Puzzle of the Red Stallion (25 page)

D
R. PETERSON CAME DOWN
the narrow stairs which led from the cupola into the bedroom. “And that’s that!” said the young doctor.

A barrage of wary eyes met his. “You’ll want an autopsy, Doctor?” That was Captain Tinker, no longer jovial.

Dr. Peterson shrugged. “If the family likes. But it’s clear enough. This was the third attack—and Gregg went out like a light. It’s a clear case of what we call a cerebral accident—burst blood vessel in the brain. The first attack was three weeks or so ago when he keeled over on the stairs. The second was last Sunday morning—and I told him there’d be a third if he didn’t forego all excitement. But he wouldn’t follow orders—he must have died as he was looking through his telescope at the finish of the race….”

“Oh, no!” cut in Miss Withers. Her eyes burned with an inner light.

“Oh, yes!” corrected Dr. Peterson. “You can get all the medical experts up here that you like. They’ll bear me out.”

“Gregg was murdered!” Miss Withers went on. “
This
is the genuine murder—the other was accidental, insincere! Remember my telling you, Oscar?”

“Nonsense,” said the doctor. “This is no murder. There’s not a mark on the dead man … not even a wound that would be made by a BB.”

Miss Withers’s voice lost a trifle of its jubilance. “Doctor, can you tell me how long this man has been dead?”

Dr. Peterson said it was the easiest thing in the world. “I’ll stake my professional reputation that Mr. Gregg died between the hours of three o’clock and three-fifteen this afternoon,” he said. “And he died from excitement—apoplexy, or a kindred ailment. His blood pressure was high, always.”

The inspector, who had a prisoner, looked puzzled. “That fits,” he admitted. “The big race was run at three o’clock….”

“And I was at the track, so you can let go of my arm!” cried Abe Thomas. He wrenched out of Piper’s grasp. “I was standing in the crowd right behind you—and as the race ended I saw Miss Withers here when she pulled out tickets on every horse in the race! She looked at you, Inspector, and she said, ‘I bought a ticket on each horse—to win!’”

There was a long silence while everyone stared at the schoolteacher.

Miss Withers nodded. “So I did, Oscar.”

Piper nodded. “Well, that gives
you
a sort of alibi anyway,” he admitted as Thomas drew away in ruffled dignity.

“An excellent one, I should say,” Miss Withers put in.

“Nobody needs an alibi!” insisted the doctor with unnecessary heat. “I tell you this is a natural death.”

But everyone furnished perfect alibis all the same. “Barbara was with me all the afternoon,” Latigo Wells insisted.

Miss Withers nodded. “And she was with Mr. Fry here on the morning of her sister’s death, wasn’t she? How convenient!”

Eddie Fry said that if anybody thought he’d leave the track when an important race was being run that person needed to be sent to Bellevue for observation. Don Gregg didn’t speak very clearly at first—his tongue seemed leaden and thick. Miss Withers noticed that he kept staring toward Abe Thomas. “I was at the track,” he finally managed. “We were all at the track—and as the doctor is willing to write a death certificate, I don’t see what need there is—”

“You won’t order an autopsy, then?” queried Captain Tinker.

“Of course I won’t!” young Gregg snapped back.

“Then I will,” said the state policeman, after Piper whispered to him.

The inspector said that he knew just the man to perform it. “I’ll phone Dr. Bloom,” he said.

Miss Withers, trembling with excitement, was questioning the hysterical Mrs. Thomas.

“You didn’t leave the house all day?” demanded the schoolteacher.

Mattie Thomas shook her head. “Of course not! I didn’t even get up and dress. You see before Abe left he took Mr. Gregg his lunch, so I could stay in bed. I was in bed most of the day—I always sleep when I got nothing to do.”

“And nobody came here?” Miss Withers asked.

The woman shook her head. “How could they? Nobody’s been to this house since the nurse left last night. If they did come they couldn’t get in without ringing for me to open up….”

“And you heard nothing, noticed nothing out of the ordinary?”

The fat woman shook her head miserably.

Captain Tinker was still on the friendliest terms with the inspector, but he made it clear that this case had happened in his own bailiwick.

“They’d better all go,” he decided. “I can’t see enough evidences of foul play to make it worth while to hold any of these people,” he told Piper. “Unless you have objections?”

“If you ask me,” said the inspector truculently, “I think we ought to lock up the whole bunch and sweat the truth out of them. But it’s your show, Captain.”

“‘But we know nothing really; for truth lies deep down,’” quoted Miss Withers softly. “That’s from Euripides.”

Captain Tinker hesitated. “After all, there’s nothing to be done about it until we get an autopsy report,” decided that officer finally. “They all got pretty good reasons for coming over here. And they furnish alibis for each other, as long as they were all locked out until old Thomas got home.”

“Locked out—unless somebody had the simplest kind of a skeleton key,” Miss Withers whispered to the inspector. “Did you notice that front-door lock? I could pick it with a toothpick.”

The captain was hastening down the stairs to bring the good word to the six frightened people who waited there. The inspector was about to follow when Miss Withers beckoned to him.

“Look around this bedroom,” she said.

The inspector took in the room, with its closed windows and its rumpled bed. “Looks like Mrs. Thomas was a bit slow with her housework today,” he said.

Miss Withers nodded. “For a man who died painlessly and instantly in his armchair in the cupola, that bed is in quite some disorder,” she suggested. It was true—one sheet looked as if it had been tied into knots.

“Oscar,
this
is the real murder,” she kept repeating. “We can only glimpse it vaguely through the smoke screen that a clever killer has thrown everywhere—but this is the real genuine eighteen-carat killing.”

“Okay, but where are the clues?” Piper wanted to know. He studied the windows carefully but all were tightly screened. As he walked across the room Miss Withers noticed that his shoes grated. There was a faint film of sand on the floor. On an impulse she opened the closet door, but it was empty except for a few suits of clothes. On a hangar was Pat Gregg’s checkered coat and vest which matched the trousers which the body still wore.

Without a qualm she picked the pockets, finding them quite barren of interest. The billfold held little more than an ownership card for the station-wagon, some unpaid bills for horse feed, and a note scribbled on perfumed blue stationery. The note had been folded and unfolded until it seemed about to fall apart at the creases.

It was dated a little more than three weeks previously and signed with a flourish—“Violet Feverel.”

“I hereby acknowledge receipt of $900 back alimony,” it read. “Paid to me this day by Mr. Patrick Gregg in behalf of Mr. Don Gregg.”

The inspector stared at this sad record of a business deal between the two who now lay dead. “This receipt,” said Miss Withers thoughtfully, “secured his freedom for Don Gregg—for a few moments. That Feverel woman must have had a good laugh as she had him clapped back into jail for default of what alimony had piled up while he was locked in behind bars.”

“No wonder the old man had a heart attack when he heard she’d crossed him that way,” the inspector agreed.

They looked around the room carefully but there was nothing else of interest. The key was not in the door today, nor had it shown up among Gregg’s belongings. At least this time Thomas had not had to break down the door.

There was some meaning in all this, Miss Withers was sure. Her mind seemed full of disorganized, uncorrelated material. “Oscar, it’s like having the first two and the last two letters of a word in a crossword puzzle. All we need to do is to fill in the blank spaces….”

“Yeah,” agreed the inspector. “All we need to do is to figure out how any one of our suspects can be in two places at the same time!” He laughed dryly. Then, “What are you staring at, Hildegarde?”

“Two places at the same time …” she repeated thought fully. “Oscar, it just struck me that—”

She broke off short. With a sudden rush of ice to the back of her neck she noticed that the doorknob was beginning very softly to turn.

Her first impulse was to scream and her second to duck down behind the bed. Paralyzed, she stood and pointed. Finally the inspector caught on. It was not in him to debate—he flung himself at the door and wrenched it open. “Thomas! what in—”

But it wasn’t Abe Thomas. It was young Don Gregg—looking as if his years had come upon him all at once. There was a strange pinched look about his nostrils and his eyes were bloodshot.

“The captain says to come downstairs,” he said quickly. “Nobody is supposed to be up here until my father’s body is taken away.”

He held the door open and they hurried through. At the head of the stairs Miss Withers noticed the tall grandfather’s clock. It was not ticking now.

“‘But it stopped short—never to run again, when the old man died,’” she quoted with a shiver, staring at the inert pendulum.

Don Gregg looked at her curiously. “No, it didn’t,” he explained. “Thomas just came up and stopped it. Said it didn’t seem decent for it to go on ticking now.”

Downstairs Captain Tinker had been thinking things out for himself. “I don’t see any way that this could tie up with your murder case in the city,” he said to the inspector. “Especially on account of what Dr. Peterson says. But if you want to lend us your medical examiner, sort of sub rosa, so to speak …”

Miss Withers nudged the inspector and he nodded. “I certainly do,” he said.

Tinker nodded. “I’ll stay here in charge until he comes,” he decided. “He ought to see the body where we found it. I’ll have our own coroner here at the same time and then they can collaborate down at the mortuary in the village.”

“How very cozy!” Miss Withers remarked. She was suddenly anxious to get out of this house, away from the dull stare of Don Gregg.

“Mrs. Thomas had a fit of the vapors,” Tinker went on, “and her husband took her to the kitchen. I let the rest go—after all there’s nothing to indicate murder here and we know where to find them.”

Miss Withers’s sniff was loud enough to make the inspector wheel and face her. “What’s up, Hildegarde?”

She stared at him and shook her head. “I’m ready, Oscar,” she said, tight-lipped. “Good night, Mr. Gregg.” The young man nodded.

Captain Tinker said they could take his car and he would have one of his own men pick it up at the village. “I’ll stay here and keep the death watch,” he said with an attempt at lightness. “It’s not the first time.”

Miss Withers said politely that she hoped it was not the last and followed Piper down to the car.

“I telephoned Dr. Bloom,” the inspector told her. “He made quite a fuss but I finally got him to promise that he’d come up here. I’d feel more certain of this cerebral accident stuff if Bloom said so.”

Miss Withers sniffed again. “He won’t,” she said. “And Oscar, we’re not going to New York tonight … not if you happen to know a good dependable burglar.”

“A what?”

“A burglar,” the schoolteacher continued calmly. “Do you know of a dependable crook who can break into my apartment, take Dempsey for a walk, and feed him as per instructions?”

The inspector thought it might be possible. “Sergeant Swarthout is handy with burglar tools,” he said. “But why do you want to stay up here tonight?”

“It’s time this whole mystery was solved,” she snapped back. “And it won’t be solved by absent treatment either. I intend to stay in the front-line trenches….”

“Until Dr. Bloom finds that Gregg died a natural death?” Piper suggested with a grin. He guided the roadster out onto the main highway.

“Which he won’t!” Miss Withers stoutly retorted.

They managed to get dinner of a sort in Beaulah’s one hotel—a little country inn temporarily overflowing with racetrack followers. Miss Withers even noticed one or two of the jockeys picking daintily at dishes of lettuce and spinach, and she realized how they kept that slightness of figure and why they wore that pinched and hungry look.

Miss Withers ordered lavishly and barely touched her food. When the inspector chided her she shook her head impatiently. “I’m putting two and two together,” she explained. “Right now they add up to something in five figures plus decimal points, but I’m still trying.”

“It’s a shame we can’t get rooms,” the inspector complained. “A good night’s sleep would do wonders….”

“‘To sleep: perchance to dream’!” Miss Withers returned. “Oscar, I couldn’t sleep until I hear what Dr. Bloom reports.” Suddenly she dropped the spoon in her coffee. “Oscar! Did you hear me? ‘To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come …’”

“You’re tired, Hildegarde,” said the inspector kindly. “You’re overwrought. I’ll see if I can’t find a place for you to lie down….”

“Oscar!” she exploded. “Don’t be any more stupid than you have to be! I’m quoting Shakespeare for a reason!”

“Yeah? What reason?”

Miss Withers leaned toward him, her plain and somewhat equine visage tense with excitement. “Pat Gregg dreamed strange dreams during his other attack,” she explained breathlessly. “He dreamed of being the pendulum of a clock and then of being a red Barbary ape swinging in a tree….”

“So what? He had nightmares! I don’t make anything of that,” growled the inspector.

“No,” said Miss Withers, “you wouldn’t. But perhaps Dr. Bloom will. You wouldn’t make anything of the bullet that struck Violet Feverel’s horse, nor the horseshoe fastened to a hoe! You wouldn’t see any meaning in the dreams of a man at death’s door, nor significance of a few notes scribbled on the back of a race-track program! You wouldn’t understand …”

“About the briar pipe?” Piper grinned. “I always smoke cigars myself.”

“Forget the briar pipe, will you?” demanded Miss Withers. “Throw it overboard, it’s a Jonah.”