DR. PETERSON TOOK HIS hat from the horns of the glassy-eyed deer head which haunted the front hallway. “The old man is not to be disturbed until he wakes, understand?”
Mrs. Thomas swore that she would guard her master’s rest with every drop of blood in her veins.
“I’ll be back later this afternoon with a nurse,” continued the young medico. “I’ve given Mr. Gregg an opiate and he ought to sleep until then.” He moved brusquely toward the door, stopping when he saw that it was barred by Miss Withers and the inspector.
“What I said goes for you too,” the doctor told them. “No more third degrees.”
But Miss Withers was interested. “A nurse for Mr. Gregg, eh? Is he as ill as all that?”
The doctor frowned. “Well—no. I don’t think so. But there are some contradictory symptoms that I’d like to keep an eye on.”
“In other words, you’re not so sure that it’s apoplexy after all?”
Peterson smiled wryly. “The one thing I’m most certain of is that Mr. Gregg has had some sort of cerebral accident. But what worries me is the fact that it wasn’t fatal!”
“I beg your pardon?” Miss Withers gasped, and Piper drew closer.
“I mean,” he went on, “the attack was somehow arrested right in the middle, as if the hand of death slipped. That doesn’t happen often—but it’s a break for the old man. I’ve great hopes for his recovery now that he’s dropped off to sleep.”
“‘To sleep: perchance to dream’!” murmured Miss Withers under her breath. “To dream of being part of a clock, poor man. If I were he, Doctor, I should try my hardest to keep very much awake.” But the front door had with great finality slammed upon the doctor’s heels. The inspector moved after him.
“And where are you going, Oscar?” demanded Miss Withers.
“Back to town,” he told her. “Back where there’s a hot trail. We’re not buttering any parsnips out here.”
“That,” Miss Withers told him impolitely, “that is what you think!” But she was worried all the same. Absent-mindedly she patted the deer’s nose and then whirled suddenly to face the inspector.
“Oscar Piper, I do wish you’d stop staring at the back of my neck …”
Her voice trailed away as she saw that the inspector was engaged in dropping his cigar ash in a convenient letter box.
He looked up and grinned. “Getting the jitters, Hildegarde?”
“Perhaps,” she nodded. She stared down the hall, which ended in a dining room where the fat Mrs. Thomas was doing a bit of casual dusting. Overhead rose the ancient sagging balustrade of the stair leading to the upper hall, but that was vacant. Nobody was in the living room—there was not even a family portrait to stare down from the wall with narrow wicked eyes. That left only the deer head, unhappy symbol of man’s interpretation of the idea of fellowship with the lower orders of life. Somehow Miss Withers could not believe that the silly glass marbles which the taxidermist had used for eyes could be responsible for the uneasy feeling at the back of her neck.
“Well, Hildegarde?” pressed Piper impatiently. “Coming back to the city?”
She nodded slowly. “It’s noon, Oscar—and we’ve missed breakfast. Do you suppose that you could use your influence with La Thomas to get us a bite to eat?”
The inspector said that there was something in the idea, and when pressed, Mrs. Thomas admitted with only a second’s hesitation that she thought she could find some cold baked beans and part of a lemon pie in the larder.
“Great!” cried the inspector. “Typical Bostonian breakfast—ought to suit you to a T, Hildegarde.”
Miss Withers brightened. Just as many Hebrew gentlemen who have never been south of Chicago burst into tears when “Dixie” is played in a restaurant, the angular schoolteacher was a fervent New Englander in everything but birth. She had never quite forgiven her parents for migrating from Back Bay to Iowa a few weeks before her advent into this world.
But with her duty came first—even before the allure of baked beans and coffee. She sat down at the dining-room table, as it happened in a chair which stood very close to the wall. Suddenly she drew a sharp breath and cocked her head.
“Oscar, do you hear anything?”
“Sure,” answered the inspector jovially. “I can hear chickens cackling, birds twittering, bees buzzing, and that she-horse in the pasture whinnying to her colt. This place is noisier than a subway station.”
That wasn’t quite what Miss Withers had meant. “Don’t you hear noises upstairs—like soft footsteps?”
He listened. “Nary a footstep, Hildegarde. But what if there were? It’s probably Thomas.”
Miss Withers had forgotten the little man. After all he had a perfect right upstairs, and no doubt several good reasons for being there.
“Stop jittering and eat,” counseled the inspector as Mrs. Thomas appeared with plates and cups. “Do you good.”
Miss Withers nodded and tried to relax. But after a moment she rose suddenly to her feet, murmuring something about powdering her nose. The inspector stared after her wonderingly, for it was his belief that her somewhat prominent beak had not been powdered since the Taft administration.
She hurried up the stairs alone, trying to move as softly as possible. But a chorus of squeaks from the sagging steps accompanied her, and she found the upper landing deserted. Even the face of a looming grandfather’s clock seemed alien and unfriendly. It struck the half hour—eleven-thirty.
For a moment she stood stock-still, wishing for the comforting presence of the little dog Dempsey at her heels, wishing for the black cotton umbrella which had proved so useful a weapon in the past—even almost wishing that the inspector had accompanied her. She shrugged her shoulders and tiptoed down the hall.
There were three doors opening off this upper hall, three closed doors and the gaping space where a way had been broken into the old man’s bedroom. She tried the handle of the first door. It turned, and she opened softly and peered within. Here was only a bathroom, grim and horrible. The streaked iron tub was mounted upon four lion’s claws, and the washbowl bore the decoration of an excessively over-painted wreath of roses. For a moment she stared at her face in the uncertain mirror and then she closed the door. Nothing evil lurked in this room—nothing but that atrocity of a bathtub.
The next door opened on dusty hinges to disclose a room cluttered with worn-out riding boots, dusty saddles, countless bits of leather and harness, empty gun racks, and old trunks and suitcases spilling forth faded blue silks and mouse-gnawed horse blankets. There was a ripe rich smell of horses and leather and dust. Several spiders had set up extended engineering operations here, vast webs which swung from the ceiling and which were undisturbed as far as the schoolteacher could see.
She closed that door. There was only one left, the door nearest the broken door of the old man’s room. Here, she decided, must be the room where Abe Thomas was pursuing his mysterious and furtive purposes.
Miss Withers drew a deep breath and turned the knob. Perhaps it was her fancy, but that knob seemed a few degrees warmer than it should have been, as if someone had held it in his hand a moment or two before.
She looked into a bedroom almost as large as the old man’s, a long narrow room with windows to the south. Through the green shades, worn and tattered by the years, little pencil lines of sunlight radiated. The room was empty and airless, but as Miss Withers made a mental note of bed and bureau, table and chair, she wrinkled her nose at the faint but unmistakable odor of rich tobacco.
Quick as a flash she flung open the closet door, but found nothing more than a toy rifle, a very battered and empty suitcase, and a pair of riding boots, badly worn and scuffed.
Frowning, she surveyed the room again. This must, she felt, be Donald Gregg’s room, or the room which had been his before his marriage. The walls were decorated with Rolf Armstrong girls torn from the covers of College Humor. Over the mirror, in a frame evidently intended for a much larger picture, was a photograph of a face which she recognized with a start. It was the girl who had called herself Violet Feverel, smiling a very wide and toothy smile and clasping to her very insufficiently clad bosom a tube of tooth paste.
But if Miss Withers was sure of anything at this stage of the game it was that the footsteps she had heard were not made by Violet Feverel. Turning aside from the advertisement she went out into the hall again. There remained only the room in which the sick man lay. Softly she tiptoed down the hall and through the broken door of the old man’s bedroom.
The shades had been drawn again and the room was filled with the sound of heavy, irregular breathing. Pat Gregg’s round, somewhat blurred face seemed as pale now as it had been livid before.
“If he’s asleep I won’t bother him and if he’s awake it won’t matter,” she salved her conscience. Softly she crossed the room, while the man on the bed remained comfortably immobile. She went up the steep stairs at the farther end of the room, pressed against the trap door, and found that it lifted easily.
There was no sound from above, and risking everything on one rash plunge, she climbed into the cupola and let the trap door drop back softly beneath her. She found that she stood in a tiny room perhaps nine feet square, with a large window in the center of each wall. One window was open, and its chintz curtain flapped in the breeze.
She was alone—in spite of her certainty that here she would find the one who had padded softly up and down the hall.
From the walls, filling every available inch of space, half a hundred thoroughbreds looked down at her. It was horses, horses everywhere—horses in photographs, etchings, copies of paintings—and beneath each picture such deathless names of Exterminator, Sun Beau, Gallant Fox, Man o’ War and Cavalcade.
Above the battered oak desk was a large photograph of a galloping horse with a monkeylike exercise boy perched on his neck. She recognized without difficulty her acquaintance of the morning, the big red horse called Siwash. Next to his was a smaller picture, a little out of place among so many thoroughbreds she thought. It was of a young man and woman coming down the steps of the Little Church Around the Corner—and the man’s face was one that she had last observed on the bottom of a parakeet’s cage. The girl, of course, was Violet Feverel.
“Mr. and Mrs. Don Gregg,” Miss Withers observed to herself. “In happier days than this, I’ll warrant.”
Besides the desk, which was a litter of racing charts, records of past performances and breeding histories, there was nothing in the room except a low stool and—surprising enough—a good-sized telescope mounted upon a tripod.
“Heavens,” Miss Withers exclaimed. “The man’s an astronomer!” She crouched down and peered wonderingly into the shining instrument, but only the absolute darkness of outer space met her eye. Then it occurred to her to remove the eyepiece and she had better results.
She found that the telescope had not been aimed at the stars of heaven, but through a gap in the elms and into a neighboring valley about a mile to the south. With a little adjustment of the knob, before Miss Withers’s surprised blue eyes there appeared a portion of brown trampled earth. As she peered, she saw a massive red truck come momentarily into her field of vision, with a sharp-toothed drag hitched on behind. She could even see the clods of earth fly up from the soft track.
There was a pause, and then came a colored boy perched on a fat bay, one hand leading—or being led by—a prancing, eager race horse who wanted more exercise than he was being granted.
Miss Withers stood up and nodded. Of course—she should have remembered that Beaulah Park was in this vicinity.
“What an excellent method of saving admittance fees!” she observed.
But this was not what she had come to see. She poked busily among the papers on the desk but found little which seemed to have bearing on the case at hand. There were no letters, no signs of pipe or tobacco.
As a last resort she looked underneath the green blotter. Here was only a folded announcement of the forthcoming Beaulah Park Grand Handicap, to be run on the next Saturday. On the margin of the announcement, in shaky handwriting, she found notations which at first sight bore no meaning for her.
Roberman says maybe $500 at 25 to one, 5 more at 20….
Toby Kyte will take any amt at 20 to one…. Bard says up to $200 at 30….
Somehow Miss Withers suspected that this had to do with gambling and for lack of a better clue she folded the announcement and tucked it into her handbag along with the muddy briar pipe which still tantalized her.
She was about to raise the trap door when another idea occurred to her. She went back to the window and studied the flapping chintz curtain. Then she peered out upon the shingles, which sloped steeply away toward the eaves. It would not be impossible for a man to descend, or even climb up along that route, given a ladder to reach from the eaves to the ground, but it seemed highly improbable.
“Dear me,” observed the schoolteacher unhappily, “have I got to resort to the idea of a secret passage at my time of life? Yet otherwise how could that Thomas person have eluded me?”
She received another shock at that moment. Looking from the window she noticed that a lively bit of drama was taking place in the green pasture. There Abe Thomas with a bridle in his hand was endeavoring to capture the fat mare, who kept dancing tantalizingly out of his reach.
Beside her, kicking up his heels in sheer delight at being alive, the red colt galloped.
“Then who in heaven’s name have I been stalking up and down the halls?” the schoolteacher asked herself. She received no answer.
Trembling with excitement Miss Hildegarde Withers descended again to the bedroom. She felt like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific. Only, she reminded herself, in spite of Keats it wasn’t Cortez at all, it was Balboa. Nor did he recognize the ocean at which he stared. But the “wild surmise” part of the poem, that was genuine.
She tiptoed softly across the room. The irregular breathing continued, and suddenly she remembered something that she had once read. She turned and stood beside the bed.
“Fake!” accused Miss Hildegarde Withers.
The breathing changed into a surprised gurgle. “Eh?” gasped Pat Gregg feebly.
“I said ‘fake,’” she told him, not unkindly. “When you try to simulate sleep, see that your breathing is regular.”
“Well,” said the old man calmly, “I had to get rid of that officious fool of a doctor somehow.”
“Yes, of course,” she hastily agreed. “Tell me one thing and then I’ll let you remain alone with your thoughts. Just who in this wide world would have any reason to kill you?”
“Kill me?” Pat Gregg tried to rise up in bed. “I’ve been asking myself the same question ever since my dog was poisoned. There’s only one answer to that—Violet Feverel!”
“But she’s in the morgue!”
He nodded. “Makes me rest easier to know that. You see, she’s the only person who could gain by my death. She knew she’d milked the last cent out of me that she could. My son couldn’t pay her alimony and she had him thrown in jail.”
Miss Withers was mildly amazed. “Jail for debt? I thought that went out with Mr. Micawber.”
“Contempt of court they call it,” he told her. “The judge decreed that my son should pay three hundred dollars a month alimony or a flat settlement of fifteen thousand. He couldn’t pay the monthly rate, so she got a judgment against him for the fifteen. But none of it did her any good—not even putting Donny behind the bars. Because he gets nothing from me until I’m dead!”
He sank back on the pillows. “It cheers me up to think that even if I do cash in my tickets one of these days, she won’t collect at the pay-off window.”
“You’re not going to die,” Miss Withers comforted him.
“No? Want to make a little bet on that? But not right away, I hope. Got a lot of things to do.”
“What things?” Miss Withers pressed.
He smiled. “I want to live to see that red colt in the pasture romp home in the Futurity,” he said dreamily. “Like poor old Siwash tried to do and couldn’t. And I want to get Siwash back from that buzzard of a woman—only she’s dead, isn’t she? Anyway, I want to see him run again. And I want …”
“You’re a rather horrible old man,” said Miss Withers.
He laughed in her face. “You don’t think that really,” he croaked. “I know women—like I know horses. Pretty much alike when you get to know ’em. You got to master both, a bit of spur and plenty of whip. That was the trouble with Siwash, he was such a blasted pet that the jockeys never had the heart to whip him into front position. Siwash was beaten many a time by poorer horses…”
“And that’s why you gave him away?”
He shook his head. “Siwash wasn’t as bad as that—he was known as the best second-rate horse on the track. I figured that Violet and my son would race him, maybe build up a stable around him. Only that vain peacock of a woman …”
“Buzzard, didn’t you say?” Miss Withers corrected.
“She was both,” Pat Gregg went on. “She insisted on having Siwash broken to be a saddle horse so she could look like a picture in the rotogravure section when she went out to ride. Bah!”
He turned his face to the pillow. “Now I’m going to sleep,” he dismissed her. “Want to get rid of this buzzing in my head.”
“Pleasant dreams,” said Miss Withers. Swiftly she leaned down and felt of the slippers which lay at the foot of the bed. They were cold—and yet the footsteps she had heard in the hall were not those of bare feet. It was not until too late that she remembered that Pat Gregg might have jumped back into bed with his shoes on.
Downstairs she found a plate of cold and soggy beans awaiting her. Mrs. Thomas brought coffee, lukewarm and thin. Then, as the woman waddled back to her kitchen, Miss Withers leaned toward the inspector.
“I’ve found something, Oscar!”
“Yeah? Well, so have I!” Somewhat bitterly the inspector lifted a dank and unpleasant-looking hair from the uneaten portion of his lemon pie. “And I’ve listened to the inside story of the great romance between Mr. and Mrs. Abe Thomas. It seems that they got married last year after half a lifetime of both working for the old man—a love story fit for Real Confessions Magazine, according to the way the old girl tells it. And she calls him ‘Ducky’!”
“Who?” Miss Withers asked absently.
“Him—the little guy who’s been chasing that she-horse ever since you went upstairs….” The inspector pointed out through the window.
“You listen to me,” Miss Withers insisted. “Oscar, you remember the cupola and its open window? Well, it rained last night—but just now I sneaked up there and found that the curtain was dry and unstained, and the papers on the little desk the man keeps up there were not even disturbed!”
“Well?” The inspector pushed back his chair. “What of it?”
“This!” she snapped. “Pat Gregg was locked in his room where he had an attack of apoplexy sometime early this morning, according to the doctor. Anyway he had no reason to climb to the cupola and open the window. Yet the only entrance to the cupola is through that bedroom, and since the rain stopped the cupola window has been opened!”
“Huh?” The inspector frowned heavily. “Well, couldn’t it have been Thomas who opened it, after he broke down the door?”
She shook her head. “There wasn’t time enough, even if he had an urge for fresh air and a view of the countryside. We heard the crash of the door and only a few seconds later the little man burst past us crying for the doctor.”
“That’s right,” Piper admitted. “But somebody could have hidden up there before the old man went to bed last night—somebody who waited until this morning after the rain, opened the window for some fresh air, and then slipped down and …” Piper’s voice died away. “But why should a midnight prowler want fresh air, and how could he hand his victim a dose of apoplexy? It doesn’t add up.”
“It will, before we finish with this case,” she told him. “We’re at a dead end now and these beans are soggy. Suppose we go back to town.”
Surprisingly enough it was Mrs. Mattie Thomas who protested most loudly against their departure. “I feel so much safer with you folks here,” she insisted. “If you’d only stay the night—or at least until the nurse gets here.”
The schoolteacher shook her head. “But the nurse should arrive soon—”
Mrs. Thomas bridled. “Dr. Peterson insisting that Mr. Gregg needs a nurse, with me ready and willing to smooth his pillow! I’d work my fingers to the bone for him.” She waved a fat and languid hand in the air.
Abe Thomas, who had finally corralled his mare, was less insistent. “If you got to go, you got to go,” he admitted. “All the same I don’t like the look of things. I wish—I wish Master Don was home.”
“By the way,” Miss Withers pressed, “you both knew him as a child. What sort of person is Donald Gregg?”
“A fine young man,” said Thomas quickly. “If only he could get the curse of gambling out of his soul. He’d gamble on anything, like his father. Only he’s unluckier, if that’s possible.”
“Unlucky at cards, unlucky at love,” observed the inspector dryly. “Young Gregg seems to have been born with two strikes on him.”
“Doesn’t he!” agreed Miss Withers. She faced Abe Thomas. “You say that you’re not addicted to gambling on the horses?”
“Me?” He laughed. “I know too much about the game. It’s a mug’s racket. If a man could plunge once, win, and then stay out he’d be all right. But nobody can—it all goes back to the bookies.” Mr. Thomas’s face expressed a fine scorn for the sport of kings. “Look at the old man upstairs—doctor won’t let him go to the races any more so he has a watch-tower built and a telescope installed just so he can see the finish line at Beaulah Park. Me, I put my money where it belongs, in the bank.”
“Our money, Ducky,” corrected the fat woman coyly.
“Ours then,” Abe Thomas amended. “Now if you folks want to be driven back to the station …”
As they climbed into the station-wagon again, Miss Withers looked thoughtfully back toward the Gregg house, her mind filled with question marks. Up the pasture slope she noticed a red colt standing under a Golden Transparent apple tree and stretching his neck toward the unripe fruit. There was a tall ladder leaning against the upper branches, but young Comanche was not aware of the purposes to which a ladder might be put. Miss Withers, on the other hand, was.
A few minutes later she was jolting back toward the city in a half-empty day coach. The inspector was fretting. “I ought to have stayed in town,” he insisted. “Lord only knows what the boys have been doing on the Feverel case. Just my luck to have some fresh newspaper laddie stumble on the thing and spread it all over the front pages….”
“This case will not be washed up as easily as all that,” Miss Withers pointed out. “Oscar, what do you know about betting on the races?”
He looked at the schoolteacher with amusement. “Got the bug, Hildegarde? Going to plunge on the big handicap next Saturday? The best thing for you to do is to follow Thomas’s advice and keep away from the bookies. Or if you must bet, put your money on the favorite to show and you can’t lose much.”
“Don’t be silly!” was her rejoinder. “I just wanted to know.”
“Don’t kid me,” Piper told her. “You’ve got the yen, I can tell. Better stick to teaching kids their A B Cs, Hildegarde.”
“Indeed?” She glared at him. “If I did that, where would you be?” And they rode the rest of the way into Grand Central in silence.
New York City stagnated under the weight of a Sunday afternoon, with even the asphalt of its deserted streets sizzling peacefully in the hot sun. The inspector was much relieved to find that no extra newspapers were being hawked on the corners. Evidently the death of a solitary equestrienne had not awakened the curiosity of bored city editors. “Which,” said Piper fervently, “is a break.”
Miss Withers found herself propelled toward a taxicab. “What next, for heaven’s sake?” she queried.
The inspector lit a fresh cigar. “Hildegarde, haven’t you begun to wonder, during the events of the forenoon, just what, who, where and why is the lad named Don Gregg? Well, we’re going to ask him a couple of questions. That’s why I told the driver to take us to alimony jail….”
They came down Thirty-seventh Street and drew up before a drab and ancient building—four stories of faded red brick which wore a tenement-style fire escape down its front and heavy iron lattice-work at every window.
“‘A home away from home,’” quoted Miss Withers. “Cheery place, isn’t it, Oscar?”
“You should have seen Ludlow Street Jail before the rats gnawed it to pieces,” Piper told her. “The alimony-dodgers think this’s a palace compared with that.”
They went up the steps, through an open gate, and rang a bell.
After a long wait the door was opened by a guard in a blue uniform. He needed a shave and looked very unhappy.
“We want to see Donald Gregg,” said the inspector. “And don’t tell us he isn’t in!”
The guard tried to shut the door in their faces. “This isn’t visiting hours,” he announced.
“I happen to know that it is visiting hours,” Piper snapped back. “Come on, open up!”
“I—I’ll tell the deputy warden,” said the guard. The door closed and he was gone a long time. Finally he returned, looking more unhappy than ever.
Behind him was a man in plain clothes, equally unshaven and still more lugubrious of countenance.
“I’m the deputy warden,” he admitted. “Sorry, but you can’t see Mr. Gregg.”
“And why the hell not?” demanded Piper, who had stood about enough. He flashed his badge.
“You can come in if you want to, Inspector,” said the deputy. He swung the door wide.
The hallway smelled of strong soap, of cabbage, tobacco and humanity. They went up one flight of stairs and through a long room filled with uneasy easy chairs and tables. Here a few men in their shirt sleeves were playing cards or reading newspapers. They all looked as if they had headaches. In one corner a large blue-black Negro was singing to the accompaniment of a cigar-box ukulele:
“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….”