Murder on the Blackboard

by Stuart Palmer

“I’m afraid this is a murder inquiry, not a picnic,” she suggested. The Sergeant was already at the door, bound for the office and the telephone. Miss Withers saw her chance.

  “I’ll have to be excused for a little while,” she said to the Principal.

  Macfarland was bending one of the wings of his stand-up collar back and forth.

  “But Miss Withers … the Sergeant wants to question all of us. And I must speak with you privately.”

  She paused at the doorway. “Later, Mr. Macfarland.”

  “But I wanted to tell you … I thought, that in the light of the new developments in the case since I talked to you last night … it might not be necessary …”

  “It is necessary,” said Hildegarde Withers. She went out into the hall and down toward the main door.

  Officer Mulholland interposed his bulk as she reached the doorway. “Sorry, ma’am. But the Sergeant says nobody was to leave this place till he gave the word.”

  “But for Heaven’s sake, man, that doesn’t apply to me.”

  Miss Withers smiled her prettiest smile, but Mulholland shook his head.

  “It’s as much as my job is worth, ma’am,” he told her. “If the Sergeant says so….”

  Miss Withers could hear the Sergeant’s voice booming out over the telephone. At the moment she wanted nothing less than an interview with that gentleman, unless it was an interview with Macfarland himself.

  “All right, Mulholland,” she said. “There are more ways to kill a cat than choking it to death with butter.” And she turned on her heel.

  As the officer went back to his post, Miss Withers paused outside the door marked “Principal.”

  She nodded, slowly. The Sergeant was giving the telephonic third degree to Betty Curran’s landlady.

  “You say she gave up her room with you at the beginning of last week? And she drew all her money out of the bank, huh? No forwarding address—what’s that? Okay. Yeah. What color hair did she have?”

  Miss Withers turned, and swiftly ran up the stairs to the third floor. She passed down the hall to the little square door at the end, took a deep breath, and forced it open.

  Immediately the siren shattered the stillness of the big empty building, shrieking its alarm to high heaven.

  But Hildegarde Withers was paying no attention to the disturbance she was creating. Swiftly and dizzily she was sliding down the old-fashioned spiral fire-escape, chute-the-chute fashion, her hat gripped in one hand and her bag in the other.

  Round and round she went, until at last her brown oxfords struck the door at the bottom, and she slid out into the daylight.

  She picked herself up, made a cursory examination of her skirt to make sure that there had not been an unfriendly nail or bit of jagged metal anywhere in the slide, and then strode swiftly across the playground, around the teeter-totters, and out into the street.

  Five minutes later she was in a taxi-cab, bound across town.

  Calling all cars … calling all cars … a missing girl … a missing girl … name Beth Curran … age twenty-three … blonde hair … height five feet two inches … weight a hundred and fifteen pounds … last seen wearing a blue coat and blue hat … mole on left cheek …

  Slowly, almost mournfully, the description droned itself out through the invisible ether. Long black touring cars, two hundred of them, pulled over to the curb while stubby pencils took down the details.

  Teletype mechanisms clicked furiously in every important city of the nation, reproducing the words … “Last seen wearing a blue coat and hat….” Morgue attendants lifted the white sheets from many a marble slab. Down at the Bureau of Missing Persons an elderly gentleman in a Lieutenant’s cap and shirt sleeves laboriously filled out a yellow card. “… weight a hundred and fifteen pounds … last seen wearing a blue coat and hat….”

  Hildegarde Withers, all oblivious of the furor she had created, was standing on the stoop of a remodelled tenement on Barrow Street, in the heart of Greenwich Village.

  Facing her, and resting comfortably on a fifty-pound cake of ice, a swarthy person was fingering a fifty-cent piece.

  “Sure Mister Stevenson he is one of my customer, why not? Two, three mont’ I deliver his ice. He pay me every week. Why he have anybody else when my place right down here in his basement?”

  Miss Withers nodded. “Did you deliver anything else to him but ice?”

  The swarthy man nodded. “Sometimes he phone me at night when he want a fire. Hees fireplace, you know. I bring a wood, cheap.”

  That wasn’t what Miss Withers meant. “Oh, you mean da gin?” Pietro shook his head vigorously “I have good gin, cost dollar a fifth. Everybody else in these building, he’s my customer. But Mist’ Stevenson, he’s never order that. He don’t have wild parties, I guess. Just orders ice, and wood when he have a lady guest and want it nice and cheerful and warm.”

  “Aha!” Miss Withers herself was getting warmer. She ventured a cautious question.

  “No, signora. I never see Mister Stevenson with a little yellow-haired lady, no. He’s not have any lady friend like you say, who wears a blue coat and hat. I know all about him. I live right here. I see everybody come in, everybody go out. Sometimes he have a tall, pretty lady, dark and thin, but no yellow-haired lady.”

  Well, that was that. There was nothing more she could do here, having already discovered Stevenson’s apartment locked, and no evidence of a key under the mat or above the ledge of the door.

  Miss Withers contributed another fifty-cent piece in consideration of the little Neapolitan’s keeping quiet about her scouting foray, and then reentered her taxi.

  She took stock for a moment, and then told the man to drive her down to Center Street. All her hunches in this case seemed to be leading her up blind alleys.

  “I must be getting childish,” she told herself, scoldingly. “In every case there’s an essential clue, pointing straight to the murderer. But if there’s one here, it’s like the purloined letter in Poe’s story—too obvious to be seen.”

  She climbed up the stone steps of the dreary building which is Police Headquarters, and went directly to the office which had been Inspector Oscar Piper’s. The inner door was closed, but in the outer office Lieutenant Keller, her old acquaintance, was engaged with a container of brew and a sack of liverwurst sandwiches.

  For a few moments they said the usual things about the Inspector. “I called the hospital this morning,” Miss Withers confided, “and they said he was going out of it nicely. As soon as he’s conscious I can see him for a minute, maybe tonight or tomorrow morning.”

  She accepted a sandwich. “Do you think there’s any chance of his knowing what struck him?”

  The Lieutenant shrugged his shoulders. “We know who struck him all right all right. That Swede janitor is going to get his. Only one thing I don’t understand. The Inspector isn’t as young as he used to be, but he’s no weakling yet, and he knows how to take care of himself. I don’t see how any drunken maniac could hit him over the head without the Inspector’s doing anything about it.”

  Miss Withers nodded. “I agree with you. That’s why I talked the Police-Surgeon into going with me this morning to give Anderson a test, there in the precinct house. The Sergeant doesn’t think Anderson was drunk.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Lieutenant Keller answered. “But he’s wrong. I talked to Dr. Farnsworth on the phone a few minutes ago. He tried to call you, but you weren’t at the number you gave him. He gave Anderson the works, and he says the ugly is still loaded up with alcohol. You could burn him for Sterno. The doc says that Anderson must have been crazy drunk last night. Of course, those big Swedes can hold twice as much liquor as anybody else. All the same … anyway, Allen and Burns are up a tree. If the guy was as drunk as the doc says he was, there’s no use to third-degree him, because he won’t remember what happened anyway.”

  Miss Withers looked at the opposite wall and nodded. “I’d like to know how a man can get dead drunk in a cellar without letting the police
see him when they search the place twice—and without even leaving one empty bottle around.” She had another idea.

  “Lieutenant, have you checked up on Tobey, the little man from across the street who sells candy and so forth? Not that he seems to be implicated, but I just wondered.”

  “Sure we checked up on him,” Keller answered. “There’s no harm in little Tobey, ma’am. He’s had that place for years. He sells cheap candy, and bootleg fireworks in the summer. Lately, according to what the boys dug up, he’s been selling a little bootleg liquor, too. Though he doesn’t seem to be hooked up with any gang. It’s good stuff, not poison or anything like that. And as long as nobody dies from the stuff, we keep hands off. The Federal men can do their own snooping.”

  “So his liquor is better than his candy, eh?” Miss Withers finished the last of her sandwich. “Well, I’d better be running along, Lieutenant.”

  But she was to do no running along yet awhile. In the doorway she met a bustling young man.

  It was Dr. Levin, Assistant Medical Examiner for the County of New York, and he was in a hurry.

  “Hello, Miss Withers—how’s the Inspector? Hello, Keller. Well, here’s our report, such as it is. Want to look it over before it goes to the Commissioner?”

  The Lieutenant wanted to look it over, and so did Miss Withers. “But where’s the little package you were going to bring me?” asked the former.

  “The package? Oh, you mean the teeth.” Levin shook his head. “No use, Lieutenant. They wouldn’t do you a bit of good in making an identification of the body.”

  “Why not? Say, I’ve got to have those teeth. We’ll find out what dentist this Halloran dame went to, and let him identify them. It’s a cinch … unless they were destroyed in the fire….”

  “It is not,” Levin contradicted. “It is not a cinch at all. Because while the teeth of the body I just performed an autopsy on are uninjured by the fire, they’re also uninjured by anything else, including dentists’ drills. In other words, this girl never had a cavity in her life. So how are you going to prove anything with them?”

  The Lieutenant was flabbergasted. “But how are we going to establish the identity of the corpse without them? Miss Withers here thinks she saw Anise Halloran dead in the Cloakroom, but how are we going to make a jury believe that the body in the furnace is the same girl? It stands to reason—but that isn’t legal proof. We’ve got to show a corpus delicti … and when a body’s been in the furnace for half an hour, blazing merrily, there isn’t much corpus left.”

  Miss Withers picked up the report, on an official form of the Medical Examiner’s Office. It stated, in medical terminology, that the cadaver examined was that of a young woman of the Caucasian race … that the cause of death was a fracture of the frontal bone of the skull by means of a heavy sharp instrument, probably an axe, and that death was instantaneous due to injury to the brain.

  “It’s not much of a report,” Levin admitted. “There was less than ninety pounds weight in the cadaver. Everything burned off—hair, face, skin of the body—even both legs were consumed and one hand. Half an hour longer and there’d have been only the thorax, and not much of that.”

  “Whoever put that girl in the furnace knew how to work the drafts,” Lieutenant Keller suggested. “If he gets out of the Chair, this janitor ought to get himself a job in a crematorium.”

  Miss Withers wrinkled her nose. “I’m beginning to be convinced against my will, that this was the work of fiend, after all.”

  Dr. Levin, lingering as if there was still something on his mind, nodded. “The funny part of it is that it was all so unnecessary,” he said slowly.

  “Unnecessary? But isn’t murder usually unnecessary?”

  “This one more than most. Because Anise Halloran—if this is the body of Anise Halloran—was in a pretty bad way before she was ever hit over the head.”

  The young doctor leaned against the table. “It came up almost accidentally,” he admitted. “I was making a little test of my own to determine how long the body had been exposed to extreme heat. There is a change in the structure of the bones after a certain length of time, and I was working with sulphuric acid on a specimen of the bone of the hand. I stumbled on an interesting little detail. The subject was pretty far gone with pernicious anaemia of the bones—one of the littlest known and most deadly forms of anaemia. She might have lived, but she would have been a hopeless invalid all her life. The animal structure of her bones was wasting away—and no amount of fire could cause that!”

  He put on his hat. “So long, everybody. Give my regards to the Inspector when you see him. Good thing for the Department that he was hit with the flat side of the axe instead of the sharp. I suppose the boys will be chipping in one of these days to buy some flowers or something to send up to him. Don’t forget, Lieutenant, I want a hand in it….”

  “Wait!” Miss Withers clutched his arm as he was making for the door. “Hand! That’s it, hand! Didn’t you say that the fire destroyed both legs and one hand of the body?”

  Dr. Levin nodded. “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Plenty!” Miss Hildegarde Withers drew herself up to her full height. “That leaves, if my count is right, one hand that wasn’t burned?”

  Levin nodded. “The left hand it was. According to the boys who dragged the body out of the furnace after using fire extinguishers on it, that hand escaped because it had fallen down, under the coal, so that it protruded into the ash-pit underneath. But what about it?”

  “This about it,” said Hildegarde Withers. “Anise Halloran was very dainty, very fussy about herself. The other teachers used to gossip about her because she always went to a beauty parlor over on Lexington Avenue for a manicure, instead of doing it for herself.” Miss Withers pointed a long bony finger at the Lieutenant. “Get busy and find that manicurist, the one who was used to doing Anise Halloran’s finger nails. Take her down and show her the unburned hand—she’ll identify the body as well as any dentist could!”

  The Lieutenant nodded, and then hitched up his belt. “Say! It might work at that. Where’s this beauty parlor at? I’ll put a man on it immediate.”

  “I suppose it’s going to be just a little hard on the manicure girl,” Miss Withers told Dr. Levin as the Lieutenant bent over the telephone across the room. “Identifying a partially cremated corpse!”

  The young doctor grinned. “Say, dentists get calls to do it all the time. And I never saw a manicure girl yet who wasn’t harder boiled than any dentist who ever breathed.” He picked up his hat again. “This seems like a lot of red tape in order to prove that a body of a girl is really her own body, but that’s the way these things have to be done.”

  Miss Withers nodded agreeably. “I don’t suppose it has occurred to you that perhaps the body of this girl isn’t really her own body? Another young teacher disappeared recently from Jefferson School. And before long I’m going to find out where and why!”

  “You’ve got a nice day for it,” said Dr. Levin as he went through the doorway.

  X

  Cinderella’s Slippers

  (11/16/32—12:30 P.M.)

  “ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT.” The Lieutenant moved wearily toward his telephone. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t have the shoes sent up here, did I? I just said you wouldn’t get anywhere with them. Why that janitor fellow took it into his head to collect dames’ shoes is more than I can figure out. But everybody to their own taste, as the old lady said when she kissed the cow.”

  “Maybe Anderson could furnish some explanation of the shoes,” Miss Withers suggested.

  But the Lieutenant shook his head. “He’s foxy, that Swede. Just plays dumb and tells the boys he never heard of the shoes. Says somebody must have brought ’em in and hid ’em in his room, which is a fat chance.” He bent closer to the inter-office phone.

  “Hello, McTeague? Who’s got the box of slippers the boys dug up in the janitor’s room at Jefferson School the other night? Property clerk … oh, the D.A., huh?
Well, leap over and get ’em, will you?”

  A few minutes later Miss Withers bent above a small cardboard box, of the type used for packing groceries or druggists’ notions. In it were five pairs of shoes. All were well-worn and of last year’s mode, and all but one pair of oxfords were frivolous and light in weight. She took out an opera pump, surveyed its battered heel, and then placed it thoughtfully on her hand. She surveyed it from several angles, and then put it down and took up a strap of sandal. This also came in for close scrutiny.

  The Lieutenant watched her. “I don’t see what that’ll get you, ma’am, I honestly don’t. They’re just old shoes that Anderson picked up in the garbage cans or somewhere. He’s a queer duck—but the shoes haven’t got anything to do with this case.”

  “No? That’s what Sergeant Taylor thought, too.” Miss Withers pushed the box toward the policeman. “Come, come, Lieutenant. See anything strange about these shoes that you think Anderson picked up from garbage pails or dump heaps?”

  Keller shook his head. “Just shoes far as I’m concerned, ma’am. All dames’ shoes look alike to me.”

  “That’s just it! These shoes look too much alike. There’s a reason—they’ve all been worn by the same feet. All five pairs are just the same size, and the heels are worn down the same peculiar way. What’s more—” Miss Withers lowered her voice to a whisper—“what’s more, I’ll stake my life on it that the person was Anise Halloran!”

  “But how …?”

  “I looked through Anise Halloran’s closet last night,” Miss Withers confessed. “I saw her shoes, and studied them closely. I always notice gloves and shoes. Well, these are not only of the same size and type, they’re identical—even to the angle of the heel’s wearing away!”

  Miss Withers suddenly stood up. “Give me that telephone,” she said abruptly. “This morning I objected to Allen and Burns giving the janitor a third-degree. That’s why I brought the doctor up to examine him, for the most part. But now I’m going to call the precinct house and tell those two strong-arm detectives that they can go as far as they like with Anderson. They can knock the stuffing out of him, for all I care. Because there’s no innocent reason why he could have started a collection of the dead girl’s shoes. He’s in this case up to his neck, Lieutenant.”