HAVING TAKEN HER DEPARTURE, Miss Hildegarde Withers had to bring it back, ring the Cairns bell, and politely request permission to use the telephone in order to summon a taxi. As it turned out, she might as well have saved her breath, for the hotel desk informed her that both the local vehicles were out on calls.
There was nothing for it, then, but to march out upon the highway and head towards town. The schoolteacher had barely got into her stride when a small black coupe came rocking along behind her. She hastily made the universal gesture with her thumb, and the car slowed down.
It turned out to be Mame Boad at the wheel, headed for town to do her marketing and obviously pleased at having company. She was considerably less happy a few minutes later when Miss Withers reminded her of their previous meeting.
“I have been thinking a good deal lately,” the schoolteacher said, “about the call that you and Dr. Radebaugh and Commander Bennington paid upon me when I first came to Shoreham.”
“Oh, that!” answered Mrs. Boad. “Nothing of importance, really. We were all upset at the time, of course. But since then the situation has changed.”
“You mean, otherwise taken care of?” Miss Withers pressed wickedly.
Mame Boad did not answer, but twin spots of orange rouge flamed suddenly on her cheekbones. They rode on in silence for perhaps half a mile. “I’ve been thinking of dropping in on you for a chat one of these days,” Miss Withers continued. “You’re the Cairnses’ nearest neighbor, are you not?”
Mrs. Boad thought about it and then cautiously admitted that she guessed she was. “Huntley Cairns bought the place last year, and they lived in the old house until they started to tear it down to make room for the new one.”
“And Mrs. Cairns’s sister uses your stable?”
“We keep her horse, yes. Of course Cairns pays—or paid—half the wages of the groom who comes in by the day.”
“A very cooperative arrangement. I suppose that a wild, violent girl like Lawn is pretty hard on horseflesh, isn’t she?”
“What?” The little car jerked slightly. “Lord, no! That girl takes her big gelding out every day, and half the time instead of giving him a decent workout she’ll get off and let him graze, or just trot him along in the surf to strengthen his forelegs. Willy—that’s the groom—says that Lawn has never once brought that fellow in sweating. She likes to do most of the grooming, too, fixes him bran mashes and all that sort of thing. I think she likes horses better than people.”
“A point of view not too unreasonable, in view of the sort of world we live in. By the way, Mrs. Boad, curiosity has always been my besetting sin. I wonder if you’d tell me just what it was that you and your friends were so anxious to have me investigate some weeks ago. It needn’t go any further—”
Mame Boad sailed serenely through a boulevard stop. “But I’m afraid I can’t answer that question,” she said abruptly. “At least not now. Perhaps after I have the consent of the others involved … The matter was personal and very delicate, you see.”
“More delicate than murder? I wonder.” Miss Withers received no answer to that and had expected none. “By the way, if you are going in that direction, please drop me off at the police station. Or on second thought, right here on the corner. I believe there’s a bookstore—yes, there it is. Thank you so much.”
Even after she was inside the shop Miss Withers could see Mame Boad peering in at her from the black coupe as she drove slowly away. “Let her stew a little,” decided the schoolteacher calmly. A clerk approached her, and she asked for a copy of Oriental Moments.
The young man tugged at his wisp of moustache for a moment and then gave it as his opinion that she wouldn’t be able to buy a copy in Shoreham. “It came out last year, I believe, but there wasn’t much call for it,” he told her. “It’s probably out of print now, but we could try ordering it for you.”
She shook her head slowly. The young man came closer and lowered his voice. “We do happen to have a copy of The Chinese Room, and Trio, and—”
“I beg your pardon!” Miss Withers shook her head emphatically. “Is Oriental Moments that sort of book?”
He smiled. “No, madam. But from the title, certain of our customers have thought so.”
She turned and headed out of the store, but in the doorway she heard him add: “I think there’s a copy in the rental library downstairs, if it isn’t out.”
There was, and it wasn’t. A moment later, at the price of library membership and upon her promise to pay three cents a day for its use, Miss Hildegarde Withers came into temporary possession of Oriental Moments, red jacket and all. Moreover, on a card stuck into the front of the book was a list of the names of previous renters. This she studied with great care, but the only one implicated in the Cairns case who was listed there turned out to be Adele Beale, and that had been more than six months ago.
The schoolteacher went out into the street with her nose buried in the volume, expecting the worst, in spite of what the clerk had said, because of the provocative Chinese damsel depicted undressed on the cover. But the book turned out to be a series of notes and impressions of life in Chungking by a State Department employee stranded there during the time it was the temporary wartime capital.
From the first few pages Miss Withers could see that the author, in typical State Department fashion, had been bored with his work, superior to the Chinese, jittery about the Russians, and consistently myopic about the actual forces and cross-purposes which had been surging all around him. There were pages and pages about receptions and cocktail parties, with detailed accounts of the extreme difficulty of getting Scotch flown in over the Hump from India, but what this had to do with the murder of Huntley Cairns, or anything else, Miss Withers was at the moment unable to tell.
She came down the street, still reading, and very nearly turned into the Elite Turkish Baths for Gentlemen Only instead of her proper destination. Crossing the street, she was about to enter the Shoreham police station when she heard a shrill whistle behind her and turned to face Lawn Abbott. The girl was wearing, in addition to open shirt, blue jeans, and jodhpur shoes, a very worried expression.
“Fancy meeting you here!” said Miss Withers.
“Wait, oh, please wait,” Lawn cried, “before you go in. Are you going to try to get permission to see Pat?”
“Among other things, yes.”
“I have to talk to you first. It’s very important.”
Miss Withers smiled and nodded. “Important to whom?”
“To—to Pat, of course. Listen, did my sister give you some old letters to return to him?”
“Some what?”
“Oh, don’t be like that at a time like this. I know she did. It would be just like her. I know where she kept them hidden, and they weren’t there, so I charged her with it. She denied it, but Helen can’t fool me. That’s why I rushed down here. You mustn’t return those to Pat!”
“And why not, child?”
“Read them,” Lawn said bitterly. “I have. I suppose you wouldn’t consider it strictly honorable, but I found them in an old cookbook, where she had them cached. Nobody ever looks into a cookbook, not in our house anyway. Don’t you see what I’m driving at? Those letters were mostly written to Helen after she was married. Pat was overseas and very bitter. He said a lot of things about Huntley and what he’d like to do to him, things that the police could twist—”
“But your sister didn’t say anything about my giving them to the police!”
“She thought perhaps you would, though. You’re supposed to be such friends with that inspector from New York. Or maybe she asked you to slip them to Pat in jail—where ten to one they’d be discovered and taken away from him. I have my own ideas about why Helen did it. It couldn’t be that she was just trying to get rid of the letters or she could have burned them.”
“At any rate,” Miss Withers decided firmly, “the letters can stay right where they are for the time being.” She patted her capacious pocketbook firmly. “At the moment I’m much more interested in something else. Have you ever seen this book before?”
Lawn stared blankly at Oriental Moments. Then she shook her head. “But why—”
“I don’t quite know why,” Miss Withers began, and broke off as the door beside them opened and Jed Nicolet came out, hurrying a little. He seemed about to plunge past them when Lawn turned and called. Surprised, he turned, recognized Lawn, and his sharp, vulpine face brightened.
“Hello-ello!” he said. “What’s up? Are you two hunting together now?”
“I was about to make an effort to see the prisoner,” Miss Withers admitted. “How is he taking it?”
The lawyer shrugged. “How should I know?”
“But I thought an attorney could always get in to see his client.”
“He is supposed to, according to the law. If he can find where said client is being held. I could even have had him out on a writ, I think, only—”
“Only the police have him hidden somewhere?” Miss Withers nodded slowly. The inspector was up to his old tricks.
“Nothing like that,” Jed Nicolet admitted. “Pat is upstairs all right, in one of the nice moldy cells that the county provides. Only it seems that he has decided that he doesn’t want a lawyer, and if he does have a lawyer he doesn’t want me.” Nicolet started to laugh a little nervously. Then he stopped laughing and choked.
“What’s the matter?” Lawn demanded.
“Nothing—nothing at all,” Nicolet said. His face, Miss Withers noticed, was gray. “See you later,” he called over his shoulder, and went hurrying down to the sidewalk.
“Whatever in the world!” gasped Miss Withers.
“Jed isn’t himself at all,” Lawn murmured softly. “Do you suppose—he seemed to be staring at that book in your hand.”
“I noticed that too.”
“But why should he turn white and run off as if somebody were after him?”
“It is just remotely possible,” observed the schoolteacher, “that somebody is!”
Lawn thought about that remark for a long moment. “I think I see what you mean,” the girl said. “That would change everything, wouldn’t it? I mean, if the triangle idea was all wrong and the police had to start looking—”
“For a hexagon? In my opinion this entire case is much more complicated than any figure in plane geometry. It’s trigonometry, at least. Well, I came down here to make an attempt to see Pat Montague. Do you want to come with me?”
Lawn hesitated. “I can’t bear to think of Pat behind bars. I can’t bear to think of anybody behind bars, for that matter. It isn’t humane to lock people up. I’ve been there myself, you see.”
“You have?”
“Oh, didn’t you know? Yes, I spent three days locked up when I was seventeen.” She laughed suddenly at Miss Withers’s expression. “Oh, it wasn’t anything so very criminal. It was just that I’d run away from home, and the Atlanta police held me until father could come down and lead me home in disgrace.”
“You’ve had quite a career, haven’t you?” Miss Withers’s voice was faintly envious.
“An unlucky one, at least so far,” Lawn admitted. “And right now I don’t think I’d have much luck with Pat Montague. Not that I wouldn’t like to …” She shook her head. “I guess I’ll run along.”
“Shall I give him a message?”
“Why …” Lawn thought. “Just tell him that I know he’s innocent and that it won’t be long before everybody else knows it too.” She pressed Miss Withers’s arm and turned back swiftly towards the curb and Helen’s light car, which she had parked there at an angle. “I’d better get this heap home before my sister gets more furious at me than she is already. Good night, and good luck.”
Miss Withers stared after her. “It’s the younger generation, knock-knock-knocking at the door,” she hummed to herself. She was suddenly glad that she had never tried bringing up anything more complicated than kittens, puppies, canaries, and tropical fish.
She went on inside the station, found an elderly man in uniform picking his teeth at the desk, and asked in her politest tone for an audience with the prisoner.
“Can’t see him!” pronounced that guardian of law and order. He nodded towards the stairs. “The sheriff and that New York cop are up there with him now.”
“It’s that New York cop that I really want to see,” Miss Withers advised him, and headed up the stair before he could answer. She had some trouble with a big barred-iron gate at the head of the stair, but finally she hammered upon it until she had drawn the irate attention of the turnkey, Sheriff Vinge, and the inspector.
“Let her in,” said Piper wearily. “And it’s okay with me if you keep her in. What is it now, Hildegarde?”
“I want five minutes with the prisoner, whether he likes it or not, and I think he’ll not.”
“How about it, Sheriff?” the inspector asked, introducing them.
“Well, now, since this’s the lady that turned him in—” Sheriff Vinge was anxious to be friendly. “Oh, go ahead, ma’am. Last cell on the right, and we’ll be watching, so don’t try to slip him any hacksaws or skeleton keys.”
“I don’t want to slip Pat Montague anything but a piece of my mind,” said Miss Withers, and hurried on. She found Montague sitting on his cot, looking rather confused and irritable, which, she supposed, was only to be expected.
“How do you do, young man?” she greeted him.
Pat Montague looked up at her, blinked, and said, “Oh, God!”
“I know how you feel,” she went on hastily, peering through the bars. “I admit that I gravely misjudged you the other night, but since that time I’ve done my best to rectify the error, really, I have.”
Montague stood up and came towards her. “Forget it. I was sore at the world, but this is a good place to cool off and think things over. Besides, it was all Nicolet’s fault. He should have minded his own business in the first place.”
“Perhaps he was. But never mind that. I have a message for you.” She waited a moment, but there was only a slight flicker of interest. “Aren’t you going to ask if it’s from Helen?”
His face was clouded. “All right, is it?”
“As a matter of fact, no. From her sister. Lawn said to tell you that she knows you’re innocent and that pretty soon everyone else will know it too.”
A faint but engaging smile lighted his face, and Miss Withers understood why women were so intrigued with Pat Montague. “Thanks,” he said. “She’s a good kid, I guess, after all. She’s changed a lot since I went away.”
“Everything changes in three years. You’ve changed. And so, for that matter, has Helen.”
Pat winced slightly under that jab. “I wouldn’t know,” he said hopelessly. “For a long time I thought that if I could only see her, just once—”
“But didn’t you? I mean, for just a second, when you looked down from the roadway to the swimming pool that afternoon?”
“But that wasn’t Helen!” he said quickly. “It couldn’t have been. She was just so much in my mind that I thought anyone in a white bathing suit was her. It must have been Cairns I saw. There was time for it to happen while I was walking down from the road—it’s about a quarter of a mile, you know.”
“Still a very neat, carefully timed job of murder,” she said.
He wasn’t listening. “Miss Withers, will you be seeing Helen again soon?”
“Perhaps. Why?”
“Just tell her that as soon as I get out of here I’m going as far away as I can get, as fast as I can. Maybe I’ll reenlist; I worked my way up once and I can do it again. I don’t think I’d like being a civilian very much, anyway. I came back expecting things to be the same, and they seem all changed and different—”
“To you and ten million other young men,” said Miss Withers.
“Tell her I’m sorry I tried to come barging back into things, and she may as well forget me.”
“That,” pointed out the schoolteacher, “is a rather delicate message to carry.”
“You mean it will hurt her?”
“It will hurt somebody,” Miss Withers hinted. This was most certainly not, she realized, the opportune time to hand him the packet of love letters, even if she had intended to, which she hadn’t.
“I must run along,” she said. “There is just one question. When Searles came up to you at the pool just a moment after you discovered the body, how was he dressed?”
“Dressed? In overalls, I guess. I can’t remember.”
“Of course you can remember. Didn’t he have his coat over his arm and his sleeves rolled up?”
Pat shut his eyes hard, scowling. “No, he didn’t! He was wearing his jacket—a dirty old denim jacket.”
“But the sleeves—were they soaked?”
Pat saw what she was driving at and shook his head. “They were dry,” he admitted. “I wish I could say they were wet, but they weren’t, not then, anyway.”
And that, as Miss Withers said later to the inspector, was that. She found Piper waiting for her at the gate of the lockup and went downstairs with him. “But what are you so glum about, Oscar? Having trouble getting evidence enough on Pat Montague to take to the grand jury?”
“There might be a snag or two in that quarter,” he admitted.
“Such as the length of the murder weapon, so called?”
He grinned. “I figured you’d get on to the rake handle sooner or later. Yes, that among other things. You know what we were talking about to Pat Montague when you came busting in? He wants to be put to the lie-detector test. You know what I think of those machines, anyway. It’s possible to beat them if you know enough about how they work and have pretty good control of yourself. That’s especially true when the test isn’t given by an expert, and the sheriff is a little dubious about okaying the expense of sending out to Evanston for one of Keeler’s bright young men.”
“But it speaks well for the prisoner, doesn’t it? I mean his requesting the machine.”
“A smart lawyer could certainly make it look that way, yes. Or if the newspapers got hold of the request, which they haven’t yet. And don’t you go talking!”
“Perish the thought!” Miss Withers was about to say more, but at that moment the officer at the desk beckoned to the inspector, holding up the phone.
“It’s for you, sir!”
Piper picked it up, said, “Speaking,” and listened for some time. Then he said, “Thanks, Georgie,” and hung up. He came back to Miss Withers, grinning from ear to ear.
“Well?” she demanded. “Come clean!”
He hesitated. “I don’t know what it means, probably nothing—but it’s a sidelight on Cairns. That was what you wanted, wasn’t it? You know how the guy made all his money?”
“Public relations, somebody said.”
“That means nowadays almost anything you want it to mean. But Huntley Cairns was no fool. He stumbled on to a gold mine of an idea and parleyed it into a fortune. His firm was really a super deluxe machine for swamping motion-picture studios, radio chains, and stage producers with letters. After we had our talk this morning I got the man who’d done the original investigation to go back to Cairns Associates and get tough, and he uncovered the whole thing.”
“Letters!” she echoed. “But why?”
“Those people are all supersensitive to what they call the public pulse. About the only way they can gauge public demand is by the fan mail they get. They never actually read it, but they have it tabulated and all that sort of thing. For instance, let’s suppose that Joey Jones is a radio comedian and he wants his sponsor to renew his contract. He simply comes to Cairns Associates and hires them to start up the machine. They have a couple of hundred letter-writers, mostly women who work at home. They’re supplied with all the various kinds of pens and inks and pencils and typewriters of all makes and sizes and type styles. All sorts of notepaper, too. The letters are collected centrally and then distributed for mailing at post offices in the towns where the client especially wants to show he has a devoted following. A few days later the sponsor begins to get thousands of letters, all screaming that they will never buy any more of his underarm deodorant unless they can hear Joey Jones every Thursday night. Or unless Dawn O’Day gets to play the lead in A-budget pictures, or unless Marmaduke Glutz plays Hamlet on Broadway this year.”
“But, Oscar, is it legal?”
“Perfectly. They used phone books and city directories to get the names and addresses in case of a checkup or a form-letter answer, but they changed the names or initials just a little, enough to keep clear of forgery charges. Cairns got from ten to twenty-five cents a letter, depending on what the traffic would bear. For a thousand dollars anybody could get up to ten thousand letters, which would be less than one week’s salary and deductible from the income tax as a legitimate expense, anyway.”
Miss Withers thought about it. “Very clever of Cairns. It does sound like a gold mine.”
“It is—or was. And just think of the unfunny comics, the matronly ingénues, the gravel-voiced tenors who have been shoved down the public’s throat because Cairns Associates made the big-money advertisers, the theatrical and movie producers, think that the public couldn’t get along without them!”
“Oscar, could the murder motive have come out of that?”
He was amused. “I don’t think the National Association of Manufacturers drowned Cairns. And the long-suffering public can’t very well protect itself, or we’d have had an end of crooners and double-talk comics and soap operas years ago.”
“How about a dissatisfied client?”
The inspector shook his head. “The clients weren’t dissatisfied. The Cairns system even now and then gave an unknown a chance. Those Linton twins who were at the cocktail party had signed up with Cairns, and he was all set to put on a letter campaign to get them the movie role in Forever Amber—you know, as a novelty. One actress has played a dual role, why not two actresses playing one? Cairns was charging them a double rate because they were unknowns, but that’s no motive for them to bump him off. We’re keeping an eye on them, though, because we don’t want to miss angles.”
“Or any curves, you mean? Gracious, Oscar, and at your age too!”
“Aw—” The inspector grinned and waved his hand. “You run along, I’ve got to get back to work. The commissioner will be wondering why I take so long to wind a case like this up and put it away.”
“In my private opinion,” the schoolteacher said, “this case is going to wind itself up, and right speedily too.”
He stared at her. “You haven’t been throwing monkey wrenches around in the machinery, have you?”
“Not intentionally. But in my helpful way I just possibly have been acting as a sort of catalytic agent. I feel it in my bones that something is going to happen, maybe tonight.”
“You and your hunches! Be a good girl and get back to your tropical fish and let me worry about clues, will you?”
She paused in the doorway “Yes, Oscar, but suppose you haven’t considered the right clues! I mean the Book with the Red Jacket, and the Returned Letters, and the Mildewed Bathing Suit, and—”
“Save it,” he said. “I’ll be over later, and you can riddle me your riddles then. And if Pat Montague comes through with a confession in the meantime, you’ll be the first to know.”
“I’m glad,” Miss Hildegarde Withers called after him, “that I don’t have to sit on a hot stove until that happens!”