Murder on Wheels Read Online Free PDF

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