Murder on the Blackboard

by Stuart Palmer

  “But supposing Anise was married to Bob Stevenson! Still it did not make sense that he’d kill her to get the ticket when naturally he would share in the wealth as her husband.

  “I mulled and mulled over the problem. There were a dozen little details that didn’t fit in. Anise had been looking very badly for the last few days, even I noticed that at school. She had also, we discovered, taken to secret drinking, which was entirely out of character. The liquor was not enough to have caused her ill health. I figured that there must be something deeper, more sinister.

  “What puzzled me most was the murder being committed almost under my nose. The murderer must have known that I pride myself on snooping in such cases. Therefore, either he had no choice, or else he desired my intervention. Or both!”

  “It makes my head ache,” complained the Inspector. “But go on.”

  “Well, it was the latter possibility that made me sure Anderson could not have committed the murder. Whoever did it carefully planned everything to point in a certain direction—but not too obviously. I was supposed to start sleuthing around, and to happen upon the chain of clues leading to Anderson. A crime of violence—the body buried in the cellar, where only the janitor was at home—the shoes hidden where they were sure to be found—everything spelled janitor. Except that the janitor was really drunk, judging by the doctor’s report and the evidence of the straw in his eyebrows. Besides—his feet were too big. Remember the shoes that I found on the floor near the body of Anise Halloran? Professor Pfaffle was sure it was a sex murder because of that. And actually, the murderer, knowing that I was in my room and guessing that I might become suspicious, removed the shoes from the corpse and put them on his own feet! Carrying his own shoes, he walked down the hall past my door, inadvertently arousing my suspicion by the shuffling sound he made. I thought Anise was ill—and rushed out to make sure. The murderer stopped in the doorway to put on his own shoes again, and then tossed Anise’s back through the window into the room with the corpse from outside!”

  The Inspector nodded. “So far so good. Go on.”

  “I figured that out quite easily. Well, then the murderer slipped back into the building, figuring on burying the body where it would be found later and sending the janitor to the death house.”

  “Wait,” objected Piper. “How did he know that Anderson would not surprise him?”

  “He knew of the janitor’s little hideaway,” Miss Withers insisted. “He must have learned that by accident, when coming down to the cellar for manual training supplies or lumber for his classes. That was the premise upon which he built everything else. And he knew that Anderson got dead drunk there, every afternoon.

  “But he didn’t count upon my finding the body in the Cloakroom. He knew that I never use the room, but keep my hat in my desk. He was in the cellar, digging his grave, preparatory to putting the body under ground, when we upset the whole apple cart. You walked in on him—and he hit you with the flat of the shovel, from behind. He had the hatchet with him, but he didn’t want to kill you.

  “He knew that if one detective came, others would follow. So he had to give up the idea of burying the corpse. The furnace was handy, and he thrust it in, built up the fire, and hid himself somewhere on the upper floors—probably on the second, where he placed the murder hatchet in the exhibit case, in place of the wooden one which he must have taken away with him and destroyed.”

  “Where did he get the real hatchet?”

  Miss Withers shrugged her shoulders. “You forget that he had complete control of the manual training room, as well as the science laboratory. He alone knew how many hatchets there ought to be—and that’s why none were found missing.

  “Anyway, he hid on the second floor, afraid to try to make a break for it through the front door. Probably he did not think of the fire escape at the time. At any rate, he remained in the building until I had searched the third floor, and was almost ready to try the second! Wait—I’ve got it. He was waiting, trying to get into his own classroom. He wanted to destroy some evidence which he knew was there.”

  “And that was what?”

  “A cigarette lighter and a can of benzine and some unwashed glasses,” Hildegarde Withers explained. “All of which proves that his hand had been forced, somehow. He had not meant Anise to die that afternoon, but somehow it became necessary.”

  “The lottery ticket announcement in the paper?”

  “Probably. Undoubtedly. You ask why he wanted to kill Anise when she was coming into a fortune?”

  Miss Withers shook her head. “He didn’t want to kill her, then. But he had to finish the job that he’d already started with minute doses of benzine. That was why he’d got Anise into the unhealthy habit of drinking every day—he got her into his room between classes and they drank together—with a drop of benzine in her glass, its flavor deadened by whiskey.

  “If he stopped the doses then—she would remain a helpless invalid, a burden to him all his life. Remember the guinea pig that died, and the other one that became an invalid? He tested the doses on them first—God knows how he learned of the poison. He was a science teacher, remember. He might have read of the Frenchman’s report on the effect of refined petroleum products on monkeys that Dr. Van Donnen told me about. Anyway, he was quietly going about the job of killing his secret wife when he struck a snag. And this was it!”

  Miss Withers jumped to her feet. “It wasn’t entirely the lottery ticket. He had to kill Anise by violence, because while he succeeded in making her a dipsomaniac, she didn’t like the taste of his liquor mixed with benzine. She knew where he bought it, from the stock Tobey had got from Anderson, and she went there and supplied herself with her own stock!

  “His dosing of her was cut off in the middle—right where she was doomed to invalidism, but not to die. The lottery business was only incidental, he was killing her because he was tired of her, or because he had fallen in love with her roommate, or because he was burning to try the new method of murder he had learned about. There are men like that, Oscar.”

  “You’re telling me!”

  “Well, he was fairly well covered, he thought. The benzine can was explained by the cigarette lighter. Only I couldn’t understand why the lighter had never been used, and yet the benzine can was nearly empty. As for the glass he forgot to wash, it was only luck that a red ant happened to wander into his laboratory, perhaps brought in by some specimens or dirt samples or something, and inadvertently tipped the whole thing off by drinking the poisoned residue in the glass, and dying.

  “The rest is simple. All he had to do was to sit back and let the bright Miss Withers solve the murder of Anise Halloran by the wicked janitor, and let Anderson go to the electric chair for it. Only something slipped. Something always slips. It was dramatic justice in this case that it happened as it did. Anise Halloran, or Anise Stevenson as her name was, clung to the shreds of her marital happiness. Even though she had begun to fear her husband—witness the gun loaded with blanks that she had Janey Davis procure for her over in New Jersey somewhere—still she wore her wedding ring. And when he threw her body into the blazing furnace, she was still wearing it.”

  “You mean, he didn’t know enough to take it from her finger?”

  “It wasn’t on her finger, silly. She couldn’t let anyone see it. She wore it somewhere next to her body, probably on a cord around her neck. Bob Stevenson never thought of searching her for it in his haste—and that blackened and partly fused bit of metal was a terrible link in the chain against him!

  “Another thing went wrong. The shoes—there was something wrong about the shoes. He planted them in the janitor’s quarters that day—but they were Anise’s shoes. And where would Anderson get five or six pairs of Anise Halloran’s shoes? Who, besides Stevenson, could possibly acquire more than one pair at the most? He had access to her apartment. He had known her for a long time. And his passion for completeness and full detail tripped him neatly. The shoes fooled the detectives. They fooled Pfaffle, but
they didn’t fool me.

  “I was neatly fooled,” confessed the Inspector. “When you finally convinced me that Anderson was being framed, I was sure the guilty party was Macfarland. I think it was because of the sneeze you heard in the hall outside your door just about the time the murder was committed—when Macfarland was supposed to be at home writing his essay, and wasn’t.”

  Miss Withers nodded. “It was like Stevenson to think of doing that. He knew I’d take it for Macfarland. Anybody would. It established that the principal was lying—or nearly did so. He was full of tricks like that. I seem to remember a rattling sound in the basement about that time too—which was probably done by him to impress me with the fact that Anderson was around and about.

  “Stevenson must have relaxed when all that was settled. He settled down to playing the great friend and lover to Janey Davis—who stood a very good chance of cashing in on his dead wife’s lottery ticket. But even if she threw up the ticket, she was young and lovely—lovelier than Anise, for that matter—and she was a woman that he hadn’t had, and probably couldn’t have, without marrying her.”

  “It’s all clear except the alibi,” Piper objected.

  “You mean Stevenson’s being at the library reading up on the Addison family? He planted that perfectly. He was a familiar visitor to the Genealogy Room. He simply signed for a book that he knew was very rare, took it to his little reading nook, put it into the drawer where the boy would not pick it up and return it to the main desk, and slipped out. He went back to Jefferson School—murdered Anise Halloran—slipped out of the fire escape when he knew it was too late to do whatever he wanted to do in his own laboratory, and returned to the library, where he unearthed his book from its hiding place and returned it to the desk. Thus he had an alibi—not a perfect one, he was too smart for that. But it was just the sort of alibi that an honest, innocent person usually has.”

  The Inspector nodded. “It all fits like a glove. Now that I look at it this way, I see that nobody else could have killed that girl. I suppose that Stevenson got panicky and came for you with the hatchet in the cellar that day because he was afraid you’d stumble on the truth?”

  “Afraid? He was pretty sure I had. If the magnificent structure he had built to incriminate Anderson were to topple over, he was pretty close to hot water. That sounds tangled … but it states the case. And I had come around asking too many of the wrong kind of questions to suit Bob Stevenson. He read in the extra that the janitor had escaped, and the chance was too good. If I were killed in the basement that day, no jury on earth would fail to convict Anderson of both crimes. But the hatchet missed me. And Mr. Stevenson had to give up that little dream….”

  The Inspector shook his head. “The fellow certainly was thorough. Stevenson ought to go down in the annals of crime as the murderer without nerves.”

  “But he wasn’t without nerves! He knew that you didn’t get a glimpse of him when he attacked you from behind with the shovel. But he got to worrying. He weakened, and thus he gave himself away. He swallowed the bait, hook, line and sinker, and he returned to the hospital after he was sure we had all left, set upon putting you where you could never identify anybody again. Murder had got to be a habit with him by then. But the escape of Anderson was almost too convenient. He was on his guard. That’s why he rapped on the door of this room—and nearly spoiled everything.

  “If he had entered without knocking, and come over to the bed with gun or poison in his hand, the case would have been clear. But as it was I had only circumstantial evidence against him, and flimsy evidence at that.

  “So when he knocked at that door, very softly, he was hoping and praying that there was no one here but you, and that you were in a coma. If you answered the knock, he’d have gone—knowing that you were wide enough awake to cry for help. But when I did, he must have been torn between stark staring terror, and relief that he had knocked and that he had a story all ready.”

  Miss Withers found her throat dry as a corn husk, and drank copiously from the water pitcher itself, avoiding the brown-stained glass which awaited the Medical Examiner.

  “But he was an optimist, Oscar. He believed that luck was with him when I accepted his help. I had no choice, for I knew this was my one chance to trap him. He hoped to slip the poison in your medicine, which he thought you would drink on awakening, and then to make me believe that we had both drowsed while the real murderer entered. He removed his shoes, and crossed the room without a breath of sound. But I knew what he was doing, because he spoke to me first to see if I slept. And I heard the tiny splash his pellet of poison made as it touched the water … you know the rest.”

  “I know the rest,” agreed the Inspector. “But would you mind telling me one thing? Why in heaven’s name did you go around whistling that insane little bird-call for days and days? What part did that play in this twisted business?”

  “You mean this?” Miss Withers pursed her lips, and whistled her two notes, thrice repeated…. “Whoooooo-wheeeee….”

  The Inspector nodded. She smiled, shamefacedly. “That, Oscar, was the one essential clue that you always talk about. It was the little tune that Anise Halloran wrote on the blackboard underneath her regular scales and tunes for the morrow’s class. When she wrote that phrase, Oscar, she tried to leave a message behind her. Somehow, she knew. Perhaps her suspicion of her husband went farther than ordering the little gun that Janey never gave her. Perhaps she guessed the dreadful secret behind the liquor which tasted so badly. Perhaps she knew what was waiting for her that night—but did not know where, or when. It will always be a mystery why she did not cry out for help, instead of putting that pathetic little clue on the blackboard. I think it was her pride. She married him, you see. She still wore his ring, next her bare body. She had faith, an insane faith, that everything would somehow come out all right. She intended to come back next morning and erase the pitiful evidence of her momentary terror and suspicion of the man she once loved—perhaps still loved.”

  “Yeah, but why the tune? What does whoooo-wheee convey?”

  Miss Withers took a pencil from her bag, and the Inspector’s chart from the foot of his bed. “I whistled it to every suspect in this case, until they all thought I was cuckoo. I made the natural mistake of reading the tune instead of the notes, Oscar. See here? She wrote the simplest, easiest message she could think of—just the notes A-D … A-D … hold A-D. Notice the hold, Oscar? Stevenson’s name was A. Robert Stevenson, in full. The A. undoubtedly stood for Addison, the maternal side of his family of which he was so proud. She must have called him ‘Ad’ as a pet name, and in her terror she forgot that no one else knew it! All the same, her message remained in plain view of all of us, on the blackboard, crying aloud Bob Stevenson’s guilt for those who could read. See? ‘If anything happens to me (it’s understood she implied) hold Ad!’”

  Miss Withers rose to her feet. “I’m going to leave you now,” she said. “It’s been a hard night for an invalid, even if you did sleep through it like a log while I was giving you credit for being a consummate actor!”

  Piper grinned. “I knew I was in good keeping,” he told her. Their hands met, across the coverlet.

  “There’s only one person I’m really sorry for in all this,” Miss Withers remarked. “Janey Davis is such a sweet child, and this is going to be the hardest blow of her life. She was pretty close to being in love with that charming fiend. I wonder if I ought to go to her before the newspapers come out with all the gory details?”

  “I think you ought to go home and go to bed,” Piper told her, his voice strangely gentle. “Janey Davis is a young lady who can take care of herself.”

  At that moment a very sleepy Janey Davis was answering the telephone in her little apartment on 74th Street.

  The voice at the other end of the line was very familiar to her by now. It was Georgie Swarthout’s.

  “I know it’s early, Janey,” he said softly. “But I’ve got something really important to talk to you about.
Won’t you get dressed and come out to breakfast with me?”

  There comes a time in every girl’s life when, having said “No” very definitely and very many times repeated to a certain young man, she says “Yes” from pure contrariness. Much to her surprise, Janey Davis said it now.

  And the curtain falls….

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Hildegarde Withers Mysteries

  I

  Jack-in-the-Box

  LIKE THE NOTE OF a pitch-pipe between the lips of some mad, unearthly chorus leader, the traffic officer’s whistle sounded its earsplitting E above high C. Rush hour traffic on the Avenue, which had just been granted a green light, stopped jarringly, with a screech of brakes. All but the open Chrysler roadster, which as Officer Francis X. Doody had noted from the corner of his vigilant blue eye, was veering crazily towards the left instead of keeping on south past the impassive stone lions of the Library as was its proper course …

  Officer Doody took the whistle out of his mouth and bellowed “Hey!” But the echoes were still sounding back their flattened versions of his blast when there came a sickening crash of tortured glass and metal. The open blue Chrysler had come to rest with its front end inextricably entangled with the fender of a northbound Yellow taxi.

  “Where do you think you’re goin’?” Doody spoke his piece by rote as he strode wearily over toward the scene of the smash. He jerked the white gloves from his big red hands as he went, remarking audibly that this was just about what he could have expected of his lousy luck, anyway. As if it wasn’t enough, on the tag end of a dreary November afternoon, to have it start snowing just as the crowds were pouring out of shops and office buildings! To cap it all, some dumb driver had to pick the busiest corner in Manhattan to try a forbidden left turn in the middle of a Go light. “One damn thing after another!” Doody was mumbling.