Free Green Ace by Stuart Palmer Page B

murderer’s head size?”
    “They’ll know more about the owner of this hat than God or his mother,” promised Piper. “You wait and see.” He handed it over to one of the detectives, with explicit instructions. Then he came back to the schoolteacher, looking at his wrist watch. “All right, you were going to come clean. Make it fast, I’ve got a witness waiting in the other room to be questioned.”
    “The manatee?” said Miss Withers. “She’s a witness to the actual murder?”
    “No,” he snapped. “Just the landlady, but she got a good look at the killer when she passed him on the stairs.”
    “I wonder which one it was,” breathed the schoolteacher. “My vote is still for Mr. Sprott, only he’d probably wear a beret instead of a hat …”
    “What in Judas Priest are you talking about?”
    “The three suspects, of course.” She took a deep breath, and told all.
    But the Inspector took it somewhat lightly. “No dice,” he said.
    “Perhaps not. But I repeat, Oscar, that I have been running around all over town dropping hints to the three people I consider eminent suspects in the Harrington murder that Marika had already received word from supernatural sources about Rowan’s innocence—and moreover that we expected her to provide the name of the real murderer at any moment.”
    “ We ?”
    “Perhaps, Oscar, I did take your name in vain just a trifle. To make it all sound more authentic and official, of course.”
    He glowered. “Someday you’re going to burn every finger on your little hot hands, cutting corners that way.” The Inspector took time out to light up a fresh cigar. “But this time I don’t think you tossed any monkeywrenches into the machinery. We’ll investigate all possible angles, of course. But for my money the real murderer of Midge Harrington is still sweating out his last week up in the condemned row at Sing Sing. There’s no connection between the two deaths, except in your overfertile imagination.”
    “But Oscar—if Rowan isn’t guilty, the real killer must have a very guilty conscience. Suppose he was superstitious enough to believe that Marika was genuine and actually could go into another trance and name him?”
    “It wasn’t that kind of a murder. Marika had hundreds of clients wearing a path up the stairs. Most of them were in some sort of jam or else they wouldn’t have come. It’s not surprising that a woman whose husband is under sentence of death was one of the collection. Marika, like anyone in her racket, simply drew the Rowan woman out until she found out what she wanted most to hear, went into a fake trance, and told her the good news.”
    “And then, by some odd coincidence, got murdered as soon as I spread the word around about what she had said about Rowan’s innocence?”
    “Life is full of coincidences. And believe me,” the Inspector went on very seriously, “girls like Marika are poor insurance risks. Messing around in the lives and emotional tangles of other people isn’t a safe occupation. Maybe somebody who took her advice found it didn’t work out and came back tonight for a spot of revenge. Or maybe the word got around that she made a lot of money. We found an empty cash-box in the bedroom, left open on the floor. From where I sit it looks like just another case of robbery and felonious assault ending in homicide.”
    “Perhaps you’ve been sitting too long, Oscar.”
    “Look, it must have been somebody she knew,” he went on logically. “Because Marika would have been suspicious of any new customer especially, that late in the evening. Look at that door—a chain, a bolt, in addition to the regular lock. Besides, she had an appointment book, one of those desk pads. Only today’s page—”
    “It’s missing? Then she did have an appointment with her murderer. But, Oscar, aren’t there ways you can treat the remaining sheets to bring out what had been written above?”
    Piper shook his head. “The killer tore out all of