Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene
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Authors: Stuart Palmer
A Hildegarde Withers Mystery
Stuart Palmer
1.
I
N THE OFFICE AT CENTRE
Street Headquarters where Inspector Oscar Piper kept his desk and hung his hat, the phone began to ring. The inspector, suffocating in a welter of the administrative chores that he still considered an unreasonable imposition, came up for air and grabbed the noisy instrument with the reprieved feeling that it was at least something different to do. His bark was answered by the suave voice of the commissioner himself.
“Oscar? How’s everything in Homicide?”
The inspector, taking this question as rhetorical, raked the fingers of his free hand through grizzled hair and responded cautiously, with a touch of Black Irish humor, that things in Homicide were pretty dead. He was rewarded with a polite chuckle at the other end of the wire.
“I’m sending someone over to see you, Oscar,” the commissioner said. “He’s on his way.”
“What does he want?”
“I’ll let him tell you that. Frankly, more than anything else, I think he needs to have his hand held.”
“Wrong sex. I’m only holding hands with females this week.”
“Seriously, Oscar, I wish you’d do whatever you can for him. As a favor to me, if you need a reason. His name’s Bernard Gregory. Corporation lawyer. Substantial citizen. To tell the truth, I know him quite well, although I wouldn’t exactly call him a personal friend.”
“Why hand him to me?”
“Because it occurred to me while I was talking with him that you might be the one person in a peculiar position to do him some good. You’ll understand, I think, when you listen to his problem.”
“My peculiar position is running Homicide. Is homicide his problem?”
“Nothing like it. Consider this a diversion, Oscar. Something for a change. Look out for him, will you, Oscar? There’s a good fellow. I’ve got to run now.”
The commissioner hung up and, presumably, ran. Inspector Oscar Piper, immobilized by a plethora of paperwork, remained anchored at his desk. Again he raked his grizzled head, cursing soft Irish curses. For no specific reason, directed at no selected thing or person. It was just that he had been inclined by experience as well as nature to an uneasy and profane reaction when commissioners came bearing gifts or asking favors.
It was about half an hour later when Bernard Gregory was ushered through the door by the uniformed watchdog on the other side. Inspector Piper, mindful of the commissioner’s artfully implied request for kid-glove treatment, got his short, wiry body to its feet and offered a greeting with a bony hand. He resumed his seat behind his desk after Gregory had, on invitation, occupied one in front of it. Inspector Piper, without appearing to do so, inspected his visitor with a sharp eye. The commissioner had said that Bernard Gregory was a substantial citizen, and he looked it. Broad shoulders, thick bole, sturdy legs with some spring left in them. Gray hair, sharply parted and smoothly brushed. Clipped gray mustache between a bold nose and thin lips. Wide forehead and direct eyes, now slightly clouded by whatever problem had brought him where he was. He was groomed and polished and tailored, but he wasn’t soft. Why is it, the little Irish inspector wondered, that all corporation lawyers look like variations of an old Calvert ad and all criminal lawyers look somehow disheveled and slightly soiled, as if they were wearing dirty underwear. Well, that wasn’t true, of course. It was a libel on the latter, at any rate, a tenacious image invulnerable to all contrary examples, probably established by Clarence Darrow and carried on by John J. Malone.
“I suppose,” said Bernard Gregory, “that the commissioner has warned you of my coming.”
“He has informed me,” Inspector Piper amended. “What can I do for you?”
Bernard Gregory leaned forward, clutching his knees as if to underscore by his position the bluntness of his words. “I’ll come directly to the point, Inspector. My daughter is missing. I want her found.”
Inspector Piper wondered with a touch of weary asperity, which he dissembled, how many other distraught parents in this city, to say nothing of all the other cities of all the world, could say the same thing. But he must not, he reminded himself, let his childless bachelorhood make him impatient with the problems of those less fortunate.
“We have a Bureau of Missing Persons,” he said. “This is Homicide. Why have you come to me?”
“I didn’t come. I was sent.”
“Of course. By the commissioner. It’s just that the Bureau of Missing Persons is organized and equipped for this kind of work.”
“I’ve been to Missing Persons, as a matter of fact. I got the feeling that my problem wasn’t taken very seriously. I wasn’t satisfied. That’s why I exploited my acquaintance with the commissioner and went to see him.”
“I see. Well, you shouldn’t make any hasty judgment about Missing Persons. Believe me, it wasn’t that they didn’t take your problem seriously. It’s merely that they can’t get emotional about a problem that constantly repeats itself. You can’t expect them to. It happens every day, Mr. Gregory. People disappear. Nowadays, because of the uncertainty and unrest of the world, an alarming percentage of those who disappear are, like your daughter, very young. I assume, at least, that your daughter is very young.”
“She’s twenty-one. Just barely. I can no longer exercise authority over her if she chooses to disregard it. That’s not the point. The point is, I’m worried about her. I don’t know where she is, and I want to know. If she’s in trouble, I want to help her. Besides, there is another and very pressing reason why she must be found. Her mother is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”
There it was, Inspector Piper reflected with genuine compassion. There was the inevitable effect of every thoughtless, rash, aberrant act. Someone else, usually innocent, was always hurt, destroyed or otherwise affected by it. No man is an island. Especially is a parent not an island. Why couldn’t the loved children of loving parents understand that? Why were they deliberately most cruel to the ones most vulnerable? Why? Because the best of them, when you stopped to consider it, were creatures of fierce conviction and total commitment. Because they became involved in something that was more intensely important than any other thing or any person. Does Mother suffer? Well, that’s too bad, but it can’t be helped.
Woman, what have I to do with you?
“How long,” said Inspector Piper, “has your daughter been missing?”
“About two weeks. Possibly a little longer. I can’t be exact because I’ve been unable to discover just when she was last seen, or by whom.”
Inspector Piper’s bushy eyebrows had climbed a fraction of an inch up his forehead. “That long ago? Have you done anything before this to try to locate her?”
“Certainly. When she didn’t report back to school on time, I drove up immediately to see if I could get any lead as to where she might be. First, however, I made inquiries at the office of the Committee of Artists for Peace here in New York.”
Inspector Piper lifted a hand in a truncated halt sign. He shook his grizzled head as if to clear it. “Wait a minute. You’re losing me. Maybe you’d better back up and fill me in.”
“Of course. Sorry. My daughter Lenore is, or was, a senior at Bennington. As you may know, they have what they call a non-resident term there. It begins about the middle of December and ends about the middle of March. In this term the girls are turned loose to rub elbows with the rest of us. They’re required to work at something or other, of course. It’s supposed to give them experience with reality, a taste of the world as it is. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a good thing. They seem to live, otherwise, a rather cloistered life up there. Not that they aren’t allowed extraordinary liberties. Apparently the girls impose a rather severe discipline upon themselves.
“Anyhow, they have this non-resident term, and Lenore chose to work this year for the Committee of Artists for Peace. Her mother and I saw her infrequently during the term. She didn’t live at home, and she seemed to want to be left alone. She completed the term, all right. I discovered that much at the office of the Committee. But she didn’t return to school afterward. Wherever she has gone, she apparently went directly from New York.”
“And no one at the office of the Committee could give you a clue?”
“If they could, they wouldn’t. They assumed there that she had returned to school.”
“Who did you talk with there?”
“The director. Several people in and out of the office. Particularly with a young man named Bud Hoffman. I was told that he and Lenore had been seeing a great deal of each other after hours, and that he might be expected to know more about her personal affairs than her other associates. But apparently he didn’t.”
“He couldn’t help you?”
“No. As a matter of fact, he gave me the impression of being rather stunned and embittered by Lenore’s action. He seemed to look on it as a personal injury, or something of the sort. He hadn’t been with the Committee as long as Lenore. He was taken on afterward, and was leaving immediately. To be exact, he had already left it. I got his address at the Committee office and found him in his rented room nearby.”
“He had no idea at all where your daughter might have gone?”
“He said not. He said she just vanished without a word of explanation or good-bye or anything else. I felt sorry for him. He seemed like a substantial sort of young man. Older than Lenore. About thirty, I’d say. Stocky. Blond. Considerably neater and more clipped than most of the others I talked with. Somehow he didn’t strike me as the sort who would be working for a Committee of that nature. He was obviously hurt and angry. Lenore is an attractive girl, and she has always treated her young men rather badly. I suppose it’s simply because she has never been able to take any of them seriously.”
“And no one at your daughter’s school could throw any light on her disappearance?”
“None. I talked at length with her counselor and her roommate, without results. It was strange. I had the uncomfortable feeling that they considered me a meddlesome old fuddy-duddy who had his wind up for nothing.”
“That was, as you say, about two weeks ago. What action, if any, have you taken since then?”
“I hired private detectives to try to trace her. Lenore’s mother and I discussed it, and we decided that that would be best. At least in the beginning. We wanted to be discreet, you see. To avoid publicity if we could. Not that I would have been withered by a little publicity, however unpleasant, but we had Lenore to consider. She’s a very intense and sensitive girl. If she’s gone off on some kind of mission or crusade or something, something she feels is vital, God knows what it would do to her pride to be publicized and possibly ridiculed. Most important, God knows what it would do to her relationship with us. With her mother and me.”