Murder on Wheels Read Online Free

Here’s a man found in the street with a rope around his neck. And an empty roadster. No place to search for finger prints. No doorman to question. No eye-witnesses, just because there were too many people there.”
    “I don’t get that,” said his companion. “On Fifth Avenue … at the rush hour …”
    “Exactly. It was snowing hard, and everybody was looking to see where they walked, and nobody paid much attention to passing cars. The only eye-witness we’ve got gives us a cock and bull story about a man jumping backwards out of his car. And that’s a physical impossibility.”
    “I wonder,” murmured Miss Withers.
    “The trouble with this case,” said the Inspector, drumming his fingers impatiently against the window, “the trouble with this case is that it’s too weird, too bizarre. My boys know just what to do when they find a round-heeled little chorus girl strangled in her apartment, or walk in on a missing judge dead in bed with the wife of his best friend. That’s routine. All the same, even though there’s nothing here but the rope to get our teeth into, it’s the complicated murders that are solved easiest. If we found Walter Winchell with a bullet through his head we’d have to pick up a thousand suspects, but when we find somebody choked to death with butter we just look for a nut. See what I mean?”
    The cab whirled around onto the Drive, and began to make better time. It was already dark, and the snow was falling so heavily that Miss Withers could hardly make out the lights of Jersey across the Hudson.
    “We’re almost there,” Inspector Piper explained. “I want to be the one to break the news to that family, and see how they take it. I won’t be but a few minutes, you’d better wait in the cab.”
    Miss Withers got her dander up in a second. “Wait in the cab? Oscar Piper, you had me wait in a cab once, and I waited there for nearly two hours while you chased a poor little Chinaman across Brooklyn Bridge.”
    “Yeah? Well, that poor little Chinaman was packing opium enough to keep the snow-birds happy all winter. I explained it all, Hildegarde!”
    “Never mind. But I’m coming in the Stait house with you. I can be your stenographer again, and take down questions and answers. I want to be in it if there’s any excitement. And you do, too. You claim you’re taking up this case personally because of the Stait name, but you’re really doing it because it’s a case that’s different, and after the excitement we had on the Aquarium Murder (The Penguin Pool Murder, Brentano’s, 1931) desk work bores you. Isn’t that true?”
    Inspector Piper nodded. “But there’s no need for you to get mixed up in this.”
    “If you shut me out of this case,” promised Miss Withers decisively, “I won’t even keep my promise to be a sister to you, Oscar Piper.”
    In the first flush of excitement at the successful culmination of the Aquarium Murder, these two had decided to get married. A confirmed old bachelor and a determined old maid, they were both secretly relieved that an accidental alarm had prevented them from going through with it.
    “All right, you can come along,” said the Inspector grudgingly. “There’s the house, you can see it from here. It’s the big four-story graystone tomb on the corner—the one with the light on the top floor.” He tapped on the window. “Pull up here, driver.”
    They walked slowly along the sidewalk toward the Stait mansion, the snow muffling their footsteps.
    “This is an errand I dislike,” confessed Piper. “It’s not so easy, even if you’ve been in this business as long as I have, to walk into a happy home and say ‘Excuse me, but I just sent your darling son to the Morgue, and I want you to go down with me and identify him.’”
    “There isn’t a chance that they’ve already got the news?”
    The Inspector shook his head. “Not a chance. The papers won’t come out with an extra tonight, anyway. The first sheet to have it