Green Ace

by Stuart Palmer

  It was little Willie Prjbwski, one in difficulties with third-grade arithmetic but now a bald, bespectacled auditor with one of the public utility companies, who called her back that same evening with the desired information.

  So it was that next forenoon—Rowan now had but five days left—Miss Withers marched up two flights of stairs above a neighborhood drugstore in the rabbit warrens of the Grand Concourse region, and rapped sharply on a door bearing the legend: “New Elite School of Professional Tap, Spanish and Rhythm.”

  No answer. She rapped again and then entered a tiny reception room, sparsely furnished and of no interest whatever. But from interior regions she could hear soft strains of music. She opened the inner door and peered in.

  She saw part of a long, bare hall, with a practice bar under the windows and a full-length mirror opposite. A ponderous, elderly automatic phonograph was grinding out The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi, and in the center of the polished floor a tall, fair man was dancing. He danced all by himself, except for the two enormous fans of tinted ostrich feather, and he wore only an undershirt and a pair of Paris-green slacks.

  “Whoops!” she gasped, and then “Excuse me!” But the solitary dancer was so engrossed that he did not turn his head. She suddenly realized that this was no pixie drag act. Apart from the soft, sinuous femininity of the gestures there was nothing effeminate about him at all. “Pssst!” she whispered.

  The man turned, stared at her with china-blue eyes, and then said without breaking the rhythm, “All right, come on in if you want to join the class. There’s extra fans in the corner over there.”

  Somebody giggled, and Miss Withers stepped inside far enough to see that there were three scantily clad young women, completely equipped with ostrich feathers, facing the teacher and trying to copy his technique.

  The music suddenly ended, and he said, “Get it, girls? The whole thing is control. And lag on the beat. As you turn, make ’em think you won’t get the fans in place at the right time, only pick it up one, two—three! See?” He looked at his watch. “Okay, it’s eleven-thirty. Only work on this at home during the week, all of you. And Irma, quit dieting or nobody will care whether you shake a fan or not.”

  The girls scampered noisily toward a dressing room, and Nils Bruner came over to Miss Withers, dropping the fans and mopping his forehead. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “I want to take a dancing lesson,” she said. “But not fan-dancing.” As she spoke she could see herself in the full mirror on the opposite wall, and realized how silly her prepared opening must sound.

  But Bruner did not smile. “Of course,” he said. “A private ballroom lesson. The waltz?”

  He was so fair that he seemed almost an albino. No trace of the pomade, the long sideburns, that she had expected. Indeed, if this tall, strange young man ever had five o’clock shadow it must look like frost or perhaps mold on his decided chin.

  “Yes, I think the waltz,” Miss Withers admitted.

  He looked sad. “Shall I make an appointment for one day next week?”

  “You couldn’t possibly make it today?” Next week would be too late, at least for Andy Rowan.

  Bruner looked sadder still. “I am sorry. But honestly, I’m booked solid. In a few minutes I have a class in tap and soft-shoe—a roomful of screaming teen-agers.”

  “Skip it,” the schoolteacher said abruptly. “Mr. Bruner, I’ll break down and confess that I really didn’t come here for a lesson, but on business. Do you remember a girl who studied with you a couple of years ago, named Midge Harrington?”

  The pale lashes flicked only once, then he said quickly, “Of course! Such a tragic end! The girl had great talent if she’d only stuck to her dancing. Such personality, such beauty …”

  “Do you happen to have a professional photograph of her around anywhere?”

  This time the hesitation was noticeably longer. “I might have,” Bruner said. “Only it’s autographed, and it has certain sentimental associations. I suppose you want it for publication in some newspaper? Could you go as high as fifty dollars?”

  Miss Withers said, “No, not a newspaper.” She thought she could go as high as twenty-five. After some haggling they settled, and she received a large studio portrait of a tall young woman in heavy make-up and ornate Spanish costume, clicking castanets and grinning like La Argentinita. “To mio maestro Nils Bruner who taught me all I know, Midge,” was scrawled at the bottom in a round, childish hand. Somehow that unformed, girlish writing touched the schoolteacher’s sympathies as not even the grim morgue photograph had been able to do.

  Bruner cocked his head wisely. “You’ll want a story to go with the picture, I suppose?”

  “Why, yes,” Miss Withers admitted. “Anything that will shed light on her character might help.”

  He lowered his voice. “Of course you’ve looked it up, and you know that she was named in my wife’s divorce suit. For no real reason at all, I assure you, except that Virla wanted to hurt me professionally as much as possible. As a matter of fact, no dancing teacher should ever have a wife. Because in my profession once in a blue moon you run into real talent, a personality destined for stardom and bright lights. It is almost impossible to develop that talent, to help the rosebud open into full bloom, without appearing at least to have a personal interest. People misunderstand.”

  “You weren’t in love with her, then?”

  “Not for publication,” said Nils Bruner quickly. “But you experts understand how to write such things without—without making trouble, shall I say? Anyway, it’s the truth that I never saw Midge after the divorce, though I always knew that if she struck it rich she’d pay me for the private lessons I had to give her on credit. She never had any money, you know. No family or anything.”

  “An orphan—or did she get born in a seashell, like the other Venus?”

  “I think she had a mother,” he said slowly. “Supposed to have been a Floradora girl once, but you can’t prove it by me. Anyway, she boarded out the kid with some people in Brooklyn Heights, and after a while she quit sending money and Midge was on her own.”

  Miss Withers agreed that this was all very sad, but the interview seemed to be getting off the track. “It’s too bad you didn’t marry the child,” she said. “Midge was very much in love with you, wasn’t she?”

  The pale blue eyes clouded. “No,” he said, “she wasn’t. Something always got in the way. I always thought it must have been some man she couldn’t forget, somebody she met before she was my pupil.”

  Reenter the ghost-lover motif. “I see,” said Miss Withers. “A grand passion before she was sixteen? Dear, dear.”

  There was a slight interruption while the three pupils, now in street clothes and carrying little satchels, said their goodbyes and wended their way homeward. But the schoolteacher still lingered, vaguely dissatisfied.

  “Anything else I can do to help?” said Nils Bruner. “A photograph of me, for instance? I don’t know what kind of feature your magazine plans, but if you can get in the name of the studio somewhere—”

  “I’m not with a magazine either,” Miss Withers told him. “I wouldn’t put it past Life or Look or Peep to dig up the Midge Harrington case at this time, but I’m not a ghoul, I’m only a private investigator without portfolio. I supposed you’d heard that the police have the wrong man in prison and that they’re reopening the investigation into her murder?”

  Bruner very softly said something in a foreign language, but she could translate his expression. She suddenly realized that she was alone with a powerful and very angry man, a man who had talked too much in the hope of chiseling a little extra publicity and now deeply regretted it. He seemed to be coming a little apart at the seams …

  “Probably there’s nothing in it after all,” she said quickly. “The whole thing originated in a spirit message, you know. Some medium named Marika down on Ninety-sixth Street came up with word that Rowan is innocent, but so far she hasn’t named the real killer.”

  “The p
olice—they take the word of such a person?” he asked thickly.

  “Only because there seems to be corroborative evidence. Thank you for your help, Mr. Bruner. And of course for the picture.” She beat a speedy retreat. Safe and sound in the street again, she took out her notebook and wrote: “Nils Bruner, Crotona Building. No reaction, much too casual. Denies affair with Midge but admits she owed him money. Svengali angle? Where was Virla Bruner that night?”

  Somewhat weary with her labors, she popped into the drugstore for a cup of tea and a sandwich. She had to admit that Bruner seemed every whit as promising a suspect as had the trumpet-player.

  The odds were even better, she realized half an hour later. Because from her perch at the soda fountain she could see the entrance to the stairway leading up to the dance studio, and no horde of teen-agers came swarming in for their class in tap and soft-shoe. It was twelve o’clock—and then twelve-thirty. Nobody went into the place at all except one precocious little miss in a tight sweater, with a basket of black curls and the map of Ireland on her face. She paused in the doorway to smear on fresh mouth then ran up the stairs three steps at a time.

  “So!” said Miss Withers. She lurked around for another half-hour or so, but nobody came down the stairs.

  “I might as well try to decide it the way my pupils would, with eeny, meeny, miny, mo,” she said to herself as she headed toward the bus. “But just to play fair I suppose I have to include George Zotos, the sole remaining nomination.”

  There was one good thing about a manufacturer, from her point of view. He had to stay with his factory. But, of course, Mr. Zotos was bound to be a let-down, after the others.

  It was a block-long building, grimy with soot, located in the wrong part of Long Island City. The reek of overpowering sweetness, of vanilla and chocolate and cinnamon, was almost unbearable half a block away, and by the time Miss Withers had talked her way inside the place she made up her mind never to eat another pastry as long as she lived.

  The cream-puff king sat in a big chair behind a big desk in an office whose walls were covered with convention pictures and framed membership certificates. The man himself was soft and round, with dark curly hair thinning on top and moist brown eyes. Iris had been right, he was rather like a cocker spaniel. But it was a wary spaniel, not sure whether to growl or wag its tail.

  Her previous efforts to pass as a hep-cat and as a student of Terpsichore having met with no marked success, this time Miss Withers laid her cards on the table. “Mr. Zotos,” she informed the very bewildered little man, “I’ve come to see what you have to say, if anything, about the news that the police have a new lead on the murder of Miss Midge Harrington.”

  “Who?” he muttered.

  “Midge Harrington, the girl you tried to help get to be Miss Brooklyn last year. She was murdered, remember?”

  Then she saw that tears were welling out of his brown eyes, big tears that ran unashamed down his plump cheeks.

  “Yes,” he whispered. “I remember. But why do you come to me?”

  “Because I’m a relative of hers,” said Miss Withers without shame. (After all, were we not all cousins after Adam, or the apes?) “I’m calling on everyone who knew her, to help the police. After all they haven’t much to go on—the whole thing was reopened by an odd clause in somebody’s will, and by a supposed spirit message—”

  “A—a spirit message? I don’t understand.”

  “Nor do I. But this Marika person, over on Ninety-sixth Street, got a message saying that the man the police arrested and convicted is innocent. And there seems to be some corroborative evidence. I’d like to see justice done, and Midge avenged.”

  “Yes,” he said softly, still not using a handkerchief. “Midge Harrington was the only girl—” He gulped. “She’s gone, and that’s all that matters. But she was the only woman I ever could have loved, you see. I understood that they got the man who did it, but if they’re reopening the case the police probably know what they’re doing. If I can help in any way—” He brightened, and reaching into his desk. “Would you like to see something?”

  And so for half an hour Miss Withers had to admire his scrapbooks, containing every line of the publicity Rowan had planted for Midge, every bathing-suit picture, every simpering posed portrait. The prize shot, on a page of its own, was one of Georgie-Porgie Zotos himself presenting Midge with a corsage of orchids at some luncheon affair, and staring up at her as a little boy might peer into a toyshop window. “I even have a privately-made recording of her voice, singing ‘It’s Cold Outside,’ ” he went on. “Sometimes I play it on my little portable. What a woman!” George Zotos sighed, shaking his head.

  “You loved her, didn’t you—very much?”

  “What man wouldn’t?” he asked, surprised at the question.

  “She loved you too?”

  Zotos blinked. “Of course not! Miss Harrington was—well, I always felt that she was unapproachable, untouchable. Sort of as if she always really belonged to someone else, somebody she met or dreamed about years before.”

  “Here we go again,” said Miss Withers under her breath.

  “She wasn’t like anybody else,” said the man with painful seriousness. “She was a work of art, she was the frosting on the cake. If what you say is true, and the man who did that awful thing is still at large, I only wish I could get him alone for five minutes …”

  “To smother him to death with cream-puffs?” Miss Withers said, but not aloud. She stood up. “Thank you, Mr. Zotos. Here’s my card, and if you think of anything that might shed light on the case, do call me.”

  “Of course. If there’s anything I can do—”

  “There is one thing. Can you tell me just why Midge Harrington’s dreams of being Miss Brooklyn, and trying out for the Miss America crown, couldn’t come true?”

  “Why—” He hesitated.

  “Was it her purple past, whatever that means?”

  “I wouldn’t say that, I wouldn’t say that at all. It’s just that the committee behind the Atlantic City beauty pageant has certain rigid rules and specifications, which are naturally subscribed to by the local and state committees. We were advised that our candidate, Miss Harrington, was ineligible. Some busybody had written a letter—”

  “Perhaps it was because Midge was living at the Rehearsal Arts Club over in Manhattan instead of here in Brooklyn?”

  “Perhaps,” agreed Zotos doubtfully.

  Miss Withers headed for the door. “One last word, Mr. Zotos. When the police come around questioning you, you needn’t mention that I dropped by. Sometimes they get annoyed when I try to interfere.”

  “Surely,” he said, from very far away. As she went out of the office she heard him hastily putting away the scrapbooks. On the subway back to town, still feeling wrung out like a towel, Miss Withers wrote: “George Zotos, a sticky Caliban. Does each man kill the thing he loves? Anyway he still loves her. A longshot bet.”

  As the schoolteacher neared home she felt an increasing uneasiness of spirit. When he heard how she had spent the last two days the Inspector was sure to accuse her of hurling monkeywrenches into the machinery again. And it was more than probable that Talleyrand, the other male in her life, had amused himself by making an apple-pie bed in her room or otherwise disgracing himself during her long absence. As she came up the street she had vague but unpleasant premonitions of disaster. She resented them all the more because this was the time when her fabled intuition was supposed to be at work, her mental shortcuts which had sometimes led her to the correct answer without going through all the intermediate stages. Of course, she was well aware that anything perceived intuitively must afterward be checked with reason …

  She hurried up the stairs and put her key in the lock. At least Talley wasn’t howling with loneliness, the soft little howls that drive other tenants slowly crazy. In fact, the big poodle was in his favorite spot on top of the closed cover of the kitchen stove, sleeping peacefully.

  The telephone was off the
hook, a sure indication that it had rung and rung until in desperation the dog had pawed it into silence. Before taking off her coat and hat she sat down and called the Inspector, but he was not at home and he was not at Centre Street.

  “Is he out on a murder case?” she demanded of the sergeant.

  “Ma’am, I don’t know.”

  “And if you did know you wouldn’t tell me!” She hung up, rather abruptly. Then she put murder out of her mind and prepared a somewhat sketchy meal for herself and the poodle, settling down afterward with a copy of War and Peace, a classic she was always beginning and never able to finish. Tonight was no exception. A little after ten-thirty, with the phone still stubbornly refusing to ring, she got out the phone book, which at times constituted her favorite reading material.

  There it was, like an answer to prayers. “Marika—West 96th …” Inspired, she dialled the number. Almost instantly there was an answer, a man’s voice heavy with caution. “Yes?”

  “I’d like to speak with Marika, please.”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “I don’t know that it matters, but my name is Hildegarde Withers. I want to make an appointment …”

  There were muffled male voices and then somebody else took over. “Hildegarde!” roared the Inspector, “what in Judas Priest’s name do you mean calling at a time like this, and how’d you find out about it?”

  “I really did want an appointment,” said Miss Withers. “With Marika, not with you.”

  “Get out your ouija board then,” he told her. “Because the dame they call Marika is right here on the floor beside me, colder than Kelsey!”

  “Oh, my prophetic soul! She was strangled with that same necklace, wasn’t she, Oscar?”

  “That she was not. Somebody bashed out her brains with her own crystal ball.”