The Penguin Pool Murder (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries)
The Penguin Pool Murder
A Hildegarde Withers Mystery
Stuart Palmer
To Melina
Contents
Introduction
Foreword
1. What the Penguins Knew
2. Behind the Glass
3. I Told You So!
4. Friday is Fish-day
5. Out of the Water
6. One Hat and Seven Cigarette Butts
7. The Passenger in the Empty Taxi
8. Lambs to the Slaughter
9. Again the Garnet Pin
10. The Rift in the Lute
11. The Tumbler in the Booth
12. The Patch in the Lute
13. A White Knight Goes Riding
14. Follow the Swallow
15. The Dumb Man Speaks
16. The Dumb Man is Silent
17. The Happy Dispatch
18. The Plots Thicken
19. Nor Iron Bars a Cage
20. Whom the Gods Destroy
21. And So to Bed
Preview: Murder on the Blackboard
INTRODUCTION
HERE COMES HILDEGARDE.
Black cotton umbrella at full extension, she trips up one Chicago Lew McGirr, pickpocket, formerly fleeing, now out cold:
“Serves you perfectly right.”
So enters the admonitory Miss Withers in The Penguin Pool Murder (1931), formidable from the outset. There are those who would argue forcibly that Hildegarde Withers is not a proper noun but a complete sentence. A palpable gaffe, directed at one who always abhorred puns.
“They’re the lowest form of humor.”
Though she wasn’t above using one to trip up a miscreant worlds worse than McGirr in her first case. The found object, however mean, may be employed to a higher purpose. Never believe the occasionally light-of-heart Hildy was ever light-of-head.
“It’s not because I’m getting such a big thrill out of playing detective, though you may imagine it’s the most exciting thing that ever happened to me in all my born days. It’s not just human sympathy for a nice girl and a nice young man who are caught in the net of the law. It’s more than that. It’s the fact that I was born and brought up to an old-fashioned ideal of justice … blindfolded, uncompromising justice.
“I believe there is something holier about the truth, about justice and right, than there is in cleanliness and even some godliness, young man. Justice is bigger than human hates and loves and sympathies, not only legal justice, but abstract justice. The kind of justice that lets the letter of the law go sometimes to follow the spirit instead! …
“I want to solve this murder because I’m a good citizen.”
So help us, John Philip Sousa.
Why do we like this austere incarnation of our worst childhood fears? Mary Poppins she is not. Hildy can even rattle an unwary census taker who, alluded to early in Chapter I, pronounced her a “spinster, born Boston, age thirty-nine, occupation schoolteacher”; for, as she flatly testifies under oath in Chapter XX, the lady was born and brought up in Dubuque, Iowa.
“So there!”
Perhaps Hildegarde Withers endears herself to us because, from the moment she lays Chicago Lew low, she remains her own person, and offers no apologies for it. “Spinster” had different connotations 60 years ago, though it still meant unmarried; today a working single woman of middle years cannot be so easily dismissed as an “old maid.” Miss Withers was demonstrably liberated, though scarcely libertine.
“I’m meddling on my own.”
She wore her hair unfashionably long and up, affected hats of an equally independent appeal and remained clearly and completely in control of her third grade pupils at Jefferson School (then as now, no mean feat). She suffered fools not at all. No wonder it took a Black Irish head of a New York homicide bureau to make any kind of a match for her.
Inspector Oscar Piper is entitled to a measure of surmise at their initial meeting here.
“I told you so!” announced Miss Withers triumphantly. Piper stared at her, and his pale eyes narrowed imperceptibly.
And well they might. The tall gaunt man in the loose topcoat, who “looked like a newspaper reporter grown gray in harness,” would alternately battle and collaborate with the acerbic schoolmarm over many years and volumes to come. By 1950, the year of The Green Ace, Piper could freely acknowledge, “You are about as gullible as a Scotch pawnbroker.”
Ah, another anachronism. Stuart Palmer could admittedly deal in the occasional stereotype in ways that can offer offense today. But surely there was no intended affront in references to such Withers charges as Abraham Lincoln Washington, “a small sepian lad,” and Isadore Marx, who, after all, remain admirable West 76th Street Irregulars in their willingness to please.
They are only abrupt brush strokes in a broad panorama, and Palmer sometimes wrote more quickly than he thought.
He lived in a hurry, too. Palmer was born in Baraboo, Wisconsin, starting place for the brothers Ringling, June 21, 1905, so he was 26 when Penguin Pool came out; Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene was completed after his death on Feb. 4, 1968 by Fletcher Flora. Palmer’s writing life was preoccupied with Hildy but not devoted exclusively to her.
Educated at the Chicago Art Institute and the University of Wisconsin, he was variously employed as an ice man, apple picker, taxi driver, newspaper reporter, teacher, editor, and treasure hunter. Frederick Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, writing as Ellery Queen, noted Palmer “replaced Thorne Smith, who invented Topper, as chief copy writer for Doremus and Company, New York advertising agency (a desk previously held by Richard Lockridge, co-inventor of Mr. and Mrs. North).” After Penguin Pool was filmed in 1932 with Edna May Oliver (vinegary James Gleason played Piper), he moved to Los Angeles to work on a number of screenplays that became entries in B series about the Falcon, the Lone Wolf and Bulldog Drummond.
“The Falcon’s Brother” (1942) was particularly notable as a film in which the hero was actually bumped off, to be replaced by his brother (roles performed by real-life brothers George Sanders and Tom Conway)—and as the first collaboration (three weeks) with mystery writer Craig Rice, whose wily, bibulous lawyer John J. Malone teamed up with the tough schoolteacher in a number of short stories collected as People vs. Withers & Malone (1963). In his introduction to that book, published six years after Rice’s death, Palmer saw fit to quote his pen pal’s assessment of him:
“You know, Stu, if you weren’t so tall and if you had a law degree, you’d be Malone. You wear expensive suits and dribble ashes on the lapels, you follow the races and sit up all night playing poker, your secretaries all adore you, you have Malone’s taste in women and usually his bad luck with them, and when you get high you always try to form a barbershop quartet!”
Palmer served to the rank of major in World War II, in charge of liaison between the Office of the Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, and all Hollywood film and newsreel production. He married five times, had three children. He belonged to the Writers Guild of America, the National Press Club and the Friends of Lizzie Borden.
Palmer was a founder of the Screen Writers Guild and president of the Mystery Writers of America 1954–1955.
The author’s dust jacket photo for Cold Poison (1954), a Withers case set in an animation studio, shows a bespectacled man with a gray mustache, crisply combed hair and a bow tie. He looks like a pharmacist. But the copy underneath testifies to a cluttered life in the San Francisco Valley in the presence of his fourth wife, children’s book author Winifred E. Wise, and “his parents, several assorted children, a cocker spaniel and a Siamese cat.”
That became Unhappy Hooligan (1956), the first Howie Rook story, about an overweight ex-newsman with a jaundiced view of women. This may have been an even closer alter ego than the tart Miss Withers; as a feature writer, Palmer covered the Monahan murder trial for the Los Angeles Herald-Express and worked as a private investigator for various L.A. defense attorneys. Still, like Hildy, his hard-knock experience never quite eliminated the Scaramouche factor in his fantasy.
“You are a romantic, aren’t you?” grinned the inspector.
“Well, I’m old-fashioned,” admitted Miss Withers. “I like my stories to finish up with a good happy love match. I like the last scene to be a fadeout, like a moving picture, with the suggestion at least that the young couple live happily ever after.”
Thus Penguin Pool ends with Oscar and Hildy dashing “madly” off in the direction of the License Bureau at City Hall.
But marriage was not to be.
We never really entertained the notion of our unencumbered Miss Withers settling comfortably down to a domestic situation anyway, even if Piper could have suppressed himself into some semblance of that space-age paterfamilias, the Sensitive Husband.
They remained together, but at a distance. Hildegarde would migrate with her creator to the West Coast; Piper preferred Manhattan, where he could be heard intermittently exploding with such cosmic reproaches as, “Judas Priest in a mix-master, why does everything have to happen to me?” Miss Withers acquired a poodle named Talleyrand instead and a decidedly more tolerant philosophic bent, notable in Cold Poison:
“What else is the melting pot for? We are all descended from parents who got tired of their homelands and came here to do it differently, and many of them simplified their names. My great-great-great grandfather was named Witherspoon, by the way; somewhere along the line the ‘poon’ got lost. So I wouldn’t take it too seriously. And I wouldn’t worry too much about your young man’s finding out about your having posed for an art class of fellow students; there’s nothing dishonorable in that.”
She would be played, after Oliver, in the movies by Helen Broderick and Zasu Pitts and on TV by Eve Arden. Today she could easily be embodied by Lily Tomlin. Stuart Palmer’s “old-fashioned” character stays current.
With apologies to the incomparable Hildy, his Withers remains unwrung.
—William Ruehlmann
Norfolk, Virginia
December, 1989
Foreword
THE TELLER OF THE tale claims an ancient right to choose setting, situation, and the framework of character from among those which possibly may be recognized by some of his readers, with the warning that no actual personages are herein designedly pictured.
S.P.
1
What the Penguins Knew
TWO LITTLE BLACK PENGUINS were the first to know the secret. They became vastly excited, flashing their sleek black bodies through the water, and now and then coming to the surface to shriek Bloody Murder in a Galapagoan squawk. But for a time their intense excitement did not communicate itself to the greater world that lay outside the glass barrier of the tank.
Suddenly a woman’s voice, reedy and shrill, rang against the ancient white-washed walls of the Aquarium. Even as its echoes died away, the figure of a frightened, rabbit-like little man scuttled past the dim corner under the stairs where the penguins were trying to blazon their secret. In his hand the fugitive clutched an oblong of black leather which all too evidently proclaimed itself to be a woman’s purse.
His objective was a stair which led to the balcony above, but in his path there suddenly appeared the embattled bulk of a gray-clad guard. With a squeak like a cornered rat’s, the little man whirled in his tracks and ducked back between the cases of stuffed exhibits, past the gaping and bewildered crowd. As he ran, there came from his bulging pockets a faint musical jingle.
The way to the main exit was clear now, though close behind him still pounded the heavy feet of the guard. The little man made a last frantic burst of speed—freedom was almost within his grasp—only to tumble ingloriously over a black cotton umbrella that dropped like a bar sinister across his path. His skull collided with one of the pillars, and for the time being the little man lay very still.
For a long minute there was a hush, and then Miss Hildegarde Withers, whom the census enumerator had recently listed as “spinster, born Boston, age thirty-nine, occupation school teacher,” dusted off her umbrella and restored it to its place under her arm with a certain air of satisfaction.
“Serves you perfectly right,” she admonished her silent victim. Then she turned her keen blue eyes on the milling crowd. “Abraham!”
A small sepian lad detached himself from the little group of third grade pupils who stood, awestruck and admiring, behind Miss Withers. “Abraham, pick up that handbag and give it to the lady.”
Abraham obeyed with alacrity. The leather bag was eagerly seized by the woman whose shriek had set the echoes ringing but a few moments before, and its contents found intact. “I saw him trying to cut the handle with a razor blade,” she was eagerly explaining to whomever would listen, “… and then he jerked it right out of my hand, he did.”
The guard, fat and perspiring from his unaccustomed chase, took a firm grip of the prisoner’s coat collar and jerked him into a sitting position. As he did so, three gold watches slid from the pocket and clinked musically on the tile floor.
“A pickpocket, huh?” said the guard.
“Quite obvious, even to the most limited intelligence,” pointed out Miss Withers. “I guessed it myself.”
“Stealing watches, too.”
“Do they look like grandfather clocks?”
“We’ve got him, dead to rights,” the guard mused. “Yes, mum. A case for the cops, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“Or for the ambulance, anyway.” Miss Withers shooed her chattering charges toward the door. “Don’t stand there like a log, my good man. Do something!”
The guard let go of his prisoner’s collar, and the man slumped again to the floor. “I don’t just really know what the official procedure ought to be in a case of this kind,” he observed doubtfully. “The Director is busy with guests, and I know he doesn’t want any publicity of this kind….”
“HEY!” A big bass voice boomed through the building like a husky fog-horn, clearing the crowd from the doorway like chaff before the wind. “Hey, there! What’s all this fuss about?”
Six feet three of bone and muscle shoved its way belligerently through the crowd. “One side, one side, will you?” The policeman looked down past the two rows of shining buttons on his front to where the crumpled figure lay on the floor. Then he whirled on the guard, belligerently.
“Well, speak out, Fink! What is it? Alcoholism? Did you send for the ambulance?”
“Not yet, Donovan. And this is no alcoholism, it ain’t. It’s a pickpocket that I’ve nabbed.” Fink held up the three watches as evidence. Immediately they were engulfed in the policeman’s enormous paw. He bent over to survey the bruised face on the floor. Then he started.
Wetting his thumb, he whirled over the pages of a little black book that he took from his hip pocket. Finally he found a certain page, and read aloud with much puzzling over words….
“McGirr, John—alias Chicago Lew—height five feet three, weight one hundred and two pounds, wanted in Des Moines, Detroit and Chicago for petty thievery and picking pockets—” He replaced the black book in his pocket with a flourish. “It’s him all right. We’ve been looking for this guy for two months, we have.” He bent over the prisoner.
“Just you hold on there, Mickey Donovan!” Fink, the fat guard, stuttered with eagerness. “What about the reward, I wanta know? Is they a reward for this Chicago Lew? Is they? Because I lay claim to it, here and now. I want these people to witness it, I do. If they is a reward, I’m going to
get it.”
“Suppose there is?” Donovan put his hands on his hips and stared at the other. “I’m doing the arresting, ain’t I? I’m the cop here, ain’t I? I got the prisoner, ain’t I? I recognized him, didn’t I?”
The big policeman moved toward his prisoner again, but Fink thrust his face between.
“That don’t make one bit of difference,” insisted the guard. “Just because you’re the flatfoot on this beat, Mickey Donovan, is no sign that you’ve got a right to walk in and hog the reward for this prisoner. He’s mine, I guess. I leave it to anybody here, I do. Didn’t I chase him through the place? Didn’t I nab him here in the doorway? Didn’t I …”
“If there is any reward, I don’t see why I shouldn’t get it.” Miss Withers left her little flock and strode forward, her umbrella held menacingly before her. Both Fink and Donovan drew back a step, as did the surrounding crowd.
“I stopped him with this umbrella, you know. He would have escaped if it hadn’t been for me, and then this poor woman would have had to lose her handbag, besides the watches that were stolen from somebody….”
Immediately loud voices from the crowd announced that most of the gentlemen present had lost their timepieces, and that they recognized their property among the watches in Donovan’s hand. The air became filled with strangely vague descriptions of the property, until Donovan silenced them with a roar.
“You can get your property up at the Police Property Clerk’s office, if you can identify it to the Captain’s satisfaction. Some of you never saw a watch before except in a pawnshop window. Leave off your jabbering, will you?”
“But I tell you, this man doesn’t get taken out of here until we come to some agreement about the reward,” insisted Fink. “Half of it, anyway. That I’ve got to have, Mickey Donovan! Half of it, or he doesn’t go to jail. There’s nobody here to make a complaint against him anyway….”