Puzzle of the Red Stallion (7 page)

Barbara took up one of the larger ashtrays and dumped its contents into the fireplace. Here too, pasted on the bottom, was a smaller photograph of the same face, blackened and discolored by countless expiring cigarettes.

“Well, why don’t you laugh, everyone does!” cried the girl.

There was only a stony silence, during which Miss Withers tried not to shiver. Then the parakeet screeched shrilly and a ring came at the door.

The four of them stood immobile. There was another ring and a man’s voice called, “Miss Feverel!”

Piper nodded at the girl. “See who it is—stall him!” She obediently went to the door, with the other three at Piper’s gesture drawing back out of line with the doorway.

“Who is it?” Barbara cried, ear to the panel.

“It’s Thomas, Miss Feverel—with a very important message from your father-in-law….”

Barbara looked around and saw that the inspector was motioning her to open up.

The door swung and a man pushed hurriedly inside. He was neither old nor young, thin nor fat. Dressed in a musty and dampened suit of sober black, with a greenish derby clutched in one gnarled hand, he was the picture of an old family retainer.

“Mr. Gregg—he wants to see you,” said the newcomer. His voice was fairly dripping with gloom. “Please get your things, Miss Feverel, and come with me … or it may be too late!”

“And
why
may it be too late?” interposed the inspector. Thomas looked past the girl and saw the others coming toward him. His mouth dropped open….

“Excuse me, I didn’t know….”

“This is not Miss Feverel,” Piper snapped. “It’s her sister. Violet Feverel was murdered on the bridle path of Central Park this morning—”

He stopped at the look of blank surprise which had come across the worn and dusty features of the man in the doorway. He gasped twice, clutching the knob for support.

“Miss Feverel
murdered
?” he repeated. “No—it can’t be! You’re lying to me, you’re trying …” He stopped, regaining control of himself. “But nobody would want to murder
her …
it’s old Mr. Gregg they’re after!”

Piper came closer. “What do you mean? Somebody’s trying to murder who?”

“Mr. Pat Gregg, my employer,” said Thomas. “That’s why he wants to see Miss Feverel right away—she used to be married to his son, you know. The old man wants to talk to her before he dies—he knows he’s going to die.”

“Do you know it too?” rasped Piper.

“No man knows such things for sure,” said Thomas sententiously. “It’s not for me to say,” his face darkened. “But I do know this—yesterday somebody poisoned old Rex, the police dog. It wasn’t just ordinary meanness between neighbors either—for that dog was trained to take food from nobody but myself and Mr. Gregg!”

“And you think,” Miss Hildegarde Withers asked quietly, “you think that anyone meaning harm to the old man would first remove the dog who protected him?”

Thomas nodded slowly. Then he turned toward the door. “I got to get back there,” he said.

T
HE INSPECTOR HASTILY TOOK
up a commanding position against the door. “Not so fast, not so fast,” he commanded. “What’s all this about?”

“We might have a chance to find out,” Miss Withers cut in, “if we follow the lead of this gentleman here, Mr.—?” She nodded inquiringly.

“Thomas,” said the newcomer. “Abe Thomas, ma’am.

Me and my wife Mattie have taken care of Mr. Pat Gregg twenty years come April. And now,” he urged apologetically, “it’s a thirty-mile drive to the place and I’ve got to get started. I wish you’d come with me….”

Piper frowned. “I don’t see what connection there can be between the murder of Violet Feverel and the fact that somewhere up in the sticks a dog got sick.”

“Sick nothing! I tell you, Rex was poisoned. Some black hearted hellion fed him ground glass in a biscuit, the cruelest death that a beast can die. Why, back in Australia, where I come from, I once saw a man run out of camp because he’d killed some dingoes that way—and the wild dog dingo is the most worthless creature in God’s world. I tell you—”

“Save it,” said Piper. He caught Miss Withers’s eye and saw that she was nodding emphatically. “We’ll go—but I’m betting it’s a snipe-hunt.”

Barbara, in the background, was now putting on her hat. The inspector shook his head. “Sorry, miss,” he told her. “You’ll have to remain in town and face a very unpleasant duty.”

She looked up and nodded. “I know. I’ll have to identify my sister’s body, isn’t that it?”

Her voice was controlled and even. Miss Withers noticed all the same that there were fine little lines of tension around her mouth and nostrils.

Piper nodded. “There’ll be a departmental car to take you down to the morgue. Better get it over with as soon as you can.”

“I’m taking you down there, of course,” cried Eddie Fry. He took his position jauntily at the girl’s side.

Her slim white fìngers touched his sleeve for a moment. “Please, no,” she said. “I want to go alone.”

“Don’t weaken!” the young man told her anxiously. “You need me more than ever—we’re still going to be sealed, aren’t we?”

Everyone looked at Barbara. “I—I don’t know,” she breathed. “I don’t think so. Isn’t that funny, really? I was going to marry you just to run away from Violet, and now—and now I don’t have to marry anyone….”

She began to laugh, thin brittle laughter like the high notes of an untuned violin. Her wide eyes were misting over.

Miss Withers sniffed. “It’s about time she had a good cry,” said the schoolteacher softly. “Stay and comfort her, young man.” Eddie nodded. He was already doing it to the best of his ability. “And don’t worry over anything she says now; the girl is all upset,” Miss Withers counseled as she followed the others out of the room.

Thomas, leading the way at a walk which was almost a trot, was halfway to the elevator, but the inspector lingered and grinned at his co-worker. “Well, if it isn’t Miss Lonelyhearts!” he greeted her. “Still singing rah, rah, rah for moonbeams, Hildegarde?”

She made a wry face. “Don’t be a sour old misanthrope, Oscar. Just because I’ve guessed wrongly in the past
¹
is no reason why I shouldn’t lend a helping hand to young love when I can. You know, Oscar, I feel sorry for that girl.”

Piper lit his cigar, using four matches. “A harum-scarum piece she is, too,” he observed.

“Nonsense! She’s at an age when there’s something sacred about having FUN, in capital letters. She was all starry-eyed and breathless about her good time in Harlem, and then it had to turn out this way!”

“You don’t suppose,” observed the inspector thoughtfully as they came out under the canopy, “you don’t suppose that having FUN in upper-case type was so important to little Babs that she killed the sister who spoiled it for her?”

“I do not—at least, I don’t think I do,” Miss Withers came back. She was surveying, without enthusiasm, a rickety-looking station-wagon flivver which waited at the curb, with the nervous little Abe Thomas crawling behind the wheel.

“Oh, is this what we travel in?” she asked hesitatingly.

Thomas nodded heavily. “You’ll find it rides comfortable as a hearse,” he promised.

“How delightful,” murmured the schoolteacher as she clambered aboard. The inspector swung in beside her and they were off amid a clatter of gears.

The summer sun seemed almost directly overhead by the time the roar of the engine died away. New York City was far behind them, lost over the rim of the horizon. Miss Withers drew a deep breath of the fresh country air. “Well,” she asked the driver, “are we there?”

Thomas shook his head. “No, ma’am. I just turned off the ignition to save gasoline—had to fill the tank in the city, at seventeen cents a gallon. That’s too dear to waste as long as the law of gravitation is still working.”

The car was slowly gaining momentum down the slope, along a winding country road with branches whipping against the fenders on either side.

Ahead of them the road dipped and rose again, mounting toward a white house which sprawled over the farther hilltop. Thomas indicated it with his thumb. “We’re nearly there,” he said.

A rolling green pasture came into view on the right, and beyond the crumbling stone wall a fat mare raised her head inquiringly.

“Look!” cried Miss Withers, delightedly. The mare was galloping along the wall, keeping even with the car without difficulty. Behind her, manfully trying to keep up, a gawky red-brown colt cantered upon stilt-like and unsteady legs.

Thomas turned his head. “That’s all there is of the Gregg stable,” he said. “That Comanche colt—he’s already entered for the Futurity Stakes. The old man’s praying he’ll turn out to be another Siwash, only better.”

“Another
what
?” demanded Miss Withers.

“Siwash—the horse the old man raced for three years and then gave to his daughter-in-law as a wedding present. It seemed like Mr. Gregg’s luck went with the horse, somehow.”

Miss Withers nodded. “I shouldn’t say that Siwash brought much luck to his new owner,” she observed. “Violet Feverel was riding him when she was killed this morning!”

Thomas nearly turned the car into the stone wall, awakening the inspector from a pleasant doze. “If she was killed, I’ll tell you right now that it was through no fault of the horse,” Thomas went on, regaining control of himself and the car. “That big red Siwash hasn’t a mean streak in his body, or he hadn’t when I handled him!”

The inspector was inclined to enter into an argument about this point, but Thomas put the car into gear again as they began to climb the steep slope toward the house.

“Well, well,” Miss Withers ejaculated. It was veritably a house to gaze upon, built in a combination of the worst styles of the last century. The general effect was something like that of a dusty wedding cake, for in spite of the kind concealment of the towering elms, the house was an eyesore of gables, porches, porticoes, dormers and frescoes jumbled together, the whole thing topped with a somewhat precarious-looking cupola.

“The Gingerbread House!” gasped Miss Withers. “Oscar, when you were little didn’t you ever read the fairy tale about the little boy and girl who wandered into the Gingerbread House and were turned into mice by the old witch?”

Oscar Piper looked at her intently. “Hildegarde, you need a strong cup of coffee,” he returned. The car was swinging up toward a sagging porch, but before the wheels had stopped rolling their driver leaped from his seat, motioning for them to follow.

They had a glimpse of his thin legs dashing up the steps. Nobody in the world, Miss Withers noted, can run and keep his dignity, not even an old family retainer. Abe Thomas unlocked the door quick as a flash and disappeared inside.

“Say, that little man
is
worried,” the inspector observed as he helped Miss Withers down. They hurried up the steps, but as ill luck would have it, an inconvenient gust of wind slammed the open door almost in their faces. The inspector rattled the knob furiously, but there was a snap-lock.

“A rousing welcome,” Miss Withers observed. She pressed her forefinger against the bell while the inspector pounded on the panel. After a long moment the door was surprisingly flung open in their faces and the doorway filled by a very fat woman who seemed to have hastily hung wrappers, aprons, slippers and faded untidy hair upon her person.

Her small mouth put on a wide, ineffably sweet smile. “Good morning!” she cooed. “Did you want something?”

They both spoke at once. “Mr. Thomas …”

The fat face pouted. “Isn’t that too bad! My husband, he went to New York early this morning and won’t be back till late.” At that moment she noticed the flivver still quivering noisily in the driveway. “You came in the car—then where’s Abe? Oh—” She opened her mouth but the scream of anguish did not come. A faint crash sounded from somewhere in the upper reaches of the house. As the fat woman turned, the inspector and Miss Withers pressed past her. They glanced into a living room of the horsehair period and rushed on toward the stairs.

Halfway up they met Abe Thomas coming down, his face white as the proverbial sheet.

“Telephone … doctor…. Something’s happened…. Mr. Gregg!” he mouthed. As they waited immobile, he burst past them and clattered down the stairs.

The inspector and Miss Withers stared at each other. “Something’s happened to Mr. Gregg,” she repeated softly. “Oscar, I’m not as surprised as I should be.”

But Oscar Piper was sprinting down the hall toward an oaken door which now hung crazily upon burst hinges. In spite of his flying start Miss Hildegarde Withers was neck and neck with him at the finish.

They burst into a wide and darkly dismal bedroom, its shades still drawn. The room was dominated by a bed of dark walnut, with a much-carved headboard rearing almost to the ceiling. On this bed, moaning feebly, lay a plump old man in a tangle of blankets.

The schoolteacher gasped and stopped suddenly—for all that could be seen of Mr. Pat Gregg was of an unearthly blue-purple shade, even to the crown of his bald head.

Whatever the inspector had expected to find, it was not this. He bent for a moment over the unconscious man. Then he looked up, his forehead puckered. “A stroke of some kind, Hildegarde.”

Miss Withers shook her head doubtfully. In the silence that ensued they could both hear the excited voice of Abe Thomas shouting into the telephone.

“I wonder if he smokes a pipe,” Miss Withers murmured.

Piper stared at her. “The guy downstairs? What if he does?”

She shook her head. “I mean the man on the bed. But never mind, you wouldn’t understand.” The sick man was breathing more loudly now, expelling every gasp with a low moan.

“Shouldn’t we be doing something for him?” Miss Withers wondered.

Piper shook his head. “Best to wait for the doctor, from what I know of first aid,” he said. “He’ll know what caused it—we’d better stick to our detecting.”

“We’d better start detecting,” Miss Withers snapped back. She carefully scrutinized the broken door. “Thomas had to force his way in, no doubt of that,” she decided.

On a chair near the head of the bed were displayed scattered articles of masculine attire, including the trousers of a very loudly checked suit affixed to a broken pair of suspenders. “I’m too much of a lady to snoop,” she told the inspector. “But as long as we have this fortunate interval, don’t you suppose we might have a look in the pockets?”