Puzzle of the Pepper Tree

by Stuart Palmer

  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. The
re 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.

  “Accidents will happen,” Miss Withers told the girl. “Maybe if you walked him oftener—”

  “I’ve walked off five pounds in the few days I’ve had him,” complained Phyllis. “Tell me honestly”—she came closer—“do you think Barney Kelsey did the murder?”

  Miss Withers stared at the girl critically. “My private opinion is still private, young lady. What do you think?”

  “I think he didn’t!” insisted Phyllis warmly.

  “You seem very positive about that,” Miss Withers told her. “Has Mr. Kelsey taken you into his confidence?”

  “Huh?” Phyllis looked startled. “Oh, you saw us talking this morning. No, he didn’t mention the murder at all.”

  Miss Withers let her fingers play an imaginary tune on the stair railing. “I wonder if you would have any objection to telling me what you did talk about?”

  Phyllis was thoughtful. “Oh, nothing much. I said something about the places to eat here not being very good, and he told me about some little restaurants in New York where he’d like to take me—the Parisien and the Blue Ribbon for German food and the Red Devil for rum cake.” Phyllis looked wistful.

  “I know,” said Miss Withers. “Anything else?”

  “He said I had nice ears,” Phyllis announced. “Nobody else ever praised my ears.”

  Now it was Miss Withers’s turn to be thoughtful. She looked up and down the hall, and then beckoned Phyllis a little closer.

  “I’ve got an idea,” she said. “You’ve been playing Dr. Watson since this business began. Wouldn’t you like to be the detective for a change?”

  Phyllis hesitated for the fraction of a second. “Sure I would,” she answered.

  “All right. You’ve struck up an acquaintance with Kelsey. Suppose you drop in at the jail where they’ve got him prisoner at the next visiting hour, and draw him out on a subject or two? He might talk more freely to you than to me or the chief.”

  Phyllis nodded. “He might, at that. But he won’t. I mean, I won’t do it.”

  “Scruples?” Miss Withers’s stare was sharp. “Or are you remembering my warning to keep away from the man? Understand, I’m not insinuating that he committed the murder. His ironclad alibi is enough to prove his innocence to almost anybody except that dolt of a chief of police.”

  “Or to you,” Phyllis sagely put in. “No, thanks, I don’t want any piece of it. If Barney Kelsey puts his curly gray locks into a noose, it’s going to be through no work of mine.”

  Miss Withers knew when she had struck defeat. “It was just an idea,” she confessed. “Well—I’m going for a walk. I suppose you’re anxious to start dressing for the dance?”

  “I’m not going to the dance tonight,” said Phyllis. “If the excursion for the Isthmus leaves at nine o’clock, I’ll have to turn in early to make it.”

  Miss Withers bade the girl good-night and went on downstairs and out of the hotel. T. Girard Tompkins hailed her, no doubt anxious to add to her fund of information regarding Catalina pottery, but she passed him by with a polite word of greeting and headed along the shore toward the town.

  The little pepper tree stood bleak and solitary in the moonlight, but Miss Withers had no eyes for it tonight. She strode past the Casino, meeting groups of stragglers hurrying to catch the last show at the moving-picture theater, and came along the boardwalk into Avalon itself.

  Luckily, Chief Britt was in his office. She found him in a most expansive mood, with a cigar tilted from one corner of his mouth and his feet on the desk.

  “I s’pose you came down to congratulate me,” he hazarded. “Yes, ma’am—just thirty hours since the discovery of Forrest’s body, and I’ve got the murderer in the hoosegow.”

  “You’ve got Barney Kelsey in the—the hoosegow, as you put it,” corrected Miss Withers tartly. “What good do you suppose that is going to do?”

  “Do?” The chief took his feet off the desk. “It’ll do plenty. We’re going to hold an inquest one of these days, and I’ll bet you dollars to dimes that the jury will find Forrest met his death at the hand of the man who was hired to guard him—Barney Kelsey!”

  “You can’t have an inquest without a body,” Miss Withers told him. “You haven’t what they call the corpus delicti, which doesn’t mean exactly the corpse, but the body of your case, the groundwork, so to speak.”

  Britt pursed his lips. “The body’ll turn up,” he informed her. “Maybe it’s turned up already, for that matter. Didn’t you phone in about somebody seeing it?”

  Miss Withers patiently repeated the message she had given Ruggles, regarding Roscoe the bellhop’s dark secret.

  Britt nodded sagely. “Seems like the last link in the chain to me. The two assistants, and maybe Tate himself, are in on this with Kelsey. You know how them movie people are. Murder don’t mean a thing to ’em. Their part of the job was to dispose of the body. Tomorrow morning first thing I’m going over to the Isthmus and start a search.”

  Miss Withers was inclined to the opinion that Chief Britt’s searches were not likely to bring anything to light, but she did not tell him so.

  “To come back to the man you have in jail,” she went on. “How and why could he have killed Forrest?”

  The chief shrugged. “How? Probably poisoned his food. Although the Los Angeles police’ve been checking up on the movements of both of the men on Thursday night and Friday, and they say that Forrest left Kelsey at the hotel and went skylarking out to this—this house on Sunset Boulevard before dinner time, and that’s the last time the two of ’em was together. I don’t know of any poison that works as slow as that, but there must be some. Kelsey probably figured it would kill his boss during the night, and he’d go innocently along on his trip over here in the morning. Only the poison was slow, and Forrest didn’t feel it till he was on the plane.”

  Miss Withers shook her head dubiously. “Suppose all this is true, then why did Kelsey do it?”

  The chief waggled a fat finger in the air, making a dollar sign. “Didn’t you tell me you heard from this inspector fellow that somebody in New York was offering fifteen thousand bucks if Forrest didn’t ever come back to testify against the big shots? I guess fifteen thousand would be enough to buy any bodyguard.”

  Miss Withers nodded. “It would buy other people, too,” she pointed out. “I’ve heard of murder being committed for less than that by such persons as airplane pilots, or doctors and nurses, or businessmen—or, for that matter, by schoolteachers and policemen. The infamous Dr. Webster was a professor at Harvard, but he murdered for less than five hundred dollars. And times are bad, Mr. Britt.”

  Before the chief could answer, his desk telephone shrilled. He lifted the receiver and his face brightened. “It’s long-distance calling from Pasadena,” he informed his caller. Then: “Hello, hello. …”

  He jiggled the hook. “Ever since the last temblor our phone to the mainland has been woozy,” he explained. “Guess the cable was injured—hello!”

/>   He listened for perhaps five minutes, and Miss Withers saw the self-confidence drain from his face. Finally he hung up and turned toward her.

  “If that was your analytical chemist, what did he say?” Miss Withers prompted. “Or did the messenger lose the specimen?”

  Britt shook his head. “Dr. Lundstrom has had that chewing gum for only an hour or so. Just time enough to give it all the primary tests. No trace of any of the acid poisons, no arsenic or anything like that. He says—”

  “The man doesn’t know his job, then,” Miss Withers cut in. “Because that gum simply has to be poisoned!”

  “He’s the best chemist in the West,” Britt told her. “I was going on to say that he’s found something stranger than poison, even. He’s found that the chewing gum doesn’t match the paper wrapper it came in. It’s only sweetened boiled chicle—and that’s why he’s going on with every test he can think of.”

  Miss Withers digested this for a while. “Homemade gum, eh?”

  The chief was tramping up and down his office. “Now if we only had a body to analyze, we could get somewhere. With the vital organs in Lundstrom’s hands, we’d know inside of an hour what all this means.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Miss Withers told him. “Let’s forget the gum for a while and concentrate on the body. I have an idea, in spite of what Roscoe the bellhop says, that it wasn’t taken to the Isthmus at all. Tell me—you know the island and I don’t—how does one get to the Indian Burial Caves that are shown on the maps?”

  Britt looked surprised. “Them? Why, you follow South Street out past the ball park and keep going alongside of the canyon. But—” He suddenly understood what she was driving at.

  “You’re thinking that maybe these two movie fellers drove the body over there instead of taking it to the Isthmus? Forget it. The road hasn’t been traveled this season on account of its being in disrepair, and their truck wouldn’t get halfway there.”

  “How about a wheelbarrow?” inquired Hildegarde Withers.

  The chief looked dubious. “Maybe. But there ain’t much over at that Indian camp. It’s five or six hundred years old, and nothing’s left but some mud huts and some broken dishes and stuff, covered up with cactus. Who’d want to go over there, anyways?”