Puzzle of the Pepper Tree

by Stuart Palmer

  He listened for a moment and then cut in on his unseen friend: “Well, it’s too hot already for me. I tell you, I’m not welshing. It’s there, and you know the combination. Take it, you punk, and shut up.” He slammed the receiver, and Miss Withers heard the door close.

  She waited for a moment and was about to rise when the door was suddenly thrown open and a fat woman in knickers started to enter.

  “I beg your pardon!” she said. The schoolteacher, thinking fast, pretended to search on the floor for the nail file which she held in her hand. Then, hoping that the back of her neck did not betray a flush, she stepped out of the booth.

  The man on whom she had been playing eavesdropper was crossing the lobby on his way toward the door. She was almost certain that he had not seen her—almost, but not quite.

  Then she noticed that the lobby was almost bare, and that everyone was crowding toward the patio. There were excited murmurs, and she heard a woman gasp. A mother dragged two protesting children back into the lobby, and Miss Withers knew without being told that Chief Britt had found what he was looking for.

  The rigid and profaned body of the little man in the cocoa-colored sport suit was being laboriously carried down the slope. Chief of Police Amos Britt had his corpus delicti.

  “And,” said Hildegarde Withers to herself, “the investigation is right back where it started.”

  The roar of the Avalon’s siren sounded through her reverie. From the two buses lined up outside the driveway came a blast of horns which signified that it was time for the day’s trippers to hurry back to the steamship for the homeward voyage, corpse or no corpse.

  “The ship won’t wait, folks,” the fat-faced bus driver was declaiming. “All aboard. …”

  There was one person in the crowd who did not share the almost universal reluctance to leave this position of vantage from which to view the gruesome display on the hillside. Patrick Mack of Bayonne came rushing back into the hotel and pounded on the desk.

  “Give me my bill,” he ordered. “I’m catching this bus.” He caught sight of the sepian Roscoe in a corridor. “Hey, boy! Here’s my key. Get my bags out of 305, and if you get ’em on the bus there’s five bucks in it for you.”

  Roscoe caught the key and departed up the stairs, while Mack impatiently waited at the desk. The talkative clerk seemed to feel it a reflection upon himself and the hotel that the guest was leaving.

  “I’m sorry that this excitement had to spoil your stay, Mr. Mack,” he said. “But it will all be over in a little while. Nothing like this ever happened before—”

  “Never mind that,” Mack told him. “Add up my bill, will you?”

  Miss Withers, who had been shamelessly listening from the neighborhood of the telephone booth, took advantage of his perturbation to slip out of the lobby and climb the stairs.

  She met Roscoe on the second landing, a bag in either hand. “Wait a moment,” she said.

  “Can’t stop, ma’am. The gentleman’s waiting—”

  “Let him wait,” said Hildegarde Withers. She barred the stairway.

  “But he said he’d give me five dollahs if Ah got his bags on the bus.”

  Miss Withers hesitated. “I’ll give you seven-fifty if you don’t,” she promised. She displayed the money. Roscoe also hesitated—and was lost.

  “Ah could tell him the lock of the door was stuck,” he suggested hopefully. Miss Withers condoned the deceit.

  “Has that gentleman done somethin’ wrong?” Roscoe queried. Miss Withers paused in the doorway of her own room.

  “Not yet,” she informed him cryptically and withdrew. She closed her door, locked it, and then drew the shades of her windows. During the next twenty minutes she made a survey of her room and of the bath, as minutely as if she had lost something of great value. Whatever it was, she finally came to light upon the fat Gideon Bible which lay upon her bedside table. Seated upon the edge of her bed, she busied herself with the volume for a long time, then put it down and, with a new feeling of security and hope, stretched out for a nap.

  When she awakened, the daylight was no longer shining through the cracks in her window shades. The wall telephone was buzzing, and she lifted the receiver wearily.

  “The chief of police is on his way up to see you,” she was told.

  Hurriedly she straightened the bed, raised the curtains, and adjusted her hair. In spite of her trouble, the chief when he arrived was in too much of a stew to notice anything.

  “I thought you might like to know,” he announced, “that Doc O’Rourke is making his autopsy right now. Though there’s little enough to work on.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that the corpse wasn’t bettered by lying up on the hill since Friday night,” Britt told her. “I don’t mean decomposition, either. But the clay on this island is of a peculiar type. It’s full of acids. Good thing Kelsey identified the body in the infirmary that day, because nobody could identify it now.”

  “I see,” said Miss Withers. She was actually beginning to see, at that.

  “And another thing,” said Britt. “You asked me to get a report from the mainland on what Lew French and Chick Madden, the Dragonfly pilots, were doing the night before the murder. They did happen to be on shore Thursday night, though they usually stay here on the island between trips. The L.A. police have found that the boys was over at the Burbank airport, bargaining to buy a secondhand airplane that they were planning to use on a transpacific flight.”

  Miss Withers was thoughtful. “Planes like that cost a lot of money, don’t they?”

  Chief Britt was willing to agree to that. “And do you happen to know what salary the pilots on the airway draw every week?”

  Britt didn’t know, but he was willing to venture that Chick and Lew could not earn more than seventy-five dollars apiece.

  “I suppose they make seventy-five a week and put four thousand of it in the bank,” Miss Withers told him. “Like Commissioner Welch, who used to be Forrest’s employer. That’s all I wanted to know.”

  “They didn’t actually buy the plane,” Britt told her. But Miss Withers was thinking of something else.

  “I wish you’d do something for me,” she said casually. “I’ve got an idea, and I don’t want to explain any more about it unless it comes to something. But have you got a man—I’d rather not have Ruggles do it because everybody knows him—a man who could loiter around the post office and make a list for me of every person connected with this case who goes in and out of there during the rest of today and tomorrow?”

  The miraculous discovery of the body had made the chief firmly convinced of her omniscience. His was not to reason why.

  “That’s as easy as falling off a log,” he assured her.

  The discussion broke up on Miss Withers’s admission that she had never fallen off any logs.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  THE WATCHED POT WAS beginning to boil, Miss Withers felt. There was a tension in the air which permeated the wide and pleasant dining room of the St. Lena. Tonight there was no Phyllis to gather the curious members of the ill-fated party together in a conclave of what she called the Ancient Order of Dragonflies. T. Girard Tompkins likewise failed to put in an appearance. Captain Narveson sat at a table near the window, with his wistful eyes on the trim whaling vessel which still hung offshore, and his steak tonight went almost untasted.

  Miss Withers sat alone at the big center table, watching the newlyweds in the corner having an argument. The course of true love was running true to form, she observed. Well, this enforced vacation was growing unendurable for all of them. Even the schoolteacher, fired as she was by the thrill of the chase, was wearier than she knew.

  As she climbed back toward her room, she met Roscoe in the hall with a tray. “Ah just took Mistah Mack his dinner,” he informed her. “Say, was that white man mad at me for making him miss the bus! Iffen I hadn’t dodged, he’d like to killed me with the toe of his boot.”

  “So Mr. Mack was upset over the ne
cessity of staying, was he?” Miss Withers pondered that for a moment.

  “Yes, ma’am. And jus’ now he had another tantrum because I come into his room without knocking, bringing his dinner. He shoves a letter he was writing under his blotter and calls me all the names he can think of.”

  Roscoe passed on, shaking his woolly poll, and Miss Withers gained the sanctity of her own chamber. She spent the next hour in making meaningless marks upon a piece of paper and in wishing that the inspector were here to tell her what to do with the blue envelope.

  The course which she had outlined for herself was so reckless a one that she trembled internally. This was her first experience as a lone wolf—for she put little faith in Chief Amos Britt—and her maidenly heart thumped alarmingly.

  Just before nine o’clock the telephone rang, and she leaped to answer. Instead of Britt’s drawling voice, she heard the clipped tones of Dr. O’Rourke.

  “Just by way of an apology, ma’am,” he said. “I’m eating crow. Just finished the job that I didn’t get a chance to do last Saturday morning, thanks to whoever burgled the infirmary. Well, you were right.”

  “I was right?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I just came over to report to the chief. Forrest’s insides show without any question that he was poisoned. Just to make sure, I made a couple of tests for the dope that Lundstrom found in your chewing gum, and got an instant positive. He had enough aconitine in his alimentary canal to kill a horse.”

  “Thank you, Doctor, for letting me know,” Miss Withers told him. “I was practically on pins and needles. Would you mind asking the chief to step to the phone if he’s near by?”

  “Hello,” boomed Chief Britt. “Well, we were right, weren’t we? It was poison.”

  “Yes, we were,” agreed Miss Withers, a little bitterly. “Tell me, have you got any report from the man you were going to put at the post office?”

  “I sure have,” said Britt. “I stationed George, the man who bossed the search for the body, outside the door and had him make a list of everybody implicated in this case who went in the place tonight.”

  Miss Withers held her breath. “And whom did he see?”

  The chief hesitated.

  “Hurry up, man. Don’t you see that this is important? I can’t tell you why, but I positively know that the murderer had a reason for going to the post office tonight. Which one was it?”

  “It seems to have been one of several,” said Britt succinctly. “I’ll read you his list. Of course he didn’t put down townspeople, or anybody who wasn’t on the Dragonfly. But he lists Tompkins, the La Fond woman, Mrs. Deving and her husband, and Captain Narveson.”

  Miss Withers exhaled a deep breath. “Oh! Well, anyway, that excludes Tate and his assistants.”

  “Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t,” said Chief Britt. “Because they sent one of their trucks over to get the mail for the whole crowd.”

  “A lot of help that is,” Miss Withers exploded. “I suppose that Dr. O’Rourke and the two pilots and Higgins the watchman all dropped in, too.”

  The chief shouted a question to someone at the other end of the line, and then told Miss Withers: “He says as a matter of fact that they did!” His voice became faintly apologetic. “You see, the post office here is quite a social center in the evenings.”

  “So I see,” said Miss Withers. “But did your man put down what those people did there?”

  “Nope,” was Britt’s answer. “I told him to stand across the street so as not to scare anybody away. You didn’t say anything about that part of it.”

  The schoolteacher gave him a short good-bye and hung up. “I didn’t think it was possible for a policeman to be stupider than Oscar Piper, but Amos Britt is changing my mind,” she said to her mirror.

  She flounced into a chair, but found the room suddenly stuffy. She was in the mood to do something, and there seemed nothing at hand to be done.

  Crossing the room, she flung her window wide open. “Patrick Mack will sneak away on tomorrow’s boat,” she told herself. “And with him will go the secret of this whole mystery.”

  Suddenly she caught herself. The man whose name had just crossed her lips was sneaking away somewhere now. At least he was headed down the beach, hatless, and with a fresh cigar between his teeth. The moonlight was bright, and she could recognize those padded shoulders anywhere. From time to time the man stopped, looking searchingly behind him as if he were afraid of being followed.

  “I wonder!” said Hildegarde Withers aloud. Fate had seemingly tossed into her lap an opportunity which was, if not golden, at least well gilded.

  “It can do no harm to try,” she told herself. “I’m already in this for a lamb, it might as well be a couple of sheep. After robbing the United States mails, this is naturally the second step.”

  She went hastily out into the hall, taking the key of her own room as she did so. At the head of the stairs she stopped long enough to make sure that nobody was noticing her, among the numerous comings and goings of the hotel. Then she slipped up the stairs to the third floor.

  Room 305, Roscoe had been told when he went to get the bags. That was a large corner room. The locks of the St. Lena were of the type now obsolete except in summer hotels, consisting of the old-fashioned kind which could be opened with any skeleton key. Unfortunately, she had no T-shaped skeleton, and her own key failed to turn. But this was not the first time that Hildegarde Withers had picked a lock with a hairpin, and the operation took her less than a minute. She opened the door and stepped into the darkened room.

  There was a strong odor of food, of whiskey, and of stale cigar smoke. It was evident that Patrick Mack had been brought up to distrust fresh air—another sign of his foreignness to this locale. All windows on both sides of the room were closed.

  She calmly turned on the light and went straight to the desk in the corner. It was surmounted by the usual rack for stationery, and the gummy bottle of ink. But it was the blotter which interested Miss Withers most. She lifted it eagerly, but was instantly disappointed.

  If Mack had concealed a letter here upon Roscoe’s sudden entrance with his dinner tray, he had later removed it.

  Perhaps, she thought, he had finished it and gone out to mail it. No, the post office closed at nine, and besides, he had been ambling along like a man without any particular destination.

  His bags, still packed, stood beside the bed. They were locked and resisted Miss Withers’s most crafty efforts with the hairpin. The bureau was empty, except for the usual matches, pins, and lining of old newspapers. Swiftly, for she had not much time for a margin of safety, she removed this lining, but there was no sign of whatever Mack had been writing.

  The closet, which owing to some whim of the architects had been built against the outside wall and extended from the bathroom partition to the side window, was deep and roomy. In it hung a dark blue topcoat and a felt hat. The topcoat pockets contained a pair of gloves, three paper folders of matches, and a lot of fluff mixed with tobacco. The hat lining was empty.

  “I don’t know what I was looking for, but whatever it was I’m not finding it,” she told herself. She came out in the middle of the room and stared at the two locked traveling bags.

  Reluctantly she decided to give it up as a bad job and turned toward the door. Unfortunately it stood half open, and the padded shoulders of Patrick Mack filled the space.

  He didn’t look surprised, and he didn’t look angry. There was no expression whatever on his pasty face with its blue jowls. He simply stood there and stared at her. Then he closed the door behind him.

  Miss Withers thought faster than she had ever thought in all her life. “My mistake,” she said, a little too loudly. “I seem to have wandered into the wrong room.”

  “The wrong room,” repeated Mack woodenly. “Lady, you said a mouthful. You been in it going on ten minutes. Next time you try second-story work, don’t turn on the lights. I could see that side window from ’way down the beach.”

  �
�Oh,” was all Miss Withers could think of. She felt with trembling fingers for the bed and sat down on the railing. Her knees were strangely disposed to quiver.

  “I’m going to call the cops and have you run in,” said Mack. He reached for the telephone.

  “I—I don’t think you’ll do that,” Miss Withers told him quickly.

  Mack looked up sharply. “And why the hell not?”

  Miss Withers lowered her voice. “Because, you see, I happen to know why you came to Catalina Island. And the police do not, as yet.”

  Mack’s face never changed in its set expression, but his hand slowly dropped from the telephone. His stubby fingers stretched toward his left armpit, and he casually drew out a thin automatic pistol. “Talk some more,” he invited.

  “You have a gun,” Miss Withers said. “And I doubt very much if you can produce a California permit.”

  “Wrong,” Mack advised her. He showed her his California permit. He also showed her a sheaf of permits, from half the states of the Union. “But don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve never used it yet.” He locked the door and put the key in his pocket. Then he crossed the room and sat down in the chair beside the desk. “What was that crack about knowing why I came to Catalina?”

  “I meant what I said,” Miss Withers told him. Her self-assurance was rapidly returning. Perhaps this was the best and easiest way, after all. For this man knew what she must know, and perhaps he could be induced to tell.

  She made herself slightly more comfortable. “Ever since you came here I’ve wanted a talk with you,” she said. “As you probably know, I’m more or less interested in discovering the murderer of—of Roswell Forrest.”

  “And what has that got to do with me?” Mack took out a fresh cigar and lit it with a hand that did not shake. “If you give me a good song and dance, maybe I’ll change my mind about turning you in, lady.”