Green Ace (2 page)

“Someone said, Oscar, that the tragedy of love is that two people never fall out of it at the same time. Not, of course, that I’ve had much personal experience.”

He grinned. “Yeah, like in the song about the Strawberry Roan, they went up together and came down alone. About that time the beauty-queen campaign went haywire, which wouldn’t make Midge any sunnier in the disposition. She was probably putting the screws to Rowan, trying to get him to elope with her and threatening to go to his wife and spill the beans if he didn’t keep his promises. It was the simple case of a guy not wanting to lose his meal-ticket—his wife was a rich widow when he married her, and the straitlaced type to boot.”

“By the way, I seem to remember that she didn’t stand by Andy at the trial?”

“Can you blame her? It must have been a considerable shock to find that her handsome young husband had been playing boompsadaisy with a large economy-size blonde from Flatbush. When Natalie met and married Andy Rowan in Paris a few years after the war she was on an all-expense luxury tour and he had just been fired from a minor job with a foreign press bureau. She brought him home and put up the dough for his lush public-relations office over in the Chrysler Building. Hell hath no fury like a woman who’s been made a fool of.”

“Things aren’t always that simple.” Miss Withers craned her long neck, studying the papers spread out on the Inspector’s battered old oak desk. “Oscar, I notice that even before you heard from the warden something had impelled you to dig out the official file on this case, so you must have had an inner twinge or two of doubt.” She moved around beside him, and picked up a photo. “Andy Rowan’s a rather good-looking boy, even in this awful police picture. The mouth may be a little weak, but the eyes are nice …”

“Women!” exploded Oscar Piper. “I suppose a guy with nice curly hair and dimples can’t be just as guilty as the next one?”

But she was skimming over the medical examiner’s report. “Dead on arrival … asphyxia and hyoid fracture … well-nourished white female, identified as Midge Harrington, 18, showgirl and dancer … address Rehearsal Arts Club … by roommate Iris Dunn, 22, actress. No identifying scars, weight 156, height 5-11 … My, Oscar, she was a big girl for her age, wasn’t she?”

The Inspector nodded. “Yes, she outweighed Rowan, who was a dapper little squirt. Probably she could have taken him in a fair fight. But she never had a chance. We figure it was a sort of sneak punch. When he met Midge at his wife’s house that night he probably staged a fake reconciliation and then unwrapped the necklace as a peace offering. If he stood behind her to clasp it around her neck, the way a man does at a moment like that …”

“Why, Oscar!” cried Miss Withers, “I had no idea that you knew about such niceties. I’d have been willing to wager that even in your palmiest days you never gave a girl anything more than a pound box of candy, and then stuck around until the last gumdrop was finished.”

“Okay, okay. Anyway, that’s our reconstruction of how the murder occurred. With the necklace held tight around her neck, all Rowan had to do was to give just one hard jerk and it was all over, curtains.” The Inspector riffled through the file and picked up another photograph. “Here, take a look at this and maybe you won’t feel such a rush of motherly sympathy for poor Andy Rowan.”

Miss Withers found herself staring at an enlarged close-up of the dead girl, obviously taken on a slab in the morgue, all wild hair and glaring eyes. She gulped, and then cocked her head curiously. “Oscar, that thing around her neck—?”

“That’s not the murder weapon, just the stigmata it made. The necklace left an indelible mark in the tissues, four dots and a lozenge and so on. We know from this photo what it must have probably looked like.”

“But you never succeeded in finding out where Rowan acquired it?”

“That we did not. But that sort of costume jewelry,
brummagen
is the trade name for it, is sold in half the stores in New York. You can’t often trace anything like that, the shopgirls sell too many of them. Anyway,
not
finding how he got it was about the only weak link in the chain of evidence.”

“And you didn’t find the necklace afterward, either?”

“We figure he simply dropped it off the ferryboat, along with her clothes, on the way to Staten Island. You can’t drag the whole Upper Bay. He probably wanted to drop the body too, but found too many people aboard who’d have heard that big a splash. He was picked up just half a mile from Midland Beach, you know. If he hadn’t passed that stop sign he’d probably have dug a nice grave for Midge in the sand somewhere, and maybe we wouldn’t have found her yet.”

“It all sounds very damning, almost too damning.” The schoolteacher stood up and crossed the room to stare intently at the view from the window, which gave onto a brick wall a dozen feet away. She said, “All the same, I’d like a talk with Rowan.”

“A talk in the death-house?” Piper thought that was funny. “Nobody but his wife or his lawyers could get in there, and they’ve all long since washed their hands of him. He’s as good as dead already, now that the appeal has failed. The Governor has intimated that he isn’t going to take any action, not with the public up in arms about the nationwide wave of crimes against women and children. Besides, suppose you did get to Rowan? What do you think an amateur snoop could worm out of him at this late date that trained detectives missed?”

“There’s such a thing as being overtrained! I confess now that I’ve always had certain doubts about the Harrington case just from what I’ve read about it. Suppose Rowan is innocent, as his writing that kind of will clearly indicates? Justice is justice, and on top of that I hate to see your hide nailed to the barn door by the yellow press. Perhaps Mrs. Rowan can be induced to help. What’s her address, Oscar?”

“Still 144 Prospect Way, as far as I know. But Hildegarde—”

“I know. I promised not to meddle any more, but this is a serious situation. I simply must take steps to save you in spite of yourself from an awful mistake!”

“Oh,
no
!” cried the Inspector, feeling that the cure would be worse than the disease. So many of Miss Withers’ well-meant attempts at assisting him in the past had backfired that he hastily leaped to his feet, saying, “Hildegarde, wait a minute!”

“Like time and tide, I wait for no man,” she called over her shoulder. She was gone, leaving behind only a faint odor of soap, violet sec, and chalk dust.

Letting as usual no grass whatever grow under her stoutly clad feet, Miss Withers was soon hammering on the door of a big solid red-brick house overlooking Riverside Drive and the looming geometry of the George Washington Bridge. At first glance there was nothing here, even to her active imagination, to suggest that the place had ever been associated with murder and sudden death. The lawn was well kept, the shrubbery trimmed. But the windows were streaked and dusty, with drawn blinds, and no one answered her knock. Finally she started resolutely around to the rear, and almost stumbled over a fading sign stuck in the side lawn: “
FOR IMMEDIATE SALE OR TRADE
, Digby and Sons” …

She rounded the corner of the house, almost plunging into the brown and brittle tangle that had been a rose garden, and stopped short. A young man in a leather jacket was just letting himself out of the kitchen door—a tallish, weedy young man who started visibly when he saw her approach.

“One moment!” cried Miss Withers. “Young man, if you’re from the real estate brokers I’d like a chance to view the house.”

“Real estate?” he said blankly, in a cultured voice that was a cut or two above his extremely casual clothes. “I don’t understand.”

“The house is for sale, isn’t it? I’d like to look at it, and I want to get in touch with the owner.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” he said. “Sorry.” And he started off.

“But if you’re
not
from the realtor’s, then who are you?”

“Gas man,” he told her. “Just reading the meter.” And he was gone.

Miss Withers hammered on the back door, without much hope. She even tried the knob, but it was locked. There were French doors opening out onto a sort of raised sun porch, but every blind was drawn. Finally she gave it up and went away.

A telephone call to the real estate office produced only the information that they did not have the address of any Mrs. Andrew Rowan or Mrs. Natalie Rowan, nor had the girl at the switchboard ever heard of her. The telephone book and city directory, were equally of no help whatever.

“I might have known!” observed the disappointed school-ma’am to herself as she left the phone booth. Mrs. Natalie Rowan had probably put her house up for sale through an intermediary and then taken herself off to some playground of the idle rich such as Bar Harbor or Santa Barbara, there to try to forget the unpleasant ceremony scheduled for the week of the twentieth. One could hardly blame her, under the circumstances, for wanting to be as far as possible from the last act of this sorry tragedy and all its attendant publicity. Still Miss Withers thought it would have been very helpful for her to know exactly where Natalie Rowan was, and just what if anything she was up to …

Shortly before noon next day—Sunday—a limousine with uniformed driver pulled up outside dreary prison walls to disgorge a tall and expensive woman wearing bright yellow hair, an imposing mink jacket, and several diamond bracelets. She marched up to the entrance gate and demanded to see Andrew Rowan. In the face of the guard’s weary announcement that visiting hours were from two to four every second Wednesday, she pointed out that there would be little or no use in her returning next visiting day to pay a call on a dead husband. It was a point well taken. The gate guard made a telephone call and finally the visitor was permitted to enter, though not until she had come to the conclusion that Sing Sing is almost as hard to get into as out of.

Then she ran into a uniformed matron, who said firmly, “If you’ll just step in here, Mrs. Rowan? There are certain formalities.”

“Of course! I’m to be frisked or whatever you call it to make sure that I haven’t a saw or a file concealed on my person, to pass through the grating …”

The matron’s smile was grim. “No danger of that, ma’am. You’ll see your husband through a glass barrier, and speak with a microphone. We’re not worried about such nonsense as saws and files, but we do keep a sharp look out for cameras.” The search was performed briskly and competently, with amazing thoroughness. Of course, some cameras these days were made very small, but still—

The visitor cooled her high heels in an anteroom for half an hour and then was led through a maze of corridors and finally ushered into a long hall split in half by a low table, with a dozen or so armchairs facing on either side. The table was divided by a heavy wire-inforced glass that ran clear to the ceiling. Everything was spotlessly clean, smelling of brown soap and lysol, but the stench of human shame and misery hung heavy in the air.

A wooden-faced guard sat overlooking the room from a raised armchair at one end; two more stood by the iron door in the opposite wall through which a man in shapeless prison gray was coming. It must be Andy Rowan—or what was left of him. Yet there was little or nothing about him to remind anyone of the handsome young chap who had fainted behind the wheel of the blue Buick or who had posed for the police photographs; his curly hair was cropped short and his drawn face was all nose and chin and staring eyes. As he was led forward he watched the floor, as if afraid of stumbling over an invisible obstacle.

The keeper in charge of him, a burly fellow with tight gray waves in his hair, was more alert. Without warning he caught the prisoner’s arm, turned him around, and headed him back toward the iron door again—a round trip to nowhere. So near, and yet so far. Then, after the door had clanged on Andy Rowan again, the keeper briskly crossed the room, unlocked a panel in the dividing wall, and came through to the disappointed visitor.

“Mrs. Rowan?” He smiled professionally. “I’m sorry, there’s been a little mistake. You’re supposed to be cleared through the warden’s office for an interview with your husband when it isn’t a regular visiting day. If you’ll only come this way I’m sure it can all be ironed out in a few minutes.”

She started to protest, looking wistfully back over her shoulder. But the keeper’s hand was gripping her arm in that oily familiarity which becomes second nature to most men who are given the power of lock and key over their fellows. His knowing eyes and unctuous smile implied that there was some sort of unsavory understanding between them, some common secret. She twisted away, but they went back again, through more and more corridors and up a stair, where she finally sat alone in a bare waiting room for a little while and then at last was ushered into a suite of offices overlooking the prison yard. Her escort left her there, and she went forward alone toward where a man was standing—a quiet, grayish person in tweeds, with deep worry lines etched across his forehead and caliper grooves from nose to mouth.

Indicating a chair, he said, “Mrs. Rowan? Sit down, please. I’m Warden Boyington.”

“How do you do?” she said a little weakly, as she refused a proffered cigarette.

“May I say, Mrs. Rowan, that you don’t look quite as I expected?”

“Oh yes, yes of course!” She even managed a wavering smile. “I
am
a little older than my poor husband, but—”

The warden held a gold lighter to his own cigarette. “I didn’t mean that. You seem,” he went on gently, “to have aged considerably, and also to have grown some three or four inches taller, since you were up here a couple of weeks ago.”

“But—why, naturally I’ve been sick with worry, and perhaps I’m not looking my best. And these high heels I’m wearing …” She stopped, and there was a long uncomfortable silence. Then Miss Hildegarde Withers hitched up her diamond bracelets and said, “Well, warden, it was worth trying anyway!”

Warden Boyington suddenly hit his desk so hard that all its accumulation of pens and little ornaments and vases of flowers leaped up into the air and did a little samba dance. “Damn it to hell, ma’am, I hate reporters!”