Puzzle of the Pepper Tree

by Stuart Palmer

  Kay Deving looked at her Marvin, and they seemed to share a secret joke between them.

  “Oh, go on dreaming, then,” Phyllis told them. “You’ll come, Miss Withers—I know you’re a sport!”

  The waiter approached with the check, and laid it ostentatiously in the middle of the table, where the men of the party stared at it.

  “Let’s make it Dutch, of course,” said Miss Withers.

  T. Girard Tompkins extended a languid hand—demonstrating where it was that motion pictures got the idea of slow-motion photography. But it was Ralph O. Tate who picked up the check and took out his wallet.

  “This circus has cost the studio a couple of grand already in wasted time,” he said. “They may as well get stuck for eleven bucks more.”

  “You’re very gracious,” Miss Withers told him.

  Tate nodded warily. But one generous gesture begets another. Before he left the table he drew from the left pocket of his vest four inexpensive cigars. “Here,” he offered, and passed them out to the captain, Tompkins, and his two assistants. Marvin Deving was smoking a cigarette.

  There was a murmuring of thanks, and then Captain Narveson sniffed his cigar and crammed it into his corncob. There was a short strained silence.

  Ralph O. Tate absently drew from the right-hand pocket of his vest a dark mottled Corona Perfecto and lit it with a gold-and-diamond lighter.

  “So long, folks,” he said. “See you through the bars.” Then he was gone—sweater, riding boots, and all.

  “Through the bars, eh?” Captain Narveson applied a fourth match to the bowl of his pipe. “From the inside, Ay bat yu!”

  The party broke up at that sally. The captain followed his pipe out toward the pier—Tompkins loudly inquired of a waiter as to the whereabouts of the washroom, and Tony and George departed with the avowed purpose of changing into their dancing clothes.

  Miss Withers made her way slowly toward the door, going around the room so as to pass by the table where she had seen the lonely figure of Barney Kelsey. But he had departed, and only a coffee cup and a solitary quarter for the waitress showed that he had been there.

  In the doorway Phyllis waited. “You know why I did it, don’t you?” she said, as Miss Withers came up. “I thought it would give you a chance to look them all over. Don’t I make a swell Dr. Watson? Notice any signs of guilt?”

  “I did not,” Miss Withers confessed. “But I wish you hadn’t told them about my going to the plane.”

  Phyllis grinned. “They knew it anyway. So I kidded them along—but I left out about Mister Jones getting sick.”

  “Bravo!” said Miss Withers. “You know, I’ve never dined like this in my life. With a red-handed murderer, perhaps, in our midst, laughing and chatting like the rest of us. I kept thinking of it—and though I ate all my dinner, I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what I had.”

  “Neither can I,” Phyllis confessed. She was looking back into the dining room, almost deserted now. “And neither can they.”

  She indicated the newlyweds, who still sat, amid the wreckage of the feast, staring into each other’s eyes, while the glares of the impatient waiters passed over their cloud-wrapped heads.

  “It’s like a disease with them,” said Hildegarde Withers.

  Phyllis turned on her. “A disease! Well, maybe you’re right. But it’s a disease I’d do anything in the world to get—if I could be like they are!”

  “Even murder?” inquired Miss Withers softly. But Phyllis La Fond did not hear.

  CHAPTER VII

  “HELL’S BELLS RINGING IN the rafters, Hell’s bells beckon …” Somewhere on the moonlit loggia a clear soprano voice caught up the tune which the orchestra in the grand ballroom was playing, and continued to the end. “All is forsaken—when roll is taken …” There was a laugh and a scuffle, and the song ended.

  Hildegarde Withers, standing alone in one of the arched doorways, shivered a little, although she was wearing a sensible blue-serge suit, and the night was warm.

  “All I can say is—the tunes they dance to today aren’t much like the ones when I was a girl,” she remarked out loud to nobody in particular. “Then it wasn’t ‘Hell’s Bells,’ it was ‘Daisy Belle.’”

  The Casino was crowded tonight, and nearly a thousand young men were propelling the same number of young women back and forth and around upon a floor of inlaid wood floated, at great expense to the late Mr. Wrigley, upon a bed of resilient cork. From time to time, as the tempo of the orchestra changed, the lighting system veered from orange to soft blue, and then deepened to a sensuous purple spot which wavered across the rapt faces of the devotees who whirled, dipped, glided, and then whirled again with a monotonous sameness.

  “And they talk about this young generation and its wild orgy of pleasure,” Miss Withers went on. “Those young people look about as orgiastic as if they were playing tennis.”

  She could see now and then the supple figure of Phyllis La Fond, encased in an evening gown of flaming crimson, with puffed sleeves and a flowing skirt that parodied the party dresses that Miss Withers had worn just after the turn of the century.

  Phyllis was dancing with no less a person than Mr. T. Girard Tompkins, and as the dance progressed Miss Withers could see that it was with more and more difficulty that the girl held Mr. Tompkins in a vertical position. In spite of her best efforts, he was prone to stumble on the turns and to work his left arm up and down in a pump-handle motion.

  “Hey!” Phyllis reminded him sharply.

  But Tompkins only closed his eyes ecstatically. “Beautiful,” he murmured and stepped with all his two hundred pounds upon the toe of Phyllis’s satin slipper. They turned again, and Miss Withers sniffed.

  “Before I’d let a man put his hand on my bare back—”

  She turned suddenly as she felt herself surrounded. But it was only Tony and George, the two sad young gentlemen who were paying for past and future sins by acting as assistants to Ralph O. Tate.

  “We’re looking—” said Tony.

  “Have you seen her?” said George.

  “I didn’t know you with neckties on,” confessed Miss Withers. “Have I seen whom?”

  “Not whom,” complained Tony. “Phyllis. Have you seen her?”

  Miss Withers indicated the spot, on the crowded floor, where she had last seen Phyllis in the drowning grip of Mr. Tompkins.

  “We can cut,” said Tony.

  “Okay,” said George.

  “Match you to see which gets her first and which takes Tompkins off the floor.”

  “Okay,” said George.

  “Call it,” said Tony.

  “Heads,” said George, listlessly. It was tails; it was always tails. They wormed themselves through the swaying throng, and Miss Withers was alone again.

  She began to wonder why she had come. It was already past her usual bedtime—and yet she had the feeling that something was portending, something hanging and ready to fall. There was a tension, an electric charge, in the very air—or else she was getting jumpy.

  She turned and walked out across the marble loggia. All of Avalon Bay lay before her, a half-moon strung with lights which made the dark swelling water a setting for ten thousand jeweled points of diamond.

  As she walked couples separated, staring after her and slowly coming closer again as she passed. “An old-maid schoolteacher doesn’t belong here,” said Hildegarde Withers to herself.

  She found a stone bench in a vacant corner and seated herself upon it, her foot swinging back and forth to the music which she would have stoutly maintained was no music at all. Her thoughts were again moiling over the mystery of the morning.

  Then the orchestra paused, and a stream of dancers came out into the moonlight. Through them, walking swiftly, moved a lithe figure in crimson—and Phyllis La Fond dropped on the bench beside her with a sigh of relief.

  “So here you are! May I stay a minute? I don’t want that tank of a Tompkins to find me, and Tony and George are almost as much
of a nuisance for different reasons.” Phyllis placed her red satin slippers on the balustrade, leaned back against the bench with a wasted display of shimmering silk stocking, and lit a cigarette. “Sorry—will you have one?”

  “Snooping is my only vice,” said Hildegarde Withers. “Besides, I’m afraid of fire as close to me as a cigarette would be.”

  “Then you ought to chew cut plug,” suggested Phyllis amiably. She did a quick repair job with her lipstick.

  “You’re not dancing?” she inquired blithely. “You should have snagged the Norsky. I’ll bet Captain Narveson can do a mean heel-and-toe.”

  “I might dance, if they’d play a mazurka,” confessed Miss Withers. “Or even a good square dance.”

  Phyllis flicked her cigarette over the balcony, as if it annoyed her. “Well, anyway, I got everybody here except the captain, the newlyweds, and the Great Tate,” she said. “I really didn’t think the captain would show up. He’s probably in his room writing a letter to some wife that he’s had for forty years.”

  “Everyone to his own taste,” Miss Withers reminded her. But Phyllis was thinking of something else.

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t right, did I? But it’s Tate I wanted to come. He could do a lot for me if he wanted to.” Phyllis stared wistfully at the moon. “He’s directing King Passion for Paradox—it’s an epic of life among the pearl divers. They’re going to make the location shots up at the Isthmus, at the other end of the island. He could give me a part if he wanted to.”

  “Will you tell me the difference between an epic and an ordinary motion picture?” Miss Withers was suddenly curious.

  “An epic,” explained Phyllis La Fond, “is a picture where the hero and heroine die about the third reel and then their grandchildren fall in love. Tate directs nothing but epics, and sometimes he directs a super-epic. But he’s hard to make.”

  “Fancy that!” said Hildegarde Withers. She looked sharply at her companion. “So Mr. Ralph O. Tate doesn’t give something for nothing, eh?” Phyllis was silent. “Except of course, nickel cigars and nips from his flask—”

  The girl gave such a start that Miss Withers broke off. “What’s the matter?”

  “Oh, nothing. I just remembered something.” Phyllis laughed.

  “Something about—the trip this morning?” pressed Miss Withers.

  Phyllis shook her head. “Something about my career, or what might be my career.”

  Miss Withers dropped the subject. “You’re very ambitious to be a motion-picture actress, aren’t you? No matter what it costs?”

  “Listen,” Phyllis told her. “I’m very ambitious to get ahead, in any way. Nowadays a girl has got to use everything she’s got or can borrow—before the old chin line begins to sag. It’s a tough racket, this, and I love it. I’m made for it, see?”

  Phyllis stopped suddenly and clutched Miss Withers’s arm. “Look—no, not there—in the doorway. Who is it? He stared at me all through dinner. I love gray hair on a man.”

  “So you get a whiff of the quarry, do you?” Miss Withers turned from Phyllis’s ardent, predatory face toward the indicated doorway. Inside, the orchestra was playing again, but the stranger showed no interest in the various hopeful and unattached young women who lurked here and there, swaying their lithe bodies to the music.

  “Barney Kelsey!” said Miss Withers slowly. “That’s his name, young woman. And if you never listen to me again as long as you live, take heed now and keep far away from him.”

  Phyllis laughed, a low, throaty laugh. “Watch me,” she challenged. “He looks interesting—and lonesome.”

  But as she started to rise, Barney Kelsey wandered away from them.

  “He’s not as lonely as you think,” said Miss Withers dryly. “Look behind him.”

  As Kelsey disappeared around the curve of the building, there appeared from a nearer doorway the gaunt and doddering figure of Chief Britt’s “deppity.” A wide dark hat covered his face, and he was taking tremendous pains to conceal his presence from the world in general, but there was no mistaking his intentions.

  “Hawkshaw Ruggles—and he’s shadowing Kelsey!” Miss Withers turned toward her companion. “Now what do you think of—”

  She stopped short, for Phyllis was now little more than a red splash against the doorway of the Casino, followed by a lingering trail of a very strong and very good perfume of which Miss Withers would have liked to know the name.

  “She must have seen another lonely man,” said Miss Withers philosophically. “Or at least another man.”

  She rose to her feet, preparatory to bidding the festive gathering a farewell. But she had traversed only a few steps of the walk around the loggia when she ran into the half-open arms of Tompkins.

  “Well, if it isn’t Mizz Wizzers!” The inebriate greeted her like a long-lost brother. “My ol’ pal Mizz Wizzers!”

  Miss Withers found herself at something of a loss for words. Finally she managed a polite “How do you do?”

  “Come on and dansh!” insisted Mr. Tompkins. “Won’t take no for an answer. We’ll show them something, you and me.” Tompkins demonstrated what it was he wished to show by performing a little dance step all his own, accompanied by much quivering of his paunch and embellished by a final stagger or two. “Come on, baby!”

  “I’m standing this one out,” Miss Withers told him. Mr. Tompkins’s face fell like a shot. “Aw, come on,” he pleaded. “Listen to that music. ’S my favorite tune, and nobody’ll dance with me. That girl in red skips out with the movie director and now you turn me down.”

  “She did, did she?” Miss Withers bit her lip and then turned on her heel, leaving T. Girard Tompkins telling his troubles to the moon.

  Quickly and quietly she made a survey of the ballroom, finding Tony and George promoting their fortunes with some chiffon-clad local talent. Lew French, one of the Dragonfly’s pilots, was stepping with the prim starched nurse from the infirmary—now neither prim nor starched. But there was no sign of Phyllis.

  The loggia, from one end to the other, proved also a blank, although Miss Withers interrupted tête-à-têtes between half a dozen couples whom that lady fondly and innocently believed to be engaged, at least.

  At a loss, Miss Withers paused at the outermost edge of the loggia and leaned over the parapet. To her right, a lantern-hung walk led to the town half a mile away, with at least a thousand places where a couple might be having the interview which she was tremendously desirous of overhearing. Or perhaps they had gone back to the hotel—at any rate, she was, as her pupils would have said, “out of luck.”

  Resignedly, Miss Withers made her way back toward the main staircase, keeping a weather eye out for any signs of the big song-and-dance man, Tompkins. But she was safe—almost too safe, she thought.

  She found herself wondering if Oscar Piper, that grizzled and hard-bitten inspector now on a train somewhere between New York and California, had ever learned to dance. “And to think I almost married him once—and never found that out!” Miss Withers shook her head sadly.

  Then she stopped short. Without particularly noticing where she was going, she had come part way down the main staircase which led from the ballroom floor to the lower level and the theater foyer. She was now standing upon a landing, halfway down the stair—and from somewhere near her she could detect that strong and yet elusive scent which adorned the all-too-evident charms of Miss Phyllis La Fond!

  She looked all around, but she had the landing to herself. There were no doorways leading into the theater, which had but lately run the last reel of the last Mickey Mouse on the program.

  But the foyer below was equipped with benches and smoking stands for the convenience of patrons. By leaning far over the balustrade, Hildegarde Withers could catch a glimpse, not of one of these benches, but only of a pair of men’s shoes, well-brushed gray suedes—and of a pair of well-filled sheer stockings beside them ending in red dancing slippers.

  Miss Withers could have dropped a pebble on Phy
llis and Ralph O. Tate—had she been equipped with such a missile and had she been addicted to such minor practical joking.

  The murmur of voices came up to her, a murmur only distinguishable as the tones of a baritone and a contralto voice in a blurred conversational duet. The words were drowned out by Mr. Tompkins’s favorite tune—which happened to be “Hustling and Bustling for Baby,” if that matters.

  But finally the dance drew to its end, and the weary orchestra on the platform of the Casino ballroom put up its instruments and mopped its foreheads. Miss Withers gripped the balustrade with tense hands and strained the ears which could detect a whisper in the last row of her third-grade classroom at Jefferson School.

  Slowly and painfully, like a distant station coming in over a balky radio set, the words of the couple beneath her grew clearer.

  Phyllis was speaking. “… and you wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?”

  “No, I wouldn’t want that to happen,” agreed Tate. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “You’d better decide right here and now,” Phyllis continued. Her voice was strained and a little hard. “If you don’t come through I’ll go to Chief Britt first thing in the morning and tell him about that flask. Don’t think I haven’t the nerve. If he knew—”

  “All right, all right. I didn’t say I wouldn’t, did I?” Tate’s voice had a worried ring in it. “I’ll phone the studio in the morning, and I’m pretty sure they’ll do what I say. It isn’t much of a part, though—”

  “I don’t care,” Phyllis said. “It’s a part. I’m tired of being left out in the cold.”

  Mr. Tate said something which was lost as Miss Withers found herself forced by the approach of some homeward-bound revelers to leave her post momentarily. When the coast was clear again she heard:

  “If it comes right down to that,” Phyllis was saying, “blackmail isn’t anything nowadays. I’ve heard stories about how you hold your job because of what you know about some of the Chosen People.”