso made methodical notes in a limp-backed book that threatened near the end to run out of clean pages. Miss Withers, who had nothing at hand to write with or in, watched and listened and tried to give in her retentive memory some kind of sane order to a welter of testimony. In her effort to accomplish this almost impossible task, a couple of things became clear as the parade of witnesses passed in and out of the late captain’s stateroom. In the first place, this incredible crew had been assembled inside the Golden Gate by the simple, seductive method of advertisements, written by Captain Westering and by him placed in selected metropolitan newspapers across the country. The remarkably effective grapevine of an active underworld had done the rest. In the second place, after a period of stagnation and frustration, prolonged by lingering hope and sustained by canned beans, the good yacht
Karma
had become a pustule of festered relationships. And the pathogen was Captain Westering himself.

Miss Withers, in this confusing performance of extraordinary characters, could never afterward remember the dramatis personae in order of appearance, but she could summon clearly the vision of each, neatly tagged and classified in her mind, just as she could still summon the visions of urchins, now aged or dead, who had done tedious time in her classroom in years past.

Bernadine Toller. “My friends call me Bernie.” Cocktail waitress from Denver, Colorado. A friend had told her about Captain Westering’s call for Argonauts, and she had taken her savings of tips out of the bottom dresser drawer and headed for San Francisco. Sort of impetuous. She did things like that. Sort of impetuous. Captain Westering was cool, but cool. He was simply out of sight. She and the captain had had a thing going; it was something you could just feel, like goose pimples. But that was before Lenore Gregory made the scene. Captain Westering was hung up on the Gregory chick. She had the captain shucked. Bernadine Toller looked at Miss Withers with chilling empty eyes and smiled a terrible empty smile. Her voice was frail and brittle, with a quality of little-girl demureness that was somehow as shocking as a smirk on the face of a corpse. About her was an aura of nihilism all the more dreadful for being dressed in a pinafore.

Delmar Faulkenstein. Folk singer. Originally from Dallas, Texas, but traveled around. Made the minor spots, the coffee shops and whatnot, where there was enough bread to hire one voice and a guitar. It wasn’t much, but it was his trip. He had been across the bridge in Sausalito when he heard about Captain Westering’s projected voyage. It sounded like a gas, and here he came. As it was, the whole thing had turned out to be a bummer. Not that it was any big surprise. The captain was a phony. The captain was born for killing. He flipped over the chicks, that was his trouble. And vice versa, to make it worse. Things got loose on a little tub like this. Everyone practically in everyone’s lap, so to speak. He wasn’t the heat, not Delmar Faulkenstein, but he’d know where to look for the captain’s killer if he was. He shook his lank hair, shaped six feet of ample curves with his hands, and seemed to go suddenly to sleep on his feet with his eyes open.

Corrine Leicester. The long-legged dancer from Los Angeles who had shared the stateroom next door with Miss Withers during detention. She did bits in movies, on TV. She had been on the verge of her big break, she was sure of it. She had caught the attention in certain quarters of certain people. Powerful people. But then she had heard from a certain TV writer of Captain Westering’s pilgrimage. She had to come. She simply couldn’t help herself. She felt very strongly about the war, all the killing and everything, and it was like a call she couldn’t deny, no matter what sacrifice she had to make. The TV writer had felt the same way. About war and peace and all. They had often discussed it with each other.

Why hadn’t the TV writer, if he felt so strongly, volunteered for the pilgrimage himself? Well, he had. He was waiting with the others this very minute. They had come up together from Los Angeles. His name was Adrian Hogue. What had been the nature of the relationship between her and Mr. Hogue? They had been good friends. Intimate friends? Well, very good friends. What had been her opinion of Captain Westering? Captain Westering had been a rare man. He had something magnetic about him. He drew one irresistibly. Had he, for instance, irresistibly drawn Corrine Leicester? She had been fascinated by him. She wouldn’t deny it. What had been the reaction of Mr. Hogue to this? He hadn’t liked it, of course. In fact, he’d been quite difficult.

Did Miss Leicester know Miss Gregory? Yes, of course. Everyone aboard knew everyone else. What did she think of Miss Gregory? To tell the truth, she hardly thought of her at all. Miss Gregory was, she supposed, attractive in a colorless sort of way. But immature. Quite naïve, really. Captain Westering had recognized this. He had tried to be kind to her. Had paid her little extra attentions, and so on. Miss Leicester, thought Miss Withers, had suddenly closed up. She was exercising control and dealing in understatement. She posed gracefully in her leotards, her long legs dominant. They were, in spite of the muscle knots in the calves, very nice legs.

Adrian Hogue. A handsome man, in his late twenties, with soft dark eyes and black hair that had grown below his collar on the back of his neck and in long sideburns in front of his ears. He supported the statements of Corrine Leicester. They had come up from Los Angeles together. What was his opinion of Captain Westering? On this point, the opinions of Mr. Hogue and his
very
good friend differed radically. Westering was a fraud. He didn’t give a damn about world peace or philosophical concepts or anything at all except excitement and women, which were, when you stopped to think about it, often the same thing. He was a poseur, a dated swashbuckler à la Errol Flynn. In brief, he was a straw man, a glamorous dummy who fronted for his wife. Aletha Westering! Now, there was a woman! It was easy enough to see that she held her absurd husband in contempt, whatever she might pretend to the contrary. Look at the way she went off to live with her sister in Sausalito and left him at liberty to prowl at will among a load of gullible women who couldn’t tell the difference between a shallow pretender and a real man.

Rebecca Welch. Former student at Ohio State University. Home in Cleveland. Another runaway, no doubt, with agonized parents somewhere in a sweat behind her. About nineteen. Not over twenty at most. Long blond hair, straight as a string, hanging free. Blue eyes haunted by the shadow of regret and fear. Recent graduate from the teeny-bopper class. Now rudely disenchanted, Miss Withers thought. Home is where the heart is, and her heart was home. She was the friend Lenore Gregory had gone to find just before Captain Westering began to die in his stateroom. Lenore had found her being sick in the crew’s quarters. Rebecca verified this fiercely, as though it were far more important than it was. She was obviously attached to Lenore, in whom she saw one of her own kind, and who was now in need of help. Would the attachment prompt her to lie for her friend? Miss Withers thought it would, but was sure it hadn’t.

Harriet Owens. Diminutive poet from Kansas City, Missouri. About ninety pounds of fierce intensity in a five-foot package. Dark brown hair cut shorter than most of the men’s. There was something almost exhausting about her, an effect of indiscriminate total commitment that would too often be wasted on ends that weren’t worth it, a kind of cannibalistic hunger feeding on her own heart. Miss Withers thought of another poet famous in her salad days.
I burn my candle at both ends
... Harriet Owens, like Corrine Leicester, had joined the amateur crew of motley Argonauts in the company of a man, Carey Singer, a young assistant professor of Russian Literature at Wichita University, in Kansas. He and she had done graduate work together at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Seduced by Captain Westering’s siren call, he had jumped his contract and headed west, detouring far enough from his way to collect Harriet, a pushover for a pilgrimage so exalted. It was evident now, however, that Carey Singer felt he had given up quite a lot for next to nothing. His bitterness showed. Intense, diminutive Harriet, Miss Withers concluded, had also been vulnerable to Captain Westering’s magnetism.