Puzzle of the Silver Persian (33 page)

Indeed it was as a climax to such an adventure
²
that Dempsey, along with several new-born brothers and sisters and a mother strangely misnamed “Mister Jones,” had been dropped into the lap of the staid schoolteacher. The rest of the family had been found homes in the country, but Miss Withers had never been able to bring herself to the point of parting with this most bewhiskered and pugnacious puppy.

Life had been different and exciting since her acquisition of Dempsey—so called because of his pell-mell tactics as a warrior. The scamp had a habit of flinging himself fearlessly upon every male dog he met, and day after day his mistress saved him from possible extermination at the jaws of some massive bull or Alsatian. He gnawed her slippers and played rough games with her piles of neatly corrected examination papers, he rattled her bed as he searched himself for fleas in the midnight hours and roused her at the crack of dawn; but Miss Withers continued to view Dempsey with scandalized amusement.

This morning the little dog quite outdid himself by leading his mistress into the clutches of the law.

It happened as they rounded the corner nearest the park. Miss Withers was kneeling on the sidewalk in an effort to make Dempsey relinquish a particularly unsavory-looking bit of candy wrapper which he had discovered. Suddenly she looked up to see a little green roadster pulling alongside the curb. Two officers confronted her.

“Aha!” cried the foremost. He wore a jovial air, and the stripes of a sergeant.

Miss Withers drew herself up as haughtily as was possible with a dog and his leash wound around her long skirt. “What is the meaning of this, may I ask?”

“You’re breaking the lawr!” said the sergeant.

“Indeed?” Miss Withers smiled icily. “I’ll go with you quietly, so don’t use the riot gun and the tear gas. And please, no third degree—I’ll talk!”

“Talk!” The sergeant burst into a guffaw. “I’ll just bet she will, eh, Shay? I can spot the talkers right away.”

Officer Shay thought that was very funny. “Nothing else but, huh?”

Miss Withers saw that much to her disgust Dempsey was flagrantly betraying her by trying to lick the hands of both policemen at once.

They finally got down to cases. “It’s your dorg, lady,” explained Sergeant Greeley. “He ain’t got no muzzle.”

Miss Withers sniffed. “Besides the obviously bad grammar, that accusation is false,” she announced. “My dog has a muzzle, an excellent muzzle. It’s right here in my handbag.” She showed them.

“Yeah, lady,” explained the sergeant wearily. “But he’s got to wear it on his face. City ordinance, it says so. Warm weather coming on, and you never know when a dorg will go mad and bite somebody.”

“There are times when I would consider it in the light of a direct answer to prayer,” Miss Withers snapped. Dempsey sat down unconcernedly and kicked at his left ear, remembering that a flea had annoyed him there once upon a time. He showed no interest whatever in the fact that his mistress was receiving a ticket instructing her to appear next Monday morning at West Fifty-third Street Police Court and pay a two-dollar fine.

Miss Withers was unable to refrain from pointing out that it was no wonder crime ran rampant and Bolsheviks flourished in Manhattan when police spent their time persecuting honest citizens for infractions of forgotten ordinances. If anyone asked her opinion—

The policemen started to get back inside the green roadster. “Lady,” the sergeant told her earnestly, “you’re lucky you don’t have to wear the muzzle instead of the dorg!”

The official laughter at this sally was cut short by the sudden barking of the radio loudspeaker in the car.

“
Calling car 69
—
calling car 69
—”

“That’s us!” yelped Shay. He kicked at the starter while the sergeant took out his notebook. Miss Withers, in spite of her excellent upbringing, listened shamelessly.

“
Calling car 69…. Go to Central Park bridle path opposite West Eighty-sixth Street…. See park attendant about a Code 44…. That is all
—”

“Let’s go!” cried Sergeant Greeley. The little flivver whirled away leaving Miss Withers and Dempsey alone on the curb.

“
Code 44
”—she knew very well what that meant. On evenings when she had no papers to correct and when the inspector did not drop in for a fast game of backgammon, it was her delight to switch her radio over onto the police calls. One night, annoyed by the fact that all the real drama was hidden behind code numbers, she had hit upon the inspired idea of keeping a record of all calls together with the given address. Next day she checked them against the newspaper accounts of what happened at each address and thus solved the mystery of the codes.

“
Code 44
,” next to the general alarm embodied in “
Code 30
” (which Miss Withers had heard only during the capture of Two-gun Crowley), was the most exciting signal of all. It meant, as Miss Withers had discovered, simply—“
a dead body
!”

Miss Withers’s nostrils widened and into her blue eyes for a moment there came the look of a small boy who has just seen the fire engines go past. Then she relaxed.

“After all it’s not
my
dead body,” she told the eager little dog. “I’m rapidly getting the reputation of being the most meddlesome woman east of Los Angeles, and there’s barely time to get breakfast and take that spot out of my blue dress before church, and this is certainly one time when I ought to mind my own business!”

Dempsey quivered with delight as he sniffed the thousand odors of the green park across the street.

Miss Withers sniffed too. “After all,” she remarked thoughtfully, “I have a perfect right to exercise my dog in the park if I wish—and those two flat-footed imbeciles are not the proper persons to cope with a
Code 44
!”

She started off at a pace which made Dempsey trot to keep up. “Not by a jugful,” she concluded, and her nostrils flare as if from afar she had heard the note of a hunting horn.

¹
See “Miss Otis Regrets,” a popular song of the era.

²
See
The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree
, Crime Club, 1933.

L
ESS 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.