Murder on the Blackboard

by Stuart Palmer

  Mr. Macfarland, thus appealed to, shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I told you that it was none of my doing,” he reminded her.

  “Well, but what are we waiting for?”

  Mr. Macfarland said that he didn’t know.

  “I suppose it’s Hildegarde Withers! I don’t see what authority she has to gallivant around all over town questioning us as if she were a prosecuting attorney! Just because she knows a policeman. Tell me”—Miss Rennel was voicing the thoughts of them all—“tell me, Mr. Macfarland, has Miss Withers any official authority?”

  “None as far as I’m concerned,” that gentleman said wearily. “Before I knew of the arrest of the janitor I had some idea of asking her to undertake an investigation, but later events …”

  He was interrupted by the arrival of no less a personage than Sergeant Taylor of the Homicide Squad, at present acting as a vanguard for a small army composed of Professor Augustine Pfaffle, his stenographer, male, a photographer, likewise male, and bringing up the rear, the bulky figure of Mike McTeague, a Gibraltar in brass buttons.

  “Folks!” announced Taylor dramatically, “I have the great honor—I mean, I’m glad to have the opportunity—I mean, this here gentleman is one of the world’s greatest criminologists, and a gentleman with whom I am honored to have the opportunity of working with him. You all read in the newspapers about how without going out of his hotel room he was able to locate the missing suspect in this here murder case.

  “Now it seems that there’s one or two angles of this murder about which the Commissioner and the District Attorney aren’t entirely satisfied, and so the case has been turned over to Professor Pfaffle here. He is going to iron out the wrinkles, with your help, ladies and gentlemen, so that a waterproof iron-bound case can be turned over to the District Attorney and the Grand Jury, so that justice will be satisfied and—”

  “The Army and Navy forever, three cheers for Jack Dalton of the U.S. Marines,” whispered Bob Stevenson into Janey’s curls.

  “What I vant is very simple,” the great criminologist announced. “It is not enough for us to know that a murder was committed in this building at a certain time by a certain person. We must know vy! And we must know how! Also, we must present legal proof of der fact. For that reason I ask your help. I vant every one of you to try to remember what he or she did on that fatal afternoon when Anise Halloran was killed. It is very important, and besides, you may be interested to know that everything we do and say is to be taken down for inclusion in my new book on crime and criminals, as well as given to the newspapers.” He nodded toward the secretary, who was busy with notebook and pencil, catching every pearl that fell.

  “I vant you to just be natural, and go ahead as if your classes were in the classrooms as they were that afternoon. You are all here, I trust?”

  “All but our third grade teacher, Miss Hildegarde Withers,” said the Principal. “However, she has been sent for, and should arrive at any minute.”

  “At any minute is not soon enough,” fumed Professor Pfaffle. “I must have everybody here, at once! Everybody!”

  He walked up and down in front of the blackboard, hands behind his back, and his high brow furrowed. His shoulders almost brushed against the musical scales which the murdered girl had marked upon this blackboard only a few days before, but Professor Pfaffle paid no attention.

  “You promised me full cooperation,” he stormed at Macfarland. “And now one of your teachers isn’t here!”

  “Two teachers aren’t here,” said Bob Stevenson softly. He was looking at the blackboard. Only Janey Davis heard him, and her head bent a little lower.

  “Veil, vy don’t you do something?”

  Mr. Macfarland rose to the occasion. “You might send somebody after the missing teacher,” he suggested. “After all, you’ve been given complete authority, Professor.”

  “Ja!” Pfaffle whirled upon the Sergeant. “You! Send that officer—” he pointed toward McTeague—“send him to get this Fraulein Withers. If she does not come willingly, arrest her!”

  McTeague blinked. “A—arrest Miss Withers?”

  A wicked smile flickered across the face of Bob Stevenson. “I’d give a month’s pay to see him do it,” he whispered. Sergeant Taylor opened his mouth, protestingly.

  “You have your orders!” The Professor was imperious. “Send this man after her, at once!”

  Sergeant Taylor nodded slowly. “Okay, Perfessor. Only, don’t you think we’ll need McTeague here? He’s the only cop we’ve got to help us now.”

  “Need him? What for? The less police around the better for my plan. I want everybody to be perfectly natural, understand? They cannot be natural and act as they did on the day of the murder with a policeman before every door. Send him on.”

  “You’re the boss,” said Sergeant Taylor. McTeague left the school, shaking his head. He had instructions to bring in Miss Withers, dead or alive.

  Professor Pfaffle conferred with his satellites. Then he very ostentatiously referred to his massive silver watch.

  “We haf already lost twenty minutes,” he announced. “All because of this Fraulein Withers!” He stopped short.

  There was the sound of quick footsteps in the hall, and then a cheery voice greeted the assemblage.

  “Who’s taking my name in vain? I’m so sorry, so very sorry that I’m late. I hope things didn’t get cold!”

  Hildegarde Withers swept into the room, her bonnet cocked over one eye, and her umbrella sticking out straight under her arm.

  “Miss Withers?” Principal Macfarland half rose in his seat. “Where have you been? Didn’t you meet McTeague? because we just sent him after you.”

  Miss Withers found a seat at one of the front desks, not without considerable hustling and rattling of her umbrella. “I saw somebody in uniform rushing out of the door as I came down the stairs,” she admitted. “But I didn’t dream it was McTeague looking for me.”

  “Down the stairs? What were you doing upstairs?” Macfarland was annoyed.

  “Just looking around,” Miss Withers told him. “I suppose this is Professor Pfaffle of whom I have heard so much?”

  “Ja, I am him,” admitted the Professor, slightly mollified. “We haf waited for you. Haf you been upstairs looking around all this time?”

  “Yes, I was looking for a friend of mine—a red ant. But I’m here now. Let the fish-fry proceed.”

  Professor Pfaffle shook his head dubiously, and then rapped sharply on the desk with his knuckles. “You understand, all of you? Except for the fact that none of the pupils are at their desks, you will act as you did that afternoon. If you stepped out into the hall then, do it now. If you crossed your room to the window, do it now. But everything at its due place, you understand. Forget nothing—the slightest thing may be important. In the case of a pathological murderer such as this Anderson seems to be, every detail of the actions of those around him may be of the highest importance. Omit nothing!”

  He looked at his watch. “It is almost three o’clock,” he told them. “Reenact the last half hour of that day, down to the most minute detail! Everything, remember!”

  Miss Strasmick raised her hand.

  “Professor, I cut my finger in a pencil sharpener that afternoon. Do I have to cut it over again? It was just getting well!”

  But the teachers were already filing out toward their own classrooms, leaving Miss Vera Cohen alone in room 1A. That lady drew a copy of the Saturday Evening Post from a drawer of her desk, and opened it noisily.

  “I read this story until I left Anise here alone putting her work on the board that afternoon, so I suppose I’ll have to reread it now, though I know she marries him at the end.”

  The Professor and his satellites stood outside in the hallway. “Which is the lady I spoke to you about?”

  Sergeant Taylor motioned toward the door of 1B, through which Miss Withers had just passed. The Professor raised his eyebrows.

  Then he moved down the hall, followed by the photogr
apher and the secretary—also the Sergeant, who was intent upon not missing a single thing.

  Professor Pfaffle burst in upon Miss Withers without knocking. She put down her copy of the Atlantic Monthly, and stared at him through her glasses as if he were a noxious weed.

  “I understand that it was you who stumbled upon the janitor’s hiding place,” he told her. “We shall require your cooperation for the next few minutes.”

  “But you gave me instructions to reenact the events of the murder afternoon,” she reminded him. “I sat at this desk all afternoon.”

  He waved his hand. “Never mind that. We are already aware of your movements upon the afternoon in question—or at least what you say they were. I wish to take some photographs of the basement and of the janitor’s hole in the wall where he slipped through into the warehouse. The Sergeant’s men have been unable to locate this hideaway, and I wish you to show it to us.”

  “Find it yourself,” she suggested. “It ought to be easy for a man who can tell where an escaped suspect is hiding. And another thing, nobody showed me where it was.”

  The Professor drew himself up to his full height. “You do not understand my position,” he told her. “I haf been appointed Acting Inspector of the Homicide Squad! The Commissioner of Police has himself given me this little symbol of my authority!” With a certain natural pride, Professor Augustine Pfaffle displayed a large silver badge affixed to his vest.

  Miss Withers gave it a glassy eye. “How pretty!” She rose slowly from her desk, after putting the Atlantic carefully away. She felt of her own badge, but decided to keep that for an emergency.

  “I suppose I’ll have to show you what you want to know,” she told him. “But I’m not wild about going down in that basement again. The last time I was there I very nearly had an accident. By the way—” She turned to the Sergeant. “Did the print men find anything on that hatchet?”

  “Not a thing,” admitted Sergeant Taylor. “They worked over it mighty carefully, too, because we need some concrete evidence to support the Professor’s hypot—his theory. There weren’t any prints on the shovel, either, though we did find some hairs and blood which belonged to the Inspector, and showed that the shovel was what the janitor used to whack him down.”

  “So it was the janitor?” Miss Withers followed the Professor obediently out of the room. “I’ve been a little skeptical about that, all along. There are a few things that don’t fit in, somehow.”

  “Nonsense,” retorted the Professor. He was genial again now that he had won his point. “I understand that you fancy yourself as an amateur detective, Fraulein Withers? Ah, the amateur! Always looking for abstruse meanings in the obvious. Who else but this janitor Anderson had the opportunity? The cellar was his territory, and he could dig graves and dispose of bodies there as he saw fit. Who else but Anderson was the pathological type to commit a sex crime of this nature? Ah, my gnädige Fraulein, it is as plain as the nose on your face.”

  Miss Withers flashed him a barbed look, but he sailed on blithely. “I shall never forget another case very like this one in some aspects—the shoes in particular. You are aware that several pairs of shoes of the dead girl’s were found hidden in the janitor’s room under the stairs? A very clear case of fetishism. In this case of which I was speaking, a poor fellow broke into a store in Berlin and stole nearly a hundred pairs of women’s shoes. Not to wear them, ach nein! They were discovered in his room some time later, each and every shoe with its toe bitten off!”

  “Mercy sakes!” They were now descending the cellar stair. Miss Withers looked extremely perturbed. “Then you think that Anderson is one of those—?”

  “A shoe-fetishist? Ja, I know it. I understand that even when you found the body, the shoes had been removed and were lying in the center of the room. They were no doubt added to the poor demented creature’s collection after he disposed of the body.”

  Miss Withers was thoughtful. She remembered the blue sandals that she had stumbled upon so terribly in the darkness. They had not been among the shoes discovered in Anderson’s room. But she held her tongue.

  “Here’s the furnace where the body was found, in flames,” she said, in the tone of a rubberneck bus-driver. “Ahead of us, in the corner, is the half-dug grave. And here …” she left the board sidewalk and moved swiftly across the dirt floor where it rose toward the ceiling … “here is the hole in the wall!”

  She stood back in silence while the Herr Professor was with difficulty pushed up through the hole by the faithful Taylor. She watched while the photographer took picture after picture, and listened while the Professor dictated page after page of notes, instructions, and conclusions as part of his case-history.

  Overhead she could hear the footsteps of the other teachers in the hall. For a time Miss Withers amused herself by trying to determine each teacher by her step, and by the part of the building from which it came. It would not be hard, she realized, for a man hiding here to know a good deal about events on the floor above him.

  At last Professor Pfaffle expressed himself as satisfied. Sergeant Taylor, who had, as Miss Withers told it later, “clung to the Professor’s coat-tails like a puppy to a root,” expressed himself as being thrilled and delighted with the privilege. “It sure is great to work with you,” he declared.

  “It ain’t often we get a chance to see how a great expert like you takes aholt of a job.”

  They paused at the foot of the stairs while the photographer replaced his camera in its shoulder case.

  “It might interest you to know, Professor,” Miss Withers announced, consulting her old-fashioned watch, “that the time is now exactly three-fifty-five, which is the hour when I discovered the body of that murdered girl. Now if you had only resorted to the usual theatric device of having somebody else impersonate the victim, this is the time at which the crime should be reenacted….”

  She broke off short as the tread of heavy footsteps came from the hall overhead. There was something menacing, implacable, and remorseless about them to the little group which stood in the dank cellar, and waited….

  The heavy tread halted, almost where the door of the Teachers’ Cloakroom was, and then after a moment came on.

  “Hello … hello, there….”

  The voice was muffled and strange, filtering as it did through closed doors and solid walls. But at least it was human.

  Sergeant Taylor gave a somewhat quavering answer, and then the door at the head of the stair swung open to disclose the figure of a tallish, broadish man in formal afternoon wear, with a gardenia in his buttonhole and a whangee in his hand.

  Taylor came to attention. “The Commissioner!” he gasped.

  “I just thought I’d drop in and see how you’re getting along,” came the cheerful booming voice. “What is this, a wake? I expected lots of excitement and fireworks.”

  “The fireworks come later,” Professor Pfaffle assured the Commissioner. “You shall see for yourself. I now go upstairs to question the teachers. They have reenact the events of that afternoon—if any one of them do anything different today, another will notice it. I shall from this afternoon get a case history which will make the excursions of Freud and Jung into criminology look like the picnic of a child. From this afternoon we are learning much, nein?” Taylor agreed heartily and quickly.

  “Unless I very much miss my guess, you are going to learn even more than you expect,” said Miss Withers, sotto voce, “before this afternoon is over.”

  The Herr Professor smiled patronizingly at Miss Withers as they climbed the stair. “Is it possible that you, Fraulein, have made a study of abnormal psychology?”

  “I’ve read William James,” she retorted acidly.

  “James? James? I haf not heard of him. Pre-Freud, I imagine.”

  “In more ways than one,” Miss Withers told him cryptically.

  The Herr Professor had hardly reached the Commissioner’s side when he took his stance and began another speech.

  “I am glad and
happy that you haf come here to witness my triumph,” he announced. “The same scientific principles which enabled me to trace the hiding place of the escaped janitor …”

  “What man wouldn’t make a break for the park if he’d been in a cell for a day or so, and saw it spang in front of him as he came out of the window?” Miss Withers was losing her temper. But the Professor plunged on.

  “Those same scientific principles, I repeat, which told me that Anderson had been for a long time a victim of claustrophobia as well as fetishism….”

  “I suppose that his little nook between the liquor cases which you thought so significant was also chosen by him because of his fear of closed spaces?”

  “These principles …” the Professor glared at Miss Withers … “have made perfectly clear to me the motives, the mental causes and causations, and the whole secret of this crime. It was a love crime, the love of Caliban for a star….”

  Miss Withers looked puzzled at this, but let it go by. The Professor, on his mettle, really opened up and got down to business. He had already nodded to the secretary to take this down, as he could use most of it in the press statements he intended to give out in time for the morning papers.

  “I know every thought that went through the mind of the janitor, Anderson,” he announced. “I know how he committed this crime. I know his every movement on that fatal afternoon, or I shall know it as soon as I question the teachers who have just reenacted their own motions on that afternoon.

  “I know that Anderson had a warped love for Anise Halloran, so far above him that she was out of his reach. He was, in his mind at least, a stone beneath her feet. He was only worthy to lick her shoe … note the fetishism? … and the next step was for him to start his collection of these beloved objects. Perhaps she bought new shoes during her lunch hour, and threw the old ones into her waste basket. At any rate, his duties as janitor gave him many opportunities. He was a voluptuary anyway, notice the comfortable little hideaway he made for himself where he could drink and smoke and gloat over his photographs while he should have been on duty. You follow me?”