The Riddle of the Blueblood Murders Read online

  Miss Withers murmured proper condolences to the man who had lost his own pet. “Ill get the one who did it,” promised Holt tensely, “if it takes the rest of my life. McGrath was no dog-poisoner, and he did not commit suicide. I know—he has been in the middle West judging shows for a month or so, and he could not have been responsible for the poisonings in the metropolitan area here. We must look closer to home.”

  Miss Withers spoke the word “Exactly” into his ear-trumpet.

  “I was just thinking,” said Holt. “Neville and McGrath have been at cats and dogs lately . . . and they had a fight yesterday, so I hear. I wonder—”

  So was Miss Withers wondering. She put Dempsey back into his cage, and carefully snapped the lock into place. According to her orders, a close wire screen had been tacked up inside the wide wire netting, and she knew that he was safer there than anywhere else in the building. Yet, somehow, she felt that she was doing the wrong thing.

  She turned to Holt. “Going to keep on with the sleuthing?”

  He nodded. “But not here. I’ve got a hunch,—a real clue.” He drew closer to her. “Is it true that you’ve got some connection with the police?”

  “Er—yes, and again, no,” she answered.

  But Holt went on. “I know you have.” He looked quickly around. “We may be watched. Meet me in Neville’s office in five minutes and unless I miss my guess I’ll be able to show you something that will surprise you I” The little man was quite evidently under the strain of intense excitement. “I see it!” he cried. “I see it all—will you help me?”

  “I’d like to know what it’s all about,” said Miss Withers.

  “I’ll show you,” he promised. “I’ll convince you, sure enough.”

  “Very well,” she spoke into the trumpet. “I’ll meet you.” The little man darted away, in the direction of the judging stand, and she watched through narrowed eyes while he engaged Kearling in close conversation.

  Then Miss Withers walked slowly down the runway which led under the stairs toward Neville’s office. The door was unlocked, but she did not enter. She stood thoughtfully outside for a moment, and then on a wild impulse turned around and hurried back whence she had come.

  The thought had just occurred to her that perhaps, even behind the barrier of fine screen, Dempsey was not as safe as she had thought him. He had been trained never to take food from an unknown hand—but the little dog was most over-friendly with all humankind. . . . And suppose poisoned food was not the means used by the poisoner.

  Miss Withers came scurrying past the rows of kennels, noticing as she came that not even a kennel boy or a handler was about. In the ring they were judging Alsatians, and everyone was clustered close to see the beautiful big tawny police dogs, with their wolf-like heads.

  “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf-” Miss Withers found the silly tune running through her head. As she turned the corner leading to the alley-way in which Dempsey was confined, she stopped short, knowing the truth.

  The whole puzzle arranged itself swiftly in her mind-even before she saw the little figure of Holt leaning against Dempsey’s cage. His ear-trumpet was in his hand, and he was gaily whistling the little tune, as she had heard him whistle it before.

  Terror gripped her as Holt looked up, with a wide smile on his face.

  “Get tired of waiting?” he asked. “Something delayed me. I was just having a look around.”

  Miss Withers tried to control her face and could not. She stared at the wire, and saw that Dempsey stood watching her, wagging his tail. It had not happened—yet. Then she noticed that a tiny hole had been torn in the wire which protected the little dog.

  Holt saw her glance turn in that direction, and he stopped whistling. “You noticed that, eh?” He came closer to her. “Too bad.”

  Miss Withers tried to scream, but as in a nightmare her voice failed her. Only Dempsey heard the gasp, and leaped frantically against his cage in an effort to come forth to the rescue.

  Holt walked toward Miss Withers, who moved falteringly backward. She was out of the alley-way, crossing the main avenue of kennels. Here and there a dog, disturbed by currents which he could sense and not understand, whined a little.

  She still moved away from that smiling face, from the hand that was sliding within the ear-trumpet. Then she found her back against a barrier.

  Peter A. Holt, manufacturer of colors and dyes, drew a fat hypodermic needle from its place of concealment within the ear-trumpet. “If you want to know who killed McGrath, go and ask him in hell,” said the madman.

  And still nobody came . . .

  Miss Withers gasped, and knew that he had been waiting just for that. He thrust the needle within a foot of her face, and his thumb touched the plunger . . .

  She waited for the thin, stinging stream of prussic acid to strike her face.

  High on the steps leading to the rows of vacant seats above, a white-clad carpenter snatched from his tool-kit a pair of powerful binoculars. He handled them more cleverly than he had been using his saw and hammer.

  “My God!” he cried. “What are you waiting for?”

  His companion sighted along the barrel of a blue-black police target pistol, and pulled the trigger with a soft and loving squeeze.

  A leaden bullet mushroomed against the madman’s chest, and he was thrown back. He staggered, but did not fall. Nor did he lower the hypodermic needle, though his hand trembled.

  He rammed the plunger home, with a wild shriek. But the delay had given Miss Withers time to regain her paralyzed senses, and to turn. She felt a thin spattering of liquid against her hair at the back of her neck. At the time she thought nothing of it, but as long as she lived she was to wear a bald spot there, as large as a dime.

  The two erstwhile carpenters were racing over the sawdust, and they arrived on the scene to find both parties to this fantastic finale lying stretched out on the ground. Miss Withers regained control almost at once, to find Inspector Oscar Piper bending over her.

  “I’m afraid I wasn’t much of a success at playing a lone hand, this time,” she confessed weakly. “Oh, Oscar, why didn’t you tell me that you were planning to double-cross me?”

  The Inspector was surveying what was left of Holt, crumpled on the sawdust floor.

  “Rotten shot,” he said, accusingly, to Detective-Sergeant Georgie Swarthout. “I told you to wing him, didn’t I?”

  “I aimed for the wing and got the wish-bone,” said the young marksman cheerfully. “And I saved the State several thousands of dollars incidentally. Shall I ring up the boys at HQ?”

  “Of course,” said Miss Withers later in Neville’s office. “I didn’t have the wit to see that all the killings must have been done in some such manner. Only from a hypodermic needle could poison have been sprayed on all those dogs who have been killed during the past month or so. Remember how it happened in the theater—and yet nobody saw anything? Prussic acid is the only poison that can cause death that way when it touches the tongue or the nasal passages.”

  “The needle’s been used by racketeers recently to spray acid through keyholes and thus to ruin clothes in rival tailor shops,” Piper told her.

  But she was proceeding. “Who but a maker of colors and dyes would have had access to unlimited amounts of prussic acid, which is the main ingredient of Prussian blue, as every schoolboy knows? Holt had such success with his poisonings in the streets that he got the idea of entering the dog-show as an owner, and bought his collie to carry out the illusion.”

  “How could he, if he hated dogs, as you say?”

  “Well, he killed his own dog first. Psychologists call such men caniphobiacs, Oscar. McGrath must have come along and caught Holt in the act. They struggled, and McGrath got hold of the poison bottle from which the madman had been refilling his syringe. Holt saw he was getting the worst of it, so he pulled out his needle and sprayed cyanide in the other man’s face. McGrath naturally gasped—and that did for him.”

  “That might explain t
he poison in McGrath’s nostrils that puzzled Doc Bloom so much,” agreed Piper.

  “Of course. I should have guessed at the truth from the way Holt’s dog ignored him. The beast was neither friendly nor afraid—he simply had never got acquainted with his master. Probably just purchased, before the show.”

  The Inspector was puzzled. “But why should Holt endanger himself by trying to continue today what he started last night?”

  “He was mad, Oscar. Last night Neville and I came into the place talking, and our voices warned Holt away before he had time to do more than tumble the body of McGrath out of sight. He ran off and forgot his bottle of poison, so all he had was whatever was left in his syringe. He may have come back here looking for the bottle this morning. At any rate, he could not resist sending me on a fool’s errand when he saw that I was interested in the case, and it must have appealed to a madman’s sense of humor to think that while I waited for him in the office here, he was putting the finishing touches to my own dog. That would make his crimes dramatically complete in his warped mind.”

  Henry Neville knocked on the door of his own office, and entered, with a glass of water for Miss Withers. She drank it gratefully.

  “And all the time,” that lady concluded, “there was a fine, fair clue staring us in the face. Holt carried an ear-trumpet but it was only to conceal the needle. He wasn’t deaf, not very. For I heard him whistling, Oscar.”

  “Whistling?” Neville looked surprised. “I don’t see—”

  “Neither did I until it was too late,” Miss Withers admitted. “But did you ever see a blind man using tobacco?”

  The Inspector nodded. He guessed what she meant.

  “They seldom do, because they can’t see the curling smoke. Same reason—a deaf man couldn’t hear himself whistle. All through this affair, something has been bothering me, and it was that. I made a mess of things, and you only saved my life by playing Sherlock Holmes and double-crossing me, Oscar.”

  Piper grinned. But Henry Neville looked very weary. The Inspector turned to him. “Well, you may rest easy now, my friend.”

  “Only because the show is over,” confessed Neville. “There was no hushing up this second killing, even if it was to save a life. I’ve had to call off the last day of the show, and let the owners take their animals home. It’s just as well. I’m going to take my own setters and go down to Maryland for a week’s shooting. Anyway the poisoning scare is nipped in the bud.”

  “In the flower, rather,” said Miss Withers. The Inspector led the way toward the kennels, where at last there was a scene of bustling activity. They collected Dempsey and crowded toward the doors, amid a throng of dog fanciers, each with one or more precious bluebloods at the end of a leash.

  “Poor old Dempsey was out of his class,” Miss Withers remarked. It was not exactly true. At that moment the pugnacious little terrier jerked his leash from the hand of his mistress and threw himself upon the nearby Champion Million-dollar Highboy, whom he set about whittling down to size.

  They were dragged apart almost instantly, but Dempsey took his punishment without sadness, and capered cheerily homeward. He had bitten off about two thousand dollars’ worth of blue-ribbon dog flesh, and regained his self-respect.