“WHEN I MAKE A mistake,” remarked Miss Hildegarde Withers to the blurred panorama of Long Island’s ash dumps which flitted past her train window, “I make a beaut!”
A mile or so farther along the way she added: “But after all, it’s the murderer who can’t afford to make a mistake. He has only to be wrong once for us to succeed—we have only to be right once.”
And as she left the train at Shoreham Station and waited for a taxicab she concluded: “However, I’ve certainly proved to myself once more that a little information, like a little learning, is a dangerous thing. I must find out what really happened at that cocktail party.”
But where, exactly, to begin? The schoolteacher knew that a direct frontal attack, today at least, was out of the question. The Cairns house would be by now completely taken over by the police. The inspector, together with the car and driver supplied him by the department, would be there by now, and he was not in a mood to put up with her being underfoot.
Besides, he knew his business. The machine was unimaginative but thorough. There would be no clues passed over, no statements unchecked. It would be her problem to milk the inspector dry of whatever information he dug up, but that could come later. In the meantime …
“Go roundabout!” had been Peer Gynt’s counsel from the Boyg. Miss Withers was not at all sure what a Boyg was, but the advice seemed sound. She would sneak up on this murder from the side. At this point in her reveries one of the town’s two taxicabs arrived, emblazoned with the “Busted Duck” insignia of the honorably discharged veteran, and she told the driver approximately where she wanted to go.
He brightened on learning that it was to be a rather longer haul than usual. At the end of the ride he leaned back to open the door, indicating the second house from the corner. “That’s it,” he advised her. “One of Mame Boad’s old firetraps. Richest woman in this town. I used to work for her before I got drafted—she keeps her dog kennels in fine shape, but her tenants can make their own repairs.”
Miss Withers agreed that there should be a special level of hell’s hottest corner reserved for the nation’s landlords and asked the young man to wait. As she went up the walk she noticed that the lawn needed cutting and saw that there was a small convertible parked in the driveway with one front wheel in a bed of nasturtiums.
Upstairs in the front bedroom Adele Beale lay snoring, with her face buried deep in a down pillow. A familiar, insistent voice tugged her back to life.
“Wake up, will you? Wa-a-a-ake up!”
The pillow was forcibly removed, and Midge Beale stared down critically at the wife of his bosom, who had retired last night without removing her war paint or doing up her hair and who now looked like something special in the way of hags. “Go away and let me die in peace,” she moaned. “I can’t stand the thought of breakfast.”
“Never mind breakfast, I didn’t make any. But wake up!”
She opened one eye. “Midge! It isn’t even light yet!”
“It’s getting dusk, you mean. Come on.”
“Midge, listen. I had the damnedest nightmare—”
Midge Beale had long since lost interest in Adele’s dreams, though she loved to tell them in detail. “Anyway,” he cut in, “it was no nightmare about Huntley Cairns. It happened, all right. Snap out of it. Remember, they kept us up there until all hours, and when we finally got home we killed a bottle?” He shook her shoulder. “Come on downstairs, we got company.”
Adele sat up suddenly, pushing the hair back from her eyes. “Reporters?”
He shook his head. “No reporters, so stop primping. It’s a funny old battleaxe in a hat that looks like a fruit salad. She’s trying to dig up some evidence to get Pat Montague out of jail. She says she’s an old aunt of his or something.”
“Tie a can to her! Tell her—”
“I tried to, and I couldn’t make it stick.”
“I don’t think I can stand up,” Adele complained. “And I must look like a perfect fright.”
Midge nodded. “How much would you charge to haunt a house?”
“How many rooms?” Adele countered, unsmiling. She ran a comb through her hair, stuck on another mouth over the old one, and slipped into a shapeless pink garment trimmed with maribou. Then, clinging to the banister, she made her way slowly down the stairs. She stopped halfway. “Now don’t tell her anything!” she whispered fiercely.
“Perish the thought,” Midge agreed.
In the living room Miss Hildegarde Withers was sitting on one of the wicker chairs, her feet firmly planted on a Navajo rug. “Forgive me, Mrs. Beale, for getting you up at this hour,” she began. “But when murder strikes in a little town like this we are all involved until it’s settled.”
“If murder did have to strike, it was just as well it landed on Huntley Cairns, who is so easily spared,” Midge said.
“That’s your opinion!” Adele snapped. “If you knew as much as you think you know …” She caught herself. “Anyway, in my opinion, it was only an accident anyhow, and I’m sure that Midge and I know nothing about it. I don’t see why you came to us, anyway—”
“That, my dear, was because you two are almost the only ones on the list of sus—the list of material witnesses that I had not had the pleasure of meeting previously.”
“You’re wasting your time, I’m afraid,” Adele said wearily.
“Perhaps I am. I have plenty to waste. I’m quite sure that neither of you had anything to do with the murder. But could we please start at the beginning? Did you have any business dealings with Mr. Cairns?”
The schoolteacher was speaking to Midge Beale, but Adele answered quickly, her eyes flashing. “No, of course not! Why should I—I mean we?”
“I’m just a test pilot,” Midge went on. “Right now I’m flying a T-square, though. I only knew Cairns to speak to, but Adele—”
“I knew him slightly years ago. But Helen is one of my nearest and dearest friends.”
The schoolteacher nodded. “I see. Does either of you, by the way, think that Pat Montague could have murdered Cairns?”
“Nope!” Midge said quickly.
“Yes!” cried his wife. “Because if he didn’t, then who did? Oh, I guess that isn’t a very nice thing to say to one of his relatives, but it’s what I think.”
Miss Withers hesitated. “I’m afraid I should admit to you that I am an aunt to Pat Montague only pro tem and by adoption. But I had to get in to talk to you somehow. Never mind that, Mrs. Beale. You say that you think Pat did it, and a moment ago you said you thought Cairns died by accident.”
“I only meant—”
“Never mind. If it was murder, Pat Montague may be guilty, but not for the reasons I thought last night. That is why, since I was responsible for his being dragged away to jail, I am now trying to get him out. Or at least sworn to get to the bottom of this mystery.” She beamed at them. “Come now, can’t either of you suggest a reason why somebody would want to kill Huntley Cairns?”
Adele shook her head. “It’s early in the evening for me to play guessing games.”
“I know from nothing,” Midge said. “I wouldn’t even have gone to that party if I hadn’t been dragged by the scruff of the neck.”
“Well, you enjoyed it after you got there, I noticed! I saw you dancing with Helen, and if you’d had a sandwich in your pocket it would have been on toast in two minutes!”
Midge blinked. “Okay! I’ll bet your only reason for insisting that we go to the party was so that you could see Huntley Cairns again! Why don’t you tell the lady why you once crowned him with a plate, darling? That was before we were married, when you were going around with him. Weren’t you even making a pitch to marry him?”
Miss Withers sank deeper and deeper into her chair, trying to look as if she weren’t there. The Beales’ hangovers made them seem inclined to play truth and consequences.
“That was years and years ago! If you think I’m still carrying a torch for Huntley …” Adele whirled on the schoolteacher. “Just so you won’t get any wrong ideas from my loudmouthed husband, it all happened one night when we were out at the Sands Point Country Club. Huntley had been drinking boilermakers—”
“What?” Miss Withers interrupted blankly.
“Whiskey with a beer chaser. Anyway, he got a little tight—”
“Stinko!” corrected Midge. “I was there.”
“So I broke our engagement, that’s all,” she concluded.
“You broke the engagement and the chicken-sandwich plate and all over his head because he suddenly went on the prowl for Helen Abbott,” Midge reminded her, his voice a little louder than was necessary. “Helen was at the next table—she’d come as usual with Pat, and Lawn was tagging along. Pat decided to give kid sister a thrill by waltzing with her—that was the time when her teeth were still in gold bands—and Huntley noticed that Helen was sitting all alone and looking very luscious in one of those strapless evening gowns. I was across the room with the Baldwins and the little Harper girl—”
“Bug-eyed and flat-chested,” Adele cut in. “No wonder you were staring elsewhere—”
“Anyway,” her husband continued dreamily, “jolly old Huntley insisted that you bring Helen over to your table, and pretty soon you got mad and flounced out of the place. Later on in the men’s room Pat hung a right cross on Huntley’s jaw and knocked him into the—”
“Midge Beale!”
“Into the middle of next week, I was going to say. That was how the romance started, really. A few weeks later Pat got himself selected into the Army. Helen carried the torch for a while and then I guess she got fed up with going out with only her father and kid sister all the time. Anyway, word got around that she and Huntley Cairns had been seen in town at the Stork and El Morocco, and pretty soon they were sitting in corners at parties studying House and Garden.”
“Sealed-lips Beale,” commented Adele.
“Well, it’s common knowledge,” Midge reminded her. “Relax, baby, nobody is going to think that you drowned Huntley Cairns because he got away from you three or four years ago.”
“I’m afraid he’s right,” Miss Withers agreed in a somewhat disappointed tone. “There is still no apparent motive for anybody to kill Cairns—anybody but Pat Montague, that is. But I don’t like to gamble on favorites, nor on extreme long shots either. Now what do you think of a nice in-between selection for the murderer—the commander, for instance, or Jed Nicolet?”
Midge laughed. “Sam Bennington might haul out a service pistol and blaze away at some poor unlucky guy that Ava had lured into her bedroom, but I can’t see him drowning anyone. That’s too subtle for Old Annapolis, Class of ’26. And Jed Nicolet is a lawyer, and lawyers are too smart to commit murder. Besides, Jed is supposed to have a crush on Lawn, not Helen.”
Miss Withers digested that. “I don’t know about the rest of you,” Adele spoke up suddenly, “but I’m going to have a snort. Purely medicinal, just to keep the top of my head from coming off. I feel like the hammers of hell, the ones they keep in the corner to pound toenails with. Where is it, Midge, dear?”
“There isn’t anything in the house but the chartreuse,” Midge told her.
“I tried and couldn’t.”
Miss Withers declined a pickup with thanks, and Adele tried the chartreuse and couldn’t, either. The schoolteacher rose to her feet, deciding that this lead, which had looked so promising at first, was worked out. “There’s just one question that I want to ask,” she said. “Of course you don’t have to answer, but it might help in clearing Pat Montague and putting an end to this investigation. Who, of all the people involved in the case, do you consider most capable of committing murder?”
“Lawn!” Adele said. “Lawn Abbott.”
“But why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Except that she’s such a strange, silent person, a sort of law unto herself. And she’s dark and mysterious—sort of poisonous, somehow. She did break up Helen and Pat’s romance, I know she did. And Helen knows it too.”
“And what did Lawn ever do that was on the wrong side of the ledger?”
“Aw, I don’t like to …”Adele shrugged. “Well, when she was in school, some swanky place near Boston, because that was when Thurlow Abbott still had some of his money, a poor little music teacher with a wife and three children got kicked out of his job for being caught kissing her. And she was supposed to have run away and got into some trouble and been in jail down south somewhere. Then a boy at Bar Harbor, two summers ago, tried to kill himself because she wouldn’t run away with him. Besides”—and Adele made it clear that this was the crowning argument, the clincher—“besides, she hasn’t any women friends, and she doesn’t seem to want any!”
Miss Withers nodded. “Perhaps that is why Lawn didn’t show up at her sister’s housewarming, at least until the last minute. Well, I must be getting along. Thank you both for your help.” She gathered her umbrella and pocketbook.
“That’s all right. Drop in and listen to that new radio program, The Beale Family, any afternoon at five.” Adele glared at her husband and then headed for the stairs.
Midge Beale walked to the door with Miss Withers. “Don’t mind Adele, she’s just hung over. Wonderful little wife—best housekeeper you ever saw. She can make a dollar do the work of three.”
“How nice—and how loyal of you to say so.”
He shrugged. “If my opinion is worth anything,” Midge went on, “you won’t get anywhere asking questions of Bennington and the rest of them. These local bigwigs stick together, and they’re closemouthed. You should have seen the fuss Bennington and Nicolet made at the party when they thought I was eavesdropping on them in the library. And all they were doing was having a huddle over Huntley Cairns’s taste in literature.”
Miss Withers, about to head down the steps towards her taxi, stopped short. “Literature? You mean they were interested in his library?”
“That’s right. And then they got started arguing with Mame Boad over whether or not I liked dogs. There was something Nicolet found in the far bookcase—something in a thin red book that he was going to read out loud, only Bennington stopped him because I was there. They were all hopped up about it.”
“Thank you so much,” Miss Withers said. “It doesn’t seem pertinent at the moment, but you never can tell. I’m just collecting bits of cardboard now; I’m not trying to fit them into the puzzle yet.” She frowned. “I wonder—no, I guess not. Good night, Mr. Beale.”
She climbed into the taxi, hesitating before she gave the driver an address. She would have given anything for a talk with Pat Montague in the jail. His version of the fracas with Huntley Cairns in the Sands Point club men’s room might be very interesting. But Pat was in no mood to see her, even if she could get by the barriers outside.
Or if she could only get into the Cairns house for an hour—that might lead to the uncovering of something. But the inspector had that staked out for himself. She would only be in the way.
“ ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’ ” she said.
The driver turned. “What say, lady?”
“The hotel, please,” requested Miss Hildegarde Withers wearily.
She dined alone in the big hotel dining room, wondering, as always, how hotel chefs manage to make everything taste like canned salmon. Then she marched back to her cottage and unlocked the door.
“Merciful heavens!” cried the schoolteacher. “The room is a shambles!”
At any rate, shambles or not, it was evident that the place had been hastily but thoroughly searched in her absence. Cushions were askew on the davenport and on the chairs, the tacks along the edge of the carpet were all pulled out, and books had been taken out of their shelves and put back upside down, which made Miss Withers dizzy to look at. Even the cover of the aquarium had been removed and replaced so that it did not quite fit.
In the bedroom there were fewer signs of disturbance, and none at all in the kitchenette and bath. Nothing whatever seemed to be missing. Miss Withers sat down on the bed, frowning intently. What in the world could any one have imagined they would find here?
There was no sign that the lock had been forced, and the screens and windows were all in place, unmarred. “This lock will have to be replaced at once,” Miss Withers decided, “or I shan’t sleep a wink tonight, not a wink.”
She picked up the phone and gave crisp and definite instructions to the man at the desk. He was very dubious about the possibility of getting a locksmith at this hour and on a Sunday, too, but she gave him what was usually referred to as a piece of her mind and hung up.
Miss Withers came into the living room, knelt down while she straightened the books, and then on an impulse she returned to the phone. “Get me the local police station,” she insisted.
The night clerk, evidently a very uneasy and suspicious type, tried to find out why she wanted the police. “Never you mind, young man!” she snapped. “Just get the police. I want to talk to Inspector Oscar Piper. I’m going to report that my cottage was broken into this afternoon and turned topsy-turvy—”
“Yes, I know,” sounded a quiet voice behind her. She whirled, to see the inspector himself standing in the front doorway.
“Oscar!” she cried. “I was just trying to get hold of you! I don’t understand. Has this vandalism already been reported?”
He came into the room, looking slightly sheepish. “Well, I know all about it,” the inspector said slowly. “You see, Hildegarde, I ordered it done.”
She stared at him balefully. “Do I understand you to say—”
“I sent Sergeant Fischer over here,” Piper confessed as he sank uninvited into her most comfortable chair. “Relax, and I’ll tell you about it. You see, we were hunting for Huntley Cairns’s wristwatch.”
She blinked. “Well, why hunt for it here—was the light better or something? I assure you that I haven’t set up as a fence.”
“The watch was missing,” said Piper wearily. “It’s one of those jobs set in solid crystal that tell the hour and the day and the year. His wife gave it to him when they were married, and we had to make sure that young Montague hadn’t taken it off the body and then secreted it here when he knew he was going to be arrested.”
“But you didn’t find it, did you?”
The inspector looked at her, a shy leprechaunish smile lighting his face. “Oh, sure we found it. But not here. They finally got around to draining the swimming pool this afternoon, and it was buried in the mud and stuff at the bottom. Here it is, still ticking.”
He showed her the tiny, glittering thing. One link in the flexible platinum band was broken. “It’s a clue, anyway,” the inspector pronounced.
“The law,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers, “puts a great deal too much faith in tangible things, such as clues and weapons and alibis, and not enough in the imponderables. Whose brilliant mind was it, by the way, that leaped to the conclusion that Pat Montague might have removed the wristwatch from his victim before drowning him? Is it now the official police theory that this was robbery, with murder only an accidental by-product?”
The inspector looked uncomfortable. “We have to eliminate every possibility,” he said defensively. “Young Montague might have known that the watch was a wedding present from Helen to her husband, and in a flareup of jealousy—”
“Never in a million years, Oscar Piper.” Miss Withers handed back the watch. “What else did the majesty of the law uncover up at the scene of the crime, if I’m not too inquisitive?”
The inspector took out a long greenish-brown cigar, sniffed it, and put it away in his pocket again. “It’s a funny setup,” he admitted. “When I first arrived at the Cairns place I could see that nobody was especially anxious to cooperate. The old man is a phony, like most actors. The widow is supposed to be crying her eyes out with grief, but if you ask me, she’s more scared than sorrowful. The kid sister doesn’t care a whoop in hell for anybody or anything, or at least that’s the impression she wants to give—but she hangs around, all the same, trying to kibitz on what we’re doing. The servants are pulling the old, old gag—they pretend they don’t quite understand and retreat into a mess of ‘Yassuhs’ and ‘Ah sho’ly don’ know nuffins.’ ”
“Defense mechanism,” the schoolteacher put in. “In looking over the place, didn’t you stumble on anything—anything unusual?”
He scowled. “We went all through the place, particularly Cairns’s desk in the library, but we didn’t find much except receipted bills. The house cost twice as much as he had expected, but I guess he expected that. Cairns’s closet was full of super deluxe elevator shoes, guaranteed to make a man two inches taller overnight—”
“I wonder,” Miss Withers observed, “why people laugh so much at someone who tried to make himself look taller with special shoes, or younger with hair dye or a toupee, or slimmer with a corset. Because, basically, we all want to appear at our best.”
“Ugh,” said the inspector. “Well, now you know about as much as I do. Except that in Helen Cairns’s closet she kept a weekend case packed and ready. We thought we had something there for a minute, but she explained that she had packed it six months ago, after she’d had an argument with her husband about plans for the new house, and she had never unpacked. Nothing else incriminating around the place.”
“There wouldn’t be,” said the schoolteacher. “This is an odd sort of murder, Oscar, and it’s not according to the formula at all. I can’t help feeling that either the wrong person was murdered, or it was at the wrong time, or—or something!”
He looked at her. “Come clean, Hildegarde. What have you been up to?”
She told him sketchily about the call on the Beale family. “I can’t help wondering,” she said, “if there could be any tie-up between what Midge Beale told me and something that happened about six weeks ago, when I first came here. I had a call from a little group of upstanding, public-spirited local citizens—Dr. Radebaugh, Mrs. Boad, and Commander and Mrs. Bennington. They at first gave me the impression that they were collecting for a home for wayward girls or something, but finally they admitted that they wanted me to do a job of confidential sleuthing for them. My reputation as a meddler had preceded me, I imagine via Mr. Nicolet, who remembered our day in court. At any rate, they wouldn’t tell me what they wanted me to do until I promised to help them, and I wasn’t willing to buy a pig in a poke. Besides, I had only just given you my solemn promise not to mix into police affairs, so I told them that I had retired, or reformed, or something, and sent them on about their business. I’d give anything now to know what it was that they wanted.”
The inspector pointed out reasonably that nobody could have been after her to solve the Cairns murder six weeks before it happened. As a matter of fact, it was clear that nobody had planned this murder ahead of time because nobody could know that Huntley Cairns would be so excited about his new swimming pool that he would leave his guests in the house and rush out for a quick dip—especially when it was drizzling. “This murder,” he concluded, “was done on the cuff—on the spur of the moment.”
“There is always the possibility,” Miss Withers mused, “that the local committee, or some Machiavellian member of it, contemplated a murder and wanted to get me on their side beforehand—or to send me off on some wild-goose chase.”
“Relax, Hildegarde! Nobody ever has to send you on a wild-goose chase. You go by yourself. And don’t worry. If you think it’s important I’ll find out what it was that the local committee had on its mind.” He picked up his hat and started for the door.
“With a rack and thumbscrew, Oscar—because I have a feeling that they have, as you say, ‘clammed up.’ On second thought, the rack and thumbscrew would be a very good idea.”
“I won’t even have to use a rubber hose,” he promised, and took his departure.