Green Ace

by Stuart Palmer

  The man saluted, and then gallantly escorted the schoolteacher back out of the line of fire. “The Mayor will certainly listen to reason,” she was saying as they hurried along. “Even though they say he used to be a policeman himself. Of course, it might be better still if you’d hold your fire and let me go up that stairs and have a few words with the fugitive. If I explained to him that it’s really all a mistake—”

  “Banana-Nose Wilson ain’t exactly in a mood to have his better nature appealed to,” the officer told her jovially. “But you go ahead and ask the Mayor what he thinks of the idea, and if he says okay then it’s all right with me. Here we are—upsadaisy and in you go!”

  Miss Withers had taken the first step up before it occurred to her that the Mayor of New York City was not apt to be watching events from the shelter of a paddy-wagon, and by then it was too late. She was pushed on in by a practiced hand applied to the small of her back, and the door clanged shut with a dismal finality.

  Even so, the schoolteacher missed only the last scene of the last act of the manhunt. A moment after the door of the Black Maria closed upon her, Inspector Oscar Piper joined Carmody at command headquarters a block away, in time to see Banana-Nose Wilson fling a soiled bed sheet out of the tenement window as a token of surrender.

  The captain, sighing with relief, picked up the microphone of the public address system, and walked a few steps into the open, trailing wires behind. “All right, Wilson. Can you hear this? Fling your guns out of the window. Fling your guns out of the window into the street!” His voice, magnified to stentorian proportions, echoed up and down the Avenue, rattling the remaining windowpanes …

  A pistol, and then another, came arcing out of the smashed window, flashed in the glare of the searchlights and clattered on the asphalt.

  “Come out of there with your hands up! Come out of there and start down the stairs with your hands up!” Carmody handed the mike to one of his men and turned to the Inspector. “Well, that’s that.”

  Piper agreed that that was that, and a good thing, too. “Any casualties?”

  “Nothing too serious. I guess Wilson shut both eyes tight every time he pulled the trigger.” They started across the street, to be nearly trampled to death by the rush of photographers lining up before the tenement steps. After a rather long wait six policemen emerged, each grasping some part of the anatomy of a small, very disheveled rabbit of a man with a top-heavy nose and reddish, streaming eyes. Flash bulbs went off like heat lightning in silent explosions, newsreel cameras whirred …

  “Hold him by the collar, sergeant. Well, okay, you’ll be a sergeant for this. Now give us that great big smile—”

  A man with a portable microphone ran forward and held it up to the prisoner. “Say something, Banana-Nose,” he pleaded hoarsely. “Say something for the television audience!”

  Banana-Nose Wilson said something, and Channel Four went dark all over the nation, though not quite soon enough to prevent the kiddies from learning some new words. What happened next has been argued in newspaper columns and in police squad rooms ever since, but the general consensus is that in the jockeying of his uniformed captors for photogenic positions, Wilson found himself momentarily free and started to run. It is also possible that he was camera-shy, and only trying to get away from the barricade of lenses. At any rate, the man started back into the building and was immediately shot in the back by Captain F. X. Carmody, who had aimed for the knee but had forgotten the heavy trigger pull of a .45.

  “Saving the State the expense of a trial and execution,” as Inspector Oscar Piper observed later to Miss Withers, in a cozy corner of a reception room in the women’s observation ward at Bellevue. He had to raise his voice, as a lady in the nearby dormitory was bedded down in a nest of imaginary tarantulas and howling for someone to come and take them away.

  “Nothing is well about it, and nothing is ended!” the schoolteacher snapped at him. She was wearing a dingy gray bathrobe, much too small for her. “Oscar Piper, are you actually going to let them keep me here in this awful place all night?”

  “I should,” he told her. “I honestly should, at that! It might be a lesson to you. Why on earth you wanted to go interfering with Captain Carmody in the midst of the biggest manhunt since Two-Gun Crowley—”

  “It was my duty,” she said. “I don’t expect any thanks for it, but I was only trying to save you from the worst mistake of your life, that’s all. Because Banana-Nose Wilson wasn’t—”

  “He was!” interrupted Piper wearily. “But well go into that later. Okay, Hildegarde, you can go as soon as the man at the desk can dig your papers out of the file and tear them up. Carmody could insist on your being held for routine observation, but he’s in a good mood. The newspapers are playing him up as the hero of the day, or will when we give a go-ahead on the story. I’m holding it back for the confession …”

  “Hero of the day!” Miss Withers said. “Just because he shot that poor man?”

  The Inspector scowled. “Say, maybe you do belong in here after all. You’ve got some sort of fixation or something about Wilson’s innocence. The man fits the description. His head is the right size for the hat we found under Marika’s body, or near enough.”

  “And what about the rest of it? Does his hair match the bits found in the hat?”

  “No, but—”

  “And was he in Texas at the right time to have bought it?”

  “He was in Auburn Prison,” the Inspector told her. “But he has unusual physical development, like most sneak-thieves, and could easily have vaulted those fences out in back of Marika’s apartment, which is more indicative. The man was a born thief, probably it was somebody else’s hat and he just lifted it off a hook in some restaurant. Don’t weep for Banana-Nose—he’s a habitual criminal, and that flat of his was as full of loot as Ali Baba’s cave. Our men found nine radios, a gross of expensive cameras, a bushel basket of watches, and enough table silver and jewelry to start a store. Evidently he’s been improving his time between visits to the probation officer with pursuing his old trade hot and heavy …”

  At that moment they were interrupted by a brawny policewoman, who laid Miss Withers’ clothes, hat and purse on a chair and said that she could go free after signing the usual release and property slip. The Inspector nodded, and started for the door.

  “I’ll be with you in half a moment,” said the much relieved schoolteacher. “Oscar, I am grateful to you for rushing over here to get me out of Bedlam!”

  He stopped in the doorway, grinning. “Okay, but I didn’t know you were here until just now. I rode over in the ambulance with Wilson, hoping he’d make a confession. He’s upstairs in surgery now.”

  Miss Withers gasped. “You mean, he isn’t dead?”

  “Not quite. But it’s just a question of time, with a hole like that through him. When and if he comes out of the ether we’ll have another try at him. I’m sending for Mrs. Fink, too—I’d like her to cinch the thing with a positive identification.”

  “Which, of course, she will, though what legal standing it will have—” Miss Withers sniffed and threw back her head, then clutched wildly at the skimpy bathrobe. “Oscar, if you don’t mind I’d like to dress in private.”

  “One thing I like is a good loser,” said the Inspector, and departed. When he got over into the criminal hospital wing he saw the unconscious Wilson on a stretcher already being wheeled down the hall by an orderly, the resident surgeon walking along behind.

  “Did all I could for him,” said the medico wearily. “But you should have seen his insides. He’s a scrambled egg.”

  Piper winced visibly, and wanted to know how long. Peeling off rubber gloves, the surgeon told him any time—hours, maybe days. It was only in the movies that a man dropped dead when shot, unless the slug happened to rip through heart or windpipe or certain parts of the brain. Though the result was usually the same.

  “Any chance of his regaining consciousness before the end?”

  The d
octor, not so callous after all, said he sincerely hoped not, for the man’s own sake. A hole through the upper intestines was one of the more painful ways of dying. Pressed further, he admitted that if a statement from the doomed man was of vital importance he could have a try at bringing him to. After the ether wore off, of course. A mammoth jolt of benzedrine sulphate might do it, plus morphine to deaden the pain.

  “Then try,” ordered the Inspector. “We need a deathbed statement.”

  He went back down the hall, hung up his coat and hat, and made himself comfortable in a creaky wicker chair by the elevators, lighting up a greenish-brown cigar and smiling in spite of himself at the memory of Hildegarde Withers trying to be forceful and dignified in a skimpy hospital-issued bathrobe. It had been the high spot of his day.

  More than an hour passed before Mrs. Fink hove in sight, convoyed by two harassed-looking policemen. The landlady was in high dudgeon having, it developed, already retired for the night. She was distinctly in a noncooperative mood.

  But the Inspector turned on his best public-relations smile, and his seldom-used brogue. “Sure, and this is positively the last you’ll be bothered,” he assured her. “And it must be a considerable source of satisfaction to you to know that your description, and your identification of the drawing and photographs of this man Wilson, resulted in his capture in record time. Tis only that we want to tie things up nice and neat by having you take a look at him when he wakes up.”

  “I’m barely awake myself,” vented Mrs. Fink. “I hadda get up and get dressed and be dragged alla way down here just to look at him?”

  “I know, I know. But you’re a very important figure in this case,” Piper went on. “The only person who got a look at the murderer, you know—except for the victim. I shouldn’t be surprised at all if some newspaper made you a good offer for your first-person story. You’ll have your picture in the News and the Journal-American.” He took her arm. “Right down the hall, please.” They came at last to the door. “Now if you’ll wait out here just a moment—”

  The Inspector went into the bare little hospital room, with its one barred window and white iron bed. The doctor was sitting on the window ledge, morosely smoking a cigarette. Sergeant Smith, complete with notebook, hovered over the prisoner, but there was a somewhat baffled expression in his eye. Banana-Nose Wilson, slow to die, had reacted quickly to the injections and was now in the elated, euphoric stage of morphine.

  “What a show!” he was saying, in a wheezy whisper. “All the cops in town, lights, firemen, newsreels—just to take one little guy who never hurt anybody in his whole career! I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t been there. Did I make a splash or didn’t I?”

  “He denies the Thoren murder, Inspector,” Smitty said in a low tone as he conferred with his superior in a corner. “Says he was out that night on a prowl job somewhere down in the Village, he doesn’t remember just where. It’s not much of an alibi—there were three or four sneak jobs pulled down there last night, but it’s a regular thing. And he wants to know why he got the slug thrown at him—”

  Piper nodded. “He wanted to draw our fire, so he could cheat the chair.”

  “Or cheat the Baumes Law. Next conviction it’s life for him as a habitual criminal. That’s his story.” They moved over toward the bed, and the sergeant said brightly, “Well, Wilson, here’s the Inspector to see you!”

  Banana-Nose whispered two words, one of which was “copper.”

  “There’s still a little time to set the record straight, Wilson,” the Inspector said gravely. “You’ve got nothing to lose now by talking. You want to check out with a clear conscience, don’t you? I suppose you know that you were seen going up the stairs of that house on Ninety-sixth Street a few minutes before Marika Thoren died.”

  “Now you ask anybody,” Banana-Nose said. “I always go up fire escapes.”

  “But we know this wasn’t just another job. Marika was expecting you, or she wouldn’t have let you in. She was your girl friend, wasn’t she?”

  “Wrong again. My weakness is horses.”

  “What’d you do with the money you took out of her cash box?”

  Wilson laughed, a little wildly. “Why, I found myself a million dollars all in nickels and dimes and I sat around and counted ’em a million times. Don’t be silly, copper. If I’d had any dough I’d have taken a powder out of town the minute I heard I was wanted, instead of holing up in a flat …” His voice trailed away to the shadow of a whisper, and Piper saw the doctor’s warning finger making circular motions indicative of a need for hurry.

  Piper sighed, and nodded to the sergeant. “Okay, Smitty, bring her in.” And then, as Mrs. Fink and her escort came into the room, “All right, is this him?”

  The landlady, puffed with pride and importance, came closer and stared at the man on the bed, who stared back blankly and then shut his eyes tight. But she cocked her head on one side, in an unconscious imitation of an art critic at an exhibition. “He had a hat and trenchcoat on,” Mrs. Fink said doubtfully.

  “Okay, okay,” Piper reassured her. “We can’t stage a regular identification parade for you under the circumstances. Just look at this man’s face. Look at his most distinguishing features, the eyes and nose. Is he the one you saw last night?”

  “I—I don’t know,” she began. “I guess so. Yes, that’s him all right. Only the nose was different, pinker sort of.”

  “Never mind the color, his wound would account for that. Is the shape right?”

  “Yes—but he had glasses on.”

  “Never mind the glasses!” In spite of himself the Inspector raised his voice.

  “Yessir,” Mrs. Fink hastily conceded. “Like you say, that’s the man.”

  “Never mind what I say—oh, all right. I guess that’s good enough.” He nodded at the officers. “You can haul her back home.”

  Eager as a schoolboy at recess-time, the landlady headed for the door. But it was slowly opening inward, to disclose a tall figure in a trenchcoat, topped by a man’s hat with snapped-down brim. The face was oddly owl-like, with hornrimmed glasses set too close together and a beak that put Banana-Nose to shame.

  Mrs. Fink froze. She pointed a trembling finger, shrieking, “Oh my God, that’s really him!” and then fainted dead away in the sergeant’s unwilling arms.

  The apparition opened its mouth and spoke, in measured accents. “Ah, gentlemen, what a nose is that! One cannot look upon such a specimen of the nasigera without exclaiming, ‘No, truly, the man exaggerates …’ After that, one smiles, one says: ‘He will take it off …’ But Monsieur de Bergerac never takes it off at all. Which, by the way, is where I and Rostand’s hero differ.” The figure raised one arm to strip off the eyeglasses and the pink latex nose attached to them, disclosing the weatherbeaten but triumphant face of Miss Hildegarde Withers.

  “You’d never have believed it if I hadn’t demonstrated,” explained the schoolteacher anxiously. “Would you, Oscar?”

  “Judas Priest in a jug!” exploded the Inspector savagely, recognizing too late his own hat and coat “How—I—I mean—” He was choking.

  “How did I get into the ward? The policeman at the gate remembered me from the Larsen case. I simply explained to him that I had something very important to deliver to you. And here it is—it cost me thirty cents on the Hallowe’en novelty counter of the drugstore down the street.” With a sweeping gesture she handed him the comic rubber nose.

  “Patience, and shuffle the cards.”

  —Cervantes

  10.

  EVEN AS THE KEY TURNED IN the hall door, Talleyrand knew with a poodle’s sixth sense that something was wrong. He yawned, wagged a tentative tail, and hastily began to search his conscience. True, there was the matter of the tom-up newspaper, but he had already had his scolding for that. Talley could think of no other misdemeanor, and wisely decided that his mistress was upset about something out of his ken.

  But it might be just as well, he thought, to omit the
joyful leaping and barking ceremonies usually attendant upon her return. Nor was sympathy indicated, considering the way Miss Withers rushed around turning off lights and slamming doors and talking to herself. When Talley heard her washing her hair he knew that the storm warnings were flying indeed, and he folded his paws over his whiskery apricot muzzle and played very dead dog.

  The schoolteacher finally climbed into her own bed with the everlasting War and Peace, but as usual she bogged down in chapter three of that celebrated classic. Finally she switched off the light. Not that she’d sleep a wink tonight, she told herself wearily. The sting of Oscar Piper’s tongue-lashing outside the hospital room at Bellevue still rankled, somehow. Their friendship dated back to their first meeting over a corpse in the penguin pool of the old Aquarium down at the Battery, which was more years ago than she liked to count. It had sometimes been a stormy one, with considerable differences of opinion, but never any rift as wide and as deep as this. From the man’s attitude you would think she had stabbed him in the back instead of saving him from a terrible, irrevocable mistake.

  Granted that from his point of view she had been a little overdramatic in bursting in on the identification scene at the hospital, in front of an audience. Men hated to be made to seem ridiculous, even when they were. Especially when they were.

  Now that it was too late Miss Withers could think of a lot of devastating things she could have said to the Inspector, and she lay awake in the pitchy darkness while she phrased them most bitingly, getting it all out of her system. She toyed briefly with the idea of getting up and ringing him on the phone, just to have the last word. But the man would probably be asleep. Probably everybody was asleep at this hour—everybody but her. The schoolteacher tried counting sheep, but there were so many black ones among them, and the black ones were so much more interesting …

  Miss Withers was not so alone in her wakefulness as she fondly imagined. Over the curve of the horizon to the southwest, in the prim and chilly guest room of a Main Line mansion in old Philadelphia, Iris Dunn lay propped against three down pillows in a great canopied walnut bed, waiting. She had been waiting for a long time.