Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (14 page)

Phyllis, the captain, Tate, Tompkins, and the newlyweds—yes, and Barney Kelsey—somewhere among them was the answer to the questions which fretted her. Not one of them was in evidence around the hotel, and Miss Withers had a furious itch to creep down the balcony, window by window, and search their rooms.

She shook her head. “Be yourself, Hildegarde,” she said aloud. But she was not quite herself, in spite of the soothing effect of washing and combing her hair. Today nothing was quite itself on this ordinarily peaceful paradise, for the dark and bloody trail of murder crisscrossed everywhere.

She walked up and down the narrow balcony, quite oblivious of the eager, moist black button of pin-seal that was pressed against the window of Phyllis’s room. There was an unwonted stillness about the place, and the white, vibrating sunlight reminded Miss Withers of the old Roman belief that the restless dead walk abroad, not at midnight, but at high noon.

Even the little pepper tree, which seemed to shimmer in the noonday glare, was somehow different. No longer could Miss Withers imagine it to be a wild and frightening thing, stretching leafy arms toward the little rock garden and leaning away from the cliff it feared, as if still dizzy and shocked from its former catastrophe. Now it was only a tree.

She had a sketchy luncheon in the empty dining room and then set out along the shore toward the village. It was one o’clock, and the chimes were sounding from the carillon ahead of her. Miss Withers sniffed and was suddenly homesick for the good honest striking of the clock in the tower at Jefferson School.

The red bus, piled three deep with sightseers, whirled past her in a cloud of dust, no doubt bound for the airport landing which had been made famous as the scene of the crime by the Los Angeles newspapers. Evidently the steamer
Avalon
had docked and for once had had a full passenger list.

As Miss Withers came past the Casino she met the ancient handyman, Rogers, loaded down with several pails and some complicated-looking contraptions of metal and rubber.

“You’re not going to transplant our pepper tree again, are you?” she inquired. Rogers shook his head and looked up toward the cliff behind her.

“No, ma’am. Reckon she’s a-goin’ to make it, after all. Leaves look a little green.” He nodded. “Today I had a different job, and one I don’t like half so well.”

Miss Withers took it that she was expected to inquire as to what the job was. Rogers grinned, showing an expanse of brown chewing tobacco with one surprisingly white tooth standing as a monument to his past prime.

“It was a plumbing job in the Casino,” he told her. “I’m sorta a specialist in such. You’d be surprised what they throw in them bowls. Other day I took out two oranges, and last week a wedding ring and fifty foot of fishline. People ain’t got no sense at all about what’ll go through a two-inch pipe.”

Miss Withers’s nose had been steadily lifting itself in the air as the doddering old man rambled on. But his next sentence made her forget her squeamishness.

“Today was the queerest of all, ma’am,” he was saying. “And as for me, I don’t understand why anybody at the Casino last night would go to such a place to throw away such a thing. It does beat all!”

“It does, doesn’t it?” agreed Miss Withers. “May I ask what—I mean—the nature of this object?”

“’Twasn’t an object.” The old man grinned again. “’Twas nine objects.” And he told her what they were.

Miss Withers restrained herself with some difficulty from crying “Eureka!” After all, her wild guess might be wrong. Besides, it was something that could not be proved, unless—unless a small miracle had happened or would happen.

“I have a friend who makes a collection of objects which people throw into er—such places,” she told the man. “I don’t suppose that you kept what you found?” Her voice was extremely casual.

“As a matter of fact, mum, I did. They’re right here in this pail, because I didn’t want to risk having to take the plumbing apart on a deeper level. I was figuring on taking the whole mess and throwing it off the cliff into the ocean.”

Miss Withers saw to it that he changed his plans, and was rewarded for her pains by the realization that this old man thought her a howling maniac.

“One more thing,” she wanted to know, as he picked up his pails and gadgets again. “Were these thrown into the plumbing from the Men’s or Ladies’ Room?”

“Ain’t no telling that,” said Rogers amiably. “Found ’em below the V.” He stared with some degree of pleased surprise at the silver dollar she placed in his palm.

“Say, mum—if your friend is interested in any more of such truck, I’ll start saving whatever I find. Last year there was a pair of silk step-ins—”

But Miss Withers was already out of hearing.

She found Avalon town filled with tourists, as she strode vigorously down Main Street. Having little or no sympathy with the great American habit of rubbernecking, Miss Withers pushed impatiently through the mob. “The man who made the best mousetrap never got such a crowd as this,” she reflected. She had read somewhere that in Los Angeles itself the officers of the law were often embarrassed to find, upon arriving at the scene of a crime in their patrol cars, that the room was filled with gawking spectators who had tuned in on the police calls!

The fact that, at least to the casual eye, her own actions during the past few hours placed her more or less in the same category never occurred to the good lady. She bustled into the curio store of Chief Amos Britt, to find that establishment under the management of a plump dame who turned out to be Mrs. Britt. What Miss Withers would have called “a land-office business” was going on in the less expensive gadgets, as here was the center of the crowd’s interest. Outside the door at the rear were Ruggles and a little huddle of newspapermen, whom Miss Withers eluded with the ease of long practice. She knocked sharply on the door and was somewhat surprised, upon announcing herself, to hear the chief invite her to come in.

Amos Britt, red-faced and perspiring, was in close conclave with Barney Kelsey, also red-faced but not so damp as the chief.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she apologized.

“You ain’t interrupting anything,” Chief Britt told her bitterly. “We been at it ever since you left, and we’re getting nowhere, fast.”

“Forrest hired me in Philly, and he didn’t confide in me. I’ve told you all I know,” said Barney Kelsey. If possible, his gray hair seemed a shade lighter than it had yesterday, and his voice was without conviction.

“You know very little, then,” said Britt. “You don’t know who sent Forrest money to stay out here, and you don’t know who his friends are back East, and you don’t know anybody who’d be likely to kill him, and you don’t know how it might have been done, and—”

“I told you, I never saw him from Thursday afternoon when he left the Hotel Senator until I came on his body under the sheet in the infirmary.”

“And I suppose you can’t tell us why it didn’t stay under the sheet at the infirmary?”

Kelsey insisted that he could not. “I was asleep in my room at the hotel.”

“So was everybody else,” said Britt, still bitter. “Forrest must have come to life and walked out on his own, I guess. Probably he’ll come in here and give himself up one of these days.”

Miss Withers noticed that Barney Kelsey gave an appreciable start at this grotesque fancy.

“All right, Mr. Kelsey, you can go. But you’re not to go far, see? For two cents I’d clap you in jail right now as a material witness.”

Kelsey wasted no time in getting out of the office, and Britt turned to Miss Withers. “I’ve changed my mind about that fellow,” he complained. “He’s too smooth and oily for my taste.”

Miss Withers pointed out that the possession of aplomb was not a hanging offense.

“Yeah,” nodded Chief Britt. “But what did he want to give the slip to Ruggles for last night if he’d nothing to conceal?”

Miss Withers gave it as her opinion that there was nothing morally or legally binding upon a person under police surveillance to keep within sight of his shadow.

“Well, I wisht I’d of arrested him anyhow, as a material witness,” Britt told her. He rose from his chair and kicked the waste basket savagely. “This would have to happen just when the marlin are beginning to strike in the channel.”

“You couldn’t very well arrest as a material witness the one person involved who was farthest from the man when he died,” Miss Withers continued. “There are eight people—and two pilots—who are ever so much more material to this investigation than Barney Kelsey.”

The chief’s little eyes widened. “You ain’t suggesting that I put ’em all in the hoosegow?”

“I am,” said Hildegarde Withers. “It would be the wisest move you ever made, but you won’t do it.” As a matter of fact, the chief didn’t.

He shook his head slowly. “I dunno. We never had a murder, or a body-snatching either, here at Avalon. I wisht this New York detective would get here—mebbe he’d have some ideas.”

“I doubt the value of his ideas,” said Miss Withers acidly. “But Inspector Piper will be here soon enough. He’s on a train somewhere between Toledo and Chicago.”

Her voice died away, and her blue eyes narrowed as she stared at the door which led into the store. “Somebody is listening,” she whispered.

“Somebody is
what?”
The chief turned toward her, blankly.

“I heard a rustle outside that door,” she said. “If you’d been awake—” She crossed the room and tore the door open, but there was nobody there. In the street outside she could see Deputy Ruggles posing for the newspaper photographers, and across the store Barney Kelsey was admiring a table lamp made of clustered sea shells, which Miss Withers considered one of the most loathsome objects she had come upon in years. But Mr. Kelsey was far from alone in the place.

Mrs. Britt was in the act of wrapping up a mother-of-pearl jewel box which Marvin Deving had just purchased for Kay Deving. The young bride was all in white today, from shoes to beret, and with her pale skin and fiery hair she made a pretty picture of girlish innocence.

It was a picture that cast into the shade the plaid-clad voluptuousness of Phyllis La Fond, who was engaged at the moment in rescuing a sharkskin walking stick which had caught the fancy of Mister Jones. It was pulled from the eager jaws with considerable difficulty and replaced with the others.

She caught sight of Miss Withers. “Hullo, there! So this is where you spend your days.” She jerked the leash and Mister Jones away from a pile of polished abalone shells. “How about joining us for a walk?”

“Sorry,” said Hildegarde Withers, “but I’m out for a jaunt up the hill with the chief. Am I not, Mr. Britt?”

The chief blinked and, as Miss Withers kicked him sharply in the ankle, nodded. He followed her out of the store, after giving directions to his wife as to where he might be found. The scene between the couple was short, but there was a definite note of tension in the air. “My missus thinks she ought to be putting up watermelon pickles instead of tending store, but I told her that pickles keep and murders don’t,” Britt confided as Miss Withers led him out into the street.

“Well, this murder is keeping all too well so far,” Miss Withers told him. “I wanted to come out here because we can’t be overheard. The safest place, you know, isn’t a hideaway—it’s the middle of a public square, where you can see everybody a block away.”

The chief admitted the wisdom of this. “But what you got on your mind, ma’am?” They were going up a street lined with flimsy wooden rooming houses, and the incline was steep. He was very much in low gear.

“Plenty,” said Hildegarde Withers. But she would say no more until they came out upon a little dusty knoll, with the town spread out beneath them.

“There won’t be anybody listening in on us now,” pointed out the chief impatiently. “What’s on your mind?”

Miss Withers seemed not to hear him. She was looking across the little valley toward a farther hill. “What are those men doing?”

The chief smiled proudly. “An idea of my own, ma’am. I took a map of the island, drew a circle a mile around the town—which is about as far as anybody could carry a corpse on a wheelbarrow—and divided the circle up into squares of about four or five acres each. Then I swore in seventy-five of the local unemployed as special deputies and set ’em to searching for the body of Roswell Forrest.”

“A miracle,” said Miss Withers fervently. “They’ve been trying to square the circle since Euclid died, and you did it without batting an eye. I take off my hat to you, Amos Britt.”

“You can save that till my men find something,” he told her.

Miss Withers had a flash of intuition which told her that she would be saving her congratulations for a long time, but she did not say so.

“Until we find the corpse,” she said finally, “there is no way to discover what method the murderer used to kill Forrest, is there?”

To this the chief agreed. “If it is murder,” he added—“and there isn’t any reason why the body’d be stolen otherwise.”

“Exactly. And since the Death Ray is still a myth, and there were no signs of violence upon the body, I have inclined since the beginning to a theory that poison was the method used. Particularly since the little dog Jones was very ill from something he ate in the
Dragonfly
plane.”

The chief nodded. “So far so good,” he said. “Mebbe the autopsy would have brought your poison to light. But if it was poison, then how did he take it? The hotel people over to Los Angeles maintain that he left that morning in a tearing hurry, without stopping for breakfast. We’ve traced him to the place where he rented the car—a block down the street—and most of the way down to Wilmington. And he never ate a mouthful. I never heard of a poison that would lay back that long and suddenly catch a man.”

“Perhaps this is how it was done,” said Miss Withers softly. She opened her bag and took from it a little newspaper-wrapped parcel. This she began to unfold.

“Through a stroke of pure and unadulterated luck, I got these from the plumber who found them clogging the sewage disposal pipes of the Casino,” she explained. “Probably they’re nothing at all, but I want them analyzed all the same.”