Murder on Wheels (19 page)

It was a delicate subject, but Miss Withers pressed it. “Such things have a way of happening,” she pointed out. “Rose Keeley is going to have a baby, you know. How can you be so sure?”

“I’m as sure of it as I’m sure of—of anything,” said Lew proudly. “Because—well, well, because Laurie told me!” His voice was strained and nervous now, pitched too high.

Dana Waverly turned her wide eyes on her young husband, and their bodies moved imperceptibly apart.

“Whatever that girl says about Laurie is a
lie,”
Lew insisted. “He was innocent of any charge she can make!”

“But she doesn’t say anything,” Miss Withers informed him. “I talked to her last night, and she avoided the subject. But never mind that. Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the cowboy had nothing to do with it.” She lowered her voice. “Do you think that, for any reason in the world, your cousin Hubert’s alibi could have been faked, and he might have committed the murder?”

There was a long pause, and if Lew Stait was not honestly surprised he was a better actor than Miss Withers gave him credit for.

“Hubert? Good heavens, no. Why, we twins have always been his best pals. I didn’t know he had an alibi—the Inspector told us not to discuss this case among ourselves, and we’ve steered off the subject here in the household. But Hubert doesn’t need an alibi. He couldn’t have had anything to do with the murder. It’s unthinkable …”

“But” Dana started to speak, and then thought better of it. Miss Withers wondered if the young bride had been about to disagree with her husband, and waited a moment, but no more information came forth.

“That’s all I wanted to know,” Miss Withers decided. “I’m sorry to have intruded like this. May I say that I wish you very good luck?”

Lew Stait thanked her, and Dana smiled a crooked little smile. “We’ll need all the good luck we can get,” she said. They passed on toward the stair but not arm in arm as when they had come in. Miss Withers paused in the hallway to button her overcoat before braving the chill wind of the river-front.

A hand touched her shoulder, startling the good lady considerably. It was Hubert again, his eyes wide and blinking behind the glasses.

“I want a word with you,” he whispered. “I know you think that the cowboy killed my cousin. Maybe he did, but I doubt it. It was somebody closer to Laurie than that, somebody who knew he was driving down Fifth Avenue at that hour—somebody who pretended to be his friend. Perhaps closer than a friend!”

“Yes? Who do you think that could be?” Miss Withers was casual.

Hubert looked behind him before he spoke. Then he came closer. “I’m afraid for my life,” he whispered. “The deaths in this family aren’t over yet, by a long way. And … if you want to find out who killed Laurie Stait,
watch his twin brother Lew!”

With that Hubert turned suddenly and scuttled up the stair as if his own shadow threatened him.

T
HE INSPECTOR PUT DOWN
his telephone and crossed his feet luxuriously on his desk.

“Hildegarde,” he announced, “you be the first to congratulate me.”

Miss Withers closed the door behind her, and came into his office. “And just why did you think I should congratulate you? I suppose you’ve solved the Stait murder? Or maybe you found Charley Ross and Judge Crater all at once?”

“Your first guess was correct,” he informed her, letting two beautiful smoke rings rise in undulating whirls above his head.

Miss Withers had a quick thrill of apprehension. “You solved it? How?”

“Well, I just got word that my men have picked up Buck Keeley.”

“Oh!” Miss Withers subsided into a chair with a distinct sigh of relief.

“Well, you don’t seem very excited?”

“I’m not. I was afraid for a moment that you’d beaten me, Oscar Piper. But you and your Buck Keeley!”

“Yeah? Well, if Buck Keeley didn’t kill Laurie Stait, I’d like to know who did! He had the motive, didn’t he—with his sister like you said, in a family way? He had the rope, and the skill to use it. And he’d been making threats, everybody knew that.”

“Yes,” agreed Miss Withers. “Everybody knew that Buck Keeley was in town making threats. That’s just the trouble.” She saw the bewilderment on Piper’s face. “Oh, I don’t say that I can prove Keeley didn’t do it. Maybe he did, although his sister claims Buck was having a brawl with some of the other cowboys and an officer at that moment, three blocks away from the scene of the murder.”

“Sure she does. And Carrigan and the cowboys swear now that Keeley was with them. Only if you remember they talked differently when we first went to the Rodeo. Then Rose Keeley insisted that Buck was with her at dinner in the hotel, and the boys bore her up.”

“Maybe they were lying then because they thought Buck was being arrested for something in connection with the fight?” Miss Withers shrugged her shoulders. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Oscar, I said that I was going ahead on this case as a free lance, to show you that a woman can be a sleuth. But I’ve got an idea that will take your official position to work out. Forget poor Buck Keeley, and look at these.”

She passed a book across the desk to the Inspector, who stared at it blankly. “Toby Tyler, or Ten Weeks with a Circus—by James Otis. Thirty-fourth Printing.” He looked at her. “So what is this, another Peter Rabbit?”

“Look at the flyleaf,” she suggested. “It happens to be a grand old classic among children’s books, but I suppose you never read anything but Deadwood Dick when you were at the right age for it.”

The Inspector looked at the flyleaf, and raised his brows. “To Laurie from Lew, Xmas, 1921.” He nodded. “So you’ve been up at the Stait house again, have you? Well, what am I supposed to deduce from this, except that the twins used to exchange presents under the Christmas tree in a happier day than this?”

“Maybe nothing, maybe a great deal,” Miss Withers informed him. “Notice anything about the writing?”

He looked at the flyleaf again. “Sort of a childish scrawl, but that’s not so strange. Laurie and Lew Stait were hardly twelve years old then. Even the ink has faded out to a sort of dull brown. But as for any meaning …”

Miss Withers gave him exhibit B. It was the note from Lew Stait to his young wife, the note which Miss Withers had lifted from the mirror in the bedroom at the Stait house that morning.

“It’s not the context I’m interested in,” she announced. “Though that’s at least revealing. If that young man went down to the apartment after the engagement ring his wife somewhat absent-mindedly left there, he had his trip for nothing. But apart from that, does anything strike you about these two handwritings?”

“I’m no handwriting expert,” the Inspector insisted. “They look alike, if that’s what you mean. I suppose that a man’s writing changes with the years.”

“I’m no expert either,” Miss Withers said coldly. “And therefore I think we’d better call in one. In this book inscription we have a genuine sample of Lewis Stait’s writing before the murder, and in this note we have a sample of his writing after the murder.”

“But why all this interest in Lew Stait’s handwriting? This isn’t a forgery case!”

“Maybe it is,” Miss Withers told him solemnly. She hesitated as if about to take the plunge.

Then she thought better of it. “Oscar, I don’t want to explain yet I want you to submit these samples of handwriting to the best expert you know, and ask him if they are actually written by the same person. Perhaps it isn’t possible to tell, but I understand that they can do wonderful things with a microscopic enlargement. Will you get the expert for me?”

“Of course, of course, if you think it means anything. I suppose you’re trying to see if Lew Stait’s early handwriting shows any traces of homicidal mania, or some such silliness. But I’ll send them out to our expert, never fear.” He pressed the buzzer on his desk.

“How soon will he make a report?” Miss Withers was anxious.

“He happens to be a ‘she,’” Piper informed her. “Mrs. Korn has officiated as technical witness in many a forgery and fraud case, and she can spot a poison pen letter a mile away. She lives over in Jersey somewhere, but I’ll have a messenger take these to her and bring back the reply within a few hours. If there’s any secrets hidden away in Lew Stait’s childish scrawl or in his note to lovey-dovey, Lolly Korn will ferret them out, even if she is bed-ridden.”

He handed the exhibits to Sergeant Taylor, with, brief and explicit instructions. Then he relit his cigar. “You needn’t sit back and look like the cat who swallowed the canary, Hildegarde.”

Miss Withers was wearing a self-satisfied smile.
“I
have a feeling that this case is going to be settled, and settled soon,” she ventured.

The Inspector agreed, heartily. “Give me a couple of hours with this Buck Keeley, and I’ll have a signed confession to the Stait murder,” he promised. “I wish they’d bring him in. The boys must have picked him up in a wheelbarrow instead of the wagon.”

But before the Inspector’s cigar had gone out again, he heard the wail of a siren, and then a somewhat disheveled-looking young man was brought up the hall. His clothes gave evidence that he had slept in them, and slept none too well at that. There was a bristle of beard on his face, and his small, piglike eyes held an expression of injured innocence which was alien to his hangdog air and the manacles which adorned either wrist.

On each side of the stocky westerner loomed the tall blue figure of a uniformed policeman, and in the rear Mike McTeague strode along in plain clothes, with one hand on the holster which bulged under his coat.

“And here’s your roughneck,” announced McTeague breezily. The Inspector, standing in the door of his inner office with Miss Withers behind him, shook his head.

“Mike, who do you think you’re arresting, Terrible Tommy O’Connor? Take those bracelets off him.” McTeague rattled his keys.

“Where did you pick him up?”

“Down in the Municipal Lodging House, sir. He was there on the bum, with a hundred bucks in his pocket. One of the bums saw his wad, and when he couldn’t lift it he squealed and they ganged up on him. That’s how it came out.”

“I see. Well, Keeley, you see it’s no good.” The Inspector’s voice was calm and gentle. He might have been a father-confessor. “Don’t you think you’d better tell us all about it?”

Buck Keeley raised a whiskery but pugnacious jaw. “Tell you all about what? Am I here under arrest?”

Inspector Piper shook his head. “Of course not. We just wanted to ask you a few questions, and the boys were a little overeager, that’s all.”

“I’m answering no questions, and I’m leaving right now,” objected Buck Keeley. But he did not get far.

“In that case we’ll exercise our privilege and hold you over night as a suspicious character associating with known criminals,” the Inspector told him. “But I hope it won’t be necessary. I’m sure you’ll be able to explain everything satisfactorily, including the reason why you slipped up and used one of your own ropes to bump off Laurie Stait.” Piper turned to the two uniformed men. “Take him down the hall boys, and I’ll be there in a minute. Make him comfortable.”

Buck Keeley muttered a word worthy of old Mrs. Stait’s parrot in his more bawdy moments, and then went down the hall without offering resistance.

“He’s going to be easy,” the Inspector promised Miss Withers. “You watch me. Wait here and I’ll be back with a confession before you can say Jack Robinson.” Then he, also, went down the hall.

The hands of the clock crawled on toward noon, swung past the meridian and down on the afternoon side. And still the Inspector did not show up with his confession.

When he did arrive, coatless and tie-less, he was mopping his brow. He poured himself something that may have been water from a carafe on his desk, and then shook his head at Miss Withers.

“I stopped saying ‘Jack Robinson’ because I lost count,” she informed him acidly. “It would seem that you overestimated the third degree. Another hour and Buck Keeley will have
you
signing a confession of the murder.”

“He’s stubborn, all right,” Piper agreed. “I’ve worn out a couple of my best detectives on him, and there’s a new shift shooting questions at him now. He’s a pigheaded sort, the kind of a mug who fixes a story and then sticks to it.”

“I don’t suppose it occurred to you that his story might possibly be true?”

“It can’t be,” Piper told her. “He claims that he tried to hide out only because he knew he’d be blamed for the bumping. And he says that at the hour of the murder he was having a fist-fight with a cop on Forty-fourth Street.”

“Well? Couldn’t he have?” Miss Withers was thoughtful. “Why don’t you have the policeman in here to identify him? Kehoe ought to recognize the men who gave him that beautiful black eye.”

“I thought of that,” confessed the Inspector. “And I tried it. But identifications aren’t always sure fire, you know. There was a case only a few months ago when we nearly sent a little punk to the Hot Squat up the river because he looked a lot like Two-gun Crowley, and happened to be in the courtroom when witnesses to a hold-up were pointing out who they imagined had done it. Well, that’s the way it was with Kehoe. We had him down here about an hour ago, and walked Keeley down the other corridor with five court attaches, so Kehoe could get a flash at him. But what does that dumb Irishman do but pick out the City Recorder of Deeds, who happened to be passing through, as one of the guys who had socked him in the fist-fight and
then
had a drink with him afterward! So what does it prove?”

Miss Withers nodded, thoughtfully. “You say they had a drink together?”

“Yeah. Of course Kehoe didn’t tell me that, but the Rodeo manager, Carrigan, did. As far as that goes, I’d rather a cop would have a drink with a citizen now and then, than arrest everybody he brushes up against. The court calendar is full enough as it is, and the less arrests the better. Only of course I couldn’t tell Kehoe that, for the sake of discipline.”

He suddenly clapped his fist against his palm. “I’ve got it! I’ll bet you that the whole thing was a frame. The fight and all that was faked, in order to furnish Keeley with an alibi. He got his friends to pull the thing, and then swear he was there, only it went askew somehow.”