Murder on the Blackboard (11 page)

It was, strangely, the librarian of the genealogy room at the Library. “We found the information you wanted,” she was told. “Luckily it was among the A’s, so it only took a few minutes. According to the records, Mr. Stevenson took out volume one, a rare book titled ‘The Addison Family Previous to 1812,’ by Robert Addison. He signed for it yesterday afternoon at exactly three-thirty, and returned it to the desk at a quarter of six.”

Miss Withers asked another question. “Oh, no. If Mr. Stevenson had left the library during the afternoon his book would have been collected by the pick-up boy and returned to the desk, since no books may be taken out. The boy makes his rounds every half hour. I’m sure you’re very welcome. No, I won’t speak of it to a soul.”

Miss Withers hung up the receiver. There was a noise in the hall. She looked out and caught the eye of a fellow-conspirator. It was Leland Stanford Jones. He came at her whisper, and handed her a key. She looked at him questioningly. But he shook his head. “It’s gone, teacher. I looked all through her desk!” Miss Withers patted his shoulder and motioned toward the door. Then she returned to the telephone, and made a call.

Surprised at the result, she made several more. Finally she put down the instrument and strode triumphantly back into the faculty meeting.

“I’d like to interrupt with one question,” she said. Mr. Macfarland looked annoyed.

“Yes, Miss Withers?”

“I’d like to know where it was that you learned that Miss Betty Curran, our domestic science teacher, was convalescing from an appendicitis operation at Brooklyn Hospital.”

Mr. Macfarland frowned. “She told me so, before she left. Why, we sent flowers—you remember that, Miss Withers! All the teachers contributed.”

Miss Withers nodded. “But did anybody go to see her?”

There was a general shaking of heads. “Brooklyn is a long way by subway, and besides, she asked us not to. Said she’d rather be alone.” Miss Strasmick looked at Hildegarde Withers. “Why?”

“Exactly. Well, perhaps Mr. Macfarland was wrong when he said that she could play no possible part in this investigation. Betty Curran was a good friend of Anise Halloran’s, and Anise Halloran is dead. What’s more, I just phoned Brooklyn Hospital, and four or five other big hospitals in that part of the city, and at none of them is there or was there a patient named Betty Curran!”

Mr. Macfarland gasped, audibly. “I never … heard of such a thing! Then where
is
Miss Curran? What’s she been doing all this time?”

Miss Withers nodded. “I wonder!”

T
HINGS WERE GETTING OUT
of the Sergeant’s depth. He looked at Miss Withers, but got no help from that lady. He looked at the Principal, who seemed in need of help himself.

Sergeant Taylor had gathered these teachers together in the hope of garnering from them information which would fasten the net tighter around Anderson the janitor. And now things seemed to be getting out of hand, what with the introduction of new names and new avenues of approach. Taylor liked his cases simple

“I don’t see—” he began.

“Quite evidently,” Miss Withers told him. “
Very
evidently you don’t see.”

There was a shuffling among the teachers, and an exchange of whispers.

The Sergeant pushed his hat up on his forehead. “I suppose you mean that this Curran dame is hiding out, and that she killed Anise Halloran? It don’t make sense, to me. That sort of a killing ain’t often done by a woman. Women kill each other with a gun or else with poison. Besides, where’s a motive?”

“I mean nothing of the sort,” said Hildegarde Withers. She surveyed the assemblage. “This is neither the time nor the place to tell you what I mean. But, Sergeant, I think you’d better stop this futile speech making and send out a broadcast to pick up Betty Curran. Check up on her boarding house or wherever she lived. Send out her description. That missing girl is important to this case, and don’t forget that for a minute. The janitor is safe in a cell, and he’ll keep. There’ll be weeks to dig up evidence against him—but you may only have hours to find that girl.” Miss Withers lowered her voice, so that only the Principal and the detective could hear. “You may be hours too late!”

The Sergeant’s eyes narrowed. “You mean … say! A fiend, huh? Two victims instead of one! You don’t think we’ll find this Curran girl even if we do send out the alarm … not alive, anyway!” He turned to the gathering.

“Excuse me, folks. I’ve got to get to the telephone—you all wait right here.”

The teachers settled back in their seats resignedly, all but Miss Strasmick, the wide-faced, red-lipped mistress of the fourth grade. She half rose in her seat.

“You can’t do that!” she began. “Betty Curran is a friend of mine.”

The Sergeant faced her. “I can’t do what?”

“You can’t sound the alarm as if she was a criminal or something. I—I’m sure she has nothing to do with this. It’s cruel—it’s …”

“Exactly,” Bob Stevenson chimed in. “Suppose Miss Curran is simply in some other hospital? Isn’t what she’s doing her own business?”

“Well, for the—” But Miss Withers cut the Sergeant short.

“I’m afraid this is a murder inquiry, not a picnic,” she suggested. The Sergeant was already at the door, bound for the office and the telephone. Miss Withers saw her chance.

“I’ll have to be excused for a little while,” she said to the Principal.

Macfarland was bending one of the wings of his stand-up collar back and forth.

“But Miss Withers … the Sergeant wants to question all of us. And I must speak with you privately.”

She paused at the doorway. “Later, Mr. Macfarland.”

“But I wanted to tell you … I thought, that in the light of the new developments in the case since I talked to you last night … it might not be necessary …”

“It is necessary,” said Hildegarde Withers. She went out into the hall and down toward the main door.

Officer Mulholland interposed his bulk as she reached the doorway. “Sorry, ma’am. But the Sergeant says nobody was to leave this place till he gave the word.”

“But for Heaven’s sake, man, that doesn’t apply to me.”

Miss Withers smiled her prettiest smile, but Mulholland shook his head.

“It’s as much as my job is worth, ma’am,” he told her. “If the Sergeant says so….”

Miss Withers could hear the Sergeant’s voice booming out over the telephone. At the moment she wanted nothing less than an interview with that gentleman, unless it was an interview with Macfarland himself.

“All right, Mulholland,” she said. “There are more ways to kill a cat than choking it to death with butter.” And she turned on her heel.

As the officer went back to his post, Miss Withers paused outside the door marked “Principal.”

She nodded, slowly. The Sergeant was giving the telephonic third degree to Betty Curran’s landlady.

“You say she gave up her room with you at the beginning of last week? And she drew all her money out of the bank, huh? No forwarding address—what’s that? Okay. Yeah. What color hair did she have?”

Miss Withers turned, and swiftly ran up the stairs to the third floor. She passed down the hall to the little square door at the end, took a deep breath, and forced it open.

Immediately the siren shattered the stillness of the big empty building, shrieking its alarm to high heaven.

But Hildegarde Withers was paying no attention to the disturbance she was creating. Swiftly and dizzily she was sliding down the old-fashioned spiral fire-escape, chute-the-chute fashion, her hat gripped in one hand and her bag in the other.

Round and round she went, until at last her brown oxfords struck the door at the bottom, and she slid out into the daylight.

She picked herself up, made a cursory examination of her skirt to make sure that there had not been an unfriendly nail or bit of jagged metal anywhere in the slide, and then strode swiftly across the playground, around the teeter-totters, and out into the street.

Five minutes later she was in a taxi-cab, bound across town.

Calling all cars … calling all cars … a missing girl … a missing girl … name Beth Curran … age twenty-three … blonde hair … height five feet two inches … weight a hundred and fifteen pounds … last seen wearing a blue coat and blue hat … mole on left cheek …

Slowly, almost mournfully, the description droned itself out through the invisible ether. Long black touring cars, two hundred of them, pulled over to the curb while stubby pencils took down the details.

Teletype mechanisms clicked furiously in every important city of the nation, reproducing the words … “
Last seen wearing a blue coat and hat….
” Morgue attendants lifted the white sheets from many a marble slab. Down at the Bureau of Missing Persons an elderly gentleman in a Lieutenant’s cap and shirt sleeves laboriously filled out a yellow card. “
… weight a hundred and fifteen pounds … last seen wearing a blue coat and hat….
”

Hildegarde Withers, all oblivious of the furor she had created, was standing on the stoop of a remodelled tenement on Barrow Street, in the heart of Greenwich Village.

Facing her, and resting comfortably on a fifty-pound cake of ice, a swarthy person was fingering a fifty-cent piece.

“Sure Mister Stevenson he is one of my customer, why not? Two, three mont’ I deliver his ice. He pay me every week. Why he have anybody else when my place right down here in his basement?”

Miss Withers nodded. “Did you deliver anything else to him but ice?”

The swarthy man nodded. “Sometimes he phone me at night when he want a fire. Hees fireplace, you know. I bring a wood, cheap.”

That wasn’t what Miss Withers meant. “Oh, you mean da gin?” Pietro shook his head vigorously “I have good gin, cost dollar a fifth. Everybody else in these building, he’s my customer. But Mist’ Stevenson, he’s never order that. He don’t have wild parties, I guess. Just orders ice, and wood when he have a lady guest and want it nice and cheerful and warm.”

“Aha!” Miss Withers herself was getting warmer. She ventured a cautious question.

“No, signora. I never see Mister Stevenson with a little yellow-haired lady, no. He’s not have any lady friend like you say, who wears a blue coat and hat. I know all about him. I live right here. I see everybody come in, everybody go out. Sometimes he have a tall, pretty lady, dark and thin, but no yellow-haired lady.”

Well, that was that. There was nothing more she could do here, having already discovered Stevenson’s apartment locked, and no evidence of a key under the mat or above the ledge of the door.

Miss Withers contributed another fifty-cent piece in consideration of the little Neapolitan’s keeping quiet about her scouting foray, and then reentered her taxi.

She took stock for a moment, and then told the man to drive her down to Center Street. All her hunches in this case seemed to be leading her up blind alleys.

“I must be getting childish,” she told herself, scoldingly. “In every case there’s an essential clue, pointing straight to the murderer. But if there’s one here, it’s like the purloined letter in Poe’s story—too obvious to be seen.”

She climbed up the stone steps of the dreary building which is Police Headquarters, and went directly to the office which had been Inspector Oscar Piper’s. The inner door was closed, but in the outer office Lieutenant Keller, her old acquaintance, was engaged with a container of brew and a sack of liverwurst sandwiches.

For a few moments they said the usual things about the Inspector. “I called the hospital this morning,” Miss Withers confided, “and they said he was going out of it nicely. As soon as he’s conscious I can see him for a minute, maybe tonight or tomorrow morning.”

She accepted a sandwich. “Do you think there’s any chance of his knowing what struck him?”

The Lieutenant shrugged his shoulders. “We know who struck him all right all right. That Swede janitor is going to get his. Only one thing I don’t understand. The Inspector isn’t as young as he used to be, but he’s no weakling yet, and he knows how to take care of himself. I don’t see how any drunken maniac could hit him over the head without the Inspector’s doing anything about it.”

Miss Withers nodded. “I agree with you. That’s why I talked the Police-Surgeon into going with me this morning to give Anderson a test, there in the precinct house. The Sergeant doesn’t think Anderson was drunk.”

“Yeah, I know,” Lieutenant Keller answered. “But he’s wrong. I talked to Dr. Farnsworth on the phone a few minutes ago. He tried to call you, but you weren’t at the number you gave him. He gave Anderson the works, and he says the ugly is still loaded up with alcohol. You could burn him for Sterno. The doc says that Anderson must have been crazy drunk last night. Of course, those big Swedes can hold twice as much liquor as anybody else. All the same … anyway, Allen and Burns are up a tree. If the guy was as drunk as the doc says he was, there’s no use to third-degree him, because he won’t remember what happened anyway.”

Miss Withers looked at the opposite wall and nodded. “I’d like to know how a man can get dead drunk in a cellar without letting the police see him when they search the place twice—and without even leaving one empty bottle around.” She had another idea.

“Lieutenant, have you checked up on Tobey, the little man from across the street who sells candy and so forth? Not that he seems to be implicated, but I just wondered.”

“Sure we checked up on him,” Keller answered. “There’s no harm in little Tobey, ma’am. He’s had that place for years. He sells cheap candy, and bootleg fireworks in the summer. Lately, according to what the boys dug up, he’s been selling a little bootleg liquor, too. Though he doesn’t seem to be hooked up with any gang. It’s good stuff, not poison or anything like that. And as long as nobody dies from the stuff, we keep hands off. The Federal men can do their own snooping.”

“So his liquor is better than his candy, eh?” Miss Withers finished the last of her sandwich. “Well, I’d better be running along, Lieutenant.”

But she was to do no running along yet awhile. In the doorway she met a bustling young man.