Puzzle of the Red Stallion (11 page)

“
Write me a letter,

Send it by mail….

Send it in care of

Birmingham Jail,

Birmingham Jail, love,

Birmingham Jail,

Send it in care of

Birmingham Jail….
”

All the eyes in the room focused upon Miss Withers and the inspector, vacantly yet defiantly. It was hard for Miss Withers to realize that these men were not criminals, that few of them had ever stood before a judge and none of them had seen a jury. They were locked up here because their ex-wives had seized an opportunity to get back at them for unpaid alimony.

At the far end of the recreation room was a tier of cells, each fairly comfortable in spite of the open bars at the door. The deputy warden indicated the farthest one, which showed only a shower curtain pinned across the door. On the shower curtain were lettered the words—“Do Not Disturb.”

Piper lifted the curtain but the cell was empty. “Well, where is Gregg?” he demanded.

The deputy warden swallowed. “That’s what we’d like to know,” he admitted. “He belongs in here….”

“But he broke out?”

“Not exactly,” the deputy hurried on. “You see, last night was Saturday night. I went out to a show and so did some of the guards. We left Milton, the guard who let you in, in charge. Long about midnight, he says, a deputy sheriff came to the door with a writ for Gregg’s release. Seems his alimony’d been paid up and it was okay for him to go. So Milt put the writ in the desk and let the prisoner go….”

“But I don’t see—” Piper exploded.

“Well—I came back after Milt had been relieved. I checked up and figured everybody was here, on account of this curtain we let Gregg hang over his door to keep out the light. It wasn’t until this morning that I found the writ and I noticed … I noticed …”

From his pocket the deputy took an official-looking document signed by a judge of the Court of Appeals. “I noticed that Judge Bascom signed his name like he never signed it before, and the seal—”

The inspector snatched the document and displayed it to Miss Withers. “The seal,” he announced sarcastically, “is made of pretty red wax, but it reads ‘Sacred Order of the Sons of Ananias’! You can buy ’em at ten cents a dozen at any trick and magic store on Broadway!”

Back in the recreation room the blue-black Negro was mournfully singing:

“
Oh, if I had the wings of an angel,

Over these prison walls I would fly,

I’d fly to the arms of my poor darling …

And there I’d be willing to die….
”

“A
NYWAYS,” SAID THE DEPUTY
warden, “he’s flew the coop.”

Inspector Oscar Piper drew a deep breath. “Did you send out a general alarm—notify all radio cars, ferryboats, railroad stations …?”

The deputy warden shook his head sadly. “He got out of here about midnight, and by the time we discovered that the writ wasn’t kosher he’d had plenty of time to get across the river into New Jersey. And there’s no extradition for the offense of contempt of court. This is just a dis’plinary jail, not a penal institution,” he went on to explain. “It’s almost impossible to get out-of-the-state police to co-operate with us just to pick up a missing prisoner. Besides, we figured he might come back after he’d attended to some private business or other….”

“How I should hate to remain sitting upon a red-hot stove until young Mr. Gregg wanders back to alimony jail,” Miss Withers observed.

“Well,” decided the inspector suddenly, “I’ll authorize the general alarm for Gregg. There’s extradition to cover the crime we want him for!”

“For which we want him,” corrected Miss Withers absently. “But Oscar, even if Don Gregg is Suspect Number One, I wish you’d make haste slowly. I have a feeling that he isn’t far away, but if you make a loud noise you’ll send him scooting.”

“He’s got to be found, all the same,” insisted Oscar Piper.

Miss Withers told him that she would rather find the deputy sheriff who had appeared out of nowhere and freed the prisoner so handily. Piper seized upon the idea.

“Say, that’s right! Who was he?”

The deputy warden didn’t know. Milton, the hapless keeper who now awaited suspension or worse, was hardly more helpful. By dint of much questioning the inspector managed to build up a figure slightly less shadowy than nobody. It seemed that the stranger had been of medium height, had worn a hat and dark overcoat of blue or black, and was chewing gum. “That’s all I remember,” he insisted. “I wasn’t feeling so well last night.”

“Or were you feeling too well?” Miss Withers cut in. She remember her first impression—that the keeper and his charges had all appeared slightly hangoverish when she came in.

“Well,” said Milton slowly, “we’re not as strict here as most jails, and that’s a fact. But it’s my idea that Gregg knew he was going to be sprung, and he got the other boys to sort of cut up a bit and maybe get me rattled. They make a drink out of potater peelings and stuff, and they must have slipped some of it into the ginger ale I was drinking….”

“Good thing you kept your eyes open,” Piper said. “It was Saturday night in the jail-house and all of the boys were there raising merry hell, but still old eagle-eye here noticed that the deputy sheriff wore a hat and a coat. Wonderful!”

Milton frowned, scratched his head. “He looked like a deputy sheriff and he talked like a deputy sheriff—and he flashed a badge.”

“We could pick him out of a million with that description,” the inspector pointed out warmly. “Probably the badge was a tin shield with ‘Chicken Inspector’ on it. So all we have to do is to look for a medium-sized guy in an overcoat …”

“Who chews gum,” Miss Withers concluded. “I’m surprised at that. I rather thought he’d have smoked a pipe.” She gave Milton an innocent glance.

“A pipe? Say, that reminds me—he
did
smoke a pipe. Threw away the gum while he was waiting for me to bring down the prisoner and lit a terrible-smelling old hod.”

“Fancy that!” Miss Withers said softly and followed the inspector through the dismal portals and out into the street again. She put her hand upon his arm as he was about to dash off in the direction of the nearest telephone booth.

“Before you have young Gregg arrested for the murder of his ex-wife, don’t you think it would be a good idea to find out if it
was
murder?”

“Huh?” That brought the inspector up short. “Good Lord, Hildegarde, you yourself tipped us off….”

“I was only guessing, and I’m not the medical examiner,” she reminded him. “How about getting a report from Dr. Bloom?”

The inspector spent a busy five minutes at the telephone. “The case is still pretty much at a standstill,” he reported as he emerged from the booth. “No word from Bloom yet—we might as well drop in on him on our way uptown.”

“After all, there’s nothing like a social cup of tea at the morgue, is there?” Miss Withers agreed. They hurried to that grim building above the East River where life and death overlap.

There was a short wait and then Charles Bloom, veteran medical examiner for the Borough of Manhattan, came out of the back room and closed the door carefully behind him. Miss Withers wrinkled her nose at the faint odor of formaldehyde and wished she were elsewhere.

“Nice of you both to drop in,” said Dr. Bloom, blowing his nose heartily upon a square of fine Irish linen which showed both a monogram and a ragged tear. “Just finished—want to have a look?”

Piper shook his head. “Well?”

Dr. Bloom nodded. “It was murder, right enough.” He rolled something thoughtfully in the palm of his hand. “One of the neatest jobs I’ve seen for some time. I’m writing down the cause of death as internal hemorrhage caused by rupture of the main throat artery with—with this!”

He showed them what was in his palm—a tiny pellet of lead slightly flattened.

“What? Killed with a BB?” gasped Piper.

The doctor nodded. “Just an old-fashioned, ordinary BB shot, made to be fired from a kid’s air rifle.”

“But the wound—there wasn’t a wound on her!” Miss Withers cut in incredulously.

“I didn’t say there wasn’t a wound, I said none was apparent,” Dr. Bloom explained. “With a missile so small there’s often no exterior bleeding, and the wound was no larger than a pin prick. But that’s how the job was done, and death was almost immediate. Exact time of death—well, it must have been about three quarters of an hour before I first examined the body, say approximately quarter of six this morning.”

Miss Withers was dubiously shaking her head. “It doesn’t ring true,” she insisted. “How could the murderer be sure he’d hit a vital spot with a toy weapon like that?”

Bloom was moved to laughter, stroking his wispy beard. “Vital spot? Dear lady, it’s worse than that. I’ll guarantee that there is no other spot on the body where Violet Feverel could have been shot with a BB and killed. Or even badly injured, except in the eye. No ma’am, that BB had to strike her throat just as it did in order to harm her. The killer played a long outside chance….”

“And had hell’s own luck behind him,” Piper observed.

Miss Withers remembered something else. “Doctor, did you happen to notice that the dead girl had something gripped in her hand?”

Bloom nodded. “You have sharp eyes! Yes, there were a few reddish hairs, horse hairs I’d say offhand. Looks like she felt herself falling and grabbed at the horse’s mane to stick on.”

“That would mean that the shot was fired while she was mounted,” Miss Withers said thoughtfully. “Which makes the marksmanship all the more remarkable, doesn’t it? All the same …” She subsided.

The schoolteacher was somewhat annoyed at the inspector’s jubilance as they came out of the morgue. “I see it all now,” he somewhat optimistically announced. “Violet Feverel was in the habit of taking out her horse at that hour. Gregg knew it. And since all riders in the park take the same general route along the bridle path, he knew where to lie in wait for her. Somewhere he got hold of an air gun and as she rode up toward the viaduct he rose out of the bushes which cover the slope and—bingo! Then Gregg does a quiet sneak—”

“You’re referring to young Don Gregg, I presume?”

“Who else? Naturally he had a grudge against the woman who had kept him in alimony jail for months. His first thought on getting out was to pop her off. He shot from the bushes and was out of sight before she hit the ground….”

Miss Withers shook her head. “No, Oscar. The killer came down and stood beside the dying woman.”

“Huh?” Piper was incredulous. “Then—there were footprints?”

She shook her head. “By the time I got there the path surrounding the dead girl was pretty well trampled by the flat feet of your radio officers.”

“Then how in the dickens …”

But she didn’t want to tell him, not yet. The briar pipe which reposed in her handbag was her ace in the hole, to be displayed at the proper time and place.

“Guesswork, Oscar,” she said. “Where are you off to?”

“I’m going to take this taxicab to the nearest eastside subway station,” explained the inspector wearily. “Then I am going to take a subway train down to headquarters. I am going to light a cigar, put my feet on the desk, and then send out a drag-net for Mr. Don Gregg that will bring him in if he’s halfway to China!” He grinned. “Is that okay with you?”

“Godspeed,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers. But she climbed swiftly into their waiting taxi. “You won’t mind walking to the subway, Oscar?” she called out through the top of the door as she rolled away. “You see, I have an appointment with the only witness to this murder.”

Somehow the excessive quiet of Sunday afternoon in Manhattan did not extend to the dark and aromatic confines of Thwaite’s Academy of Horsemanship. In their box stalls the boarded horses moved restlessly, neglecting the hay which hung over the sides of their deep mangers. Across the alley the hacks fretted against the narrow sides of their stalls, pawing at the worn floor boards beneath their bedding. One of them, a sympathetic little gray mare known to her child riders as “Salt” because her disposition was that of the salt of the earth, raised her wise old head and whinnied shrilly.

Even Satan, the black tom whose manner usually indicated that he considered this stable his, from the tiniest mouse to the largest horse, had withdrawn after the unfathomable manner of his kind to the farthest corner of the harness room where he crouched beneath a saddle and waited.

Came the voice of Maude Thwaite: “Bring Siwash out, Highpockets!”

The colored boy quavered uncertainly: “I dunno, Mis’ Thwaite….”

“Bring him out, I say!”

“Now, Maude …” began the little veterinary surgeon placatingly.

“Hurry up!” commanded the woman, her voice harsh as broken glass. And Highpockets led the big red horse out of his box stall.

“Put that twist on his nose!” snapped Mrs. Thwaite. Highpockets protested again. “I can’t do that, Mis’ Thwaite. This Siwash horse and me—we’re pretty good pals….”

“Don’t be a fool! Do as I say!”

Shaking his head, Highpockets slipped a curious instrument over Siwash’s nose. It consisted of a short loop of rope run through a hole in the end of a stick of wood.

Still Mrs. Thwaite was not satisfied. “Around his upper lip, you fool. And twist it so he can’t break away!”

Shaking his head again the colored boy tightened the twist. Siwash bobbed his head and his ears swung back against his neck….

“Latigo, get the strap!” commanded Mrs. Thwaite.

But Latigo Wells shook his head. “I ain’t paid to do that,” he objected. “Besides, I—I got work to do in the front office.” He stalked forward down the runway. As he reached the hall which led to the office he was almost trotting and beads of sweat stood out on his face.

Once in the office he threw himself down in the swivel chair. From the top of the desk he took his guitar and struck a very sour chord.

“Damn that old heifer to hell!” he prayed fervently. “For pure unadulterated meanness …”

He took a deep breath and shut his eyes. A succession of sad and weary chords sounded in the lonely room, and then he began—