Miss Withers Regrets (11 page)

High on the chest of drawers sat a worn, furry monkey grinning down enigmatically, and beneath it was a silver candlestick well guttered with wax, a large incense burner, and a dozen or so bottles of perfume. Miss Withers’s personal tastes ran to rose and violet toilet water, but she realized that most of these scents were rare and expensive, almost unobtainable now.

While the inspector fidgeted impatiently she took a peek into the closet. It appeared that Lawn’s wardrobe was largely confined to evening dresses, slacks, and riding-habits. Along one wall was a rank of riding-boots, jodhpur shoes, and fragile high-heeled slippers, but a pair of rubber-soled sneakers appeared to have received the most wear.

A wispy scarf and panties of blazing crimson were drying on a hanger. That would be the bathing suit that Lawn had worn in her private investigation of the pool yesterday morning.

A little reluctantly Miss Withers followed the inspector out of the room. “That’s the works,” he said. “Except for the servants’ room over the kitchen.”

“What, no nursery?”

“Cairns probably figured he had family enough with his wife’s father and sister on his hands.”

Miss Withers had a quick look at the servants’ room and bath, which was so neat and impersonal that it might have served as a model bedroom in a department-store exhibit. There was a chessboard set up on the bedside table, an armful of fresh red roses in a big vase on the bureau, and a tiny shelf of books which included John Donne, Walter Pater, George Crabbe, Emily Post, and Countee Cullen. None of the books had a red jacket.

“So that’s that,” said the inspector.

“We’ve settled one thing, at least,” the schoolteacher announced. “From none of the bedroom windows, not even Helen’s, is the swimming pool visible. The bathhouse cuts off the view.”

The inspector said he already knew that. None of the guests at the party could have known that Huntley Cairns was alone at the pool. They went downstairs again, came finally into the kitchen, where an elderly man in filthy overalls was placidly making himself a sandwich out of canapés left over from the party, putting a whole slab of them between two slices of bread.

“Searles!” cried the inspector. “What are you doing here?”

“Eating,” said Searles. He kept on.

“You’re supposed to be down at the inquest.”

“I was down to the inquest,” admitted the gardener wearily. “I was the first witness called, and when they got through with me I came back to work. Nobody said anything about my being fired, and gardens gotta be watered, whether folks die or not. More I see of people, more I like plants, anyway.”

Questioned further by the inspector, Searles emphatically denied seeing anybody or hearing anybody prowling around the place. But he had been busy turning on sprinklers.

“And don’t go looking at me fishy-eyed because I’m in the house,” the old man went on. He showed a key. “I have the run of the place because it’s my job to keep fresh flowers in all the rooms. I’m supposed to have my lunch, too, but with the help gone, I had to make my own.”

The inspector took Miss Withers’s arm and showed her into the dining room. “That’s reasonable enough,” he said to her. “No point in getting the old man riled up—he’s plenty sore at everybody for being arrested. You know how it is.”

“Gardens do have to be watered,” admitted the schoolteacher thoughtfully. “But, Oscar—”

“Save it,” the inspector told her. “I want to get back down to the inquest before it’s over and done with. Come on, I’ll give you a ride home—and will you please stay there and keep from throwing monkey wrenches?”

Miss Withers didn’t answer him. She pulled away, heading towards the library. “Just a minute, Oscar. I have an idea—a wonderful idea. It’ll only take a minute.”

Grumbling, he followed her into the library. “What’s this, a retake?”

“Listen, Oscar. It was late in the afternoon when Mr. Beale and the others were in here—”

“Suppose it was?”

“The windows face to the east. It must have been quite dark, so the lights would have been on, wouldn’t they?”

“Suppose they were?”

Without answering she pulled the Venetian blinds, drew down the shades, and turned on all the lights. “Now!” cried Miss Withers. “Don’t you see, Oscar? Artificial light brings out colors that aren’t there by daylight. A book jacket that looked yellowish-orange by day could look red at night. We will have to look carefully—there! I see one now!”

She pounced upon a thin volume on one of the middle shelves and then stopped, her eyes clouded with disappointment. The reddish-orange jacket bore the title
Oriental Moments
and a drawing of a well-proportioned Chinese dancing girl without any clothes on, but the book inside turned out to be something else entirely. It was
Fitz on Contract
—
300 Hands Analyzed.

“And if that’s a clue,” remarked the inspector unpleasantly, “then I’m a monkey’s uncle. Unless of course you think that somebody drowned Huntley Cairns because he led from a king or left his partner in a secondary suit.”

Miss Hildegarde Withers stared at the treatise on contract bridge for a few moments, and then she slowly replaced the misleading wrapper and shoved the book back into its place on the shelf.

“Oscar,” she said, “the trouble is that we don’t know enough about the victim, his background, and all that sort of thing.”

“Don’t we? We know that he flunked out of Dartmouth for trying to buy a list of examination questions from a French instructor, that he lost half the money his father left him trying to beat the stock market in 1931 and ’32, that he worked more than a year as account executive for a radio advertising agency and then set up in business for himself—”

“And immediately hit the jackpot! He was either smarter than we think or luckier than he had any business to be. Sudden success such as his must have been achieved at the risk of stepping on somebody else’s toes—business rivals, that sort of thing.”

The inspector didn’t think so. “We had a man go up to Cairns Associates and take a look-see. He reported everything okay—Cairns seems to have been himself and the associates too. According to his office staff, he had the habit of working late about one night a week with a string of models and chorus girls, but that isn’t unusual for a man whose home life is on the frigid side.”

Miss Withers shrugged. “Perhaps I’m wrong,” she admitted. She was very, very meek as she followed the inspector towards the front door, but far back in a corner of her mind an idea was beginning to take shape.

D
OWN IN THE TOWN OF
Shoreham the crowd was pushing out of the funeral home into the sunshine. One or another of the photographers darted out to get a shot of Helen Abbott Cairns, a handkerchief to her face, as her father hurried her towards the car.

The reporters yapped like a kennel of hounds: “May we quote you as saying …” “Is it true that …” “Does this verdict …” But their cries were terminated by the slamming of the limousine door and the roar of its motor.

Beneath the great evergreen which shaded the doorway Jed Nicolet stood idly tapping a cigarette against the back of his hand. Commander Bennington came up beside him. “Well!” said the Navy man.

Nicolet nodded. “Deceased came to his death at the hands of person or persons unknown. Only we know, don’t we, Sam?”

“Stop talking like that, you young fool!”

“Well, don’t we?”

“They’re still holding that soldier,” said the commander huffily. “He certainly had a motive, being crazy in love with Helen. And the opportunity too.”

Nicolet shook his head. “Not Montague. That’s why I mixed into it Saturday night. He isn’t going to take the rap.”

“Bilge!” Bennington stuck his lower lip out far enough so that he could have gazed down upon it. “They have no real case against him, not now, anyway. They’ll have to let him go for lack of evidence; you’re a lawyer and you know that. I don’t see anything to be gained by talking, do you?”

“It depends on where you’re sitting,” Jed Nicolet pointed out. “Not from the standpoint of Mrs. Boad, or the doctor, or you. Or me, for that matter. I was an accessory before the fact; I suppose I might as well be one after. All the same, it’s not too nice to know that one of your friends, one of the people you play bridge and tennis with and meet at the Marine Room for dinner every Saturday, is a murderer.”

“But as long as we don’t know which one—” Bennington suggested. “Besides, Cairns had it coming to him.”

“You’d feel differently,” Nicolet told him, “if Pat Montague were on trial for his life, which he very likely will be. Are you for keeping silent even then?”

Bennington didn’t say anything. Mrs. Boad and Trudy were coming towards them. He looked off, saw his wife, and bowed out. “Ava’s waiting,” he called out over his shoulder. “We’ll talk about it later, won’t we, Jed?”

“Such a fuss!” Mame Boad remarked after a moment. “And all over practically nothing! It’s such a shame that Huntley Cairns has all that money. If he were poor this would have been written off as an accidental death.”

“If he’d been poor he wouldn’t have had a swimming pool to get drowned in,” Jed reminded her.

Mrs. Boad snorted. “I must be running along—Trudy has to get to the hairdresser’s. Do come up for dinner one night this week and we’ll talk about it then. But I still insist that the whole thing is crystal-clear. That Abbott girl’s testimony clinched it. Cairns died an accidental death by getting caught on that metal hook, or whatever it was, down underwater in the pool.”

“In spite of the fact that the man could barely swim on the surface?”

Mame Boad said there was no telling what some people would do, and flounced off. Jed threw away his cigarette and started after them and then was halted by a jovial hail from Dr. Radebaugh. “Drop you anywhere, Jed?”

Nicolet shook his head. “I’m walking back. I want to think. This setup is all wrong.”

“You’re doing too much thinking,” the doctor advised him. “It isn’t good for you—makes for ulcers and things. Better come up to my office and have a checkup.”

He climbed into his roadster, and Jed started off along the sidewalk. There was still plenty wrong with the setup. Wrong because of many things, but chiefly because of Huntley Cairns, who now lay back inside that funeral parlor in an expensive casket with real silver handles, unwept, unhonored, and unsung. Most definitely unwept.

Jed walked slowly back down town, pausing at the Elite Florists to order a suitable floral tribute for the funeral. He wondered if it was in good taste to send a corsage of orchids to the widow. Probably not, he decided, and chose two dozen waxy-white Frau Karl Druschki roses. On second thought he ordered the orchids sent to Lawn.

Up at the salmon-pink house on the hill, Miss Hildegarde Withers was just being aided into the police sedan by the inspector when a taxi pulled up and deposited Lawn Abbott. She stopped short, staring, and then came forward, looking stranger and paler than ever in the navy-blue suit which she had worn as suitable for inquests and funerals. “Just exactly what is going on here?” she demanded bluntly.

“Er—you see—” began Miss Withers.

“I get it!” Lawn said. “Miss Withers, you’re being arrested, aren’t you?” She whirled on the inspector. “What’s it for? I demand to know!”

He stared at her, straight-faced. “Now, if you’re really demanding you may as well know that this lady’s been laying herself open to a charge of breaking and entering. Or illegal entry, anyway.”

“Is that it?” Lawn Abbott drew herself up to her full height, which was slightly over five feet, including her heels. “Then let me tell you something, mister policeman. You can’t hold Miss Withers on any such charge as that. She had every right to be in the house!”

“Just why?” asked the inspector very gravely.

“Because I asked her to! Only yesterday morning I called her into the case because I could see what a botch the regular police were making of it. If she came inside she was only there at my request, trying to straighten out this muddle! Now, let’s see you arrest her and make it stick!”

The inspector, containing himself with difficulty, bowed. “Under the circumstances I haven’t any choice,” he admitted. “Miss Withers, you have been sprung, and how!” He winked at her behind Lawn’s back.

“I certainly have, haven’t I?” murmured the schoolteacher, a little taken aback at the girl’s intense partisanship.

Lawn grasped her hand. “Please come on back in. I want to talk to you.”

“I think maybe I’ll come too,” suggested Inspector Piper wickedly.

“You’ll come with a search warrant tucked in your hot little hand, and not without it!” Lawn drew Miss Withers towards the front door, pausing to glare at Officer Lunney sprawled in the deck chair.

Once inside, Miss Withers shook her head. “Very kind of you—but, child, aren’t you afraid of making enemies sometimes? You were rather short with the inspector, and in front of one of his subordinates too.”

“Oh, dear. That’s a knack I seem to have,” Lawn admitted ruefully. “For making un-friends. I’m always getting into trouble because I say what I mean and what I think—in a world full of people who live by double talk.” She led the way into the living room and threw herself down on a big divan, relaxing immediately as a cat on a cushion.

“I suppose,” she said, “you think I’m an odd person. Maybe I am. Maybe you’re a bit odd too. I guess I shouldn’t have rushed out of your place yesterday—I had no business to have hurt feelings. But please tell me what’s going on and what’s going to happen. I left the inquest early when I saw the way it was going, but Helen and Father will be along shortly. We haven’t much time.”

“It is later than you think,” the schoolteacher agreed. “They used to inscribe that on sundials, so it must be true.”

“I’m truly sorry that I blew up yesterday,” Lawn repeated. She bit thoughtfully at the tip of her right forefinger. “I guess I’m just the moody type. But I’d just had a scene with Helen and Father. I can’t stand my family, you see, and they can’t stand me. Never mind that—I hear that you are doing your level best to get Pat out of jail, and I want to know all about it, and how I can help. By the way, if it’s a question of money—”