Murder on Wheels (17 page)

“I see. Tell me, what was the reason for the estate’s being entailed in this fashion? It’s not usual, is it?”

The lawyer shook his head. “Old Roscoe Stait didn’t trust women, you see. He lived all his life under a sort of shadow. His married life was happy enough, I guess, but he never slept at night very soundly. It’s a sort of skeleton in the family closet, Inspector, but I suppose you have the right to know. You have heard, perhaps, of Eva Montelli?”

The Inspector frowned. “Eva Montelli? It has vague associations, but I’m not sure. Wasn’t she the housewife over in Jersey who poisoned her husband a few years back? Or was she the Washington Lure?”

“Neither one. It was a long time before your day or mine, Inspector. Eva Montelli was what she called herself, and if she ever had another name she succeeded in losing it. Those were the gay days just after the Civil War when New York society discovered opera. Eva Montelli was the Mary Garden of her day, a contralto with a voice, they said, like an houri. She certainly had the looks, and some of the habits, of one. She was the darling of the gay young bloods, and it was from her slipper that champagne tasted best, so the stories run. I’ve seen a few pictures of her, and although she had an hour-glass figure and too much dignity for my taste, she was a beautiful woman all the same.”

“And old Roscoe Stait got himself involved with this Montelli opera singer?”

“Worse than that. It seems that she had been having an affair with the Director of the opera company, a broken-down Wagnerian tenor named Havemeyer. How serious an affair nobody knows. But she was no puritan. Then she met Roscoe Stait, and married him.”

“So? The old man was married twice?” The Inspector was interested.

“No, only once. But my story isn’t over. Eva Montelli married the old millionaire after a romantic elopement sort of business, and there was much rejoicing. Perhaps she loved him. I don’t know why the idea has grown up that women can marry only poor men for love. Anyway, this thick-skulled Prussian of a Havemeyer brooded over things until he got himself into a fine temperamental rage, and then he called on the happy bridegroom with a pocketful of Eva’s letters, as well as some other evidence to prove or insinuate that she was not what her new husband hoped. It was a pretty rotten thing for him to do, and that’s why when he was found riddled with bullet holes the jury freed Eva Montelli Stait after fifteen minutes’ deliberation. The story goes that each juryman kissed her hand when she thanked them. Roscoe Stait did the gentlemanly thing and took his wife back with open arms—then he locked her in the upper floors of his house and kept her there.”

“And she stood for that?”

“Evidently she did. Maybe she got used to being shut away from other men. Her husband had the idea, you see, that her beauty was fatal. Anyway, even after his death she went on expiating her ‘justifiable homicide’ in the same way, living in the attic of the Stait house with only a parrot for company. That was where her two sons were born—both dead now. Oh, she’s been known to come down stairs, and she rules that family with an iron hand, though there’s nobody left but her two grandsons now … and Hubert and Aunt Abbie who’ve found a home there. You can figure it out as you like. Personally, I think she’s a trifle touched. Sometimes she sings to herself up there at night, and it’s weird enough, God knows. But you can’t make her believe that she’s paying more than that worthless fat tenor was worth, and there she stays, drying up a little more every year.”

The Inspector shook his head. “It’s unhealthy to be shut up anywhere, for anything. She’d have been better off if they’d sent her up the river for that killing. But tell me, why did she hate Laurie?”

“Laurie? I don’t think she did hate him, exactly. Of course, she gave that car to Lew, but she knew he’d let his brother use it. But she was fanatical about sex, partly on account of her own early experience, I suppose. And she had the idea that Laurie was a rounder with women, and intimate with the maid.”

“I saw
Lew
Stait with the little Dutch maid,” confessed the Inspector. “The night of the murder. Maybe Laurie was blamed for the sins of his twin?”

And that remark surprised Charles Waverly all out of proportion to its significance. The Inspector pretended not to notice anything.

“One more question,” he began. “Mrs. Stait said something about your having a chat with a man sometime last week who came to see Laurie, a man with an accent, she said.”

Charles Waverly nodded. “It was a westerner, a big, hearty fellow with one of those trick hats in his hand. He wanted to talk to Laurie, and I finally got out of him that he was appearing in behalf of his sister. Laurie had spent the summer at their ranch out west, and it appeared that the sister was in a family way.

“I pointed out to him the legal aspects of the case, and then he was bold enough to demand that if Laurie wouldn’t marry his sister, he should make a cash settlement, which put the whole thing in the light of blackmail to me, and I told him so. I made it clear that Laurie Stait would have all the protection that his family position could give him, and the cowboy went away using pretty strong language.”

“Yeah?” The Inspector rose to his feet. “And you didn’t come and give me this information when you heard that Laurie Stait had been strangled with a western lariat? My God, man, that’s a clear motive for murder!”

Charles Waverly shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t think so. It seemed to me that this Keeley fellow was more put out at not getting some easy money than he was about his sister.”

“But why have you kept this to yourself for all this time?”

“I hoped it would never come out,” admitted the young lawyer. “For my sister’s sake, mostly.”

“But how would it affect your sister Dana? She married Lew Stait and it wouldn’t hurt the dead twin to have a scandal attached to his name.”

“What? Oh, quite right, Inspector. I was in error, I know. But as the family lawyer, I wished to keep it all back if possible. Because Dana’s unfortunate marriage this morning—”

The Inspector leaped into the breach. “Unfortunate? Why, I understand that you were in favor of her marrying Lew, and that you were afraid of her marrying Laurie?”

“Of course. I meant that the marriage was unfortunate in the time chosen, and not in itself. You see, I love my sister Dana more than anything else in the world, and I’d do anything short of murder to see her happy.”

The Inspector nodded. “Tell me, Waverly. At what time the afternoon of the murder did your sister Dana come to your office. It was early, wasn’t it?”

Charles Waverly did not flinch. “You can’t trap a lawyer, Inspector.”

“But she was at your office? She came there to tell you that she wouldn’t marry Lew, didn’t she?”

Charley Waverly did show a start at that. “Damn that stenographer of mine. Did Mildred tell you that? She must have, because I know Dana wouldn’t …”

“Dana didn’t,” the Inspector announced. “She’s avoided being questioned, so far.” He stood up, and stepped toward the door of the outer office. “Excuse me a moment, will you?”

A night man in uniform was waiting in the outer office, and the Inspector gave quick, explicit instructions. “Remember—a girl named Mildred something.” Then he was back at his desk.

“You haven’t answered my question, Mr. Waverly.”

“I don’t think I need to answer it. My sister did call on me that afternoon, and she did discuss with me her problem. She was engaged to Lew Stait, and infatuated with his twin brother. That’s all I care to say at this time.”

“Very well.” The Inspector leaned closer to his guest. “You couldn’t hazard a guess as to who might have killed Laurie Stait, could you?”

“I’m sorry, Inspector. It’s a mystery to me.”

“Of course it is. And you wouldn’t care to suggest who the man might have been who identified the body of Laurie Stait in the lobby of the Enterprise Trust Building, and then retracted his identification and slipped away in the crowd? The officer in charge said that it was a tall man with a little moustache—and your office happens to be in that building.”

Charles Waverly shook his head. “That will not get you anywhere, Inspector. There are several thousand tenants in that building, and it is only natural that there should be a good many persons on the busiest corner in the world who happen to be tall and have moustaches. It really won’t do … and unless you have something awfully important to ask me now, I’d like to run along home. It’s a long subway ride up to my little apartment on East Seventieth.”

The Inspector apologized for the inconvenient location of Headquarters. “It’s too bad,” he said, “that we aren’t closer to Fifth Avenue. Buses are a lot more comfortable than subways, don’t you agree with me?”

Waverly nodded. “I always take a bus in preference to any other mode of travel,” he admitted. “I ride down every morning to my office on an open bus, if the weather permits, and it peps me up for the day. Usually I go home the same way. Well, good night, Inspector. If there’s anything else I can tell you—”

“If there’s anything else you can tell me, you’re smart enough not to,” the Inspector said under his breath. But he let the smart young lawyer pass out of the office.

The Inspector relaxed into his chair again, and crossed his feet on his desk. “I wonder how good an actor this Waverly fellow is?” he said softly. “Never batted an eye when I mentioned the bus. If he’d had an ounce of guilty conscience he would have denied ever using the buses—supposing that Hildegarde is right about the way the job was done. I wonder—”

He was still wondering an hour or two later when he got a report over the telephone.

“I found her, Inspector,” came Swarthout’s excited tenor. “Name’s Mildred Hotchkiss. Lives in the Bronx, which is where I am at the moment, calling from a drug store. She’s worked for Charley Waverly as stenog—she calls it secretary—for a couple of years, and with a little pressure I got one thing out of her, though I don’t think she knows that it means anything, and I’m not sure what it means myself. But anyway, Dana Waverly and her brother had a hell of a quarrel that afternoon of the murder. It was something about a promise she’d made to him in the past. Waverly sent Mildred on an errand, but she came back in time to hear the girl say to her brother—“Those stories are all lies, and he loves me. I know he loves me, because he carries the only love letter I ever wrote him around in his billfold right now!’ She’s a cute little trick, Inspector. Want me to stick on the job?”

“I do not. You’d better come back to town and get yourself some sleep. Get it in bed, your own bed, and not under a table in some speakeasy. It’ll do you more good.”

The Inspector crashed the receiver and debated whether or not to allow himself just one more cigar before going home. The cigar won the decision, and when it was burning merrily, he pulled a pad of paper out of his drawer and made a number of markings which partook of the nature of a cryptogram. He drew a square, quartered it, blocked in the quarters, and then added a decoration of a chimney and a roof to the top. He followed this masterpiece of surrealism with a fresco of automobile wheels, and a couple of somewhat shaky triangles. Then he wrote:

Billfold—Lew’s—missing when his aunt wanted money for taxi but discovered that same night in a post office collection box, with the dough in tact

Billfold—Laurie’s—missing from the corpse

Billfold—Somebody’s—contained a love letter of Dana Waverly’s

Inspector Piper then drew a large question mark, added legs and a silk hat to it, and went home to bed.

L
ONG EXPERIENCE AS A
teacher had given Miss Withers the pet theory that the time to find out anything that someone doesn’t want to tell is early in the morning. She knew that a large majority of the world’s citizens awaken by slow degrees, with resistance at a low ebb, and whenever she found it necessary to determine a culprit among her pupils at Jefferson School she made the accusation bright and early the next morning as the boys and girls were filing into their seats.

Grade Three at Jefferson School was now being administrated—undoubtedly very badly—by a substitute, but in her avocation of sleuthing Miss Withers applied the same technique. Thus it was that she rang the bell at the servant’s entrance of the Stait house a few minutes after eight o’clock the next morning.

A clatter of pans died away inside, but otherwise there was no answer. Miss Withers rang again, and suddenly the door was flung open and a large and shining butcher knife was presented before her maidenly breast.

“Hands up!” demanded a highly nervous voice. It was Mrs. Hoff, but her vast bulk was trembling like Jello in a high wind.

Miss Withers put up, not her hands, but her eyebrows. Slowly the weapon was withdrawn.

“You can come in,” said Mrs. Hoff grudgingly. “I not know who it wass. The way things happen in this house, I take no chances.”

“You certainly do not, but anyone who comes near you takes a good many,” said Miss Withers. She advanced into the kitchen, but stopped short on seeing Gretchen, the little blonde maid, also with a large and glittering knife.

Gretchen proceeded to bisect an orange, and add it to a bowl of yellow semisphere beside her. Then she rose to her feet and made a bee-line for the hall.

“Never mind her,” Miss Withers told the cook. “It’s you I want to talk to. You realize, of course, that it is to your best interest to aid the police in every possible way? You could be arrested, if that detective wanted to press the charge, for resisting an officer, mayhem, assault and battery, attack with a deadly weapon and the intent to kill …”

“I not do any of those things,” Mrs. Hoff said weakly. “I only hit him with a skillet.” But her resistance was ebbing away. She subsided into a rocking chair, and stared out of the window.

Miss Withers wasn’t sure how to begin. She surveyed the preparations for breakfast. A dozen slices of bacon lay on a plate beside the stove. On the table stood a large and formidable device which resembled a mammoth hour-glass, with an aluminum band in the narrow neck. Above, boiling water slowly subsided to reappear in the crystal-clear compartment at the bottom as golden brown coffee.