Murder on the Blackboard

by Stuart Palmer

  “Mistaken my eye,” said Burns doggedly. “She was the music teacher here, wasn’t she? Well, right in this room there’s a lot of music written on the blackboard. You can’t kid me—I used to be a choir boy.”

  “The classroom you have just left belongs to Miss Vera Cohen, of the second grade,” Miss Withers told him.

  “Well, what’s the notes doing there then?”

  “Listen to me a moment, and I’ll enlighten you,” Miss Withers began. “Miss Halloran had a little office on the third floor, but most of her music work was given in the respective classrooms. Let me see—yes, tomorrow morning would be her morning with the second graders. She was just being beforehand tonight, and putting her scales and charts and things on the board so as to have everything in readiness for the morrow.”

  “Let’s have a look at that room,” Sergeant Taylor decided. Miss Withers was already ahead of him.

  Everything seemed to be strictly in order within the domain of Miss Vera Cohen. Miss Withers’ keen eyes fell at once upon the marking which graced the blackboard in the front of the room.

  It was here, then, that poor Anise Halloran had remained, after most of the other teachers had gone for the day, to prepare her work for tomorrow. It was here that she had drawn her last breaths of the murky, chalk-filled air of Jefferson School—and it was from this barren room that she had gone out into the hall to click on her high heels past Miss Withers’ door and down to the Teachers’ Cloakroom—with the shadow already upon her face, and the beating of vast invisible wings in her ears.

  Had the girl a premonition of what awaited her there when she made these notations on the blackboard? Miss Withers wondered, for there was something wavery and irregular about the spacing of the lines, and something erratic about the notes, which was not like the neat work of Anise Halloran in the past.

  Particularly was this true of the last line of music on the board, beneath the scales and the rendition of the hackneyed rondel, “Are you sleeping—are you sleeping, brother John?” The phases in question seemed to have been added in a hurry, as if Anise Halloran had been in haste to keep her appointment with Death.

  This little tune, which ran off unfinished at the end, looked simple enough even for Miss Cohen’s second graders. But all the same, Miss Withers copied it into her notebook.

  “Why are you bothering with that?” the Sergeant wanted to know. “I suppose you’re going to whistle up the murderer, the way sailors are supposed to whistle up a wind when they want one?”

  “Maybe I am,” Miss Withers said. She was beginning to have her doubts about the Sergeant. This was his first taste of authority, and it was going to his head.

  Well, it would do no harm to tell him this. “You want to know the reason I copied down this last bit of music? I’ll tell you, though you won’t take it seriously. It was the last thing Anise Halloran wrote. I like the feeling of something she used, something she touched, something that occupied her mind near the end. Not that I believe in second sight or anything like that—but you never can tell. There are fakirs in India, and even in this country, who can look at a ring, and tell you the personality of the person who wore it last.”

  “It’s over my head,” Sergeant Taylor insisted. “I’m a practical man, I am. Well, we’ve done everything here that can be done. Just a minute while I make sure my men are stationed for the night, and we’ll clear out of here.” He went out into the hall.

  “Mulholland!” A man stepped clear of the far doorway.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Okay. Just wanted to make sure you were there. Where’s Tolliver?”

  “Here, sir.”

  Another bluecoat put in an appearance, a brawny bulk of beef with feet like scows.

  “Mulholland, you’re stationed in the hall here, outside the Cloakroom. You and Tolliver will do guard duty tonight. Nobody goes in or out, you know enough to know that. You’ll be relieved in the morning some time. That is all.”

  He swung on Miss Withers, authority resting upon his shoulders like a mantle. This was the Sergeant’s big hour.

  “Say,” he queried, “do you happen to know where I can dig up the address of this girl who was bumped off? Have they got a record or something around the place?”

  Miss Withers assured him that they had. “Wait here a moment,” she said, authoritatively.

  Quickly she disappeared into the Principal’s office. Before the Sergeant could make up his mind to follow her, she had drawn out the file box from Janey Davis’ desk again.

  Snatching a pen and dipping it in a nearby inkwell, she drew a tiny streamer at the top of the figure “1” in Anise Halloran’s street number. Now the card read “apartment 3C, 447 West 74th Street.”

  “That ought to give me half an hour’s head start,” she figured rapidly. She came out into the hall and handed the card to the Sergeant.

  Her mind was busy in an effort to discover some means of keeping this little Hawkshaw from tagging along. “By the way, Sergeant,” she suggested, “are you sure that you’ve found all there is to be found in the basement? I have a very strong hunch that the murder weapon is still down there—and that your shovel doesn’t mean a thing. Hadn’t you better look again?”

  Sergeant Taylor drew himself up to his full height. “Say, listen,” he told the school-mistress. “Maybe we did slip up at first on the body and a few things like that. But don’t kid yourself. One thing my boys know how to do, and that’s to search a place. They’ve been over every inch of the floor downstairs with a filter and a fine-tooth comb, and unless the murder weapon was small enough for one of your red ants to carry down his ant-hole, I’ll stake my life on it that it ain’t there. No, ma’am, there ain’t nothing nor nobody down in that basement now. Unless”—he ventured a heavy jest,—“unless the ghost of the dead little dame is wailing around the furnace!” He laughed, heartily.

  It was a laugh in which Miss Withers did not join. Neither did the joke seem to amuse Mulholland, he whose job tonight was to keep him on a lonely vigil here.

  “Say, you don’t believe—” he started to say.

  But his question, and the Sergeant’s hearty chuckles, were both clipped off as with a pair of shears.

  From somewhere, out of the darkness and the loneliness of that ancient building, there came the sound of a human voice, raised in song. It was far away, and muffled, and there was a throaty, eerie note in it.

  “There’s somebody upstairs!” shouted Detective Allen.

  “No, it’s out on the playground …” Mulholland pointed wildly.

  “You’re both wrong,” Miss Withers cut in. “Listen a moment.”

  The voice came louder. It was no ghost, that was certain. It was the voice of a man, a gay man, a man who had nothing heavier than a feather upon his conscience or his mind.

  The song was of the simplest. “Oh, I know an old soldier an’ he got a wooden leg, an’ he hadn’t no tobaccy and none could he beg….” These were the words, or at least as many of the words as the singer wished to sing. Slowly he came closer.

  “I’ll get him,” the Sergeant promised.

  “Wait,” Miss Withers put in. “He’s coming this way.” She looked at the Sergeant. “Are you sure that was a fine-tooth comb you combed the cellar with?”

  The voice was very near now, rough and bawdy and boisterous. It was, of a certainty, coming up the basement stair … up from the basement that had been fine-combed so thoroughly and so often by the Sergeant and his men!

  “Oh, there was an old soldier …”

  The voice stopped, and an apparition in gray stared at the little group from the doorway at the end of the hall.

  He was a man of medium size, with a thick head of colorless hair and a face that was seamed and wrinkled as a potato left too long in a damp, dark place. He wore a decent blue serge coat above denim overalls, and there was straw in his eyebrows and blood in his eye.

  He swayed gently back and forth, like a wheat field in the breeze.

  “An
derson!” gasped Hildegarde Withers breathlessly. “Anderson the janitor!”

  Slowly Anderson came forward, putting each foot down carefully in front of the other, with his body as intense and rigid as if he were walking a tightrope.

  He made a valiant and not too successful effort to stare them all in the face as he came to an abrupt halt against the wall.

  “Whass comin’ off here?” he questioned. “Mgoing close upaplace.”

  The Sergeant’s mouth widened a little. He looked toward Mulholland. “Take him.”

  The big cop seized Anderson’s arm, and the janitor immediately slumped, head down. “Gong home,” he muttered. “Gong turnou’ lights….”

  With a smile of satisfaction, the Sergeant pressed forward. He shook the man roughly by the shoulder. “Say, what do you know about this killing, huh? Come clean!”

  Anderson blinked. “Abou’ wha’?”

  “Answer me, or I’ll break your back! Where you been hiding out? Come on, or we’ll help your memory with a night-stick.”

  “You can’t do this to me,” Anderson retorted, brightening a little. “’M a rich man. ’M a millionaire, if had m’rights.” Tears suddenly burst from his bleary eyes. “I been cheated, I tell you. Cheated! Thirteen’s m’lucky number, I tol’ her so. I tol’ her….”

  Slowly his body collapsed, like a deflated balloon. Mulholland lifted his grip and grunted with the weight.

  The Sergeant looked at Miss Withers, but he got no help from her. “Frisk him and take him away,” he ordered the precinct detectives, who stood ready. “Take him over to the station and give him the water-cure. He won’t talk now.”

  “How we going to book him, Sergeant?”

  “Book him?” The Sergeant was more than a little excited. “Book him for the murder of Anise Halloran … no, play safe. Book him for disorderly conduct, resisting an officer, parking in front of a fire hydrant. What do I care how you book him as long as he’s safe behind the bars?”

  “He appeared out of nowhere in the cellar,” Miss Withers suggested wickedly. “Maybe he’ll disappear in the cell the same way.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, put the cuffs on him, Allen. Now let’s see you vanish, Mister Janitor.”

  Anderson gave no evidence of vanishing. He dangled in Mulholland’s grasp like a limp rag.

  The precinct detectives patted his pockets professionally. Suddenly Burns cried out.

  “What you got?” The Sergeant was all ears. “Find the murder weapon, or a gun?”

  “Naw.” The detective extracted something from his prisoner’s hip pocket. “But it bulged like a gun.”

  He tossed over to his superior a pair of white cotton gloves with blue wrists. The Sergeant surveyed them eagerly. Then he looked at Miss Withers.

  When the wagon arrived, Anderson was still in what appeared to be an utter state of alcoholism. He was carried out, his face wreathed in a sodden smile. The Sergeant approached Miss Withers.

  “You won’t be needed after all,” he told her. “I guess I’ve washed up this case, and in double-quick time, too. What a sap he was to walk right in on us! I suppose the dope thought I’d be fooled with his play-acting about being drunk. He’s not as drunk as he looks.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “I’ll tell you how I know that,” Taylor confided. “There wasn’t a single empty bottle, or a full one either, in the cellar. And he had nothing in his pockets to drink. A guy can’t stay drunk without a source of supply, and he’s been hiding out down there for some hours.”

  “How about the furnace? Glass melts, and fuses to a rough lump in intense heat.”

  Taylor shook his head. “Not a sign of it. We sifted the ashes, looking for anything that might have to do with the corpse. All we found was this.”

  He took a tiny blackened doughnut from his pocket and showed it to the schoolteacher. “Probably a ring from the girl’s finger, before it got partly melted. Analysis will show what it is. Though there’s no need of fussing much with that. This case is open and shut.”

  “Open and shut,” Miss Withers repeated absently.

  “Sure it is. The janitor’s a moron. He got full of liquor—yes, he had a good load, though he wasn’t as drunk as he pretended. Then he hit the girl over the head with a shovel, dragged her down cellar—and then burned the body. He was going to bury it, but the Inspector prevented that, by walking in too soon. Say, we’ve had dozens of these sex crimes lately. The papers are full of ’em.”

  The Sergeant wrapped up the gloves carefully, and put them in his inside pocket. “These’re important,” he announced.

  Miss Withers wanted to know why.

  “The murderer wore gloves so as not to leave his fingerprints on the shovel handle,” Taylor announced triumphantly. “But microscopic analysis will show traces of this same cotton on the shovel, I’ll bet anything.”

  “That’ll prove a whole lot, seeing that the janitor naturally used that shovel every day of his life,” Miss Withers pointed out. “Sergeant, you’re making a mistake.”

  “I’m making a what?” The Sergeant was blank. “Oh, you mean we’re not sure that the shovel was the weapon the janitor used to kill the girl and bean the Inspector?”

  “I mean you’re making a mistake in giving the janitor the third degree. I warn you, if any harm comes to Anderson while you have him in the station house, I’ll see that a whole basketful of trouble unloads on you. Guilty or not guilty, you have no right to beat up a man to get a confession, and I’m opposed to it. Besides …”

  “Besides what?” The Sergeant looked around him for support, and found it in the persons of his uniformed men, who were looking at Miss Withers with ill-concealed contempt.

  “Besides, you didn’t look at his eyebrows,” she finished, and took her departure.

  VI

  Miss Withers Springs a Quiz

  (11/15/32—7:30 P.M.)

  THE ASSUREDLY DEMENTED AIDE-de-camp of the Weather Man whose especial duty it is to send Manhattan’s weather, had evidently been unable to decide between rain and snow, and had sent both that night for good measure. Miss Hildegarde Withers heaved a heartfelt sigh of relief as her taxi finally skidded to a stop before a sombre brownstone on West Seventy-fourth Street. Shielding her sailor from the drifting wet by means of a half-folded evening paper, she ran across the sidewalk and up a short flight of steps.

  There was a line of bell-pushes beneath the row of mailboxes. Apartment 3C was at the end, evidently the top floor rear. There was a card, whose comparative whiteness signified that Halloran and Davis had not lived here for long.

  Miss Withers leaned heavily on the buzzer. Her hand reached for the knob of the inner door, but no click came from upstairs to release the lock. She tried again, pressing the button until her thumb ached, but still she drew no reply.

  “Botheration,” snapped Miss Withers. She hadn’t counted on this. She stood awhile, in thought. Her train of thought was rudely side-tracked by the noise of a taxi outside. She drew back against the inner door, and waited.

  A girl and a man came up the steps, laughing at the gusty wind which drove rain into their fresh young faces.

  The girl, her face an elfin white triangle above the turned-up collar of tweed sport coat, was Janey Davis. Her arm was crooked inside the elbow of a tall young man. For a moment Miss Withers did not see who he was, and then she raised her eyebrows. Young Bob Stevenson, shopwork and science instructor at Jefferson School, had better taste than she had credited him with.

  The young couple paused outside and she could see Janey’s lips forming a question. Would he come in? Evidently he would, for he followed Janey through the door. They looked up as one, to see Miss Withers facing them, her face white and drawn.

  “Good evening,” she opened, quaveringly.

  “Good heavens!” said A. Robert Stevenson. “Miss Withers—what’s wrong?”

  “Plenty,” said that lady, heavily. “Shall we go upstairs?”

  They went upstairs, the t
rim little figure of Janey Davis leading the way, Miss Withers marching second, and Bob Stevenson bringing up the rear, his high white brow furrowed and his hair slightly askew. His topcoat was dripping, and his neat—almost dainty—oxfords were wet through. He shivered a little.

  They came, through the door marked 3C, into a small squarish living room whose inner wall bore the tell-tale panelling of a folding bed. There were books and ashtrays scattered everywhere, and one comfortable chair into which Miss Withers lowered herself carefully.

  “I came here to tell you that Anise Halloran has been murdered,” she remarked in a strictly conversational tone. “We haven’t much time before the police will come traipsing around asking questions. I though maybe you’d rather talk to me first—I have some connections at Headquarters, you know.”

  The two of them stared at her, blankly. Then Janey Davis grasped the back of a chair.

  “Not Anise … murdered! No, no … that couldn’t happen. Nobody would want to murder Anise….”

  “Then somebody did it unwillingly,” Miss Withers told her, coldly.

  Bob Stevenson lit a match, though he had no cigarette in his mouth. “Would you mind starting over from the beginning?” he asked quietly. “You’re sure she’s dead?” He hesitated a moment over the word as if he did not like the taste.

  “She’s dead all right,” said Hildegarde Withers. “Dead and cremated.” She told them the bare facts of what had happened.

  Janey, half-hysterical, was mouthing sorrow and incredulity. But Bob Stevenson had more control.

  “She was such a little thing,” he said softly. “Why should anyone want to kill her? I don’t understand it. It all seems so—so wrong. Why, we were expecting her to join us here tonight when we got back from dinner, and we were going to play three-handed bridge …”

  “A beastly game,” Miss Withers cut in. “Well, she won’t be here. I can’t waste words. You realize that everybody who knew her will be suspected until this thing is cleared up. I suppose the two of you have alibis?”

  “Alibis?” Janey Davis’s surprised eyes looked even more surprised than ever.