Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (11 page)

Tate was whistling “Hearts and Flowers” softly to himself. Then he broke in upon Phyllis’s reverie. “Let’s get back to the hotel.”

But Phyllis didn’t want to go. “I’m for a walk,” she said. “In the moonlight.”

Walks in the moonlight were nothing to Ralph O. Tate. Nothing but picture hokum.

“See you later?” he asked significantly.

“Why not?” agreed Phyllis La Fond.

At that moment Dr. O’Rourke was depositing Miss Withers in front of the St. Lena. “I still think you’re barking up the wrong tree,” he was saying. “But the chief is worried all the same. He’s not even going to wait for the county coroner, but got the order over the telephone. Pleasant as our dances this evening have been, you’ve let me in for a very unpleasant chore tomorrow morning. And the sum total of my discoveries will be
nothing.”

“Quite possibly,” said Hildegarde Withers tartly. “But there’s something to be found if you’re capable of finding it. Good-night, Doctor, and good luck.”

Dr. O’Rourke took off his Panama. “I’ll phone you in the morning to report that I was right and that Forrest died from natural causes.”

“Hmph!” snorted Hildegarde Withers and went abruptly into the hotel, past the drowsing desk clerk, and up the stairway. Safe in her room at the head of the stairs, she picked up her antique watch from the bureau and stared at it.

“Quarter of one! And a fine time for a quiet old maid to be getting to sleep!” she scolded herself. But it was to be a later hour than that before she touched her waiting pillow.

She was sitting before her mirror, sending a brush vigorously through her brown tresses in which very little gray as yet revealed itself, and while she counted the strokes her mind was busily exercising itself with such problems as why a bodyguard should take a boat when his endangered ward was aboard a plane, and why Tate was worried about his flask, and why a little dog named Mister Jones had become violently ill aboard the
Dragonfly.

“Eighty-seven,” said Miss Withers determinedly. “Eighty-eight, eighty-nine.” It was at that moment that she became aware of a faint noise in the adjoining room. Her brush went on, but she stopped counting.

Everything was still—and then she heard it again. It was a soft, a furtive noise—evidently a noise that no one was meant to hear. But those were the noises for which this canny lady had learned to listen.

She rose to her feet and put down the brush. Then she gathered her flannel bathrobe more closely around her bony frame and went to the hall door.

She stopped short at the sound of voices outside. She could make out the irrepressible Tompkins, singing “Dixie” considerably off key.

Someone hushed him, and he apologized even more loudly. “Tha’s my favorite tune,” he confided.

Miss Withers shook her head. Then she crossed the room to the large window which led onto the balcony and flung it open. The night was thick and misty, and already the moon was hidden. There was no one to see her on the balcony, and she slipped swiftly out. Phyllis’s window was dark, but she rapped sharply on the open pane.

For a moment there was no answer, and then—“Who is it?”

Miss Withers announced herself and then without further ceremony climbed through into the room. A warm tongue caressed her bare ankles—Mister Jones remembered her. As her eyes became accustomed to the darkness she could make out Phyllis La Fond lying face downward across her bed, still dressed in the crimson gown.

Her shoulders were shaking with the soft, choking sobs that Miss Withers had heard from the next room.

The uninvited guest hesitated for a moment, then produced a fresh handkerchief from the pocket of her flannel robe and offered it.

As Phyllis dabbed at her eyes, Miss Withers went into the bathroom, found a washcloth, and wrung it out under the cold-water faucet.

“Here,” she advised. “Wipe your eyes.”

Phyllis started to sit up and then buried her face in the pillow.

“Come, come,” said Miss Withers. “It isn’t as bad as all that, is it? I’ll go if you want to be alone, but I couldn’t help hearing.”

“S-sorry I’m such a ba-baby,” sobbed the girl into Miss Withers’s handkerchief. “Don’t go—I’ll snap out of it in a minute.”

Miss Withers sat down on the bed. In the darkened room the body of Phyllis looked oddly young and helpless.

“What’s the trouble?” she asked after a while. “Did Mr. Tate turn you down?”

Phyllis shook her head. “Tate! No, it’s nothing to do with him. I stopped crying over his kind years ago. No, it’s—”

“Remember, I’m playing detective, and anything you say will be used against you,” said Hildegarde Withers cheerfully.

“Well, it’s not remorse over killing this mysterious Forrest, either,” said Phyllis. She sat up straight and did something to her tangled blonde hair. “Listen,” she suggested hopefully. “I’m over it now, but I’d like to talk to somebody. Wait while I get into something comfortable, will you?”

Miss Withers waited. As the carillon rang out the hour of one, Phyllis La Fond came out of the bathroom dressed in a black lace negligee and purple mules. In either hand she held a tall glass.

“Here, be a sport,” she invited. “I need a drink, and I’m no solitary drinker. When you can do that you’re beyond the pale, they say. Take it and listen.” Miss Withers took it, a little gingerly.

Phyllis drew up a little table beside the bed and curled up near Miss Withers.

“I suppose you think I’m an awful fool,” she began.

“Most of us are, at one time or another,” the schoolteacher told her.

“Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you what I was bawling about, and you’ll know how big a one I am.” Phyllis put down her drink on the table and leaned closer.

“It was seeing those kids—the newlyweds.” Her voice was still a little choky beneath the cheerful, forced tones.

“I should think they’d make you laugh, not cry,” said Miss Withers.

Phyllis shook her head. “They’re in love,” she said softly. “And they’ve got each other. Maybe they’re fools, but it’s a great foolishness. And every time I look at them, I think that maybe if I—if things had been different, I might—”

“Yes?”

“Well, I might have been like Kay Deving. Instead of a tramp.” Phyllis hugged her knees. “Funny, isn’t it? You see, what I said to you today—it wasn’t true. I’m in this racket, but I don’t like it, even if I belong in it. You know what I mean. Chiseling around, playing men for coffee-and-cake money—I’m just a bum, and I’ll keep on going down till I land in a Mexican hook-joint or jump off the Arroyo Seco bridge. I say I don’t care, I tell myself this is the deal I got and I might as well play it out. But once in a while I get this way—and it seems as if I just can’t go on.”

“Must you?” said Hildegarde Withers. “Go on, I mean.”

“Of course I must! What else is there to do? Men notice me, but they notice just one thing. They talk to me, but they talk about one thing. It’s all I’m good for, but I don’t have to like it, do I?”

“How old are you?” Miss Withers wanted to know.

“Guess,” said Phyllis.

“Twenty-five?” hazarded that lady.

“Thanks,” said Phyllis. “I look twenty-five with the right lights, and thirty in the daytime. I won’t say how old I am now. But three years ago, when a fat man picked me up in a Rolls and put me down in the gutter, I was seventeen, anyway.”

She lit a cigarette and crunched it out in the tray. “I don’t pour the sad story of my life as a true confession into the ear of everybody, you know. But you’re the first nice woman who’s been nice to me in a long time.” Phyllis slid off the bed and stood up. “Thanks for listening. I’m sorry I’ve bellyached.”

Miss Withers did not rise. “You listen to me, young woman.” Phyllis sat down again. “This isn’t 1900. I’m old-fashioned enough about some things, but I can see pretty clearly, all the same. And remember, nobody has to be anything he—or she—doesn’t want to be.”

“Doesn’t she, though!” put in Phyllis. “Do you think I’m a bum from choice?”

“Somebody—I think it was Henry James—once said that no one ever was a slave but thinking made him so. It isn’t what one does, it’s what he thinks. And you, if you really wanted to, could drop your past, whatever it is, like a hot cake.”

There was a long pause, during which Mister Jones leaped upon the bed beside the two women and fell to chewing Phyllis’s crimson dancing slipper with a hearty good will.

“Let the dead past bury its dead,” Miss Withers went on. “I’m what you call an old maid. Sometimes I think it’s just as bad a mistake to have too few men as to have too many. But I’ll give you a piece of advice, and you can do what you like with it. If I were you, with your youth and your looks, I’d pick out the nearest and the nicest unattached man and marry him!”

“And after that—”

“After that I’d play fair,” Miss Withers concluded. “And that’s more than most men have any right to expect.”

She was interrupted by a banging on the door. Mister Jones burst into a fusillade of barks.

“Hurray!” came the thick voice of T. Girard Tompkins. “Come on out, baby, the party’s young. They’re playing m’ favorite tune.”

“Don’t say anything and he’ll go away,” counseled Miss Withers. It was a matter of some moments, and then they heard the call repeated next door.

“Come on out, Miss Wizzers,” demanded Tompkins. “Come out and look at the stars with me.”

Undaunted, Tompkins proceeded down the hall. The two women heard profane sounds from the room shared by George and Tony, telling Mr. Tompkins where he could go to hear his favorite tune, and what he could do with it. Captain Narveson was also aroused, and his sleepy voice barked out a command to be off that was louder than Tompkins’s maudlin shout.

Miss Withers and Phyllis were at the door, which was open a crack. “Somebody ought to call the night clerk,” suggested Miss Withers.

“The night clerk is probably safe in bed,” Phyllis told her. “If only that drunken fool doesn’t burst in on the newlyweds!”

Which was just what he was doing. There was a rattle of heavy fists upon the door of the farthest room across the hall. “Come on out, you two,” shouted Tompkins. “Can’t go to sleep on your wedding night. Come on—it’s a chivaree! Come on, le’s paint the town red. Le’s dance, thish m’ favorite tune.”

Through the crack in the door Miss Withers and Phyllis could see the other door open and catch a glimpse of Kay Deving, white and frightened, in a frilly nightdress.

“Please go away,” she implored. “Don’t make any more noise—Marvy is asleep!”

Miss Withers was about to go to the rescue when Kay closed the door again, and Tompkins started back down the hall, weaving from side to side and talking to himself. Finally, to the relief of the aroused guests who were showing themselves in almost every doorway, he happened upon the door of his own room, hammered on it imploring himself to come out for a look at the stars, and finally lurched inside. There was the crash of a chair, and silence.

Phyllis and Miss Withers looked at each other and smiled. Phyllis shut the door and switched on the light.

Their two glasses stood, untouched, on the bedside table. “We didn’t do much drinking, did we?” remarked Phyllis.

“I’m going to bed and to sleep,” Miss Withers said, still an optimist. “I’ve done a lot of preaching and I’m not used to it. Good-night—and think over what I’ve said.”

“Sure,” said Phyllis.

Miss Withers disappeared through the window, from which Mister Jones watched her out of sight.

Phyllis picked up her drink, downed it, and then took up Miss Withers’s. She was laughing, but she took pains to laugh silently.

“And I forgot to ask her about the flask!” Miss Withers remembered, when she was back in her own room again.

She picked up her brush and went to work. Just to make sure that she hadn’t missed any strokes, she began at seventy-five again, and went up to a hundred. Then she braided her hair into two tight braids and switched off the light.

But sleep still eluded her. As she lay in her lonely bed, staring at the ceiling above her, she heard someone coming down the deserted hallway outside. It was not, as she at first feared, the heavy tread of Tompkins. Someone was coming with the ponderous secrecy of the half-drunk.

The footsteps stopped outside of Phyllis’s door. There was a rattle of fingernails on the panel.

“Open up, baby,” came the thick whisper. “It’s me!”

Mister Jones vented a few woofs, but that was all.

“It’s Ralph, honey,” came the whisper again.

Still there was no answer. Finally the stealthy footsteps moved away and up the stairs.

“Well, for heaven’s sake!” said Hildegarde Withers to herself. “Did my sermon take root?”

It was not until the next day that it occurred to her that Phyllis might not have been there to hear Tate’s signal.

T
HERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG
with the room, something which took the tang from the cigarette which James Michael O’Rourke had lighted as he descended the stairs from the apartment. It was not alone the presence of that rigid figure beneath the sheet on the operating table, or the thought of the unpleasant task which confronted him, but something altogether deeper and more subtle. All the same it was definitely there—some tiny jog in the ordinary and orderly pattern of the infirmary.

Cold gray morning was showing itself outside, and the little doctor could hear the loud voices of workmen in the excavation on the neighboring lot. O’Rourke threw his cigarette through the window in their general direction and then drew the shade.

He turned on both the overhead light and the lamp which illumined the table. “Silly idea,” he remarked aloud. “Wild-goose chase if I ever saw one.”

At that moment the window curtain flapped noisily, and O’Rourke, as nervous as if again he faced his first laboratory test in dissection, almost dropped the basin he was preparing.

He whirled and saw through the glass of the front doorway a prim and starched young woman. She rattled the knob. “Forgot your key again?” he called.

“Oh, good-morning, Doctor,” said Nurse Olive Smith. “I thought you’d be out to breakfast. No—I didn’t forget my key. I left it in this door, and it must have walked off yesterday.”