Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene (2 page)

“The police, Mr. Gregory,” said Inspector Piper drily, if not caustically, “are also capable of discretion. Never mind that, though. I take it that your private detectives were unsuccessful, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“That’s true. The agency was recommended to me highly, but it’s little enough that they’ve turned up. Indeed, the one bit of pertinent information I’ve acquired came to me quite independently through the United States mail.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“A bill from a major oil company. Lenore apparently needed repairs done on her car that she was able to have done at a service station. The bill came to slightly less than a hundred dollars. The repairs were done at a station in Gallup, New Mexico. I don’t quite understand why Lenore used her credit card, for I have reason to know that she left New York with plenty of money. Perhaps she wanted to hang onto her cash for another purpose. However that may be, I’m glad she used the card. The address on it is our address in Manhattan. Her bill, therefore, came here, and I, of course, opened it.”

Inspector Oscar Piper was silent. The Black Irish blood in his moderately sclerotic veins was beginning to seethe, and an unholy suspicion was slowly achieving the stature of a certainty in his brain. A whole new prospect had been opened unto him by the simple intelligence that Lenore Gregory had been located, however briefly and indirectly, in Gallup, New Mexico. Surely no one went to Gallup, New Mexico, except people who lived there, unless they went there on their way to somewhere else. And Gallup, New Mexico, as all informed folk knew, was on the way to Los Angeles, California. The intelligence also opened a crack through which Inspector Oscar Piper was privileged to peek once more into the malodorous, devious mind of a police commissioner. At last he was beginning to understand why Bernard Gregory, who had a missing daughter, had been steered by a conniving buck-passer to the domain of Homicide, which should ordinarily have no concern in the matter. Now he understood what the commissioner had meant by saying that he, Oscar Piper, was in a peculiar position. It was not, in fact, that he was in a peculiar position. It was that he had a peculiar friend. A peculiar friend in a strategic place. Inspector Piper breathed deeply and tried to speak calmly.

“You say she had plenty of money,” he said. “How much is plenty?”

“Something over a thousand dollars, I’m afraid.”

The inspector’s eyebrows climbed again. “That seems like a very large sum, especially for a girl off on her own somewhere. Was it in cash?”

“I assume so. Unless she bought traveler’s checks.”

“How did she get hold of that much cash? Was she well paid by the Committee she was working for?”

“She wasn’t paid at all. She was donating her time and work. I made her an allowance for expenses. When her nonresident term was near an end, in anticipation of her return to campus, I deposited a thousand dollars in her personal checking account. I had no hesitation about it, because Lenore has always been sagacious in her expenditures. However, when she didn’t show up at her school, I checked with the bank and found that her account had been cleaned out, except for a nominal amount to cover outstanding checks.”

“When did she withdraw the money?”

“March fifteenth. The final day of her term.”

“She must have left soon after. Probably the same day or the next. You say she had her car repaired at a station in Gallup, New Mexico. What kind of car was she driving?”

“A Volkswagen. About a year old. Anyone who saw it should easily remember it.”

“Oh? I was under the impression that Volkswagens make a virtue of looking like each other.”

“Not this one. Lenore had one of the girls at school, an art student, give it a paint job of daffodils.”

The inspector closed his eyes briefly, imploring the succor of Judas Priest with all the nagging despair that many an oldster feels when he stares in dismay across the generation gap. One of those! He might have known it. A blooming flower child. A tender dispenser of sweetness and light. A prolific mutant of the standard cuckoo, multiplying like rabbits to harass parents, confuse sociologists, and complicate the lives of honest cops. In Washington, D.C., and probably in other cities across the country, there was an organization called the National Society for Parents of Flower Children. Patterned somewhat after Alcoholics Anonymous, it provided a therapeutic symposium where desperate parents of incomprehensible children could share their miseries and cry for strength. In the inspector’s opinion, it was appropriate that the NSPFC had taken AA as a pattern, inasmuch as the former was likely to be the precursor of the latter.

He was certain now, in view of the Gallup clue and the decorated Volkswagen, that Lenore Gregory had fled to the City of Angels or its environs, seeking the company of soul brothers and sisters along the Sunset Strip or at Laguna Beach or wherever the brothers and sisters were gathered for spiritual and sometimes carnal communion. Why, he wondered bitterly, couldn’t she have been content with the selection in the Village?

“We’ll assume,” he said, “that she’s gone to Los Angeles. It seems indicated.”

“I agree,” Bernard Gregory said, “but Los Angeles is a large city. How do you hope to find her?”

“The police have ways of finding people, whether they’re in Los Angeles, California, or in Blue Eye, Missouri. However, this is a delicate matter which requires extraordinary methods. Maybe we’d better proceed unofficially.” Here he paused, before capitulating, to curse once more the black perfidy of the commissioner. “It happens that I have a ... er ... contact in the Los Angeles area who may be able to help us. A maiden lady who was for years a gad ... er ... that is to say, a sort of unofficial member of this police force. I can assure you that she is”—and here he crossed his fingers below his desk—“the soul of discretion.”

“Whatever you say.” Bernard Gregory stood up. “I’ll leave it in your hands, Inspector. I can expect to hear from you?”

“Just as soon as I have anything to report.”

“Good. Thank you very much for your time.”

Inspector Piper came around his desk and shook hands. “You’d better send me a picture of your daughter,” he said. “I’ll send it along to my contact.”

“I have one here. It’s a good likeness, I think.”

He took a billfold from his pocket, removed a picture from an isinglass pocket, and passed it to the inspector. He repeated his thanks, said good-bye, and left. The inspector sat down again at his desk, laying the photograph face down in front of him. After a few moments, as though he had prayed for strength and the prayer was answered, he turned the photograph over and studied it.

What he saw was pleasing to his aging eye. Turned at an angle between full face and profile, the face that looked back at him from the corners of clear dark eyes had a kind of serene loveliness that touched his leathery heart. Good bones. Short, straight nose. Generous mouth and firm chin. Slender neck with a hollow at the base of the throat that the inspector, if he been younger, might have wanted to kiss. Smooth dark hair was skinned back severely and gathered in a bun, giving her the sophisticated look she surely strived for. Now, wherever she was in her hippie world, if the hippie world was where she was, the hair was probably unpinned and hanging down her back. The inspector was offended by the thought. He didn’t know why, exactly, except that he liked her as she was in the photograph. Still studying it, he reached for the phone.

“Get me Miss Hildegarde Withers,” he said to the switchboard operator. “I don’t remember her number or address offhand, but she lives in Santa Monica, California.”

H
ILDEGARDE WITHERS, RETIRED SCHOOLMA’AM
, retired gadfly to the NYPD, but still the active and durable friend of Inspector Oscar Piper, although presently removed from his company by the width of a continent, which the inspector considered in his sour moments as being none too great a distance, was in her yard gathering the basic ingredient of her next salad when the phone inside her house began to ring. She was in no hurry to answer it. Indeed, being convinced in advance that the communication, whatever it was, would prove to be both inconsequential and dull, she was rather indifferent about answering it at all.

The truth was that the spirited and equine-ish spinster was finding life nowadays rather a bore. She had discovered that the sunset years, as described in glowing terms in the free literature of realtors and chambers of commerce out after the social security trade, were inclined to develop, after a while, a surfeit of serenity. Not, of course, that she didn’t find her personal sunset on the whole pleasurable. She had Talley, her standard poodle, for company. She had her neighbors and her African violets for diversion. She could pick her salads in her own yard. When she wished to resign herself to the prospect of being swallowed up in good time by the illimitable universe, which required more humility than she ordinarily had, she could sit on a rock and watch, like stout Cortez with eagle eye upon a peak in Darien, the immeasurable waters of the wide Pacific.

Only it wasn’t, of course, Cortez. It was Balboa. Odd that a genius like Keats should have made such an egregious error. But perhaps it was an error no more egregious than the one she had made in swapping coasts. It would be nice, she thought sometimes, to divide each year equally between both. She had been sorely tempted lately to fly back East for a long visit with her old friend, Inspector Oscar Piper, in time to catch New York in fall and leave it again before winter.

The phone inside continued to ring in long bursts with dogged tenacity. Suddenly she read into the sound a compelling urgency. Surely any casual friend with nothing more on her mind than a luncheon date or a committee meeting would have given up long ago. Leaving Talley in command of the yard, she hurried inside and snatched up the raucous instrument. A strange masculine voice asked her to identify herself, which she did breathlessly after her tardy dash from the yard, and then, immediately afterward, she was momentarily deprived by pleasure and excitement of what short breath she had. For in her ears, more beautifully golden than the remembered tenor of the not-so-late John McCormack, another Irishman, was the irascible bark of Oscar Piper.

“Hildy?”

“Oscar! Oscar Piper!”

“Long time no see, Hildy. How are you and the angels getting along?”

“I’m not quite ready for the angels yet, Oscar. All in good time. Meanwhile, you’ll have to be patient.”

“Well, you were long enough getting to the phone. I was beginning to suspect that you’d already been snatched away. Where were you, anyhow? Out in the yard picking oranges?”

“Not oranges, Oscar. Avocados.”

“Imagine picking avocados in your own yard. Imagine, for that matter, picking avocados anywhere. Surely you don’t eat them?”

“You always were a person of questionable tastes, Oscar. There
is
other food in the world than spaghetti, you know.”

“Spaghetti!” The inspector’s voice was suddenly dreamy and a little sad, and Hildegarde Withers was acutely aware that it originated more than three thousand miles away. “It doesn’t taste the same somehow, Hildy, without you across the table. How would you like to have a big plate with me right now, with a bottle of Chianti to share?”

“Shut up, Oscar! I’m far too old to cry.”

“That’s an invitation.”

“Don’t be rash. You may have me on the next jet.”

“Well, to tell the truth, I wouldn’t want you to come that soon. I’ll need you where you are for a while yet.”

“What do you mean, Oscar? Explain yourself.”

“That’s my Hildy. You sound exactly like you were snapping at some elementary urchin in that school where you used to slave.”

“
As if
, Oscar. Like is a preposition or a verb. You shouldn’t use it as a conjunction.”

“There you go. Correcting my grammar at God knows how much a minute. Anyhow, what’s good enough for Winston is good enough for me.”

“Oscar, you’re being evasive. It’s apparent that this is not just a friendly call, and as much as I would like to think that you were motivated only by a longing to hear my voice, you had better come clean. What’s on your mind?”

“Nothing much. Just a simple little job. It occurred to me that a superior compulsive snoop like you would be just the one to handle it. Besides, you happen to be on the scene.”

“Thank you, Oscar. You have such an ingratiating way of putting things. Precisely what is this simple little job?”

“Finding a runaway, that’s all. A wandering flower child. Her name is Lenore Gregory, aged twenty-one, and she took a powder about two weeks ago. It’s not really a police job, certainly not Homicide’s, but I’d like to lend a hand if I can. Her parents are really in the saucepot. Father says Mother is on the verge of a breakdown.”

“‘What quality of fools is this?’”

“What’s that?”

“Never mind. Some words of Tennyson. A sadly neglected poet these days.”

“Oh. We have reason to believe that this girl may be in Los Angeles, Hildy, or in the immediate area. Naturally, I thought of you right away, stuck out there in exile and probably dying to get back in harness.”

“Oscar, you seem to be afflicted with that strange provincialism that is common in many New Yorkers. You simply cannot rid yourself of the illusion that the nation beyond your city limits is composed entirely of countryside and villages. For your information, Los Angeles is a sizable city. In the matter of square miles, indeed, it is considerably larger than New York. Are you seriously suggesting that I comb the area in search of one small, wayward girl?”

“Use your ingenuity. You’ll manage.”

“It’s flattering of you to think so. Or is it merely artful. Consider, for example, the question of transportation. As you know, I don’t drive. How do you expect me to get from one place to another?”

“That’s no problem. Fly. Use your broomstick.”

“Very funny, Oscar. Very funny, indeed.”

“Seriously, Hildy, I wish you’d take it on. Listen to me. Lenore Gregory is a lovely girl. Her father’s a corporation lawyer, well heeled, and the girl is apparently carrying a bundle with her. Over a grand. She’s driving a Volkswagen with a gaudy paint job of daffodils, so it ought to stick out like a sore thumb even in that loony-bin you live in. Moreover, as I said, she’s one of the flower children. She’s probably gone straight to wherever the hippies are. You must know the places in your neck of the woods. If not, you can find out. That should restrict your search considerably. Will you give it a try?”