“They stomach-pumped him!” put in Iris helpfully.
“Nils Bruner and Riff Sprott,” mused Miss Withers. “Something to go on.”
“You won’t go very far,” Iris said. “When Midge was through with a man she was through. I don’t think she ever saw Bruner after his wife got the divorce—she never mentioned his name when I was rooming with her. And Riff Sprott got tired of calling her up about six months before she died. Somebody said he even made an honest woman out of the canary who sang with his band. So—”
Miss Withers said, “Now don’t let’s be so quick to eliminate suspects. We must explore a little further. By the way, who was backing Midge in her fling at being Miss Brooklyn?”
“Just some old stuffy club,” Iris offered.
“The Bigger Flatbush Business Boosters,” Natalie elaborated.
“But a club is only a group of men,” the schoolteacher said sharply. “And men are putty in the hands of a beautiful animal like Midge Harrington. Now wasn’t there one who took a special interest in promoting her career?” But Iris only shook her head.
“I happened to see one of the club checks one day when I was in my husband’s office,” said Natalie. “It was countersigned by a man named Zotos, George Zotos.”
“Oh, him!” Iris laughed. “Old Georgie-Porgie, Midge always called him. He was harmless as a cocker spaniel. Besides, he was old—over forty at least.”
Miss Withers pointed out that there is no age limit on the sowing of wild oats. “We must include Mr. Zotos in our list. Bruner, Sprott, and Zotos. Too bad we can’t get the spook of Midge Harrington to point an ectoplasmic finger at the right one.”
“I’m afraid Marika can’t guarantee any such results …” Natalie began.
“I was entirely serious, though perhaps Marika will be helpful to us at some stage of the investigation, if only to throw a scare into the suspects. The murderer, of course, thinks he’s got away with it, and that when Rowan pays the penalty it will be a perfect murder. But he still must be jittery. I wonder if this might not be the time to try psychological methods? Suppose someone were to call on each of our suspects on some pretext or other and then suddenly mention the dead girl’s name? The killer might give himself away by his reaction.”
Natalie choked over another brandy. “What? Oh, I could never get by with anything like that, I’m no actress.”
“I’m an actress,” Iris admitted. “At least I’m a member of Equity. But don’t forget I saw Midge in the morgue. Not for all the tea in China would I risk my lily-white neck by snuggling up to her killer.” She shuddered elegantly.
Miss Withers arose, then stood bracing herself against the pull of Talleyrand, who was as usual eager to be off. “That rather leaves it up to me, does it not?”
Mrs. Rowan breathlessly announced that she would gladly pay a reward of ten, no twenty thousand dollars to anyone who would get to the truth of the matter!
“I’ll do my best,” promised the schoolteacher. “Not for the money—I still have my amateur standing. But I have an inbred weakness for longshots and lost causes. And justice, even in these worsening times, is justice.” She marched out of the room, dog and all, to what seemed the distant roll of drums and fanfare of trumpets. The outer door slammed.
The two women sat a little dazed in their chairs. “Golly!” exploded Iris. “I saw it but I don’t believe it! That incredible dog with a hair-ribbon in its bangs—and her hat, like a kid’s kite caught on a telephone pole!”
“It’s what’s under the hat that counts,” said Natalie Rowan thoughtfully. “She may seem to you a preposterous character, but I’ve heard that she can wind that Inspector at Centre Street around her little finger. And somehow having her just walk in here out of thin air and offer to help, just when things seemed so terribly hopeless … Do you believe in angels?”
“Sure, the Broadway kind. They pinch you when you’re waiting for your entrance cues … Mrs. Rowan, should you? That’ll be your fourth brandy this morning!”
“I’m not having a drink, dear, I’m pouring the rest of it down the sink. Because somehow I think I’m going to need my wits about me from now on.”
Out in the foyer Miss Hildegarde Withers, who had slammed the door from the inside with the idea of doing a little eavesdropping of her own, nodded approvingly and then slipped out into the sunlight, letting the door close silently behind her.
“We boil at different degrees.”
—Emerson
3.
“GIVE A DOG A BAD NAME,” observed Miss Withers over the breakfast coffee, “and he may live up to it. Or a man either.” She had been musing over the amazing number of famous murderers who had names befitting their deeds—Cordelia Botkin, for instance. And Martin Thorn and Augusta Nack, to say nothing of Herman Mudgett, Ivan Poderjay, and Dr. Crippen …
Her companion, seated on the opposite chair, looked wistfully at the last piece of buttered toast, and then gave a faint wordless cry of anguish as she spread it with marmalade and bit into a corner.
“Since this present puzzle has to be attacked with a shot in the dark anyway, perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea to play hunches? The only available suspects are Bruner, Sprott, and Zotos. Somehow I have a fancy for the name of Riff Sprott, as a potential murderer, I mean.”
Talleyrand, the big apricot poodle, sulked in silence. He had never accepted the dictum that grown dogs eat only one meal, and that at night. His hot brown eyes begrudged his mistress every bite she took, and with the inborn histrionic talents of one descended from a long line of theatrical and circus performers, he pantomimed famishment.
To no avail. His mistress—who had inherited him along with a lot of other trouble from one of her previous attempts at minding the Inspector’s business—was intently studying a weekly magazine of theatrical news, couched in what seemed to her almost a foreign language. Now and then she stopped to commit some phrase to memory. Noting her preoccupation, Talley reached out with elaborate caution and almost but not quite closed his whiskery jaws on the topmost lump in the sugar bowl.
“Bad for the teeth!” Miss Withers snapped, without looking up. “Get down at once.” Talley gave her a reproachful stare, then let his furry body slide off the chair. Then he had a mercurial change of mood and danced off hopefully toward the hall closet.
“You’ve already had your walk,” she told him firmly. “I’m afraid this is one excursion on which you’d only be in the way. I want to appear as Nemesis, not Mother Goose.” She put on her second-best hat, the one the Inspector always said resembled a runner-up float in the Rose Bowl parade, and then changed it for a more rakish bandanna. She would have liked to try the effect of a beanie, sweater and skirt, and bobby socks, but perhaps that would have been overdoing it. Starting out, she turned back and carefully draped a length of light chain around the door of the refrigerator. “Just in case,” she told the dog, “you are tempted to fall from grace again.”
When she was gone the big poodle made a detailed prospecting trip underneath all the table tops, but it had been some time since the retired schoolteacher had had a visit from any of her former pupils, and nobody had parked any gum. The day, for Talley at least, had got off on the wrong foot.
His mistress, however, felt a surge of hopeful confidence as she came out into the bright fall sunshine, heading briskly over toward the Park and then southward toward the theatrical district and Times Square. She had less than a week in which to perform a minor miracle—but as she reminded herself, the whole world was created in that same space of time.
But musicians, she soon discovered, are strictly nocturnal creatures, like bats and owls and garden snails. Riff Sprott was supposed to inhabit Suite 14B at the Dube Hotel, but wasn’t home. It was not until late that afternoon that Miss Withers gingerly descended a long stair and poked her inquisitive nose into a clammy little basement just off Seventh Avenue, whose blind neon signs proclaimed it to be The Grotto Club. It still smelled of yestereve’s stale liquor and tobacco, of
expensive perfume and of food, and even—she fancied—of roaches. In the deserted bar a melancholy youth left off wiping out glasses to wave a grayish towel in the direction she was to follow. Not that she needed help, for the rich and dissonant polyphony blasting forth suddenly from the inner room was guidance enough. It sounded to the schoolteacher about as harmonious as the scraping of a fingernail on a blackboard, but she marched on.
As she gingerly made her way toward the musicians’ stand past tiny tables covered with upended chairs and across a dance floor about the size of her living room rug at home, she noted that there was a bored, softly plump redhead leaning against the piano and beating time to the music with heavily enamelled claws. The five men were informally clad, but the girl wore a green evening gown in spite of the fact that it was barely twilight outside—a gown with nothing much before and rather less than half of that behind, as the song went.
The man with the trumpet—Miss Withers would have called it a “cornet”—was in his early thirties, a wiry nervous chap who wasn’t bad looking if your taste ran to a complexion like a flounder’s belly, a Hollywood shirt of many colors, and a dab of lip whisker. But he put down his horn with weary politeness when he saw that he had a visitor. “Take ten, boys,” he told the others, and stepped down from the stand with a gold-toothy smile. “What’s on your mind, sister?”
Miss Withers took a deep breath and sang out cheerily, “Hiyah, Riff! Autograph me one, will ya? I may look like a square, but I’m not long underwear. I’m a gal that’s strictly in step with hep, yep. You know, you’ve got one of the hottest five-man combos along the alley, and I just dropped in to see if you’ve grooved any new platters lately so I can add ’em to my album of real jumping jive!”
They were all staring at her, and the man with the tenor sax who had been improvising softly suddenly blew a shrill squeak. Riff Sprott backed warily away. “Beg pardon, sister? Come again, and cut out double-talk.”
“Oh, dear!” The maiden schoolteacher shook her head sorrowfully. “You mean I haven’t got the patois right, even after studying Down Beat and Weekly Variety for hours?”
“The act sounds queerer than a three-dollar bill,” Sprott told her. Then he sighed and held out his hand. “Okay, give me the summons and let me get back to rehearsal.”
“Heavens, I’m not a process server,” admitted Miss Withers. “I only dropped by, Mr. Sprott, to see if you’ve heard the news about Midge Harrington?”
The man gasped as if he had been kicked in the stomach by a sharp-toed shoe, and his face paled to a leprous green. Then he grasped Miss Withers by the arm and started walking her hastily back across the dance floor, out of earshot of the others. “You said Harrington?” He swallowed. “But Midge is dead!”
“I know. But the investigation into her murder is being reopened.”
His hand tightened on her arm, but he only said, “Oh?”
“Friend of yours, wasn’t she?”
“Look,” said Biff Sprott. “It’s no particular secret that Midge and I were an item in Winchell at one time, and when she gave me the air I was slap-happy enough to take a whole bottle of goof-pills. A bellboy found me and the Rescue Squad gave me the works and I didn’t start pushing up daisies after all. But that’s water over the dam, lady. I’d like very much to forget it.”
“Sometimes the dead won’t stay forgotten. You admit you knew Midge well at one time. I’m not asking out of idle curiosity, but—what was she really like?”
His eyes were suddenly far away, and there was an odd twist to his mouth. Yes, indeed, I could see him as a murderer, Miss Withers thought. The nympholept type, in love with an ideal of womanhood that never existed and never could exist. A jumble of nerves, too—though there was surprising strength in his pale, slender hands. She would have a black-and-blue mark on her arm tomorrow.
“You want to know what was she like?” he said softly. “Midge was—she was like a phrase of music, just a few bars by itself, that can’t be set to words. A hunk of melody that gets under your skin and you can’t help humming it all day long till you don’t know if you hate it or love it. And you can’t decide whether you heard it somewhere or just made it up, only it’s unfinished. Maybe if you’re in the business you even try to build it into a song, but you never can.”
“ ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter …’ ” quoted Miss Withers.
“ ‘Therefore ye soft pipes …’ ” Sprott blinked. “Poetry, yet! They beat enough of that into me in school. Anyway, Midge Harrington was a lot of girl, and all of it beautiful. You can carve that on her tombstone.”
“But a pretty girl is just like a melody, is that what you mean?”
Sprott was fast regaining his self-control. “That’s a moldy old Berlin number.”
“Sorry. But you and Midge Harrington were very much in love, weren’t you? What happened?”
“Sure, I had it bad. I don’t know what business it is of yours, but I don’t mind telling you that the only thing wrong was that she wasn’t enough in love with me. Maybe if I’d met her earlier, before some other guy put her heart in a deep-freeze, it might have been different.”
Miss Withers nodded sympathetically. “It has been said that only once does a woman love a man, after that she is in love with love. But who was this other man, this ghost who came between you? It wasn’t Nils Bruner?”
“Bruner? You mean the dance guy?” Sprott made a wry face. Then he reached into the pocket of his rainbow-hued shirt and took out a single cigarette, which he set afire. Drawing in the smoke as if he needed it, he eyed her with a cold and suspicious, eye. “How would I know? Who are you anyway, and why are you putting your five cents in?”
Miss Withers told him her name. “I’m just a friend of Inspector Piper’s. Sometimes he discusses his cases with me. That’s how I learned that they are beginning to think at Headquarters that they have the wrong man locked up for Midge’s murder.”
Sprott lighted his cigarette all over again, though it seemed to be burning well. “What? Who says so? That guy Rowan is guilty.”
“No, innocent. I have it on excellent authority. It’s out of this world.”
“Huh?”
“In more ways than one. As a matter of fact, all of this started because of a spirit message received through a medium or clairvoyant or whatever you want to call her—somebody named Marika, up on Ninety-sixth Street.”
“Are you kidding?” Sprott demanded.
“Not in the least. It’s too bad the woman didn’t stay in the trance long enough to get the name of the real murderer, but at least she has touched off a chain reaction that even has upset the official minds at Centre Street.”
He said, a little cautiously, “But what has all this got to do with me?”
“Nothing, of course!” said the schoolteacher warmly. “As I told my friend the Inspector, you’re a well-known artist. I’ve listened to all your broadcasts, and I have some of your records. Slew-Foot Boogie and Her Tears Flowed Like Wine are my special favorites. It’s ridiculous to suspect you. And I think it’s perfectly silly assigning detectives to shadow every step you take and—but I shouldn’t have let that out, should I?”
Sprott studied his cigarette as if it were some new invention, unique and puzzling. He opened his mouth, and then closed it again.
“Of course,” Miss Withers wickedly continued, “you did react and turn somewhat pale when I mentioned the girl’s name …”
“And why wouldn’t I?” cried Riff. “You went and mentioned it right in front of my wife, who happens to be standing over there by the piano waiting to run through her number.” He looked back over his shoulder. “We been married sixteen months, but she has the idea that I’m still carrying the torch for Midge Harrington. Just a mention of that name and Chloris hits the ceiling. She’ll—”
“Come, come, young man,” interrupted Miss Withers. “Don’t try to tell me that your wife is still jealous of a girl who’s been dead since more than a year ago?”<
br />
He nodded wearily. “Lady, she’d even be jealous of you! So please climb back on your broomstick and fly away home, will you?” Politely but firmly he edged her through the bar to the door, and she heard the lock click behind her as a signal that the interview was ended.
Miss Withers climbed back up to the street and then paused to smooth her ruffled feathers. She stood amid signs advertising “Riff Sprott and His Funetic Five, with Chloris Klee” and a color photograph, considerably larger than life, of a curvesome female bearing some resemblance to the girl by the piano. Chloris had her mouth open and seemed about to bite the microphone off its stand.
The schoolteacher turned her back on this overpowering exhibit and took a small notebook from her capacious handbag. She wrote: “Riff Sprott, The Grotto Club. Big reaction, dubious explanation involving wife Chloris’ supposed jealousy. Admits he carried torch for Midge and that he loved her more than she did him. Find out when Chloris started singing with band.”
Things, decided Miss Withers, were definitely looking up. She hoped fervently that it really was Riff Sprott, not only because he had a name befitting a strangler, but because of that crack about the broomstick. If he did have a guilty conscience, her hint that the police were shadowing him ought to give him something to worry about.
But this was no time for snap judgments, nor to let her intuition have its head. There were other candidates …
Nils Bruner was next on her list. Dancing-masters keep more regular hours than musicians, but are considerably more difficult to locate, due to an occupational tendency to pull up stakes and move to new and more fertile fields when the going gets tough. The studios in Flatbush were closed and had been for rent since last October. No forwarding address.
But Miss Withers had access to certain information not available to the ordinary amateur detective and sometimes not even to the police. During her twenty-odd years at P.S. 38, generations of grubby urchins had passed through her tutelage to graduate and eventually take their place in the world outside, and with as many as possible of them she kept in touch via Christmas cards. At moments like this she could call on a far-flung organization, just as Sherlock Holmes did on his Irregulars. Some of her boys and girls had risen to positions of importance and influence.
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