The Cases of Hildegarde Withers Read online

  “Those who have not already made the acquaintance of Hildegarde should make haste to do so, for she is one of the world's shrewdest and most amusing detectives.”—The New York Times

  St. Swithin Press

  http://www.stswithin.com

  “The Puzzle of the Scorned Woman” first published in The New York Sunday News, 1942; “The Riddle of the Yellow Canary” first published in Mystery, 1934; “A Fingerprint in Cobalt” first published in The New York Sunday News, 1938; “The Riddle of the Doctor’s Double” copyright Stuart Palmer; “Green Fire” first published in The Chicago Tribune, 1941

  Copyright by Stuart Palmer

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-927551-52-3

  More adventures of the “old battleax,” Hildegarde Withers:

  Murder on Wheels

  Four Lost Ladies

  CONTENTS

  The Puzzle of the Scorned Woman

  The Riddle of the Yellow Canary

  A Fingerprint in Cobalt

  The Riddle of the Doctor’s Double

  Green Fire

  The Puzzle of the Scorned Woman

  THE most potent weapon known to Hermione Lapham was the big flat checkbook on her desk. She took it out, but the girl shook her stringy blonde curls and cried, “Oh, no!”

  “Well then, Miss Pender, what do you want?”

  “I want Paul Severance! He mustn’t marry your daughter next week, like it says in the society pages.” Elsie Pender’s eyes were dark-rimmed, and of a particularly muddy shade of blue which a child might achieve with its first paint box. “Not after what we’ve been to each other. It isn’t fair. I—I—”

  Mrs. Lapham was calm. “There, there, my dear. I’ll get you a glass of something.” She rose quickly and went out of the room, her long velvet tea gown swishing over the deep pile of the Aubusson carpet. As she came into the hall she thought that she heard the sound of fluttering footsteps, and frowned. Leave it to the servants to make a point of overhearing something like this.

  It could not have taken her more than two or three minutes to reach the library and pour out a glass of cognac, but when she returned to the drawing-room Elsie Pender was gone.

  Hermione Lapham came closer to the desk, stared for a moment into the open drawer, and then closed it carefully. She lifted the glass of brandy and tossed it off at one gulp, then reached for the telephone. “Spring 7-3100 please. Yes. Police department? This is Mrs. J. Vance Lapham, 1324 Park Avenue. I want to report the theft of a .32 automatic.”

  It was a late afternoon threesome in the inner sanctum of Inspector Oscar Piper, head of the Homicide Division, Headquarters. “And that’s why,” Mrs. Lapham was concluding, “I asked the Inspector here for assistance.” She beamed at the spinster in the peculiar hat, an angular, prim-looking school-teacherish person.

  “But I’m not, properly speaking, a detective at all,” Miss Hildegarde Withers objected.

  “Well, you’ve appointed yourself gadfly to the department,” the Inspector put in. “And you have time to fool around with this sort of thing, while we have not. The Homicide Squad is concerned with murders after they happen, not before.”

  “Moreover,” added Mrs. Lapham, “the usual detective person with the derby hat and the flat feet would be quite impossible. Perhaps I should have let matters rest with reporting the theft of the gun, but I do feel it my duty…”

  “A .32 automatic is a bad plaything for an hysterical girl,” admitted Miss Withers thoughtfully. “May I ask why you think this Elsie Pender might choose your dinner party tonight as the proper scene for a murder?”

  The dowager smiled feebly. “I’m a little to blame for that. When I heard the girl’s tragic story—the old, old story—I suggested that Miss Pender appear at my apartment tonight and face the doctor, whom she says has refused to see her. I thought—”

  “You thought it might be an immediate cure for your daughter, isn’t that it?” The Inspector gnawed his cigar. “You wanted her to take it quick, on the chin?”

  Mrs. Lapham nodded. “But I didn’t imagine there would be any danger of—of violence.” She shuddered. “I have requested that there be no placing of uniformed men about, no shadowing. If the girl puts in an appearance, I hope to get at the truth quietly and without scandal. Perhaps I can reason with her. But I thought it might be a good idea to have some responsible person on hand just in case.”

  “I see,” said Miss Withers. “I’m a precautionary measure.”

  “Rather, yes. You will be introduced as Corinne’s aunt—her aunt Martha, from Dubuque. You should have no difficulty in passing as an eccentric relative from the Far West.”

  “Thank you so much,” came back the schoolteacher, with a wry smile. “Dinner at eight? I’ll dig out my coral earrings and the dotted Swiss.”

  Miss Withers swept into the Lapham apartment early, in time for a brief chat with Corinne, who contrived somehow to resemble both her dowager mother and a hothouse flower. Something orchidaceous and expensive, the schoolteacher decided.

  “Delighted to have you as an aunt,” the girl was saying. “But I haven’t the slightest idea what this is all about. Is somebody after the family jewels? Because if they are, they’d better try the safety deposit vault—”

  “I don’t know much more than you,” Miss Withers admitted. “I’m just here, that’s all. Perhaps it has something to do with your late father’s contributions to the police welfare fund. But enough of that. Tell me who’s to be here tonight.”

  Corinne smiled. “Just the Hemples—old neighbors of ours from when we lived in Georgetown. And their son Vaughan, my first beau. Then there’s Dr. Parkhill, looks like a frog but he’s rather a dear. And Paul Severance, of course—”

  “Your fiancé, yes? Tell me about him.”

  “Oh, Paul is quite passable. Notice this scar on my chin?”

  Mrs. Withers, puzzled, shook her head.

  Corinne beamed. “That’s because of Paul. I went through a windshield up on the Post Road one night last summer when Vaughan Hemple forgot to turn out for a tree. I was pretty well scrambled but Paul Severance lifted the scar as neat as you please. Cleverest beauty doctor in America, they say. Anyway, that’s how I met him.”

  “You’re very much in love, aren’t you?”

  “In love?” Corinne shrugged, with all the worldly wisdom of twenty. “What’s love anyway? All I know is, he’s not too bad looking and his rumba isn’t too nauseating…”

  Mrs. Lapham interrupted at this point to inform Corinne that the other guests were arriving. A moment later Miss Withers was introduced to Dr. Severance, a tall man with a plump boyish face. A little on the smooth side, she thought. But in spite of what she had heard about him, she felt herself warming to the man when he took her hand in his own lean sensitive fingers. “So you’re Corinne’s Aunt Martha! Just as she described you to me…”

  “A good glib liar,” she noted mentally.

  “I’d better practice calling you Aunt Martha too, eh?”

  She nodded. “You’re a beauty doctor, aren’t you? I suppose that when you’re in the family I’ll get all my plastic surgery free?”

  “But my dear lady!” Severance flashed a wide friendly smile. “You would be insane to have anything done to your face. Character is rare these days. And who wants to look like everyone else?”

  “I wouldn’t mind—” began Miss Withers. Then she saw that the doctor was looking across the room, where Corinne was signalling for help. She seemed surrounded by a brawny fullback, a tanned youth with big pawing hands and a loud laugh. This would, of course, be Vaughan Hemple.

  “Excuse me,” said Dr. Severance quickly. When he was gone Miss Withers felt qui
te deserted. Some men have that quality, blast them.

  It was a quality unshared by her dinner companion, a frog-faced, completely bald person who turned out to be Dr. Parkhill, Severance’s office associate. “Oh, yes,” he said with a smile. “I’m his junior. Some men would resent being second in command to a younger man. But that’s fiddlesticks. Paul Severance can teach anybody. He can take the skin off your stomach—”

  “Really!” gasped Miss Withers, conscious that all conversation had stopped and everyone was looking at her.

  “—and move it up to replace any destroyed skin on your face. Wonderful in treatment of burns.”

  Vaughan Hemple cut in, with a somewhat bitter note in his voice. “But after all, isn’t it a sort of silly job for a grown man in times like this—fixing up women to look younger than they are, and all that?”

  Somebody hushed him, but young Hemple had downed a couple of glasses of wine, and an inner bitterness seemed to rise up within him. “Seems to me, this is a time for a man to get in and pitch…” He was looking pointedly at Severance.

  “Vaughan just got his questionnaire from the draft board,” His mother’s voice came, proud and a bit quavery. “I suppose, Dr. Severance, you’ll be in uniform any day?”

  Severance said nothing. He was looking across the table at Corinne, and a slow reddish flush rose along his neck. There was a dead silence for a moment, and then everyone jumped as the distant ringing of the doorbell came with dramatic suddenness.

  Mrs. Lapham dropped her fork, and looked at Miss Withers, who in turn looked at Dr. Severance. She wondered just what she should do to prevent him from being murdered, supposing this was the Pender girl and she came rushing into the room blazing away with the stolen gun. One couldn’t very well ask him to get under the table…

  But the butler appeared, to announce with shocked horror in his voice: “A policeman, madam!” He was only a breathless step ahead of the policeman, who turned out to be Inspector Oscar Piper.

  Mrs. Lapham rose quickly. “But really, Inspector! I thought it was clearly understood—”

  He nodded wearily. “Sorry, ma’am. Won’t be a minute.” He came closer to the table, looked along the faces of the guests. Finally he passed Miss Withers without even a friendly wink, and paused before Dr. Severance. “You’re wanted at your office, Doctor.”

  Severance looked extremely blank. “What for?”

  “You’ll understand when you get there.” The Inspector flashed open his palm, with the gold badge cupped in it. The doctor slowly rose to his feet, turned as if to say something to Corinne, and then—with the Inspector’s hand on his arm—went toward the door, where two plain-clothes men took over and hustled him away.

  Inspector Piper turned back toward the dinner party, rocked back on his heels and surveyed them. But Miss Withers had no eyes for him. She was watching Corinne Lapham, frozen in her chair. She did not even seem to realize that Vaughan Hemple was patting her shoulder.

  Mrs. Lapham started to explode, but the Inspector held up his hand. “Save your breath, ma’am. Mind if I sit down?” He sank into the chair Severance had just vacated. “You may as well know, folks,” he said conversationally, “that when Dr. Severance gets down to his office my boys are going to show him the body of a girl named Elsie Pender, stretched out on the floor behind his desk. Shot through the left breast at close range, with a .32 automatic.”

  Inspector Piper obviously intended to say more, but there was an interruption. Corinne Lapham silently crumpled and slid out of sight under the table. “So she does love the scalawag,” Miss Withers murmured. “God help her.”

  That broke up the gathering in the dining room. Corinne was borne upstairs to her room in the strong arms of her first beau, while the women gasped and fussed around her.

  In the hall Miss Withers cornered the Inspector.

  “Oscar, if you ask me—”

  “I don’t ask you. This is one time it’s really cut and dried and laid on the line.” All the same, the Inspector looked a little worried, remembering past conflicts. “Look, Hildegarde. The girl came down to Severance’s office and threatened him, so he grabbed the gun away from her and plunked her through the pump. There’s no other answer.”

  “I can think of half a dozen,” Miss Withers told him. “How about suicide?”

  He smiled a superior smile. “We looked into that. Especially since there was a suicide note beside the body.”

  “Aha!”

  “Aha yourself. The note was written in pretty flowery language for the Pender girl to use. Moreover, it was written on the office typewriter—and signed on the typewriter!”

  Miss Withers said nothing.

  “Severance didn’t dare try to forge her handwriting, see? Besides—”

  “How about the girl’s hands? Any powder burns?”

  He shook his head. “Nitrate test drew a blank. Yes—we tested her gloves, too. They were brand new, and unsullied.” Piper then delivered the knockout blow. “But what really kills the suicide theory is the fact that the girl was shot twice!”

  Miss Withers started to say something, then subsided as the Inspector nudged her. Dr. Parkhill was approaching. Piper beckoned to him. “You work for Severance, don’t you?”

  “With him, please. I have a one-fourth interest in the clinic. But Inspector, the idea of Severance having anything to do with—”

  “You knew this Pender girl?”

  “She worked for us last summer, for about four months. Severance did a skin transplantation job on her face and neck a year ago. Acid burns, nasty job. She didn’t have any money, so she worked it off as receptionist. I always thought her a stiff, hands-off sort. But with a mug like mine, all women seem that way.” Dr. Parkhill smiled philosophically.

  “You knew of the affair between Severance and little Elsie?”

  Parkhill hesitated. “If there was one, they certainly kept it quiet. I thought he brushed her off the way he brushed off all the girls who fell in love with him.”

  “The wrong way, this time,” Piper said grimly. “What time did Severance leave the clinic this afternoon?”

  “About two. I stayed until after four, developing some photographs. We take before and after shots of all our patients—”

  “Then Severance came back. Maybe he had an appointment with the girl for later. Or he brought her there, knowing the place would be deserted.” Piper shrugged. “That’s all, Doctor. Leave your address with the officer at the door, in case we want you.”

  Miss Withers went up the stairs, intending to offer her help in the resuscitation of the lovely Corinne. But she came to the bedroom doorway in time to hear Mrs. Lapham’s clear, insistent voice—

  “But Vaughan is right, dear. Think how fortunate you are that it happened before you were married to the man! I should have realized something was wrong when he insisted on such a precipitate marriage. …”

  “He wanted it soon because—because he expects to be called to service—he’s to be a lieutenant-commander in the Naval Reserve Medical Corps!” Corinne’s voice was weak. “That’s what he says plastic surgery is for—they practice in peacetime so they can develop technique to use on wounded men—”

  “That’s his story, anyway.” Vaughan’s voice was throbbing with earnestness. “Look, honey. There’s just one way to beat the publicity. Elope with me, tonight. Greenwich, or North Carolina. You’ll be out of it—”

  “Oh, I—I couldn’t—” but Corinne’s voice was weaker still. Miss Withers turned and tiptoed away again.

  The Inspector waited in the lower hall. “Ready, Hildegarde? I’ll just stop at the office for a minute to turn in my report, and then I’ll run you home.”

  They were in the headquarters car, headed south, when the Inspector leaned towards her. “Come out of it, Hildegarde. Can’t you accept, just once, that I’m right? Do you always have to look for the improbable, the impossible? There never was a case so simple. …”

  “All but the new gloves,” the schoolteache
r said cryptically.

  “Huh? Now relax, Hildegarde. Severance realized that this Pender girl was going to ruin his chances of marrying seven million dollars, so he bumped her off and then tried to make it look like suicide.”

  “A very clumsy attempt, Oscar. And he didn’t strike me as a clumsy man.”

  “Lots of people are clumsy when they turn to murder.”

  “Granted. And Severance isn’t the only man who wants to marry Corinne and her bankroll.” The Inspector only grunted at this somewhat obvious remark. And then Miss Withers jogged his elbow. “Oscar, would you mind very much if we dropped in at the Severance clinic for a moment?”

  “But why?” Piper frowned. “You don’t like dead bodies. And Severance will be getting a going-over from the boys. …”

  Still she insisted. “Not that I doubt he’s the murderer. Nobody else has enough motive. But for the sake of that girl, I’d like to clarify the situation just a bit. …”

  “Okay, okay,” agreed the weary Inspector. And so it was that Dr. Paul Severance looked away from the accusing fingers of three homicide squad detectives to see the equine visage of Miss Hildegarde Withers appearing through the doorway of his consulting room.

  “Why, Aunt Martha!” he said, in his mellow voice. “This is good of you.”

  She put him right about the relationship, in no uncertain terms. “I came here, young man, to give you one chance to confess. No, not to the murder. But when you found the body of Elsie Pender, why did you feel it necessary to write that phony suicide note?”

  He waited a long time to answer. “I didn’t write it,” said Paul Severance finally.

  Miss Withers obviously lost all interest in him. She looked for a moment at the sprawled body of Elsie Pender behind the desk, noted the worn but modish dark-brown coat, the pert red hat. She peered down at the suicide note, the obviously contrived suicide note with the glaringly phony signature in typescript.

  She picked up and studied the pair of gloves which had passed the nitrate test, the brand-new black suede gloves.