Puzzle of the Pepper Tree

by Stuart Palmer

He climbed the flight of steps to the third floor and then corrected himself. “One in two million,” he said.

  It was well along into the morning when Hildegarde Withers awoke. She sat up in bed and shook her head to clear it. Though she did not realize it, she was feeling an aftereffect of her last night’s experience which closely paralleled a good thick hangover.

  But the day was a momentous one—she knew it. The certainty gave her strength to climb under an icy shower. She dressed swiftly and then called the desk.

  “Is Inspector Oscar Piper a guest here?”

  “Room 360,” she was told. “But he asked not to be disturbed.”

  “All the same,” she told the clerk, “it’s after ten o’clock and he’s going to be disturbed.”

  A considerable time had elapsed before she got a sleepy response. “Meet you in the dining room in twenty minutes,” he assured her.

  He was there, washed and shaved and brushed, in a little more than fifteen. They sat down on opposite sides of a table which looked out on an expanse of lapis-lazuli ocean.

  “Well!” said the inspector. Miss Withers looked back at him critically and repeated it. “Well,” she said. They both smiled.

  “What happened last night after I left?” she wanted to know.

  “Plenty,” said the inspector. “First of all, I got a sort of official standing in the community.” He bared his vest and showed her a bright badge of shining nickel which bore the legend “Deputy Sheriff.” It was pinned beside the massive shield of solid gold that his subordinates had given him on his twentieth anniversary as an officer.

  “Chief Amos Britt plucked this from the breast of poor old Ruggles last night,” he told her. “Neat, but not gaudy, don’t you think?”

  “What else?” Miss Withers was a woman of one idea. “What did you actually accomplish?”

  “Nothing,” admitted the inspector. “Which in itself may prove something. I was lucky to have my kit along with me. I tested the gun with fingerprint powder and found not a trace of a print. That means the murderer wore gloves or wiped it clean.”

  Miss Withers nodded. “Go on.”

  “Then I helped Britt dig the bullet out of the hall upstairs. It fits the gun that was in Mack’s hand.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Miss Withers told him.

  “Then I made another test. You know that we can tell if a hand has fired a gun within twenty-four hours by microscopic powder burns that the naked eye doesn’t see? It even applies to the new smokeless powder. Well, I tested the dead man’s hand. It did not show any burns. With Britt’s authority in back of me, I tested the hands—both hands—of every person who was in this hotel last night, whether they liked it or not. Excepting yourself, of course. And got a negative in every case.”

  “Then—that means the murderer came from outside?” Miss Withers was bewildered.

  “Nobody came in from outside. As it happens, the desk clerk was awake, because I had just been escorted to the place by the boys from the Long Beach station house and had made him show me to your room.”

  “Then your test is no good—or else you missed somebody.”

  “The test is perfectly good,” Piper told her. “And we missed nobody. I recognized a lot of the people you mentioned in your code wire. Tompkins and Narveson and those callow newlyweds and the gay girl in the next room who has the pup.”

  “What about a glove?”

  Piper nodded. “It would have to be the thickest glove I ever struck,” he admitted. “Those powder burns have been proved to go through leather and rubber. Maybe an iron glove would do it.”

  “Then it must have been an iron glove,” insisted the schoolteacher. “Because the murderer could not have come in from outside. It doesn’t fit!”

  “If the glove fits, put it on,” said Oscar Piper. “Well, you had the night to sleep on your idea. Suppose you tell me who is responsible for this circus.”

  Miss Withers smiled at him. “This is my murder,” she pleaded. “It’s the only case I’ve ever had all to myself. Let me have the glory. I earned it in that closet last night. You’ll probably guess when I run over the events of the past four days. But don’t make me spring the surprise until I’m ready.”

  “It’s fun to be fooled, it’s more fun to know,” quoted the inspector. “But I don’t mind playing Watson for a change.”

  “For a change?” Miss Withers inquired innocently. And it was at that moment that Piper realized that she was herself again.

  As breakfast was placed before them, she began a résumé of the case, starting with the moment when she had noticed Hinch, the manager of the airport, running toward the plane. She told him of the autopsy that didn’t come off, of the long search for the missing body. She painted a sadly revealing portrait of her venture to the Indian caves, and of the discovery of the pepper tree’s odd behavior. Here and there, since she was a woman, she left a hiatus or two, but the inspector was none the wiser for it.

  The luncheon menus were resting before them by the time Miss Withers had concluded her travelogue.

  Piper shook his head. “You’ve certainly been over Niagara in a barrel with nails in it,” he said. “I’m dizzy.”

  “Then you don’t guess the murderer?”

  “Sure,” he told her. “I guess it’s one of about eight or a dozen people.”

  “That’s been my trouble, too,” she said. “It wasn’t until the other day that it suddenly occurred to me—it might be two of eight or a dozen people.”

  Piper rubbed his hands together. “You mean—that two of these supposed strangers are really acting in cahoots?”

  “Figure it out for yourself,” she advised. “I had to.” She pushed back her chair as a distant siren sounded.

  “Good heavens, there’s the steamer,” she said. “That means it’s after twelve. Let’s go down and call on Chief Britt. Perhaps he’s solved both murders while we chatted here.”

  For all that, they had a good deal more to discuss as they ambled down the shore road, and Miss Withers was surprised to find that she tired more easily than usual. The chimes of the carillon had sounded for the first hour of the afternoon before they reached Chief Britt’s curio shop.

  The chief brightened as he saw them. “Well, it’s about time,” he boomed. “This is getting over my head.”

  Miss Withers asked him what the trouble was.

  “Trouble? Ma’am, you don’t know the half of it. First off this morning, I have to go over and separate two good friends of mine who are trying to mess up the ground with each other. Lew French and Chick Madden, the Dragonfly pilots, you know. Something about the nurse in O’Rourke’s office. And then she threatens to walk out on the Doc, and sue him for back salary besides.”

  “How very interesting,” Miss Withers observed. The inspector, feeling sadly out of place in an executive office not his own, bit the end off a cigar and lit it.

  “That ain’t all,” Britt went on. “This second murder on top of the first starts hell humming on the mainland. They’re threatening to shove the Los Angeles detective force or the state police into my lap. I stalled that by saying I had official assistance from New York, but it ain’t going to stay stalled.” He shook his head sadly. “But that ain’t what worries me worst.”

  “What is?” Piper spoke without removing his cigar.

  “It’s Barney Kelsey,” complained the chief. “He got himself sprung.”

  Piper now took the cigar from his mouth and threw it into the waste basket. “How in the—”

  “I thought you weren’t going to let him get to a phone or have a visitor, except for Phyllis with her magazines?” Miss Withers interposed.

  “I didn’t,” admitted the chief. “It must have been that La Fond dame. Anyhow, somebody phoned to Los Angeles for a lawyer, and about half an hour ago a dapper gent gets off the Avalon, hands me a writ of habeas corpus issued by a Superior Court judge of this county, and that’s that. I have to turn Kelsey loose, and he goes off with the lawyer a
nd the girl.”

  Miss Withers thought it over for a moment. Then she spoke: “You really haven’t lost much, have you? If Kelsey was in jail last night, he couldn’t have killed Mack. Besides, there is no way for him to leave the island before the Avalon sails late this afternoon. A lot can happen in an afternoon.”

  A lot did happen in an afternoon—that same afternoon. The beginning of it all was when Miss Withers and the inspector, leaving Chief Britt’s office, ran into a strange trio at the entrance to the local drugstore.

  Phyllis La Fond, with a new self-confidence in her eyes, walked on the inside. Next to her, pale but smiling, was the young-old man with the gray streaks in his hair, breathing deeply of the air and sunshine. On the outside, carrying a briefcase, was a dapper gentleman whom Miss Withers rightly judged to be the lawyer.

  “I’ll introduce you,” she said to Piper, forgetting that he had already met Phyllis via the acid test to her hands in search of powder burns. But that social event was to be postponed.

  The trio swung abruptly and entered the drugstore. Miss Withers was nettled. “Whatever! Why should Phyllis act like that? Do you suppose that she blames me for your suspecting her last night, along with all the rest?”

  The inspector wasn’t paying any attention. He stood stock-still in the middle of the sidewalk, and the ash from his cigar fell unheeded down his vest.

  “What’s come over you?” Miss Withers demanded. “Are you having fits?”

  “Yes,” said Oscar Piper. “Fits or worse. Do you happen to know who that man is—the one in the middle who looks as if he’d been through seven hells?”

  “I do,” said Miss Withers casually. “I’ve known for some time that he’s Roswell Forrest. But I hoped you wouldn’t.”

  CHAPTER XX

  “NO MORE SECRETS,” PLEADED the inspector. “Come clean with me, woman. If you knew Forrest wasn’t dead, why didn’t you say so? And for the love of heaven, who is the corpse you’ve been chasing all over this island?”

  “Come out on the pier and I’ll tell you all,” said Miss Withers amiably. “Or nearly all,” she added under her breath.

  They swung their legs from the very end of the smaller of the two piers and watched a fat, half-tame sea lion begging for fish scraps in the water beneath them. Plump, whiskered Charlie had rarely seen two humans more adamant in all his fifteen years as the harbor pet. They sat on the stringpiece for an hour and never once tossed him a morsel.

  “Before I tell you anything, I’d like to know why you dropped everything in New York and came out here because you thought that Roswell T. Forrest was dead,” Miss Withers demanded.

  “Simple,” said the inspector. “He was—or rather, is—an innocent pawn in a dirty game of chess. He never got a dime of the money that Welch and some of the others took out of the city treasury. But he knew about how it was done. Maybe he should have squealed on his boss. But again, maybe he shouldn’t. Anyway, while Welch, the commissioner, is standing his ground and willing to take whatever is coming to him, some of the others aren’t. Mack was the worse of the lot, a petty racketeer about halfway between a politician and a thug.”

  “Which is a bad place to be,” put in Miss Withers.

  “Anyway,” went on Piper, “I was sent out here to find out what was what. If Forrest was bumped off to keep him from coming back and testifying—he had a good enough incentive to do it, with his property in jeopardy—then I intended to run down his killers. If he was bumped off for some personal reasons, I had instructions to hush the thing up as far as the Hall was concerned. But now—”

  “But now that, by mistake, his bodyguard was killed instead of himself, you’ve lost interest?”

  Piper slapped his thigh. “So that’s it! Kelsey is the stiff!”

  Miss Withers nodded. “Probably he was playing Forrest, to protect his boss, and the employer was pretending to be the bodyguard. It was a smart idea and kept the process servers from getting anywhere. At any rate, I first suspected it when I learned how the man who was killed in the plane hurried in an attempt to catch the boat. He hated planes worse than you do. Yet he took the Dragonfly—why? Because he was being paid to be with Forrest. If it had been the other way round, do you suppose Forrest would have tried so hard to be with his bodyguard? They thought they were safe—which is why Kelsey had a night off.”

  Piper nodded in agreement. “I should have known by your wire,” she admitted. “You said in your description that Forrest had brown hair and dressed very well. It never occurred to me that trouble and worry could change the hair from brown to gray. So I let that fool me. I should have known that you would know better than to describe an overdressed sport like the dead man as well dressed. Anyway, even after I decided, I said nothing. Because at the time I was sure that Forrest did not kill his own bodyguard. …”

  “It wouldn’t be so foolish,” Piper pointed out. “After all, he hired a man who resembled himself slightly. Perhaps he planned to kill him in order to establish his own death and escape the hunt?”

  “You’re getting smart,” said Miss Withers. “Anyway, after Forrest had gone to so much trouble to take advantage of the lucky break he had, and to switch identities, it occurred to me as a good idea to let him have all the rope he wanted. So I kept a deep silence.”

  “It must have been a great strain on you,” said the inspector unsympathetically.

  “It was. He walked into the infirmary that Friday morning and learned that because of those letters in Kelsey’s pocket—letters that the dead man must have picked up at the hotel desk and forgotten to give his employer—he stood a chance of stepping out of his identity. He never hesitated, Oscar. I was there, and it was smooth as silk.”

  “That’s clear enough,” the inspector admitted. “But what’s this about Mack’s part in the case—the blue envelope, and all the rest of it? I told you that Mack, who had a reputation of being on the level in his own crooked way, let it be known around town that he’d put up fifteen grand to have Forrest out of the way. Did he come here to pay off without knowing that the murderer he thought doing his own errand was really working for another reason?”

  “I have an idea,” said Miss Withers suddenly. “Your questions will be answered in a better way than this. Come back to the chief’s office with me.”

  To Chief Britt she outlined her plan, a suggestion of extreme simplicity and charm. “I don’t see what harm it could do,” that worthy admitted. “If you say so. …”

  He was completely at the mercy of this busy schoolteacher and had ceased to care. Events were moving too thick and fast for Amos Britt.

  “Suppose you set the party for four o’clock,” suggested Piper thoughtfully. “That will prevent any of them from leaving for the mainland until tomorrow.” The chief nodded his agreement.

  “I have a few errands to transact,” Miss Withers explained. “I can do them better alone. If you want to be useful, try and find Forrest and the girl, and keep an eye on them.”

  The inspector somewhat reluctantly agreed and watched Miss Withers sail off in the direction of the post office. She passed straight through that valuable building, pausing only to notice that the box which she had burgled no longer contained the substitute blue envelope which she had so carefully prepared and stuffed with folded newspaper.

  She had the last link but one in her chain. With a feeling of exultation unhindered by the realization that she had committed, or caused to be committed, at least two major crimes in the past few days, and had been an accessory after the fact in another, she set off toward the hotel.

  Here she waylaid Roscoe. The ancient bellhop was without power to resist this importuning lady with the authoritative voice and the crisp five-dollar bills. She told him what she wanted him to find, and where he was to find it. Then she made him swear that he would appear faithfully at the appointed time.

  With a sense of duty well done, Miss Withers lay down upon her bed and slept for an hour. She was still weakish from Patrick Mack’s none too te
nder ministrations, and unless she was sadly mistaken she would need all her strength before the day was over.

  She awakened at three-thirty, bathed her face, and figuratively girded her loins for conflict, which consisted of putting on her best dress, a navy crepe-de-chine with an ecru lace collar. This gave her a real but unreasonable sense of confidence and power.

  She descended the stairs and found the Devings, Kay and Marvin, exulting in the lobby.

  “Isn’t it gorgeous?” the young bride demanded. “Haven’t you heard? The police say that they did discover powder burns on Mr. Mack’s right hand, and that he killed himself as a confession of the murder of Forrest. And after we all give depositions at Chief Britt’s office we can go!”

  “‘Gorgeous’ would be putting it mildly,” agreed Miss Withers. They passed joyously on out into the sunshine, while the aging schoolteacher watched them with a feeling of sadness tugging at her heart.

  Roscoe winked at her from the stair landing, and she nodded and strolled slowly out and along the shore. Before she had gone a dozen steps she was hailed by loud hoots upon a motor horn.

  She looked up in surprise to see Ralph O. Tate, the moving-picture director, waving at her from the front seat of one of the studio trucks. Beside him were George and Tony, also waving.

  “Ride?” they chorused.

  She was more than willing to ride, but she refused to answer their excited questions as to the tragedy of last night. “Well, thank God they’re going to close the case and stop hindering me,” said Tate. “That’s why I didn’t mind stopping work this afternoon and coming over when I got the call.”

  “I imagine that everyone will be glad when it’s over,” Miss Withers admitted.

  They whizzed along the highway, passing the newlyweds in a cloud of dust and drawing up before the curio store with a shock that almost dislodged George and Tony from their perches on the running boards.

  They went in together, to find that Ruggles stood sentinel at the door to keep out the idle public and possible inopportune customers for curios. He waved them toward the rear of the store, where counters had been moved aside to make a little clearing among the thousand and one curiosities of the stock.