Murder on the Blackboard (21 page)

She found the famous little laboratory expert measuring the rifling marks on a leaden bullet, preparatory to comparing them with those on another bullet shot out of a suspected gangster’s gun. He rose to greet her, bewildered and a little embarrassed at being caught without coat or collar.

“Never mind that,” she told him. “I want some information. I’ve been asking doctors and reading medical books all week, but I don’t get anywhere. Tell me, Doctor. What is the best thing to kill ants with?”

Dr. Van Donnen raised his eyebrows. “But my dear lady! Do you come to me because of ants in your cupboard? Any commercial poison—Flit or the like….”

“I don’t quite mean that,” said Hildegarde Withers. “Is there any poison which would be instantly fatal to an insect, say an ant, but of which he would enjoy the taste?”

Van Donnen was thoughtful. “The best commercial ant poisons are sweet syrups loaded with sodium arsenite. But those would not come under the specification you mention, because they are slow to work. The ant carries them to his nest, and poisons the whole food supply of the swarm. Let me see—something which an ant will eat or drink from preference, but which will kill him instantly….”

He snapped his fingers. “I would say that it must be some petroleum derivative, such as kerosene, which would act upon the respiratory functions of the insect. The odor is so strong that ants and all insects like it, but before he would even taste it he would be dead.”

Miss Withers nodded, thoughtfully. “And what would be the effect of kerosene, say, upon the human system?”

“Perfectly harmless. It is often used as a remedy for sore throat. The more highly refined petroleum products, however, can be dangerous. Ethyl gasoline, for instance, if concentrated, is one of the deadliest of lead poisons. But what has this to do with the investigation you are undertaking? I understood that the unfortunate girl met her death through a hatchet blow on the skull?”

“I’m just nosing around,” said Miss Withers. “These refined gasoline products such as you spoke of before—what would their effect be on the human system? Suppose I drank a glass of gasoline or naphtha?”

“Your system would reject it, instantly. Only a very minute dose could be retained by the stomach. If that were not true, common cleaning fluid or benzine would be a dangerous poison. But no more than a drop or two could be kept down by the stomach, and such a minute dose would have to be repeated every day for two weeks or more before death would ensue … and that death would be a long and lingering one.”

Dr. Van Donnen clasped his hands, and his round little face took on a cherubic beam. “It is very interesting that you have brought up this subject, Miss Withers. I have for many years in the subject of the petroleum poisons been interested. Nothing is known by the general medical profession of their action, owing to the fact that the characteristic taste is so strong and the stomach so easily upset by them. But a pamphlet was published last year by Dr. Emile Ladrue of Paris announcing that he had succeeded in producing the symptoms of pernicious anaemia of the bones in a monkey by daily minute doses of benzine for only one week. The monkey survived as an invalid for several months, but Ladrue was of the opinion that if the doses had been continued for another week, death would have come very shortly.”

“That’s what I wanted to know,” said Miss Withers grimly. “Dr. Van Donnen, I’m going to insist on the Coroner’s ordering an exhumation and a stomach analysis of the corpse of Anise Halloran!”

He blinked. “But Miss Withers! If you suspect a petroleum poison, stomach analysis will prove nothing. Everything is absorbed by the blood. There is no trace left, as in the inorganic poisons, which can be analyzed!”

Miss Withers paused by the doorway. “Doctor, suppose you wanted to conceal the taste of a strong petroleum poison, how would you do it? In coffee, as my mother concealed castor oil?”

He shook his head. “Liquor would be the best thing,” he told her. “So much in these times it tastes like benzine anyhow!”

Georgie Swarthout waved his hand in a gesture which implied that the entire Alps restaurant, from the orchestra in the distance to the balcony on which they sat, was a special creation of his own for this particular event.

“This isn’t so bad, now you’re here, is it?”

The three sad young ladies who comprised the orchestra struck up something very Strauss, and the waiter produced the soup tureens as a magician might have caused a rabbit to appear out of a hat.

Janey Davis drew an intricate little design on the tablecloth with her fork. “It isn’t so bad,” she agreed. “But I still don’t know why I came.”

“I’ll tell you,” said Georgie Swarthout. “You came because you knew I’d go right on phoning you until you agreed to have dinner or breakfast or lunch or something with me. And some of the moments I chose to phone you were a little inopportune….”

“Very inopportune,” said Janey Davis.

“Have it your own way. I heard about a girl who said she had to take four baths one Sunday afternoon before the phone would ring. What do you think of that?”

“I think you’re impossible,” said Janey Davis.

“At least highly improbable,” agreed Swarthout. “Dance?”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t.”

“Come on, forget that I earn my salary by working for the city, will you? You look worried, young lady. This case has been gruelling for you. Relax.”

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.

M
ISS 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!”