“Yeah, I guess so,” agreed the Commissioner. “Sounds reasonable.”
“Ja. Well, then a change comes over the janitor. Perhaps slowly, perhaps all at once. If all that he may possess are the shoes of his beloved, no one else shall have more. He will destroy her! He lurks in the hall until all the teachers haf gone home, he thinks, but her alone. In his hand is the hatchet—for the warped and twisted mind of this poor man makes this killing an act of worship, a supreme sacrifice!
“He enters the Cloakroom, and strikes her down before she can cry out. A moment in which he attempts to remove her shoes, the object of his love now that the perversion has overwhelmed him—and then he realizes that Miss Withers is still in the building, perhaps through hearing her voice. He flees … without the body. Miss Withers enters, finds it, and goes for help. While she is gone he attempts to go through with his plan of burying the body in his basement. But the Inspector returns too soon, and the madman strikes him down with the shovel, and realizes that he has only a matter of moments. The grave is forgotten, as there is no time to dig it deeper. Only the furnace remains as a place to hide the dreadful remains. In goes the body, and the flames catch it in their teeth. Anderson runs to his hideaway, filled with panic. He drinks—and the liquor fuddles what is left of his mind so that he walks out upon the detectives, like a child, forgetting all his deep-laid plottings. That is typical of this type of delusion.”
“It might also be typical of innocence,” Miss Withers suggested. But nobody paid any attention.
“There is your case,” Pfaffle finally concluded. “It only remains to substantiate it, and the evidence which these teachers will give me is to do that. They must have noted many details this afternoon which will fill in the blanks in that other afternoon. Now for the final chapter of our little story—Sergeant, call everybody into room 1A again.”
The Commissioner looked puzzled. “I say, I didn’t see anybody around when I came in….”
“Sergeant, get them here—everybody. I want the Commissioner to hear this. Go through the building and bring them all down, every single teacher.” Pfaffle was booming with enthusiasm. He led the way down the hall, but the Commissioner lingered beside Miss Withers.
“And what do you think of all this statement of the case?”
“I think it’s splendid,” Miss Withers told him. “Only it isn’t true. Anderson couldn’t be the murderer. His feet are too large, and there was straw in his eyebrows. Besides …”
She broke off suddenly. They were standing in the door of Miss Cohen’s classroom, with Pfaffle bustling about the desk, when the loud and excited voice of the Sergeant sounded on the stairs.
“Professor! I’ve looked in every classroom in the building, and nobody’s here! They’ve scrammed, every last one of ’em!”
The Herr Professor dropped his eyeglasses to the floor with a sickening crack, and the blood rushed to his face.
“Du lieber Gott! Der Schweinhunds! I’ll haf by the scruff of the neck every one of them dragged to the jail!”
The Commissioner, his professionally impartial face struggling to keep from a smile, voiced his surprise. “But I don’t see why …”
“Dumkopfs! They shall answer for this!” The Professor was giving a good example of one of his own case histories in dementia.
Miss Withers sniffed, and gathered up her umbrella preparatory to departure. She had stood a good deal from the Professor this afternoon, but she felt amply rewarded.
“Your own instructions, if you remember, Professor,” she told him gently. “I heard you order us, in the faculty meeting, to act exactly as we did that afternoon of the murder. Teachers go home at three-thirty, you know. And the officer whom the Sergeant meant to place on guard duty at the door was sent after me. So when three-thirty came, they all calmly walked out. Which, if you ask me, is the most sensible idea that has been brought forward this afternoon.”
XVI
Ach, Du Lieber Augustine!
(11/19/32—4:00 P.M.)
“YOU REALLY HAVE NO cause to complain of the behavior of the faculty of Jefferson School,” the Commissioner was reminding Professor Pfaffle. “You told them to reenact everything, and they took that to mean departure, too.”
“Somebody varied the procedure by departing earlier today than he did on that other afternoon,” Miss Withers observed. “Somebody remained here that day until long after the police arrived, and then left noisily but quickly by means of the fire escape. I’m afraid that person was not as punctilious about obeying you as the rest of them seem to have been. Unfortunate, Professor.”
That gentleman was in a fine fury. He removed his shiny badge, and threw it on the desk. Then he beckoned to his photographer and his secretary, who had remained by the door, at attention.
“We go,” he announced. “I resign from the position of Acting Inspector of the Homicide Squad. Augustine Pfaffle is not accustomed to being a laughing-stock.”
He marched down the hall, and the front door of Jefferson School closed with a tremendous bang.
Miss Withers looked at the Commissioner, and that gentleman looked back at her. “I wish Oscar Piper was on the job,” said the Commissioner wistfully.
“I wish so too,” said Miss Withers. Only Sergeant Taylor seemed unhappy about the whole thing. “Aw, he’s gone, and I was figuring on learning from him how to be a psycho-criminologist!”
At that moment the door of Macfarland’s outer office opened, and the Principal appeared. “What was that noise—a shot?” Miss Withers noted that his hands trembled more than the slamming of a door would seem to necessitate.
“Gee,” said Sergeant Taylor. “I looked in all the classrooms, but I clean forgot to look in there. And he was there all the time!”
“Of course I was there all the time,” said Macfarland testily. “How much longer is this nonsense to keep up? Where’s the Professor?”
“The Professor and the nonsense are both gone, along with everybody else,” Miss Withers remarked. “But you’re still here. Were you here this late the afternoon of the murder, by any chance?”
“Of course not! I told you that I left early—Janey will substantiate that—and that I walked the streets gathering material for my daily essay.”
“But it didn’t occur to you that your orders were to reproduce exactly our activities of that afternoon?” Miss Withers’ voice was very casual, but Macfarland hesitated in answering.
“My wife will be worrying about me,” he suggested hopefully.
The Commissioner suddenly consulted his watch. “I must be off,” he told them. “I only stopped in to see how my new appointee was getting on, and now I know. My car is outside, Miss Withers.”
“You may drop me at the Tombs,” Miss Withers suggested. “I understand the janitor has been booked for murder and taken there. I’d like to have a chat with him, if you can pass me through the red tape.”
The Commissioner had a sudden idea. “You’ve shown the only intelligence in this case so far,” he told her. “Here … this ought to cut all the red tape you meet.” And he handed her the bright badge that the Herr Professor had thrown aside. “I’ll make it official if you wish,” he suggested.
She pinned it beside the gold one which was Oscar Piper’s. “I guess two honorary decorations ought to equal one official appointment,” she remarked.
Waldo Emerson Macfarland let his eyes widen, saucer fashion, and the Commissioner bowed.
“You can talk to him for just fifteen minutes,” said the guard. He clanged the iron grill behind him.
“Ten will be plenty,” said Hildegarde Withers. She turned to the man who stood with his hands in the pockets of his coat, and his head lowered.
“Good afternoon, Anderson,” she remarked.
The janitor stared at her. “Why d’you come here? Why don’t you leave me alone? I got nothing to say to you.”
“But I have something to say to you,” Miss Withers told him.
Anderson slumped into a chair. �
��It’s fonny you aren’t afraid to be here alone with me,” he growled. “Don’t you read the newspapers? Don’t you know I’m the Hatchet Fiend?” Something in her calm presence loosened his tongue.
“Nonsense,” Miss Withers told him. “The worst thing you’ve done, as far as I can see, is to steal liquor from the warehouse and sell it to your friend Tobey across the street.”
The janitor remained unruffled. “So Tobey talked, did he? Well, I don’t care. Everybody talk talk talk all the time. That German doctor, he says I’m queer—that I’m a nut. He ask me questions I won’t answer for any man! He wanted to know what I dream!”
“Was that why you hit him and went out of the window the other day? I thought so. Now listen to me, Anderson. I haven’t got much time. But you’re going before the Grand Jury in a little while, and if something isn’t done about it you’re going to be tried and executed for the murder of Miss Halloran.”
“I don’t care if I am,” said Anderson.
Miss Withers’ voice was stern. “Don’t you talk that way to me! I won’t have it. Why in Heaven’s name do you want to die?”
He shrugged his wide shoulders. “Why should I live? For forty years my luck is bad. Then once, good luck comes … but I miss it. I always miss it.”
“Yes? What good luck?”
“The best luck in the world … money! I don’t want to spend my life a poor man, a janitor, tending furnaces and cleaning schoolrooms. Bad luck cannot last always, so I keep on trying for the great lucky break.” Anderson was letting the words tumble forth, like a pent-up torrent. “I play the stock market, I lose. I play the Mexican lottery, I lose. I play the Chinese lottery, I lose, again and again. I bet on Dempsey in Philadelphia, and on Al Smith in the election. Always I lose. I play the Irish sweepstakes for three years. This year I have no money. The man who sells me my tickets last year tells me, if I take a book of tickets and sell them, I get one free for myself. But I must sell every ticket in the book, understand, except that last one. So I sell them. I work, I talk, I argue, but I sell them. All but two tickets—the final one I must sell, and the one I mean to keep.
“Miss Halloran, she buys liquor from Tobey. I know she is sporting, see? I go to her, I tell her about the ticket and what she might win. So she borrow the money from another girl—but she insist on taking the ticket I want, instead of the other one. She take ticket 131313 … and I am left 131319, the only other one. Three thirteens are solid fourteen carat luck … and she wins. But me, I lose. I know that ticket will win, but I have to let her choose, it is the rules. The last ticket left is mine … and then, just as I knew it would happen, I read in the newspaper that my number wins. My number—but her ticket! She snatches my fortune from my hands. That afternoon I go crazy! I can’t think, I can’t think, I can’t do anything. So near I have come to a fortune!”
“So you killed Anise Halloran for that?” Miss Withers was incredulous.
“I kill nobody. I crawl into the warehouse and get drunk. I drink to forget. I drink more than I ever drank all my life … and when I come out, they tell me I kill somebody.”
Miss Withers nodded. “One more thing, Anderson. Who knew about the little hole in the wall by which you got into the liquor warehouse?”
“Nobody!”
“How about Tobey, the candy store man? You sold the stuff to him….”
“I told him a friend bring it off the Scandinavian-American liner for me.”
“Which he may not have believed. It’s not impossible, of course, that some one of the teachers, or even Mr. Macfarland himself came into the cellar looking for you while you were climbing in or out of your little secret hideaway. Well, I’m going now, Anderson.”
He clutched at her sleeve. “You believe me?” Then he turned away from her impassive face. “No, you don’t believe me. You’re just like the others. You want to make me talk, but you think I kill that girl because I want her shoes or something. You think I’m a Hatchet Fiend!”
“I do not,” Miss Withers told him, as a parting shot. “Whatever you are, you’re not a fiend, and you’re no more pathological than the rest of us, the Professor included. As for your being a murderer—the courts will decide that. Good luck, Anderson.”
Miss Withers passed out of the Tombs, and on to the Criminal Courts Building. Hesitating a moment at the head of the stairs, she finally decided to pass by the familiar office where Lieutenant Keller, she knew, must be waiting eagerly to discuss the Viennese criminologist and his meteoric rise and fall. On she went to the very last door of the long hall, which bore the simple legend—“Van Donnen.”
She found the famous little laboratory expert measuring the rifling marks on a leaden bullet, preparatory to comparing them with those on another bullet shot out of a suspected gangster’s gun. He rose to greet her, bewildered and a little embarrassed at being caught without coat or collar.
“Never mind that,” she told him. “I want some information. I’ve been asking doctors and reading medical books all week, but I don’t get anywhere. Tell me, Doctor. What is the best thing to kill ants with?”
Dr. Van Donnen raised his eyebrows. “But my dear lady! Do you come to me because of ants in your cupboard? Any commercial poison—Flit or the like….”
“I don’t quite mean that,” said Hildegarde Withers. “Is there any poison which would be instantly fatal to an insect, say an ant, but of which he would enjoy the taste?”
Van Donnen was thoughtful. “The best commercial ant poisons are sweet syrups loaded with sodium arsenite. But those would not come under the specification you mention, because they are slow to work. The ant carries them to his nest, and poisons the whole food supply of the swarm. Let me see—something which an ant will eat or drink from preference, but which will kill him instantly….”
He snapped his fingers. “I would say that it must be some petroleum derivative, such as kerosene, which would act upon the respiratory functions of the insect. The odor is so strong that ants and all insects like it, but before he would even taste it he would be dead.”
Miss Withers nodded, thoughtfully. “And what would be the effect of kerosene, say, upon the human system?”
“Perfectly harmless. It is often used as a remedy for sore throat. The more highly refined petroleum products, however, can be dangerous. Ethyl gasoline, for instance, if concentrated, is one of the deadliest of lead poisons. But what has this to do with the investigation you are undertaking? I understood that the unfortunate girl met her death through a hatchet blow on the skull?”
“I’m just nosing around,” said Miss Withers. “These refined gasoline products such as you spoke of before—what would their effect be on the human system? Suppose I drank a glass of gasoline or naphtha?”
“Your system would reject it, instantly. Only a very minute dose could be retained by the stomach. If that were not true, common cleaning fluid or benzine would be a dangerous poison. But no more than a drop or two could be kept down by the stomach, and such a minute dose would have to be repeated every day for two weeks or more before death would ensue … and that death would be a long and lingering one.”
Dr. Van Donnen clasped his hands, and his round little face took on a cherubic beam. “It is very interesting that you have brought up this subject, Miss Withers. I have for many years in the subject of the petroleum poisons been interested. Nothing is known by the general medical profession of their action, owing to the fact that the characteristic taste is so strong and the stomach so easily upset by them. But a pamphlet was published last year by Dr. Emile Ladrue of Paris announcing that he had succeeded in producing the symptoms of pernicious anaemia of the bones in a monkey by daily minute doses of benzine for only one week. The monkey survived as an invalid for several months, but Ladrue was of the opinion that if the doses had been continued for another week, death would have come very shortly.”
“That’s what I wanted to know,” said Miss Withers grimly. “Dr. Van Donnen, I’m going to insist on the Coroner’s ordering an
exhumation and a stomach analysis of the corpse of Anise Halloran!”
He blinked. “But Miss Withers! If you suspect a petroleum poison, stomach analysis will prove nothing. Everything is absorbed by the blood. There is no trace left, as in the inorganic poisons, which can be analyzed!”
Miss Withers paused by the doorway. “Doctor, suppose you wanted to conceal the taste of a strong petroleum poison, how would you do it? In coffee, as my mother concealed castor oil?”
He shook his head. “Liquor would be the best thing,” he told her. “So much in these times it tastes like benzine anyhow!”
Georgie Swarthout waved his hand in a gesture which implied that the entire Alps restaurant, from the orchestra in the distance to the balcony on which they sat, was a special creation of his own for this particular event.
“This isn’t so bad, now you’re here, is it?”
The three sad young ladies who comprised the orchestra struck up something very Strauss, and the waiter produced the soup tureens as a magician might have caused a rabbit to appear out of a hat.
Janey Davis drew an intricate little design on the tablecloth with her fork. “It isn’t so bad,” she agreed. “But I still don’t know why I came.”
“I’ll tell you,” said Georgie Swarthout. “You came because you knew I’d go right on phoning you until you agreed to have dinner or breakfast or lunch or something with me. And some of the moments I chose to phone you were a little inopportune….”
“Very inopportune,” said Janey Davis.
“Have it your own way. I heard about a girl who said she had to take four baths one Sunday afternoon before the phone would ring. What do you think of that?”
“I think you’re impossible,” said Janey Davis.
“At least highly improbable,” agreed Swarthout. “Dance?”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t.”
“Come on, forget that I earn my salary by working for the city, will you? You look worried, young lady. This case has been gruelling for you. Relax.”
Murder on the Blackboard Page 16
