Green Ace (22 page)

“I do indeed,” Miss Withers told him. “When the impossible is eliminated then whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth. Here are a couple of moot questions for you to answer. First, was there any mark or wound on Andy Rowan when he was arrested?”

“Huh? Why, nothing serious. As I remember there was just a sort of lump on his forehead, probably from bumping the windshield when his car coasted into the back of that truck.”

“Or when he got hit with a sap. Second question—why did the two officers who arrested him show sudden signs of prosperity afterwards—new cars, new fur coats for their wives, that sort of thing?”

The schoolteacher took off. Oscar Piper hastily grabbed up the check and followed her toward the door, saying, “Wait a minute! That’s a serious charge—”

“But I’m not making any charges,” said Miss Withers. “I’m just thinking up questions. That five thousand dollars that both Andy Rowan and his wife admit he had in his pocket the night of the murder is beginning to get in my way, just like the fences in Marika’s backyard.” As he stopped by the cashier’s desk, fumbling for change, she hesitated in the doorway. “Goodnight, Oscar. Don’t bother about a taxi, I can grab the subway at Sheridan Square and be home in ten minutes.”

She could indeed—but wasn’t. Leaving the train at Times Square, the schoolteacher sought out a catchpenny novelty store on 42nd near Sixth that offered amazing bargains in cameras, camping equipment, and all sorts of musical instruments. Portable phonographs, Miss Withers discovered, came in various sizes, and prices, made to play records cut at 78, 45, or 33½ rpm. After quite wearing out the salesman she invested a major share of her remaining cash in an instrument and, thus loaded down, put in a short session in a telephone booth, a longer one in a substation stocked with out-of-town telephone books, and then finally bundled everything into a taxicab and headed home, with blood in her eye.

Iris was still at dinner when the call came in. The Greshams dined late, and dressed for dinner. Which might have been fun, only the evening gowns worn by Bill’s mother and aunt and sister ran to sleeves and scarves, and the girl was so acutely conscious of her naked shoulders and the cleavage which remained obvious in spite of her best efforts with a borrowed brooch that she was hardly tasting the overboiled vegetables, the paper-thin slices of ham.

Bill was no help. She hadn’t been able to get him alone all day. Something happened to him here in this house, cancelling out his personality. He didn’t even smile at the butler, who looked so much like Bill Robinson that Iris always expected him to go into his dance. Now the old colored man was saying, in hushed, apologetic tones, “They’s a long distance call from New Yo’k for Miss Dunn.”

Iris was watching Bill’s face, and at the “Miss Dunn” he had, she thought, the grace to blush.

“My husband,” thought Iris. “For better, for worser.” Then, as she started to put down her napkin, she heard the old crocodile—correction, she heard her esteemed, though unknowing mother-in-law at the head of the table say, “Tell them she’s at dinner, Thomas. Ask them to call another time …”

“Oh, no, please!” Iris cried, louder than she meant, and ran hurriedly out of the dining room. The telephone was all the way down a long hall, and as she came toward it she promised herself that no matter who this was, no matter what they had to say, she’d tell the Greshams that an emergency, some sudden illness of a rich uncle or something, was calling her away. Immediately. She could pack and make the ten o’clock train to New York …

Then she remembered that nobody knew she was here, nobody in the world. She was supposed to be hiding out. Her agent didn’t know she was here, nor Actors Equity. She picked up the phone under some strange compulsion she could not understand, and it was cold to her fingers. “Y-yes? This is Miss Dunn speaking.”

Some operator said, “Here’s your party, go ahead.” And then it came, just as she had somehow known it would come. The laughter again, the roaring, slow, inhuman laughter from hell!

“Oh,
God
no!” Iris cried. And then it stopped.

“Don’t be alarmed,” came a crisp feminine voice from the other end of the line. “Just
testing
, my dear. Was that the way it sounded when you heard it before?”

“Yon k’n hide de fier, but w’at you gwine do wid de smoke?”

—Uncle Remus

I
T WAS LATE WHEN MISS
Withers arrived at the house on Prospect Way, loaded down with an overnight bag, a paper sack containing Talleyrand’s pan and water dish and rubber ball and chocolate-flavored bone, and the inevitable black umbrella and oversized handbag. It had been a considerable wrench for the schoolma’am to tear herself away tonight from her own fireside, her own beckoning bed. But when she had finally phoned Natalie Rowan, hoping to beg off, the woman had been almost frantically insistent.

Of course, the poodle, still of an age when every change in routine presaged adventure, was delirious with joy. He had enjoyed the taxi ride uptown, as usual doing his best to bark simultaneously at every car passing on either side. He liked the new smells of the trees and shrubs on the Rowan lawn, he liked Natalie Rowan when she came cautiously to the door to let them in, and he even liked the burly man in the blue serge suit who sat in the biggest chair in the living room, smoothing his tight gray curls with one hand and holding an especially odorous pipe in the other. The room was blue with smoke.

“Thank heavens, you finally got here,” Natalie exclaimed. “Of course you remember Mr. Huff, Miss Withers?”

“I do indeed.” The schoolteacher acknowledged the introduction somewhat frostily, and was openly unimpressed by the news that the keeper from Sing Sing had stuck around just in hopes of a word with her before he left.

“If I’d known what you were up to last Sunday,” the man said heavily, “I wouldn’t have gave you away. Because any friend of Mrs. Rowan and her husband is a friend of mine.”

“How cozy,” muttered Miss Withers under her breath. Then she got hold of herself, and politely asked after the health and well-being of the prisoner.

“You never saw nothing like it,” Huff told her, without taking the pipe from between his strong yellowish teeth. “I certainly don’t see what keeps him going, but he shows no signs of cracking.”

“Evidence of a clear conscience, do you suppose?”

“Of course it is,” Natalie put in breathlessly. “Anybody could see that.”

Huff rubbed his jaw. “That, or something else just as good. I’ve seen a lot of them come and go, and Rowan certainly doesn’t act like the others in the condemned row.”

“And do you know the latest?” Natalie Rowan said. “Andy’s writing his autobiography, imagine that!”

The schoolteacher imagined it without too much strain, and remarked that it was possibly a very good thing for the man to have some way to occupy his time. “I wonder if he’s bringing out any new facts in his story?” she added.

“Nobody’s read it,” Huff admitted. “Not even me.”

“But this is the important part,” Natalie continued, her voice high and strained. “Andy’s going to keep right on writing it up to—as long as he’s in that awful place. And he plans to ask the warden himself to do an introduction, and then leave the manuscript to any New York newspaper who will publish it and use the proceeds to establish a fund for the benefit of persons convicted of murder on purely circumstantial evidence!” She gulped. “Not that that will do Andy personally any good.”

“I keep telling Mrs. Rowan,” said the man from Sing Sing, “that she’s got to prepare herself. No harm to keep on hoping, but only about one in fifty who ever gets into the death-house comes out alive.”

“We are dealing, after all, with a man and not just a statistic,” began Miss Withers. Then she saw Natalie Rowan’s face, which was suddenly streaming tears. “Take it easy—” she said.

“I’m sorry! But I just can’t stand any more …” The woman turned and ran blindly out of the room, upsetting an end table. There was the slam of a bedroom door.

The silence was heavy, and uncomfortable. “You can’t blame her,” said Mr. Huff, as he felt for his highball glass on the floor beside him and carefully emptied it. “Well, I’ll run along. Hope you work something out, because I sort of like the guy.”

Miss Withers saw him to the door. “Just what would be the chances,” she said in a low voice, “of your getting hold of that manuscript of Rowan’s so I could see it?”

“Like I told Mrs. Rowan when she suggested the same thing; no dice, ma’am. A death-house prisoner’s personal property is his. While he lives, that is. Maybe afterward?”

“Afterward would be too late.” The schoolteacher cleared her throat. “If it’s a question of money—”

Huff looked shocked. “Lady, I shouldn’t even be doing this!”

When the door had closed upon him Miss Withers went upstairs and did her best to get Natalie Rowan calmed down, mingling reassurances with hot-water bottles and aspirin and bromides. “I’m sorry I went all to pieces,” Natalie finally whispered. “Right in front of that nice Mr. Huff, too.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” the schoolteacher said.

“But you won’t leave me? You’re staying the night? You’ll sleep right across the hall, so we can hear each other if anything should happen?”

“Nothing is going to happen,” said the schoolteacher. “Now you get to sleep. I’ll straighten up a bit downstairs, and see to the lights and the doors and everything. Talleyrand can stay in the kitchen, and keep an eye on things.”

Natalie nodded sleepily. “Don’t bother to empty the ashtrays,” she murmured. “It’s so nice to see signs of a man around the house—any man.” Then her eyes opened wide. “And if the phone rings, let it ring. It would only be another of those awful things …”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about those laughing phone calls,” Miss Withers said. “By the way, was the call that came today any different really from the first one?”

“I—I don’t know. It just hit me different, I guess.”

“I think
I
know why,” the schoolteacher told her. “I had in the meantime infected you with the virus of fear. You were susceptible this time, you were prepared to be scared because I had been. That’s what Iris did to me. If I hadn’t been made hypersensitive by her story of the first phone calls I’d probably have hung up on the laughing hyena and thought nothing of it. Would you like your window open?”

“Please,” Natalie said. “But—but who infected Iris, then?”

“Yes,” said the schoolteacher. “But no more of this tonight. We’ve both had what might be described as a hard day.” She turned out the bedside lamp and tiptoed out of the room.

Downstairs in the middle of the room in which Midge Harrington had died Miss Withers stood still for a moment with her eyes closed, trying to envision the place as it had been that night more than a year ago, with the girl lying strangled in the middle of the Aubusson carpet, and Andy Rowan walking unsuspectingly into the trap—

But it was only a room, full of fumed-oak furniture. She looked up at the portrait of Emil Fogel, the esteemed cotter-pin manufacturer. “If only you could talk!” said Miss Withers. “But you did, didn’t you? Only you should either have kept silent or else said just a little more …”

He stared back glumly, and the schoolteacher hastened to straighten up the room a little, carrying out glasses. Then in the kitchen she washed up the dishes remaining from Mr. Huff’s supper, which had evidently consisted of potato pancakes and applesauce. Talley begged for and received a cold-remaining pancake, and then bedded down obediently in a corner, looking as though butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. But all the same his mistress tied the refrigerator door shut, and barricaded the swinging door of the kitchen.

“Stay put,” she told the dog. “You may look like an innocent brown lamb, but there’s larceny in your heart.” She checked the locks, turned out the lights, and made her way back upstairs to a fluffy little guest room, where her few Spartan belongings contrasted strangely with the blue and gold forget-me-not motif. There was a floppy French doll propped against the pillows, and Miss Withers firmly dropped it out of sight in the closet. She gave her hair its requisite hundred strokes with the brush, donned her old-fashioned flannel nightgown, and climbed into bed.

It was the first peaceful moment of reflection she had had all day. Now was the time for detached thought, the time to make decisions. Only she went to sleep. It was a deep, dreamless sleep that was like a little death. It might have lasted five minutes or five hours, and then suddenly she was wide-awake again, not daring even to breathe, because something was wrong in the house.

“A noise,” she decided. “It must have been a noise.” It came again, a faintly metallic sound outside in the hall.

“It’s only mice,” Miss Withers reassured herself. Then she stiffened. “What do I mean,
only
mice? I
hate
mice!”

But mice would not be silently, slowly, opening her door. Mice would not tiptoe stealthily into her room. Then a heavy weight descended upon her bed, and the schoolteacher sat up and opened her mouth to scream—only to smell a comforting doggy odor and realize that it was Talley. Leave it to him to solve the mystery of the barricade at the kitchen door. He had tracked her upstairs like a bloodhound, then patiently twisted the doorknob with his teeth until it opened …

“Bless your silly safe-cracker’s heart!” she whispered, and hugged his neck. Talley gave her ear a polite lick in the darkness, then turned around five or six times to frighten snakes out of the tall grass and dropped into a compact lump at her feet. There was, in the poodle’s philosophy, a time and a place for everything, and this was the time and place for sleep. Affection could come later, probably around feeding time.

But while Talleyrand had taught himself to open doors, he had never learned to close them behind him. And somehow there was something in this house which made Miss Withers want to shut herself away. She had to crawl out of bed with a chilly draft whistling about her thin ankles, and when she returned she was hopelessly wide-awake. She counted herds of sheep, she counted to a thousand by fives, she counted famous historical murderers whose names began with A, she declined
amo
,
amas
,
amat
, she even counted beads in a string that stretched to infinity …