Free Puzzle of the Red Stallion by Stuart Palmer Page B

“She was killed in Central Park this morning at sunrise.”
    A pleased, almost cherubic expression flitted across the old man’s face. “How I’d like to have been there!” he murmured. Then, “So Thomas told you I sent for her? Police, aren’t you? Then I can’t blame him for discussing my business, can I? Police have to know everything. If a sparrow falls—Only my late daughter-in-law was no sparrow, she was a buzzard.”
    “That’ll be all for now,” Dr. Peterson interrupted. “I don’t care if you’re Sherlock Holmes himself, you can’t give my patient the third degree now.”
    “Okay,” said Piper. “If you’ll come out into the hall a moment, Doctor …”
    They stepped through the broken door. “I’ll make it snappy,” said the inspector. “First, did you notice the mark on his neck?”
    “Bruise,” the doctor admitted. “Probably bumped something or hit himself during the attack. He’s got bad ones on his shoulders too.”
    “It couldn’t be anything else but an attack of apoplexy?”
    Peterson shrugged. “I never saw that congestion of the blood vessels of the face and head in any other condition. I’ll stake my reputation as a doctor that Pat Gregg has had a light attack of apoplexy, the logical follow-up to the heart attack two weeks ago. The next one—it’ll kill him.”
    The inspector’s eyes narrowed. “Could the attack have been caused by exertion—such exertion as going to New York and killing his daughter-in-law at sunrise and hustling back here?”
    “It certainly could,” Dr. Peterson remarked with a faint smile, “except for the minor objection that there’s only one chance in a thousand that he’d be lucky enough to get home and have his attack in bed. It would almost certainly happen at the time of greatest excitement—presumably when he was engaged in exterminating his daughter-in-law. Besides, this attack appears to have come earlier than sunrise—at least an hour earlier.”
    “Okay,” said the inspector. “It was just an idea anyway.” He went swiftly in search of Miss Withers—so swiftly that he very nearly tripped over the fat Mrs. Thomas, who was crouching at the head of the stairs and weeping quietly.
    “Turn ’em off,” Piper told her, not unkindly. “Mr. Gregg is going to be all right.”
    “That’s good,” said Mattie Thomas brokenly, and the tears still coursed across her fat cheeks. The inspector shrugged and went on.
    Miss Hildegarde Withers was nowhere in the lower part of the house, but knowing her distaste for such stuffy environs of the haircloth sofa era, he was not surprised. She was finally tracked down at the pasture fence, where she and the gawky red colt were studying each other in an interested fashion.
    He told her of what had transpired in the sickroom. “So the old man seems to have disliked his daughter-in-law—but there’s no chance of his having been the one to do her in. Only a thousand to one that he’d be able to do it without having the attack then and there, the doctor says.”
    Miss Withers nodded. “A thousand to one—but Pat Gregg is a born gambler, Oscar. And he seems to have recovered mighty quickly, all of a sudden.” She took Piper’s arm. “But I haven’t been wasting my time either. Come on….”
    Piper brightened. “Got something on the worthy Thomas at last? I knew he’d bear looking into.”
    She gave him a quizzical look. Then she pointed toward a distant hencoop where the man in question was busily engaged in liberating a large flock of squawking and excited white Leghorns. They gathered around Thomas, leaping at the pan of grain which he held in his hands.
    “Breakfast is late for the hens this morning,” Miss Withers pointed out. “It’s probably due to the fact that Thomas was away in the city and his wife remained in bed.”
    “Yeah? Well, breakfast is late for me, too,” Piper objected. “What’s all this got to do—”
    “Come and see,” the schoolteacher told him. She