Murder on the Blackboard by Stuart Palmer Page B

to advise that you start at once for Mr. Stevenson’s home in the south, Virginia I think it was. I’m very much in doubt about that young man, and I think a few days spent investigating his past would throw much light on this case.”
    Miss Withers was thoughtful. “Perhaps you are right. I’ll have to consider it. Of course, you promised me a free hand if I took the case …”
    “Of course,” Macfarland agreed. “Certainly, beyond a doubt. Just an idea.”
    She left him, and went out into the rain. At the next corner she stopped and looked back at the old brownstone house.
    “Just an idea, indeed!” she said aloud. “I go to Virginia on a wild-goose chase, and when I get back the case is stale potatoes!” Turning her face southward again, Miss Withers used a phrase that would have brought instant reprimand upon young Leland Stanford Jones.
    “In a pig’s eye!” she announced to the night and the storm.

VIII
Recess
(11/16/32—7:00 A.M.)
    A LL THROUGH THE LONG hours of that night, Detectives Allen and Burns had leaned over the stolid figure of Olaf Anderson, sending wave after wave of questions over his head, and after each wave Olaf Anderson remained, eyes glazed, mouth open, as impregnable as Gibraltar.
    Sweat poured down the red faces of the two inquisitors, wilting their collars. Slowly their voices grew hoarser, and their tempers more short. But Olaf Anderson’s cropped, knobby head remained unbloody and unbowed.
    They gave him, aided by recruits from the station reserves, what is known as “the works.” A bright, unfrosted bulb beneath a glaring reflector cast a hundred watts into his faded blue eyes. He sat in a hard chair, denied even the grace of a table to lean his arms upon. Cigarettes lay just out of his reach, a water cooler stood across the room, denied to him until such time as he should decide to make a voluntary confession of his own free will.
    Everything had been tried. Anderson had been locked in a cell with a detective masquerading as a fellow-felon. His thick tips had never opened. He had seen a supposed suspect—also a masquerading detective—dragged into an inner room, and howls and bellows of pain issuing therefrom. He had even been given fatherly, kindly advice by the venerable Desk Sergeant, but even then he had shown no interest in the idea of “coming clean and making things easy for yourself….”
    His eyes were glazed and bloodshot, but so were Allen’s and Burns’. His lips were cracked and dry, but so were the two detectives’. Finally, as a last resort, a tall bottle of whiskey was brought before him, together with a pair of glasses. This bait held even less lure for the big Swede. He shut both his eyes very tightly and turned his head away.
    Finally Burns reached in the pocket of his coat and removed two unusual looking bits of paraphernalia. One was a ten-inch length of garden hose, plugged at the ends. The other was a man’s sock, the toe and part of the foot stuffed, Santa Claus fashion, with sand. The detective laid these objects on the table, in full view of Anderson.
    “Go ahead, sock him,” urged Allen. “The Captain says it’s all right as long as we know he pulled the job. If that won’t make him talk, I got other ideas that will.”
    Anderson the janitor, staring straight ahead of him, opened his mouth wide enough to say “I told you I kill nobody,” and closed it again.
    Burns leaned closer. “I’ll give you one more chance,” he offered. “You killed that Halloran kid, didn’t you? And then stuffed her body in the furnace? And then you hit the Inspector over the bean with a shovel and hid out in the cellar? Come on, where did you hide out?”
    “I kill nobody that I remember,” Anderson insisted.
    “All right, you asked for it,” Allen told him. He caressed the stuffed sock lovingly, and then brought it down across the Swede’s forehead.
    The prisoner blinked and shook his head. The sock burst, and sand flowed down the front of the