The Cases of Hildegarde Withers Read online

  “What?” interrupted Piper. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  Dr. French indicated a narrow building which stood next door to the Wurtz brownstone, wall to wall. “I think the jelly came from there,” he said. “A Mr. Alison lives there, I believe; his cook sent it over as a friendly gesture.”

  Piper snapped his fingers. “Hildegarde! Remember my telling you I knew who lives in the brownstone? It happened ten years or so ago, before I got on the Homicide Squad. There was a big lawsuit between Wurtz and his next door neighbor.”

  “That was the elder Mr. Alison, now dead,” said the doctor. “Wurtz is a stiff-necked old chap, and he got indignant about the damage dogs were doing to his two foot square of lawn here. So he put up an iron fence and charged it with electricity, just enough to give the pups a sharp shock when they paused here…I and Alison caned him for it.”

  Piper nodded. “Wurtz won the suit, with damages of six cents. But Alison had to pay the terrific costs, and the blow hastened his death.”

  Dr. French moved toward his neat little roadster. “If anything happens to Johan Wurtz I’m not going to sign a death certificate until we know darn well what killed him!”

  He whirled away with a roar of gears.

  It was at precisely seven-fifteen next morning that Miss Emmy Marvin, the Wurtz housekeeper, hurried to answer a ring at the front door. She was positive about the time, and not even the cross-examination which she was destined to face in a certain court room ever shook her certainty.

  She opened the door, and the worried look left her fat face. “Good morning, doctor! I’m so glad you’re here—not that the master isn’t looking better this morning, but what I say is, you never know.”

  “True, Miss Marvin,” said the doctor as he hurried down the hall.

  Miss Marvin trotted after him. “Nasty weather, isn’t it, doctor? I see you have a bit of a cold yourself—your voice is all hoarse. Wise you are to wrap up in that muffler…”

  “Never mind showing me the way up,” said the hoarse voice.

  Miss Marvin stared after him, with a certain surprise. Dr. French was wearing heels almost as high as a woman’s on the neat brown brogues which were disappearing up the staircase.

  “Vanity!” observed Miss Marvin to herself. “Imagine him wanting to be took for a taller man!”

  She went quietly on with her labors, which for the moment consisted of using the vacuum on the hall carpet.

  The doorbell rang again, and the housekeeper put the vacuum aside and hurried along the hall, wiping her forehead. She flung open the door, and gibbered like an idiot.

  There on the step stood Dr. Peter French, glasses, plaid coat, and all. “Good morning, Marvin,” he said, cheerfully, before he saw the look on her face. His voice was clear, and he wore no muffler.

  “Oh, God!” cried Miss Emmy Marvin. “I’m—I’m crazy, I am! Doctor, I tell you as God is my judge, fifteen minutes ago I let you in through this door—and you ain’t gone out yet!”

  The soft face of Dr. Peter French hardened suddenly, and his arm thrust her rudely aside. He went up the stair in four great strides, turned, and raced up the second flight.

  His feet pounded in the hall as he headed for the door of Johan Wurtz’ room. A door crashed open, and then Dr. French stopped short.

  Johan Wurtz lay in his narrow bed beside the two pied majolica horses. But never again would he handle their pottery figures, for around his thin throat had been tied the cord of his dressing gown, so tightly that the silken rope was almost hidden in the flesh.

  Dr. French went out into the hall to meet the housekeeper, who was puffing up the stairs. When she saw his face she screamed.

  “Take hold of yourself,” he snapped at her. “Get down to the telephone and call the police—call Inspector Piper at Headquarters and tell him that it’s happened!”

  “No, we’ve got nothing to hold you for,” Piper told Dr. French some time later. The doctor was pathetically relieved.

  “I’ll wait down in the library with Maida, if I may,” he suggested. “We—we’re engaged to be married.”

  “Okay,” said Piper. The house swarmed with detectives, but Miss Hildegarde Withers moved quietly to and fro among them, on mysterious errands of her own.

  She approached the Inspector. “Oscar, what do you make of this? I found it in the bathroom upstairs.” She showed him a hand towel, stained with pinkish-brown. “It’s grease paint. Some one touched up his makeup in the bathroom after doing in the old man!”

  “And he got in disguised as the doctor!” Piper plunged in. “That accounts for the high heels Miss Marvin saw him wearing—and the hoarse voice…”

  Miss Withers nodded slowly. “Oscar, do you happen to know if Mr. Alison next door happens to be an actor by profession?”

  Piper stared at her. “We can find out!”

  “Boys, get Sergeant Krim here right away,” roared the Inspector.

  Finally a broad-shouldered young officer, wearing a very self-satisfied smile, came into the dead man’s bedroom, which happened to be the place Piper had chosen for a headquarters.

  “No fingerprints anywhere,” said Sergeant Krim. “But I did find this on the rear staircase…”

  He held out a silver cigarette case. It bore a monogram, and the initials were W-F-A.

  “William F. Alison,” said the Inspector slowly. “Go get him, Krim.”

  “Huh?”

  “Next door, sergeant. He lives there.” Piper gestured with his thumb.

  “Okay, Inspector.” The sergeant hurried away.

  “He made his getaway down the rear stair just as the real doctor came in the front,” Piper decided. “A lot of nerve the guy had, but of course he knew the housekeeper was in the front hall, and that Maida and her precious brother wouldn’t be awake yet. But to get to that rear stair he had to go up to the fourth floor, through the housekeeper’s rooms, and down—because the rear stair doors are blocked up on the second and third floors.”

  “But suppose he got to the kitchen,” Miss Withers objected. “Where could he go from there?”

  “There’s a rear door opening into a tiny court,” said Piper. “The court is fenced, but an agile man could get over the fence into Alison’s rear yard, or into the service yard of the apartment on the other side.”

  “Hmm,” observed Miss Withers dubiously. “Murder for revenge, eh?”

  “Why else?”

  Miss Withers stood aside to allow Sergeant Krim and a uniformed patrolman to drag up the steps a white-faced, very handsome young man.

  “I won’t talk!” shouted William Alison, but he was optimistic. Miss Withers hurried on down to the library. As she came to the open door she saw that Maida lay on the yellow rug, in a faint, with her brother and the worried doctor ministering to her.

  Back up the stairs went Miss Withers, but the door was closed. She knocked imperiously, and in a moment the Inspector opened it a crack.

  “Alison’s played leading roles in a stock company,” Piper whispered. “One of the boys recognized him—go take a walk for yourself, and when you get back we’ll have a confession.”

  “Confession!” spoke Miss Withers angrily, but the door closed again. “Just because he’s an actor doesn’t mean he deserves to go to the chair—or does it? Anyway, Maida fainted when she saw him under arrest!”

  She amused herself by wandering through the old house. It took her, she found, exactly four minutes to go from the dead man’s room up one flight to the housekeeper’s quarters, down the rear stair and into the court. She also satisfied herself that it would take a good bit of gymnastics to climb any of the rear fences—a task quite beyond her powers, or those of any average woman.

  “Then where was Maida last night?” Miss Withers asked herself.

  She went back to the girl’s room and began a methodical search. She poured the powder from a pink box, dug the cold cream from a jar. In the bottom of the jar was a ring.

  She turned her attention to the clothes
closet, but found nothing out of the ordinary. There was another closet, from which emanated the faint smell of cedar. It bore a stout lock of the Yale variety, quite beyond the power of Miss Wither’s hairpin.

  Taking a long chance, she felt along the top of the door frame, where from experience she knew that many optimistic persons hide their keys. Nor was she disappointed—the closet-door yielded and she disappeared inside for a long half hour.

  When Miss Withers came back into Maida’s bedroom her face was flushed and there was an icy glint in her blue eyes. Her expression did not change when she saw that a girl was sitting on the bed, staring at her.

  “So you found it!” said Maida savagely. “Well…?”

  Miss Withers did not answer. “How old are you, child?”

  “Twenty—but I don’t see—”

  “Did you love him such a lot?”

  “Did I?” The clear, young eyes clouded. “Did I!”

  “And then the doctor came along, and you changed your mind?”

  Maida began to laugh, hysterically.

  “I suppose you thought it was very romantic, like Romeo and Juliet? Having an affair with the son of the man your uncle hated most in the world! Who thought of digging out the bricks and making a passage from your closet to his bedroom, you or he?”

  Then Maida was hysterical. Miss Withers left her and went away. She spent the next half hour closeted with Marvin, the housekeeper.

  “Strict with her? Let me tell you, she walked a chalkline all right.”

  “They used to quarrel?”

  “Not exactly. Miss Maida is very sweet, you see. She couldn’t bear to hurt anybody’s feelings—not much like her brother. Why, if you ask me, I think that she promised to marry the doctor mostly because her uncle kept after her so. She was afraid he’d fret himself into his coffin if she didn’t.”

  “I see,” said Miss Withers, who didn’t see at all. All she could think of was the damning fact that Will Alison was an actor, that he stood just enough shorter than the doctor to need high heels to match Dr. French’s height, that only one person could have dropped that tell-tale cigarette case with its initials, W-F-A. …

  Miss Withers then remembered that there was a desk in the library. Hurrying there, she found Franzel busily engaged in going through the drawers.

  “You needn’t spy on me!” he hurled at her. “I don’t know anything about this. Why don’t you go find that doctor—they told him he could go, but he’s still hanging around. He knows…”

  “You mean you suspect Dr. French?” she asked.

  Franzel backed water. “I won’t say that—but for the last few weeks he’s been snooping around. He’s got wind of something, but he’s close-mouthed.”

  “Too bad you’re not,” murmured Miss Withers softly, as the young man brushed past her. She bent over the desk and found that young Franzel had been engrossed in reading his deceased uncle’s insurance policies.

  Miss Withers emulated him, not without profit. The results of her study showed that Johan Wurtz had carried twenty-five thousand dollars in insurance. “With double indemnity in case of accidental or sudden death,” she noted. All policies showed Franzel and Maida as joint beneficiaries.

  She hurried upstairs, and finally managed to get the Inspector to come out into the hall. “Oscar, listen to me! Here’s something—if Wurtz died from heart failure he’d leave $25,000 insurance, but if he died from sudden or accidental death—including murder, I assume—the policies would be doubled!”

  “So what?” said Piper cheerily.

  Miss Withers shrugged, smiled sadly, and started out on a new line of endeavor. Suddenly she heard her name called in a familiar voice. The Inspector was eager and excited.

  “Hildegarde! Come and bring your notebook!” She hurried down the hall and into the dead man’s bedroom. Against the window Will Alison was standing, looking like a young man who had been recently in hell and expected to return there.

  “Take his confession in long-hand,” ordered the Inspector jubilantly. “He’s decided to make it easy for himself, haven’t you Alison?”

  The young man nodded woodenly and spoke in a rapid sing-song. “I, William Alison, of my own free will and volition, do hereby confess to the murder of Johan Wurtz, alone and unaided…”

  “Wait a minute,” cut in Piper. “Hildegarde, you’re not taking this down!”

  “Of course not,” said Miss Withers pettishly. “It’s stuff and nonsense. This boy didn’t kill Wurtz, either alone or with the help of Maida. I can prove he didn’t do it. In the first place he wouldn’t have made his getaway via the back stairs, where the cigarette case was dropped. Not when there’s a neat little passage cut in the adjoining walls between Maida’s bedroom and his own!”

  “What?”

  “I just went through it, and spent some time in the Alison house next door,” said Miss Withers calmly. “It was a very convenient idea, as well as a romantic one. But love is no crime, Oscar. We must look elsewhere for our murderer…” She heard the faintest of noises. …

  Miss Withers’ voice trailed away. “Unless I am very much mistaken,” she said in a whisper, “we may look for our murderer just outside the door of this room!”

  “Franzel, eh?” Piper understood at once. With one long stride he was at the door, the sergeant close behind.

  No one was in the hall but Dr. Peter French, who was walking quickly away.

  “Wait a minute!” roared Piper, but the doctor couldn’t wait. He turned and sprinted up the stairs to the fourth floor, and they heard him pounding across the housekeeper’s room.

  “After him!” shouted the Inspector. “To the back door—quick!” There was much hubbub in the halls, with detectives swarming up from the ground floor, shouting in the corridor…

  “Take your time,” Miss Withers advised as soon as she could make herself heard. “He can’t escape over the rear fences—because I locked the rear door and broke off the key in the lock. Just to make sure. …”

  She saw Dr. French dragged away by detectives, without a qualm. She shook hands with Franzel, who said, “I told you so! But I didn’t think you were paying any attention.”

  She even watched the lovely Maida come out of her hysterics with miraculous swiftness in the arms of young Alison.

  “You two ought to get married right away,” the Inspector suggested.

  “Oscar!” gasped Miss Withers. “What a thing to say!”

  He shrugged. “Well, with that passage between the houses and all that—when it gets into the newspapers…”

  “I think the proprieties will be taken care of, if Maida will simply dig the wedding ring out of her cold cream jar and wear it so it will show,” Miss Withers suggested calmly. “They’ve been married for weeks. …”

  “Months,” sang out Maida, through her tears of relief. “Since last Spring, but we knew it would kill uncle if he knew. You see, he hated the Alisons!”

  The Inspector felt himself being shoved out of the room by Miss Withers. “The newspaper boys are clamoring,” she told him. “Hadn’t you better find out how you solved the Wurtz murder before you talk to them?”

  “I—I guess so,” said Piper. “It was the doctor all right, but I don’t see how he could have done it or why he would want to. Otherwise I have a perfect case…”

  Miss Withers smiled. “All the time,” she said, “it seemed a bit thick to me that a man, even an actor, could disguise himself as some one else well enough to fool the old housekeeper in broad daylight. There was only one man, Oscar, who could be sure that he would succeed in disguising himself as Dr. French—and that was the doctor himself.

  “The wily doctor knew that the housekeeper would notice the changed voice, the muffler and the raised heels. He intended us to find the grease paint, because every one of those clues pointed away from him! Besides, he’d already awakened official suspicion in the wrong direction with his story of the poisoned jelly—a very unlikely story, too!”

  “So he sneake
d out the back way after murdering the old man, and came in the front after disposing of the shoes and muffler?”

  She nodded. “And he planted the cigarette case, as part of the frame he was trying to build against young Alison. He knew of the family feud, the Montague-Capulet affair. But he didn’t know about Romeo and Juliet, Oscar. That tripped him, because if Alison had a secret entrance to the Wurtz house he would hardly risk going through the open court in the rear!”

  “Yeah,” protested Piper. “But you’re giving me everything but the motive.”

  “Don’t you see that?” said Miss Withers wearily. “Dr. French thought he was going to marry Maida. Her uncle had bullied her into half-promising—again I suppose she thought that if she refused, the old man might fret himself into collapse. Silly, but we do lots of silly things at twenty…and afterward, for that matter.

  “It was silly of Dr. French, for all his cleverness in executing a plot, to decide to murder an old man—and in such a way that it could be nothing but murder—so that he would marry a girl who brought a dowry of half of fifty thousand instead of half of twenty-five!”

  They went down the stairs, and found Franzel waiting for them in the lower hall.

  “I’d like you to have these—as a souvenir,” he said. Into Miss Withers’ hands he put a pair of delicately carved horses, cut from clear rose quartz.

  She hesitated. “Take them,” he urged. “They were the prize of uncle’s collection, and he’d want you to have them.”

  “I will,” agreed Miss Withers, “if you’ll tell me why you sleep with your clothes on.”

  “It saves time dressing and undressing,” said Franzel solemnly. “Besides, I’m afraid I’d had a few drinks…”

  “I’ll send you a physiology text, with pictures of a drunkard’s liver in color,” she promised him. “Come, Oscar—we haven’t had breakfast and it’s almost tea time.”

  “I am hungry,” he admitted. “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse!”

  Miss Withers held out to him a single carved lump of bright rose quartz. “Try this?” she invited.