Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (12 page)

“I thought you’d be on time instead of an hour early,” O’Rourke grunted. “I planned to get this dirty business over before you got here.”

“I thought there might be something I could do,” said Nurse Smith.

“There is,” said O’Rourke. “You can get me four fingers of spiritus frumenti out of the medicine cabinet, and then get the hell out of here. This is no place for a woman.”

“A nurse isn’t supposed to be a woman, is she?” inquired the nurse sweetly. She filled the prescription and stood by while O’Rourke administered his own dose.

“Ugh!” grimaced the doctor. His day improved several degrees. He smiled at the earnest and pleasant face of Miss Olive Smith. “You were passing for a woman all right at the Casino last night,” he twitted her. “Cheek to cheek with that harum-scarum pilot—and no back to your dress, either. I counted seventeen vertebrae.”

“He isn’t harum-scarum,” Nurse Smith confided dreamily. “Lew French is going to do big things some day. He’ll surprise all of you.”

“Yeah?” O’Rourke stood aside as the nurse efficiently completed the preparations he had half begun.

“Yes, Doctor. He and Chick are going to buy a plane of their own and make a big nonstop flight—”

O’Rourke was drawing on his rubber gloves. “I know. A nonstop flight between Tijuana and Hollywood, with a load of what Uncle Sam never stuck a revenue stamp on.”

“He’s going to do it soon,” continued Nurse Smith, wrapped in thought. “And when he puts the big deal over and buys his plane, you get a new nurse.”

O’Rourke shook his head. “Can’t afford a new nurse. I’m still making back payments on your salary. Anyway, if you wait for your boyfriend to save up enough money to buy a plane, you’ll be an old woman.”

“Maybe I won’t wait,” said the nurse, who had definite ideas of her own. She pushed an instrument tray alongside the sheet-draped operating table and added a couple of waste pails.

“Go on, get out of here,” ordered the doctor. “I don’t need you, and I don’t want an audience. I’m a little rusty at this sort of thing, anyway, and—Say, what’s the matter with you?”

Nurse Smith was staring, wide-eyed, at the sheet-draped figure which waited there for this last and most terrible profanation. She made a little noise in her throat, like the silent scream of a nightmare.

“Well, what is it?” O’Rourke looked at her blankly. “For the love of heaven don’t go probationer on me.”

“L-l-look,” she said. O’Rourke looked where she pointed.

The morning breeze, pushing past the shade of the open window, had drawn the sheet tightly across the thing it was meant to conceal.

“It hasn’t any—any face!” whispered the girl.

O’Rourke crossed the room with one stride and tore the sheet away. The nurse was right.

The thing on the operating table had no face. It had no body. Only the barest framework of a body remained where last night Roswell T. Forrest had lain in his rumpled sport outfit of cocoa-brown. Only the crude mechanical structure of bleached calcium phosphate which we call the skeleton—that was all. The movement of the sheet dislodged a bony arm, which slipped from the operating table and swung back and forth. …

Olive Smith forgot that she was a nurse and began to laugh, hideously. But the doctor took her by the shoulders and shook her until her teeth rattled.

“Look here!” insisted O’Rourke, pointing toward the ghastly relic which lay on the table, forever out of reach of his autopsy knife. “Look at it again.”

He let her go and snatched savagely at a loop of wire which projected from the exact center of the cranium of the skull. One jerk, and the articulated skeleton sat upright. Another, and it slid from the table and dangled beneath his outstretched arm.

“Cut out the histrionics,” said O’Rourke. “This is nothing but a be-blasted practical joke.”

The nurse came closer. “Why—that’s right! It’s only poor old Jimmy Spareribs!”

O’Rourke crossed the room, still dragging the skeleton, and opened the door of the little closet where his dressing gown had hung. He looped his burden over a projecting hook, and as the dusty rattling of the bones subsided, he slammed the door and turned the key.

Nurse Smith perched on a stool, and the color began to surge back into her face. “So that’s all it was!”

O’Rourke stared at her sharply. “Stop grinning, young woman. We’ve found a skeleton, but we’ve lost a cadaver. And the chief will be raising merry hell if we don’t find his corpus delicti.”

They were not destined to find the mortal remains of the little man in the brown sport suit. The infirmary offered no hiding place big enough to dispose of anything larger than a pair of tonsils. O’Rourke even climbed the stairs again to peer into his bureau drawers, behind his kitchenette icebox, and even under his bed, but there was no trace.

“The corpus delicti is a derelict, sure enough,” he said. “It’s funny, because everything was okay when I came in last night, around one o’clock.”

“Did you look under the sheet?” Nurse Smith suggested.

The doctor shook his head. “No, but I did hang up my coat in the closet, and Jimmy Spareribs was where he belonged.”

The doctor snapped his fingers. Now he knew what it was that had struck him as being askew in the room half an hour before. He went to the side window of the room and lifted the shade.

“When I went to bed last night I locked this window,” he announced. “And this morning I threw a cigarette butt through it. Unless I’m a bloody somnambulist, someone opened this window while I slept!”

Nurse Smith put her head close to his, and they both stared out upon what had been a vacant lot and was now in the early processes of becoming a chain-store grocery. There was a confused muddle of footprints outside the low window—footprints on which were superimposed a flat and wavering track like the trail of a serpent. It led along the entire side of the infirmary, skirting the excavation, from sidewalk to alley.

The little man in the sport outfit of cocoa-brown had been plunged into this placid place by a red-and-gilt
Dragonfly
from out of the sky. Now, even more mysteriously, he had been whisked away.

“I’d better get the chief,” said O’Rourke, as he drew his head in through the window. Nurse Smith stared after him, thoughtfully.

It was all of ten minutes before the doctor returned, leading a little procession composed of Chief Amos Britt, Deputy Ruggles, and the inevitable Hildegarde Withers, who had come into the chief’s office hoping for an interview before his day’s work began. She had not, however, hoped for anything like this.

“The door was locked, and the front windows don’t open,” explained O’Rourke. “But this window on the side looks as if somebody had monkeyed with it.”

“Somebody has,” called a clear voice from outside. “Look, Doctor! Somebody must have forced a knife blade through here.”

Nurse Olive Smith demonstrated what she meant by jumping excitedly up and down outside the window.

“Look out!” called Miss Withers, but it was almost too late. The nurse’s low-heeled shoes had wrought havoc with any traces that might have remained in the dust.

Miss Withers pushed the girl to one side and pointed out a single rough oval marked on the ground. It was very evidently the print of a rubber heel, and it bore in reverse an initial K, with the upper bar of the letter broken.

“I’m so sorry,” breathed Nurse Smith. But nobody paid any attention to her. Chief Britt stared at the print and nodded slowly.

He lifted his own worn brown oxford and showed them all a similar heel. “Koch Shoe Hospital,” he announced. “They got branches in every town on the mainland. This isn’t going to be much help to us, I’m afraid.”

He went out of doors and placed his heel next to the blurred mark which remained. The two were very similar, except that the K on his print was much less distinct. “I’ve worn these shoes two months since they was soled,” he informed them all. “If only we had the whole footprint we could tell the size of the shoe that was worn here last night, but all heels are about the same size.”

“I’m sorry,” repeated Nurse Smith. “I didn’t mean—”

“You didn’t do much harm,” the doctor comforted her. “The other prints were smeared all out of semblance to anything like the mark of a foot, or a heel either. I noticed that when I saw them.”

Britt placed an empty pail over the mark and gave orders to Ruggles that it be photographed at such time during the day as the proprietor of the local art store could conveniently shut up shop and come over. His little porcine eyes were troubled, however, by deeper worries than footprints.

“Now why should anyone want to steal what you’d think they would want least in all the world?” he inquired of Miss Withers. That lady did not answer.

“Body snatchers most likely done it,” insisted Ruggles, the octogenarian deputy.

“Looks more like a crazy practical joke,” suggested O’Rourke. “Couldn’t be body-snatching. There’s no medical school where anybody could sell a body near here.”

“Doesn’t look at all practical, or like a joke either, stealing bodies like this,” protested Chief Britt heavily. “This thing’s getting to be too much of a mystery for my taste.”

“That’s where we differ,” cut in Miss Withers brightly. “The more complicated a case is, the easier it is to break. Inspector Piper has told me that many a time. All the same, this stealing of the corpse looks simple enough.”

“Huh?” Chief Britt scratched his neck, and his shoulders were sagging.

“The murderer returned to steal the body of his victim,” insisted Miss Withers. “For a very good reason—he knew he could no longer hope for a certificate of natural death, and he dared not let Dr. O’Rourke make an autopsy for fear of what would be discovered!”

Chief Britt shook his head. “But this crazy business of substituting the skeleton—”

“That was an afterthought,” Miss Withers decided. “When he—or she or they, for that matter—crept through the window last night, he didn’t know if the doctor had come in yet. He couldn’t risk having the alarm raised at once. Or perhaps he feared someone might look in and see that the body was gone. He needed something to make the sheet bulge up—went to the closet for a coat and saw the skeleton—and there you are!”

“There I am,” repeated Britt sadly. He led the way out of the infirmary. But his attempt at making anything of the trampled prints outside the door was interrupted.

The voices that Dr. O’Rourke had heard early that morning raised in argument were still going on. “Ain’t a-goin’ to buy ye a new one and that’s all there is to it,” someone was insisting.

A man in faded blue denim caught sight of the chief. “Hey, Amos—here’s a case of petty larceny for you! Somebody stole George’s wheelbarrow.”

“Go on and let me be,” retorted Chief Britt, with an edge to his tone. “I got me more important worries than to hunt up lost tools for your ditch diggers.”

“Perhaps you haven’t,” said Hildegarde Withers softly. With the tip of her umbrella she poked at that flat and wavering indentation in the dusty ground, which led along the side of the infirmary.

Britt stopped short and stared at her. “Perhaps hunting for that lost tool is your most important worry right now,” she went on. “I don’t know much about such implements, but couldn’t this mark have been made by a wheelbarrow?”

Chief Britt squatted laboriously. “Looks like it could,” he admitted. “And it runs where no wheelbarrow would naturally go—which means—”

“Say!” Deputy Ruggles brightened. “Then all we got to do is to follow this trail and find the body again!”

He set out hopefully and came back wreathed in clouds. “Lost the marks in the alley,” he confessed.

He found Miss Withers and the chief walking slowly down the street in the bright sunlight, their oddly contrasting shadows slanting behind.

“But why—” Britt wanted to know.

“It isn’t time to ask why,” Miss Withers told him sharply. “You ought to be asking
how
—how anyone could have climbed through that window, stolen a corpse in the room underneath the one where the doctor was supposedly asleep, and taken it away on one of the noisiest conveyances ever invented. That’s what you ought to be asking.”

Britt pulled at his lower lip thoughtfully. “Does look funny. But O’Rourke is a heavy sleeper. There was a fire across the alley from his place a month or so ago, and both our engines and everybody in town turned out. He slept through it. This is a pretty sleepy town after sundown, ma’am. And when the Casino shuts down at twelve-thirty or so, then everybody is in bed.”

They were standing in the doorway of the curio shop. “But don’t you have policemen or patrolmen or something?” Miss Withers, used to Manhattan with its cop on every corner, was scandalized.

“There’s only me and Ruggles,” said the chief gently. “And most generally we have to sleep at night. Of course”—Britt held the screen door of his shop open—“Of course, there’s Higgins. He’s night watchman on the docks. We’ll ask him if he heard anything.”

Miss Withers followed the chief back into his office in the rear and heard him take down the telephone and request the immediate presence of Mr. Dan Higgins. There was some argument over the phone, but finally he replaced the receiver.

“Dan’s just got to bed, his wife says,” he told Miss Withers. “Seems sort of mean to wake him.”

Mr. Higgins was even more decided about it when he arrived, in suspenders and carpet slippers. “Naw, I didn’t see nothing and I didn’t hear nothing,” he insisted. “It was quiet as a tomb last night—and dark as pitch too, after the fog came in. I was on the dock all night, and no matter what anybody says, I never closed an eye.”

“All right, Dan, you can go close one now,” said the chief.

“Wait a moment, please,” interrupted Miss Withers. “Aren’t you going to ask Mr. Higgins if any ships left the harbor last night?”

The chief looked as if he regretted heartily having allowed her to remain. But he put the question. “Any boats sail, Dan?”

“Never a one,” said Dan Higgins. “The two piers was dead as a doornail. Sometimes fellows go out fishing, but not this morning. Never a boat—wait a minute.”

Higgins frowned with acute concentration. “There was one boat, Amos. But she didn’t land. Dory come ashore from the
City of Saunders
that anchored offshore about midnight. Narveson, the Swede that owns the outfit, came down to the dock and yelled to the men that they’d have to wait for him another day, and they pulled off.”