Murder on Wheels Read Free

and some dough, not to speak of calling cards and all that.”
    “Still think it’s suicide, Oscar?”
    The Inspector whirled around at the voice. Standing at his shoulder was a woman of perhaps thirty-nine or so, a woman possessed of a certain unusual determination of character if her chin and the bridge of her nose were to be taken as evidence. She was dressed in the fashion of some years ago if in any fashion at all, and she gripped a well-worn umbrella firmly in one hand. The crowd pushed back discreetly to let her through.
    “Hildegarde Withers! I didn’t know you followed me!”
    “You didn’t think I was going to sit there in Whyte’s and eat your cinnamon toast as well as my own, did you?” Her voice was pitched low, but it had an edge on it. “The last time you heard a police alarm and walked out on me you left me sitting in a taxi outside City Hall until the Marriage License bureau had closed. I’m not letting you get away from me again that way.”
    “This is just a vulgar suicide,” explained the Inspector to his lady friend.
    “Yes? Well, if there’s any excitement I’m going to get in on it.” Miss Withers’ nostrils widened a trifle, increasing the resemblance between her face and that of a particularly well-bred horse. Her keen eyes, behind the gold-rimmed glasses, twinkled delightedly. “Notice the coat, Oscar, notice the coat,” she whispered. “You may find out before we’re done that this is the place for the Homicide Squad after all. And perhaps the place for me, too.” The Inspector’s face was blank.
    “I don’t get you!”
    Miss Withers pointed silently to the cigarette which had burned itself quite thoroughly into the furry softness of the dead man’s coat lapel.
    “Did you ever hear of a man’s committing suicide while smoking a cigarette? Not while he was hanging himself, anyway. Hemp and tobacco don’t go well together—although some people like to smoke cigars that are compounded that way.” She sniffed at Piper’s fuming perfecto.
    The Inspector nodded slowly. “Maybe, just maybe, you’re right. Well, this is a mess. The Commissioner will raise hell because we didn’t leave the body in the middle of traffic until they’d taken photographs and fingerprinted the whole block and so forth. But there’s nothing for it now …”
    He stopped short. Officer Doody, who had made a beginning at sorting out his badly entangled corner, appeared suddenly beside him again. Someone was with him.
    “Beg your pardon, sir.” Doody produced the cringing figure of the little cab-driver. “This is Al Leech, Inspector, Hackman’s Badge 4588. It was him I sent to ring in for an ambulance. Instead of doing that he phoned for the Morgue wagon. It was him that saw whatever it was that happened. I just nabbed him as he was trying to untangle his cab from the wreck down there with the car that didn’t have any driver.”
    “Good work, Doody,” said the Inspector. He faced the little man.
    “So you had a smash, huh? Did that have anything to do with this business up here? Where’s the other driver?”
    “The other driver? There wasn’t any other driver!”
    “You mean he beat it as soon as there was a crash? Or did he come running up here to rubberneck like the rest of these yawps?”
    “Neither one,” insisted Leech. “I’m telling you there wasn’t any driver in that blue Chrysler. That blue open job was running wild when she bumped me—because the driver jumped out away up the street. About here, I’m thinking. That’s him there on the stretcher!”
    “You’re drunk, man!”
    “I haven’t had enough fares today to buy a glass of beer,” insisted the driver. “I tell you, I saw it all. It wasn’t so clear, on account of the darkness and the thick snow and all. But I saw him. He jumped out of the roadster, as if he was trying to grab the side of a bus that was sailing past I was way over to the left, trying to pass the car in front of me, which is the only