Miss Withers Regrets (16 page)

“You should have booted him, then,” Miss Withers suggested.

Midge Beale watched the thick red gore splash on to the porcelain. “Twenty-five dollars every week!” he continued. “From Fatso Cairns, of all people. And Adele tried to tell me that it was just a business arrangement, or a sort of royalty. But she couldn’t show me a contract or anything. I wouldn’t even have found out about it, only she asked me for money when she’d already had her household allowance this week. No wonder she was such a whiz at making both ends meet. It’s clear enough that she had something on Cairns and was making him pay off. Maybe it was breach of promise when he dropped her to marry Helen.”

“In that case,” Miss Withers argued reasonably, “he would hardly have continued the payments after Adele married you. And the smallness of the sum, plus the weekly regularity, would seem to argue against the blackmail theory. I’m sure there must be some explanation. Why don’t you have a nice quiet talk—”

“You can’t have a nice quiet talk with a woman who always bursts into tears,” Midge objected. “No, thanks, I don’t need another cloth. It seems to have let up.”

“Then I must be running along,” the schoolteacher said, “before I say anything that will get your nose started again. There was just one question, however. At the Cairns cocktail party, after your little session in the library—”

“Don’t ask me for details about the rest of the party,” Midge begged. “About that time it got very, very drunk out. That was Helen’s fault, for stranding me with two martinis.”

“I was only going to ask if you noticed the absence of anybody about that time—any of the people who had been in the library?”

He shook his head. “The Benningtons were playing bridge with Jed Nicolet and Mame Boad,” he informed her. “Doc. Radebaugh and Trudy Boad cut in for one or two hands.”

“Then any one of the five—I mean six, counting the dummy—could have been absent for a while without being noticed?”

“Without being noticed by me, anyway,” Midge assured her.

Miss Withers headed for the stairs. “I hope you’ll forgive me,” she apologized when she was at the door. “I mean, for my thoughts. But a trail of bloodstains—”

Midge gasped. “I get it! You thought that—I mean, that Adele was—”

“Well, wouldn’t anybody think that?”

He was laughing. “Why, ma’am, I wouldn’t harm a hair of her head, even though I’d just love to wring her pretty neck. You understand?”

“I suppose so,” agreed Miss Withers doubtfully. “Oh, I almost forgot. Have you ever seen this book before?” She waved
Oriental Moments
in front of him.

“Huh?” he brightened. “I don’t know for sure—but it looks like the book that Nicolet made so much fuss over in Cairns’s library. It’s the right color, anyway.”

“I thought it would be. Then you didn’t see the same book when your wife took it out of the rental library down town some months ago?”

Midge looked blank. Then his face cleared. “Oh, that! Sure, I remember, especially the drawing on the cover. I kidded the life out of Adele. She picked up the book, thinking by the title and the naked girl on the cover that it was hot stuff, but it turned out to be too dull to read. Once you put it down you couldn’t pick it up.”

“Really! Your wife kept it out for more than a week, I happen to know.”

“You may know that, but you don’t know Adele. She never returned any book in less than a week, and some she never returned. That’s the way she’s made.”

“Oh?” said the schoolteacher.

“Just a coincidence,” Midge assured her.

“I suppose so,” agreed Miss Withers thoughtfully, and made her adieus. She rode back to the hotel in a thoughtful silence. No matter which way she headed, she wound up against a stone wall. “My autobiography,” she said to herself, “ought to be titled
My Life and Times in Blind Alleys
.”

T
HE PHONE RANG THREE
times and then was answered by “Miz Cyains’s res’dence,” spoken in a soft, chocolate-syrupy voice. There was a brief pause, then a giggle, and Lawn Abbott dropped into her own voice. “Speaking,” she said. “Oh, don’t mind me, Miss Withers—I was only clowning. What’s up? Did you get into—I mean, did you see him?”

“I did—”

“Oh—please wait just a sec while I get comfortable with a cigarette and everything.” Lawn carried the telephone, its luxuriously overlength cord trailing out behind, over to a divan. She held a cigarette to a lighter built to resemble a flintlock pistol and then got comfortable, which to her consisted of lying on the back of her neck with her boot-clad legs in the air. “Now tell all!” she begged.

“Pat Montague seems to be taking his confinement as well as can be expected,” the schoolteacher began. “It is being very difficult for that young man, you know. He doesn’t know just yet what he wants or where he’s going except that if he ever gets out he plans to reenlist.”

Lawn chewed eagerly on a fingernail. “Did you give him my message?”

“Why, yes—yes, I did. I think he was very pleased. As a matter of fact, being in jail is giving that young man an excellent chance to do some thinking—some very overdue thinking. But more of that later. Are you—I mean, can you speak freely?”

Lawn looked quickly towards the kitchen, where Beulah and Jeff were making definite but diminished rattling noises indicative of dinner to come. Then she looked towards the stairs and nodded. “Free as the breeze. Helen is in her room taking a beauty sleep, and father has retired with a bottle and a book of his old press clippings. What is it? Do you want me to come into town? Because if you do, I can catch a ride in with Searles; he’s just about ready to leave for the day—”

Then the girl listened for a while. Finally she said, “Yes, but I don’t get it.”

“Just call all of them,” came the schoolteacher’s clipped Bostonian accents. “The Benningtons, Mrs. Boad, Dr. Radebaugh, and Jed Nicolet. I was going to ask Adele Beale to do it for me, but she’s disappeared. You know all those people as well or better than she does, anyway, and certainly better than I do.”

Lawn suddenly sat up very straight, her face flushed and excited. “Of course,” she said. “It takes a lot of crust, but I’ll do it. If you think it will help Pat—”

Miss Withers’s voice sounded pleased. “And may I suggest that you do the telephoning where you can be sure of privacy? This matter is extremely confidential, you know.”

“That will be easy,” Lawn promised. “Dad and Helen are avoiding me as if I had the leaping leprosy, anyway. I’ll report my results later, okay?”

Hanging up, the girl rose and crossed the room to the liquor cabinet. She took up a bottle, uncorked it, and then hastily put it back, recognizing it as Scotch whiskey. She poured a jigger of brandy, took a sip, made a face, and then returned to the divan, carefully carrying the glass. “The things I do for that man!” she said to herself, and picked up the telephone again.

It was a rather longer ordeal than she had at first imagined, but she had the drawing room all to herself, without any one’s disturbing her at all. Once she thought she heard an upstairs door open and steps in the hall, but when she looked up at the landing nobody was there.

Meanwhile, Pat Montague was himself in an extremely unhappy frame of mind, having just been led down the jail stairs by Officer Lunney and brought into the sheriff’s office. The room was full of officers in and out of uniform, some of them old acquaintances by this time and some new. Two of them seemed to be putting the finishing touches to an electric chair, which was hooked up with something that resembled an old-fashioned crystal radio receiver.

“It isn’t really the hot-squat, Montague, though I’ll admit it looks a little like it,” Vinge greeted him.

Pat swallowed with difficulty.

Inspector Oscar Piper came towards him. “You asked for it, so here it is. It’s perfectly clear, isn’t it? You are submitting to the lie-detector test willingly and of your own volition. The law says that no man can be forced to testify against himself. You want to submit to the test because you hope it will prove the truth of statements previously made by you, is that right?”

The prisoner nodded.

“You have a right to have an attorney present if you wish.”

Pat shook his head. “No, thanks, Inspector.”

Piper shrugged and turned to the sheriff. “I guess we can get going,” he said.

And Miss Hildegarde Withers waited beside the telephone. Having dropped a stone into the pool, she sat still and let the ripples spread out to engulf her destined victim. Or was it victims?

To pass the time she picked up a magazine which contained a fascinating treatise on the genetics of tropical fish, particularly of two varieties whose normal habitat was the jungles, the
tierra caliente
of Southern Mexico. The article made clear how easy it would be to develop wagtails, albinos, comet platys, and something known as the black-bottomed wagtail platy, all from the crossbreeding of the wild swordtail and the platyfish.

She put down the book and wondered if the murder instinct could be bred out of mankind and if murderers were perhaps only sports, mutants, or throwbacks to Cain or the Neanderthal. When highly developed tropical fish mated at random the offspring reverted to the original types. Yet of course all humans mated at random, or at least according to the dictates of happenchance. Midge Beale, catching pretty, shrewish Adele on the rebound from her romance with Huntley Cairns. Helen Abbott, lonely and confused and unwilling to wait for a sweetheart in uniform, drifting into matrimony with the first man who asked her. Her father, a widower, marrying the Princess Zoraida …

The impulse to murder, Miss Withers thought, must be a recessive trait in all human beings. Why was it, then, dominant in a few? Of course Bertillon and Lombroso had believed that murderers differed in appearance from other people, but the schoolteacher knew to her sorrow that this was not true.

There was no sign, like the overlong tail fin of the swordtail cropping up in a litter of comet platys, to mark the throwback.

The schoolteacher got up and made herself a lettuce sandwich and drank a glass of milk, still carefully keeping her eyes from the telephone, on the old theory about the watched pot. She felt possessed of an inner tension which could only partially be explained by the oppressive stillness of the air.

Murderers, according to the inspector at least, were usually trapped because they could not let well enough alone. As a rule, they felt sure that they had left something undone and many times came out into the open to cover up tracks that didn’t exist. The murderer of Huntley Cairns had so far avoided making this mistake, at least. Perhaps with a little teasing, a little goading, he would show himself one of these moments—to the discerning eye.

But the telephone didn’t even ring once. Miss Withers thought of the bathtub, remembering the old story about the pretty girl who said that on a Saturday night she had to take three baths before the phone would ring. The not ringing of the telephone became a tangible thing, an audible sound in itself, just as the absence of the vibration of a ship’s engines, when for some reason they have to be stopped at sea, can awaken every passenger.

“This is silly,” decided Miss Withers. She went over to the phone, gave the Cairns number to the operator at the desk, and waited. Lawn Abbott answered immediately in her natural voice.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, I didn’t call you back because it was no dice. I called them, all of them, over and over again.”

“You mean they won’t come?”

“Nope. Nobody home. The Benningtons’ maid finally answered and said they had gone out for dinner and the evening. Jed’s houseboy wouldn’t say anything except that Mister Nicolet was out. Harry Radebaugh has his phone connected up with a switchboard service for doctors, and they answered but wouldn’t say anything except that they would have the doctor call later. I finally got hold of Trudy Boad and she said at first that her mother was out. I called back and she said her mother had gone to bed and couldn’t be disturbed.”

“I see.” Miss Withers’s plans swiftly rearranged themselves, like the pattern in a child’s kaleidoscope. “It would appear that the group is holding its own convocation. I shall still try to crash the party.”

“But how can you?” Lawn cried. “You don’t know where—”

“They will be at somebody’s house,” the schoolteacher told her. “I shall simply climb into a taxicab and go exploring—to the homes of all of them. Outside one house there will be five or six cars, so that will be the meeting place. Anyway, thank you for your help. Let’s hope that tonight will see the end of all this trouble.”

“I wish—” the girl began, and stopped.

“Is anything wrong?” Miss Withers pressed after a moment.

“Only my sister and my father…” Lawn began. Then her tone changed. “And I’m really very sorry, but we have no comment to make and nothing whatever to say for publication. Good-bye!”

The line went dead.

“Family trouble again,” Miss Withers deduced. Again she felt that there was something to be said for living alone, where one’s telephone calls, entrances, and exits could be questioned by nobody. She asked the desk to summon her a taxi and headed forth into the summer twilight.

“Among the most gala social events of the summer season (according to the Shoreham
Standard)
are the justly famous evenings around the barbecue pit at the delightfully informal home of Commander and Mrs. Sam Bennington, and invitations thereto are much sought after.”

Not on this particular evening. Five unhappy people were gathered together around the bare and cheerless charcoal grill at the foot of the garden. Overhead an unshaded electric bulb cast a pale and unflattering light upon the group, as well as attracting a horde of June bugs, Mayflies, gnats, and mosquitoes who had nothing else on that evening.

From the roadway, an onlooker could have seen only the glow of the light and heard only a hum of voices that now and again rose to a crescendo and then died suddenly and started all over again. There was no tinkle of ice in tall julep glasses, no sharp spat! of the ping-pong ball hit across the deserted table. Nor was there any rich, sizzling scent of charcoal-broiled beefsteaks.