Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (15 page)

She spread out before the surprised chief of police a damp exhibit consisting of nine green-wrapped sticks of a popular brand of chewing gum.

“Nine little steps to heaven,” she said softly—“or steps to wherever it was that Roswell Forrest went.”

T
HE GLASS-BOTTOMED
MERMAID,
world famous for the views of the ocean floor which it afforded its passengers, was paddling serenely out through the harbor. Beyond it, two speedboats were racing, cutting the green water into wide angles of foam. Sounds of a thousand voices raised in merriment along the sandy shore came faintly to Miss Withers’s ear as she stood on the lonely hilltop and waited for the chief to speak.

Finally he broke the long silence. If Hildegarde Withers had been waiting for extravagant congratulations or praise, she was sadly disappointed. “Hmm,” said Chief Britt. He took the bedraggled bits of evidence and stared at them as if he expected to see stamped thereon the skull and crossbones of a pharmacist’s warning.

“Never heard of poisoned chewing gum,” Britt continued. “Don’t seem likely to me.”

“This is not a likely murder,” Miss Withers told him. “So far the murderer has had all the good fortune—what my pupils call ‘the lucky breaks.’ It’s about time we had a stroke of luck. I do a lot of snooping around, and it only stands to reason that once in a while I run into something. The long arm of coincidence reaches both ways, you know.”

The chief was still staring at the chewing gum. “But it don’t make sense!”

“Of course it does! Why should anyone try to get rid of ordinary chewing gum by throwing it into a bowl? The murderer prepared two packages of gum and used only one stick. He—or she—was afraid to get rid of the unused gum in any ordinary way. He couldn’t be seen burying it or throwing it into the sea, where it might turn up. He couldn’t leave it around to be discovered or to be picked up by some unsuspecting person.”

“Don’t strike me that chewing gum could be poisoned,” said Amos Britt.

“Then would you care to try a stick of this?” Miss Withers shook her finger in his face. “You mark my words, an analysis of these nine sticks of chewing gum will show traces of the poison that killed Roswell Forrest—the poison in which the missing stick was dipped.”

Britt scuffed the toe of his wide shoe into the rocky hilltop. “It still seems to me that poisoning food or something he drank would be more reasonable.”

“Exactly. Except that he ate nothing for fourteen hours before he died. And as for what he drank—I would be inclined to agree with you except for the fact that Ralph O. Tate, the playboy movie director, also took a deep gulp from his flask after Forrest drank. In spite of the proverb, what’s one man’s meat is not another man’s poison.”

Chief Britt eyed her cautiously. “How’d you imagine anybody could administer poisoned chewing gum anyway?”

“I don’t imagine!” Miss Withers retorted sharply. “I’ll leave the imagining to you. But tell me one thing: Isn’t it the custom of the airline to supply passengers with a package of gum as a remedy for air sickness?”

“Yes and no,” said Chief Britt. “You see—”

“That’s how it was done, then,” said Miss Withers triumphantly.

Britt still lacked enthusiasm. “What do you mean by your yessing and noing?” Miss Withers demanded.

“Yes, they hand out chewing gum,” explained the chief. “But no, it ain’t this kind. The airline uses candy gum, not thin sticks like this.”

Miss Withers bit her lip. “I don’t suppose Forrest would have known that, do you?”

She stopped to draw breath, and at that inauspicious moment an interruption offered itself in the person of a tall and brawny individual with a large Adam’s apple and pale eyes behind thick, horn-rimmed glasses. The newcomer was approaching from the slope of the hill.

“Hey, Amos!”

“Now we get some results,” said Chief Britt to Miss Withers. “George is bossing my search parties.” He waved encouragingly toward George. “Come on up and tell us what you found.”

“We didn’t,” said George, when he had his breath. “The boys have gone over every square that you marked out, and found nary a sign of a new grave or even of a wheelbarrow track. We went through every building in the town, too.”

The chief’s face fell. But this was no surprise to Miss Withers. “Would it be correct for me to inquire if a search was made on the golf course?” she suggested.

George swallowed, and his Adam’s apple bobbed like a cork. “I’ll say a search was made! We dug up every sand bunker on the course, but besides a lot of moldy balls, there was nothin’.”

He turned and stalked down the hill again, leaving the two of them alone. “Well, if the body isn’t here—and if it couldn’t have been taken away—where is it?” Miss Withers wanted to know.

“Throwed in the sea or burned,” suggested the chief. “Only if it is in the water, it would of turned up. Whoever stole that body had no chance to take it very far out without a boat, and the water is so clear here that you can see fifty feet down. Somebody in swimming or in a boat would have seen it by now. I guess it must of been burned.”

“Cremating a body makes a great deal of smoke and a terrible odor,” said Hildegarde Withers. She polished the handle of her umbrella. “My opinion is that the body is buried somewhere—and not at the other end of the island, either.”

Chief Britt smiled and then spoke with a weary patience, as if to a very small child. “Look at this ground, ma’am. Hard as a rock. It would be a terrible job to dig a grave here at all, and impossible to hide the traces of the dirt.”

“Suppose it wasn’t buried in the dirt,” Miss Withers hazarded. “What about that building excavation next door to the infirmary? Suppose the body was sunk in some soft concrete …”

The chief stared at her for a moment. Then he wrapped up the chewing gum again and stuck it into his hip pocket.

“I’ll be looking into that,” he promised her. “Only I don’t think the digging has got to the concrete stage yet, anyway. This chewing gum’ll go to a Pasadena laboratory on this afternoon’s boat. Let’s be getting back.”

“Let’s,” she agreed. “We’ve done enough for one day.”

“More than the Los Angeles police would have done, anyway,” the chief announced. “They’re crazy to get in on this case, you know. Good thing for me that, with the mayor out fishing, my brother-in-law is chairman of the city council. He won’t ask for outside help. I don’t need outside help.”

“I should say not,” said Miss Withers, without the sign of a smile.

She left Britt at the door of his curio shop and lingered long enough to see Mrs. Britt hurrying away, no doubt to her watermelon pickles. It was evident that nothing was likely to happen during the rest of the afternoon, and Miss Withers spent a busy half-hour in composing a night letter to Inspector Piper, care of the Santa Fe, which ran to three hundred words and outlined rather clearly the case up to this point. She spent another half-hour in coding the message according to the one cipher which she was certain he would be able to read—a simple deletion of all the vowels and reversal of the remaining letters. “That ought to keep Oscar’s attention off the haystacks and cornfields for an hour or two tomorrow morning,” she announced triumphantly to herself, as she signed the message “DRGDLH.”

Miss Withers walked slowly back toward the hotel, pausing a moment on the breakwater outside the Casino to stare at the crystal-clear depths and wonder what secrets they could be hiding. A little way out from shore she could see the
Mermaid
coming back from its voyage, her twin paddle wheels churning noisily and the passengers clustered along the glass windows set in her hold.

A trip aboard the trim little vessel had been Miss Withers’s first excursion at Catalina, when with half a hundred others she had drifted lazily above the submarine gardens which lined the shore from Seal Rocks to Pirate’s Cove—the entire lee side of the island. She remembered vividly those glimpses of another and more populous world than our own, where sleek and rainbow-colored fishes darted through forests of kelp and sea moss, where the dessert-like purple jellyfish floated dreamily, and now and again the horrible yet ridiculous octopus stretched a spotted tentacle from the deeper shadows of the crusted rocks.

Suppose, she was thinking—suppose that those gaping ones aboard the
Mermaid
should come upon a glimpse of an exhibit they were not meant to see—the pale and bloated face of the man in the cocoa-colored sport outfit, tangled among the slimy fronds of the giant kelp, now only bait for the nibbling perch and the scuttling green lobsters?

It was not a pleasant picture, and Miss Withers shivered a little as she turned away from the shore.

The placid balconies of the St. Lena were a welcome sight as she came around the cliff beneath the little pepper tree. But a shout which rang across the water from the deck of the glass-bottomed
Mermaid
drew her back to the shore again. She could see, even at that distance, a commotion on board. The little boat ceased to move, and there was a splashing as her paddle wheels went into reverse.

Miss Withers prayed vainly for a pair of opera glasses. But she could see that the crew of the excursion boat were preparing to use a boat hook. She watched as they caught hold of an object which seemed to be floating, just awash, alongside.

Her eyes strained until she had a headache, but she could not make out whether or not it was as she feared.

Then, with a shout, the sailors pulled together on their hooked poles and dragged from the sea—not the corpse of Roswell T. Forrest, but only a rusty wheelbarrow. Miss Withers nodded to herself, for she could see it very clearly—as well as some other details which had, until now, eluded her.

She could not see the adhesive tape which had been wound around the rim of the iron wheel, or the heavy grease which still glistened on the axle. But remembering that neither the doctor nor the night watchman had heard anything, she was almost certain that these aids were there.

The
Mermaid
got under way again, headed for the pier, and Miss Withers hastened onward toward the sanctity of her own chamber.

But even here she was to find echoings of the silent scream which had sounded when the man who had not wanted to die choked out his last breath aboard the red-and-gilt
Dragonfly.

It was something of a fortunate accident for Miss Withers—her second in the eventful day. But it began casually enough.

There was a low rumble of voices inside her own room as she came up the stairs. She paused for a moment outside the half-open door and then realized that her first fear of prowlers was unfounded.

It was only the maid, standing in the middle of the room with an armful of towels. But the maid was not talking to herself.

“I tell you,” she was saying, “you going to get yo’self a heap of trouble if you don’t tell ’em.”

The voice of Roscoe, the gray-headed bellhop, chimed in. “B-but he give me a dollah to forgit about it.”

“You git yo’self in some trouble that a dollah won’t help yo’ forgit,” the maid promised him. “Iffen I was you, black trash, I’d git to the policeman quick as ever I could.”

Miss Withers chose this moment to enter, and Roscoe leaped to attention from his seat on the windowsill. The maid put down her towels and made for the door, and Roscoe started to follow.

“Wait a minute, young man,” ordered Miss Withers.

Roscoe froze in his tracks.

“What’s this you don’t want to tell the police? Something about the murder?”

Roscoe rolled his eyes. “Murder? No, ma’am. It ain’t nothing.”

Miss Withers realized that she had taken the wrong tack. “I’m your friend, Roscoe,” she said kindly. “I know something about this case. Suppose you tell me what is on your mind. Then I’ll decide whether or not you ought to go to the chief with it. Murder is serious business, you know.”

“Yas’m,” said Roscoe dubiously. “But this ain’t got nothin’ to do with this murder everybody’s talkin’ about. No, ma’am!”

“About the body, then?” Miss Withers knew that Chief Britt was endeavoring to keep the theft of the body a secret from the newspapers and the public alike, but perhaps it was a futile gesture.

Roscoe was still dubious.

“Well, who gave you the dollar not to tell?”

“Oh, that was Mistah George, the movie man.” Roscoe brightened. “He give me a quarter to tote his bags upstairs yesterday when he come, too.”

Miss Withers nodded. “Roscoe, you’ve nothing to fear. But if you keep silent you may find yourself under suspicion of being an accomplice, you know. Tell me what you know, or I’ll have to go to the police and have them make you tell.”

“Oh, Lawdy Jesus!” Roscoe eyed the door, but Miss Withers still blocked his way.

“Come, come!”

“I been worryin’ about it all day,” Roscoe admitted. “Ever since I heard what happened down in the town las’ night. But it didn’t have nothin’ to do with the murder, no, ma’am. It was only—” Roscoe gulped—“it was only that Mistah George and Mistah Tony, the movie men, they got up awful early this mornin’. They had to meet a truck that was goin’ to take them to the movie location at the Isthmus, they said. I toted down all their stuff, and then they sent me up the road to see if the bus was comin’ from town.”

“From the town?”

“Yas’m. It seemed funny to me, too, when the Isthmus was the other way. But I went up as far as the Casino, and then I heard a car over here and come back. The movie bus was outside the hotel, right at the carriage entrance, and I seen—”

“You saw!” corrected Miss Withers automatically.

“Yas’m, I saw Mistah George and Mistah Tony carrying it through the lobby. They was sort of hurrying and looking both ways to make sure nobody was watching, and then I saw ’em drag it into the back of the truck. The truck drove off sort of slow, but Mistah George seen me and he waited. ‘You don’t know anything about this, do you?’ he asks me, and gives me a silver dollah. Then he runs on ahead and catches the truck.”

Miss Withers was able to contain herself no longer. “I don’t suppose you could come to the point and tell me just what you saw them carrying?”

“Yas’m.” Roscoe lowered his voice. “It was a dead body!”