The Withdrawing Room (25 page)

“I didn’t know myself,” Sarah lied. “Miss Hartler asked them without telling me.”

“Some nerve! Where’s the old witch now? I’d like to give her a big, fat chunk of my mind.”

“Never mind her, Mariposa, she’s gone and she won’t ever come back. Go set the table for six, will you? Then come and get a tray. We’re going to be long on appetizers and short on dinner tonight.”

Quickly Sarah furbished up the metaphorical funeral baked meats into an impressive array of canapés, and filled the decanter from the last jug of sherry. She opened cans of pea and tomato soup for purée mongole, made a fast exploration of the refrigerator and emptied everything she could find into a large casserole, spread cheese over the top, and thrust it into the oven to bake. She slashed a head of lettuce into serving portions and poured some of her premixed vinaigrette dressing over them. Mariposa could get their emergency cache of vanilla ice cream out of the freezer and spoon it into parfait glasses with crème de menthe and a few chopped nuts. It was the fastest dinner she’d got so far and please God it would be edible.

Then she ducked up the back stairs, took a fast shower, swept her light brown hair up into a knot, and put on the pretty gray satin Aunt Emma had given her. Running late, Sarah was not surprised to find her company already assembled when she got back to the library. Charles was doing the honors. Mariposa, she hoped, was back in the kitchen stirring the soup and fixing the desserts. Mr. Porter-Smith had on a black bow tie and a somber cummerbund in deference to what he’d obviously supposed would be a solemn occasion, and was looking askance at Mrs. Sorpende’s flamboyant adornment.

Sarah soon fixed that. “Oh, you did wear your flower! How sweet of you. I told Mrs. Sorpende I needed something cheerful to look at tonight,” she explained to the room at large. “You wouldn’t believe what’s been happening in this very room. Mr. Bittersohn, would you—” His eyes turned battleship gray and she caught herself in the nick of time. “Oh, you’re already set for sherry. Forgive me if I act a bit flustered, everyone. It’s because I am. Charles, tell Mariposa to turn down the gas under the soup and come in here, then I shan’t have to go through the whole performance twice. Professor Ormsby, do have some more of those pâté things. Dinner’s going to be late, I’m afraid, though we’ll hurry it along as best we can.”

“No rush,” said that loquacious man with his mouth full. “No place to go tonight. Where’s Niobe? Her door’s open.”

“So it is. I’m sorry, I forgot to close it. That used to be the drawing room, as I may have mentioned, and we had to open it up again this afternoon because a lot of people came here after the funeral. That’s why we’re running so far behind. It was Miss Hartler’s idea to invite them without asking permission. She appears to have been full of ideas.”

Sarah sipped at her own sherry until Mariposa joined the group, ribbons aflutter and eyes wide. Then she told her tale. What with numerous interruptions of, “How ghastly!” from Miss LaValliere and trenchant questions from Mr. Porter-Smith, the tale was long in the telling. They were finished with the appetizers and the soup, and well into the surprisingly tasty casserole before she got through. Even then, nobody was satisfied.

“But what about all them strangers messin’ up the hall?” Mariposa put in despite the scandalized Charles’s attempts to shush her. “How come we found that woman snooping through the china closet?”

“I simply don’t know,” said Sarah. “Mr. Bittersohn...” She groped for suitably noncommittal words in order to avoid another blast from those boreal gray eyes. “You know about antiques and things, and you were awfully clever about leading Miss Hartler to confess this afternoon. Would you have any ideas?”

“I wasn’t so clever,” he objected. “You were the one who broke her down with that point about the clothes.”

“It appears to me that the police sergeant who managed to track down Mrs. Feeley and stage that dramatic confrontation is also in line for some well-deserved kudos,” Mr. Porter-Smith added a bit resentfully, no doubt thinking that he himself would have been covered with Holmesian glory by now had not Cousin Percy required his services at the office.

“Sergeant McNaughton did a marvelous job,” Sarah agreed, although she knew perfectly well who deserved the kudos. “But getting back to Mariposa’s question, Mr. Bittersohn, couldn’t you at least take a guess?”

“I could try. You may recall that I was talking with your aunt last night at the undertaker’s? She told me then what Miss Hartler mentioned this afternoon, that the brother inherited the parents’ entire estate on the understanding that he look after his sister.”

“That was a risky sort of thing for them to do,” said Mrs. Sorpende. “Look what happened to the Dashwoods.”

“Who are they?” asked Miss LaValliere.

“Characters in a book by Jane Austen. Do go on, Mr. Bittersohn,” Sarah urged before Miss LaValliere could ask, “Who’s Jane Austen?”

“Evidently Miss Joanna didn’t fare much better than Elizabeth and Marianne Dashwood, according to your aunt. Dear Wumps kept her short of cash. After he got too sick to function, she ought to have had herself appointed conservator, as your Cousin Dolph suggested, but that would have meant exposing Wumps’s mental deterioration and that wouldn’t have served her purpose. She might have forged his name to checks to keep them going, but there was a big element of risk in that. So what she did was to sell various antiques her brother had collected from people who were under the impression they were making donations to the Iolani Palace. That woman Mariposa mentioned was acting more like a customer than a sneak thief, wasn’t she?”

“A pretty sharp customer,” said Sarah. “She offered me fifty dollars for that pair of Coalport vases over there in the china cabinet. She tried to convince me they were reproductions.”

“Which of course they’re not,” said Bittersohn. “Sounds more like a dealer, which would make a lot more sense though a lot less cash. Miss Hartler could drop into a shop with a nice little piece to whet their appetites and tell them she had plenty more like it at home. That could explain why she bumped off Quiffen when she learned he’d beaten her to your drawing room. A house like this is exactly the sort of background she’d need.”

“And his having jilted her ages ago wouldn’t make her any less reluctant to give him the shove,” Sarah agreed. “Hell hath no fury, and so forth. That woman did act confused about whose house it was. Remember, Mariposa? And Mr. Hartler—I mean Miss Hartler—kept interrupting and fussing about what a nuisance he—I mean she was, which was certainly true. I’ll bet he’d—oh, you know what I mean—given the impression he owned the place.”

“No doubt,” said Bittersohn. “Miss Hartler would have been posing as an old widower with a place too big for him and investments that weren’t paying off as well as they used to, wanting to get rid of his stuff and move to a retirement home or somewhere. You couldn’t blame outsiders for swallowing a story like that once they got a look inside this house. It was an ideal setup, and not a badly organized operation for an amateur.”

“Don’t you think, Mr. Bittersohn, that Miss Hartler must have been planning this whole thing for quite some time? Take that hotel stationery from Italy, for instance. She must have got hold of it ages ago, when she and her brother took a trip to Rome with Aunt Marguerite, just so that she could write a letter to leave around explaining why she’d been gone and why she was coming back at the right moment to be in on the obsequies. I wonder how she managed to find Mrs. Feeley to dump poor old Wumps on all that time?”

“Through an advertisement, I expect,” Mrs. Sorpende put in. “People are always putting little ads in the classified section saying they’re willing to board an elderly person who requires tender, loving care. Sometimes they mean it, sometimes they don’t. This Mrs. Feeley sounds ideal. She lived close enough to Boston so that Miss Hartler could get back and forth easily. She was a kind, responsible, and also unsophisticated and sentimental sort of person who’d respond favorably to the picture Miss Hartler was trying to paint of herself as a loving sister trying to do her best for her senile older brother without committing him to an institution. Miss Hartler couldn’t take him to a real nursing home because they keep records and wouldn’t care to have her disrupt their schedules by taking him out for walks whenever it suited her purpose. Since the Feeleys were not only kind but also unlicensed, she thought she could depend on them to keep their mouths shut no matter what happened.”

“But I don’t get it,” wailed Miss LaValliere. “I mean, you’re saying that when Mr. Hartler lived here he was really Miss Hartler all the time, right? And when he went out to that Feeley place he was Miss Hartler because Mr. Hartler was already there, right? I mean, how could he? I mean, how could she? I mean I don’t get it.”

Sarah exchanged covert smiles with Mrs. Sorpende. “That’s because you didn’t see those photographs Mrs. Feeley brought with her. To begin with, the two of them were very much alike, even to their voices. You just didn’t notice because he was so bouncy and jolly while she was droopy and whiny. He appeared taller and fatter but that could be done with elevator shoes and a pillow under the belt.”

“Yes, but their clothes?”

“That was the easiest part. Mr. Hartler used to wear a poplin raincoat and one of those squashable tweed hats, as you’ve perhaps noticed. The coat was reversible. On the poplin side it buttoned at the right, like a man’s. The other side was a dark tweed and buttoned left like a woman’s. That’s what Miss Hartler had on in the pictures, along with a trailing woolen scarf and a great floppy beret with crocheted flowers on it. She’d have left Boston wearing the man’s hat and elevator shoes, with the beret and scarf stuffed down the front of the coat to give her a tummy. Somewhere along the line, she’d reverse the coat to the tweed side, put on the beret and scarf and a pair of woman’s shoes she had with her, and hide the man’s hat and elevator shoes in a bag she was carrying.”

“The point on which I crave elucidation,” said Mr. Porter-Smith, “is where Miss Hartler kept her brother after she took him from the Feeley house until the time he turned up dead in the Public Garden. It would seem that he must have walked there since one could hardly picture that frail elderly woman carrying him; therefore, he must
ipso facto
have remained alive during the entire interval. However, your thesis as I understand it is that Miss Hartler took Mr. Hartler away from his lodgings, came back here by herself in an understandably boisterous mood, rejoined him later in the evening and remained with him until she walked him over to the place where his body was found, and killed him. That seems an incredible feat.”

“Oh, Gene, you always have to make things harder,” said Miss LaValliere. “She probably just dumped him at a movie. That’s what I’d do.”

“From the way Mrs. Feeley described the brother, I doubt whether Miss Hartler would dare leave him by himself in public,” Sarah objected. “What I think is that she had a place all arranged to hide him in. When she came here disguised as Mr. Hartler that first time, she told me she was living at a rooming house on Hereford Street I suspect the room was much closer to the Garden, perhaps around Arlington or Berkeley. She didn’t give it up when she moved here pretending to be her brother. It hasn’t been very long, after all, though it seems forever. I’d say she walked him from the Feeley house down to Savin Hill Station, brought him a few stops on the subway, then took a cab the rest of the way to wherever the hideout was.”

“But why not take a cab the whole distance?”

“Because then there’d have been a cabbie working the Savin Hill area who could testify he’d picked up an old couple at that time and taken them to a Back Bay address,” Bittersohn answered for her.

“And he might remember what that address was,” said Sarah. “Aren’t they supposed to keep logs, or tell their dispatchers where they’re going?”

“Good point, Mrs. Kelling. By taking the cab from some other station, Miss Hartler would be cutting down on the chance of being identified.”

“Then why take a cab at all? Why not stay right on the subway to Park Street and then transfer to the Green Line?”

“They were old people and that would mean climbing a lot of stairs as well as being exposed to the risk of meeting somebody who’d recognize them. The brother was unstable and excitable, and would be more apt than not to call attention to himself in one way or another if they stayed on the train for any length of time. A cab was faster and safer. Furthermore, if they pulled up at the rooming house in a cab and were spotted by some other resident, it would be easier for Miss Hartler to pretend she was just some good Samaritan bringing an old fool home from a party where he’d had too much to drink. She could then lock old Wumps in the room with those bogus Iolani Palace treasures to keep him happy for a while, get straight back into the cab, and be taken to South Station or maybe Columbia, ride to Savin Hill on the Red Line, do her act with Mrs. Feeley about having lost him, collect his stuff, and disappear.”

“Where to? Back to the room?”

“No, I think she must have gone first to that big motel near Logan Airport and checked in under a false name with her brother’s luggage, which also contained a good many of her own possessions. No doubt Mrs. Feeley found certain cases already packed and locked when she went to clear out his room. Since the Harriers had been to Italy in the past, the luggage already had the sort of customs stickers on it that Mrs. Kelling would expect to see when Miss Hartler arrived here in an airport taxi.”

“By the time she’d done all that,” said Mrs. Sorpende in a tone, that sent shivers down every spine around the table, “she mustn’t have had long to wait.”

“Not long,” Bittersohn agreed. “She went back to the rented room on the trusty old MBTA, kept Wumps amused until the neighborhood quieted down, then took him over to the Garden and did him in.”

“With what?” demanded Mr. Porter-Smith.

“I’m not sure you want me to answer that.”

“Yes, we do,” Miss LaValliere insisted.

“Okay, then. Apparently she took off one of his heavy elevator, shoes on one pretext or another, hit him from behind with the heel, then put the shoe on her own foot and kicked in his face with the toe.”