Puzzle of the Silver Persian (34 page)

“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 Aquarium
¹
, wasn’t it?”