Murder on Wheels (21 page)

Miss Withers shook her head. “It wouldn’t do any good, Oscar.”

“And why not?”

“Because she won’t be there,” the school-teacher informed him. “If Dana Waverly doesn’t want to talk, she won’t put herself in a position where she has to talk. She’s enough of a sport so that, even if she’s leaving her husband, she won’t say anything against him until this has blown over somehow. She’s the type.”

“But I’ve got to find out why she left him!”

“I’ve got an idea,” Miss Withers suggested. “You’ll have a terrible time locating Dana this afternoon, because evidently she wants to keep out of this, and she’ll know you’ll be looking for her. But I know where you’ll be able to find her tomorrow.”

“Huh? Where will she be tomorrow?”

“Mr. Frank Campbell is having belated funeral services for Laurie Stait tomorrow afternoon at two,” Miss Withers reminded him. “Dana is such a close friend of the family that she won’t dare stay away, particularly in the light of all the newspaper publicity that there’s been. She’ll appear at the chapel, certainly, even if she doesn’t go on out to the burial vault with the family afterward. Dana is the type who would consider that part of her code. Why don’t you seize her there, and ask your questions if you think you must?”

The Inspector nodded slowly. “Maybe you’re right, at that. I’d rather go to the dentist than to a funeral, but sometimes you can learn something even there. I suppose that even the old lady herself will leave her parrot and put in an appearance, she’s just the type to get a big thrill out of the party.”

He reached for his coat. “Come on, it’s late enough so we can pretend this is dinner, and you shouldn’t object to spaghetti for dinner. Let’s forget about sleuthing for tonight, and take in a movie.”

It was, as the Inspector pointed out next morning, a great day for a funeral. No funeral director could have arranged, or even imagined, a more fitting setting for the last grim rites. Gray, ghostly clouds hung low over the temples and minarets of Manhattan, shrouding the city and cutting off the top of the Empire State Building as if with a pair of shears. Little, scudding winds through the storied canyons, chill and bleak, howling of a winter that was no longer a promise but a bitter actuality.

The threat of rain or snow did not deter the Inspector from showing up at Headquarters in accordance with his custom at eight o’clock, in time for the daily round-up. When this major social event of the day was completed, and the new crop of gangsters and auto-thieves and degenerates had been returned to their cells, he descended the stairs to his own sanctum.

Sergeant Taylor was on duty in the outer office. “Phone call just came for you,” he announced. “Lady left a message—Miss Withers. She says she’s expecting you to pick her up at one-thirty, in time for the funeral. She can’t come down this morning because she has to go out to the school where she teaches.”

“Huh? Okay, thanks.” Inspector Piper broke out a new box of cigars, and busied himself for a while in trying to pry the first one loose.

The Sergeant poked his head in at the door. “Somebody wants to see you, Inspector.”

Piper looked up, annoyed. “All right, tell ’em to wait. I’m busy.” He went on digging until at last a cellophane-wrapped panatella leaped into his hand. He made a religious rite of removing the wrapper and getting the cigar burning well. Long ago the Inspector had discovered that his mental processes worked smoothest when his teeth were clamped hard upon one of these moist and aromatic bundles of weed.

At last he came to a decision. “Hey, Sergeant!”

Taylor appeared in the doorway.

“Sergeant, I got a job for you. It’s a hard job and an important one. Take one of the boys and go pick up Lew Stait, wherever he is.”

The Sergeant grinned. “That’s not such a hard job as you think, Inspector.” He stepped to one side and jerked his thumb toward the outer office behind him. “That guy who’s waiting to see you says his name is Lew Stait. And he says he’s in a hurry.”

The early visitor was in a hurry, and likewise in something of a nervous state. He had neglected to shave, and his yellow hair was unkempt under his derby. He had not slept in his clothes, but that was because quite evidently he had not slept at all.

The Inspector did not offer to shake hands, but he pointed out a chair by the window, where such light as there was fell directly on the young man’s face.

Stait pulled a newspaper clipping from his pocket and shoved it across at the Inspector. “I want to know what that means,” he said.

The Inspector studied it. “
COWBOY RODEO STAR WINS FREEDOM
” … it was a reasonably correct version of the statement he had issued to the press yesterday afternoon.

“It means just what it says. Why?”

“Because you’ve turned loose the murderer of my brother, that’s why!”

“Nonsense.” The Inspector shook his head. “Mr. Stait, we’ve proved beyond the possibility of a doubt that Buck Keeley could not have been the murderer of your twin brother. He’s got an unbreakable alibi!

“Can’t alibis be faked?”

“Sometimes. But not this one.” The Inspector stared at his caller. “Why are you so anxious to see Keeley indicted? He didn’t have any motive, did he?”

“Of course he had a motive. He was trying to force my brother into marrying his slut of a sister, although I swear to you that there was no reason under heaven why he should have married her.”

“How can you be so sure of that, young man? Your brother was out at the Wyoming ranch and you were here in town last summer.”

“I tell you, that makes no difference. I know that nothing happened which should not have happened. They were trying to marry that girl off to what they thought was a rich man. I’ll swear it on a stack of Bibles.”

The Inspector shrugged his shoulders. “I’d like to settle this case and forget it just as much, or probably more, than you would. But I tell you frankly, Buck Keeley convinced us of his innocence.”

“But it was his rope!”

The Inspector rose to his feet and passed over to one of the glass cases which lined the wall, and twisted a tiny key into the lock.

The panel swung open, and he fumbled among the assorted weapons there until he found what he wanted. It was a coil of soft, light rope, bound at the end with blue silk thread. He drew it out from among the sash-weights and revolvers and stilettos which had been Exhibit A’s in the important murder cases of the last decade and others slated for impending trials.

He threw the rope on the table under his visitor’s eyes, and the young man drew back with a violent start.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” The Inspector fingered the noose at the end. “This is what jerked the life out of your brother,” he observed affably. “This part here cut into his throat. It’s a bad death to die, hanging is. Worse than the chair, in some ways, they say.”

He pretended not to notice the evident agitation of his caller, and passed quickly over to his desk, where he drew a second rope from a bottom drawer.

This also he threw upon the table, beside the first. “And now, since you want to know I’ll show you just why we are sure Buck Keeley didn’t kill your brother,” he said roughly. “Notice this second rope? In the first place, it’s more than twice as long as the murder weapon.”

He pointed out the difference, and Lew Stait nodded slowly.

“The full length lariat was too long and awkward to use for that little job,” said the Inspector heartily. “So the murderer cut it off, not wanting to have any more rope to conceal under his coat than was absolutely necessary. He cut it off, and then found he had to bind the end to keep it from unwinding …”

The younger man fingered the end of the rope. “But this blue thread is Buck Keeley’s special mark. He uses it to distinguish all his ropes and saddles and so forth.”

“Just how do you know?”

“Why—because Laurie, my brother, brought back souvenirs of his trip out there. When he left the ranch he bought his saddle and spurs …”

“And a rope?”

“No, not a rope. But he told me about them.”

“Well, it’s true that Buck Keeley used a blue thread to mark his riding gear and his ropes,” the Inspector confided. “This longer rope here is one that he used in the Rodeo at the Garden. Notice the blue thread. It would take a laboratory expert to tell the difference in those two different threads, but one is common silk and the other is a silk-rayon combination sold only at the excellent notion counters of Mr. Woolworth’s stores. In other words, the rope that hanged your brother was bound with thread that Buck Keeley would have had to travel across two states to buy. We have a laboratory expert, you see. What’s more, we find that whoever bound the murder rope did an awkward and slipshod job on it. He wasn’t a cowboy, Stait.”

“Who was he, then?”

The Inspector didn’t answer that. “Maybe you can tell me that?”

Lew Stait thought for a moment. “Maybe I …” His jaw closed like a trap, and there was the gleam of a sudden determination in his eye. The Inspector guessed that his caller had made up his mind about something or other—a decision which had evidently been a difficult one.

“May I ask you one more question, Inspector?”

“What is it?” The Inspector had some questions of his own to ask, but he was wondering if this was the time to ask them.

“Tell me one thing,” begged the surviving Stait twin, as he leaned across the table. “Tell me this—your lady friend, Miss Withers, said something about Hubert’s having an alibi for the time of the murder. You warned us not to discuss the case at home, and even if you hadn’t the subject is such a sore one that nobody has mentioned it. Where was Hubert when my brother was killed?”

The Inspector considered for a moment, and then decided that there could be no harm in letting that secret out.

“Your cousin Hubert was at a movie with your Aunt Abbie,” he announced. “They left together, you knew that.”

“Yes, I knew that. But—let me think. Listen, Inspector, if you want to solve this case, break down that alibi! Hubert must have been involved …”

“Why?”

“I—I can’t tell you. It’s …”

“You’re making a pretty strong accusation, young man. Your cousin Hubert had no motive for the killing, remember. He wasn’t in love with the same girl as the dead man. He stood to inherit only after
your
death as well as your brother’s. And he has the ticket stubs and your Aunt Abbie to prove where he was at the time of the murder. No, you’re not in a position to accuse him. It might even make someone suspect
you
of murdering Laurie Stait!”

For some unknown reason, that remark struck home. “Me murder Laurie Stait?” The young man burst forth in paroxysms of laughter. He laughed until he was weak. The Inspector suddenly rose and left him there.

He spoke briefly to the Sergeant. “When this young man leaves my office, put a tail on him and keep it there day and night, see? I want him free for the funeral this afternoon, and if things break right we’ll have our arrest for the afternoon papers tomorrow!”

He returned to the inner office to find his visitor in a new mood. Lew Stait was in control of himself now, and the Inspector realized that he had missed an opportunity in striking while the iron was hot. There was a rigidity about the disheveled young man with the yellow hair that told of his nervous and wrought-up condition. His eyes were narrow, and a vein throbbed visibly in his temple.

“Thank you, Inspector,” he was saying. “I’ve got an errand to perform now. If you want me you know where to find me.”

“If we should want to question your wife, do you know where we could find her?” asked the Inspector gently.

Lew Stait shook his head. “She’s gone. Do you blame her? So what matters now?” His hands were plunged deep into the pockets of his overcoat, and he was breathing heavily.

Then he whirled suddenly toward the door, as if making up his mind again. “I’ve got to get out of here,” he shouted, and then was gone.

The Inspector watched as the young man went down the hall, and saw a lounger in a brown overcoat detach himself from a pillar and stroll idly along behind him. Then Piper returned to his office, locked up the murder rope along with the other murder tools in his exhibition cases, and lit a fresh cigar.

Sergeant Taylor appeared in the doorway with a batch of mail. “On second thought,” said the Inspector cheerfully, “on second thought we may have that arrest in time for the evening papers.”

T
HE INSPECTOR AND MISS
Withers sat in the shelter of a taxi-cab outside the funeral chapel, and watched the people pass from curb to doorway. It was not a big funeral, as funerals go. There was no blocking of the street with frenzied mourners, as at Valentino’s last rites. No solid silver coffin bore the bones of this unfortunate man to his last resting place, for this was no gangster funeral. But the Staits were people who had once mattered in this rapidly changing city, and there were those who had not forgotten.

They saw figures prominent in the social and intellectual life of the city pass under the canopy and into the wide chapel, gloomy as a stage setting for the last act of Romeo and Juliet.

Here and again Miss Withers nudged the Inspector to point out the arrival of one or two of the figures associated with the murder investigation itself. Mrs. Hoff and Gretchen arrived early, the former clad in sober black but the little maid arrayed in a white coat of rabbit fur and wide net stockings as her contribution to the ceremony. Charles Waverly was there, in formal morning clothes. Miss Withers had a quick suspicion that he had even blackened his frivolous yellow moustache for the ceremony.

Then there came Dana, red-eyed and leaning on the arm of the buxom Bertha Doolittle. She might have been the widow, Miss Withers thought. There was a look in her eyes as if something she had loved was dead.

Last of all the figures in this panorama, and most theatrically imposing, was Gran—Mrs. Roscoe Stait herself. Wrinkled as a mummy, old as the mouldering horse and carriage which deposited her at the curb, the old lady scorned Aunt Abbie’s proffered arm and stalked across the sidewalk to the door of the chapel. It might have been her first sight of the outdoors and the faces of her fellow-men in a dozen years, but Gran looked neither to right nor left. The poise which had stood her in such good stead on opera stage and in the court room did not desert her now. This was her hour, and she disappeared inside with a great rustling of mouldy silks. The Inspector turned nervously to see whether or not the naked parrot was hopping down from the carriage door to follow her, but that, at least, was spared him.