Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene (9 page)

Being by nature inquisitive, Miss Withers had gathered this information bit by bit during the course of the last hour or so, some from Lenore, who had apparently decided to trust her from necessity if not from choice, and the rest by direct communication with the subjects themselves. Miss Withers was egregiously conspicuous among the hodgepodge of Argonauts aboard the vessel, a flagrant deviation from an abnormal norm who should have stirred up suspicion and distrust simply by her glaring squareness, let alone the mysterious suddenness with which she had appeared among them like death’s companion. The fact that no one did, in truth, betray any extraordinary curiosity about her or animosity toward her, excluding the muttering Prophet in his corner, was an indication, she thought, of the temper of the motley crew, who accepted anyone because anyone might appear, and expected anything because anything might happen. Even, thought Miss Withers grimly, murder.

“Socrates!” said Miss Withers suddenly.

Al Fister, who had been looking at Lenore from the corners of his eyes across Miss Withers’ spare bosom, leaped as if the spinster had ripped out a smoking oath and stabbed him with her hatpin for indulging in improper fantasy, which he very nearly had been.

“What?”

“Parsnips!” said Miss Withers.

Al examined Miss Withers with an expression divided between anxiety and apprehension. He had always known, of course, that the old girl was a little balmy, probably the effect of prolonged abstinence, but she had appeared to possess a certain shrewdness combined with admirable tenacity and mental toughness. He had not anticipated that she might under exceptional stress fall apart at the seams.

“Miss Withers,” he said, “have you flipped?”

“If you mean what I think you mean,” Miss Withers replied with some asperity, “I most certainly have not. Nor am I likely to. Someone must remain sane in this assembly of maniacs.”

“I thought I heard you mention Socrates and parsnips.”

“So I did. A logical association of thoughts. I might have reversed the order, of course, but that’s of no matter.”

“Well, you know my limitations. UCLA drop-out and all that. Logic isn’t one of my strong points.”

“Socrates was an Athenian philosopher. Even your limited education should have made you aware of that. He was charged with corrupting the young of the city and was put to death for it, an extreme penalty which, if applied impartially today for the same reason, would have the guilty queued up outside every execution chamber in the country. That, however, is not the point. The point is, the Athenian method of execution was the oral ingestion of poison. Specifically, hemlock. If you are interested, Plato has left us a graphic account of Socrates’ death.”

“What I’m interested in is what this has to do with anything else you’d care to mention.”

“If you’ll please not interrupt, I’ll explain. When I was bending over the body of Captain Westering, I detected a faint pungent odor that I couldn’t quite identify. Later, when I sniffed the cream sherry that killed him, I detected the same odor. It was a common odor, one that I had smelled often before, and I’ve just now recalled what it was. It was the odor of parsnips. Hemlock and the parsnip are, I believe, members of the same botanical family. They smell alike, and the deadly roots of the former have the same appearance as the edible roots of the latter. Hemlock grows wild in this area. Livestock is sometimes poisoned by eating it. The roots are fat and filled with fluid. When cut, they bleed. Any knowledgeable person could easily collect enough of the fluid to poison half of San Francisco. You may be sure that it was used to kill Captain Westering, who was, I fear, no Socrates.”

“Come off, Miss Withers. Are you trying to tell me that some kook who knew about the Socrates scene, the corruption bit and all, actually
executed
this Captain Westering for the same reason?”

“No. It’s an intriguing hypothesis, and I don’t doubt that the good captain was guilty of his own brand of corruption, but it isn’t, unfortunately, tenable. Captain Westering was killed by accident. The intended victim, I’m convinced, was Lenore.”

This was news to Al. To judge from his expression, news of the most disturbing sort. Naked in his distress, so to speak, he now looked openly at Lenore with alarm and fierce protectiveness laid bare in his homely face among the freckles. Miss Withers, no stranger to the vicarious experience of romance, could almost hear the simmering of vital juices.

“What makes you think so?” Al said.

“I have good reason. Lenore will tell you later, perhaps, if she wishes to do so. Meanwhile, if I’m right, there may be a second attempt. We must take every possible precaution to guard against it.”

The other people in the room had gone on all this while with their own conversations—the dancer with the folk singer, the ex-policeman with the waitress, the Prophet with himself or his groovy gods. The quiet huddle in the corner had drawn no special attention, the three subdued voices no attuned ear. The sporadic attention of the Prophet Onofre, accompanied by frenzied mutterings, was restricted to Miss Withers alone and was prompted by pure, irrational animus that was innocent of curiosity. Al, Miss Withers’ grim warning still thundering silently in his brain, was plucking his nether lip, his brow furrowed by the giant effort of extraordinary cerebral action.

“I wonder who it was that left this tub while I was waiting on the dock?” he said.

“What!” Miss Withers’ voice was soft but sharp. “You saw someone leave?”

“That’s right. I just said so.”

“Why didn’t you intercept him?”

“Why should I? I didn’t know then that a murder had been committed aboard.”

“Of course. You had no way of knowing. Did you get a good look at this person, whoever he was?”

“Well, how good a look can you get in the fog at night? Besides, he was moving pretty fast. All I got was a kind of general impression when he walked under a light on the dock. He wasn’t too tall. About average, I guess. He was wearing a jacket, I think, and a pair of white sneakers. His hair was long, like a hippie’s, and I’m pretty sure he was wearing a pair of dark glasses. That’s about all.”

“It’s something, at least. I don’t suppose you could find more than a few thousand around Haight-Ashbury or Berkeley or Sausalito who would fit the same general description. What time was it when you saw him?”

“Right after you went aboard. As a matter of fact, I thought at the time you must have seen him on deck.”

“I didn’t. Which suggests that he took
care
that I didn’t. If he was below in the captain’s cabin, he must have come up from the passage just seconds before I went down. Moreover, if he was there, it had to be during the time when Lenore was away looking for her friend. Captain Kelso should have this information. Drat the man! What could he be doing in there all this time?”

Which was, of course, merely an expression of Miss Withers’ annoyance and frustration. Veteran herself of more than one murder investigation, confidante and companion of Inspector Oscar Piper, Homicide, NYPD, she knew perfectly well what Captain Kelso was doing. He was doing a great deal, and doing it thoroughly, and he was seeing that a great deal more was done and done thoroughly by others. And it all took time. Suspects, meanwhile, including Hildegarde Withers, could only wait with whatever patience they could muster.

If Miss Withers’ patience was nearly at an end, so was her waiting. They had all been conscious throughout their period of detention of a miscellany of sounds around them—goings and comings in the passage outside, knocks and taps and scuffling in the stateroom next door, the rising and falling murmur of voices, punctuated now and then by a sharp bark, a discernible word. And now they were suddenly conscious of relative silence, unnatural silence, silence threaded with only the creaks and groans of the old vessel herself, wallowing at her dock, and the persistent soft lapping of dark water at the piles.

At that moment the door to the passage was opened, and Captain Kelso lumbered two steps into the room. His eyes culled the occupants and came to rest on Miss Withers. Lifting a meaty paw, he crooked a finger. “Sorry to keep you waiting so long, ma’am,” he said, with more deference than Miss Withers had expected. “Still, I imagine you know well enough how these things go. If you will come with me now, please.”

M
ISS WITHERS WENT WITH
alacrity. Captain Kelso’s new and welcome touch of deference persisted. He even held the stateroom door open for her and allowed her to precede him into the quarters that had been occupied by the late Captain Westering. The captain himself, or what had been left of him, was now gone. The room showed unmistakable signs, obvious to an experienced eye, of the thorough investigation that had been made in here by skilled men who knew their jobs. A thin dust of powder had been left here and there, for example, by some disciple of Bertillon in what Miss Withers predicted silently would turn out to be a meticulous exercise in futility. Not that there would be a dearth of fingerprints. On the contrary, there would surely be a plethora. It was impossible to imagine otherwise on this weird vessel packed with undisciplined oddballs who must have slept three-deep at night and wandered almost at will when awake, even in and out of the sacrosanct captain’s cabin. Except, of course, when the captain had been engaged in private conference with one of the crew-passengers, probably one of the prettier girls, and took appropriate steps to prevent interruption. The decanter, Miss Withers saw at once, had vanished.

Captain Kelso, now that he had brought her here, seemed to forget about her completely. He lumbered about with apparent aimlessness, paradoxically quick and quiet in the pursuit of nothing. He stood for a moment in the center of the room, staring at the floor. He moved to the berth where the captain’s body had lain and stood staring down at the place where it lay no longer. He went over to the chest and pondered the place where the decanter had been. He even lumbered into the head and out again. From a hip pocket of his trousers he took a huge wad of soggy handkerchief and scrubbed his massive dome with it.

“This is it,” he said.

“This is what?” Miss Withers asked.

“The blue-ribbon winner. The living end. Whatever you want to call it, this is it. I’ve been a cop in this town for forty years, most of them connected one way or another with homicide, and I’ve been on cases from the waterfront and Chinatown to Nob Hill and back again. I’ve run the gamut from nabob to hippie. This is San Francisco. We get all kinds here, and I thought I’d met them all. I thought there was nothing left to see and nowhere else to go. My mistake.” He shook his massive head from side to side, scrubbed it again with his soggy rag, and pushed the rag back into his hip pocket. “This,” he said, “tops them all. This is the finest assembly of assorted nuts that I’ve ever had the rare privilege of meeting up with, privately or professionally.”

Miss Withers, quite naturally, was indignant. She expressed her indignation. “Thank you very much,” she said.

“Present company excepted, of course.” His little fermented eyes rested significantly on her startling headpiece, which seemed to have some spiritual relationship with the city’s famous hangover of Victorian architecture, and she had the definite impression that his exception lacked conviction. “You told me you were here on some kind of unofficial mission for the New York police.”

“That’s true. Specifically, for Inspector Oscar Piper.”

“I know it’s true. I’ve checked it out.”

“You’ve talked with Oscar?”

“Not personally. I had a call put through from headquarters.”

“I trust that Oscar was not too unpleasantly surprised.”

“As I get it, he wasn’t exactly surprised at all. More like resigned, he seemed to be. The lieutenant who put through the call said he said something like, ‘Judas Priest, not again!’ And then he said something like, ‘I ought to have my head examined.’ Maybe you can tell me what he meant.”

“Nothing at all. Oscar is an irascible old curmudgeon. He was simply being unkind and unjust.”

“Maybe so. Anyhow, he finally got around to vouching for you, and he said he’d appreciate all consideration we could show you. All right. I’m a considerate man, if nothing else. Will you please return the favor by telling me exactly what in the devil brought you into this unholy mess?”

“Certainly. I’ve been searching for a girl name Lenore Gregory. She disappeared quite some time ago from her home in Manhattan. Or, more exactly, she disappeared while she was presumably attending school in New England. It seemed to be indicated that she had gone to Los Angeles, and her father, who is a substantial citizen in Manhattan, wanted her found as quietly as possible. He made his way to Inspector Piper, who is actually head of Homicide and shouldn’t have been involved, and that’s where I came in. I worked with Oscar on certain homicide cases when I was a resident of New York, but I’ve since taken up residence in Santa Monica, and so Oscar naturally thought that I, being on the scene, so to speak, might be able to help. To cut my account short, I traced the girl to San Francisco and to this dock, and I found her tonight aboard this vessel.”

“I know. Standing over the body of a murdered man.”

“I explained that. She had been in the stateroom earlier and had left to look for a friend. When she returned, after finding her friend, she discovered Captain Westering dying in his berth, where he had apparently thrown himself when he began to feel ill. He died while she was standing over him, before she could cry out or run for help.”

“Let me remind you. That’s
her
explanation. Not
yours
.”

“So it is. And I believe it. It is simply impossible to suspect that child of murder.”

“Child? Does a child run away from home and over three thousand miles across a continent to join a crazy expedition of some sort with a collection of questionable kooks?”

“That, I think, if you see what I mean, is precisely the kind of thing that a child
would
do.”

Captain Kelso took time to look at her with a glimmer of grudging respect in his sour eyes. “I see what you mean, all right. Some people take a long time to grow up, and some never do. Like the current rash. Flower children all over the place, full of love and dreams and psychedelic drugs, perennial believers in fairy tales. Nevertheless, children have committed murder before. You know that as well as I do. Cops are simple people, and they like to
keep
things simple. When a girl is found standing over the body of a murdered man, with not a single witness to what happened before, she’s the best suspect around until a better one comes along.”