Miss Withers Regrets (3 page)

“Sorry I’m so late, but better late than never,” Cairns was saying. “Been working like a dog all day and I’m dirty as a pig. Drink up, everybody, and I’ll be back as soon as I get cleaned up.”

He was a little man, broad in the beam, with the breast pocket of his neat pinstripe blue suit crammed with gold pens and pencils. “Bet he comes down togged out in something sharp and two-toned, probably with suede shoes,” Midge said to himself.

He must have said it aloud, for someone beside him asked, “What’s that?”

It was Bill Harcourt, a large cheery man who was apt to tell hairy-dog stories on the third drink and pass out on the fourth. He lived, so far as any one could tell, on the food and drink he picked up at parties, which he could scent ten miles off, and on memories of his family’s pre-1929 money.

“Hi,” Midge said. “Just talking to myself.”

Harcourt nodded blankly. “How’s it by you? Still grounded?”

“They let me go up in elevators now,” Midge confided, and looked towards the stairs. Huntley Cairns was turning to the right at the landing. It must be true, then, that he and Helen had separate bedrooms—separate suites, even, for she had turned to the left when she rushed up to change.

Midge felt suddenly sorry for his host. Money wouldn’t buy everything, at that. Of course it would buy more than pants buttons would, which was about all he would have if the plant finally closed down. Test pilots rarely saved a good deal of money, especially test pilots with nothing to test and given a courtesy job fiddling around with blueprints and T squares.

“I should have taken the job with Howard Hughes when I had a chance,” Midge decided “Then when production slacked off I could go out and help put up three-sheets of movie stars’ bosoms.” He laughed, and realized that he was laughing all by himself. Looking over the crowd, he decided he would just as soon stay by himself. He could see Ava Bennington trying to catch his eye, but he was allergic to Navy wives, especially when their husbands were ashore. Besides, whenever he was near her he found it difficult to resist the temptation to ask her if the old tradition was true—about call-house madams saving up their profits so they could retire and marry Annapolis men.

Midge deftly managed to avoid her and then nearly ran into mountainous old Mame Boad, who owned half the village, including the house he rented. She sported a string of yellow pearls as large as .38 bullets around her wattled neck, and the reddish-brown dress she wore made her look exactly like a turkey. Her daughter Trudy, long in the tooth and very freckled, was close behind her. According to rumor, she was not allowed to smoke or drink yet, though she must be nearly thirty. This, Midge felt, called for a strategic withdrawal.

He withdrew, heading out on to the patio, but there was a sprinkle of rain and he came back, to become involved in the little circle around Colonel Wyatt, a fierce old eagle of a man who had guessed wrong about the military ability of both the Japanese and the Russians, and whose life had become embittered thereby.

Midge ricocheted off the edge of this gathering and finally found a haven in the library, a long narrow room lined almost to the ceiling with books. There was a desk at one end and a large fireplace faced by a divan at the other. The cushions were stuffed with real down, and Midge Beale sank into them with a deep gratefulness of spirit.

There had been absolutely no intention on his part to doze off, as he swore later. He intended only to close his eyes for a few moments to rest them from the glare and the smoke. But he jerked wide awake some time later, to hear voices nearby. It took a minute or two for him to orient himself—and then he stiffened, keeping down well behind the back of the divan.

“… and it could be a blind,” said somebody in a hushed, male voice. “Cairns is foxier than he looks.”

“Nonsense. Look, here’s
The Dark Gentleman, Beautiful Joe,
and two Terhune’s collie stories. “That was a voice Midge recognized, that of Jed Nicolet, a hotshot lawyer with offices in the Empire State, who always spent his summers out here in a big house half a mile down the road that hadn’t been changed in thirty years.

For some reason the two men were cataloguing Cairns’s library. Midge wished they would go away and let him sleep.

“He could have let somebody else pick ’em out. Not his wife—I don’t think Helen ever reads anything except maybe the ads in
Vogue.
But her sister—”

“I can speak for her,” Nicolet said. “Lawn Abbott doesn’t read anything except modern poetry. By the way I wish she’d show up. There’s a girl who—” He stopped short. “Say, look here, Bennington! Listen to this—the book just fell open!”

Bennington. That would be Ava’s husband, Commander Sam Bennington, who’d retired from the Navy six months ago to sit on his big behind and help spend Ava’s money. He was still talking. “Or he could have ordered his books by the linear foot, to match the color scheme.”

“Sam, I said look here!” There was something in Jed Nicolet’s voice so compelling that Midge couldn’t resist poking his head up above the back of the divan. Both men were eagerly bent over a slender red volume which Nicolet had taken from a case near where he stood at the far end of the room. The young lawyer’s fox face was alight with eagerness. “Listen to this!”

“Wait!” Bennington suddenly said. He turned and started towards the divan. Behind him Jed Nicolet hastily whipped the book back into the shelves again. Then he, too, converged on Midge.

“Spying on us, eh?” Bennington growled unpleasantly. “Get up!”

Midge started to rise and then sank quickly back again. “Oh, no,” he retorted. “I don’t bite on that one.”

“You sneaking little eavesdropper—”

“How do you make that out? I was here first.”

“Take it easy, Sam,” Jed Nicolet put in. “Look, Beale, this is a little awkward. We didn’t know you were here.”

“That goes double. I didn’t even expect to see you at this party, not after the trouble you had with Cairns.”

Nicolet hesitated. “Sure, why not? After all, Helen is—well, she’s Helen. And Lawn is a very good friend of mine. After all, why hold a grudge? The vet did pull Wotan through. He limps a little on one leg, that’s all. Spoils him for show. But I thought it over and I realized that Cairns may not have seen him after all—a black Dane on a dark night. I decided this is too small a town to hold a grudge in.”

Commander Bennington snorted. “I still say a man should know if he ran his car smack into a two-hundred-pound dog. But never mind that. Look, Beale. About what we were talking about—”

“I didn’t hear a thing,” Midge hastily assured them. And then the tension was broken by the booming voice of Mame Boad as she swept in upon them through the doorway.

“Well, what did you find?” she demanded breathlessly. “I’m so impatient that I—” She stopped short as she saw their expressions.

“We were just talking about things,” Nicolet admitted.

“And that reminds me,” Mrs. Boad cried. “This is a charming house Huntley Cairns has thrown together, all full of gadgets and cute as a bug’s ear. I like it, even if I do miss the nice old-fashioned place that used to stand here. But what this house needs is the patter of little feet, and I mean paws. Next litter of pups my bitch has, I’m going to make Huntley buy one for Helen.” Here she cocked a quizzical eye. “Or doesn’t our host
like
dogs?”

“The question before the court,” Jed Nicolet told her, “is how young Beale feels about them.”

Mame Boad blinked. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! Don’t mind him. He looks to me like a man who’s just crazy about dogs.”

They all looked at Midge. “Well, in a way I am,” he admitted. “Only the doctors said that my asthma was caused by dog hairs, so I—” He gulped. “What’s everybody so serious for, anyway? Will it be okay if I buy a Mexican hairless?”

Bennington’s face, weathered by years of salt winds and alcohol fumes, was redder than usual now. “Look here, Beale, since you know this much you might as well—”

It was Helen’s cool, sweet voice which interrupted them this time. “So here you all are! My very nicest guests, hiding out from the party!” Jed Nicolet moved forward, but she patted his shoulder in passing and took Midge’s arm in hers. “Come with me, young man. Don’t be so elusive—Leilani Linton is just dying to dance with you, and we’ve got a lot of new rumba and samba records.” She was smiling, but there was something strange and set in her smile, as if she had turned it on and couldn’t find the switch to turn it off.

So Midge gladly suffered himself to be led along. Nor was he very surprised to find that neither Leilani nor Aloha Linton happened to be anywhere in sight and that it was Helen herself who wanted to dance with him. She even kicked off her shoes so that she was on his level.

But instead of taking the position for the rumba, she came breathtakingly close into his arms, the lush perfection of her body and the scent in her hair making his knees suddenly turn to rubber. Her lovely face was flushed, and he would have thought her a bit tight except that he hadn’t seen her take even one drink.

Helen didn’t want to dance either. She simply wanted to ask him something. It took them one turn around the room before he could guess, because she barely hinted at the thing that was on her mind.

“Oh!” Midge said. “Well, of course I’m not at all sure that it was Pat. He looked a little taller and straighter, but that could be the Army. I just had a quick glimpse of his face as we came past. You know how Adele drives.”

“You—you came
past
?” she breathed in his ear.

“Oh, yes,” he admitted. “About halfway up the hill. Pat, or whoever it was, seemed headed this way.”

For a moment she stiffened, and then sagged so that he held almost all her weight in his arms. “Look, Helen,” he whispered. “Is anything wrong? I mean is there anything I can do?”

“You can get me a drink,” she said, but when he came back with a double martini in each hand she was gone. He looked for her vainly in the drawing room, in the playroom, in the dining room and hall, and finally downed both drinks, for economy’s sake. A pleasantly pink fog began to close in upon him at that point. He had memories later of trying to play ping-pong with Trudy Boad and of losing the ball somewhere and of looking for Adele and not being able to find her either.

When the fog lifted again he was somehow in the kitchen, that wonderful Flash Gordon kitchen with the automatic everything and the glass-walled stove and refrigerator, drinking milk out of a quart bottle and singing with Bill Harcourt, Doc Radebaugh, and the houseboy, whose name was Jeff and who had a fine deep contrabass.

“We’ll serenade our Louie

While life and love shall last…”

A dirty old man in overalls was screaming at them to shut up so he could use the kitchen telephone, and the quartet moved into the serving pantry. But even there, just as they were going good with “Oh, a Man without a Woman,” they were suddenly silenced by the screaming of the police sirens.

“The party’s a success!” Bill Harcourt cried. “It’s a raid—don’t give your right names!”

Then Lawn Abbott, her face whiter than ever, came inside to tell them what was lying at the edge of the swimming pool.

F
OR A HOUSE WHOSE EVERY
window blazed with light, the Cairns place was strangely quiet. The radio-phonograph was stilled, with a needle stuck in the middle of a record. Dishes and glasses were piled sticky and unwashed in the kitchen sink, unwiped ashtrays slowly overflowed on to the table-tops and rugs, and out on the service porch there was nobody to hear the soft drip-drop of the water which seeped from the body of Huntley Cairns and ran off into a bed of young hyacinths.

Then Officer Ray Lunney tapped on the front door, then looked in and beckoned to Sergeant Fischer, who immediately joined him outside. “Sheriff’s coming,” Lunney said. “I can hear that heap of his gasping up the hill.”

“About time he got here,” pointed out Fischer complacently. “We’re ready for him. You know old man Vinge, if he gets the idea there’s any complicated angles to a case, he’s apt to sidestep. He’s not going to risk making any enemies, especially in this touchy section, with him having to stand for election every two years. You go inside and keep everybody quiet while I give him the lowdown.”

Sergeant Fischer waited until Lunney was inside and then turned and headed out into the driveway. The Sheriff’s conservative black sedan coughed its way up the hill and turned into the driveway, and then a fatherly-looking man started to get out, peering through thick-lensed glasses.

“We’re taking bows tonight, Sheriff,” Fischer said cheerily. “The case is all washed up and put to bed. We’ve got our man tied up in the back seat of the radio car, all ready to take into town. He’s guilty as a skunk in a chicken yard.”

Sheriff Vinge nodded a little uncomfortably. “Good, good. Er—who is it?”

“Don’t worry,” the sergeant assured him. “It’s nobody—I mean it’s only Joe Searles. You know, the old codger that drives around in an old station wagon loaded with junk, talking to himself half the time.”

Vinge began to relax. “Oh! Yeah, I know him. Lives alone in a shack down by the wharf. Why’d he do it?”

“There wasn’t any actual quarrel that we can prove,” Fischer explained. “But it’s only natural that the old man would have a grudge against a man like Cairns, who made a lot of money overnight and bought this place. The house that used to stand here, you know, was originally built by Joe Searles’s own grandfather. He owned all the land along here once—used to grow hops and sorghum. I don’t guess Searles has ever got over the idea that it’s rightly his. The old man’s done plenty of talking around the village, too. About how he didn’t like Cairns, and how Cairns didn’t know anything about trees or flowers or how to take care of land. And Cairns seems to have complained about the size of the bills old man Searles was running up at the nursery and the feed store. There was bad blood between ’em, Sheriff, and I don’t think Searles will hold out for more’n two or three hours of questioning.”

“That makes sense,” the sheriff said, definitely happier now. “Go on.”