Murder on the Blackboard (15 page)

Miss Withers watched as Swarthout drew a straw-wrapped bottle from a nearby open case. “What I don’t understand,” she said, “is what Anderson did with the liquor in all the cases that had to be removed? I suppose he did his best to drink it up, but there must be a hundred cases gone if this space was once filled up.”

“Sold it, probably,” Swarthout decided. “Or maybe he poured it in the furnace, too, which is a rotten shame.” He shook his head. “Imagine that fuzzy Swede working away here for months, just to get a cozy little nook for getting drunk in! And never getting caught at it….”

“The man’s a regular Sybarite,” Miss Withers whispered. “I’m beginning to rearrange my idea about that janitor. And yet—he must be innocent of the crime, because being in jail he’s certainly not the person who hurled a hatchet at me half an hour ago….”

“Listen!” Georgie Swarthout’s hand caught her wrist, and his finger was on his lips.

Somewhere in the distant reaches of the liquor warehouse they heard a voice, dim and muffled. “The watchman, on his rounds,” whispered Georgie.

The voice came closer, louder. It was raised in song. “Oh beat the drum slowlee and play the file lowleeeee, and play the Dead March as you carry me on, take me out on the praireee and pile the sod o’er meeeee …”—there was a decided hiccup at this point—“For I’m a young cowboy and I know I done wrong….”

Closer and closer came the voice, and then it began to fade away. “Oh, I first took to drinking and then to card playing, got shot in a fi-ight and now I must die….”

There was the sound of a metal door clanging shut, and the warehouse was silent again.

“No wonder Anderson had such an easy time,” Swarthout observed after a moment. “That watchman reminds me of old John Twist, a patrolman up in the Tenth Ward. He heard a shot in a railroad warehouse, and went over to investigate it, without any particular eagerness. He poked his head in the door and yelled, ‘If you’re in there get out of there because I’m going to count three hundred and then come after you.’”

“Very funny,” Miss Withers told him. “And now I think I’d like to get out of here. It smells like my Uncle Henry used to smell on the nights when my mother wouldn’t let me kiss him goodnight.”

With even more difficulty than on the trip up, Miss Withers was lowered through the trap door again. Swarthout extinguished the lantern, not without a wistful eye at the straw-covered bottles. But Miss Withers waited below, and he had a very clear idea of what her attitude would be.

“Get behind me, Bacchus,” he whispered, and dropped down through the hole. It was only the matter of a moment to pull the trap shut again, and to replace the board in the pile as it had been before.

They found Sunshine Willis faithfully guarding the main door, a yellow newspaper in his hands and his sad face sadder than ever.

“I’ll use the phone in the Principal’s office to notify Headquarters of what we found,” Swarthout told Miss Withers. “They’ll send a man down to take pictures of that hatchet before it’s moved.”

Miss Withers paused beside Willis. Silently he extended toward her the newspaper. “Want to read it while he’s phoning?”

She shook her head. “No, thank you. I’ve been through too much excitement to do any reading now. I’ve got to think….”

Willis still held out the yellow sheet. “It’s an extra,” he explained patiently. “They were yelling it when we were in the cellar. You better read it.”

Miss Withers took the sheet, and fumbled for her glasses. But she needed no glasses to peruse the screaming black headlines that announced with amazing clarity and conciseness…. “MURDER SUSPECT SOCKS DOC AND SCRAMS”

“What in heaven’s name….” She sat down on the stoop and read on, breathlessly. “Suspected of Being Grade School Fiend, Janitor Knocks Distinguished Alienist Galleywest and Does Human-Fly Act From Window…. Olaf Anderson, arrested as a suspect in the murder of Anise Halloran, beautiful schoolteacher, made a clean getaway from the hotel room of Professor Augustine Pfaffle, eminent Viennese criminologist, at eleven o’clock this morning, first striking the professor unconscious. Anderson had been taken by police to Professor Pfaffle’s apartment for examination at the request of local police authorities and in the midst of a psycho-analytic test while alone with the professor, Anderson leaped to his feet, knocked the distinguished scientist unconscious, and made his escape through the window and down the ornamental façade of the Park View Hotel to the court. At an early hour this afternoon he had not been apprehended, although every exit to the city is blocked and the police state that an arrest is imminent … fiddlesticks!” The final word was added by Miss Withers herself, as she thrust the paper back at Willis.

“Psycho-analyzing Anderson! Visiting criminologist or not, that man is pure daffy! Anderson is no deeper than a mud puddle—” Miss Withers broke off short. She remembered something. At that moment Swarthout came out of the door.

“Look at that,” she said. He nodded.

“What else do you think they’re stewing about over at Headquarters?”

“Bother Headquarters,” said Hildegarde Withers. “Do you realize what this means?”

He nodded. “We were so sure that the janitor was innocent of the murder because he couldn’t have been in the cellar and taken that crack at you! And now—it’s a thousand to one that he was the only person who could have done it!”

“I’m not betting, even at those odds,” said Hildegarde Withers. “Come on, I’m going on an errand. If you don’t mind, I’d like you to go along. That hatchet made me a little nervous.”

“Made
you
a little nervous!” Swarthout grinned at her. “Say, it didn’t come anywhere near me, and I’m plenty nervous myself. A good clean bullet isn’t so bad, even in the dark, but a tomahawk has never appealed to me.”

“By the way,” the young man continued as they sought an uptown subway, “I suppose we’re going on a manhunt for the janitor? Got any idea where he might be hiding?”

“I have not,” declared Miss Withers. “Let the police chase Anderson. The less I see of him, the better. There’s more point in searching for that missing Curran girl, to my mind.” She stopped as she saw Georgie Swarthout’s face.

“Lord, I forgot to tell you,” he announced, above the roar of the train. “They did find her!”

“What? Where? Is she dead?”

Georgie shook his head. “Not exactly. The police up in Niagara Falls nabbed her in a rooming house, hiding out under the name of Mrs. Rogers.”

Miss Withers leaned back in her seat. “This is surprise number two today,” she admitted.

“It was a surprise for the girl, too,” Georgie went on. “The Lieutenant told me all about it over the phone when I called him from the school. You see, this Curran girl was hiding out under the name of Mrs. Rogers. Only it seems there’s a Mr. Rogers in the picture, and a wedding ring and everything. The Niagara police have ’em both in the hoosegow, which is a hell of a place to spend a honeymoon. But the Commissioner is wiring them to let the kids go, because it’s all on the level and they were married ten days in Hoboken. The names were phonied up a little, and the ages. But they’re married, sure enough.”

“A secret wedding, I’ll be bound, and they had to do it because of course Betty Curran would lose her job if the Board knew she was married!” Miss Withers eagerly caressed the handle of her umbrella. “Nowadays young couples find it hard enough going with two salaries coming in—but the Board decided that preference must be given the unmarried teachers, because they needed the work worse! That’s it—that’s why Betty Curran left her rooming house, and told everybody at school that she was going to have an operation. That’s why the Strasmick girl started to object when I suggested sounding the alarm. I’m ashamed of myself—but somehow I was certain sure that the disappearance of Betty Curran had something to do with the Halloran case. And all the time the girl was only human—she was trying to eat her cake and have it, too. Marriage and her job—both.”

“Sure,” agreed Swarthout. “If it’s no secret, where are we bound, and why?”

“We’re bound for an apartment house on West Seventy-fourth Street, where I’m going to ask a question backwards.”

“Huh?”

“I’m going to ask a question by telling the answer first,” promised Miss Withers. “Come on, here’s Grand Central. Let’s catch the Shuttle across town.”

They finally reached the old brownstone house on 74th Street. Miss Withers started up the steps, but Georgie halted on the edge of the sidewalk.

“I’ll just stick around here,” he suggested. “You’ll do better with your questions if I’m not around.”

“You come along, young man,” she ordered. “I’ll do all right. Besides, I want to get your reaction to a young lady. A very beautiful young lady.”

“If I must I must,” said Georgie Swarthout. He followed her up the steps, waited while she rang, and then climbed on up the two flights of stairs.

The door was answered by Janey Davis herself, clad in shimmering cerise pajamas. Her hand went swiftly to her well-rounded throat. “I didn’t know anyone was with you,” she gasped. Then she turned and ran for a dressing-gown, stepping out of the closet in a pale green wrap that Miss Withers disapproved of, and envied a little. It showed practically all the pajamas, and a good deal of Janey.

“You were right,” Georgie Swarthout told Miss Withers. “And I was going to stay outside on the cold sidewalk!”

There were introductions, and Janey let the young man hold her hand for the merest fraction of a second. It was not hard to see that she had been crying recently, and that she was only waiting their departure to start crying all over again.

“I know why you’ve come—I suppose,” she burst out as soon as the two guests had seated themselves. Janey leaned against the mantel, her arms outstretched and her head thrown back.

“This thing is terrible! It’s driving me crazy! At first you broke the news so calmly that it stunned me. I didn’t believe it, I didn’t think it was true. I didn’t realize that poor Anise would never come home any more. But I wasn’t able to sleep a wink since, nor eat anything today. It seems wicked to go on living with Anise, who loved life so much, lying on a marble slab somewhere while doctors desecrate her body….”

“Well, well,” broke in Miss Withers. “You mustn’t let yourself go, my dear. Try to think of pleasant things. Don’t stay alone too much. I know this is terrible, but it could be worse.”

“I don’t see how!”

Miss Withers saw, very clearly. “If a certain somebody had been a better axeman, or if I hadn’t fumbled with a match this afternoon—but never mind that. You say you knew why we came?”

Janey Davis nodded. “The police were here, and they say they’re coming back. About the lottery ticket. They don’t believe me when I say that half of it is mine, and my money bought it. They hinted—terrible things. As if I’d do anything like that for money!”

“Of course not,” agreed Miss Withers, tongue in her cheek. She’d seen practically everything done for money, including bloody murder.

Georgie Swarthout tore his eyes off Janey’s face long enough to chime in. His voice had the ring of sincerity. “We know you didn’t have anything to do with it, Miss Davis. We just want your help, that’s all.”

The girl gave him a grateful look. Then she turned back toward Miss Withers. “I must have seemed a cheap, common thing to you the other night. About the lottery ticket, I mean. But I’d been praying so for it, and I needed it so. You see, my father and mother live in a little town upstate. They’re quite elderly, and they’re losing their home because they can’t get it refinanced. It wasn’t for myself.”

Her face softened. “But I see I can’t take the money, even my half of it, now,” she went on. “Not since the ticket was in Anise’s name, and since it won just before her death. It would be … grave robbing.”

Miss Withers nodded approvingly. “A very worthy attitude. But, my dear child, this is an important decision to make. Have you thought it over?”

Janey nodded. “I’ve thought it over and talked it over. With Bob, I mean. He thinks I’m a little goose, I guess. But I think he’s proud of me, too.”

“Bob, I infer, is Mr. Stevenson?” Miss Withers inquired.

Janey Davis nodded. She smiled, as though she knew a deep, delicious secret.

“All the same,” Miss Withers proceeded, “we didn’t come up here to talk about the lottery ticket. Let that lie between your own conscience and the lottery commissioners themselves. I came up here to ask you, as Anise Halloran’s roommate, why it was that you didn’t tell me the other night that she bought whiskey from Anderson, the janitor?”

“You mean the brown bottle—what she called her medicine?”

Miss Withers nodded. “Yes, that and the bottle in her desk down at school. Why didn’t you tell me, especially since the janitor is involved in this business?”

Janey Davis’ eyes were very wide and very innocent. “I didn’t tell you it because it wasn’t true! Anise never bought any liquor from Anderson. I didn’t know he sold it, and neither did she. The only thing she ever bought from him was the lottery ticket, and that was unpleasant enough. It turned out that she chose the number that he wanted for himself, or something like that. Anise was quite upset about it but she got her own way, as usual.”

Miss Withers shrugged her shoulders. “Suppose I happen to tell you that I know positively that it was Anderson from whom she bought her liquor?”

Janey Davis shook her head, so that the curls danced about her ears. “No, not Anderson. It was Tobey, the candy man across the street, that she bought her liquor from.” Her hand went to her lips. “I—I didn’t mean to tell that.”

“And why not?” Miss Withers wanted to know.

“Because I didn’t see why it mattered in this case. Anise is dead, and she’s suffered enough without having her name dragged through the mud any more. Her secrets are her own. Besides, she only drank because her nerves were bad. She bought the stuff herself because she said other people’s liquor tasted like cleaning fluid. She was sick, really she was. It was just in the past two or three weeks that she took to drinking.”

Janey Davis was almost crying. “Why can’t you and the police search for her murderer, and forget about her little—failings? There isn’t a person living who doesn’t have something in his life that he isn’t proud of. I have, and so have you!”