Miss Withers Regrets (14 page)

She went on inside the station, found an elderly man in uniform picking his teeth at the desk, and asked in her politest tone for an audience with the prisoner.

“Can’t see him!” pronounced that guardian of law and order. He nodded towards the stairs. “The sheriff and that New York cop are up there with him now.”

“It’s that New York cop that I really want to see,” Miss Withers advised him, and headed up the stair before he could answer. She had some trouble with a big barred-iron gate at the head of the stair, but finally she hammered upon it until she had drawn the irate attention of the turnkey, Sheriff Vinge, and the inspector.

“Let her in,” said Piper wearily. “And it’s okay with me if you keep her in. What is it now, Hildegarde?”

“I want five minutes with the prisoner, whether he likes it or not, and I think he’ll not.”

“How about it, Sheriff?” the inspector asked, introducing them.

“Well, now, since this’s the lady that turned him in—” Sheriff Vinge was anxious to be friendly. “Oh, go ahead, ma’am. Last cell on the right, and we’ll be watching, so don’t try to slip him any hacksaws or skeleton keys.”

“I don’t want to slip Pat Montague anything but a piece of my mind,” said Miss Withers, and hurried on. She found Montague sitting on his cot, looking rather confused and irritable, which, she supposed, was only to be expected.

“How do you do, young man?” she greeted him.

Pat Montague looked up at her, blinked, and said, “Oh, God!”

“I know how you feel,” she went on hastily, peering through the bars. “I admit that I gravely misjudged you the other night, but since that time I’ve done my best to rectify the error, really, I have.”

Montague stood up and came towards her. “Forget it. I was sore at the world, but this is a good place to cool off and think things over. Besides, it was all Nicolet’s fault. He should have minded his own business in the first place.”

“Perhaps he was. But never mind that. I have a message for you.” She waited a moment, but there was only a slight flicker of interest. “Aren’t you going to ask if it’s from Helen?”

His face was clouded. “All right, is it?”

“As a matter of fact, no. From her sister. Lawn said to tell you that she knows you’re innocent and that pretty soon everyone else will know it too.”

A faint but engaging smile lighted his face, and Miss Withers understood why women were so intrigued with Pat Montague. “Thanks,” he said. “She’s a good kid, I guess, after all. She’s changed a lot since I went away.”

“Everything changes in three years. You’ve changed. And so, for that matter, has Helen.”

Pat winced slightly under that jab. “I wouldn’t know,” he said hopelessly. “For a long time I thought that if I could only see her, just once—”

“But didn’t you? I mean, for just a second, when you looked down from the roadway to the swimming pool that afternoon?”

“But that wasn’t Helen!” he said quickly. “It couldn’t have been. She was just so much in my mind that I thought anyone in a white bathing suit was her. It must have been Cairns I saw. There was time for it to happen while I was walking down from the road—it’s about a quarter of a mile, you know.”

“Still a very neat, carefully timed job of murder,” she said.

He wasn’t listening. “Miss Withers, will you be seeing Helen again soon?”

“Perhaps. Why?”

“Just tell her that as soon as I get out of here I’m going as far away as I can get, as fast as I can. Maybe I’ll reenlist; I worked my way up once and I can do it again. I don’t think I’d like being a civilian very much, anyway. I came back expecting things to be the same, and they seem all changed and different—”

“To you and ten million other young men,” said Miss Withers.

“Tell her I’m sorry I tried to come barging back into things, and she may as well forget me.”

“That,” pointed out the schoolteacher, “is a rather delicate message to carry.”

“You mean it will hurt her?”

“It will hurt somebody,” Miss Withers hinted. This was most certainly not, she realized, the opportune time to hand him the packet of love letters, even if she had intended to, which she hadn’t.

“I must run along,” she said. “There is just one question. When Searles came up to you at the pool just a moment after you discovered the body, how was he dressed?”

“Dressed? In overalls, I guess. I can’t remember.”

“Of course you can remember. Didn’t he have his coat over his arm and his sleeves rolled up?”

Pat shut his eyes hard, scowling. “No, he didn’t! He was wearing his jacket—a dirty old denim jacket.”

“But the sleeves—were they soaked?”

Pat saw what she was driving at and shook his head. “They were dry,” he admitted. “I wish I could say they were wet, but they weren’t, not then, anyway.”

And that, as Miss Withers said later to the inspector, was that. She found Piper waiting for her at the gate of the lockup and went downstairs with him. “But what are you so glum about, Oscar? Having trouble getting evidence enough on Pat Montague to take to the grand jury?”

“There might be a snag or two in that quarter,” he admitted.

“Such as the length of the murder weapon, so called?”

He grinned. “I figured you’d get on to the rake handle sooner or later. Yes, that among other things. You know what we were talking about to Pat Montague when you came busting in? He wants to be put to the lie-detector test. You know what I think of those machines, anyway. It’s possible to beat them if you know enough about how they work and have pretty good control of yourself. That’s especially true when the test isn’t given by an expert, and the sheriff is a little dubious about okaying the expense of sending out to Evanston for one of Keeler’s bright young men.”

“But it speaks well for the prisoner, doesn’t it? I mean his requesting the machine.”

“A smart lawyer could certainly make it look that way, yes. Or if the newspapers got hold of the request, which they haven’t yet. And don’t you go talking!”

“Perish the thought!” Miss Withers was about to say more, but at that moment the officer at the desk beckoned to the inspector, holding up the phone.

“It’s for you, sir!”

Piper picked it up, said, “Speaking,” and listened for some time. Then he said, “Thanks, Georgie,” and hung up. He came back to Miss Withers, grinning from ear to ear.

“Well?” she demanded. “Come clean!”

He hesitated. “I don’t know what it means, probably nothing—but it’s a sidelight on Cairns. That was what you wanted, wasn’t it? You know how the guy made all his money?”

“Public relations, somebody said.”

“That means nowadays almost anything you want it to mean. But Huntley Cairns was no fool. He stumbled on to a gold mine of an idea and parleyed it into a fortune. His firm was really a super deluxe machine for swamping motion-picture studios, radio chains, and stage producers with letters. After we had our talk this morning I got the man who’d done the original investigation to go back to Cairns Associates and get tough, and he uncovered the whole thing.”

“Letters!” she echoed. “But why?”

“Those people are all supersensitive to what they call the public pulse. About the only way they can gauge public demand is by the fan mail they get. They never actually read it, but they have it tabulated and all that sort of thing. For instance, let’s suppose that Joey Jones is a radio comedian and he wants his sponsor to renew his contract. He simply comes to Cairns Associates and hires them to start up the machine. They have a couple of hundred letter-writers, mostly women who work at home. They’re supplied with all the various kinds of pens and inks and pencils and typewriters of all makes and sizes and type styles. All sorts of notepaper, too. The letters are collected centrally and then distributed for mailing at post offices in the towns where the client especially wants to show he has a devoted following. A few days later the sponsor begins to get thousands of letters, all screaming that they will never buy any more of his underarm deodorant unless they can hear Joey Jones every Thursday night. Or unless Dawn O’Day gets to play the lead in A-budget pictures, or unless Marmaduke Glutz plays
Hamlet
on Broadway this year.”

“But, Oscar, is it legal?”

“Perfectly. They used phone books and city directories to get the names and addresses in case of a checkup or a form-letter answer, but they changed the names or initials just a little, enough to keep clear of forgery charges. Cairns got from ten to twenty-five cents a letter, depending on what the traffic would bear. For a thousand dollars anybody could get up to ten thousand letters, which would be less than one week’s salary and deductible from the income tax as a legitimate expense, anyway.”

Miss Withers thought about it. “Very clever of Cairns. It does sound like a gold mine.”

“It is—or was. And just think of the unfunny comics, the matronly ingénues, the gravel-voiced tenors who have been shoved down the public’s throat because Cairns Associates made the big-money advertisers, the theatrical and movie producers, think that the public couldn’t get along without them!”

“Oscar, could the murder motive have come out of that?”

He was amused. “I don’t think the National Association of Manufacturers drowned Cairns. And the long-suffering public can’t very well protect itself, or we’d have had an end of crooners and double-talk comics and soap operas years ago.”

“How about a dissatisfied client?”

The inspector shook his head. “The clients weren’t dissatisfied. The Cairns system even now and then gave an unknown a chance. Those Linton twins who were at the cocktail party had signed up with Cairns, and he was all set to put on a letter campaign to get them the movie role in
Forever Amber
—you know, as a novelty. One actress has played a dual role, why not two actresses playing one? Cairns was charging them a double rate because they were unknowns, but that’s no motive for them to bump him off. We’re keeping an eye on them, though, because we don’t want to miss angles.”

“Or any curves, you mean? Gracious, Oscar, and at your age too!”

“Aw—” The inspector grinned and waved his hand. “You run along, I’ve got to get back to work. The commissioner will be wondering why I take so long to wind a case like this up and put it away.”

“In my private opinion,” the schoolteacher said, “this case is going to wind itself up, and right speedily too.”

He stared at her. “You haven’t been throwing monkey wrenches around in the machinery, have you?”

“Not intentionally. But in my helpful way I just possibly have been acting as a sort of catalytic agent. I feel it in my bones that something is going to happen, maybe tonight.”

“You and your hunches! Be a good girl and get back to your tropical fish and let me worry about clues, will you?”

She paused in the doorway “Yes, Oscar, but suppose you haven’t considered the right clues! I mean the Book with the Red Jacket, and the Returned Letters, and the Mildewed Bathing Suit, and—”

“Save it,” he said. “I’ll be over later, and you can riddle me your riddles then. And if Pat Montague comes through with a confession in the meantime, you’ll be the first to know.”

“I’m glad,” Miss Hildegarde Withers called after him, “that I don’t have to sit on a hot stove until
that
happens!”

O
NCE SAFE AT HOME,
the schoolteacher went directly to her aquarium, as a clairvoyant to her crystal ball or a gypsy to her tea leaves. Through pale jade water the jeweled fish still moved in their pathless ways. After she had stared at them close up for a little while Miss Withers felt herself once more losing her identity, moving through the glass exactly like Alice. Yet this was a stranger world than Wonderland or the regions that bordered on Looking-Glass House.

It was a world of sudden changes. Overnight one of the bright Paris-green plants, a sturdy spatterdock, had shot up one sprout several inches, reaching almost to the surface of the water. A fat mystery snail climbed, as she watched, up to the top of the marine world and then stretched out a trunk-like arm to suck in air. After a moment he let go his hold, bubble and all, and floated dreamily down to the bottom to start all over again. “Very much the way I’ve been carrying on,” Miss Withers decided.

A long, snaky dojo slid along the bottom of the tank, sucking in sand and spitting it out again, and then suddenly gave up its scavenging and swam sinuously up to a crotch in one of the feathery
allisneria
plants, where it coiled itself up for all the world like a boa constrictor in a jungle tree.

And ever and always the jeweled fish moved in their everlasting journey to nowhere. All except one of the rosy tetras, who now floated belly-up against the farther side of the tank, behind the thermostat. As the schoolteacher, shocked and horrified, retrieved the tiny corpse with the aid of a dip net, she saw that the tail fin had been bitten clean away.

Down in the lower corner of the tank the female
betta
followed her mate as always, goggle eyes admiring his peacock perfection. In the jade distance behind the pile of rocks the two angelfish floated serenely, their long antennae sweeping back, their mouths moving in what seemed to be a silent whisper. One of them, however, had a slight list to starboard.

“I’d like to be a mermaid for about five minutes,” Miss Withers said grimly. “I’d get to the bottom of this business.”

But since that metamorphosis seemed out of the question, the school ma’am sat down and tried to find out something closer to the realms of possibility. “I’m a fine one,” she told herself, “to attempt the unraveling of a murder mystery when I can’t even fathom this epidemic of cannibalism in my own aquarium.”

Somehow, in spite of all reason, a strange sort of parallel was taking shape—between the midget murders among her tropical fish and the greater problem which had disrupted the placid little town of Shoreham. She had a completely unreasonable feeling that if she solved one she would solve the other too.

Which reminded her that she was rather behind on her reading.
Oriental Moments
came first on the list, and it was not until she was well into the fifth chapter that she found anything at all which could possibly have any bearing on the matter at hand. Here, however, she paused, reread the paragraph, and turned down a corner of the page. She put the little book back into her handbag with a nod of satisfaction.