Puzzle of the Pepper Tree

by Stuart Palmer

  Miss Hildegarde Withers was not in the habit of sidestepping anything. She turned and strode back to where he sat.

  “What do you want with me?” she demanded.

  The little man smiled placatingly. “Nothing with you,” he admitted.

  “Then why are you snooping after me?”

  “They said you’re looking for Roswell T. Forrest,” admitted the stranger. “So am I.”

  Miss Withers pondered this for a moment. There was something in the little man’s bearing which precluded the possibility of his being merely another curiosity seeker. Nor did he look like any newspaper reporter that she had ever seen. “May I ask who you are, and why you take the liberty of tagging after me?”

  The little man produced a printed card, bearing the inscription “Harry L. Hellen” and a Longacre telephone number. “Hellen Damnation, they call me,” he informed her, not without pride. “I’m the best process server in the world. Y’ hear about how I hung a paper on Slim Lindbergh just before he took off on his big hop? I got a summons in my pocket for Forrest, and not knowing my way around here, I figured I’d stick with you.”

  “Oh,” said Miss Withers. She handed him back the card. “I’m afraid you haven’t been keeping up on current events, Mr. Hellen. Don’t you know that Forrest was murdered last Friday morning?”

  “I do not,” said the human bloodhound. “Where’s the proof?”

  “But the body was identified before it disappeared.”

  “By who?” asked Hellen disparagingly.

  “By whom,” Miss Withers corrected. “By his bodyguard, Mr. Kelsey.”

  “Yaaa.” Hellen made a lower lip that outdid Chevalier’s. “It’s a phony. That guy never croaked. I been following Forrest for six weeks. Almost nabbed him in El Paso, but Kelsey strong-armed me, the dirty bum. Lost the two of ’em in Colorado, and just picked up the trail again. They never get away from Hellen Damnation.”

  “I’m afraid this one did,” Miss Withers insisted. “Why, it was obvious that the man was dead.”

  “Yeah? Nobody but a doctor can tell a thing like that.”

  “But Dr. O’Rourke did pronounce him dead.”

  “Sawbones can be fixed, like anybody else. And with the heat on him, Forrest was good and ready to drop out of sight. I’ve had ’em try it before. He only took something to make him stiffen up, and then that night the doctor brought him to and turned him loose. Forrest is around somewhere, laying low. They tell me you’re working this case undercover for Tammany. Well, I’m on the other side this time, but we’re going the same direction. What do you say we play it together?”

  Miss Withers thought that one over. “You mean—I’m to keep on looking for the man dead, and you for him alive—pooling our results?”

  “You said a mouthful, lady!”

  It has been pointed out by a hundred historians that the smallest accidents often decide events of the most tremendous significance. “For the want of a nail the shoe was lost”—and Napoleon’s bad handwriting, according to the legend, is supposed to have resulted in Waterloo. So it chanced that at this crucial moment, as Miss Withers pondered an alliance. Mr. Harry L. Hellen chanced to blow his nose loudly and unpleasantly. Miss Withers winced.

  “I’m afraid,” decided the schoolteacher, “that, as you say, we are on opposite sides of the fence.” She gripped her handbag, with its precious contents, a little more tightly. “Good-bye, Mr. Hellen.”

  The subpoena server grinned. “Don’t say good-bye, lady. You’ll be seeing me around.”

  “If I see you too closely, I’ll have my friend Chief Britt ride you out of town,” she snapped. The little man made no reply and did not this time follow her.

  It was a minor incident, but enough to begin the afternoon on a jarring note. Miss Withers strode through Chief Britt’s curio shop as if borne on a gale of wind and slammed the door behind her. The chief was actively engaged in whittling the arm of his chair.

  Miss Withers cut short his heavy pleasantries on yesterday’s excursion and its unexpected ending. “Have you got those two movie men in jail?” she demanded.

  The chief shook his head. “I ain’t having no luck with my prisoners,” he complained. “I had to let them go when they found out what I was accusing ’em of. Proved pretty clearly that they was trying to cover up the fact that their boss was dead drunk. I guess it wasn’t the first time. The guy who came over with the movie truck to get ’em said the same thing. But that ain’t what I’m worried about. It’s Barney Kelsey.”

  “What about Kelsey?” Miss Withers was excited. “Did he escape?”

  “Escape? No, not exactly. Not yet, at any rate. But he’s getting mighty restless. You see, I ain’t got evidence enough against him to book him for the murder, and he knows it. Especially with the news I got from Pasadena yesterday—”

  “What news?”

  “Didn’t I tell you that?” asked the chief leisurely, although he knew very well that he had not. “Oh, yes, it come in while you were chasing around with the wild goats. Doc Lundstrom turned in his report, and he finds that your chewing gum shows traces of being doctored. It had been melted up and then doped and dried again. Most of the stuff had been soaked out of it, because of its sol—solubility in water. But he found traces of aconitine, mixed with digitalis. Aconitine is one of the swiftest and most tasty poisons known, and the digitalis makes it work all the faster, because of the stimulation to the heart. So that’s that.”

  “It certainly is,” said Miss Withers. “And of course that clears Kelsey?”

  Chief Britt shrugged. “Seems to. He never saw Forrest from Thursday afternoon until he come into the infirmary and saw him dead. I don’t see how he could slip his boss any poisoned gum that long before the guy chewed it. The people at the hotel said that neither one of the two of them ever bought any chewing gum at the cigar stand, or was seen chewing. Looks like we’ve got the wrong man.”

  “You are probably right,” Miss Withers told him thoughtfully. “But all the same, listen to me. I’ve got a wire here from the inspector, and you can see for yourself what he says. Isn’t there some way you can hold Kelsey a little longer?”

  “Mebbe,” admitted the chief. “He ain’t got any lawyer, and there ain’t any phone at the jail he can use.”

  “Good! Keep him there till Inspector Piper gets here, at any rate. That ought to be early Wednesday, if the inspector catches the Avalon at Wilmington. And another thing”—Miss Withers was very serious about this. “I advise that you keep Kelsey from having any visitors.”

  “I have been keeping the newspaper boys and the photographers away,” said the chief. “But it’s funny you mentioned that. I just gave permission for that bouncing young lady friend of yours to go in and see him—Miss La Fond, or whatever her fancy name is. She wanted to take him some magazines and cigarettes, and I didn’t see why not. She’s up there now—I suppose it’s too late to stop her.”

  “I wasn’t referring to Phyllis,” said Miss Withers thoughtfully. “I was thinking of a little man in a derby.”

  Chief Britt let this go by. He was completely subjugated by this determined amateur. But he was agreeable.

  “It can be fixed. I’ll give orders that no gents in derbies can get in.”

  “Or gentlemen without them,” Miss Withers added, “I don’t suppose he has another hat, but he may. Were there any other developments while I was chasing around with the goats, as you so aptly put it?”

  “There were.” The chief shuffled a wad of telegrams. “I got answers to all my queries, or all your queries, rather.”

  “Was there anything really—interesting?” she asked.

  “Depends on how easy you’re interested,” said Britt. “Nothing in ’em to set me jumping up and down, but you may be different. I found out what you asked me to about the movements of most of the suspects for the day or so preceding the tragedy. Isn’t much to it. Tate and his two assistants were at the Paradox film studios, casting for their picture. This Phyl
lis La Fond woman was trying to get her furniture out of an apartment where the rent was unpaid for four months back. She spent Thursday evening at Graumann’s Chinese Theater with a girlfriend. The Hollywood police checked up on it.”

  “And Tompkins?” Miss Withers asked casually.

  “Thursday afternoon he left his place on the outskirts of Pasadena and stayed all night with relatives in Los Angeles. They say he was trying to raise money to keep the sheriff from taking his house away from him. But he didn’t succeed. We didn’t get much of a check on Narveson. He says he spent Thursday night at home with his family. Seems sorta queer, nowadays, but maybe it could happen.”

  Miss Withers agreed that it was within the bounds of possibility. “Did you get a check on the newlyweds?”

  Britt’s piglike eyes were twinkling. “Yes, I should say we got something. They weren’t newlyweds till Friday morning, just before the Avalon sailed, when they came into a Long Beach justice’s office and got hitched, with two clerks for witnesses. The preceding night the girl spent at the Y.W.C.A., and young Marvin registered at a Long Beach hotel but didn’t use his room. A last night with the boys, I reckon.”

  “I’ve heard of that, too,” admitted Miss Withers. “An old custom—the last fling at freedom.”

  “Which in this case is very strange,” Chief Britt told her. “Because while the county clerk’s office there has no record of it, the newspaper files in Los Angeles show that Marvin Deving was married to Kay Denning a year ago in Frisco!”

  “A year ago!” Miss Withers sat up very straight.

  “You ain’t heard nothing yet. The boys up at the Herald-Express morgue also claim they’ve got clippings showing that Marvin Deving got married to Kay Wenning—notice the change in the name—in Seattle two years ago, and some time before that he was married to a Katie Manning in Santa Monica!”

  “Heavens and earth! This isn’t bigamy, it’s quadrogamy, if there is such a word.”

  But the chief shook his head. “It’s the same couple, all the way through. And no divorces, either. They were married, as far as the newspapers go, four times. But the only time they bothered to get a license was last Friday. Figure that one out.”

  “I’ll do my best,” promised Miss Withers absently.

  “It’s clear enough that they’ve been putting on a show for us,” the chief told her. “Playing lovey-dovey like they have—and married four times. But they ain’t a-going to get by with it.”

  Miss Withers looked quickly up. “May I ask your plans?”

  “Plans? Say, I’m going to make them young scamps talk and talk plenty. I sent Ruggles up to the hotel with instructions to stick outside their door and as soon as they had time to change their clothes and get some lunch to bring ’em both down here, telling ’em nothing and giving ’em no chance to talk to anybody.”

  “Bravo!” said Miss Withers. “Was that your idea, or did somebody coach you?”

  Britt blinked.

  “Because it’s the stupidest possible move at this time,” she concluded. “You’ll frighten them out of their wits, or else warn them. And what have you got to hold them on? Even less than you have on Barney Kelsey. What if the newspapers do claim they got married several more times than they got licenses for? That isn’t a criminal offense. Suppose they explain that they announced their intentions to marry, and then postponed the event each time? For heaven’s sake, use your head.” Miss Withers pointed to the telephone. “Call off your deputy, or you’ll have two more prisoners in your jail that you’ll have to let go the next day.”

  Reluctantly the chief was won over. “Watch them, watch the whole bunch of suspects, as much as you can,” she told him. “But don’t tip off your hand. I got some information last night by making the most of a fragment.” She told him about the flask that poured two ways.

  “That would’ve meant something if Doc Lundstrom hadn’t found poison in your samples of chewing gum,” Britt admitted.

  “We don’t know for sure that the chewing gum was the method of murder,” he was reminded. “The liquor in one side of that flask could have been poisoned. I don’t think, frankly, that it was. But it could have been. In that case, the gum could have been a second line of defense, a spare tire so to speak, to be used if the drink failed. Had that occurred to you?”

  It had not. The chief was despondent again. “If I could only get my hands on that body,” he moaned. “Then we’d have a starting point.” He carefully gathered together the messages and placed them in a folder which already held Piper’s telegrams and a litter of other official papers relative to the case. Miss Withers noticed a familiar-looking sheet of brown paper.

  “May I see this a moment?” she asked and abstracted the list of Roswell Forrest’s belongings which the chief had copied out upon a sheet of her sketchbook. For a long time she stared, not at Britt’s painful handwriting, but at the reverse of the sheet.

  She spoke, and her voice was hushed. “Tell me, Mr. Britt—just how severe would you judge yesterday’s earthquake to be?”

  Britt looked surprised and a little hurt. “Oh, the temblor? Why, it was very mild. They hardly felt it on the mainland. According to the Los Angeles newspapers, it was what the experts call a ‘point-ought-one’ shake. Rattled down a chimney or two and broke a bottle of my wife’s preserves.”

  “It couldn’t, for instance, have performed any miracles such as moving mountains or turning trees around, could it?”

  “I don’t see what you’re driving at,” Britt told her. “Of course it couldn’t. Even a major shake doesn’t affect a tree.”

  Methodically Miss Withers gathered together her gloves, her handbag, and her umbrella.

  “If you will come with me, I’ll show you where the stolen body was hidden,” she said.

  CHAPTER XVII

  WIND IN THE PEPPER tree ruffled its trailing foliage and set the pale shadows to dancing across the hotel patio far below. Miss Withers steered the chief of police into a certain position facing the cliff and then placed the page torn from her sketchbook before his face.

  “Look at that tree—and then at my drawing,” she commanded. “I made that sketch when the tree was first set there by the handyman.”

  Chief Britt, puzzled and impatient, fumbled for his glasses. “Very pretty,” he murmured.

  “I’m not asking you for art criticism,” she told him tartly. “Don’t you notice anything else? Look again.”

  The chief looked again. “Oh,” he said. “You drew it wrong. You’ve got the two biggest branches leaning toward the highlands, and the tree is faced the other way.”

  “It wasn’t—when I made that sketch,” said Hildegarde Withers. “That’s why I asked you if an earthquake could turn a tree around. I noticed that it was wrong, but naturally I blamed everything on the quake.”

  “All right,” said Britt impatiently. “But you said something about the missing body of Roswell Forrest.”

  “You had men searching this end of the island looking for a new grave,” Miss Withers told him. “You said that with the ground as hard as it is at this season, any disturbing of the earth would be easily noticed. The base of that tree is the one place where it would not be noticed. Dig it up—and you’ll find your missing body. If the person who buried it there hadn’t made the mistake of putting the little tree back in a reversed position, the secret would have been safe until Doomsday and after.”

  Chief Britt took off his hat and slapped his fat thigh with it. “Jumping Jehoshaphat! You mean, the murderer picked that place to dispose of the body because it had just been dug up, and then set the tree over the grave again?”

  “Must I draw you a diagram?” asked Hildegarde Withers acidly. But the chief was already puffing up the slope. She had no desire to follow him, but passed into the hotel. Deputy Ruggles was still idling in the lobby, a fact which dissatisfied her extremely.

  He approached her and then squinted curiously through the doorway. “Say, what’s come over Amos? He’s climbing aroun
d like a locoed billy goat.”

  “I suggest that you follow him,” Miss Withers advised. “He may need your help.”

  “But he told me to keep an eye—”

  “I am under the impression that he has changed his mind, or had it changed for him,” she said.

  Ruggles peered up toward the hillside, where Chief Amos Britt was already wrestling with the little pepper tree. Then he set off on an obedient jog.

  Miss Withers crossed the lobby, edging her way past screaming children, invalids in wheelchairs, and a throng of otherwise assorted tourists. The hotel was usually crowded at this hour, since the one-day excursion tickets to Avalon included luncheon at the St. Lena. She was about to climb the stairs to her room when she noticed that one of the telephone booths disclosed the red and perspiring profile of the man who had registered at the desk as Patrick Mack of Bayonne.

  He was engaged in a conversation which occupied his entire attention, and she stepped quickly back out of sight. She found herself possessed of a burning desire to hear that telephone conversation.

  She stepped quickly into the adjoining booth.

  She removed the receiver but did not drop a nickel. This was for the benefit of anyone who might notice her from outside. Then she pressed her ear against the partition.

  She could hear a muffled voice, but the words were entirely lost. Although built of roughly finished pine lumber, the booths afforded more privacy than she had hoped.

  She was about to give it up as a bad job when suddenly she noticed a loosened knot in a knot hole, about three feet from the floor. Whipping open her bag, she found a nail file. Then she leaned over and picked at the knot, taking infinite pains to prevent it from slipping through into the next booth, where Mack still argued with somebody.

  Finally, as she had somehow known it would do, the knot came free, and she crouched with her ear to the hole.

  Mack’s voice came clearly now, though she got only one end of the conversation. “It’s your own blasted fault,” he was saying. “I tell you, you’re not coming to my room, not with a hick copper and that snoop of a schoolteacher hanging around spying. I’ve arranged the payoff, and you’ll take it and like it.”