Puzzle of the Red Stallion (8 page)

Inspector Oscar Piper was not one to be over-delicate. The trousers held—besides a faded silk handkerchief, three dollars in silver, a penknife with a mother-of-pearl handle and a rabbit’s foot—two identical keys on a ring. The keys fitted perfectly into the lock of the broken door.

“That’s that,” said the inspector. He replaced the belongings. Then he noticed that his companion had her head cocked on one side.

“Smell a herring, Hildegarde?”

“Several herrings,” she told him. “Oscar, do you happen to notice that there’s something gritty on the floor? Could it be sugar?”

“Sugar or sand,” agreed the inspector. “Maybe the old man’s been to the beach recently.”

The schoolteacher nodded. She was wandering around the room, walking on tiptoe because of the old man who still groaned in his deep coma. She frowned at her image in the mirror and then upon an impulse she raised the window shades, permitting the cheerful noonday sun to come streaming in.

“Puts a different atmosphere on things, doesn’t it?” the inspector asked.

She nodded slowly, looking over his shoulder. “It certainly does, Oscar! There’s another entrance to this room!”

They both gazed upon a narrow stairway at the farther end of the room, an open stairway of unpainted pine which led to a trap door in the ceiling.

But before the two intruders could investigate this stairway, they heard Abe Thomas and his fat wife come rushing down the hall.

“He’s gone, of course,” cried Thomas, approaching the bed. “No—he’s breathing! If he can only hang on a few minutes longer—the operator just managed to locate Dr. Peterson—” Thomas shook his head. “It’ll be too late for him, that I know.”

Mrs. Thomas quivered and a big tear rolled down either cheek. “The poor old man—to meet his end with no loving hand to stroke his forehead, and no loving voice in his ears … and me not dreaming that he wasn’t right as a trivet, or anyways as right as his excitable nature would let him be….”

“Has he been ill long?” Miss Withers asked.

Both Thomas and his wife loudly insisted that Mr. Pat Gregg had been in reasonably good health yesterday. “For a man of his age, that is,” Thomas explained.

“And the last time you saw him, then, was it in the evening?” Piper questioned.

“Yes, sir. About seven o’clock, I guess. I helped him upstairs, because his rheumatism was bothering him more than usual. Then I heard him lock himself in—he had the only keys. You see, he was used to Rex sleeping under his bed and since the dog was poisoned old Mr. Gregg has been mighty nervous-like.”

Piper nodded. Then he faced the fat woman, who was still staring toward the bed with an expression of mingled horror and fascination on her face. “Mrs. Thomas—remember carefully, and don’t lie—”

She stared at him with a wounded expression. “How could I hold anything back from a member of New York’s Finest, sir?” Her voice was very serious.

“Eh? All right, all right. You heard nothing, noticed nothing wrong last night?”

She shook her head, but chose to stare at a picture on the wall. “Not a sound, sir. But Abe and me, we sleep at the other end of the house. On Sunday morning, particularly when Abe goes away like he did this morning, I usually like to rest my bones in bed until Mr. Gregg rings for his breakfast. And this morning he didn’t ring at all….”

Miss Withers whispered something to the inspector. “Oh, yes.” He turned back to Thomas. “Then it was last night that your employer told you to take the message to his former daughter-in-law?”

Abe Thomas hesitated, then nodded. “But I didn’t leave until early this morning,” he explained.

“And you have no idea why he wanted to see Miss Feverel?”

Thomas hesitated again, looking quickly from the man on the bed to his inquisitor. “I couldn’t rightly say,” he began. “But my own opinion would be that it had something to do with his son, young Mr. Don. You see, he and his wife were divorced with a lot of hard feeling, and when Mr. Don got behind with his alimony Miss Feverel—as she always called herself—had him put in jail. That worried Mr. Gregg, if I may say so.” The little man’s expression was pained, unhappy.

“I should think it would have worried young Mr. Don too,” Miss Withers suggested dryly.

She was interrupted by the tooting of an auto horn in the driveway outside. “The doctor, praise be!” gasped Mrs. Thomas, and they heard her go pounding down the stair.

Dr. Peterson, unlike the general practitioner whom Miss Withers had visualized, was a crisp and tow-headed young man in his thirties. He came into the bedroom, frowned at the patient, and then tugged thoughtfully at his wispy mustache.

“Another attack, eh? Thomas, would you mind getting my kit out of the car? And one of you ladies get a pan of hot water….”

Miss Withers wanted to ask why modern doctors were so disinclined to carry anything larger than a pad of prescription blanks with them. Her idea of a doctor was a large, untidy man with a worn black satchel in his hand and a stethoscope peeping out of his coat pocket.

But when finally equipped Dr. Peterson rolled up his sleeves, displaying capable if rather hairy arms. “Outside, all of you,” he ordered.

Thomas and his wife backed unwillingly through the broken door. Miss Withers hesitated and the inspector stood his ground. “New York City Police,” he said, displaying his badge. The shield of gold had gone in and out of his pocket so many times that morning that he was half inclined to pin it on his vest. “I’m staying,” he went on. “There’s something funny about this business.”

The doctor shrugged and looked toward Miss Withers. “Is she the law too? Because—”

The inspector was about to spring to her defense, but Miss Hildegarde Withers had had enough of the sickroom. “I’ll wait for you outside, Oscar,” she said, and went quietly out of the room.

As he worked the young doctor kept up a running commentary. “Simple enough case—cerebral accident or apoplexy,” he said. “Probably bulbar—a rupture of blood vessels in the medulla oblongata. I was afraid this might happen….”

“You’ve treated him before, then?”

Dr. Peterson nodded. “Two weeks ago—for a heart attack. His blood pressure’s away up in the clouds, due to high living and taking such things as horse races too seriously. I warned him—told him to stay away from the races.”

The inspector moved closer, leaning over the bed. “This other attack—how did it happen?”

Dr. Peterson washed out his hypodermic needle with alcohol. “I was called in and found him unconscious on this bed. Had a bit of bad news, I guess. Anyway he collapsed on the stair and somehow Thomas got him into bed and had sense enough to give him ammonia to sniff. That was all that kept him from going off then and there.”

He bent his ear against the old man’s chest and then shook his head. “If he comes out of this coma, he’ll probably be paralyzed on one side. I give him a hundred to one….”

Both doctor and policeman jerked back as the sick man’s mouth twitched open. “A hundred to one,” he whispered faintly. Pat Gregg opened his eyes and stared up at them. “I’ll—I’ll take fifty dollars worth of that bet….”

Then his eyes closed wearily.

“He’s reacting to the injection!” cried the doctor. He pulled again at his mustache. “Funny that he isn’t paralyzed—must have missed getting it by the skin of his teeth….”

“Won—by a whisker,” whispered Pat Gregg. “I was left at the post, pocketed badly on the backstretch, but I—I broke through and came to the front….”

He tried to sit up in bed. The blue-purple tinge was receding from his face, remaining only in a spot beneath his ear.

“I had a funny dream, Doctor,” he said, his voice coming more clearly now. “A regular nightmare it was. Bet you three to five you never had a dream like that. I dreamed I was the pendulum in that big clock out in the hall. And then I was a big red Barbary ape swinging in a tree, only the branch broke….”

He stopped and looked up at the inspector. “Who’re you?”

“Never mind,” said Piper. “Remember anything before the attack—before you were sick? Who was with you and what happened?”

Pat Gregg shook his bald head. “Nobody was with me. My head’s buzzing like a beehive, but I can remember. Thomas helped me up the stairs, and then I locked myself in and went to bed….”

“You felt it was coming on before then, and sent for your daughter-in-law?” The doctor was making motions, but Piper kept on doggedly.

The old man’s eyes filmed. “Sent for—Violet? Why should I send for that—that—”

“You told Thomas to bring her here first thing in the morning.”

“Did I? And she came?” The old man was almost smiling.

“She didn’t come—because she couldn’t,” Piper went on. “She was killed in Central Park this morning at sunrise.”

A pleased, almost cherubic expression flitted across the old man’s face. “How I’d like to have been there!” he murmured. Then, “So Thomas told you I sent for her? Police, aren’t you? Then I can’t blame him for discussing my business, can I? Police have to know everything. If a sparrow falls—Only my late daughter-in-law was no sparrow, she was a buzzard.”

“That’ll be all for now,” Dr. Peterson interrupted. “I don’t care if you’re Sherlock Holmes himself, you can’t give my patient the third degree now.”

“Okay,” said Piper. “If you’ll come out into the hall a moment, Doctor …”

They stepped through the broken door. “I’ll make it snappy,” said the inspector. “First, did you notice the mark on his neck?”

“Bruise,” the doctor admitted. “Probably bumped something or hit himself during the attack. He’s got bad ones on his shoulders too.”

“It couldn’t be anything else but an attack of apoplexy?”

Peterson shrugged. “I never saw that congestion of the blood vessels of the face and head in any other condition. I’ll stake my reputation as a doctor that Pat Gregg has had a light attack of apoplexy, the logical follow-up to the heart attack two weeks ago. The next one—it’ll kill him.”

The inspector’s eyes narrowed. “Could the attack have been caused by exertion—such exertion as going to New York and killing his daughter-in-law at sunrise and hustling back here?”

“It certainly could,” Dr. Peterson remarked with a faint smile, “except for the minor objection that there’s only one chance in a thousand that he’d be lucky enough to get home and have his attack in bed. It would almost certainly happen at the time of greatest excitement—presumably when he was engaged in exterminating his daughter-in-law. Besides, this attack appears to have come earlier than sunrise—at least an hour earlier.”

“Okay,” said the inspector. “It was just an idea anyway.” He went swiftly in search of Miss Withers—so swiftly that he very nearly tripped over the fat Mrs. Thomas, who was crouching at the head of the stairs and weeping quietly.

“Turn ’em off,” Piper told her, not unkindly. “Mr. Gregg is going to be all right.”

“That’s good,” said Mattie Thomas brokenly, and the tears still coursed across her fat cheeks. The inspector shrugged and went on.

Miss Hildegarde Withers was nowhere in the lower part of the house, but knowing her distaste for such stuffy environs of the haircloth sofa era, he was not surprised. She was finally tracked down at the pasture fence, where she and the gawky red colt were studying each other in an interested fashion.

He told her of what had transpired in the sickroom. “So the old man seems to have disliked his daughter-in-law—but there’s no chance of his having been the one to do her in. Only a thousand to one that he’d be able to do it without having the attack then and there, the doctor says.”

Miss Withers nodded. “A thousand to one—but Pat Gregg is a born gambler, Oscar. And he seems to have recovered mighty quickly, all of a sudden.” She took Piper’s arm. “But I haven’t been wasting my time either. Come on….”

Piper brightened. “Got something on the worthy Thomas at last? I knew he’d bear looking into.”

She gave him a quizzical look. Then she pointed toward a distant hencoop where the man in question was busily engaged in liberating a large flock of squawking and excited white Leghorns. They gathered around Thomas, leaping at the pan of grain which he held in his hands.

“Breakfast is late for the hens this morning,” Miss Withers pointed out. “It’s probably due to the fact that Thomas was away in the city and his wife remained in bed.”

“Yeah? Well, breakfast is late for me, too,” Piper objected. “What’s all this got to do—”

“Come and see,” the schoolteacher told him. She led the way to an open shed at the end of the driveway. From the old number plates nailed on the walls, the grease and oil dried deep into the floor of pounded sand it was evident that here the station-wagon was kept. At the rear the frame of an ancient bicycle was peacefully rusting away.

Along one wall were piled three great iron drums painted red and marked “gasoline.” “Evidently they save a cent or two a gallon by buying it wholesale,” Piper suggested. “What’s that got to do …”

But Miss Withers was pointing down at the tire marks on the sand. Over them, in an irregular tracery of webbed footprints, were the tracks of the chickens.

“What do you make of that, Oscar?”

He stared at her blankly. “Chickens mean nothing to me unless they’re fried,” he announced.

“Well, these mean something to me,” Miss Withers retorted. “Those hens have been shut up all morning—and I never heard of a chicken searching for food after dark. At sunset they seek their roosts and presumably were shut up by Mrs. Thomas before she went to bed.”

“Why not Thomas?” objected Piper.

“Because he wasn’t here,” Miss Withers exploded triumphantly. “He’s lying when he says he took the car out of the garage this morning and drove into New York. It was last night—because there are chicken tracks
on top
of the tire marks!”

“Say!” said Piper. Then his face fell. “But the car might have been standing outside on the driveway all night….”

Miss Withers shook her head. “You’ve talked with Thomas and you know he’s not the type to let his employer’s car stand out in the rain.”

“That’s right,” agreed the inspector. “It did rain. And the hen tracks give us the real goods on Thomas. Say, I’m going to ask him a couple of questions. Where is that guy?”