“I, for one,” Miss Withers told him. She moved toward the door and then stopped. “I’ve got something else on my mind,” she began.
“Then get it off,” Britt told her wearily.
“Somebody ought to check up on the movements of all the suspects on the day or so preceding the tragedy,” she pointed out. “I’d particularly like to know what the license clerk and the newspaper records have to say about the newlyweds. And—one thing more—I think the two pilots ought to be included in the survey.”
Chief Britt blinked. “Those boys? Why, they wouldn’t hurt a flea.”
“But Forrest wasn’t a flea,” retorted Miss Withers. “Will you send the wires?”
He nodded. “But I don’t see—”
“You will,” she promised him and passed out into the clear but humid night. Walking had often served her as a stimulant for thought, and she had much to think about as she strode back down the darkened Main Street of Avalon. Only the corner drugstore and the local pool hall showed lights. Through the open door of the latter she could see the thickset figure of Captain Thorwald Narveson, engaged in a stiff game of rotation with two young men whom she recognized with a shock as being the pilots of the Dragonfly, Lew French and his partner Chick.
The captain stood away from the table to chalk his cue, and Miss Withers saw the lights reflected in the shiny seat of his blue-serge trousers. What she had said a few moments before to the chief seemed to apply everywhere. Times were bad—even for the owners of whaling ships. Times were bad—and fifteen thousand dollars was a lot of money. She remembered that Narveson had sat very near the dying man and that he alone had failed to show surprise at the discovery of the death. It was admitted generally, she knew, that good poker players make good murderers. She found herself wondering if that would also apply to pocket billiards.
She was thinking in circles, ever and ever again bumping up against the same stone wall. The body of the dead man was missing. It had been stolen from the infirmary, or at least the window had been burgled, some time after Dr. O’Rourke returned from escorting her to the hotel. Allowing fifteen minutes or so to give the doctor time to stroll home, that made the hour of the corpse-stealing sometime between one or one-fifteen and the lifting of the fog blanket shortly before three in the morning, unless the job was risked by moonlight, which she seriously doubted.
Yes, it was safe to say that the body of Roswell Forrest had been stolen and disposed of sometime between one o’clock and three. That was little time enough, considering the magnitude of the task.
Yet every one of the prospects had a splendid alibi for that hour. She herself had been in Phyllis’s room until at least two-thirty, and during that time she had seen or heard Tompkins, George and Tony, Narveson, and the newlyweds—or at least had heard the young wife begging for silence because “Marvy” was asleep, which was almost as good.
Tate’s alibi had been established a few minutes later, it was true. But still there would not have been time for him to do all that was done that night and then to appear, half drunk, outside Phyllis’s door.
That left only Barney Kelsey, among the persons implicated in the case, and he had accounted for himself by insisting that he gave the slip to Ruggles and went directly to the hotel and to his room on the upper floor. As she knew full well, the lack of an alibi was no proof of guilt—in fact, the most ironclad alibis are the manufactured ones.
All the way back to the hotel the bewildered lady tried to decide whether or not one of the alibis could have been manufactured. Phyllis’s was clear enough. So was Tompkins’s. Unless the two assistant directors and the captain had hired someone to stand behind their doors and mimic their voices, their alibis were equally good. She came at last to the sorry comfort of deciding that only Marvin Deving stood unaccounted for. And if the slick-haired young man had contemplated anything in the nature of body-snatching, she was sure he would have presented the best alibi of the lot. Besides, both he and Kay had been speechless with surprise when she told them of the disappearance of the body—and that sort of surprise is hard to fake.
Yet she remembered the print of the shoe outside the infirmary window—the shoe with the nicked initial in its rubber heel. Marvin Deving’s shoes had made that mark—but when and why she found herself unable to decide.
Weary and worn, Miss Withers came into the hotel lobby resolved upon only one conclusion. The entire mechanism of this crime lacked an important cogwheel. She was sure that it existed somewhere—but until she found it she was handicapped.
Except for the clerk and a blue-jowled gentleman engaged in reading a sheaf of newspapers, she found the lobby of the St. Lena deserted. It was late, and Hildegarde Withers was very tired.
But in spite of the weariness in her angular body, the schoolteacher was still in the grip of an insatiable curiosity. Acting upon an impulse, she paused in the lobby to engage the clerk in conversation. He was a washed-out person of late middle age, who looked as if he had seen better days and never expected to see any more.
He readily swung the register around to show her the neatly written signature of Barney Kelsey. Yes, Mr. Kelsey had registered last night about the hour of twelve-thirty. He had been shown by Roscoe to a room on the third floor rear.
Miss Withers frowned. Unlike the rooms on the second floor, there could have been no balcony outside Kelsey’s room to afford him a secret means of egress. “Then he didn’t leave the hotel after he checked in, you’re sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” insisted the clerk, restraining a yawn with evident difficulty. “Chief Britt was up here asking me the same thing.”
“And you were on duty all night?”
“Till seven o’clock this morning, yes, ma’am.”
Miss Withers looked down at the well-cushioned wicker chair which stood behind the counter. “You didn’t drop off to sleep, not even once?”
The clerk maintained that never had sleep touched his eyelids. But his gaze was evasive, and Miss Withers, dimly remembering that he had not given her a good-evening last night when she returned from the Casino, pressed her point.
“Good heavens, man, you’re not a sentry. Nobody is going to shoot you for going to sleep on your post.”
Presented in that light, the clerk was willing to admit the barest possibility that she was right.
She nodded wearily. Then the lobby with its open door and snoring clerk would have been no check at all upon the movements of Kelsey—or any other guest. She was right back where she had started.
Idly she turned over the page of the register and glanced down a column of today’s visitors. There were a good many, for the season was in full swing, and what the newspapers were calling “the Red Dragonfly Mystery” had lured a number of curiosity seekers into remaining over the weekend.
It was the last name in the column which caught Miss Withers’s eye: “Patrick Mack, Bayonne, New Jersey.” The writing was round and almost childish.
“Patrick Mack,” she repeated thoughtfully. There was a spark of something glittering in the bottom of her mind, like a new penny in a swimming pool. But for the moment it eluded her.
The clerk lowered his voice to a religious hush and nodded over her shoulder. “That’s him, ma’am,” he indicated. “Ever since he registered he’s been hanging around as if he was waiting for somebody. Friend of yours?”
Miss Withers turned and saw across the room the head and shoulders of a man who was as out of place among these breezy Westerners as was she herself.
He was looking up from his newspaper, and their glances met and passed on. Above the pages Miss Withers could see a plump, swarthy face and a pair of shoulders wide with the curved padding in which Seventh Avenue tailors delight. He belonged in a ringside seat in the Garden, or among the low-voiced crowd who haunt Lindyck’s restaurant and mark the tablecloths with matchstubs.
“No, I don’t know him,” said Miss Withers. But all of a sudden the case which had hitherto been such a muddle began to clear—just
the merest fraction. Here, she decided with a swift flash of the intuition which usually guided her—here was the missing balance wheel of the whole machine. For the key to the mystery, she was almost positive, lay not in the sprawling Western metropolis in which Forrest had chosen to hide himself, but in Manhattan—and this stranger, in spite of his “Bayonne” on the register, spelled Forty-second Street to her.
She was remembering the letter written to Forrest by his former secretary—and the terse understatement, “… because Mack wouldn’t like it.”
Without realizing it, Miss Withers stared at the only other guest in the lobby with so burning a gaze that he looked suddenly up from his newspaper, flushed a shade deeper, and then rose to his feet with a very real yawn and disappeared toward the stairs.
“Mr. Mack represents a big shipbuilding and wharfage firm in New York,” vouchsafed the clerk garrulously. There was something in Hildegarde Withers’s clear blue eyes and slightly equine visage which impelled people to talk to her—an unconscious attraction which had often stood her well during past ventures into the realm of Sherlockery.
“And he’s here on big business,” the clerk continued. “If you ask me, he’s planning on building a big amusement pier here—or buying the Casino or something. Because he just gave me a blue envelope full of valuables to keep in the safe overnight. All them big business men use negotiable securities nowadays, with the banks like they are.”
“Indeed!” Miss Withers had no particular interest in blue envelopes. She found herself cursed with a burning desire to be in two places at the same time tomorrow. She was determined to run down the missing body if it was anywhere to be found—and she was possessed of a very definite hunch that if she were ever to solve this mystery she ought to stick closer than a brother to Patrick Mack.
The two paths, at the moment, did not seem to converge. Miss Withers bade the clerk a polite good-evening. “I suppose I’m practically the last of the Old Guard to check in, am I not?”
The clerk was thoughtful. “Well, I wouldn’t say that, ma’am. Mr. and Mrs. Deving went to the movie and haven’t showed up yet—and Mr. Kelsey isn’t in, either.”
Miss Withers nodded. “Yes, ma’am” rambled on the clerk. “With a fine night and a moon and all, I can understand the newlyweds being out. But as for Mr. Kelsey—”
“I can understand Mr. Kelsey’s lateness,” said Miss Withers shortly and went up to bed.
CHAPTER XIII
A THOUSAND ELEPHANTS STORMED through Miss Withers’s dreams that night, so that she awoke with a distinct feeling of relief to see the pale light of early dawn at her window. She drew the old-fashioned watch from beneath her pillow and saw that it was hardly four o’clock. Then she sat up straight in bed, pinching herself just to make sure that she was not even yet in the grip of the nightmare, for the elephants still thundered.
A vase of flowers crashed from her bureau to the floor, and a bad reproduction of Reynolds’s “Age of Innocence,” which Miss Withers had always loathed, swung wildly on the opposite wall and then hurtled down. Her bed rocked like a skiff in a gale, and it was with trembling knees that the good lady finally reached the floor.
She got to the wall telephone, and after much rattling of the hook she succeeded in arousing the clerk downstairs.
“I must insist that the people overhead stop that commotion,” she announced. “If they don’t wish to sleep, I do!”
Not without difficulty, the clerk finally managed to inform her, his voice strained but heavy with studied calm, that she was mistaken in thinking that the people overhead had anything to do with the vibration which still rocked her room. “It’s a mild temblor,” said the clerk.
“A what?” Miss Withers was far from patient. “A Knight Templar, did you say?”
“No, ma’am—a temblor! What Easterners call an earthquake.” He hesitated over the last word, as if it were vulgar and outside the usage of good society.
“There is absolutely no danger,” the man continued. “It is best to stand in the doorway of your room until it subsides, so that if the walls give way you will not be crushed.” He hung up, evidently besieged with other calls. Miss Withers stood there shivering for a moment. She could hear Mister Jones barking in the next room, and a woman down the hall was monotonously calling for “Fred.” Somebody ran down the hall, but it was not Fred.
The shaking subsided and immediately took up again where it had left off. Miss Withers clutched the phone for support and watched her bureau drawers slide out and empty themselves neatly on the carpet.
Perhaps she screamed. She was not sure about it afterward, although she always maintained stoutly that she did not.
At any rate, she felt an inward surge of relief when her open window to the balcony was darkened, and in stepped Phyllis La Fond, in negligee and slippers, and with Mister Jones gripped in her arms.
“One for all and two for five,” greeted Phyllis cheerily. “If I’m going to be buried alive I want company. Mind if we join you?”
“Do I mind!” said Miss Withers heartily.
The room was chilly, and Phyllis immediately planted herself in the bed, where Miss Withers and the dog shortly joined her. “I suppose the rest of them will go chasing outside and catch pneumonia on the lawn,” said Phyllis optimistically. “We’re as safe here—I’ve been through three of ’em before. The first shock is always the worst.” The room rocked again, and Mister Jones whimpered. Miss Withers realized that the pounding of the surf had taken on a harsher, sharper note. The fat, bewildered little dog pushed a cold nose against her, and she stroked it comfortingly, not without a thought of possible fleas.
The tremors followed one another in diminishing ratio and finally died away completely.
“This was nothing compared to the Santa Barbara quake,” Phyllis informed her hostess. “Well, it seems to be over. I guess I’ll go back and get some sleep.”
“Do you mind,” requested Miss Withers a little quaveringly—“do you mind getting your sleep right here?”
Strangely enough, they both did sleep, while Mister Jones stole down from the bed and fell happily to chewing on Miss Withers’s best pair of stockings.
Phyllis woke first, and her exclamation on noting the slender watch on her wrist awakened the schoolteacher.
“Quarter-past nine,” she wailed. “I’ve missed the excursion bus to the Isthmus!”
Miss Withers blinked. “You mean they’ll run the excursion bus just the same after what happened?”
“Of course, why not? Good heavens, a temblor isn’t anything! Nobody pays any attention to them out here. Sometimes they shake down an old-fashioned building, but that’s all. Business as usual.”
Phyllis had arisen hurriedly, but Miss Withers detained her. “I have an idea,” she suggested. “No matter how you hurry, you’ve missed the bus. But I’m going to rent transportation of some kind today for a little trip of my own, and if you’ll go with me, I’ll have the boy drive you over the Isthmus afterwards. Besides, I’d like company.”
“You’re on,” said Phyllis. “Meet you downstairs for breakfast in half an hour.” She went toward the window. “Come on, doggie.”
“I wonder if you’d mind bringing Mister Jones along?” Miss Withers asked. “I’ve got an idea.”
Miss Withers spent some time in straightening her room, replacing her belongings in the bureau and picking up the picture and the smashed bowl. When she was dressed she went to the window and looked out half expecting to see a ruined landscape.
A silver-gray haze hung over the morning, through which the sun had difficulty in penetrating. The waves broke against the shore with a sullen pounding, but that was the only tangible result of the earthquake as far as she could see. The lawns and beach were much as usual, and a few sun worshipers were already sprawled on the sands.
Still she stared critically around. Not a palm tree had fallen, not a flower seemed disturbed.
Even the little pepper tree was still in its place on the crest o
f the hill. Miss Withers looked at it, frowning for a moment. The little tree did appear differently than it had when last she had tried to catch its outlines in her sketchbook. She hurried crossed the room and fumbled through her belongings until she found the canvas-bound book, searching for the drawing that she had begun before sterner problems usurped her leisure. But the half-finished sketch was not there.
She went back to the window with a puzzled expression on her face. Sketch or no sketch, the tree had somehow changed. It now seemed to be pressing toward the declivity, its two armlike branches stretched out to sea!
“Well, we live and learn,” she told herself. Closing the sketchbook, she hurried down to breakfast.
Somewhat to her surprise, she found Phyllis already attacking a plate of toast in the dining room, with Mister Jones tied to a leg of the table and munching a crust contentedly. Miss Withers ordered coffee, and a box lunch to take out.
“This must be a real expedition,” Phyllis hazarded. “Maybe I’m lucky not to have gone with the others.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” she was told. Then Miss Withers looked up suddenly to see the stranger of last evening coming into the dining room. Patrick Mack of Bayonne looked somewhat worn and sleepless, and he had cut a neat gash in his chin while shaving.
He passed by their table without a single appreciative glance at Phyllis’s well-displayed figure. Miss Withers sensed that he was made uncomfortable by her fixed stare, and also that he was looking for somebody who wasn’t here.
He went swiftly back into the lobby, asked the clerk a question to which a negative reply was given, and received into his own keeping again the fat blue envelope. Miss Withers, who had risen from the table as casually as she could manage, watched him from the door of the dining room. He put the envelope carefully into his inside pocket and set off toward the town.
Puzzle of the Pepper Tree Page 14
