Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene by Stuart Palmer Read Free Book Online

pleasing prospect.”
    Removing from her purse a thin packet of five crisp tens, she passed it over. Her informer took it and shoved it at once, without counting, into a side pocket of a pair of dirty Levis. He stood up, looking down on her for a moment, and his thin lips split again in a grin of wolfish derision. Without a word, he turned away and started down Ocean Front in a kind of flapping, slow-motion lope.
    Watching him go, Miss Withers knew what it was that had most disturbed her in her brief excursions into the strange underworld of the hippies. She had felt from the beginning something insidious, a dank pervading atmosphere of evil that she couldn’t understand or justify. In a way, she thought, the hippies were a manifestation of incredible innocence. Many were so young, and all were so sad. Flower children with a message of love, liberating themselves from a violent world by the power of pot and psychedelic drugs. Dedicated secessionists from an ugly establishment, flying high and always coming down in a pustule of dirt and disease and addiction. Mistaken they were, frequently infuriating and often lost. They were touched hourly by evil, but evil themselves they were not. No. The sense and smell of evil came from creatures of prey like the one now loping off up Ocean Front. It rose like a thin and fetid miasma from the avaricious who gather wherever the vulnerable are. Rising, Miss Withers made certain that her hat was securely in place and walked briskly down the promenade to the bench where Al Fister sat waiting.
    “Al,” she said, “please take me home at once. I am badly in need of a bath.”
    Al laughed and stood up and fell in alongside. “Any luck?” he said.
    “I don’t know if you would call it luck or not,” said Miss Withers. “And if you would call it luck, I don’t know if you would call it good or bad. In any event, I have learned that our young runaway has gone to San Francisco. Her motive and her precise destination remain to be discovered.”
    In a short while she was clambering out of the sidecar of the Hog and heading up the walk to her house, Al tagging behind. In the living room she veered off toward her bedroom, speaking over her shoulder as she went.
    “I must see if I can wash off the smell of that creature. I’ll be back shortly, Al. Meanwhile, if you feel inclined to spoil your dinner, you will find a piece of roast beef in the refrigerator and the remains of a chicken. I’m sure you can find something to satisfy you. It has been my observation that you have no difficulty in that respect.”
    Al accepted the invitation and kept on going into the kitchen. He constructed a thick sandwich of roast beef, lettuce and mayonnaise, and sat down at the kitchen table to eat it. He could hear the shower running in the bathroom, where Miss Withers, skipping the luxury of a tub, was scrubbing away at the stink of corruption. After a while the sound of the shower stopped. Al got up with his empty plate and served it with a drumstick and a wing, leaving half a breast out of consideration for Miss Withers. The wing was gone and the drumstick was going when Miss Withers, scoured and refurbished, appeared in the doorway.
    “It is now eight o’clock in New York,” she said.
    “In Boston, too,” said Al. “In Kansas City, though, it’s only seven, and only six in Denver.”
    Miss Withers plainly considered this embroidery too facetious to merit a response. “Inspector Piper,” she said, “will be at home by this time, if he is not still out to dinner or somewhere else.”
    “As I see it,” said Al, “that takes in all the possibilities.”
    “I mean, unless circumstances are exigent, that he will no longer be in his office in Centre Street. We shall see.”
    Miss Withers crossed the kitchen to the extension telephone and dialed from memory. She waited, drumming a rapid tattoo on the cabinet beside her. Pretty soon the voice of Inspector Piper came on.
    “Oscar,” Miss Withers