Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene Read Free

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.”

2.
    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