Puzzle of the Red Stallion (3 page)

“
Code 44
,” next to the general alarm embodied in “
Code 30
” (which Miss Withers had heard only during the capture of Two-gun Crowley), was the most exciting signal of all. It meant, as Miss Withers had discovered, simply—“
a dead body
!”

Miss Withers’s nostrils widened and into her blue eyes for a moment there came the look of a small boy who has just seen the fire engines go past. Then she relaxed.

“After all it’s not
my
dead body,” she told the eager little dog. “I’m rapidly getting the reputation of being the most meddlesome woman east of Los Angeles, and there’s barely time to get breakfast and take that spot out of my blue dress before church, and this is certainly one time when I ought to mind my own business!”

Dempsey quivered with delight as he sniffed the thousand odors of the green park across the street.

Miss Withers sniffed too. “After all,” she remarked thoughtfully, “I have a perfect right to exercise my dog in the park if I wish—and those two flat-footed imbeciles are not the proper persons to cope with a
Code 44
!”

She started off at a pace which made Dempsey trot to keep up. “Not by a jugful,” she concluded, and her nostrils flare as if from afar she had heard the note of a hunting horn.

¹
See “Miss Otis Regrets,” a popular song of the era.

²
See
The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree
, Crime Club, 1933.

L
ESS THAN A MILE
to the north, where Eighty-sixth Street Transverse cuts across Central Park, four men stood in the shadow of the viaduct arch. Above them on the bridge the little green roadster of the radio police nestled against a long white ambulance from Bellevue. The men stood in the soft mud of the Bridle path, looking down at what was left of Violet Feverel.

Her body lay sprawled in the path, with the auburn hair draggled and a red-brown stain about the mouth. Rather than fear or pain there was an expression of something very like surprised chagrin on her face, an expression rapidly being effaced by the last relaxation. About her body the earth was churned by small neat hoofprints, and in her dead and stiffening fingers Violet Feverel held a few coarse reddish hairs.

Sergeant Greeley wore a serious expression now. “How about it, Doc?”

The young interne shook his head. “Too cold for me,” he said lightly. He shoved his fists into the pockets of his white linen jacket. “Too dead to interest anybody but the medical examiner and brother Campbell’s head mortician. Deader’n a herring, in fact.”

“I knew it!” burst in an elderly and unshaven man in the gray uniform of a park attendant. “That’s why, soon’s I found her laying here, I beat it over to the phone in the Reservoir office and—”

“Yeah?” said the sergeant. “Just how did you happen to find her?”

“I was coming to work earlier than usual this morning on account of how there’s always a lot to be done around the flower beds after a rain. I was walking across the park—I live over on Lexington Avenue, lived there five years. You ask anybody if Ralph H. Simons hasn’t lived there five years. I’m taking a short cut along the upper reservoir, and ahead of me maybe a quarter of a mile I see a woman riding hell for leather towards this viaduct here. I says to myself, She’ll break her neck if she doesn’t slow down! Naturally I watch to see if she slows down on the other side of the viaduct where the path comes into the clear again. But I don’t see hide nor hair of her, nor the horse either, so I hurry on the rest of the way and when I get here all I see is this good-looking dame lying all mussed up in the mud. One look is all I need to tell me she’s dead—”

“O-kay!” burst in the sergeant. “Sell it to the
Mirror
.” He waved the loquacious little man aside and looked down at the body thoughtfully.

“She must have went quick, eh, Doc? Get the funny look on her face!”

The interne nodded. “Tough—for a good-looking girl like that to go out with the taste of her own blood in her mouth….”

Officer Shay, who had no stomach for corpses, winced a little. But the sergeant shrugged. “Good-looking or not, they all hate to stop breathing. What do you think killed her, Doc?”

The interne stuck out his lower lip. “Internal injuries caused by taking a dive off the nag, I’d say.”

Shay dug his toe into the soft mud. “Say, can you really get croaked falling offen a horse? I’ve done it often enough as a kid and never got killed.”

“Always a first time, my boy,” the sergeant told him. “Bound to happen with these high-flying dames riding horses too good for them.”

“Sure,” chimed in Simons, the park attendant. “This dame, I see her here lots of mornings. Always on a big red horse too. She comes early so she can gallop the nag without being stopped. After eight o’clock Casey’s on the job—you know, the big mounted cop who polices this path. He won’t let any of the riders go faster’n a trot.”

Nobody was listening to him. “Say, Doc,” the sergeant asked, “you couldn’t make out a death certificate, could you?”

The interne shook his head. “She was dead when I got here.”

Sergeant Greeley nodded. “Go phone the station, Shay,” he ordered. “Tell ’em it’s the works.”

Shay began laboriously to climb up the bush-covered slope which led to the top of the bridge, where the car was parked. The way was impeded by a maze of bushes and overgrowth. Suddenly he stopped and his perturbed face peered through the foliage.

“Hey, Sarge!” he called. “What if they want to know who the dame is?”

Sergeant Greeley pondered. “No handbag on her,” he said. “Wait, it stands to reason that the horse belonged in one of the stables at the lower end of the park. Phone them a description of the horse and they’ll be able to tell you who rode it out this morning!”

“Yeah? Description of what horse?” Shay objected.

They all looked at each other. “Can’t have gone far,” decided Greeley. “We got to find the horse before we can find out who this dame is!”

Up on the bridge the ambulance driver was impatiently honking his horn, but the interne still lingered, staring down at the body. “You know, I’ve seen her somewhere,” he said. “That face is just as familiar to me as my own.”

“Yeah? Say, on your way out, will you keep an eye open for a loose horse?” asked the sergeant. “We can’t have a man-killing nag running wild through the park.”

At that auspicious moment, heralded by a salvo of excited barks from the sidelines, the supposed man-killing horse was led into the scene by a determined-looking spinster. Miss Hildegarde Withers was plodding along through the mud, keeping as far as possible from the big beast at the other end of the rein. Her terrier, suspicious and disapproving, darted hither and yon at a discreet distance as if trying to work up courage enough to rescue his mistress from the jaws of this ravening colossus.

“Were you looking for this, gentlemen?” inquired Miss Withers calmly. “I found it trampling the flower beds and thought that perhaps—ugh!”

Siwash, suddenly noticing the limp horror in the bridle path, made an abrupt about-face, jerking the reins from Miss Withers’s grasp and very nearly upsetting her.

She clutched wildly at him to keep her balance and the touch seemed to calm him. The big thoroughbred stopped, still trembling, and rubbed a wet and grass-stained muzzle against her shoulder as if for comfort.

Sergeant Greely stared incredulously. “Look who’s here!” There was no appreciable note of welcome in his voice.

He turned toward Officer Shay. “Okay,” he said. “You can phone in a description of the horse—” He stopped and looked critically toward where Miss Withers was gaping at the body. “You can tell which one is the horse, Shay,” the sergeant continued heavily, “because the horse wears a bridle and the dame wears a hat. Get it?”

“Yeah,” said Shay dully. He didn’t feel appreciative with that girl lying there staring up at the sky.

Miss Withers sniffed, but she did not waste breath in argument. She was thoughtfully studying her hand.

The sergeant waved Shay toward the car. “Tell them to send out the medical examiner. But tell them he don’t need to hurry—it’s a simple case of internal injuries caused by falling offen a horse.”

“Caused by
what
?” inquired Miss Withers wonderingly.

The interne, who was reluctantly tearing himself away from the scene, stopped and blinked through his glasses. “If it’s anything to you, lady, this dame died of internal hemorrhage caused by a fall from her horse!”

Miss Withers looked again at her fingers where she had brushed against the big thoroughbred as he started wildly a moment before.

“Go on, Shay,” urged the sergeant. “Get to the phone and make a report on this business so we can get home. That is”—he turned to Miss Withers—“that is, if it’s okay with you, lady. No objections?”

“My only objection,” Miss Withers announced calmly, “is to this!” She displayed her fingers, daubed with carmine. “If that young woman died from her fall I don’t quite see why there should be a splotch of blood on the thigh of this animal!”

Sergeant Greeley came, swore mightily, and was convinced. “Blood on the horse—then it doesn’t make sense. What does it mean?”

For a moment there was silence, broken only by the rasp of the park attendant’s fingers across his stubby chin and by the faint tinkle of the interne’s instrument case as he let it fall.

“It means,” Miss Hildegarde Withers told them, “that this dead girl was
assisted
into the next world!”

Officer Shay was drawn, in spite of himself, into the scene again. “What’s she talking about now?” he complained. “Come on, let’s wash this up and get some sleep….”

“Shut up!” roared the sergeant. “Can’t you unnerstand plain English? The lady is saying that this dame was moidered!”

Miss Withers nodded approvingly. “There’ll be an A-plus on your report card, Sergeant.”

From that point on events came thick and fast. Miss Withers, who had dropped a stone into the figurative pool, now found herself carried farther and farther away from its center by eddying waves of officialdom. Seemingly, a small army had sprung up from nowhere to mass itself around the body of the dead girl on the bridle path.

Detectives from the local precinct station asked a great many questions and made laborious notations. Homicide Squad men in plain clothes asked a few questions and made no notes at all. Photographers flashed their blinding lights into the forever blind eyes of Violet Feverel, recording upon celluloid the tragicomic posture of her crumpled body. Fingerprint men wandered about and finally, for the lack of anything better, they began to dust their mysterious black and white powders over the saddle and bridle of the nervous thoroughbred. Siwash fretted in the grasp of two brawny patrolmen and wished he were elsewhere.

Forgotten, Miss Hildegarde Withers bided her time patiently. The moment arrived when little Simons, the park attendant, was finally permitted to stand aside and draw a few gasping breaths on a cigarette. He had been sucked dry by relays of questioners, and the little man was in such a state that he very nearly screamed when Miss Withers came up suddenly beside him.

He looked twice as guilty as sin and the perspiration streamed from his forehead. Miss Withers wore a more formidable expression than she realized as she confronted her intended victim, and the little dog who wriggled in her arms was embarrassed by the tightness of her grasp.

“I tell you I don’t know a thing!” Simons exploded in Miss Withers’s face. “I was just coming across the park to work like I always do—you ask anybody—and I seen her riding hell-bent …”

“Saw!” corrected Miss Withers absently. “Saw, not seen. Yes, of course you found the body by pure happenstance. Somebody had to find it. But you didn’t see anybody running away?”

“No—I told the police, I told them a thousand times, that the park was deserted.”

“You found the body dead, but still warm,” she continued. “Was that before or after you heard the sound of a car driving away?”

Her clear blue eyes stared at him blandly, innocently. Simons’s mouth dropped open.

“Say! It was after—I mean, there
was
a car!” He caught her arm. “You don’t think …”

“Not yet,” Miss Withers snapped. “But to return to that car—it was a big limousine, was it not?”

Simons shook his head and scratched nervously at his hairy neck. “Didn’t see the car,” protested the little park employee. “I just heard it—the engine starting up. I forgot it until just now, what with all the excitement and everything. Finding the body, I mean….”

“And you have no idea from which direction the sound came?”

He shook his head sadly. “It might have been somewhere up there on the roadway,” he offered. His arm swung in a vague circle. Then a sudden realization smote him. “Say, those cops are going to be sore! I got to go back and tell them about this!”

Miss Withers was not one to impede the course of justice. She nodded thoughtfully. “The detectives look very busy just now,” she suggested. “Perhaps a little later would be a more auspicious time?” And with the little dog still clutched to her maidenly bosom Miss Hildegarde Withers faded quietly from the scene.

For a long time nobody missed her. Heavy brogans tramped this way and that in a wide circle around the body of Violet Feverel. Then suddenly they all stepped back to clear a path. The uniformed men saluted.

From a squad car on the roadway above there emerged a gray and wiry Irishman with his hat cocked over one eye. This personage at once crashed down the slope into the scene of action, a dead cigar clamped in his jaws. As he approached the spot where the dead girl lay, he took the cigar out of his mouth.

“What is this, field day?” inquired Inspector Oscar Piper as he surveyed the assemblage.

A very large and bulging detective pointed down with a stubby forefinger. “There’s the body, Inspector!”

“Right on the job, eh, Burke?” greeted Piper. “And you found the body already! You’re off to a flying start, you are. A body—and it’s dead! Anybody know why?”

“We haven’t moved her, Inspector. The medical examiner says he’ll be here when he finishes his breakfast.”