Miss Withers Regrets Read Online Free PDF Page A

as I’m here I may as well look at the body.”
    “On the service porch. I’ll show you.” Sergeant Fischer snapped on his electric torch and led the way around the house. “We brought it up here where the light was better so Doc Radebaugh could make his examination. Don’t suppose there was any harm moving him, as long as he’d been moved once already.”
    “I got no objection, anyway,” said the sheriff dryly. “And I don’t guess Cairns has.” He looked down upon the uncovered body of Huntley Cairns. “Good God, what’s that thing he’s got on?”
    “An athletic corset, the doc called it. To keep his stomach in.”
    Vinge shook his head. “Bet you it was uncomfortable.” He turned away. “Funny thing Searles would pull the body out of the water before he phoned. And, by the way, where’d he phone from?”
    “He came up to the kitchen. That’s one of the ways we trapped him, because he could just as well have phoned from the extension down in the bathhouse.”
    “But according to his story, he had the murderer locked in there, didn’t he?”
    “In the men’s side, yes. There was another extension in the ladies’ room.”
    The sheriff laughed. “Bashful, maybe? Did you ask him?”
    “Yeah. First he said he didn’t think about there being one in there, and then he changed his story and said that he tried the door and it was locked, or stuck. Worked all right when I tried it. And there was nothing inside, either. It was pretty clear that he was lying.”
    “Joe Searles never had much reputation for telling the truth,” Vinge agreed. “So Doc Radebaugh looked at the corpse, did he? That’s handy, him being an acting deputy coroner. Where’s he now?”
    “With the other suspects, in the living room.” Sergeant Fischer sensed the sheriff’s disapproval and added hastily, “Well, you know Lunney. Before I could stop him he’d told everybody that they were material witnesses and they had to stay until you said they could go. But I handled ’em with kid gloves, Sheriff.”
    Vinge hesitated, and his thick shoulders sagged. “There’s men itching for my job who would change their minds quick enough if they knew what I have to go through,” he said, and headed into the house.
    Kid gloves or not, their detention had made the people in the Cairns drawing room as jittery as water on a hot stove. They all started talking at once.
    “Take it easy, take it easy!” said the sheriff. “We’ll have this all straightened out in a few minutes. Don’t anybody need to get worried or upset, because all I need from you folks is an informal statement.”
    “Here’s a list of everybody,” Officer Lunney whispered, proudly presenting his notebook and then crossing to the front door, where he stood with arms folded.
    The sheriff looked at the list, wiped his glasses, and looked again. “Before we start taking the statements,” he said almost apologetically, “I’d like to ask Dr. Radebaugh just when the deceased met his death.”
    Harry Radebaugh, stiff and professional, stood up as if called on to recite in school and said that in his opinion it was not more than two hours ago and not less than one. The post-mortem on the body might cut it down a little closer. But Cairns had come in on the five o’clock and had arrived at the party about twenty minutes after. He’d gone right upstairs and, presumably, almost straight down to his new swimming pool. “Roughly he died between five-thirty and six-fifteen, because it was six-twenty when Miss Abbott came up and found the body on the tiles, covered with a man’s blue denim jacket.”
    “Searles’s coat,” Sergeant Fischer put in.
    The sheriff nodded. “And the phone call from Searles came in at sixteen minutes past six. That all matches right enough.”
    “If you ask me,” Thurlow Abbott suddenly put in, “they should have used a pulmotor on Huntley. Lots of people have been revived after they’ve been in the water for hours.”
    Vinge looked