Murder on the Blackboard

by Stuart Palmer

  “Somebody else did bat one, though,” said Hildegarde Withers. “I could see you were surprised at my sitting up the drinks …”

  “Setting, you mean?”

  “All right, setting up the drinks?”

  “I was,” admitted Swarthout. “I still am. Did you figure on getting them drunk enough so they’d talk, or what?”

  Miss Withers shook her head. “I just wanted to see their reaction when I brought out the bottle with that special label on it. And neither one of them was at all surprised, in spite of the fact that that was the liquor Anise Halloran made a practice of drinking. I suppose I’m now as bad as the janitor, because to steal one bottle is as bad as to steal a whole warehouseful. But I had a hunch, and it didn’t work. I’m not used to my hunches missing fire.”

  “What gets me,” complained Georgie Swarthout as they walked on up 74th Street, “is why you left the bottle sitting on the table up in that cute little Janey Davis’ apartment.”

  As it happened the quart bottle with the Dewar label was no longer resting on the table in Janey’s apartment. It was lying scattered across the roof of a garage in the rear, its amber contents mixed with the falling snow.

  The young lady who had just hurled it from an open window was leaning with her cheek against the frame.

  “Oh, Bob, what’ll we do?”

  The young man came over beside her. “We’ll keep on doing just as I suggested, dear.”

  “But Bob”—she moved her cheek from the windowframe to his shoulder—“they even suspect me! Miss Withers does, I know she does.”

  “She suspects everybody, and quite right, too,” said Bob Stevenson. “Probably she goes home at night and asks herself questions until she gets herself in a corner and nearly confesses. Don’t you worry about Withers, she’s a smart old girl. Prides herself a bit on being a sleuth, but why not?”

  “Oh, Bob, I wish I were as sure as you are!” She snuggled a little closer, and he ventured to enclose her shoulders with his arm. “Sure about it’s all coming out all right, and everything. I’m frightened, Bob.”

  She looked up at him. Her eyes were moist, and her hands trembled.

  “Say something, won’t you?”

  He swung away and faced her. “What can I say, you darling? It’s the wrong time to say what I want to say. But—Janey, you know what it is. When all this is over and forgotten, and Anise’s murderer has paid the penalty and we are all allowed to be ourselves again, will you … will you, Janey?”

  Janey’s soft fingers brushed his lips. “Don’t say it, don’t ask it now, Bob. When this is all over, after you know everything there is to know, then come and ask me—if you still feel the same way—come and ask me the most important question in all the world.”

  Bob Stevenson laughed. “As if there’d be anything to find out about you that could make me change! That’s a joke!”

  But joke or no joke, Janey Davis joined very little in his open laughter. She held out both her arms to him.

  “Oh, Bob,” she cried brokenly. “I’m so alone! I want something so terribly, and it seems to be you!”

  XIII

  Dunce Cap

  (11/17/32—4:15 P.M.)

  “IT’S ALL LIKE A puzzle that won’t work out,” Miss Withers was complaining. The Inspector, still swathed in bandages so that he resembled a turbanned Mohammedan, watched her through swirls of blue cigar smoke.

  “And I’ve got a feeling that when finally I’m given the solution, I’m going to find that I’ve been butting my head against a stone wall—as I did once in a newspaper crossword puzzle only to learn the next day that the word iris had been defined by the nitwit who made it up as ‘the Greek god of love.’”

  Miss Withers nibbled at a grape from the basket at the head of the Inspector’s dismal looking white iron bed.

  “It seems to me that you’re getting along fine,” Piper told her. “You’ve got pretty fair grounds for suspicion of five or six people, and a clear case against one, the janitor, even if that pompous ass of a criminologist from Vienna did let him get away. My boys will pick him up, though.”

  “Yes,” Miss Withers agreed. “And what good will that do? I tell you, the janitor didn’t commit the murder! He couldn’t have, he was drunk as a lord. And that was no crime of impulse. The murderer knew the school, and my habits. The murderer knew that Anise Halloran would be the last person to enter that Cloakroom in the afternoon, since I never used it. He not only knew that I was mixed up with the police, he counted on it … or she did, whichever it was.”

  “Yeah? Well, there’s lots to figure out. If my head didn’t ache so, I’d take a whirl at the thing from here, but as it is I can only listen.” The Inspector puffed at his cigar, almost happily. It was the first time in years he had had the energy and leisure to smoke a cigar through to the butt without letting it go out a dozen times. He was making the most of it.

  “You haven’t told me yet how Anise Halloran managed to walk down the hall and out the building, as you say you heard her, and yet reappear instantly in the Cloakroom, a bloody corpse. Do you think she tiptoed back, so you wouldn’t hear her?”

  “I’ve got my theory of that,” Miss Withers told him. “But I want to mull it over a little more. If my hunch is right, it’s added proof that Anderson had nothing to do with the murder, directly at least.”

  “I’ll make one suggestion,” said Oscar Piper meekly. “You’re making a hell of a mistake to take up this case with your mind made up that the janitor isn’t guilty because he is so obvious a suspect. Everything points to him, so out of pure contrariness you want to prove him innocent, and somebody else guilty. You’re fitting facts to the theory, not theory to the facts. And wouldn’t it be a good joke on you and on the newspapers if in this case the obvious, dumb suspect happened to be the real murderer, after all?”

  “Maybe,” said Hildegarde Withers. “But Anderson didn’t kill Anise Halloran. There was straw in his eyebrows, his feet are too big, and besides, he doesn’t act like a murderer!”

  “I told you some years ago that murderers never do,” said Oscar Piper. “How about the hatchet that somebody swung at your head a little while after Anderson broke away from his guards and gained his freedom? Doesn’t that pin it on him?”

  Miss Withers nodded. “It certainly seems to pin it on him. But suppose somebody else thought of that!”

  “You’re making a whole lot of this lottery-sweepstakes business,” the Inspector went on. “I don’t see where that gets us anywhere. Janey Davis wouldn’t commit a murder in order to get the other half of the money, and if she did she wouldn’t give up her prize.”

  “She hasn’t given it up,” Miss Withers reminded him. “I think she would very much like to be persuaded not to give it up. She’s got some weeks yet before the race is run, you know. I feel it deep down in my bones that Janey Davis is going to change her mind.”

  Miss Withers rose to her feet and walked rapidly the length of the room. “There’s so many angles to the case,” she complained. “So many parts that don’t fit into the jig-saw picture. Why and how did the janitor get his collection of old shoes—Anise Halloran’s old shoes? Where was Macfarland that afternoon when he says he was home and his wife says he was taking a walk and gathering material? How did the wooden hatchet in the exhibit case come to be a steel hatchet when it whizzed past my head? Why did Anderson have an endless supply of good liquor, and not sell any, and why did Tobey across the street sell quantities of the same liquor without any big booze ring hookups? Why did a sweet kid like Anise Halloran take to drinking straight whiskey, and start running down physically at the same time?”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” pleaded the Inspector. “I’m afraid you’ll have to flunk me in this test. Isn’t there one question I can answer?”

  Miss Withers was thoughtful for a moment. “Yes,” she said. “Answer me this. Why did Anise Halloran stay after school to put her next morning’s scales on the blackboard, and then go to the Cloakroom
with the last one unfinished and a fragment? It went like this, you know….”

  She tried to whistle. “Whoooo-wheeeeee, whooo-wheee….”

  “Not much tune to that,” the Inspector told her. “I’d about as soon listen to a crooner. And I don’t see any clue in it, either. It doesn’t mean a thing to me.”

  “It might to somebody else,” said Miss Withers. “That is what Anise marked on the blackboard a few moments before she died. Thanks to my right idea of calling in the manicurist, we know that the body is hers, anyway. I was sure for a while that the major clue lay in the disappearance of Betty Curran, but now that is explained away. Don’t those two notes suggest a song, a popular song perhaps, that might be a clue, a hint to guide us?”

  “It sounds like a sparrow twittering to me,” Piper admitted. “But you might try it on your suspects.”

  “I certainly intend to.” Miss Withers rose to go. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Oscar. That little nurse of yours keeps walking past the door, and I suppose I’ve overstayed my limit.”

  “So long,” the Inspector called to her. “I’d give anything to be going out of here with you, if only to hear the eminent Professor Pfoof—”

  “Pfaffle,” corrected Miss Withers.

  “That’s what I said. The joke’s on the Commissioner, who should have known better than to turn a murder suspect over to a visiting expert. I’d like to hear Pfaffle alibi-ing now. He’ll be in a pretty spot, or I’m no judge.”

  “A clever little people, these Viennese,” misquoted Miss Withers. “He may sneak out of it yet. Well, toodle-oo.”

  “What?”

  “Toodle-oo. It’s an expression I picked up from Georgie Swarthout.”

  The Inspector nodded. “Has that young scamp been any help to you?”

  “He certainly has. He’s out this afternoon doing a little investigating on a new lead.” Miss Withers smiled proudly. “That young man shows promise, Oscar, if only he can be kept away from going the way of all flatfoots. Association with me has done him worlds of good—why, he got this idea for a new lead after only one day on the case. Said he’ll tell me about it tomorrow.”

  With a wave of her hand, Miss Hildegarde Withers departed, whistling the trenchant, plaintive notes that Anise Halloran had marked upon a blackboard in the last few minutes of her life.

  Though doormen looked after her inquiringly, and a stray dog or two came bounding toward her feet, she marched on down the Avenue, still whistling—“Whoooo-wheeee….”

  XIV

  Finders Are Keepers

  (11/18/32—9:30 A.M.)

  “HELLO? HELLO, THIS IS Miss Davis … who? … WHO? … Mr. Swarthout? Why, I don’t remember … oh, yes. Yes, you’re the detective who came up here with Miss Withers. What? Oh—I’m awfully sorry, but I have an engagement for lunch today … yes, and dinner, too. I’m sure what you have to tell me would be very interesting, but it’s quite impossible. You’ll have to excuse me now, I’m taking a bath.”

  Janey Davis, with a turkish towel wrapped insufficiently around her fair white body, hopped from rug to rug toward the bathroom, whence clouds of steam were issuing. “Of all the colossal nerve!” she remarked to herself.

  A moment later, with her curly hair loosened from its tight bathing cap again, she stood with a comb and surveyed herself in the mirror.

  “I wish I knew what he wanted!” Then she tossed her head. “Well, I haven’t got anything to worry about!”

  Across the town, in a luxurious hotel-apartment overlooking the Park from an eminence on the Avenue, Professor Augustine Pfaffle was doing worrying enough for two. His living-room was swarming with the gentlemen of the press—gentlemen by courtesy only, since they steadfastly refused to leave him alone, no matter how profusely the great criminologist’s manager, representing the Thatcher Lecture Bureau, poured out drinks and offered sandwiches.

  “Can I quote you as saying that American morons are quicker-witted than the morons over where you come from?”

  “Did Anderson sock you once or twice?”

  “What did you do for the eye, raw beef or a leech?”

  “How come, with all your experience in investigating crime, you stayed in this room alone with a murderer?”

  “Was it anything in your examination of Anderson, the janitor, that made him sock you in the eye and then beat it?”

  “Is it true you said he was descended from the Jukes family?”

  “May we quote you as saying that you consider Olaf Anderson a greater and more bloodthirsty killer than Landeau or the Marquis de Sade?”

  “Pose for another picture, Professor … smile!”

  Finally the Herr Professor raised both his skinny talons above his shining bald head and shrieked the pack of them down.

  “Zentlemen! Blease!”

  His eyeglasses dangled on their long black cord almost to his knees, and at every step he took a little cascade of cigarette ash fell from his vest.

  “I do not wish to make a statement now. My manager tells me that it will conflict with my lecture tour. All this business is very unfortunate. In Vienna it would be impossible for a criminal to escape through the windows and down a wall.”

  The Professor twisted his slightly simian face into a grimace significant of the fact that he was wishing himself back in Vienna right now. “Zis unfortunate accident, zentlemen … it is nothing! It is only a matter of hours, perhaps minutes, before the prisoner will be back in his cell. I assure you!”

  “Oh, yeah?” A fat and somewhat unshaven young man thrust his face almost into the Professor’s. “If you’re the big shot crime expert, why don’t you psycho-analyze where the janitor has beat it to? Come on, Professor, let us see the great brain in action!”

  “Yeah! You say it’s only a matter of minutes before Anderson is caught and back in his cell. Give us a break, Prof. Where is he?” Other voices began to chime in.

  “Where he iss?” Professor Pfaffle was stalling for time, and they knew it.

  “Come on, Professor. You let him get away, now why don’t you figure out where he’s gone? It ought to be easy for the greatest crime expert in the world….”

  “Sure—where would Anderson go? Back to his school, or where? That ought to be pie for a criminologist. Why, haven’t you ever heard about the little boy on the farm who could always find the pig when it got loose? They asked him how he managed it and he said, ‘I always stop and think where would I go if I were a pig, and I look there, and there she is!’”

  Professor Pfaffle drew himself to his full height. He looked at Mr. Thatcher of the lecture bureau, but Mr. Thatcher gave him no help in his crisis.

  Professor Pfaffle waved one arm in the direction of the window. “Of course I know where it iss he went,” he announced. “The movements of the criminal are an open book to the expert. He iss … there …” Pfaffle’s gesture took in all of Greater New York.

  The reporters moved toward the window. “You mean, in Central Park?” They seemed oddly impressed with the idea. The Professor made a quick decision.

  Professor Pfaffle nodded energetically. “Ja, the park. The man is a claustrophobiac, of course. His crime has made him fear closed walls and the sight of his fellow men. He is, therefore, hiding in the wide reaches of Central Park since he knows he has no chance to leave the city while every exit is guarded.”

  “Say … you’re good!”

  “There’s a story lead—Pfaffle the Hungarian Bloodhound spots lost trail by absent treatment….”

  “Pose for a picture pointing at the park—give us that old smile!”

  “Who’s got a nickel—wait, it isn’t a pay telephone. Hello … hello….”

  Finally they were gone. The Professor wiped his brow. Thatcher, the exquisite man-about-town in spats and wing collar, came over to him.

  “You got out of that neatly, Pfaffle my boy,” he said. “Maybe we won’t get cancellations of your bookings after all! The only thing is, I hope that janitor really is in the park!”

 
The Professor hoped the janitor was somewhere not in the park, and said so in two languages, combining the worst epithets of both.

  “Why not he iss in der park? If the police do not find him there, that is their fault. Besides, by that time we are aboard a train, no?”

  Thatcher patted him on the shoulder. “You’re a regular master-mind,” he admitted. “For a while I was sorry I’d arranged the whole thing with the Commissioner, when you let the prisoner make a laughing stock of you. But now you’ve stalled off the papers so that they’ll play up the park, and lay off you. The newspapers will forget the case in another day or two anyhow—and by then, as you say, we’ll be aboard a train and a fast one. The audiences in Chicago and Detroit will eat this up, watch ’em.”

  “Ja,” agreed Pfaffle. “So I thought.”

  “Tell me,” Thatcher inquired. “Was that on the level? I mean, did you just happen to see the park out of the window and think it a likely place, or did you really figure out the criminal psychology of the man?”

  “Anderson has no psyche worthy of the name,” insisted the Professor. “He is the most stubborn, surly hund I have met in some time. I hope they never find him. I have never had more trouble in analyzing a subject than I did with him. It is like beating on a stone wall.”

  He paused for a moment. “All the same, the man is a low-grade moron and if they wish me to, I shall testify in the court, provided I am not out on tour at the time.”

  “You could go on a dozen tours and come back before his case is ever tried in court,” Thatcher told him. “The docket is filled months ahead.”

  The Herr Professor made no reply. Owing to the suddenness with which the newspapermen had departed, there was still a little something in the way of refreshments left behind. To these dregs and fragments Pfaffle applied himself as if he needed them.

  As was her habit upon mornings when school did not keep, due to regular or accidental holidays, Miss Hildegarde Withers was sitting at that moment upon a bench near the 72nd Street gate of Central Park, her nose buried in a copy of the New York Times. In spite of the bright sunshine, a chill wind tugged at the sheets of her newspaper and whipped the collar of her modest coat about her ears.