Murder on the Blackboard

by Stuart Palmer

  A newsboy came, crying his wares, just as she was in the middle of an extremely interesting letter on the editorial page, signed “Irate Citizen.” “Paper, lady?” The boy stared at her morning paper unpleasantly. “Afternoon paper’, lady? Worl’ Telegram, Sun an’ Post?”

  She frowned, disapprovingly, and then changed her mind. After all, she ought to read up on everything now. She handed the boy three pennies, and tucked a folded paper under her arm. Then she returned to Irate Citizen, who was openly in favor of legible house numbers and against dry-sweeping.

  The boy passed on, down toward the peanut stand where even at this late season a few nursemaids with baby carriages had congregated, surrounded by swarms of begging, bulging pigeons. He was yelling something gleaned from the news columns, but Miss Withers made an effort to keep her attention on her Times.

  It was not an easy matter, due to the swooping flight of the ever-hungry birds, and the merry cries of the be-sweatered and be-legginged children, who ran back and forth over Miss Withers’ feet, pursuing each other with misplaced zeal.

  At that moment a man, by his hangdog air and the state of his clothing a permanent member of the army of the unemployed, came furtively out of the bushes nearby, crossed the lawn, and stepped over the fence onto the sidewalk. Miss Withers did not notice him, no one noticed him. He was of the type whom no one notices, and it seems that even the Creator himself has forgotten.

  He paused beside the peanut stand, and one hand went into his pocket. A nickel was produced, and exchanged for a brown paper bag.

  This was routine procedure. The pigeons near by communicated, in their own mysterious fashion, the news of the approaching bounty to their more distant kind, and the air was immediately darkened.

  And then it happened. The peanut vendor shook his head, as if to clear his vision, and cocked it on one side. Several hundred birds did exactly the same thing, their amazement and surprise only too evident. This was unheard of! This was unthinkable!

  The silence and the nervous tension of the moment communicated itself to Hildegarde Withers, and she put away her Times. She looked down toward the peanut stand, past the wheeling, cheeping birds—and saw that the disheveled, hatless little man had broken the unwritten law of the place.

  He was walking swiftly on, toward the center of the park—and he was busily eating the peanuts he had bought!

  Several hundred pairs of eyes followed him out of sight—but one pair was sharper than all the rest. Hildegarde Withers rose to her feet, with her newspapers tucked under one arm and her umbrella gripped in her hand. She moved after him, quickly and implacably.

  She came around the curve of the sidewalk, to find the little man engaged in climbing the fence that set off the shrubbery.

  “Anderson!” she commanded. “Olaf Anderson, you come straight here!”

  He turned, his face paler than the shock of tumbled hair above it. There was little fight left in Anderson the janitor. His knees trembled, and he sniffed continually.

  “I bane come quiet,” he promised. “Don’t shoot!”

  She did not shoot. Miss Withers, however, did something even more drastic than shooting would have been. Her eyes piercing as gimlets, she leaned close to Anderson. “Listen to me!” she commanded.

  Then, pursing her lips, she emitted the fragment of a tune which had already become the theme song of this demented drama—the two notes thrice repeated that Anise Halloran had written in her last few minutes of life.

  “Whoooo-wheeeeeee—whoooo-wheeeee….”

  Anderson blinked, but no shadow of terror nor glint of intelligence showed in his face.

  Miss Withers tried again. “Didn’t you ever hear this before? Doesn’t it mean anything to you? Listen—whoooo-wheeeeee….”

  Anderson’s face lighted up. He took a stealthy step in the direction of the shrubbery. “Cuckoo,” he responded. “Cuckooooooo.” Then he suddenly turned and ran for his life.

  It was at that opportune moment that Motorcycle Officer Michael Vincent Cummings chose to come noisily down the Parkway, a freshly sharpened pencil and a new book of summonses in his breast pocket. He looked upon an angular lady waving a black umbrella frantically in the air, and then, at a glimpse of the janitor’s flying heels, Officer Cummings flipped his machine up on the sidewalk, through the fence wires, and up the slope toward the shrubbery.

  His motorcycle, like many another steed, balked suddenly at the barrier, leaving Officer Michael Vincent Cummings to transcribe a parabola in the air. His descent, however, brought him into contact with a pair of rapidly moving denim overalls, to which Officer Cummings clung with grim tenacity.

  “I gotcha!” he cried out, with that passion for stating the obvious which characterizes so many of us.

  From that point on Anderson the janitor spoke not at all, except to affirm his intense hunger, but he sneezed often and loud.

  Miss Withers watched the departing “wagon,” and shook her head sadly. Never in her life had she found her duty as a citizen so unpleasant to the taste. She tried to tell herself that this man had taken one life, and attempted two more, within the space of the last four days, but she could not make it stick.

  It was not until that moment that she turned to the afternoon paper which she had purchased. A two column box at the upper left caught her eye, and the heading held it. “I’ll Have the Last Laugh, Says Pfaffle…. Viennese criminologist from whom suspect in Halloran killing escaped yesterday says psycho-analysis will find him—look in Central Park, declared Augustine Pfaffle late this morning. The Professor went on to explain that his interrupted examination of the school-janitor showed him to be a pronounced victim of claustrophobia, or fear of closed spaces….”

  “Closed fiddlesticks,” declared Hildegarde Withers. She dropped the newspaper carefully into a Keep the City Clean container, whimsically modelled of concrete in imitation of a tree trunk, and marched off across the park toward the east. It was after eleven and she had promised to meet Georgie Swarthout at the Inspector’s room in Bellevue surgical ward at noon.

  She came silently through the door and seated herself by the head of Piper’s bed. The Inspector put aside his cigar and stared at her.

  “You look like all three of the Furies,” he told her. “What’s up?”

  She told him briefly of the events in the park. The Inspector raised his eyebrows so that they disappeared in a maze of bandages, and whistled softly.

  “Bravo! Three cheers, and other congratulations. Although it’s ten to one that the traffic cop you called in will get all the credit. Possibly he’ll mention that a feminine bystander aided him in spotting the wanted man.”

  “He can have the credit,” said Hildegarde Withers. “I don’t want any acclaim for dragging a man back to a cell out of the great outdoors. It makes me feel like something very low. As my children say, I could put on a top-hat and walk under a snake. The look in that man’s eyes when I called his name … it haunts me.”

  “This is going to be a feather in the cap of our visiting friend from Vienna,” the Inspector told her. He motioned to a litter of newspapers around his bed. “My X-rays came out so well this morning that they said I could read up on things a bit, which is how I happened to run across it. You know, I was just wondering if maybe there’s something in this psycho-analytical method of solving crimes?”

  Hildegarde Withers sniffed, audibly. “There’s everything in it except common-sense,” she announced. “Why, if I—”

  She was interrupted by a cheery hail from the doorway, and Georgie Swarthout arrived, a box of cigars under his arm for the Inspector, and a meaning look for Miss Withers.

  Piper opened the box, and sniffed at the aroma of Havana which rose to his nostrils. “You know,” he observed with a twinkle in his eye, “Vice-president Marshall was wrong, after all, when he said what this country needs is a good five-cent cigar. What this five-cent cigar needs is a good country.”

  Miss Withers ignored this, and turned to Georgie. “I can see t
hat you’re full to bursting with something,” she told him. “Come on, get it out of your system. Did your new lead come to anything? What was it, the murderer’s monogrammed cuff-links at the scene of the crime, or another missing ruby eye from the idol of the secret cult in Tibet?”

  “Neither one,” said Georgie Swarthout. “This isn’t out of an Edgar Wallace thriller, but it thrills me, all the same. I played my hunch, see?”

  “Begin at the beginning,” Miss Withers told him. “Go on until you get to the end, and then stop.”

  “It began when I saw that Stevenson guy,” said Georgie Swarthout. “I didn’t like his looks, see? Too fussy about his clothes….”

  “They don’t hang men for wearing tab collars and spats,” Miss Withers reminded him. “But go on.”

  “Well, it didn’t take me long to get wise to him,” Georgie announced. “That guy was concealing something.”

  “If there’s anybody in this case who isn’t,” Miss Withers observed wearily, “I don’t know who it is.”

  “Yeah. Well, anyway, I didn’t like his looks. The idea of a swell girl like Janey Davis mooning around after him!” Georgie shook his head. “I got suspicious of him right away. So I went down to where he lives, in the Village, and I had a talk with the little wop who sells ice and wood in the basement….”

  “And gin, a dollar a fifth, if I remember his quotation,” Miss Withers put in.

  “Huh? Yeah. I gave the wop a dollar to tell me if he’d seen any dame answering the description of the dead Halloran girl come down there with Stevenson. But that doesn’t get me anywhere. The wop swears that he never saw Stevenson bring a dame into his apartment, big or little, blonde or dark.”

  Georgie rose from his chair, and leaned across the foot of the bed. “But get this! I wasn’t satisfied with that, so I go upstairs. Stevenson isn’t home, and I pick his lock the way we did Dana Waverly’s last year in the bus murder case, and I go in.”

  “You are one up on me,” Miss Withers conceded. The Inspector leaned back on his pillows, but his hands clenched and unclenched at his sides.

  “Well, I went through the dump. Nothing much in the line of furniture. Mostly second-hand junk from the uncalled-for warehouses. Fireplaces full of burned newspapers. Bookcases full of books.”

  “What books?” Miss Withers judged people, first by their hands and feet, and next by their libraries.

  “Oh, just books. Nothing much. Mostly books on family trees and so forth. All about the Stevenson family, and the Addison family, and so forth. The living room didn’t get us anywhere, and the bathroom was also a blank, except for a few bugs in the tub. But there was a kitchenette in the wall, and in that kitchenette I found this!”

  With a flourish, the young detective pulled from his pocket a nearly-full bottle, and handed it to Miss Withers.

  “Ever see that label before?”

  She nodded slowly. “Dewar’s Dew of Kirkintilloch” had entered the case again.

  “And that proves Mister Stevenson isn’t the white-haired boy you thought he was,” declared Georgie Swarthout. “This liquor isn’t kicking around everywhere. I guess this is pretty good evidence that somebody besides the janitor knew about that secret entrance through the school cellar into the warehouse next door!”

  Miss Withers picked up the bottle, smelled it, and made a wry face. “This case is getting to have a pretty high alcoholic content,” she said slowly. “So far it’s been nothing but bottles of whiskey. If I weren’t a strict teetotaller already, I would be now, for certain.”

  The Inspector sat up against his pillows. “Swarthout, can’t you dig up some clues that are White Rock or seltzer or something? Discover a jar of buttermilk that points straight to the murderer, and Miss Withers will be ever so much happier.”

  “I’d be happier at anything that pointed straight to the murderer,” that lady told him acidly.

  At that moment the white-capped nurse knocked on the door. “A message for you, Inspector. It just arrived.”

  She brought a blue and white envelope, with the familiar Postal Telegraph monogram, and put it in Piper’s hand. He opened it savagely, and as he read its contents he ground his strong teeth deeply into Swarthout’s innocent cigar. Then he shoved his missive toward Miss Withers.

  It was signed by one Jasper Abbott, who had risen from street-car motorman to the elevated position of Assistant Commissioner of Police, by virtue of an inability to earn a living in any other fashion and a cousin high in the rolls of Tammany Hall. Mr. Abbott was not the Inspector’s closest buddy, and his wire did nothing to cement their friendship.

  It read: “THE COMMISSIONER DESIRES ME TO CONVEY TO YOU HIS PLEASURE AT HEARING THAT YOU WILL BE BACK ON DUTY WITHIN THE NEXT THREE OR FOUR WEEKS IN WHICH WE ALL JOIN STOP YOU WILL BE GLAD TO KNOW THAT IN YOUR ABSENCE PROFESSOR AUGUSTINE PFAFFLE OF VIENNA HAS BEEN APPOINTED ACTING INSPECTOR OF THE HOMICIDE SQUAD AT THE SUGGESTION OF DISTRICT ATTORNEY ROCHE AND GIVEN A FREE HAND IN THE HALLORAN CASE.”

  “Glad?” said the Inspector bitterly. “I’m practically tickled pink.”

  XV

  I Know Something I Won’t Tell

  (11/19/32—11:00 A.M.)

  JANEY DAVIS WAS ASLEEP, a vaguely troubled sleep, when the telephone rang. Her curly red-brown hair was tumbled across the pillow, and her body curled like a kitten’s. She reached out a smooth white arm and fumbled with the alarm clock. But the ringing went on.

  Then she sat up straight in bed, stark terror in her eyes. She was staring at the door. For a moment she remained there, soft, warm, terrified and lovely. Then the instrument across the room on the desk attracted her by its frantic vibrations, which almost lifted the receiver from the hook. She slipped her feet into a pair of mules, and crossed the room to the window. Once the wintry blasts were shut away, and the curtains raised to admit the dim glow which passes for daylight in Manhattan, she lifted the telephone.

  It was the voice of her chief, Mr. Waldo Emerson Macfarland, and by his tone he seemed very upset indeed.

  “Miss Davis? Janey? Listen to me carefully. I want you to get down to the school just as quick as ever you can….”

  “But—” the sleepiness left the girl’s voice. “But I thought there was to be no school until Monday! You said so yourself!”

  “Never mind what I said, pay no attention to that,” Macfarland told her. “I’ve just got my instructions, and I am giving you yours. When you get down there, telephone every teacher and every employee of the school—excepting poor Anderson, of course—and tell them to be there at one o’clock. No, I don’t know what it’s for. Something to do with the police. If any of them object, tell them there will be an officer after them if they are not down there at two o’clock. The officer on guard at the door will have his instructions to let you in. Am I making myself perfectly clear, and do you understand me?”

  “Yes, I understand you,” said Janey. “But I don’t see—I thought the case was closed? They arrested the janitor, didn’t they? Even if he got away, they caught him again … who else do they want?”

  “Whom else,” Macfarland told her absently. “And Janey—”

  “Yes, Mr. Macfarland?”

  “Be very careful what you say and how you act!”

  “As if he needed to tell me that,” said Janey Davis to herself. She went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth, vigorously. Then she turned on the shower, and let her pajamas slip from her body. Gingerly she stopped under the stream of water, tucking the last shreds of her hair under a green bathing cap.

  It was at that inauspicious moment that the telephone chose to ring again.

  Wearily, the girl stepped out of the tub again, wrapped a scanty bath towel around herself, and slopped over to the phone.

  “Hello? … Who? … Yes, this is me … Mr. Swarthout? … Say, with all night and all day to choose from, is there any law that you always have to phone me right in the middle of a bath? Besides, I’m in a hurry….”

  She wrapped the towel more closel
y around her shoulders. “What? No, I can’t have lunch with you today, either. I have to work. W-O-R-K, work. Yes. No, I don’t know when I’ll get through. Yes, at the school. No, I don’t think so … really, I can’t….”

  The faculty of Jefferson School had gathered faithfully in response to Janey’s telephone calls. By thirty-five minutes after two the narrow seats of Miss Vera Cohen’s classroom, always used for faculty meetings because of it nearness to the Principal’s office, were almost full.

  Even Betty Curran Rogers was there, a frightened smile on her lips and a shining new wedding ring on her left hand. Her knees were up at her chin, due to the lowness of the seat which was meant for second-graders, and her heart was in her mouth, due to the fact that at any moment she expected to receive official notice from Mr. Champney and Mr. Velie of the Board of Education that on the expiration of her contract at the end of the semester her services would no longer be required at Jefferson School. Since the new Mr. Rogers was a salesman of power cruisers, with a drawing account of twenty-two-fifty a week, the situation was not one to be taken lightly.

  Today Mr. Macfarland did not sit at the desk, with Janey Davis at his side to take dictation or make notes on his remarks. He was, like the rest of them, dutifully waiting on a bench. He fiddled with his eyeglasses.

  Janey Davis sat across the aisle from him, her pencil busily drawing little circles and whirligigs. Young Mr. Stevenson, in the seat behind, watched her anxiously, but she did not turn around.

  He leaned forward once to whisper, but she shook her head. “For Heaven’s sake remember where we are,” she whispered back.

  Miss Rennel was busily talking. “I’d like to know why we’re down here in the first place, and why we’re waiting in the second place? Land’s sake, nobody is any more anxious to cooperate than I am, but in my opinion this is highhanded, very highhanded….”