Green Ace (17 page)

Miss Withers, a little dizzy, found a chair and leaned against it. “Is there anything the matter?” Mrs. Rowan asked anxiously.

“Nothing,” admitted the schoolteacher. “But this phone call—didn’t it strike you as odd or anything?”

The woman shook her head. “Just plain
silly
!”

“Because, you see, I received one too, and so did Iris. The call then didn’t frighten you into wanting to drop everything and run away and hide?”

Natalie’s smile was scornful. “I don’t scare that easy.”

“But didn’t the laughter strike you as menacing, unearthly and inhuman?”

She shook her head again. “Just silly. But maybe I’m lacking in imagination.”

The schoolteacher hesitated, suddenly self-critical. Would she herself have let the phone call get under her skin if she had not first caught the contagion of fear from Iris? “You’re quite sensible,” she decided. “But all the same, there is dirty work at the crossroads. Our quarry is showing a certain tendency to stop being the Hunted and become the Hunter. Remembering what happened to two women already, do you think it is safe for you to be alone in this big empty house?”

“No,” said Natalie. “Only—”

“How about a maid or a paid companion?”

“But if I did call an agency, how do I know they wouldn’t sneak some girl reporter or photographer in under false pretenses? I can’t stand the thought of that.” Natalie shook her head. “Unless—unless you yourself would consent to come here!”

“
I
?” Miss Withers stiffened a little.

“Especially since Iris has deserted, I’d like somebody around, somebody who knows.”

There were many reasons why not. “I’d miss telephone calls and visitors,” objected the schoolteacher. “And there’s my plants to water, and Talleyrand—”

“You could bring your dog along, he’d be an added protection!”

The schoolteacher snorted. “Talley is in love with the whole human race. If Jack the Ripper crawled in through a window at midnight Talley would probably hold the flashlight for him, or fetch him a rubber ball to throw.”

“He’d be something alive and cheerful around the place, anyway. Oh, do say you’ll come!” She hesitated. “If money would make any difference—”

“
Please
!”

“Oh dear, I didn’t mean to offend you. But you see, I’m not intellectual like you, or beautiful like the girl who was just here. All I have, all I ever had, is just plenty of money. And I’d spend every cent of it to save Andy.”

“I know,” said Miss Withers. “And I’ll consider your suggestion. But you see, I must be a free agent if I’m to have any chance of success.”

“Oh, you’ll succeed, I know it. As I told Iris that day after you walked in to the rescue like a boat from the blue, I knew right away that you were going to bring my Andy back to me safe and sound. You’re an instrument of Providence.”

“Perhaps,” said the schoolteacher, feeling herself to be a rather blunted tool at the moment. If only she could share Natalie Rowan’s confidence—

The case, to her mind, wasn’t going according to Hoyle. The suspects, in spite of all her efforts, kept dancing away like wills-o’-the-wisp. By this time her intuitive guesses should be condensing into a hard certainty. Had she perhaps made the cardinal mistake of underestimating an opponent?

Again Miss Withers was reminded of the old story about the man on a train who played cards with His Satanic Majesty, and was dealt a perfect hand with all four aces. And then the devil led out the green Ace of Higgogriffs.

“I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them.”

—Charles Darwin

T
HE MAIDEN SCHOOLTEACHER’S FIRST
thought on arriving home was of a comfortable pair of slippers, and her second of the telephone. Oscar Piper’s home phone did not answer; he was probably out tomcatting somewhere. But on a long chance she rang Centre Street. The Headquarters switchboard was jammed, but finally she got through to homicide and heard a familiar voice. “Oscar!” she cried. “I have news for you!”

“Ditto here,” he said genially. “Yours first.”

But curiosity was her besetting sin. “Oh, I know what you’ve got to tell me. You traced the license number of that automobile I asked you about, the swanky imported British Jaguar that belongs to Iris Dunn’s boy friend. But that’s beside the point—”

“Is it?” interrupted the Inspector dryly. “Oh, we traced it all right, through the motor vehicle department. But unless you’re barking up the wrong tree again, Iris is moving in pretty high circles. That car is registered in the name of Sir Geoffrey Giddings, a staff member of the British delegation to the UN. Age sixty, three married daughters, Knight Commander of the Bath, hobbies are chess and grouse-shooting. He has an apartment on the third floor of that same building. Of course, some of those old boys like to have a fling, but—”

“No!” she said disconsolately. “Impossible.”

“Sixty isn’t so old!” the Inspector protested indignantly.

“Perhaps not, but nobody named Geoffrey would ever get the nickname of
Bill.
Besides, the boy who came hurrying into that apartment building and rushed up to Iris’ floor hadn’t even seen twenty-five yet. I’m afraid that when I saw the car I leaped to conclusions.”

“As usual,” Piper told her. “But never mind that now. Remember what I said last night about having the murderer of Marika in forty-eight hours, and this afternoon about cutting it to twenty-four? Too bad you didn’t bet with me. Because just for your private information we’ve got Banana-Nose—”

“Oscar!” she shrieked. “You haven’t arrested that Wilson man, you mustn’t! He didn’t—”

“Oh yes, he did. I was about to say, we’ve got him pinned down in a tenement over on Tenth Avenue. He’s armed and desperate, and the main problem is how to get hold of him without losing any policemen in the process. A whole city block is roped off, and the boys are taking no chances.”

“Good heavens!” she cried. “Who’s responsible for that—not you, I hope?”

“I sent out the pick-up order, and one thing leads to another.”

“Goodbye, Oscar,” she said.

“Hey, wait a minute. Didn’t you have something to tell me?”

“All I have to tell you at the moment,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers acidly, “is that now you’ve put your foot in it up to your ears. I can’t explain why now—I’ve got to rush down there to the scene of this three-ring circus and put a stop to it.” She hung up.

The Inspector buried his face momentarily in his hands. “Holy Saint Paul and Minneapolis,” he moaned. “When Hildegarde gets into one of her Curfew Shall Not Ring moods—” Then he pressed a key and shouted into the talk-box, “Order me a car, quick!”

But the schoolteacher, with a considerable head start on him, was already in a taxi headed south. “Lady, what number on Tent’?” the driver demanded.

“Just keep driving. You’ll know when you get there.”

It seemed that everybody in Manhattan knew, for the massed humanity outside the police lines was only slightly less than at the Polo Grounds on a hot Saturday afternoon. Emergency trucks, ambulances, squad cars, and firemen’s hook-and-ladder trucks blocked the street at both ends, while mobile floodlights made everything brighter and whiter than day. People had been evacuated from the tenement, the neighboring buildings and those across the street, and now more than three hundred policemen crawled over the rooftops, sniped from commandeered windows across the way, and blockaded the stairway leading up to the top-floor cold-water flat where the fugitive had holed up and dared anybody to come in after him. The glaring lights, the roped-off street, and occasional popping explosions gave it all the festive air of a Fourth of July neighborhood block party. But the only firecrackers were shots from the Browning automatic rifles, the riot guns, or the police-positive .38s and the heavier .45 automatics, as some overenthusiastic policeman let go in the general direction of the invisible guest of honor, with no appreciable result except the shattering of a good deal of window glass.

Since the building was four storeys high, most of the tear-gas grenades aimed at the gaping front windows fell back into the street to add to the confusion. Those that did hit the target were warmly applauded by the crowd outside the ropes, who also cheered lustily when Banana-Nose scooped them up, red hot though they were, and hurled them back at the little groups of snipers. Some he must also have tossed down the stairs, for the squad of officers who had been working their way painfully up toward the top floor erupted suddenly into the street again, gasping and crying for gas masks.

Somehow, in spite of the best efforts of police and firemen, a large number of neighborhood urchins infiltrated the lines, as did newsreel cameramen with portable Eyemos, press photographers, and a few amateur lens hounds with miniature cameras and homemade Press cards hopefully stuck in their hats. Also Miss Hildegarde Withers, who somehow managed to sneak under the ropes and scuttle forward under desultory fire to the spot where Captain F. X. Carmody had set up command headquarters in the partial shelter of a doorway.

“This has got to stop!” gasped the schoolteacher. “You can’t butcher this man to make a Roman holiday! He happens to be innocent, and—”

“Lady, go away,” said the captain over his shoulder, not daring to take his eyes from the blank, gaping windows high across the street.

“But the Wilson man didn’t commit that murder, and I can prove it!”

Captain Carmody didn’t care if the fugitive was wanted for murder or for mopery, he was sniping at cops. “Get outta here, lady—do you want to get shot?”

“I don’t want anybody to get shot! Can’t you declare an armistice or something for half an hour?” As the man still ignored her, she added, “If
you
won’t listen, I’ll go to the Commissioner, I’ll go to the Mayor!”

Captain Carmody brightened. “That’s a fine idea, ma’am.” He seized a patrolman who had just come up for instructions. “Here, Schwartz, this lady wants to explain to His Honor why the whole shebang has to be called off right away. Take her down the street and show her where his car is, will you?”

The man saluted, and then gallantly escorted the schoolteacher back out of the line of fire. “The Mayor will certainly listen to reason,” she was saying as they hurried along. “Even though they say he used to be a policeman himself. Of course, it might be better still if you’d hold your fire and let me go up that stairs and have a few words with the fugitive. If I explained to him that it’s really all a mistake—”

“Banana-Nose Wilson ain’t exactly in a mood to have his better nature appealed to,” the officer told her jovially. “But you go ahead and ask the Mayor what he thinks of the idea, and if he says okay then it’s all right with me. Here we are—upsadaisy and in you go!”

Miss Withers had taken the first step up before it occurred to her that the Mayor of New York City was not apt to be watching events from the shelter of a paddy-wagon, and by then it was too late. She was pushed on in by a practiced hand applied to the small of her back, and the door clanged shut with a dismal finality.

Even so, the schoolteacher missed only the last scene of the last act of the manhunt. A moment after the door of the Black Maria closed upon her, Inspector Oscar Piper joined Carmody at command headquarters a block away, in time to see Banana-Nose Wilson fling a soiled bed sheet out of the tenement window as a token of surrender.

The captain, sighing with relief, picked up the microphone of the public address system, and walked a few steps into the open, trailing wires behind. “All right, Wilson. Can you hear this? Fling your guns out of the window. Fling your guns out of the window into the street!” His voice, magnified to stentorian proportions, echoed up and down the Avenue, rattling the remaining windowpanes …

A pistol, and then another, came arcing out of the smashed window, flashed in the glare of the searchlights and clattered on the asphalt.

“Come out of there with your hands up! Come out of there and start down the stairs with your hands up!” Carmody handed the mike to one of his men and turned to the Inspector. “Well, that’s that.”

Piper agreed that that was that, and a good thing, too. “Any casualties?”

“Nothing too serious. I guess Wilson shut both eyes tight every time he pulled the trigger.” They started across the street, to be nearly trampled to death by the rush of photographers lining up before the tenement steps. After a rather long wait six policemen emerged, each grasping some part of the anatomy of a small, very disheveled rabbit of a man with a top-heavy nose and reddish, streaming eyes. Flash bulbs went off like heat lightning in silent explosions, newsreel cameras whirred …

“Hold him by the collar, sergeant. Well, okay, you’ll
be
a sergeant for this. Now give us that great big smile—”

A man with a portable microphone ran forward and held it up to the prisoner. “Say something, Banana-Nose,” he pleaded hoarsely. “Say something for the television audience!”

Banana-Nose Wilson said something, and Channel Four went dark all over the nation, though not quite soon enough to prevent the kiddies from learning some new words. What happened next has been argued in newspaper columns and in police squad rooms ever since, but the general consensus is that in the jockeying of his uniformed captors for photogenic positions, Wilson found himself momentarily free and started to run. It is also possible that he was camera-shy, and only trying to get away from the barricade of lenses. At any rate, the man started back into the building and was immediately shot in the back by Captain F. X. Carmody, who had aimed for the knee but had forgotten the heavy trigger pull of a .45.

“Saving the State the expense of a trial and execution,” as Inspector Oscar Piper observed later to Miss Withers, in a cozy corner of a reception room in the women’s observation ward at Bellevue. He had to raise his voice, as a lady in the nearby dormitory was bedded down in a nest of imaginary tarantulas and howling for someone to come and take them away.

“Nothing is well about it, and nothing is ended!” the schoolteacher snapped at him. She was wearing a dingy gray bathrobe, much too small for her. “Oscar Piper, are you actually going to let them keep me here in this awful place all night?”