Murder on Wheels Read Free Page B

enjoy these, thanks to ye. She likes the western movies and she ought to get a kick out of seeing real cowboys in action. By the looks of your eye, they got plenty action, too. You better ring in the station house and explain where you been while all the excitement was going on here, and then go and get your eye painted out.”
    “Okay,” said Kehoe. “But first I’m going up and have a look at the spot where your boy friend jumped out of his car with a rope around his neck.”
    “Find yourself a clue and solve the mystery,” suggested Doody, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “Find the dropped cuff link and you’ll get put on Piper’s squad of master-minds in the Homicide Squad.”
    “Nerts,” said Dan Kehoe. He cut through traffic, avoiding the broken glass which still littered the northeast corner of the crossing, and sauntered up to chat for a moment with the bored copper who had been assigned to watch over the “scene of the crime.”
    Then Kehoe plodded on north through the snow toward the call-box. There was a broken fountain pen lying in the gutter, half hidden by the slushy snow, and only a few inches from where his heavy brogans passed. But Dan Kehoe wasn’t looking for clues.
    If he had found that fountain pen, history would have been considerably different. But Dan Kehoe was busy thinking how to spend the yellow-backed twenty that Carrigan, manager of the Rodeo, had slipped him to make up for the black eye.
    That fountain pen was to be discovered about theater time by a quick-witted young Jewish student, who knew that its makers in their Thirty-fourth Street shop replaced all broken parts instantly and without charge. He smashed the barrel, therefore, until the etched name was obliterated, and the next day he had it repaired from point to cap—with a new name on the barrel.
    Morris Miltberg was to write an almost-perfect philosophy examination at CCNY with it in a few weeks, for which he was spending most of his evenings cramming at the present time. If he had only read the daily papers he might have recognized a name, and then the philosophy examination, and this story, might never have been written. But he didn’t.
    At this moment Miss Withers and the Inspector were rolling across Fifty-seventh in a taxi.
    “Well, suppose it does happen to be one of the Staits who was found dead in the street,” Miss Withers was saying. “Besides there having been a college athlete by that name a year or so ago, who are the Staits ? I thought you said no more murder cases for you unless it was somebody in the public eye?”
    “You probably wouldn’t know about the Stait family,” explained the Inspector wearily. “Naturally the old name doesn’t mean anything out in Iowa where you come from. But here in New York …”
    “Never mind where I come from,” interrupted the school-teacher, testily. It had always been a great sorrow to Miss Withers that her father and mother had moved from the intellectual fastnesses of Beacon Street to Des Moines a few months before her advent into this world.
    “Anyway,” continued the Inspector, “the Staits used to rate with the Vanderbilts and the Stuyvesants. The third mayor of New York was a Stait. Tammany Hall was built on land donated by old Roscoe Stait the First. And now one of his grandsons is found dead in the middle of a crowded thoroughfare which his grandfather used for a cowpasture. The family hasn’t the money it used to have, but there’s a bit in the till yet, I’m thinking. Anyway, the newspapers are going to raise merry hell until we find out the inside of that circus of death that happened this afternoon. What’s more, we’re going to get the murderer, and get him quick.”
    Miss Withers smiled triumphantly. “Then you agree that it’s murder and not suicide?”
    “It’s murder all right,” insisted the Inspector. The cab slowed down for a red light at Seventy-second. “A nasty murder, too. Nothing to work from. No rhyme or reason to it.