Janey pushed back her chair. “Oh—all right.” She smiled a little. “This is a waltz; do you waltz?”
“No, but I’ll hold you while you waltz,” promised Georgie. They waltzed.
In his arms the girl was stiff as cardboard, and trembling a little. Georgie leaned toward her ear, hidden in a mass of red-brown curls. “Is it as bad as all that? You act as if I was medicine.”
“Why did you bring me here?” she insisted. “What do you want to know?”
“Believe me, this is purely a social venture on my part,” he said. “I told myself the first moment that I saw you—here is a girl who can waltz. And now you stiff-arm me.”
Janey Davis relaxed, flinging her head back and closing her eyes. “Is that better?”
“You know it is.” They finished the dance in silence, and then returned to their table.
“But listen to me,” Janey insisted. “I’ve told the authorities everything I know about this case. Really—what do you want to know?”
“I want to know where you want to go for the rest of the evening,” Swarthout told her between bites. “My badge takes us past the box office at most of the theaters.”
Janey shook her head. “I can’t go anywhere, I’m sorry….”
“Another date?”
She nodded.
“With that Stevenson chap?”
She nodded again. “But I don’t see what business of yours it is.”
“It isn’t,” Georgie admitted. “He’s an awfully good friend of yours, isn’t he?”
“Of course he’s an awfully good friend—of both Anise and me.”
“Known him long?”
“Only since the beginning of school. This is my first year as Mr. Macfarland’s secretary, and his first year as assistant principal at Jefferson. But Anise met him last summer at Mr. Macfarland’s place up in Connecticut!”
Georgie did not conceal his interest in that fact. “Then Anise Halloran knew Stevenson—and Macfarland, too, for that matter—before school started?”
Janey put her hand to her lips. “I—I didn’t mean to say that!”
She half rose in her hair. “Why did you have to make me say that? Mr. Macfarland has been so kind to me, and Bob Stevenson is one of my best friends….” Ready tears sprang to her wide eyes, but there was something calculating behind them.
“I’m sorry,” Georgie Swarthout told her. “This asking questions gets to be a habit. Come on, break your date tonight. Let’s forget the whole mess, shall we, and just be gay?”
“I can’t be gay,” the girl told him. She reached for her handbag. “I don’t think I’ll ever be gay again. And you’ll have to excuse me—I’m not at all hungry. And I can’t forget that you’re a detective, either.”
“But not a very good detective,” Swarthout reminded her.
Janey Davis let him help her with her wrap. “I’m not so sure about that,” she said bitterly.
XVII
Blind Man’s Bluff
(11/20/32—12 noon)
MISS WITHERS WALKED NERVOUSLY up and down past the hospital bed, watching the Inspector polish off the last of his lunch. For the time being, the familiar hospital odors of ether and antiseptic were submerged in the rich aroma of chicken and mashed potatoes.
Piper pushed aside the plate and reached for a cigar. Miss Withers took a box of matches from the bedside table and struck one for him. Then she cast a mountain of Sunday papers from the side of the cot, and placed an ash-tray there.
“Pretty soft for you, Oscar,” she told him. “The rest is doing you good. I guess this was the only way in the world to make you take a vacation.”
“It’s soft enough,” Piper admitted. “Too soft, in fact. I’ve had all the vacation I want. I don’t see why I had to get socked on the head just at the time when there was a big murder investigation beginning.”
“You’re like the old lady who said it was too bad we had to have a depression during these hard times,” Miss Withers remarked.
The Inspector puffed fretfully at his cigar. “And I lie here on my back, with my hands tied, while the Commissioner turns that phoney professor from Vienna loose in my office!”
“Well, Professor Augustine Pfaffle turned himself out in a hurry,” Miss Withers reminded him. “He’s sent in a bill for three thousand dollars as a consultant’s fee, I hear. It would have been considerably less expensive for the people of the city of New York to have bought a copy of a book on abnormal psychology….”
“Or for that matter, to have electrocuted the janitor fellow, Anderson, without trying to find out what mental quirk made him bump off the girl.”
“As a matter of fact, he didn’t,” Miss Withers announced. “I’ve said so all along. I’ve told you and I told the Sergeant and I told Professor Pfaffle himself, though it didn’t do any good. But I know that Anderson didn’t kill Anise Halloran.”
“Yeah?” The Inspector’s nerves were not what they might have been. “I suppose you know who did?”
For a long moment Miss Withers did not answer. She was staring at the pitcher of ice water on the Inspector’s table, in which a little oblong reflection of the window danced merrily up and down.
She smoothed out her gloves. Then at last she spoke, her voice quiet.
“Oscar Piper, I do know!”
In spite of his bandaged head, the Inspector very nearly sat upright. “You know who killed that Halloran girl? And you’re sitting here, doing nothing about it? For the love of God, who did it, and why?”
Miss Withers pursed her lips very tightly. “I only know who.”
“Well, spill it!”
She shook her head. “What good would it be for me to tell you, or anybody down at Headquarters either? It’s too fantastic, too impossible. Nobody would believe me, and I haven’t got any proof. It’s just a hunch, but I know it’s right.”
The Inspector forgot himself so far as to hurl his dead cigar across the room. “Tell me … who is it? The flower of the old South, Mr. A. Robert Stevenson? Waldo Emerson Macfarland, who writes an essay every day and two on Sunday? One of the other teachers—say that big husky Pearson girl who wears low-heeled shoes and mannish clothes?”
“I’m making no announcements now,” insisted Hildegarde Withers. “If I told you what I’m thinking, you would have the Sergeant and probably those two blundering detectives Allen and Burns making an arrest within five minutes. And then you’d discover, after a few weeks, that there wasn’t sufficient evidence against that person to convict, and the case would be dropped.”
“Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn’t,” the Inspector argued. “Say, I bet I know who you’re putting the finger on! A woman could have done this job, hatchet and shovel and all!”
Miss Withers kept her face impassive. “Remember one thing while you’re guessing, Oscar Piper. The murderer of Anise Halloran was smart and clever. This is one of the most diabolic and ingenious plots I’ve ever heard of, but also the most confusing. Because things are not what they seem….”
“Skim milk masquerades as cream …” chimed in the Inspector, finishing the old ditty.
“Exactly. And the whole thing was planned to represent a crime of passion, but there was about as much passion in it really as a butcher shows when he does whatever is done to a steer. The murderer figured on everything, and provided for every possibility except bad luck.”
“And that bad luck?”
“Was being too careful of details like shoes,” Miss Withers finished. “Now if you can figure out anything from that point, you’re welcome to it….”
She broke off suddenly as the door opened and the round, inquiring face of Sergeant Taylor showed itself.
He touched his hat to Miss Withers, and then went to the foot of the bed. “How’r yuh, Chief?”
“Don’t ‘chief’ me,” said Piper bitterly. “You’re graduated out of my class now into the psycho-criminology class, or so I hear. Go back and take your orders from Professor Pfoof, or whatever his name is.
”
“That’s what I came up here about,” said Taylor unhappily. “All that psycho-what-you-call-it business is washed up, Chief. The Commissioner is sore as a boil about Professor Pfaffle’s resigning before he could fire him, and then running straight to the District Attorney with his pet theory about Anderson. They say the D.A. is going to have Anderson indicted before the Grand Jury according to Pfaffle’s statement of the case, and the Commissioner said I was to come up here and get any suggestions you or Miss Withers might give me. He says we need a new angle on the case …”
The Inspector smiled grimly. “So that’s the theme song, eh? The honor of the dear old department is at stake again. And so the Commissioner wants me, lying here in bed, to dope out a new Hatchet Fiend for him and show up Pfaffle! Well, he can …”
“Oscar!” Miss Withers rubbed her nose, vigorously. “I have the germ of an idea. Now if the Sergeant will follow it….”
“Yeah,” said Taylor bitterly. “I followed one of your ideas, and now I’m going to be sued for false arrest by that Curran girl you were sure had something to do with the case!”
Miss Withers stopped short. “That’s true. I did think she had something to do with the case. And all the time she was getting married, secretly. Sergeant, that was a joke on me … a joke on me….” Her voice faded away.
Suddenly her eyes lighted up. “I’ve got it! Eureka, I’ve got it. I mean I have it! I’ve been blind as a bat! But now I’ve got it!”
The Inspector looked at her as if she had gone daft. Miss Withers was dancing a quiet little buck and wing all by herself.
“You’ve got what, Hildegarde? Ants? Or the shakes or something?”
She nodded, happily. “Ants do come into it. At least one does. Oh, it fits, it all fits! I not only know who now, I know why!”
She stopped short. “Proving it is a different matter, I’m afraid. The hunt has only just begun, but at least I’m not hunting blind any more. I know what I’m after, which is a help. All we need is a decoy….”
“A what?” The Sergeant was obviously skeptical and bewildered.
“We need a goat,” Miss Withers told him sharply. “When they hunt tigers in India, I’ve read that they first tie a goat to a tree. The goat blats and wails at night, and the tiger hears it, comes prowling around, and thinks he’s found some easy meat. But while he’s eating the meat, the man up in the tree shoots him dead. It’s very simple and easy.”
“Except for the goat,” the Inspector put in. “I suppose you’ve picked the Sergeant here for that part?”
“I have not.” The Sergeant looked considerably relieved. But Miss Withers continued.
“You, Oscar, are going to be the goat!”
“What’s that?” the Inspector very nearly put the hot end of his cigar in his mouth.
“You’ve been complaining that things were dull, and that you were left out of the picture, weren’t you? Well, I’m going to put you back into the picture.” Hildegarde Withers smiled on him, benignly.
“Me? But what can I do? With this damn bandage across my head, and the doctor saying that I’ve got to stay in bed two more weeks….”
“You can play goat in bed,” Miss Withers told him.
XVIII
Homework
(11/20/32—8:30 P.M.)
“I FEEL COLD,” SAID Janey Davis. “Bob, I don’t want to walk in the park, even if there is a moon. Can’t we just stay here in the apartment?”
Bob Stevenson laughed. “Of course, honey. I forgot that you’re a little hothouse flower, and this is November going on December.” He elbowed his way out of the tiny kitchenette, in which he had been helping Janey prepare a light supper for the two of them, and felt of the radiator.
“Cold as ice,” he announced. “Would it do any good to pound on it?”
Janey shook her head. “It’s not that kind of cold, Bob. I feel cold inside. And sort of frightened.”
He came quickly toward her, and held out his arms. She let him hold her for a moment, her face against his shoulder, and then pushed him away.
“Don’t mind me,” she said. “I know there’s nothing to be frightened of. I’m afraid I’m bad company tonight.” She went over to the empty fireplace.
He leaned back in his easy chair, facing her. “I know what’s the trouble, honey. It’s the idea of going back to the old routine tomorrow, back to Jefferson School … back where Anise was—”
“Don’t! Please don’t! I can’t stand it, Bob.” Her face was white and desperate. “Bob, let’s go away somewhere, now, tonight! Let’s go where nobody will ever mention Anise’s name again—where nobody will ever ask questions and wonder and pry! Can’t we, Bob?”
“There are some things you can’t run away from,” said Bob Stevenson. “I feel the same way, and I suppose the others do, too. Hold on a little longer, Janey, and we will go away—far away. Ships sail down past the Goddess of Liberty bound for Majorca and Bali and Timbuctoo….”
“Timbuctoo is in the desert,” Janey reminded him. But she was smiling.
He waved his arm. “How does Persia sound then, or Rangoon? They say the Irish lakes are the most beautiful lakes in the world … and Cambodia has temples that were just as they are today long before our ancestors came down out of the trees. One of these days, Janey—”
“Oh, Bob!” Then a practical note entered her voice. “I don’t know what we’d use for money, though. Unless I cashed that lottery ticket….”
“Well? I don’t think Anise would mind, Janey. She had no people, you know. Nobody that she’d want her money to go to more than you. And half of that ticket was yours….”
Janey sat on the arm of his chair. “Maybe I am being a little foolish about it, Bob. And I do want to get away from it all, so very badly….”
The telephone interrupted her.
Janey Davis whirled around, her finger pointing at the innocent instrument. “There! That’s what I mean. We can’t get away, even in dreams. I feel like a hunted thing, day and night. The police, or the reporters, or Dr. Macfarland …”
“I imagine poor Mac feels a bit hunted himself these days,” Bob told her. “Hadn’t you better answer it? It’s probably the wrong number.”
Savagely, her lithe body moving like an angry panther’s, she crossed the room and raised the receiver.
“Yes?”
It was Georgie Swarthout’s voice at the other end of the line. “Is that you, Janey?”
“Yes, it’s me.” She pressed her hand over the mouthpiece, and looked helplessly at Stevenson. “That fresh detective again, Bob. He hounds me half to death, trying to make me go out with him. What will I do?”
“My advice would be to go,” Bob Stevenson told her. “You can’t afford to antagonize any fly cop, darling. He seems a harmless kid, and you could use a friend at court, as the saying goes.”
Janey shook her head, rebelliously. Swarthout’s voice was booming cheerfully in her ear. Suddenly she realized that he wasn’t trying to make a date this time.
“Will you say that again?” She listened now, with all her might and main.
“Sure I will. Get this, Beautiful. I just wanted to find out whether you were in or not. I’ve got to see you for a moment. On business, official business. Something has broken in the Halloran murder.”
“Where are you? … come right up,” Janey gasped.
“I’m on my way.” And the line went dead. Janey told the young instructor what had transpired.
“I’ll be running along, then,” suggested Stevenson.
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” said Janey Davis. “I want your moral support. Georgie Swarthout has a hot brown eye, and there is no discouraging him. If this visit is official, there’s nothing he could have to say to me that you can’t hear. And if it isn’t, I think it’s just as well that you’re lurking in the background.”
“Okay,” agreed the young man. He put on his coat and straightened his tie. He was hardly back in the easy chair again when the downst
airs bell broke into a clamor, and Georgie Swarthout raced up the stairs.
If he was disappointed to see Bob Stevenson sitting there, he concealed it like a true philosopher.
“Listen,” he said breathlessly. “I’ve only got a few minutes. Lucky for me I found you both here. Saves me a trip to the Village.”
“I don’t understand …” Janey faced him defiantly.
“You’re taking a trip to Bellevue, both of you,” Georgie explained.
“But why both of us?” Janey wanted to know.
“And why Bellevue? That’s a hospital, isn’t it?” Bob Stevenson was alert.
“Listen carefully,” said Swarthout. “We’ve got a big break in the Halloran case. It’s going to be washed up tonight. You’ll both be glad to know that. And here is how.”
Bob Stevenson stood up and crossed over to the fireplace, where Janey was. Georgie dropped into the easy chair, and fumbled for a cigarette.
“Are we in luck!” he exclaimed. “Piper is over there with a mending skull, you know. At Bellevue, I mean. It was a pretty close one for him, but he’s beginning to come out of it. Which is why both of you, and every other person implicated in this Halloran case, is going to gather at Bellevue tonight—as quick as you all can get there. Because”—Georgie lit his cigarette, carefully and thoroughly—“because it’s ten to one that the murderer of Anise Halloran is somewhere in that crowd. And Piper is going to identify the guilty party!”
Janey Davis was clinging to the mantel, her fingers white at the knuckles. For a moment she swayed, and then her body was tense again.
“Identify? What do you mean? How can the Inspector identify anybody?” Bob Stevenson was frankly puzzled.
“Well,” explained Georgie, “you heard that the Inspector walked into the cellar of Jefferson School while the murderer was still at work, didn’t you? And got hit over the head with a shovel for his pains?”
“Yes, I heard all that,” agreed Stevenson. “But he didn’t get a glimpse of whoever struck him!”
“So the papers said. And that’s what he thought when he first came to. A crack on the head like that affects the memory of events that happened shortly before, so the medics say. Anyway, it’s beginning to come back to him. He did get a glimpse of the face … and he remembers it! So all we have to do is to round up everybody and walk them through the hospital room. He’ll pick out the murderer, and the rest of you will go free of suspicion.”
Murder on the Blackboard Page 17