Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene by Stuart Palmer

Lenore in what appeared to be a shocking crime. Now, in his corner, he glared at the floor in front of him and engaged in a running monologue of dire mutterings. Every once in a while he would look up directly at Miss Withers. The sight of her seemed to arouse him to a perfect fury of invective, for his mutterings would rise abruptly in volume and tempo, sound tumbling over sound in a welter of gibberish. Miss Withers could make no sense of any of it. So far as she could tell, he was invoking in his private tongue the wrath of his personal gods. For her incomprehension she was thankful. She had an uneasy feeling that the gibberish, given sense, would have been unfit for the ears of an elderly virgin.
    Miss Withers had been summarily herded into this small stateroom, which was next to the captain’s and between his and the one in which, when she boarded the vessel, she had heard singing and the sound of talking. Her shepherd had been a certain offensive man called Captain Kelso, head of the Homicide Bureau of the San Francisco police. He was a hulk of a man, with a bald dome and a beefy face that turned apoplectic-scarlet at the slightest provocation. He seemed to move awkwardly, in a lumbering gait, but Miss Withers had noticed that he managed, nevertheless, to get things done quietly and swiftly. After listening without expression to her preliminary account of events, and clearly feeling no need for her assistance in the investigation, which she was prepared to offer, he had ordered her in here to wait, and here she was, over an hour later, still waiting. Quite naturally, she resented such treatment. She could hardly avoid the feeling that one who had been accorded prerogatives by the Inspector of Homicide, NYPD, should be accorded at least equal prerogatives by the Head of Homicide, SFPD, who was, after all, only a captain.
    In the stateroom next door, division being dictated by cramped quarters, another group of unlikely Argonauts awaited the pleasure of the police. Here in this one with Miss Withers and Lenore and Al were the Prophet Onofre, muttering curses or imprecations in his corner, and four others divided equally between the sexes. There was an obscure dancer from Los Angeles, wearing black leotards under a skirt not much longer than a figure skater’s. She was sitting sidewise on a bunk, talking to a male folk singer from Dallas, Texas, who lay stretched out with his arms folded up and under his head. The calves of the dancer’s legs were knotted with muscle. The folk singer’s hair was dark red and very long, hippie style, which meant no style at all so far as Miss Withers could tell, except freedom to grow as long as it might in any direction it was inclined.
    On a worn sofa which must have served someone as a bed at night, inasmuch as a pair of sheets and a thin blanket were folded up at one end, sat a blond waitress from Denver and an ex-policeman from San Francisco. They made, all in all, a rather terrifying couple. The waitress had pale hair, silvery in the dim light, with the most incredibly perfect face and the emptiest eyes that Miss Withers had ever seen. One saw such eyes, sometimes, in the faces of idiots.
    Her companion on the sofa was a slender young man, about thirty. Among the deviants on the vessel, fantastic Argonauts collected from God knew where for God knew what, he acquired somehow a sinister quality from being ordinary. His light brown hair was neatly trimmed and combed. He had a plain face, like the one next door or down the block. He was wearing a white cardigan sweater over a white T-shirt, both of which were clean, and a pair of navy-blue slacks that had been recently pressed. Over his eyes he wore a pair of glasses, tinted lenses in heavy plastic frames, which he removed every once in a while and held briefly by the bridge between a thumb and index finger, the exact repetition of an unconscious habit. Once he had turned his uncovered eyes directly upon Miss Withers, and she had felt