Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (17 page)

“Accidents will happen,” Miss Withers told the girl. “Maybe if you walked him oftener—”

“I’ve walked off five pounds in the few days I’ve had him,” complained Phyllis. “Tell me honestly”—she came closer—“do you think Barney Kelsey did the murder?”

Miss Withers stared at the girl critically. “My private opinion is still private, young lady. What do you think?”

“I think he didn’t!” insisted Phyllis warmly.

“You seem very positive about that,” Miss Withers told her. “Has Mr. Kelsey taken you into his confidence?”

“Huh?” Phyllis looked startled. “Oh, you saw us talking this morning. No, he didn’t mention the murder at all.”

Miss Withers let her fingers play an imaginary tune on the stair railing. “I wonder if you would have any objection to telling me what you did talk about?”

Phyllis was thoughtful. “Oh, nothing much. I said something about the places to eat here not being very good, and he told me about some little restaurants in New York where he’d like to take me—the Parisien and the Blue Ribbon for German food and the Red Devil for rum cake.” Phyllis looked wistful.

“I know,” said Miss Withers. “Anything else?”

“He said I had nice ears,” Phyllis announced. “Nobody else ever praised my ears.”

Now it was Miss Withers’s turn to be thoughtful. She looked up and down the hall, and then beckoned Phyllis a little closer.

“I’ve got an idea,” she said. “You’ve been playing Dr. Watson since this business began. Wouldn’t you like to be the detective for a change?”

Phyllis hesitated for the fraction of a second. “Sure I would,” she answered.

“All right. You’ve struck up an acquaintance with Kelsey. Suppose you drop in at the jail where they’ve got him prisoner at the next visiting hour, and draw him out on a subject or two? He might talk more freely to you than to me or the chief.”

Phyllis nodded. “He might, at that. But he won’t. I mean, I won’t do it.”

“Scruples?” Miss Withers’s stare was sharp. “Or are you remembering my warning to keep away from the man? Understand, I’m not insinuating that he committed the murder. His ironclad alibi is enough to prove his innocence to almost anybody except that dolt of a chief of police.”

“Or to you,” Phyllis sagely put in. “No, thanks, I don’t want any piece of it. If Barney Kelsey puts his curly gray locks into a noose, it’s going to be through no work of mine.”

Miss Withers knew when she had struck defeat. “It was just an idea,” she confessed. “Well—I’m going for a walk. I suppose you’re anxious to start dressing for the dance?”

“I’m not going to the dance tonight,” said Phyllis. “If the excursion for the Isthmus leaves at nine o’clock, I’ll have to turn in early to make it.”

Miss Withers bade the girl good-night and went on downstairs and out of the hotel. T. Girard Tompkins hailed her, no doubt anxious to add to her fund of information regarding Catalina pottery, but she passed him by with a polite word of greeting and headed along the shore toward the town.

The little pepper tree stood bleak and solitary in the moonlight, but Miss Withers had no eyes for it tonight. She strode past the Casino, meeting groups of stragglers hurrying to catch the last show at the moving-picture theater, and came along the boardwalk into Avalon itself.

Luckily, Chief Britt was in his office. She found him in a most expansive mood, with a cigar tilted from one corner of his mouth and his feet on the desk.

“I s’pose you came down to congratulate me,” he hazarded. “Yes, ma’am—just thirty hours since the discovery of Forrest’s body, and I’ve got the murderer in the hoosegow.”

“You’ve got Barney Kelsey in the—the hoosegow, as you put it,” corrected Miss Withers tartly. “What good do you suppose that is going to do?”

“Do?” The chief took his feet off the desk. “It’ll do plenty. We’re going to hold an inquest one of these days, and I’ll bet you dollars to dimes that the jury will find Forrest met his death at the hand of the man who was hired to guard him—Barney Kelsey!”

“You can’t have an inquest without a body,” Miss Withers told him. “You haven’t what they call the corpus delicti, which doesn’t mean exactly the corpse, but the body of your case, the groundwork, so to speak.”

Britt pursed his lips. “The body’ll turn up,” he informed her. “Maybe it’s turned up already, for that matter. Didn’t you phone in about somebody seeing it?”

Miss Withers patiently repeated the message she had given Ruggles, regarding Roscoe the bellhop’s dark secret.

Britt nodded sagely. “Seems like the last link in the chain to me. The two assistants, and maybe Tate himself, are in on this with Kelsey. You know how them movie people are. Murder don’t mean a thing to ’em. Their part of the job was to dispose of the body. Tomorrow morning first thing I’m going over to the Isthmus and start a search.”

Miss Withers was inclined to the opinion that Chief Britt’s searches were not likely to bring anything to light, but she did not tell him so.

“To come back to the man you have in jail,” she went on. “How and why could he have killed Forrest?”

The chief shrugged. “How? Probably poisoned his food. Although the Los Angeles police’ve been checking up on the movements of both of the men on Thursday night and Friday, and they say that Forrest left Kelsey at the hotel and went skylarking out to this—this house on Sunset Boulevard before dinner time, and that’s the last time the two of ’em was together. I don’t know of any poison that works as slow as that, but there must be some. Kelsey probably figured it would kill his boss during the night, and he’d go innocently along on his trip over here in the morning. Only the poison was slow, and Forrest didn’t feel it till he was on the plane.”

Miss Withers shook her head dubiously. “Suppose all this is true, then why did Kelsey do it?”

The chief waggled a fat finger in the air, making a dollar sign. “Didn’t you tell me you heard from this inspector fellow that somebody in New York was offering fifteen thousand bucks if Forrest didn’t ever come back to testify against the big shots? I guess fifteen thousand would be enough to buy any bodyguard.”

Miss Withers nodded. “It would buy other people, too,” she pointed out. “I’ve heard of murder being committed for less than that by such persons as airplane pilots, or doctors and nurses, or businessmen—or, for that matter, by schoolteachers and policemen. The infamous Dr. Webster was a professor at Harvard, but he murdered for less than five hundred dollars. And times are bad, Mr. Britt.”

Before the chief could answer, his desk telephone shrilled. He lifted the receiver and his face brightened. “It’s long-distance calling from Pasadena,” he informed his caller. Then: “Hello, hello. …”

He jiggled the hook. “Ever since the last temblor our phone to the mainland has been woozy,” he explained. “Guess the cable was injured—hello!”

He listened for perhaps five minutes, and Miss Withers saw the self-confidence drain from his face. Finally he hung up and turned toward her.

“If that was your analytical chemist, what did he say?” Miss Withers prompted. “Or did the messenger lose the specimen?”

Britt shook his head. “Dr. Lundstrom has had that chewing gum for only an hour or so. Just time enough to give it all the primary tests. No trace of any of the acid poisons, no arsenic or anything like that. He says—”

“The man doesn’t know his job, then,” Miss Withers cut in. “Because that gum simply has to be poisoned!”

“He’s the best chemist in the West,” Britt told her. “I was going on to say that he’s found something stranger than poison, even. He’s found that the chewing gum doesn’t match the paper wrapper it came in. It’s only sweetened boiled chicle—and that’s why he’s going on with every test he can think of.”

Miss Withers digested this for a while. “Homemade gum, eh?”

The chief was tramping up and down his office. “Now if we only had a body to analyze, we could get somewhere. With the vital organs in Lundstrom’s hands, we’d know inside of an hour what all this means.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Miss Withers told him. “Let’s forget the gum for a while and concentrate on the body. I have an idea, in spite of what Roscoe the bellhop says, that it wasn’t taken to the Isthmus at all. Tell me—you know the island and I don’t—how does one get to the Indian Burial Caves that are shown on the maps?”

Britt looked surprised. “Them? Why, you follow South Street out past the ball park and keep going alongside of the canyon. But—” He suddenly understood what she was driving at.

“You’re thinking that maybe these two movie fellers drove the body over there instead of taking it to the Isthmus? Forget it. The road hasn’t been traveled this season on account of its being in disrepair, and their truck wouldn’t get halfway there.”

“How about a wheelbarrow?” inquired Hildegarde Withers.

The chief looked dubious. “Maybe. But there ain’t much over at that Indian camp. It’s five or six hundred years old, and nothing’s left but some mud huts and some broken dishes and stuff, covered up with cactus. Who’d want to go over there, anyways?”

“I, for one,” Miss Withers told him. She moved toward the door and then stopped. “I’ve got something else on my mind,” she began.

“Then get it off,” Britt told her wearily.

“Somebody ought to check up on the movements of all the suspects on the day or so preceding the tragedy,” she pointed out. “I’d particularly like to know what the license clerk and the newspaper records have to say about the newlyweds. And—one thing more—I think the two pilots ought to be included in the survey.”

Chief Britt blinked. “Those boys? Why, they wouldn’t hurt a flea.”

“But Forrest wasn’t a flea,” retorted Miss Withers. “Will you send the wires?”

He nodded. “But I don’t see—”

“You will,” she promised him and passed out into the clear but humid night. Walking had often served her as a stimulant for thought, and she had much to think about as she strode back down the darkened Main Street of Avalon. Only the corner drugstore and the local pool hall showed lights. Through the open door of the latter she could see the thickset figure of Captain Thorwald Narveson, engaged in a stiff game of rotation with two young men whom she recognized with a shock as being the pilots of the
Dragonfly,
Lew French and his partner Chick.

The captain stood away from the table to chalk his cue, and Miss Withers saw the lights reflected in the shiny seat of his blue-serge trousers. What she had said a few moments before to the chief seemed to apply everywhere. Times were bad—even for the owners of whaling ships. Times were bad—and fifteen thousand dollars was a lot of money. She remembered that Narveson had sat very near the dying man and that he alone had failed to show surprise at the discovery of the death. It was admitted generally, she knew, that good poker players make good murderers. She found herself wondering if that would also apply to pocket billiards.

She was thinking in circles, ever and ever again bumping up against the same stone wall. The body of the dead man was missing. It had been stolen from the infirmary, or at least the window had been burgled, some time after Dr. O’Rourke returned from escorting her to the hotel. Allowing fifteen minutes or so to give the doctor time to stroll home, that made the hour of the corpse-stealing sometime between one or one-fifteen and the lifting of the fog blanket shortly before three in the morning, unless the job was risked by moonlight, which she seriously doubted.

Yes, it was safe to say that the body of Roswell Forrest had been stolen and disposed of sometime between one o’clock and three. That was little time enough, considering the magnitude of the task.

Yet every one of the prospects had a splendid alibi for that hour. She herself had been in Phyllis’s room until at least two-thirty, and during that time she had seen or heard Tompkins, George and Tony, Narveson, and the newlyweds—or at least had heard the young wife begging for silence because “Marvy” was asleep, which was almost as good.

Tate’s alibi had been established a few minutes later, it was true. But still there would not have been time for him to do all that was done that night and then to appear, half drunk, outside Phyllis’s door.

That left only Barney Kelsey, among the persons implicated in the case, and he had accounted for himself by insisting that he gave the slip to Ruggles and went directly to the hotel and to his room on the upper floor. As she knew full well, the lack of an alibi was no proof of guilt—in fact, the most ironclad alibis are the manufactured ones.

All the way back to the hotel the bewildered lady tried to decide whether or not one of the alibis could have been manufactured. Phyllis’s was clear enough. So was Tompkins’s. Unless the two assistant directors and the captain had hired someone to stand behind their doors and mimic their voices, their alibis were equally good. She came at last to the sorry comfort of deciding that only Marvin Deving stood unaccounted for. And if the slick-haired young man had contemplated anything in the nature of body-snatching, she was sure he would have presented the best alibi of the lot. Besides, both he and Kay had been speechless with surprise when she told them of the disappearance of the body—and that sort of surprise is hard to fake.

Yet she remembered the print of the shoe outside the infirmary window—the shoe with the nicked initial in its rubber heel. Marvin Deving’s shoes had made that mark—but when and why she found herself unable to decide.

Weary and worn, Miss Withers came into the hotel lobby resolved upon only one conclusion. The entire mechanism of this crime lacked an important cogwheel. She was sure that it existed somewhere—but until she found it she was handicapped.

Except for the clerk and a blue-jowled gentleman engaged in reading a sheaf of newspapers, she found the lobby of the St. Lena deserted. It was late, and Hildegarde Withers was very tired.

But in spite of the weariness in her angular body, the schoolteacher was still in the grip of an insatiable curiosity. Acting upon an impulse, she paused in the lobby to engage the clerk in conversation. He was a washed-out person of late middle age, who looked as if he had seen better days and never expected to see any more.