Puzzle of the Pepper Tree

by Stuart Palmer

  “My position here is a little more official than you seem to think,” she said confidently. “And your position is a distinctly unpleasant one, Mr. Mack. You see, I happen to know that it is rumored about New York’s sporting section that you, as one of the principal parties in danger from the Brandstatter Committee investigation, were so anxious to keep Roswell Forrest from returning to testify against you that you offered to spend fifteen thousand—I believe ‘grand’ was the term you used—to insure his continued absence.”

  Mack looked at her admiringly. “You talk like a mouthpiece, lady. But it don’t mean nothing. What if I did say it? That doesn’t pin anything on me. A lot of other boys are in the same spot and probably said the same thing. If they didn’t, who’s to testify that I did?”

  “That isn’t all,” Miss Withers continued. “I have what you would probably call a deuce in the hole. Or is it a trey? Anyway—I am morally certain that you not only offered fifteen thousand dollars to anybody who would remove Roswell Forrest permanently, but that you were the direct instigator of the murder. You came here because you believed that the murderer had carried out his part of the bargain, and you intended to keep yours and pay him. Am I right?” She chatted casually—because it was the only thing to do.

  “I’m letting you talk just to see how funny you can get,” Mack told her. “You sound like a hophead. Been kicking the gong around lately? Go on with your song and dance.”

  “You are an intelligent man, Mr. Mack,” Miss Withers told him.

  He did not deny it. “I’m in business,” he said. “A lot of different kinds of business. I may carry a gun to protect myself, but I’m no gangster. That stuff is out of date.”

  “And being an intelligent man,” Miss Withers steamed ahead, “you must be clear-sighted enough to realize that this whole plot has gone to pieces. The murder was planned to look like a natural death. It was I who prevented the doctor from making out a certificate and insisted upon an autopsy. Then the body was stolen, but that only delayed matters. Today it was discovered, and the whole business is bound to come to light. Where will that leave you?”

  Mack relit his cigar. “It’ll leave me all right,” he told her. “Go on with the fairy story.”

  “You feel secure because you had no actual part in the commission of the crime? No doubt a man of your experience knows how to protect himself against anything’s being proved against him. Even if the murderer, when he is caught, denounces you I suppose you will trust to an absolute denial and the subsequent delay of the courts?”

  Mack only smiled. “Hurry it up, the story’s getting dull.”

  “It will grow more interesting for you when Inspector Piper of the New York police gets here tomorrow,” she snapped at him. “The noose is around your neck, young man. Only one thing can save you. If you will go with me to the chief of police and make a confession implicating the party who actually committed the murder, you may secure a lighter sentence. Such things are arranged sometimes, I know. I am willing to promise you that I will use my influence to—”

  Mack rose to his feet. “Nerts,” he said tersely.

  He came closer to the unwelcome visitor. “Listen to me,” he said. “You’ve shot off your mouth long enough. I’ve got just one answer to the whole thing, and it’s this. So what?”

  Miss Withers raised her eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You heard me. I said ‘So what?’ Meaning, what if I have? Suppose this pipe dream of yours is true. Go ahead to your rube copper and spill the beans. Bring in all the inspectors that ever grew. They don’t worry me. Because you’ve got nothing on me and you know it. Ask anybody to book me on any charge and see how far you get.”

  Miss Withers was more than a little nettled, or she would never have played what she called her “deuce in the hole.” She regretted the words as soon as they had left her mouth, but it was not soon enough.

  “You are not aware that I have the blue envelope,” she said. Then she stopped short at the transformation which came over Mack’s face. His nostrils widened, and the veins on either side of his forehead stood out like strange, branching worms. But he kept his voice calm by an effort.

  “The blue envelope?” he repeated woodenly.

  “The blue envelope,” finished Miss Withers, nervous in her triumph—“the envelope with thirty five-hundred-dollar bills in it. It is possible to trace currency that big, I understand.”

  Mack put his cigar carefully in the ashtray and then rubbed the backs of his hands with stubby fingers.

  “In that case,” he told her evenly, “let’s get going and call on your friend the chief of police. I’ll talk.”

  Excitedly, the schoolteacher stood up. How easy those things were when you handled them in the right way! “Tell me the name of the murderer,” she demanded.

  “I’ll talk when I get a promise of an easy out,” Mack told her. “And not until then. What you say don’t bind the cops. Wait a second, and I’ll go with you.”

  Strangely enough, Miss Withers never thought of reaching for the wall telephone as he disappeared into the bathroom. If she had, there would not have been time to use it, for Patrick Mack reappeared almost instantly. He reached in the closet for his hat and then crossed the room to the door. Miss Withers was close behind him, eager to get out of this room in which she had been so uncomfortable.

  Mack was smiling, almost genially. Miss Withers told herself that the man must be relieved to know that it was all over, and that the strain of his secret would soon be lifted. He was rattling the key in the lock. …

  Then the key no longer rattled, and though Miss Withers did not see him turn, she felt the world go black.

  Something sticky and rubbery was pressed over her face from eyes to chin—a great square of adhesive tape. She fell backward, strangling—and felt herself caught roughly by the shoulders and eased to the floor.

  She felt something wound tightly around her ankles, even as she began to kick them in a furious spasm. Her wrists were similarly bound, with a neatness and dispatch which she did not appreciate.

  No more fiendish and diabolical scheme had ever been devised for reducing a human being to a quivering mass than this quick strangulation. Her arteries throbbed in neck and forehead, and white panic filled her being. Was death coming to her like this, then—all unexpected and unannounced?

  Unconsciousness was unmercifully long in arriving, she thought. Then, as it seemed the horror could no longer endure, she felt herself seized by the neck and shoulders and lifted a little from the floor.

  There was the click of an opening penknife, and then a stabbing pain at her nostril, followed by a meager inrush of the sweetest air that ever blew. The white inferno receded to a throbbing red and then paled.

  “Lay still, or I’ll put another one on without a hole in it!” promised Patrick Mack. “You goddam old hen.”

  She could neither see nor speak nor move. But the man still talked, as if he enjoyed the novelty.

  “You’ll tell me what to do, will you? You’ll offer to get me a light sentence!” He let go her head, and it bumped on the carpet. She heard heavy footsteps.

  “I wish I had you where I could take off the bandage and make you talk,” said Mack wistfully. She heard a familiar click which told her that he was at her handbag. Well, he would find little enough in that. Except, of course, the key to her room. She sincerely regretted the habit which had made her bring it.

  “Must be a novelty for you to listen,” he went on. “This’ll be good for you. Give your jaw a rest. It’ll be a long rest, because I’m going to stick you in this closet. You’ll still be there after I’ve caught tomorrow’s boat, because I’m putting a ‘Don’t Disturb’ sign on the hall door. I don’t care whether they ever find you—but if they do, you’ll have plenty to explain about why you butted in.”

  He punctuated his remarks by dragging her, a step at a time, across the room. She bumped ignominiously over the sill of the closet, and—

  “I believe
I like your face better this way,” Mack told her. “You ought to wear adhesive all the time.”

  She writhed at that remark and thumped her heels weakly on the floor. “Go ahead and kick,” Mack said. “The people in the room underneath moved out this morning, and nobody’ll hear you. All the same, I don’t think you’ll get air enough through that slit to allow much kicking around. So long, auntie.”

  The closet door closed, and the furious, frightened schoolteacher found even greater difficulty in getting air enough into her tortured lungs. She heard Mack’s heavy tread as he moved across the room, and then the hall door closed quietly.

  There was a moment of silence, and then the sound of Mack’s voice came to her, muffled and thick. His tone was one of surprise.

  Then the indistinct words lost themselves in a high, almost feminine squeal, punctuated by the vicious and terribly final spat of a revolver. That was all.

  CHAPTER XIX

  TWELVE O’CLOCK SOUNDED FROM the distant carillon, coming thick and muffled to the ears of the helpless woman who lay intent only upon one purpose—the drawing of enough breath through the tiny slit in her face covering to keep it from being a death mask.

  There was a ringing in her ears which continued and increased in intensity even after the twelve strokes had ceased to sound. Through it she heard, as one going under ether, the sound of running footsteps in the halls of the hotel. Doors were opening, and the high excited voices of women came meaningless and shrill.

  Miss Withers had no idea how long this sort of thing continued, and then the clamor burst in upon her ears with a redoubled intensity. She realized that the hall door of the bedroom had been opened.

  She heard the voice of the night clerk. “So help me God, he’s blown the top of his head off!”

  She thumped weakly with her heels, but even she could hardly hear the result. The effort almost strangled her, and she lay back and listened again.

  “Bring him in—that’s it. Lay him on the bed. Somebody get Dr. O’Rourke!” Another man’s voice announced that the doctor had already been sent for. “But it’s little good anybody can do for him,” the unseen man went on. “His brains bane all over the hall.”

  “Captain Narveson!” Miss Withers screamed the name, but her sealed lips emitted not a sound.

  Kay Deving’s contralto rose above the din. “Oh, why doesn’t somebody get the police?”

  “Oh, why doesn’t somebody get me!” Miss Withers moaned. But nobody did. She listened and prayed for the sound of Phyllis’s voice among the crowd. Perhaps Mister Jones, the fat and excited little dog, would be with his mistress. And Mister Jones was the one living thing in that hotel who would be certain to know of her plight if he got within smelling distance.

  Tears came to the schoolteacher’s eyes as she thought of the little dog sniffing outside the closet and then scratching and marking to call the attention of the human beings to his discovery. She visioned the little terrier as a great dark St. Bernard, with a cask of oxygen instead of brandy at his collar.

  But the miracle did not happen. It was only a fantasy, bred by the poisonous intoxication of carbon dioxide in her blood.

  Nobody would dream of looking for her here. Not until tomorrow would she be missed, and perhaps not then. Perhaps the closet door would not be opened until the room was occupied by some other guest. And that would be too late. Tomorrow would be too late. Another hour would be too late.

  She tried to kick against the floor again, but it was of no avail. The noise would not have frightened a mouse, and the effort left her swooning.

  The voices in the room, shut away from her by the thin width of a partition, swelled to a cascade of sound, a nightmare in which she heard as in a dream the voices of everyone that she had ever known. Oscar Piper’s dry, clipped speech came most clearly. Her eyes filled with tears again, tears which the tightly binding bandage forced back to smart and burn. Why hadn’t she married Oscar Piper long ago? Why hadn’t she done a thousand things that she would never do? Why—

  The roaring in her ears increased to an unbearable thunder which lasted for twice a thousand years. Then—

  “She’s coming through,” said a familiar voice. It was Oscar Piper’s voice. Someone was speaking with his voice. Someone was looking down at her with his eyes. Contrary to the familiar fiction, Hildegarde Withers did not imagine for a moment that she was dead and in heaven. She was too conscious of a stinging tingling of her cheeks, of a dull ache through her whole body, to imagine that this was death. Death meant a release from that sort of thing. Besides, someone was waving a glass phial beneath her nose.

  “I’m all right,” she said weakly. Then she opened her eyes wide and realized that it was the inspector who held her, and not a creature out of her nightmares. He looked worried.

  “Don’t try to talk,” he said. She saw Dr. O’Rourke over his shoulder, and even the piglike eyes of Chief Amos Britt.

  “I’ll talk if I want to,” she managed. “What happened?”

  She was breathing as if she had forgotten how the air could taste. With the soul-satisfying oxygen she drew in strength. After a moment she managed to sit up.

  “Turn her the other way, so she won’t see … it,” came a feminine voice. It was Phyllis’s.

  Miss Withers shook her head. “I’m all right,” she said. “What happened?”

  “Steady, old girl,” said Oscar Piper. He was without his usual cigar, and his lower lip protruded more than usual. He was all in dusty gray, and he smelled of tobacco and gasoline.

  “I want to know what happened!” she insisted. She realized that the room was full of people and that she was sitting in the armchair by the writing desk.

  “That’s what we want to know,” said the inspector quietly. “As soon as you feel able to tell us. I was waiting down in your room when I heard the shot.”

  “But,” she protested, “you weren’t due until tomorrow.”

  “You know how I hate airplanes,” Piper told her. “But the desert was too much for me. It was 114 degrees in the dining car. So I left the train at Phoenix and caught the Transcontinental. It saved a day, and I talked the Long Beach harbor police into bringing me over in their patrol boat.”

  Miss Withers sensed that he was talking to keep her from using her voice. “I’m all right, really,” she insisted. “But how did you ever find me in here?”

  The inspector smiled. “Naturally I horned in when I heard the alarm,” he said. “I helped them bring Mack’s body in here. Then I happened to notice your handbag on the floor, with everything dumped helter-skelter. I knew there wasn’t another handbag like that one left in America. So I started looking around—and there you were, trussed up like Rameses’ mammy.”

  “You mean mummy,” she corrected weakly.

  Chief Britt horned in on the conversation. “Listen,” he queried eagerly. “Who tied you up?”

  She told them what had happened, or at least the events following her conversation with the man who now lay upon the bed, shielded from her by the crowd.

  “But that can’t be,” objected Britt, when she told of the sound she had heard in the hall just before the shot. “Because nobody shot Mack. Less than a minute after the shot was fired, people come out into the hall. And there he laid, with the top of his head blown off, and his gun in his hand. Clear case of suicide—I guess you threw a scare into him. Appears to me that his suicide is a clear confession of guilt in the Forrest killing, eh, Inspector?”

  Piper refused to commit himself.

  “Nonsense,” said Miss Withers. “A man doesn’t go out into a hallway to kill himself. I know very well—”

  She stopped short. Once already this evening she had blundered by letting her tongue run away with her. She was determined to avoid making the same mistake twice. “Could I see the weapon?” she asked.

  Chief Britt produced a handkerchief-wrapped revolver, still warm to the touch. “There she is,” he announced. “It’s Mack’s, all right. Just fits his shoulder
holster. He’s got a permit for it, too.”

  “I see,” she remarked. Then she glanced significantly at the inspector. “I think I’d like to be helped to my room, if you don’t mind.”

  Leaning on the inspector’s arm, she looked down at the shapeless mound beneath the sheet which someone had drawn.

  “He called me an old hen,” she said softly and then suffered herself to be led through the door.

  “Careful,” said the inspector, leading her around a dark stain on the hall carpet. When they were on the stairs, she turned to him. It was characteristic of them both that they wasted no words in greetings or the usual chatter.

  “I’m not as weak as you think,” she said. “I can get back to my room. I wanted to tell you. It wasn’t suicide, and that isn’t Mack’s gun that the chief has. I ought to know—I looked down the barrel of it tonight. He carried an automatic—one of those nasty little snubnosed things.”

  Piper nodded. “All this is pretty new to me,” he said. “Your last wire gave me the lineup, but nothing of what’s happened since Saturday. Mack’s part in this thing I can guess. But who did the job on Forrest, and who killed Mack? I don’t suppose he told you about the first murder when you were having your confab with him.”

  “He told me nothing,” said Miss Withers. “But I’m pretty sure I know. I want to think, and rest. Let me sleep on it tonight while you go back and keep Chief Britt from making himself any more ridiculous than he must. We’ll have breakfast together and talk this out.”

  The inspector frowned. “I hate to leave you alone. Suppose somebody takes a notion to bump you off in the night?”

  “I’m as safe as you are,” she assured him. “Besides, I’ll push a bureau against my door. Good-night, old friend. And thank heavens you remembered my handbag when you saw it.”

  She gripped his hand and then turned suddenly away and closed the door of her room behind her.

  Inspector Oscar Piper stood for a moment, staring at the door. “What a woman!” he said softly. “One in a million!”