Murder on Wheels (12 page)

He looked up. “I’m off for 23 Minetta Lane,” he announced. “Coming, Hildegarde?”

She stared at him without answering.

“Coming?”

She shook her head. “Wait a minute, Oscar. What was the name you read aloud just before you found Dana Waverly’s?”

“You mean Charles M. Waverly, the attorney? I know what you’re thinking. Yes, it’s undoubtedly the family lawyer old Mrs. Stait was talking about … and the next in line of the Stait men. You might make a note of the address. I’ll need to see him.”

“I did make a note of the address. Enterprise Trust Building, number 555. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“Mean anything? What should it mean … oh, Great Scott! Wasn’t it the lobby of the Enterprise Trust Building where Laurie Stait’s body was carried by that dumb traffic cop Doody?”

“It was. Still going down to Minetta Lane, Oscar?”

“More than ever,” he told her. “If there isn’t some connection between Charles Waverly the lawyer and Dana Waverly the new Mrs. Lew Stait I’ll eat my badge, and my buttons too. Lieutenant, phone Swarthout and have him meet me downstairs in a hack. Come on, Hildegarde.”

“I’m not coming,” Miss Withers informed him. “I’ve got other plans. First I’m going to go home and do my setting up exercises, and then I’m going to look in at the Rodeo at Madison Square Garden again. I’d like to meet this Buck Keeley, or at least have a look at him. That ought to be an interesting matinee today, particularly if Rose Keeley feels well enough to perform.”

“But I thought …”

“Never you mind, Oscar Piper. We agreed that we were going to work this case out separately and see which one was right. We might meet this evening and have dinner, if you like. In a sort of armed neutrality, perhaps.”

“Right you are. I’ll be seeing you.”

He was almost at the door when there was the sound of heavy footsteps in the hall outside, and in walked a massive gentleman in blue, with the nightstick and uniform cap of a patrolman in his hand. One eye was puffed and in mourning.

“Dan Kehoe reporting, sor, by permission …”

“Kehoe? Reporting for what?” The Inspector was in a hurry. “Out with it.”

“It’s like this, Inspector. There was a killing on my beat last night, sor.” Kehoe swallowed with difficulty. “The Stait fellow that was strangled.”

“I know that,” the Inspector told him. “So you’re the dummy who didn’t show up all evening, huh? And why not?”

“That’s what I come to tell you about, sor. I reported it to the Captain last night at the precinct station when he bawled me out for not being there on duty. He thought nothing of it at the time, but since then I’ve been wondering if maybe there wasn’t some connection, sor. He told me to report it in person.”

“Some connection between what?” The Inspector jammed his hat down on his ears. “I’m in a hurry, Kehoe.”

“Yes, sor. A connection between the killing of this Stait fellow and the fight I got in. It was at five-thirty o’clock, sor. And I was coming down Forty-fourth Street near the Avenue when I saw a cab pull up in front of the Hotel Senator. Some fellows got out and started to argue with the driver, Inspector. It was about the fare. And I catch a glimpse of them pulling him out from behind the wheel so he’d be the handier for taking a sock at. So I got up to them and I warn them to stop making a nuisance and I ask the driver if he wants to prefer a charge of disorderly conduct. And just then one of the roughnecks hauls off and gives me this in the eye, Inspector.”

“Well, what did you do? Warn him again?”

“No, sor. I punched him in the jaw. His big hat rolled halfway acrost the street.”

“So he had an opera hat on? A swell, huh? And drunk at that hour, too.”

“No, sor. Not an opry hat. It was one of them ten-gallon hats that Tom Mix wears in the movies. They all of them had hats like that And then another guy jumps me, and a third climbs out of the cab and kicks at my shins, and we mix into it pretty hot and heavy. And just as I’m getting my second wind there comes a little guy in a derby out of the hotel and separates us.”

“What did he do, throw a pail of water on the whole dogfight of you?”

“No, sor. But he seemed to have some control over the cowboys. For that’s what they were. He was the manager, he said. And he explained that they weren’t really used to taxicabs and such, and that they didn’t mean any harm. And he said that if I booked any of the boys on disorderly conduct they’d have to call off the Rodeo, and half the kids in town would be disappointed. So I let ’em go, and he gave me some box seats for the show, and that was all. Nice fellow he was, name of Carrigan. Then I reported back to the station house, and explained to the Captain why I didn’t know about the killing on my own beat, Inspector. Only last night I got to wondering.”

“About what?”

“Well, the boys said that this Stait was killed with a rope, and those cowboys are good with ropes, I’ve seen ’em before. It seemed funny, things happening all at the same time like that.”

“Very good, Kehoe. Now you can stop wondering, and let us do that. If you were involved in an emergency call on your beat, there’s no reason why you need to fear any disrating for missing the killing. You can go.”

The big patrolman turned a blue back. “Oh, Kehoe. You might keep your mouth shut about this.”

“Yes, sor. ‘Sealed-lips Kehoe,’ they calls me.” He saluted, a broad smile on his face and his good eye twinkling. Then he was gone.

Miss Withers wanted to know what the Inspector thought of that. He admitted that he didn’t think much of anything of it.

“If Buck Keeley was one of the cowboys who got in a brush with Kehoe, then he didn’t bump off Laurie Stait, and if he wasn’t, well—what does the brawl mean?”

“You go on down to Minetta Lane and let me worry over what it means,” Miss Withers told him.

But she spent the next couple of hours, as it happened, in an entirely different pursuit—one which would have surprised the Inspector considerably if he could have seen her, though he was not easily surprised.

The Inspector came down the stone steps outside Headquarters, and looked up the street and down for signs of the operative who was supposed to be waiting for him here.

“Hey, Swarthout!”

A ruddy, boyish face presented itself above the spare tire of a waiting Yellow. “Yes, Inspector?”

“Come on, snap out of it!” The driver of the Yellow climbed swiftly behind the wheel, and the Inspector climbed in beside his youngest operative.

The young man offered his chief a cigarette, unsuccessfully. “Didn’t see you coming,” he admitted.

Piper gave the driver the Minetta Lane address. “What were you doing behind this cab when I came down?”

Swartout looked innocent. “Nothing, Inspector. Nothing but passing the time away.” There was the slightest accent on the word “passing.”

“Oh, yeah? You’re a fine example to the public, Swarthout. The crap-shooting detective, huh? Gambling in public!”

Swarthout took a pair of pink cubes from his pocket and rattled them lovingly. “I don’t mind telling you in confidence, Inspector, that with these dice there isn’t any gambling in it at all. I found ’em on Tony the Wop last week, and they take the chance out of games of chance. By the way, what are we doing down in Greenwich Village, attending a drag?”

Piper grunted. “I want to have a little look at a girl’s apartment down there,” he admitted. “I sent for you because you’re handy with tools, and we may have to break into the place. Besides, you don’t look as much, like a stage dick as most of the boys, and I want to keep this little visit quiet, see?”

“Right, Inspector.” Georgie Swarthout patted his little pocket kit of tools. He was one of the few men attached to Headquarters who had not risen from the police ranks, but had been taken on during the past spring when a new Commissioner had started a campaign for “higher education” in the cohorts of the city’s defenders. Most of the “college cops” had not lasted as long as the shine of their first brass buttons, but because he looked and acted so much like anything in the world except a detective, this one had made something of a niche for himself. The Inspector disapproved of him and liked him.

“You know, Angel-face, I love the Village less than any other section of this town,” the Inspector confessed as they rolled around a corner. “I’ll never forget a night when we had to call out the reserves. I was a Precinct Captain then. The usual complaints of a noisy party came in, but this wasn’t the usual party. The people in a basement apartment on Bedford Street complained that their ceiling was coming down.

“Well, as it turned out later a crazy poet above them was throwing a lease-breaking party. As a climax some of the boys had kidnapped a milkman’s horse and somehow led it up four steps and into the ground-floor living room. When we got there they’d all ducked out, and all we picked up was a lonesome white horse surrounded by empty gin bottles.”

They had no difficulty in finding the building. It stood out among the tumble-down houses of the Lane like a buyer’s order on a broker’s desk. There were flower boxes outside the front windows, empty now but sure to blossom with red geraniums as soon as April brought the flower hucksters to the street.

In the lobby was a set of push-buttons, with one at the bottom labelled “Supt.—out of order.”

The Inspector ran his thumb down the line of cards in brackets. There it was. “Third floor front—Miss Dana Waverly.” Above the engraved name Waverly had been neatly lettered with a fountain pen the addition “B. Doolittle.”

So Dana Waverly had a roommate, huh? Well, that either simplified or complicated things. Piper knew that there might be difficulties in getting the janitor to let him roam through the place. After all, they had no search warrant with them. He pressed hard on the bell opposite “Third floor front.”

Nothing happened. Evidently not even the roommate was in. There was still a trick or two up his sleeve. Waving Swarthout away from the lock of the inner door, Piper jammed his thumb against every door-bell in the house. There’d be somebody home in one apartment or another. There was. The inner door clicked alarmingly, and Swarthout caught it, opened it a few inches, and shot the night lock. Then the two of them marched out of the building, allowed time enough for whoever had answered the ring to give up waiting for the unexpected visitor, and then returned. With no hesitation the Inspector led the way through the unlocked door, up the two flights of stairs, and then along the corridor to the third floor front. Nobody was in the hall.

The lock, unfortunately, was of the Yale variety. The Inspector searched the mantel and under the carpet, as a matter of form, but there was no key parked anywhere. “Do your stuff, kid,” he ordered.

The young operative became deadly serious as he went over the lock. His hands made a few deft motions, involving the use of a long coiled spring, a screwdriver, and the blade of a knife. Then he placed his shoulder against one side of the door frame, his right foot against the other, and pressed inward.

There was a sharp click, and then the door opened. Swarthout looked at his wrist-watch. “One minute and forty-five seconds,” he announced. “I wish the professor who flunked me in Mechanical Engineering could have seen that.”

The lock was scarred, but a few turns of a screwdriver tightened it again and made what had happened fairly unnoticeable. The Inspector had a look around the room. This was not, he realized, the typical Greenwich Village apartment.

In the first place, there were a good many comfortable places to sit down. Between the front windows was a large radio-phonograph combination, and against one wall appeared an antique chest of drawers that was out of the ordinary. The floor was covered with gay rag rugs.

The general effect was one of moderate luxury. Small cases scattered here and there held a good many books.

“Quite a library,” suggested Swarthout. The Inspector joined him in front of one of the shelves.

“I don’t object to books in themselves,” said Piper. “But I wish you’d tell me sometime the excuse for all this poetry.”

Swarthout held no brief for poetry himself, not having read any since he had waded through a semester of required English Lit. But he felt it necessary to uphold the cause of verse on account of the academic background for which he was kidded so unmercifully by his fellow detectives.

“Here’s something you’d go for, Inspector.” He drew from the shelf a worn copy of
Alice in Wonderland.
The title page, he noted was inscribed “To Dana from Lew and Laurie, Christmas 1921 …”

He fanned the pages. “Get a load of this … ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe—all mimsy were the borogoves …’”

“Thanks. I’ll stick to Zane Grey and W. Clark Russell for my reading,” Piper told him. “That door there leads to the kitchenette, I see. You hop in and have a look at the place. Sometimes you can learn a lot about people from their kitchens. You might make an inventory of the icebox. I’ll go through the bedroom.”

“Right, Inspector.” The younger man disappeared through the nearer of the two doors in the rear wall of the room, and the Inspector chose the other. Somewhat to his surprise he found himself in a large combined dressing room and bath. This told him nothing except that Dana Waverly or her roommate had used Fracy’s lavender soap, and that a large number of clean towels had been recently hung on the racks.

A door at the farther end of the bath led into the bedroom proper—or improper, if you like. There were too many gimcracks here for the Inspector’s taste. Three ridiculous French dolls watched him gravely from the pillows, and everything seemed covered with taffeta. A single bed, a vanity table, a chest of sweet-smelling cedar, and three chintz chairs made up the furnishings of the room. It was not hard to figure that this was occupied by only one person. Probably Dana Waverly slept here and her roommate used the day bed in the living room, Piper guessed.

He crossed at once to the vanity table, avoiding his own image in the myriad mirrors and bending over the drawers. Here were an unholy number of creams and powders, all of exquisite makes and manufacture. But there were no letters, none of the personal and revelatory material that he desired.