Puzzle of the Pepper Tree

by Stuart Palmer

  “Me? Of course not. They were all new five-hundred-dollar bills.”

  “There is blood on them,” said Hildegarde Withers.

  Her attention was suddenly brought back to earth by Mister Jones. The little dog was wriggling in her arms, sniffing and barking with a black button of a nose pointed across the canyon.

  “He must smell another goat,” suggested Phyllis. But Miss Withers shook her head.

  “Listen,” she said. “And tell me if I’ve gone completely out of my head, or if you hear a radio somewhere. I’ve read of seeing mirages, but never of hearing them.”

  Phyllis listened. Somewhere in the distance, faint but distinct, she could hear a jazz singer appropriately intoning “Chloë.”

  “It’s a search party!” she said excitedly.

  “I never heard of a search party with a portable phonograph for entertainment,” Miss Withers told her. “Look at Mister Jones—he wants to push on across the canyon. We’ve failed as pathfinders, let’s follow him.”

  They plunged down the canyon slope and came upon a winding path which led up the other side. Here, strangely enough, was a grove of twisted eucalyptus trees—and beyond them, not half a mile away, the twinkling lights of what Miss Withers instantly recognized to be the settlement at the Isthmus!

  They stopped short and looked at each other, wordlessly. The wind had gone down completely now, and though the sky was still overcast above them, far out at sea the last pale light of a sunset was showing through a break in the curtain.

  Acting on an impulse which neither understood, the two women shook hands. “I’ll make a bargain with you,” Miss Withers suggested. “If you’ll forget about the fiasco with the gun, I’ll forget about the blue-envelope business.”

  “It’s a go,” said Phyllis. And then, arm in arm, the girl who had had too many men and the woman who had not had any hurried gratefully back toward civilization, at the muddy heels of an excited little black and white dog.

  Theirs was a reception profoundly satisfying as they stumbled up the steps of Madame O’Grady’s Come-On-Inn, the Isthmus boarding house.

  That good and buxom lady took them at once to her motherly bosom. “Mither of God, it’s the lost ladies!” She wrapped them in hot blankets and conversation, plied them with steaming food and drink, and set them before a roaring fireplace to dry. From the lighted dining room, inquisitive faces showed that their welcome did not depend upon their being the only guests. Kay and Marvin Deving brought their coffee cups companionably before the fireplace and plied them with questions. The newlyweds explained that the storm had delayed the return of the Sunday excursion, owing to the danger of crossing mountain slopes already loosened by the morning’s quake, and that the entire party had decided to remain all night. T. Girard Tompkins, who confessed that he had come along only because he understood that Phyllis planned to be a member of the party, showed a new animation at her unexpected arrival.

  His paunch jogged up and down as he trotted about with hot-water bottles, lights for Phyllis’s cigarettes, and a square bottle from which he poured liquid fire into their coffee and into Mister Jones’s dish of raw eggs and milk. Under Miss Withers’s stern eye he nobly abstained from taking any himself, and tonight there was no mention of his favorite tune.

  “With three hundred and sixty days of sunshine in the year, you had to come wandering over thim hills on a day like this one,” Madame O’Grady complained as she fussed with the great eucalyptus logs in the fireplace. “’Tis a fine introduction to the loveliest spot on the loveliest island but wan in God’s universe.”

  She militantly swept the hearth clean again and then put her hands on her wide hips. “Now wasn’t it like a pair of greenhorns to go gallivanting off and get lost—with poor Amos Britt coming in every half-hour or so to give orders to the search parties that’s combing the hills for ye.”

  Miss Withers clattered the spoon in her saucer. “The chief—is he here?”

  “He is and he ain’t,” admitted Madame O’Grady. “He’s drove over here four or five times to use my telephone, because it’s the only one at the Isthmus. But most of his time he’s been spending over to Mike Price’s place, a half a mile across the Neck. ’Tis there that the moving-picture folk are staying, though God Himself only knows why, with oleomargarine on the table instead of good butter. They say that it’s closer to where they’re making their moving picture, though I’m thinking that it’s only because Mike Price isn’t as particular about their heathenish goings on as some others. Women walking around half naked, and those noisy trucks roaring around at all hours of the day and night!”

  Miss Withers edged in a question as to what the Madame might know of Chief Britt’s purpose.

  “He’s looking for a cold, dead body, they do be saying,” she was told. “And he’s got better sense than to come looking for it here.”

  Miss Withers rose, a little shakily, to her feet. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll step outdoors and get a breath of fresh air.”

  Madame O’Grady shook her head blankly as the schoolteacher departed. “A dozen miles over the hills already today—and now she wants fresh air!” Phyllis called out “Wait!” and half rose in her chair.

  But Miss Withers was already moving resolutely down the road toward the flickering cluster of lights which she knew to be Mike Price’s place. They seemed to be within a stone’s throw, but no matter how fast she walked, they kept tantalizingly the same distance away.

  The road led along a silver beach, and Miss Withers could see, a short distance upon her right, another equally silvered strip of sand, and beyond it another expanse of rolling ocean. Truly, the tireless attempt of the sea to make two islands out of one was nearing its successful culmination here. Miss Withers paused to illumine a roadside sign with her flashlight.

  “Fifteen cents admission to the ancient Pirate Ship Ning Po—have lunch where more than a thousand Human Beings were tortured to death!”

  Miss Withers sniffed. “A happy thought,” she observed. As she turned away from the cheerful placard and the looming dark wreck which stood embedded in the sand beyond it, she heard the roar of a speeding automobile coming toward her. It rounded the curve and flashed by on two wheels, its lights momentarily blinding her.

  All the same, for a moment she thought that she recognized the bulky man who sat behind the wheel. But it was too late to do anything about that, and she pushed on.

  Weariness such as she had never imagined came over her, but she never faltered. The flickering lights of Mike Price’s place became a symbol in her mind, a goal which could not be, and must be, reached.

  All the same, she was never to get there. She plodded past a little city of tents, where a campfire or two still lingered, and then came upon a long pier which stretched out over the water. The moon was now shining as clearly as if the sky had never been overcast at all, and by its light she could see the figure of a man sitting disconsolately upon a piling.

  For a moment she thought that her quest was successful and that it was the chief, after all. “Hello!” she called.

  Then she noticed that the solitary man was smoking a cigarette, a vice which Chief Britt considered effeminate. “I beg your pardon,” she said stiffly.

  The man rose to his feet, and she saw that he was wearing riding boots. “Oh, it’s Mr. Tate!”

  “Hello,” said the moving-picture director, unenthusiastically. “Yeah, it’s me. What’s left of me.”

  Miss Withers approached somewhat gingerly. She was not one to believe all that she had read about movie directors, but then, you can never tell, as she often remarked.

  “I don’t know what you want,” Tate told her bitterly. “But whatever it is, you’re too late.” He threw his cigarette viciously into the water and turned to her. “Listen, have you got any influence with this comedy constable of a Britt?”

  “Possibly,” Miss Withers hedged. “Why?”

  “Because the guy is nuts, that’s why. He’s plumb loco, or else he’
s hired by some other outfit to put the skids under this picture I was trying to make.”

  Miss Withers, never averse to securing information of any kind, asked what it was that the chief had done this time.

  “Plenty,” said Tate. “He comes up here about noon today. Lucky it was too thick weather to be shooting, but we had an interior set or two we could have taken. But he has to poke around all over the location. Wouldn’t tell me what he was after. Wouldn’t tell me anything. Just sniffed around through the props, through the wardrobe trunks, in and out of the sound equipment, like a hound dog that’s looking for a bone he buried and forgot where.

  “I’ve got troubles,” said Tate. “I’ve got five ham actors on big salaries hanging around. I’ve got a sound crew and two cameramen and God knows what else. We lost Friday on account of your damn murder, and Saturday we only took eight scenes because everybody was talking and thinking of nothing but the killing, and now today—what does that hick cop think he is, anyway?”

  “Whatever he was looking for—he didn’t find it?”

  Tate shook his head. “Find it? Of course not! There’s nothing to find.”

  “In that case, I don’t think he’ll be staying much longer,” Miss Withers said comfortingly.

  “Much longer? He’s gone back to town already, hellbent in that flivver of his.” Miss Withers realized that her surmise in the darkness had been correct. But Tate was not through with his tale of woe.

  “And he’s taken both my assistants with him, under arrest! How anybody can expect me to make a picture with all this circus going on. …”

  Miss Withers smiled. Somehow, she had expected this. Chief Britt was growing desperate, evidently. And so he had added George and Tony to his roll call at the local jail. All because they had been seen carrying a body out of the hotel before sunrise Saturday morning.

  She decided upon a bold stroke. “You know,” she remarked conversationally, as she rested her weary frame against the piling of the pier, “you have no right to complain of Chief Amos Britt. Because you haven’t been on the level with him yourself.”

  “What?” Tate was taken aback.

  “Phyllis has told me all about your flask,” Miss Withers announced.

  The great Ralph O. Tate lit another cigarette. “Oh, she did, did she?”

  “Under pressure,” Miss Withers admitted. “Well?”

  “You’ve told the chief that?” Tate did not seem particularly worried, but he was evidently thinking fast.

  Miss Withers shook her head. “I’d like to see it first, and I’d like to have you tell me why you turned it around before you drank—or pretended to drink. Not that I have any official right to demand it—but it might be easier this way for everybody concerned.”

  “Here.” Tate reached toward his hip and produced the silver vessel. Miss Withers took it and stared at it. Not being familiar with such objects, she was forced to confess that it looked like an ordinary flask to her.

  “It’s what they call a duplex,” Tate explained. “I bought it at a jeweler’s on Hollywood Boulevard where they have a lot of trick gadgets. There’s two separate glass bottles inside. The necks cross, like an old-fashioned oil-and-vinegar cruet, so that when you tip it this way, one bottle empties itself.” He demonstrated by removing the cap and letting a few precious drops splash to the planking. “And if you want to tap the other side, you turn it like this.” Again the flask gurgled.

  “You see?” Tate was forgetting his unhappiness in the demonstration of a pet toy. “It’s simple as A B C. And convenient, too. In my business, I have to have a drink handy for social purposes all the time. Myself, I drink the real McCoy. Costs me a hundred a case, and it’s worth it. But I’m not wasting that stuff. So I fill up the other half of the flask with local Bourbon, aged overnight, and nobody knows the difference. It’s handy, too, when you got a girl who’s getting noisy at a party. You let her drink out of the side that you’ve filled up with ginger ale.”

  It was, Miss Withers realized, simple as A B C. Almost too simple, in fact. But if she was dubious, she hid it well.

  “You’ve been very frank,” she said. “And very helpful, too. I can easily understand why you let the sick man on the plane have a drink from the second-best, and then took one yourself from the other. But why, since it was all so easily explained, did you let Phyllis threaten you into giving her a job?”

  Tate laughed hollowly. “That? Oh—that was just a gag. I like to let dames think they’re putting one over on me. If she hadn’t got cold feet that night, she’d have got the cold shoulder the next morning when she came to go to work. Her kind are two for a dime in Hollywood. You know—just bums.”

  “I know,” agreed Hildegarde Withers. “You’re quite a psychologist, Mr. Tate.”

  “You have to be, in my business,” he told her. “I get so I can tell everything a woman is thinking.”

  “You can, can you?” Miss Withers murmured. But he did not hear her.

  “Listen,” Tate was saying. “You got a lot of drag with this local copper. Now that you understand about the flask and everything, there’s no use letting him get all hot and bothered about it, is there? Can’t you just bear down on him a little and get him to forget all about me and let the boys come back to work? If it’s a question of dough—”

  This time it was Miss Withers who did not seem to hear. “Put away your checkbook,” she said. “You won’t need it. Because I’m quite certain that George and Tony were arrested on a misunderstanding, and that as soon as I speak to the chief they will be released. You see, Chief Britt has never heard of dummies.”

  “What?” Tate looked blank.

  “He doesn’t know as much about the way moving pictures are made as I do,” Miss Withers explained. “I’ve read about the dummies that you dress up like your characters and substitute in falls and accidents. As soon as I heard that George and Tony were seen carrying a dead body from the hotel, I realized that in spite of the suspicious circumstances surrounding the affair, it was only a dressed-up dummy that you intended to use in this picture you are making.”

  Tate gasped. “The chief knows about that? Oh—I see why he was poking all over the place today! Looking for the body of Forrest—”

  “Because the bellhop saw your assistants carrying a dummy out of the hotel, very secretly,” Miss Withers finished. The director was laughing, and she joined in. “What a joke on the chief this is!”

  Tate paused and looked at her. “It’s not so much of a joke on the chief as it is on somebody else,” he admitted. “You see, we aren’t using any dummies in this picture, and if we did they’d be brought out on the property truck with the wardrobe and all the rest of the junk.”

  “Then—” Miss Withers drew away from the man.

  Tate pushed the beret back off his polished dome and grinned evilly.

  “You see, I’d had something of a night of it after the rest of you turned in, and when morning came I wasn’t in such good shape. So it wasn’t a dummy and it wasn’t a corpse that the boys were sneaking out of the hotel before sunrise—it was me!”

  CHAPTER XVI

  OUT OF THE SHADOWS into the clear morning sunlight came the red bus, roaring down the canyon and drawing up beside the patio of the Hotel St. Lena with a jarring scream of its brakes. Miss Withers was already on her feet, ready to disembark. “I was never so glad to get back from anywhere in all my life,” she observed heartily.

  Phyllis, with Mister Jones cramped uncomfortably under her arm, was close behind her. “And to think that we had the whole chase for nothing but fisherman’s luck,” she complained, a little bitterly.

  “Um,” Miss Withers responded, without committing herself.

  They were walking up the steps toward the hotel lobby, followed by Tompkins, who carried Phyllis’s coat in his most gallant manner, and by the newlyweds, whose baggage consisted of a camera and a handkerchief full of shells and beach pebbles which they had spent yesterday in collecting along the Isthmus beaches, in spit
e of rain and wind.

  The remainder of the belated Sunday excursion party rolled away toward the town, not without backward glances toward Miss Withers. They had heard whispers of this strange lady’s unusual avocation, and she was beginning to grow used to being surrounded, at the most inconvenient times, by a circle of goggling eyes. No doubt the tourists expected her to pull the murderer, or the missing body of Roswell Forrest, out of a hat, along with a rabbit and some white mice. She ignored them with a completeness which, since such spectators played little or no part in the development of the case, this account shall faithfully follow.

  She pushed past a little man in a dusty derby who was talking to the clerk, and got her mail. There were two wires from the inspector, whose steady progress westward was evidenced by the fact that the first had been filed in Topeka, Kansas, and the second in a small town somewhere in eastern New Mexico. “Read your wire and advise Britt hold Kelsey,” read the former. The other wire was also under the ten-word limit in length. “Arrive Los Angeles Tuesday five pm meet me.”

  Miss Withers shrugged. Barney Kelsey was already held, as tight as the local jail could hold him. And as for the inspector’s second request, she very much doubted if she would leave the island and its tangled complexity of intrigue unless she had made at least a beginning on solving the mystery. “Let Oscar Piper find his own way here,” she decided. She was later to regret that decision.

  Anxious as she was to arrange a meeting with Chief Britt, the good lady felt that she owed herself the luxury of a long steaming bath and a leisurely luncheon in the hotel dining room. Then, and not until then, did she set off down the shore.

  She was almost in the town before she realized that she was being followed by the dogged little man in the derby hat who had been at the hotel desk. He was not taking any particular pains to conceal his presence and, when she turned angrily to face him, only sat calmly down on the boardwalk railing and waited for her to go on.