Murder on Wheels (24 page)

His great plumed tail waved from side to side like a semaphore, and his nose wrinkled itself up into a snarling smile. He was making sure of his welcome. He took two steps toward the young man who sat, thunder-struck, on the bed, and then sniffed delightedly.

He gathered himself on his toes, and launched his body into the air, full at the throat of the single remaining Stait twin.

But the snarling whine was one of unaffected delight, and the great jaws opened only to let a long red tongue caress the face of the prisoner.

“Down, Rowdy, down!” The young man on the bed spoke without thinking.

“You see?” said Miss Withers. “This is a present from Rose Keeley, who is a little sorry for her part in this. We wired the ranch manager to ship the dog air mail. I sent one of my best pupils out to the flying field to get him here as quickly as possible. And now does anybody doubt that this boy was out at Keeley’s ranch last summer, and adopted this dog?”

Nobody did. Rowdy was in the heights, prancing around his newly-recovered master. Every second or two he stood up on his hind legs to place his forepaws on the shoulders of the boy whom they all knew now to be Laurie Stait. His nervous and delighted whine filled the room.

Laurie was stroking the silky head. “Rowdy, you’ve spilled the beans for me, old fellow.” He turned to the Inspector. “Will you take me out of this? It doesn’t make it any easier to see that pup, and know that I’ve got to go where I can’t take him.”

The Inspector nodded to his two aides, one of whom took a grimly-glittering pair of bracelets from his coat pocket.

At this point there was a considerable interruption. From out in the hall came weird and raucous sounds. “Here, here, here—sic ’em, sic ’em. Rats!”

Rowdy deserted his master and dashed through the door in answer to the stern summons, only to wind up foolishly in the hall. Above him, perched on the balustrade, was the dumpy figure of the naked parrot. Someone, in ministering to the old lady, had left the door of her attic apartment open.

“Sic ’em, boy!”

Rowdy ran in circles for a moment, trying to find out who was calling him. It was evident that he took no stock in the ability of birds as conversationalists.

“Hell’s bells, boys. Belay ’em with a nine-tailed cat! Rats, Fido, rats! Skrrrrr, skreeeeeeeeeeeee …”

Skipper relapsed into parrot language. The collie, suddenly realizing that he had been duped, returned to the bedroom with his ears drooping. He was shamefaced at having been taken in.

What he saw there made him forget all about the parrot, and spring to his master’s side, white teeth bared and his eyes a pale smoky yellow. He sensed that the two men who approached Laurie, one on either side, were not friends.

The detectives, who were ready with their handcuffs, drew back. “Hadn’t I better use the butt of a gun on the pooch?” one of the operatives wanted to know.

“You won’t need that,” said Laurie Stait. “I’ll go along without any fuss. All right, Rowdy, old boy. Lie down.”

Rowdy couched instantly upon all fours, ears cocked and his tongue panting.

His eyes were fixed on Laurie Stait with a world of love and admiration—something of the look that had been in Dana’s eyes when first Miss Withers had seen the young couple together. But she had done all she could for them.

“Take him down to the station, boys. I’ll be down there in a few minutes.” The Inspector looked at Miss Withers uneasily.

“It’s the only thing I can do,” he pointed out.

“Of course,” she agreed. They were standing in the hall, Miss Withers watching Dana’s struggles to hold the leash which kept Rowdy from following his master to jail, or anywhere else in this world or the next.

“I’ll keep him safe for you,” she had told Laurie before he went through the door and down the steps. He did not answer her.

Miss Withers faced the Inspector. “Where are you going now, Oscar?”

“Where do you suppose? I’m going down to the precinct station and see that Laurie Stait is booked for the murder of Lew Stait and of Hubert Stait. Why?”

“You’ve got the wrong man,” Miss Withers told him.

He shook his head. “You’re off the track for once, dear lady. Hubert and Laurie were alone in this house. Nobody left the place until we got here …”

“Exactly,” Miss Withers agreed. “But afterward?”

“Why, I’ve got men stationed at both front and rear doors!”

“All the same, the murderer of Lew Stait—and of Hubert, for that matter—went out of here a little while ago. And you gave your official permission.”

“What? Why, nobody left this house!”

“Somebody did,” Miss Withers told him triumphantly. “Somebody left feet first!”

T
HE INSPECTOR STARED AT
Miss Withers. “Suppose you explain?”

“I don’t know whether I can explain or not, Oscar. It’s like the jokes in
Punch,
or the meaning in James Joyce’s
Ulysses.
If you see it, all right. If you don’t, there’s not much use analyzing. This whole thing has been a warped, twisted sort of puzzle—a game that we had to play according to the rules devised by a madman. It’s as if a chess opponent arbitrarily decided to have his castles move diagonally, and his bishops control the files. It’s mad, every bit of it. As mad as the court scene in Wonderland, and evil as sin besides.”

“I don’t see all that,” Piper told her. “I think you’ve let your sympathies run away with you again.”

“I’m not letting anything run away with me, if I can help it. There’s been too much running already, and not enough thinking. I want to tell you a story, Oscar, and when I finish perhaps you’ll see what I mean.”

Miss Withers sat down on a bench on the first flight landing, and the Inspector joined her, a dead cigar between his teeth and a deep wrinkle between his eyes.

“It all goes back to that Friday afternoon, Oscar. The afternoon when Hubert and Lew Stait—you’ll admit it was Lew, now?—left Laurie in this house after a friendly cocktail and drove off in the Chrysler roadster.

“Lew was going to see Dana for dinner, without the slightest suspicion of what news she had for him. Laurie knew his brother was going, and so did Hubert. You take that as being incriminating for Laurie. Because he had a very apparent motive for wanting his brother out of the way. But wait!

“Hubert was going to the movie, and his cousin dropped him off on the curb. We have Aunt Abbie as a witness to that, for she was waiting outside the lobby. Hubert knew, and Aunt Abbie knew, just where Lew was going, and the natural route he would take. You’ll admit that?”

“Of course I’ll admit that. But I still don’t see how you can involve either one of them in the death of Lew. They went into the movie, and Lew drove on!”

Miss Withers smiled. “Of course! That’s what fooled us for so long. Hubert went into the movie with Aunt Abbie. Remember, she isn’t very bright, Oscar. She’s movie mad, and absent-minded besides. They found seats, and then in a moment Hubert excused himself and got up—ostensibly to go to the men’s room. He left Aunt Abbie engrossed in the picture, and—”

“And what? All this is mere guessing, Hildegarde. Suppose Hubert did leave the theater. He couldn’t come out in time to catch his cousin in the roadster. He couldn’t reach across the city and touch a man who was miles away!”

“You forget New York traffic conditions at the rush hour, Oscar. And you forget the dirty weather of that afternoon, which always jams things up even worse. Lew wasn’t miles away. He wasn’t even very many blocks away, and whoever murdered him counted on that fact.”

“But I still don’t see how—”

“Wait. The Cinemat Theater is half a block from Carnegie Hall, where there’s a station of the BMT. Suppose a young man were to get aboard a subway train there, and get off at Thirty-fourth Street five minutes later. He could walk over to Fifth Avenue, take a north-bound bus, and still be far ahead of the Chrysler.

“He’d pick an open top bus, as I explained to you some days ago, hoping to be alone up there. But if he wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter so terribly. He’d be in the rear seat, and the whole operation wouldn’t take but a second or two. And the other passengers up on top would be with their backs to him, remember that.

“He ran a great risk, that murderer. Too great a risk to be sane. Because there were better and more secret ways of killing Lew Stait. But our murderer wanted the thrill of pulling the wool over the eyes of everybody. He wanted to feel that he was smarter than the world, and that he could murder his enemy on the busiest corner of the city.”

“How did this murderer of yours know that the bus would pass close to the south bound auto?”

“He didn’t, of course. Heaven only knows how many times he had tried it before, or was willing to try it again. But he knew that busses usually try to make time by keeping toward the middle of the street in rush hour, and knowing Lew Stait’s temperament he figured that the driver of the Chrysler would also be in the outer lane. And he was not mistaken.”

“But the rope, Hildegarde! You can’t tell me that the murderer had time to go to the Rodeo and steal a lariat.”

“No. He had it wound around his waist, under his topcoat. And that rope, as I hinted before, was one of the trophies brought back from Wyoming by Laurie Stait. It hung in his room along with the saddle and the spurs. And it was where every member of the Stait family had access to it.

“So far so good. The murderer was crouched in the rear outside seat on top of that bus, and he knew that in the midst of that rush-hour crowd he was taking a terrible risk. And yet not as bad as it seems, for in that hurrying multitude everyone had to keep his eyes down to see where he was going. And so it was that only one person, the driver of the taxi far in the rear, saw what happened, or a part of it.

“There was a moment when the northbound bus swung past the southbound open roadster, and at that moment the murderer dropped his noose. The cast was not farther than ten feet, and he had been practicing. The contrary motion of the two vehicles snapped Lew’s neck like a clay pipestem, and the murderer cast off the rope which had been caught around the rail of the bus, and let it go, body and all.

“Nobody would connect the body in the street behind them with the bus which sped northward. He counted on that, Oscar. I’ll wager the murderer continued on his journey, all innocence, and only left the bus when he was well out of danger. Perhaps he even stayed on until the bus turned up Fifty-seventh.

“Then he bought another ticket—remember the extra red stub that you picked up out on the snow! That was where Hubert made his first mistake. He put the ticket stub automatically into his pocket and rejoined Aunt Abbie, and only thought of getting rid of it when he was almost home.”

“But you mean to tell me that she wouldn’t have missed him?”

“I doubt it. She’s mad about the films, and the other morning, as I told you, she forgot whether she’d had her breakfast or not. Suppose she did miss him, I don’t think she could tell whether he’d been gone three minutes or thirty. But wait—I think I see a little more light.” Miss Withers pursed her lips.

“I’ve got it! Hubert—suppose for a while that it was Hubert—delayed a moment in a telephone booth before he went into the theater again. He had to send the news to Laurie!”

“Then Laurie was an accomplice?”

“In a way. You see, it was all part of the plan. Hubert phoned Laurie that he had just learned—never mind how—that Lew had been killed by a lariat. Laurie, already in hiding from Buck Keeley, naturally thought that his twin had been killed by mistake for himself. Hubert played on that. And he pointed out that Laurie had here a clear way out of his own difficulties, a chance to switch identities and start over again. It must have been Hubert’s suggestion that Laurie try to ape Lew and make love to the little maid. He did it badly, and after that evening he didn’t fool her at all. Remember how she warned me that Lew had changed since the death of his brother?

“Laurie has that respect for intellect, even for twisted intellect, that most healthy young morons have. He was in a panic, perhaps a panic that Hubert had helped to foment, and he clutched at any straw to rid himself of the incubus of Rose Keeley. Hubert warned him to get rid of identifying papers, and to say that his billfold had been stolen. Ergo, when a billfold marked Lew Stait was found in the dead man’s pocket, we were supposed to take that only as evidence that Laurie had borrowed his brother’s wallet.

“Laurie missed fire when he got rid of his papers, however. Because he didn’t have the heart to burn Dana’s letter. He sneaked past me to the cellar to burn his billfold and smell up the house with leather, but he hid the love letter under the kitchen table on his way down because it was precious to him.”

Miss Withers paused for breath, and then plunged on. “That letter, Oscar! Doesn’t that suggest anything to you? Remember what Charles Waverly’s stenographer overheard? Dana bragged about the love letter of hers that Laurie carried next to his heart. And that explains why no billfold was found on the dead body in the street.

“You suspected yourself, Oscar, that Charles Waverly was the man who identified the body. But at the same moment as he blurted out his identification in front of Doody, he realized the scandal that would ensue if Dana’s letter were found. For of course he thought the body was Laurie’s. Everybody took it for granted that if one of the Stait twins got into a scrape, it was Laurie.

“Charles Waverly did a brave thing, Oscar. He leaned over, pretending to listen to the dead man’s heart to see if there was some spark of life. I’ve got that much from Doody. But what he really did was to pick the corpse’s pocket. Charles Waverly would do anything to keep his little sister out of a murder investigation. As soon as he got away and looked at the wallet, he knew it was Lew who was dead. But then it was too late for him to come forward, so he dropped the wallet in a mail box and kept his own counsel. For Dana’s sake.”

“What have you proved? What is there in this fantastic yarn you’ve given me that wouldn’t apply to Laurie as well as Hubert—Laurie who had a real motive?”

“Only this. You forget that perhaps Hubert had a motive. If he killed one twin and the other died to pay for it, he was the next in line. But the motive lies deeper than that. I’m guessing that it was revenge!”