Read Online Green Ace by Stuart Palmer - Free Book Online

had to admire his scrapbooks, containing every line of the publicity Rowan had planted for Midge, every bathing-suit picture, every simpering posed portrait. The prize shot, on a page of its own, was one of Georgie-Porgie Zotos himself presenting Midge with a corsage of orchids at some luncheon affair, and staring up at her as a little boy might peer into a toyshop window. “I even have a privately-made recording of her voice, singing ‘ It’s Cold Outside ,’ ” he went on. “Sometimes I play it on my little portable. What a woman!” George Zotos sighed, shaking his head.
    “You loved her, didn’t you—very much?”
    “What man wouldn’t?” he asked, surprised at the question.
    “She loved you too?”
    Zotos blinked. “Of course not! Miss Harrington was—well, I always felt that she was unapproachable, untouchable. Sort of as if she always really belonged to someone else, somebody she met or dreamed about years before.”
    “Here we go again,” said Miss Withers under her breath.
    “She wasn’t like anybody else,” said the man with painful seriousness. “She was a work of art, she was the frosting on the cake. If what you say is true, and the man who did that awful thing is still at large, I only wish I could get him alone for five minutes …”
    “To smother him to death with cream-puffs?” Miss Withers said, but not aloud. She stood up. “Thank you, Mr. Zotos. Here’s my card, and if you think of anything that might shed light on the case, do call me.”
    “Of course. If there’s anything I can do—”
    “There is one thing. Can you tell me just why Midge Harrington’s dreams of being Miss Brooklyn, and trying out for the Miss America crown, couldn’t come true?”
    “Why—” He hesitated.
    “Was it her purple past, whatever that means?”
    “I wouldn’t say that, I wouldn’t say that at all. It’s just that the committee behind the Atlantic City beauty pageant has certain rigid rules and specifications, which are naturally subscribed to by the local and state committees. We were advised that our candidate, Miss Harrington, was ineligible. Some busybody had written a letter—”
    “Perhaps it was because Midge was living at the Rehearsal Arts Club over in Manhattan instead of here in Brooklyn?”
    “Perhaps,” agreed Zotos doubtfully.
    Miss Withers headed for the door. “One last word, Mr. Zotos. When the police come around questioning you, you needn’t mention that I dropped by. Sometimes they get annoyed when I try to interfere.”
    “Surely,” he said, from very far away. As she went out of the office she heard him hastily putting away the scrapbooks. On the subway back to town, still feeling wrung out like a towel, Miss Withers wrote: “ George Zotos, a sticky Caliban. Does each man kill the thing he loves? Anyway he still loves her. A longshot bet. ”
    As the schoolteacher neared home she felt an increasing uneasiness of spirit. When he heard how she had spent the last two days the Inspector was sure to accuse her of hurling monkeywrenches into the machinery again. And it was more than probable that Talleyrand, the other male in her life, had amused himself by making an apple-pie bed in her room or otherwise disgracing himself during her long absence. As she came up the street she had vague but unpleasant premonitions of disaster. She resented them all the more because this was the time when her fabled intuition was supposed to be at work, her mental shortcuts which had sometimes led her to the correct answer without going through all the intermediate stages. Of course, she was well aware that anything perceived intuitively must afterward be checked with reason …
    She hurried up the stairs and put her key in the lock. At least Talley wasn’t howling with loneliness, the soft little howls that drive other tenants slowly crazy. In fact, the big poodle was in his favorite spot on top of the closed cover of the kitchen stove, sleeping peacefully.
    The telephone was off