Green Ace (16 page)

“Amen to that,” agreed the schoolteacher. “But what I came up to tell you—”

“Is it the police?” Natalie interrupted hopefully. “Have they found anything? Are they beginning to realize that the same person killed both those girls?”

“No,” admitted Miss Withers flatly. “The Inspector has a new theory, a little on the fantastic side—”

“He doesn’t suspect
me
, does he? Because I don’t have any alibi for that night except going to the movies, and everybody knows I’d do almost anything in the world to save Andy now that I know he’s innocent …”

“Innocent people usually don’t have very good alibis, if any.” Miss Withers was a little amused. “And if you had gone to such desperate lengths as committing murder to help your husband, you wouldn’t have used a crystal ball as a weapon.”

“It should have been a necklace,” agreed Natalie. “If only the murderer had used the same weapon this time, so even the police could
see
the connection—”

“The police! Inspector Piper has leaped on a horse and galloped off in all the wrong directions. His current theory—” And she told about Banana-Nose Wilson.

The woman slumped in her chair, for once looking her age. “Sometimes it all seems so hopeless,” she moaned. “You don’t know what a day I’ve had. People hammering on the door, and no little Iris to shoo them away. First there was the man from Campbell’s mortuary who wanted to talk to me about arrangements for bringing—for bringing Andy’s body back, and whether there’d be a funeral or what.” She dabbed at her eyes with a bit of lace. “I told him that if there was any funeral there’d be a double one, and I mean it. Then a nasty young man from some true official detective magazine wanted to take a picture of this living room as the scene of the murder, to illustrate some story he’s written that’s to run in the magazine as soon as Andy is officially executed, and then—”

“However difficult your day, I imagine it had nothing on your husband’s,” cut in Miss Withers tartly. “But cheer up, I have good news, or what may turn out to be so. I’ve been stirring up our suspects a bit.” She gave a brief account of her prowling at the Duke Hotel, and of how Mr. Zotos had popped up with a new lead.

“The Harrington girl
married
?” gasped Natalie.

“Making four suspects instead of three, if we can only locate him. On top of that, I think I know how the murderer of Midge Harrington managed to get into the apartment house to murder Marika, and—”

The doorbell rang again. “I should have a maid,” Natalie admitted. “But I can’t stand anybody bustling around. If Iris were only here—”

“I’m afraid that Iris Dunn has stood not upon the order of her going, but gone. Carried away in an expensive imported chariot by a weedy knight known as Bill. But I’ll promise you that I’ll locate her when and if we need her. Meanwhile, suppose I see what I can do in the role of Cerberus.” She marched out to the front door, and opened it.

“Stop leaning on that bell!” she said firmly. “Mrs. Rowan isn’t—” Then she stopped. Standing out on the step, resplendent in silver fox, was an extremely beautiful, though plumpish red-head; a tall proud girl who managed to look angry, scared, and appealing all at the same time.

“I’m Chloris Klee,” she said quickly. “May I please come in? It’s important.”

“Why, you’re Mrs. Riff Sprott, I remember!”

“Mrs.
Walden
Sprott,” corrected the girl. “Riff is just a sort of nickname. Only I use my professional name, mostly.” She came into the house, obviously stiffening her spine for the ordeal. “I remember you too,” said Chloris. “You’re the one who tried to make with the jive talk, and then tipped Riff off that the heat was on. Only I didn’t expect you’d be here.”

“You want to see Mrs. Rowan—on behalf of your husband, I suppose? Why did he send you?”

“But he didn’t! He mustn’t ever know!” whispered the girl as she followed Miss Withers into the living room. Natalie Rowan, who had prudently retreated into the rear of the house, came back into the room and was introduced.

But Chloris refused a cup of tea, a drink, and even a chair. “What I’ve got to say won’t take a minute, and I have a show to do. I came up here, Mrs. Rowan, to beg you to use your influence to make the police let my husband alone.”

“Oh?” said Natalie blankly. “
My
influence?”

“He’s almost out of his mind with this persecution! His lip is gone, his timing is way off, and tonight he even had to get a substitute to play his horn. The management of The Grotto is about ready to tear up the contract and throw us all out into the street. Can you imagine what it’s like to have detectives following you everywhere you go, peering in through the door when you stop in a cafeteria for a bite, standing outside your hotel all night and looking up at the window?”

Natalie Rowan slowly shook her head.

“Riff can’t eat, he can’t sleep, he can’t even drink! Look, Mrs. Rowan, I know you’re behind all this—reopening the Harrington case and all the rest of it. You’ve got money, and you’re needling the police. You’re doing it for your man—you love him a lot, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said the woman softly. “If he dies, I die too. That sounds fancy, but it’s the truth.”

“Then maybe you know how I’ve felt about Riff since the first day I met him, and that was almost three years ago! Maybe your husband didn’t kill that big Harrington witch, and if he did for my money he ought to get a medal.” Chloris shrugged her well-rounded shoulders. “But even if he didn’t kill her—get this! My husband didn’t either!”

“One moment—” put in Miss Withers.

“Oh, I suppose the police have found out about the alibi!” Chloris smiled scornfully. “I suppose they finally worked on one of the boys in the band and got him to break down and admit that Riff didn’t spend the evening of the murder with them at a jam session up in Harlem like they swore they did. Swing musicians always stick together; they have no special love for the law, and the boys thought they were doing Riff a favor by saying he was along. Only he wasn’t—I can see you already know that. But there’s one thing you don’t know—”

“Several things, but we’re finding out fast,” said Miss Withers under her breath.

“Riff was home in our hotel suite that night!” the girl concluded defiantly. “I know it.”

“And just how do you know it?”

“Okay, I’ll give it to you straight, since it’s just among us girls. The combo didn’t have any bookings that week, all of August was
lousay
that summer. We were strictly from hunger, and things got so bad that I went back to doing dinners.”

“You, a cook?” The schoolteacher’s eyebrows went up again.

“Judas, no! I mean stag dinners. It’s a quick hundred bucks.”

“I’m afraid I still don’t understand,” admitted Miss Withers.

“I know!” offered Natalie. “She means she was baked into pies, and took baths in wine, that sort of thing. I remember one night in Paree—”

Chloris laughed out loud. “That’s specialty stuff, they hire burleyque talent for that. No, all I ever did was to wear a slinky off-the-shoulder evening gown and circulate. It’s not so rough, you don’t have to get in very deep if you remember to keep smiling and sidestepping. You make dates with any of the suckers who insist on it, only they don’t know your right name or where you live, and by the time the party is over they’re usually too looped to care anyway.”

“Keep smiling and sidestepping,” said Miss Withers dryly. “Ill certainly remember that, if the situation ever comes up. But, my dear young woman, if you were away from home
doing a dinner
as you put it, then how can you swear that your husband was safe beside his own hearth curled up with a good book? How do you know he wasn’t right here in this room at eleven o’clock that night, murdering Miss Harrington?”

“But—” Natalie put in, and then caught Miss Withers’ look.

“Listen,” Chloris said. “The dinner that night was for a bunch of out-of-town furniture buyers, and those boys like to feel the upholstery. It got very drunk out very early if you know what I mean, and I got tired of having my framework appraised. Usually at those things you’re supposed to stick around until midnight at least, but I went to whoever was in charge and soft-talked him into giving me my dough and letting me sneak out early. I got home a couple of minutes before eleven, and there was Riff passed out on the sofa in the living room. He’d been there all evening, too.”

“And how could you tell that?” pursued the schoolteacher mercilessly. “Did you hide his shoes?”

“You’ve never been married, have you? Oh, there’s a dozen ways to tell. By the empties, for one thing. It takes about three pints to put Riff away. And the ashtrays were all full, and newspapers and racing forms scattered around. He’d finished a crossword puzzle, and tried to finish some old song of his that never comes out right, which he only tackles when he’s half-swacked.”

Miss Withers found herself humming a phrase of it, and hastily said, “Go on.”

“Well, I took off his shoes and left him to sleep it off where he was. Next morning he didn’t remember where he’d got his load or what he’d done, so when he heard about the murder of his ex-girl friend he tipped off the boys to alibi for him. Not that the police asked too many questions, because they were pretty sure they already had the case sewed up in a sack.”

“I see,” said the schoolteacher. She scowled at Natalie Rowan, who had her mouth open and was about, it appeared, to put her foot in it. “Well, Mrs. Sprott, you can rest assured that this will be brought to the attention of Inspector Piper at Headquarters.”

“And will you get him to call off his bloodhounds?”

“I shall do my best,” promised Miss Withers, not saying her best
what.
“Neither Mrs. Rowan nor myself has any desire to make trouble for the innocent. But we are trying hard to make trouble for the one who killed Midge Harrington.”

“Natch,” said the girl. She looked at her watch and gave a little squeal. “I’ve gotta get back to the gin-mill and warble.” She started for the door. “You won’t forget, now?”

Miss Withers shook her head, and the front door slammed. “Well,” said Natalie, “that seems to eliminate one suspect, if she’s telling the truth.”

“Does it? The girl has effectively destroyed her husband’s alibi for that night—an alibi which was good enough to satisfy the police at the time.”

“But—” Natalie frowned with concentration. “She’s given him another one. Only I thought the police figured that Midge Harrington died around ten o’clock, not eleven!”

“Exactly. I baited a little trap, and Chloris fell for it hook, line and sinker. She says she got home at eleven. That would still leave him plenty of time to commit the murder, then come home and set the stage to create the impression he’d been there all evening. It wouldn’t be hard to spread around newspapers and racing forms, dirty up the ashtrays, and maybe even empty a couple of pints of whisky down the drain. Then he could take a stiff drink, pour a little of the nasty stuff over his clothes, and lie down and look and smell exactly as if he’d passed out hours before.”

Mrs. Rowan looked a little happier. Then her face clouded again. “But Riff Sprott can’t be the one we’re looking for. Because even if he doesn’t have an alibi for the first murder, he must have for the second. He’s working in a night club, you said.”

“Until tonight, yes. But the dinner show is seven to nine, supper show eleven to one. I checked that when I visited The Grotto. He had plenty of time between appearances. Judging by the smell of the place, any musician working there would have to go out for some fresh air, and it would be easy to slip away from the others.”

“But—but the police were shadowing him? How could he have got away from them long enough—”

“He didn’t,” said Miss Withers. “Because they weren’t. I just hinted that when we had our heart-to-heart talk that first day, to stir things up. With the idea planted in his mind, the rest of it was just a case of overactive imagination. Riff Sprott is seeing police shadows behind every lamp post.”

Natalie was bubbling over. “Then Sprott has a guilty conscience—you’ve proved it! That means he’s guilty—”

“No, not necessarily. I’ve simply put forward an hypothesis. We haven’t any real proof, not yet. And remember the old saying—if you sent an anonymous telegram to a hundred men picked at random out of the phone book, saying
FLEE, ALL IS DISCOVERED!
ninety of them would leave town that night.”

“Oh, dear,” sighed Natalie Rowan, very much deflated again. “You just build me up and then let me down …”

The phone went off like a firecracker, and Miss Withers jumped a good inch into the air. “That’ll be Iris,” cried Natalie quickly. “I just knew she wouldn’t disappear without a word, not when I owe her her last week’s pay check.” She rushed out into the hall, cried an eager, welcoming “Hello?” into the phone, and then was silent.

The schoolteacher, straining her ears in vain, became conscious of a sharp pain in her chest, and realized that she was forgetting to breathe. She tried to remember bits of her old first-aid training—if this was another of those maniac calls, Natalie would probably faint or throw a fit. She was about to rise and go to the rescue, when she heard the woman saying, “Yes, I’ve got it. Thank you.”

Natalie came back into the room with what was almost the ghost of a smile on her face. “It wasn’t Iris after all. Just a wire from Mr. Huff, from Ossining. Tomorrow is his day off and he’ll be down in town. He’s so kind and thoughtful—he’s going to drop over in the evening and give me a firsthand eye-witness account of how Andy is bearing up.” She peered at Miss Withers. “What’s the matter? You look so strange. There isn’t anything really wrong about a keeper calling on the relatives of a prisoner, is there?”

The schoolteacher sighed deeply. “No, I imagine not. It’s only that—well, to be frank, I was afraid the call was from someone else. The telephone can be as surprising as a grab bag sometimes.”

“It’s a fearful nuisance as far as I’m concerned,” Natalie said sensibly. “Nine-tenths of the calls I get are a sheer waste of time. It’s an unlisted number, too. But I guess every newspaper in town has assigned a cub reporter to try to get an interview with me, or a picture staged with me weeping over Andy’s photograph. And guess what happened today just after lunch, when I was trying to relax my snarled nerves in a hot bath? Some nitwit called up and when I came dripping down to answer the phone, instead of saying anything he just laughed and laughed! Did I give him a piece of my mind!”