Green Ace

by Stuart Palmer

  She rounded the corner of the house, almost plunging into the brown and brittle tangle that had been a rose garden, and stopped short. A young man in a leather jacket was just letting himself out of the kitchen door—a tallish, weedy young man who started visibly when he saw her approach.

  “One moment!” cried Miss Withers. “Young man, if you’re from the real estate brokers I’d like a chance to view the house.”

  “Real estate?” he said blankly, in a cultured voice that was a cut or two above his extremely casual clothes. “I don’t understand.”

  “The house is for sale, isn’t it? I’d like to look at it, and I want to get in touch with the owner.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you,” he said. “Sorry.” And he started off.

  “But if you’re not from the realtor’s, then who are you?”

  “Gas man,” he told her. “Just reading the meter.” And he was gone.

  Miss Withers hammered on the back door, without much hope. She even tried the knob, but it was locked. There were French doors opening out onto a sort of raised sun porch, but every blind was drawn. Finally she gave it up and went away.

  A telephone call to the real estate office produced only the information that they did not have the address of any Mrs. Andrew Rowan or Mrs. Natalie Rowan, nor had the girl at the switchboard ever heard of her. The telephone book and city directory, were equally of no help whatever.

  “I might have known!” observed the disappointed schoolma’am to herself as she left the phone booth. Mrs. Natalie Rowan had probably put her house up for sale through an intermediary and then taken herself off to some playground of the idle rich such as Bar Harbor or Santa Barbara, there to try to forget the unpleasant ceremony scheduled for the week of the twentieth. One could hardly blame her, under the circumstances, for wanting to be as far as possible from the last act of this sorry tragedy and all its attendant publicity. Still Miss Withers thought it would have been very helpful for her to know exactly where Natalie Rowan was, and just what if anything she was up to …

  Shortly before noon next day—Sunday—a limousine with uniformed driver pulled up outside dreary prison walls to disgorge a tall and expensive woman wearing bright yellow hair, an imposing mink jacket, and several diamond bracelets. She marched up to the entrance gate and demanded to see Andrew Rowan. In the face of the guard’s weary announcement that visiting hours were from two to four every second Wednesday, she pointed out that there would be little or no use in her returning next visiting day to pay a call on a dead husband. It was a point well taken. The gate guard made a telephone call and finally the visitor was permitted to enter, though not until she had come to the conclusion that Sing Sing is almost as hard to get into as out of.

  Then she ran into a uniformed matron, who said firmly, “If you’ll just step in here, Mrs. Rowan? There are certain formalities.”

  “Of course! I’m to be frisked or whatever you call it to make sure that I haven’t a saw or a file concealed on my person, to pass through the grating …”

  The matron’s smile was grim. “No danger of that, ma’am. You’ll see your husband through a glass barrier, and speak with a microphone. We’re not worried about such nonsense as saws and files, but we do keep a sharp look out for cameras.” The search was performed briskly and competently, with amazing thoroughness. Of course, some cameras these days were made very small, but still—

  The visitor cooled her high heels in an anteroom for half an hour and then was led through a maze of corridors and finally ushered into a long hall split in half by a low table, with a dozen or so armchairs facing on either side. The table was divided by a heavy wire-inforced glass that ran clear to the ceiling. Everything was spotlessly clean, smelling of brown soap and lysol, but the stench of human shame and misery hung heavy in the air.

  A wooden-faced guard sat overlooking the room from a raised armchair at one end; two more stood by the iron door in the opposite wall through which a man in shapeless prison gray was coming. It must be Andy Rowan—or what was left of him. Yet there was little or nothing about him to remind anyone of the handsome young chap who had fainted behind the wheel of the blue Buick or who had posed for the police photographs; his curly hair was cropped short and his drawn face was all nose and chin and staring eyes. As he was led forward he watched the floor, as if afraid of stumbling over an invisible obstacle.

  The keeper in charge of him, a burly fellow with tight gray waves in his hair, was more alert. Without warning he caught the prisoner’s arm, turned him around, and headed him back toward the iron door again—a round trip to nowhere. So near, and yet so far. Then, after the door had clanged on Andy Rowan again, the keeper briskly crossed the room, unlocked a panel in the dividing wall, and came through to the disappointed visitor.

  “Mrs. Rowan?” He smiled professionally. “I’m sorry, there’s been a little mistake. You’re supposed to be cleared through the warden’s office for an interview with your husband when it isn’t a regular visiting day. If you’ll only come this way I’m sure it can all be ironed out in a few minutes.”

  She started to protest, looking wistfully back over her shoulder. But the keeper’s hand was gripping her arm in that oily familiarity which becomes second nature to most men who are given the power of lock and key over their fellows. His knowing eyes and unctuous smile implied that there was some sort of unsavory understanding between them, some common secret. She twisted away, but they went back again, through more and more corridors and up a stair, where she finally sat alone in a bare waiting room for a little while and then at last was ushered into a suite of offices overlooking the prison yard. Her escort left her there, and she went forward alone toward where a man was standing—a quiet, grayish person in tweeds, with deep worry lines etched across his forehead and caliper grooves from nose to mouth.

  Indicating a chair, he said, “Mrs. Rowan? Sit down, please. I’m Warden Boyington.”

  “How do you do?” she said a little weakly, as she refused a proffered cigarette.

  “May I say, Mrs. Rowan, that you don’t look quite as I expected?”

  “Oh yes, yes of course!” She even managed a wavering smile. “I am a little older than my poor husband, but—”

  The warden held a gold lighter to his own cigarette. “I didn’t mean that. You seem,” he went on gently, “to have aged considerably, and also to have grown some three or four inches taller, since you were up here a couple of weeks ago.”

  “But—why, naturally I’ve been sick with worry, and perhaps I’m not looking my best. And these high heels I’m wearing …” She stopped, and there was a long uncomfortable silence. Then Miss Hildegarde Withers hitched up her diamond bracelets and said, “Well, warden, it was worth trying anyway!”

  Warden Boyington suddenly hit his desk so hard that all its accumulation of pens and little ornaments and vases of flowers leaped up into the air and did a little samba dance. “Damn it to hell, ma’am, I hate reporters!”

  “But warden—”

  “You’re under arrest. Now laugh that off.”

  “Man, a hybrid of plant and ghost.”

  —Nietzsche

  2.

  LAUGHTER WAS AT THAT moment farthest from Miss Wither’s thoughts. There were a number of things she would have liked to say, but the warden wasn’t giving her the chance. “It’s time one of you people had a lesson,” he remarked with some bitterness. “Once, before my term of office, a reporter sneaked a camera into the execution chamber, and next day the world was edified by a portrait of Ruth Snyder when the current scorched her. I suppose, ma’am, you thought it would be an equally smart scoop to get a sob-sister interview with a man in the condemned block by pretending to be his wife. You might just possibly have got away with it, if Keeper Huff hadn’t been on his toes.”

  Miss Withers hastily took in sail and ran her true colors up to the masthead, only it turned out that the warden didn’t like amateur detectives either! “But warden, just suppose this man Rowan is really
innocent,” she demanded during the next lull.

  Warden Boyington looked at her with ill-concealed aversion. “They’re all innocent, to hear them tell it. We’ve hardly ever had a convict in this place who didn’t claim he was framed. Every man in the condemned block sits day after day puzzling over law books and trying out writs and briefs and appeals, figuring that the rest of his mates will have to die but he’s different. I tell you—”

  “Tell me this,” she said. “Rowan has been up here almost six months. You must know him, must have talked to him. Does he impress you as a guilty man?”

  The warden shrugged. “How would I know? We’ve never had an ‘innocent’ man in the condemned cells, to my knowledge. They’re as good as dead when they go in. I’ll admit Rowan is confident, or claims to be, that some miracle will save him, but that’s not uncommon.”

  “Only that odd will he made—”

  “How’d you get wind of that?” Warden Boyington hit his desk again. “If Huff let that out of the bag—”

  She shook her head. “I can’t reveal my sources of information.”

  “Well, I’ll reveal something to you. It is my unpleasant duty to inform you that it’s a misdemeanor to enter a state prison under false pretenses, and a felony to forge a false name in the visitors’ book. Let’s see you fast-talk your way out of that!”

  Miss Withers closed her eyes, having a clear vision of months in a dungeon cell on dry bread and water, surrounded by large slimy rats. As a desperate last resort she had to swallow what was left of her pride and implore the man to check on her bona fides with a long distance call to Spring 7-3100. “You can even reverse the charges,” she offered hopefully as a clincher.

  It took some persuading, but finally Warden Boyington put through the call. He listened, relaxed a little, and then passed the instrument across the desk to her. After it was all over he painstakingly hung up the phone again and silently indicated the door. So it was with her ears still burning from the Inspector’s caustic “I told you so!” that Miss Withers gathered together her borrowed and rented finery, clinging to what little dignity was left to her.

  Yet she could not resist one last attempt. “Warden,” she said, “as man to man, tell me what you think about that last will and testament of Andrew Rowan’s!”

  “I think it’s a practical joke, that’s what I think! Men in the condemned row sometimes develop an odd sense of humor. They love to send comic valentines and doggerel poetry, sometimes to me and sometimes to the police or the district attorney or whoever on the outside they blame for their being here. There’s the old unfunny gag about the convict who had one last little request as they led him to the chair—he said he wanted the warden to sit on his lap.”

  She frowned. “And how would you feel about executing an innocent man?”

  “I wouldn’t feel any different. I’m only a servant of the people, carrying out orders of the court. Personally I am opposed to capital punishment, and my wife sneaks sedatives in my coffee at dinner every day we have an execution. But I’m not an individual, I’m an instrument.”

  “Monsieur de Paris at least wore a black mask!” snapped the schoolteacher, and stalked out of the place.

  “Almost!” she sighed dismally to herself as the gates clanged. But almost was to no avail, almost was but to fail. And with the one question she had wanted to ask Andy Rowan still unanswered. Eight days from now he might not be alive to answer it. She had no very clear idea of what “the week of September twentieth” really meant, of whether they executed a man on Monday or kept him around until the following Sunday night, but to all intents and purposes it worked out the same. Judging by the progress she had made so far, Rowan would surely die for the Harrington girl’s murder—and the Inspector, the only man in her life even though she detested him one day and mothered him the next, would be pilloried in the press when the news of the will got out.

  Immediately after a murder the press was always crying for the blood of the fiend who had perpetrated it, but after somebody had been found guilty and sentenced to death the papers were equally avid to reopen the story with a suggestion that an innocent man had been crushed under the Juggernaut of Justice. And this time, the exception that proves the rule, it might very well be true.

  Somewhat baffled, the schoolteacher suffered herself to be borne back to Manhattan in her hired limousine. Then, as they went through the outskirts of Yonkers, she suddenly cried aloud, “Of all the unmitigated idiots!”

  The driver, having just won a narrow victory in a brush with a truck trying to make a left turn, turned an irate face. “What was that crack, lady?”

  “Not you—me!” Miss Withers said hastily. “I forgot about the money!”

  Which naturally made the man leap to the conclusion that she was trying to get the charges put on the cuff. But the schoolteacher paid him off, adding a very modest tip, outside her little apartment on West 74th, and then rushed inside to divest herself of her borrowed plumage and to make peace with Talleyrand, her French poodle. Talley was a gregarious canine, He liked regular meals and more than food he liked companionship, both of which had been denied him all day long. He welcomed her as one returned from the dead, then rushed to open the closet door. It was one of his self-taught tricks, and he had to turn the knob very carefully with his teeth, but he came triumphantly galumphing back with his leash.

  “Very well,” said the schoolteacher. “But it will be a very short walk indeed, for I have work to do. The game is afoot.”

  They went once around the block, with Talleyrand pausing now and then to investigate a new smell or to grab up a scrap of secondhand chewing gum, but as they came back to the familiar steps of the brownstone his mistress paused, tapping her prominent front teeth with a fingernail. “On second thought, perhaps you may as well come with me after all,” she decided. “Any woman anchored to a big silly apricot-colored beast like you will be taken at sight for an eccentric of the first water. Which is the exact impression I wish to convey.”

  Talley vibrated what there was left of his tail, and showed an incredibly red tongue in a doggish laugh. He was a home-loving dog, but not very.

  So the retired schoolteacher and her gamboling Standard poodle set out on the quest. It was a search filled with ups and downs, and required the pulling of many strings and the taking of certain liberties with the truth, but she eventually discovered that the present owner of the house on Prospect Way was a Mrs. Emil Fogel. There was a very slim chance indeed that she would have any information about the previous owner, but it was worth a try. At ten o’clock next morning Miss Hildegarde Withers, still complete with dog, went out by appointment to see about buying a house.

  The shades were still drawn, the windows still unwashed, but this time the door opened at her first knock. There stood a shapely girl in slacks, whose sultry mouth and bright strawberry hair suggested that somewhere farther downtown, perhaps Times Square, would have been her more natural habitat,

  “You’re Mrs. Fogel?” demanded the schoolteacher.

  “She couldn’t make it,” the girl said. “I’m her secretary-companion.” She looked dubiously down at Talley, who was straining at the leash and curling a black lip to bare one gleaming fang. “Does it bite?” Miss Withers told her of course not. “But it looks as if he’s snarling.”

  “Nonsense, child, he’s only chewing leftover gum again. A terrible habit, but I’m thankful he hasn’t found out about tobacco. So Mrs. Fogel couldn’t keep the appointment, after all? I guess she isn’t very anxious to sell the property.”

  “Oh, but she is! I can give you all the details—”

  Miss Withers had already infiltrated the front hallway, furnished sparingly with a telephone table, a hard bench, and an ancient upright victrola, circa 1910. It was but a step past heavy draperies into the big living room, whose French doors would have looked out into the garden if the blinds had been opened. The girl touched a switch and a bowl-shaped chandelier glowed feebly overhead. It was a somber room, f
illed with ponderous overstuffed chairs and fumed-oak tables, and the gilt-framed portrait on one wall of a scowling man with a toothbrush moustache did not brighten it.

  “The asking price is $28,000-$30,000 if you take furniture and all.”

  “I see,” said Miss Withers, casually ruffling the poodle’s silky topknot. “But isn’t that a little high? Shouldn’t there be some reduction because of the possibility of the place being haunted? There was a very gruesome murder committed here last year, you know.”

  The young woman winced, as if somebody had hit a very sour chord on a piano. Then she said, too quickly, “Oh, was there? I hadn’t heard.”

  “But surely the present owner must have heard? Perhaps that’s why she’s so anxious to sell?”

  “Yes, but—Mrs. Fogel’s only owned the place a short time, and—”

  “Fiddlesticks. That “For Sale’ sign on the lawn has been weathering there too long for the house to have changed owners very recently. And someone is living here right now, even though the door isn’t opened except by appointment.”

  “But Mrs. Fogel—”

  “Suppose we stop playing games, and call her by her real name. Mrs. Fogel wouldn’t have any reason for hiding out, but Natalie Rowan might. Ask Mrs. Rowan to step in please!”

  It was a direct hit, on target. The young eyes were wide as saucers. “But Mrs. Rowan isn’t—I mean Mrs. Fogel isn’t seeing anyone, I mean—”

  “You little fool, you don’t know what you mean!” interrupted a hoarse feminine voice from the hallway. The woman who abruptly pushed through the draperies was somewhere in her early forties, though her eyes were older. She was handsome still, yet there was something about her that suggested a comely turtle, a turtle vulnerable and trying hard to pretend it hadn’t been pried out of its shell. She said, “Iris, well excuse you!”