Murder on the Blackboard Read Free

got back.”
    “But he’s here now?”
    “Oh, yes’m. In the back room. Mister Tobey!”
    A short, bald toad of a man appeared in the curtained entrance of the rear room. The nails of one fat hand continually scratched his bald pate, and with the other he tapped suggestively upon the glass counter.
    “Someding?”
    Miss Withers joined Leland at the counter, above the assortment of brownish licorice, octogenarian peppermints, and furry horehound.
    There was something very wary and defensive in Tobey’s attitude toward this new customer. It didn’t stand to reason that this angular lady had come to buy candy. More likely she was going to squawk about the quality of his product, like the young teacher across the street who had complained to the Board of Health about him when one of her pupils took a cramp in singing class. Just because of the bright colors in his hard candies! Aniline dyes, his eye! As if kids got any sicker from one kind of candy than another! Besides, the brighter it was the better they like it. Tobey knew.
    He fidgeted, mumbled, and rubbed his hands raspingly together, but still this tall lady with the umbrella waited there, seemingly intent upon a choice between lemon drops and chocolate-covered peanuts.
    He did not know that the curved, cloudy glass of the show counter reflected the dimly-lit doorway across the street. Whatever it may have been that Miss Withers had hoped to see, her vision was suddenly blotted out by a looming gray figure.
    She whirled around, with her finger on her lips. “Oscar!”
    Let me explain to those of my readers who are having their first introduction to Oscar Piper, Inspector of Detectives, that he is a leanish, grayish man of somewhat indeterminate age, with a pugnacious lower lip and a pair of very chilly blue-gray eyes. A badly-lighted cigar usually hangs from one corner of his mouth, and his speech, perhaps because he has risen from the ranks and is proud of it, smacks a little of Broadway, West Broadway.
    There was a cigar in his mouth as he entered Tobey’s store on this memorable evening, and he neglected to remove it before addressing Miss Withers. He was pleasantly surprised to have that lady grasp his hands in hers, with a warning look toward the candy proprietor and the waiting urchin.
    She placed a quarter on the counter. “Anything you like, Leland,” she said. Then she led the Inspector into the street. He followed, docile enough. These two had once become engaged to be married—in the flush of excitement after the successful termination of a gruelling murder case—for the space of half an hour. Their friendship had ripened in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that the Inspector’s zeal for the enforcement of the more intelligible of the state’s laws had led him on a sudden chase that gave Miss Withers the opportunity to change her mind.
    “Sorry to break up your whole afternoon,” Miss Withers told him. “But now and then a dead body is apt to interfere with the daily pinochle game.”
    The Inspector took the cigar out of his mouth, but he was not given a chance to speak.
    “I’m serious,” she went on. She told him what she had seen in the Teachers’ Cloakroom.
    The Inspector teetered quietly on his toes. “Murder, eh? When did it happen?”
    “You don’t understand,” Miss Withers exploded. “It’s still happening! That’s why I sent word to you to come quietly. This is no time for a squad car to scream bloody murder through the streets. Somebody smashed Anise Halloran’s skull in that schoolhouse a little while ago—and that somebody is still in there!”
    She tugged at his arm. “Come on!”
    The Inspector held back. “This is irregular as—well, it’s irregular,” he told her. “I have to notify the local precinct station of the murder, and have two plainclothes men sent out here, and the Medical Examiner …”
    “Botheration!” Miss Withers still pulled at his arm. “While you’re doing all that, the murderer