[Hildegarde Withers 16] - People Vs. Withers & Malone by Stuart Palmer & Craig Rice

Author:Stuart Palmer & Craig Rice [Palmer, Stuart & Rice, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Award Books
Published: 1963-04-14T23:00:00+00:00

People vs. Withers & Malone

“Don’t look at me so askance/” said John J. Malone as he crept into his office at two P.M. “I can’t stand much more.”

“You could stand a bromo,” said the faithful Maggie. Then she saw his eyes turn hopefully toward the Emergency file. “You took the bottle with you when you left last night. That was just after you borrowed my last ten dollars.”

The little lawyer winced at the noise of the fizz, but he raised the glass, squaring his shoulders under the nearly new, somewhat rumpled, dove-gray Finchley suit. “To the memory of my once illustrious career,” he toasted hollowly.

“I gather you had no luck last night.”

“You gather correctly. I hit every saloon from here to the boondocks, but never a trace of the missing Mr. Taras. They’ve got him hid, all right.” Malone sighed. “The latter part of the evening is a blur—in fact, I seem to have had a blackout. However, I just might have stumbled on something; I found a string tied around my finger when I woke up in a Turkish bath, I find I wrote a check without filling in the stub and I seem to remember the name Little Helga, but that’s all.”

“I hope the check was for under $3.65,” Maggie told him. “Because that’s the current bank balance.”

The little lawyer searched his pockets, fished out a lone cigar with a greenstick fracture which he tried vainly to light. “Maggie dear, you can put this down in your diary as Black Wednesday.”

“Only it’s Thursday,” she corrected. “Which means that our client dies in less than a week, and then it’s your turn to go before the grand jury, as if we both didn’t know.” They were silent for a long minute—which was more than could be said for the apparition in raincoat and umbrella which suddenly swooped in on them like a large raven looking for a bust of Pallas Athene on which to perch. But this bird did not croak, “Nevermore”; it only cried, “Malone! Maggie! Here I am!” Miss Hildegarde Withers, whom they had thought safely busy with her own pursuits in faraway California, now warmly embraced them both. “I came as soon as I heard how bad it was,” she told them.

“Welcome to the wake,” Malone told her.

“Fiddlesticks! You can’t win ’em all—this Coleman case was lost even before you got hold of it.”

“Yes? Well, Junior Coleman only got life at the first trial, when he was defended by his rich father’s stuffy old law firm. I won him a new trial and what did I get him? A death sentence!”

“I’m more worried about this subornation charge against you.”

“Leaving ethics out of it, when did I ever have a thousand dollars at one time—for bribery or any other purpose?”

“A good point. What steps are you taking, Malone?”

“Looking for clues,” said Maggie. “And in the usual place —at the bottom of a bottle.”

“I was trying to locate that witness, Taras, who said in court that I’d tried to bribe him.

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