Murder on Wheels (6 page)

“I see. Then the three boys seemed to enjoy one another’s company?”

“Oh, yes, sir. Why, Mr. Laurie and Mr. Lew wouldn’t think of going anywhere without taking Mr. Hubert along. They were so much alike they got tired of each other, I guess, and wanted a third. Why, they bought Mr. Hubert a full dress suit out of their own allowances when Gran—I mean Mrs. Stait—said that his dinner jacket was good enough with times as bad as they are. Though if I do say it as shouldn’t, he looked a sight in those long tails, with his skinny neck and his legs that don’t meet at the knees by half an inch.” She giggled, wickedly.

“That will do, Gretchen. You can go to your room, and as soon as Mrs. Hoff comes in, tell her that I want to talk to her here.”

“Yes, sir.” Gretchen made a willing exit from the scene of the inquisition.

Inspector Piper shook his head after her. “There goes a tough little mug if I ever saw one,” he observed.

Miss Withers shook her head. “Nonsense, Oscar. Didn’t you ever hear of the flapper? Well, Gretchen’s just learned about flapperdom. In five years she’ll have a husband and a flat full of Grand Rapids furniture by the month, and a couple of hostages to fortune into the bargain. You’re old fashioned, Oscar.”

“I’m surprised at you,” Piper told her. “Well, let’s get back to business. There’s only the old lady and the cook left for us to quiz. Got your notebook full?”

“When I have, I’ll throw it away and write the shorthand on my cuff,” said Miss Withers acidly. “You aren’t getting anywhere, Inspector. You aren’t even ‘getting to foul ball,’ as the boys say …”

“You probably mean ‘first base,’” put in the Inspector mildly. “But I don’t see why I’m not getting anywhere. This is all part of the routine.”

“Routine fiddlesticks,” said the school-teacher. “Why don’t you find out where Laurie Stait was bound for when he borrowed his brother’s car and started down Fifth Avenue? Why don’t you find out that?”

“But—”

“Somebody knew,” she reminded him tartly.

“Maybe the old lady will tell us,” suggested Piper thoughtfully. “I sort of look forward to the chat with her. She sounds like something out of Godey’s Book. Here goes—”

The telephone in the hall broke into a shrill crescendo. Sergeant Taylor moved swiftly from the front door to answer it, but the Inspector halted him.

“You go, Miss Withers,” he said softly. “It would seem more natural for a woman’s voice to answer at this house than a man’s. We might just possibly learn something.”

She went. For a moment she held the receiver against her ear. Then she said hello in a low voice.

“Is Mr. Lew Stait there?”

It was a girl’s voice, a deep, warm mezzo-soprano. There was a thin note of worry somewhere, buried deep.

Miss Withers knew what she was supposed to say. “Who is calling, please?”

“Oh, is that you, Aunt Abbie? This is Dana. Is Lew there—or Laurie?”

“They’re out just now—is there any message?” Miss Withers hated to tell the lie, even though it was regular procedure in such cases.

“Oh … I see.” The voice was disappointed.

“Shall I have him call you back when he comes in? Where are you now?”

The girl at the other end of the wire wasn’t suspicious. “Where should I be? Here at home, at the apartment, of course … where I’ve been waiting for Lew hours and hours … has anything happened?”

“You say you’re at the apartment
where?”
Miss Withers made a good cast, but the trout didn’t rise to the fly. There was a long silence, and then the receiver clicked softly at the other end of the line.

Miss Withers left the phone and rejoined the Inspector. She told him what had happened.

“A dame with a soft, sweet voice asking for Mr. Lew, huh?” The Inspector permitted himself the luxury of a fresh, unchewed cigar and a smile. “Strike up the chamber music, boys. Hearts and Flowers from now on in this case, we’ve found our love interest. I was hoping that we could do better than Gretchen.” He cast a glance at the school-teacher. “Just like the Aquarium Murder, Hildegarde. Still looking for the happy ending?”

“I’m off romance for the present,” Miss Withers told him stiffly. “I suppose you’re all full of ideas about how to track down the poor child who just talked to me, yes? It’s comparatively simple, of course.”

“Yeah?” The Inspector stopped dead in his tracks and looked at her. “How is it so easy? It’ll be no cinch to trace that call—most of the phones are on the dial system now anyway, and there’s not a chance to trace a call from one of those jiggers.”

Miss Withers shook her head. “You don’t need to trace that call. That girl who called herself Dana hung up when she realized I was a fraud as Aunt Abbie—and she knew I was a fraud because I asked where her apartment was. Which means that Aunt Abbie, and probably the rest of the household here, know her pretty well and where she lives.”

“Right. I’ll put the screws to Aunt Abbie.” He went toward the hall. “Taylor, hop up those stairs and get me the dame who was down here a minute ago. Hurry up!”

The detective’s heavy tread mounted the stairs, and died away in the upper hall. “My theory about this case—” began the Inspector heavily. “Good God!”

From somewhere in the rear of the house there came a crash, of such proportions as to suggest a young earthquake.

Voices, dim and muffled through the intervening doors, rose in furious altercation, and then another explosion, louder than the first, brought silence to the old house. Too much silence.

That was all. Miss Withers looked at the Inspector, and he looked back at her. His hand instinctively hovered over the hip on which he had carried no weapon since the memorable day eleven years before when he had taken off his uniform.

Then a square of light showed at the end of the long hall—and was immediately blotted out by something large, imposing, and formidable.

Someone was coming up from the rear, past the dark corner under the stair, out into the full light of the front hall.

It turned out to be a woman, a large woman, built on the general proportions of Grant’s Tomb.

She was wearing somewhat askew a hat that was more reminiscent of Mary of England than of Eugenie of France. Wisps of glossy red hair shone from beneath it, and there was a glint of redder fire in her eye. Her fur-trimmed coat was disarrayed.

In one hand she gripped an iron skillet, and as she advanced she kept it poised in readiness to thrust or parry. She stopped at the foot of the stair, legs wide apart and eyes narrow.

“You cut-throats!” she offered. “Come on one at a time and I’ll give you what-for!”

Neither Miss Withers nor the Inspector accepted the invitation. At that opportune moment Aunt Abbie appeared at the head of the stair with the Sergeant behind her.

“Amanda!”

The lady with the skillet took a deep breath. “Yes’m?”

“Amanda Hoff, what in the world is the matter? These people are from the police.”

The skillet resumed its place as a culinary tool rather man as a weapon.

“The police, ja? Well, it’s about time. Why don’t you come back and arrest the dead corpse in my kitchen?”

“W
HAT IN HEAVEN’S NAME
—” Inspector Piper snapped out of his coma as if a spring had suddenly been released. “Come on!”

He led the way on the run down the long hall toward the kitchen, followed by the belligerent Mrs. Hoff, and the Sergeant. Aunt Abbie was close behind.

Miss Withers lagged for a moment. It was not that she dreaded whatever she might see in the kitchen. She had no fear of death, at least not when it struck somewhere else.

But something troubled her mind, some subtle sixth sense clamored in the back of her head for attention, crying, “See here! See here!”

It was not the faintly tainted odor of something burning which still pervaded the old house. That she had noticed before.

For a long moment she stood alone, and then all of a sudden the realization came to her. From somewhere in this ancient, decaying mansion there came a contralto voice of exceeding purity, faint but clear. Perhaps it was a radio set or a phonograph—whatever it was, the voice was strangely eerie. It was sweet and haunting, and not altogether human.

There were loud exclamations in the kitchen, Mrs. Hoff’s gutturals among them. But Miss Withers did not hear. She was straining her ears to identify the strange yet hauntingly familiar melody.

She knew it for the solo portion of the duet between Azucena, the old gypsy woman, and her son when both lay in the shadow of death, during the third act of Verdi’s hackneyed
Il Trovatore.
“… ai nostri monti …” came the faint contralto in the age-old song of sorrow. “Home to our mountains …”

Even as Miss Withers exclaimed at the quality of that voice, it cracked terribly, harshly—and then continued with a dreadful cacophony to the end of the phrase, a quarter of a note flat!

It was unthinkable that any musically-trained ear could have permitted that grotesque parody to continue—yet continue it did, on to the last warped quaver. There was a long moment of stillness, and then Miss Withers went thoughtfully on toward the door of the kitchen.

After all, she supposed, the death of a man was more important than the death of a voice.

However, as luck would have it, this man was not entirely and completely dead—perhaps irrevocably is the word, since every sleep is a little death, and McTeague was as sound asleep as he had ever been in his life.

He was still stretched out on the kitchen floor where he had fallen under the crushing weight of Mrs. Hoff’s skillet, and there was a sizable lump on his forehead.

Aunt Abbie, with a bustling ineffectiveness, was dribbling water on his wrists and neck, and the breath of life was beginning to suck again through his blue lips.

The Inspector and Mrs. Hoff were facing each other like a couple of bantam roosters—or rather, like a bantam rooster and an ostrich. Honors at present were all to the bantam, as the Inspector let his temper carry him on. Sergeant Taylor had drawn back in admiration.

“Woman, do you realize what you’ve let yourself in for? Assaulting an officer with a deadly weapon, resisting an officer in the course of his duty, mayhem … why, you’re lucky if you get out of Auburn in time to celebrate your hundredth birthday, you meddling old battle-ax!” He pushed a lean jaw almost into the fat face of the German cook. “Come on, answer me! What in the name of God made you try to murder my best operative?”

The woman shook her head dumbly. “By the back door into mine own kitchen I’m coming, and stands in the middle of the room holding a gun in his fist this man! And a racketeer he was, I’m saying. Ja, I know about these bad ones.”

The Inspector grunted. “Can you prove where you have been for the past three hours?”

“Oh, ja, ja. To the Strand I was.” Mrs. Hoff had definitely decided to get hysterical. “Ach, Gott, and now I haf to burn in what they call the Hot Squat, ja?” She was quivering like a jellyfish.

The Inspector moved his eyebrows a quarter of an inch, and nodded slowly. He turned to Miss Withers. “Hildegarde, what movie is playing at the Strand this week?”

Miss Withers didn’t know. But Aunt Abbie stopped doing the Florence Nightingale. “It’s a wonderful picture, Inspector. I saw it last night. It’s
‘What Price Gangster,’
with Chester Morris.”

“Ah ha!” The Inspector grinned at Mrs. Hoff. “So you were going to knock poor McTeague for a public enemy, huh?” He leaned forward suddenly. McTeague, under the momentary respite from Aunt Abbie’s sprinkling, was coming around. “Hello, Mike!”

The cloudy blue eyes opened, blinked, and gradually came into their normal focus. McTeague shook his head savagely for a moment, and then looked up at the Inspector.

“Come on, Mike. Get up on your pins, you’re okay. The old lady took you for Scarface Capone. Come on, this isn’t getting us anywhere.”

Mike still lay there, staring up at the Inspector. Slowly one eyelid dropped and raised again.

“Huh?” Piper almost dropped his cigar. Then McTeague winked again, twice. It was the old operative’s signal, meaning—“I can’t talk here—don’t recognize me—sit on your cards.”

“Come on, back into the other room, all of you!” Piper pointed to the door. “All right, Taylor, take everybody into the front room and keep ’em there.”

Then the Inspector was alone with his operative. “What is it, Mike? What’s on your mind besides a lump like a hen’s egg?”

“Come down here.” McTeague’s lips formed the words, almost soundlessly. But the big detective made no effort to rise to his feet.

“What’s wrong, Mike? Come on, you’re all right. Snap out of it.”

“Come down here, Inspector!”

Piper got down on his knees, wondering if the operative had gone off his trolley from that crack on the forehead.

McTeague was looking up at the underside of the kitchen table. Piper followed the line of his eyes, and then drew a quick breath.

Pinned to the wooden frame in which the drawer was supposed to slide, the Inspector saw a whitish oblong with a black dot in the center. The dot proved to be a common thumb tack that yielded to the blade of a pen-knife, and the white oblong was a letter.

“Now what sort of foolishness is this?”

The envelope had been folded twice, and showed signs of wear and tear along the folds. Someone had carried it around for quite a while. Piper smelled of it, and then offered it to McTeague.

“What do you make of that, Mike?”

The big detective sniffed. “Hmmmm—not a dame, Inspector. Smells as if it had been toted around in the pocket of a leather suit for a while.”

“Right—it’s calfskin, that odor. Now let’s see what it says.”

The handwriting on the envelope was in a slanting feminine script. It was addressed to “Mr. Laurie Stait, Keeley’s Lazy Y Ranch, Medicine Hat, Wyoming.” The postmark was dated “New York, July 18th”—of the previous summer.

The Inspector had no scruples about drawing out the single sheet of expensive note paper, which also showed signs of much handling. Whoever had carried the envelope had read and re-read its contents often, he figured. The note itself was short and to the point.