Read Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene for Free Online

Miss Withers’ home phone number. Nothing more. If it was intended to be cryptic, as it apparently was, it was too cryptic for Al. It was late, of course, and he was tired and stuffed with cake and milk, and so it was perhaps understandable and excusable if his mind was not working at peak efficiency.
    “You were wrong,” he said. “I still don’t dig.”
    “It’s really quite clear,” Miss Withers said. “Who, wanting to buy a second-hand Volkswagen, would specify a blue one decorated with daffodils? One buys what the market offers and paints it afterward as one wishes. The point is, Lenore Gregory, as I have told you, was driving just such a vehicle. It was surely noticed and remembered wherever she went. I submit that any person except a UCLA drop-out would understand immediately that I am not interested in the car, but the driver. Let us hope that our bait brings up a proper fish.”
    “Meaning someone who knows where she is and is willing to sell her out?”
    “Precisely. The use of stool pigeons, Aloysius, is common practice in police procedure. The end justifies the means. And now, if you have finally had sufficient milk and cake, you had better go home to bed. Your brain, I fear, clearly needs restoration.”

4.
    M ISS WITHERS SAT ALONE on a bench in Venice, her head covered with the magnificent creation of an anonymous milliner, her purse, clutched firmly by both hands, in her lap. To the right and left of her stretched a long line of other benches, most of them unoccupied. Behind her, running parallel to the line of benches, was Ocean Front, a wide street restricted to all traffic except official vehicles. In front of her, stretching two hundred yards to the ragged edge of the blue Pacific, was the littered sand of the beach. On the beach, between her and the ocean, was a long, low public bathhouse. To the right of the bathhouse, as she sat facing it, at the foot of Navy Avenue, Lick Pier extended across the beach and into the ocean. On the pier was an amusement park and a dance hall, from which, in the plush days of radio, the schmaltz of Lawrence Welk had gone out weekly coast to coast. The dance hall had been called the Aragon then; now it was called the Cheeta.
    Miss Withers appeared to be relaxed, taking her ease and perhaps a nap in the warm sun, with a soft sea wind touching her face and stirring the flowers of her magnificent hat. In fact, however, her senses were alert. On Ocean Front behind her, between the beach and the shops of Venice, the people of Venice passed and were now passing, the straights and the squares and the hippies and the elderly retired Jews who lived in the Ocean View Hotel at the corner of Ocean Front and Rose Avenue and went for entertainment to the Israel Levine Senior Adult Center. Miss Withers sat quietly and watched and listened. She waited.
    She had arrived in Venice some twenty minutes earlier. Santa Monica, where she lived, was just next door, so to speak, and Al had whisked her over in jig time. They had left the Hog in a parking lot at the corner of Navy Avenue and Speedway, and Miss Withers afoot had crossed over a block to Ocean Front and then strolled along the Front to the bench where she now sat. Al, meanwhile, after allowing her a head start from the lot, had tagged after, and was now sitting some distance away on a bench of his own near Lick Pier.
    Miss Withers had an appointment. Her cryptic ad had been answered. It was no longer than two hours ago that her phone had rung, and she had thought at first that it was some prankster on the line, for no one answered when she spoke, although the line was open, and still did not answer when she repeated herself. She was about to hang up in disgust when the voice came over the line, and she could still feel, even sitting here on the bench in the warm sun, the crawling of her flesh when she heard it. She didn’t quite know why. It was a soft voice, masculine, not offensive in any palpable way, but it seemed to have