Green Ace by Stuart Palmer Read Free Book Online

world was created in that same space of time.
    But musicians, she soon discovered, are strictly nocturnal creatures, like bats and owls and garden snails. Riff Sprott was supposed to inhabit Suite 14B at the Dube Hotel, but wasn’t home. It was not until late that afternoon that Miss Withers gingerly descended a long stair and poked her inquisitive nose into a clammy little basement just off Seventh Avenue, whose blind neon signs proclaimed it to be The Grotto Club. It still smelled of yestereve’s stale liquor and tobacco, of expensive perfume and of food, and even—she fancied—of roaches. In the deserted bar a melancholy youth left off wiping out glasses to wave a grayish towel in the direction she was to follow. Not that she needed help, for the rich and dissonant polyphony blasting forth suddenly from the inner room was guidance enough. It sounded to the schoolteacher about as harmonious as the scraping of a fingernail on a blackboard, but she marched on.
    As she gingerly made her way toward the musicians’ stand past tiny tables covered with up-ended chairs and across a dance floor about the size of her living room rug at home, she noted that there was a bored, softly plump red-head leaning against the piano and beating time to the music with heavily enamelled claws. The five men were informally clad, but the girl wore a green evening gown in spite of the fact that it was barely twilight outside—a gown with nothing much before and rather less than half of that behind, as the song went.
    The man with the trumpet—Miss Withers would have called it a “cornet”—was in his early thirties, a wiry nervous chap who wasn’t bad looking if your taste ran to a complexion like a flounder’s belly, a Hollywood shirt of many colors, and a dab of lip whisker. But he put down his horn with weary politeness when he saw that he had a visitor. “Take ten, boys,” he told the others, and stepped down from the stand with a gold-toothy smile. “What’s on your mind, sister?”
    Miss Withers took a deep breath and sang out cheerily, “Hiyah, Riff! Autograph me one, will ya? I may look like a square, but I’m not long underwear. I’m a gal that’s strictly in step with hep, yep. You know, you’ve got one of the hottest five-man combos along the alley, and I just dropped in to see if you’ve grooved any new platters lately so I can add ’em to my album of real jumping jive!”
    They were all staring at her, and the man with the tenor sax who had been improvising softly suddenly blew a shrill squeak. Riff Sprott backed warily away. “Beg pardon, sister? Come again, and cut out double-talk.”
    “Oh, dear!” The maiden schoolteacher shook her head sorrowfully. “You mean I haven’t got the patois right, even after studying Down Beat and Weekly Variety for hours?”
    “The act sounds queerer than a three-dollar bill,” Sprott told her. Then he sighed and held out his hand. “Okay, give me the summons and let me get back to rehearsal.”
    “Heavens, I’m not a process server,” admitted Miss Withers. “I only dropped by, Mr. Sprott, to see if you’ve heard the news about Midge Harrington?”
    The man gasped as if he had been kicked in the stomach by a sharp-toed shoe, and his face paled to a leprous green. Then he grasped Miss Withers by the arm and started walking her hastily back across the dance floor, out of earshot of the others. “You said Harrington ?” He swallowed. “But Midge is dead !”
    “I know. But the investigation into her murder is being reopened.”
    His hand tightened on her arm, but he only said, “Oh?”
    “Friend of yours, wasn’t she?”
    “Look,” said Biff Sprott. “It’s no particular secret that Midge and I were an item in Winchell at one time, and when she gave me the air I was slap-happy enough to take a whole bottle of goof-pills. A bellboy found me and the Rescue Squad gave me the works and I didn’t start pushing up daisies after all. But that’s water over the dam,