Puzzle of the Silver Persian (36 page)

“Howdy,” he greeted them, sliding the guitar quickly toward its place atop the desk.

“You’re the manager here?” queried Piper.

“That’s me—Latigo Wells. And if you’re figuring to rent horses—”

“Don’t be silly—do we look dressed for riding?” Miss Withers snapped. She smoothed her neat serge suit.

“You never can tell,” Latigo Wells was saying. “I just had the dickens of an argument with a tough guy in a blue overcoat—he got sore when I wouldn’t rent him a fast horse. I told him he’d have to wear boots or chaps to ride any horse out of this stable. And these hacks in the stable get a hard enough life without going out under that kind of a hombre.”

“We don’t want horses,” the inspector cut in. “We’re looking for—for a Miss Feverel. You know her?”

Latigo’s gray eyes flickered. “Sure I know her. She’s not here. And if I were you I wouldn’t wait—she’s likely to be gone for some time.”

Miss Withers sniffed. “I don’t suppose that you, working here, happen to know where she lives?”

Latigo bristled at that. “Sure I know—I been up to her apartment. Last Tuesday night, to a swell party. She lives in the Hotel Harthorn, up on Broadway.” Then the westerner rose to his feet. “Say, what’s it to you folks?”

“It’s this,” said Oscar Piper. He flashed his badge. “Miss Feverel was found dead on the bridle path about an hour ago.”

Latigo didn’t say anything, but his neck reddened and he grew oddly white about the mouth.

“Of course you’ve been right in this office all morning?” Piper continued casually.

“Sure,” Latigo nodded. “Ever since I saddled her horse—that big red race horse she owns. I been sitting here …”

“Why didn’t you answer the phone, then—and why did the colored boy say that you went out to breakfast?”

Latigo blinked. Then he smiled apologetically. “I told him I was going and then I changed my mind. I been sitting here, just singin’ a little—and I guess I was too busy singin’ to answer that phone. I just let her ring….”

He began to roll a cigarette. “You say Miss Feverel’s dead? Did the horse kick her?”

Miss Withers looked at the inspector and her eyelid dropped a fraction of an inch.

Piper nodded. “Looks that way,” he said. “Dangerous horse.”

“Sure,” agreed Latigo. “Any fast horse is dangerous for a woman who can’t ride better than her. I warned her—no race horse makes a good saddle horse without a lot of training. But she wouldn’t spend the money to have the horse schooled right—I guess she was hard up. Didn’t pay her board bill on time, neither….”

“Mrs. Thwaite made a fuss about that, didn’t she?” asked Miss Withers wickedly.

Latigo shrugged. “Not that I know of. They were great pals, Mrs. Thwaite and Miss Feverel. And the doc, too—that’s Mr. Thwaite.” He faced them, twisting his cigarette. “Everybody was pals with Miss Feverel—that girl was strictly aces.”

“Not
quite
everybody,” Miss Withers amended. Piper nodded.

“Well,” Latigo admitted, “they did have their arguments. You see, Miss Feverel got the idea that Mrs. Thwaite wanted Siwash. She suspicioned that we were using her horse when we knew she wouldn’t be around….”

“And of course she was mistaken in that belief?”

“Well—” Latigo began.

“Of course!” snapped a brittle and decisive voice. A door had opened just behind Miss Withers, disclosing a stairway filled at the moment by a very wide woman and a rather smallish man who sported a large mustache. The woman came first in practically everything—as she made clear.

“I’m Maude Thwaite,” she announced. “What’s going on here?”

It was rare for Miss Hildegarde Withers to take an instinctive dislike to a person on sight. In fact, as experience had taught her, she was prone to the other extreme. Yet she felt an instinctive surge of loathing rise in her being as she looked upon the proprietor of this riding academy.

Mrs. Thwaite was wide and muscular—qualities not necessarily unattractive in a woman. But her eyes were small and beady, and her complexion was a gray-blue, heavily mantled with light powder.

She was dressed in formal riding attire—fitted jacket, light jodhpurs and heavy shoes. In one hand she held a heavy crop with a silver cap and she switched herself on the ankles as she spoke.

“I said—what’s going on here?”

“Yes, what’s going on here?” echoed her husband. Even shaggy worsted failed to give him bulk, either physical or mental. He waxed his mustache as he spoke.

“Only a few questions about Miss Feverel,” said the inspector hastily. “You know her?”

“Of course—” Rufus Thwaite began. His wife drowned him out.

“Yes, we know Violet—a very good friend and a valued customer,” she said. “She has stabled her horse with us for the last six months.”

The inspector was a great believer in direct frontal attack. “Well, she won’t be a customer any longer,” he remarked. He displayed his badge. “You see, she was killed about an hour ago on the bridle path.”

“Murdered!” added Miss Withers, just to make it more definite.

Dr. and Mrs. Thwaite looked at each other. Then they both said the proper things.

“Naturally, you’ll be glad to help us in the investigation?” Piper went on.

But the Thwaites were doubtful. “You see,” explained Mrs. Thwaite, “we didn’t know her except as a customer—a client, really. She was in the habit of coming very early in the morning to exercise her horse, before either myself or the doctor was up….”

“Doctor, eh?” Piper looked at Thwaite. “Medical or divinity?”

“I am a veterinary surgeon,” explained the little man. “As we were saying, we won’t be able to help you much.”

For once his wife agreed. “All we know is that Miss Violet Feverel lives—I mean lived—at the Hotel Harthorn.” She sneered slightly. “No doubt Latigo here has told you more interesting facts about her—I understand he moved in her social circle….”

Latigo Wells looked excessively uncomfortable. “I was only up to her place one evening, and then I only stayed a few minutes,” he hastily explained.

“Well—” said the inspector.

Miss Withers nudged him. “Come on, Oscar—before these people convince us that they never heard of Violet Feverel.”

Dr. Thwaite opened the outer door for them. “If there’s any little thing you want to know, just call on us!”

“It’s the big things that we want to know,” Miss Withers told him. “We’ll be back. Hotel Harthorn, you said?”

They passed out into the street and the office door closed behind them. The inspector started toward the sidewalk, but Miss Withers crouched beside the door, motioning him back.

Together they listened. They heard Latigo being sent on into the stables with a message to Highpockets regarding a rubdown for Violet Feverel’s horse. Then, after a moment of silence, Maude Thwaite’s voice came clearly, with a note of placid satisfaction.

“Well, my dear,
this
ought to settle the problem of Siwash!”

“There,” said Miss Withers, as she led the inspector hurriedly down the sidewalk, “there is a woman who would eat her young!”

It was still early morning—particularly early for a Sunday morning—when they reached the Hotel Harthorn. To Miss Withers the place seemed a typical apartment hotel, identical with half a hundred others which lined Broadway and the crosstown streets of the neighborhood.

But the inspector was more closely in touch with the city. “Hotel Harthorn,” he observed as they stood outside the near-marble entrance. “Average monthly record—one racketeer arrested, two suicides of girls diving from high windows, one dope peddler picked up and turned over to the Federals, two complaints a week on noise or disorderly conduct charges … nice place. Mostly theatrical people….”

“‘Nothing ever happens at the Grand Hotel’!” quoted Miss Withers. “Shall we go in and start something?”

They found a dapper desk clerk hidden behind a Sunday newspaper scandal section. “Miss Feverel’s apartment,” said Piper.

The clerk shook his head and turned a page. “She’s out,” he informed them.

“When did she go out?” Piper wanted to know.

The clerk shrugged. “Sometime before I came on duty,” he said. He rustled the newspaper suggestively.

But the inspector and Miss Withers were not so easily discouraged. “Pry yourself out of that chair,” Piper snapped. “And bring your pass-key.”

The clerk’s eyes widened as he saw a gold badge in the inspector’s hand. “Oh—an accident?”

“There will be one if you don’t get going,” Piper told him.

The dapper man led them down a hall to a somewhat old-fashioned automatic elevator. He pressed the button and Miss Withers drew the inspector aside. “Not much use to question the night man, provided there was one and he wasn’t asleep at the switch,” she pointed out. Her finger indicated another hall which ran past a closed newsstand and opened into the side street. “Places with as many exits as this don’t allow for much of a check on the guests.”

Piper nodded and they rode creakily upward to the sixth floor. Then they went down the hall and the clerk took out his key in front of 607. By now he was thoroughly worried. “This is a respectable place, Officer—I hope there won’t be any publicity.”

The inspector reached out and took the pass-key. “You just trot back to your desk and everything will be just dandy,” he told the clerk.

The man lingered dubiously. “If you’re going in I’m supposed to go with you….”

Piper shook his head. “There may be shooting,” he hinted.

“Shooting? Oh—but—” He edged away, and then suddenly turned and made for the elevator.

“But, Oscar,” began Miss Withers. The inspector hushed her.

“Mostly a bluff,” he whispered as he inserted the key. “But I didn’t want him around. And—I think I hear somebody inside the place….”

As he opened the door an odor of mingled perfume, stale tobacco smoke, mixed liquors, and massed humanity eddied against them. Yet light enough poured through the Venetian blinds at the windows to show that the long living room was empty.

It was a typical hotel apartment, with almost no evidences of the personality of the tenant except for a battered piano. Everywhere, Miss Withers noticed, were the usual flotsam and jetsam of a party’s aftermath—bottles in the wastebaskets, glasses broken in the gas-log fireplace and making rings on the furniture, rugs piled against the wall and a large hole burned in one of the cushions of the davenport.

There was no sound of anyone in the place, though the face of the dead girl looked down from dozens of photograph frames. The intruders moved softly forward across the living room. Piper opened a farther door and stepped into a very frilly and feminine bedroom. This was in better order, in spite of the spilled powder and a silver evening dress tossed casually across a chair. The bed had not been slept in and here too the walls were covered with photographs of Violet Feverel.

Now Miss Withers realized why the dead girl’s face had seemed so familiar. The photographs showed her lighting a cigarette of a popular brand, inspecting an electric icebox, and smiling brightly at a tube of tooth paste. “Lord,” exclaimed Piper, “it’s the Billboard Girl!”

Miss Withers peered gingerly into the bathroom, but that too was empty. Further investigation showed a tiny kitchen with more bottles and glasses. But that was the total. Miss Withers and the inspector moved back to the living room, and Piper went over to the window and drew up the blinds.

“We might as well have some light—” he began. Then both he and Miss Withers were startled half out of their wits by a hoarse cry from behind them.

“Hello, Eddie!”

The inspector whirled and one hand snapped to his pocket. “Stay where you are!”

“Nuts to you, Eddie!” came the voice again. The speaker had no choice about staying where he was. Miss Withers discovered him in a neat gilt cage under the piano—a tiny green-red parakeet, far smaller than his voice.

He swung head downwards from a trapeze, his beak clicking rhythmically.

“Get out the handcuffs, Oscar!” Miss Withers suggested. They joined in nervous laughter—it was no pleasant task wandering among the belongings of the young woman whose body they had just seen laid roughly in a wicker basket.

Just then a key rattled in the door and quick as a flash the inspector dragged Miss Withers down behind the davenport. They waited, hardly daring even to breathe, as a girl and a man in evening clothes came into the apartment.

“… because we’ve got less than no time at all! Just throw some things into a suitcase,” he was saying, in a gay and flippant tone.

“Yes, Eddie,” said the girl. They kissed in the doorway. As she moved with a nervous little laugh out of his arms the girl saw Miss Withers and the inspector rising up over the top of the davenport and her face froze.

“What … what do you want?” she demanded.

Miss Withers was as yet unable to speak, for the girl across the room was fearfully like, in face and figure, the victim on the bridle path. This seemed to be Violet Feverel come back to life—Violet Feverel as she had been ten years ago.

“I’m asking the questions here,” Piper cut in. “I’m from the Bureau of Homicides.”

“Yeah?” began the young man known as Eddie. But the girl at his side cut him short.

“I’m Barbara, Violet’s sister,” she said evenly. “Has something happened?”

The inspector nodded. “Something has. Your sister met with an accident on the bridle path this morning.”

The girl nodded mechanically. “Yes … yes? She’s dead, isn’t she?” Barbara caught her breath and her teeth bit into her lip. “I … I can tell by your faces.”

She sat down suddenly in a chair, but she refused Miss Withers’s well-meant ministrations. After a moment she looked up at the inspector. “You’ll want to ask questions?”

“Plenty,” said Piper. He motioned Eddie into a chair. “You too,” he ordered. He lit a cigar. “You’re both dressed up for 8
A.M.
,” he continued. “Where you been?”

“Harlem,” said Barbara.

“At Mabel’s Inn on Lenox Avenue,” added the young man. His fingers toyed with his evening tie, which by daylight showed blue in place of the conventional black. He wore blue socks and an orange handkerchief peeped from the pocket of his tight-fitting dinner coat.