Green Ace by Stuart Palmer

next week too, and took the pages away with him. The careful type.”
    “Yes, except, of course, for the hat. But everyone makes mistakes.”
    “He made a worse one, and that was being seen coming up the stairs.” So indeed did it appear when Mrs. Rose Fink was brought in to make her statement. The woman was typical of that ubiquitous breed who get a ‘pittance and free rent of a basement apartment for “managing” old brownstones converted into apartments; grayish, bloated females cut out of the same lump of underdone dough with a perpetual squint from years of peering through keyholes.
    This was Mrs. Fink’s crowded hour, and she was inclined to make the most of it. It had been about twenty minutes to ten that evening when she had gone upstairs to replace a dead bulb in the top-floor hall, and on her way down she had almost run into the murderer’s arms. He was just coming up the first flight, so somebody must have pressed a button releasing the lobby door. Mrs. Fink had noticed him because he seemed in a hurry. No, he was no tenant, nobody she had ever seen before.
    From the corner where she remained on sufferance, Miss Withers watched with reluctant admiration as the Inspector gently steered the woman away from her natural inclination to describe the stranger as the traditional dark-skinned, powerful brute six feet six inches tall, with simian arms and carrying a suspicious-looking bundle, presumably a hatchet. Pinned down, Mrs. Fink decided that what she had seen was a man of about Piper’s own height, which was five feet eight. He had been on the stocky side, wearing a dark hat pulled down over his eyes and a gabardine trenchcoat. Wearing gloves, or else his hands were in his pockets.
    “But I’ll never forget that face,” the woman declared solemnly. “He wore big thick glasses, and the nose on him—” Mrs. Fink held a pudgy palm eight inches or so in front of her face. “There was a nose that was a nose!”
    Pressed further, Mrs. Fink didn’t think he had a moustache, but inclined to the idea that maybe he hadn’t shaved recently. “Go on,” Piper prompted. “The man pushed past you and went on up the stairs. You went back to your own apartment?”
    “Yes, sir. In the basement. I had some unmentionables to rinse out.” She smiled, a coy sort of leer that made the Inspector wince visibly. But she went on, “I was just finishing, maybe half an hour later, when Mr. Bagmann, the new tenant in the flat under this, came down to complain about the noise. He has to get up early because he’s a chef, and he’s always complaining when any of the other tenants have a party.”
    Piper nodded to a sergeant, who cleared his throat and said, “Paul G. Bagmann, 41, short-order cook at Childs’ Columbus Circle. A real sourpuss, and we let him go back to bed, Inspector, after we got his statement. No other tenants happened to be home except the Girards, an elderly couple who have the entire first floor. They didn’t hear anything, but they went to bed early and they’re both deaf as posts.”
    “Just what did Bagmann say he heard?”
    “Says he heard loud music and people stamping around and dancing. That woke him and he looked at his watch. It was eight minutes after ten. Then he turned over and tried to go back to sleep and there was a tremendous crash.”
    “That’s right!” chimed in Mrs. Fink. “So to shut him up I climbed upstairs and listened at the door, but I couldn’t hear anything. I knocked, and for a minute I thought I heard soft footsteps. Then I knocked again and sang out, ‘It’s only me, dearie!’ though, of course, Marika would have known who it was—she had nothing to do with the other tenants and I was the only person who would be likely to knock without ringing from the lobby.”
    “You thought she was in, but wouldn’t come to the door?”
    The woman nodded. “I was hoping that since I’d had the climb up three flights for nothing, maybe I’d drop in for a cup of tea