Hildegarde Withers: Final Riddles? by Stuart Palmer

Author:Stuart Palmer [Palmer, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781936363575
Publisher: Crippen & Landru, Publishers
Published: 2022-03-02T23:00:00+00:00

The Return of Hildegarde Withers

Miss Hildegarde Withers knew that something was afoot as soon as she came into the Inspector’s outer office and saw that his door was closed. It was a chill wet December morning, and unwilling to go back into the drizzle or to interrupt one of her friend’s official “conversations” with some unlucky suspect, the spinster school-ma’am sat down and proceeded to cool her sensible heels.

She pricked up her somewhat prominent ears as the sound of excited feminine voices came faintly through, and then the door opened and Inspector Oscar Piper ushered out of his office three attractively dressed young ladies who were strange visitors indeed for this center of the grimmest police activity. They were very young, alike as three peas in a pod except that the girl in the seal jacket was a little younger and prettier and more distraught than her companions, one in civet and one in squirrel.

“Last door at the end of the hall,” the Inspector said to his departing guests, and then held the door for Miss Withers.

“Well, Oscar,” Hildegarde observed tartly, eyeing a little mound of red-smeared cigarette ends in the midst of his cigar butts, “your clientele seems to be changing its tone.”

The Inspector grinned sheepishly. “They got in here by accident. Some sort of a hysterical story about their dancing teacher disappearing up in Carnegie Hall last night. Seems this woman, name of Carla Monterey, popped off into thin air, leaving her clothes on a chair. She even left a hot shower running in the bath—to steam a velvet dress, so the kids say. I sent them up to the Bureau of Missing Persons.”

“And just what good will that do?”

“Not much. The Sergeant will fill out a blue slip for the file.” “But Oscar—” There was a glint in Miss Withers’ eye. “Nothing in it for Homicide. We got rules, you know.”

“Have, not got! Fiddlesticks! Rules are made to be broken. What’s the rest of their story?”

A little nettled, Oscar Piper went on: “Just that they are all students in the school of this Monterey woman. Sometimes she books herself and her advanced pupils for professional engagements. Last night they were having a late rehearsal, which ended in some sort of row between the Monterey woman and her manager, an Argentine calling himself Emile Valentine. Valentine, yet! Anyway, this gaucho character and the girls went out for supper, and when some of them came back to pick up a handbag that had been forgotten, the dancing dame was gone. Studio’s on the twelfth floor, and the elevator man said he hadn’t taken her down. This morning she didn’t answer her phone, so the girls really got worried and came down here. I figure it’s just another case of artistic tantrums. Ten to one the woman will show up before the day is out.”

“So she walked out and left a dress to steam,” said Miss Withers thoughtfully. “You might have gone up there and looked around.”

“I’m up to my ears.

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