LESS 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.”
“That’s just dandy,” said Oscar Piper. “Well, where’s the weapon?”
“There ain’t any, Inspector.”
“Well, we can’t have everything. Where’s the wound?”
“There ain’t any, Inspector!” Burke stared dubiously down at the stiffening corpse. “Must of been stabbed in the back, where it doesn’t show. There was blood on the horse and that proved she didn’t die from the fall like they thought at first. It seems to me—”
Piper grunted. “Don’t tell me you figured this all out for yourself, Sergeant!”
The detective shook his head. “The radio boys gets the credit, Inspector. They said they figured it out just as soon as the old maid butted in leading the horse which had run away….”
“Oh,” said Piper. He lit a match and let it go out in his fingers as an expression of incredulous amazed wonder crossed his face. “What’s this about the old maid? What old maid? Who are you talking about, and where is she?”
Sergeant Burke licked his lips. “Why—just a nosy old maid who was always butting in. Just another nut gone haywire about murders. So I told her to scram….”
The inspector took his cigar out of his mouth and thoughtfully broke it into little pieces. He nodded in smiling approval. “Go on—so you figured she was a nut and you threw her out?”
“Yeah, Inspector. But we got her name and address!” Thick fingers fumbled in the pages of a tattered notebook. “Here it is—Miss Hildegarde Withers … Number 60 West 74th Street….”
He discovered to his surprise that the inspector was chanting the name and address in unison with him.
Inspector Piper let it be known that he was annoyed. “Great work, Sergeant! She’s just a meddlesome old battle-ax who happens to be the smartest sleuth I ever knew in or out of uniform!” By this time the inspector’s collar was three sizes too tight and his face had turned a deep cherry red. “Burke, you’d have to go to night school for years to learn to be a half-wit!”
Burke gurgled and saluted mechanically. “Well,” roared the inspector. “What are you waiting for? She can’t have gone far—and if we don’t bring her back I’ll give you two weeks’ duty cleaning spittoons down at headquarters!”
With the sergeant trotting at his heels Inspector Oscar Piper forced his way back up the bush-covered slope to the squad car. He motioned Burke behind the wheel and they drove on a little way looking for a place to turn around. But the transverse was well blocked with official cars and they found it no easy matter. “Back up, then,” the inspector ordered.
As the roar of the motor died down they both heard the sound of a dog’s frantic barking. “Wait a minute,” said Piper. He swung open the door of the car and ran over to the stone railing which bordered the elevated transverse. For a moment he stared blankly down, his head cocked on one side like an inquisitive sparrow’s. Then he wildly beckoned Burke to join him.
They looked down upon a little lake, hardly larger than a pool, which nestled here in the corner between the high slope of Eighty-sixth Street Transverse and the outer stone wall of the park. Here a cluster of young willow trees waved fresh foliage above its muddy waters. At the moment the quiet of this sylvan scene was being rudely shattered by a small and excited terrier who was leaping about in the shallow water near shore and barking at the top of his lungs.
Beside him, perched precariously upon a teetering rock which threatened every moment to tip and hurl her headlong into the water, stood Miss Hildegarde Withers. She was engaged in poking at the depths with a thin willow switch.
Her voice added to the hubbub. “Go on, Dempsey, get it! Bring it to me, there’s a good boy!”
Then the inspector leaned over the edge and shouted merrily, “Pearl diving, Hildegarde?”
The angular schoolma’am turned a startled face toward the heights. “Of all things!” she cried. But she was not one to waste time in idle badinage. “Oscar Piper—it’s about time. Come here and come quickly.”
In three seconds he was beside her, the grinning sergeant in the rear. “Hot on the trail, Hildegarde?” asked the inspector. “What do you expect to find in the pool—the mysterious Death-Ray machine? Or is it the feathered bamboo blow-gun filled with tufted poison darts of the Mato Grosso Indians?”
Nettled, Miss Withers pursed her lips. “Perhaps!” she told him. “The dog has found something anyway. If I only had a boat!”
Piper shook his head. “Now, Hildegarde, be reasonable. What could possibly be in that mud hole?”
“A gun, perhaps,” Miss Withers told him. “The murder weapon! There’s a spot of oil, fresh oil, in the roadway just in front of where you parked your car. Somebody let an automobile stand here since the rain—and the park attendant heard a car drive away just before he came on the body. It occurred to me that if the murderer wanted to dispose of anything he might very likely choose this pool—and Dempsey had scented something!”
The little terrier had finally cast himself into the water over his depth. He swam in circles around the middle of the pool, still barking. Now and then he thrust his whiskery muzzle under the surface.
“Okay,” conceded the inspector. “Burke, get into your diving suit and see what the pooch is after.”
Sergeant Burke protested that he was wearing a pair of almost new socks. But the inspector pointed a commanding thumb at the murky depths.
“Here goes!” muttered Burke, and threw himself forward. He landed up to his knees in mud and slimy water, and then, as if encouraged by the sight of reinforcements, Dempsey ducked under the surface only to come up choking and spluttering.
Beside him, Sergeant Burke rolled up his sleeve and plunged a massive hairy arm into the water. “I can’t find anything, Inspector!” he bellowed.
But the little dog Dempsey was still confident. “Good boy,” encouraged his mistress from the shore. “Go get it!”
In spite of himself the inspector was caught into the spirit of the affair. Wading a little farther into the mud he caught sight of an abandoned garden hoe among some other relics and took it up by the handle.
“Here!” he shouted to Burke. “Try raking the bottom with this.” He tossed the hoe out to the dripping detective who caught the heavy implement and sloshed obediently at the bottom of the pool, stirring up great roils of mud. Then Dempsey barked, took a deep breath and dived out of sight, with his short legs churning the water like paddle wheels.
He was gone a long time. Miss Withers, who had been unconsciously holding her breath, let it go with a great sigh. She was just about to plunge in to the rescue when the little dog reappeared with a shapeless something gripped firmly in his jaws. Burke lunged for it, but the little terrier deftly avoided him and paddled toward shore.
“Good boy,” called out his mistress. “Bring it to me!”
Dempsey obeyed cheerfully. He emerged from the pond, gave himself a brisk shaking which drenched the inspector’s trouser legs, and then with an air of duty well done the little dog deposited at the feet of his horrified mistress a very sad-looking turtle.
There was a long and painful silence, broken by the splashings of an irate and bedraggled Burke, shoreward bound.
The inspector’s eyes twinkled. “The murder weapon!” he exclaimed unkindly. “Somebody hit the girl over the head with a turtle. Or maybe the turtle chased her off the horse?”
Miss Withers, as was usual when at a loss for words, sniffed. Then she dragged Dempsey away from his prize in disgrace and started toward the roadway with all the dignity she could muster.
But Sergeant Burke was the type of person unable to leave well enough alone. “Look, ma’am,” he shouted after her, “do you want I should bring the murder weapon along?”
Miss Withers turned to see him poking at the comatose turtle with his hoe. She stopped and her eyes widened. She took a step closer and then suddenly let Dempsey slide to the ground.
“I don’t suppose it would strike either of you two masterminds,” she pointed out, “that the garden implement in the sergeant’s hand is just a little—unusual?”
“What?” The inspector’s gaze flickered from her to the hoe. His mouth dropped open.
The implement which had at first appeared to be an ancient and discarded garden tool now showed itself to be, as the schoolteacher had pointed out, a very unusual hoe indeed. The rusty blade had been bent sharply back and through holes punched in the iron, four screws held firmly to its lower surface a bright, unrusted horseshoe!
“Put there for luck, I don’t think!” said the inspector.
Miss Withers reminded him that there were different kinds of luck.
“I only wish we knew what it meant!” Piper continued, studying the odd device.
“Come on and we’ll find out,” Miss Withers counseled. They went away from the pond, with Dempsey dragging back on his leash to gaze wistfully upon his turtle. That philosophical creature, sensing that all was quiet again, had miraculously sprouted legs and a beaked head and was ambling back toward the water—and out of Dempsey’s life forever.
They returned to the scene of the crime to discover a new arrival bending over the body of Violet Feverel. This personage was lean and dyspeptic looking, and he affected loose English tweeds and a bowler which happened to be a size too small for him.
“Miss Withers,” introduced the inspector, “meet Dr. Charles Bloom, medical examiner for Manhattan.”
“I think we’ve already met,” said the schoolteacher. “It was some years ago, at the Aquarium1, wasn’t it?”
“Ah, the lady with the hat pin!” But Dr. Bloom had no desire to talk over old times. He tugged nervously at the wisps which remained of a once luxurious beard and frowned down at the body as if, by dying, Violet Feverel had incurred his displeasure.
“You can move her any time you like,” said the doctor. He scribbled upon a pad.
“But—” interrupted Piper. “What do you figure killed her?”
“Well,” began Dr. Bloom cautiously, “as for wounds …”
“They crushed the back of the skull, and were supposedly made by a horse’s shod hoof!” Miss Withers eagerly prompted. “Isn’t that right?”
Dr. Bloom smiled wearily. His heavy-lidded eyes took in the hoe which the inspector dangled in one hand.
“You’re suggesting that this was a murder fixed to look as if a horse had done it—and really involving a weapon improvised from a horseshoe?”
Miss Withers nodded eagerly. “There was a story in a magazine—”
“Dear lady,” said Dr. Bloom patiently, “I read my Chesterton too. Though I must say that the device is well known to medical jurisprudence. There was a case in Calcutta—another in Texas. But this time I’m afraid the answer is no. There are no wounds on the body!”
“But—but she’s dead!” protested Miss Withers.
“A superficial examination such as this is only enough to show that this young woman died from internal hemorrhage. As a matter of fact, blood filled her lungs and she strangled to death!”
“But it was murder?” the inspector hopefully demanded.
“Officially, I don’t know,” the doctor told him testily. “I can tell you better after the autopsy. My private opinion, however, is that if this is not murder I’ve never seen one!” And the medical examiner beamed like a happy child.
“I knew it was murder,” Miss Withers chimed in. “Just as soon as I saw that splotch of blood on the side of the horse.”
“Remarkable,” Dr. Bloom congratulated her. “Particularly since the spot to which you refer is not human blood, but horse’s. I had one of the officers bring me a sample on a bit of paper and applied a primary test.” His firm white teeth clicked decisively.
“But … where was the horse wounded?” Miss Withers begged.
“That is just what worries me, dear lady,” said Dr. Bloom as he brushed mud from his trousers. The horse shows no wound at all! And now, if you’ll excuse me …” He took up his bag and scurried toward his car.
“Well, here we are!” said Oscar Piper. He hefted the oddly weighted hoe as if about to hurl it back into the shrubbery. “It was a swell idea anyway.”
“Not so fast.” Miss Withers stopped him. “I’ve just had another idea. Do you suppose that we could find one untrampled hoofprint in this vicinity and make a little comparison?”
The body of Violet Feverel was already being lifted into a wicker basket by two white-clad men from the morgue wagon. Perhaps a dozen feet from where she had lain, outside the trampled circle, the inspector caught sight of a comparatively smooth bit of path which showed the delicate circular mark of a horse’s hoof.
He lowered the hoe so that the horseshoe fastened to the bottom touched the soft earth. It fitted the print, fitted with a microscopic exactness. “Well, I’ll be—” He turned suddenly and found that Miss Withers was not beside him.
The squadron of detectives and police had begun to break up, but the angular schoolma’am still lingered over the spot where the dead girl had lain.
“Never mind looking for the missing cuff link,” called he inspector over his shoulder. “It doesn’t happen nowadays. Come over here, this is really important!”
Miss Hildegarde Withers did not answer. She took a quick look around to make sure that she was unobserved, and then bent down and hastily drew from the soft mud which still bore the impress of the dead body a warm and pungent-smelling object which she thrust into her handbag.
One glance had told her that it was a briar tobacco pipe, battered and blackened. As Miss Withers joined her coworker her lips softly formed the words, “People’s Exhibit A” She nodded prophetically.
1See The Penguin Pool Murder, 1931.