Murder on Wheels (22 page)

“You aren’t going in, are you?” Miss Withers wanted to know. He shook his head.

“It wouldn’t look well for a member of the Force to intrude at a time like this,” he admitted. “But I did want to get a glimpse of the arrivals, and we’ve got that.”

“All members of the family are here except Lew Stait and Cousin Hubert,” Miss Withers pointed out. “They’re already beginning inside—I can hear the organ.”

“I don’t know about Hubert,” the Inspector admitted. “Probably he doesn’t like funerals, and I don’t blame him. But I don’t mind telling you that I doubt very much if Lew Stait will show up at all. It’s a hunch of mine that that young man is trying at this moment to step out of the picture, and it won’t do him any more good than it did Buck Keeley. And Lew Stait has no alibi that’s worth a tinker’s damn.”

“Oscar,” said Miss Withers suddenly. “I’ve got something to tell you. I know who committed this murder.” There was a sudden lessening of the tension between them.

The Inspector grinned. “Of course you do. And so do I.I promised Taylor an hour ago that we’d have our arrest in time for the home edition of the afternoon papers. And I mean to—wait a minute, who’s that?”

A boyish-faced usher in cutaway and striped trousers was calling something from the doorway. Then he came running across the sidewalk.

“Are you Inspector Piper of the Police?”

The Inspector pled guilty.

“Well, your office is on the phone and they say it’s a matter of life and death. They want to relay a call that just came in …”

“Get out of my way,” Piper shouted, and sprinted for the doorway.

Miss Withers cooled her heels for what seemed like half an hour, and what was probably as long as five minutes. Then the Inspector came out, still on the run, and leaped into the taxi beside her.

“The Stait house—203 Riverside Drive—and step on it!”

The driver whined. “But mister, if the cops sees me …

Piper flashed his gold badge. “I
am
the Cops,” he shouted unconsciously paraphrasing a
bon mot
of one of the less-fortunate Louies. And the machine leaped forward up Broadway as if shot from a bow.

“It was Hubert Stait,” explained the Inspector, hanging on to the strap for dear life as the taxi ducked a-round a truck. Miss Withers was all ears.

“He spoke so low into the phone I could hardly hear him,” continued Piper. “Says he knows now who killed his cousin, not only knows but can prove it. He’s scared green over something, and his voice quavered like an old man’s, but he’s game, Hildegarde. Says he’s at last got evidence that’ll convict the murderer—”

“And that is?”

“He wouldn’t say over the phone. Afraid he’d be overheard, I guess. But he begged me to hurry. I guess he’s afraid he’ll lose his nerve.”

“I don’t think that young man will ever lose his nerve,” said Miss Withers dryly. And her fingers slowly polished the already worn handle of her umbrella.

The taxi-cab skidded around a corner and then spurted up the Drive, passing red lights, ducking between oncoming cars, and otherwise giving Miss Withers a mild case of nervous prostration.

The State house came into view, gaunt and gloomy against the heavy gray sky. The taxi skidded to a stop, and Miss Withers glanced at her watch. It was exactly two-thirty-five—the trip from Broadway at 67th had taken something less than fifteen minutes. Miss Withers was of the opinion that this was a record for the distance. If it wasn’t, she was quite content to let the old record stand.

But the Inspector did not race up the steps as she had expected. Down the street he noticed the figure of a young man in a brown overcoat idly chatting with a doorman of a new apartment building. He waved his arm, and the man in the brown overcoat came running up the street.

“Sure the Stait twin is in there,” said Swarthout. “I tailed him around to four sporting goods stores where he tried to buy cartridges, and then he came here. About half an hour ago. Nobody’s been in or out. I guess he’s alone in the house—the doorman says that he saw them all leave a while back to go some place. Even the old lady.”

“You follow me,” ordered the Inspector. “Maybe Lew Stait isn’t alone in there. Come on, Hildegarde.”

He pressed his thumb against the bell, and waited. There was no answer. He pressed it again, excitedly, impatiently, so that the hall rang with sound, but still nothing happened.

The Stait house stood vacant and gloomy and bare, silent as a tomb. Silent as the new abode of one twin, Miss Withers thought.

“What’s wrong here?” The Inspector beat with the heel of his hand on me door. “Georgie, you duck to the back door. If it’s open, come through and let us in. If it isn’t, you stay there and don’t let anybody in or out. I smell trouble.”

He drew back, ready to try kicking in the front door, when it was suddenly jerked away from them, and the half-naked figure of a tall young man appeared, a big bath towel wrapped around him.

It wasn’t, as Miss Withers had supposed for a moment, Cousin Hubert. It was the surviving Stait twin, water running from his sturdy athlete’s body and forming pools on the carpet.

They had but a glimpse of his pale, startled face, and then their host made an effort to slam the door. The Inspector caught it with his shoulder just in time, and pushed through into the hall, his hand instinctively on the hip that had once borne a service revolver.

Miss Withers, scandalized but still game, hung in his wake.

“W-what do you want?”

The young man drew the bath-sheet more closely around his body, and looked desperately past the intruders as if he was planning to bolt for it. He was trembling, whether from chill or from fear Miss Withers could only guess.

“Come clean, Lew! Where is your cousin Hubert?”

“Hubert?” Lew spoke the name as if it was new to him. “Hubert?”

“Yes,
HUBERT
! Where is he?”

“I don’t know. Why should I know?”

“Quit stalling. We want to find your cousin.”

Lew drew a deep breath. “Why, you’ll find Hubert at the funeral, I guess. He must be down at the funeral chapel. Why not look for him there? I couldn’t stand seeing my own twin buried, but the rest went—”

He tried to lead them toward the door. “It’s on Broadway above the Circle,” he pointed out. “Only a short drive from here. Why—”

“You won’t get rid of us that easy,” Piper told him. “Come on, we’re going up to your cousin’s room.”

“But he isn’t there, I tell you!”

“How do you know?” put in Miss Withers.

The young man set his jaw. “I know damn well. I came home figuring that Hubert wouldn’t have the face to show up at the funeral. I wanted to talk to him. But he’s gone out, and his door is locked.”

They were going up the stairs, the Inspector pausing on the landing long enough for Lew Stait to get into a dressing gown and slippers. The butt of a revolver showed in the pocket of the dressing gown. Piper snatched it in silence. He exchanged a long look with Miss Withers. They went on—the young man white and still shivering. Miss Withers noticed that his hands were shrunken with the thousands of tiny wrinkles that come when soaked too long in over-hot water. They were not attractive hands, to her.

Then the three of them stood outside Hubert’s door. The Inspector rapped loudly, but there was no answer.

He tried the knob, but the door was locked. He turned to Lew. “Have you got a key for this door?”

The young man denied it “This is an old-fashioned lock,” the Inspector observed. “I could pick it with a hair-pin—or any ordinary skeleton would open it. But we won’t wait for that—”

He drew back, as if he intended to hurl his shoulder against the stout oak barrier, but instead he swung the heel of his right foot against the door near the knob, crashing it so that panels cracked and hinges screeched.

Again—and the door swung inward, disclosing the long narrow room which was Hubert Stait’s bedroom and study. It was dim in the half-light of the winter afternoon, and there was a singularly musty odor in the air, which may have emanated from the rows of books which hung on both walls.

A clock on the mantel ticked monotonously, its slow beat pounding in Miss Withers’ ears as she saw who was staring at them from a high wing chair near the fireplace.

It was Hubert Stait, but he did not seemed surprised, or even interested, at their rude invasion of his privacy. He simply sat there, and stared.

“Hello, there!” said Piper, and there was a cracked ring in his voice. For somehow he knew that he would receive no answer to his greeting—knew, even before his fumbling fingers found the light switch beside the door.

As the overheads went on, everything in the room was suddenly white and glaring, with one wide black shadow like a bar sinister across the carpet. That shadow was cast by the high back of the fireside chair in which Hubert Stait was resting.

His eyes, strangely naked without the habitual spectacles, were bulging in their sockets, and his body had been lifted a few inches from the cushion by means of a strangling cord which gripped the thick neck and ran up and over the high back of the chair.

On the floor beside his feet lay, face-down, a copy of “Le Côté de Guermantes,” its leaves twisted and crumpled.

The noose, which had pulled savagely at the skin of his throat, was made of a rope familiar to all of them. It was of half-inch hemp, which ran up and over the high back and down where it was knotted around one foot of the chair. That end was bound with blue thread.

Miss Withers looked at her watch, instinctively. It was five to three—less than forty minutes since the Inspector had heard this man’s voice over the telephone, imploring him to make haste.

They had not, for all their hurry, been quick enough. Hubert Stait was still warm, but he was quite completely and finally dead.

“A
M I TO CONSIDER
myself under arrest?”

The surviving Stait twin was dressing himself, under the eagle eye of two detectives from the local precinct station. The Inspector stood in the doorway, and behind him the old house bustled with ghoulish activity.

“You can consider whatever you please,” said Piper. “And my advice to you is the less you say the better.”

“I’ve told you the truth,” Lew Stait protested. “I came home here to have a talk with Hubert—”

“After scouring the town in an attempt to buy 44 shells for the revolver you stole from my collection of murder weapons!”

“What if I did? I didn’t get any cartridges, did I? I came home because I knew that Hubert wouldn’t be at the funeral, and when I found his door locked I came downstairs and took a bath. I thought it would calm my nerves.”

“You probably wanted to wash yourself clean of the stain of murder, like Macbeth in the play,” suggested one of the detectives, who prided himself on a literary background.

“You can’t get by with that story,” Piper went on. “I talked to Hubert on the telephone at twenty minutes after two, and we’ve traced that call from this house. You can’t tell me that he sneaked out of his room and used the telephone without your knowing he was here.”

“But I was in the bath, with the water running …”

“You’ll have a hard time making a jury believe that, young man. You nearly got away with it, didn’t you?”

“Away with what?”

“You killed your brother,” the Inspector accused. “I always felt that your alibi that the little maid gave you wouldn’t hold water. You dropped a noose over the head of your twin brother because you knew that the girl who was engaged to you really loved him. But your cousin Hubert got wise to you, and when you heard him telephone me that he had definite proof of the murderer, you sneaked up the stairs to his room—didn’t you?”

Lew Stait refused to talk.

“You concealed yourself in the closet, or in the corner behind the book-case. And when Hubert came back to his room to wait for my arrival, and sat down in his big chair in front of the fireplace, he thought he was safe. He thought he had a locked door between himself and you. He sat down in the big easy chair and picked up a book—and you pounced on him!”

The Inspector shoved his jaw almost in the young man’s face. “The jig is up, Stait. You thought you’d inherit your brother’s share of the property. You thought you’d cinch the girl you both loved, although that didn’t work, either, because she got wise to you and left you a couple of days after you made her marry you. Oh, we’re wise to you. You don’t need to sign any confession.

“We know where you got the rope. Your brother Laurie brought it back from the west with him as a souvenir, along with the other cowboy paraphernalia. It was too long for the little strangling job you planned from the top of the bus, so you cut it off and hid the remainder of it somewhere in the house here. Then you bound the end
with
blue thread—the wrong blue thread, but you didn’t know that—so that it would appear that Buck Keeley did the job. You knew he was in town and you knew that he was trying to get your brother to marry his sister, who was in trouble.

“Then Buck Keeley proved an alibi that took the wind out of your sails. And then your cousin got wise to you. Hubert had the brains of the family, I remember you told me that the first night I questioned you. But you didn’t realize how true that was.

“So when he was sitting in that fireside chair up in his room you crept out of the shadows, probably in your stocking feet, and made use of the remainder of the lariat. You dropped a noose over his head as you stood behind his chair, and before he could move or cry out you drew it tight, throwing your whole weight on the rope. While he was dying you tied the other end around the bottom leg of the chair, and left him there. Don’t try to lie now, Stait. The key to your room fits his door, we found that out. You locked the door and came downstairs. Whatever made you get the idea of taking a bath is a mystery to me, but all you murderers are crazy.”

“I’m not a murderer, I tell you. If Hubert didn’t commit suicide, somebody else killed him!”

“Suicide? There was no key in that room, young man, and the door was locked. Besides, a man can hang himself, but how can he tie the other end of the rope to the back of the chair he’s sitting in? Hubert was afraid of you. He thought you might try to give him what you gave your twin brother, and you did. You’ll burn in the Chair for it, Stait.”