Green Ace (10 page)

“Oscar Piper is open to conviction, but just barely. What I believe and what I can prove are two very different things.”

Natalie’s despairing sigh could be heard over the phone.

“But cheer up,” said the schoolteacher. “The police have a rather complete description of the killer, though I admit it doesn’t seem to point
too
clearly at any one of our suspects. By the way, there are a couple of questions I must ask. First, who was it that told you about Marika and her occult powers?”

“Why—” There was a longish pause. “I don’t exactly remember.”

“But didn’t you say a friend suggested it?”

“Yes, I know. But thinking it over, I guess I heard about Marika from my husband, I mean Andy. I don’t mean that he consulted her or anything, but I think he knew somebody who did. I remembered his casual mention of the name, and later when I was so lost and miserable and had nowhere to turn I looked her up in the phone book …”

“No! Go away!” said Miss Withers sharply. She was speaking to the poodle, who was licking her bare ankles to indicate that it was time for a walk or breakfast, preferably both. “Excuse me, Mrs. Rowan. My other question is—how does one reach Iris Dunn? Do you have her address and phone number?”

“Of course,” said Natalie, and gave them from memory. “But you probably won’t find her home. I tried and tried to get hold of her last evening, but she was out gallivanting somewhere. No answer this morning, either.”

“Youth will be youth,” Miss Withers told her philosophically. “Or at least so I’ve heard. Was it something important you wanted Iris for?”

“I—I don’t know. But when I didn’t hear from you yesterday I got to thinking. It seemed to me that all along Iris had maybe been holding out about someone or something in Midge’s past. Like she did about Mr. Zotos, until you pried it out of her. And sometimes she seems so frank, and then again she just freezes up and says she doesn’t remember something I feel she knows perfectly well …”

“Is this just intuition, or have you something specific?”

Natalie hesitated. “Let me see. I remember one time I was asking her all sorts of questions about the Harrington girl and her men friends, and Iris mentioned some flowers that came one morning for Midge shortly after they started to room together. A wonderful spray of white orchids on the day
after
Easter, of all the odd times. She said Midge went to bed and cried most of the rest of the day, with the orchids pinned to her nightgown. But Iris said she couldn’t remember the name of the man who sent them, though there was a look in her eye—”

“I know that look,” Miss Withers told her. The ghost of a thought flicked through her mind, but it was gone before she could nab it. “Well, perhaps there’s a romantic side to Miss Dunn. And as for being out, one can’t blame her for burning the candle a bit at her age. She wasn’t out all night, was she?”

Natalie admitted she didn’t know about that. She had called the girl three or four times with no answer, had even gone downtown to her apartment and hammered on the door. Then she had called Miss Withers for no particular reason except that she felt in need of spiritual comfort, and finally in desperation had gone to a movie. “There was a murder mystery on a double bill, and I thought I might learn something. But I had to sit through almost all of
Samson and Delilah
first, and that was awful. It didn’t follow the book except at the end, and Hedy Lamarr kept reminding me all the time of the Harrington girl and what she did to my Andy—” Natalie gulped. “And the other picture, why it turned out that the murderer was really one of the victims; she got mixed up and drank a cocktail she’d poisoned for somebody else. You see, there was this midget in love with an opera singer—”

“I’d love to hear all about it, but right now I’m busy,” interrupted Miss Withers firmly. “And I suggest that you leave Iris Dunn to me. Perhaps she has to be approached roundabout, like Peer and the Boyd in the Ibsen play.”

“Oh yes!
The Return of Peer Grimm.
Emil and I went to it years ago. That’s a play about a ghost, too—”

The schoolteacher felt that her quota of ghosts and ghostly messages was full up for the moment. “You’ll hear from me,” she promised. “Meanwhile take a sedative.”

“But I did, last night!” cried Natalie. “I took two Seconals, and I had a dream about Marika coming into my bedroom with a lighted candle and whispering ‘I know now!’ She was dead by that time, wasn’t she? So maybe her spirit really did come—”

“Mrs. Rowan,
please
!”

“Well, anyway, I shrieked, ‘If you know, then who
was
it?’ so loud that I woke myself up!”

“Too bad you didn’t take
three
Seconal tablets—you might have dreamed the rest of it. Goodbye again, Mrs. Rowan.”

Sometimes, she felt, Natalie was almost too much to cope with. But, of course, the poor woman was undergoing something of an ordeal, made worse by the crushing realization that she had misjudged her Andy. Still, she had supplied one or two more pieces to fit into the jigsaw puzzle Andy Rowan had known about Marika. Maybe he had gone to consult her in that apartment where she died. Or maybe some friend of his, somebody he knew very well, had been one of the mystic’s wide circle of clients.

“It might even have been the Harrington girl,” Miss Withers observed conversationally to the impatient poodle as she hastily flung on her clothes preparatory to taking him out. “Maybe Midge went to Marika—they say that people in show business are usually superstitious. Marika would have drawn her out and found what she wanted most to hear, then looked in the crystal or read the Runes and told her that she was fated to marry a dark, slight, curly-haired man with a dimple. Meaning Andy Rowan. Maybe Midge even came back and told her lover that she’d been to a soothsayer and that Fate had destined him to be hers? Maybe—” she stopped and shook her head. “Too many maybes.”

When mistress and frisking dog returned from a brisk go around the block they found the Inspector on the doorstep, looking pleased as Punch. “Just on my way uptown,” he said. “Thought I’d stop in—”

“For a cup of coffee, of course.” Miss Withers led him inside. “Care for a bite of breakfast?”

“Breakfast, yet! I had lunch half an hour ago.”

“Probably a stale sandwich on the edge of your desk, I know your habits.” She looked at him critically. “Oscar, you look like the canary that ate the cat. Don’t tell me you’ve already got Marika’s murderer arrested?”

“As good as,” he said confidently. “Hildegarde, you’re always poking fun at scientific police methods, but just listen to this. Remember that hat? I just got the laboratory to report on it.”

“So now at last we know the murderer’s head size!”

But nothing could ruffle him. “Yes, six and seven-eights. About right for the man’s height. But the hat was bought in Dallas, Texas, about six or seven years ago—we know that because the model was discontinued during the war. It retailed at around thirty dollars but had never been blocked or cleaned, which means that the owner was flush with money at times but not recently. A five-dollar bill was tucked inside the sweatband, soggy and discolored and evidently been there for years. Maybe the guy originally hid it there so he’d never be out of taxi fare or the price of a bottle, and then forgot it. Traces of cheap brilliantine and expensive hair restorer. A few light brown hairs left over from his last haircut, which was about a week ago. The vacuum picked up minute traces of powder, alfalfa, and camel dung.”

“He probably only walked through the Zoo on a windy day.”

The Inspector put down his coffee cup, and tackled bacon and eggs. “Seriously, Hildegarde, we know a lot more about our man. He was in Texas five or six years ago, and flush. He’s had hard times since. He’s careful of his appearance and worried about losing his hair, which is light brown. Maybe you’re right about the Zoo—but he powders his forehead after shaving, which most men don’t bother to. With that on top of Mrs. Fink’s description, it should be a cinch.”

“Perhaps, Oscar.
Cinch
is hardly the word I’d choose for any angle of this affair. By the way, has the landlady identified any photographs yet?”

“The old girl is down there now, plowing through the racks. Nothing definite when I left the office, but Sergeant Smith says she had one
possible.
Only that guy has been out at Alcatraz for a couple of years, so she’s looking further. Of course, the photo angle may come to nothing. The killer may be a first offender.”

She sniffed meaningly. “I doubt it. He killed Midge Harrington a year ago.” Miss Withers poured out more coffee. “Of course, Oscar, you forgot all about my request to ask the three people who discovered Marika’s body about which one of them unbolted the hall door of the apartment.”

“Wrong again. We did, but they were all so excited at discovering the corpse that none of them can actually swear to it. Mrs. Fink thinks it was her husband, and the husband thinks it was Bagmann. They were all in a tearing hurry to get out of that room and downstairs to call the cops.”

“Odd, with a phone right there in the room.”

“So for once somebody was smart enough not to touch anything on the scene of the crime!”

“I see. And just for the record did you do any checking to see if Messrs. Sprott, Bruner and Zotos had alibis for last night?”

“I’ve had more important things to do! Hildegarde, once and for all will you stop trying to connect two murders that just won’t tie together? Besides, you yourself admit that the description of the murderer doesn’t fit any of your Three Musketeers.”

“Except for the Cyrano nose, it could be any of them—even Bruner in spite of his height, because he could have hunched down in the trenchcoat and it’s hard to estimate tallness on a stairway, especially a dark stairway. Oscar, I’ve thought and thought about it. Isn’t it possible that the nose was make-up? Years and years ago I saw a movie called
The Sign of the Cross
, with Charles Laughton as a wonderfully dissolute Nero, and he had a beautiful Roman nose that couldn’t have been natural.”

“Face putty,” Piper told her wisely. “Actors sometimes use it, though it won’t stand too close inspection. But remember, Marika let the guy into the house and into her apartment because she knew him. If he’d been wearing the wrong phiz when she opened the door—”

It was a point well taken, she could hardly deny that. There would hardly have been time for the murderer to do a reverse-action make-up job at the head of the stairs before he knocked at Marika’s door. But still there seemed something a little too
too
about the nose. Of course, there were people with beaks that seemed an exaggeration—the late J. P. Morgan was one.

The Inspector drained his coffee cup and said he had to run along. “Are you on your way back up to Marika’s apartment?” Miss Withers asked eagerly.

He nodded. “Got a box of her personal papers and stuff out in the car that I want to take back. Nothing in them that seemed much help, though. Except a lot of receipts for postal money orders—seems she’s been sending dough to some guy out in Phoenix, Arizona, name of Cawthorne.”

Miss Withers’ eyes narrowed. “Does it look like blackmail? I thought from what you said about mediums that they preyed on others instead of being preyed upon.”

“Don’t be always jumping to conclusions,” Piper said wearily. “Maybe she was only making payments on a dude ranch so she could retire someday. We’ve asked the Phoenix police to investigate, of course. As for the rest of her correspondence, it was mostly from clients who wanted their fortunes told or their horoscopes read by mail.”

“Horoscopes too? Heavens, that woman seems to have rung all the changes. By any chance did she tell the auguries by studying chicken entrails?”

“Maybe. But she couldn’t have been much good at it, because she certainly didn’t have any warning of her own fate. All of which proves that any message she got from the spooks about Andy Rowan’s innocence was worth less than a Confederate dollar.”

“Oscar, perhaps you don’t know that Confederate paper money is now a collector’s item?”

“All right, all
right
!” Piper paused in the doorway, a truculent gleam in his eye. “And I don’t mind telling you that while I’m up there in the dead woman’s apartment I’m going to check very carefully through those victrola records again. Maybe there was a dance tune tucked in among the hymns, and you missed it. We’re all only human, you know.”

“Speak for yourself,” snapped Hildegarde Withers. “For your information I still have 20/20 vision, and can tell a hawk from a handsaw, or sacred from profane music. I can also remember enough of my own salad days to realize that when a man and woman dance together, especially alone in an apartment, they have certain romantic interests. The man who came to Marika’s apartment and bashed out her brains was nobody she cared a tinker’s damn about. I call your attention to the curious incident of the lipstick in the night time.”

“But Marika wasn’t wearing any lipstick!”

“That was the curious incident. Curious, I mean, if she was in a flirtatious mood. You may know a lot about crime, Oscar, but you don’t know women.”

“I am learning,” he said. “The hard way.” And he took himself off.

Miss Hildegarde Withers wasted no time in following his example, except that she headed in an entirely different direction. The time had come, she thought, to have a long heart-to-heart talk with Iris Dunn, who might just possibly have something up her sleeve besides a well-rounded arm.

At least Natalie thought so. And Natalie Rowan wasn’t entirely the garrulous fool she sometimes sounded.

The schoolteacher finally arrived at a vast building taking up an entire block on the middle-lower West Side, built in the ’30s when architects who should have known better were bandying phrases about “modern multiple housing” and “machines for living.” She took the elevator to the 18th floor and knocked sharply on a door at the end of a long corridor. Almost immediately the lid of a metal peephole opened, and a young, strained voice cried, “Who is it?”

“It is I, as you can see for yourself,” said Miss Withers. “May I come in?”

There was the rattle of a chain, and the door opened slowly, reluctantly, as though Iris Dunn would have slammed it in the schoolteacher’s face had she dared. “I thought you were somebody else,” the girl admitted.