Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene Read online

  “A commendable suggestion. Here, like straight out, is what I have on my mind. I have been commissioned, in a manner of speaking, by a certain rather important member of the fuzz to try to locate a young lady of twenty-one years who is suspected of being in the Los Angeles area. Specifically, in one of the areas frequented or inhabited by hippies. Her name is Lenore Gregory, and she is a member of a substantial New York family. No crime is involved, I assure you. It’s simply a matter of locating the girl and reporting her whereabouts. Her mother and father are naturally, distraught.”

  Al swallowed all this without a gulp. Indeed, he had heard rumors to the effect that Miss Withers was not in all ways exactly what she seemed, and that she had had, in fact, a pretty checkered career in New York City before moving West. Having heard the rumors and having now heard what she had to say, he was beginning to feel, actually, a stirring of interest, in her proposition. It might provide a welcome break in his reflections on where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do when he got there.

  “And you want me to drive you around to these places so you can try to pick up this girl’s trail,” he said. “Is that it?”

  “Precisely. I shall, of course pay all expenses.”

  “Well, Miss Withers, I’d like to help you, and that’s the truth, but I’m pretty sure my dad wouldn’t relinquish the family wheels, and all I’ve got is the Hog.”

  “The what?”

  “The Harley.” He affectionately patted the saddle of the ominous-looking machine he had been tinkering with. “The Hog.”

  To Miss Withers, the name seemed highly inappropriate. She was inclined to think of it rather as a Brahman bull or a bucking bronco. It looked as if it would immediately try to throw off anyone who was rash enough to climb on.

  “Does this machine come equipped with a sidecar?” she said.

  “I could attach one if I had it, but I don’t.”

  “They are available, however, are they not?”

  “Oh, sure. Why?”

  “Young man, if you think for an instant that I’m going to straddle that thing, you have even less sense than I give you credit for. You will buy a sidecar today at my expense. When I’m finished with it, it will become your property.”

  “You’ll need a crash helmet too. It’s against the law to ride a motorcycle without one.”

  “Merciful heavens! However, if one must, one must. It is necessary, after all, to show proper respect for the law.”

  And so it happened that Miss Hildegarde Withers, in the best tradition of chivalry from Camelot to La Mancha, went forth to rescue a fair damsel in distress, riding sidesaddle, so to speak, on a Hog.

  3.

  AFTER ALMOST A WEEK of fruitless searching, she was beginning to feel, it must be admitted, more akin to the fantasy-ridden don than to any of Arthur’s knights. She had started out with the naïve notion that her assignment was simply one of tracking down a willful and deluded girl, no doubt spoiled rotten by permissive parents, and giving her, after finding her, the benefit of a few choice words about the facts of life. It was not, of course, that easy. As she rode forth each day on her mechanical Rosinante, Don Quixote to Al Fister’s Sancho Panza, she became increasingly aware that her quest did not take her simply from one town to another, or from one part of town to another part, but into another world, if not another dimension—the twilight world of the hippies, who lived by rules she did not know and spoke a language she could only imperfectly understand.

  It was a strange world, as she came to know it, a world where pot and peyote replaced the dry martini, where LSD and desoxyephedrine enlarged the vision of pale ghosts of real people who dreamed and drifted but did not dance to the music of the sitar played by Ravi Shankar. Like others who lived outside this world, she had fallen into the common error of thinking of the hippies as rebels, but now she began to understand that they weren’t rebels at all. They were secessionists. Unable to accept or change the system, they had simply split, flaked off, voluntarily got lost. And lost, she thought, they were. Going nowhere, they had lost their way. The beat generation. When she was young, more years ago than she cared to count, it had been the lost generation. The years of the expatriates. Now, doing her legwork on Sunset Strip, riding the Hog in a helmet to Laguna Beach or wherever the hippies were and the Lost Lenore might be, making her inquiries and watching the contemporary breed on the bright beaches or in psychedelic joints or community pads smelling of pot, she kept remembering a phrase, a title used long ago by Scott Fitzgerald for one of his books: All the Sad Young Men. And all the sad young women. That was the adjective. That was the mot juste. These young people were sad. Sitting with folded hands in limbo. Contemplating a kind of universal navel in a chemical nirvana. Negative. Nothing to do and nowhere to go. Even their sex, which permeated their haunts, was a kind of negation. Sex is so convenient when it’s too much trouble to love. The nothing world. Nada. But it isn’t, Mr. Hemingway, a clean, well-lighted place.

  Miss Withers on the hippie scene stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. In all of hippiedom no one was less a hippie than she. When she started out on her excursions, she faithfully wore, pushed over her bun as a concession to the law, the crash helmet that the law prescribed; but carefully preserved in a box at her feet in the sidecar was her current selection from the inventory of astonishing hats that had invariably incited the derision of Inspector Oscar Piper. When the Hog was deserted and the excursion pursued afoot, she abandoned the helmet and donned the hat, feeling fully dressed for the first time since leaving home. In bars and coffee shops and even appearing suddenly to the gaping vision of a startled initiate in the open doorway of some shabby pad to which she had gone on a false scent, she was a stern apparition who probably caused more than one runaway disciple to remember uneasily the days of rapped knuckles and home arrest.

  On one occasion, informed of the event and the date by Al Fister, who read the Los Angeles Free Press and otherwise kept tuned to the grapevine, she wandered among the incomprehensible, and to her indescribably dull, happenings of a Griffith Park love-in. She had gone with Al as escort with more than a little trepidation, expecting a kind of unwashed public orgy. Nothing of the sort. Indeed, she observed no liberties exercised between the sexes to exceed, or even equal, those she had been aware of (by hearsay, or course) between young men and young women driven to indiscretion by the scent of honeysuckle and red clover on the picnics of her youth. She could not possibly understand, to begin with, how any one of the motley assemblage could have been incited to the slightest intimacy with any other one. They were unkempt and uncombed and frequently unwashed, as unprepossessing a lot as she had ever seen assembled in number, and about them, real or imagined, was the pervading smell of a neglected armpit. On an improvised stand of scrap lumber, a group which called itself the Dharma Bums created an unholy din with amplified guitars, an uninhibited electric organ, and pounding drums. On the grass, couples danced barefooted, detached, out of contact, each apparently indifferent of the other’s movements, or even to his presence. There was an abundance of free food for the taking, donated or begged or borrowed or collected from the refuse of markets, but Miss Withers did not take any. She wandered through the crowd, remembering, with a nostalgia intensified by the present contrast, the far-off Saturday night open-air concerts she once attended, when the band played marches and simpler selections from the classics, and the trombone player, who was also the vocalist, invariably sang “My Buddy” or “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-winding” or something else left over from the Kaiser’s war. She was saddened and a little angered by being made to feel so dated. So impotent. She stood for a while and listened to a young man with long blond hair and a meager blond beard, dressed in an old army shirt and Levis and a pair of Jesus sandals, who was leaning against the bole of a tree and strumming chords on a guitar and singing softly to himself a song about someone called Mr. Tambourine Man. She moved on and came across a female child in her teens, some distance apart, sitting Indian-fash
ion on the grass and reading a paperback book of poems by Ferlinghetti. She engaged the child in conversation, but the conversation was not a success.

  The most frustrating thing about her experiences, apart from a general confusion, was the evasiveness she constantly encountered. One thing became apparent. There was a conspiracy of protection among them, the beats or the hippies or the flower children or whatever the sect within the body, and all of them, card-carrier or teeny bopper, displayed incredible slyness in dealing with the outsider, the straight, who seemed to pose the slightest threat to the security or independence of a member of their subculture. This posed for Miss Withers, being an obvious straight, an almost insurmountable problem. In at least one other instance of her incurable snooping, she had pretended to be what she was not, assuming a disguise in the interests of the case, but to assume the character and appearance of a hippie was palpably beyond her powers and her stomach. She wondered glumly if she was doomed after many a brilliant performance to a final flop.

  It was Al Fister who suggested the tactic that finally put her forrader. Having returned late at night from hours of futile searching, they were stoking themselves in Miss Withers’ kitchen with cold milk and cake. Al was in reasonably good spirits, not feeling in the matter the same urgency that gave fuel to Miss Withers, but the latter could not remember feeling so utterly defeated since she had, years ago in New York, nearly come a fatal cropper in the affair of four missing ladies.

  “Al,” she said, “we simply must devise a new approach to our problem.”

  “If it was me,” said Al cheerfully around a cud of cake, “I’d just forget it.”

  “If it were I,” Miss Withers corrected testily. “The subjunctive mode and the predicate nominative. Didn’t they teach you any grammar at all at that academic factory you attended?”

  “I guess it didn’t take.” Al grinned, reaching for the cake and the knife. “Anyhow, I’d forget it.”

  “Young man, I don’t admit defeat so easily. However, I realize that you have a record as a drop-out. If you want to give up, you are free to do so.”

  “Not me.” Al shook his head, his amiability undisturbed. “To tell the truth, I’m beginning to think this is a gas. Besides, that chick in the picture flips me. If you finally make her scene, wherever it is, I want to be alongside.”

  “Please try to speak English. I’m a little tired of translating jargon.”

  “Well, if you want to keep with it, do you know what I’d do?”

  “Inasmuch as you haven’t told me, I don’t. I am, however, open to suggestions.”

  “I’d get the help of a pro, that’s what I’d do.”

  Miss Withers, her pride wounded, was instantly on her dignity. She gave Al the full effect of a frigid look of pedagogic severity. “Young man, I may not be an official member of any police force, but I assure you that experience gives me some claim to professional standing. Moreover, this is a case requiring the utmost discretion. It is better handled privately. I was specifically informed on that point by my old friend Inspector Oscar Piper.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of the fuzz—the police. I was thinking of a bounty hunter.”

  “Bounty hunter? Is this more jargon?”

  “Well, you’ve heard of the bounty hunters of the old days in the West, haven’t you? Guys that made a gig out of tracking down outlaws for the rewards that had been put on their heads? They’re just the same now, except they don’t track down outlaws. They track down hippies.”

  “Are you saying that there are men who make a job of this sort of thing?”

  “Sure. That’s what I said. A gig. Lots of kids run away from home nowadays to come out here to LA or San Francisco to join the hippies, just like this chick we’re looking for. The old folks at home get uptight about the whole thing, naturally, and sometimes they’ll hire one of these bounty hunters to find the kid for them. Sometimes he lets them know, but sometimes, if the hippie’s got any bread, he works both ends and doubles the take by agreeing to keep what he knows to himself.”

  “I’ve never before heard of anything so despicable. How does one go about contacting a bounty hunter?”

  “They don’t advertise, you know. You can see why. They’re in a kind of a sensitive position, I mean. Undercover. They’re not hippies, but they fake it because there’s a lot more to be learned inside than outside. It would be rough if anyone got hep to them. I mean, hippies are all for love and peace and all that, but some of them might lose their cool if they found an informer in the nest. Besides, there are the motorcycle clubs like Hell’s Angels to look out for. Those cats don’t object to any violence, not at all, and they’ve taken the hippies to raise.”

  “Well, I have no intention of running about to evil-smelling and depressing places asking perfect strangers with long hair and beards if they happen to be bounty hunters, or if they could please direct me to one. I’ve had quite enough of that sort of thing. If the bounty hunter can’t advertise, there is no reason why I can’t. The problem is, I am committed to discretion. How does one advertise without attracting the publicity we wish to avoid?”

  “You might try the Free Press. It circulates mainly among the beats and the hippies and people like that. The straights and the squares hardly know it exists, and they wouldn’t read it if they did.”

  “It sounds a disgraceful sort of newspaper, if you ask me. However, in a matter of this kind, it will probably suit our purpose exactly. As a precaution, I shall try to be deceptive. My advertisement must avoid proper names, and it must be couched in terms which will make it fully understood only by someone with reason to understand.”

  “I don’t dig.”

  “Never mind. You’ll dig in a moment.”

  Miss Withers got up and left the kitchen, returning shortly with paper and pencil. Meanwhile, Al had cut his third slice of cake and poured his second glass of milk. Miss Withers sat down, nibbled the eraser of her pencil in concentration, and then wrote rapidly and briefly.

  “There,” she said, reversing the paper and pushing it across the table toward Al. “That should do nicely.”

  Al leaned forward to read: Wanted—1967 blue Volkswagen sedan decorated with daffodils. Urgent. Will pay well. This message was followed by Miss Withers’ home phone number. Nothing more. If it was intended to be cryptic, as it apparently was, it was too cryptic for Al. It was late, of course, and he was tired and stuffed with cake and milk, and so it was perhaps understandable and excusable if his mind was not working at peak efficiency.

  “You were wrong,” he said. “I still don’t dig.”

  “It’s really quite clear,” Miss Withers said. “Who, wanting to buy a second-hand Volkswagen, would specify a blue one decorated with daffodils? One buys what the market offers and paints it afterward as one wishes. The point is, Lenore Gregory, as I have told you, was driving just such a vehicle. It was surely noticed and remembered wherever she went. I submit that any person except a UCLA drop-out would understand immediately that I am not interested in the car, but the driver. Let us hope that our bait brings up a proper fish.”

  “Meaning someone who knows where she is and is willing to sell her out?”

  “Precisely. The use of stool pigeons, Aloysius, is common practice in police procedure. The end justifies the means. And now, if you have finally had sufficient milk and cake, you had better go home to bed. Your brain, I fear, clearly needs restoration.”

  4.

  MISS WITHERS SAT ALONE on a bench in Venice, her head covered with the magnificent creation of an anonymous milliner, her purse, clutched firmly by both hands, in her lap. To the right and left of her stretched a long line of other benches, most of them unoccupied. Behind her, running parallel to the line of benches, was Ocean Front, a wide street restricted to all traffic except official vehicles. In front of her, stretching two hundred yards to the ragged edge of the blue Pacific, was the littered sand of the beach. On the beach, between her and the ocean, was a long, low public bathhouse. To the right of
the bathhouse, as she sat facing it, at the foot of Navy Avenue, Lick Pier extended across the beach and into the ocean. On the pier was an amusement park and a dance hall, from which, in the plush days of radio, the schmaltz of Lawrence Welk had gone out weekly coast to coast. The dance hall had been called the Aragon then; now it was called the Cheeta.

  Miss Withers appeared to be relaxed, taking her ease and perhaps a nap in the warm sun, with a soft sea wind touching her face and stirring the flowers of her magnificent hat. In fact, however, her senses were alert. On Ocean Front behind her, between the beach and the shops of Venice, the people of Venice passed and were now passing, the straights and the squares and the hippies and the elderly retired Jews who lived in the Ocean View Hotel at the corner of Ocean Front and Rose Avenue and went for entertainment to the Israel Levine Senior Adult Center. Miss Withers sat quietly and watched and listened. She waited.

  She had arrived in Venice some twenty minutes earlier. Santa Monica, where she lived, was just next door, so to speak, and Al had whisked her over in jig time. They had left the Hog in a parking lot at the corner of Navy Avenue and Speedway, and Miss Withers afoot had crossed over a block to Ocean Front and then strolled along the Front to the bench where she now sat. Al, meanwhile, after allowing her a head start from the lot, had tagged after, and was now sitting some distance away on a bench of his own near Lick Pier.

  Miss Withers had an appointment. Her cryptic ad had been answered. It was no longer than two hours ago that her phone had rung, and she had thought at first that it was some prankster on the line, for no one answered when she spoke, although the line was open, and still did not answer when she repeated herself. She was about to hang up in disgust when the voice came over the line, and she could still feel, even sitting here on the bench in the warm sun, the crawling of her flesh when she heard it. She didn’t quite know why. It was a soft voice, masculine, not offensive in any palpable way, but it seemed to have undertones of a kind of listless derision, giving the impression that it might at any moment, for no sane reason, break into a stream of passionless obscenities.