The Cases of Hildegarde Withers Page 6

  “You see,” Piper continued, “this Dr. Brotherly had stumbled across what he thought might be a valuable painting on display in the auction rooms. He was all set to pawn his wife’s pearls so he’d have funds enough to outbid everybody else. But first he wanted to check up on his guess. It was a clever idea, too.”

  “Yes, wasn’t it?” Miss Withers put in. She approached the easel admiringly.

  “Notice, Oscar, how the artist smoothed the lovely cobalt blue of the velvet cap, using his thumb as most artists do.

  “Thumbprints in pigment, imagine! And Dr. Brotherly got permission from the Metropolitan to photograph prints on a genuine Holbein, and on Monday afternoon brought the enlarged print to the auction galleries to compare. Only someone found him, interrupted his work. And the poor man had barely time to thrust the photo inside his shirt!”

  Louis Hamish went quietly on restoring the painting.

  “Yeah,” Piper put in. “Somebody realized that Brotherly was wise and managed to strangle him with a silk scarf, stick the body afterward into the nearest large piece of furniture. That’s the story, Hamish.”

  “Ingenious, yes,” Hamish admitted. “But you don’t think all this applies to me?”

  “You bought this painting, didn’t you? You were going to buy the wardrobe, and sneak the body out…”

  “Please don’t shout, Inspector. Understand that I’m not a collector, I’m a buyer. I act as agent for museums, galleries and private collectors.”

  “Well, who hired you to buy last night?”

  Hamish looked at his watch.

  “The real owner of the Holbein—if it is one—is on his way down here now, with the intention of taking it on the next plane for Chicago. You will, both of you, be somewhat surprised when you see who it is, but you’ll realize that it would be impossible for this person to have bid for it.”

  There was a knock on the door, a voice called “Louis!”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the murderer of Dr. Brotherly,” said Hamish softly. He crossed the floor, swung open the door. A man burst excitedly in, leaving it ajar behind him. It was Paul Varden, auctioneer of the Sutton Galleries.

  “Well, Louis! There’s the devil to pay!” His voice trailed away as he saw the others, and his face blanched into a guilty mask.

  “Talk, and talk fast!” Piper barked. “Does that picture on the easel belong to you? Did you hire Hamish to bid it in for you?”

  “Why, this—this—” he fumbled. “Who says so?”

  “Did you make a telephone call to the Brotherly home, and send a fake telegram, all calculated to make the family think him alive and hiding from some mysterious Yellow Peril?”

  “I don’t know what this is all about, but I—I—”

  Hamish spoke. “I had to tell them, Paul, old chap. I’m not going to jail to save you. I just admitted you were coming to get your picture.”

  Not until then did the fog-horn voice of Mr. Paul Varden return full blast. He called upon everybody to witness that he had come simply to warn Hamish about—well, about the fuss the police were making over his having smuggled something out of the auction room windows last night.

  Louis Hamish was back at the easel, thoughtfully continuing with the restoration job as if he had no interest in anything else. “Stop looking at me!” Varden howled at the Inspector. “I never killed anybody! You’ve got to believe me—try the lie-detector, try anything.”

  “I’ll try frisking you,” Piper said. A moment later he took a small package from the auctioneer’s coat, a package containing opalescent globules.

  “Mrs. Brotherly’s pearls!” breathed Miss Hildegarde Withers. Piper nodded. “Well, Mr. Paul Varden—” He took out handcuffs, snapped them on the wrists of the cringing auctioneer. “You’re taking a ride.”

  “Yes, of course,” came an interrupting voice. “But not quite yet, Oscar. Haven’t you forgotten something?”

  They all stared at Miss Withers. Piper glared at her.

  She pointed to the brown-paper package. “I mean the shoes we found in the apartment up at the Hotel Elleston, remember?”

  Hamish still leaned over the painting, but his hand stopped in midair.

  “You see,” Miss Withers continued conversationally, “Brotherly had to use a magnifying glass in his comparison of the photograph with the prints in the pigment of that picture. The glass was broken in his struggle with the murderer, ground underfoot. Police found some fragments in the dead man’s rubber heels, found others on the showroom floor. Enough to make a complete lens, except for one missing piece. Pearls may be planted in a man’s overcoat pocket, but you can’t fake the evidence of glass splinters. So if these bits in your rubber heels should happen to match…”

  She didn’t need to go on. Hamish’s eagle-face was sleepy no longer. He turned on the stool, and there was a gun in his hand.

  “I was afraid that I didn’t make the story stick,” he admitted. “But it was worth trying. Don’t move, Inspector. I’m a fair shot.” He took the picture from the easel, tucked it under his arm.

  “Just sit tight,” he said evenly. “I only want to exit. Want to come, Bianca?”

  She looked at him as she might have at a lizard. “I thought you were innocent!” she cried.

  He shrugged. “Sorry to disillusion you.” Hamish stopped.

  “Dear me, but this is a situation,” Hamish paused to say. “I need at least ten minutes, and somehow I don’t think you’ll be sporting enough to give me a head start. Perhaps I ought to shoot one of you, so you’ll be busy calling ambulances?”

  “You can’t get by with this, Hamish!” Piper exploded.

  “Yes? And why?”

  “Ask the man who stands in the doorway behind you!”

  Louis Hamish didn’t bat an eye, the gun kept steady. “An old trick, quite unworthy of you, Inspector.” He took another step back…

  He had stepped into the arms of a tall young man in uniform, who held him neatly while the inspector swung a cruelly efficient fist to the pit of his stomach. And then it was over; handcuffs changed hands.

  “I had to come back, Bee,” Johnny Robbins was saying, “to tell you I was sorry for saying…” She seemed to be sorry, too, and glad.

  “What I want to know is,” Piper demanded of the schoolteacher, “where you got those shoes! Without them we’d be nowhere.”

  “Exactly, Oscar.” Miss Withers picked up the painting from the floor, dusted it off, and replaced it on the easel. “But I have a confession to make. The shoes aren’t Hamish’s and they haven’t any glass splinters in them. I bought them at the shoe shop on the corner, but they served just as well.”

  The expression on the face of Mr. Louis Hamish, as the schoolteacher said later, was worth the whole trouble of the case. It was really too bad that Bianca Riley and her soldier weren’t noticing anything at the moment.

  The End

  The Riddle of the Doctor’s Double

  “AND people think they must go to the country to find peace and quiet!” Inspector Oscar Piper gestured toward the lonely curves of Riverside Drive, glistening wet under the street lamps.

  It was well after midnight, an unwonted hour for both the grizzled Inspector and the angular school teacher who was his best friend and severest critic. But Miss Hildegarde Withers had finally persuaded him to attend a performance of chamber music, for the good of his soul, and it had continued late.

  “Manhattan is never really quiet or peaceful, Oscar,” Miss Withers told him. “Sometimes it is hushed—but only with the hush that comes just before the crescendo movement of a Wagnerian opera.”

  Suddenly a light flashed on in the second story window of a sober brownstone house.

  “There, Oscar!” said the school teacher. “If we only knew what scene is being played in that lighted room above us! Perhaps it is a lovers’ meeting, or a bitter quarrel. Perhaps an assassin waits…”

  The Inspector snorted.

  “I can imagine what’s going on in that house becaus
e I know the place and the old codger who lives there. Johan Wurtz is the name—retired brewer. A hundred to one that he got up to take some bicarbonate of soda. …”

  The Inspector was rudely interrupted by a shrill trumpet-like scream which exploded from a window above them.

  “Help! Police! Poli-i-i-i-ice!” It was a woman’s voice—a woman who leaned from the second story window.

  The Inspector spat out his cigar and made a dive for the door of the brownstone house.

  He leaned on the bell, and when the door opened he flashed his badge. “What’s going on here?”

  A fat woman in a shapeless wrapper flung the door wide, and Piper was somewhat nettled to see Miss Hildegarde Withers sail past him.

  “Upstairs!” gargled the fat woman. They ran up a thickly-carpeted stair, turned, and burst into a library where every light blazed.

  It was a long and narrow room, crammed with bookshelves, tables, and massive chairs. The tops of the cases and almost every available inch of table space had been given over to tiny statuettes of horses. One small table was overturned and its models scattered across the rich yellow rug.

  A man lay sprawled in the shadows.

  It was the woman who spoke, disjointedly. “I heard the noise—poor Mister Wurtz—dead as a stone he is…”

  Piper faced her. “You the maid?”

  “Housekeeper,” she said. “Miss Emmy Marvin is me.”

  Piper knelt, ignoring the spilled statuettes. The body was dressed in long underwear beneath a silk dressing gown. It was a thin old body, the face dark and puffy, with an imperious beak of a nose.

  The Inspector stood up. “Phone for a doctor, Hildegarde—he isn’t even dead.” Piper motioned to the housekeeper. “Help me get him to that sofa over there.”

  There was a telephone in the lower hall, above it a card with a list of phone numbers. One, outlined in red ink, was “Dr. Peter French.” Miss Withers dialed the number.

  Dr. French’s voice was sleepy, but it changed at once to a reassuring professional crispness. “Be there in ten minutes,” he said. “Meanwhile, I want you to dig out what we call a ‘capsule,’ a silk-covered glass vial from Mr. Wurtz’ vest pocket, and break it under his nose. It should revive him.”

  Miss Withers hurried up the stairs, wondering where the sick man’s bedroom might be. After discovering that the only other room on the second floor was the dining-room, she hurried on up to the third.

  She burst into the first door she found, and fumbled until she found the light switch. Then as the room was flooded with brilliance, she stood stock-still and gaped.

  In the middle of a large four-poster bed a young man hurriedly sat up, clutching the covers around him. His wispy red hair hung over his forehead.

  “Wha-wha—” he gurgled.

  He turned, and with one arm fumbled beneath the pillow. But Miss Withers backed swiftly out through the door, without further delay. Oddly enough, that young man was wearing a white shirt and a black bow tie.

  The next bedroom was far down the hall. She entered a delicately feminine bedroom, all white and gold. Bits of silk and lace were scattered everywhere, but the bed was empty.

  There was one other door in the hall, beside the bathroom which stood open.

  This last was a square cell-like chamber with a hard-looking bed, a small chest of drawers, and no decoration except a pair of pied majolica stallions who reared at each other on the bedside table.

  There was a worn brown suit on a chair back, and in a pocket Miss Withers discovered the tiny tube for which she was searching. As she drew it from the pocket a voice spoke behind her.

  “Stick up your hands!”

  She whirled to face a bedraggled, sandy-haired young man whose lower lip trembled with excitement. His hand held a very ugly-looking automatic pistol.

  “Stuff and nonsense!” snapped Miss Withers. “Let me take this capsule down to the sick man in the library…”

  “Huh?”

  “Mr. Wurtz has had an attack!” she advised him. “If you know what’s good for you, young man…”

  She advanced toward the door, hoping that she showed none of her inner panic.

  “Wurtz?” echoed the young man. “My uncle?” He looked amazed.

  The young man stood back out of the way. “It isn’t loaded, anyway,” he told her with a faint grin. “See?” He pointed the gun at the ceiling and pulled the trigger. Then he dropped his jaw in surprise as the room echoed to a resounding explosion.

  “Well!” he muttered, as Miss Withers went down the stairs three at a time.

  The Inspector met her, flanked by the housekeeper. “Only the family idiot,” snapped Miss Withers, unkindly. “Playing with his empty gun. …”

  She pushed past them, and hurried to the side of the old man who lay on the sofa in the library. With an efficient snap she broke the enclosed glass tube, and let the fumes of amyl nitrate fill the stricken man’s nostrils.

  There was a voice in the doorway—the wispy young man was grinning. “Sorry, ma’am, I misjudged you. How’s uncle?”

  The Inspector went into action. “You can give me that gun,” he ordered, and moved forward.

  “Okay,” said the young man. “But it isn’t loaded now—there was just one shell in the chamber. …” He handed it over.

  Piper dropped the automatic into his capacious pocket. “Anybody else likely to start potshooting at us? Who-all’s in the house?”

  The housekeeper shook her fat, frightened face.

  “Nobody but just us—and Miss Maida, sir. Master Franzel’s sister.”

  “And where is Miss Maida now?” barked the Inspector.

  “In her bed, the darling child,” the housekeeper informed him belligerently.

  Miss Withers’ eyebrows went up at least an inch.

  The young man addressed as Franzel was standing near the figure of old Johan Wurtz, whose breathing had suddenly begun to fill the room.

  “Uncle’s coming out of it,” he announced. He turned to face the Inspector and Miss Withers. “Many thanks for your help, but I don’t see that we need the police. Marvin, will you show these people out?”

  “Not so fast!” the Inspector objected.

  “Well, why not? My uncle is subject to these attacks, which is why he carries these capsules about with him. He often has trouble in sleeping, and I suppose he came down to amuse himself with his toys.” The young man gestured toward the statuettes. “Any signs of foul play in that?”

  “This way,” said the housekeeper firmly. The Inspector and Miss Withers followed her down the stair, but in the lower hall they heard the ring of the doorbell.

  “The doctor, praise be!” gasped the housekeeper. She admitted a large, soft-looking man in a plaid overcoat, who stared at them curiously through thick glasses.

  Piper introduced himself, and Miss Withers. “Turned out to be pretty much of a false alarm, doctor,” he said.

  But the doctor’s hand was on his arm. “Inspector, do you mind?” begged Dr. French. “I’m not satisfied—I mean, I’d like you to wait for just a few moments…”

  They came into the library again, to find Franzel gathering up the spilled ornaments, and a slim and very lovely young girl kneeling beside Johan Wurtz’ couch. She rose as they entered, pulling a thin negligee around her.

  “Maida,” said the doctor, as if the name meant something to him.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Peter,” said the girl, looking rather strangely toward Miss Withers. “I must have been sleeping very soundly, not to hear anything…”

  “Especially the sound of a shot in the next room,” Miss Withers told her.

  The sick man’s eyes opened, and he stared up at them, slow recognition dawning on his face.

  “My children!” he said hoarsely, and smiled. “I’d like—I’d like to go upstairs. …” His voice died weakly away.

  The Inspector moved to help Dr. French, but Franzel shouldered him aside.

  Maida started as if to follow, and the
n stopped. “You—you mustn’t mind Franzel.” She gave them a very sweet smile.

  “You see, he’s upset because he’s so fond of uncle!”

  The Inspector and Miss Withers exchanged a long and dubious look, as the girl’s light slippers clicked on the stair.

  “If she was asleep in her bedroom,” said Miss Withers, “she slept in a bureau drawer! Because when I went upstairs looking for the medicine her room was empty!”

  They came out onto the landing just in time to catch a glimpse of Dr. French as he took a quick kiss from the lips of the lovely Maida, and then came hurrying down toward them.

  “I’ll be back first thing in the morning!” he called to the girl on the third floor. “And tell Miss Marvin to go to bed, we’ll let ourselves out.”

  “Well, doctor?” Piper queried. But the doctor placed his finger to his lips, and led them out of the house.

  “I asked you to wait because for some weeks I’ve had a suspicion that Johan Wurtz was in danger of his life—”

  “You mean—murder?” cut in Piper.

  “I mean murder,” said the doctor.

  “But who’d want to murder him?” Miss Withers put in. “Is he rich?”

  The doctor shook his head. “On the contrary, he has very little except this mortgaged house. The only heirs are Maida and her brother, and they’d get everything anyway in the course of a few months. With his heart, Johan Wurtz cannot live to see another Spring, which makes it all the more damnable that some one wants to murder him.”

  “Yeah,” objected Piper, “but how do you know that some one wants to bump him off?”

  “I’ll tell you,” said Dr. French. “While he was convalescing from his last attack the old man’s appetite was pickish. He complained that some calf’s foot jelly had a funny taste and put it aside. Just for fun I took it to the laboratory and tested it. The stuff—” Dr. French paused for dramatic effect—“the stuff contained about half a gram of digitalis!”

  “But that’s not poison!” objected Piper.

  “Not unless you’ve got the kind of heart that Johan Wurtz has,” said the doctor. “I didn’t dare to tell him, naturally. But I warned the Marvin woman not to give him anything more to eat that had been sent in by the neighbors…”