The Penguin Pool Murder (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries) Read online

  “Answer me! Where is Mrs. Lester?” He waved his hand, and detectives ran like frightened deer to search the far corners of the apartment. Roche was positively vibrating….

  Miss Withers smiled, faintly. Again she was having the time of her life. “I don’t know where Gwen Lester is at the present moment,” she said softly, “but when she went out of her ten minutes ago in my hat and overcoat, she was under arrest and in custody of Inspector Piper of the Homicide Squad. Why don’t you look for her down at Police Headquarters?”

  There was a long silence, broken only by sounds from the hitherto bored Commissioner suggesting that he had just laid the egg … a large egg, of which he was very proud.

  “Arrest this woman,” screamed Tom Roche. “Arrest her for resisting an officer, aiding and abetting a criminal, accessory after the fact …”

  The Commissioner came slowly forward, still trying to keep a straight face. He put his hand gently on the District Attorney’s shoulder. “My private opinion would be, Tom, that you’ve sufficiently established your asininity already tonight. Think of the newspaper boys you insisted on bringing!”

  They both turned toward the hallway, but already the squad of reporters had disappeared in the direction of the nearest telephone booth.

  The Prosecuting Attorney made a gesture with his well-manicured fingers indicative of chagrin. “I suppose you’re right,” he admitted, “but darn it all to hell, anyway!”

  13

  A White Knight Goes Riding

  “I SUPPOSE YOU KNOW what you’re up to, Piper.” It was ten o’clock of the next morning, a bright Sabbath. “I hope you know, anyway. For your sake and the sake of the department.” There was no answer.

  The Commissioner rose from behind his barricade of telephone and onyx desk pens and moved over to stare out of the long window into the vacant downtown streets. “Don’t think I’m sore, Piper, because I’m not. I didn’t want to be in on Tom Roche’s publicity hunt, and I was tickled at the way it came out. The arrest was made from this office, just as it should have been. That was a smart sneak you made with your prisoner, dressing her up like the school-teacher.”

  Oscar Piper, Inspector of Detectives, sat on the edge of his Commissioner’s desk, also looking out of the window.

  “Yeah, I guess I know what I’m up to,” he told his superior.

  “Because if you don’t, you’re in a tough spot,” the Commissioner finished. “You’ve made Tom Roche the maddest man in this city. He’s a hound for publicity, but it wasn’t this left-handed kind that he wanted. Be sure you’ve got evidence enough to justify your arrests, that’s all. There’s motives enough in the Lester murder sure enough … fear, passion, and cupidity. You’ve got your case built up, and you’ve got your prisoners both under arrest. All you’ve got left to do is to lay your evidence before Roche so that he can get a conviction. He’s sore as a boil now. Make certain your end of the job is beyond any chance of being torn apart.”

  “I am certain,” said the Inspector. “There’s a cast-iron case against Gwen Lester and Philip Seymour. Only it’s completely circumstantial. There wasn’t an eye-witness to the murder. There hardly ever is, you know. But I’ve got a chain of evidence that will send Gwen and her boy friend to the chair just as sure as God made little apples. Only—”

  “Only what?”

  “Only suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the little lady and the lawyer didn’t happen to do it? Bump her husband, I mean.”

  The Commissioner looked annoyed. “What do you mean they didn’t do it? It’s open and shut, like this. Didn’t the husband catch them in an assignation? Didn’t they have opportunity? Didn’t they have both an immediate motive and a built-up one? Remember, not only the woman’s freedom, but her husband’s big life insurance and the value of the seat on the Stock Exchange … there’s motives for you. Isn’t that enough, if you bring it out in the right way?”

  “Sure,” said Oscar Piper. “It convinces me plenty. It’s too good. I’ve got a sort of a picture of the crime in my mind, and everything doesn’t jibe perfectly. Maybe if I smoke a couple of cigars over the idea I can get it set in my mind. You see, it isn’t enough for us to believe that they committed the murder, it isn’t enough for us to know that they committed the murder. I got to know exactly how they did it, so we can prove it on ’em. Even with a confession nowadays you can’t get a conviction in first-degree murder without proof and plenty of it.”

  Inspector Piper tipped his hat over his eyes. “Well, I’ll be seeing you, chief. I’ll give your love to Tom Roche if I meet him.”

  “Better keep from seeing him, or being seen by him, for a while,” advised the Commissioner. “Don’t answer your phone.”

  Piper grinned, and slammed the office door behind him. Ten minutes later he was in his own office. He dismissed the plainclothes man on guard at the door, and after getting a cigar well under way, he tackled the heap of material on his desk.

  It all related to the Lester case. Everything else had been sidetracked for that since the story had broken in the newspapers.

  The first item was a report from the two operatives who had at his request made a complete survey of the books and papers of the Wall Street firm of White and Lester.

  They found the firm solvent but not exactly prosperous, and as Piper had requested, they appended a list of the seven or eight customers who had suffered worst from the recent market crash of “bloody” October.

  Five of these, Inspector Piper saw, were of the usual type, all of them men listed in the telephone directory and most of them in the credit rating books. They were quite evidently men who could afford their losses, or at least to whom the crash had not come as a terrible and final financial shock.

  But the sixth, instead of appearing in the Inspector’s worn copy of Dun and Bradstreet, was listed only in Who’s Who. It was Bertrand B. Hemingway.

  Piper noted that Hemingway had been taken for a toboggan ride on a certain famous radio stock which opened at ninety-four dollars a share on a Wednesday morning, and closed the next afternoon at something under thirty. As margin for his speculation in the radio stock, Hemingway had put up what stocks he owned outright, some five thousand dollars worth of them.

  According to the records of White and Lester, this margin, together with some seventeen thousand dollars worth of paper profits, had vanished into thin air during those two days of trading.

  Guessing is apt to be more successful in a bull market than during a crash, the Inspector decided. Hemingway had guessed that Radiozome would weather the storm, and Radiozome hadn’t.

  “And this is what the Director called investing a little money, huh?” mused Piper. He laid aside the papers for further perusal, and read on.

  The last name on the list of heavy losers among the White and Lester clients was that of a Mr. Parson, no initial given. It had been listed in the files of White and Lester as “Mr. Lester’s client—special.”

  The Inspector wished that he knew more about the routine of Wall Street. Maybe there was something out of the ordinary about this special account. Only he couldn’t see what it was. He read on, doggedly.

  Neither the telephone book, Dun and Bradstreet, nor the Social Register gave any information regarding a Mr. Parson. He had however, according to the sales slip and transaction records, been a customer of White and Lester for more than a year.

  During that time on or about the fifteenth of every month he had deposited additional margin, either to bolster his account or extend his trading scope, in actual cash. There was no record that he had ever given orders for a stock to be bought outright, but had used his margin to speculate among the stocks known as “active erratics.” Several times a sudden drop had wiped out his paper profits, and even encroached upon his capital, but Mr. Parson, like a good sport, had plunged back into the melee to recoup, somehow raising more capital. Most of the time, the records showed, Parson had been a good guesser. He had made substantial winnings for a while, which as a rule h
e applied as additional margin against the purchase of larger blocks.

  There was a note from one of the police auditors to the effect that there was no record in the Lester books of any check payment at any time to Mr. Parson. He had taken, as he had paid, actual hard cash. That was an unusual thing nowadays.

  But this was establishing no motive for the unknown Mr. Parson to have cherished a resentment against his broker amounting to homicidal mania. And that was what Piper had to search for.

  Then he came to the records for the fatal October days when the bottom dropped out of the bull market and left the Republican party in the spot. On October 17th, Piper read, Mr. Parson had “owned” a large block, some thousand shares, of Wagner Brothers Preferred, with a cash margin against them of about fifteen thousand dollars and a potential profit of several times that much.

  The statement also showed that on October 18th the firm of White and Lester had sold out the account of Mr. Parson to protect itself, but as such a loss that the original margin and paper profits were both quite thoroughly gone.

  The file also contained a scribbled memorandum on a telephone pad “Mr. Parson called while you were out and left message … he says sell out and save what you can.” The slip was dated October 18th, at nine-thirty in the morning.

  Anyway, nothing had been saved. There was the carbon of a final statement to Mr. Parson, showing in clear figures why his stocks had tobogganed, without any offers, until almost the end of the trading for the day, when it had been cleared out in time to save the broker from suffering, but not the client.

  There were newspaper clippings showing sales on the New York Stock Exchange for October 17th and 18th. On the first day, a blue pencil check drew attention to the fact that 1250 shares of Wagner Brothers had changed hands, at a closing price of thirty dollars asked and twenty bid. On the following day twelve shares changed hands at a closing price of fifteen dollars a share.

  Piper tossed this paper on top of the others. There was hardly a chance that Mr. Parson, whoever he was, could have blamed his broker for his own bad judgment, at least to the point of seriously threatening his life. Besides, the account had been closed out twice before for the same reason, though for smaller amounts, and Parson had taken it like a man.

  So much for the customers’ records. Piper resolved to discuss them with Miss Withers; maybe the school-teacher would know about such things.

  Next Piper turned to what he had long ago learned to be a most fertile source of information … the dead man’s cancelled checks.

  He noted in passing that the amounts of Lester’s checks for the running expenses of the household, to Mrs. Lester, etc., were cut from one half to a quarter after the crash. The broker had been hurt, and badly hurt, by the slump.

  But he had not been badly enough hurt to prevent his making out a check for one thousand dollars to Miss Marian Templeton, his private secretary … ten days before his death.

  One thousand dollars must have been a large sum to a man who was pinching and saving to pull through, to a man who was making his pretty, luxury-loving wife get along on less than half her usual allowance. But the check had been signed, and cashed.

  There was only one other bit of meat along the hash of Lester’s personal checking account.

  On the 19th of October, in the midst of the terror-week in the Street, he had signed a check for one hundred dollars made out to a Mr. Ralph Hodge, which was endorsed “Ralph Hodge, Pres. Hodge Private Detective Bureau.”

  Piper knew of the organization, given for the large part to the shadowing of suspected wives or husbands, the search for lost heirs, and the fabrication of divorce evidence.

  In five minutes he had Mr. Hodge on the telephone. That worthy gentleman apologized for not coming forward before, and explained that he had accepted the hundred dollars as a retaining fee from Gerald Lester.

  “He was afraid that something would happen to him,” said Hodge. “He wanted a guard on himself, so we fixed one for him. The charge for that sort of thing is ten dollars a day, and he didn’t renew the order, so the man was taken off at the end of the ten days. Lester wouldn’t tell us any more than that, so all our man could do was to stick around. Too bad now that Lester didn’t retain us permanently, eh Inspector?”

  “Yeh,” said Piper. “What was the name of your operative who was put on the job?”

  “McFee’s his name, Inspector. Want to talk to him?”

  The Inspector told Mr. Hodge that he most emphatically did want to talk with Mr. McFee, and that immediately.

  An hour later a sad-faced individual walked into the Inspector’s office, laid his hat in his lap, and waited. He was gaunt, rugged, and had shaved too closely.

  “You McFee?”

  The private detective nodded.

  “You were on the job of guarding Gerald Lester?”

  “I was.”

  “For ten days only?”

  “For ten days. That was all he paid for. He told me at the end of the time that he didn’t think it was necessary to be on his guard any longer. He admitted that he’d probably been panicky without reason in the beginning. But he was afraid that somebody was after him, and that’s a cinch.”

  “And somebody was?” Piper leaned forward.

  “Not to my knowledge. I had no idea that he was … you know, funny. He was upset and nervous enough, but he wasn’t willing to tell us anything more than that he was afraid of his life.”

  “Anything suspicious while you were trailing him?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “You were with him day and night?”

  “Just in the daytime. I saw him to his door at night … whichever door it was.”

  “You mean …?”

  “He had a girlfriend in the Village,” McFee admitted. “Sometimes he stayed there, but never for long. For a while I thought that maybe he was afraid of her, because he usually came away looking pretty upset. But then I figured him out to be just a scary sort of a guy.”

  Piper nodded thoughtfully, and chewed his cigar. “That’s the only job you ever did for Lester?”

  “Sure it is, why?”

  “You didn’t accept the job of shadowing his wife, Gwen Lester?”

  “I did not. I can prove where I was working since …”

  “Never mind.” Piper came closer. “You weren’t shadowing Gwen Lester on the morning when she left their apartment and went down to the Aquarium in a taxi to meet Philip Seymour?”

  “No, Inspector, I tell you …”

  “You didn’t see her meet Seymour inside the Aquarium and then run to a phone booth and call up her husband, did you?”

  For a third time McFee gave indignant denial. Piper leaned back and threw away the remains of his cigar.

  “You’d better have some pretty good proof where you were last Friday afternoon,” he said slowly. “Because somebody tipped off Gerald Lester to what his wife was doing, and it looks just like you … or some dick …”

  “It wasn’t me,” said McFee complacently. “Because last Friday all day I was in court, testifying in a divorce case where we had to bust down a hotel door up on Forty-eighth Street. I guess that’s a pretty good alibi.”

  Inspector Piper guessed that it was, too. “But we’ll want to hear more from you later,” he told the man.

  Then Piper turned absent-mindedly to the heap of material which still lay on his desk. For a moment he had seen an answer to the one big difficulty which lay in the path of the conviction of Gwen and Philip … the question of who phoned Lester from the Aquarium? If it had been a private detective hired by Lester, the whole case against them would have been bullet-proof. But now—

  These were his thoughts as he shuffled the litter on his desk, and then suddenly he forgot telephone calls entirely.

  He picked up an enlarged and glossy print of one of the photographs taken by a headquarters photographer of the “scene of the crime.” Piper had glanced at this as it was drying in the dark room, but here it was in all its detail.<
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  And the first thing that met his eye was a darker blotch among the dark water-blurred rocks of the penguin tank, a blotch which might have been part of the “naturalistic” scenic background … and wasn’t!

  For the photograph, taken hurriedly on the afternoon of the crime, while he himself was locked in Hemingway’s office and questioning suspects, showed when enlarged that this darker “rock” was loosely blocked and dented in the shape of a man’s hat! No doubt about it, it was a man’s hat!

  And now Inspector Piper knew for sure what it was that someone had come back for, across the prostrate body of the policeman on guard. It was this hat, left by the murderer on the scene of the crime! or left by someone—

  And did this eliminate Philip Seymour? He had been safely in the Tombs at the time. Unless there had been an accomplice … unless perhaps Gwen Lester had slipped back to take away the incriminating evidence? Only, would a woman have been able to strike down a husky cop … and would a woman have hidden herself in the men’s wash-room? That was unlikely …

  Piper studied the print again. Was this his imagination, after all? Mightn’t that be a real rock, and look like a sunken hat to him only because of an irregularity, and because Miss Withers had suggested the idea to him?

  He laid it aside, and took up the remaining memoranda. These were from the fingerprint department, which announced, as he had suspected, that no readable prints had been taken from the handle of the door, from the edge of the tank, from the nearby steam-pipes, nor from the hatpin of Miss Withers (which by now was accepted as the cause of Lester’s death).

  Indeed, the print experts declared, it would seem that everything had conspired to remove or smudge every trace of possible print. The mob which had rushed through into the runway on the heels of Donovan had helped to do this, of course.

  A dozen fingers had touched the handle of the door, and at least several pairs of hands had gripped the metal edge of the tank top. Donovan hadn’t simplified matters any by mistaking the case for one of simple drowning, and bringing in that lawyer fellow Costello to help mess things up.