Murder on the Blackboard (7 page)

Slowly his body collapsed, like a deflated balloon. Mulholland lifted his grip and grunted with the weight.

The Sergeant looked at Miss Withers, but he got no help from her. “Frisk him and take him away,” he ordered the precinct detectives, who stood ready. “Take him over to the station and give him the water-cure. He won’t talk now.”

“How we going to book him, Sergeant?”

“Book him?” The Sergeant was more than a little excited. “Book him for the murder of Anise Halloran … no, play safe. Book him for disorderly conduct, resisting an officer, parking in front of a fire hydrant. What do I care how you book him as long as he’s safe behind the bars?”

“He appeared out of nowhere in the cellar,” Miss Withers suggested wickedly. “Maybe he’ll disappear in the cell the same way.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, put the cuffs on him, Allen. Now let’s see you vanish, Mister Janitor.”

Anderson gave no evidence of vanishing. He dangled in Mulholland’s grasp like a limp rag.

The precinct detectives patted his pockets professionally. Suddenly Burns cried out.

“What you got?” The Sergeant was all ears. “Find the murder weapon, or a gun?”

“Naw.” The detective extracted something from his prisoner’s hip pocket. “But it bulged like a gun.”

He tossed over to his superior a pair of white cotton gloves with blue wrists. The Sergeant surveyed them eagerly. Then he looked at Miss Withers.

When the wagon arrived, Anderson was still in what appeared to be an utter state of alcoholism. He was carried out, his face wreathed in a sodden smile. The Sergeant approached Miss Withers.

“You won’t be needed after all,” he told her. “I guess I’ve washed up this case, and in double-quick time, too. What a sap he was to walk right in on us! I suppose the dope thought I’d be fooled with his play-acting about being drunk. He’s not as drunk as he looks.”

“And how do you know that?”

“I’ll tell you how I know that,” Taylor confided. “There wasn’t a single empty bottle, or a full one either, in the cellar. And he had nothing in his pockets to drink. A guy can’t stay drunk without a source of supply, and he’s been hiding out down there for some hours.”

“How about the furnace? Glass melts, and fuses to a rough lump in intense heat.”

Taylor shook his head. “Not a sign of it. We sifted the ashes, looking for anything that might have to do with the corpse. All we found was this.”

He took a tiny blackened doughnut from his pocket and showed it to the schoolteacher. “Probably a ring from the girl’s finger, before it got partly melted. Analysis will show what it is. Though there’s no need of fussing much with that. This case is open and shut.”

“Open and shut,” Miss Withers repeated absently.

“Sure it is. The janitor’s a moron. He got full of liquor—yes, he had a good load, though he wasn’t as drunk as he pretended. Then he hit the girl over the head with a shovel, dragged her down cellar—and then burned the body. He was going to bury it, but the Inspector prevented that, by walking in too soon. Say, we’ve had dozens of these sex crimes lately. The papers are full of ’em.”

The Sergeant wrapped up the gloves carefully, and put them in his inside pocket. “These’re important,” he announced.

Miss Withers wanted to know why.

“The murderer wore gloves so as not to leave his fingerprints on the shovel handle,” Taylor announced triumphantly. “But microscopic analysis will show traces of this same cotton on the shovel, I’ll bet anything.”

“That’ll prove a whole lot, seeing that the janitor naturally used that shovel every day of his life,” Miss Withers pointed out. “Sergeant, you’re making a mistake.”

“I’m making a what?” The Sergeant was blank. “Oh, you mean we’re not sure that the shovel was the weapon the janitor used to kill the girl and bean the Inspector?”

“I mean you’re making a mistake in giving the janitor the third degree. I warn you, if any harm comes to Anderson while you have him in the station house, I’ll see that a whole basketful of trouble unloads on you. Guilty or not guilty, you have no right to beat up a man to get a confession, and I’m opposed to it. Besides …”

“Besides what?” The Sergeant looked around him for support, and found it in the persons of his uniformed men, who were looking at Miss Withers with ill-concealed contempt.

“Besides, you didn’t look at his eyebrows,” she finished, and took her departure.

T
HE ASSUREDLY DEMENTED AIDE
-de-camp of the Weather Man whose especial duty it is to send Manhattan’s weather, had evidently been unable to decide between rain and snow, and had sent both that night for good measure. Miss Hildegarde Withers heaved a heartfelt sigh of relief as her taxi finally skidded to a stop before a sombre brownstone on West Seventy-fourth Street. Shielding her sailor from the drifting wet by means of a half-folded evening paper, she ran across the sidewalk and up a short flight of steps.

There was a line of bell-pushes beneath the row of mailboxes. Apartment 3C was at the end, evidently the top floor rear. There was a card, whose comparative whiteness signified that Halloran and Davis had not lived here for long.

Miss Withers leaned heavily on the buzzer. Her hand reached for the knob of the inner door, but no click came from upstairs to release the lock. She tried again, pressing the button until her thumb ached, but still she drew no reply.

“Botheration,” snapped Miss Withers. She hadn’t counted on this. She stood awhile, in thought. Her train of thought was rudely side-tracked by the noise of a taxi outside. She drew back against the inner door, and waited.

A girl and a man came up the steps, laughing at the gusty wind which drove rain into their fresh young faces.

The girl, her face an elfin white triangle above the turned-up collar of tweed sport coat, was Janey Davis. Her arm was crooked inside the elbow of a tall young man. For a moment Miss Withers did not see who he was, and then she raised her eyebrows. Young Bob Stevenson, shopwork and science instructor at Jefferson School, had better taste than she had credited him with.

The young couple paused outside and she could see Janey’s lips forming a question. Would he come in? Evidently he would, for he followed Janey through the door. They looked up as one, to see Miss Withers facing them, her face white and drawn.

“Good evening,” she opened, quaveringly.

“Good heavens!” said A. Robert Stevenson. “Miss Withers—what’s wrong?”

“Plenty,” said that lady, heavily. “Shall we go upstairs?”

They went upstairs, the trim little figure of Janey Davis leading the way, Miss Withers marching second, and Bob Stevenson bringing up the rear, his high white brow furrowed and his hair slightly askew. His topcoat was dripping, and his neat—almost dainty—oxfords were wet through. He shivered a little.

They came, through the door marked 3C, into a small squarish living room whose inner wall bore the tell-tale panelling of a folding bed. There were books and ashtrays scattered everywhere, and one comfortable chair into which Miss Withers lowered herself carefully.

“I came here to tell you that Anise Halloran has been murdered,” she remarked in a strictly conversational tone. “We haven’t much time before the police will come traipsing around asking questions. I though maybe you’d rather talk to me first—I have some connections at Headquarters, you know.”

The two of them stared at her, blankly. Then Janey Davis grasped the back of a chair.

“Not Anise … murdered! No, no … that couldn’t happen. Nobody would want to murder Anise….”

“Then somebody did it unwillingly,” Miss Withers told her, coldly.

Bob Stevenson lit a match, though he had no cigarette in his mouth. “Would you mind starting over from the beginning?” he asked quietly. “You’re
sure
she’s dead?” He hesitated a moment over the word as if he did not like the taste.

“She’s dead all right,” said Hildegarde Withers. “Dead and cremated.” She told them the bare facts of what had happened.

Janey, half-hysterical, was mouthing sorrow and incredulity. But Bob Stevenson had more control.

“She was such a little thing,” he said softly. “Why should anyone want to kill her? I don’t understand it. It all seems so—so wrong. Why, we were expecting her to join us here tonight when we got back from dinner, and we were going to play three-handed bridge …”

“A beastly game,” Miss Withers cut in. “Well, she won’t be here. I can’t waste words. You realize that everybody who knew her will be suspected until this thing is cleared up. I suppose the two of you have alibis?”

“Alibis?” Janey Davis’s surprised eyes looked even more surprised than ever.

“You heard me,” said Miss Withers. “You can prove where you were when the murder was committed?”

Janey looked blank. “Of course I can,” said Bob Stevenson. “I went to the public library early this afternoon, and I stayed there in the Genealogy Room until I came here to take Janey out to supper. I do that often, it’s a hobby of mine to trace back on my family tree. I’m preparing a paper on my mother’s family. We put a lot of stock in those things down where I come from.”

“And where’s that?” Miss Withers wanted to know.

“Virginia,” Stevenson told her. “I’ve got rid of the accent, being up north the way I have.”

“We have been known to put a lot of stock in those things up where I come from, in Boston,” Miss Withers reminded him. “Janey, what did you do this afternoon?”

The girl blinked. “Me? Why—just nothing. I sat around home, that’s all. I was going to a gym class, but Anise promised she’d hurry home and go with me, and so I waited for her until it was too late. She hasn’t been looking at all well lately, and I argued her into doing something about it. And now—”

“And now she’s in the Morgue,” Miss Withers observed. “It’s too late to do anything about that—but we can find out who did it. Can either of you offer any suggestions?”

“I didn’t know her so very well,” Stevenson admitted. “This is her first year at Jefferson School, and mine, too. I’ve seen her around the building, and thought how nice looking she was—and then of course since I’ve been coming here to see Janey, we’ve got to be quite friends.”

Miss Withers looked at Janey Davis. “And you?”

“We’ve just roomed together this month,” Janey admitted. “I had this place alone, and I thought it would be nice to cut the rent in two. Anise didn’t like the place she was living in, because they frowned on boy friends, and so she moved in with me. I don’t know much about her except that she came from somewhere in the middle west. Chicago, I think. She told me her parents were both dead.”

Miss Withers was busy making shorthand notes. “And the ‘boy friend,’ as you call it—the one they objected to in Anise’s last place. I suppose he’s been here often?”

Janey hesitated. “Often? No, not at all—unless someone came when I was out. I never thought of it before, but maybe it is funny. Anise had lots of dates out, but I didn’t know her well enough to ask her where she was going, and she never seemed to want to tell me. She’s been strange lately … worried, and thin looking.”

“Worried about what?”

“Her health, I guess. She complained that she wasn’t ever hungry.”

Miss Withers nodded. “I’d like to look through her room before the muddling detectives get here,” she suggested. “Will you help me, Janey?”

“Of course!” Janey stood up. “But she didn’t have any room. There’s only this room, and the kitchen-dinette over there. That’s her closet, and the little chest of drawers holds her things.”

“I’d better be running along,” said Bob Stevenson. “Unless there’s something that I can do?”

Miss Withers appreciated his delicacy. There was something a little indecent and irreverent about unfolding the personal belongings of the dead girl in front of a man’s alien eyes.

Stevenson paused at the door. “I wonder—you don’t happen to know if school keeps tomorrow or not, do you?”

Miss Withers had her own ideas, but she did not expose them. “I’m going down there at the usual time in the morning,” she said. “I think it would be best if we all did.”

“Right!” He crossed the room and took Janey’s hand. “This is tough for you,” he said. “Good night.”

Miss Withers watched Janey’s blue eyes follow the young instructor as he went out. Unless she was very much mistaken, Janey Davis saw Sir Galahad, Rudolph Valentino, and H.R.H. Prince Charming incarnate in that well-muscled figure.

The two women stood for a moment facing each other, and then they set to work. A search of the closet and the chest of drawers brought nothing to light that should not have been there. Just a few clothes and dozens and dozens of shoes, the latter well-worn on the inside of the heel.

Strangely enough, there were no keepsakes, no letters, no personal photographs. “Anise told me she threw them all away when she moved,” Janey confided. “She wanted to start over again, I guess.”

Miss Withers nodded. With sure, deft fingers she refolded the silken garments that had covered and warmed Anise Halloran’s round young body only a few hours before. She stood the pairs of high-heeled shoes back on their shelf. Then she rose to her feet.

Miss Withers moved across the room toward the kitchen. It was little more than a closet set in the wall, with one narrow window and an alcove with a built-in table and two benches.

“We didn’t eat in much,” Janey said. Miss Withers looked idly through the cupboard shelves. A tall dark bottle caught her eye. It bore no label, but it was half full of a pungent amber liquid. Miss Withers removed the cork, sniffed at it, and replaced it.

“That’s Anise’s medicine,” Janey offered.

“Bad medicine,” said Miss Withers. “Anise wasn’t the type to have a taste for whiskey.” Her eyes roamed the shelves, but there was no sign of cocktail shaker or even of mixing glasses. Just the tall brown bottle—

“She drank it straight, too,” concluded the schoolteacher.

Janey Davis was defiant. “Well, what if she did? This isn’t 1850, Miss Withers. What Anise did was her own business. Besides, she never drank at school, and it didn’t affect her teaching.”