Murder on the Blackboard (3 page)

He had about made up his mind to start a systematic search of the place when the faintest of sounds reached his ears. It was no more than the whisper of a sound—a far-away clink of metal against stone. He stiffened.

“Probably rats,” he told himself. “The cellar must be full of them.”

There it came again … followed by a muffled thump.

“It’s certainly rats,” the Inspector decided. “But I wonder—”

Slowly he moved on tiptoe down the hall, away from the main door. A red light burned feebly above a swinging door at the end of the hall. He pushed the door aside … and the noise of the rats came more clearly.

He was standing on the top of the cellar stairs—looking down a flight of concrete steps into the realm sacred to the janitor of Jefferson School and his battery of furnace and coal bins and storage rooms and all the rest of it. There were dank and unpleasant odors in the air that welled up from the abyss, and the Inspector began to pick his way down without any particular eagerness.

Finally at the bottom, he put away his flashlight. He’d not need it after all, as the place was hung ahead of him with low-power incandescent bulbs, which gave more glow than real light. He could see, on either side of him and straight ahead, long lanes of roughly boarded flooring between thick arched pillars of concrete that supported the upper floors.

Slowly the Inspector made his way along the flooring, trying to avoid creaking boards, and keeping his ears wide open. The noise of the rats had stopped—evidently his coming had frightened them away.

His ears were also attuned to the first sound of the police sirens that within the space of a few minutes should be shattering the stillness of his lonely section. But he was not to hear it.

There came the faintest of movements behind him, a mere rustling of cloth or the drawing of a breath. It was not rats—the Inspector knew that much. Tense as a steel spring, he swung to one side and whirled about, but it was too late.

A thousand bolts of lightning struck him on the back of the head, with reverberating echoes of thunder that mercifully died away … away….

Outside in the street two squad cars were already blaring their sirens as they roared up to the door of Jefferson School. But Oscar Piper did not hear them. He lay on his face in a gathering pool of blood. His crumpled cigar, still firmly grasped in his mouth, hissed and went out.

“D
ON’T STAND THERE LIKE
stone statues!” Miss Withers was saying. “Do something!”

There wasn’t much to do, not yet at any rate. The ambulance was on its way—Miss Withers dabbed futilely at the Inspector’s gory head with her handkerchief—and officers swarmed through the cellar of Jefferson School.

“Let me get my two hands around the neck of the sonovitch …” prayed McTeague earnestly. His watery blue eyes were narrow and unhappy, like those of a caged animal. “Just my two hands …”

Sergeant Taylor, of the Inspector’s office, shook his head. He shivered a little, stared distastefully around at the dank and ill-smelling place, and for the dozenth time he loosened the big six-shooter that he wore in a shoulder holster.

“Wait till we get the Inspector out of here,” he promised her, “and then we’ll start doing something. We’ll tear this building down to the ground until we find whoever was fool enough to try this. And when we get him we’ll give him a lesson in what not to try on cops. There hasn’t a cop killer got away in this town in twenty years …”

He stopped short at the look on Miss Withers’ face. “Of course, I don’t mean that they can’t pull the Inspector through, y’understand. He’s a tough bird, and I’ve seen men live with bigger holes than that in their skull. Hey—you ain’t going to faint, are you?”

“I am not,” said Hildegarde Withers. “But to come back and find him like this! I didn’t want him to stay here alone, but he insisted. And I tried to make him take my umbrella …”

“Never mind that now,” said the Sergeant. “As soon as the ambulance comes we’ll start work in earnest. Whoever did this is still in the building, since you phoned from across the street with your eye on the main door, and the windows only open from the top a few inches….”

Miss Withers Draws a Plan of JEFFERSON SCHOOL

“That’s to keep the children from taking short cuts to the playground,” Miss Withers informed him.

Second-grade Detectives Allen and Burns, from the Bowery Precinct Station, hovered discreetly in the background. This whole thing was considerably over their respectively thick heads.

“If Piper croaks, who gets to be Inspector of Detectives?” Allen wanted to know.

His partner hushed him. “Not you, you sap. Maybe he won’t croak. I seen a picture of a guy who had a crowbar through his skull and lived for twenty years.”

“Yeah? Where did he live?”

“Mattewan—chained to the wall—if you call that living,” Burns informed the persistent questioner.

“Did you see the wound? What do you think it was did with?”

“Looks like an axe job to me,” Burns replied. “Shut up, will you? I think I hear the ambulance.” He did hear it.

The interne from Bellevue took one look at the gash in the Inspector’s skull and rubbed his unshaven chin.

Then he reached for a hypo. “Something hit him mighty hard,” he informed the breathless little group around him. “Swell piece of concussion if I ever saw it. I’ve got to get him back to the operating room and do a trephine job….” Then his exploring fingers touched the gold badge on the Inspector’s vest. “Say—who is it?”

They told him who it was. Instantly he chose a different hypo. “Excuse me,” he corrected. “I’ve got to get him back to the operating room and let one of the big shots do a trephine.”

Miss Withers was close beside him. “Doctor, what chance does he have?”

The interne shrugged. “A swell chance—if we can keep him breathing for a while. They forget to breathe sometimes under a whack like that. Anyway, he won’t need any ether for the operation—he’ll be out stone cold for hours. All right, boys, lift him easy.”

Miss Withers leaned over the limp figure for a moment, then she stood erect. “You want to ride along with him?” asked the interne.

She shook her head. Sergeant Taylor stood beside her as they carried Oscar Piper away.

“I’m glad you stayed,” said the Sergeant. “You can show us through this place. I know how you feel.”

“Do you?” asked Miss Withers woodenly.

“From now on I’m playing understudy,” she announced. “We’re working together?”

“A hundred per cent,” said Taylor, but his voice lacked enthusiasm.

“If I could only get me two hands around the neck …” McTeague intoned, hopefully.

And the chase went on.

Sergeant Taylor dispatched Allen and Burns, together with several husky uniformed men, to go through the cellar with a fine-tooth comb. “Though there’s not much chance that the murdering blackguard stayed down here,” he added, “we’ll take McTeague and go through the building from the roof down.”

“We won’t get far at that,” Miss Withers told him. “Most, if not all, of the teachers here lock their classrooms at the end of the day.” She was thoughtful. “The janitor has a master-key….”

“Janitor, hey? Well, where is this janitor?”

“Anderson may have gone home—no, because the lights were on down here and the main door was open. He wouldn’t go home and leave them that way—but he doesn’t seem to be around anywhere. Never mind him for now—I know where the duplicate master-key is kept.”

Swiftly Miss Withers led the way up the stairs, down the hall past the door of the Teachers’ Cloakroom, past the door of her own schoolroom, to a large office on the first floor, nearest the main entrance. The door bore a legend “Principal” and it was locked.

McTeague swung his massive brogan, and the door swung inward. They came into a small reception room, with a typewriter desk in one corner where, Miss Withers explained, the Principal’s secretary, one Janey Davis, presided. Everything here was strictly in order—Miss Withers led the way into the main office and designated the middle drawer of the big oak desk.

Out they went into the hall again, and up the stairs at the right. The second-floor hall was pitch dark, and McTeague’s flash cast ghostly shadows. It lighted for a moment on a tall glass-fronted show case built into one wall.

“What’s that?” the Sergeant wanted to know. He was staring through the glass upon an assortment of seemingly unrelated objects.

Miss Withers pointed out a small label atop the case. “Lives of the Presidents” was the legend.

“An idea of Mr. Ballantyne, who taught shop work here last year, before Mr. Stevenson came,” she explained. “He had the upper-class boys whittle out models of objects closely related to the presidents of the United States. They made everything of pine and then painted them.”

The Sergeant rubbed his chin. “Not bad, eh?” Inside the case he could make out a rude log cabin and a life-size shovel, its blade marked with sums in chalk. Miss Withers did not need to tell him that these represented the early life of Abraham Lincoln.

George Washington, too, was represented by the hacked-off stump of a little tree, and a bright-handled hatchet beside it. Farther on stood a model of Mount Vernon, slightly askew as to pillars, a pair of duelling pistols labelled “Hamilton and Burr,” and a silk-hat marked “Woodrow Wilson.”

“Kids have more fun nowadays than we did when I went to school,” the Sergeant informed Miss Withers. “Whittling out toy models, huh? They should have made an empty dinner pail in memory of Herb Hoover, and completed the list.”

“Hoover’s been blamed for everything else,” Miss Withers remarked acidly. “I suppose this murder is his fault, too? Come on, we’re wasting time.” They climbed another flight of stairs.

“This is the top, huh? No way to the roof?”

Miss Withers nodded, then shook her head. “No way at all. And if anybody did get up there, he couldn’t get down. There’s a fenced-in playground on two sides of the school, the street out in front, and a twenty-story warehouse on the other side.”

“We’ll start at the end of the hall and work back,” Taylor decided. “You keep out of this, Miss Withers. This is one bad hombre, and if we flush him he’s likely to swing at you.”

“No more me than you,” she pointed out. But the Sergeant was studying a peculiar door at the end of the hall.

“Thought you said there was only a playground here on this side of the building?” Taylor queried. “Then where’s this funny little door go?”

Rudely he pushed on the swinging door, but it held fast. He looked at Miss Withers.

“That? Oh, I forgot to tell you. It’s a fire escape. A little old-fashioned, perhaps, but it was the latest thing when Jefferson School was built, back in the time of Boss Tweed. We have fire drill every week, and the children file into this doorway, one by one, and slide down and out onto the playground. They love the excitement of roller-coasting down, chute-the-chute fashion, and the building can be emptied in five minutes.”

McTeague thrust his bulk forward. “Say—if the kids can get out that way, why couldn’t the murderer? If I could only get me hands on him….”

“I don’t think he got out that way—” began Miss Withers. She was interrupted by the sound of running feet on the stair.

Taylor jerked at his gun, but replaced it when he saw the perspiring face of Allen, the precinct plainclothes man. His mouth was working.

“Hey, what do you think we found down in the cellar?”

Miss Withers’ eyes narrowed. “The body of Anise Halloran!”

He shook his head. “No, no body. There ain’t no body in the cellar at all. But somebody’s been digging a good-sized grave down there, in the soft dirt under the arches. We found the shovel and everything!”

“Well, I’ll be everlastingly—” Sergeant Taylor set out, on the run, with Allen at his heels. McTeague followed, with a reluctant look at the door of the fire escape, which had slammed shut.

But Miss Withers let them go. She wasn’t interested in open graves. This was her chance to do a little quiet sleuthing on the side, and she leaped at it. Oddly enough, she forgot for the moment that a bloodthirsty murderer was supposed to be hiding somewhere in the shadows of the deserted schoolhouse. The lure of the chase was upon her.

Using the master-key which she still held in her hand, she proceeded to unlock each of the third floor rooms in turn, beginning with 3F, which was sacred to Miss Hopkins and her sixth grade.

There was little here which seemed of interest. The well-worn chair behind the desk on the platform wore a gay cushion of chintz. That was typical of Mattie Hopkins, who weighed two hundred pounds and preferred comfort to everything else. There was a pair of carpet slippers beneath the desk, and several hundred spit balls had dried upon the long blackboards. Miss Withers shook her head. Mattie Hopkins was getting slack with her pupils.

Miss Withers passed on to 3E, across the hall. Here the saturnine Agatha Jones dispensed English and allied subjects to the seventh and eighth graders. The room was neat as a pin, except for the blackboards, which still bore scrawlings of the day’s work in sentence structure. Idly Miss Withers went through the drawers of the desks, unearthing a sling shot, three packages of chewing gum, and other booty no doubt gathered by Miss Jones during the day and unreturned to its juvenile owners. None of this seemed to have any bearing on the situation.