Murder on the Blackboard (16 page)

Miss Hildegarde Withers let that pass without committing herself one way or the other. “These things are bound to come out sooner or later,” she said slowly. “It would be better if you gave us all the help you can, instead of hindering.” But her remarks fell on stony ground.

Janey sobbed quietly into her handkerchief, while Georgie Swarthout made vague gestures of comfort. The situation was relieved by a shrill buzz of the doorbell.

Janey Davis came out of her sobbing spell, and went to the door. Her face lighted up at what she saw there—Bob Stevenson, his dark Chesterfield coat flecked with snow. He began to shake the wet drops from his hat, but the girl clutched his arm and drew him through the door.

He looked up, and saw Miss Withers’ eyes boring into his own. “I see that the Spanish inquisition is still on,” he observed. “Janey here didn’t have anything to do with the case. Why can’t you leave her alone? They’ve got the murderer, or at least they did have him until they let him get away. I don’t see …”

“You don’t need to see, young man,” Miss Withers told him. “The investigation is bound to go on, whether we like it or not. I’m trying to be as human as possible about my part of it, but I’m going right straight ahead. Also, having learned what I came to find out, I’m going home. Oh, you must pardon my forgetfulness. Mr. Stevenson—Mr. Swarthout, of the police also, I might add.”

The two young men nodded, and mumbled their delight at meeting. Miss Withers marched toward the doorway. Suddenly she hesitated.

“It’s another nasty cold day,” she observed. “Janey here is all unstrung, Mr. Stevenson is chilled and wet through, and we’re both of us likely to be before we get a block away. I think under the circumstances, and to show that there is no hard feeling in all this, we ought to have a drink together.”

Georgie Swarthout stopped as if shot. “What? Say, my ears must be going back on me. What you just said sounded like ‘we ought to have a drink together’!”

“That’s what I did say.” Miss Withers made her best attempt at a convivial smile.

Bob Stevenson was smiling vacantly, his eyes wide. Janey Davis was the first to move.

“I—I’m sorry, but there’s nothing to drink here. The police came and took Anise’s medicine….”

“Heavens, child, I didn’t mean that.” Miss Withers reached beneath her coat, and after much tugging she brought forth a single tall quart bottle.

Georgie’s eyes widened. The label was
Dewar’s Dew of Kirkintilloch
—and that bottle was from the liquor warehouse they had just left.

She set it on the table with a flourish. “Have you some glasses?” she asked Janey.

The girl looked questioningly at Bob Stevenson, and then moved woodenly toward the kitchen. Miss Withers had certainly dropped a bombshell into the conversation.

Stevenson began to be amused by the whole situation. “And to think that all this time I’d figured you for a Puritan,” he told Miss Withers. He accepted one of the three glasses that Janey Davis brought. She herself didn’t want any.

Georgie Swarthout tossed his off first, his eyes still on Miss Withers with wonder and amazement. Miss Withers took one gulp, but her eyes welled up with tears. Only Georgie, who stood beside her, saw that she poured most of the contents of her glass into a little Japanese garden that stood on the telephone table.

But A. Robert Stevenson sniffed his with considerable gusto. “It isn’t often one gets liquor like this nowadays,” he admitted.

“Very seldom indeed,” agreed Miss Withers, who had never tasted this or any other kind in all her life. She put her empty glass on the table.

“I was just thinking,” she said slowly, her eyes on the ceiling, “how Anise Halloran would have enjoyed being here, if she were alive. Congenial company—two of you with whom she’s often drunk in the past—and really genuine liquor—”

Miss Withers let her voice soften. “Suppose she is here, trying to touch us, peering over our shoulders, trying to scream into our ears the name of the person who sent her into the shadows forever….”

“Oh, for God’s sake, stop!” Janey flung her lithe young body into a chair, and crouched there, her head buried in her hands. Georgie moved toward her, but Miss Withers waved him back.

There was the faintest trembling of Bob Stevenson’s hand as he put down his partially emptied glass and knelt beside the girl.

“That’s all right, Janey,” he told her comfortingly. “Miss Withers didn’t mean to frighten anybody….”

“Miss Withers jolly well
did
mean to frighten somebody,” said that lady under her breath.

Janey’s hand clutched Stevenson’s shoulder, pulling his well-tailored coat out of shape. He stroked her arm, comfortingly.

“That’s all right … all right….” He looked up at Miss Withers. “You’d better leave her to me,” he suggested. “Come back some other time; the child is hysterical now.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” Miss Withers admitted. “Come on, Georgie. We’ve put our foot in it again.”

They went down the stairs in silence. Miss Withers looked at her young companion, her eyes twinkling.

“What do you make of our visit?” she asked.

Georgie shook his head. “I’ve got a hunch you suspect the smart young instructor of something or other, only I don’t know what. Was that why you rang in the act about the dead girl listening in and so forth? If it was, he never batted an eye.”

“Somebody else did bat one, though,” said Hildegarde Withers. “I could see you were surprised at my sitting up the drinks …”

“Setting, you mean?”

“All right, setting up the drinks?”

“I was,” admitted Swarthout. “I still am. Did you figure on getting them drunk enough so they’d talk, or what?”

Miss Withers shook her head. “I just wanted to see their reaction when I brought out the bottle with that special label on it. And neither one of them was at all surprised, in spite of the fact that that was the liquor Anise Halloran made a practice of drinking. I suppose I’m now as bad as the janitor, because to steal one bottle is as bad as to steal a whole warehouseful. But I had a hunch, and it didn’t work. I’m not used to my hunches missing fire.”

“What gets me,” complained Georgie Swarthout as they walked on up 74th Street, “is why you left the bottle sitting on the table up in that cute little Janey Davis’ apartment.”

As it happened the quart bottle with the Dewar label was no longer resting on the table in Janey’s apartment. It was lying scattered across the roof of a garage in the rear, its amber contents mixed with the falling snow.

The young lady who had just hurled it from an open window was leaning with her cheek against the frame.

“Oh, Bob, what’ll we do?”

The young man came over beside her. “We’ll keep on doing just as I suggested, dear.”

“But Bob”—she moved her cheek from the windowframe to his shoulder—“they even suspect
me
! Miss Withers does, I know she does.”

“She suspects everybody, and quite right, too,” said Bob Stevenson. “Probably she goes home at night and asks herself questions until she gets herself in a corner and nearly confesses. Don’t you worry about Withers, she’s a smart old girl. Prides herself a bit on being a sleuth, but why not?”

“Oh, Bob, I wish I were as sure as you are!” She snuggled a little closer, and he ventured to enclose her shoulders with his arm. “Sure about it’s all coming out all right, and everything. I’m frightened, Bob.”

She looked up at him. Her eyes were moist, and her hands trembled.

“Say something, won’t you?”

He swung away and faced her. “What can I say, you darling? It’s the wrong time to say what I want to say. But—Janey, you know what it is. When all this is over and forgotten, and Anise’s murderer has paid the penalty and we are all allowed to be ourselves again, will you … will you, Janey?”

Janey’s soft fingers brushed his lips. “Don’t say it, don’t ask it now, Bob. When this is all over, after you know everything there is to know, then come and ask me—if you still feel the same way—come and ask me the most important question in all the world.”

Bob Stevenson laughed. “As if there’d be anything to find out about you that could make me change! That’s a joke!”

But joke or no joke, Janey Davis joined very little in his open laughter. She held out both her arms to him.

“Oh, Bob,” she cried brokenly. “I’m so alone! I want something so terribly, and it seems to be you!”

“I
T’S ALL LIKE A
puzzle that won’t work out,” Miss Withers was complaining. The Inspector, still swathed in bandages so that he resembled a turbanned Mohammedan, watched her through swirls of blue cigar smoke.

“And I’ve got a feeling that when finally I’m given the solution, I’m going to find that I’ve been butting my head against a stone wall—as I did once in a newspaper crossword puzzle only to learn the next day that the word
iris
had been defined by the nitwit who made it up as ‘the Greek god of love.’”

Miss Withers nibbled at a grape from the basket at the head of the Inspector’s dismal looking white iron bed.

“It seems to me that you’re getting along fine,” Piper told her. “You’ve got pretty fair grounds for suspicion of five or six people, and a clear case against one, the janitor, even if that pompous ass of a criminologist from Vienna did let him get away. My boys will pick him up, though.”

“Yes,” Miss Withers agreed. “And what good will that do? I tell you, the janitor didn’t commit the murder! He couldn’t have, he was drunk as a lord. And that was no crime of impulse. The murderer knew the school, and my habits. The murderer knew that Anise Halloran would be the last person to enter that Cloakroom in the afternoon, since I never used it. He not only knew that I was mixed up with the police, he counted on it … or she did, whichever it was.”

“Yeah? Well, there’s lots to figure out. If my head didn’t ache so, I’d take a whirl at the thing from here, but as it is I can only listen.” The Inspector puffed at his cigar, almost happily. It was the first time in years he had had the energy and leisure to smoke a cigar through to the butt without letting it go out a dozen times. He was making the most of it.

“You haven’t told me yet how Anise Halloran managed to walk down the hall and out the building, as you say you heard her, and yet reappear instantly in the Cloakroom, a bloody corpse. Do you think she tiptoed back, so you wouldn’t hear her?”

“I’ve got my theory of that,” Miss Withers told him. “But I want to mull it over a little more. If my hunch is right, it’s added proof that Anderson had nothing to do with the murder, directly at least.”

“I’ll make one suggestion,” said Oscar Piper meekly. “You’re making a hell of a mistake to take up this case with your mind made up that the janitor isn’t guilty because he is so obvious a suspect. Everything points to him, so out of pure contrariness you want to prove him innocent, and somebody else guilty. You’re fitting facts to the theory, not theory to the facts. And wouldn’t it be a good joke on you and on the newspapers if in this case the obvious, dumb suspect happened to be the real murderer, after all?”

“Maybe,” said Hildegarde Withers. “But Anderson didn’t kill Anise Halloran. There was straw in his eyebrows, his feet are too big, and besides, he doesn’t act like a murderer!”

“I told you some years ago that murderers never do,” said Oscar Piper. “How about the hatchet that somebody swung at your head a little while after Anderson broke away from his guards and gained his freedom? Doesn’t that pin it on him?”

Miss Withers nodded. “It certainly seems to pin it on him. But suppose somebody else thought of that!”

“You’re making a whole lot of this lottery-sweepstakes business,” the Inspector went on. “I don’t see where that gets us anywhere. Janey Davis wouldn’t commit a murder in order to get the other half of the money, and if she did she wouldn’t give up her prize.”

“She hasn’t given it up,” Miss Withers reminded him. “I think she would very much like to be persuaded not to give it up. She’s got some weeks yet before the race is run, you know. I feel it deep down in my bones that Janey Davis is going to change her mind.”

Miss Withers rose to her feet and walked rapidly the length of the room. “There’s so many angles to the case,” she complained. “So many parts that don’t fit into the jig-saw picture. Why and how did the janitor get his collection of old shoes—Anise Halloran’s old shoes? Where was Macfarland that afternoon when he says he was home and his wife says he was taking a walk and gathering material? How did the wooden hatchet in the exhibit case come to be a steel hatchet when it whizzed past my head? Why did Anderson have an endless supply of good liquor, and not sell any, and why did Tobey across the street sell quantities of the same liquor without any big booze ring hookups? Why did a sweet kid like Anise Halloran take to drinking straight whiskey, and start running down physically at the same time?”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” pleaded the Inspector. “I’m afraid you’ll have to flunk me in this test. Isn’t there one question I can answer?”

Miss Withers was thoughtful for a moment. “Yes,” she said. “Answer me this. Why did Anise Halloran stay after school to put her next morning’s scales on the blackboard, and then go to the Cloakroom with the last one unfinished and a fragment? It went like this, you know….”

She tried to whistle. “Whoooo-wheeeeee, whooo-wheee….”

“Not much tune to that,” the Inspector told her. “I’d about as soon listen to a crooner. And I don’t see any clue in it, either. It doesn’t mean a thing to me.”

“It might to somebody else,” said Miss Withers. “That is what Anise marked on the blackboard a few moments before she died. Thanks to my right idea of calling in the manicurist, we know that the body is hers, anyway. I was sure for a while that the major clue lay in the disappearance of Betty Curran, but now that is explained away. Don’t those two notes suggest a song, a popular song perhaps, that might be a clue, a hint to guide us?”

“It sounds like a sparrow twittering to me,” Piper admitted. “But you might try it on your suspects.”

“I certainly intend to.” Miss Withers rose to go. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Oscar. That little nurse of yours keeps walking past the door, and I suppose I’ve overstayed my limit.”