Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene (7 page)

“Why should I?”

“Because her father and mother are extremely worried and anxious to have word from her. I am, indirectly, their representative.”

Carol Hadley was silent for a moment. She sat with head and shoulders bowed, her knees now released, and plucked at the grass. “So that’s it,” she said. “Lenore was afraid of something like this. That her parents would have the hounds after her, I mean. She suspected cops or private detectives, though. It didn’t occur to her that she would be followed by a ...”

Carol Hadley, aware of the indiscretion to which her words had led her, broke off suddenly in what was almost a display of confusion. Miss Withers, neither offended nor dismayed, finished her sentence for her.

“By a snoopy old maid who looks rather like a fugitive from a rest home. That’s all right, my dear. Others before you have been deceived by my appearance. It has the advantage in most cases of being what you might call an effective natural disguise. Never mind, however. Let me repeat my earlier question. Will you help me find Lenore?”

“How?”

“Simply by telling me where she is.”

“What if I don’t know?”

“Do you?”

Again Carol Hadley was silent, plucking grass. This time longer. But finally she answered. “Yes. I know. I tried to get her to contact her parents, but she was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Of this. That they’d try to get her back before she had time to do what she felt she must. Lenore’s very intense.”

“She is, I understand, of age. Her parents can’t force her to return if she doesn’t wish to.”

“That’s not the point. Actually, Lenore loves her parents, though you may doubt it. Especially her father. She was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to defy them if it came to an issue.”

Miss Withers thought again of the words of Tennyson, that neglected Victorian, the words she had quoted in part over the telephone to Inspector Oscar Piper:
What quality of fools is this, to hurt the most the ones they love the best.

“I see. So it was easier simply to run away. Do you know Lenore well?”

“Oh, yes. I lived in Manhattan for years before coming out here with my family. Lenore and I were in school together.”

“Did you also know her parents?”

“Yes. I’ve been to their apartment several times.”

“Do you think they deserve the treatment they’re getting?”

“I guess I don’t, really. They’re dreadful stuffed shirts, of course, but I liked them. They mean well.”

“You would be doing them and Lenore a great favor if you were to tell me where to find her.”

“Do you think so? Perhaps I would. To be honest, I’ve not been quite easy about what she plans to do. Something about it stinks.”

“What does she plan to do?”

For the third time Carol Hadley hesitated, but Miss Withers was now aware of a singing sense of triumph. She had broken through. At last she had managed to penetrate that pliable, passive resistance that had threatened constantly to defeat her.

“All right,” Carol Hadley said, her decision made and her bridge burning behind her. “I’ll tell you, and if that makes me some kind of traitor, to hell with it. I don’t mind admitting that it will be a relief. Lenore’s going on a cruise to the Far East. To India and Japan. On a private yacht, very hush-hush. It’s supposed to be a kind of pilgrimage to the lands of Zen. There are fifteen or twenty of them going, and they’re all chipping in, whatever they can, on expenses. The owner of the yacht calls himself Captain Westering, which sounds phony, and I don’t think he knows much about sailing or navigating or anything like that. The yacht is called
Karma
, the Hindu word for Fate. Lenore tried to talk me into going along, and I did go down to the waterfront to talk to this Captain Westering about it, but when I saw how things were, I said no, thanks. I was sworn to secrecy, of course, but now I’ve broken my word all to hell, and I don’t care. I’m glad. The yacht is an old one that used to belong to Errol Flynn or John Barrymore or someone like that, and I doubt if it ever gets to the Far East, or even halfway, and what I’m afraid of, to tell the truth, is that it will sink.”

“I gather from your tense that the yacht is still moored at the waterfront?”

“Yes. It’s at a commercial dock in the bay, where it’s supposed to be getting fitted out and stowed and provisioned for the voyage. It should have sailed long before now. Lenore called me only yesterday and said they were running into all kinds of problems.”

“Where is Lenore staying?”

“On board the yacht. All the passengers are. Most of them, at least.”

“And where is the dock?”

And again, for the last time, on the verge of her final revelation, Carol Hadley hesitated beside her burning bridge in the land of the enemy, clearly torn, although too late, between her better judgment and a tenacious personal loyalty. Miss Withers did not make the mistake of trying to prod her in one direction or the other. Wisely, she merely waited.

“I suppose,” Carol Hadley said, “that I can always comfort myself with the thought that I’ve done the sensible thing like a good little girl, even though I shall have broken my word and shall feel like a louse. Having told you so much already, I may as well tell you the little that’s left ...”

And so it happened that Miss Withers stood at last, at approximately the hour of nine thirty of an April evening thick with fog, on a commercial dock in San Francisco Bay and looked up through fog at the looming rakish bulk of the yacht
Karma
. She had been delayed in her arrival, in spite of an almost irrational compulsion to hurry, by the compassionate act of stopping at Alioto’s on Fisherman’s Wharf to fill with broiled sea bass an aching cavity between the intestines and diaphragm of Al Fister. Al was now beside her on the dock, stoked and revived, her staunch confederate.

In her nostrils were the salt-scent of the fog and the odor of crab pots. She could not shake an insidious sense of foreboding, an instinctive apprehension, and she found herself thinking, for no good reason, of the old and evil days of the Barbary Coast, not many miles from where she stood, when marauding, vicious crimps prowled the waterfront dives, and murder was done nightly on the dark docks. Why had she thought of murder? Faint light came from a few portholes of the aging yacht. From somewhere, behind one of the portholes, came the sound of a strummed guitar, a man’s voice singing, other voices raised now and again above the sounds of the strings and the singing. Miss Withers found herself shivering, not solely the effect of the damp fog that seeped through her clothes and laid chill, presumptuous fingers on her flesh.

“Al,” she said, “I’m going aboard. Remain here, please, until I return.”

The gangplank was down, inviting trespassers. Beneath Miss Withers’ sensible shoes, the deck of the old yacht, once walked by the hallowed feet of Barrymore or Flynn or whoever, rolled ever so gently in quiet water, which made a soft and cadenced slapping sound against vessel and piling. No one challenged her or moved to intercept her as she made her way toward a dim rectangle of light coming amidships from below. The apparent indifference to security combined with the somehow stealthy sounds of the muffled darkness served to increase Miss Withers’ sense of dread. Descending narrow stairs into a narrow passage, she paused and listened, facing aft. The guitar and the singing and the sporadic interjection of raised voices were louder here. They came from behind the closed door of a stateroom on her right. She moved to the door and put her hand on the knob.

She paused again, diverted by another sound. An alien sound from another source. A sound imposed with a kind of dreadful irrelevance on other sounds. She heard it once and not again, but it came, or so it seemed, from behind a closed door aft, at the end of the brief passage and facing directly up it. What sound? The harsh catching of the breath in someone’s throat? No. Not quite. More, Miss Withers thought, like a truncated whimper of terror or despair.

Silently and swiftly Miss Withers moved to the door at the end of the passage and tried the knob. The door was unlocked. She opened it without hesitation into a stateroom that was obviously, from its size and location and fittings, the quarters of the owner or captain or both if they happened to be the same man. On a bunk to Miss Withers’ right as she faced into the cabin was the sprawled body of a man, face down, one arm hanging limply over the side, fingers trailing on the floor, and one leg drawn up as if fixed there by death in a contortion of agony.

For the man, Miss Withers knew with dreadful certainty, was dead. Crouched over his body was a girl. Hearing the door open behind her, the girl straightened slowly and turned around, exposing a face coarsened by terror and drawn by fatigue. Her mouth was slightly open, and her eyes glittered like glass shards. One hand came up slowly to her mouth, as if to stop a scream. In spite of all distortions, it was a face Miss Withers, by dint of photography, recognized at once.

She had found at last the Lost Lenore.

L
ENORE GREGORY SPOKE. HER
voice was an eerie whisper that seemed to originate independently of her body, the merest breath of despair, a ghost of sound that Miss Withers could hardly hear.

“He’s dead! Oh, God, he’s dead!”

Miss Withers took a step forward into the room. Without taking her eyes off the girl, she reached behind her and shut the door. The click of the latch was like a clap of thunder in the dead silence of the room. Swiftly, moving without sound, she brushed past the frozen girl and knelt beside the body on the bunk. There was no pulse in the wrist of the dangling arm. The flesh was very warm, almost feverish. The dead man’s head was turned so that she could look into his staring eyes. His jaws were locked, as if he had died grinding his teeth in convulsive agony. Miss Withers stood erect and turned to the girl, whose rigid body seemed at that instant to break up in a massive shudder. With a shrill little whimper, she plunged suddenly across the cabin and into the head, from which came the sounds of violent retching. After a few minutes she reappeared, her face haggard and bloodless but now composed.

“Why?” Miss Withers said.

Lenore Gregory’s expression did not change. In her eyes, dark and enormous in her pale face, there was a flicker of something like wonder that died instantly. Her voice was pitched low, so that Miss Withers had to listen intently to distinguish words, but it was under control. She had, it seemed, purged herself by her attack of retching of both nausea and incipient hysteria.

“I don’t understand,” Lenore said.

“Why did you kill him?”

“Kill Captain Westering? I didn’t kill him. Why should I?”

“For no reason, I hope. It’s just as well to have the matter cleared up at once.”

“Why do you assume that he was killed at all? He had an attack of some kind. It must have been his heart. When I came back, he was lying face down in his berth. He seemed to be in pain and was having convulsions. He died just then. I didn’t even have time to call anyone.”

Miss Withers, who was no stranger to the various effects of poisons, was skeptical. Locked jaws and convulsions did not strike her as compatible with a heart attack. Moreover, while kneeling beside the body, she had looked into staring eyes and noted dilated pupils. Detectable to the sharp old nose that had been poked often before into murderous business that was really none of hers, there had been, finally, a pungent odor, faint but unmistakable, that was familiar but elusive. What was it? The answer lurked on the dark edge of her mind, waiting for light. Whatever else it was, it was the smell of murder, but Miss Withers, for the time being, did not make an issue of it. Instead, she pounced like a tabby on a particular word.

“
Back
? You say you came
back
?”

Lenore Gregory opened her mouth to answer and then closed it suddenly with a snap of teeth. A belated seriocomic expression, equal parts suspicion and astonishment, invaded her face in a delayed reaction to the apparently inexplicable presence of this mysterious and inquisitive apparition who had appeared suddenly, with no warning whatever, as if she had materialized from nothing and dropped in from nowhere. Whoever she was, she was obviously a trespasser and possibly a threat. She was as out of place on this yacht among a ragtag and bobtail collection of amateur Argonauts as a vicar in a fleshpot. No one could possibly have suspected for a moment that the angular and acrid Miss Withers, with her spinsterish aura and her absurd hat, was a tardy pilgrim to the holy lands of Zen.

“Wait a minute,” Lenore said. “Why are you asking me these questions? Who are you? Where did you come from? What do you want here?”

“There is no time to go into all that now,” Miss Withers said crisply. “Later I’ll explain everything. Now, if possible, we must see what can be done about extricating you from a very difficult position.”

“What do you mean? I came in here and found Captain Westering dying in his berth, that’s all. Why should I need to be extricated from anything?”

“It depends, I should think, on two things. First, how did Captain Westering die? Second, will the police believe your story? Precisely what, by the way,
is
your story? Perhaps you had better tell it to me briefly. If it is not plausible, we may have to edit it a little.”

“Oh, nonsense. What we had better do is call a doctor. It’s too late to do any good, of course, but there will have to be a death certificate or something.”

“That won’t be necessary. The police will supply their own doctor. They call him a medical examiner.”

“You keep harping on the police. Why should the police be involved at all?”

“Because, my dear child, Captain Westering did not die a natural death. If you have any such foolish hope, put it right out of your mind. He ingested a lethal dose of some kind of poison. He was murdered.”

“Murdered!” Lenore’s face, which had begun to recover its natural coloring, went white as chalk again. Her great dark eyes swam with resurgent terror. “What makes you think so? How could you possibly be sure?”

“You will simply have to trust me. We don’t have time for lengthy explanations, I tell you. Exactly what happened here tonight so far as you were concerned?”