Miss Withers Regrets (18 page)

“Possibly,” suggested Miss Withers, “she does it to annoy Mrs. Cairns and her father.”

“But they aren’t at home. They’ve gone to La Guardia Field.”

“What? You mean they’ve left—”

“They didn’t take any suitcases,” Beulah interrupted quickly. “I think they just went to meet somebody, but I don’t know who.”

“Thank you very much. You’ve been most helpful.”

“Anything at all,” Beulah said.

“Anything? Then just tell me why you’ve dropped the plantation accent—the ‘yessums’ and ‘Ah sho do honeychile’ patois.” Miss Withers cocked her head inquisitively.

The girl hesitated. “Well, you see—that sort of talk goes with the job, like wearing an apron. In service, most homes, you’ve got to Uncle-Tom it. Only Jeff and I are quitting at the end of the month. Mr. Cairns left us a quarter’s pay in his will, and with that and what Jeff can get under the veterans’ bill of rights, he’s going back to college.”

“How nice for you both!” Then Miss Withers frowned. “And I don’t suppose you happen to know any of the other provisions of the will?”

“Honestly, I don’t,” Beulah admitted. “Except about the trust. I heard Mr. Abbott say that Mrs. Cairns gets the income from that as long as she doesn’t remarry.”

“Very interesting. Thank you again.” Miss Withers went back to her taxi. “Next stop, I believe, should be the police station,” she told him. On the way back to town he made one or two tentative efforts to start the conversational ball rolling, but she barely answered him.

At the station she paid him off, wincing slightly at the amount, and marched inside. For once the officer at the desk seemed glad to see her. “Oh, Miss Withers! The inspector’s been trying to phone you. We called your hotel, but you weren’t there.”

“Well, I’m here now,” she said.

There was some delay in locating the inspector, but finally he came down the hall, a dank, dead cigar clamped in his jaws and beads of perspiration on his scalp and forehead.

“Well, look who’s here!” he greeted her. He sounded, she thought, both triumphant and uneasy.

“I understand that you telephoned me, Oscar.”

“Sure. Didn’t I promise that you’d be the first to know?”

She peered at him. “Oscar Piper, what are you talking about?”

“Montague’s confession, of course.”

“His confession of
what
?”

“Everything. The works.”

The world was spinning around her. “You mean that after you’d trapped him with the lie detector he broke down?”

The inspector looked carefully at his cigar, decided it was past saving, and threw it into the wastebasket beside the desk. “Not exactly. Just between us, I’ll admit that the results we got with the lie detector weren’t so hot. Montague showed a guilty reaction to some of the key questions about the murder of Cairns, but to some he didn’t. And there were other questions tucked away in the list, like why did he kidnap Charley Ross and where did he and Jesse James hide the gold they got out of the Gallatin Bank and what was his mother’s real maiden name, and he gave a guilty reaction to those too! Maybe there was a short or something in the machine. I told you I didn’t think too much of those contraptions. But, anyway, after we’d fooled around with that for a while, Montague finally gave in and began to dictate a confession. It’s being typed out now for him to sign.”

“With a promise of clemency?”

“That’s up to Loomis, the Knight’s County district attorney. He’s here now, and he says he won’t ask the death penalty, anyway, as there’s no premeditation that can be proved.”

Miss Withers looked very displeased. “Sometimes I think that we’re slipping back into the dark ages of the eighteenth century, when all the police ever tried to do in solving a murder was to torture a confession out of somebody—”

“Relax, Hildegarde. There wasn’t any of the rubber-hose-in-the-back-room stuff used on Montague.”

“Just a two-hundred-watt bulb right in his eyes, and everybody taking turns yelling at him, which is about the same thing. Oscar, I don’t know what to say. This changes everything.”

The inspector looked surprised. “But I thought you knew it and that you’d rushed down here to congratulate me! It was all announced on the radio around eight o’clock—a little prematurely, but Sheriff Vinge likes to stand in well with the press and the radio newscasters, so he handed it out.”

“What I actually came down here for, Oscar, was to ask you to rearrest Joe Searles.”

“The Cairnses’ gardener?” Piper thought that was very funny. “When did you get that bee in your bonnet?”

“Never mind. I’ve been thinking things over, that’s all. If you won’t arrest Searles, won’t you at least assign a detective to watch him?”

“Relax, Hildegarde! We’ve got a confession—”

“And you think it will hold up?”

He hesitated only a moment. “Honestly, Hildegarde, I think so. I don’t see why not. The district attorney is in there with Sheriff Vinge now, and we’re going to give Montague a new lie-detector test based on his confession, just to make everything watertight.”

“And is the prisoner willing to do that?”

“He’s willing to do anything and everything. I never saw a man bust up into so many pieces under a load of guilt. Take it easy, Hildegarde, and don’t talk yourself into thinking that this is necessarily one of those twisted, complex cases. I’ll admit that in the past you’ve kibitzed on some murder cases that were pretty queer. But don’t forget that for every one of those, we have a dozen where the homicide squad arrests the most likely suspect, proves a case against him, and eventually gets a conviction.”

“Uh-huh,” said Miss Withers absently.

“And remember that Pat Montague had a motive to kill Huntley Cairns, and so far nobody else did. Not even your friend the gardener, Searles.”

Miss Withers didn’t answer that. Just then a big, handsome, blonde girl came down the hall carrying a sheaf of typewritten manuscript. “There comes the D.A.’s secretary with the confession now,” he said excitedly. “She’s going into Vinge’s office.”

“Oscar,” began Miss Withers slowly, “I think I ought to tell you—”

“Sure, sure. I’ve got to run along. We’ve got to work out a list of questions to throw at Pat Montague when he’s hooked up to the lie detector.”

“Then ask him one for me,” suggested the schoolteacher tartly. “Ask him if he thinks a gentleman is in honor-bound to confess himself right into the electric chair for the sake of a lady he used to be in love with!”

She stalked out of the place, slamming the screen door behind her, and was morose all the way back to the hotel. Arriving at her cottage, she turned on all the lights, including the fluorescent lamp over the tank of tropical fish, but for once that watery wonder world had no power to distract or inspire her. Another fish or two seemed to be missing, but she was past caring about that.

“It must be that I have lost my grip,” she said out loud. It wasn’t so much that she begrudged the inspector his little triumph and his easily won confession. She had her own private opinion about the value of confessions, anyway.

Only it seemed that things were moving in the wrong direction. Currents were flowing backward. Even her fabled intuition was all haywire. Perhaps the inspector was right and she should have stayed retired. Yet away down in the back of her mind little red lights were flashing off and on, and they seemed to be spelling out a name.

On a sudden impulse she picked up the local telephone book. Sure enough, there was the name—“Searles, Joseph—Lndscpg—24 Pier Lane—4439.” Evidently he needed a phone in his business. She could, she thought, find out if the man was at home, explaining the call by saying that she needed some rosebushes pruned.

Miss Withers gave the number to the hotel operator and waited. But the lie about the rosebushes was not to rest upon her conscience. “They don’t answer,” the operator said. “You want me to keep on trying?”

“Never mind,” said the schoolteacher. Perhaps landscape gardeners kept later hours than she had imagined, for it was after eleven.

She sat down and tried to read but found that she was going over the same paragraph again and again, without the slightest idea as to its meaning. Somehow she killed time until almost twelve and tried again.

“Still no answer,” the operator said.

Miss Withers frowned. Certainly a man who had to get up with the birds should be home and in bed by now. “Hold on until somebody answers,” she requested. She counted as she heard the ringing sounds—eleven—twelve—thirteen.

And then, miraculously, there came a click at the other end of the line and a gruff “Wha’?”

“Is this Mr. Searles? This is Miss Withers speaking. I have some rosebushes—”

The voice at the other end of the line, heavy with sleep and alcohol, said briefly what she could do with her rosebushes, and the instrument was hung up with a crash.

“Well!” said Miss Hildegarde Withers to herself. “That nasty old man ought to have his mouth washed out with green soap!”

She stalked across the room and back again. “I certainly never in my life—”

Then she sat down suddenly in a chair and drew a deep breath. What if her bombshell dropped among the group at the Benningtons’ had not proved a dud after all? What if it had bounced right into her own lap? Her accusation of Joe Searles had been almost purely rhetorical, to prove her point. But gardeners did have access to all sorts of poisons, and Searles was a dirty old man whose thumb might very well have smudged any book he was reading. Moreover, she had never in her life heard a gardener speak a good word for dogs, who were always befouling lawns and racing across new seedings and digging holes in flowerbeds to bury ancient bones salvaged from garbage cans.

But granting all that, then why not take the next, obvious step? Suppose that Huntley Cairns had suspected his employee, or even found him out? A man with a wholesale disregard for canine life might not stop at taking human life. And who but a gardener and household handyman could easier assemble some neat little device which would splice one rake handle on to another, forming a shaft that would reach far down into the water, to the very bottom of the deep end of the swimming pool?

Then he could have slipped away to dispose of the gadget and return to discover the body—only with the added luck of discovering Pat Montague on the spot?

This was, she decided, too big a thing to handle alone. The more she thought about it, the more convinced she was that Searles had killed Huntley Cairns in order to protect himself from exposure and arrest as the fiend who had brought death to half the canine population of Shoreham and aroused the furious owners.

She grabbed the telephone and put through a call for the inspector, but was told by the man at the police station desk that Piper was in an important conference and could not be disturbed. They would tell him that she had called.

And that was that. Miss Withers stalked up and down the room for a few moments, like some weird, ungainly bird of prey—a very, very nervous bird. In the movies at a time like this it was always the heroine—and she still thought of herself in that light—who went rushing off alone to beard the murderer in his den. That always led up to the scare sequence in the lonely old house on the moors, or in the mad scientist’s laboratory, or—this season—in the private mental hospital of the celebrated but too-handsome psychiatrist.

“If I had but known the terror that awaited me—” was usually one of the lines of dialogue.

The whole thing could, of course, wait until morning. Meanwhile poor Pat Montague, to whom she had once done a considerable injustice, was being put to the question by means of lie detectors and third degrees by district attorneys and country sheriffs and the inspector himself. Heaven knew to what lengths they would go to squeeze just the right kind of confession out of him.

Besides, tonight Joe Searles was drunk and asleep. Miss Withers did not put too much faith in the ancient phrase about
in vino veritas,
but she did know that a man suddenly awakened from sleep is psychologically incapable of telling a good lie. His mental defenses were all down, and it took time to set them up again.

According to the ancient gold watch pinned to her bosom, it was almost the witching hour of twelve. Miss Withers put on her hat again, took up her umbrella, and was about to head out into the night when the telephone rang.

With a sudden sigh of relief she seized upon it and cried, “Oscar! Hallo!”

Only it wasn’t Oscar, it was Lawn Abbott, and her voice was hushed, a little strained. “They shoved a note under my door a while ago—that you’d stopped by. Anything wrong?”

“Almost everything,” Miss Withers admitted. “What I stopped by to tell you was that I crashed the meeting and dropped my bomb. But that doesn’t seem to matter now. Or hadn’t you heard? Pat Montague has confessed.”

“That’s a lie!” came the girl’s voice in an angry whisper.

“I’m afraid not,” Miss Withers said a little stiffly. “I had it straight from the best sources.”

“I mean the confession is a lie, no matter what Pat said!” Lawn was fiercely confident.

“Oh! Well, I agree with you. I think that the murderer lies in an entirely different direction. I was just about to start out, in the hope of making a surprise attack. Care to play Watson to my Sherlock?”

“Love to. But where, and how?”

“I intend to call on Mr. Joe Searles at once,” Miss Withers told her. There was a strange gulp at the other end of the wire. “What?”

“Nothing. I just swallowed a damn. You see, I’m afraid I can’t get into town. Helen and father went off somewhere earlier—I think they took both cars, and if they didn’t, still Helen has the keys to the roadster. My sister and I aren’t on very good terms. I could try to catch a ride—or—”

“Never mind,” Miss Withers said.

“But I’d like to … Oops! I hear somebody coming. More trouble.” The receiver clicked.

“ ‘So I’ll do it myself’ said the little red hen,” observed the schoolteacher. Emerging from her cottage, she found both taxis away on calls. Searles’s address, however, should lie within walking distance, almost on the edge of town and near the shore. She set out sturdily, her sensible heels tapping on the side walks like drumsticks.