CHARLES STUART Palmer (1905-1968), a descendent of colonists who settled in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1634, led a picaresque American life before becoming a successful writer, holding such jobs as iceman, sailor, publicity man, apple picker, newspaper reporter, taxi driver, poet, editor, and ghost-writer.
The Penguin Pool Murder (1931) introduced the popular spinstersleuth Hildegarde Withers. Formerly a schoolteacher, the thin, angular, horse-faced snoop devoted her energy to aiding Inspector Oliver Piper of the New York City Police Department, driving him slightly crazy in the process. She is noted for her odd, even eccentric, choice of hats. Palmer stated that she was based on his high school English teacher, Miss Fern Hackett, and on his father.
There were thirteen more novels in the Miss Withers series, the last, Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene (1969), being completed by Fletcher Flora after Palmer died. There also were three short story collections, with the first, The Riddles of Hildegarde Withers (1947), being selected as a Queen’s Quorum title. It was followed by The Monkey Murder and Other Hildegarde Withers Stories (1950), and People vs. Withers and Malone (1963), in conjunction with Craig Rice, which also featured her series character, John J. Malone.
The film version of The Penguin Pool Murder was released in 1932 and spurred five additional comic mystery films, the first three featuring Edna May Oliver in a perfect casting decision, followed by Helen Broderick, and the last, Forty Naughty Girls (1937), with Zasu Pitts. Piper was played by James Gleason in all films.
The success of the series gained Palmer employment as a scriptwriter with thirty-seven mystery screenplays to his credit, mostly for such popular series as Bulldog Drummond, the Lone Wolf, and the Falcon.
“The Monkey Murder” was originally published in the January 1947 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; it was first collected in The Monkey Murder and Other Hildegarde Withers Stories (New York, Bestseller, 1950).
By Stuart Palmer
AFTER-THEATER CROWDS were flowing sluggishly around Times Square, and then suddenly an eddy was formed by the halting of a pugnacious little Irishman, who stared back over his shoulder. “A fine thing!” observed Inspector Oscar Piper with some bitterness, “when murderers walk the streets and thumb their noses at the skipper of the homicide squad!”
“Oscar!” gasped Miss Hildegarde Withers, clutching her rakish bonnet and peering into the crowd. “Did he really? That nice, neat man?”
“That nice, neat man committed a nice, neat murder, and now he’s going scot-free, and he—well, maybe he didn’t actually thumb his nose but he smiled and tipped his hat. That was George Wayland, the wife-strangler, blast him!”
The old-maid schoolteacher firmly gripped her friend’s arm, steering him down a side street and into a smoky little basement restaurant. She ordered a bottle of chianti and two plates of spaghetti with mushrooms, and then demanded to know what this was all about.
“You were up at Cape Cod when it happened,” confessed the Inspector. “This fellow Wayland killed his wife for her money, trying to cloud the issue with a phony religious-cult background. The body of Janet Wayland, a good-looking, rich, and slightly silly dame of about thirty-eight, was found mother-naked in the back bedroom of a house she owned, up on East Sixty-fourth. The place had been vacant for a year—her husband had lived at a hotel while she was away—and there weren’t any servants yet, but they had moved back in, anyway, a few days before. The woman was lying on a sort of sacrificial altar, tied hand and foot. The room was fixed up so that it looked like the nightmare of a Hollywood set-designer for B-budget horror pictures. And the idol above the altar was a big ugly stuffed monkey, its tail extending into a length of rawhide which had been soaked and then allowed to dry and tighten slowly around the woman’s throat. You can look at the official photos if you have a strong enough stomach.”
“Please leave my stomach out of this,” Miss Withers said primly. “What a weird, unbelievable sort of murder!”
“That kind we usually crack wide open in a couple of days,” the Inspector told her. “Usually the hard ones are easy. When we found out that Wayland stood to inherit more than two hundred grand from his wife, and that they’d been rifting—or at least that she had just returned from a year’s marital vacation in California—that seemed to cinch it. To top that, we learned that Wayland had been seen, in his wife’s absence, running around with a big sexy Swede secretary, a luscious piece. That was the clincher. We arrested Wayland for murder.”
“But what went wrong? Wouldn’t he talk?”
“He talked our arm off. Stuck to his story that he returned from a business trip to Albany and that as soon as he got in the house he smelled the incense and heard the music. There was an automatic phonograph playing one record over and over, right there in the murder room. Oriental music, by some Russian. . . .”
“Rimsky-Korsakoff? Probably ‘The Young Prince and the Young Princess,’ from Scheherazade.” Miss Withers hummed a bit of it.
“Something like that. Anyway, he claimed that he had to break down the door of the room to get in. The neighbors heard a crash, just a minute before he rushed out yelling bloody murder. The door had actually been bolted on the inside—we can spot things like that—and the window was locked too. Janet Wayland had been dead for about two hours then, and he claimed he had just got in at Grand Central. He even had the right seat-stub, too—but he could have picked up one of those at the station without ever getting on a train. We figured he’d bolted the door and broken it in some time before the murder, and then set up the door and crashed it again to make the proper noise at the right time.”
The schoolteacher frowned. “But Oscar—”
“Let me give you the rest of it. Wayland yelled for the lie-detector test as soon as we picked him up, but it came out haywire. He showed a guilty reaction to some of the key questions, but he gave the same reaction to three or four of the harmless ones—so that was that. We had to let him cool.”
“And no doubt started to bear down on the lady in the case?”
Inspector Piper grinned. “You know our methods. We began to dig around, and we turned one of our lady-killing cops loose on the secretary. Inga Rasmussen worked as a secretary in the main office of the company where Wayland is a traveling salesman—he makes a couple of hundred a week peddling big mining machinery all over the country. Lieutenant Bartz gave the girl quite a play, but after a week he reported that as far as he could see there was nothing in it. She had only gone out with Wayland because she was new in town and didn’t know anybody else. It had only been dinner and dancing anyhow, and while Wayland hadn’t admitted having a wife out in California, he also didn’t make any more than the usual polite passes in the taxicab on the way to take her home.”
“I wouldn’t even know about those,” confessed Miss Withers with a faint note of regret in her voice. “But do go on.”
“That’s about it. We couldn’t trap Wayland in any important lie. We couldn’t trace any of the phony theatrical junk in the murder room, but traveling like he did, he could have picked it up here and there. He had motive and opportunity, so we piled up what evidence we had and then the district attorney refused to take it to the Grand Jury. His objection was that George Wayland, from everything we could find out about him, is such a simple, ordinary, unimaginative guy. He is Mister Average American—likes baseball, smokes popular cigarettes, reads the front page of the newspaper and then turns back to the comics. He goes to the movies to see Betty Grable and Ann Sheridan, he bets on Joe Louis and the Yankees, orders ham and eggs or steak in a restaurant, drinks beer or bourbon, and goes to church once a year on Easter. . . .”
“I don’t follow,” the schoolteacher interrupted. “Many murderers were average citizens. Look at Judd Gray, and Crippen—”
“Wait. According to the D.A., and I’m inclined to agree, the average citizen commits the average murder. He uses a gun or a knife if he’s a man, a sash-weight or poison if he’s a woman. I mean—”
“I know what you mean. Something more has gone into the composition of Janet Wayland’s murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed, to paraphrase De Quincey. Something unlike Wayland—you admit he might commit a murder, but it wouldn’t be the kind of murder this is, even though you’re sure that somehow he did it anyway!”
Piper nodded. “The murder was out of character. Any good defense attorney could point out Wayland as the average man and then ask a jury if they believed he’d think of strangling anybody with the tail of an East-Indian monkey-god. That, plus the locked-room thing, would get him off, probably. See what I mean?”
“I do indeed. But where did Wayland get the idea?”
“Must have read it somewhere. But where? Yet he did it. I’ve been a cop long enough to smell a real wrongo, and he’s one.”
Miss Withers sipped the last of her wine, which she had liberally diluted with seltzer. “You seem to be upon the horns of a dilemma, Oscar. I’m not vain enough to think that I can perform any miracles at this late date, but I’d like to pay a call on the lady in the case, if you happen to have her address.”
The Inspector picked up the check. “Go ahead,” he told her. “But you’ll find that angle was very thoroughly covered.”
The next day was Sunday, and shortly after noon Miss Hildegarde Withers emerged from the subway at Sheridan Square, once the haunt of artists, writers, and madcaps, and nowadays trod by more prosaic though no doubt better-shod feet. The address was on Minetta Lane, which she located with some difficulty. She climbed to the top floor and leaned heavily upon the bell, with no results. Then she knocked. A female voice from within cried “Just a minute!” and then the door was opened by a tall, flushed girl in rumpled green silk lounging pajamas. “Yes?” she said, in a pleasant but somewhat flat middle-western accent. “What is it?”
“Miss Rasmussen? My name is Withers, Hildegarde Withers. Inspector Piper, down at headquarters, suggested that I call on you for a little chat. Completely unofficial, of course. I hope it’s not an inconvenient time?”
“Not at all, come on in. You’ll have to excuse the mess the place is in, but a girl friend of mine was here for breakfast, and I haven’t straightened up yet. Sunday is my lazy day, you know.”
The room was small, with high narrow windows, and had been cheerfully if somewhat artily furnished with rattan and chintz and cheap brassware. Inga indicated the couch. “Do sit down while I fix myself up, I won’t be a minute.”
If it was lipstick that the girl intended to put on, she was already wearing a smudge of it on the lobe of her left ear. Miss Withers sniffed disapprovingly, but all the same she was resolved that if she had any choice in her next reincarnation, she was going to insist on red-gold hair, apple-blossom skin, and eyes like drowned stars. She sat there quietly until Inga returned. “No doubt you think I’m a meddlesome character,” the schoolteacher began, “but after all, a woman was murdered—”
Inga flashed: “If you’re harping on the Wayland thing, I never saw Mrs. Wayland and I’m sorry I ever saw Mr. Wayland and I’m not going to be badgered about it any longer!”
Miss Withers nodded. She looked at the twin wet rings on the glass top of the coffee table, then poked at the edge of the divan cushion where had been spilled some thirty-five cents in change, a small jack-knife, and a silver cigarette lighter. Then she sniffed the air judicially. “Your girl friend smokes a pipe, doesn’t she?”
Inga didn’t answer, but her eyes flashed a brighter green. “Why don’t you ask him to come out of the bedroom?” the schoolteacher continued quietly. “The three of us can have a nice heart-to-heart talk.”
“Okay!” blazed the girl. She crossed the room with a stride like an Amazon’s, and flung open the bedroom door. A man was standing there, a little foolishly, but Miss Withers saw with a start of surprise that it was not George Wayland. It was a young, very handsome police officer, in his shirt-sleeves.
“Gracious,” she murmured. “If it isn’t Lieutenant Bartz!”
The girl seized his arm and drew him into the room. “Tommy, make her stop asking questions and go away!”
The Lieutenant looked unhappy. “I don’t see—”
“The murder of Janet Wayland is still in the open file, young man. And didn’t the Inspector tell me that you had dropped this line of investigation?”
He smiled sheepishly. “I’m not on duty now, ma’am. We—we sorta got engaged, Inga and I. We can’t do much about it now, though, on account of it isn’t ethical for me to marry any suspect—I mean, anyone involved in a case, at least not until it’s settled. You won’t go telling Inspector Piper, will you?”
Miss Withers was beaming. “How perfectly romantic! So policemen do have their softer moments! I was beginning to wonder. The Inspector only proposed to me once, years ago, and he took that back before I could accept him.” She congratulated them both.
“I hope now,” Inga said, “you’ll believe that I hardly knew that awful Wayland man. If the case could only be settled—”
Lieutenant Bartz put his arm around her. “Inga is just dying to cook my breakfasts every morning,” he said. “And fight with me for the comic section.”
“We’ll have two papers!” Inga said fondly.
“And you’ll sit there and tell me what you dreamed the night before.” He turned. “Inga always has the cutest dreams.”
“My father,” Miss Withers advised him, “always said he would rather hear it rain on a tin roof than hear a woman tell her dreams. But young love—ah, me! And all that stands in the way is the specter of Mrs. Wayland, isn’t it?”
“If you’re going to try to take that case out of moth-balls,” the Lieutenant offered, “I’d like to help in any way I can.” Inga nodded too.
“Then let’s put our heads together and figure out a way for me to pay a call on George Wayland,” Miss Withers said. There was an immediate huddle, with the Lieutenant suggesting that she could say she was a newspaper reporter, and Inga offering the idea of Miss Withers claiming to be a member of some religious cult that the late Mrs. Wayland had belonged to, out in California.
“I’m afraid I’m not the type for a reporter, and Wayland is no doubt allergic to them anyway by this time. And I couldn’t pass as a devoted follower of the swami anyway. . . .”
Lieutenant Bartz snapped his fingers. “I happen to know that Wayland is trying to cash in on his wife’s property. The house is going to be listed for sale, so why not pretend you’re a buyer?”
“Say no more, young man!” Miss Withers took her departure, but she was only halfway down the stairs when she heard the sound of young, impetuous feet, and Inga came up beside her wearing a raincoat.
“I’ll walk with you as far as the corner,” the girl offered. “I want to apologize for the way I talked when you first came in, and anyway I want to bring back some ice cream. Tommy loves gelati—that’s the Italian ice cream that’s so crisp and creamy.”
The schoolteacher, a little touched, said that was all right. “Why didn’t Tommy come too?”
“I set him to washing dishes,” Inga confided. “You’ve got to get a man trained early the right way, I always say.”
They walked on, and said another goodbye outside the little Neapolitan confectionery on the corner of the Square. “Be happy, my child,” said Miss Withers. “You’ve had a very narrow escape.”
Inga nodded slowly. “But I still can’t believe Mr. Wayland did it! He was such a gentleman—and he wasn’t the type!”
Miss Withers rode on uptown, then took the shuttle to Fifth and climbed aboard a north-bound bus. She got off at Sixty-fourth and walked east, wondering just what type George Wayland really was, and how he would receive her. The whole thing, as it turned out, was ridiculously easy, almost too easy in fact. Wayland himself answered the door when she rang the bell of the neat four-story brownstone, and seemed to have no reluctance whatever about showing the house to a prospective buyer with a very weak story.
His smile was easy and warming. Miss Withers guessed that he was around thirty-five, a little on the plump side but well-tanned and dressed with extreme neatness. He might easily have been the man behind the railing in her bank, the vestryman at church, or the one who helped her with her bundles on a Pullman.
Wayland talked a good deal, and a little fast, but that might or might not be a sign of nervousness. “Here’s the living room,” he was saying. “The furniture’s for sale too, if you’re interested.”
Miss Withers was emphatically not interested in Italian Rennaissance with all its dust-catching heavy carvings, but she nodded pleasantly. The downstairs rooms all seemed furnished with more money than taste, the pictures being reproductions of such traditional works of art as The Blue Boy, Age of Innocence, and The Horse Fair. There were few books, and those were sets of Victorian novelists, in very good bindings.
On the second floor he displayed two front bedrooms, one obviously his own for there was an expensive leather toilet kit on the chest of drawers, silver brushes, and numerous bottles of cologne and shaving lotion nearby, and a heavy silk dressing-gown on the bed. Wayland led the way toward the rear, where one doorway gaped wide like a missing tooth.
Wayland paused for a moment. “This door,” he said, “is to be replaced.” He made no sign of entering, but Miss Withers sailed blithely past him. The room, however, showed no clues. It was completely bare, stripped down to the baseboards. The one window, opening above the sloping roof of the kitchen, had a heavy iron grille built into the original stone—nothing larger than a cat could have entered or left that way.
Miss Withers thought that she had never seen a less productive scene-of-the-crime. She followed Wayland to the third floor, where there was nothing much of interest, and then back down again. “Now we’ll have a look at the cellar,” the man said. And he opened a little door which led down out of the butler’s pantry.
The air which rose from the cellar’s depths was dank and musty and cold, yet with a trace of perfume. For the first time Miss Hildegarde Withers felt an unpleasant chill of apprehension. Upstairs was one thing, but going down into the semi-darkness of a basement with a man supposed to have killed one woman in this house already—
Her agile mind devised all sorts of excuses. She could say that she had to run along, that her friends were waiting, that the house was too large. . . .
“‘One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward!’” she quoted. After all, Wayland was no more dangerous in one place than another. She started, a little gingerly, down the stairs.
Down below there was a great pile of paper cartons, some neatly tied with string and some open and overflowing. Miss Withers saw women’s dresses, shoes, underwear, and all the rest of it—a pitiful exhibit.
“I’ve asked the Goodwill people to pick that stuff up,” Wayland was saying. “Just some old clothes that I have no use for now.” Miss Withers followed him obediently onward, gathering from her quick glimpse of the debris that the late Mrs. Wayland had been addicted to very high heels and to the scent of gardenia. She had also, from the look of her girdles, been very fat around the middle. Wayland was at this moment delivering a lecture about construction and termites and water-heaters, but the schoolteacher only nodded from time to time. She peered into the shadows underneath the stair, noticing a rough shelf on which had been neatly arranged a row of old magazines dating, she noted, as far back as 1934. Most of them seemed to deal with women’s fashions, a few with travel, and there was a long row of pulps, in the adventure and outdoor category.
Wayland saw what had caught her eyes, and came back to lift one of the periodicals from the rack, blow the dust from it, and shake his head. “I was always going to re-read some of these. But I guess there’s nothing deader than old magazines. . . .”
Miss Withers was forcibly reminded of something much deader, when her eyes fell upon the ruins of a paneled door which had been thrown into a corner. It certainly had been most thoroughly smashed, and the marks where the bolt had torn away were clearly visible. Behind this door Janet Wayland had been murdered. . . .
“There’s one thing I may as well tell you,” Wayland said. “It may queer the sale of the house. My wife died here, in fact she was murdered—”
“Yes, I know,” said Miss Withers, backing away a little.
“Oh, then you did read the papers!”
She nodded. “But I’m not at all fidgety about such things. I imagine that if most old houses could talk, they’d have a tale of violence and tragedy to tell.”
He nodded agreeably. “I never want to see the place again, of course. I’m anxious to sell it, and use the money in trying to trace down the murderer of my wife. The police are helpless, but I intend to try the big private agencies. . . .” He shook his head. “But of course that wouldn’t interest you, except that I’m in a position to accept any halfway-reasonable offer for the house.”
They went on back past the magazines, past the pitiful heap of the dead woman’s clothing, and up the steep stair. “Well,” said George Wayland, “that’s the works. You’ve seen everything. What do you think about it?”
His eyes met hers directly, but they were wary, amused, and almost teasing. The schoolteacher suddenly realized what he was thinking. He hadn’t for a moment been fooled about her being a possible purchaser. In some odd way, perhaps almost in spite of himself, he was letting her know that he had murdered his wife, that he was getting away with it, and that he dared her to say or do anything.
“Think it over,” Wayland continued. “You don’t have to make up your mind today.” He laughed, and his laughter to Miss Withers seemed as hard and brittle as the breaking of wood—or the crackle of thorns under a pot. Somehow she managed to keep from screaming, to hold herself from bursting into panicky flight, until he had opened the front door for her once more. “Thank you for coming,” said George Wayland. “And do remember me to your friend the Inspector.”
The door closed, and Miss Withers scuttled down the street, her feathers ruffled, for all the world like a scandalized hen. “Laugh in my face, will he? The nerve of him!” A moment or so later she almost burst out laughing, realizing that her tone had almost exactly been that of the Inspector last night when he complained that Wayland had thumbed his nose at him.
But how had the man known who she was? He couldn’t have remembered her from that chance encounter on the crowded street. Unless he had eyes in the back of his head, or was in league with the devil. Of course, according to one way of thinking, all murderers were in league with the devil. . . .
The Inspector dropped over, later that night, to find Miss Withers perched before her aquarium of tropical fish, so deeply immersed in that miniature world that she had to shake her head violently for a moment to get back to everyday. It was a sure sign that she was in mental turmoil.
She told him of her call on Inga Rasmussen, leaving out for the moment any mention of the Lieutenant, and also told him of her later venture into the house on East Sixty-fourth. “I see now what you mean about that man, Oscar,” she admitted. “He killed her, and he’s laughing!”
“He’ll have something else to laugh about,” the Inspector informed her wearily as he sank into a chair. “The Dispatch, it seems, is going to nail my hide to the wall in its Sunday section next week. They’ve dug up a lot of stuff on the Wayland murder, and they’ve stolen or faked some photos of the room. ‘Police Powerless in Weird Love Cult Killing’—you know the sort of thing. It embarrasses the mayor, and he blasts at the Commissioner, and the Commish blasts at me. It’s a hot seat to be sitting in. If Wayland would make just one mistake—”
“He doesn’t look like a man who makes mistakes,” Miss Withers said. “If only we could make one for him!” She provided the unhappy policeman with coffee and doughnuts, and insisted upon his smoking one of his fat green-brown perfectos, usually verboten in her vicinity. “Cheer up, Oscar. In a week, anything can happen!”
“Sure—I can break my leg,” he said dismally.
“I might have an idea,” she continued hopefully. “I do believe I feel one coming on!”
“Heaven save us from any more of your ideas,” Piper said ungallantly. “I’ve got headaches enough as it is.”
All the same, when the days of the week slipped by without any word from the lady who usually referred to herself as self-appointed gadfly to the police department, the Inspector began to get restive. He had postponed warning the powers upstairs about the forthcoming newspaper article, hoping against hope that something would happen. On Friday he called the press room downstairs, located the reporter who had tipped him off, and demanded to know what was the latest moment at which the article could be jerked. “It’s put to bed at five o’clock tonight,” he was told.
“Thanks,” said the Inspector grimly, and then put in a call for Miss Withers. “Just wondered how you are, and what’s new?” he opened.
“Oh, Oscar! One of my guppies is having young—or what do you call baby fish?”
“Puppies!” cried Inspector Oscar Piper, a little hysterically. “Guppies’ puppies! Of all the—”
“No need to shout. By the way, I’ve been giving some thought to that other matter. Something you said the other night gave me an idea. Of course it all depends on one thing and another—”
“What things? I sit here on a hot stove, and you double-talk!”
“Oh, whether there is a pay-phone in the ice cream store, and what kind of a job they did for me out at the printing plant at Dunellen, New Jersey, and what time the Goodwill Industries truck gets around—”
He began to burble again, but she promised to call back, and hung up.
A few moments later Miss Withers’s phone rang again. This time it was Lieutenant Bartz. “Just wondered if you were getting anywhere with your sleuthing,” he said cheerily. “Anything I can do to help? I’m worried—”
“I’m sure you both are,” Miss Withers said cryptically.
“That’s right. Inga and I are very anxious, because if the case doesn’t get settled, why then we can’t get married.”
“Exactly. Believe me, you’ll be the first to know. Or almost the first, anyway.” Miss Withers went back to her aquarium, where the female guppy was having trouble with her eleventh offspring. The viviparous mite finally had to be removed by a pair of tweezers, its mother wrapped in wet cotton and then replaced in the tank, whereupon she immediately produced numbers twelve and thirteen.
It was shortly after four o’clock when the schoolteacher received her long-awaited call. “This is Mac speakin’,” came the querulous, unsteady voice of a lifelong alcoholic. “It’s all set, ma’am. We made the pick-up this aft’noon.”
“Well, thank heavens!” Miss Hildegarde Withers immediately seized her capacious handbag, her umbrella, and then jammed on a headpiece which looked, as the Inspector had once said, as if it had been designed by somebody who had heard of hats but never actually seen one.
Her trip downtown, and her entrance into the office of the Inspector, were breathless. The little man looked up from his desk, which was littered with half-smoked cigars. “Come down to say goodbye, Hildegarde? Because Monday morning I expect to be sitting at a precinct desk—”
“Nonsense, Oscar. You’re not going to be busted, to use your own ungrammatical term. Because you’re going out right now and arrest George Wayland for the murder of his wife.”
“Oh, I am?” The Inspector snorted.
She nodded brightly. “And while you’re there, go down in the cellar and pick up a copy of one of the magazines on the cellar shelf. It is, if I remember correctly, Tropical Adventure Tales for October, 1939, and there is something on page twenty-six that you simply must read. The district attorney will be interested in it later, but right now you must read it out loud to Mr. Wayland, after you have him here.”
Inspector Piper stared at her, hard. “On the level?”
She nodded. “Cross my heart.”
The Inspector hesitated, shrugged, and then suddenly went into action. As soon as he had left the office, Miss Withers picked up the telephone. “Inspector Piper wants you to locate Lieutenant Bartz,” she said sweetly to the man at the police switchboard, “and ask him to come down at once . . . because there’s good news for him!”
Then she calmly sat down, having sowed the wind, to await the whirlwind. The hands of the clock were at quarter to five when the cavalcade arrived—first the Inspector, then George Wayland fuming and spluttering between two uniformed patrolmen, and finally a pair of plainclothes detectives, one of whom bore a copy of a battered pulp magazine with a lurid cover.
Wayland saw Miss Withers, and bowed. “Now I begin to see—” he began bitterly.
“Not yet, but you will,” the Inspector promised. “Sit down, Mr. Wayland, and I’ll read you a bedtime story—out of a magazine which four witnesses saw me take out of your cellar. Let’s see—page twenty-six—here it is.” Piper cleared his throat. “‘I peered through a tangle of vines past Ali, my trusty gun-bearer—”
Wayland yawned. “What is this, Inspector? Isn’t this cruel and inhuman treatment or something?”
“‘—past Ali, my trusty gun-bearer,’” continued Piper determinedly, “‘and there by the flickering light of the jungle fires I saw the Witch-men dancing their ceremonial dance of death. Their bodies were painted in hideous, grotesque colors, and as they chanted they raised their arms to the vast looming statue of Hanuman, the monkey-god. . . .’”
Miss Withers noticed that Wayland had stopped yawning. In the background Lieutenant Bartz, with Inga clinging to his arm, came into the room and stopped stock-still near the door.
The Inspector’s flat, Brooklynese tones contrasted strangely with the purple prose he was reading, but he held his audience spellbound all the same. “‘Then I gave a shudderin’ gasp of horror, for I could see Karen, her ivory-white almost nude body stretched out on the sack—the sacrificial block—so that she could move neither hand nor foot. Her pale lovely face was upraised to the idol, frozen wit’ terror. The music rose to a cress—crescendo, pulsing in my veins. Swirls of incense from the stolen temple vessels rose around the tortured girl, but the worst was yet to come. No, no, this could not be! The Thing, the statue of Hanuman, the monkey-god was alive! Its tail was moving like a sinuous, hairy snake, moving down slowly to wrap itself around the throat of the helpless girl! To be continued in our next issue.’”
Wayland had struggled to his feet. “It’s a lie!” he screamed. “It’s a frame-up! I never read that magazine—”
“You never remembered reading it—you never remembered where you got the idea for the murder, but you were unlucky enough to keep the proof that will send you to the Chair!” Piper held the magazine, spread open, in front of the prisoner. “In your own cellar, you mugg!”
The sweat was pouring from Wayland’s round face, but he made one last feeble effort. “But the door—you admit I had to break down the door—”
“You broke it down before the murder was committed—and then set it up again so you could smash it at the right time, with witnesses listening!”
The fight was gone out of the man now. He held his head in his hands, sobbing a little. Miss Withers leaned over and whispered something to the Inspector. “What?” he cried.
“But, of course, Oscar. He couldn’t have done it alone! Somebody had to—”
“No, no! I was alone!” cried Wayland. “Inga didn’t—”
“Shut up, you fool!” Inga cried, tearing herself away from the young detective and hovering over Wayland like an avenging Fury. “You weak, sniveling fool! They’ve trapped you!” She stopped suddenly, biting her hand. The room was still.
“I was about to say,” continued Miss Withers, “that somebody had to be on the inside of that room, to bolt the door for him so he could break it down. And what is more likely than that it should be the young lady who rushed out so fast to telephone a warning to him when she heard I was coming to snoop around?”
“Prove that in court!” Inga cried.
“Your mistake,” Miss Withers advised her, “was made when you set your fiancé to washing the dishes so you could get out and make your phone call. No girl in her right mind would do a thing like that before she had the young man signed, sealed, and delivered.”
Then everyone started talking at once. The Inspector took over, very swiftly and efficiently, at that point, and Wayland and Inga Rasmussen were hustled off down the hall in different directions. After a little while Piper returned to his office, mopping his forehead. Miss Withers sat there quite alone, reading Tropical Adventure Tales.
He nodded jubilantly. “They’re both confessing a mile a minute, each trying to put the blame on the other one. Even if they repudiate the confessions later, we’ve got more than we need.”
“Red-heads are hot-headed,” Miss Withers observed. “I counted on that.” She looked at her watch. “Five-thirty. I’m sorry there isn’t time to stop that feature story.”
“Huh? Oh, that won’t matter. The editor will just look like a fool, panning us for a murder that was all washed up two days before.” He looked around. “Where’s young Bartz?”
“Gone to turn in his badge, for being made such a fool of. She never intended to marry him, but it was a wonderful cover-up for her while Wayland cashed in on their loot. And she had a direct pipe-line for information on what the police were doing on the case.”
Piper grinned. “I’ll let him sweat for a day or two, and then reprimand him and forget it. I think I’ll call the boys in the press room and give them the story. You’ll get credit, too—that was darn smart of you, memorizing the magazines in the cellar and then getting back copies and reading through all of them to uncover the inspiration for the murder.” He looked up. “Hey, where you going?”
“I was just getting near the exit,” Miss Withers said softly. “So I can make a run for it after I confess that the magazine was a fake. Oscar, I wrote that story myself, and paid to have it set in type and bound into a copy of an old pulp magazine similar to the ones in Wayland’s cellar. I thought he wouldn’t remember for sure—and you said if we could only prove where he got the idea—”
“Go on,” commanded the Inspector grimly.
“So I knew the Goodwill people were going to pick up some stuff in Wayland’s cellar, and I got in touch with a reformed bum who works for them—I used to give him dimes now and then—and he planted the magazine this afternoon!”
“Great Judas Priest!” whispered the Inspector.
“So we’ll never know where Wayland actually did get the idea, but I happen to know that Inga likes to tell her dreams at the breakfast table. It might very well have been one of her nightmares—a nightmare that came true!”
She adjusted her hat so that it perched a little more precariously than before, and started out. “Come back here!” the Inspector commanded.
Miss Withers smiled feebly. “You’re not furious with me?”
“Furious?” The Inspector was sheepish. “I feel like eating crow.”
She beamed at him. “Make it chicken, and I’ll rush home and put on the dotted Swiss and join you. Shall we say Fourchette’s at eight?”