Green Ace

by Stuart Palmer

  She searched the living room meticulously, though not quite as the police would have done. The law looked for concrete clues, for hidden documents or jewels or concealed weapons. But the schoolteacher was trying to delve one layer deeper, convinced that every action must have its reaction—and leave its traces.

  Miss Withers brightened when on a shelf in the living room closet she came upon an old manila envelope containing part of a song-poem set to scribbled music, the sheets torn twice across but mended with scotch tape. The title was “Tall and Terrific” but that had been scratched out and changed to “Witchingest Gal.” There was no dedication, though after she had sung the words to the haunting, incomplete melody she felt that it needed none.

  “I get a kick out of coffee, I get a charge out of tea,

  Liquor is quicker but even hard liquor

  Don’t do what you do to me …

  I like the babes at The Horseshoe, I like the dolls at the Stork,

  I saw South Pacific, but Tall and Terrific,

  You’re the witchingest gal in New York …”

  “Such grammar!” said Miss Withers. “I’ll stick with Victor Herbert.” But the song must have been written for Midge Harrington, and would a man keep a memento like that around if he had strangled the girl?

  She next came upon a sheaf of old bank statements—the Sprotts’ balance wobbled usually at less than $300. A year ago it had got down to $8.85, but the latest statement, for September first, was just under a thousand. There was a rather large check made out to the American Federation of Musicians for back dues, dated last March, and since then Riff had kept himself paid up and in good standing.

  The schoolteacher stretched exploring fingers behind the cushions of the easy chairs, finding a few coins, a pocketknife with a broken blade, packets of paper matches, hairpins of three or four differing shades, and an open safety pin that stabbed her mercilessly. In a table drawer she pounced hopefully on a worn leather address book, but it contained no entry for Marika, none for Midge Harington.

  No sign of any weapon anywhere. Nothing to tie Sprott to Marika, not even a trenchcoat—and the only hat anywhere in sight was a dusty opera topper, size 6 ½—which was still close enough in circumference to the one that she had found under Marika’s body. She regretted with all her heart that the place didn’t have a kitchen. Miss Withers felt that she could tell more about a family from ten minutes in its kitchen than from tapping its telephones or reading its diaries. As a last resort she tried the bathroom, but found nothing unusual there except evidence that somebody in the household had recently acquired numerous patent remedies for gastritis.

  There were those, she realized, who would call this unforgivable snooping. But the end justified the means, she hoped.

  She at once proceeded with Plan B, spending ten minutes or so in making it clear that the apartment had been searched with a heavy hand—and yet not too clear, and not too heavy. She turned over Chloris’ underwear in the bureau drawers, probed into the facial creams with a nail file, moved furniture slightly out of place, and as a last artistic touch produced a cigar butt from the wrapping of tissue where she had carried it since she picked it up on the sidewalk, and placed it ostentatiously on the edge of the mirrored vanity. Riff Sprott, she knew, smoked cigarettes. This ought to give him something to think about.

  Keep jabbing, keep ’em off balance, as they said at the prize fights.

  It was well after seven o’clock. Riff Sprott and his orchestra would be on in the basement of The Grotto Club now, with Chloris probably leaning on the piano and rendering one of the torchy, slightly risqué ballads whose sheet music was on top of the spinet. Miss Withers wondered if on her way back uptown she ought not to stop in and catch their act.

  She had just gathered up her handbag and umbrella and switched off the bedroom light when she heard masculine voices in the hall and then the rattle of the knob—the door was opening, and she realized that with criminal negligence she had forgotten to lock it again from the inside!

  Now she was trapped! Miss Withers pressed herself against the wall behind the bedroom door, her heart pounding so she could hardly hear the voices in the other room.

  “Chloris honey?” That was Riff Sprott’s inquiring tenor. He came almost to the bedroom door, then stopped. “Chloris, you home?”

  “Nobody here but jus’ us chickens, boss,” said Miss Withers silently.

  “That wife of mine,” Sprott said. “She must have forgotten something and had to rush back for it. Typical of her to leave the lights on and the door unlocked.”

  “Women,” said the other man, in a voice that the schoolteacher almost recognized.

  “… never know who’s listening in a bar, you know. That’s why I suggested we come up here. Care for a drink?”

  Then Miss Withers began to shiver, remembering that the only liquor in the place was in the two bottles on the closet shelf. But the second man said not right after dinner, thanks. There was the sound of a chair being moved across the floor, and the voices were pitched confidentially lower. “So what are we going to do about it?”

  “I wish to hell I knew,” Sprott said feelingly.

  “Stick it out until Monday?”

  “What else? We can’t go to the police and demand a showdown—”

  “No, no. That would be asking for trouble.”

  “I’ve got it,” Sprott said, “without asking. Police on my tail day and night.”

  “I know. There’s a little man in a hard hat who’s been standing across the street and watching my windows. Suppose my pupils get wise to that, huh?” Miss Withers stifled a gasp. This was—it must be!—Nils Bruner!

  “You know who we have to thank for this stink, don’t you?” Sprott said bitterly.

  “Sure. Rowan’s wife is spending money. She’s hired that Whoops Sister in the funny hat to try to pin it on somebody, anybody. And she’s got the cops stirred up like a nest of hornets.”

  “This job last night—it makes it bad all around. Of course you’ve got an ilibi?”

  “Of course,” said Nils Bruner. “Only she’s a little under age.” There was a moment of strained silence, and then somebody turned on the radio—tuned softly, but just enough so there was no more chance of overhearing anything.

  Miss Withers had to get out of here, and fast. But there was no fire escape at the window, no convenient balcony. Just a straight drop of fourteen storeys to the street. There was light enough from the electric signs across the way so that she could make out the shape of objects in the darkness, and noise enough from the living room to cover her movements.

  She stripped the pillowcases from the bed, and cautiously ripped them apart. One she tied around her head, loosening a few strands of hair so that it fell in untidy wisps across her forehead. The other pillowcase made an apron, of sorts. Her handbag and coat, folded inside a spare blanket from the bed and a towel from the bathroom, made a convincing bundle of linen …

  Only her hat and umbrella remained, both impossible to camouflage. She said an affectionate farewell to the bonnet, then sent it sailing off into space. It was one of her favorites, though the Inspector always said it looked as if it had been taken away from its mother too young. She would have sent the umbrella after it, but there were passersby down in the street and she feared impaling somebody. As a last resort she tucked it away in the closet out of sight.

  Now everything was as ready as it would ever be. No—there would have to be something to explain the time lapse. She splashed water around in the bathroom, then closed the door firmly, picked up the bundle, and marched out into the living room.

  Remembering Chesterton’s invisible postman, she was banking on the fact that chambermaids are never noticed around a hotel. Her shoulders were bowed, her feet moved in the weary shuffle of the downtrodden, and she held the bundle well up in front of her face. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the two men, their heads together beside the radio, start up like frightened fawns.

  “Evenin�
�, Mister Sprott,” she muttered in a tired singsong. “Ay yoost bring you some clean towel and turn down the bed …”

  “Hey!” he said. “What the—”

  “Ay know it’s late,” she said over her shoulder as she grasped the doorknob. “But Ay couldn’t get in when the police were here …”

  And then somehow she was hurrying down the hall. Perhaps somebody opened the door again to stare after her, but she did not turn to make sure. Ahead of her a bellboy was lugging up an armful of baggage, with a starved blonde in his wake, but the schoolteacher maintained her steady shuffle and he passed by without a glance.

  “I ought to have been an actress!” Miss Withers told herself as she found the temporary security of the waiting elevator. She pressed the emergency stop between floors, giving herself time enough to remove the remains of the pillowcases, resume her coat and bag, and get her hair back into some approximation of order. Then she pressed her thumb on the second-floor button and held it there all the way down.

  She came timorously down the last flight of stairs—and then found that she need not run the gauntlet of the lobby after all. At the foot of the stairs, behind the elevator well, was a side entrance leading into the cocktail lounge next door. The schoolteacher marched through the place with her nose in the air, and came out into the street just in time to see a cruising taxi pass over her jettisoned hat, reducing it to a non-flying saucer.

  But the driver heard her anguished cry and slowed down, so she pretended she had only been trying to hail him anyway. A moment later, battered but reasonably intact, Miss Withers was around the corner and heading northward across Times Square.

  The meter ticked steadily, and she closed her eyes, thinking of it as another sort of clock, a shining hourglass through which the sands of Andrew Rowan’s life were running out. While the police wasted their time searching for a chimera that was supposed to have killed Marika, and she herself frittered away her time like a child at the seashore gathering shells and shiny pebbles that only turned out to be drab, colorless stones when she got them home.

  And she had nothing to tell Natalie, at least nothing encouraging. “Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof,” said Miss Withers to herself. “Perhaps if I slept on it—”

  She came hastily up her stairs, thinking of cinnamon toast and tea, a soaking hot bath and then bed, but as she let herself into the apartment and turned on the light she cried an unbelieving “Oh, no!”

  During the long afternoon, driven no doubt by extremes of boredom, Talleyrand had chewed up the entire New York Times, leaving a passably good imitation of papier-mâché all over the living room rug. But the big poodle greeted his mistress with such paroxysms of delight that she hardly had the heart to scold.

  “Which comes first, walk or dinner?” she asked the dog.

  Talley voted emphatically for walk, and presented her with his lead. They were coming down the stairs together when they ran head-on into a little man who turned out, of all people, to be George Zotos. The pastry king, it developed, had been tramping up and down the street for an hour, waiting for her to come home.

  “If you want to talk to me now,” she apologized somewhat breathlessly, “I’m afraid you’ll have to tramp some more.”

  It was indeed the sketchiest of interviews. Talley, in spite of his choke collar, yanked the schoolteacher from tree to hydrant at a pace that made poor Zotos hop, skip and jump to keep up.

  “Something you ought to know …” the man managed to say. “If you’re still working on the case of poor Midge Harrington, that is.”

  “There are a great many things I ought to know, and very few that I do. Please go on.”

  “It’s only that—well, when you came to see me so unexpectedly the other day I was so shocked and upset—” Here Talleyrand came upon a gaunt alley cat prowling the gutter, and made the night hideous with challenges, very nearly getting his nose laid open for his pains.

  “Shut up!” commanded Miss Withers. “No, not you, Mr. Zotos. Do go on.”

  “Remember you asked me that day what it was that went wrong with Midge’s hopes of becoming Miss Brooklyn and then possibly working up to a try for Miss America?”

  “Of course.” The schoolteacher pried Talley off a trodden lump of chewing gum.

  “I got to thinking, after you left. Midge was—well, she was a wonderful girl. If the police have the wrong man in prison, and her real murderer is walking the street and laughing up his sleeve, then something must be done.”

  “Obviously.” They swung around a corner, past the open door of a drugstore where Talley had once been treated to an ice cream cone. Once past this hurdle, which took both threats and brute force, the big dog settled down to a more resigned pace.

  “I want to help, in any way I can,” continued Zotos. “So I thought it over and then I went to one of the men who was on the local committee at the time, and made a few discreet inquiries. I found out that somebody had written them a letter, pointing out that Midge was ineligible for Atlantic City. They have some very strict rules for the girls, you know. The contestants must be Caucasians—”

  “Immediately eliminating the lovely girls from Harlem and Chinatown? What a pity that Miss America can’t come out of the melting pot. But was Midge—?”

  “Oh, no. It was something else. The next rule is that the contestants can’t be under contract to anybody, like a movie studio or a model agency or anything like that. Midge had a screen test at Paramount, but nothing ever came of it. So it wasn’t that either.”

  “I see,” said the schoolteacher impatiently. “You’re trying to say that it was her purple past, then, just as Mrs. Rowan hinted to me. The old idea of the tribal virgin, the tapu. Read your Golden Bough.”

  Mr. Zotos seemed a little embarrassed. “Well, ma’am—you see, one of the most important rules of all is that the contestant can’t ever have been married.”

  Miss Withers stood stock-still, almost making Talleyrand do a somersault. “Married? You don’t mean that the Harrington girl—?”

  “Yes, ma’am. The letter gave proof.”

  “But for heaven’s sake, when? I thought her time was fairly well accounted for, from the first nebulous romance with her dancing teacher until the disaster with Andy Rowan.”

  “Oh, it was before she took dancing lessons from Bruner.” He almost spat the name.

  “At fifteen?”

  He bowed his head. “Midge was a big girl for her age, and very mature. She always passed for two or three years older than she was. I couldn’t find out the man’s name—my informant said the letter had been lost in the files. But he thought he remembered that there was a photostat enclosed, probably of the marriage registration. That was all I was able to get out of him—he’s a fellow named Klotz, owns the Loveland Ballroom.”

  The schoolteacher thought about that until they had rounded the park corner, homeward bound. “But how odd that the police didn’t dig that all out, after the girl was murdered!”

  “The police seem to have missed a good many pertinent details,” Zotos said. “But they thought the case closed, I guess, when they arrested Rowan. Why, they barely asked me any questions.” He seemed a little hurt at that.

  “But they established your alibi for the night Midge was killed, didn’t they?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, of course.”

  “Which was—?”

  “I went to a play that night. Life with Father. I showed them my seat stub.”

  “Oh, yes. I saw it too. All those redheaded children! And that hilarious scene in the second act when Father has his portrait painted—”

  “Portrait?” Zotos looked puzzled. “I don’t remember … they must have cut that out the night I saw it.”

  Miss Withers hadn’t really expected him to bite on that one. “How lucky that you kept your seat stub.” She walked on in silence for a few moments. “Were you at the theater last night, too?”

  “Last night? Oh, no. Just a quiet evening at home with my books. I collect fi
rst editions, you know. Of cookbooks. A dealer in Boston just found me a perfect Cook’s Guide and Butler’s Assistant, 1868. Francatelli, you know …”

  “I think I have an early Fanny Farmer around my apartment,” the schoolteacher said absently. She walked on in silence for a few moments. “So now reenters the ghost lover,” she murmured. “White orchids on the day after Easter. Of course, it all fits like a glove. ‘The first time a woman loves her lover …’