Murder on Wheels (4 page)

“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.

M
ISS WITHERS WAS ABOUT
to leave the phone and return to the living room when suddenly she drew back into the shadows under the stairway.

Someone was coming down the stairs, someone who quite evidently did not wish to make any noise. The muffled tread was cautious and light, as if whoever was descending those steps was prepared to turn and run at the sound of a dropped pin.

But Miss Withers wasn’t dropping any pins these days. She had dropped a pin on a stairway once, and a man was sitting in the Death House at Ossining for the strange use he had put it to—in the pool of the black penguins.

There was only one light in the long hall, and that was up in the front toward the little vestibule. It was years ago that Miss Withers had learned to be silent and invisible. She might have been standing in the doorway of her third grade classroom during a furious spit-ball battle, or looming up over the shoulder of a hapless youth who preferred a lurid copy of
Weird Tales
to the more prosaic reading of his Geography, and had got the happy idea of enclosing the former within the covers of the latter. Naturalists call it “the ability to freeze”—and a just-hatched partridge chick can do it perfectly. Miss Withers froze now, shrinking back into the extreme corner. She was there and yet she was not there. A spider might have used her shoulder for one corner of his web, and a mouse might have run across her shoes without fright—at least, on the part of the mouse.

And as she waited there, hardly drawing breath into her lungs, Miss Withers saw the figure of a man pass quickly past her, back toward the domain of the servants. A door closed upon him—but not too soon for Miss Withers to make sure who this man was. It was Lew Stait, in his hat and overcoat, and he had a dark and indistinguishable oblong in his hand!

She went on, into the living room. “Aunt Abbie” was seated on a chaise longue, having a mild case of the vapours. Closer scrutiny confirmed Miss Withers’ first impression of the lady. She was as empty of ideas as a drum. Her dress was a little on the tea-gown order, and a worn sealskin cape lay beside her. She was sniffing into her handkerchief about “poor dear Laurie.” She shook her head sadly. “And to think how we all treated him, too!”

Behind her, “cousin Hubert” peered through his thick lenses like a startled owl. Inspector Piper, who had learned to identify people by their clothes and bearing, put Hubert Stait down as a nondescript poor-relation. Miss Withers was sorry for him, and later events justified her feeling.

The Inspector was quizzing Hubert. “You say that you rode down as far as the Cinemat Theater with your cousin Laurie?”

“I did.” Hubert chose his words carefully. “He dropped me off there because I had an appointment to take Aunt Abbie to see the new German musical film ‘Zwei Herzen im Deudelsac Takt.’ …”

“What time did you see Laurie last?”

Hubert looked at his watch. “I met Aunt Abbie outside the theater at five. You see, we always go to the films at that hour because the matinee prices are still in effect, and we dine late anyway. I must have left Laurie a minute or two before five …”

“I see.” The Inspector nodded. “That is very important. I was anxious to find if Laurie had time to pick anyone else up, or to visit anyone, before the time he met his end, which was at five-thirty or a few seconds before. But with traffic as it is at that hour, he must have kept on a straight course to have reached Forty-second Street in half an hour. Young man, do you realize that you must have been the last person, except of course the murderer, to see Laurie Stait alive?”

Hubert nodded. “Perhaps you’re right, officer—I beg your pardon,
Inspector.
He seemed in high spirits as he left us, however. He didn’t seem to have any warning of what was waiting for him, when he waved good-bye to Aunt Abbie and me.”

“We none of us do,” said the Inspector grimly. “So you went in to the moving picture show with your Aunt?”

Hubert nodded. “It’s a pretty good picture, Inspector. The Germans understand the nuances of production so much better than our Hollywood technicians, don’t you think?”

“I like Clara Bow,” said Piper gruffly.

“Well, in this picture there’s a bourgeois girl who falls in love with a musician.”

“Never mind, never mind. I don’t want a rehash of the plot I believe you were there, all right.”

“If you don’t, here’s our ticket stubs,” said Hubert with a faint grin. He offered two bits of red cardboard. Each bore a serial number and the monogram of the theater in big block letters. The Inspector put them in his vest pocket.

He turned to Aunt Abbie. “Did you like the movie?”

“Oh, yes, Inspector. But to think we were sitting there, laughing and enjoying ourselves, when poor Laurie was being killed in the street!”

“I notice that Hubert here is near-sighted,” observed the Inspector casually. Almost too casually, in fact. “I suppose he has to sit down in front while you, like most older persons, prefer to sit in the back rows?”

Aunt Abbie shook her head. “No, we usually sit in the middle rows, just as we did tonight. I hate to sit alone in a theater, even though I do get pretty engrossed in the story. A girl never knows who may come and sit beside her and … you understand …”

The Inspector nodded. “And after the show?”

“After the show we had dinner at a little restaurant near the theater, and then we came home. And it’s a good thing we did, let me tell you. I don’t know exactly how Gran is going to stand the shock. Of course, it’s not as if it was Lew—her favorite, you know. But Gran is so old that there’s no telling what she’ll do or how she’ll take on, and she’s used to my taking care of her, you know. I’d better run up and see.” Aunt Abbie gathered herself together.

“She doesn’t know yet,” the Inspector admitted. “There’ll be time enough, before this night is over. If she’s likely to take it hard, you’d better get a trained nurse over here.”

“Trained nurse?” Hubert was almost laughing. “You don’t know Gran. She’d throw a trained nurse out of the window, would Gran. She’s a despot, and not so benevolent a one, either. I’d hate to cross her. And she hasn’t let even the maid into her bedroom in years and years. If you got a trained nurse without her consent, or did anything else against her orders, Gran would be perfectly capable of cutting your throat. She’s so old she doesn’t care what happens.”

“Yeah? I’m looking forward to meeting this old lady.” Piper dropped his air of cross-examination. “This will be all for tonight. You can go to your rooms, but I’ll want to ask some more questions of both of you any time. Remember, no discussing this between yourselves. I don’t suppose either of you has any idea of who might have had reason to strangle Laurie Stait?”

“It was just what I’d have expected of him,” Aunt Abbie declared. “Laurie was always getting into scrapes. He wasn’t a bit like Lew, except in looks. That’s why they always called him ‘the bad twin’ and Lew ‘the good twin.’ You know, doctors claim that twins have only enough moral stamina for one person, and usually it’s all on one side.”