Miss Withers Regrets (4 page)

“Well, it figures like this. Searles had been so grouchy around the place that Mrs. Cairns—that’s the pretty, plump girl who used to be Helen Abbott when she came out here summers—she sent him off on some errands, to buy fertilizer and stuff, so he wouldn’t be around growling at the guests during the party if they walked on a tulip bed or picked a rose or something. Only he came back early, and he saw Cairns splashing around in the swimming pool. On a homicidal impulse he took a garden rake and held him under, right against the bottom of the pool. When he was sure Cairns was through breathing he dragged the body out and then rushed to phone us a crazy story about how he saw somebody else doing it. He claims he locked this guy—the usual tall dark powerful stranger—in the men’s side of the bathhouse down there, but of course when we unlocked it there was nothing inside but some of Mr. Cairns’s clothes.”

Sheriff Vinge nodded. “No witnesses?”

“There wouldn’t be any, Sheriff. It was sprinkling a little, and that kept the guests inside. Lawn Abbott—that’s Mrs. Cairns’s younger sister—came up the hill past the pool a few minutes after Searles rushed into the house to phone us, but she was too late to see him at work, which was no doubt lucky for her.”

“Guess so. Well, as long as I’m here I may as well look at the body.”

“On the service porch. I’ll show you.” Sergeant Fischer snapped on his electric torch and led the way around the house. “We brought it up here where the light was better so Doc Radebaugh could make his examination. Don’t suppose there was any harm moving him, as long as he’d been moved once already.”

“I got no objection, anyway,” said the sheriff dryly. “And I don’t guess Cairns has.” He looked down upon the uncovered body of Huntley Cairns. “Good God, what’s that thing he’s got on?”

“An athletic corset, the doc called it. To keep his stomach in.”

Vinge shook his head. “Bet you it was uncomfortable.” He turned away. “Funny thing Searles would pull the body out of the water before he phoned. And, by the way, where’d he phone from?”

“He came up to the kitchen. That’s one of the ways we trapped him, because he could just as well have phoned from the extension down in the bathhouse.”

“But according to his story, he had the murderer locked in there, didn’t he?”

“In the men’s side, yes. There was another extension in the ladies’ room.”

The sheriff laughed. “Bashful, maybe? Did you ask him?”

“Yeah. First he said he didn’t think about there being one in there, and then he changed his story and said that he tried the door and it was locked, or stuck. Worked all right when I tried it. And there was nothing inside, either. It was pretty clear that he was lying.”

“Joe Searles never had much reputation for telling the truth,” Vinge agreed. “So Doc Radebaugh looked at the corpse, did he? That’s handy, him being an acting deputy coroner. Where’s he now?”

“With the other suspects, in the living room.” Sergeant Fischer sensed the sheriff’s disapproval and added hastily, “Well, you know Lunney. Before I could stop him he’d told everybody that they were material witnesses and they had to stay until you said they could go. But I handled ’em with kid gloves, Sheriff.”

Vinge hesitated, and his thick shoulders sagged. “There’s men itching for my job who would change their minds quick enough if they knew what I have to go through,” he said, and headed into the house.

Kid gloves or not, their detention had made the people in the Cairns drawing room as jittery as water on a hot stove. They all started talking at once.

“Take it easy, take it easy!” said the sheriff. “We’ll have this all straightened out in a few minutes. Don’t anybody need to get worried or upset, because all I need from you folks is an informal statement.”

“Here’s a list of everybody,” Officer Lunney whispered, proudly presenting his notebook and then crossing to the front door, where he stood with arms folded.

The sheriff looked at the list, wiped his glasses, and looked again. “Before we start taking the statements,” he said almost apologetically, “I’d like to ask Dr. Radebaugh just when the deceased met his death.”

Harry Radebaugh, stiff and professional, stood up as if called on to recite in school and said that in his opinion it was not more than two hours ago and not less than one. The post-mortem on the body might cut it down a little closer. But Cairns had come in on the five o’clock and had arrived at the party about twenty minutes after. He’d gone right upstairs and, presumably, almost straight down to his new swimming pool. “Roughly he died between five-thirty and six-fifteen, because it was six-twenty when Miss Abbott came up and found the body on the tiles, covered with a man’s blue denim jacket.”

“Searles’s coat,” Sergeant Fischer put in.

The sheriff nodded. “And the phone call from Searles came in at sixteen minutes past six. That all matches right enough.”

“If you ask me,” Thurlow Abbott suddenly put in, “they should have used a pulmotor on Huntley. Lots of people have been revived after they’ve been in the water for hours.”

Vinge looked towards Dr. Radebaugh, who smiled and said that there could be no question of anything like that in this particular case. “You see, Sheriff, for your information, most deaths in the water come almost immediately, from shock. Cairns was dead when he was hauled out on to the tiles.”

“Or else Joe Searles would never have left him there,” Sergeant Fischer pointed out. “He’d have shoved him back in.”

“Okay,” Sheriff Vinge agreed. “Now where was I? Oh, yes. The list. First we have Mr. Thurlow Abbott.”

Abbott stood up, and in his ghostly whisper of a voice he insisted that he knew nothing at all about what had happened. Cairns had taken so long to change that he had slipped away from the party and gone up to his son-in-law’s room to see what was keeping him, but he had found nobody there and no sign of any disturbance and was on his way downstairs again when he heard the sirens.

“Very good,” said the sheriff. “Next, Miss Lawn Abbott.”

Lawn leaned against the wall, tapping at her riding shoes with a slender whip. “I’d been out for a ride,” she said. “I have a hunter hack that the Boads keep for me in their stable until Huntley—I mean until Huntley could build a stable here. I was later than I realized, because I’m not too good about keeping time, and I didn’t get up to the party until just before the police arrived. I saw the body as I came past the pool.”

“On your way up the hill did you see anything at all going on at the swimming pool?”

She shook her head. “That’s all,” said the sheriff. “Next is Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell Beale.”

“I was in the library for a while,” Midge began with a sidelong glance at Commander Bennington across the room. “Then I danced a little, and after that I played ping-pong. Then everybody started playing bridge, so I wandered into the kitchen. I didn’t go outside.”

“I didn’t leave the living room,” Adele put in. “Except once or twice to go up to Helen’s room. Once I was looking for her because she was taking so long to change her dress, and once I wanted to fix my hair. I went out on the balcony outside Helen’s room to get some air because, to tell the truth, I felt a little swacked.”

“When you were out on the balcony did you see any one down at the pool?”

“You can’t see the pool from the house because the bathhouse stands right in the way.”

Sergeant Fischer was writing away for dear life, trying to take the gist of this down. The sheriff waited for him to catch up and then asked, “Mrs. Beale, I understand there is a stair leading down to the rear patio from the upstairs balcony. You didn’t go down that stair, nor see anybody on it?”

Adele shook her head. Sheriff Vinge turned his attention to the Benningtons, obviously anxious to get the whole thing over with as fast as possible. They were quick to inform him that they had been playing bridge in the playroom with Mrs. Boad and Jed Nicolet. Whoever was dummy would go out scouting for drinks or bring in canapés or cigarettes.

“But that would only be for a few minutes at a time, wouldn’t it?” The commander agreed that a bridge hand only took around five minutes as a rule, and the sheriff beamed. “We can pass Mrs. Boad and Mr. Nicolet, too, then, because they’re accounted for. There’s Miss Gertrude Boad—”

Trudy Boad arose, stammering a little, and admitted that for most of the time she had been sitting beside the phonograph, changing records when necessary. She had beaten Mr. Beale four games of ping-pong and later sat in on the bridge game for one hand. “But if you ask my personal opinion about all this—”

“Thank you very much, Miss Boad,” said the sheriff firmly, and Trudy’s brief moment in the limelight was concluded.

Bill Harcourt, pale and sad with the alcohol dying within him, had the next turn, accounting for his movements sketchily but with some detail. He had never, he admitted, been more than fifty feet from the bar in the dining room. The only contribution he could make was that Cairns had seemed nervous and in a hurry when he arrived home, though that may have been the lateness of the hour and the fact that the man had to rush through a roomful of cocktails without getting one.

That ended that list, to the obvious relief of the sheriff. “We already got statements from the hired help,” Sergeant Fischer told him in a whisper. “Name of MacTavish, Jeff and Beulah MacTavish, colored. They been with the Cairnses about four months, and they don’t know nothing and they ain’t saying nothing, except that they got along fine with Cairns. And here’s another list, of the people that were here earlier but left before the body was discovered. They all went away by twos and threes, so I guess we can cross them off.”

Sheriff Vinge glanced at the second list, noticed the name of Colonel Wyatt, and was very glad indeed that the colonel had departed earlier enough so that he wouldn’t have to be questioned. He did, however, regret not meeting the pair of twins named Leilani and Aloha Linton.

“I guess that’s about all,” he said to the group. “I suppose, though, I ought to have a word with the widow.”

“Naturally my daughter isn’t here,” Thurlow Abbott said hoarsely. “She’s up in her room, completely collapsed.”

“Of course, of course. All I was going to ask her was if her husband was in the habit of taking time for a swim before he changed for dinner.”

Nobody spoke up to answer that question, although the sheriff looked first at Thurlow Abbott and then at Lawn, who was studiously contemplating the silver knob on her riding crop. Then there came the sound of a thin, strained voice behind them. “How could Huntley have any habits?” cried Helen from the head of the stairs. “Remember, we’d just moved into this house, and the pool was only filled day before yesterday!”

Everybody stared, but Helen was her own mistress again, giving nothing away. She came into the room like a determined sleepwalked and sat down on the edge of a chair. It happened to be the chair in which Dr. Radebaugh was sitting, and he leaned over to touch her arm, but she gave no answering smile.

Officer Lunney came up to the sheriff and whispered for a moment.

Vinge listened and started to shake his head. “But somebody’s going to ask that question sometime, Sheriff.”

Vinge sighed and turned to Helen. “We weren’t going to bother you, Mrs. Cairns. But now that you’re here—can you tell us if your husband owned a bathing suit? We were wondering why he went swimming in a sort of corset thingamajig?”

“A—a corset?” she repeated blankly.

“Yes, ma’am. He was wearing it when he was murdered—”

Helen stood up suddenly, her soft mouth drawn into a humorless grin of shock. “Did you say—” Here she tried to catch herself, but her voice spilled over. “You mean it wasn’t an accidental drowning? Are you trying to say that Huntley was actually murdered?”

Sheriff Vinge’s voice was very gentle. “I’m sorry, ma’am. But that’s the way it looks. The story the gardener tells, it won’t hold water for a minute. He made it up to cover himself—”

“What does Searles say?” Helen demanded breathlessly.

“Oh, he claims to have seen a strange young man in a blue suit bending over the swimming pool in the very act of killing your husband. According to his story, he locked the killer in the bathhouse—”

Adele Beale took a breath and opened her mouth to speak but shut it again promptly as her husband sank a thumb and forefinger into her left thigh. She glared at Midge, but he was staring off across the room at Helen.

It must be Helen who was making that quick, gasping noise, like a strangled sob. Her eyes were muddy and colorless now, dark-rimmed like holes burned in a blanket. Obviously she had forgotten that they were all staring at her; she was blind to her father’s warning glance and to the flash which showed itself ever so briefly in the face of her younger sister.

“Then it
was
Pat!” Helen cried. “He did it—he must have!” She whirled on Midge and Adele, pointing. “You said you saw him on his way here, didn’t you?”

The room was so silent that they could have heard a pin drop. And did hear one, as the heavy silver polo-mallet clasp which held Lawn’s scarf suddenly came apart in her fingers.

Sheriff Vinge’s shoulders slumped a little, as if a great weight had been added. He looked at Helen, took off his glasses to wipe them, and looked again. “I’m afraid, Mrs. Cairns, I’ll have to ask you a question. Just who is Pat?”

Helen was biting her lip now, childishly, helplessly. “You’ll really have to tell us,” Vinge went on. “Now that you’ve said this much. What’s his last name?”

“His name is mud now, thanks to her,” Midge Beale whispered. Across the room Helen Cairns suddenly dropped to her knees, burying her face in her arms. She shook her head furiously. She wasn’t going to say anything, but it was all too clear that she had said enough already.

Wheels turned, telephones rang, and wires burned. In a very few minutes thin strips of tape began to jerk out of police teletype machines all over Long Island and the metropolitan area of New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey, bearing the message:

NY STATE POLICE GENERAL BROADCAST 75524 FILED 8.25 PM JUNE 16 ALL STATE TROOPERS SHERIFFS CARS LOCAL AUTHORITIES BE ON THE LOOK OUT FOR PAXTON MONTAGUE ALIAS PAT MONTAGUE AGE 25 HEIGHT 5-11 WEIGHT 170 BROWN HAIR HAZEL EYES MILITARY BEARING AND SHORT HAIRCUT WAS LAST SEEN WEARING BLUE SUIT YELLOW NECKTIE BLACK SHOES NO HAT HE MAY BE IN ARMY UNIFORM AS FIRST LIEUTENANT INFANTRY THIS MAN WANTED ON SUSPICION OF HOMICIDE HOLD AND NOTIFY ALBERT VINGE SHERIFF KNIGHT’S COUNTY SHOREHAM LONG ISLAND OR PROVOST MARSHAL CAMP NIVENS NEW YORK END BROADCAST