Murder on the Blackboard (26 page)

“But he was an optimist, Oscar. He believed that luck was with him when I accepted his help. I had no choice, for I knew this was my one chance to trap him. He hoped to slip the poison in your medicine, which he thought you would drink on awakening, and then to make me believe that we had both drowsed while the real murderer entered. He removed his shoes, and crossed the room without a breath of sound. But I knew what he was doing, because he spoke to me first to see if I slept. And I heard the tiny splash his pellet of poison made as it touched the water … you know the rest.”

“I know the rest,” agreed the Inspector. “But would you mind telling me one thing? Why in heaven’s name did you go around whistling that insane little bird-call for days and days? What part did that play in this twisted business?”

“You mean this?” Miss Withers pursed her lips, and whistled her two notes, thrice repeated…. “Whoooooo-wheeeee….”

The Inspector nodded. She smiled, shamefacedly. “That, Oscar, was the one essential clue that you always talk about. It was the little tune that Anise Halloran wrote on the blackboard underneath her regular scales and tunes for the morrow’s class. When she wrote that phrase, Oscar, she tried to leave a message behind her. Somehow, she knew. Perhaps her suspicion of her husband went farther than ordering the little gun that Janey never gave her. Perhaps she guessed the dreadful secret behind the liquor which tasted so badly. Perhaps she knew what was waiting for her that night—but did not know where, or when. It will always be a mystery why she did not cry out for help, instead of putting that pathetic little clue on the blackboard. I think it was her pride. She married him, you see. She still wore his ring, next her bare body. She had faith, an insane faith, that everything would somehow come out all right. She intended to come back next morning and erase the pitiful evidence of her momentary terror and suspicion of the man she once loved—perhaps still loved.”

“Yeah, but why the tune? What does whoooo-wheee convey?”

Miss Withers took a pencil from her bag, and the Inspector’s chart from the foot of his bed. “I whistled it to every suspect in this case, until they all thought I was cuckoo. I made the natural mistake of reading the tune instead of the notes, Oscar. See here? She wrote the simplest, easiest message she could think of—just the notes A-D … A-D …
hold
A-D. Notice the
hold,
Oscar? Stevenson’s name was A. Robert Stevenson, in full. The A. undoubtedly stood for Addison, the maternal side of his family of which he was so proud. She must have called him ‘Ad’ as a pet name, and in her terror she forgot that no one else knew it! All the same, her message remained in plain view of all of us, on the blackboard, crying aloud Bob Stevenson’s guilt for those who could read. See? ‘If anything happens to me (it’s understood she implied)
hold Ad!
’”

Miss Withers rose to her feet. “I’m going to leave you now,” she said. “It’s been a hard night for an invalid, even if you did sleep through it like a log while I was giving you credit for being a consummate actor!”

Piper grinned. “I knew I was in good keeping,” he told her. Their hands met, across the coverlet.

“There’s only one person I’m really sorry for in all this,” Miss Withers remarked. “Janey Davis is such a sweet child, and this is going to be the hardest blow of her life. She was pretty close to being in love with that charming fiend. I wonder if I ought to go to her before the newspapers come out with all the gory details?”

“I think you ought to go home and go to bed,” Piper told her, his voice strangely gentle. “Janey Davis is a young lady who can take care of herself.”

At that moment a very sleepy Janey Davis was answering the telephone in her little apartment on 74th Street.

The voice at the other end of the line was very familiar to her by now. It was Georgie Swarthout’s.

“I know it’s early, Janey,” he said softly. “But I’ve got something really important to talk to you about. Won’t you get dressed and come out to breakfast with me?”

There comes a time in every girl’s life when, having said “No” very definitely and very many times repeated to a certain young man, she says “Yes” from pure contrariness. Much to her surprise, Janey Davis said it now.

And the curtain falls….

Turn the page to continue reading from the Hildegarde Withers Mysteries

L
IKE THE NOTE OF
a pitch-pipe between the lips of some mad, unearthly chorus leader, the traffic officer’s whistle sounded its earsplitting E above high C. Rush hour traffic on the Avenue, which had just been granted a green light, stopped jarringly, with a screech of brakes. All but the open Chrysler roadster, which as Officer Francis X. Doody had noted from the corner of his vigilant blue eye, was veering crazily towards the left instead of keeping on south past the impassive stone lions of the Library as was its proper course …

Officer Doody took the whistle out of his mouth and bellowed “Hey!” But the echoes were still sounding back their flattened versions of his blast when there came a sickening crash of tortured glass and metal. The open blue Chrysler had come to rest with its front end inextricably entangled with the fender of a northbound Yellow taxi.

“Where do you think you’re goin’?” Doody spoke his piece by rote as he strode wearily over toward the scene of the smash. He jerked the white gloves from his big red hands as he went, remarking audibly that this was just about what he could have expected of his lousy luck, anyway. As if it wasn’t enough, on the tag end of a dreary November afternoon, to have it start snowing just as the crowds were pouring out of shops and office buildings! To cap it all, some dumb driver had to pick the busiest corner in Manhattan to try a forbidden left turn in the middle of a
Go
light. “One damn thing after another!” Doody was mumbling.

Then he stopped suddenly, his arms akimbo. Swiftly the realization came over him that there was something decidedly wrong here, something “phoney” as he himself would have expressed it. Mechanically his lips formed the words … “One damn thing after another … ”

It was at that moment that this accident began to be different from all other accidents. For there wasn’t any driver behind the wheel of the Chrysler roadster. There wasn’t anybody in the car at all. It was deserted, wandering, derelict.

Doody walked clear around the wreck, oblivious to the interrupted traffic and to the din of the sirens. His jaw was thrust forward belligerently, but his expedition drew a blank.

“Smart guy, huh?”

But nobody answered him. He rubbed his eyes, half-blinded by the thick falling flakes of the sooty precipitate which passes for snow in Manhattan.

The driver of the wounded taxi scrambled down from his seat at Doody’s command. His name, he insisted, was Al Leech. Doody had a hard time to get him to speak loudly enough to be heard. Somewhere in the vast reaches of his skinny throat his voice seemed to have a way of losing itself. He was naturally small and nervous, and his eyes were unnaturally wild.

Doody took the little man by the shoulder and shook him vigorously, for lack of a better victim.

“Come clean, you! Where did the driver of that Chrysler go?”

The cab-driver swallowed with obvious difficulty, and then pointed up the street. “I saw him, I tell yer! I saw him … he’s there!”

Doody turned, and at that moment the street lights came on, slightly increasing the confusion without adding greatly to the visibility. “You saw
who where?”

The cabbie pulled away from Doody’s clutch, still pointing. His grimy finger indicated a spot perhaps thirty yards away, across Forty-second Street and up Fifth a little distance.

Doody rubbed at his eyes again. The snowfall was thickening, and this was the period between the dark and the daylight which Longfellow, in an earlier age, dedicated as “the children’s hour” and which has since been diverted from children to cocktails. The pale yellow glow of the street lamps fought the last of the winter daylight, and a nearby church clock was striking five-thirty.

Even Officer Doody could see that something lay quietly and still in the narrow lane between north and south-bound traffic on the Avenue—something that vaguely resembled a sack, and was not.

Doody took several uncertain steps forward, and then remembered his post of duty. He drew his whistle, let forth a series of staccato blasts, and then waited a moment for an answer. There was no answer. He tried again, and drew another blank.

The street was already jammed enough to block traffic both ways. Let it stay that way for a while, Doody reflected. And he set out on the run toward the gathering crowd which already had surrounded that shapeless sack on the pavement.

He fought his way through the mob, the little cab-driver directly in his rear. For the hundredth time the big cop wondered at the sudden appearance of the curious crowd which always seems to spring out of nowhere, like worms after the rain, at the first cry of an accident.

Halfway through the jam he whirled and caught the cab-driver by the shoulder. “It’s an accident case, sure enough,” he yelled above the din. “You get to the nearest phone and get an ambulance, quick. Get Bellevue—no, Roosevelt is closer. Scram!”

Obediently the little man turned and dashed toward the corner. By means of a perfect off-tackle plunge, Doody came at last to the bull’s eye of the rapidly increasing circle.

“Get back, will yez? What’s the trouble here?”

Nobody answered him. They were all looking down, down to the glistening asphalt where a young man lay sprawled out on his back … a big young man with fair hair. It was a face that would have been thought more than handsome under ordinary circumstances, but it was not handsome now.

He was dressed, this accident case of Doody’s, in a thick overcoat of yellow camel’s hair, with pigskin gloves on his somewhat small hands and bright tan shoes on his feet. The brim of a crushed felt hat protruded from beneath one shoulder, and a cigarette still burned merrily into the furry overcoat lapel where it must have dropped from lips now black and contorted.

A snappy dresser, this accident case. But there was one detail of his array which did not jibe with Doody’s ideas of what the well dressed young man will wear this season. Around his neck, just above the soft pinned collar and the blue-gold tie of printed silk, was another and heavier cravat—a noose of twisted hempen rope!

Doody blew his whistle again, a dozen short sharp blasts. Then he sank slowly to his knees, and touched the face, on which the snowflakes were still melting as they fell. The head rolled loosely, almost too loosely, to one side as he brought his reluctant fingers against the flesh. Then Doody got a grip on the knot in the half-inch rope, and worked it until it came loose in his hand. But as the rope came away, it left a cruel red stigma around the throat of the young man who lay there on the asphalt.

From the knot, this rope ran off somewhere under the encroaching feet of the multitude. Doody hauled on it vigorously, glad of something definite to get his hands on. With a certain amount of useless advice and assistance from the crowd the end was gathered in, not without an old lady or two being upset in the process.

He had expected to find something at the end of it. It stood to reason that a man can’t be hanged unless he is hanged from something. But there was only a binding of fine silk thread, dark blue in color, to keep the end from ravelling.

Doody kicked aside his landlubberly coil, and stared again at that unlovely face which looked rather horribly up at the sky. “Another suicide,” he said aloud. “Get back, all of yez! Why don’t somebody hunt up the officer on this beat?”

He sent another series of blasts echoing above the howling sirens of the blocked autos, which now were jammed all the way down to the Empire State Building.

“Suicide or not, I got to get the street clear,” decided Doody aloud. “Come on, some of you. Give me a hand and we’ll get him inside.” He pointed to the nearest bystander. “You, there!”

An apple-peddler shook his head vehemently and backed away out of sight. His place in the inner circle of the curious was taken by a youngish man in a derby, whose fingers tugged nervously at a yellow mustache as he saw what lay at his feet. He dropped his brief case, and seemed to have some trouble in taking his eyes from the face of the man who lay in the street.

“Good God, it’s Laurie Stait!” The words seemed torn from his lips.

“So? You know him, huh? Well, never mind.” Doody motioned imperatively. “Grab his legs. We can’t let him lay here in the street.”

If the new arrival was willing, he hid it successfully. But Doody insisted. “Come on, if you know him you don’t need no introduction. Grab his legs.”

He bellowed at the crowd until a narrow lane was formed, and the two of them lifted the unhappy young man to the curb, across the sidewalk, and in through the wide doors of the Enterprise Trust Building.

“Here, you can’t bring that man in here!” shouted the elevator starter. “You can’t do it … ”

“Horsefeathers,” retorted Doody. “We did do it, see? And you’ll like it.”

The crowd in the lobby was closing in again. One woman screamed that she was about to faint, and then pressed forward for a better view.