Miss Withers Regrets (21 page)

He stood by the door, beckoning gently. “Oh, very well, Oscar. Since you have to be so official. It’s a shame, though, that you don’t share my interest in tropical fish. Sometimes we can learn the more interesting and valuable lessons from a close study of wild life. ‘Sermons in stones,’ you know.” She turned out the light and picked up her bag. Then a sudden thought struck her and, murmuring something about her toothbrush, she disappeared into the bathroom.

Carefully locking the door behind her, she took out a packet of letters—love letters which should never have been written and which even now should not fall into the hands of the police or the district attorney. Swiftly she crumpled them, envelopes and all, into the bowl and touched a match to the lot. As they flared up she turned to open the window, not wanting the inspector in the other room to catch the sour, acrid scent of burning paper.

She turned back to the conflagration, stirring the burning letters with her finger so that nothing would be left but ashes. Then the schoolteacher caught her breath, for between the heavily written lines of Pat Montague’s letters there had begun to appear faint gray writing—writing in another hand, a dainty, feminine hand. She caught the phrase “happy and sad at the same time” and again: “Oh, how could you say that …” and “… if you’ll only wait and be patient…”

Tardily she splashed water from the faucet on the sodden mass, but it was no use. Miss Withers stood there, deep in thought, until she heard the inspector’s impatient voice from the front room. Then she disposed of the ashes, washed her hands, and hurried out.

Meekly she followed the inspector out to the police car which waited at the hotel entrance and climbed into the rear seat. She did not have to be told how wide was the rift between them and how far she had fallen from Oscar Piper’s good graces when she saw him close the door behind her and climb in front beside the driver.

“At any rate,” she began pleasantly, “it appears that today will see the end of all this.”

“It’ll see the end of it for you,” the inspector told her, and the roar of the motor as they jerked away from the curb put an end to further conversation.

In spite of all her delaying, they arrived at the Shoreham police station well ahead of time. None of the suspects had as yet arrived, and the inspector took her into the sheriff’s vacant office and told her to wait.

“You stay here, and don’t make a try to get away,” he said.

“Never fear,” Miss Withers told him. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” Then she caught his arm. “Oscar, for old time’s sake, do me just one favor. I believe you said that all the suspects are to be here at seven?”

He nodded.

“Are they to be escorted down in police cars, as I was?”

“As it happens, no. They’re all driving their own cars down so they can go right home afterwards, if and when they’re cleared.”

She told him what she wanted. “It would only take your men a minute—”

“This was no ordinary hit-run case,” he pointed out.

“I know,” she said. “But please have someone check their cars, anyway, very carefully. Especially the windshields!” He was obviously about to say “No” to her plan, so she added quickly: “If you’ll agree to that, I’ll tell you where to find Pat Montague.”

That got him. “What? Where?”

“Relax, Oscar, I didn’t hide him anywhere. But just think where you’d go if you just got out of jail, a dirty, smelly jail like this one, no doubt bug-infested and everything. You’d look for a bath, wouldn’t you? Well, I happen to remember that there’s a Turkish bath only halfway down the block, and I believe that customers in such places are allowed to have a bed for the night.”

For the first time that morning the inspector’s face relaxed its grimness a little. “It’s a deal,” he told her, and went out.

Miss Withers was displeased but not surprised to hear the click of a key in the door. She sat down at the sheriff’s desk, took out a pocket mirror from her handbag, and readjusted her hair and hat. Then she sat back patiently to wait. It was a wait of only a moment or two, for the telephone began to ring. Without hesitation she answered it.

“Is Vinge there? Dr. Farney speaking.”

The schoolteacher buttoned down her conscience and answered with a businesslike voice, “He’s tied up right now Doctor, but—”

“I was just going to tell him that I’d finished the post-mortem. But I’ll bring my report over.”

“The sheriff says that he’d like you to give me the details,” she said hastily.

There was no sound at all at the other end of the line for as long as a count of ten in the prize-ring. Then Dr. Farney laughed. “That’s funny,” he chortled. “Because the sheriff just walked in here.”

Miss Withers hung up just in time. For the door was being unlocked again. The inspector came in, looking glum. “Well, Oscar?”

“I looked at the suspects’ cars,” he said. “Especially the windshields. Why, will you tell me?”

“It’s very simple,” she said. “I’ve been riding around in taxicabs on these country roads in the evening enough to notice that at speeds of sixty and over the windshields become covered with dead bugs. At slower speeds the bugs slide up over the top. The murderer of Joe Searles must have been nervous and in a hurry, at least after the deed was done. So if you’ll tell me whose windshield was a bug graveyard, I’ll tell you—”

“Forget it,” Piper said. “None of them showed more than a few dead bugs, and none of them had been recently cleaned, either. Come on, the investigation is about to begin.”

“It’ll be a complete waste of time,” Miss Withers told him firmly. But she followed him down the hall. It appeared that the impending inquisition was to be held in the magistrate’s room at the rear of the building. Sergeant Fischer, his arms folded, stood guard at the doorway, but he only nodded brusquely towards a seat in answer to her pleasant “Good morning.” She plumped herself down in one of the very front pews and turned back to survey her fellow sufferers. She would have enjoyed calling the inspector’s attention to one or two items, but he had hurried out again.

A majority of the official suspects in this case were already here, perched on hard folding chairs in the blaze of the summer sunshine which poured in through the high eastern windows. Commander Bennington had missed his morning shave, and beside him his wife was pale beneath a suntan makeup. Over in a corner Dr. Radebaugh sucked on an empty pipe, near where the Beales were sitting arm in arm.

Farther to the front Mame Boad was fanning herself with a folded newspaper, her shoes slipped off for greater comfort. Jed Nicolet was beside her, his fox face wary and alert. In the front of the room, on the other side of a wooden railing, stood a tall, curly-haired, cadaverous young man who must be Loomis, the district attorney. A court reporter was beside him, indicating that this was serious.

The inspector reentered, avoiding Miss Withers’s beckoning gesture. He hurried through the barrier to confer with the district attorney.

Loomis glowered and then suddenly pulled out his watch and demanded loudly, “Well, what’s keeping them? Get on the phone—”

Then there was a commotion in the hallway and all eyes turned to see Officer Lunnery enter very importantly with Thurlow Abbott in tow. The ex-matinee idol’s eyes were heavy and bloodshot, but he seemed to perk up and draw himself together like the old campaigner he was as he made his entrance.

“Where are the others?” Piper demanded of the officer.

Lunnery hesitated. “Well, you see, it’s like this—”

“My daughter Helen is not at home,” Abbott interrupted in his froglike croak. “So she didn’t receive the summons to appear here. She didn’t even come home last night.”

“And why not?” Loomis barked.

“I don’t know. You see, we were expecting someone, a lawyer from Chicago, to arrive at nine-thirty, only he didn’t say which airport or which line. So Helen took the sedan and went to La Guardia—I mean New York airport—and I took the roadster and went over to Newark, just in case. But I had the trip for nothing, because Mr. Malone arrived, I understand, at La Guardia, and Helen brought him here and delivered him. A short time later she disappeared, and I’m very worried about her.”

“I’m not,” said Miss Withers to nobody in particular.

“Okay,” Piper said, taking the play away from the D.A. for the moment. “What about the other daughter?”

Thurlow Abbott shrugged expressively. “My daughter Lawn is locked in her room. She said that she’s expecting a telephone call and that she doesn’t feel like coming down right now. She says that if you want her you can swear out a warrant and serve it, and arrest her—”

“She said a lot more than that,” chimed in Officer Lunney, “through the locked door.”

“Good for her,” observed Miss Withers, who had always wanted to see somebody call the police bluff on one of these so-called voluntary questionings. Let the minions of the law conform to the letter of the law, she always said.

The inspector seemed unperturbed. “I don’t think that matters very much,” he pointed out to the district attorney. “We don’t really need Miss Abbott because as it happens we have proof that she was at home talking on the telephone at the exact time this second crime must have been committed. The hotel desk confirms this time, too, which was two minutes of twelve.” His glance fell momentarily upon Miss Withers, and then he turned back to the D.A. “Shall we go ahead, Mr. Loomis, or wait for the sheriff?”

“Your party,” said the D.A. with a wave of his hand and a smile which indicated clearly that it might be somebody else’s party at any moment.

The inspector leaned on the wooden rail, facing the audience. “I suppose all you people know why you’re here,” he opened bluntly. “Huntley Cairns was murdered last Saturday afternoon and Joseph Searles last night. In case the exact connection isn’t clear, I’ll call on Mr. Beale.”

Midge Beale stood up, stiff and perspiring, and after some prompting he related basically the same story of his adventures at the cocktail party that he had already confessed to Miss Withers.

“Thank you,” said the inspector. “I might add that we know what book it was that you people were so interested in and how it fits into the picture. Some of you may think that dog poisoning is grounds for murder, or that it makes killing into justifiable homicide. The law doesn’t look at it that way. Last evening, an hour or two before Searles was killed, it was brought to your attention that Huntley Cairns couldn’t have been the dog poisoner but that Searles could have—and probably was. I want to know the movements of each of you people for the time between your conference at the Bennington home and say one o’clock this morning—”

Miss Withers closed her eyes and tried to think, shutting out as much as possible the righteous voices which kept insisting that they had all gone directly home to bed from the Benningtons’ last night. Which meant, as the inspector went on to point out very clearly, that none of them had an alibi worth a nickel. “Not,” he went on, “that alibis mean much in a case like this one. Any more than do fingerprints. It’s pretty clear that the killer wore gloves—”

“And it’s absolutely clear that he wore size 8½-B shoes, isn’t it?” Miss Withers chimed in softly.

That let the cat out of the bag. Also, in theory at least, it cleared everyone in the room. The men’s shoes were all too large, the women’s too small, to have fitted the footprint which the schoolteacher had immortalized in pancake flour.

Everyone relaxed—everyone but Miss Withers. And, of course, District Attorney Loomis, who was chafing at the bit.

“What about Pat Montague?” he inquired of the inspector. “I don’t suppose he’s been picked up yet? Slipped through your fingers, I suppose?”

Miss Withers started to smile and then saw the look on the inspector’s face. “We traced Montague to a Turkish bath down the street,” he admitted. “He checked in there last night, but the attendants are a little hazy on the time. The rubber thought it was around midnight, but he clammed up when he found out why we were asking. They’re very clear, though, on the time Montague left, which was at six-twenty this morning. It is possible that somebody warned him, as he was seen in a telephone booth just before he left.”

“Why, Oscar Piper!” Miss Withers gasped. “If you’re insinuating that I—”

The inspector paid her no attention whatsoever. “We’re doing out best to locate him, Mr. Loomis,” he went on. “Since he’s out on a writ, we’ll have to go easy—”

“It seems to me that the police have done nothing but go easy on this entire case!” Loomis snapped. “If this is a sample of the way you metropolitan cops investigate a homicide, then”—he smiled a thin smile—“I think that from now on we can handle our own affairs.”

“I’ll say we can!” spoke up a cheerful voice from the door, and everyone turned to see Sheriff Vinge entering, a broad beaming smile on his face. “Sorry I’m late, gentlemen, but something came up that puts an entirely different complexion on this case!”

He strode forward, and in his wake was Dr. Farney, looking tired and important. They both went through the railing. “We may as well have all this right out in the open,” Sheriff Vinge continued. “This is Dr. Farney, everybody. He just got through examining the body of Joe Searles.” He turned towards the doctor. “Can you tell us the cause of death in ordinary layman’s language?”

“Asphyxia—that means strangulation—caused by drowning.”

“Just like Mr. Cairns died?”

“I didn’t post Cairns. From what I hear from my medical colleague”—and here Dr. Farney nodded towards Radebaugh—“it was the same sort of thing. Only when Searles died he was under the influence of fourteen ounces or more of methyl alcohol, plus sixty grains or so of seconal.”

“Translate for the folks, Doctor?” Vinge asked.

“It is supposed to be a safer form of veronal and is sold on prescription only in this state. It’s a sleeping powder, one of the barbiturates. The taste is bitter, and so it’s usually given in capsules. Searles’s liver showed 254 milligrams of barbital under Fabre’s test. Not enough to poison the man, even tied up with the alcohol, which usually heightens the effect of the barbiturates, but enough to make him pretty dopey. His blood showed a good three hundredths of one per cent alcohol.”