Miss Withers Regrets (8 page)

Miss Withers thought not. This would be easier to handle in person, anyway, and after the peace and quiet of the country she had a sudden nostalgic longing for the smells of Manhattan, the hum of its activity. Besides, there were a number of errands she could do in town, even though it was a Sunday.

Downtown in the grim environs of Centre Street, Inspector Oscar Piper sat at his battered oak desk in the inner office of the homicide bureau, deep in official papers. Only a skeleton staff was on duty, so Miss Withers was able to barge in upon him with a minimum of delay. He immediately put aside an extremely grisly photograph of some deceased citizen reclining upon a marble slab and laid aside the gnawed butt of his cigar.

“Go right ahead and smoke,” she said. “I don’t mind.”

The grizzled little Irishman stared at her. “What’s come over you?” he demanded. “Must be that the simple life agrees with you. How’s the goldfish?”

Miss Withers looked upon her old friend and sparring partner with a sudden flash of her gray-blue eyes. “They are not goldfish!”

“Okay, tropical fish, then. As long as they keep you out of my hair—”

“I could ask, ‘What hair?’ but I won’t. Because, Oscar, I want you to relieve me of a promise I made you some time ago.”

“Oh-oh! You’re weakening already, huh?”

“It’s not quite like that. I want to meddle in this particular case because so many people have made it clear that they don’t want me to. And especially because a young man appealed to me for help last night and I let him down. But don’t look so long-faced, Oscar. It’s that swimming-pool murder out at Shoreham, so it won’t be in your territory and I won’t be in your way.”

The wiry little Irishman stood up suddenly, turning to address a large photograph of ex-Mayor La Guardia which somebody had forgotten to remove from the wall. “She says she won’t be getting in my way!” he cried. “This I have got to see!”

“Now, Oscar!”

“Don’t you now-Oscar me! For your information, I just got word from the commissioner. Sheriff Vinge, out at Shoreham, feels that he is getting a little over his depth and has requested help from the department. Guess who is the lucky boy?”

“Oh, dear!” murmured Miss Hildegarde Withers. Then an elfish smile illuminated her long, horsy face. “Hold on to your hat, Oscar. Here we go again!”

“W
HEN I MAKE A
mistake,” remarked Miss Hildegarde Withers to the blurred panorama of Long Island’s ash dumps which flitted past her train window, “I make a beaut!”

A mile or so farther along the way she added: “But after all, it’s the murderer who can’t afford to make a mistake. He has only to be wrong once for us to succeed—we have only to be right once.”

And as she left the train at Shoreham Station and waited for a taxicab she concluded: “However, I’ve certainly proved to myself once more that a little information, like a little learning, is a dangerous thing. I must find out what really happened at that cocktail party.”

But where, exactly, to begin? The schoolteacher knew that a direct frontal attack, today at least, was out of the question. The Cairns house would be by now completely taken over by the police. The inspector, together with the car and driver supplied him by the department, would be there by now, and he was not in a mood to put up with her being underfoot.

Besides, he knew his business. The machine was unimaginative but thorough. There would be no clues passed over, no statements unchecked. It would be her problem to milk the inspector dry of whatever information he dug up, but that could come later. In the meantime …

“Go roundabout!” had been Peer Gynt’s counsel from the Boyg. Miss Withers was not at all sure what a Boyg was, but the advice seemed sound. She would sneak up on this murder from the side. At this point in her reveries one of the town’s two taxicabs arrived, emblazoned with the “Busted Duck” insignia of the honorably discharged veteran, and she told the driver approximately where she wanted to go.

He brightened on learning that it was to be a rather longer haul than usual. At the end of the ride he leaned back to open the door, indicating the second house from the corner. “That’s it,” he advised her. “One of Mame Boad’s old firetraps. Richest woman in this town. I used to work for her before I got drafted—she keeps her dog kennels in fine shape, but her tenants can make their own repairs.”

Miss Withers agreed that there should be a special level of hell’s hottest corner reserved for the nation’s landlords and asked the young man to wait. As she went up the walk she noticed that the lawn needed cutting and saw that there was a small convertible parked in the driveway with one front wheel in a bed of nasturtiums.

Upstairs in the front bedroom Adele Beale lay snoring, with her face buried deep in a down pillow. A familiar, insistent voice tugged her back to life.

“Wake up, will you? Wa-a-a-ake up!”

The pillow was forcibly removed, and Midge Beale stared down critically at the wife of his bosom, who had retired last night without removing her war paint or doing up her hair and who now looked like something special in the way of hags. “Go away and let me die in peace,” she moaned. “I can’t stand the thought of breakfast.”

“Never mind breakfast, I didn’t make any. But wake up!”

She opened one eye. “Midge! It isn’t even light yet!”

“It’s getting dusk, you mean. Come on.”

“Midge, listen. I had the damnedest nightmare—”

Midge Beale had long since lost interest in Adele’s dreams, though she loved to tell them in detail. “Anyway,” he cut in, “it was no nightmare about Huntley Cairns. It happened, all right. Snap out of it. Remember, they kept us up there until all hours, and when we finally got home we killed a bottle?” He shook her shoulder. “Come on downstairs, we got company.”

Adele sat up suddenly, pushing the hair back from her eyes. “Reporters?”

He shook his head. “No reporters, so stop primping. It’s a funny old battleaxe in a hat that looks like a fruit salad. She’s trying to dig up some evidence to get Pat Montague out of jail. She says she’s an old aunt of his or something.”

“Tie a can to her! Tell her—”

“I tried to, and I couldn’t make it stick.”

“I don’t think I can stand up,” Adele complained. “And I must look like a perfect fright.”

Midge nodded. “How much would you charge to haunt a house?”

“How many rooms?” Adele countered, unsmiling. She ran a comb through her hair, stuck on another mouth over the old one, and slipped into a shapeless pink garment trimmed with maribou. Then, clinging to the banister, she made her way slowly down the stairs. She stopped halfway. “Now don’t tell her
anything
!” she whispered fiercely.

“Perish the thought,” Midge agreed.

In the living room Miss Hildegarde Withers was sitting on one of the wicker chairs, her feet firmly planted on a Navajo rug. “Forgive me, Mrs. Beale, for getting you up at this hour,” she began. “But when murder strikes in a little town like this we are all involved until it’s settled.”

“If murder did have to strike, it was just as well it landed on Huntley Cairns, who is so easily spared,” Midge said.

“That’s your opinion!” Adele snapped. “If you knew as much as you think you know …” She caught herself. “Anyway, in my opinion, it was only an accident anyhow, and I’m sure that Midge and I know nothing about it. I don’t see why you came to us, anyway—”

“That, my dear, was because you two are almost the only ones on the list of sus—the list of material witnesses that I had not had the pleasure of meeting previously.”

“You’re wasting your time, I’m afraid,” Adele said wearily.

“Perhaps I am. I have plenty to waste. I’m quite sure that neither of you had anything to do with the murder. But could we please start at the beginning? Did you have any business dealings with Mr. Cairns?”

The schoolteacher was speaking to Midge Beale, but Adele answered quickly, her eyes flashing. “No, of course not! Why should I—I mean we?”

“I’m just a test pilot,” Midge went on. “Right now I’m flying a T-square, though. I only knew Cairns to speak to, but Adele—”

“I knew him slightly years ago. But Helen is one of my nearest and dearest friends.”

The schoolteacher nodded. “I see. Does either of you, by the way, think that Pat Montague could have murdered Cairns?”

“Nope!” Midge said quickly.

“Yes!” cried his wife. “Because if he didn’t, then who did? Oh, I guess that isn’t a very nice thing to say to one of his relatives, but it’s what I think.”

Miss Withers hesitated. “I’m afraid I should admit to you that I am an aunt to Pat Montague only pro tem and by adoption. But I had to get in to talk to you somehow. Never mind that, Mrs. Beale. You say that you think Pat did it, and a moment ago you said you thought Cairns died by accident.”

“I only meant—”

“Never mind. If it was murder, Pat Montague may be guilty, but not for the reasons I thought last night. That is why, since I was responsible for his being dragged away to jail, I am now trying to get him out. Or at least sworn to get to the bottom of this mystery.” She beamed at them. “Come now, can’t either of you suggest a reason why somebody would want to kill Huntley Cairns?”

Adele shook her head. “It’s early in the evening for me to play guessing games.”

“I know from nothing,” Midge said. “I wouldn’t even have gone to that party if I hadn’t been dragged by the scruff of the neck.”

“Well, you enjoyed it after you got there, I noticed! I saw you dancing with Helen, and if you’d had a sandwich in your pocket it would have been on toast in two minutes!”

Midge blinked. “Okay! I’ll bet your only reason for insisting that we go to the party was so that you could see Huntley Cairns again! Why don’t you tell the lady why you once crowned him with a plate, darling? That was before we were married, when you were going around with him. Weren’t you even making a pitch to marry him?”

Miss Withers sank deeper and deeper into her chair, trying to look as if she weren’t there. The Beales’ hangovers made them seem inclined to play truth and consequences.

“That was years and years ago! If you think I’m still carrying a torch for Huntley …” Adele whirled on the schoolteacher. “Just so you won’t get any wrong ideas from my loudmouthed husband, it all happened one night when we were out at the Sands Point Country Club. Huntley had been drinking boilermakers—”

“What?” Miss Withers interrupted blankly.

“Whiskey with a beer chaser. Anyway, he got a little tight—”

“Stinko!” corrected Midge. “I was there.”

“So I broke our engagement, that’s all,” she concluded.

“You broke the engagement and the chicken-sandwich plate and all over his head because he suddenly went on the prowl for Helen Abbott,” Midge reminded her, his voice a little louder than was necessary. “Helen was at the next table—she’d come as usual with Pat, and Lawn was tagging along. Pat decided to give kid sister a thrill by waltzing with her—that was the time when her teeth were still in gold bands—and Huntley noticed that Helen was sitting all alone and looking very luscious in one of those strapless evening gowns. I was across the room with the Baldwins and the little Harper girl—”

“Bug-eyed and flat-chested,” Adele cut in. “No wonder you were staring elsewhere—”

“Anyway,” her husband continued dreamily, “jolly old Huntley insisted that you bring Helen over to your table, and pretty soon you got mad and flounced out of the place. Later on in the men’s room Pat hung a right cross on Huntley’s jaw and knocked him into the—”

“Midge Beale!”

“Into the middle of next week, I was going to say. That was how the romance started, really. A few weeks later Pat got himself selected into the Army. Helen carried the torch for a while and then I guess she got fed up with going out with only her father and kid sister all the time. Anyway, word got around that she and Huntley Cairns had been seen in town at the Stork and El Morocco, and pretty soon they were sitting in corners at parties studying
House and Garden
.”

“Sealed-lips Beale,” commented Adele.

“Well, it’s common knowledge,” Midge reminded her. “Relax, baby, nobody is going to think that you drowned Huntley Cairns because he got away from you three or four years ago.”

“I’m afraid he’s right,” Miss Withers agreed in a somewhat disappointed tone. “There is still no apparent motive for anybody to kill Cairns—anybody but Pat Montague, that is. But I don’t like to gamble on favorites, nor on extreme long shots either. Now what do you think of a nice in-between selection for the murderer—the commander, for instance, or Jed Nicolet?”

Midge laughed. “Sam Bennington might haul out a service pistol and blaze away at some poor unlucky guy that Ava had lured into her bedroom, but I can’t see him drowning anyone. That’s too subtle for Old Annapolis, Class of ’26. And Jed Nicolet is a lawyer, and lawyers are too smart to commit murder. Besides, Jed is supposed to have a crush on Lawn, not Helen.”

Miss Withers digested that. “I don’t know about the rest of you,” Adele spoke up suddenly, “but I’m going to have a snort. Purely medicinal, just to keep the top of my head from coming off. I feel like the hammers of hell, the ones they keep in the corner to pound toenails with. Where is it, Midge,
dear
?”

“There isn’t anything in the house but the chartreuse,” Midge told her.

“I tried and couldn’t.”

Miss Withers declined a pickup with thanks, and Adele tried the chartreuse and couldn’t, either. The schoolteacher rose to her feet, deciding that this lead, which had looked so promising at first, was worked out. “There’s just one question that I want to ask,” she said. “Of course you don’t have to answer, but it might help in clearing Pat Montague and putting an end to this investigation. Who, of all the people involved in the case, do you consider most capable of committing murder?”

“Lawn!” Adele said. “Lawn Abbott.”

“But why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Except that she’s such a strange, silent person, a sort of law unto herself. And she’s dark and mysterious—sort of poisonous, somehow. She did break up Helen and Pat’s romance, I know she did. And Helen knows it too.”