Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (22 page)

“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!”

O
UT 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 spite 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.

Miss Hildegarde Withers was not in the habit of sidestepping anything. She turned and strode back to where he sat.

“What do you want with me?” she demanded.

The little man smiled placatingly. “Nothing with you,” he admitted.

“Then why are you snooping after me?”

“They said you’re looking for Roswell T. Forrest,” admitted the stranger. “So am I.”

Miss Withers pondered this for a moment. There was something in the little man’s bearing which precluded the possibility of his being merely another curiosity seeker. Nor did he look like any newspaper reporter that she had ever seen. “May I ask who you are, and why you take the liberty of tagging after me?”

The little man produced a printed card, bearing the inscription “Harry L. Hellen” and a Longacre telephone number. “Hellen Damnation, they call me,” he informed her, not without pride. “I’m the best process server in the world. Y’ hear about how I hung a paper on Slim Lindbergh just before he took off on his big hop? I got a summons in my pocket for Forrest, and not knowing my way around here, I figured I’d stick with you.”

“Oh,” said Miss Withers. She handed him back the card. “I’m afraid you haven’t been keeping up on current events, Mr. Hellen. Don’t you know that Forrest was murdered last Friday morning?”

“I do not,” said the human bloodhound. “Where’s the proof?”

“But the body was identified before it disappeared.”

“By who?” asked Hellen disparagingly.

“By whom,” Miss Withers corrected. “By his bodyguard, Mr. Kelsey.”

“Yaaa.” Hellen made a lower lip that outdid Chevalier’s. “It’s a phony. That guy never croaked. I been following Forrest for six weeks. Almost nabbed him in El Paso, but Kelsey strong-armed me, the dirty bum. Lost the two of ’em in Colorado, and just picked up the trail again. They never get away from Hellen Damnation.”

“I’m afraid this one did,” Miss Withers insisted. “Why, it was obvious that the man was dead.”

“Yeah? Nobody but a doctor can tell a thing like that.”

“But Dr. O’Rourke did pronounce him dead.”

“Sawbones can be fixed, like anybody else. And with the heat on him, Forrest was good and ready to drop out of sight. I’ve had ’em try it before. He only took something to make him stiffen up, and then that night the doctor brought him to and turned him loose. Forrest is around somewhere, laying low. They tell me you’re working this case undercover for Tammany. Well, I’m on the other side this time, but we’re going the same direction. What do you say we play it together?”

Miss Withers thought that one over. “You mean—I’m to keep on looking for the man dead, and you for him alive—pooling our results?”

“You said a mouthful, lady!”

It has been pointed out by a hundred historians that the smallest accidents often decide events of the most tremendous significance. “For the want of a nail the shoe was lost”—and Napoleon’s bad handwriting, according to the legend, is supposed to have resulted in Waterloo. So it chanced that at this crucial moment, as Miss Withers pondered an alliance. Mr. Harry L. Hellen chanced to blow his nose loudly and unpleasantly. Miss Withers winced.

“I’m afraid,” decided the schoolteacher, “that, as you say, we are on opposite sides of the fence.” She gripped her handbag, with its precious contents, a little more tightly. “Good-bye, Mr. Hellen.”

The subpoena server grinned. “Don’t say good-bye, lady. You’ll be seeing me around.”

“If I see you too closely, I’ll have my friend Chief Britt ride you out of town,” she snapped. The little man made no reply and did not this time follow her.

It was a minor incident, but enough to begin the afternoon on a jarring note. Miss Withers strode through Chief Britt’s curio shop as if borne on a gale of wind and slammed the door behind her. The chief was actively engaged in whittling the arm of his chair.

Miss Withers cut short his heavy pleasantries on yesterday’s excursion and its unexpected ending. “Have you got those two movie men in jail?” she demanded.

The chief shook his head. “I ain’t having no luck with my prisoners,” he complained. “I had to let them go when they found out what I was accusing ’em of. Proved pretty clearly that they was trying to cover up the fact that their boss was dead drunk. I guess it wasn’t the first time. The guy who came over with the movie truck to get ’em said the same thing. But that ain’t what I’m worried about. It’s Barney Kelsey.”

“What about Kelsey?” Miss Withers was excited. “Did he escape?”