Puzzle of the Red Stallion (6 page)

“Murdered!” added Miss Withers, just to make it more definite.

Dr. and Mrs. Thwaite looked at each other. Then they both said the proper things.

“Naturally, you’ll be glad to help us in the investigation?” Piper went on.

But the Thwaites were doubtful. “You see,” explained Mrs. Thwaite, “we didn’t know her except as a customer—a client, really. She was in the habit of coming very early in the morning to exercise her horse, before either myself or the doctor was up….”

“Doctor, eh?” Piper looked at Thwaite. “Medical or divinity?”

“I am a veterinary surgeon,” explained the little man. “As we were saying, we won’t be able to help you much.”

For once his wife agreed. “All we know is that Miss Violet Feverel lives—I mean lived—at the Hotel Harthorn.” She sneered slightly. “No doubt Latigo here has told you more interesting facts about her—I understand he moved in her social circle….”

Latigo Wells looked excessively uncomfortable. “I was only up to her place one evening, and then I only stayed a few minutes,” he hastily explained.

“Well—” said the inspector.

Miss Withers nudged him. “Come on, Oscar—before these people convince us that they never heard of Violet Feverel.”

Dr. Thwaite opened the outer door for them. “If there’s any little thing you want to know, just call on us!”

“It’s the big things that we want to know,” Miss Withers told him. “We’ll be back. Hotel Harthorn, you said?”

They passed out into the street and the office door closed behind them. The inspector started toward the sidewalk, but Miss Withers crouched beside the door, motioning him back.

Together they listened. They heard Latigo being sent on into the stables with a message to Highpockets regarding a rubdown for Violet Feverel’s horse. Then, after a moment of silence, Maude Thwaite’s voice came clearly, with a note of placid satisfaction.

“Well, my dear,
this
ought to settle the problem of Siwash!”

“There,” said Miss Withers, as she led the inspector hurriedly down the sidewalk, “there is a woman who would eat her young!”

It was still early morning—particularly early for a Sunday morning—when they reached the Hotel Harthorn. To Miss Withers the place seemed a typical apartment hotel, identical with half a hundred others which lined Broadway and the crosstown streets of the neighborhood.

But the inspector was more closely in touch with the city. “Hotel Harthorn,” he observed as they stood outside the near-marble entrance. “Average monthly record—one racketeer arrested, two suicides of girls diving from high windows, one dope peddler picked up and turned over to the Federals, two complaints a week on noise or disorderly conduct charges … nice place. Mostly theatrical people….”

“‘Nothing ever happens at the Grand Hotel’!” quoted Miss Withers. “Shall we go in and start something?”

They found a dapper desk clerk hidden behind a Sunday newspaper scandal section. “Miss Feverel’s apartment,” said Piper.

The clerk shook his head and turned a page. “She’s out,” he informed them.

“When did she go out?” Piper wanted to know.

The clerk shrugged. “Sometime before I came on duty,” he said. He rustled the newspaper suggestively.

But the inspector and Miss Withers were not so easily discouraged. “Pry yourself out of that chair,” Piper snapped. “And bring your pass-key.”

The clerk’s eyes widened as he saw a gold badge in the inspector’s hand. “Oh—an accident?”

“There will be one if you don’t get going,” Piper told him.

The dapper man led them down a hall to a somewhat old-fashioned automatic elevator. He pressed the button and Miss Withers drew the inspector aside. “Not much use to question the night man, provided there was one and he wasn’t asleep at the switch,” she pointed out. Her finger indicated another hall which ran past a closed newsstand and opened into the side street. “Places with as many exits as this don’t allow for much of a check on the guests.”

Piper nodded and they rode creakily upward to the sixth floor. Then they went down the hall and the clerk took out his key in front of 607. By now he was thoroughly worried. “This is a respectable place, Officer—I hope there won’t be any publicity.”

The inspector reached out and took the pass-key. “You just trot back to your desk and everything will be just dandy,” he told the clerk.

The man lingered dubiously. “If you’re going in I’m supposed to go with you….”

Piper shook his head. “There may be shooting,” he hinted.

“Shooting? Oh—but—” He edged away, and then suddenly turned and made for the elevator.

“But, Oscar,” began Miss Withers. The inspector hushed her.

“Mostly a bluff,” he whispered as he inserted the key. “But I didn’t want him around. And—I think I hear somebody inside the place….”

As he opened the door an odor of mingled perfume, stale tobacco smoke, mixed liquors, and massed humanity eddied against them. Yet light enough poured through the Venetian blinds at the windows to show that the long living room was empty.

It was a typical hotel apartment, with almost no evidences of the personality of the tenant except for a battered piano. Everywhere, Miss Withers noticed, were the usual flotsam and jetsam of a party’s aftermath—bottles in the wastebaskets, glasses broken in the gas-log fireplace and making rings on the furniture, rugs piled against the wall and a large hole burned in one of the cushions of the davenport.

There was no sound of anyone in the place, though the face of the dead girl looked down from dozens of photograph frames. The intruders moved softly forward across the living room. Piper opened a farther door and stepped into a very frilly and feminine bedroom. This was in better order, in spite of the spilled powder and a silver evening dress tossed casually across a chair. The bed had not been slept in and here too the walls were covered with photographs of Violet Feverel.

Now Miss Withers realized why the dead girl’s face had seemed so familiar. The photographs showed her lighting a cigarette of a popular brand, inspecting an electric icebox, and smiling brightly at a tube of tooth paste. “Lord,” exclaimed Piper, “it’s the Billboard Girl!”

Miss Withers peered gingerly into the bathroom, but that too was empty. Further investigation showed a tiny kitchen with more bottles and glasses. But that was the total. Miss Withers and the inspector moved back to the living room, and Piper went over to the window and drew up the blinds.

“We might as well have some light—” he began. Then both he and Miss Withers were startled half out of their wits by a hoarse cry from behind them.

“Hello, Eddie!”

The inspector whirled and one hand snapped to his pocket. “Stay where you are!”

“Nuts to you, Eddie!” came the voice again. The speaker had no choice about staying where he was. Miss Withers discovered him in a neat gilt cage under the piano—a tiny green-red parakeet, far smaller than his voice.

He swung head downwards from a trapeze, his beak clicking rhythmically.

“Get out the handcuffs, Oscar!” Miss Withers suggested. They joined in nervous laughter—it was no pleasant task wandering among the belongings of the young woman whose body they had just seen laid roughly in a wicker basket.

Just then a key rattled in the door and quick as a flash the inspector dragged Miss Withers down behind the davenport. They waited, hardly daring even to breathe, as a girl and a man in evening clothes came into the apartment.

“… because we’ve got less than no time at all! Just throw some things into a suitcase,” he was saying, in a gay and flippant tone.

“Yes, Eddie,” said the girl. They kissed in the doorway. As she moved with a nervous little laugh out of his arms the girl saw Miss Withers and the inspector rising up over the top of the davenport and her face froze.

“What … what do you want?” she demanded.

Miss Withers was as yet unable to speak, for the girl across the room was fearfully like, in face and figure, the victim on the bridle path. This seemed to be Violet Feverel come back to life—Violet Feverel as she had been ten years ago.

“I’m asking the questions here,” Piper cut in. “I’m from the Bureau of Homicides.”

“Yeah?” began the young man known as Eddie. But the girl at his side cut him short.

“I’m Barbara, Violet’s sister,” she said evenly. “Has something happened?”

The inspector nodded. “Something has. Your sister met with an accident on the bridle path this morning.”

The girl nodded mechanically. “Yes … yes? She’s dead, isn’t she?” Barbara caught her breath and her teeth bit into her lip. “I … I can tell by your faces.”

She sat down suddenly in a chair, but she refused Miss Withers’s well-meant ministrations. After a moment she looked up at the inspector. “You’ll want to ask questions?”

“Plenty,” said Piper. He motioned Eddie into a chair. “You too,” he ordered. He lit a cigar. “You’re both dressed up for 8
A.M.
,” he continued. “Where you been?”

“Harlem,” said Barbara.

“At Mabel’s Inn on Lenox Avenue,” added the young man. His fingers toyed with his evening tie, which by daylight showed blue in place of the conventional black. He wore blue socks and an orange handkerchief peeped from the pocket of his tight-fitting dinner coat.

“You made a night of it,” Piper suggested. “I never heard of any place open there after sunrise.”

“Well—” said Eddie thoughtfully….

“For the last few hours we’ve been riding up and down Riverside Drive in a taxi,” Barbara said, her voice even and expressionless.

“Why?”

“Because I had to make up my mind,” Barbara admitted. “About something private.”

“About running away?” Miss Withers put in.

“Partly that,” said the girl.

“She was trying to decide whether or not to marry me,” Eddie offered. “Imagine hesitating about a thing like that!” He grinned.

“
Will
you begin at the beginning?” Piper asked. He tried vainly to find an ashtray with room enough left in it to contain his cigar. Finally he used the rug.

“I’ve been visiting my sister for the past week,” Barbara recited, as if she had rehearsed it. “Tonight, I mean last night, there was a party. For me, mostly, because I’m sort of a sap from Syracuse. It broke up late and Violet got rid of the last of the die-hards by changing into her riding clothes. She said they could drop her off at the stable….” She looked at Piper through long lashes. “You’ve been to the stable?”

He nodded. “Well, I wasn’t supposed to go on to Harlem with the others,” Barbara continued. “And I couldn’t ride with my sister because I haven’t riding things. Besides, she said I ought to get to bed….”

“Reasonable at that,” Miss Withers pointed out.

“But she wasn’t! You’d have thought Violet was my mother, instead of a half-sister who never even wrote me a letter for ten years, and who took me in only because the aunt I’d been living with in Syracuse had died and I didn’t have any other place to go….”

She took a deep breath and went swiftly on. “So Eddie knew I wanted to go on to Harlem with them all and have
fun
. He said he’d see to it that Violet got into the first cab, and I could come down and get into the second, and she’d never know. Only when we stopped at the stables Violet found I was in the cab and we had a terrific fight….”

Miss Withers’s eyebrows went up.

“You hadn’t heard about it?” Barbara bit her lip. “That cowboy beau of Violet’s was gawking through the door and I was sure he must have blabbed….

“Anyway, Eddie had to go on without me, but I caught a taxi and told the man where the place was and I caught the crowd in Harlem.”

“And had
fun
,” Miss Withers nodded sympathetically. “You say that Mr. Latigo What’s-his-name of the stables was friendly with your sister?”

Barbara shrugged. “She got a laugh out of him anyway. Even had him come up here one evening, but I guess he didn’t look as interesting in his best clothes. He thought we were all laughing at him because we tried to make him perform—I think he went home mad.”

“One more question,” said the inspector. “Who was your sister’s boy-friend?”

Barbara hesitated and looked sidewise at the young man beside her. He smoothed the very peaked lapels of his dinner jacket thoughtfully.

“Me, as much as anybody,” he said slowly. “But we were just—”

“Just good friends!” interrupted Piper wearily. “I know, I know. By the way, what’s your name?”

“Eddie—Edward M. Fry,” the young man admitted. He seemed to retain his jovial air with a certain amount of difficulty.

“Business?”

“I’m a veteran in the army of the unemployed,” said Mr. Fry. “Used to work around Coney until times got tough….”

“And you support yourself in the style to which you had become accustomed—how?” Miss Withers interrupted.

He smiled apologetically. “I’ve been lucky out at Beaulah Park,” Eddie admitted. “Guessing on the goats … horses to you, lady.”

“But you weren’t so lucky at love?” Piper pressed.

The young man hedged and Barbara saved him. “My sister Violet had an unhappy marriage,” she told them. “She was divorced about a year ago and since then I don’t think there’s been any man who mattered.”

“Married, eh? To a chap named Feverel?”

Barbara shook her head. “Vi and I were born Foley,” she explained wearily. “She changed it to Feverel when she started her career as a model. But her husband’s name was Gregg, Don Gregg.”

“And she divorced him, eh? We’ll have a hunt started for Mr. Gregg,” said Piper quickly.

Barbara smiled on one side of her mouth. “You won’t have to hunt very far,” she told them. “He wouldn’t pay up and Violet had him thrown into alimony jail.”

“Jail, eh? Then there was no love lost between them?”

“Not on Violet’s part anyway,” the younger sister told them. “I’ll show you just what she thought of her ex-husband.” She rose from her chair and went over to the parakeet’s cage. “Look there!” she said.

The inspector almost gave vent to a guffaw, but stopped. In the bottom of the bird-cage, instead of the usual folded bit of newspaper, was a cabinet photograph of a blond and plumply handsome man of perhaps thirty years.