Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene (8 page)

“Well, Captain Westering asked me to see him in his state-room tonight. In here, I mean. To discuss things about the voyage we were going to make. It was supposed to be a kind of cooperative voyage, with everyone chipping in whatever he could, and I had more to contribute than some of the others, and so Captain Westering seemed to feel that that gave me a right to sort of be on the inside and have a kind of voice in things. Anyhow, he discussed things with me and asked my advice and all, and that’s why he wanted to see me tonight.”

“How much have you contributed to this fantastic venture?”

“It’s not fantastic. Nothing of the sort. At least, it wasn’t until now. I had about a thousand dollars when I arrived, and I got another thousand by selling my Volkswagen.”

“That’s a considerable sum. What has been done with it?”

“I’m not sure. Perhaps Aletha would know.”

“Who’s Aletha?”

“She’s Captain Westering’s wife. Or was. I have to keep reminding myself that he’s dead.”

“Where is she now?”

“Living conditions are rather crowded here on the yacht, so she’s been staying with her sister in Sausalito. She’s there now, I guess. I don’t know.”

“All right. We’ve digressed again, and we haven’t time. Finish telling me what happened. Be as brief as you can.”

“Nothing much happened, really. After dinner, which mostly came out of cans, Captain Westering asked me to meet him later in his cabin. I said I would, and when I got here he had out the decanter of sherry that he kept for me because I can’t seem to drink strong liquor without getting sick, and not very much of the sherry, but then I remembered that I’d agreed earlier to go ashore with another girl here on the yacht. Rebecca Welch. I told Captain Westering that I’d be back in a short while and went to find Rebecca, to tell her I couldn’t go ashore with her, and finally I found her in the crew quarters. We talked for a while, and then I came back here and found Captain Westering just dying in his berth, and right afterward you were suddenly here too.”

“You must have come down the passage just ahead of me. We barely missed each other. How long were you gone after leaving Captain Westering?”

“It must have been half an hour or so. As I said, I had to look for Rebecca, and then we talked.”

“I see. The story is plausible enough. How many of your collection of Argonauts knew that Captain Westering kept a special supply of sherry for your consumption when you visited him in his cabin?”

“I don’t know. It was no secret.”

“Is that it there on top of that chest?”

“I think so. Yes, I’m sure it is.”

Miss Withers crossed to the chest and examined the decanter without touching it. With her handkerchief she removed the stopper and sniffed the contents, bending over and poking her nose close to he opening. Lacing the odor of the sherry there was, just barely detectable, the same scent that had bugged Miss Withers’ memory before. A common scent that she should recognize. The scent of death and what else? Miss Withers carefully replaced the stopper. On the chest beside the decanter were two glasses. One of the glasses had been drunk from. The nutty odor of the sherry lingered in it. Captain Westering, waiting for the return of Lenore, had clearly helped himself to a glass while waiting. Too bad for Captain Westering. The sherry had surely killed him.

“You,” said Miss Withers, “are a very lucky young lady.”

“Lucky?”

“Indeed. The poison, whatever it is, is in the sherry. Does that suggest anything to you?”

Lenore was silent, her breath caught in her throat, and Miss Withers, watching her intently, was forced to give her points. Within that almost fragile loveliness was surely a stout heart. A pulse throbbed in her throat, and her dark eyes flared. Otherwise, she showed no sign of shock.

“Who would want to kill me?”

“That’s a very good question. I suggest that you think about it seriously.”

“It isn’t necessary to think about it at all. I’ve only known these people about a week. A day or two longer. Just since I got here.”

“I could name a few murderers, my dear, who were complete strangers to their victims. Did Captain Westering make a practice of inviting you into his cabin for sherry?”

“I told you. We discussed the voyage. While I was here I usually had a glass of sherry.”

“From this decanter?”

“Yes. As I said, Captain Westering kept it especially for me.

“Did he ever have a drink from the same decanter?”

“I don’t recall that he did. He drank something else. Scotch, I think. He made fun of me a little because of the sherry. Because I couldn’t drink stronger liquors, I mean.”

“It’s not, I should say, a particularly regrettable deficiency. Never mind that, though. You can surely see that the poison, having been put into the decanter, must have been intended for you.”

“How do you know it was put into the decanter?”

“My senses are still quite good, young lady, including my sense of smell. The poison is in the decanter. You may be certain of that.”

“What kind of poison?”

“I’m not positive. I can’t quite identify the odor.”

“Then how do you know it’s poison?”

Miss Withers had been warned that Lenore Gregory was a headstrong young lady. She was now more than prepared to believe it. Resisting an impulse to shake the girl until her teeth rattled, she answered with a crisp tone of authority, very much as she had used to address an obstreperous small fry back in her days as a schoolma’am.

“I don’t intend to discuss the matter now. You’ll see for yourself in good time. You don’t seem to understand, young lady, that I’m trying to help you. Can’t you see that your position is perilous? I think someone has tried to kill you, and he has only failed by the merest chance. That, however, may not be the position of the police. I’ve had considerable experience with the police in cases like this, and I’ve observed that they invariably have a powerful penchant for the obvious. I stepped into this stateroom and found you bending over the body of a murdered man. Their first assumption will be that I surprised you in the act of murder.”

“That’s insane. Absolutely crazy. I admired Captain Westering. Why should I kill him and ruin all our plans?”

“We’ll get to those plans later. For the moment, I wonder if it would be indelicate to ask just what expression your admiration took?”

“If you’re asking if we were lovers, we were not.” And lifting her head in a little gesture of pride that struck Miss Withers as being somehow pathetic, she added defiantly, “Not yet, anyhow.”

“I’ve no doubt that Captain Westering was a romantic and persuasive man,” Miss Withers said drily. “And you, my dear, are a lovely and impulsive girl. A highly combustible mixture of qualities, if I may say so. Perhaps what your precise relationship was is not important. What may be much more important is what someone
thought
it was. We’ll know in time. Now we’ve delayed long enough. We must act.”

“Well, you seem to have taken charge. Tell me what to do.”

Miss Withers was silent for a minute, thinking. She could hear, coming from the forward stateroom, an undulating drone of sound, voices rising and falling in talk and song, and she realized that the sound had been there all the time as a kind of background to the silence of this grim room, which seemed somehow unbroken even by the hushed and urgent words of the elderly woman and the young woman standing there in the presence of death. It was strange, Miss Withers thought. Strange that a man could die alone in an agony of convulsions a few short yards from company and help. Why hadn’t Captain Westering cried out or staggered into the passage? Had the poison that killed him, whatever it was, been too swift and deadly? Or had he, feeling the poison’s first effects, simply crawled into his berth unsuspecting, thinking they would pass and realizing too late that they would not?

“On the dock,” Miss Withers said, “you will find a young man waiting for me. His name is Al Fister. Go and tell him to find a phone and call the police. Tell him to return as quickly as he can and to see that no one leaves this vessel before the police arrive. You will, of course, come back aboard to wait with the rest of us.”

Lenore Gregory turned to go, and at that moment the stateroom door suddenly flew open without a sound to reveal against the background of the short passage one of the most startling male creatures that Miss Withers, fresh though she was from the haunts of hippies, had ever seen. Tall, perhaps six-six, and thin as a slat, he wore a soiled white robe that flapped around his thin shanks some eight inches above the ankles. On his feet, otherwise bare, were Jesus sandals bound on with leather thongs. His hair was long and grizzled and greasy, hanging to his shoulders, and a grizzled beard, growing like a thicket from most of his face, hung down his front as far as a length of hemp rope that girded his waist. From this encroaching coppice of hair, set tight on either side against a bulbous nose, were two glittering little eyes that glared over Miss Withers’ shoulder at the body of Captain Westering. He looked, Miss Withers thought, like an obscene caricature of Moses. His voice, when he spoke, had a curious hollow sound, as if he were talking into an empty barrel.

“What are you doing here?” he said. “
What have you done to Captain Westering
?”

M
ISS WITHERS, LIKE A
solid Victorian period piece, stood grimly in a corner, removed slightly in space and immeasurably in spirit from the litter of human odds and ends that shared the stateroom with her. Besides her, there were seven people in the room. Flanking her on either side, casting covert glances of curiosity at each other across her spinsterish bosom, were Al Fister and Lenore Gregory. They had assumed their positions on Miss Withers’ flanks in a kind of mutual and unspoken commitment, prepared on one hand to defend her against all comers, and deriving from her nearness, on the other, a measure of comfort and confidence. By Lenore, as a matter of fact, Al was incited to even more elevated reactions. Her dark, ascetic loveliness had burst upon him like a revelation on the dark dock in salt-scented fog, and he had been feeling ever since all thumping heart and outsized hands and feet. Sensing at once, even before his sense was confirmed, that she was somehow threatened by events, he had begun to burst with Quixotic fancies.

In another corner, sitting cross-legged on the floor with his thin shanks exposed, was the startling creature who had materialized earlier in the captain’s stateroom like a soiled avenging angel to catch Miss Withers and Lenore in what appeared to be a shocking crime. Now, in his corner, he glared at the floor in front of him and engaged in a running monologue of dire mutterings. Every once in a while he would look up directly at Miss Withers. The sight of her seemed to arouse him to a perfect fury of invective, for his mutterings would rise abruptly in volume and tempo, sound tumbling over sound in a welter of gibberish. Miss Withers could make no sense of any of it. So far as she could tell, he was invoking in his private tongue the wrath of his personal gods. For her incomprehension she was thankful. She had an uneasy feeling that the gibberish, given sense, would have been unfit for the ears of an elderly virgin.

Miss Withers had been summarily herded into this small stateroom, which was next to the captain’s and between his and the one in which, when she boarded the vessel, she had heard singing and the sound of talking. Her shepherd had been a certain offensive man called Captain Kelso, head of the Homicide Bureau of the San Francisco police. He was a hulk of a man, with a bald dome and a beefy face that turned apoplectic-scarlet at the slightest provocation. He seemed to move awkwardly, in a lumbering gait, but Miss Withers had noticed that he managed, nevertheless, to get things done quietly and swiftly. After listening without expression to her preliminary account of events, and clearly feeling no need for her assistance in the investigation, which she was prepared to offer, he had ordered her in here to wait, and here she was, over an hour later, still waiting. Quite naturally, she resented such treatment. She could hardly avoid the feeling that one who had been accorded prerogatives by the Inspector of Homicide, NYPD, should be accorded at least equal prerogatives by the Head of Homicide, SFPD, who was, after all, only a captain.

In the stateroom next door, division being dictated by cramped quarters, another group of unlikely Argonauts awaited the pleasure of the police. Here in this one with Miss Withers and Lenore and Al were the Prophet Onofre, muttering curses or imprecations in his corner, and four others divided equally between the sexes. There was an obscure dancer from Los Angeles, wearing black leotards under a skirt not much longer than a figure skater’s. She was sitting sidewise on a bunk, talking to a male folk singer from Dallas, Texas, who lay stretched out with his arms folded up and under his head. The calves of the dancer’s legs were knotted with muscle. The folk singer’s hair was dark red and very long, hippie style, which meant no style at all so far as Miss Withers could tell, except freedom to grow as long as it might in any direction it was inclined.

On a worn sofa which must have served someone as a bed at night, inasmuch as a pair of sheets and a thin blanket were folded up at one end, sat a blond waitress from Denver and an ex-policeman from San Francisco. They made, all in all, a rather terrifying couple. The waitress had pale hair, silvery in the dim light, with the most incredibly perfect face and the emptiest eyes that Miss Withers had ever seen. One saw such eyes, sometimes, in the faces of idiots.

Her companion on the sofa was a slender young man, about thirty. Among the deviants on the vessel, fantastic Argonauts collected from God knew where for God knew what, he acquired somehow a sinister quality from being ordinary. His light brown hair was neatly trimmed and combed. He had a plain face, like the one next door or down the block. He was wearing a white cardigan sweater over a white T-shirt, both of which were clean, and a pair of navy-blue slacks that had been recently pressed. Over his eyes he wore a pair of glasses, tinted lenses in heavy plastic frames, which he removed every once in a while and held briefly by the bridge between a thumb and index finger, the exact repetition of an unconscious habit. Once he had turned his uncovered eyes directly upon Miss Withers, and she had felt in that moment a sudden chill pass through her flesh. The eyes were dark and lusterless, dead in their sockets, and she had an extravagant notion that they had looked for centuries, through countless reincarnations, on enduring evil. It was absurd, of course. The man was simply an ex-policeman. Probably a debased fellow who had been fired from the force for some kind of corruption, a hound who had joined the hares.