Green Ace

by Stuart Palmer

  “Small habits well pursued betimes May reach the dignity of crimes.”

  —Hannah More

  4.

  “HOLD EVERYTHING!” SAID MISS Withers. “I’ll be there in ten minutes. No, make it fifteen, I forgot I’m not dressed.”

  “Don’t bother, Hildegarde,” came the Inspector’s chill tones. “We’re not having open house up here. This is one time you’ll have to keep the hell out.”

  She hesitated only a moment. “I’m afraid I’m in already.”

  “What?” Piper made it sound like a swear-word.

  “As an accessory after the fact. Of course,” the schoolteacher continued breathlessly, “I had only the best of intentions in doing what I did, and Marika was obviously mixed up somehow in the Harrington case. But never mind, after all. You’re right, I shouldn’t always be interfering. You’ve probably got the thing all solved by now anyway. Sorry I mentioned it.”

  “Wait a minute!” cried the Inspector, giving an unconscious imitation of Jack Benny on the radio. “You’re already in this up to your bustle. Now you get up here fast, dressed or not, or I’ll send a squad car after you and have you dragged here in handcuffs!”

  She told him to send away, it would save taxi fare. And a few minutes later the maiden schoolteacher, clutching her hat, was whisked uptown to the accompaniment of screeching sirens, past the melancholy and bird-bedaubed grandeur of Grant’s Tomb to one of the dingier residential blocks on West Ninety-sixth. Even as a stolid and disappointingly uncommunicative police led her up the two flights of narrow, ill-lighted stairs she had a clear vision of what the apartment—chez Marika—would be like. It would be cluttered with all the hackneyed stage properties of the professional soothsayer, heavy with incense, frayed velvet drapes and perhaps even a stuffed owl gathering dust on the mantel.

  There would probably be a discreet little card on the door, with the name “Marika” in pseudo-Egyptian script, and perhaps a human eye peering astigmatically through something intended to represent The Veil Through Which We Cannot See but looking more like a bad Los Angeles smog.

  But, as she admitted to herself, Miss Withers was so wrong. She was ushered through a plain door into a brilliantly lighted, cheery room of the cozy type, with comfortable overstuffed chairs, bright prints on the wall, a portable phonograph and big, well-filled bookcases. To her inquiring nostrils came the immediate scent of the bowl of stocks and snapdragons on the mantel, of hot flashbulbs, tobacco and sweat—the latter easily traceable to Inspector Oscar Piper and his cohorts, who swarmed around the other end of the room under the bay windows. Crane her neck as she would, the schoolteacher could get no glimpse of the object of their professional attention, but she fancied that she caught another odor—something sweetish and a little sickening.

  She was perfectly content to leave them alone with the remains. As she watched the specialists of the homicide squad carry out their appointed task Miss Withers thought, as always at such moments, of how sometimes one can’t see the forest for the trees. She respected them, but the respect was mixed with scorn. Within their limitations they knew their job inside out, but the trouble was that they often performed it that way. Crime, according to her concepts, was far more than an absolute, scientific fact, or something to be attacked and conquered with cameras and fingerprint powders and microscopes.

  The schoolteacher would have been happy to outline her theories to the roomful of detectives, but since they were paying her no attention whatever she quietly moved across the room to an open doorway. Only momentarily did she resist the impulse to snoop a bit in the little refrigerator, the cupboards, and the garbage can. Marika was clean, though not meticulously so. She had dined at home, on baked potatoes, two lamb chops with fresh frozen peas, and a custard. It seemed oddly plain plebeian fare for a professional mystic.

  Yet what else? Breast of griffon under glass, with creamed mandrake and poison ivy salad? She smiled wryly at the thought. After all, she knew very little about mediums. The one or two she had met looked as if they lived on tea and crackers, and that seldom.

  Miss Withers came back into the living room, trying to catch the Inspector’s eye, but he was still occupied. However, there was another door across the room, and her besetting sin of curiosity led her to tiptoe over and quietly open it. She looked into a bedroom, small but comfortable, furnished in early American with conservatively feminine touches. There was a framed portrait on the chest of drawers, depicting a glamorous girl with quite incredible eyelashes, wearing a turban.

  She started in, but here she met a snag in the shape of a uniformed officer who suddenly stood up and stared at her. He was evidently standing guard over a middle-aged woman in a flowered housecoat who sat on the edge of the bed, shaking with sobs, and showing signs of wanting to cry on his shoulder. She looked rather like a manatee, being bulging and shapeless and faintly moist—like something recently risen from the depths of the sea and anxious to get back.

  “Oh, excuse me!” said Miss Withers politely.

  “It’s okay, you ain’t exactly interrupting anything,” the officer told her. He seemed to be glad of the intrusion. “Who sent you, the Inspector?”

  “Providence,” Miss Withers told him. But she hastily backed out of the room, judging the time inopportune for a survey of the dead woman’s bedroom. Back in the front room again she knelt down beside the nearest bookcase, seeking as was her wont a shortcut to the tastes and personality of the woman who had bought these volumes, who had arranged and dusted and presumably read them.

  “Looking for a good racy novel, Hildegarde?” the Inspector suddenly greeted her.

  Miss Withers stood up. She saw that across the room a sallow young man whom she vaguely remembered to be one of the deputy medical examiners was just closing his little black bag preparatory to leaving. He was saying, “Yes, quarter of ten—give it half an hour either way. Maybe I can cut it closer after the PM, if somebody can tell me when she ate last.”

  “Around seven, I think,” spoke up the schoolteacher suddenly.

  They all turned and stared at her. “Now how the hell do you know that?” demanded the Inspector. “Unless you were here.”

  “There is no need for profanity, Oscar. I deduce the time by certain evidence in the kitchen. The oven is stone-cold, though she baked a potato. The grease in the frying pan isn’t completely congealed—and the dishcloth is still a little damp while the dish towel is dry. That tells its own story to anyone who ever kept house.”

  “Women!” said the doctor, not unfriendly. “But around seven it is, and I’ll work on it from that angle.” He nodded cheerfully to them all, and went out. His leaving cleared the traffic jam in the bay window, and now Miss Withers had a fifty-yard-line view of what lay on the rug, beside a little cherrywood table and two chairs, one of which was overturned.

  “Oh!” she gasped.

  Miss Hildegarde Withers preferred to look upon murder in a purely objective way, as a problem in human behavior, a chess problem. Bodies were so concrete, so real, so helpless—with every wound crying like a tongue.

  The woman who claimed to have seen into the Beyond was now obviously in a position to verify her glimpses. She lay on the rug face upward, supine, arms akimbo. But she was a far cry from the dumpy little sycophant the schoolteacher had pictured as the typical spiritualistic medium. In life Marika must have been pretty, a little on the thin side, with dark, almost black hair and darker eyes. She could not have been much more than thirty, and still resembled the photograph in the bedroom. Only now, of course, she wore no make-up, no eyelashes or lipstick, and her long white legs stuck awkwardly forth from the folds of a comfortable but far from glamorous negligée.

  And her lips were almost smiling—not in the awful risus, but as if she were asleep and dreaming pleasant dreams. It was only when you drew closer that you saw the depression in the line of her cranium, and the wide blackish shadow on the rug which wasn’t a shadow at all.

  “Okay,” said the Inspector briskl
y. “Now you’ve seen her, and your curiosity is satisfied. Only mine isn’t. I want to know why you called up here tonight, and what else you know about this case.”

  “I telephoned to make an appointment for a sitting. And I also intended to drop a warning to Marika, because I realized that some things I had said might put her life in danger.”

  The Inspector said softly that he would be damned. He would have said more, but a plainclothes detective came up to him with a question, holding something in his hand which looked like a glass bowling ball. “No,” said Piper. “No need to pack it special. Only prints on it are the dead woman’s.”

  “Murderers will wear gloves, won’t they, Oscar?” Miss Withers sniffed. “Is that the murder weapon?”

  He nodded. “One of her props. Might mean it wasn’t premeditated at all. Or the killer might have brought some other weapon and then switched to this because it was so handy—and so heavy.”

  “ ‘The clouded crystal ball,’ ” quoted the schoolteacher a little giddily. “Clouded by her own blood. Oscar, do you think the poor woman was gazing into it when the murderer snatched it up and brained her?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  She looked at him. “As a general thing my guesses are much better than yours, and you know it. But, Oscar, I understood from Mrs. Rowan that Marika was a trance medium—”

  “Mrs. Rowan? What’s all this? I thought that when you came back from Sing Sing with your tail between your legs you’d got smart and stopped meddling!”

  “My impersonation only failed because the real Mrs. Rowan had had a change of heart and been up there before me.” She told him of how she had run Natalie to earth, and about the spirit message from the late lamented Emil Fogel.

  “Double-distilled bilge!” was his verdict.

  “Perhaps, Oscar. But as I was about to say, Marika was a trance medium. Isn’t it odd that she used the old-fashioned crystal? I’ve read up a little on this sort of thing, and there are distinct levels. The high-class mediums scorn to use props.”

  “You don’t know Marika like I do,” said the Inspector. “She had everything. We found a ouija board and a planchette in the cabinet over there, also a spirit-writing slate, a lot of astrology charts, and several decks of cards with funny pictures.”

  “Tarot cards? They’ve been used in telling fortunes since before the foundations of the pyramids were laid. Mostly by charlatans, of course. But where there’s so much smoke mightn’t there be some fire?”

  “We don’t have to worry about that angle,” the Inspector told her. “Marika was a clairvoyant, fortuneteller, a medium, and a self-accredited adviser on problems of love, fortune and marriage. And in spite of all that, she wasn’t even able to foresee her own murder.” His voice was filled with heavy scorn.

  “All the same, Oscar, there are more things in heaven and earth—” Miss Withers shook her head. “Marika was an out-and-out fake, then?”

  “Aren’t they all? I’m not saying that we found any of the wet cheesecloth and ice-packed gloves and magic lanterns around the place, such as oldtime phonies used. But a smart operator doesn’t have to, today.”

  “Dear, dear,” murmured the schoolteacher. “Oscar, just what would you say were the chances of a fake medium getting a genuine message?”

  “Are you kidding?” said Oscar Piper. “About the same as Barney Google’s Spark Plug winning the Kentucky Derby next spring.”

  But Miss Withers wasn’t listening. She said, half to herself, “Unless, of course, the medium happened to have sources of information which actually weren’t supernatural at all.” She was watching a policeman across the room who was outlining the body with green chalk-marks on the rug.

  “Marika Thoren had a police record,” pronounced the Inspector, as if that settled everything. He took a slip of paper from his pocket. “Arrested January 1948 on suspicion of fortunetelling without a license, case dismissed. Arrested May 1948, same charge, nol-prossed. Arrested July 1949, dismissed.”

  “No convictions, I gather?”

  He shrugged. “Victims don’t like to sign complaints, or testify in court they’ve been duped. But the boys on the Bunco Squad keep after people like Marika.”

  “I can well imagine. Hounding the poor woman from pillow to post, without any proof at all that she’d ever broken the law. You and your thought-police!”

  “Never mind that now!” he snapped testily. “Just why do you imagine something you said might have put Marika on the spot?”

  “Well, Oscar, that’s a long story—” Miss Withers suddenly broke off, pointing across the room. “Look!”

  The broken body of Marika was being gingerly lifted into the long wicker basket, preparatory to its long last ride to Bellevue’s morgue and the attendant grisly ceremonies. Where it had lain, pressed flat by the weight on her hips, was the crushed remains of something. Somehow the schoolteacher managed to be the first to snatch it up. “Could this be a clue, Oscar? It seems to be a man’s hat.”

  He took it from her, with controlled asperity. “So it is,” he said, brightening: “Well, if that isn’t the luck of the Irish! A perfect murder—only we get a break. The hat must have been knocked off in the struggle, and she happened to fall smack on it. Imagine the murderer looking everywhere for his hat, and then having to sneak off without it!”

  “I suppose his initials are on the sweatband?” Miss Withers asked.

  “No. But we don’t need initials. Give the boys in the lab an hour or two with this—”

  “And they’ll know the murderer’s head size?”

  “They’ll know more about the owner of this hat than God or his mother,” promised Piper. “You wait and see.” He handed it over to one of the detectives, with explicit instructions. Then he came back to the schoolteacher, looking at his wrist watch. “All right, you were going to come clean. Make it fast, I’ve got a witness waiting in the other room to be questioned.”

  “The manatee?” said Miss Withers. “She’s a witness to the actual murder?”

  “No,” he snapped. “Just the landlady, but she got a good look at the killer when she passed him on the stairs.”

  “I wonder which one it was,” breathed the schoolteacher. “My vote is still for Mr. Sprott, only he’d probably wear a beret instead of a hat …”

  “What in Judas Priest are you talking about?”

  “The three suspects, of course.” She took a deep breath, and told all.

  But the Inspector took it somewhat lightly. “No dice,” he said.

  “Perhaps not. But I repeat, Oscar, that I have been running around all over town dropping hints to the three people I consider eminent suspects in the Harrington murder that Marika had already received word from supernatural sources about Rowan’s innocence—and moreover that we expected her to provide the name of the real murderer at any moment.”

  “We?”

  “Perhaps, Oscar, I did take your name in vain just a trifle. To make it all sound more authentic and official, of course.”

  He glowered. “Someday you’re going to burn every finger on your little hot hands, cutting corners that way.” The Inspector took time out to light up a fresh cigar. “But this time I don’t think you tossed any monkeywrenches into the machinery. We’ll investigate all possible angles, of course. But for my money the real murderer of Midge Harrington is still sweating out his last week up in the condemned row at Sing Sing. There’s no connection between the two deaths, except in your overfertile imagination.”

  “But Oscar—if Rowan isn’t guilty, the real killer must have a very guilty conscience. Suppose he was superstitious enough to believe that Marika was genuine and actually could go into another trance and name him?”

  “It wasn’t that kind of a murder. Marika had hundreds of clients wearing a path up the stairs. Most of them were in some sort of jam or else they wouldn’t have come. It’s not surprising that a woman whose husband is under sentence of death was one of the collection. Marika, like anyone in her
racket, simply drew the Rowan woman out until she found out what she wanted most to hear, went into a fake trance, and told her the good news.”

  “And then, by some odd coincidence, got murdered as soon as I spread the word around about what she had said about Rowan’s innocence?”

  “Life is full of coincidences. And believe me,” the Inspector went on very seriously, “girls like Marika are poor insurance risks. Messing around in the lives and emotional tangles of other people isn’t a safe occupation. Maybe somebody who took her advice found it didn’t work out and came back tonight for a spot of revenge. Or maybe the word got around that she made a lot of money. We found an empty cash-box in the bedroom, left open on the floor. From where I sit it looks like just another case of robbery and felonious assault ending in homicide.”

  “Perhaps you’ve been sitting too long, Oscar.”

  “Look, it must have been somebody she knew,” he went on logically. “Because Marika would have been suspicious of any new customer especially, that late in the evening. Look at that door—a chain, a bolt, in addition to the regular lock. Besides, she had an appointment book, one of those desk pads. Only today’s page—”

  “It’s missing? Then she did have an appointment with her murderer. But, Oscar, aren’t there ways you can treat the remaining sheets to bring out what had been written above?”

  Piper shook his head. “The killer tore out all of next week too, and took the pages away with him. The careful type.”

  “Yes, except, of course, for the hat. But everyone makes mistakes.”

  “He made a worse one, and that was being seen coming up the stairs.” So indeed did it appear when Mrs. Rose Fink was brought in to make her statement. The woman was typical of that ubiquitous breed who get a ‘pittance and free rent of a basement apartment for “managing” old brownstones converted into apartments; grayish, bloated females cut out of the same lump of underdone dough with a perpetual squint from years of peering through keyholes.

  This was Mrs. Fink’s crowded hour, and she was inclined to make the most of it. It had been about twenty minutes to ten that evening when she had gone upstairs to replace a dead bulb in the top-floor hall, and on her way down she had almost run into the murderer’s arms. He was just coming up the first flight, so somebody must have pressed a button releasing the lobby door. Mrs. Fink had noticed him because he seemed in a hurry. No, he was no tenant, nobody she had ever seen before.