Four Lost Ladies (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries) Read online

Miss Withers nodded. “Very much so. She’s been of considerable help to me, too, though she has a way of speaking in italics, if you know what I mean. And really no more trouble to have around than a whirling dervish. I don’t miss that madcap wire-terrier of mine any more, I can tell you that. But apart from the natural exuberance of youth and some cigarette ashes strewn here and there, we get along very well.”

  “But where does she come in? What’s her interest?”

  The schoolteacher said with a smile, “It’s possible that she was fond of her aunt, and is determined to find her or else help avenge her murder. It is also possible that she has certain expectations—there was an insurance policy of considerable size.”

  He sighed. “You’ve still got that bee in your bonnet?”

  “When I started on this thankless task,” Miss Withers told him, “I was working completely in the dark. In most investigations you start with the corpse, plus a number of suspects. Here I had neither. It was like learning to play three-dimensional chess blindfolded and with mittens on. But now—”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve got something?”

  She nodded. “Murder. Murder most foul.”

  “With no corpses left around?” He grinned. “A new kind of mass murder.”

  The schoolteacher shook her head so that her hat, which today resembled a frigate under full sail, careened sharply to starboard. “No, Oscar. Just to simplify things I’ve narrowed my sights down a little. Jeeps—I mean Alice Davidson Junior—and I have had a very busy week. We’ve been running into the library so often to look at the old newspaper files that I’ve almost expected the stone lions at the Fifth Avenue entrance to recognize us and start wagging their tails. Luckily a number of my former pupils with whom I keep in touch have grown up to assume jobs with department stores and banks and public utility companies, so I’ve had access to certain records not available to the general public. Sometimes when that didn’t work my assistant sleuth has got results by flickering her long eyelashes at susceptible males. Out of it all we’ve boiled it down to four cases that I’m positive about—four women of the type I was talking about to you the other day—middle-aged, lonely, unattached—who ought to be around somewhere enjoying life, and who aren’t.”

  “But people are always dropping out of sight,” the Inspector reminded her. “It’s a part of modern existence. Home ties, friendship, even marriage don’t mean what they did when we were young. People move, change jobs, marry and divorce and remarry and change their names for luck or business reasons. They drift away—”

  “Yes,” she said grimly, “sometimes they drift right out of this world! Because as we kept on snooping, a pattern began to emerge. The drift was in a certain direction, along parallel lines that meet in infinity. I’ll show you.” Miss Withers stepped to the door, opened it, and beckoned.

  Piper took a look at Jeeps, did a double-take, and then stood up. “Well, Hildegarde,” he said fervently, “I don’t know what you’re hunting for, but you’re using the right kind of bait.”

  She introduced them. “Oh,” Jeeps said in a disappointed tone. “I thought you’d be wearing your uniform. But I bet you look super-super in it, Inspector!”

  “His only uniform is a big smelly cigar and a cloak of indifference,” Miss Withers put in tartly. She took from the girl the black looseleaf notebook which contained the results of their week’s work. “Oscar, after you’ve seen this I think you’ll agree with me that what we have discovered requires definite and immediate action.”

  He hesitated. “Couldn’t you just give me a quick fill-in—the highlights? I’ve got to be over at the Municipal Building in a few minutes.”

  “Very well. Jeeps, will you—?”

  “File One,” said the girl, her voice ringing with importance. “Alice Davidson—that’s my aunt. Age forty-two. Buyer for women’s wear, attractive, unmarried. Collected fifteen thousand dollars on an endowment insurance policy last September eighteenth. A week later she took leave of absence from her job with a downtown wholesaler, gave up her lease on a furnished apartment on East Forty-Seventh, and moved to a big hotel on Park. She checked out ten days later and hasn’t been heard of since. Nothing in Vital Statistics about her. State Department says she made no request for a passport. No airline or steamer bookings. Closed out her bank account the day she checked out of the hotel.”

  “Well,” said the Inspector, “that doesn’t indicate—”

  “Wait, Oscar! Next file, please.”

  “Ethel Brinker, age forty-six, registered nurse and quite nice-looking according to this photo in the newspaper clipping. It tells about how she invented a burpless baby bottle and sold the patent outright for twenty thousand dollars. Nurses’ registry has only her old address on file, a rooming-house in the Bronx from which she moved to a luxury hotel last November fifth. Two weeks later she checked out and hasn’t been heard of since.”

  “And an interesting sidelight on Miss Brinker is that the woman who runs the rooming-house where she used to live says there has been someone around looking for her. It seems that she left a pet poodle at a boarding-kennel out on Long Island, and they want some money or they threaten to sell the dog,” put in Miss Withers.

  “Nasty little white lap dogs with pink, runny eyes,” said the Inspector. “If I owned one I’d abandon it too, quick as I could.”

  “File Three,” Jeeps continued. “Mae Carter, a pretty though plump widow of thirty-eight who got into the Camden newspapers last fall by winning a radio jackpot give-away netting her a new convertible, an all-electric kitchen, a completely furnished prefabricated honeymoon cottage, free dental care for the rest of her life, and some other stuff. It was supposed to be twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth, but she turned it into cash for about half that, came to New York November twenty-first for a shopping spree, and disappeared a few days later.

  “File Four: Emma Sue Atkins, a Baltimore divorcée of forty-three who on December first accepted a settlement of seventeen thousand five hundred dollars for injuries sustained a year ago in a taxi accident. She came to New York for a fling, and then checked out of her hotel December thirteenth and hasn’t been heard of since.”

  “There!” said Miss Withers triumphantly. “Now, to use the inelegant expression of your own, Oscar, do you still think I’m barking up the wrong tree?”

  “Hmmm,” he said. “Let’s see. You’ve found four women who seem to have dropped out of sight under apparently similar circumstances.”

  “Apparently? You might as well say that coal is apparently black!”

  “But out of so many cases you were bound to find some similarities,” he went on patiently. “I bet if you hunted long enough you could find four women who had their nails manicured, ate shrimps for lunch, went to a movie, and then on the way home came up out of the subway to be hit by a red two-ton delivery truck loaded with old newspapers, but that wouldn’t prove anything. It’s like having the answer and working back to the problem—it’s too easy to discard any factors that don’t fit. There’s nothing odd certainly about women with sudden prosperity going to the big luxury hotels, that’s what the places are for. And with money, no doubt they want to make a break with the past, and start a new life.”

  “But what fun is money if you can’t show off before people who knew you when?” Miss Withers pointed to the notebook. “Besides, why have we found that all these women left so much of the minor business of life unattended to? What about the inactive bank accounts, deposit accounts at Macy’s, and the rest of it? What about the new suit that Mae Carter left at Altman’s for alterations and never picked up? What about Emma Sue Atkins’s pledge of fifty dollars to the Red Cross that’s never been paid, and the abandoned pet and the unsent Christmas cards?”

  “Women,” pronounced the Inspector, “are unpredictable.”

  Miss Withers exchanged a smile with Jeeps. “Not to other women, Oscar. Very well, then I’ll play my last trump. Would it make any difference to you if I said that all four of these wome
n stayed at the same hotel within the last six months? Isn’t it a little odd that they all made their exit from the same gorgeous clip-joint—the Hotel Grandee over on Park Avenue?”

  “Oh,” he said flatly. “The Grandee.”

  “What about it, Oscar?”

  “Nothing, nothing at all. I mean, that’s one place where there’s absolutely no funny business. From our point of view it’s one of the best-run hotels in town. Since they had their grand opening last spring they’ve had a perfect record—no gambling, no vice, no rough stuff, and only one suicide.”

  “And that one?”

  “Relax, Hildegarde. There was no question about its being suicide, and the body was identified as one Harriet Bascom, so it wasn’t one of your four. Just a little librarian from Poughkeepsie who got broke and discouraged and did a swan-dive out of a window one night last summer.”

  She subsided, a little disappointed. “All the same—well, Oscar? We’re waiting.” On the other side of the desk Jeeps had her fingers crossed.

  The Inspector looked at his wrist-watch and scowled. “I don’t quite—”

  “Now don’t say I ought to take this to Missing Persons! We’ve already checked their files and photographs. But they say that only the next of kin can request an official investigation. All we got was a polite runaround.” She sniffed indignantly.

  “They know their job,” Piper told her. “They also know that ninety-nine times out of a hundred when people disappear they’re actually only concealing the fact that they’re undergoing psychiatric treatment, or doing time for shoplifting, or married to somebody their family wouldn’t approve of. It can be very embarrassing to drag that out into the light.” He stood up and put on his coat. “If I tried to start a homicide investigation without even the slightest proof that anybody had even died, I’d be laughed right out of my job, especially with the Department in the midst of a shake-up. Tell you what, you come down and see me the first of the week, and maybe I can find a private investigator who’ll take the case without charging you much of a fee. Now I’ve got to rush—excuse me, ladies.”

  The door closed behind him.

  “A private eye!” breathed Jeeps dreamily. “Somebody like Alan Ladd—”

  “Most of the ones I’ve seen,” Miss Withers told her, “are more inclined to resemble William Bendix. But we’ll have no truck with that breed. ‘I’ll do it myself, said the little red hen, and she did.’”

  “But what more can we do? We can’t send out circulars and photos on the teletype and get newspaper publicity and force people to answer our questions.”

  “No,” admitted Miss Withers. “But all the same—never underestimate the power of a woman.”

  “Huh?” Jeeps looked blank.

  “Like the generals in the last war, I am about to make a strategic withdrawal to previously prepared positions. Knowing the Inspector of old, I was somewhat prepared for his decision.”

  “But you do like him quite a lot, don’t you?” the girl asked shrewdly.

  “My dear child, apart from the sentimental fondness any woman feels for the only man who ever proposed to her, I detest him—as a symbol of a world dominated by masculinity. Speaking of proposals, I think I am shortly to receive another.”

  Jeeps now looked completely blank. “From who?”

  “Whom. I don’t know his name. We might call him Mr. Nemo, or Monsieur Personne—Nobody, in other words, although I know he exists. Just as you know a spider exists when you see a web, and the center of this particular web is the Hotel Grandee.”

  The girl took a deep breath. “Okay, when do we start?”

  “I, not we,” the schoolteacher told her firmly. “What I have in mind is a very dangerous experiment, and I’m not going to let anyone else get involved in it. You, my child, are being shipped home on the first train.”

  “But—”

  “But me no buts!” said Miss Hildegarde Withers, in her classroom voice. As they rode back uptown in the subway she opened the notebook again, turning to clippings in the back—blind alleys that they had followed to the end, prospects that didn’t pan out. “Ah,” she said. “From a United Press dispatch, La Porte, Indiana, December third—‘Mrs. Josie Goggins of this city nearly fainted with surprise and delight last night when she answered the telephone and learned that hers was the winning guess on the Miss Whosit radio contest, netting the attractive widow an eight-room house completely furnished with antiques, a two-motor plane, a chinchilla coat, free maid service for a year, and tax-exempt bonds to bring the amount to thirty-five thousand dollars … ’”

  And so it happened that when long shadows were falling on Park Avenue the next afternoon, a hired limousine drew up at the canopy of the Hotel Grandee, depositing on the curb a tall and somewhat bewildered woman wrapped in chinchilla, and snowed under with eleven pieces of new and expensive luggage. She was led inside by Muller, the doorman, as gently as if she were a piece of Venetian glass. Then she registered, and was convoyed ceremoniously to the elevators by a circle of bellboys, somewhat like the Queen Mary being worked into her mooring.

  “That new 19A22,” observed the ninth assistant-manager, on desk duty. “I’ve seen her someplace before.”

  “So have I,” came back the fourteenth, on stand-by duty. “In the funny papers.”

  “Wait,” the other said. He snapped his fingers and then reached under the counter for a much-folded copy of the Daily Racing Form, pointing to a photograph on page one. “That’s it,” he said. “Put a red wig and some diamond earrings on Citation and the horse would be a dead ringer for Mrs.—what is it? Mrs. Josie Goggins.”

  “Okay, but—jiggers!” The Form was whisked instantly out of sight and both bright young men were busily engaged in essential enterprises when a comfortable, stocky man in a quiet tweed topcoat sauntered by, looking very much at peace with himself and the world. “Good afternoon, Mr. Brady—in spite of the snow,” said Nine.

  “That snow,” said Brady didactically, “is a godsend to the farmers, after a dry fall. The more moisture falls, the better, as far as the crops are concerned.” Both the young assistant-managers nodded, feeling suddenly as if they must have left something undone or unbuttoned. Mr. Brady always stared at people a fraction of a second longer than was necessary; realizing the fact, he usually wore a pair of heavy tortoise-shell rimmed glasses with just a shade of amber tint to them, to take the edge off his glance.

  Upstairs on the nineteenth floor the newly arrived guest was moving uneasily about her suite, like a cat in a strange house. A bellboy with a snub nose and a winning smile was briskly giving her the second step of the Grandee’s plushiest welcome, arranging a number of bowls of great yellow chrysanthemums in the living-room so that it resembled a stage setting. He also dumped bowls of fresh hothouse fruits in the bedroom. “Compliments of the management, Mrs. Goggins,” he said to her.

  “Oh—oh, yes. Thank you very much.”

  The doorbell rang, and he sprang gallantly to answer it. All of a sudden a voice cried, “Oh, madame, I am so disconsolate—that I ’ave been late!” She was wearing beneath her light coat a uniform of sleazy black silk, knee-length and with a frilly lace apron. “I ’ope you ’ave not been angry wiz Gigi?”

  “Oh, no!” gasped Miss Hildegarde Withers.

  Jeeps put down the small bag she carried, and then moved quickly to head off the bellboy, who was returning to the chrysanthemums. “I am Madame Goggeens’ personal maid,” she told him loftily. “I myself arrange the flowers the way she like zem. Merci beaucoup!” She handed him a dollar in dismissal. As the door closed behind him, the girl turned to Miss Withers. “You’re really not angry wiz—I mean with me?”

  “My feelings, at this moment, are—”

  “Because it isn’t safe for you to go into this alone. And I played one of the leads in our class play, and everybody knows how a French maid talks—”

  “But that uniform!” said the schoolteacher weakly.

  “It was the only one I could rent. A
nd I remembered that one of the prizes the real Mrs. Goggins won was maid service for a year so—” She paused for breath. “I can let down the hem or something. Please can I stay?”

  “I still—”

  “If you send me away I’ll go down to Centre Street and tell the Inspector what you’re up to!”

  “Blackmail,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers. “Well, for heaven’s sake at least get out of that silly costume and into your own clothes!” She sighed with resignation, and then, turning, caught a glance at herself in the mirror, and winced. The woman who looked out at her had brightly hennaed hair, suspiciously long dark eyelashes, and an extremely unreal complexion. “Oh, dear!” she said. “This is none of I!”

  “Me,” Jeeps corrected. “They were a little heavy-handed with you at the beauty parlor. Let me tone you down, and then you can go downstairs and start waiting for Mr. Nemo to pounce. Do you know, I think this is going to be fun!”

  “I disagree,” said Miss Withers firmly. “Already I’m blushing under my paint to realize how much I resemble an aging bawd.”

  The girl stroked the incredibly soft fur. “Anybody wrapped in chinchilla is a lady.”

  “Perhaps so. But how can I relax, knowing how much I had to pay for a week’s rental and insurance? If one of my former pupils weren’t head of a fur company, I couldn’t have managed it at all.” She shook her head. “The worst of it is, now that I’m all done up like Mrs. Astor’s horse, I don’t know just how and where to start operations.”

  “Don’t worry; if we’re right, he’ll make the first move. You probably ought to make it easy for him by cruising around the cocktail lounges. And if you see a likely prospect—”

  “I know. I drop my handkerchief.”

  Jeeps shrieked. “Heavens, no! Even holding an unlighted cigarette and looking helpless is pretty passé. Dropping your purse and letting compact and coins and everything scatter on the floor isn’t so bad—”

  “I had thought,” admitted the schoolteacher, “that when I have ordered enough drinks and disposed of them quietly in the upholstery or the potted palms, I might find that I have nothing in my handbag smaller than a five-hundred-dollar bill?”