The Penguin Pool Murder (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

  With her eyes on the clock, Miss Withers waited there for five of the longest minutes in her life. There was not a sound from the vast emptiness of the school building around her, but she waited all the same.

  Then she reached toward the drawer of her desk which held her sailor—gasping a little to discover that in her excitement she still held in her hand the blue sandal that was Anise Halloran’s.

  Swiftly she acted. The blue sandal was enclosed in examination papers, and tucked under her arm. On her head she planted the neat sailor, at a rakish angle, and in her right hand she clutched with a grip of steel the handle of her cotton umbrella.

  For a moment she paused outside the door of 1B. She looked a little longingly back down toward the door of the Cloakroom, and then shook her head. It was too late for that. The best thing was for her to act naturally now.

  She strode serenely down the hall and out through the front door into the street. It is an evidence of a certain latent histrionic ability in the lady that on this memorable night she left Jefferson School in identically the same manner that had been hers some two hundred-odd times every year for the past decade.

  Nor did she hesitate on the steps of the building, but turned to the left and walked briskly along Avenue A. She did not appear to be counting windows—but at the sixth from the main door she paused. There was an eight-inch space at the top of that window—eight inches of jetty darkness.

  Miss Withers swung her arm, and that darkness swallowed up a girl’s blue sandal. The schoolteacher made an abrupt about-face. Calmly she marched back and across the street to Tobey’s, the little notion store opposite the main entrance of Jefferson School.

  The freckled face of Leland Stanford Jones appeared above the glass of the phone booth. He stood on his tiptoes to hang up the receiver and then came out.

  “I called him, teacher!”

  “Leland! Did it take all this time …?”

  “Mister Tobey wasn’t in,” Leland interrupted defensively. “The door was open, but he wasn’t in. I couldn’t get change out of your dime for the phone till he got back.”

  “But he’s here now?”

  “Oh, yes’m. In the back room. Mister Tobey!”

  A short, bald toad of a man appeared in the curtained entrance of the rear room. The nails of one fat hand continually scratched his bald pate, and with the other he tapped suggestively upon the glass counter.

  “Someding?”

  Miss Withers joined Leland at the counter, above the assortment of brownish licorice, octogenarian peppermints, and furry horehound.

  There was something very wary and defensive in Tobey’s attitude toward this new customer. It didn’t stand to reason that this angular lady had come to buy candy. More likely she was going to squawk about the quality of his product, like the young teacher across the street who had complained to the Board of Health about him when one of her pupils took a cramp in singing class. Just because of the bright colors in his hard candies! Aniline dyes, his eye! As if kids got any sicker from one kind of candy than another! Besides, the brighter it was the better they like it. Tobey knew.

  He fidgeted, mumbled, and rubbed his hands raspingly together, but still this tall lady with the umbrella waited there, seemingly intent upon a choice between lemon drops and chocolate-covered peanuts.

  He did not know that the curved, cloudy glass of the show counter reflected the dimly-lit doorway across the street. Whatever it may have been that Miss Withers had hoped to see, her vision was suddenly blotted out by a looming gray figure.

  She whirled around, with her finger on her lips. “Oscar!”

  Let me explain to those of my readers who are having their first introduction to Oscar Piper, Inspector of Detectives, that he is a leanish, grayish man of somewhat indeterminate age, with a pugnacious lower lip and a pair of very chilly blue-gray eyes. A badly-lighted cigar usually hangs from one corner of his mouth, and his speech, perhaps because he has risen from the ranks and is proud of it, smacks a little of Broadway, West Broadway.

  There was a cigar in his mouth as he entered Tobey’s store on this memorable evening, and he neglected to remove it before addressing Miss Withers. He was pleasantly surprised to have that lady grasp his hands in hers, with a warning look toward the candy proprietor and the waiting urchin.

  She placed a quarter on the counter. “Anything you like, Leland,” she said. Then she led the Inspector into the street. He followed, docile enough. These two had once become engaged to be married—in the flush of excitement after the successful termination of a gruelling murder case—for the space of half an hour. Their friendship had ripened in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that the Inspector’s zeal for the enforcement of the more intelligible of the state’s laws had led him on a sudden chase that gave Miss Withers the opportunity to change her mind.

  “Sorry to break up your whole afternoon,” Miss Withers told him. “But now and then a dead body is apt to interfere with the daily pinochle game.”

  The Inspector took the cigar out of his mouth, but he was not given a chance to speak.

  “I’m serious,” she went on. She told him what she had seen in the Teachers’ Cloakroom.

  The Inspector teetered quietly on his toes. “Murder, eh? When did it happen?”

  “You don’t understand,” Miss Withers exploded. “It’s still happening! That’s why I sent word to you to come quietly. This is no time for a squad car to scream bloody murder through the streets. Somebody smashed Anise Halloran’s skull in that schoolhouse a little while ago—and that somebody is still in there!”

  She tugged at his arm. “Come on!”

  The Inspector held back. “This is irregular as—well, it’s irregular,” he told her. “I have to notify the local precinct station of the murder, and have two plainclothes men sent out here, and the Medical Examiner …”

  “Botheration!” Miss Withers still pulled at his arm. “While you’re doing all that, the murderer will wash up all traces and disappear. This is no ordinary crime, Oscar Piper. The murderer knew what he was doing, and he waited for me to go home!”

  The Inspector threw his cigar away. “Where’s the body?”

  She pointed. “Got a gun, Oscar?”

  He shook his head. “You know I haven’t carried a gat since I took off my uniform.”

  “Well, then you can take my umbrella,” she offered. Stealthily, they approached the schoolhouse.

  One dim bulb was burning, as usual, above the entrance to the main hall. They came into the building, with its musty smells of chalk-dust and humanity. Quickly Miss Withers led the way down the long hall toward the rear—past the door of 1B and down to the Teachers’ Cloakroom.

  The door was still closed. Inspector Piper listened outside it for a moment, and then thrust it open. He stepped back quickly out of range, but nothing happened.

  A second later he found the light switch. There was a long, silent pause, and then he whirled on Miss Withers.

  “Hildegarde! Is this your idea of humor?”

  The room, Miss Withers saw to her amazement, was empty—as calm and quiet as it had ever been.

  There was only the flapping curtain, blown by the breeze which came in through an eight-inch opening at the top of the window. The couch, on which Anise Halloran’s body had lain, was not only empty, but its cotton print covering was orderly and neat.

  Miss Withers pointed toward it. “There! There’s where it was!”

  Piper came closer. He took the couch cover in his fingers and inspected it closely. “Nonsense! You say that she had been bleeding? Well, there hasn’t been time for anybody to wash stains out of this cover and get it dry. There’s not a sign of blood.”

  Miss Withers shook her head doggedly. “I don’t care. I saw what I saw. I’m not given to hallucinations. Nor do I indulge in the flowing bowl. You know that, Oscar. And I say that there was a dead body here less than ten minutes ago.”

  “Where could it go?” The Inspector drew a thin dark cigar fro
m his pocket. “A corpse doesn’t get up and wander about, as a rule. Unless this girl was only wounded, and managed to come to herself and get out of here …”

  Miss Withers shook her head. “She was dead, sure enough. Her face—yes, she was dead. I can see her yet—with her face so calm and peaceful under that gaping wound. She must have died without knowing what struck her, Oscar …”

  “Not necessarily. Fiction to the contrary, there is complete relaxation of all muscles in the face—and body, too—immediately after death, and it lasts till rigor mortis sets in. All expression leaves the face of a corpse within a few minutes—seconds, even. But go on. Try to remember …”

  “She lay there, with her head toward the window.”

  “How was she dressed? Coat on?”

  “I—I don’t remember. Yes, I guess so. She had on a hat, I know that. It was a dark helmet that fitted the head, and it was drawn a little back to show the forehead.”

  Piper nodded. “I see. They couldn’t have got her out of that window … no, that’s as far as it opens. Well, your dead body is still in this building somewhere, and so is the murderer unless he—or she—made a getaway damn recently.”

  “Nobody made a getaway. I watched the hall while I was here, and the main and only door wasn’t out of my sight while I was across the street.”

  “Good.” The Inspector rubbed his hands. “I’m beginning to think you’re right. Maybe the body was parked here for awhile. But why, I don’t see … nor how the murderer managed not to leave a blood stain on the couch …”

  “Wait,” interrupted Miss Withers. “I think I’ve got it! There was something white under the body—I thought it was a towel, and it puzzled me. Now I know. The murderer intended to take the body away and leave no trace. He had it pillowed on newspapers!”

  “Insulated, huh?” The Inspector chewed his cigar. His voice was tense and eager, for all its being pitched hardly above a whisper.

  “The murderer is probably trying to hide the body somewhere else in the building, or else get it out of a rear window onto the playground. Lord, I’ve got a chance to catch him in the act!”

  “You mean we have,” Miss Withers corrected. She took a firmer grip on her umbrella. “Come on!”

  Piper shook his head. “Two of us moving around in the building are sure to make some noise, and probably startle him. Besides, you’ve got to turn in the alarm. We must have a thorough search of this building, and quickly. There is such a thing as routine, too, and the local precinct has a right to get in on this. You run to the phone across the street, and start the boys this way. I’ll lie low here and see if I can get wise to anything. Vamoose!”

  “But, Oscar …”

  “Hurry, will you? This thing is likely to get too big for us to handle. Go on, Hildegarde!”

  “Just my luck not to be in at the finish,” whispered Miss Withers sadly. She departed, swiftly and silently.

  Inspector Oscar Piper paused in the Cloakroom long enough to light his cigar. Its pungent smoke comforted him. It didn’t seem as if he had company, living or dead. The schoolhouse was quiet as a tomb—indeed, it was a tomb if Miss Withers was correct. And she had a way of being correct.

  He had about made up his mind to start a systematic search of the place when the faintest of sounds reached his ears. It was no more than the whisper of a sound—a far-away clink of metal against stone. He stiffened.

  “Probably rats,” he told himself. “The cellar must be full of them.”

  There it came again … followed by a muffled thump.

  “It’s certainly rats,” the Inspector decided. “But I wonder—”

  Slowly he moved on tiptoe down the hall, away from the main door. A red light burned feebly above a swinging door at the end of the hall. He pushed the door aside … and the noise of the rats came more clearly.

  He was standing on the top of the cellar stairs—looking down a flight of concrete steps into the realm sacred to the janitor of Jefferson School and his battery of furnace and coal bins and storage rooms and all the rest of it. There were dank and unpleasant odors in the air that welled up from the abyss, and the Inspector began to pick his way down without any particular eagerness.

  Finally at the bottom, he put away his flashlight. He’d not need it after all, as the place was hung ahead of him with low-power incandescent bulbs, which gave more glow than real light. He could see, on either side of him and straight ahead, long lanes of roughly boarded flooring between thick arched pillars of concrete that supported the upper floors.

  Slowly the Inspector made his way along the flooring, trying to avoid creaking boards, and keeping his ears wide open. The noise of the rats had stopped—evidently his coming had frightened them away.

  His ears were also attuned to the first sound of the police sirens that within the space of a few minutes should be shattering the stillness of his lonely section. But he was not to hear it.

  There came the faintest of movements behind him, a mere rustling of cloth or the drawing of a breath. It was not rats—the Inspector knew that much. Tense as a steel spring, he swung to one side and whirled about, but it was too late.

  A thousand bolts of lightning struck him on the back of the head, with reverberating echoes of thunder that mercifully died away … away….

  Outside in the street two squad cars were already blaring their sirens as they roared up to the door of Jefferson School. But Oscar Piper did not hear them. He lay on his face in a gathering pool of blood. His crumpled cigar, still firmly grasped in his mouth, hissed and went out.

  III

  Ink and Inklings

  (11/15/32—4:45 P.M.)

  “DON’T STAND THERE LIKE stone statues!” Miss Withers was saying. “Do something!”

  There wasn’t much to do, not yet at any rate. The ambulance was on its way—Miss Withers dabbed futilely at the Inspector’s gory head with her handkerchief—and officers swarmed through the cellar of Jefferson School.

  “Let me get my two hands around the neck of the sonovitch …” prayed McTeague earnestly. His watery blue eyes were narrow and unhappy, like those of a caged animal. “Just my two hands …”

  Sergeant Taylor, of the Inspector’s office, shook his head. He shivered a little, stared distastefully around at the dank and ill-smelling place, and for the dozenth time he loosened the big six-shooter that he wore in a shoulder holster.

  “Wait till we get the Inspector out of here,” he promised her, “and then we’ll start doing something. We’ll tear this building down to the ground until we find whoever was fool enough to try this. And when we get him we’ll give him a lesson in what not to try on cops. There hasn’t a cop killer got away in this town in twenty years …”

  He stopped short at the look on Miss Withers’ face. “Of course, I don’t mean that they can’t pull the Inspector through, y’understand. He’s a tough bird, and I’ve seen men live with bigger holes than that in their skull. Hey—you ain’t going to faint, are you?”

  “I am not,” said Hildegarde Withers. “But to come back and find him like this! I didn’t want him to stay here alone, but he insisted. And I tried to make him take my umbrella …”

  “Never mind that now,” said the Sergeant. “As soon as the ambulance comes we’ll start work in earnest. Whoever did this is still in the building, since you phoned from across the street with your eye on the main door, and the windows only open from the top a few inches….”

  Miss Withers Draws a Plan of JEFFERSON SCHOOL

  “That’s to keep the children from taking short cuts to the playground,” Miss Withers informed him.

  Second-grade Detectives Allen and Burns, from the Bowery Precinct Station, hovered discreetly in the background. This whole thing was considerably over their respectively thick heads.

  “If Piper croaks, who gets to be Inspector of Detectives?” Allen wanted to know.

  His partner hushed him. “Not you, you sap. Maybe he won’t croak. I seen a picture of a guy who had a crowbar thro
ugh his skull and lived for twenty years.”

  “Yeah? Where did he live?”

  “Mattewan—chained to the wall—if you call that living,” Burns informed the persistent questioner.

  “Did you see the wound? What do you think it was did with?”

  “Looks like an axe job to me,” Burns replied. “Shut up, will you? I think I hear the ambulance.” He did hear it.

  The interne from Bellevue took one look at the gash in the Inspector’s skull and rubbed his unshaven chin.

  Then he reached for a hypo. “Something hit him mighty hard,” he informed the breathless little group around him. “Swell piece of concussion if I ever saw it. I’ve got to get him back to the operating room and do a trephine job….” Then his exploring fingers touched the gold badge on the Inspector’s vest. “Say—who is it?”

  They told him who it was. Instantly he chose a different hypo. “Excuse me,” he corrected. “I’ve got to get him back to the operating room and let one of the big shots do a trephine.”

  Miss Withers was close beside him. “Doctor, what chance does he have?”

  The interne shrugged. “A swell chance—if we can keep him breathing for a while. They forget to breathe sometimes under a whack like that. Anyway, he won’t need any ether for the operation—he’ll be out stone cold for hours. All right, boys, lift him easy.”

  Miss Withers leaned over the limp figure for a moment, then she stood erect. “You want to ride along with him?” asked the interne.

  She shook her head. Sergeant Taylor stood beside her as they carried Oscar Piper away.

  “I’m glad you stayed,” said the Sergeant. “You can show us through this place. I know how you feel.”

  “Do you?” asked Miss Withers woodenly.

  “From now on I’m playing understudy,” she announced. “We’re working together?”