Green Ace (7 page)

There was one good thing about a manufacturer, from her point of view. He had to stay with his factory. But, of course, Mr. Zotos was bound to be a let-down, after the others.

It was a block-long building, grimy with soot, located in the wrong part of Long Island City. The reek of overpowering sweetness, of vanilla and chocolate and cinnamon, was almost unbearable half a block away, and by the time Miss Withers had talked her way inside the place she made up her mind never to eat another pastry as long as she lived.

The cream-puff king sat in a big chair behind a big desk in an office whose walls were covered with convention pictures and framed membership certificates. The man himself was soft and round, with dark curly hair thinning on top and moist brown eyes. Iris had been right, he was rather like a cocker spaniel. But it was a wary spaniel, not sure whether to growl or wag its tail.

Her previous efforts to pass as a hep-cat and as a student of Terpsichore having met with no marked success, this time Miss Withers laid her cards on the table. “Mr. Zotos,” she informed the very bewildered little man, “I’ve come to see what you have to say, if anything, about the news that the police have a new lead on the murder of Miss Midge Harrington.”

“Who?” he muttered.

“Midge Harrington, the girl you tried to help get to be Miss Brooklyn last year. She was murdered, remember?”

Then she saw that tears were welling out of his brown eyes, big tears that ran unashamed down his plump cheeks.

“Yes,” he whispered. “I remember. But why do you come to me?”

“Because I’m a relative of hers,” said Miss Withers without shame. (After all, were we not all cousins after Adam, or the apes?) “I’m calling on everyone who knew her, to help the police. After all they haven’t much to go on—the whole thing was reopened by an odd clause in somebody’s will, and by a supposed spirit message—”

“A—a spirit message? I don’t understand.”

“Nor do I. But this Marika person, over on Ninety-sixth Street, got a message saying that the man the police arrested and convicted is innocent. And there seems to be some corroborative evidence. I’d like to see justice done, and Midge avenged.”

“Yes,” he said softly, still not using a handkerchief. “Midge Harrington was the only girl—” He gulped. “She’s gone, and that’s all that matters. But she was the only woman I ever could have loved, you see. I understood that they got the man who did it, but if they’re reopening the case the police probably know what they’re doing. If I can help in any way—” He brightened, and reaching into his desk. “Would you like to see something?”

And so for half an hour Miss Withers had to admire his scrapbooks, containing every line of the publicity Rowan had planted for Midge, every bathing-suit picture, every simpering posed portrait. The prize shot, on a page of its own, was one of Georgie-Porgie Zotos himself presenting Midge with a corsage of orchids at some luncheon affair, and staring up at her as a little boy might peer into a toyshop window. “I even have a privately-made recording of her voice, singing ‘
It’s Cold Outside
,’ ” he went on. “Sometimes I play it on my little portable. What a woman!” George Zotos sighed, shaking his head.

“You loved her, didn’t you—very much?”

“What man wouldn’t?” he asked, surprised at the question.

“She loved you too?”

Zotos blinked. “Of
course
not! Miss Harrington was—well, I always felt that she was unapproachable, untouchable. Sort of as if she always really belonged to someone else, somebody she met or dreamed about years before.”

“Here we go again,” said Miss Withers under her breath.

“She wasn’t like anybody else,” said the man with painful seriousness. “She was a work of art, she was the frosting on the cake. If what you say is true, and the man who did that awful thing is still at large, I only wish I could get him alone for five minutes …”

“To smother him to death with cream-puffs?” Miss Withers said, but not aloud. She stood up. “Thank you, Mr. Zotos. Here’s my card, and if you think of anything that might shed light on the case, do call me.”

“Of course. If there’s anything I can do—”

“There is one thing. Can you tell me just why Midge Harrington’s dreams of being Miss Brooklyn, and trying out for the Miss America crown, couldn’t come true?”

“Why—” He hesitated.

“Was it her purple past, whatever that means?”

“I wouldn’t say that, I wouldn’t say that at all. It’s just that the committee behind the Atlantic City beauty pageant has certain rigid rules and specifications, which are naturally subscribed to by the local and state committees. We were advised that our candidate, Miss Harrington, was ineligible. Some busybody had written a letter—”

“Perhaps it was because Midge was living at the Rehearsal Arts Club over in Manhattan instead of here in Brooklyn?”

“Perhaps,” agreed Zotos doubtfully.

Miss Withers headed for the door. “One last word, Mr. Zotos. When the police come around questioning you, you needn’t mention that I dropped by. Sometimes they get annoyed when I try to interfere.”

“Surely,” he said, from very far away. As she went out of the office she heard him hastily putting away the scrapbooks. On the subway back to town, still feeling wrung out like a towel, Miss Withers wrote: “
George Zotos, a sticky Caliban. Does each man kill the thing he loves? Anyway he still loves her. A longshot bet.
”

As the schoolteacher neared home she felt an increasing uneasiness of spirit. When he heard how she had spent the last two days the Inspector was sure to accuse her of hurling monkeywrenches into the machinery again. And it was more than probable that Talleyrand, the other male in her life, had amused himself by making an apple-pie bed in her room or otherwise disgracing himself during her long absence. As she came up the street she had vague but unpleasant premonitions of disaster. She resented them all the more because this was the time when her fabled intuition was supposed to be at work, her mental shortcuts which had sometimes led her to the correct answer without going through all the intermediate stages. Of course, she was well aware that anything perceived intuitively must afterward be checked with reason …

She hurried up the stairs and put her key in the lock. At least Talley wasn’t howling with loneliness, the soft little howls that drive other tenants slowly crazy. In fact, the big poodle was in his favorite spot on top of the closed cover of the kitchen stove, sleeping peacefully.

The telephone was off the hook, a sure indication that it had rung and rung until in desperation the dog had pawed it into silence. Before taking off her coat and hat she sat down and called the Inspector, but he was not at home and he was not at Centre Street.

“Is he out on a murder case?” she demanded of the sergeant.

“Ma’am, I don’t know.”

“And if you
did
know you wouldn’t tell me!” She hung up, rather abruptly. Then she put murder out of her mind and prepared a somewhat sketchy meal for herself and the poodle, settling down afterward with a copy of
War and Peace
, a classic she was always beginning and never able to finish. Tonight was no exception. A little after ten-thirty, with the phone still stubbornly refusing to ring, she got out the phone book, which at times constituted her favorite reading material.

There it was, like an answer to prayers. “Marika—West 96th …” Inspired, she dialled the number. Almost instantly there was an answer, a man’s voice heavy with caution. “Yes?”

“I’d like to speak with Marika, please.”

“Who’s calling?”

“I don’t know that it matters, but my name is Hildegarde Withers. I want to make an appointment …”

There were muffled male voices and then somebody else took over. “Hildegarde!” roared the Inspector, “what in Judas Priest’s name do you mean calling at a time like this, and how’d you find out about it?”

“I really did want an appointment,” said Miss Withers. “With Marika, not with you.”

“Get out your ouija board then,” he told her. “Because the dame they call Marika is right here on the floor beside me, colder than Kelsey!”

“Oh, my prophetic soul! She was strangled with that same necklace, wasn’t she, Oscar?”

“That she was not. Somebody bashed out her brains with her own crystal ball.”

“Small habits well pursued betimes May reach the dignity of crimes.”

—
Hannah More

“H
OLD EVERYTHING!” SAID MISS
Withers. “I’ll be there in ten minutes. No, make it fifteen, I forgot I’m not dressed.”

“Don’t bother, Hildegarde,” came the Inspector’s chill tones. “We’re not having open house up here. This is one time you’ll have to keep the hell out.”

She hesitated only a moment. “I’m afraid I’m
in
already.”

“
What
?” Piper made it sound like a swear-word.

“As an accessory after the fact. Of course,” the schoolteacher continued breathlessly, “I had only the best of intentions in doing what I did, and Marika was obviously mixed up somehow in the Harrington case. But never mind, after all. You’re right, I shouldn’t always be interfering. You’ve probably got the thing all solved by now anyway. Sorry I mentioned it.”

“
Wait a minute!
” cried the Inspector, giving an unconscious imitation of Jack Benny on the radio. “You’re already in this up to your bustle. Now you get up here fast, dressed or not, or I’ll send a squad car after you and have you dragged here in handcuffs!”

She told him to send away, it would save taxi fare. And a few minutes later the maiden schoolteacher, clutching her hat, was whisked uptown to the accompaniment of screeching sirens, past the melancholy and bird-bedaubed grandeur of Grant’s Tomb to one of the dingier residential blocks on West Ninety-sixth. Even as a stolid and disappointingly uncommunicative police led her up the two flights of narrow, ill-lighted stairs she had a clear vision of what the apartment—
chez
Marika—would be like. It would be cluttered with all the hackneyed stage properties of the professional soothsayer, heavy with incense, frayed velvet drapes and perhaps even a stuffed owl gathering dust on the mantel.

There would probably be a discreet little card on the door, with the name “Marika” in pseudo-Egyptian script, and perhaps a human eye peering astigmatically through something intended to represent The Veil Through Which We Cannot See but looking more like a bad Los Angeles smog.

But, as she admitted to herself, Miss Withers was so wrong. She was ushered through a plain door into a brilliantly lighted, cheery room of the cozy type, with comfortable overstuffed chairs, bright prints on the wall, a portable phonograph and big, well-filled bookcases. To her inquiring nostrils came the immediate scent of the bowl of stocks and snapdragons on the mantel, of hot flashbulbs, tobacco and sweat—the latter easily traceable to Inspector Oscar Piper and his cohorts, who swarmed around the other end of the room under the bay windows. Crane her neck as she would, the schoolteacher could get no glimpse of the object of their professional attention, but she fancied that she caught another odor—something sweetish and a little sickening.

She was perfectly content to leave them alone with the remains. As she watched the specialists of the homicide squad carry out their appointed task Miss Withers thought, as always at such moments, of how sometimes one can’t see the forest for the trees. She respected them, but the respect was mixed with scorn. Within their limitations they knew their job inside out, but the trouble was that they often performed it that way. Crime, according to her concepts, was far more than an absolute, scientific fact, or something to be attacked and conquered with cameras and fingerprint powders and microscopes.

The schoolteacher would have been happy to outline her theories to the roomful of detectives, but since they were paying her no attention whatever she quietly moved across the room to an open doorway. Only momentarily did she resist the impulse to snoop a bit in the little refrigerator, the cupboards, and the garbage can. Marika was clean, though not meticulously so. She had dined at home, on baked potatoes, two lamb chops with fresh frozen peas, and a custard. It seemed oddly plain plebeian fare for a professional mystic.

Yet what else? Breast of griffon under glass, with creamed mandrake and poison ivy salad? She smiled wryly at the thought. After all, she knew very little about mediums. The one or two she had met looked as if they lived on tea and crackers, and that seldom.

Miss Withers came back into the living room, trying to catch the Inspector’s eye, but he was still occupied. However, there was another door across the room, and her besetting sin of curiosity led her to tiptoe over and quietly open it. She looked into a bedroom, small but comfortable, furnished in early American with conservatively feminine touches. There was a framed portrait on the chest of drawers, depicting a glamorous girl with quite incredible eyelashes, wearing a turban.

She started in, but here she met a snag in the shape of a uniformed officer who suddenly stood up and stared at her. He was evidently standing guard over a middle-aged woman in a flowered housecoat who sat on the edge of the bed, shaking with sobs, and showing signs of wanting to cry on his shoulder. She looked rather like a manatee, being bulging and shapeless and faintly moist—like something recently risen from the depths of the sea and anxious to get back.

“Oh, excuse me!” said Miss Withers politely.

“It’s okay, you ain’t exactly interrupting anything,” the officer told her. He seemed to be glad of the intrusion. “Who sent you, the Inspector?”

“Providence,” Miss Withers told him. But she hastily backed out of the room, judging the time inopportune for a survey of the dead woman’s bedroom. Back in the front room again she knelt down beside the nearest bookcase, seeking as was her wont a shortcut to the tastes and personality of the woman who had bought these volumes, who had arranged and dusted and presumably read them.

“Looking for a good racy novel, Hildegarde?” the Inspector suddenly greeted her.

Miss Withers stood up. She saw that across the room a sallow young man whom she vaguely remembered to be one of the deputy medical examiners was just closing his little black bag preparatory to leaving. He was saying, “Yes, quarter of ten—give it half an hour either way. Maybe I can cut it closer after the PM, if somebody can tell me when she ate last.”