Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene (3 page)

“Why should I?” The retired schoolma’am’s sniff was clearly audible on the other side of the continent. “How many times have you referred to me as a gadfly, Oscar Piper? How many times have you told me that the New York Police Department is perfectly capable of getting along without my help?”

“Judas Priest in a jug! Don’t tell me you’re getting paranoid in your old age! All right, Hildy. If it gives you any pleasure to make me squirm, I apologize. Be a good girl and lend a hand. It’ll get the rust out of your pipes, and it’ll get me off the hook with the commissioner. Tell you what I’ll do. If you’ll play ball, I’ll give you a call the next time we have a really juicy murder here, and you can come running.”

“Is that a promise?”

“My oath on the Book.”

“Oscar, you’ve got your fingers crossed.”

“Hildy!”

“Oh, all right. You’ve known perfectly well all along that I wouldn’t be able to resist. If I locate this girl, what am I supposed to do with her?”

“There’s nothing much you
can
do, as a matter of fact. Talk with her. Try to make her come home, or at least get in touch with Mama and Papa. Reassurance is what they need more than anything else right now. Make sure the girl’s all right, not in any trouble or anything, and report to me. I’ll pass the information along.”

“What if she’s
not
all right? What if she
is
in trouble?”

“We’ll hope she’s not. If she is, you stay out of it. Let me have the grim details, and I’ll put Papa on the job.”

“I’ll need a complete description. A photograph would be better.”

“I have one. I’ll shoot it right out to you.”

“Very well, Oscar. I’ll do my best to get you and the New York Police Department off the hook once more.”

“Thanks, old girl. It’s noble of you. Now I’ve got to hang up. This call’s costing the city a fortune. Take care of my favorite schoolma’am, Hildy.”

“Be assured that Hildy will. Good-bye, Oscar.”

Miss Withers hung up and strolled slowly out into her yard again. If she had been less conscious of the proper deportment for spinster ladies, to say nothing of the opinions of neighbors, she might have chortled aloud and kicked up her heels. The gravelly voice of Inspector Oscar Piper had been a potent tonic. It had lifted her spirits, which had been drooping, and had filled her with all sorts of errant and extravagant hopes. No doubt she was being foolish, incited by wishful thinking to absurd expectations, but nevertheless the warm golden air was suddenly more invigorating, and her restricted regimen all at once expanded. There was really, of course, except for the pleasure of communication with an old friend, no justifiable reason for exhilaration. The assignment she had accepted was likely to prove more tedious and dull than otherwise. Surely there was little enough to stimulate one in the prospect of hunting down a silly young girl and trying to convince her of the error of her ways. What Oscar called legwork.

Still, it was a challenge. Finding an elusive fugitive in the vast Los Angeles area, even a fugitive with daffodils painted on her Volkswagen, would be a difficult task, if not impossible. Moreover, if the truth must out, Miss Withers nourished a faint hope of unexpected developments. It was not that she really wished Lenore Gregory any more trouble than she deserved. It was just that she hoped, in an unspecified kind of way, that her assignment would turn out in the end to be more than it seemed to be in the beginning.

She stooped to scratch the ears of Talley, who had approached in all confidence that he would get his ears scratched. She strolled across her manicured lawn and inspected her bright and thriving flower beds. But she was hardly aware of what she was doing, for her mind was already at grips with the preliminary problem of finding, so to speak, a needle in a haystack. There was to begin with, as she had said to Inspector Piper, the quite fundamental one of getting about, the plain and simple necessity to get from one place to another with a minimum of delay and difficulty. In this sprawling city and its environs, geographically giant-esque, this would be no easy matter for a maiden lady with no vehicle of her own and no instruction in driving it, even if she had one. Taxis were not readily available hereabouts, as they were in eastern cities, and the cost of hiring one for prolonged service would be, besides, prohibitive.

In addition to the problem of getting around, there was the question of where to go. Miss Withers tried to keep abreast of the times and reasonably aware of the contemporary scene, but she was not well versed, she had to admit, in the habits of hippies. She saw them here and there, singly and in pairs and small groups, usually identifiable by their long hair and unkempt clothes and the strong impression, even when they were downwind, of unwashed bodies, but she had not made a practice of invading their haunts and locating their colonies. Venice, right next door, had its share, she understood. Laguna Beach, she knew, had its. Surely you could find them on the Sunset Strip. She had read about the love-ins in Griffith Park. But it was all so far removed from the orderly world of a retired schoolma’am whose extracurricular experience had been confined for the most part to such orthodox deviants as murderers and assorted felons. She needed instruction. She needed, in fact, a guide.

Distracted by her problems, she gazed across intervening lawns and flower beds at the familiar sight, three houses down the block, of young Aloysius Fister tinkering with his motorcycle in his driveway. Miss Withers was fond of Aloysius, although she disapproved of him and invariably gave him, when the opportunity arose, sagacious advice which he good-naturedly ignored. Aloysius was a college drop-out. He had been doing quite well at UCLA, Miss Withers understood, and then without warning he had simply withdrawn and come home. The only reason he gave was that he had reached the conclusion, after implied soul-searching, that college might not be the answer to a lot of things, at least for him, and he was deferring any further academic endeavor until he could decide where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do after he got there. Meanwhile, insofar as Miss Withers could see, he did nothing at all, unless you counted going to the beach and forever tinkering, as now, with his motorcycle.

What he needs
, she thought,
is to make himself useful
. And seconds after the thought, her purpose hardly formed in her mind, she found herself approaching him resolutely.

“Good morning, Aloysius,” she said.

The young man flinched and grinned wryly, brushing straw-colored hair out of his eyes with the back of a greasy paw. “Please, Miss Withers! I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you’ll call me Al, I’ll call you Hildegarde.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort, young man. If you prefer to be called Al, I’ll be glad to comply without any concession on your part.”

“Fair enough.”

“However, I deplore your attitude. Aloysius is a fine old Irish name. I’m quite partial to the Irish.”

Al Fister grinned again, and the grin did pleasant things to his homely, sun-tanned face. In spite of certain early fore-warnings of a dissolute character, Miss Withers thought he was really quite a charming boy. His straw-colored thatch, with a kind of obstreperous will of its own, was not amenable to the discipline of comb or brush. His eyes, which crinkled at the corners when he grinned, reflected the amiability of his temper, which was pacific by nature and conviction. He was dressed in a soiled white T-shirt, a pair of faded blue Levis, and filthy sneakers.

“I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “If you’re looking for my mother, she isn’t home.”

“I’m not looking for your mother,” Miss Withers said. “You’re the one I want to speak with.”

“Another lecture, Miss Withers? What have I done now?”

“It isn’t what you’ve done. Quite the contrary. It’s what you
haven’t
done. So far as I’ve been able to observe, you haven’t done anything whatever.”

“Maybe you haven’t observed enough.” Al’s grin was ready, his amiability undisturbed. “You might be surprised at what I’ve been doing when I was out of your sight.”

“That may be. I doubt that I should be favorably impressed.” Miss Withers sniffed audibly and somehow severely. “I’ve decided, young man, that you need something constructive to do. You need to
contribute
.”

“It’s nice of you to think of me, Miss Withers, but I wouldn’t want you to worry.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t, and so I won’t. To begin with, Al, I’d like you to tell me what you know about the peculiar breed of human beings referred to as hippies.”

“Hippies?”

“Yes. Surely you’re familiar with them?”

“Who isn’t? They’re all over the place. What do you want to know about them?”

“Primarily, their major places of congregation and habitation. Also, how one might go about making oneself familiar with them.”

“Well, you can find them on the Strip, in Griffith Park, at Laguna Beach. There happens to be some right over in Venice. They spill over, of course. Like I said, you can find them all over the place. After all, the Establishment hasn’t reached the point yet of keeping them on reservations.”

“The Establishment?”

“Sure. The established order. The squares and their fuzz.”

“Fuzz, I believe, is a rather derogatory term applied to the police?”

“That’s right. The cops.”

“How would you like to be, so to speak, a kind of unofficial member of the fuzz?”

“Not me.”

“Nonsense. It would give you a sense of responsibility, and it would be a service to me. If it offends you to be a part of the Establishment, you can pretend that you’re Philip Marlowe. I should think that even you would have no objections to playing private-eye.”

Understandably, a trace of bewilderment was beginning to encroach on Al’s expression of amiable tolerance. As a matter of fact, he liked this old chick. In her way, she was pretty cool. But sometimes she seemed to be way out, like now, and he wondered if she had her full quota of marbles.

“Look, Miss Withers,” he said desperately, “maybe you’d better just tell me what you’ve got on your mind. Like straight out, I mean.”

“A commendable suggestion. Here, like straight out, is what I have on my mind. I have been commissioned, in a manner of speaking, by a certain rather important member of the fuzz to try to locate a young lady of twenty-one years who is suspected of being in the Los Angeles area. Specifically, in one of the areas frequented or inhabited by hippies. Her name is Lenore Gregory, and she is a member of a substantial New York family. No crime is involved, I assure you. It’s simply a matter of locating the girl and reporting her whereabouts. Her mother and father are naturally, distraught.”

Al swallowed all this without a gulp. Indeed, he had heard rumors to the effect that Miss Withers was not in all ways exactly what she seemed, and that she had had, in fact, a pretty checkered career in New York City before moving West. Having heard the rumors and having now heard what she had to say, he was beginning to feel, actually, a stirring of interest, in her proposition. It might provide a welcome break in his reflections on where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do when he got there.

“And you want me to drive you around to these places so you can try to pick up this girl’s trail,” he said. “Is that it?”

“Precisely. I shall, of course pay all expenses.”

“Well, Miss Withers, I’d like to help you, and that’s the truth, but I’m pretty sure my dad wouldn’t relinquish the family wheels, and all I’ve got is the Hog.”

“The
what
?”

“The Harley.” He affectionately patted the saddle of the ominous-looking machine he had been tinkering with. “The Hog.”

To Miss Withers, the name seemed highly inappropriate. She was inclined to think of it rather as a Brahman bull or a bucking bronco. It looked as if it would immediately try to throw off anyone who was rash enough to climb on.

“Does this machine come equipped with a sidecar?” she said.

“I could attach one if I had it, but I don’t.”

“They are available, however, are they not?”

“Oh, sure. Why?”

“Young man, if you think for an instant that I’m going to
straddle
that thing, you have even less sense than I give you credit for. You will buy a sidecar today at my expense. When I’m finished with it, it will become your property.”

“You’ll need a crash helmet too. It’s against the law to ride a motorcycle without one.”

“Merciful heavens! However, if one must, one must. It is necessary, after all, to show proper respect for the law.”

And so it happened that Miss Hildegarde Withers, in the best tradition of chivalry from Camelot to La Mancha, went forth to rescue a fair damsel in distress, riding sidesaddle, so to speak, on a Hog.

A
FTER ALMOST A WEEK
of fruitless searching, she was beginning to feel, it must be admitted, more akin to the fantasy-ridden don than to any of Arthur’s knights. She had started out with the naïve notion that her assignment was simply one of tracking down a willful and deluded girl, no doubt spoiled rotten by permissive parents, and giving her, after finding her, the benefit of a few choice words about the facts of life. It was not, of course, that easy. As she rode forth each day on her mechanical Rosinante, Don Quixote to Al Fister’s Sancho Panza, she became increasingly aware that her quest did not take her simply from one town to another, or from one part of town to another part, but into another world, if not another dimension—the twilight world of the hippies, who lived by rules she did not know and spoke a language she could only imperfectly understand.

It was a strange world, as she came to know it, a world where pot and peyote replaced the dry martini, where LSD and desoxyephedrine enlarged the vision of pale ghosts of real people who dreamed and drifted but did not dance to the music of the sitar played by Ravi Shankar. Like others who lived outside this world, she had fallen into the common error of thinking of the hippies as rebels, but now she began to understand that they weren’t rebels at all. They were secessionists. Unable to accept or change the system, they had simply split, flaked off, voluntarily got lost. And lost, she thought, they were. Going nowhere, they had lost their way. The beat generation. When she was young, more years ago than she cared to count, it had been the lost generation. The years of the expatriates. Now, doing her legwork on Sunset Strip, riding the Hog in a helmet to Laguna Beach or wherever the hippies were and the Lost Lenore might be, making her inquiries and watching the contemporary breed on the bright beaches or in psychedelic joints or community pads smelling of pot, she kept remembering a phrase, a title used long ago by Scott Fitzgerald for one of his books:
All the Sad Young Men
. And all the sad young women. That was the adjective. That was the
mot juste
. These young people were sad. Sitting with folded hands in limbo. Contemplating a kind of universal navel in a chemical nirvana. Negative. Nothing to do and nowhere to go. Even their sex, which permeated their haunts, was a kind of negation. Sex is so convenient when it’s too much trouble to love. The nothing world. Nada. But it isn’t, Mr. Hemingway, a clean, well-lighted place.