Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene (12 page)

“The policeman who brought you here will drive you home,” he said. “Good night.”

Aletha Westering nodded but did not speak. Alura O’Higgins neither nodded nor spoke. The former stood up, shook out her clinging white robe, and walked regally past Captain Kelso, followed by the latter. Captain Kelso closed the door and leaned against it and closed his eyes. His lips moved. Miss Withers could not tell if he was cursing or praying.

“That woman,” said Miss Withers, “not only
tells
lies, she
lives
lies. She deludes herself and believes her delusions.”

“Sure.” Captain Kelso opened his fermented little eyes and released a malevolent look at Miss Withers. “She’s a phony. The world’s full of them. This tub is crawling with them.”

“You’re mistaken. I didn’t say she’s a phony. I said she’s deluded. She believes at any given time whatever she wishes to believe. Such women are dangerous.”

“If you ask me,
all
women are dangerous. I’m beginning to believe that even
you
are dangerous. You show up like a spook at the scene of a murder, and the next thing I know, I’m letting you act like a detective.”

His little eyes were still malevolent, but actually, if the truth were known, he was beginning already to develop a certain affection for the angular old busybody. Once, a thousand years ago, he had been a small boy with red ringlets, and in that medieval period he had had a mother whom he sometimes remembered. Mr. Kelso, husband and father, having fallen off Pier 36 and drowned while drunk, she had become a seamstress in order to survive. Hardship and worry had made her short of temper and shorter of forbearance. He could still feel for his sins the excruciating rap of her thimble on his skull. Miss Withers, for some obscure reason, conjured up visions of this faded, benevolent tartar.

“Consider her behavior relative to Captain Westering,” Miss Withers said, deliberately ignoring the digression. “Here is a man who, according to her, exercises a fatal charm over the ladies, and yet she goes off to live in Sausalito with her sister, leaving him to his own devices with a passel of attractive young women, all of them apparently romantic and susceptible, under conditions that literally impose extraordinary intimacy. I wonder why.”

“You heard her.” Captain Kelso’s voice had the effect of a belch, as though something had soured on his stomach. “What sensible wife would get upset over a little hocus-pocus in the hay? It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t purified by love.”

A
FTERWARD, MISS WITHERS ALWAYS
remembered the action of the rest of that night, or rather of the long hours of the morning creeping toward dawn, as a kind of mad drama written by a schizophrenic playwright at which she and Captain Kelso were, somehow, both spectators and players, and in which, otherwise, of a large cast, never more than one player at a time was on the stage. The effect was disturbing. It was of the insubstantial stuff of nightmares. Miss Withers had never smoked pot or taken LSD or any of the other so-called psychedelic drugs which were supposed to enlarge the mind and set it free, but she wondered, if she were to do so, if the effect would not be comparable. Maybe it was because her mind, in those thin and haunting hours when the force of life sinks low and death stands by, had slipped its discipline in a fantasy of mad antics and impressions. Maybe it was because, after a day of almost endless hours in which she had traveled far and done much, she was simply giddy from sheer exhaustion. Whatever the truth, it was a night she remembered as a weird dream in swirling vivid colors. A night in which, in spite of incontrovertible evidence of reality, she could hardly believe.

The players entered one by one from the wings, actually from the two small staterooms into which they had long ago been herded. Entrance cues were fed to them by a heavy-eyed detective in the passage who kept himself awake by imagining the incredible luxury of being asleep. Of the cast of players waiting, two made no appearance. One was Lenore, because she had been thoroughly grilled by Captain Kelso at the start of the show, and the other was Aloysius Fister, because it was satisfactorily established that he, like Miss Withers, was really no more than a kibitzer who had been embroiled simply by accidentally making the scene.

The action was started by the Prophet Onofre, possibly on the theory that it is best to face the worst first. Prodded from the rear by the detective, he loped into the captain’s cabin with his scanty white robe flapping around his thin shanks midway between knees and ankles. His baleful glare fixed instantly upon the face of Miss Withers, who clearly excited an extraordinary animosity, and his lips moved in muttered imprecations. His fury and outrage seemed to charge him with an electrical force that made his grizzled, greasy beard and the long hair of his head, ordinarily limp, stand out in all directions and quiver like the antennas of some monstrous myriopod.

Kelso: What is your name?

Onofre: I am the Prophet Onofre.

Kelso: What is your
real
name?

Onofre: My real name is the Prophet Onofre. I have no other.

Kelso: Did you ever have another?

Onofre: Before my rebirth to grace, I used another name.

Kelso: What was it?

Onofre: In those days of iniquity I was called Sylvester Snyder.

Kelso: All right, Sylvester, where do you live?

Onofre: I live where I am, wherever that may be.

Kelso: No permanent address. What do you do?

Onofre: I bring light into darkness. I proselyte in the wilderness among the children of night.

Kelso: No occupation. Why are you on this vessel?

Onofre: I came in the beginning of a pilgrimage. I heard the call of distant lands, the voices of ancient prophets.

Kelso: Come off it. What put you onto this screwball voyage?

Onofre: There was a notice in the San Francisco
Chronicle
.

Kelso: That’s more like it. I understand this was to be a cooperative venture. Everyone to share expenses and work, I mean. What have you contributed?

Onofre: I would have led the pilgrims safely to distant ports over angry waters. I live in grace. I have been touched by the spirit.

Kelso: What spirit?

Onofre: The spirit of light. The spirit of love. The spirit that lives in the hearts of the flower children.

Kelso: You’re the prophet of the flower children?

Onofre: I have spoken.

Kelso: Self-appointed?

Onofre: I have been touched by the spirit. I have heard the voice.

Kelso: All right, Sylvester. Let’s get back to contributions. Have you laid out any hard cash?

Onofre: I am possessed of none of this world’s goods, except the poor rags that cover my nakedness. My wealth is of the spirit.

Kelso: I see. A free-loader.

Onofre: I am fed by those who love me. I am sheltered by those who follow after truth in my footsteps.

Kelso (harshly, clearly sick of the game): Captain Westering died here in this cabin tonight. He died, as nearly as we can set the time, about nine o’clock or a little before. Where were you at that time?

Onofre: I was pacing the docks with a heavy heart and a troubled mind. I had walked in the bitterness of my trial all the way along the Embarcadero to the vicinity of the old Barbary Coast and back again. I suppose, at nine o’clock, I was again approaching this vessel, but still some distance away.

Kelso: What was troubling you?

Onofre: I was troubled by the character and true nature of the man I had taken in good faith to be my captain on this pilgrimage.

Kelso: Captain Westering? What about him?

Onofre: He was a libertine, a monstrous fraud, a godless wretch.

Kelso: What made you think so?

Onofre: I am attuned to evil by the spirit of good. I was filled with fury and despair by the things that happened aboard this vessel.

Kelso: What things?

Onofre: I will speak no further of evil. Already I have spoken too much. Where it grows, I will root it out.

Kelso: As the citizens around Haight-Ashbury would say, rooting out evil seems to be your thing.

Onofre: It is my mission. Evil is insidious. It infiltrates the society of innocents in the guise of good. Even my poor flower children are tempted on all sides by the devils of evil. I have been called to destroy them.

Kelso: Brother, you’ve got a job! But you’re talking now like an Old Testament eye-and-toother. What happened to love and light? Where’s your other cheek?

Onofre: I have been given special dispensation. I am under holy orders to root out evil by any method, wherever it appears.

Kelso: Are you, now! Did you have holy orders, for instance, to root out Captain Westering? The term’s appropriate, come to think of it. Did you come across some water hemlock somewhere when you were living, maybe, on roots and berries in the wilderness?

Onofre: I know nothing of hemlock. I did not kill Captain Westering.

Kelso: You didn’t bleed a few hemlock roots and slip the juice in the captain’s sherry?

Onofre: I did no harm to Captain Westering. I did not lift my hand against him. I returned to remonstrate with him, that’s all, and found him dead. Let the woman speak! (Pointing at Miss Withers with dramatic sternness, very much as Uncle Sam pointed from posters at shoe clerks during the Kaiser’s war in Miss Withers’ youth.) She was bending over his body when I came! (Not quite true, inasmuch as Miss Withers had been, in fact, standing a pace or two away from the body with her back to it.)

Kelso (rubbing his bald scalp with his wad of handkerchief): You could have poisoned the sherry any time before. That’s the hell of this mess. But let it go for now. That’s all, Sylvester. You can go back to detention.

Captain Kelso stopped rubbing his scalp and stowed the wad in a pocket of his limp jacket. “I’ve got to step this up,” he said glumly, “or we’ll be here from now on. What did you think of Sylvester as a starter?”

“He is,” said Miss Withers, “as mad as the Hatter or the most consummate fraud since Cagliostro. Possibly he is some of both.”

“With maybe a little Borgia thrown in for good measure. What do you think of him as a suspect?”

“Fanatics who follow the dictates of God are dangerous. They are always right, always justified in any atrocity, and they always have, besides, someone to pass the buck to if they are caught.”

Captain Kelso, who was secretly a modest and uncertain man, never quite sure of anything, let alone right and wrong, stared at the floor with a sour expression that was far from an accurate reflection of his true feeling. The more he was around this old sister, the more he liked her. No wonder she had been able to gull the whole damn Homicide Bureau of the New York Police Department. He tried to think of a left-handed amenity that wouldn’t reveal too much of what he was thinking, but before he could come up with anything, the door opened again, and the ex-policeman was ushered in. He stood quietly in front of Captain Kelso, who was seated at a small table with his notebook spread open before him, and Miss Withers was suddenly aware of deadly tension in the cabin. It was as if, she thought, the air was suddenly saturated with an odorless and sensitive gas that would explode in a blinding flash at the slightest disturbance—a raised voice, an abrupt gesture, a heated word.

Kelso (his voice flat, almost a monotone, clearly under rigid control): Nathan Silversmith, spy, pervert, sadist, turncoat.

Silversmith: I see that you remember me, Captain.

Kelso: How could I forget you? But never mind that. What are you doing on this tub? You a flower child these days?

Silversmith: I’ve seen the light, Captain. I’ve been touched by grace. The Prophet Onofre has shown me the error of my ways.

Kelso: Like hell. Who are you spying for now? Who planted you in this flock of doves?

Silversmith: Captain, you hurt me. I seem to smell the faint odor of prejudice.

Kelso: Before we’re through with this business you may be smelling cyanide.

Silversmith: For killing the good captain? I hate to disappoint you, but you’re down the wrong road. Why should I kill him?

Kelso: Why not? Just a bad habit, maybe. You killed your wife, didn’t you?

Silversmith (quietly venomous): Cool it, Captain. That’s criminal slander.

Kelso: Sue me. Before you do, though, you can answer a few questions. Where were you when Captain Westering died?

Silversmith: When did he die?

Kelso: Nine. Thereabouts.

Silversmith: I was ashore, smelling the oyster pots.

Kelso: Where ashore?

Silversmith: At Fisherman’s Wharf. In a bar on the Embarcadero.

Kelso: What time did you get back?

Silversmith: Early. Must have been shortly after the good captain’s passing. You and your heat hadn’t made the scene yet.

Kelso: Did you see anyone on the dock as you approached?

Silversmith: There was someone standing there, like he was waiting for someone or snooping. The fog was heavy. I couldn’t see him very well.

Kelso: I know about him. Anyone else? Someone moving away?

Silversmith: No one else.

Kelso: A hippie? Long hair, dark glasses, in a hurry.

Silversmith: You’re bugging me, Captain. I told you no. No one.

Kelso: What did you do when you came aboard?

Silversmith: There were three chicks and a couple of cats in the stateroom at the fore end of the passage. Just having a quiet ball to pass the time. Listening to that long Texas cat sing folk songs. I invited myself in. Crashed the pad, as they say in the Hashberry.

Kelso: Did you see or hear anything unusual while you were there?

Silversmith (looking at Miss Withers): Not until this old chick suddenly materialized in the doorway and told us that murder had been done and the cops called.

Kelso: You were a cop once. A rogue cop, maybe, but still a cop. You’ve been living here in a litter of kooks long enough to have a notion or two. Who do you think poisoned Captain Westering?

Silversmith: Sorry, Captain. Get your own notions.

Kelso: I’ve already told you who my favorite suspect is. Or didn’t you get the point? You. Nathan Silversmith. Now tell me yours.