Murder on the Blackboard (17 page)

“So long,” the Inspector called to her. “I’d give anything to be going out of here with you, if only to hear the eminent Professor Pfoof—”

“Pfaffle,” corrected Miss Withers.

“That’s what I said. The joke’s on the Commissioner, who should have known better than to turn a murder suspect over to a visiting expert. I’d like to hear Pfaffle alibi-ing now. He’ll be in a pretty spot, or I’m no judge.”

“A clever little people, these Viennese,” misquoted Miss Withers. “He may sneak out of it yet. Well, toodle-oo.”

“What?”

“Toodle-oo. It’s an expression I picked up from Georgie Swarthout.”

The Inspector nodded. “Has that young scamp been any help to you?”

“He certainly has. He’s out this afternoon doing a little investigating on a new lead.” Miss Withers smiled proudly. “That young man shows promise, Oscar, if only he can be kept away from going the way of all flatfoots. Association with me has done him worlds of good—why, he got this idea for a new lead after only one day on the case. Said he’ll tell me about it tomorrow.”

With a wave of her hand, Miss Hildegarde Withers departed, whistling the trenchant, plaintive notes that Anise Halloran had marked upon a blackboard in the last few minutes of her life.

Though doormen looked after her inquiringly, and a stray dog or two came bounding toward her feet, she marched on down the Avenue, still whistling—“Whoooo-wheeee….”

“H
ELLO? HELLO, THIS IS
Miss Davis … who? … WHO? … Mr. Swarthout? Why, I don’t remember … oh, yes. Yes, you’re the detective who came up here with Miss Withers. What? Oh—I’m awfully sorry, but I have an engagement for lunch today … yes, and dinner, too. I’m sure what you have to tell me would be very interesting, but it’s quite impossible. You’ll have to excuse me now, I’m taking a bath.”

Janey Davis, with a turkish towel wrapped insufficiently around her fair white body, hopped from rug to rug toward the bathroom, whence clouds of steam were issuing. “Of all the colossal nerve!” she remarked to herself.

A moment later, with her curly hair loosened from its tight bathing cap again, she stood with a comb and surveyed herself in the mirror.

“I wish I knew what he wanted!” Then she tossed her head. “Well, I haven’t got anything to worry about!”

Across the town, in a luxurious hotel-apartment overlooking the Park from an eminence on the Avenue, Professor Augustine Pfaffle was doing worrying enough for two. His living-room was swarming with the gentlemen of the press—gentlemen by courtesy only, since they steadfastly refused to leave him alone, no matter how profusely the great criminologist’s manager, representing the Thatcher Lecture Bureau, poured out drinks and offered sandwiches.

“Can I quote you as saying that American morons are quicker-witted than the morons over where you come from?”

“Did Anderson sock you once or twice?”

“What did you do for the eye, raw beef or a leech?”

“How come, with all your experience in investigating crime, you stayed in this room alone with a murderer?”

“Was it anything in your examination of Anderson, the janitor, that made him sock you in the eye and then beat it?”

“Is it true you said he was descended from the Jukes family?”

“May we quote you as saying that you consider Olaf Anderson a greater and more bloodthirsty killer than Landeau or the Marquis de Sade?”

“Pose for another picture, Professor … smile!”

Finally the Herr Professor raised both his skinny talons above his shining bald head and shrieked the pack of them down.

“Zentlemen! Blease!”

His eyeglasses dangled on their long black cord almost to his knees, and at every step he took a little cascade of cigarette ash fell from his vest.

“I do not wish to make a statement now. My manager tells me that it will conflict with my lecture tour. All this business is very unfortunate. In Vienna it would be impossible for a criminal to escape through the windows and down a wall.”

The Professor twisted his slightly simian face into a grimace significant of the fact that he was wishing himself back in Vienna right now. “Zis unfortunate accident, zentlemen … it is nothing! It is only a matter of hours, perhaps minutes, before the prisoner will be back in his cell. I assure you!”

“Oh, yeah?” A fat and somewhat unshaven young man thrust his face almost into the Professor’s. “If you’re the big shot crime expert, why don’t you psycho-analyze where the janitor has beat it to? Come on, Professor, let us see the great brain in action!”

“Yeah! You say it’s only a matter of minutes before Anderson is caught and back in his cell. Give us a break, Prof. Where is he?” Other voices began to chime in.

“Where he iss?” Professor Pfaffle was stalling for time, and they knew it.

“Come on, Professor. You let him get away, now why don’t you figure out where he’s gone? It ought to be easy for the greatest crime expert in the world….”

“Sure—where would Anderson go? Back to his school, or where? That ought to be pie for a criminologist. Why, haven’t you ever heard about the little boy on the farm who could always find the pig when it got loose? They asked him how he managed it and he said, ‘I always stop and think where would I go if I were a pig, and I look there, and there she is!’”

Professor Pfaffle drew himself to his full height. He looked at Mr. Thatcher of the lecture bureau, but Mr. Thatcher gave him no help in his crisis.

Professor Pfaffle waved one arm in the direction of the window. “Of course I know where it iss he went,” he announced. “The movements of the criminal are an open book to the expert. He iss … there …” Pfaffle’s gesture took in all of Greater New York.

The reporters moved toward the window. “You mean, in Central Park?” They seemed oddly impressed with the idea. The Professor made a quick decision.

Professor Pfaffle nodded energetically. “Ja, the park. The man is a claustrophobiac, of course. His crime has made him fear closed walls and the sight of his fellow men. He is, therefore, hiding in the wide reaches of Central Park since he knows he has no chance to leave the city while every exit is guarded.”

“Say … you’re good!”

“There’s a story lead—Pfaffle the Hungarian Bloodhound spots lost trail by absent treatment….”

“Pose for a picture pointing at the park—give us that old smile!”

“Who’s got a nickel—wait, it isn’t a pay telephone. Hello … hello….”

Finally they were gone. The Professor wiped his brow. Thatcher, the exquisite man-about-town in spats and wing collar, came over to him.

“You got out of that neatly, Pfaffle my boy,” he said. “Maybe we won’t get cancellations of your bookings after all! The only thing is, I hope that janitor really is in the park!”

The Professor hoped the janitor was somewhere not in the park, and said so in two languages, combining the worst epithets of both.

“Why not he iss in der park? If the police do not find him there, that is their fault. Besides, by that time we are aboard a train, no?”

Thatcher patted him on the shoulder. “You’re a regular master-mind,” he admitted. “For a while I was sorry I’d arranged the whole thing with the Commissioner, when you let the prisoner make a laughing stock of you. But now you’ve stalled off the papers so that they’ll play up the park, and lay off you. The newspapers will forget the case in another day or two anyhow—and by then, as you say, we’ll be aboard a train and a fast one. The audiences in Chicago and Detroit will eat this up, watch ’em.”

“Ja,” agreed Pfaffle. “So I thought.”

“Tell me,” Thatcher inquired. “Was that on the level? I mean, did you just happen to see the park out of the window and think it a likely place, or did you really figure out the criminal psychology of the man?”

“Anderson has no psyche worthy of the name,” insisted the Professor. “He is the most stubborn, surly
hund
I have met in some time. I hope they never find him. I have never had more trouble in analyzing a subject than I did with him. It is like beating on a stone wall.”

He paused for a moment. “All the same, the man is a low-grade moron and if they wish me to, I shall testify in the court, provided I am not out on tour at the time.”

“You could go on a dozen tours and come back before his case is ever tried in court,” Thatcher told him. “The docket is filled months ahead.”

The Herr Professor made no reply. Owing to the suddenness with which the newspapermen had departed, there was still a little something in the way of refreshments left behind. To these dregs and fragments Pfaffle applied himself as if he needed them.

As was her habit upon mornings when school did not keep, due to regular or accidental holidays, Miss Hildegarde Withers was sitting at that moment upon a bench near the 72nd Street gate of Central Park, her nose buried in a copy of the New York
Times.
In spite of the bright sunshine, a chill wind tugged at the sheets of her newspaper and whipped the collar of her modest coat about her ears.

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.