Free Green Ace by Stuart Palmer

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.”
    “Around seven, I think,” spoke up the schoolteacher suddenly.
    They all turned and stared at her. “Now how the hell do you know that?” demanded the Inspector. “Unless you were here.”
    “There is no need for profanity, Oscar. I deduce the time by certain evidence in the kitchen. The oven is stone-cold, though she baked a potato. The grease in the frying pan isn’t completely congealed—and the dishcloth is still a little damp while the dish towel is dry. That tells its own story to anyone who ever kept house.”
    “Women!” said the doctor, not unfriendly. “But around seven it is, and I’ll work on it from that angle.” He nodded cheerfully to them all, and went out. His leaving cleared the traffic jam in the bay window, and now Miss Withers had a fifty-yard-line view of what lay on the rug, beside a little cherrywood table and two chairs, one of which was overturned.
    “Oh!” she gasped.
    Miss Hildegarde Withers preferred to look upon murder in a purely objective way, as a problem in human behavior, a chess problem. Bodies were so concrete, so real, so helpless—with every wound crying like a tongue.
    The woman who claimed to have seen into the Beyond was now obviously in a position to verify her glimpses. She lay on the rug face upward, supine, arms akimbo. But she was a far cry from the dumpy little sycophant the schoolteacher had pictured as the typical spiritualistic medium. In life Marika must have been pretty, a little on the thin side, with dark, almost black hair and darker eyes. She could not have been much more than thirty, and still resembled the photograph in the bedroom. Only now, of course, she wore no make-up, no eyelashes or lipstick, and her long white legs stuck awkwardly forth from the folds of a comfortable but far from glamorous negligée.
    And her lips were almost smiling—not in the awful risus , but as if she were asleep and dreaming pleasant dreams. It was only when you drew closer that you saw the depression in the line of her cranium, and the wide blackish shadow on the rug which wasn’t a shadow at all.
    “Okay,” said the Inspector briskly. “Now you’ve seen her, and your curiosity is satisfied. Only mine isn’t. I want to know why you called up here tonight, and what else you know about this case.”
    “I telephoned to make an appointment for a sitting. And I also intended to drop a warning to Marika, because I realized that some things I had said might put her life in danger.”
    The Inspector said softly that he would be damned. He would have said more, but a plainclothes detective came up to him with a question, holding something in his hand which looked like a glass bowling ball. “No,” said Piper. “No need to pack it special. Only prints on it are the dead woman’s.”
    “Murderers will wear gloves, won’t they, Oscar?” Miss Withers sniffed. “Is that the murder weapon?”
    He nodded. “One of her props. Might mean it wasn’t premeditated at all. Or the killer might have brought some other weapon and then switched to this because it was so handy—and so heavy.”
    “ ‘The clouded crystal ball,’ ” quoted the schoolteacher a little giddily. “Clouded by her own blood. Oscar, do you think the poor woman was gazing into it when the murderer snatched it up and brained her?”
    “Your guess is as good as mine.”
    She looked at him. “As a general thing my guesses are much better than yours, and you know it. But, Oscar, I understood from Mrs. Rowan that Marika was a trance medium—”
    “Mrs. Rowan ? What’s all this? I thought that when you came back from Sing Sing with your tail between your legs you’d got smart and stopped meddling!”
    “My impersonation only failed because the real Mrs. Rowan had had a change of heart and been up there before me.” She told him of how she had run