Puzzle of the Pepper Tree

by Stuart Palmer

  Britt stowed his blue bundle away in a pocket of his coat. He began to show that he was impatient to wind up the matter.

  “Now listen,” he approached Miss Withers. “You keep saying you think this fellow was killed. Do you see any reason why you think so?”

  “She doesn’t see reasons—she smells ’em,” offered Dr. O’Rourke.

  Miss Withers sniffed. “Chief Britt, haven’t you ever had a flash of intuition—a premonition—a hunch, in other words?”

  The chief blinked his tiny, cunning eyes at her. “Yes, ma’am. In poker games. And it costs me money every time.”

  The crowd which lingered outside the little infirmary was increasing steadily, and Miss Withers noticed an admixture of newcomers with suitcases and light coats swung over their arms, as the chief opened the door again.

  “G’bye, ma’am, g’bye, Doc,” he spoke politely. Then he stopped short and said, “Hello.”

  Through the open doorway a shaft of noon sunshine poured into the dark little room, spreading a track of gold across the floor and touching the bared face of the dead man with a semblance of life.

  Then the shaft of sunlight was blotted out again, blocked by the square shoulders of a man so tall that he had to stoop in order to enter the doorway.

  His face, Miss Withers instantly noted, was handsome, almost too handsome, in a soft way. The eyes were the only jarring feature, for they showed momentarily a flickering, evasive look. Then he smiled apologetically, and the eyes were like other eyes.

  “Excuse me,” he said. His voice had an Eastern tang that was almost harsh among these drawling Californians. “They were saying on the pier that somebody had died, but they didn’t know who it was. I expected a friend to meet me here, and he didn’t show up. I wondered—”

  “Take a look for yourself,” said the chief hospitably. “Letters in his pocket identify him as being named R. Roswell. Know him?”

  The newcomer removed his Panama and moved toward the body. Immediately he became ten years older than his oddly young face, for his hair was streaked with gray. As yet he had no eyes for the doctor or the two women, but stared at the figure which lay on the operating table as if he expected it to rise and salute him.

  For a long minute he stared at the face of the dead man. Then he turned toward the others, his handsome face expressionless.

  “I was afraid of that,” he said slowly. “It’s my friend—and his full name is Roswell T. Forrest.”

  Miss Withers gasped, audibly. The newcomer turned toward her. “I see you know,” he said. “I was his traveling companion—my name is Barney Kelsey.” Then he continued, dully: “We were supposed to make this little outing together, but Forrest missed the boat.”

  “But the letters,” protested the chief. “The letters were addressed to him by his first name only?”

  “I’ll explain all that. But, first, do you know who—what happened to him?”

  Dr. O’Rourke started to speak, but Miss Withers, in a voice that kept him silent, interrupted.

  “A paralytic stroke is a terrible thing,” she observed, commiseratingly.

  The newcomer’s eyes flickered once as the chief and the doctor stared at each other blankly.

  But before they spoke, Barney Kelsey nodded his head.

  “Forrest has had trouble like that before,” he went on, swiftly. “The doctors warned him that another attack would be fatal.”

  There was a dead silence.

  “Oddly enough,” continued Miss Hildegarde Withers, “Dr. O’Rourke here discovered no trace of paralysis past or present in the body. My remark was purely general. The doctor leans toward heart failure, at the present moment. My own ideas lead in quite another direction. I suppose your friend Forrest was also subject to heart trouble?”

  Kelsey’s eyes were those of a trapped animal for a flash, and then they became bland and open.

  “On second thought,” he said softly, “I agree with you that Roswell Forrest was murdered.”

  “I thought you would,” said Miss Withers.

  CHAPTER IV

  “THIS IS GETTING NO clearer, fast,” admitted Chief of Police Britt, after a long moment of uncomfortable silence. He looked at a massive silver watch and then definitely gave up any hope of getting back to his curio shop that noon. “S’pose you get down to cases and tell us what you mean by all this stuff about murder, and about your friend Roswell named Forrest or vice versa?”

  The chief went wearily over and turned a key in the door. Then he faced Barney Kelsey, expectantly. “Don’t mind the audience, just go ahead.”

  The stranger nodded. “I’ll try to make it short,” he promised. “This lady here”—he indicated Miss Withers—“recognized the name of Roswell T. Forrest. I’m surprised it means nothing to you, Chief.”

  “Maybe it does,” hedged the chief cautiously, “and maybe it doesn’t.”

  “Well, it’s been in the newspapers enough, anyway. Forrest has been dodging the Brandstatter Committee investigation, back in New York City, for a couple of months. He was confidential secretary to Welch, the Commissioner of Docks and Harbors, whom they’ve got on the grill right now. They wanted to make Forrest testify against his boss—”

  “In regard to the safety deposit boxes he shared with Welch!” cut in Miss Withers triumphantly. “That’s it! The New York papers were full of it when I left, and the clippings in Forrest’s billfold are about the same thing!”

  Kelsey bowed in agreement. “I’ve been traveling around the country with Forrest,” he continued. “Helping him dodge process servers and the newspaper men. You see—”

  “Wait a minute,” said the chief. “Let me get this straight. You did all this traveling around for love—or money?”

  Kelsey hesitated.

  “He means,” interrupted Miss Withers, “did you receive a salary from Forrest?”

  “I received salary and expenses, yes,” admitted Kelsey. “But not from Forrest. He couldn’t afford anything like that. Every week he received a money order from a New York lawyer—who, I don’t know—and along with his came one for me. You see, it was pretty important to a lot of people that Forrest shouldn’t come back to New York by mistake.”

  “So we see,” said Hildegarde Withers. Dr. O’Rourke grunted disagreeably in the background.

  “You realize,” the chief inquired, “that this makes you an accessory after the fact to anything Forrest may have done?”

  Kelsey shrugged his shoulders. “There were no charges against him, Chief. You get me wrong. They only wanted to subpoena him as a witness.”

  “Then why all the hiding out?”

  “Some pretty important people didn’t want his testimony brought forward—and besides, Forrest was no squealer.”

  “Still sounds funny to me,” objected Chief Britt. “If there were no criminal charges against Forrest, all he had to do was to stay out of the jurisdiction of the state of New York. They could serve subpoenas on him till the cows came home, and it wouldn’t mean a thing.”

  “Wouldn’t it! If they stuck a writ on him, he could be cited for contempt of court and fined.”

  “Go on,” said the chief.

  “We’ve been in Los Angeles about two weeks,” continued Kelsey. “Adjoining rooms at the Senator. We’ve been laying pretty low, and Forrest kept in communication with New York only through his first name, under which he was registered. But nothing happened and nobody seemed to be on our trail, so lately we’ve been moving around a little more freely. We decided to take this little outing together, partly to keep his mind off other things. Forrest went out alone Thursday—yesterday afternoon—and stayed out. Phoned me he would meet me at the boat this morning, because I had the tickets. But he didn’t show up.”

  “Know where he spent the night?” In spite of himself, the chief was growing interested. Dr. O’Rourke was puffing impatiently at a cigarette, and Miss Withers seemed engrossed in a cameo brooch which she wore.

  Kelsey hesitated at the question. �
�He visited a friend—a Miss Frances Lee, out on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. He phoned me from there.”

  The chief rubbed his chin. “Frances Lee? Frances Lee …”

  Here Dr. O’Rourke interrupted. “You wouldn’t know, Britt. The madame runs a deluxe—er—bagnio.”

  “A what?” Miss Withers was bewildered.

  “A home for falling women,” O’Rourke enlightened her, wickedly.

  Chief Britt nodded and turned again toward Kelsey. “D’you know anybody who might have a reason to kill Forrest?”

  Kelsey didn’t.

  “Know if Forrest had any relations?”

  “He had a wife in Yonkers,” was the reply. “If you call that a relation. I can give you the address.”

  The chief laboriously made a note of it. Then he turned toward O’Rourke.

  “Well, Doc, what d’you think we better do?”

  O’Rourke surveyed the corpse with disfavor. “Do? Get him off our hands quick as we can. Send him over to the coroner at Long Beach. I still think it was a natural death. There’s not a sign of violence—no wounds, no bullet holes. Why make a big stink about it?”

  Hildegarde Withers faced him belligerently. “Young man, no matter what you try to say or do, there’s going to be a big—er, smell. Hushing it up won’t help.”

  The chief, torn between opposing forces, scratched his head.

  “But I’ve never had a murder case yet, in all my ten years in office!” he protested dubiously.

  “There has always to be a first time for everything,” Miss Withers told him. “Dr. O’Rourke reminded me of that but a moment ago.”

  Barney Kelsey stole a furtive glance at the corpse and then looked quickly away.

  The chief was tramping up and down the room. “Things like this don’t happen here,” he argued with himself. Then he stopped short, facing Miss Withers. “Listen,” he offered. “I’ll have them bring the passengers off that plane down to my office and see if they noticed anything that wasn’t as it should have been. Now that ought to take care of your objections, Miss—what’s your name?”

  “Hildegarde Martha Withers,” that lady reminded him tartly. “Obviously you will have to question the passengers of that plane before they get separated and scattered. You mustn’t let this body go over to the mainland, either, until—”

  “Easy there, ma’am.” The chief was drawing near the end of his patience. “Now I wouldn’t walk into your classroom and tell you how to teach your kids their ABC!”

  “You’re welcome to!” Miss Withers assured him. “Any time you see me doing my job the way you’re doing yours. Can’t you see that this is a full-fledged, front-page murder mystery? If you try to hush it up as a natural death, there’s bound to be a big—a big smell, and I can well imagine what the newspapers will have to say about you and Dr. O’Rourke!”

  With that last broadside, Miss Withers crossed to the door, unlocked it, and closed it gently but firmly behind her. Barney Kelsey hesitated, gave his intended address, and then followed her example, leaving the door ajar.

  Chief of Police Amos Britt stared at James Michael O’Rourke, M.D., and the doctor returned his stare, wordlessly.

  “And the sad part about it is that she’s right,” O’Rourke remarked softly, as if anxious not to awaken the dead man in the brown sport outfit.

  “Mebbe she is and mebbe she isn’t,” Chief Britt announced. “Anyway”—his face brightened—“Anyway she’s finally taken herself out of it.”

  At that moment Miss Hildegarde Withers, far from having taken herself out of anything, was doing her best to involve herself deeper into what was to be famous in newspaper annals as “The Red Dragonfly Mystery.”

  Half a block from the infirmary, on a covered arcade connecting two side streets, is the Avalon post office, and next door to this invaluable institution glows the blue-and-white globe of a telegraph office. Miss Withers pushed aside scornfully the stub of pencil with its inevitable jingling chain, and with her own slim fountain pen set down the following message:

  POSTAL TELEGRAPH

  AVALON CALIFORNIA 12:45 P

  INSPECTOR OSCAR PIPER,

  CENTRE STREET

  POLICE HEADQUARTERS

  NEW YORK CITY

  CURIOUS TO KNOW PLEASE RUSH DESCRIPTION AND WHAT INFORMATION YOU HAVE ON FILE REGARDING ROSWELL T FORREST AND BARNEY KELSEY REGARDS

  HILDEGARDE

  When this telegram was safely on the wire, Miss Withers took from a pocket of her coat a small, limp, modern-library edition of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Making her angular body as comfortable as possible on one of the wooden benches near the telegraph desk, she proceeded to put completely from her mind all thought of the dead man and the officials who were at the moment so embarrassed by his presence.

  That lady’s remarkable patience and calmness, however, were not shared by the seven marooned individuals who were still waiting at the airport for a bus to transport them on to the village of Avalon.

  The great Ralph O. Tate took it hardest. With a small and brittle twig which he had torn from a nearby bush he whipped viciously at the sleek black leather of his riding boots. Before him stretched a blue ocean, with a haze that was California in the far distance. Behind him were the yellow villa and the barrier of mountains. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Tony and George, his two satellites, busily matching coins. They had run through dimes to quarters by this time.

  Beside him, her well-rounded body resting upon well-rounded heels, Phyllis La Fond chatted companionably—inevitably. Now and again Tate flung a stone at the water, but most of his missiles refused to skip. That, too, was in key with the rest of his morning—for at the other end of Catalina, Tate knew all too well, there was a moving-picture company on location. Waiting since sunrise this morning—waiting for him. At something like two hundred dollars an hour.

  “Someday,” Phyllis was saying—“Someday I’ll get my chance in pictures. Somebody will look at me and realize that there’s something hidden in me, something that everybody doesn’t see—”

  Tate surveyed her form-fitting plaid suit impartially. “I don’t know where you’d hide it,” he remarked.

  At that moment a siren sounded from the gateway beside the village—a raucous yet welcome blast from the red bus which had just coasted down the slope to a skidding stop.

  “It’s about time,” emitted the great Ralph O. Tate. “All right, boys!” He rose to his feet, replaced the blue beret upon his shining poll, and made off up the beach.

  Phyllis picked up a small oval stone, looked longingly at the back of his skull, and then spat daintily upon the pebble and sent it skipping across the water, to her deep inward satisfaction.

  Then she, too, followed the procession.

  “It’s all right, folks,” Manager Hinch was announcing. “The bus finally got here. Step lively, please!” Phyllis needed no invitation to step lively.

  Hinch had had a bad hour and had finally locked himself in the office where no one could get at him. But now he was himself again, distributing smiles.

  Captain Thorwald Narveson tapped out his corncob pipe against the stones and rose to his feet. Around him was a little circle of dottle and match stubs, but he was otherwise just as he had been left an hour or more ago. The innocent blue eyes still twinkled, and the freckles on his ears and forehead stood out even darker than before. The captain tossed his duffle bag on the bus and then placed himself heavily and firmly in the rear seat.

  Ralph O. Tate was the next on board, followed by his two assistants and the baggage. He took his seat between them, effectually preventing Phyllis from any further promotion of her fortunes. Philosophically, she joined the captain on the rear seat, defeated but not dismayed.

  Last to come were the newlyweds. Desperate shouts from Hinch and a series of earsplitting blasts upon the horn beneath the thumb of the fat youth in overalls finally brought them forth from the shadows of a eucalyptus clump. The redhaired girl was still cool and
comfortable in sweater and blue trousers, and in her hand she gripped tightly a wilted bouquet of nondescript flowers. The young man was busily combing his hair. Without further mishap they scrambled aboard, and the girl hastily set about wiping orange lipstick from her young husband’s nose.

  “All aboard!” shouted Hinch cheerily. He seemed to be washing his hands. “All aboard!”

  The motor bus roared, and then Phyllis suddenly rose to her feet, shrieking.

  “Wait—wait!” Her hands waved, wildly. “I forgot my baggage. It’s—it’s in the office!”

  “It’ll be safe there until you come after it,” Hinch shouted above the roar of the moving bus.

  He waved the driver on. After all, he had received his instructions, and if Chief Britt wanted these people to question, he could have them on the double-quick. The sooner the better, said Hinch.

  The bus lunged forward as the plump youth noisily shifted into second gear, and then roared up the slope. Phyllis sat down, hard, and only the thick hand of Captain Narveson kept her from rolling off sidewise.

  Phyllis murmured something impolite. The captain nodded in hearty agreement. “Yas, indeed,” he said. His blue eyes twinkled more than ever.

  Phyllis grinned in spite of herself and then calmly took his arm and clung to it through the rest of the ride.

  They were deposited before a doorway marked “Curios—Pottery—Postcards—Chief of Police,” just as the town carillon located on the hill above Mr. Zane Grey’s summer residence sounded the first hour of the afternoon.

  Everywhere around them, from the open counters of the little restaurants, rose the aroma of hot dogs, hamburgers, and abalone steaks, but the hungry passengers of the Dragonfly were herded briskly through the doors of the curio store and on toward a rear room. Their shepherd was a gaunt and slightly doddering person who announced himself, in a thin cracked voice, as “Chief Britt’s deppity.” His name, it later developed, was Ruggles, and this was his crowded hour. He made the most of it.

  “Jist a little formality,” he promised them. Director Tate’s impassioned objections met only with an “I’m a mite deef …”