Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (26 page)

She tried to kick against the floor again, but it was of no avail. The noise would not have frightened a mouse, and the effort left her swooning.

The voices in the room, shut away from her by the thin width of a partition, swelled to a cascade of sound, a nightmare in which she heard as in a dream the voices of everyone that she had ever known. Oscar Piper’s dry, clipped speech came most clearly. Her eyes filled with tears again, tears which the tightly binding bandage forced back to smart and burn. Why hadn’t she married Oscar Piper long ago? Why hadn’t she done a thousand things that she would never do? Why—

The roaring in her ears increased to an unbearable thunder which lasted for twice a thousand years. Then—

“She’s coming through,” said a familiar voice. It was Oscar Piper’s voice. Someone was speaking with his voice. Someone was looking down at her with his eyes. Contrary to the familiar fiction, Hildegarde Withers did not imagine for a moment that she was dead and in heaven. She was too conscious of a stinging tingling of her cheeks, of a dull ache through her whole body, to imagine that this was death. Death meant a release from that sort of thing. Besides, someone was waving a glass phial beneath her nose.

“I’m all right,” she said weakly. Then she opened her eyes wide and realized that it was the inspector who held her, and not a creature out of her nightmares. He looked worried.

“Don’t try to talk,” he said. She saw Dr. O’Rourke over his shoulder, and even the piglike eyes of Chief Amos Britt.

“I’ll talk if I want to,” she managed. “What happened?”

She was breathing as if she had forgotten how the air could taste. With the soul-satisfying oxygen she drew in strength. After a moment she managed to sit up.

“Turn her the other way, so she won’t see … it,” came a feminine voice. It was Phyllis’s.

Miss Withers shook her head. “I’m all right,” she said. “What happened?”

“Steady, old girl,” said Oscar Piper. He was without his usual cigar, and his lower lip protruded more than usual. He was all in dusty gray, and he smelled of tobacco and gasoline.

“I want to know what happened!” she insisted. She realized that the room was full of people and that she was sitting in the armchair by the writing desk.

“That’s what we want to know,” said the inspector quietly. “As soon as you feel able to tell us. I was waiting down in your room when I heard the shot.”

“But,” she protested, “you weren’t due until tomorrow.”

“You know how I hate airplanes,” Piper told her. “But the desert was too much for me. It was 114 degrees in the dining car. So I left the train at Phoenix and caught the Transcontinental. It saved a day, and I talked the Long Beach harbor police into bringing me over in their patrol boat.”

Miss Withers sensed that he was talking to keep her from using her voice. “I’m all right, really,” she insisted. “But how did you ever find me in here?”

The inspector smiled. “Naturally I horned in when I heard the alarm,” he said. “I helped them bring Mack’s body in here. Then I happened to notice your handbag on the floor, with everything dumped helter-skelter. I knew there wasn’t another handbag like that one left in America. So I started looking around—and there you were, trussed up like Rameses’ mammy.”

“You mean mummy,” she corrected weakly.

Chief Britt horned in on the conversation. “Listen,” he queried eagerly. “Who tied you up?”

She told them what had happened, or at least the events following her conversation with the man who now lay upon the bed, shielded from her by the crowd.

“But that can’t be,” objected Britt, when she told of the sound she had heard in the hall just before the shot. “Because nobody shot Mack. Less than a minute after the shot was fired, people come out into the hall. And there he laid, with the top of his head blown off, and his gun in his hand. Clear case of suicide—I guess you threw a scare into him. Appears to me that his suicide is a clear confession of guilt in the Forrest killing, eh, Inspector?”

Piper refused to commit himself.

“Nonsense,” said Miss Withers. “A man doesn’t go out into a hallway to kill himself. I know very well—”

She stopped short. Once already this evening she had blundered by letting her tongue run away with her. She was determined to avoid making the same mistake twice. “Could I see the weapon?” she asked.

Chief Britt produced a handkerchief-wrapped revolver, still warm to the touch. “There she is,” he announced. “It’s Mack’s, all right. Just fits his shoulder holster. He’s got a permit for it, too.”

“I see,” she remarked. Then she glanced significantly at the inspector. “I think I’d like to be helped to my room, if you don’t mind.”

Leaning on the inspector’s arm, she looked down at the shapeless mound beneath the sheet which someone had drawn.

“He called me an old hen,” she said softly and then suffered herself to be led through the door.

“Careful,” said the inspector, leading her around a dark stain on the hall carpet. When they were on the stairs, she turned to him. It was characteristic of them both that they wasted no words in greetings or the usual chatter.

“I’m not as weak as you think,” she said. “I can get back to my room. I wanted to tell you. It wasn’t suicide, and that isn’t Mack’s gun that the chief has. I ought to know—I looked down the barrel of it tonight. He carried an automatic—one of those nasty little snubnosed things.”

Piper nodded. “All this is pretty new to me,” he said. “Your last wire gave me the lineup, but nothing of what’s happened since Saturday. Mack’s part in this thing I can guess. But who did the job on Forrest, and who killed Mack? I don’t suppose he told you about the first murder when you were having your confab with him.”

“He told me nothing,” said Miss Withers. “But I’m pretty sure I know. I want to think, and rest. Let me sleep on it tonight while you go back and keep Chief Britt from making himself any more ridiculous than he must. We’ll have breakfast together and talk this out.”

The inspector frowned. “I hate to leave you alone. Suppose somebody takes a notion to bump you off in the night?”

“I’m as safe as you are,” she assured him. “Besides, I’ll push a bureau against my door. Good-night, old friend. And thank heavens you remembered my handbag when you saw it.”

She gripped his hand and then turned suddenly away and closed the door of her room behind her.

Inspector Oscar Piper stood for a moment, staring at the door. “What a woman!” he said softly. “One in a million!”

He climbed the flight of steps to the third floor and then corrected himself. “One in two million,” he said.

It was well along into the morning when Hildegarde Withers awoke. She sat up in bed and shook her head to clear it. Though she did not realize it, she was feeling an aftereffect of her last night’s experience which closely paralleled a good thick hangover.

But the day was a momentous one—she knew it. The certainty gave her strength to climb under an icy shower. She dressed swiftly and then called the desk.

“Is Inspector Oscar Piper a guest here?”

“Room 360,” she was told. “But he asked not to be disturbed.”

“All the same,” she told the clerk, “it’s after ten o’clock and he’s going to be disturbed.”

A considerable time had elapsed before she got a sleepy response. “Meet you in the dining room in twenty minutes,” he assured her.

He was there, washed and shaved and brushed, in a little more than fifteen. They sat down on opposite sides of a table which looked out on an expanse of lapis-lazuli ocean.

“Well!” said the inspector. Miss Withers looked back at him critically and repeated it. “Well,” she said. They both smiled.

“What happened last night after I left?” she wanted to know.

“Plenty,” said the inspector. “First of all, I got a sort of official standing in the community.” He bared his vest and showed her a bright badge of shining nickel which bore the legend “Deputy Sheriff.” It was pinned beside the massive shield of solid gold that his subordinates had given him on his twentieth anniversary as an officer.

“Chief Amos Britt plucked this from the breast of poor old Ruggles last night,” he told her. “Neat, but not gaudy, don’t you think?”

“What else?” Miss Withers was a woman of one idea. “What did you actually accomplish?”

“Nothing,” admitted the inspector. “Which in itself may prove something. I was lucky to have my kit along with me. I tested the gun with fingerprint powder and found not a trace of a print. That means the murderer wore gloves or wiped it clean.”

Miss Withers nodded. “Go on.”

“Then I helped Britt dig the bullet out of the hall upstairs. It fits the gun that was in Mack’s hand.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Miss Withers told him.

“Then I made another test. You know that we can tell if a hand has fired a gun within twenty-four hours by microscopic powder burns that the naked eye doesn’t see? It even applies to the new smokeless powder. Well, I tested the dead man’s hand. It did not show any burns. With Britt’s authority in back of me, I tested the hands—both hands—of every person who was in this hotel last night, whether they liked it or not. Excepting yourself, of course. And got a negative in every case.”

“Then—that means the murderer came from outside?” Miss Withers was bewildered.

“Nobody came in from outside. As it happens, the desk clerk was awake, because I had just been escorted to the place by the boys from the Long Beach station house and had made him show me to your room.”

“Then your test is no good—or else you missed somebody.”

“The test is perfectly good,” Piper told her. “And we missed nobody. I recognized a lot of the people you mentioned in your code wire. Tompkins and Narveson and those callow newlyweds and the gay girl in the next room who has the pup.”

“What about a glove?”

Piper nodded. “It would have to be the thickest glove I ever struck,” he admitted. “Those powder burns have been proved to go through leather and rubber. Maybe an iron glove would do it.”

“Then it must have been an iron glove,” insisted the schoolteacher. “Because the murderer could not have come in from outside. It doesn’t fit!”

“If the glove fits, put it on,” said Oscar Piper. “Well, you had the night to sleep on your idea. Suppose you tell me who is responsible for this circus.”

Miss Withers smiled at him. “This is my murder,” she pleaded. “It’s the only case I’ve ever had all to myself. Let me have the glory. I earned it in that closet last night. You’ll probably guess when I run over the events of the past four days. But don’t make me spring the surprise until I’m ready.”

“It’s fun to be fooled, it’s more fun to know,” quoted the inspector. “But I don’t mind playing Watson for a change.”

“For a
change?”
Miss Withers inquired innocently. And it was at that moment that Piper realized that she was herself again.

As breakfast was placed before them, she began a résumé of the case, starting with the moment when she had noticed Hinch, the manager of the airport, running toward the plane. She told him of the autopsy that didn’t come off, of the long search for the missing body. She painted a sadly revealing portrait of her venture to the Indian caves, and of the discovery of the pepper tree’s odd behavior. Here and there, since she was a woman, she left a hiatus or two, but the inspector was none the wiser for it.

The luncheon menus were resting before them by the time Miss Withers had concluded her travelogue.

Piper shook his head. “You’ve certainly been over Niagara in a barrel with nails in it,” he said. “I’m dizzy.”

“Then you don’t guess the murderer?”

“Sure,” he told her. “I guess it’s one of about eight or a dozen people.”

“That’s been my trouble, too,” she said. “It wasn’t until the other day that it suddenly occurred to me—it might be
two
of eight or a dozen people.”

Piper rubbed his hands together. “You mean—that two of these supposed strangers are really acting in cahoots?”

“Figure it out for yourself,” she advised. “I had to.” She pushed back her chair as a distant siren sounded.

“Good heavens, there’s the steamer,” she said. “That means it’s after twelve. Let’s go down and call on Chief Britt. Perhaps he’s solved both murders while we chatted here.”

For all that, they had a good deal more to discuss as they ambled down the shore road, and Miss Withers was surprised to find that she tired more easily than usual. The chimes of the carillon had sounded for the first hour of the afternoon before they reached Chief Britt’s curio shop.

The chief brightened as he saw them. “Well, it’s about time,” he boomed. “This is getting over my head.”

Miss Withers asked him what the trouble was.

“Trouble? Ma’am, you don’t know the half of it. First off this morning, I have to go over and separate two good friends of mine who are trying to mess up the ground with each other. Lew French and Chick Madden, the
Dragonfly
pilots, you know. Something about the nurse in O’Rourke’s office. And then she threatens to walk out on the Doc, and sue him for back salary besides.”

“How very interesting,” Miss Withers observed. The inspector, feeling sadly out of place in an executive office not his own, bit the end off a cigar and lit it.

“That ain’t all,” Britt went on. “This second murder on top of the first starts hell humming on the mainland. They’re threatening to shove the Los Angeles detective force or the state police into my lap. I stalled that by saying I had official assistance from New York, but it ain’t going to stay stalled.” He shook his head sadly. “But that ain’t what worries me worst.”

“What is?” Piper spoke without removing his cigar.

“It’s Barney Kelsey,” complained the chief. “He got himself sprung.”

Piper now took the cigar from his mouth and threw it into the waste basket. “How in the—”

“I thought you weren’t going to let him get to a phone or have a visitor, except for Phyllis with her magazines?” Miss Withers interposed.

“I didn’t,” admitted the chief. “It must have been that La Fond dame. Anyhow, somebody phoned to Los Angeles for a lawyer, and about half an hour ago a dapper gent gets off the
Avalon,
hands me a writ of habeas corpus issued by a Superior Court judge of this county, and that’s that. I have to turn Kelsey loose, and he goes off with the lawyer and the girl.”