The Cases of Hildegarde Withers Read online

  “When was it?” asked Miss Withers.

  “Two years ago, at least. But May Day is going to be a bigger hit than any of them. It’s going to be the sensation of the season. All the crooners want it, and the contracts for records are being signed this week.”

  Miss Withers nodded. “There’s a lot of money in writing a song, isn’t there?”

  “A hit—oh, yes. Berlin made a quarter of a million out of Russian Lullaby.” Miss Kelly had to raise her voice, as a dozen pianos in a dozen booths were clashing out lilting, catchy music. A door opened somewhere, and Miss Withers heard a sister team warbling soft, close-harmony…“I met you on a May Day, a wonderful okay day, and that was my hey-hey day…a day I can’t forget. …”

  “It’s published the first of May,” Miss Kelly went on chattily. “And that’s why Mr. Reese is so busy. He’s got to go out of town this afternoon, and I’m afraid he won’t be able to see you today without an appointment.”

  “Eh?” Miss Withers started. “Yes, of course. No, he won’t. I mean…I mean…” She rose suddenly to her feet, humming the lilting music of May Day. It was familiar, hauntingly familiar. Of course, she had read of how popular tunes were stolen. And yet—suddenly the mists cleared and she knew. Knew where she had heard those first few bars of music—knew what the meaning of it all must be—knew the answer to the riddle. She turned and walked swiftly from the room.

  She rode down in the elevator somehow, and stumbled out of it into the main hall. There she stopped short. She could waste no energy in walking. Every ounce of her strength was needed to think with. The whole puzzle was assembling itself in her mind—all the hundred odd and varied bits flying into place. Everything—

  She stood there for a long time, wondering what to do. Should she do anything? Wasn’t it better to let well enough alone? Nobody would believe her, not even Oscar Piper. Certainly not Oscar Piper.

  She stood there until one o’clock struck, and the hall was filled with luncheon-bound clerks and stenographers. Her head was aching and her hands were icy-cold. There was a glitter in her eyes, and her nostrils were extraordinarily wide.

  Miss Withers was about to move on when she stopped, frozen into immobility. She saw the elevator descend, saw the doors open…and out stepped the plump, red-haired Miss Kelly.

  She was laughing up into the face of Arthur Reese. Reese was talking, softly yet clearly, oblivious of everything except the warm and desirable girl who smiled at him. …

  Miss Withers pressed closer, and caught one sentence—one only. “You’ll be crazy about the American Riviera. …” he was promising.

  Then they were gone.

  Miss Withers had three nickels. She made three phone calls. The first was to Penn Station, the second to Mrs. Blenkinsop, and the third to Spring 7-3100. She asked for Inspector Piper.

  “Quick!” she cried. “Oscar, I’ve got it! The Thorens suicide wasn’t—I mean it was murder!”

  “Who?” asked Piper sensibly.

  “Reese, of course,” she snapped. “I want you to arrest him quick…”

  “But the locked door?”

  Miss Withers said she could duplicate that trick, given a knife and the peculiar type of lock that Reese had installed on his music-reception room.

  “But the suicide note?”

  Miss Withers gave as her opinion that it was dictated, judging by the spaces between words and the corrections made by the writer.

  “But—but, Hildegarde, you can’t force a person to take poison!”

  Miss Withers said you could give them poison under the guise of something more innocent.

  “You’re still crazy,” insisted the Inspector. “Why—”

  Miss Withers knew what he was thinking. “The alibi? Well, Oscar, the murder was committed at a time when Reese was still in his office, which explains the daylight. He smashed the girl’s watch, and then set the hands ahead. But you didn’t have sense enough to know that with the minute hand at five of six, the hour hand cannot naturally be exactly opposite! Particles of glass interfered, and the hands of her watch were at an impossible angle!”

  Piper had one last shot in his locker. “But the motive?”

  “I can’t explain, and the train leaves in twenty minutes!” Miss Withers was a bit hysterical. “She’s a nice girl, Oscar, even if she has platinum finger-nails. She mustn’t go with him, I tell you. If they get out of the state, it means extradition and God knows what—it’ll be too late. …”

  “Take an aspirin and go to bed,” said the Inspector kindly. “You’re too wrought up over this. My dear woman…” He got the receiver crashed in his ear.

  Mr. Arthur Reese was out to enjoy a pleasant week-end. The first balmy spring weather of the year had come, aptly enough, on the heels of his first happy week in many a month. To have May Day showing such excellent signs of becoming a hit upon publication day was almost too much.

  He made no mistakes. He did not try to kiss Kelly in the taxi, not even after they had picked up her suitcase and were approaching Penn Station.

  There would be time enough for that later.

  “This trip is partly pleasure as well as business,” he said to Miss Kelly. “We both need a rest after everything that’s happened this week—and I want you to play with me a little. Call me Art. …”

  “Sure,” said Kelly. “You can call me Gladys, too. But I like Kelly better.” She snuggled a little closer to her employer. “Gee, this is thrilling,” she said. “I’ve never been to Atlantic City even—let alone with a man and adjoining rooms and everything…what my mother would say!”

  “Very few people would understand about things like this,” said Reese comfortably. “About how a man and a girl can have a little adventure together like this—really modern. …”

  “If you say so,” said Kelly, “it’s true. You know I’ve had a crush on you ever since I came to work for you, Mr. Reese—Art. …”

  “Sure,” he said. “And I’m crazy about you, too.” He paused, and his eyes very imperceptibly narrowed. “How old are you, Kelly?”

  “Twenty,” she said wonderingly. “Why?”

  “Nice age, twenty,” said Reese, taking a deep breath. “Well, Kelly—here we are.”

  Reese had a stateroom on the Atlantic City Special, and Kelly was naturally pleased and excited by that. She was greener than he had thought. Well, he owed this to himself, Reese thought. A sort of reward after a hard week. It was a week ago today that—

  “What are you thinking of?” asked Kelly. “You look so mad.”

  “Business.” Reese told her. He took a hammered silver flask from his pocket. “How about a stiff one?” She shook her head, and then gave in.

  He took a longer one, because he needed it even worse than Kelly. Then he took her hungrily in his arms. “I mustn’t let him know how green I am,” thought Kelly.

  The door opened, and they sprang apart.

  A middle-aged, fussy school teacher was coming into the stateroom. Both Kelly and Reese thought her vaguely familiar, but the world is full of thinnish elderly spinsters.

  “This is a private stateroom,” blurted Reese.

  “Excuse me,” said Hildegarde Withers. When she spoke, they knew who she was.

  She neither advanced nor retreated. She had a feeling that she had taken hold of a tiger’s tail and couldn’t let go.

  “Don’t go with him,” she said to Kelly. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  Kelly, very naturally, said, “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

  “I am,” said Miss Withers. She shut the door behind her. “This man is a murderer, with blood on his hands. …”

  Kelly looked at Reese’s hands. They had no red upon them, but they were moving convulsively.

  “He poisoned Margie Thorens,” said Miss Withers conversationally. “He probably will poison you, top, in one way or another.”

  “She’s stark mad,” said Arthur Reese nervously. “Stark, staring mad!” He rose to his feet and advan
ced. “Get out of here,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re saying. …”

  “Be quiet,” Miss Withers told him. “Young lady, are you going to follow my advice? I tell you that Margie Thorens once took a week-end trip with this man to Atlantic City—America’s Riviera—and she’s having her high school class as honorary pall-bearers as a result of it.”

  “Will you go?” cried Reese.

  “I will not.” There was a lurch of the car as the train got under way. Shouts of “all aboard” rang down the platform. “This man is going to be arrested at the other end of the line—arrested for murdering Margie Thorens by giving her poison and then dictating a suicide note to her as—”

  Reese moved rather too quickly for Miss Withers to scream. She had counted on screaming, but his hands caught her throat. They closed, terribly. …

  The murderer had only one thought, and that was to silence forever that sharp, accusing voice. He was rather well on to succeeding when he heard a clear soprano in his ear. “Stop! Stop hurting her, I tell you!”

  He pressed the tighter as the train got really under way. And then Kelly hit him in the face with his own flask. She hit him again.

  Reese choked, caught the flask and flung it wildly through the window, and dropped his victim. He was swearing horribly, in a low and expressionless voice. He shoved Kelly aside, stepped over Miss Withers, and tore out into the corridor. The porter was standing there, worried and a little scared about the sounds he had heard. Reese threw him aside and trampled on him. He fought his way to the vestibule, and found that a blue-clad conductor was just closing up the doors.

  Reese knocked him down, and leaped for the end of the platform.

  One foot plunged into the recess between train and platform, and his hands clawed at the air. He fell sidewise, struck a wooden partition which bounded the platform, and scrambled forward.

  He leaped to his feet. He was free! It would take a minute for the train to stop. He whirled and ran back along the platform. …

  He knocked over a child, kicked a dog savagely because its leash almost tripped him, and flung men and women out of his way. The train was stopping with a hissing of air-brakes. He ran the faster. …

  He saw his way cleared, except for a smallish middle-aged man in a gray suit who was hurrying down the stairs—a man who blinked stupidly at him. Arthur Reese knocked him aside and was then very deftly flung forward in a double somersault. Deft hands caught his arm, and raised it to the back of his neck, excruciatingly.

  “What’s all this?” said Inspector Oscar Piper. “What’s your blasted hurry?”

  Miss Withers came to life to find a porter splashing water in her face, and red-haired Miss Kelly praying unashamed. The train had stopped. “I’m all right,” she said. “But where did he go—he got away!”

  They came out on the platform to find the Inspector sitting on his captive. “This was the only train that left any station in twenty minutes,” said Piper. “I changed my mind and thought I’d better rally around.”

  An hour or so later Miss Withers sat in an armchair, surrounded by the grim exhibits which line the walls of the Inspector’s office in Center Street. She still felt seedy, but not too seedy to outline her deductions as to the manner in which Reese had committed the “suicide” of Margie Thorens. One by one she checked off the points. “I knew that a girl who had a fountain pen in her handbag wouldn’t use a pencil to write something unless it was given to her,” she said. “It wasn’t her own, because it was too long to fit into the bag, unless it miraculously bent. From then on the truth came slowly but surely…”

  “But the motive!” insisted Piper. “We’ve got to have a motive. I’ve got Reese detained downstairs, but we can’t book him without a motive.”

  Miss Withers nodded. Then—“Did a woman come down to see you, a Mrs. Blenkinsop?”

  The Inspector shook his head. “No—wait a minute. She came and went again. But she left a package for you with the desk lieutenant. …”

  “Good enough,” said Miss Withers. “If you’ll call Reese in here I’ll produce the motive.”

  Arthur Reese, strangely enough, came quietly and pleasantly, with a smile on his face.

  There was an officer on either side, but Piper had them go outside the door.

  “I’m sorry, madam,” said Reese when he saw Miss Withers. “But I lost my head when you said those terrible things. I didn’t know what I was doing. If I’d realized that you were a policewoman. …”

  “You’re under arrest for the murder of Margie Thorens,” cut in Piper. “Under the law, you may make a confession but you may not make a plea of guilty to a charge of murder. …”

  “Guilty? But I’m not guilty! This woman here may have made a lot of wild guesses as to how I might have killed Margie Thorens, but man alive—where’s my motive? Just because I made love to her months ago…”

  “And took her to Atlantic City—before she was eighteen,” cut in Miss Withers. “That gave her a hold over you, for she was under the age of consent. Being an ambitious and precocious little thing, she tried desperately to blackmail you into publishing one of her songs. And then you found that she had accidently struck a masterpiece of popular jingles—this famous May Day. So you took the song, and made it your own property by removing Margie. She wrote May Day—not you! That’s your motive!”

  Reese shook his head. “You haven’t got any proof,” he said confidently. “Where’s one witness? That’s all I ask! Just one—”

  “Here’s the one,” said Hildegarde Withers calmly. From behind the desk she took up a paper-wrapped bundle. Stripping the newspapers away, she brought out a gilt cage, in which a small yellow bird blinked and muttered indignantly.

  Miss Withers put it on the desk. “That was Margie Thorens’ family,” she said. “One of her only two companions in the long days and nights she spent, a bewildered little girl, trying to make a name for herself in an adult’s world.” She clucked to the little bird, and then, as the ruffled feathers subsided, Miss Withers began to whistle. Over and over again she whistled the first bar of the unpublished song hit, May Day.

  “I met you on a May day. …”

  “Who-whew whew-whee whee whee,” continued Dickie happily, swelling his throat. On through the second, through the third bar. …The Inspector gripped the table top.

  “Reese, you said yourself that you never called on Miss Thorens and never knew where she lived,” said Hildegarde Withers triumphantly. “Then I wish you’d tell me how her canary learned the chorus of your unpublished song hit!”

  Arthur Reese started to say something, but there was nothing to say. “I talked to a pet store man this morning,” said Miss Withers, “and he said that it’s perfectly possible to teach a clever canary any tune, provided he hears it over and over and over. Well, Dickie here is first witness for the prosecution!”

  Arthur Reese’s shrill hysterical laughter drowned out anything else she might have said. He was dragged away, while the canary still whistled.

  “I’m going to keep him,” said Miss Withers impulsively. She did keep Dickie, for several months, only giving him away to Mrs. Macfarland, wife of the Principal, when she learned that he would never learn any other tune but May Day. …

  It was December when Inspector Oscar Piper received an official communication. “You are invited to attend, as a witness for the State of New York, the execution of Arthur Reese at midnight, January 7th…. Sing Sing, Ossining, New York per L. E. I.”

  “With pleasure,” said the Inspector.

  The End

  A Fingerprint in Cobalt

  “THIS is a massacre, not an auction sale!” Auctioneer Paul Varden of the Sutton Galleries had worked himself up into a fine frenzy, but it seemed that nobody wanted to buy a mahogany wardrobe so heavy that it took three men to lift it onto the platform.

  “Do I hear one hundred dollars? Do I hear seventy-five?” Varden appealed directly to a man who was drowsing in one of the aisle seats beside the only pretty
girl in the place. “Mr. Hamish, surely as an art buyer you won’t let this fine solid mahogany heirloom slip out of your hands?”

  Mr. Hamish, star customer of the evening, had a long beaked face somewhat resembling that of an American eagle. “Do you say seventy-five, Mr. Hamish?” the auctioneer urged. Then the girl—she wore her hair and her tweed suit as neatly as a private secretary should but was too pretty even so—touched the man beside her on the arm. He opened his eyes, listened to her soft whisper, and looked up at the platform. Then Mr. Hamish very delicately touched his nose with thumb and forefinger.

  The auctioneer gulped a glass of water, decided upon an entirely different attack. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, if you don’t care for the looks of the wardrobe, just look at the room in it. George!”—he summoned a gigantic Negro—“open those doors so everybody can see. Why, it’s big enough for a bar, big enough so you could tip it over, put in an outboard motor, and have a speedboat!” The crowd tittered.

  Even Hamish smiled faintly, said something to the girl beside him. “Thirty dollars,” she sang out, in a clear sweet voice.

  “Thirty, thirty, thirty—do I hear fifty?” Varden beamed.

  The colored boy had pulled out all the drawers on the left side of the big wardrobe, but the full-length door on the right eluded him. George, with keys and screwdriver, fought at the tightly wedged door, mumbling. Mr. Hamish whispered again to his secretary, who immediately raised her hand. “Don’t bother, please. All Mr. Hamish wants is the wood, and it mustn’t be scratched.”

  “That will do then, George. You may relax. Now, ladies and gentlemen, do I hear fifty dollars? Thirty dollars once, thirty dollars twice…”

  He raised his hammer hastily, but before it could fall there was the screech of metal as something gave way under the pressure of the screwdriver in the hands of the persevering colored boy.

  Time stood still for a second or a century, and the room was so silent that in the back row Miss Hildegarde Withers could hear the tick of the old-fashioned watch pinned to her bosom.