Green Ace (28 page)

“The more fool she. She should have spat in his eye!”

Piper shrugged. “Anyway, it seems that Ruth wasn’t used to drinking—she’s the pleasant, housewifely type—and she had little or nothing in common with the entertainers and radio and television people who were there. She’d never fitted in with that crowd, which was one reason for the divorce. So in self-defense she drank more than she could handle, and instead of getting gay she got sleepy. It actually took the boys ten minutes to wake her after they discovered her in bed, and they’re pretty good at spotting fakes. Besides, there was enough concentration of alcohol in her blood when we tested it that morning to indicate that she was absolutely blotto.”

“But, Oscar, mightn’t she have knocked herself out with liquor
after
she found and covered the body, or for that matter even after she did away with …”

“Stop leaping at conclusions, Hildegarde! She had no motive. Anyway, by that time we’d found small, presumably feminine fingerprints on the outside of the door of Fagan’s apartment, which the murderer had evidently left ajar. The prints weren’t Ruth Fagan’s, they didn’t belong to any of the people who had been guests at the party earlier. It was apparent that somebody else in the building, somebody who wasn’t dead to the world like poor Ruth, must have heard the fight and come over to see what was wrong. But who?” Piper sighed. “Because the apartment underneath was vacant, being redecorated. The people upstairs were in Florida for the winter. The only adjoining apartment belonged to a tap dancer named Crystal Joris, and the manager of the building told us that the girl had closed it up a week before and gone out to Hollywood to test for a role in a musical picture.”

“Aha!” cried the schoolteacher. “I’m away ahead of you!”

“Wrong again,” Piper told her. “We checked immediately with the Los Angeles police, and Crystal was out there all right, registered at the Beverly Wilshire.”

“Then who—”

“I decided,” said the inspector, “that the woman we were looking for must be very young and unsophisticated, probably fresh from the sticks, or else she wouldn’t have gone barging out into the hall to see what was wrong. Anybody who’d lived in New York for any length of time would have minded their own business, or at most would have called SPring 7-3100 and reported a disturbance. So, anyway, on a hunch I phoned Miss Joris long distance, finally locating her on a test stage at Mr. Zanuck’s studio. Sure enough, she admitted that she had lent the key of her New York apartment to her cousin when she stopped off for a day’s visit at her home town out in Pennsylvania on her way west. So now we find out about Ina Kell, a kid who wanted to try her luck in the big city.”

“And you mean to say that all during the hullabaloo the Kell girl had been playing possum in the next apartment, unbeknownst to your detectives?”

“She had not. Ina was playing a different game. It turned out that she’d arrived in town on a bus the previous evening, and come to the apartment after the manager had left the lobby. Little Ina went in and upstairs, using her borrowed key, unseen by anyone. But sometime next morning she made up the bed, removed all traces of her ever being there, took her bag and sneaked out. It must have been while the boys were busy inside the Fagan apartment and before anybody had time to post an extra man on the front door of the building.”

“But why would the child decamp like that? It seems out of character—”

“Wait. We had the girl’s description from Miss Joris, and a cute little redhead wandering around the city that early in the morning is as easy to trace as a circus parade. We found the coffee shop where she had breakfast, and the counterman remembered she’d been carrying a suitcase and studying the want ads while she ate. So we checked the
Rooms for Rent
columns and that same day we picked her up, a wispy, eager, scared little girl from Bourdon, Pennsylvania, with hayseed in her hair….”

“And with stars in her eyes,” said John Hardesty dreamily, and blushed at the look the schoolteacher gave him.

“Anyway,” continued Oscar Piper, “little Ina turned out to be deeper than she looked. At first she got into a panic and denied everything, even her own name. You can’t be rough with a girl like that; it took the whole bag of tricks before I could get her to let down her hair and admit that she’d spent the night in the Joris apartment. I had to threaten to turn her over my knee and spank her before she confessed that she’d been awake and heard the fight, and had got up and gone out into the hall to see what was going on. The murderer had left the door ajar, and she peeked in and found the body. Then, according to her, she covered it up with a rug because ‘it looked so lonely and terrible and messy!’”

“Poor child! And then she tried to run away because she was afraid of being accused of the murder?”

“Wait a minute,” cut in Hardesty. “You must understand that Ina was as green as—as chlorophyll. All she knew of life was what she’d got from romantic movies and soap operas and sensational fiction. She wanted to play it heroic. Nobody could get her to admit that she’d seen Junior Gault actually leave the scene of the murder until she knew he’d already been arrested and had confessed—even though we found his gold cigarette lighter in her handbag, that he’d dropped on the scene and she’d picked up as a sort of souvenir, I guess.”

“She should have been spanked,” Miss Withers observed firmly.

“Ina claimed,” continued the assistant D.A., “and I for one believe her, that after covering the body she went rushing back into the Joris apartment to phone the authorities. But Crystal had had the phone disconnected before she left, and Ina either didn’t know it or had forgotten it. She kept trying to get the operator and of course she couldn’t. Probably the only phone she had ever seen was one on the kitchen wall, with a crank. Meanwhile outside in the hall the paper boy had looked in the half-open door and rediscovered the body, or at least the feet that were sticking out from under the rug. He sounded the alarm, and then suddenly the place was swarming with cops. She realized she had missed the boat, and …”

“Ah!” objected the schoolteacher. “But even if the paper boy arrived just as Ina popped back into her own apartment, it still must have taken him some time to sound the alarm, and five or ten minutes more before the police could get there. A rather long time to sit and jiggle the phone, don’t you think?”

“Not for her,” Hardesty said. “Don’t forget she’d probably never seen a dial phone; probably she was expecting the operator to say, ‘Number, please.’ Anyway, when she heard the police arrive she realized that matters were out of her hands. She thought she might get into trouble for not being the one to report the body, so her only thought was to run and hide.”

“A funny kid,” Piper agreed. “After we picked her up she claimed that twice that morning after she had thought it over she started to call Headquarters and confess, and each time she hung up because she got cold feet. There’s evidence that she did try to make a couple of phone calls in the restaurant. But down at my office she finally identified Junior Gault’s photograph out of a dozen others as the man she’d seen leaving Fagan’s apartment after the fracas.”

“So, you see, Ina Kell is really the key witness for the prosecution,” John Hardesty pointed out. “She’s the one person who can actually put Gault at the scene of the murder at the right time. We didn’t dare take chances with her, for fear of showing our hand. We got a signed statement, but she wasn’t allowed to testify at the preliminary hearing or before the grand jury; we kept her under wraps and strictly away from the press and everybody. I got her a place to live at a nice respectable rooming house out in Brooklyn Heights; I even got her a job as a file clerk down at the Hall of Records.”

“And,” suggested Miss Withers hopefully, “you took her out now and then?”

Hardesty stiffened. “Oh, no. I knew then that I would probably handle the prosecution when the Gault case came to trial. It would be unethical for me to have any personal contact with a witness. Until after the trial, of course.” He sighed. “Maybe I should have held her in custody as a material witness, or required her to put up a bond. But if you’d seen Ina Kell you’d realize why nothing of the kind was ever thought of. She was—different.”

“I am,” observed the schoolteacher, “growing more intrigued with little Ina every moment. For a simple, unsophisticated little girl from the country she seems to have done a pretty good job of winding you men around her pinky. And to top it all, she had suddenly disappeared? How and when and why?”

“She was fine and dandy,” said Hardesty, “when I last phoned her a couple of weeks ago. Just to check up, you understand, nothing personal.”

“Of course not!” Miss Withers beamed.

“Our operatives were keeping an eye on her, too, though we didn’t have men enough to spare so we could have her shadowed twenty-four hours a day. It wasn’t as if her story had got into the papers—nobody knew about her at all. And then last Monday when we tried to serve a subpoena on her, we found her gone.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

“Just gone. Quit her job and moved out of her room, the preceding Saturday. Told her landlady she’d write and give her the forwarding address, but she hasn’t. So if you can help us on this thing in any way …” Hardesty smiled brightly. “Of course, there mustn’t be any fanfare. I don’t mind so much having it known that I let an important witness slip through my fingers, but we’re still hoping to bring her back and spring her as a surprise on the defense when the case comes up again.”

“I see,” said Miss Withers slowly. “I suppose you yourself talked to her landlady and the other roomers? Was her room searched?”

Piper nodded. “Nothing.”

“Her friends?”

“She seems to have been a shy little thing; kept pretty much to herself. No dates. When she wasn’t at the office she was either at a movie or window-shopping along Fifth and Madison or with her nose buried in a library book.”

“Probably scared stiff, and after what happened on her first day in the city I hardly blame her. I see I shall have to start from scratch. But three heads are better than one, and you gentlemen had the advantage of meeting the young lady. Mr. Hardesty, yours is the first guess. Where would you say little Ina has gone?”

The assistant D.A. paused to light a cigarette, his big hands surprisingly dexterous. “I think she’s in hiding,” he said. “Probably not far away. Ina has a powerful imagination, and I think she brooded over the impending trial until she just couldn’t stand it. She may have had a sort of long-distance crush on Junior Gault—many nice girls are fascinated by scoundrels—and she couldn’t face swearing his life away on the witness stand. Since she wouldn’t lie, and anyway could hardly retract her own sworn statement, I think she just decided to drop out of sight until after the trial.”

“The girl would have to have a heart soft as butter, to say nothing of her head. But, very well. Oscar, what is your hypothesis?”

“I hate to say it,” pronounced the inspector, “but it’s possible she was bought off. The girl was dying to get into the big time, and maybe being a file clerk in New York wasn’t much improvement over the home town. Somebody got to her—there could have been a leak somewhere in the D.A.’s office or mine. Junior Gault, or his family, or his attorney, could have learned how important Ina’s testimony would be to the prosecution. A few thousand bucks and a plane ticket dangled in front of Miss Ina Kell …” Piper grinned. “Maybe those stars our young friend here saw in her eyes were only star sapphires!”

“You’ll eat those words,” Hardesty said quickly, “when we find her.”

“If we find her,” put in Miss Withers. “Of course, we are all aware that there are still other possibilities. Ina might have been frightened away, or kidnapped, or even worse.”

“Relax, Hildegarde,” advised Piper. “She hasn’t been murdered. The only person with the faintest motive is still safe behind bars.”

“Relax, yourself,” she countered snappishly. “And, speaking of motives, I am still far from convinced that Junior Gault really had sufficient reason to kill Fagan. Just because of a poke in the jaw, and some snide remarks on the air….”

“Well, now!” The inspector nodded genially at Hardesty. “Listen at her! And only a couple of hours ago in my office she was swearing that this time she had no intention of upsetting any applecarts. John, don’t you agree with me that this is the time for us to fix it up so Miss Withers here has a look at exhibit A?”

The assistant D.A. shrugged, but Miss Withers sat up straight. “If you’re thinking of showing me a lot of gruesome photographs of a dead body …”

“Not at all, Hildegarde. You’re going to have a look at the motive, and then you can decide for yourself if it’s sufficient or not. Know anything about television?”

She looked blank. “From what I’ve seen it’s mostly wrestlers and puppet shows and old Hopalong Autry movies seen through a blinding snowstorm.”

“Forget the good old days of the family stereoscope, will you? Time marches on.” The inspector winked at Hardesty and rose from the table. “Come, Hildegarde…. Just a minute while I make a phone call, and we’ll be on our way.”

“Hmm,” Miss Withers said. “Oscar, I think you’re up to something. But I’m just curious enough to trail along.”

“You’ll get curiouser and curiouser,” he promised, with a too-innocent smile.

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