Murder on the Blackboard (2 page)

She blinked, rapidly, but the dreadful vision still remained. Then at last the icy chill which had been travelling up her spine reached her brain. She shook her head, and assured herself that twelve times fourteen was still one hundred and sixty-eight.

It has been somewhere well written that amazement and terror are the most transient of emotions, and that within the space of a few seconds one must come to terms even with a gibbering ghost.

Miss Withers brought her teeth together with a slight click. Then her fingers felt again for the wall switch, and the room plunged into darkness.

This darkness was thick, black, and sticky. It blotted, mercifully, the picture of Anise Halloran in her last dreamless sleep, hiding the crimson gash that marred her white forehead and the rivulets that had barely ceased to flow across her cheek.

Instantly the darkness itself was peopled with a thousand vague and terrible shapes—shapes far more fearful than the quiet body of the young singing teacher, stretched out face upward on the couch.

Miss Withers nodded slowly to herself, and then stepped out into the hall and closed the door. She looked around her with something of a shiver, but whatever she had feared to see was not lying there in wait.

She came in safety to the door of her own classroom, paused for a moment to compose herself, and then stepped inside.

This was the first, and quite probably the last moment in the life of Leland Stanford Jones that anyone but his mother had looked on his freckled face and found it beautiful. As Miss Withers stood there, her mind already wrestling with the one incongruous detail of that nearby room of death, Leland turned toward her, pleadingly.

“Teacher, I wrote it seventy-one times already!”

Miss Withers nodded. “Seventy-one will be sufficient, Leland,” she conceded.

Daylight dawned in his face. “An’ I can go?”

She nodded again. “But first I want you to run an errand.”

His face fell. “But the kids are waiting for me …”

“It’s too dark to see a football anyway,” she reminded him. “I want you to run across the street to Tobey’s store. Here’s a dime for the telephone. Call Inspector Piper at Headquarters …”

Leland snapped out of it like a rubber band.

“Yes, teacher!” It was a legend among pupils of Jefferson School that twice in the past their own Miss Withers had played a part in the activities of the New York Homicide Squad.

“Tell him where I am, and tell him to come quickly and quietly,” added Miss Withers. “Hurry now—and don’t stop for—for anything or high water.”

Leland did not know that the watchful eye of his teacher followed him down the hall, across the windswept street, and through the yellow oblong that was the door of Tobey’s Candy and Notions Store.

Back in 1B again, Miss Withers took a deep breath, and then consulted the moon-faced clock. It was, in spite of the early twilight of November in Manhattan, only ten minutes after four. Forty minutes had passed since the heels of Anise Halloran had tapped their way down the hall to the Cloakroom, and only a little more than ten since they had scuffled their way back.

With her eyes on the clock, Miss Withers waited there for five of the longest minutes in her life. There was not a sound from the vast emptiness of the school building around her, but she waited all the same.

Then she reached toward the drawer of her desk which held her sailor—gasping a little to discover that in her excitement she still held in her hand the blue sandal that was Anise Halloran’s.

Swiftly she acted. The blue sandal was enclosed in examination papers, and tucked under her arm. On her head she planted the neat sailor, at a rakish angle, and in her right hand she clutched with a grip of steel the handle of her cotton umbrella.

For a moment she paused outside the door of 1B. She looked a little longingly back down toward the door of the Cloakroom, and then shook her head. It was too late for that. The best thing was for her to act naturally now.

She strode serenely down the hall and out through the front door into the street. It is an evidence of a certain latent histrionic ability in the lady that on this memorable night she left Jefferson School in identically the same manner that had been hers some two hundred-odd times every year for the past decade.

Nor did she hesitate on the steps of the building, but turned to the left and walked briskly along Avenue A. She did not appear to be counting windows—but at the sixth from the main door she paused. There was an eight-inch space at the top of that window—eight inches of jetty darkness.

Miss Withers swung her arm, and that darkness swallowed up a girl’s blue sandal. The schoolteacher made an abrupt about-face. Calmly she marched back and across the street to Tobey’s, the little notion store opposite the main entrance of Jefferson School.

The freckled face of Leland Stanford Jones appeared above the glass of the phone booth. He stood on his tiptoes to hang up the receiver and then came out.

“I called him, teacher!”

“Leland! Did it take all this time …?”

“Mister Tobey wasn’t in,” Leland interrupted defensively. “The door was open, but he wasn’t in. I couldn’t get change out of your dime for the phone till he got back.”

“But he’s here now?”

“Oh, yes’m. In the back room. Mister Tobey!”

A short, bald toad of a man appeared in the curtained entrance of the rear room. The nails of one fat hand continually scratched his bald pate, and with the other he tapped suggestively upon the glass counter.

“Someding?”

Miss Withers joined Leland at the counter, above the assortment of brownish licorice, octogenarian peppermints, and furry horehound.

There was something very wary and defensive in Tobey’s attitude toward this new customer. It didn’t stand to reason that this angular lady had come to buy candy. More likely she was going to squawk about the quality of his product, like the young teacher across the street who had complained to the Board of Health about him when one of her pupils took a cramp in singing class. Just because of the bright colors in his hard candies! Aniline dyes, his eye! As if kids got any sicker from one kind of candy than another! Besides, the brighter it was the better they like it. Tobey knew.

He fidgeted, mumbled, and rubbed his hands raspingly together, but still this tall lady with the umbrella waited there, seemingly intent upon a choice between lemon drops and chocolate-covered peanuts.

He did not know that the curved, cloudy glass of the show counter reflected the dimly-lit doorway across the street. Whatever it may have been that Miss Withers had hoped to see, her vision was suddenly blotted out by a looming gray figure.

She whirled around, with her finger on her lips. “Oscar!”

Let me explain to those of my readers who are having their first introduction to Oscar Piper, Inspector of Detectives, that he is a leanish, grayish man of somewhat indeterminate age, with a pugnacious lower lip and a pair of very chilly blue-gray eyes. A badly-lighted cigar usually hangs from one corner of his mouth, and his speech, perhaps because he has risen from the ranks and is proud of it, smacks a little of Broadway, West Broadway.

There was a cigar in his mouth as he entered Tobey’s store on this memorable evening, and he neglected to remove it before addressing Miss Withers. He was pleasantly surprised to have that lady grasp his hands in hers, with a warning look toward the candy proprietor and the waiting urchin.

She placed a quarter on the counter. “Anything you like, Leland,” she said. Then she led the Inspector into the street. He followed, docile enough. These two had once become engaged to be married—in the flush of excitement after the successful termination of a gruelling murder case—for the space of half an hour. Their friendship had ripened in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that the Inspector’s zeal for the enforcement of the more intelligible of the state’s laws had led him on a sudden chase that gave Miss Withers the opportunity to change her mind.

“Sorry to break up your whole afternoon,” Miss Withers told him. “But now and then a dead body is apt to interfere with the daily pinochle game.”

The Inspector took the cigar out of his mouth, but he was not given a chance to speak.

“I’m serious,” she went on. She told him what she had seen in the Teachers’ Cloakroom.

The Inspector teetered quietly on his toes. “Murder, eh? When did it happen?”

“You don’t understand,” Miss Withers exploded. “It’s still happening! That’s why I sent word to you to come quietly. This is no time for a squad car to scream bloody murder through the streets. Somebody smashed Anise Halloran’s skull in that schoolhouse a little while ago—and that somebody is still in there!”

She tugged at his arm. “Come on!”

The Inspector held back. “This is irregular as—well, it’s irregular,” he told her. “I have to notify the local precinct station of the murder, and have two plainclothes men sent out here, and the Medical Examiner …”

“Botheration!” Miss Withers still pulled at his arm. “While you’re doing all that, the murderer will wash up all traces and disappear. This is no ordinary crime, Oscar Piper. The murderer knew what he was doing, and he waited for me to go home!”

The Inspector threw his cigar away. “Where’s the body?”

She pointed. “Got a gun, Oscar?”

He shook his head. “You know I haven’t carried a gat since I took off my uniform.”

“Well, then you can take my umbrella,” she offered. Stealthily, they approached the schoolhouse.

One dim bulb was burning, as usual, above the entrance to the main hall. They came into the building, with its musty smells of chalk-dust and humanity. Quickly Miss Withers led the way down the long hall toward the rear—past the door of 1B and down to the Teachers’ Cloakroom.

The door was still closed. Inspector Piper listened outside it for a moment, and then thrust it open. He stepped back quickly out of range, but nothing happened.

A second later he found the light switch. There was a long, silent pause, and then he whirled on Miss Withers.

“Hildegarde! Is this your idea of humor?”

The room, Miss Withers saw to her amazement, was empty—as calm and quiet as it had ever been.

There was only the flapping curtain, blown by the breeze which came in through an eight-inch opening at the top of the window. The couch, on which Anise Halloran’s body had lain, was not only empty, but its cotton print covering was orderly and neat.

Miss Withers pointed toward it. “There! There’s where it was!”

Piper came closer. He took the couch cover in his fingers and inspected it closely. “Nonsense! You say that she had been bleeding? Well, there hasn’t been time for anybody to wash stains out of this cover and get it dry. There’s not a sign of blood.”

Miss Withers shook her head doggedly. “I don’t care. I saw what I saw. I’m not given to hallucinations. Nor do I indulge in the flowing bowl. You know that, Oscar. And I say that there was a dead body here less than ten minutes ago.”

“Where could it go?” The Inspector drew a thin dark cigar from his pocket. “A corpse doesn’t get up and wander about, as a rule. Unless this girl was only wounded, and managed to come to herself and get out of here …”

Miss Withers shook her head. “She was dead, sure enough. Her face—yes, she was dead. I can see her yet—with her face so calm and peaceful under that gaping wound. She must have died without knowing what struck her, Oscar …”

“Not necessarily. Fiction to the contrary, there is complete relaxation of all muscles in the face—and body, too—immediately after death, and it lasts till rigor mortis sets in. All expression leaves the face of a corpse within a few minutes—seconds, even. But go on. Try to remember …”

“She lay there, with her head toward the window.”

“How was she dressed? Coat on?”

“I—I don’t remember. Yes, I guess so. She had on a hat, I know that. It was a dark helmet that fitted the head, and it was drawn a little back to show the forehead.”

Piper nodded. “I see. They couldn’t have got her out of that window … no, that’s as far as it opens. Well, your dead body is still in this building somewhere, and so is the murderer unless he—or she—made a getaway damn recently.”

“Nobody made a getaway. I watched the hall while I was here, and the main and only door wasn’t out of my sight while I was across the street.”

“Good.” The Inspector rubbed his hands. “I’m beginning to think you’re right. Maybe the body was parked here for awhile. But why, I don’t see … nor how the murderer managed not to leave a blood stain on the couch …”

“Wait,” interrupted Miss Withers. “I think I’ve got it! There was something white under the body—I thought it was a towel, and it puzzled me. Now I know. The murderer intended to take the body away and leave no trace. He had it pillowed on newspapers!”

“Insulated, huh?” The Inspector chewed his cigar. His voice was tense and eager, for all its being pitched hardly above a whisper.

“The murderer is probably trying to hide the body somewhere else in the building, or else get it out of a rear window onto the playground. Lord, I’ve got a chance to catch him in the act!”

“You mean
we
have,” Miss Withers corrected. She took a firmer grip on her umbrella. “Come on!”

Piper shook his head. “Two of us moving around in the building are sure to make some noise, and probably startle him. Besides, you’ve got to turn in the alarm. We must have a thorough search of this building, and quickly. There is such a thing as routine, too, and the local precinct has a right to get in on this. You run to the phone across the street, and start the boys this way. I’ll lie low here and see if I can get wise to anything. Vamoose!”

“But, Oscar …”

“Hurry, will you? This thing is likely to get too big for us to handle. Go on, Hildegarde!”

“Just my luck not to be in at the finish,” whispered Miss Withers sadly. She departed, swiftly and silently.

Inspector Oscar Piper paused in the Cloakroom long enough to light his cigar. Its pungent smoke comforted him. It didn’t seem as if he had company, living or dead. The schoolhouse was quiet as a tomb—indeed, it
was
a tomb if Miss Withers was correct. And she had a way of being correct.