Green Ace (20 page)

“Right away, Inspector.” Then Smitty frowned. “But what if we do get a picture, and find he hasn’t got a big nose after all?”

Piper sighed. “You still don’t get it, do you? The man who killed Marika was somebody she knew, or she wouldn’t have recognized his voice and pressed the button that released the downstairs door. He came there intending to kill her, but he didn’t want to run into anybody who might recognize him later, so he put on the phony rubber nose and glasses as he came in. Outside Marika’s door, of course, he whipped them off again and stuck them in his coat pocket so she’d know him. The one thing we’re sure about is that this murderer
doesn’t
have an oversized schnoz!”

“Yessir,” said Smitty meekly. “Is that all?”

“I guess so. Wait, you better send somebody out for some aspirin.” The Inspector’s headache was not yet the worst in Manhattan or even the worst he had ever suffered, but like a lion’s whelp it showed unmistakable promise of what it was going to be.

Alone at last, he took out the thin file marked “Thoren, Marika” and thumbed through it, then put it aside. From the top drawer of his desk he produced the thick, dog-eared record bearing the name “Harrington, Midge” and forced himself to study it, though he could have repeated it almost word for word from memory. There was no similarity between the two cases that he could see. Different weapons, different types of victims, different everything. The only parallel was one that Hildegarde had built up out of guesswork reinforced with moonbeams.

Meanwhile his self-appointed Nemesis was busier, as she herself would have phrased it, than a cow’s tail in fly time. Her first port of call that morning had been the New York Public Library at Fifth and 42nd, where she hurried up the steps past the two benign stone lions only to learn when she got inside that since her last visit the back newspaper files had all been moved down to the branch at Twenty-fifth Street, Just to make everything more complicated.

However, now that she was here in the fine old building where almost everything in the world of print is stored if you can only find it, she spent an hour looking up references on such disparate items as Herbs, monocotyledonous (exotic, white), Jewelry (necklaces, brummagem), Laughter, Laughing and Laugh (Teut; OE
hlehhan,
cf. Dutch and German
lachen),
and Sound (auditory perceptions of the smaller mammalia), pursuing the latter even through dog-eared, yellowed catalogues under the imprint of His Master’s Voice and Edison, making copious notes.

Miss Withers then marched all the way down to Twenty-fifth Street, pausing here and there on the way to do a bit of shopping. She had a brief whirl at Macy’s and Gimbel’s. Salesgirls, who had catalogued her on sight as the jet-earring and cameo-brooch type, were surprised at her penchant for the more extreme styles in costume jewelry. As she waited for her change she heard one clerk say to the cashier, “Get her! Do you suppose she hoards the things?”

The schoolteacher sniffed as she accepted the heavy package, “No, not hoarding,” she whispered mysteriously. “I use them for trading with the natives.” Her exit was something of a minor triumph.

Her handbag loaded, Miss Withers proceeded to the branch library, feeling immediately at home. There was the same hush, the same smell, and the same musty little men in overcoats poring over the same home-town papers, but she found a vacant table and immediately plunged into the back copies of the
Times.

There was absolutely nothing in the Vital Statistics column for April four years ago about Midge Harrington’s marriage, on the Monday after Easter or any other day. Disappointed but not surprised, the schoolteacher took time out for a visit to the telephone booth in the hall, finding Natalie Rowan safe at home but jittery as a cat on hot bricks.

“Oh, am I glad it’s you!” cried the woman. “And I hope you’re calling to say you’re packing a bag and coming up to stay with me. Because I just got another of those phone calls, and this time it
didn’t
seem silly—”

But the schoolteacher was not in the mood to hold anybody’s hand at the moment. “First things first,” she said crisply. “There’s something you can do to help. Now listen carefully …”

“I get it,” Natalie said finally. “I’m to call every county clerk in Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, Long Island, lower New York and Connecticut to see if they issued a marriage license to Midge Harrington four years ago last April. But—”

“The man’s name was probably William something,” continued Miss Withers. “The wedding was on the day after Easter. Get going.”

“Why—why, of course. If you say so. Only I wish Iris were here, she’s so capable at that sort of thing.”

“Find Bill’s last name, so we can locate him, and I’ll wager dollars to doughnuts that we find Iris too. Good luck.” And the schoolteacher hung up.

Returning to the newspaper room, she turned to the more sensational New York dailies and plowed through endless columns of chaff in the form of Broadway gossip. Midge Harrington’s name cropped up only once or twice in a blue moon, usually in the sort of slick, contrived “news releases” that editors sometimes wink at for the sake of the accompanying leg art. Most of this had been part of Andy Rowan’s campaign, and the schoolteacher had seen much of it in Zotos’ scrapbooks.

All in all, Midge had made a rather small splash for such a big girl—until her death. Miss Withers even went through the newspaper stories of the murder and the ensuing trial, learning nothing new. The case had involved money and sex, but it lacked mystery; it had soon disappeared from the front pages.

Andy Rowan had been so obviously guilty, to everyone.

About to leave, the schoolteacher turned back to the earlier volumes again, sticking close to the theatrical pages. Finally she found something that made her perk up her ears—a half-column review by some assistant drama editor. It went:

VAUDEVILLE PROVES LIVELY CORPSE

Palace Drops Movie Revivals To Offer Frisky, Girlsome, Funny Variety Show

Lilly Morris, beloved English character songstress, and Flip Jayen, glib gagster and master of the barbed squelch, headline the revival of old-fashioned two-a-day at the Palace this week. Miss Morris, of course, is inimitable in her version of “Don’t ’Ave Any More, Mrs. Moore’ …

“I can imagine,” said Miss Withers, skipping a bit.

… Flip has a new act and a new cigar, both reminiscent of his old ones, but he is a master of timing and the dead-pan red-head against whom he bounces his slapstick has some of the best filled opera-lengths these weary eyes have seen in many a moon …

“That would be Iris, of course!” observed the schoolteacher, and was glared at by the man at the next table, who was deep in old
Christian Science Monitors.

… Maxine and her all-girl orchestra. Cawthor the Great, magician, medium and mentalist, pulls rabbit out of ectoplasm and even materializes the ghost of a mermaid named Mary, who performs some eerie and baffling stunts of her own …

“But I thought all mermaids were named
Minnie
,” Miss Withers said, and was roundly shushed by her neighbor. She ignored him, and went on.

… Nudes Indigo, a dance act featuring three king-sized adorables known as The Three Glamazons in some voluptuous Orientale arrangements, fills in the rest of the show, together with Max and his trained dogs and …

So Iris had been telling the truth, at least about one thing. She had been on the same variety program with Midge Harrington, who must have been one of the dancers. Yes, on the opposite page was a photo of three girls wearing wispy scarves and seductive smiles—Midge in the middle, clearly recognizable in spite of the make-up.

Miss Withers began to gather up her pencils and notebook, but before she checked in the heavy-bound volumes she took one last look at the pictured face of Andy Rowan, caught in a candid shot in the courtroom. He looked like a sulky, defiant small boy, she thought. Scared, yes. Guilty, yes. But guilty of what? A man who had been foolish enough to try to dispose of an inconvenient dead body might very well look just like that.

On the whole, she had to admit, the old newspapers had been a let-down. The things one really wanted to know hardly ever got into print anyway, or if they did it was a matter of reading between the lines. Digging in the files was a little like a blind archeologist’s sifting the sands of the Sahara for neoliths.

Except that archaeologists had all the time in the world, and Andy Rowan’s sands were running out. Only two and a half more days—

She tried the telephone again, but the Rowan number was endlessly busy. Which meant that Natalie was faithfully doing her assigned job. At least, whether anything came of it or not, it would keep the woman busy and occupied.

As her nickel tinkled back into the slot, Miss Withers resisted a sudden impulse to use it to ring up the Inspector, just for old times’ sake. “I will not!” she told herself firmly. “No olive branches until he apologizes on bended knee for some of the things he said last night.” She hurried out of the library, grabbed a hasty salad and cup of tea in a little lunchroom around the corner and, thus fortified, took off again.

At a little after two o’clock that afternoon she was sighted entering a music store on upper Lexington, a musty labyrinth overflowing with ancient scores, sheet music and arrangements, battered old instruments, and tens of thousands of phonograph records, some of them antique wax cylinders which could only be played on the exhibition in the window.

It was a record collector’s paradise, offering everything from early Carusos to under-the-counter Billie Holliday numbers. Miss Withers reveled in such reminders of her happy childhood as
No News, or What Killed the Dog
,
Cohen at the Telephone
,
A Hunt in the Black Forest
, and Bert Williams’ immortal
Can’t Do Nothing Till Martin Comes
, but departed finally with only one purchase, a thin brittle hard-rubber disk which she carried as cautiously as she would a basket of eggs.

It would be premature, she told herself, to show any optimism yet. Besides, wasn’t it D. H. Lawrence who had said that the insane asylums were full of optimists? But her tide had very definitely turned.

That same tide, unfortunately, half an hour later left her high and dry in the first-floor salesroom of Tiffany’s—under arrest.

“Her reasoning is full of tricks And butterfly suggestions …”

—
Alfred Cochrane

T
HE INSPECTOR SAT SLUMPED DOWN
at his battered oak desk, with a faraway look in his eye. Finally his unwilling visitor got tired of watching him doodling on his memo pad, drawing snakes curled on their own tails and linked like a chain. There was probably some Freudian significance to that, but she didn’t know what. “Well, Oscar,” she broke in, “say
something
, even if it’s only goodbye!”

More than ever this afternoon Miss Withers looked like a scandalized Buff Orpington hen, her feathers ruffled and a somewhat frantic gleam in her eye. As he still hesitated, she said, “I
demand
to know just why I was brought down here to Headquarters instead of being booked at the police station. I didn’t ask for any kid-glove treatment, I didn’t even say that I knew you. Besides, I could have beaten the rap, as you call it.”

“Could you now?” Piper asked gently, almost absently.

“Of course. Naturally I never had the slightest intention of stealing their old necklace, I just tested it a little when the salesman’s back was turned. But there was a store detective I didn’t know was watching me, and he leaped to conclusions. And then when they found all those other fragments of necklaces in my handbag, they thought the very worst.”

“Next time,” the Inspector told her, “don’t try to play games in a big Fifth Avenue jeweler’s, it’s like going into the U.S. Mint with a sack and a pistol. To answer your question, a plainclothesman happened to be outside, watching through the window. His instructions didn’t cover a thing like that, but he used his own discretion, heading off the precinct boys and bringing you down here.” He looked at the typed report in front of him. “All in all you seem to have had a busy day.”

“Oscar!” she gasped. “You didn’t have me shadowed, you wouldn’t dare!”

“Maybe I did it for your own protection,” the Inspector said. “And my own. So I could be prepared if you got ready to pull any more surprises like the one last night.” He shook his head slowly. “Hildegarde, I hate to say this. But anybody reading this surveillance report would
swear
that you haven’t got all your marbles.”

She bridled. “I beg your pardon? If you’re trying to cast reflections on my sanity, what’s so psychopathic about looking things up in the public library?”

“But what things! Books on rare orchids and the theory of sound and how doggies hear and the etymology of laughter.”

“All pertinent to the investigation,” she said firmly. “I wanted to find out if white orchids were rare enough so there would be any chance at this late date of tracing the man who sent them to Midge Harrington on the day after Easter, which was obviously some sort of anniversary because she cried over them but only wore them to bed. I discovered that they’re expensive, but not that rare. A blind alley. Then I started out to try to find something on those queer phone calls that Iris and Natalie and I all received, that crazy jeering laughter. Talley howled when he heard it, which gave me something to start on. I found that dogs’ sensitive ears are actually pained when they hear certain sound vibrations inaudible to us. But those higher vibrations aren’t usually made by any human throat, Oscar!”

“I see,” he said. “Now it’s the Case of the Laughing Robot.” But he was still far away. The man had something on his mind, giving her only half his attention. “Then,” he continued, “you went cruising down Broadway, buying junk necklaces and telling the salesgirls you were going to use them as trade goods for the natives.”

“The girl was impertinent, and I got even with her by saying the first fantastic thing that came into my head! I didn’t know I was being spied upon!”