Free Green Ace by Stuart Palmer Page A

Natalie to earth, and about the spirit message from the late lamented Emil Fogel.
    “Double-distilled bilge!” was his verdict.
    “Perhaps, Oscar. But as I was about to say, Marika was a trance medium. Isn’t it odd that she used the old-fashioned crystal? I’ve read up a little on this sort of thing, and there are distinct levels. The high-class mediums scorn to use props.”
    “You don’t know Marika like I do,” said the Inspector. “She had everything. We found a ouija board and a planchette in the cabinet over there, also a spirit-writing slate, a lot of astrology charts, and several decks of cards with funny pictures.”
    “Tarot cards? They’ve been used in telling fortunes since before the foundations of the pyramids were laid. Mostly by charlatans, of course. But where there’s so much smoke mightn’t there be some fire?”
    “We don’t have to worry about that angle,” the Inspector told her. “Marika was a clairvoyant, fortuneteller, a medium, and a self-accredited adviser on problems of love, fortune and marriage. And in spite of all that, she wasn’t even able to foresee her own murder.” His voice was filled with heavy scorn.
    “All the same, Oscar, there are more things in heaven and earth—” Miss Withers shook her head. “Marika was an out-and-out fake, then?”
    “Aren’t they all? I’m not saying that we found any of the wet cheesecloth and ice-packed gloves and magic lanterns around the place, such as old-time phonies used. But a smart operator doesn’t have to, today.”
    “Dear, dear,” murmured the schoolteacher. “Oscar, just what would you say were the chances of a fake medium getting a genuine message?”
    “Are you kidding?” said Oscar Piper. “About the same as Barney Google’s Spark Plug winning the Kentucky Derby next spring.”
    But Miss Withers wasn’t listening. She said, half to herself, “Unless, of course, the medium happened to have sources of information which actually weren’t supernatural at all.” She was watching a policeman across the room who was outlining the body with green chalk-marks on the rug.
    “Marika Thoren had a police record,” pronounced the Inspector, as if that settled everything. He took a slip of paper from his pocket. “Arrested January 1948 on suspicion of fortune-telling without a license, case dismissed. Arrested May 1948, same charge, nol-prossed. Arrested July 1949, dismissed.”
    “No convictions, I gather?”
    He shrugged. “Victims don’t like to sign complaints, or testify in court they’ve been duped. But the boys on the Bunco Squad keep after people like Marika.”
    “I can well imagine. Hounding the poor woman from pillow to post, without any proof at all that she’d ever broken the law. You and your thought-police!”
    “Never mind that now!” he snapped testily. “Just why do you imagine something you said might have put Marika on the spot?”
    “Well, Oscar, that’s a long story—” Miss Withers suddenly broke off, pointing across the room. “Look!”
    The broken body of Marika was being gingerly lifted into the long wicker basket, preparatory to its long last ride to Bellevue’s morgue and the attendant grisly ceremonies. Where it had lain, pressed flat by the weight on her hips, was the crushed remains of something. Somehow the schoolteacher managed to be the first to snatch it up. “Could this be a clue, Oscar? It seems to be a man’s hat.”
    He took it from her, with controlled asperity. “So it is,” he said, brightening: “Well, if that isn’t the luck of the Irish! A perfect murder—only we get a break. The hat must have been knocked off in the struggle, and she happened to fall smack on it. Imagine the murderer looking everywhere for his hat, and then having to sneak off without it!”
    “I suppose his initials are on the sweatband?” Miss Withers asked.
    “No. But we don’t need initials. Give the boys in the lab an hour or two with this—”
    “And they’ll know the