Puzzle of the Red Stallion (26 page)

“And all those apples you wasted trying to find a man with false teeth!” the inspector jibed.

“Wasted?” said Miss Withers calmly. “Perhaps.” She looked at her watch and saw it was after ten. “Don’t you think Dr. Bloom has arrived at the Gregg place by now?”

“I’ll find out,” Piper promised. “Anything for peace in the family.”

He got up and made a telephone call. “Bloom’s at the house,” he announced as he came back to Miss Withers’s table. “He says the young man tried to keep him from examining the body until Tinker threatened to send him to the local hoosegow.”

“But what did he find?” demanded Miss Withers.

Piper shrugged. “Nothing as yet,” he admitted. “The old boy is mighty cautious. But he says he isn’t satisfied that the death is natural and they’re going to send for an ambulance to bring the body down to the local undertaking parlors.”

“We might be able to meet them on their way!” Miss Withers said, rising from the table.

“But Hildegarde, you’ve seen the body,” protested the inspector. “You’re not going to tell Bloom how to do his job, are you?”

She looked at him. “I’m perfectly capable of making a suggestion or two,” she said.

She took up her position outside the Marble Hills Mortuary and when Dr. Bloom and the local officials arrived with their grim subject she cornered the medical examiner.

“Doctor, I want to know just what is a cerebral accident,” she demanded.

“But this is no time for a medical lecture—” he began testily. “If a man has hypertension or high blood pressure he is likely to be subject to thrombosis or cerebral embolism or some other form of what we call cerebral hemorrhage—the result of too much pressure of blood on the brain.”

“And an attack in the form of a cerebral accident could not be artificially induced?” she went on.

Dr. Bloom frowned and then smiled faintly. “Certainly. You could get the victim to run up twenty flights of stairs….”

“I was thinking of another method,” Miss Withers said. She told the doctor what it was.

“Good God!” he exploded. “I never heard of such a thing. But still—” The doctor’s face lit up with an innocent childlike excitement. His fine white teeth clicked nervously and he clawed at his beard with his stained dark fingers. “The marks on the ankles—yes, it could be! Anyway,” he decided, “I’ll go and see!” He hurried away into the mortuary after the others, but Miss Withers had all the confirmation she needed.

She rushed back to the hotel where she had left the inspector peacefully drowsing upon a settee. It was getting on toward midnight now and the hotel lobby was deserted.

“Wake up, Oscar!” she cried. “I know who killed Pat Gregg!”

“Eh? What’s that?”

“Snap out of it, Oscar. I need you to drive the captain’s car.” Her excitement finally communicated itself to the drowsy inspector.

“Okay, okay,” said he. Halfway to the door he stopped. “Where are we going?”

She pushed him forward. “We’re going to ring doorbells,” she said.

“Yeah—but whose?”

Miss Hildegarde Withers stared him full in the face. “Dead men’s doorbells!” she said.

“H
ADN’T YOU BETTER SWITCH
off your lights?” suggested Miss Withers.

“But how can I see to drive?” protested Oscar Piper. “I don’t know these roads nor this car. After all, Hildegarde …!”

“If we can’t see, we can’t be seen,” the schoolteacher told him. There was moonlight enough so that after the inspector’s eyes became accustomed to the dimness he could steer the borrowed roadster along an approximation of the middle of the winding country highway.

“I don’t see why we couldn’t do all this in the morning,” Piper was complaining.

“Nonsense, Oscar!” she said. “We’ll trap our key witness. Drag a man out of bed when he’s heavy with sleep and you’ll get the truth out of him. He won’t have his mind keyed up to lying—it’s an old dodge, but I’m staking everything on the chance that it will work.”

“Just to smash an alibi?” Piper asked.

She nodded. “The best alibi in the world,” she said softly. They rode on up the hill, with a stone wall on the right. Miss Withers knew that beyond the stone wall was a green pasture, a pasture with a Yellow Transparent apple tree in the middle of it. But there was no sign tonight of the mare and the red foal—both were undoubtedly safe within their sadly mortgaged stable.

Suddenly the inspector jammed on the brakes. “Look!” he cried. “Tinker must have left some men on guard, after all!”

He stopped the car and both of them stared up the hill toward the Gingerbread House which loomed darkly against the stars. There was a faint flicker of flame….

“The captain would have stationed policemen, not Camp Fire Girls,” she pointed out acidly. Suddenly she found it difficult to breathe. “We seem to be just in time, Oscar, there’s something very wrong going on here.”

He nodded. “You stay here in the car and I’ll go see,” he said. He fumbled in the door pocket of the car.

“O-o-oh no, you won’t,” Miss Withers retorted. “I’m staying right next to you, Oscar Piper.”

They got out of the car and went swiftly up the hill. The light still flickered, tiny yet clear.

“It’s awfully close to the rear wing of the house!” Miss Withers whispered.

So it was. Indeed, the fire flared against the very wall of the house. As they came closer they could see that now and again a dark figure moved between them and the light.

The inspector took his hand out of his pocket and there was a police automatic in his fist. “Tinker’s,” he explained in a low whisper. “I hope he keeps it well oiled.”

They crept closer, still in the shadow of the stone wall. But the dark figure which moved about the feeble fire took no note of them.

“Wait, Oscar!” Miss Withers begged with trembling voice. “Wait and see what he’s doing.”

They were within fifty yards of the house. “I know what he’s doing—he’s setting fire to the place!” Piper returned hoarsely. “It’s arson, Hildegarde.”

Miss Withers whispered that there were worse crimes than arson. “Wait—wait and watch!”

They wormed their way closer, slipping from shrub to shrub in the garden. Still the dark figure remained dim and mysterious. At times it seemed to be performing a sort of weird dance around the growing flames.

“Pouring on kerosene!” explained Piper, barely moving his lips. “Good Lord, he’s trying to burn down the place and everybody in it.”

The red light grew higher, red flames licking along the wooden siding, rising above a window frame…. The window was open and inside a flaring curtain was licked up in an instant.

“I’m going …” said the inspector. But Miss Withers gripped him with all her strength.

“No, Oscar! Not yet!”

The shadowy figure reappeared. It was a man with something in his hand.

“He’s got an ax!” gasped Piper. “Must be mad as a hoot-owl!”

But the mysterious figure was crouching beneath the window, crying out in a high-pitched, hysterical voice, “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

Inside the house a woman screamed horribly. The inspector rose to his feet and went forward on tiptoe, Miss Withers still close at his heels. They were out in the open now, but the man who cried “Fire!” had no eyes for them.

He stood near a side doorway which opened out into the garden by a stone step and the ax was upraised. Suddenly a woman, still screaming, burst from the house. It was Mattie Thomas, in spite of her fat body sprinting like a deer. She missed the step, landed sprawling in the grass and scuttled, still howling, into the shrubbery.

The man with the ax never moved. There was light enough from the burning house so that Miss Withers could see a man inside the bedroom, a man who struggled into his trousers and clutched frantically at household treasures on bureau and wall. It was Abe Thomas.

“Now!” cried the schoolteacher and let go the inspector. He made one magnificent plunge and caught the shadowy figure in a flying tackle. The two men went down in a heap together, the ax flying harmlessly to one side.

To Miss Withers’s relief she saw that only the inspector got up. He was holding his antagonist helpless with a neat arm-lock.

Miss Withers was not too surprised to see that it was young Don Gregg who writhed beneath the inspector’s grasp.

It was at this moment that Abe Thomas, his arms full of miscellaneous objects, burst out of the doorway. He stopped short, dropping boxes and clothes. “What—what—” That was all he could say. His mouth opened and stayed open.

Don Gregg was sobbing, great dry gasping sobs. “Let me up!” he begged. “Let me go!” His face was horrible in the red glare.

“Get the bracelets out of my hip pocket, will you, Hildegarde?” said the inspector. “I’ve got my hands full.”

She came closer but she did not follow out her instructions to the letter. She looked down at Don Gregg sympathetically. “You wanted to kill him, didn’t you?”

Gregg nodded wildly. “I was going to kill him and then throw the body inside the house and let it burn….”

Miss Withers found the handcuffs. “On his wrists, Hildegarde!” cried the inspector.

But she still hesitated. Abe Thomas was making ineffectual efforts at beating down the flames, but she called him. “Help me, will you?” she said.

Thomas came toward her, still too dazed by sleep and terror to speak articulately. “Wha—” he began. “Wha—”

“Hold his wrists so I can slip these handcuffs on,” suggested Miss Withers. Thomas grasped Don Gregg’s hands, held them up….

Then Thomas squealed shrilly as the schoolteacher quietly snapped the cuffs across his own wrists and stepped back.

“You can let your prisoner up, Oscar,” she said calmly. “Relax,” she told the young man. “He murdered your father, but the law will take care of him for you in due time.”

Abe Thomas chose that moment to strike down at the inspector’s head with the heavy manacles, but it was a dodge that Oscar Piper had met too many times during the course of his twenty-six years on the force. He dropped the surprised Don Gregg, ducked neatly to one side and drove his knee into his assailant’s groin with disastrous results for the old family retainer. Abe Thomas lay down on the grass and moaned. It was all over.

Young Gregg looked wistfully toward the ax. “Ah-ah!” said Miss Withers. “Let him stay there—it’s more important to put out the fire.”

As a matter of fact, the blaze was subdued more easily than the schoolteacher had feared—far more easily than Mattie Thomas, as it happened. The fat cook came out of the bushes to fling herself upon her manacled and helpless husband with moist protestations of eternal devotion. When the writhing captive succeeded in kicking her off she attempted valiantly to assail the inspector. But finally she too was put under control.

A very chastened Don Gregg knelt on the grass. “I must have gone crazy,” he said slowly. “But it seemed the only way. I didn’t dare come to you—I was afraid I’d go back behind the bars if I admitted what I’d have to admit.”

“So you thought of this gentle method of righting the scales of justice?” Miss Withers asked.

He nodded. “I only had the kerosene from a couple of old lamps,” he admitted. “It wasn’t much of a bonfire.”

The inspector rubbed his burnt and blackened palms. “It was enough!” he decided. Then he turned upon Miss Withers, who looked in the pale moonlight more like a scarecrow than the figure of avenging righteousness that she felt. “Hildegarde, don’t you think that the time has come when you could safely take an old friend into your confidence and tell him what in the merry hell all this is about?”

The schoolteacher pointed down toward Abe Thomas, whose face was a pale mask of reptilian hatred. “You’ve got your murderer in handcuffs,” she said calmly. “What more do you want?”

“Sometime—at your convenience—I’d like to know just how
we
solved this mystery,” the inspector said wistfully.

I
NSPECTOR OSCAR PIPER CAME
out of the Duke County Jail and took a deep breath of the moist air of early morning. It was Sunday again, and just a week since at this same hour a doomed girl had gone galloping through Central Park to her appointment. Seven days from murder to arrest—that wasn’t so bad, thought the inspector. Nor was he dissatisfied with the result of his long and amicable argument with Captain Tinker.

He walked down the stone steps of the jail and along the sidewalk toward where an angular spinster awaited him in the front seat of a borrowed roadster. He stopped and his feeling of warm satisfaction left him.

Before he could speak Miss Hildegarde Withers greeted him. “At last, Oscar! What was the matter, couldn’t the sheriff find his keys?”

Piper said that he was sorry about the delay. “We were deciding who’d have him,” he explained. “Abe Thomas, I mean. I finally convinced the captain that our murder came first, so we decided that he could keep the prisoner for a couple of days and have his chance at the publicity, and then we’ll extradite the rat and try him in New York for the Feverel job.”

The inspector leaned into the roadster, then moved as if to look into the rumble seat. “Hildegarde, I must be getting absent-minded! I could swear that I left another prisoner in your charge because you said you wanted to question him….” His tone was sarcastic.

“I let young Gregg go home,” Miss Withers cut him off. “He told me what he knew. All of a sudden he realized why he had been left behind at the track—and he guessed the significance of his boyhood air gun being planted where he hadn’t seen it in years! He went mad—but he’s sane enough now. And there are chickens and livestock on that place of his, including the mare and the red colt. Somebody has to feed them this morning.”

“Yeah? What about arson charges that I could bring?”

She shook her head. “It isn’t arson to make a pretense of burning your own house, Oscar. Besides, he was desperate. That young man suddenly realized that he had been unintentionally shielding the murderer of his ex-wife and of his father. He had no hope of convincing the police of that fact, particularly since his own alibi for the first murder depended only upon Thomas’s word. So he tried to execute rough justice with his own hand.”