Murder on the Blackboard (8 page)

Miss Withers, who knew differently, did not speak. She led the way back into the living room, glanced idly at the bath, and then came back to the easy chair.

“This is a nice apartment,” she observed. “But didn’t you find it a little lonely here for the two for you? Weren’t you a little frightened sometimes?”

Janey Davis shook her head, innocently. “Frightened—of what?”

“Oh, burglars, prowlers, men—anybody. Weren’t you?”

“Of course not!”

“Then why did you have this?” And from her breast Miss Withers drew out the little automatic that she had found in the drawer of Janey’s desk at Jefferson School.

Janey’s face showed that she was startled.

“That? Oh, yes, that. Why, I … I bought it for Anise. She didn’t tell me why she wanted it, she just wanted it.”

“She planned some target shooting, no doubt,” Miss Withers suggested. “But why didn’t she buy it herself?”

Janey almost smiled. “Only last week she came to me and asked me to get it for her. You see, my brother has a hardware and sporting-goods store over in Newark. And the laws are pretty strict about selling firearms in New York. So yesterday I had dinner with my brother and got the gun. But I forgot to bring it home.”

Janey Davis stretched out her hand for the gun, but Miss Withers replaced it in its hidden resting place.

“Later, perhaps,” she said. “Someone may want to look at it. This mystery isn’t cleared up yet, you know.”

Janey Davis, like everyone else at Jefferson School, knew of Miss Withers’ occasional connection with the Police Department of New York, and so she submitted to the somewhat high-handed proceeding.

“It all seems so strange, so terrible,” she said brokenly. “Why, Anise wasn’t ready to die. I know she didn’t want to die—she was afraid of dying. Who could have wanted to kill her? What motive could there be? Anise had nothing—nobody could have gained by her death!”

Miss Withers shook her head, slowly. In her hands she still held the newspaper which she had bought when she took the taxi, and which had served no purpose to this moment except to shield her hat.

Idly she began to refold it, and then her eagle eye caught, on the second page, a name that was all too deeply burned into her consciousness. She read the item in silence, and her face betrayed nothing. She fought for control, and then the room steadied again.

“Motive,” she repeated calmly. “Motive—hm, let me see. Do you think this little news item could cast any light on the subject?”

She extended the folded paper to Janey Davis, with one long forefinger firmly pressed against the paragraph in question.

The girl read, and slowly the blood mounted to her neck and face. It was a very short item indeed. A headline announced “
LUCKY NUMBER DRAWS FAVORITE IN IRISH SWEEPSTAKES.
”

Beneath the head were these words: “
Dublin, November tenth, AP
Lucky number 131313, according to an official announcement made by Mr. Shamus Donnell, president of the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstakes Commission at the conclusion of the drawing late today, won the name of Kangaroo Lad, favorite for the Midlands Derby. This last great race of the season will be run two weeks from today, and the holder of the lucky one-pound ticket, said to be one A. Halloran of New York City, is certain to receive a prize of from five hundred pounds if Kangaroo Lad merely enters the race, to a possible five thousand to ten thousand if he shows, places, or wins. Other tickets winning—”

Slowly Janey Davis put down the newspaper. Her red little mouth was open, and she expelled a deep breath.

Then she jumped to her feet and ran across the room to the mantel which hung above a fireplace boasting only a gas heater. She fumbled for a moment among a little pile of letters and papers there. Then she paused.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Wait—I remember.” She ran to the bookcase, and searched busily through its shelves.

She found at last a little limp leather volume, with a gold cross on its cover. She brought it out to the table, and flipped through the leaves.

“Anise put it somewhere in her prayer book because she thought it would bring us good luck!” said Janey Davis. “Now if I can find it … I told her not to put it here. I said it was bad luck to use a prayer book for such a purpose, but I guess I was wrong. Here it is!”

She drew forth a large oblong stiff cardboard, bright cerise in color, with an emerald green border of tortuous engraving. It bore the scrolled insignia of the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstakes, and the number embossed across its face was 131313.

Janey Davis was breathless. “The prayer book brought her good luck after all!”

“Such good luck that tonight she lies, a blackened thing of horror, in the City Morgue,” Miss Withers reminded her. “Such luck that her skull was broken in the darkness, and her face streaked with blood, and then cast into the fire….”

“Stop! Stop, I tell you!” The girl drew back, her hands to her lips. The lottery ticket whirled to the floor like an autumn leaf. But Janey Davis stooped to snatch it.

“It’s half mine,” said the girl. “Why, I even loaned her the money for her half. She came home, all excited, saying that she had a chance to get a very lucky number, and would I go halves with her? The ticket was five dollars, and I paid it. They only allow space for one name, and she put hers down, but we were halves on it. Why—”

“You’re going to have to prove that,” Miss Withers told her. “Don’t you see what a position this puts you in? Half of that ticket may be worth, let me see—even with taxes and things, it might mount up to twenty thousand dollars if that horse comes in ahead of the other horses.”

Janey looked bewildered. “But—why should that have anything to do with me? My half is my half. We agreed on that. Bob Stevenson was here when we talked about it, he’ll bear me witness. Why should her death have anything to do with this?”

“If she was dead—you had the ticket,” Miss Withers pointed out. “The whole ticket is worth more than half, and I imagine one would have little difficulty in getting the name changed. Believe me, my dear, the police are going to make things very difficult for you, even if you can prove that you bought this ticket for Anise.”

“I can! I can prove that. Look here!” Janey ran to the mantel, and took up a folded black leather oblong. “Here’s my check book—the stub will show. See?”

She riffled the stubs, and then displayed one which gave evidence that on September sixth she had drawn a check for the amount of five dollars to Anise Halloran, lowering her account from eighty-seven dollars to eighty-two.

“And if the police won’t believe that, they can look at the cancelled check and see for themselves,” Janey declared. She snatched up a long manila envelope, and dumped out its contents on the table. A moment later she presented a single bit of paper, riddled with bank perforations, to Miss Withers.

It was the check for five dollars, payable to Anise Halloran. Idly Miss Withers turned it over. There were three endorsements on the back of the check. The first was the thin, neat signature of Anise Halloran. The second was a heavy, almost illegible scrawl that Miss Withers made out to be “Olaf Anderson” and the last was “Palace Grocery, B. Cohen, cashier….”

“Anderson?” Miss Withers frowned.

“Yes, the janitor at school. You know. He came through the building with these things, selling them.”

“He didn’t come to me,” Miss Withers remarked. “But then, he wouldn’t. I’m not the gambling type.” She toyed with the check a moment.

“I guess that proves it,” said Janey triumphantly.

“It proves something, anyway,” Miss Withers agreed.

I
T WAS LATE THAT
evening when Hildegarde Withers finally inserted a key in her own door, and let herself into the little flat on Seventy-sixth Street which enclosed her Lares and Penates.

It was characteristic of the lady that she first methodically put away the damp copy of the
World-Telegram
which bore the news of the sweepstakes ticket. Then she cast a longing eye at the comfortable slippers which lay neatly beneath the head of the davenport that, when properly managed, became her bed.

But she crossed directly to the telephone. The girl at the hospital phone desk must have recognized her voice for she spoke quickly. “Oh, yes—Inspector Piper. He’s resting quietly. I mean, he’s really resting quietly. Yes, ma’am. Dr. Hampton operated at seven o’clock and it was a success. He’s going to be all right in a little while …”

“Never mind that,” cut in Miss Withers. “When will he be conscious?”

The nurse didn’t know. “Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps it will be several days. Head injuries often are that way, you know. Perhaps if you’ll phone tomorrow …”

“You can depend on it that I shall,” Miss Withers promised. She hung up the receiver with a decided click,

She had her hat off, and her slippers and dressing gown on, when the telephone went off like an alarm clock across the room. She answered it wearily, and then suddenly the weariness went from her voice.

Her ears were filled with a tenor staccato which she recognized as belonging to Mr. Waldo Emerson Macfarland, Principal of Jefferson School, and scholastically speaking, her superior officer.

Mr. Macfarland’s meaning was not entirely clear, owing to the excitement under which he was laboring. But she gathered that he wished to inform her that there had been a regrettable accident at the School; that the police and the newspapers had been having him on the telephone; that it was of the utmost importance that within the next few minutes he have an interview with his third grade teacher.

“I’m coming over to see you at once,” she was told. “Immediately. Without a moment’s delay.”

Miss Withers thought hastily. “Wait a minute!” She looked longingly at the comfortable davenport, and then at the door to the inner bedroom in which her two roommates were sleeping soundly after their day’s labors over the river in Flatbush Junior High Number Two. This was not the time nor the place to receive Mr. Macfarland, or any other gentleman.

“I’ll be over at your house in ten minutes,” she promised. Off came the slippers, and back on went the serge suit and the sailor. Then she fared forth into the night again. It was lucky, she thought, that Mr. Macfarland’s residence was only a matter of a few blocks north along the Park. It was less lucky, of course, that the rain and snow were still combining forces, and that as usual the myriad cruising taxicabs that always infest Manhattan in good weather had vanished at the first breath of bad.

Hildegarde Withers strode briskly north past the mammoth new apartment hotels, beneath sign after sign with their pitiful notices, “Vacancy—fourteen rooms, eight baths—at revised rates,” until she came at last to the barren reaches above Eighty-first Street where some of the old brownstones still hold grimly on like a breakwater before the dark tide of Harlem to the north.

She climbed the steps of 444 and rang the bell, which jingled dismally somewhere in the dark interior. She had no long wait this time, in fact the door sprang away from her. There was Waldo Emerson Macfarland, in his shirt-sleeves. He spun his glasses wildly on their wide black cord, and his gray hair was a rumpled halo above his usually placid countenance.

“I answered the door myself, because I think Rosabelle is asleep,” he confided. This was a standing cliche in the Macfarland greeting. It was true enough, Miss Withers knew. The slatternly sepian lady who “did for” the Macfarlands was quite certainly sound asleep far away on Lenox Avenue, since it was a matter of years since the place had afforded a full-time servant.

She followed the Principal through a combination foyer-reception room, past the foot of the really magnificent staircase, and into a book-lined study in the rear. Macfarland dropped instantly into the leather chair behind the battered oak desk, and rapped busily on his fore-teeth with his fingernails. Miss Withers hesitated for a moment, and then sat down.

“I have received a telephone call from Sergeant Taylor of the Police,” the Principal began. “He wishes me to call at Headquarters first thing in the morning. I have also received telephone calls from several odd persons representing the newspapers. I am informed that a regrettable accident, a very regrettable accident, has befallen a young woman we both know. In short—”

“In short, Anise Halloran was killed this afternoon, and there was no accident about it,” Miss Withers aided him. “For heaven’s sake, come to the point. You didn’t bring me out into the rain to tell me what I knew hours ago.”

“Of course, of course.” The man was swinging his eyeglasses so vigorously that Miss Withers feared he was about to let them go flying, discus fashion. “Supposing for the sake of argument—supposing that this unfortunate happening does prove to be—to be murder”—he tasted the word carefully—“I was wondering if you would be willing, in the light of your previous experience in such matters …”

“Willing to what?” Miss Withers’ nerves had stood about all they intended to stand, for one day.

“I was wondering, as I was saying, if you, in the light of your previous experience in such matters, would be willing to act in my behalf and in the behalf of the Board of Trustees, who are very upset over the matter, as a sort of—as a sort of—”

“You mean, you want me to play detective?”

“Exactly!” Mr. Macfarland was not a beaming person, but he was very close to beaming now. “You would, of course, be relieved of your duties for the length of time necessary to clear up the unpleasantness. A substitute would be provided, and any expenses—any really necessary expenses …” He sneezed in his cupped hand.

Miss Withers was both pleased and puzzled. “I suppose this is an honor,” she said. “But I’m not a detective. I was mixed up in one murder case because I happened to be at the Aquarium when a dead body appeared in the penguin tank upside down, and in another because I was having tea with the Inspector when he heard the alarm. But—”

“I should consider it the greatest of favors,” said Waldo Emerson Macfarland. “In fact, if this matter could be settled expeditiously and quietly, I should be willing to consider making a change in the staff of the faculty at Jefferson School. It has always been the custom to have a man as Assistant Principal, but I am not sure that a woman might not serve the purpose most admirably. Mr. Stevenson has not been everything that I could wish, I must admit. In fact, Mr. Champney and Mr. Velie, of the Board, have agreed to follow out any recommendations I might make for a change at the end of the semester.”