The Penguin Pool Murder (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

“A hundred per cent,” said Taylor, but his voice lacked enthusiasm.

  “If I could only get me two hands around the neck …” McTeague intoned, hopefully.

  And the chase went on.

  Sergeant Taylor dispatched Allen and Burns, together with several husky uniformed men, to go through the cellar with a fine-tooth comb. “Though there’s not much chance that the murdering blackguard stayed down here,” he added, “we’ll take McTeague and go through the building from the roof down.”

  “We won’t get far at that,” Miss Withers told him. “Most, if not all, of the teachers here lock their classrooms at the end of the day.” She was thoughtful. “The janitor has a master-key….”

  “Janitor, hey? Well, where is this janitor?”

  “Anderson may have gone home—no, because the lights were on down here and the main door was open. He wouldn’t go home and leave them that way—but he doesn’t seem to be around anywhere. Never mind him for now—I know where the duplicate master-key is kept.”

  Swiftly Miss Withers led the way up the stairs, down the hall past the door of the Teachers’ Cloakroom, past the door of her own schoolroom, to a large office on the first floor, nearest the main entrance. The door bore a legend “Principal” and it was locked.

  McTeague swung his massive brogan, and the door swung inward. They came into a small reception room, with a typewriter desk in one corner where, Miss Withers explained, the Principal’s secretary, one Janey Davis, presided. Everything here was strictly in order—Miss Withers led the way into the main office and designated the middle drawer of the big oak desk.

  Out they went into the hall again, and up the stairs at the right. The second-floor hall was pitch dark, and McTeague’s flash cast ghostly shadows. It lighted for a moment on a tall glass-fronted show case built into one wall.

  “What’s that?” the Sergeant wanted to know. He was staring through the glass upon an assortment of seemingly unrelated objects.

  Miss Withers pointed out a small label atop the case. “Lives of the Presidents” was the legend.

  “An idea of Mr. Ballantyne, who taught shop work here last year, before Mr. Stevenson came,” she explained. “He had the upper-class boys whittle out models of objects closely related to the presidents of the United States. They made everything of pine and then painted them.”

  The Sergeant rubbed his chin. “Not bad, eh?” Inside the case he could make out a rude log cabin and a life-size shovel, its blade marked with sums in chalk. Miss Withers did not need to tell him that these represented the early life of Abraham Lincoln.

  George Washington, too, was represented by the hacked-off stump of a little tree, and a bright-handled hatchet beside it. Farther on stood a model of Mount Vernon, slightly askew as to pillars, a pair of duelling pistols labelled “Hamilton and Burr,” and a silk-hat marked “Woodrow Wilson.”

  “Kids have more fun nowadays than we did when I went to school,” the Sergeant informed Miss Withers. “Whittling out toy models, huh? They should have made an empty dinner pail in memory of Herb Hoover, and completed the list.”

  “Hoover’s been blamed for everything else,” Miss Withers remarked acidly. “I suppose this murder is his fault, too? Come on, we’re wasting time.” They climbed another flight of stairs.

  “This is the top, huh? No way to the roof?”

  Miss Withers nodded, then shook her head. “No way at all. And if anybody did get up there, he couldn’t get down. There’s a fenced-in playground on two sides of the school, the street out in front, and a twenty-story warehouse on the other side.”

  “We’ll start at the end of the hall and work back,” Taylor decided. “You keep out of this, Miss Withers. This is one bad hombre, and if we flush him he’s likely to swing at you.”

  “No more me than you,” she pointed out. But the Sergeant was studying a peculiar door at the end of the hall.

  “Thought you said there was only a playground here on this side of the building?” Taylor queried. “Then where’s this funny little door go?”

  Rudely he pushed on the swinging door, but it held fast. He looked at Miss Withers.

  “That? Oh, I forgot to tell you. It’s a fire escape. A little old-fashioned, perhaps, but it was the latest thing when Jefferson School was built, back in the time of Boss Tweed. We have fire drill every week, and the children file into this doorway, one by one, and slide down and out onto the playground. They love the excitement of roller-coasting down, chute-the-chute fashion, and the building can be emptied in five minutes.”

  McTeague thrust his bulk forward. “Say—if the kids can get out that way, why couldn’t the murderer? If I could only get me hands on him….”

  “I don’t think he got out that way—” began Miss Withers. She was interrupted by the sound of running feet on the stair.

  Taylor jerked at his gun, but replaced it when he saw the perspiring face of Allen, the precinct plainclothes man. His mouth was working.

  “Hey, what do you think we found down in the cellar?”

  Miss Withers’ eyes narrowed. “The body of Anise Halloran!”

  He shook his head. “No, no body. There ain’t no body in the cellar at all. But somebody’s been digging a good-sized grave down there, in the soft dirt under the arches. We found the shovel and everything!”

  “Well, I’ll be everlastingly—” Sergeant Taylor set out, on the run, with Allen at his heels. McTeague followed, with a reluctant look at the door of the fire escape, which had slammed shut.

  But Miss Withers let them go. She wasn’t interested in open graves. This was her chance to do a little quiet sleuthing on the side, and she leaped at it. Oddly enough, she forgot for the moment that a bloodthirsty murderer was supposed to be hiding somewhere in the shadows of the deserted schoolhouse. The lure of the chase was upon her.

  Using the master-key which she still held in her hand, she proceeded to unlock each of the third floor rooms in turn, beginning with 3F, which was sacred to Miss Hopkins and her sixth grade.

  There was little here which seemed of interest. The well-worn chair behind the desk on the platform wore a gay cushion of chintz. That was typical of Mattie Hopkins, who weighed two hundred pounds and preferred comfort to everything else. There was a pair of carpet slippers beneath the desk, and several hundred spit balls had dried upon the long blackboards. Miss Withers shook her head. Mattie Hopkins was getting slack with her pupils.

  Miss Withers passed on to 3E, across the hall. Here the saturnine Agatha Jones dispensed English and allied subjects to the seventh and eighth graders. The room was neat as a pin, except for the blackboards, which still bore scrawlings of the day’s work in sentence structure. Idly Miss Withers went through the drawers of the desks, unearthing a sling shot, three packages of chewing gum, and other booty no doubt gathered by Miss Jones during the day and unreturned to its juvenile owners. None of this seemed to have any bearing on the situation.

  Miss Casey’s room, 3C, was hardly more productive. Here the seventh and eighth graders were exposed to arithmetic, history, and civics. No murderer lurked within its commonplace walls, and the face of one George Washington looked down benignly from above the window.

  Miss Withers came to 3D—a double room shared by Miss Pearson, the young drawing teacher, and she who had taught music until today in Jefferson School—beautiful Anise Halloran herself.

  This was not primarily a schoolroom but in reality only a joint office, as both the young teachers had gone into other classrooms as a rule to give their work. It contained a piano and some wooden benches for the Glee Club, a portable Victrola and cabinet of classical records and march music, which was moved throughout the building as needed, and a blackboard upon which Miss Pearson had evidently been engaged in drawing a fearful and wonderful Thanksgiving turkey, in colored chalk.

  Natalie Pearson’s desk was nearest the door. Miss Withers hesitated at prying into its contents, for she liked the boyish young drawing teacher. But this was no time for a consideration of ethics.
Within a few moments Sergeant Taylor was bound to rejoin her, and Miss Withers had a secret desire to do her sleuthing alone.

  She found two vanity cases—both in disrepair—several boxes of pastels and colored chalk, a large box of water colors, its cakes badly mixed and muddied, and a theater program, undated, for a revival of Florenz Ziegfeld’s Show Boat, still running at the Casino Theater. Within the pages of the program was pressed a limp greenish-white cattelya orchid. Miss Withers sniffed, and then smiled and raised it to her nose. Then she made a grimace, for a faint odor of putridity clung to it.

  Carefully she replaced the token, leaving everything as she had found them. Then she passed on to the desk that had been Anise Halloran’s.

  Much to her surprise, Miss Withers found it locked. For a moment she debated with herself, and then went into action with a hairpin. She had met locks like this one before, and it was only a few seconds until the main drawer slid out, releasing the others.

  Sheet music, mostly folk songs and marches, covered a well-thumbed copy of the French classic Mon Homme, sung so successfully in this country some years ago by Fannie Brice … that was all she found in the top drawer.

  The top sides disclosed a box of Kleenex, a gold and enamel vanity with a cracked mirror, two packs of Life Savers, a large bottle labelled “Aspirin” which was nearly empty, a bottle labelled “Bromo Seltzer” which was quite empty, and an envelope containing two season tickets to the Lewisohn Stadium concerts of the past summer, both well-used.

  Miss Withers puzzled a moment over the aspirin and bromo. What was a young and beautiful girl like Anise Halloran doing with headache remedies? She hadn’t looked as if she ever had a headache in the world until the last few weeks. Well, her headache would trouble her no more. Miss Withers shivered as she thought of that broken body she had seen in the Cloakroom, two floors below. Where was it now? Into what dark recess had the murderer carried it, and when would the shadows give up their secret?

  The bottom drawer on the right brought the first real surprise of Miss Withers’ search. There she came upon a fat bottle labelled “Dewar’s Dew of Kirkintilloch.” The label was discolored, as if it had lain in salt water, and the contents of the bottle, to Miss Withers’ somewhat amateurish nose, seemed to be a reasonably close approximation of Scotch whiskey.

  She sniffed, and replaced the bottle, carefully covering it with the newspapers in which it had been wrapped. There was also a box of paper cups, of the type furnished in metal cases above the water containers of the school.

  Miss Withers frowned. That didn’t seem like Anise Halloran, somehow. She would as soon have believed that liquor was the secret vice of Mr. Macfarland himself.

  The desk yielded nothing more of interest, and Miss Withers slammed the drawers shut.

  It was at that moment that stealthy footsteps outside reminded her that a murderer was quite possibly stalking her through these deserted halls. Miss Withers reached the light switch in one second, flat, and cast the room into darkness. Then, with her umbrella poised for action, she waited.

  Slowly the door opened, and a man’s dark figure showed itself. Steadily she poked forward the umbrella, until its bone handled pressed sharply against the back of the figure which was moving past her into the room.

  “One move out of you and I’ll shoot,” she promised. Then she switched on the light. Sergeant Taylor, his hands high above his head, turned to face her.

  “Oh,” she remarked, in a disappointed tone. “It’s only you.”

  He wore a heartfelt look of relief. “Thank God it’s you,” he told her fervently. “Say, what have you been doing up here alone? I thought you were coming with us …”

  “Never mind that,” Miss Withers interrupted. “Did you find anything in that grave?”

  Sergeant Taylor shook his head. “It wasn’t very deep,” he admitted. “But it was a good beginning. Six feet long, two feet wide, and about two or three feet deep, cut down into the soft dirt under the pillars in the unfinished part of the cellar. There’s no flooring there, you know.”

  Miss Withers nodded, thoughtfully. “Anything else?”

  “Nothing to speak of. No sign of that janitor fellow. They did come on a box half filled with women’s wornout shoes, hidden in the clothes closet of the janitor’s room under the stairs. And that’s a funny thing for a man to collect.”

  Miss Withers moved back and forth, restlessly. “It doesn’t make sense!” she protested. “Oh, I wish Oscar Piper were here. He was almost always wrong, but he was so positive about everything that it was almost as good as being right. He’d have some explanation for this. An hour ago I saw a body here—now there’s a grave and the body is gone.”

  “Come on down and have a look at the grave,” invited Taylor. “I’d feel better about this if you stuck with us until we find the guy we’re looking for.”

  “Then you’ll stick with me,” Hildegarde Withers told him. “Because I’m going to go through the one remaining room on this floor if it kills me.” She led the way to the door nearest the staircase, which bore the joint labels 3A and 3B. They came into a long, bare room partially filled with benches and littered with tools. “Mr. Stevenson, the assistant principal, teaches shopwork and science to the older boys in this room,” she explained. “That door farther on is his private office.”

  Taylor nodded. He crossed over to a bench and picked up a shining chisel. “Now do you suppose the Inspector was beaned with one of these?”

  Miss Withers hesitated. “Maybe. You’d better have McTeague check over these tools and see if anything is missing.”

  Taylor nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Shall I have him do it now? I ordered him to patrol the stairs and the upper hall here until we got through….”

  “Later will do,” Miss Withers decided. “I don’t want him poking around here until we see all there is to be seen.”

  The end of the room used for the science classes boasted only of a double row of chairs facing a long table against the windows, which was littered with aquaria, plant specimens, cases containing frogs and turtles, and a hutch containing nothing but sodden straw.

  “You are standing on the scene of a recent tragedy,” Miss Withers remarked as she paused before the hutch. “Amos and Andy, two guinea pigs, used to live here, the pets of the school. They were purchased for dissection purposes, I suppose, but the children got to love them so much that Mr. Stevenson didn’t have the heart to use them in his demonstrations. For some reason or other, they up and died a few days ago. That is, Amos died. Andy was sick, but he lingered on and had to be put out of his misery.”

  Taylor scented a mystery. “Say! Do you think they could have been poisoned?”

  Miss Withers was dubious. “I’m afraid it’s nothing exciting like that, Sergeant. They were fine and fat and healthy looking, but they gradually grew too weak to stand up. Something deficient in their diet, I suppose, or else lack of sunlight. Mr. Stevenson explained it to the children, but I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter. Shall we go on into his office?”

  Sergeant Taylor followed her, but he was puzzled. “See here,” he said, “I don’t get this straight. Are we hunting for clues in desk drawers, or for a murderer that’s supposed to be hiding somewhere in this schoolhouse?”

  “We’re just hunting,” Miss Withers told him. Swiftly she went through the big oaken desk in the middle of the room. There were only the usual papers, pamphlets, and teaching paraphernalia. Everything was unusually neat and tidy.

  “Good for Stevenson,” she observed. “I didn’t think he was the sort who’d keep everything so shipshape.”

  The desk top bore only a large green blotter, a fountain pen set in malachite, and, standing beside a heavy glass inkwell, a small nickel-plated cigarette lighter.

  “I don’t know what he had that for,” Miss Withers told the Sergeant. “Smoking is never permitted inside the schoolhouse during school hours, because it’s a bad example for the older boys.”

  Taylor shrugged his shoulde
rs. “Maybe the assistant principal used to work nights a lot.” He drew a cigarette from a tattered pack in the breast pocket of his coat, and offered another to Miss Withers. “I need one of these, how about you?”

  “Me? Mercy sakes, no. The idea of me smoking one of those nasty things!”

  Taylor grinned, and quoted a current advertisement. “It happens that I don’t smoke, but some of my debutante friends who do tell me that Luckies are parched, not toasted….”

  Idly he picked up the lighter from the desk and snapped it, with no appreciable result. Again, and again….

  “These things never work,” he informed Miss Withers. He replaced it on the desk, and lit his cigarette with a match from his capacious coat pocket.

  Miss Withers was surveying a shelf between the windows, on which stood an assortment of various and sundry bottles. “These look harmless enough,” she observed. “Here’s a can of the lighter fluid that they put in those little jiggers, and it’s nearly empty. I suppose that’s why the lighter won’t work, he’s forgotten to fill it …”

  She stopped short, as a distant metallic booming broke the stillness. “What’s that?”

  The Sergeant relaxed again, with a chuckle. “I’m getting as nervous as you. That’s only a radiator banging.”

  “Oh!” Miss Withers was thoughtful. “A radiator? But …”

  She moved toward the radiator across the room, but stopped short in front of a little wash stand which stood in the corner, behind a screen. It was quite evidently used for the cleaning of scientific apparatus, as the sink was littered with retorts, glasses, and cups.

  Here her sharp eyes caught sight of something. She raised one of the glasses.

  It was of the type sold in ten-cent stores everywhere, and sometimes used by otherwise law-abiding citizens of this great nation in the imbibing of highballs.

  This glass differed from its fellows in one particular. It was inhabited.

  Much to Miss Withers’ surprise, a solitary red ant lay in the bottom of the glass.

  Further examination disclosed the fact that this red ant was a dead red ant. Had he climbed to this dizzy height from the playground outside, Miss Withers wondered, in search of water, only to die of exhaustion on the slippery inside of the glass with a single drop almost within his reach?