Green Ace

by Stuart Palmer

  “Is this just intuition, or have you something specific?”

  Natalie hesitated. “Let me see. I remember one time I was asking her all sorts of questions about the Harrington girl and her men friends, and Iris mentioned some flowers that came one morning for Midge shortly after they started to room together. A wonderful spray of white orchids on the day after Easter, of all the odd times. She said Midge went to bed and cried most of the rest of the day, with the orchids pinned to her nightgown. But Iris said she couldn’t remember the name of the man who sent them, though there was a look in her eye—”

  “I know that look,” Miss Withers told her. The ghost of a thought flicked through her mind, but it was gone before she could nab it. “Well, perhaps there’s a romantic side to Miss Dunn. And as for being out, one can’t blame her for burning the candle a bit at her age. She wasn’t out all night, was she?”

  Natalie admitted she didn’t know about that. She had called the girl three or four times with no answer, had even gone downtown to her apartment and hammered on the door. Then she had called Miss Withers for no particular reason except that she felt in need of spiritual comfort, and finally in desperation had gone to a movie. “There was a murder mystery on a double bill, and I thought I might learn something. But I had to sit through almost all of Samson and Delilah first, and that was awful. It didn’t follow the book except at the end, and Hedy Lamarr kept reminding me all the time of the Harrington girl and what she did to my Andy—” Natalie gulped. “And the other picture, why it turned out that the murderer was really one of the victims; she got mixed up and drank a cocktail she’d poisoned for somebody else. You see, there was this midget in love with an opera singer—”

  “I’d love to hear all about it, but right now I’m busy,” interrupted Miss Withers firmly. “And I suggest that you leave Iris Dunn to me. Perhaps she has to be approached roundabout, like Peer and the Boyd in the Ibsen play.”

  “Oh yes! The Return of Peer Grimm. Emil and I went to it years ago. That’s a play about a ghost, too—”

  The schoolteacher felt that her quota of ghosts and ghostly messages was full up for the moment. “You’ll hear from me,” she promised. “Meanwhile take a sedative.”

  “But I did, last night!” cried Natalie. “I took two Seconals, and I had a dream about Marika coming into my bedroom with a lighted candle and whispering ‘I know now!’ She was dead by that time, wasn’t she? So maybe her spirit really did come—”

  “Mrs. Rowan, please!”

  “Well, anyway, I shrieked, ‘If you know, then who was it?’ so loud that I woke myself up!”

  “Too bad you didn’t take three Seconal tablets—you might have dreamed the rest of it. Goodbye again, Mrs. Rowan.”

  Sometimes, she felt, Natalie was almost too much to cope with. But, of course, the poor woman was undergoing something of an ordeal, made worse by the crushing realization that she had misjudged her Andy. Still, she had supplied one or two more pieces to fit into the jigsaw puzzle Andy Rowan had known about Marika. Maybe he had gone to consult her in that apartment where she died. Or maybe some friend of his, somebody he knew very well, had been one of the mystic’s wide circle of clients.

  “It might even have been the Harrington girl,” Miss Withers observed conversationally to the impatient poodle as she hastily flung on her clothes preparatory to taking him out. “Maybe Midge went to Marika—they say that people in show business are usually superstitious. Marika would have drawn her out and found what she wanted most to hear, then looked in the crystal or read the Runes and told her that she was fated to marry a dark, slight, curly-haired man with a dimple. Meaning Andy Rowan. Maybe Midge even came back and told her lover that she’d been to a soothsayer and that Fate had destined him to be hers? Maybe—” she stopped and shook her head. “Too many maybes.”

  When mistress and frisking dog returned from a brisk go around the block they found the Inspector on the doorstep, looking pleased as Punch. “Just on my way uptown,” he said. “Thought I’d stop in—”

  “For a cup of coffee, of course.” Miss Withers led him inside. “Care for a bite of breakfast?”

  “Breakfast, yet! I had lunch half an hour ago.”

  “Probably a stale sandwich on the edge of your desk, I know your habits.” She looked at him critically. “Oscar, you look like the canary that ate the cat. Don’t tell me you’ve already got Marika’s murderer arrested?”

  “As good as,” he said confidently. “Hildegarde, you’re always poking fun at scientific police methods, but just listen to this. Remember that hat? I just got the laboratory to report on it.”

  “So now at last we know the murderer’s head size!”

  But nothing could ruffle him. “Yes, six and seven-eights. About right for the man’s height. But the hat was bought in Dallas, Texas, about six or seven years ago—we know that because the model was discontinued during the war. It retailed at around thirty dollars but had never been blocked or cleaned, which means that the owner was flush with money at times but not recently. A five-dollar bill was tucked inside the sweatband, soggy and discolored and evidently been there for years. Maybe the guy originally hid it there so he’d never be out of taxi fare or the price of a bottle, and then forgot it. Traces of cheap brilliantine and expensive hair restorer. A few light brown hairs left over from his last haircut, which was about a week ago. The vacuum picked up minute traces of powder, alfalfa, and camel dung.”

  “He probably only walked through the Zoo on a windy day.”

  The Inspector put down his coffee cup, and tackled bacon and eggs. “Seriously, Hildegarde, we know a lot more about our man. He was in Texas five or six years ago, and flush. He’s had hard times since. He’s careful of his appearance and worried about losing his hair, which is light brown. Maybe you’re right about the Zoo—but he powders his forehead after shaving, which most men don’t bother to. With that on top of Mrs. Fink’s description, it should be a cinch.”

  “Perhaps, Oscar. Cinch is hardly the word I’d choose for any angle of this affair. By the way, has the landlady identified any photographs yet?”

  “The old girl is down there now, plowing through the racks. Nothing definite when I left the office, but Sergeant Smith says she had one possible. Only that guy has been out at Alcatraz for a couple of years, so she’s looking further. Of course, the photo angle may come to nothing. The killer may be a first offender.”

  She sniffed meaningly. “I doubt it. He killed Midge Harrington a year ago.” Miss Withers poured out more coffee. “Of course, Oscar, you forgot all about my request to ask the three people who discovered Marika’s body about which one of them unbolted the hall door of the apartment.”

  “Wrong again. We did, but they were all so excited at discovering the corpse that none of them can actually swear to it. Mrs. Fink thinks it was her husband, and the husband thinks it was Bagmann. They were all in a tearing hurry to get out of that room and downstairs to call the cops.”

  “Odd, with a phone right there in the room.”

  “So for once somebody was smart enough not to touch anything on the scene of the crime!”

  “I see. And just for the record did you do any checking to see if Messrs. Sprott, Bruner and Zotos had alibis for last night?”

  “I’ve had more important things to do! Hildegarde, once and for all will you stop trying to connect two murders that just won’t tie together? Besides, you yourself admit that the description of the murderer doesn’t fit any of your Three Musketeers.”

  “Except for the Cyrano nose, it could be any of them—even Bruner in spite of his height, because he could have hunched down in the trenchcoat and it’s hard to estimate tallness on a stairway, especially a dark stairway. Oscar, I’ve thought and thought about it. Isn’t it possible that the nose was make-up? Years and years ago I saw a movie called The Sign of the Cross, with Charles Laughton as a wonderfully dissolute Nero, and he had a beautiful Roman nose that couldn’t have been natural.”

  “Fac
e putty,” Piper told her wisely. “Actors sometimes use it, though it won’t stand too close inspection. But remember, Marika let the guy into the house and into her apartment because she knew him. If he’d been wearing the wrong phiz when she opened the door—”

  It was a point well taken, she could hardly deny that. There would hardly have been time for the murderer to do a reverse-action make-up job at the head of the stairs before he knocked at Marika’s door. But still there seemed something a little too too about the nose. Of course, there were people with beaks that seemed an exaggeration—the late J. P. Morgan was one.

  The Inspector drained his coffee cup and said he had to run along. “Are you on your way back up to Marika’s apartment?” Miss Withers asked eagerly.

  He nodded. “Got a box of her personal papers and stuff out in the car that I want to take back. Nothing in them that seemed much help, though. Except a lot of receipts for postal money orders—seems she’s been sending dough to some guy out in Phoenix, Arizona, name of Cawthorne.”

  Miss Withers’ eyes narrowed. “Does it look like blackmail? I thought from what you said about mediums that they preyed on others instead of being preyed upon.”

  “Don’t be always jumping to conclusions,” Piper said wearily. “Maybe she was only making payments on a dude ranch so she could retire someday. We’ve asked the Phoenix police to investigate, of course. As for the rest of her correspondence, it was mostly from clients who wanted their fortunes told or their horoscopes read by mail.”

  “Horoscopes too? Heavens, that woman seems to have rung all the changes. By any chance did she tell the auguries by studying chicken entrails?”

  “Maybe. But she couldn’t have been much good at it, because she certainly didn’t have any warning of her own fate. All of which proves that any message she got from the spooks about Andy Rowan’s innocence was worth less than a Confederate dollar.”

  “Oscar, perhaps you don’t know that Confederate paper money is now a collector’s item?”

  “All right, all right!” Piper paused in the doorway, a truculent gleam in his eye. “And I don’t mind telling you that while I’m up there in the dead woman’s apartment I’m going to check very carefully through those victrola records again. Maybe there was a dance tune tucked in among the hymns, and you missed it. We’re all only human, you know.”

  “Speak for yourself,” snapped Hildegarde Withers. “For your information I still have 20/20 vision, and can tell a hawk from a handsaw, or sacred from profane music. I can also remember enough of my own salad days to realize that when a man and woman dance together, especially alone in an apartment, they have certain romantic interests. The man who came to Marika’s apartment and bashed out her brains was nobody she cared a tinker’s damn about. I call your attention to the curious incident of the lipstick in the night time.”

  “But Marika wasn’t wearing any lipstick!”

  “That was the curious incident. Curious, I mean, if she was in a flirtatious mood. You may know a lot about crime, Oscar, but you don’t know women.”

  “I am learning,” he said. “The hard way.” And he took himself off.

  Miss Hildegarde Withers wasted no time in following his example, except that she headed in an entirely different direction. The time had come, she thought, to have a long heart-to-heart talk with Iris Dunn, who might just possibly have something up her sleeve besides a well-rounded arm.

  At least Natalie thought so. And Natalie Rowan wasn’t entirely the garrulous fool she sometimes sounded.

  The schoolteacher finally arrived at a vast building taking up an entire block on the middle-lower West Side, built in the ’30s when architects who should have known better were bandying phrases about “modern multiple housing” and “machines for living.” She took the elevator to the 18th floor and knocked sharply on a door at the end of a long corridor. Almost immediately the lid of a metal peephole opened, and a young, strained voice cried, “Who is it?”

  “It is I, as you can see for yourself,” said Miss Withers. “May I come in?”

  There was the rattle of a chain, and the door opened slowly, reluctantly, as though Iris Dunn would have slammed it in the schoolteacher’s face had she dared. “I thought you were somebody else,” the girl admitted.

  “Sometimes I wish I were,” said Miss Withers as she pushed forward into a smallish living room whose wall bed was still down. “Whom were you expecting?”

  “Oh—the rental agent,” Iris said.

  Sensitive as a cat to her surroundings, Miss Withers felt a tingling up her spine as the door closed behind her. Something was wrong here, very wrong. As the Inspector would say, the joint was jumping, alive with vibrations. It was not just that the room was a shambles of strewn clothing and feminine belongings, with a portable phonograph, trimmed in red leather, playing You’d Be So Easy to Love … The bed was covered with dozens of varicolored evening gowns, the floor cluttered with a heap of framed photographs, most of them autographed by second-magnitude stage and variety stars, which Iris had evidently been trying to tie together with string and newspaper padding.

  “Down come the Lares and Penates, eh? Is it moving day?”

  “Oh, sure,” said Iris, too brightly, as she shut off the music. “My lease, you know.”

  “A nice little furnished flat, isn’t it?” Miss Withers could see partway into a bare little kitchenette, and through an open door into a large and almost luxurious dressing room and bath. “Too bad you have to lose it.”

  The girl fidgeted. “Yes, but the place is inconveniently located, you know. It isn’t within walking distance of anything, except maybe Macy’s when there’s a good tail wind.” Iris dumped an armful of summer dresses into an expanding suitcase, every which way.

  “Today’s the sixteenth of the month, is it not? Odd that your lease doesn’t end on the first or fifteenth, as they usually do.”

  The girl stood stock still. “Why—” She was wound up tight as a spring, hiding something behind a smile that never quite took. Somehow, while perhaps she did not seem as poised and pretty as she had at their first meeting, now she was considerably more engaging, a little younger and more natural. “You know show business,” she said with assumed lightness. “Here today and gone tomorrow.”

  “I’ll not keep you long,” said Miss Withers as she removed four pairs of dancing shoes from a chair and planted herself firmly. “So you’ve changed your mind about remaining in the city and are going to take a job with a road company?” She showed her surprise. “And all the time I figured you might have had personal, shall I say romantic reasons for wanting to stay in hot, stuffy New York all this past summer.”

  “Not exactly a road company—” Iris began, and stopped.

  “Summer stock—in September?”

  “No! I’m just going away, if you must know. Hollywood, maybe. I’ve never tried Hollywood.”

  “Many others have, particularly in these days of television, without setting the Los Angeles riverbed on fire. But it’s a place to go, especially when one wants to forget a dead romance.” She stared hard at Iris.

  “Romance? Heavens, no. Whatever gave you that idea? I’m the bachelor girl type—”

  “So I see by the collection of evening dresses spread out for packing. Was it something that happened last evening that changed your mind about staying in town?”

  Iris dropped an armful of dresses, with a clatter of hangers. “What?” She swallowed. “Why should it?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” admitted the inquisitive schoolteacher quietly. “Only you do seem a bit wrought-up today. Did some young man forget to send you an orchid, or—”

  “I hate orchids! They give me the creeps. And I tell you there isn’t any young man! I only wish there was!”

  “Was it something that happened when you were out last evening—?”

  The girl shook her head, harder than seemed actually necessary. “I wasn’t out, I was home all the time!” she said firmly.

  The W
ithers eyebrows went up. “But child—”

  “Oh so it was you that called, then!” Iris said too quickly. “I just—well, I had a headache and didn’t feel like answering the phone, that’s all.”

  “And having thought things all over here alone with your headache last evening, you came to the conclusion that you ought to stop trying to help poor Mrs. Rowan and me solve the Harrington case, and go gallivanting off to Hollywood?”

  Iris came closer, eyes blazing. “That isn’t true! You don’t understand. Why should I get mixed up in a thing like that—I’m not a detective or anything. I didn’t know Midge Harrington very well, and I wish I’d never heard of her at all. I—”

  “Just how did you two meet, by the way? I’m not just curious, I’m fishing for possible leads.”

  Iris sighed wearily. “Oh, the usual thing. It was one of those revival weeks when they were trying to get vaudeville back at the Palace. They dug up some acrobats and a Swami who did mind reading and magic and a trained dog act and all the old corny stuff. I was playing a stooge, a straight woman, for Flip Jayen, the comic with the big cigar …”

  “I thought they all used cigars,” put in Miss Withers.

  “Not as big as his. Midge was in a dance act, though she only did one harem number and then a sort of poor man’s Denishawn scarf thing. We got acquainted, and when the week ended and the thing folded we decided to move in together to save money. It was just after she’d busted up with Riff Sprott.”

  “I see. It must be fascinating to be in the theater. One meets such interesting people.”

  “That’s what you think,” Iris told her bitterly. “The girls are mostly birdbrained and the men are all so much in love with themselves they have nothing left over. All I’ve ever wanted to do was to kiss show business goodbye and settle down in the suburbs—”