Puzzle of the Pepper Tree

by Stuart Palmer

  He stepped back suddenly at the expression in her face.

  “Young man,” she told him firmly, “I’m sitting right here. Unless you want to put me off?”

  Nobody, it developed, wanted to do that. But Miss Withers wasn’t through. “I also advise you to send in on this bus all of these people who were on the flying machine. The police will want to question them, and perhaps hold them.”

  There sounded a shrill squeal from the girl in the blue corduroy trousers, as she seized her young man firmly around the neck. The note of terror in her young voice was very real.

  “Marvin! They can’t take us to jail on our honeymoon!” Her voice hung on the last word, thin and reedy. Luscious brown eyes, behind the sun goggles, were welling with tears. Miss Withers noticed the band of white gold which glittered, brand-new, on the third finger of the girl’s left hand, and the schoolteacher’s face for a brief second held an expression which might have been either envy or pity, or both.

  The young man appeared naturally ill at ease. He tried to reassure the girl who clung to him. “There, there, Kay, honey. Nobody is going to take us to jail.”

  “Or anywhere else,” Phyllis found time to interject. All the same, there was a silver lining. Ralph O. Tate, who was making it clear that he considered the man in brown had chosen to die at this time in a definite plot to hold up his plans, was strolling off moodily toward the shore. Phyllis sensed that the movie director’s defenses were temporarily down, and she unhesitatingly moved after him.

  Captain Narveson placed his sea bag on the ground, seated himself upon it, and took out and lit a blackened corncob pipe. But Miss Withers still held the fort.

  “Somebody has to go along and see to things,” she insisted. “This is a case for the police.”

  Hinch, shaken out of the ingrained politeness which marks every employee of the millionaire who purchased Catalina Island and made it what it is today, drew his breath angrily. And then:

  “Madam, you are absolutely right,” broke in a calm, dispassionate voice. The man with the elk’s tooth, who had kept himself and his paunch well in the background up until now, pressed forward to the side of the bus.

  “Bad business, this,” he observed to Hinch. The manager looked as if he agreed.

  “Hello, Mr. Tompkins. Sorry this happened with you on board to mar your trip.”

  T. Girard Tompkins waved his pudgy hand. He spoke with all the confidence that a regular weekly commutation ticket on the airline could give him. Regularly during the summer season he came to inspect the island pottery works, which gave him the status of an insider instead of tourist.

  “The lady is right,” he decided, nodding toward the belligerent figure of Miss Hildegarde Withers. “This is a matter for the authorities. In fact, I believe that I shall myself accompany her to the office of my friend Chief of Police Britt. If you have no objection—”

  Mr. Hinch objected very strenuously. “This has got to be hushed up,” he insisted. “It’ll drive the tourists away. Sorry, Mr. Tompkins, but you can’t go. I don’t care if your company does buy up all the pretty pink flowerpots they make down to Pebbly Beach. I’m sending this—this accident case in alone.” He swung on Miss Withers. “Come on, get off that bus. That’s final!”

  So it was that Hildegarde Withers went rolling through the hills to Avalon village in an improvised hearse. For company she had a frightened, fat chauffeur, a brace of white-uniformed and disgusted pilots, a paunchy distributor of pottery, and a stiffening corpse in a sport outfit of cocoa brown.

  CHAPTER III

  FROM THE AIRPORT LANDING at White’s Beach to the town of Avalon itself is only a matter of two miles of winding macadam road, which skirts the slope of Mount Orizaba itself, swings east toward the shore cliffs again, and finally descends in a long slope to the valley where the new Hotel St. Lena spreads its palm-shadowed balconies.

  When the piled grandeur of the hotel and its beaches and tennis courts and promenades is past, there still remains half a mile of shore road, which curves out around a promontory, ducks between a cliff and the tremendous marble pillbox which is Mr. Wrigley’s new Casino, and finally loses itself somewhere on Avalon’s half-mile of Main Street.

  Everywhere, on that bright August morning, a strange and varied assortment of humanity was enjoying itself after its own preferences. Brown-faced gentlemen moved shoreward, bearing the heavy rods and tackle that spell menace to swordfish and leaping tuna. Red-faced gentlemen bore large and shiny golf bags. Little boys swung bright tin pails. Old ladies beamed from wheelchairs—and young ladies beamed from everywhere.

  There were girls, girls—thousands of girls. Girls in furs and girls in cotton pajamas. Girls in riding habits, girls in Paris models, girls in homemade frocks—but mostly girls in very little of anything. Young, tanned bodies in the briefest of shorts, with a wisp of silk haphazardly bound across their breasts … the essence of Catalina.

  Discordantly, jarringly, through this swarming hive of humming, workless bees moved the red bus, bearing the body of the man who hadn’t wanted to die. Strangely, no other motor vehicle was in sight. The pleasure seekers drew aside to let the bus pass, and then closed in behind it, intent upon their own plans for the holiday. Nobody saw the stiffening figure half covered on the rear seat of the bus, for the simple reason that nobody expected to see such an apparition there. It was as out of place as a ghost in a kindergarten.

  Down Main Street, with its clusters of curio stores facing the two high piers, rolled the red bus, and finally came to rest before a small building on a side street, a modest frame building which flew above its doorway a flag consisting of a white cross on a red field.

  Through the door into the infirmary the two pilots swiftly carried their passenger, like a sack of meal. Behind them, on the bus, T. Girard Tompkins turned nervously to the schoolteacher at his side.

  “Perhaps it would be better …” he began.

  “It most certainly would,” Hildegarde Withers told him decisively. She faced the driver. “Young man, you go find the chief of police. Go on—scat!”

  Reluctantly, the fat youth detached himself from his seat behind the wheel and set off down the sidewalk.

  Miss Withers took her parasol in a firmer grip and bustled through the door of the infirmary. At the same moment a stiffly starched nurse appeared, concealing a yawn, from an inner room. She seemed a very businesslike young woman, as she stood in the doorway and rocked back and forth on her low and sensible heels.

  “Dr. O’Rourke isn’t here,” she was saying. “If it’s absolutely necessary I can get him—”

  She caught sight of the limp figure which the pilots had stretched out on the high iron table. “Another sunstroke case? Because if it is, I can take care—”

  “You cannot,” cut in Miss Withers. “Call the doctor.”

  The nurse went calmly over to the table, lifted the covering and replaced it. Then she nodded. “I’ll call the doctor,” she agreed.

  She went to the door, stepped outside, and felt above her head for the lanyard. Then she lowered the flag with the white cross to half-mast.

  “A quaint local custom?” Miss Withers inquired with raised eyebrows, when the starched young lady had returned.

  “Not at all,” the nurse informed her. “Dr. O’Rourke can see it from where he is. He’ll be here in a minute.”

  As a matter of fact, it was something more than three minutes by Miss Withers’s ancient timepiece before a lean and hairy little man, attired in sneakers and a dripping red bathing suit, burst open the door and entered from the street. He ignored the rest of them and faced the nurse, who had retired to a stool in the corner.

  “What’s this? Can’t a man have his swim without—” The doctor caught sight of the covered figure on his operating table.

  “So?” He removed the covering and surveyed the body of the man in the brown suit.

  He held the dangling wrist for a moment and then bent as if to press his head against the dead man’s
heart. His lips formed a silent whistle. “Gone, eh?” He replaced the wrist. “Within the last half-hour, I’d say. Looks like a mild alcoholic case, too.” With his fingers he forced the staring eyes wider and scrutinized the pupils. He frowned and then shrugged his shoulders and stepped back.

  “You might as well have let me finish my swim,” he complained. “I’m no miracle man; there’s nothing I can do here.”

  “You can tell us how he happened to meet his end,” Miss Withers suggested hopefully.

  “Maybe I can,” hedged Dr. O’Rourke. He extended a thumb toward the two pilots, who still lingered by the door. “This happen aboard your Dragonfly?”

  “Half a mile up,” agreed Chick. “He was making a big fuss about being sick to his stummick, and then he went into a howling funk. Yelled something about not wanting to die, and then he was quiet. I figured he’d got under control, and when we landed, we found out that all that’d been holding him up was the straps.”

  “There you are,” said Dr. O’Rourke. “Pump played out on him. Doesn’t take much to knock over one of these chronic booze fighters. We can write this down as simple heart failure.”

  He replaced the covering on the dead face. Then he went over to a sink against the wall and washed his hands thoroughly with blue soap.

  Miss Withers found herself vaguely dissatisfied. “But, Doctor—do you know that this man just made a coast-to-coast plane trip without dying of heart failure? Yet you say he died of fright on a short trip like this!”

  “Good Lord, woman!” Dr. O’Rourke stared at her impolitely. “There always has to be a first time for everything. Particularly for dying, you know. Why—” he waxed heavily facetious—“Why, that’s one thing even you have never accomplished!”

  Hildegarde Withers stared at the hairy little man. There came a look into her eyes which he could not understand. She was remembering a quarter of an hour that she had spent once upon the witness stand in the case of the People of the State of New York versus Gwen Lester, and another moment in the cellar beneath Jefferson School when the murderer of lovely Anise Halloran had crept after her in the darkness.

  “Haven’t I!” she said softly.

  “You a relative?” The doctor wanted to know.

  Miss Withers hesitated at that one.

  “Naw, she’s just a kibitzer,” cut in Chick. “Well, that washes this business up as far as we’re concerned. Come on, Lew, let’s get back to the airport. The stiff is all yours, Doc. We’re fed up with him.”

  The door slammed behind them. Miss Withers came closer to the hairy little doctor, who was still dripping onto the carpet.

  “Wouldn’t a postmortem be likely to show—”

  “Postmortem?” He cut her short, irascibly. “Why in the name of the blessed Saint Vitus should there be a postmortem? Just because a stew passes out in a plane instead of in his bed or against a brass rail—”

  “All the same, I sent for the chief of police,” Miss Withers told him tartly.

  The doctor was fast losing patience. “Look here, are you trying to teach me to run my business?”

  Hildegarde Withers sniffed, audibly. She turned and looked out into the street, above a ruffled curtain which covered the lower half of both door and windows. The bus was still there, the two pilots climbing aboard, but there was no sign as yet of the fat youth who drove it, or of the official he had been sent to fetch. T. Girard Tompkins had also taken himself off, presumably to join in the search for his friend the chief.

  “Chief Britt will certainly be grateful to you for dragging him away from his store at the noon rush hour,” observed O’Rourke in an edged voice. “The chief just loves to close up his curio shop and trot around on wild-goose chases.”

  “Wild geese my Aunt Hannah,” said Miss Withers. She sniffed again. “Young man, I have had the good or bad fortune to have been in contact with several notorious and unsavory cases of homicide during the past two years. Perhaps that poor fellow over there looks like just another case of heart failure to you, but I’m getting so I can detect the very smell of murder.”

  A lean forefinger wagged in O’Rourke’s face, and Miss Withers pronounced solemnly, “I can smell murder now!”

  At that moment the door opened, and a large nickel-plated shield entered. Pinned to the shield was a large, jolly person whose smallish eyes welled from between rolls of fat, a beaming convivial person who looked like a bartender rather than a limb of John Law.

  Behind this dignitary followed a little procession of tourists, sprinkled here and there with natives. As the infirmary door was closed firmly in their faces, they began to billow against the windows, their muffled and excited voices filtering through onto the scene like an offstage-crowd noise. The big man cast at them no backward glance.

  “Hello, Doc! How’ya, ma’am?” He nodded cordially in the direction of Miss Withers. “Now what seems to be the trouble here?”

  “Trouble enough,” Miss Withers told him. “If you ask me, I’m of the opinion—”

  “Of course,” agreed Chief Britt consolingly. “Certainly.” He peered around the room and finally discovered Exhibit A. “Dear, dear! What is it, Doc?”

  “Tourist croaked while the Dragonfly was coming out,” said the doctor. “This lady thinks it’s assassination.” He snorted and began drying himself with a convenient towel. “Simple case of heart failure.”

  “Naturally,” agreed the chief. He approached the white-covered figure. “Naturally,” he echoed himself.

  Miss Withers had the impression that his thoughts were very far away, perhaps back in the curio shop which was losing its noon tourist trade. Then the chief suddenly surprised her.

  He leaned both pudgy hands on the back of a chair, and blinked. “Who did?”

  “Who did? what?” The doctor snapped.

  “Who died?” Britt inclined his head toward the body.

  Miss Withers looked at the doctor, and he looked back at her. “I don’t think anybody inquired into that,” admitted O’Rourke.

  “May make a difference,” beamed the chief. “Shouldn’t wonder.”

  He rubbed his hands together and moved ponderously toward the body. “Funny he was all alone,” Britt offered, as the nurse drew back the covering again. “They usually come over here with friends.” He hesitated a moment, as if reluctant to violate the secrecy of the dead. “Got to find out who he is before we can tell his folks,” he finished, almost apologetically.

  With a certain clumsy system about it, he removed from the pockets of the dead man a heterogeneous collection of odds and ends, which he juggled helplessly in his hands until he sighted a small table against the farther wall of the room, where he dumped them.

  “Ought to make a list,” he announced. Miss Hildegarde Withers already held sketchbook and pencil in her hands.

  “I can take shorthand,” she offered, eager to assist. But Chief of Police Britt held out his hands for the book and pencil.

  “Thank yuh,” he said. Then he began a studious enumeration of the dead man’s chattels.

  He wrote:

  Blk leather billfold, no calling cards, contents fifty-five dollars in fives and tens, parking ticket Terminal Garage, receipt for plane ticket, two newspaper clippings, one eight-cent airmail stamp.

  Two letters addressed R. Roswell, Hotel Senator, Los Angeles, unopened. Postmark New York City. One smelly pink paper, the other letterhead legal firm Fishbein, O’Hara, & Fishbein, Park Place, Manhattan.

  Change—twenty-dollar gold piece, Canadian quarter, dollar fifty in silver.

  Pair of red dice [the chief rattled these thoughtfully as he wrote], fountain pen with initials R.T.F., expensive make, brown silk handkerchief in breast pocket, unmarked. Key ring with two Yale keys and folding corkscrew.

  “That seems to be the story,” finished the chief. “Name’s Roswell. Lives over to the Senator in Los Angeles.”

  “If his name is Roswell,” pointed out Miss Withers, who was leaning over his shoulder, “then why the
initials on his fountain pen?”

  The chief of police stared solemnly at the initials R.T.F. “Cuts no ice,” he decided, after ponderous thought. “Prob’ly borrowed it off somebody. Never manage to keep one of the things myself.”

  From the hip pocket of his dingy white linen suit, Britt removed a large blue bandanna handkerchief, in which he dumped the articles which he had listed. Then he tied the corners together.

  “Got to notify his hotel,” he announced. “Doc, you make out a certificate of death and send it t’ my office so it can go in to the mainland with the corpse tonight.”

  O’Rourke had donned a bathrobe, and he looked up from his slippers in surprise. “Where d’you think I’ll get a death certificate? Nobody died here in two years.”

  “Make one up out o’ your own head, then,” pronounced the chief. At that moment a hollow siren outside made the windowpanes rattle like castanets. “There’s the Avalon now—I got to get back and open up the store—”

  “Wait,” demanded Hildegarde Withers. “There’s more to it than that. This man Roswell—or whatever his name is—died suddenly under mysterious circumstances. It isn’t exactly any of my business—”

  “Hear, hear,” offered Dr. O’Rourke.

  “But all the same, it is my honest opinion that this is a case for a coroner.”

  Chief Britt smiled, sleepily. “We ain’t got a coroner, ma’am. When there’s any need we use the one over to Long Beach, on the mainland. I’ll send the corpse over to him and if he wants to, he can have an inquest.”

  “And by that time it will be everlastingly too late!”

  Miss Withers was intense. “All the people who were on that plane when this man died will be scattered.”

  “Yes, ma’am, but—”

  “But nothing! Hasn’t this town got a mayor or anything besides you?”

  “Yes, ma’am. There’s Mayor Peters, and we got a city manager, too, name of Klein. Both of ’em out in Klein’s boat after sea bass and won’t be back for a couple of days anyway.”