Murder on the Blackboard (29 page)

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.”

“That’s all?”

“All but the colored boy who comes in to tend the furnace and clip the grass in summer. He makes himself useful around the kitchen when there are guests, which is very seldom now.”

“Good. Now can you get them all into one room for me? I’d like to question everybody for a few minutes, including the servants.” The Inspector was warming up.

But Lew Stait shook his head. “I can’t get them all into one room. Gran wouldn’t come downstairs to please anybody. It’s Mrs. Hoff’s night out, and she won’t be back for hours. And Aunt Abbie and Hubert are at a movie. Aunt Abbie gets a great thrill out of the cinema. She loves to lose herself in a thriller, and she’d sit through an earthquake if she was seeing a love scene. She doesn’t like to go alone, so we take turns in playing escort. She’s been mighty good to us, and it’s the least we can do for her.”

“At a movie, huh? Happen to know which one?”

Lew Stait nodded. “It’s the Cinemat, the modernistic theater on Fifty-seventh. I know, because I heard Hubert say when he left here with Laurie that he was going to meet Aunt Abbie in the lobby. She’s been shopping today. Hubert was going to take her to the movie and then to dinner, on account of this being the cook’s night out.”

The Inspector was puzzled. “You say that your cousin Hubert left here with Laurie?”

“Yes. Laurie was going to drop him off at the theater on his way down.”

Piper nodded. “Fifty-seventh would lie on the direct route between here and where the accident happened. Hildegarde, will you get that theater on the phone and have those people paged, or an announcement made from the stage or something?”

Miss Withers looked at her watch. “It isn’t necessary,” she pointed out. “It’s eight o’clock now, and those movies never run longer than two hours at the most. Even allowing an hour for dinner, they’ll be here shortly if they come right home.”

Piper nodded. “One thing more. Young man, I suppose you can account for your own time during the last three hours?” He lit his cigar, and eyed the surviving twin through the curls of smoke.

“I can account for it all right,” said Lew Stait sullenly. “I was right here in this house. Gretchen will bear witness to that. She made some sandwiches for me, and took up Gran’s toast and tea as usual. Why, do you insinuate that I’d have a hand in whatever you think happened to Laurie? My own twin? God, man, it would be like suicide to lay a hand on him. He was … he was like
myself!”

His acting is improving, thought Miss Withers. Or else he wasn’t acting. She didn’t sense the insincerity in his feeling now.

Instead of the Inspector’s own gruff, professional tones, her own voice took up the questioning. “Young man, who do you think it was that killed your brother Laurie?”

He looked up, startled. “How should I know?”

“Twins are generally supposed to be closer together than other people, even than brothers and sisters, aren’t they? Murder always casts its shadow ahead. Didn’t you notice anything in your brother Laurie’s actions these past few days?”

He hesitated for a long second. “No—no, of course not. Nothing definite, I mean. Except that Laurie has been sort of worried, upset a little, during the last month or so. Particularly since Monday.”

“This is Friday.” Miss Withers pressed the point, “How do you mean that he acted ‘upset’?”

Lew Stait took up a cigarette, and instead of lighting it, he carefully broke it into halves, and then quarters, and then eighths. “Well, just little things, you know. We’ve always shared a room here, you see. We’ve been together ever since we were boys. The first time we were ever separated longer than a weekend was this summer, when Laurie went out to a dude ranch in Wyoming, and I stayed here in town.”

“Why didn’t you go?”

“I had a job. Have it yet. In the Brunnix Agency, advertising. I’ll have to quit it now, though, because Gran will want me around home after what’s happened. Anyway, since Laurie got back from that ranch near Medicine Hat he’s been acting strangely. He got letters from a girl out there, for one thing.”

Miss Withers had stepped out of character for a supposed police-stenographer. “You said he seemed worried. What did he do?”

Lew Stait was staring at the open fire, his eyes cloudy. “It was the worst when Laurie was alone,” admitted the young man. “He used to sit there in that big dark room upstairs for hours and hours, chewing away at the mouthpiece of his pipe, and staring at the brick walls across the alley until I thought he was going crazy or something.”

A question was on the tip of Miss Wither’s tongue, but she didn’t ask it. For just at that moment the lights of a taxi-cab flashed against the window, and then came to a standstill along the curb. The tension in the room was broken.

“There’s Aunt Abbie and Hubert now,” said Lew Stait. His voice was steadier, and it was clear that he welcomed the relief.

He moved toward the hall, but the Inspector raised his hand. “Wait a minute. I’ll answer the door. Miss Withers, will you use that phone in the hall under the stairs to get in touch with Headquarters and have Sergeant Taylor and a couple of the boys come up here on the double? Stait, I wish you’d get your hat and wait until I call you. Just a matter of routine, you know, this identification stuff.”

Hesitatingly, Lew Stait moved toward the stair. “Mind, you’re not to talk to anybody about this, now or later,” instructed the Inspector. Then he went swiftly toward the foyer door, in which a key was already being inserted. Evidently members of the Stait family did not put much trust in Gretchen’s promptness, but used their own latchkeys.

Miss Withers stood alone in the center of the big living room for a moment, and revolved a few fundamental facts in her mind. Nothing definite, and yet—

Then she remembered that she was supposed to be on the telephone now. She went toward the instrument slowly enough to catch a glimpse of two new faces at the other end of the hall—the round, cherubic visage of a plump young man in glasses and a sloppy fedora, and behind him the placid, vacuous stare of a woman of Miss Withers’ own age, but painted and powdered and bedecked with a Eugenie hat and three long feathers.

Cousin Hubert and Aunt Abbie … “Give her another feather, Lord, and let her take wing,” whispered Miss Withers, remembering the anecdote.

Inspector Piper was already introducing himself. He always put a good deal of faith in the effect of bad tidings, Miss Withers knew. He loved to blurt out the news and then watch out for changes of expression on the faces of his audience.

“Spring 7-3100,” said Miss Withers into the mouthpiece. As she waited for the operator to complete the call, she found herself absent-mindedly humming an old tune—a tune vaguely reminiscent of something that she had sung Sunday after Sunday in the third pew on the left in St. Luke’s Episcopal Church back in Des Moines …

No, that wasn’t it, either. It wasn’t a hymn tune. It was something that Hildegarde Withers had learned at, or rather on, the knee of her own grandmother. The school-teacher shivered a little as she realized its weird significance now. For the words to the senseless thing began “Go tell Aunt Abbie, go tell Aunt Abbie … Go tell Aunt Abbie that her gray goose is dead …”

Aunt Abbie’s voice rose, very much like the cry of that same gray goose, from the living room. She had got the news.

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Copyright © 1932, 1960 by Stuart Palmer

Cover design by Mimi Bark

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