Puzzle of the Red Stallion (10 page)

As a last resort she looked underneath the green blotter. Here was only a folded announcement of the forthcoming Beaulah Park Grand Handicap, to be run on the next Saturday. On the margin of the announcement, in shaky handwriting, she found notations which at first sight bore no meaning for her.

Roberman says maybe $500 at 25 to one, 5 more at 20….

Toby Kyte will take any amt at 20 to one…. Bard says up to $200 at 30….

Somehow Miss Withers suspected that this had to do with gambling and for lack of a better clue she folded the announcement and tucked it into her handbag along with the muddy briar pipe which still tantalized her.

She was about to raise the trap door when another idea occurred to her. She went back to the window and studied the flapping chintz curtain. Then she peered out upon the shingles, which sloped steeply away toward the eaves. It would not be impossible for a man to descend, or even climb up along that route, given a ladder to reach from the eaves to the ground, but it seemed highly improbable.

“Dear me,” observed the schoolteacher unhappily, “have I got to resort to the idea of a secret passage at my time of life? Yet otherwise how could that Thomas person have eluded me?”

She received another shock at that moment. Looking from the window she noticed that a lively bit of drama was taking place in the green pasture. There Abe Thomas with a bridle in his hand was endeavoring to capture the fat mare, who kept dancing tantalizingly out of his reach.

Beside her, kicking up his heels in sheer delight at being alive, the red colt galloped.

“Then who in heaven’s name have I been stalking up and down the halls?” the schoolteacher asked herself. She received no answer.

Trembling with excitement Miss Hildegarde Withers descended again to the bedroom. She felt like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific. Only, she reminded herself, in spite of Keats it wasn’t Cortez at all, it was Balboa. Nor did he recognize the ocean at which he stared. But the “wild surmise” part of the poem, that was genuine.

She tiptoed softly across the room. The irregular breathing continued, and suddenly she remembered something that she had once read. She turned and stood beside the bed.

“Fake!” accused Miss Hildegarde Withers.

The breathing changed into a surprised gurgle. “Eh?” gasped Pat Gregg feebly.

“I said ‘fake,’” she told him, not unkindly. “When you try to simulate sleep, see that your breathing is regular.”

“Well,” said the old man calmly, “I had to get rid of that officious fool of a doctor somehow.”

“Yes, of course,” she hastily agreed. “Tell me one thing and then I’ll let you remain alone with your thoughts. Just who in this wide world would have any reason to kill you?”

“Kill me?” Pat Gregg tried to rise up in bed. “I’ve been asking myself the same question ever since my dog was poisoned. There’s only one answer to that—Violet Feverel!”

“But she’s in the morgue!”

He nodded. “Makes me rest easier to know that. You see, she’s the only person who could gain by my death. She knew she’d milked the last cent out of me that she could. My son couldn’t pay her alimony and she had him thrown in jail.”

Miss Withers was mildly amazed. “Jail for debt? I thought that went out with Mr. Micawber.”

“Contempt of court they call it,” he told her. “The judge decreed that my son should pay three hundred dollars a month alimony or a flat settlement of fifteen thousand. He couldn’t pay the monthly rate, so she got a judgment against him for the fifteen. But none of it did her any good—not even putting Donny behind the bars. Because he gets nothing from me until I’m dead!”

He sank back on the pillows. “It cheers me up to think that even if I do cash in my tickets one of these days, she won’t collect at the pay-off window.”

“You’re not going to die,” Miss Withers comforted him.

“No? Want to make a little bet on that? But not right away, I hope. Got a lot of things to do.”

“What things?” Miss Withers pressed.

He smiled. “I want to live to see that red colt in the pasture romp home in the Futurity,” he said dreamily. “Like poor old Siwash tried to do and couldn’t. And I want to get Siwash back from that buzzard of a woman—only she’s dead, isn’t she? Anyway, I want to see him run again. And I want …”

“You’re a rather horrible old man,” said Miss Withers.

He laughed in her face. “You don’t think that really,” he croaked. “I know women—like I know horses. Pretty much alike when you get to know ’em. You got to master both, a bit of spur and plenty of whip. That was the trouble with Siwash, he was such a blasted pet that the jockeys never had the heart to whip him into front position. Siwash was beaten many a time by poorer horses…”

“And that’s why you gave him away?”

He shook his head. “Siwash wasn’t as bad as that—he was known as the best second-rate horse on the track. I figured that Violet and my son would race him, maybe build up a stable around him. Only that vain peacock of a woman …”

“Buzzard, didn’t you say?” Miss Withers corrected.

“She was both,” Pat Gregg went on. “She insisted on having Siwash broken to be a saddle horse so she could look like a picture in the rotogravure section when she went out to ride. Bah!”

He turned his face to the pillow. “Now I’m going to sleep,” he dismissed her. “Want to get rid of this buzzing in my head.”

“Pleasant dreams,” said Miss Withers. Swiftly she leaned down and felt of the slippers which lay at the foot of the bed. They were cold—and yet the footsteps she had heard in the hall were not those of bare feet. It was not until too late that she remembered that Pat Gregg might have jumped back into bed with his shoes on.

Downstairs she found a plate of cold and soggy beans awaiting her. Mrs. Thomas brought coffee, lukewarm and thin. Then, as the woman waddled back to her kitchen, Miss Withers leaned toward the inspector.

“I’ve found something, Oscar!”

“Yeah? Well, so have I!” Somewhat bitterly the inspector lifted a dank and unpleasant-looking hair from the uneaten portion of his lemon pie. “And I’ve listened to the inside story of the great romance between Mr. and Mrs. Abe Thomas. It seems that they got married last year after half a lifetime of both working for the old man—a love story fit for
Real Confessions Magazine
, according to the way the old girl tells it. And she calls him ‘Ducky’!”

“Who?” Miss Withers asked absently.

“Him—the little guy who’s been chasing that she-horse ever since you went upstairs….” The inspector pointed out through the window.

“You listen to me,” Miss Withers insisted. “Oscar, you remember the cupola and its open window? Well, it rained last night—but just now I sneaked up there and found that the curtain was dry and unstained, and the papers on the little desk the man keeps up there were not even disturbed!”

“Well?” The inspector pushed back his chair. “What of it?”

“
This
!” she snapped. “Pat Gregg was locked in his room where he had an attack of apoplexy sometime early this morning, according to the doctor. Anyway he had no reason to climb to the cupola and open the window. Yet the only entrance to the cupola is through that bedroom, and since the rain stopped the cupola window has been opened!”

“Huh?” The inspector frowned heavily. “Well, couldn’t it have been Thomas who opened it, after he broke down the door?”

She shook her head. “There wasn’t time enough, even if he had an urge for fresh air and a view of the countryside. We heard the crash of the door and only a few seconds later the little man burst past us crying for the doctor.”

“That’s right,” Piper admitted. “But somebody could have hidden up there before the old man went to bed last night—somebody who waited until this morning after the rain, opened the window for some fresh air, and then slipped down and …” Piper’s voice died away. “But why should a midnight prowler want fresh air, and how could he hand his victim a dose of apoplexy? It doesn’t add up.”

“It will, before we finish with this case,” she told him. “We’re at a dead end now and these beans are soggy. Suppose we go back to town.”

Surprisingly enough it was Mrs. Mattie Thomas who protested most loudly against their departure. “I feel so much safer with you folks here,” she insisted. “If you’d only stay the night—or at least until the nurse gets here.”

The schoolteacher shook her head. “But the nurse should arrive soon—”

Mrs. Thomas bridled. “Dr. Peterson insisting that Mr. Gregg needs a nurse, with me ready and willing to smooth his pillow! I’d work my fingers to the bone for him.” She waved a fat and languid hand in the air.

Abe Thomas, who had finally corralled his mare, was less insistent. “If you got to go, you got to go,” he admitted. “All the same I don’t like the look of things. I wish—I wish Master Don was home.”

“By the way,” Miss Withers pressed, “you both knew him as a child. What sort of person is Donald Gregg?”

“A fine young man,” said Thomas quickly. “If only he could get the curse of gambling out of his soul. He’d gamble on anything, like his father. Only he’s unluckier, if that’s possible.”

“Unlucky at cards, unlucky at love,” observed the inspector dryly. “Young Gregg seems to have been born with two strikes on him.”

“Doesn’t he!” agreed Miss Withers. She faced Abe Thomas. “You say that you’re not addicted to gambling on the horses?”

“Me?” He laughed. “I know too much about the game. It’s a mug’s racket. If a man could plunge once, win, and then stay out he’d be all right. But nobody can—it all goes back to the bookies.” Mr. Thomas’s face expressed a fine scorn for the sport of kings. “Look at the old man upstairs—doctor won’t let him go to the races any more so he has a watch-tower built and a telescope installed just so he can see the finish line at Beaulah Park. Me, I put my money where it belongs, in the bank.”

“
Our
money, Ducky,” corrected the fat woman coyly.

“Ours then,” Abe Thomas amended. “Now if you folks want to be driven back to the station …”

As they climbed into the station-wagon again, Miss Withers looked thoughtfully back toward the Gregg house, her mind filled with question marks. Up the pasture slope she noticed a red colt standing under a Golden Transparent apple tree and stretching his neck toward the unripe fruit. There was a tall ladder leaning against the upper branches, but young Comanche was not aware of the purposes to which a ladder might be put. Miss Withers, on the other hand, was.

A few minutes later she was jolting back toward the city in a half-empty day coach. The inspector was fretting. “I ought to have stayed in town,” he insisted. “Lord only knows what the boys have been doing on the Feverel case. Just my luck to have some fresh newspaper laddie stumble on the thing and spread it all over the front pages….”

“This case will not be washed up as easily as all that,” Miss Withers pointed out. “Oscar, what do you know about betting on the races?”

He looked at the schoolteacher with amusement. “Got the bug, Hildegarde? Going to plunge on the big handicap next Saturday? The best thing for you to do is to follow Thomas’s advice and keep away from the bookies. Or if you must bet, put your money on the favorite to show and you can’t lose much.”

“Don’t be silly!” was her rejoinder. “I just wanted to know.”

“Don’t kid me,” Piper told her. “You’ve got the yen, I can tell. Better stick to teaching kids their A B Cs, Hildegarde.”

“Indeed?” She glared at him. “If I did that, where would you be?” And they rode the rest of the way into Grand Central in silence.

New York City stagnated under the weight of a Sunday afternoon, with even the asphalt of its deserted streets sizzling peacefully in the hot sun. The inspector was much relieved to find that no extra newspapers were being hawked on the corners. Evidently the death of a solitary equestrienne had not awakened the curiosity of bored city editors. “Which,” said Piper fervently, “is a break.”

Miss Withers found herself propelled toward a taxicab. “What next, for heaven’s sake?” she queried.

The inspector lit a fresh cigar. “Hildegarde, haven’t you begun to wonder, during the events of the forenoon, just what, who, where and why is the lad named Don Gregg? Well, we’re going to ask him a couple of questions. That’s why I told the driver to take us to alimony jail….”

They came down Thirty-seventh Street and drew up before a drab and ancient building—four stories of faded red brick which wore a tenement-style fire escape down its front and heavy iron lattice-work at every window.

“‘A home away from home,’” quoted Miss Withers. “Cheery place, isn’t it, Oscar?”

“You should have seen Ludlow Street Jail before the rats gnawed it to pieces,” Piper told her. “The alimony-dodgers think this’s a palace compared with that.”

They went up the steps, through an open gate, and rang a bell.

After a long wait the door was opened by a guard in a blue uniform. He needed a shave and looked very unhappy.

“We want to see Donald Gregg,” said the inspector. “And don’t tell us he isn’t in!”

The guard tried to shut the door in their faces. “This isn’t visiting hours,” he announced.

“I happen to know that it
is
visiting hours,” Piper snapped back. “Come on, open up!”

“I—I’ll tell the deputy warden,” said the guard. The door closed and he was gone a long time. Finally he returned, looking more unhappy than ever.

Behind him was a man in plain clothes, equally unshaven and still more lugubrious of countenance.

“I’m the deputy warden,” he admitted. “Sorry, but you can’t see Mr. Gregg.”

“And why the hell not?” demanded Piper, who had stood about enough. He flashed his badge.

“You can come in if you want to, Inspector,” said the deputy. He swung the door wide.

The hallway smelled of strong soap, of cabbage, tobacco and humanity. They went up one flight of stairs and through a long room filled with uneasy easy chairs and tables. Here a few men in their shirt sleeves were playing cards or reading newspapers. They all looked as if they had headaches. In one corner a large blue-black Negro was singing to the accompaniment of a cigar-box ukulele: