Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene Read Online Free

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