Puzzle of the Red Stallion (20 page)

“We wanted to ask,” Piper began casually, “a question or two about your attack yesterday morning. Can you remember anything more—anything you haven’t told us?”

He shook his head testily. “Nothing only that one minute I was laying in my bed sleeping, and then I had me a flock of bad dreams and finally woke up mighty sick.”

Piper frowned. “Then how did you get the bruises?” he demanded.

“Dr. Peterson says I must have thrown myself around and hit against the floor….”

“Yes,” Miss Withers cut in. “That’s probably right. Only it’s odd that you managed to fall up into bed again—for that was where Thomas found you.”

The old man pressed his hand to his forehead. “Well, I don’t remember….” The nurse signaled that they had gone far enough with that line of pursuit.

“All right, all right,” said the inspector testily. “There’s only been a murder committed, that’s all. We don’t expect anybody to give us any help, but we would like a few questions answered.”

“It might avoid a second murder,” Miss Withers added. “Because I’m almost willing to wager that there’ll be …”

Gregg’s face lit up at the word “wager.” He motioned them closer, out of hearing of the nurse who had taken her position by the door and was beginning to look impatient.

His hands were hairy, trembling. Undoubtedly the man was torn by some inner conflict, some shadowy fear.

“If I tell you—” he began and broke off short.

“Yeah? Go on!” insisted the inspector. “What do you know?”

“Nothing, yet,” whispered Pat Gregg. “But you may as well know that there won’t be any second murder until after the big race Saturday!” His voice dropped. “If you’ll come to see me afterward—as quick as you can get here after the race—I’ll give you a hint. And it’s a hint that will knock you right off your feet, I’ll bet a dollar to a tomato.” He leaned back weakly.

“But don’t wait, man—tell us now!” Piper pleaded.

He shook his head. “I might be wrong and I wouldn’t want to go getting anybody into trouble.”

“Not
much
he wouldn’t!” Miss Withers said to herself.

But that was all they could get out of Pat Gregg. The round-faced old man subsided into a stubborn but meaningful silence.

On an impulse Miss Withers proffered to the invalid the paper sack which she had carried for so long. “Won’t you have an apple, Mr. Gregg?”

He looked up surprised. “What? Why, this’s mighty nice of you, bringing fruit to me. I do get hungry for apples ’long about this time of year.” He accepted a red apple from the sack, sniffed of it appreciatively, and grinned. “A cold-storage Jonathan, but mighty good all the same,” said he. Then, to Miss Withers’s badly concealed disappointment, he took a large bite out of the apple.

Miss Withers moved toward the door. “I’m glad to see you better, Mr. Gregg.”

“Better?” he laughed. “I’m well—only for this foolishness of having a nurse around all the time.”

“Well enough to see your son, who’s waiting downstairs?”

“What?” Pat Gregg stood up to his full five feet five. “My son downstairs? Nurse, why didn’t you tell me? My boy has been away for months and you don’t tell me when he comes home!” Miss Rogers opened her mouth, but before she could speak he cut her short. “Have Don come up here, at once! At once, do you understand?” His head moved slightly in negation even as he spoke. The nurse put her hands on her hips and sighed.

Piper left the room and after a last look at the invalid Miss Withers followed him. She smelled a rat—several rats—but she couldn’t say just where.

At the foot of the stairs Don Gregg waited. “I’m surprised that you left town when the charming Miss Babs Foley is there, alone and unprotected,” the schoolteacher suggested.

“That kid?” said Gregg. “She can take care of herself. Besides—I’ve had enough of that family, call it Foley or Feverel or whatever you please. Her sister made life hell on earth for me….”

“Half-sister, wasn’t it?” Miss Withers corrected. She held out her paper bag. “Have an apple, young man.”

“But I don’t like apples!”

“Have one anyway,” cut in the inspector on general principles. If Miss Withers was going crazy he was going to stick with her.

Don Gregg took an apple rather gingerly.

“Bite it!” insisted Miss Withers. “It isn’t poisoned or anything like that.”

Don Gregg drew a deep breath and looked at the ceiling. “O-kay!” he said wearily. He bit into the apple. Immediately he became unhappy; he was staring at the remainder.

“A worm!” he cried.

“You’re lucky that it isn’t half a worm,” Miss Withers told him. “And now we must be running along. By the way, I think your father would like to see you.”

“Did he say so?” Miss Withers nodded and Don Gregg went swiftly up the stairs. They heard him go hurrying down the long hall, heard him knock upon the door. There was the murmur of voices and then the door closed with a slam. Don Gregg came back down the hall at a slower pace.

“The old man changed his mind again,” said the inspector as Miss Withers drew him through the door and out into the afternoon sunshine.

“Yes,” she nodded in agreement. “That’s obvious. But
why
did the old man change his mind?”

Even as Piper frowned over that riddle the answer came from the doorway behind them. Don Gregg stood there, his face pale and impassive.

“Because my father wants to ask me a question and he’s afraid of what the answer might be!”

Miss Withers didn’t need to ask what the question was. She nodded slowly. Perhaps that was it—and yet at the same time a very interesting and intriguing alternative presented itself.

“Hmm,” she remarked. “Well, Oscar, we’d better be getting back to the city.”

The inspector looked surprised. “Why, we haven’t—” Then he caught her glance and stopped short.

“If you’re waiting to see Abe Thomas, you ought to know that he won’t be back until late—much later than his wife thinks,” said young Gregg hopefully.

“Well, then—” said Miss Withers as if it didn’t matter.

She nudged the inspector.

“You’ll be here in case we want to find you, just as a matter of routine?” Piper put in.

Don Gregg nodded. “Until Saturday anyway.”

He stood on the porch, watching, as they got back into the police car and turned around. “I’d like to know why he’s so anxious for us not to question Thomas,” the inspector said.

Miss Withers looked at him. “I wonder if it could have anything to do with a forged writ and a fake badge?” she idly suggested.

They drove slowly along the pasture wall while the fat mare and the red foal called Comanche galloped companionably on the other side. “Poor little fellow,” Miss Withers observed. “He’s got to grow up and have his legs raced half off, and then probably he’ll pass downhill from owner to owner as a hack and finally on a junk wagon or somewhere….”

The inspector said that that was the life of a horse. He stepped on the gas and then as they reached the corner of the pasture he slowed down again.

A station-wagon was rattling and roaring up the hill toward them with Abe Thomas at the wheel. “Let’s chat a moment,” Miss Withers told Piper, and as the two cars came abreast she leaned out and waved her hand.

Thomas shoved in his clutch so that the flivver stopped with its motor roaring louder than ever. He peered out dubiously and then tried to shout. There was no sound though they saw his lips move.

“Shut it off—we want to talk to you!” Piper called.

Light dawned in the little man’s gloomy face. He spoke a silent “Okay” and then moved the gas lever up so that the motor died away to a low rumble. “What d’you want to talk about?” he asked warily.

“Plenty!” said the inspector before Miss Withers could cut him off. “You lied when you said you went into town Sunday morning to take a message to Miss Feverel, didn’t you?”

Thomas blinked and nodded. “Sure I did.”

“You went in early so you could get Don Gregg out of alimony jail on a fake writ, didn’t you?”

“Sure I did,” repeated the little man. The faintest suggestion of a smile flickered across his face.

“And you went with him to a Turkish bath?”

Thomas nodded. “Sure I did. He said he’d been dreaming of how good that steam room would feel all the time he’d been cooped up. After the steam room we were taken to adjoining cots in the sleeping room and there we slept!” Thomas did not exactly add “Make something of it!” but the phrase was implied.

“You slept there until when?” Miss Withers put in.

“Until about eight, when I went up to Miss Feverel’s apartment and met you!” insisted Thomas.

Miss Withers looked mildly triumphant. “But if you came into town to free Mr. Don Gregg instead of bringing a message to Miss Feverel, just why did you get up at the crack of dawn and go to her apartment?”

Thomas seemed to shrink, but he did not speak.

“Was it because you discovered that in the night Don Gregg had slipped out of the place—and you were afraid he might do some violence to the woman he hated? Was it because you wanted to warn her?”

Thomas seemed to shrink still smaller behind the wheel of the flivver. Automatically he fumbled for a blackened corncob.

“Too much been said already,” he muttered.

Miss Withers and the inspector exchanged a glance of mutual congratulation. “By any chance,” continued the schoolteacher quietly, “did you leave this station-wagon in the street outside the Turkish baths—with the ignition key in its place?”

“You think Mr. Don—” began the little man. He shook his head violently. “I left this flivver in the Park Central parking lot—and it was there in the morning!” His mouth snapped shut. “That’s all I’m saying!”

“That’s enough,” the inspector remarked pleasantly. “Let’s go, Hildegarde….”

But she shook her head. “Make haste slowly, Oscar.” She noticed that Thomas was knocking the tobacco from his pipe and making a wry face.

“Pipe getting sour?” she said conversationally. “Didn’t you say that there was nothing like an apple to sweeten the mouth?”

Thomas nodded suspiciously and then caught one of the red globules she tossed into the front seat of the station-wagon.

He stared gloomily at the apple. “Thanks—but it’s nothing like the apples we have ‘Down Under.’”

Miss Withers looked up. “Down under
what
?”

“Australia, where I come from,” said Thomas. “That’s a country where the police solve murders instead of pestering innocent bystanders….” He took a big bite out of the apple and Miss Withers’s heart sank.

“We might as well go,” she told the inspector.

“You mean back—to arrest Gregg?”

She shook her head. “He’ll be there if we want him. By the way,” she called to Thomas as he was about to start away, “what did Don Gregg mean by telling us he would be here until Saturday?”

The little man shrugged. “How sh’d I know? Probably the young fool expects to make a killing on the big race and then …”

“And then decamp?”

Thomas gnawed at the core of the apple. “Don’t worry, he won’t,” said the little man. “Nobody ever beats the races, but they all try. I like to go and watch ’em—screaming and gasping with excitement and then, when their horse trails in, you should hear ’em wail.”

Abe Thomas let off the emergency brake. “I’ve got to get home to my chores,” he said. The station-wagon moved protestingly on up the hill toward the Gingerbread House.

“Well,” said the inspector cheerily, “now we’re getting somewhere!” He started his motor.

But Miss Hildegarde Withers wore a face that was very long. “Oscar, it’s possible to make good time in the wrong direction,” she said thoughtfully. “Racing full speed down a blind alley …”

The inspector said he didn’t get her. “You’re mysterious as a fortune-teller,” he complained. “And all this stuff about apples! What’s behind it?”

She shook her head sadly. “Oscar, what do you think of a mystery in which the murder was committed by a person who didn’t appear until the climax?”

“In a book I’d say the author was cheating and in real life I’d say that the police weren’t on their job!” he came back.

She nodded. “Such a lot of lovely suspects and I’ve cleared every last one of them!”

“Cleared ’em? How?”

“The man who smoked the murder pipe had false teeth,” she explained. “The rest of the description was guesswork, but that was certain sure. So I had a wonderful inspiration—knowing that you can’t take a good healthy bite at an apple with false teeth. Yet every suspect—even the big red race horse—passed the test!”

There were two small hard apples in the bottom of Miss Withers’s well-worn paper bag. As the police car started up she tossed them over the fence into the pasture where the mare and the red colt were standing as interested spectators.

One apple chanced to strike the mare smartly on the rump, and as Miss Withers rode away she saw the plump matron leap into the air, kick savagely at nothing, and then race wildly homeward with the surprised colt staring after her.

I
T WAS ON THE
following Thursday evening when Miss Withers, thoughtfully engaged in washing some of her best Wedgwood, nearly dropped a priceless cup as a shrill ring came at the door.

Dempsey plunged to answer it, and as the door opened the little dog threw himself up and almost into the inspector’s face.

“Down, Gilmore!” said the caller. Dempsey gave a very un-lionlike bark and wriggled with ecstasy. He escorted the caller into the living room and then returned to his mistress’s side. When she sat down Dempsey curled beside her and hung a whiskery chin on her shoe, from which vantage point he benevolently surveyed the room.

“You haven’t showed up so I thought I’d dig you out,” Piper began. “Deserted us, Hildegarde?”

She shook her head. “I’ve been thinking, Oscar.”

“High time somebody did,” Piper told her cheerily. “This Feverel case is still up in the air higher than a kite. And the Commissioner has had a few things to say.” After dinner the inspector allowed himself a cigar much fatter and more greenish-brown in color than during the rest of the day. He lit one now and expelled the fragrant fumes. Miss Withers and Dempsey crossed the room and brought him a saucer to use as an ash tray.