Murder on Wheels (3 page)

That fountain pen was to be discovered about theater time by a quick-witted young Jewish student, who knew that its makers in their Thirty-fourth Street shop replaced all broken parts instantly and without charge. He smashed the barrel, therefore, until the etched name was obliterated, and the next day he had it repaired from point to cap—with a new name on the barrel.

Morris Miltberg was to write an almost-perfect philosophy examination at CCNY with it in a few weeks, for which he was spending most of his evenings cramming at the present time. If he had only read the daily papers he might have recognized a name, and then the philosophy examination, and this story, might never have been written. But he didn’t.

At this moment Miss Withers and the Inspector were rolling across Fifty-seventh in a taxi.

“Well, suppose it does happen to be one of
the
Staits who was found dead in the street,” Miss Withers was saying. “Besides there having been a college athlete by that name a year or so ago, who are the Staits ? I thought you said no more murder cases for you unless it was somebody in the public eye?”

“You probably wouldn’t know about the Stait family,” explained the Inspector wearily. “Naturally the old name doesn’t mean anything out in Iowa where you come from. But here in New York …”

“Never mind where I come from,” interrupted the school-teacher, testily. It had always been a great sorrow to Miss Withers that her father and mother had moved from the intellectual fastnesses of Beacon Street to Des Moines a few months before her advent into this world.

“Anyway,” continued the Inspector, “the Staits used to rate with the Vanderbilts and the Stuyvesants. The third mayor of New York was a Stait. Tammany Hall was built on land donated by old Roscoe Stait the First. And now one of his grandsons is found dead in the middle of a crowded thoroughfare which his grandfather used for a cowpasture. The family hasn’t the money it used to have, but there’s a bit in the till yet, I’m thinking. Anyway, the newspapers are going to raise merry hell until we find out the inside of that circus of death that happened this afternoon. What’s more, we’re going to get
the
murderer, and get him quick.”

Miss Withers smiled triumphantly. “Then you agree that it’s murder and not suicide?”

“It’s murder all right,” insisted the Inspector. The cab slowed down for a red light at Seventy-second. “A nasty murder, too. Nothing to work from. No rhyme or reason to it. Here’s a man found in the street with a rope around his neck. And an empty roadster. No place to search for finger prints. No doorman to question. No eye-witnesses, just because there were too many people there.”

“I don’t get that,” said his companion. “On Fifth Avenue … at the rush hour …”

“Exactly. It was snowing hard, and everybody was looking to see where they walked, and nobody paid much attention to passing cars. The only eye-witness we’ve got gives us a cock and bull story about a man jumping backwards out of his car. And that’s a physical impossibility.”

“I wonder,” murmured Miss Withers.

“The trouble with this case,” said the Inspector, drumming his fingers impatiently against the window, “the trouble with this case is that it’s too weird, too bizarre. My boys know just what to do when they find a round-heeled little chorus girl strangled in her apartment, or walk in on a missing judge dead in bed with the wife of his best friend. That’s routine. All the same, even though there’s nothing here but the rope to get our teeth into, it’s the complicated murders that are solved easiest. If we found Walter Winchell with a bullet through his head we’d have to pick up a thousand suspects, but when we find somebody choked to death with butter we just look for a nut. See what I mean?”

The cab whirled around onto the Drive, and began to make better time. It was already dark, and the snow was falling so heavily that Miss Withers could hardly make out the lights of Jersey across the Hudson.

“We’re almost there,” Inspector Piper explained. “I want to be the one to break the news to that family, and see how they take it. I won’t be but a few minutes, you’d better wait in the cab.”

Miss Withers got her dander up in a second. “Wait in the cab? Oscar Piper, you had me wait in a cab once, and I waited there for nearly two hours while you chased a poor little Chinaman across Brooklyn Bridge.”

“Yeah? Well, that poor little Chinaman was packing opium enough to keep the snow-birds happy all winter. I explained it all, Hildegarde!”

“Never mind. But I’m coming in the Stait house with you. I can be your stenographer again, and take down questions and answers. I want to be in it if there’s any excitement. And you do, too. You claim you’re taking up this case personally because of the Stait name, but you’re really doing it because it’s a case that’s different, and after the excitement we had on the Aquarium Murder (The Penguin Pool Murder, Brentano’s, 1931) desk work bores you. Isn’t that true?”

Inspector Piper nodded. “But there’s no need for you to get mixed up in this.”

“If you shut me out of this case,” promised Miss Withers decisively, “I won’t even keep my promise to be a
sister
to you, Oscar Piper.”

In the first flush of excitement at the successful culmination of the Aquarium Murder, these two had decided to get married. A confirmed old bachelor and a determined old maid, they were both secretly relieved that an accidental alarm had prevented them from going through with it.

“All right, you can come along,” said the Inspector grudgingly. “There’s the house, you can see it from here. It’s the big four-story graystone tomb on the corner—the one with the light on the top floor.” He tapped on the window. “Pull up here, driver.”

They walked slowly along the sidewalk toward the Stait mansion, the snow muffling their footsteps.

“This is an errand I dislike,” confessed Piper. “It’s not so easy, even if you’ve been in this business as long as I have, to walk into a happy home and say ‘Excuse me, but I just sent your darling son to the Morgue, and I want you to go down with me and identify him.’”

“There isn’t a chance that they’ve already got the news?”

The Inspector shook his head. “Not a chance. The papers won’t come out with an extra tonight, anyway. The first sheet to have it will be the morning rags, which will be on the street in about two hours. No, we’re first with the tidings, all right.”

He pressed his gloved thumb against the button. From somewhere in the recesses of the house came the muffled peal of a bell.

There was a long delay, and then at last a shadow appeared on the door. It swung open, disclosing the well-rounded figure of a little maid who quite evidently had remained ignorant of the recent exodus of short skirts from the fashion pages. Her knees, the Inspector couldn’t help noticing, were all that they should have been, beneath the insignificant little lace apron. There was a quantity of mussed blondish hair.

Miss Withers thought that the girl didn’t look overly bright.

“Is Mr. Stait at home?”

The girl made a valiant effort to slam the door in their faces, but the Inspector’s heavy brogan interposed just in time.

“You mean Mr. Lew Stait?” asked the maid, when she saw that these visitors were determined.

The Inspector hesitated. “I’m not sure who I want to see,” he said. “It’s about Mr. Lew.” He showed his badge, cupped in the palm of his hand.

The vacant blue eyes widened, and then grew suddenly hard and brittle as turquoise, and much the same shade.

“I don’t care who you are,” she said defiantly. “I’ve instructions that Mr. Lew isn’t at home to anybody!”

“All right, my girl. Now don’t get hysterical, but I have some bad news and I have to break it to some member of the family.”

“Tell me!” The girl’s voice was rasping and hoarse. “What about Mr. Lew? You’ve got to tell me!” She had forgotten for a moment that she was a maid.

“Be a good calm girl and don’t scream,” said Inspector Piper smoothly. “Mr. Lew Stait won’t be home at all. You see, he was murdered about an hour ago.”

There was a moment’s silence. Miss Withers thought to herself that it was just like a man to break it that way.

The girl screamed. But they were screams of laughter. She flung the door wide open, and pointed her finger at the figure of a young man who sat on the davenport in the first floor living room, clearly visible through the dingy portieres. He was a tall young man in a dark blue suit, a very handsome young man. Miss Withers noticed that he was reading a magazine upside-down, and had just finished combing his hair.

His soft collar was open, which struck Miss Withers with a ghastly significance. For on the last occasion when she had seen that fair-haired young man, he had worn the red stigma of a noose around his throat!

“That’s him right there! That’s Mister Lew!” proclaimed the girl in ringing soprano tones. “I ask you, does he look like a dead one?”

Her position forgotten, the girl stood with her back against the wall, her head turned toward the young man. He had risen from his chair and was coming, with an expression of polite distaste, toward the hall. He stopped in the doorway.

“I am Lewis Stait,” he said calmly. “Is there something I can do for you?”

Piper’s teeth met in his cigar with a dull click.

Miss Withers advanced a step. “Inspector, hadn’t you better tell the young man that the newspapers are already printing his obituary?”

Y
OU’D BETTER COME IN
,” said Lew Stait. “Gretchen, that will do. If I need you, I’ll ring.” His voice held no touch of softness or romance.

This young man was pale, but otherwise seemed to be in pretty good control. With a flounce of her diminutive skirt, the little maid turned her back on him and started down the hall toward the servants’ quarters.

“Don’t leave the house,” warned Inspector Piper. “I’ll want to ask you some questions in a little while.”

Then he went into the living room after their host, and Miss Withers followed. It was a high, long room, with an obsolete gas chandelier in the center of the ceiling and old-fashioned hot air registers in the floor. Bookcases ran around the walls, containing musty volumes which looked as if they had never been opened. The chair in which Miss Withers seated herself, like everything else in the room, was dark and heavy and old … and vaguely uncomfortable.

The Inspector introduced himself, and pointed out Miss Withers as his assistant.

Lew Stait nodded. “About my obituary …?”

The Inspector was still staring at the smooth, unmarked throat of the young man who faced them. The words brought him up with a jerk.

“There seems to be some mistake here,” he said slowly. “There was an accident about an hour ago on Fifth Avenue. The body of a young man in a camel’s-hair overcoat was found not far from a wrecked Chrysler roadster, and identified as that of a Lew Stait. We traced the auto registration and got this address. All I have to say is this, that your double, the closest double I’ve ever seen, lies down in the autopsy room of the City Morgue at this moment.”

Their host lost his aplomb for a second, and his eyes widened. Then by an obvious effort he regained his
savoir faire.
“Not my double, Inspector. It must be—it’s my twin brother Laurie!”

“Your twin?”

The boy nodded, his face white as death. “We’re what they call
identical twins.
It only happens once in a thousand cases of twins that both are exactly the same in physical characteristics, I’ve heard. So it isn’t strange that whoever saw Laurie’s—Laurie’s body after the auto wreck might mistake it for mine. You see, he was driving my car, and he’d slipped into my camel’s-hair coat because of the storm. And now, you say he’s … he’s dead?”

“He’s dead,” agreed the Inspector. “But not in an auto crash. He was strangled. We don’t just know how, but it looks like murder.”

The boy was gripping the edge of his chair, but somehow Miss Withers felt that he wasn’t really as surprised as he tried to be. Perhaps it was because of the countless inhibitions of his inbred, overcivilized stock, but he was too deeply entrenched behind his barriers to seem genuinely shocked.

“Murder!”
He repeated the word several times, tasting it.

The Inspector nodded. “In a few minutes I want you to go down to the Morgue with me or one of my men, and formally identify the body of your brother. But first, I must ask you some questions, just as a matter of routine.”

“But who did it? What happened? I don’t understand!”

“You don’t need to. Just answer these questions. First, when did you last see your brother Laurie alive?”

The boy swallowed, and considered for a moment “It was about tea-time this afternoon, I should say. Perhaps four-thirty, perhaps a little before. It was right here in this room. He came to get the key to my roadster. The car, you see, is mine, but we both used it a good deal. And now he won’t ever use it again!”

“Do you know where he was driving? Any idea of why he wanted the use of the car?”

Lew Stait shook his head. “No—no, I don’t know. Why should I know? He used it whenever he wanted it. He considered he had a right to, because there was only the one car. Gran gave it to me, but actually it was as much his as mine.”

Miss Withers was jotting all this down in her little notebook, a fact that seemed to make Lew Stait vaguely uncomfortable.

“Would you mind telling me just who are the members of this household?”

“Not at all. First, there’s Gran. My grandmother, you know. Mrs. Roscoe Stait. Gran is well over ninety, and she hardly ever comes downstairs. The attic has been done over for her. But all the same, she’s the commanding officer in this family, and don’t you forget it. You can order the rest of us around, but your badge won’t mean a thing to Gran.”

“Yes? And then, besides Gran?”

“Well, there’s Aunt Abbie. She’s a younger sister of my mother … my mother and father, you see, are dead. Aunt Abbie isn’t a Stait, but she’s been sort of in charge of our bringing up since father and mother went down on the Titanic. She—”

“Never mind. The rest of them?”

“Well, that’s the list on the distaff side, barring the servants. You saw Gretchen, and the cook is Mrs. Hoff. She’s been here forever, I guess. Then there’s cousin Hubert. He’s a Stait, but more or less indirectly. He’s really a second-cousin, but he’s an orphan, too, so this has been his home since he was a baby. He’s the brains of the house, and Laurie and I have always been the brawn. Football and all that, you know, while Hubert was making Phi Beta Kappa. Of course we all went to Columbia. Gran wouldn’t have us out of her sight.”