Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (16 page)

For a moment Miss Withers digested this somewhat amazing disclosure. “A dead body—could you see how it was dressed?”

Roscoe shook his head. “They had him in the closed truck before I got there, mum. But I saw a sort of dark overcoat throwed over him.”

Miss Withers nodded. “Did you see who drove the truck?”

“No, mum.”

“Was Mr. Tate in command of operations?” Miss Withers pressed onward. “In other words, do you think that his assistants were acting as accomplices in the carrying out of the disposal of the body?”

Roscoe blinked admiringly at her choice of words. Then he wagged his head. “I didn’t see Mr. Tate around nowhere this mornin’. Now—you-all through with me, mum?”

“You may go,” said Miss Withers. “But it may be necessary for you to repeat this testimony in the office of the chief of police.”

“Yas’m,” agreed Roscoe, evidently relishing, now that he had taken the plunge, the thrill of being the center of the stage.

“And Roscoe—I think that when you see Mr. George again, you should return the dollar.”

“Yas’m,” echoed Roscoe unhappily.

Miss Withers had thought that her day’s labors as self-appointed criminal investigator were over, but this new evidence, contradictory as it seemed to be, was nothing which she could ignore.

It was manifestly her duty to inform Chief Britt of this latest development in the case at once. She hastened downstairs to the telephone booth in the lobby and was almost immediately connected with the chief’s office.

Instead of Britt’s lazy drawl she was disappointed to hear the querulous voice of Deputy Ruggles.

“Amos is busy,” she was informed.

“I have no doubt about it,” Miss Withers retorted. “But he must speak to me. I’ve got news of the missing body.”

“Party? Amos can’t go to no party, he’s busy I tell you!” Like most persons afflicted with deafness, Deputy Ruggles raised his voice to a scream whenever he was having trouble in hearing.

“If Chief Britt is busy, I’ve got news that will make him twice as busy. You ask him to come to the phone. To the phone, understand?”

“Of course I understand,” answered Ruggles testily. “I ain’t deef. But he can’t come to the phone. He’s busy arresting Barney Kelsey!”

Miss Withers was completely flabbergasted. “Barney Kelsey? What for, in heaven’s name?”

“For the murder of Roswell Forrest, that’s what for,” came back Ruggles happily. “Caught escaping red-handed, almost. They’re bringing him back now—”

“Escaping? But how in the world—there’s only the steamer and the plane—”

Ruggles laughed cacklingly “He figured out another way. You see, there’s a feller on the pier who rents outboard motorboats to the tourists for a run of the harbor, at two dollars an hour. Kelsey rented him one this afternoon and headed her out to sea. He run out of gas, like the dumb greenhorn he is, about halfway between here and Long Beach, in the middle of the channel, and Lew French in the
Dragonfly
sighted him. The chief went out in a launch to nab him—now do you understand?”

Miss Withers slowly replaced the receiver and came out of the booth. “No, I don’t think I do understand,” she remarked to nobody in particular.

“T
HE ANCIENT ORDER OF DRAGONFLIES
is in session,” called out the effervescent Phyllis, as Miss Withers put in a tardy appearance at the dinner table that night. She waved toward a vacant chair, covering up a somewhat strained silence which had greeted the advent of the schoolteacher.

Miss Withers made a brief survey as she sat down between Phyllis and the male half of the newlyweds, at whom she smiled benevolently. There were several vacant chairs this evening, and the Ancient Order of the Dragonflies had hardly a quorum. Phyllis, Tompkins, the newlyweds, and herself made up the party. The three movie men, she imagined, were still up at the picture location on the Isthmus, busy with whatever mischief it was that Roscoe had unveiled to her. As for Captain Narveson, Phyllis went on to announce that she had glimpsed him entering the local pool and billiard emporium shortly before six.

Tompkins, pale-faced and shakily sober, received a distant nod from Miss Withers. He was having ham and eggs, the newlyweds shared a magnificent steak, but the newcomer followed Phyllis’s lead and ordered an omelette.

She noticed that the young couple had surrounded themselves with a litter of travel pamphlets and guidebooks dealing with the island.

“I see you’re bent on enjoying yourselves,” Miss Withers remarked conversationally. “I suppose this island paradise is a pleasant change from your work.”

Kay Deving looked blank.

“Miss La Fond tells me that she has seen you on the stage somewhere.”

Still Kay looked blank. “Why,” she smiled, “Marvy and I aren’t on the stage! We met in a Charleston contest years ago, but that was in a Chicago ballroom.”

“I’ve had about every job under the sun,” Marvin Deving took up the explanation. “But I never got into show business, with or without Kay. It’s always been a sort of ambition of mine, like it is of ’most everybody. Only I’ve been behind a soda fountain most of the time. Right now I’m not doing anything, as a matter of fact.”

“Maybe it was a couple of other guys,” said Phyllis La Fond. But she stared very thoughtfully at her fork.

Kay Deving turned to Miss Withers, her brown-flecked eyes alight with expectation. “Don’t you think, now that they’ve got the guilty man in jail, it will be all right for us to leave tomorrow or the next day?”

Phyllis interrupted, rather heatedly, as Miss Withers was pondering the matter.

“What makes you think they have got the man who bumped Forrest off? Mr. Kelsey didn’t do it, he’s cute. His trying to get away doesn’t prove he did the murder, does it, Miss Withers?”

The schoolteacher pursed her lips. “Not exactly, no. All the same, Mr. Kelsey has made things very difficult for himself. I’m afraid the police will feel his attempt was prima-facie evidence of guilt. Yet, as a matter of fact,” she elaborated, “Kelsey may have had perfectly innocent reasons for disobeying the order to remain here.”

Marvin Deving, he of the slick hair and the slightly fatuous smile, entered the conversation. “Yeah,” he said. “And maybe a cop goes into the back door of a speakeasy to get a glass of ginger ale.”

“Marvy means,” translated Kay sweetly, “that Mr. Kelsey may have had a reason for trying to save his life before they hung him.”

“You think of the nicest things at the dinner table,” objected Phyllis. “Let’s call a moratorium on the murder, shall we? How about playing Ghosts or Missing Words? I know a swell limerick about the old man from Peru who found he had nothing to do …”

Her efforts at turning the tide of the conversation were efficacious but unappreciated. Kay and Marvin Deving returned to their guidebooks.

Miss Withers peered across the table. “Are you children planning on doing the place thoroughly?”

Kay nodded. “As long as we have to stay here, we may as well see everything. Today we went to the bird park and out for a ride on the glass-bottomed boat, and tomorrow there’s a Sunday excursion to the Isthmus.”

T. Girard Tompkins, evidently intent upon eradicating any unfavorable impression he had made on the previous evening, was spreading himself to be affable and gentlemanly. He tugged at a pocket of his coat and finally brought forth a globular object of dull red, which appeared at first to be an apple.

He put it down carefully on the table in front of him and turned to the newlyweds. “While you are seeing the island,” he explained, “you ought to visit the pottery plant down the beach where this ware is made.”

He picked up a silver knife and tapped the odd-shaped bowl near the small opening at its top. The piece responded with a clear, resonant musical note—D flat above high C, Miss Withers thought it.

“I happen to handle the marketing of a good deal of this pottery,” he announced somewhat pompously. “It is of a very superior quality, as you can see for yourself. Only in Devonshire, England, is a clay found which is anything like the product of the Catalina craters. Once upon a time, you know, this entire island was a range of active volcanic peaks, and the oxides, kaolins, and the acid minerals, united with silicas and aluminums, are responsible for the richness and sturdiness of this Catalina ware. Watch—”

He rolled the little round bowl off the table, and though it struck upon a hard tile floor, it did not shatter. Tompkins made a breathless and triumphant recovery and placed it on the table again.

Quite evidently Mr. Tompkins expected somebody to say something indicative of interest in his bowl. Miss Withers obligingly picked it up and stared into the little hole which gave access to its hollow center. “What is it used for?”

Tompkins shrugged his shoulders. “Small flowers, old razor blades, matches, used chewing gum—” there seemed another awkward silence after that word:—“oh, anything you like.”

Miss Withers nodded. “And where do they get the clay to make these?”

Tompkins shrugged again. “Most of it from the quarry—” He stopped as he saw her face.

“Quarry!” she had forgotten that she was not alone. “That’s where the murderer of Roswell Forrest might have got rid of the body!”

But her excitement was short-lived. “The quarry is away out beyond the Isthmus,” Tompkins informed her. “They used to dig at the crater of Mount Orizaba and Mount Black Jack, but landslides wiped them out years ago. Now all the digging is done twenty miles away, at Silver Peak.”

Miss Withers nodded slowly. Then she moved as if to replace the bowl in front of Tompkins across the table. Unfortunately, she overturned a centerpiece of fresh nasturtiums, and as the ensuing cascade of water poured across the cloth, she let the apple-colored bowl go rolling on the floor, with a clumsiness quite foreign to her nature.

“I’m so sorry,” she gasped.

They were all standing up, and a waiter was mopping at the damage. “I’m afraid I’ve damaged your little bowl.”

“Not at all,” Tompkins was saying, as he peered beneath the cloths of neighboring tables. Miss Withers noticed that he was wearing canvas shoes with sponge-rubber soles. But it was Marvin Deving who spied the bowl first and who knelt to rescue it. “Here she is,” he announced lightly. “And there’s not a nick on it. Aren’t you relieved, Miss Withers?”

Miss Withers was not relieved, for while the pleasant young man had been kneeling upon the floor, she had seen all too clearly that his worn buckskin sport shoes bore new rubber heels—heels with a large initial K in relief on them. The K on the right foot had a broken upper bar.

The newlyweds excused themselves, as they intended, they said, to take in the movie at the Casino. Phyllis refused to accompany them, on the grounds that she had seen the picture as a preview a year before. “But I might be interested in that Isthmus trip tomorrow,” she added. Then she bribed a waiter to filch some bones from the kitchen and departed toward the stairs with Mister Jones’s supper. Tompkins, with his bowl in his hand, went out ostensibly to smoke a cigar on the beach, and Miss Withers remained at the table alone, her brows frowning.

It was impossible for her to believe that on his wedding night Marvin Deving had slipped through the fog to the window of the infirmary and had been responsible for the macabre and grotesque shifting of human remains which had taken place there before sunrise.

For a while she silently debated whether or not to take this information to the chief. He would immediately arrest Marvin—or would he? Barney Kelsey was already looking at the world through prison bars, but Miss Withers had no idea of placing anyone else in that predicament unless she was certain.

Did the print of Marvin’s heel outside the window mean that he had worn the shoes that made it—or, for that matter, that he had ever gone through that window, even if he had stood outside?

She remembered the blank amazement on his face—and on Kay’s too—when they heard of the theft of the body. Evidence was all right but Miss Withers placed more faith in her intuition.

Finally she gave the whole matter up and began to concentrate again upon the whereabouts of the body. “If we find it first, then we can start to figure who put it there,” she told herself.

As she rose from the table, she saw a pamphlet lying near Kay Deving’s chair—evidently a bit of travel literature which had fallen to the floor and been forgotten. She idly picked it up—and immediately became engrossed in a map of Catalina.

It was a fanciful, grotesque piece of work, but the landmarks and roads were there. She could see the peaks mentioned by Tompkins—the Isthmus, where the island had very nearly been separated into two islands by the pushing Pacific, and the height where she had stood with the chief and surveyed the vain search for the body.

The chief had drawn a circle around the town, estimating the farthest distance that a wheelbarrow could have been pushed in the night. But suppose it had not been a wheelbarrow, after all—or suppose that the body had been transferred to an auto “borrowed” from the local bus garage for that purpose—or from the moving-picture location at the Isthmus!

As she stared at the map her eyes came upon a notation upon the southwestern shore of the island—the shore on the side opposite the town and facing the vast stretches of the Pacific. There were no roads or ranches marked here, but only a wild crisscrossing of deep lines labeled “canyons,” and farther up the shore, not more than two miles or at the most three from the town, the words “Old Indian Village and Burial Caves.”

One thin and winding line from the plateau to the town showed that some sort of a road existed. Perhaps it was a road that a wheelbarrow passed over in the night. Perhaps—perhaps the burial caves had been called into service again.

Miss Withers made an instantaneous decision.

She folded up the map and nodded. “Tomorrow I visit the Old Indian Village, if I have to walk,” she said to herself. But she did not dream of the manner in which she was destined to make her entrance into that prehistoric waste, or of the nightmares that were to follow after.

She climbed to her room, but left it hurriedly in order to escape hearing the woebegone howls of Mister Jones, who, Phyllis called from her doorway, had had his bottom warmed for him due to the discovery of an accident sincerely regretted by everyone concerned.