Free Murder on the Blackboard by Stuart Palmer Page A

contents on the table. A moment later she presented a single bit of paper, riddled with bank perforations, to Miss Withers.
    It was the check for five dollars, payable to Anise Halloran. Idly Miss Withers turned it over. There were three endorsements on the back of the check. The first was the thin, neat signature of Anise Halloran. The second was a heavy, almost illegible scrawl that Miss Withers made out to be “Olaf Anderson” and the last was “Palace Grocery, B. Cohen, cashier….”
    “Anderson?” Miss Withers frowned.
    “Yes, the janitor at school. You know. He came through the building with these things, selling them.”
    “He didn’t come to me,” Miss Withers remarked. “But then, he wouldn’t. I’m not the gambling type.” She toyed with the check a moment.
    “I guess that proves it,” said Janey triumphantly.
    “It proves something, anyway,” Miss Withers agreed.

VII
In a Pig’s Eye!
(11/15/32—10:00 P.M.)
    I T WAS LATE THAT evening when Hildegarde Withers finally inserted a key in her own door, and let herself into the little flat on Seventy-sixth Street which enclosed her Lares and Penates.
    It was characteristic of the lady that she first methodically put away the damp copy of the World-Telegram which bore the news of the sweepstakes ticket. Then she cast a longing eye at the comfortable slippers which lay neatly beneath the head of the davenport that, when properly managed, became her bed.
    But she crossed directly to the telephone. The girl at the hospital phone desk must have recognized her voice for she spoke quickly. “Oh, yes—Inspector Piper. He’s resting quietly. I mean, he’s really resting quietly. Yes, ma’am. Dr. Hampton operated at seven o’clock and it was a success. He’s going to be all right in a little while …”
    “Never mind that,” cut in Miss Withers. “When will he be conscious?”
    The nurse didn’t know. “Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps it will be several days. Head injuries often are that way, you know. Perhaps if you’ll phone tomorrow …”
    “You can depend on it that I shall,” Miss Withers promised. She hung up the receiver with a decided click,
    She had her hat off, and her slippers and dressing gown on, when the telephone went off like an alarm clock across the room. She answered it wearily, and then suddenly the weariness went from her voice.
    Her ears were filled with a tenor staccato which she recognized as belonging to Mr. Waldo Emerson Macfarland, Principal of Jefferson School, and scholastically speaking, her superior officer.
    Mr. Macfarland’s meaning was not entirely clear, owing to the excitement under which he was laboring. But she gathered that he wished to inform her that there had been a regrettable accident at the School; that the police and the newspapers had been having him on the telephone; that it was of the utmost importance that within the next few minutes he have an interview with his third grade teacher.
    “I’m coming over to see you at once,” she was told. “Immediately. Without a moment’s delay.”
    Miss Withers thought hastily. “Wait a minute!” She looked longingly at the comfortable davenport, and then at the door to the inner bedroom in which her two roommates were sleeping soundly after their day’s labors over the river in Flatbush Junior High Number Two. This was not the time nor the place to receive Mr. Macfarland, or any other gentleman.
    “I’ll be over at your house in ten minutes,” she promised. Off came the slippers, and back on went the serge suit and the sailor. Then she fared forth into the night again. It was lucky, she thought, that Mr. Macfarland’s residence was only a matter of a few blocks north along the Park. It was less lucky, of course, that the rain and snow were still combining forces, and that as usual the myriad cruising taxicabs that always infest Manhattan in good weather had vanished at the first breath of bad.
    Hildegarde Withers strode briskly north past the mammoth new