Puzzle of the Pepper Tree

by Stuart Palmer

  “Here, be a sport,” she invited. “I need a drink, and I’m no solitary drinker. When you can do that you’re beyond the pale, they say. Take it and listen.” Miss Withers took it, a little gingerly.

  Phyllis drew up a little table beside the bed and curled up near Miss Withers.

  “I suppose you think I’m an awful fool,” she began.

  “Most of us are, at one time or another,” the schoolteacher told her.

  “Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you what I was bawling about, and you’ll know how big a one I am.” Phyllis put down her drink on the table and leaned closer.

  “It was seeing those kids—the newlyweds.” Her voice was still a little choky beneath the cheerful, forced tones.

  “I should think they’d make you laugh, not cry,” said Miss Withers.

  Phyllis shook her head. “They’re in love,” she said softly. “And they’ve got each other. Maybe they’re fools, but it’s a great foolishness. And every time I look at them, I think that maybe if I—if things had been different, I might—”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I might have been like Kay Deving. Instead of a tramp.” Phyllis hugged her knees. “Funny, isn’t it? You see, what I said to you today—it wasn’t true. I’m in this racket, but I don’t like it, even if I belong in it. You know what I mean. Chiseling around, playing men for coffee-and-cake money—I’m just a bum, and I’ll keep on going down till I land in a Mexican hook-joint or jump off the Arroyo Seco bridge. I say I don’t care, I tell myself this is the deal I got and I might as well play it out. But once in a while I get this way—and it seems as if I just can’t go on.”

  “Must you?” said Hildegarde Withers. “Go on, I mean.”

  “Of course I must! What else is there to do? Men notice me, but they notice just one thing. They talk to me, but they talk about one thing. It’s all I’m good for, but I don’t have to like it, do I?”

  “How old are you?” Miss Withers wanted to know.

  “Guess,” said Phyllis.

  “Twenty-five?” hazarded that lady.

  “Thanks,” said Phyllis. “I look twenty-five with the right lights, and thirty in the daytime. I won’t say how old I am now. But three years ago, when a fat man picked me up in a Rolls and put me down in the gutter, I was seventeen, anyway.”

  She lit a cigarette and crunched it out in the tray. “I don’t pour the sad story of my life as a true confession into the ear of everybody, you know. But you’re the first nice woman who’s been nice to me in a long time.” Phyllis slid off the bed and stood up. “Thanks for listening. I’m sorry I’ve bellyached.”

  Miss Withers did not rise. “You listen to me, young woman.” Phyllis sat down again. “This isn’t 1900. I’m old-fashioned enough about some things, but I can see pretty clearly, all the same. And remember, nobody has to be anything he—or she—doesn’t want to be.”

  “Doesn’t she, though!” put in Phyllis. “Do you think I’m a bum from choice?”

  “Somebody—I think it was Henry James—once said that no one ever was a slave but thinking made him so. It isn’t what one does, it’s what he thinks. And you, if you really wanted to, could drop your past, whatever it is, like a hot cake.”

  There was a long pause, during which Mister Jones leaped upon the bed beside the two women and fell to chewing Phyllis’s crimson dancing slipper with a hearty good will.

  “Let the dead past bury its dead,” Miss Withers went on. “I’m what you call an old maid. Sometimes I think it’s just as bad a mistake to have too few men as to have too many. But I’ll give you a piece of advice, and you can do what you like with it. If I were you, with your youth and your looks, I’d pick out the nearest and the nicest unattached man and marry him!”

  “And after that—”

  “After that I’d play fair,” Miss Withers concluded. “And that’s more than most men have any right to expect.”

  She was interrupted by a banging on the door. Mister Jones burst into a fusillade of barks.

  “Hurray!” came the thick voice of T. Girard Tompkins. “Come on out, baby, the party’s young. They’re playing m’ favorite tune.”

  “Don’t say anything and he’ll go away,” counseled Miss Withers. It was a matter of some moments, and then they heard the call repeated next door.

  “Come on out, Miss Wizzers,” demanded Tompkins. “Come out and look at the stars with me.”

  Undaunted, Tompkins proceeded down the hall. The two women heard profane sounds from the room shared by George and Tony, telling Mr. Tompkins where he could go to hear his favorite tune, and what he could do with it. Captain Narveson was also aroused, and his sleepy voice barked out a command to be off that was louder than Tompkins’s maudlin shout.

  Miss Withers and Phyllis were at the door, which was open a crack. “Somebody ought to call the night clerk,” suggested Miss Withers.

  “The night clerk is probably safe in bed,” Phyllis told her. “If only that drunken fool doesn’t burst in on the newlyweds!”

  Which was just what he was doing. There was a rattle of heavy fists upon the door of the farthest room across the hall. “Come on out, you two,” shouted Tompkins. “Can’t go to sleep on your wedding night. Come on—it’s a chivaree! Come on, le’s paint the town red. Le’s dance, thish m’ favorite tune.”

  Through the crack in the door Miss Withers and Phyllis could see the other door open and catch a glimpse of Kay Deving, white and frightened, in a frilly nightdress.

  “Please go away,” she implored. “Don’t make any more noise—Marvy is asleep!”

  Miss Withers was about to go to the rescue when Kay closed the door again, and Tompkins started back down the hall, weaving from side to side and talking to himself. Finally, to the relief of the aroused guests who were showing themselves in almost every doorway, he happened upon the door of his own room, hammered on it imploring himself to come out for a look at the stars, and finally lurched inside. There was the crash of a chair, and silence.

  Phyllis and Miss Withers looked at each other and smiled. Phyllis shut the door and switched on the light.

  Their two glasses stood, untouched, on the bedside table. “We didn’t do much drinking, did we?” remarked Phyllis.

  “I’m going to bed and to sleep,” Miss Withers said, still an optimist. “I’ve done a lot of preaching and I’m not used to it. Good-night—and think over what I’ve said.”

  “Sure,” said Phyllis.

  Miss Withers disappeared through the window, from which Mister Jones watched her out of sight.

  Phyllis picked up her drink, downed it, and then took up Miss Withers’s. She was laughing, but she took pains to laugh silently.

  “And I forgot to ask her about the flask!” Miss Withers remembered, when she was back in her own room again.

  She picked up her brush and went to work. Just to make sure that she hadn’t missed any strokes, she began at seventy-five again, and went up to a hundred. Then she braided her hair into two tight braids and switched off the light.

  But sleep still eluded her. As she lay in her lonely bed, staring at the ceiling above her, she heard someone coming down the deserted hallway outside. It was not, as she at first feared, the heavy tread of Tompkins. Someone was coming with the ponderous secrecy of the half-drunk.

  The footsteps stopped outside of Phyllis’s door. There was a rattle of fingernails on the panel.

  “Open up, baby,” came the thick whisper. “It’s me!”

  Mister Jones vented a few woofs, but that was all.

  “It’s Ralph, honey,” came the whisper again.

  Still there was no answer. Finally the stealthy footsteps moved away and up the stairs.

  “Well, for heaven’s sake!” said Hildegarde Withers to herself. “Did my sermon take root?”

  It was not until the next day that it occurred to her that Phyllis might not have been there to hear Tate’s signal.

  CHAPTER IX

  THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG with the room, something
which took the tang from the cigarette which James Michael O’Rourke had lighted as he descended the stairs from the apartment. It was not alone the presence of that rigid figure beneath the sheet on the operating table, or the thought of the unpleasant task which confronted him, but something altogether deeper and more subtle. All the same it was definitely there—some tiny jog in the ordinary and orderly pattern of the infirmary.

  Cold gray morning was showing itself outside, and the little doctor could hear the loud voices of workmen in the excavation on the neighboring lot. O’Rourke threw his cigarette through the window in their general direction and then drew the shade.

  He turned on both the overhead light and the lamp which illumined the table. “Silly idea,” he remarked aloud. “Wild-goose chase if I ever saw one.”

  At that moment the window curtain flapped noisily, and O’Rourke, as nervous as if again he faced his first laboratory test in dissection, almost dropped the basin he was preparing.

  He whirled and saw through the glass of the front doorway a prim and starched young woman. She rattled the knob. “Forgot your key again?” he called.

  “Oh, good-morning, Doctor,” said Nurse Olive Smith. “I thought you’d be out to breakfast. No—I didn’t forget my key. I left it in this door, and it must have walked off yesterday.”

  “I thought you’d be on time instead of an hour early,” O’Rourke grunted. “I planned to get this dirty business over before you got here.”

  “I thought there might be something I could do,” said Nurse Smith.

  “There is,” said O’Rourke. “You can get me four fingers of spiritus frumenti out of the medicine cabinet, and then get the hell out of here. This is no place for a woman.”

  “A nurse isn’t supposed to be a woman, is she?” inquired the nurse sweetly. She filled the prescription and stood by while O’Rourke administered his own dose.

  “Ugh!” grimaced the doctor. His day improved several degrees. He smiled at the earnest and pleasant face of Miss Olive Smith. “You were passing for a woman all right at the Casino last night,” he twitted her. “Cheek to cheek with that harum-scarum pilot—and no back to your dress, either. I counted seventeen vertebrae.”

  “He isn’t harum-scarum,” Nurse Smith confided dreamily. “Lew French is going to do big things some day. He’ll surprise all of you.”

  “Yeah?” O’Rourke stood aside as the nurse efficiently completed the preparations he had half begun.

  “Yes, Doctor. He and Chick are going to buy a plane of their own and make a big nonstop flight—”

  O’Rourke was drawing on his rubber gloves. “I know. A nonstop flight between Tijuana and Hollywood, with a load of what Uncle Sam never stuck a revenue stamp on.”

  “He’s going to do it soon,” continued Nurse Smith, wrapped in thought. “And when he puts the big deal over and buys his plane, you get a new nurse.”

  O’Rourke shook his head. “Can’t afford a new nurse. I’m still making back payments on your salary. Anyway, if you wait for your boyfriend to save up enough money to buy a plane, you’ll be an old woman.”

  “Maybe I won’t wait,” said the nurse, who had definite ideas of her own. She pushed an instrument tray alongside the sheet-draped operating table and added a couple of waste pails.

  “Go on, get out of here,” ordered the doctor. “I don’t need you, and I don’t want an audience. I’m a little rusty at this sort of thing, anyway, and—Say, what’s the matter with you?”

  Nurse Smith was staring, wide-eyed, at the sheet-draped figure which waited there for this last and most terrible profanation. She made a little noise in her throat, like the silent scream of a nightmare.

  “Well, what is it?” O’Rourke looked at her blankly. “For the love of heaven don’t go probationer on me.”

  “L-l-look,” she said. O’Rourke looked where she pointed.

  The morning breeze, pushing past the shade of the open window, had drawn the sheet tightly across the thing it was meant to conceal.

  “It hasn’t any—any face!” whispered the girl.

  O’Rourke crossed the room with one stride and tore the sheet away. The nurse was right.

  The thing on the operating table had no face. It had no body. Only the barest framework of a body remained where last night Roswell T. Forrest had lain in his rumpled sport outfit of cocoa-brown. Only the crude mechanical structure of bleached calcium phosphate which we call the skeleton—that was all. The movement of the sheet dislodged a bony arm, which slipped from the operating table and swung back and forth. …

  Olive Smith forgot that she was a nurse and began to laugh, hideously. But the doctor took her by the shoulders and shook her until her teeth rattled.

  “Look here!” insisted O’Rourke, pointing toward the ghastly relic which lay on the table, forever out of reach of his autopsy knife. “Look at it again.”

  He let her go and snatched savagely at a loop of wire which projected from the exact center of the cranium of the skull. One jerk, and the articulated skeleton sat upright. Another, and it slid from the table and dangled beneath his outstretched arm.

  “Cut out the histrionics,” said O’Rourke. “This is nothing but a be-blasted practical joke.”

  The nurse came closer. “Why—that’s right! It’s only poor old Jimmy Spareribs!”

  O’Rourke crossed the room, still dragging the skeleton, and opened the door of the little closet where his dressing gown had hung. He looped his burden over a projecting hook, and as the dusty rattling of the bones subsided, he slammed the door and turned the key.

  Nurse Smith perched on a stool, and the color began to surge back into her face. “So that’s all it was!”

  O’Rourke stared at her sharply. “Stop grinning, young woman. We’ve found a skeleton, but we’ve lost a cadaver. And the chief will be raising merry hell if we don’t find his corpus delicti.”

  They were not destined to find the mortal remains of the little man in the brown sport suit. The infirmary offered no hiding place big enough to dispose of anything larger than a pair of tonsils. O’Rourke even climbed the stairs again to peer into his bureau drawers, behind his kitchenette icebox, and even under his bed, but there was no trace.

  “The corpus delicti is a derelict, sure enough,” he said. “It’s funny, because everything was okay when I came in last night, around one o’clock.”

  “Did you look under the sheet?” Nurse Smith suggested.

  The doctor shook his head. “No, but I did hang up my coat in the closet, and Jimmy Spareribs was where he belonged.”

  The doctor snapped his fingers. Now he knew what it was that had struck him as being askew in the room half an hour before. He went to the side window of the room and lifted the shade.

  “When I went to bed last night I locked this window,” he announced. “And this morning I threw a cigarette butt through it. Unless I’m a bloody somnambulist, someone opened this window while I slept!”

  Nurse Smith put her head close to his, and they both stared out upon what had been a vacant lot and was now in the early processes of becoming a chain-store grocery. There was a confused muddle of footprints outside the low window—footprints on which were superimposed a flat and wavering track like the trail of a serpent. It led along the entire side of the infirmary, skirting the excavation, from sidewalk to alley.

  The little man in the sport outfit of cocoa-brown had been plunged into this placid place by a red-and-gilt Dragonfly from out of the sky. Now, even more mysteriously, he had been whisked away.

  “I’d better get the chief,” said O’Rourke, as he drew his head in through the window. Nurse Smith stared after him, thoughtfully.

  It was all of ten minutes before the doctor returned, leading a little procession composed of Chief Amos Britt, Deputy Ruggles, and the inevitable Hildegarde Withers, who had come into the chief’s office hoping for an interview before his day’s work began. She had not, however, hoped for anything like this.

  “The door was locked, and
the front windows don’t open,” explained O’Rourke. “But this window on the side looks as if somebody had monkeyed with it.”

  “Somebody has,” called a clear voice from outside. “Look, Doctor! Somebody must have forced a knife blade through here.”

  Nurse Olive Smith demonstrated what she meant by jumping excitedly up and down outside the window.

  “Look out!” called Miss Withers, but it was almost too late. The nurse’s low-heeled shoes had wrought havoc with any traces that might have remained in the dust.

  Miss Withers pushed the girl to one side and pointed out a single rough oval marked on the ground. It was very evidently the print of a rubber heel, and it bore in reverse an initial K, with the upper bar of the letter broken.

  “I’m so sorry,” breathed Nurse Smith. But nobody paid any attention to her. Chief Britt stared at the print and nodded slowly.

  He lifted his own worn brown oxford and showed them all a similar heel. “Koch Shoe Hospital,” he announced. “They got branches in every town on the mainland. This isn’t going to be much help to us, I’m afraid.”

  He went out of doors and placed his heel next to the blurred mark which remained. The two were very similar, except that the K on his print was much less distinct. “I’ve worn these shoes two months since they was soled,” he informed them all. “If only we had the whole footprint we could tell the size of the shoe that was worn here last night, but all heels are about the same size.”

  “I’m sorry,” repeated Nurse Smith. “I didn’t mean—”

  “You didn’t do much harm,” the doctor comforted her. “The other prints were smeared all out of semblance to anything like the mark of a foot, or a heel either. I noticed that when I saw them.”

  Britt placed an empty pail over the mark and gave orders to Ruggles that it be photographed at such time during the day as the proprietor of the local art store could conveniently shut up shop and come over. His little porcine eyes were troubled, however, by deeper worries than footprints.

  “Now why should anyone want to steal what you’d think they would want least in all the world?” he inquired of Miss Withers. That lady did not answer.