AS THEY WENT UP the slope toward the park gate Siwash bent his heavy-sculptured neck and touched a velvet muzzle to Barbara’s leg, leaving a wet mark on the old pair of flannel slacks which the girl had pressed into service as a riding habit. He whinnied uneasily, remembering another morning….
Siwash liked the soft feel of the bridle path underhoof. He tossed his head and waltzed sidewise, whinnying. His rider’s hand was heavy on the rein, heavy and uncertain. The big red horse tried to be philosophic about it, but the ache to run was making him fairly tremble. Months of bridle-path cantering had not sufficed to erase the memory of those glorious mornings of breezing around the track, those tense and wonderful afternoons with the crowd roaring in the grandstand. He had learned a lesson too well.
Then, miracle of miracles, it happened. His rider, that pleasant young female human, gripped his barrel with her knees so that her heels touched his ribs and at the same time the reins tightened and then fell slackly on his neck.
Siwash plunged as if somewhere a bell had clanged, bounding furiously ahead in the ground-covering leaps that his long red legs were born to make. There was a short cry, presumably of encouragement, from his rider and the heels pressed more tightly against his belly. Here was a rider after his own heart, an understanding human who loved to race against time! Siwash put his head down, since still there was no restraint from the bit, and really demonstrated what a race horse can do when he puts his mind to it.
There was no touch of the bit on his mouth, for the excellent reason that Babs had dropped the reins to adjust her unaccustomed foot in one of the stirrups. Now the leathers were flung wildly in the wind as the paralyzed girl clung to the pommel with both hands and prayed….
On they rocketed northward through the cheerful stretches of Central Park in the sunny morning. Bleary men dropped their newspapers and stood erect on park benches as Siwash went thundering by. A woman screamed somewhere and a dog yapped sharply. Babs could hear the yap of the dog very loud and clear … she wondered if it would be the last thing she would hear, besides the thunder of those hoofs beneath her…. “And there are so many things I want to do with my life,” she cried inwardly.
They rounded a turn without slackening speed and Barbara saw that just ahead a uniformed nursemaid was wheeling a baby carriage across the bridle path. There was a second of horror etched forever on Barbara’s memory—centered in the white face and gaping dark mouth of the nurse who was frozen to the handle of the baby carriage….
Barbara couldn’t scream, but she managed to shut her eyes. If she didn’t see it, perhaps the inevitable tragedy would have no real existence, remaining forever in the nightmare world to be forgotten when she finally awakened.
Siwash swerved to pass the unexpected obstacle, but on one side was the nurse, on the other two bystanders who were dashing forward in an attempt to seize the sleeping child. The big red horse had no choice in the matter. As Barbara clung blindly to his back she felt a sudden tightening of his muscles and then there was a long moment poised in the air and Siwash came down on his slim forelegs, well on the other side of the carriage. Barbara’s cheek received a hard bump from an arched rising neck. They were over the hurdle—over and away.
The girl now had her arms tight around his neck, a variation in riding form which puzzled Siwash considerably. He was ready for a signal to collect his pace, sensing that something had gone wrong at that last crossing. But no signal came. Instead there were shouts from behind, human voices quivering with fear and excitement. Siwash didn’t know what the voices were saying, but he immediately caught the note of hysteria. Someone was chasing him….
He lunged forward, faster than ever. The girl on his back, daring to breathe again, felt for the stirrup she had lost. She found it, lost it again…. “Eddie!” she moaned softly. “Somebody …”
Just ahead was the arch of the viaduct. Siwash, like all horses running with his eyes on the ground, saw the curving dark shadow and remembered what had happened here only yesterday morning. He shied wildly.
Babs, her weight mostly on one stirrup, gripped at his mane with both hands. The big red horse rocked awkwardly—and then suddenly his rider felt herself going off over his side, saddle and all. She struck the ground directly underneath him, and a dark gray curtain came down over her brain.
Central Park was calm and peaceful in the morning sunlight as the squad car from headquarters came tearing up the parkway. “I don’t see anything wrong!” the inspector was saying.
They were heading northward. “What you don’t see would fill a book!” Miss Withers snapped. “Keep going—and faster!”
At Seventy-second they saw a horse and rider galloping northward along the bridle path. “There she is!” cried the inspector.
“Look again,” Miss Withers retorted. “Barbara Foley doesn’t wear a blue uniform.” It was a mounted officer. Miss Withers had seen a lot of mounted police in her day, but she realized that until this moment she had never seen one whipping his horse.
“It’s Casey!” cried the driver of the squad car. “He must have got wind of something….”
Piper pointed to the left and suddenly the squad car left the parkway, smashed through a thin railing and rolled across a lawn. Then a sharp turn to the right and they were on the bridle path, the speeding car swerving dangerously as its tires spun in the dirt. A moment later they were alongside Casey and his fat brown horse.
The mounted cop shouted incomprehensible things. They could catch the words “runaway” and “girl.”
“Come on,” roared Piper. The mounted cop swung from his saddle to the running board of the squad car. His horse galloped after the car for a little way and then snorted indignantly as he found himself left behind.
“Girl—going hell-bent,” Casey was gasping. “Tried to catch her, but my horse couldn’t catch up.”
“If you boys weren’t so sentimental about those horses you’d have been transferred to motorcycles years ago,” Piper snapped. They careened around a corner where on one side of the crossing a little crowd had gathered around a hysterical nursemaid and a crowing, gurgling baby in its carriage. But the squad car did not stop.
Eighty-sixth Street—and there was a screaming of brakes. The squad car skidded to a stop and the pursuers piled out to see a girl lying sprawled in the shadow of the viaduct, a small, helpless-looking girl with tossed auburn hair.
Standing almost over her body was a big red race horse, his curving neck bent as he nosed softly but impatiently at her shoulder. He pawed at the ground with one delicate hoof.
Siwash moved aside as the newcomers came closer, stepping gingerly over the fallen girl. The inspector flung himself to his knees, Miss Withers beside him. Casey caught the trailing bridle and led Siwash out of the way.
“Is she—is she dead, Oscar?” Miss Withers’s voice was harsh.
Piper put his fingers on forehead and over heart, then lifted an eyelid. He held up his hand. “Smelling salts, Hildegarde!”
They were produced and waved under the pinched nose of the girl on the bridle path. “Come on, come on,” the inspector was saying under his breath. “Takes more than this to kill anybody by the name of Foley!”
“Sure!” agreed Casey. Then—“Stop it, you red divvil….” Siwash kept on rubbing his sweaty nose against the blue shoulder, which was rough and very comforting to a worried and unhappy thoroughbred. Besides, Casey smelled of horse.
“She’s out cold,” Piper was saying. “We’ve got to get her to a hospital. Come on, help me lift her….”
The driver of the squad car bent to take Barbara’s shoulder. But the voice of Miss Hildegarde Withers cut in rudely upon the proceedings.
“There he goes!” she cried sharply. “Get him!”
The officers looked up to see a rustling of the bushes on the slope above them. Casey and the police chauffeur lunged forward as one man, swarming up the slope.
It was all over in a moment. A young man in a light flannel ice-cream suit was plucked back just as he was about to clamber over the wall to the transverse above. He was dragged down again, thrust rudely before the inspector.
“Well, if it isn’t Mr. Eddie Fry!” Miss Withers greeted him cheerily, moving away from the horse who was trying to rub his nose on the small of her back.
“What in blazes were you doing here?” roared Piper. The young man opened his mouth but no sounds came.
“He was waiting for a street car, Oscar,” Miss Withers suggested.
Eddie Fry, somewhat shaken, was pointing down at the girl. “She asked me to come here!” he insisted. “She called me up early this morning and said I was to wait here because she was trying an experiment….”
“An experiment? Talk sense.” Eddie found himself surrounded by an accusing circle of unfriendly eyes. Even Siwash seemed to glare at him.
Still he insisted. “She said she was going to try to trap yesterday’s killer by re-enacting the crime and I was to wait here in case anything did happen….”
“The experiment seems to have been a success,” Miss Withers put in dryly. “Too much of a success, in fact.”
Piper caught the young man’s shoulder. “Gambling on another long shot, eh? Well, go on with your story—what happened?”
Eddie wanted to do nothing else. “I waited here,” he rushed on, “because it was here that Violet got hers. For a long time nothing happened and I was beginning to think that the people at the stable wouldn’t let Babs have the horse after all. Then I saw her coming, but she was just managing to hang on. When they got almost here the horse jerked sidewise and she went off, saddle and all. Zowie!” Eddie gestured eloquently.
Piper turned toward the big red horse. “That plug ought to be shot before he kills anybody else….”
“No!” Eddie protested. “You didn’t see what I saw, hiding there in the bushes. When Babs went off she fell right under the horse, and I knew I was going to see her brains knocked out by his hoofs. Only he stopped spraddle-legged, so as not to touch her. Then he nosed her as if he was trying to say he was sorry….”
“Stop, you’ll have me crying,” snapped the inspector. “Put the bracelets on him, boys. We’ll let him think up a better story behind the bars.”
“It happens to be true—what he’s saying,” came a soft voice from the ground. Forgotten for the moment, Barbara was sitting up and pressing both hands to the side of her head. If she had voiced the conventional “Where am I?” nobody had heard her.
She tried to rise but fell back with a little groan. “Breath knocked out of me, that’s all,” she said. Miss Withers and the inspector each gave her an arm, and she stood up. “Please let Eddie go,” the girl begged. “He’s telling the truth.”
Piper nodded. “Yeah? Then if you’re telling such a straight story, young man, why didn’t you rush down here when you saw the girl go off her horse? Why didn’t you try to help her instead of scramming?”
Barbara looked at Eddie with the same question burning in her eyes. He looked down at the bridle path as if he expected an inspired answer to be written there.
“I thought she was dead,” he said simply. “I saw the police car coming and I—I thought I’d better beat it.”
Barbara’s eyes clouded and the inspector burst forth with “Why, you chrome-colored …”
Miss Withers stopped him. “Oscar, you mistake common sense for cowardice. If that bulge at Mr. Fry’s armpit means what I think it does, he had every reason to make himself scarce. The neighborhood of a supposedly dead girl is no place for a young man with a gun in his pocket….”
“Well, I’ve got a permit for it!” interrupted Eddie Fry ungratefully. “Of course I brought a gun along—suppose the murderer had appeared and made a pass at Babs?”
“Sir Galahad in a purple shirt,” Miss Withers murmured. “All the same,” she continued brightly, “things might have been worse. This young lady isn’t hurt seriously and it all seems to have been just an accident….”
But the inspector wasn’t so sure. He faced Barbara. “Say, who knew you were riding up this way?”
The girl shrugged. “There’s only the one curving path,” she pointed out. “You either ride in a circle to the right or the left and come back at the same gate …”
“Yeah, but what person in particular—” Piper was saying.
He was interrupted by the sound of galloping hoofs. Up the path came a small gray mare bearing on her back a heavy stock saddle trimmed with silver, and in that saddle a lean young man with a long sad upper lip. Latigo Wells was out of the saddle before the mare had stopped.
“Miss Barbara—you all right?” he gasped.
Babs pushed back a stray lock of auburn hair. Strange, Miss Withers thought, that the girl had been conscious of her appearance only when this young man came on the scene. Barbara was even managing a smile.
“I’m just fine,” she said. “Only I went on my nose like you said I would.”
“Oh, like he said you would!” Piper rasped. “Maybe we got a prophet in our midst!”
“Whoa, Salt old gal.” Latigo dropped the reins and his mare stopped. He took in the situation slowly, as if making a mental note of everything. Particularly did he stare at Eddie Fry, and there was no love in that stare.
“Accident, eh?” said Latigo. “Maybe so. It’s easy enough to fall off a horse, particularly a race horse that can’t forget how he was trained. But begging your pardon, folks, it’s not so usual for the saddle to go off too. Let’s have a look.”
They all had a look at the saddle which lay beside the spot where Barbara had fallen.
“Nice accident,” said Latigo, kneeling down. In his hand was the webbed cinch-band, which happened to be in two parts. “Fine time for the cinch to break,” he said heavily. “Worn out—have a look at it, Casey.”
The mounted cop took the cinch-band as the others gathered around. He whistled.
“Looks like the wear came all in one place, don’t it?” Casey remarked. Latigo nodded, biting his lip.
“That’s the kind of wear that could be made with a piece of sandpaper or a knife blade,” the mounted officer continued. “It sure looks like somebody wanted you to take a dive off that big red horse, miss.” Again Latigo nodded.
The inspector thoughtfully fingered the webbing. “When the horse shied, there was an extra strain on the band and she snapped?” He turned to Barbara, who was watching wide-eyed. “Who saddled this nag for you?”
“Why—it was the colored boy, the one they call High-pockets. He saddled Siwash….”
“Nobody else there?”
“Everybody was there,” Barbara went on. “You see, when I called up this morning to say I was coming down and take Siwash out, Mrs. Thwaite wasn’t very eager to have me. But she couldn’t refuse, because legally the horse is mine. When I got there Latigo tried to talk me out of it. But I said I’d ridden lots of horses on farms back home….”
“Why were you so determined to break your neck, young woman?” Miss Withers wanted to know.
The girl stared at her wonderingly. “Why—you gave me the idea! You told me when you left the apartment yesterday that I’d inherited a horse and that I ought to go down to the stables. So I took the hint!”
“That’s true,” Miss Withers admitted. “But I didn’t mean …”
“Well, I thought you did. Anyway, I had an argument with Latigo and Mrs. Thwaite settled it by saying that if I wanted to ride Siwash I could go ahead. She advised me to tie up the snaffle rein and just ride on the curb—the hard bit, you know. And her husband said to keep him to a trot….”
“Go on,” Piper told her. “Did she make any adjustments of the saddle or anything like that?”
Barbara shook her head. “No, but Latigo let out the stirrups for me. Then he rushed away somewhere and Mrs. Thwaite showed me the way to the park gate….”
“I went to telephone you,” Latigo said to the inspector. “Then I was afraid something might happen all the same so I went back to the stable and saddled old Salt to try and trail Miss Foley….”
“Then everybody had a hand in getting you started on the ride, didn’t they?” Piper asked the girl.
Barbara nodded, but Miss Withers cut in with “What difference if they did? This cinch or whatever it is could have been scraped and frayed at any convenient time yesterday or last night—”
“Yeah,” interrupted Piper. “Provided the person who did it was a clairvoyant and knew beforehand that this girl was going to ride today.”
He moved over to the squad car and opened the door. “Come on, Miss Foley, we’ll run you home. You’ve had a bad shaking up.”
But Barbara hesitated. Eddie Fry sprang into the breach. “If I’m not under arrest,” he said, “I’d like to drive Babs home. My old bus is right up on the roadway.”
The girl’s eyes wavered from his eager glance to where Latigo Wells was methodically gathering up the horses’ reins preparatory to leading them both back to the stable.
Her red mouth tightened faintly. “Thanks, but I’m not going home just now,” she said. She went over and took Siwash’s reins from the ex-cowboy. “I’ll walk back with you,” she said.
“Returning with her horse or on it, like the Spartan youths,” Miss Withers told the inspector. They watched the big red thoroughbred as he ambled quietly along in step with the little gray mare.
The inspector frowned. “Casey, you might trail along behind and see that no more accidents happen to Miss Foley on the way home.” He looked toward Eddie Fry. “As for you …”
Miss Withers whispered quickly in his ear.
“Huh? Okay….” The inspector climbed into the squad car. “Home, James,” he grunted. They moved noisily away in the direction of the parkway.
Miss Hildegarde Withers found herself alone with a very nervous young man in a loud suit. “I just prevented your arrest, young man,” she announced, stretching the truth a little. “You owe me some information.”
“I told you …” he began.
“Wait,” she said. “It’s about that gun in your pocket, for which you have such a nice legal permit. It’s an air pistol, isn’t it?”
Eddie looked blank. Then he took the gun out of his upper vest pocket and showed it to her. “Better protection than any air gun,” he explained. “I need an automatic, because sometimes I bring home a big wad of money from the race track.”
“You’re sure it isn’t an air pistol?” insisted the dubious schoolteacher.
He shot out the clip and showed her the thick, snub-nosed cartridges. She nodded. “Very well, I’ll trust you to drive me home. On the way you can tell me what, if anything, you found out about the matter of those race-track wagers I asked you to look up.”
It was little enough, as it turned out. Eddie Fry seemed sorry. “I thought I was going to wash up this case like nothing,” he began. “But your idea was a fluke, lady. I called up a pal of mine who works for Kyte, the big bookmaker. Finally he got the boss to come to the phone. But it was a false alarm….”
“What? You mean Gregg didn’t phone him?”
“He phoned him all right,” said Eddie. “Old man Gregg called Kyte a couple of weeks ago and sort of finagled around trying to find out the best odds he could get for a big wad of dough on the nose of a nag called Wallaby that’s running next Saturday at Beaulah. Only he didn’t place the bet with Kyte or anybody else because, if he had, the odds on that horse would have dropped and as it is they’re getting longer every day. A dollar bet on him will bring you thirty if he wins.”
Miss Withers nodded brightly. “And if he doesn’t win?”
“You’ll get nothing, of course,” the young man told her wearily. “Except the sleigh-ride.”
“That,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers, “is the trouble with betting on the races.”
They rode on for a few moments in silence, Eddie Fry bent glumly over the wheel of his little roadster. His foot was flat against the floor boards as they sped out of the park and southward….
“No hurry,” Miss Withers finally ventured to remark.
“There sure is,” Eddie retorted. “I don’t mind dropping you off, but then I’m going to get down to see Babs and have a good talk with her. That kid has got a lot of screwy ideas in her head.”
“I wouldn’t go to see her right away,” the schoolteacher suggested gently. “Let her cool off a little. Besides, I think it’s likely that she’ll have a caller at her home.”
“Huh?”
“I’m not a gambling man,” Miss Withers said, “but it seems a sure thing to me that Latigo Wells will take her home after they leave the horses at the stable. Just to make sure she’s all right, of course.”
“Latigo Wells!” said Eddie, managing to make the name sound like profanity. “His hair is full of hayseeds.”
“Hayseeds?” The word reminded Miss Withers of something. She saw a drugstore on the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and hastily ordered Eddie to pull up to the curb.
“I won’t be a moment,” she promised. She rushed inside and sought a telephone booth. Luckily she had change in her purse, and without more than the usual delay she heard the clicking of receivers on a party line in upstate New York.
A distant operator rang four short rings, again and again. Finally a woman’s cheery voice chirped “Hello!” and the operator enunciated a crisp “Here’s your party!”
“Hello, hello,” cried Miss Withers. “Is this the Gregg home—is that you, Mrs. Thomas?”
It was nobody else. “This is very important,” said the schoolteacher. “When did your husband leave for New York?”
“What? You mean Abe?” Mrs. Thomas gave a muffled laugh. “Why, Abe didn’t leave for no place, he’s right here!”
So he was, for he took the telephone. “When did you get back from the city?” Miss Withers kept on hopefully.
“Me? Say, I haven’t been anywhere. Not since I drove back with you folks yesterday.” The gloomy little man seemed oddly annoyed by the suggestion.
“By the way”—Miss Withers tried a new tack—“how is the sick man?”
“Mr. Gregg is lots better,” Abe Thomas announced.
“So much better that he left the house this morning?” prompted Miss Withers. She waited breathlessly.
“Say, what’s—I beg your pardon. Mr. Gregg is up and around, but the nurse won’t let him out of the house.”
“Could you call him to the phone, then?”
She learned that Mr. Gregg could not descend the stairs to the telephone, in spite of his miraculous recovery. Her shot in the dark had scored a clean miss. “Then will you please ask Mr. Don Gregg to come to the telephone?” she said.
This time Thomas hesitated for a moment. “Mr. Don Gregg,” he said distinctly, “is not here.”
“Where is he then?”
Thomas didn’t know. He insisted that he had seen neither hide nor hair of his young master these many moons. “His father is mighty anxious to see him too,” Thomas added.
“Thank you so much,” Miss Withers told him. She put down the receiver and said, “… for nothing!”
Weary and disappointed she came out of the phone booth. “At least I have Eddie,” she reminded herself. “And he knows more than anybody has been able to get out of him yet.”
But it was distinctly not her lucky day, for when she came out of the drugstore she found that Eddie Fry and his little roadster were unaccountably missing.
She came upon the inspector at his desk brooding over a meager assortment of clues. There was the tobacco pipe with the discolored silver band, a slightly flattened pellet of lead which had cut a girl’s throat, and a garden hoe with a horseshoe oddly fitted to its blade. These were all.
“Having fun, Oscar?” she greeted him. “‘And all my toys about me lay, to keep me happy through the day,’” she quoted. “How are you doing?”
He shook his head. “No prints on any of this stuff, of course. Water kills ’em; so does mud. Hildegarde, we haven’t got anything yet.”
“Haven’t we!” She told him about the bets which Gregg had not made on the forthcoming race at Beaulah Park. “The old man was all set to put a small fortune on a certain horse,” she explained. “Something or someone made him change his mind.”
“And you figure that someone is our murderer?” Piper shook his head wearily. “I can’t go out and arrest everybody who didn’t bet his shirt on the big race, Hildegarde.”
“I know you can’t,” she said. “Anyway, you’d do better to arrest all the people in this investigation who have false teeth!”
“What?” The inspector grinned. “Still harping on what they told you about the pipe, eh? Supposing your hunch is correct—I can’t go out arresting people wholesale and making them show their teeth. There was a time when you could spot a set of phony teeth a block away, but not any more. They’re making them better. And what a story for the feature sections—” Piper snorted. “‘POLICE SEEK KILLER WITH TEETH AS FALSE AS HIS HEART’ … no, Hildegarde….”
“There ought to be a way of finding out without arresting the suspects and tugging at their teeth,” the schoolteacher came back. “But meanwhile can’t we look over our list of persons involved and figure out who might fit the description of the man who smoked that pipe I found under the body?”
Piper cocked his head on one side. “Yeah? Well, everything was general except the part about the teeth. He might be middle-aged, probably a man with money, world traveler, very nervous … luxurious tastes …”
“It could fit the old man, Mr. Gregg,” Miss Withers suggested. “Though I didn’t find any signs of tobacco, not even a pipe cleaner, in his desk.”
“It could fit that Abe Thomas,” Piper told her. “At least, he’s the right age. You know, I don’t like that gloomy little guy. He’s hiding something—and remember, he said he drove into town in the morning and we know he left the farm before sunset. There’s a break he made.”
Miss Withers nodded absently. “Thomas is lying, certainly. But so are a lot of others in this case. No, we can’t solve it by spotting lies….”
“Only I can’t figure out how Thomas had a motive to kill the Feverel dame,” Piper continued soberly. “Maybe it was loyalty to the family, only I can’t quite swallow that. Old man Gregg had a motive and so did the boy who was in alimony jail. Only the old man could hardly kill her and have an attack of whatever it was all at the same time. And the boy—we’ve checked his alibi. He really was in the Turkish bath that night—he was sleeping soundly in one of the cots at the time the girl was killed.”
“Really?” Miss Withers looked surprised.
Piper nodded. “Him and a friend of his—a little guy who fits the description of the phony deputy sheriff. They had their rubdowns about two in the morning and the rubber wrapped them up each in a sheet and put them to bed in adjoining cots. They were still there in the morning….”
“And they couldn’t have got up and gone out, together or separately—and then returned?”
“The people at the baths said not,” Piper admitted. “But they admitted business was pretty slack that night … so they weren’t on their toes.”
“It sounds like a genuine alibi,” Miss Withers admitted. “They could easily have faked a better one than that. I always suspect a watertight alibi, Oscar. All the same …”
“I don’t figure Mrs. Thwaite as the killer,” Piper went on. “Even though she wants that Siwash horse pretty bad. Seems that she’s set on riding him in horse shows or something. Besides, she wouldn’t smoke a pipe….”
“Her husband might,” Miss Withers retorted. “He’s the sort of man who’d do what he was told.”
“And if Mrs. Thwaite wanted murder done, she’d do it herself,” Piper snapped back. “She wouldn’t trust it to the little vet. As for your little friend Eddie, he has an alibi. He was with Barbara, they both swear. And Latigo Wells—where would the motive come in? Besides, he rolls his own cigarettes instead of smoking a pipe.” The inspector shook his head. “No, Hildegarde, this murder is tied up in seventeen layers of smoke screens.”
“I’d cut through them quick enough if I knew just who in this case wears false teeth!” Miss Withers insisted obstinately. They were interrupted as the outer door opened and a frowsy, plump little old woman poked in an ingratiating face.
Over one arm she carried a basket. “Apples today, gentleman? Nice apples?”
Piper fished in his pocket and found a dime. “Keep the apple, Auntie,” he said kindly.
But Miss Withers’s face wore an expression of ecstasy. She snatched her purse and produced two dollars. “I want to buy all the apples you have!” she announced.
She said afterward that it was worth the two dollars to see the look on the inspector’s face.