Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene (22 page)

“Lenore,” she said, “you have stated that your letter to Bud Hoffman was returned to you.”

“Yes, I have, and it was.”

“Then it’s obvious that he didn’t learn of your whereabouts from a letter that he never read. Perhaps he was told, as you suggest, by the second man, the one who told you about Captain Westering’s plans in the first place, but somehow I doubt it. I am beginning, in fact, to get an altogether new slant on Mr. Bud Hoffman.”

Inspector Piper grunted and made a short slapping gesture of exasperation. An unofficial kibitzer, he nevertheless butted in. “All right, Hildy! I know you. You’ve got something on your mind as well as in your hands. Let’s have it!”

“I am beginning to suspect,” said Miss Withers, “that Bud Hoffman was able to follow Lenore because he knew where she was going before she ever left. Indeed, I am beginning to suspect that he knew of her plans before he ever went to New York and deliberately cultivated her acquaintance. He would have had no trouble getting on with the Committee of Artists for Peace, surely. Such committees generally operate on a shoestring. They are happy to get workers as they can, cheap or gratis, with few questions asked.”

“Come off it,” Captain Kelso growled. “How the hell could he have known that Lenore was with the Committee? And even if he’d known, why the hell should he want to join her there?”

“I can only speculate, of course. But it is speculation clearly indicated by what I’m now certain of. Later, no doubt, we shall learn if I am right or not. In the first place, I submit that he learned where Lenore was working, and of her plans to join the voyage, right here in San Francisco. In fact, aboard the
Karma
. Probably from Lenore’s correspondence with Captain Westering. Surreptitiously, of course. As a trespasser and a spy on the
Karma
, unknown to the captain or Aletha or Alura. In the second place, I submit that he went East to New York to
intercept
Lenore. To try to prevent her joining the voyage and giving it the financial support it desperately needed. He must have learned or guessed from her correspondence that Lenore was from a wealthy family, and possibly he had an exaggerated idea of the amount of support she could have contributed. But this scheme developed complications, for he became emotionally involved with Lenore, as we know from what we have been told, and he could take no approach with her that would incriminate himself and ruin his own chances. In brief, he wanted to marry her, a development, if he could have brought it off, which would have offered the double satisfaction of a profitable alliance for himself and revenge on the captain.”

“Revenge!” Captain Kelso, almost frantic in his frustration and impatience, was on the brink of a jig. “Why the hell would he want revenge?”

Miss Withers slowly brought her hands from behind her back and held them out in front. In her right hand, dangling by an earpiece, was a pair of dark glasses. In her left, a limp object somehow obscene, was a cheap, shaggy wig.

“Unless I am greatly mistaken,” she said, “you will find that Al’s hippie and Bud Hoffman and Bruno Wagner are one and the same person.”

M
ISS WITHERS FLOATED IN
strange and shadowed lassitude in that dreamy half-life between waking and sleeping. She was aware of her body and where it was, but she had no conviction that it would respond to her will. She knew where it had been and how it had gotten to its present place and condition, and she had a notion that it was now late in a day following a long, bad night, but she seemed to be perversely indifferent to all that had been or might be, and to any faint proddings of her mind that she ought to be up and doing something about something. She remembered the North Beach murder, she remembered the hours afterward through which Captain Kelso lumbered in a kind of controlled and icy rage, and she remembered being delivered to her hotel and her bed at a pale hour when rational citizens were beginning to stir and rise. She could now hear, in the other twin, the deep and cadenced breathing of Lenore, who had long ago tumbled, with all the enviable resistance of the young to adversity, into a deep sleep of exhaustion.

Independent of her body’s lassitude, Miss Withers’ brain teemed with antic thoughts. They tumbled over one another in a feverish rush to be recognized. A little discipline was indicated, Miss Withers decided. She began deliberately, without disturbing her delicious sensation of basic indifference, to introduce order into her thinking, and to line up her thoughts in some kind of sequence. Well, then ...

Bruno Wagner was Bud Hoffman. Aletha Westering, called into service, had verified that. Reconstruction of the recent past, based on that double identity, was not difficult to imagine in its essentials. After the ignominious collapse of the nefarious Latter Day Vigilantes, Wagner-Hoffman must have been driven by a consuming desire to track down his traitorous leader. In time, no doubt after many false scents and dead ends, he had indeed finally caught up with Martin Dormer, now Captain Westering, currently master of a conglomerate crew of dubious Argonauts, leader of a pilgrimage to lands of Zen and Ho Chi Minh.

In the beginning, when he first arrived at the end of his long trail, Wagner-Hoffman had clearly let Westering remain ignorant of his presence. He had made no threats, taken no action, and had, indeed, apparently been at pains to remain obscure. Obviously, as some of Miss Withers’ more unsavory contacts would have put it, he was casing the job, whatever the job would turn out to be. In his stealthy invasions of the
Karma
, reading correspondence and gathering bits of information from whatever informant, he had surely come to the conclusion that Westering’s tainted funds had been dissipated in his current venture, and that the voyage was, indeed, in critical financial straits.

It was then that he had devised the scheme of striking at Westering through Lenore Gregory, or at least of discovering for himself if such a strike could be made. He had headed east. He had attached himself to the Committee of Artists for Peace, and had cultivated Lenore. But what had started out to be a cold-blooded scheme of revenge had backfired. Lenore, in the beginning a means to an end, had become in the end an end herself. But no matter. His bad luck. She was not quite the gullible romantic he had assumed, and had proved impervious to his charms. It must have been a cruel blow, added as it was to his other injuries, for he was surely, like all who cast themselves in roles like his, a man of monstrous vanity. When she disappeared without word or warning, he knew at once where she had gone. Soon afterward he had followed. This time, indirection abandoned, for a head-on confrontation with his apostate Fuehrer.

Why? To seek restitution? If not restitution, retribution? Had Wagner-Hoffman, wearing his shaggy wig and dark glasses, slipped aboard the
Karma
and spiked Captain Westering’s liquor supply with hemlock? It was certainly possible. Anyone, with a minimum of caution, could have come and gone almost at will on that undisciplined vessel. And it was probable that the quondam lieutenant of vigilantes, apparently a young man of varied experience in a checkered past, was familiar with seagoing vessels, and may even have become acquainted with the
Karma
’s scheme of hatches leading from the hold to the captain’s stateroom and to the deck. Moreover, it was not to be discounted that he had a contact aboard, someone who passed information and gave assistance. But vastly more important psychologically, would an embittered man seeking revenge on a traitor resort to poison instead of a more direct and satisfying method?

Which brought her to the girl now sleeping deeply, if not peacefully, a few feet from her. Had Wagner-Hoffman indeed intended to poison her along with the captain? If he had a motive of revenge for the murder of the captain, it was at least possible to postulate a similar motive for the murder of the girl who had, in his own mind, shamed and deserted him. It was true that the motive did not seem as compelling to the rational mind, but the minds of murderers, Miss Withers had learned, were not always rational. In brief, had Wagner-Hoffman been an economy-minded murderer? Had he tried for two birds with one stone? It did not demand too active an imagination to conceive of the rage and the hatred that must have consumed him when he found the man who had betrayed him and the girl who had deserted him in circumstances with apparent connotations. Finding insult added to injury, so to speak, had he meant, as Miss Withers had previously speculated, to kill them both?

If that was true, why had he hung around afterward at his deadly peril?

And why had he himself been murdered?

At this point, having compromised her position so far, Miss Withers made the grand concession, for purposes of further speculation, of abandoning it altogether. She approached the murder of Captain Westering without prejudice from a new point of view. Her mind, suspended in shadows between waking and sleeping, seemed to work with a precision and depth of insight that was almost unnatural, as if it borrowed energy from her dormant body.
Let us suppose,
she thought,
that Captain Kelso has been right all along
—
that Westering alone was the intended victim of murder, and that it was by the sheerest chance that Lenore was not killed by mistake.
In the light of this supposition, she began to review again the circumstances of the murder—the character of the victim, the possible motives, and most of all, one by one, the incredible cast of characters involved in parts major and minor.

Someone passed in the hall outside the door.

Outside the windows, rising from the street and faintly heard in the room, were the multiple sounds of the city moving.

And in her bed, Miss Withers was suddenly sitting erect in a blinding flash of light.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and planted her feet on the floor. The room was full of shadows, drapes drawn across the daylight outside the windows, but all objects seemed to have, nevertheless, a kind of etched distinction. She saw and thought with incisive clarity. She saw by the traveling clock on her bedside table that it was half after four. In the bed across the way, Lenore, sleeping, made a soft whimpering sound like a troubled child. In Miss Withers’ mind there was no doubt. She could no more have doubted the validity of her insight than a saint could have denied the validity of revelation. The only question remaining, now that she knew, was what to do about it. She sat still as a stone on the side of her bed for a long while, thinking. Then she reached for the phone beside her clock.

She gave directions to the switchboard operator and waited.

“Captain Kelso, please,” she said. “Miss Hildegarde Withers calling.”

She waited again until the captain, who was available, came on.

“Hello, Miss Withers. You dug up another body?”

“Fortunately, no. Would you care to arrest the murderer of the two bodies we already have on hand?”

“Oh, sure, sure. Just name a name.”

Miss Withers named a name.

Miss Withers climbed the long staircase to the emerald lawn and the walk of colored flags. Behind her, a reluctant collaborator, was Captain Kelso. Behind Captain Kelso, a dubious kibitzer, was Inspector Oscar Piper. The lights of Sausalito glittered on the hills. In the distance, beyond the shimmering span of the Golden Gate Bridge, the lights of San Francisco flared upward into the dark sky. Miss Withers, with a feeling of triumph, prodded the button that rang the chimes.

Her triumph had not been easy. Far from it. In the beginning Captain Kelso had balked like a mule, digging in his heels. Inspector Piper, without actually saying so directly, had managed to imply that his old gadfly had finally forsaken all discretion and was brewing an eruption that would rival the earthquake of 1906. But Miss Withers had remained confident and adamant. And, it must be confessed, not completely candid.

“Aletha Westering,” she had said firmly, “is clearly indicated. The evidence against her is circumstantial but it is extremely convincing. She had motive. She had opportunity. When sufficient pressure is put on her at headquarters, she’ll surely confess. You’ll see. She’s fundamentally an unstable woman, shored by fantasy, and her breaking point will be low.”

Captain Kelso’s response had been predictable. “Damn it, the only motive she had that I can see is jealousy or hate or whatever a woman feels when her husband chases other women. And you’ve said right along, by God, that Aletha wasn’t the type for it. Not in a million years, you said.”

“As to that, I can only claim a woman’s prerogative to change her mind.”

“All right,
all right
!” Captain Kelso had snarled and scrubbed his bald dome. “But I’ll tell you one thing. You’d better be dead right, or you’ll be dead, period!”

And so on these harsh terms they had proceeded, and here they were, and Miss Withers, dissembling the nagging doubt she secretly suffered, prodded the button again and rang the chimes. The door was opened by a maid. Miss O’Higgins, the maid said, was not at home. Miss Withers explained that they had come to see Mrs. Westering. In that case, if they would step in, the maid would see if Mrs. Westering was in. She left them standing and went away. She returned to say that Mrs. Westering would be with them immediately. Meanwhile, they could come down from the elevated, open foyer and find seats in the living room. They came down, but they didn’t find seats. They stood in a grim cluster and waited until Aletha Westering appeared.

When she came, she was wearing again the flowing white robe, a golden goddess of the dawn in incandescent light, and Miss Withers could hear the breath whistle softly through the nostrils of Inspector Piper, who was, so to speak, just receiving his initiation. As for Miss Withers, a veteran of the club, she wondered with a touch of cynicism if Aletha Westering wore the robe to bed. It would make, after all, a very suitable nightgown.

“Captain Kelso.” Aletha inclined her golden head to the captain, including Miss Withers and Inspector Piper in the greeting with a sweep of her golden eyes. “I didn’t expect you. Come in, please, and sit down.”