Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (10 page)

But finally the dance drew to its end, and the weary orchestra on the platform of the Casino ballroom put up its instruments and mopped its foreheads. Miss Withers gripped the balustrade with tense hands and strained the ears which could detect a whisper in the last row of her third-grade classroom at Jefferson School.

Slowly and painfully, like a distant station coming in over a balky radio set, the words of the couple beneath her grew clearer.

Phyllis was speaking. “… and you wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?”

“No, I wouldn’t want that to happen,” agreed Tate. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“You’d better decide right here and now,” Phyllis continued. Her voice was strained and a little hard. “If you don’t come through I’ll go to Chief Britt first thing in the morning and tell him about that flask. Don’t think I haven’t the nerve. If he knew—”

“All right, all right. I didn’t say I wouldn’t, did I?” Tate’s voice had a worried ring in it. “I’ll phone the studio in the morning, and I’m pretty sure they’ll do what I say. It isn’t much of a part, though—”

“I don’t care,” Phyllis said. “It’s a part. I’m tired of being left out in the cold.”

Mr. Tate said something which was lost as Miss Withers found herself forced by the approach of some homeward-bound revelers to leave her post momentarily. When the coast was clear again she heard:

“If it comes right down to that,” Phyllis was saying, “blackmail isn’t anything nowadays. I’ve heard stories about how you hold your job because of what you know about some of the Chosen People.”

Tate’s answer to this was lost.

“All right, so I’m what you say,” continued Phyllis. “I’m practically anything you choose to call me. But, just to get confessional, why? Because three years ago a little fat man went hunting San Quentin quail, and I was the quail. My Aunt Emma used to sing a song about the bird with the broken pinion never flying so high again. Well, I was broken and he did the flying. So I’m out to get whatever I can however I can. I’ll emote as well as any of the frozen-faced floozies that drip glycerin in front of your cameras—and I can do anything else that they can do, too.”

There was a long and significant pause, and then the great director of epics and super-epics spoke with a new note in his voice. Unfortunately his choice of vocabulary was such that Miss Withers was quite at a loss to comprehend his meaning.

“Then it’s in the bag, baby,” he was saying. “You know, you’ve got a lot of what it takes. I like little girls with nerve, and I can do a lot for you as long as we’re friends—”

Phyllis laughed, a little hysterically. “A Hollywood engagement, huh? Why not?” A white, unhealthy hand moved across the silken leg, and Miss Withers’s eyebrows lifted another inch. But Phyllis La Fond was rising.

“Have I got to pay the price right here in public?” she bantered.

“Later, then,” said Ralph O. Tate confidently. They were coming toward the stair, and Miss Withers drew hastily back out of sight. She had heard all, or almost all, that she had wanted to hear. But she had an odd feeling of letdown. It was not because she had played the ignoble role of eavesdropper. The end justified the means, she considered. But tonight she had seen or rather heard a new Phyllis—a hard, designing, blackmailing Phyllis. And Miss Withers had almost grown to like the girl.

Well, for that matter she had been rather fond of two of the three murderers she had been privileged to know in the past. She had learned to her cost that the descendants of Cain wear no mark upon their brows.

Phyllis and the director were coming up the staircase, so Miss Withers was forced to make a hasty retreat up to the ballroom again. She lost herself amid the throng, coming out at the other end of the room and going immediately to the cool loggia. The stars were somehow dimmer and the moonlight more diffused. A white bank of fog was drifting in from the sea.

“And I’m simply a sentimental old woman,” Hildegarde Withers told herself. “After forty years of this grubby old world I ought to realize that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” Her intellectual honesty made her pause and smile at herself. “Of course, they do wonderful things with rayon—”

She shook her head and straightened her hat. “It’s way past my bedtime,” she reminded herself. “I’ve seen and heard enough for one night.”

But Miss Hildegarde Withers was far from seeing and hearing all that the fates held in store for her this night. As she made her way back toward the staircase, again she chanced to run, not into Phyllis and Tate, who had disappeared, but into the ubiquitous T. Girard Tompkins, paunch, elk’s tooth, and all.

At that moment he was surrounded by newlyweds. With either arm he gripped a Deving—Kay on his left and Marvin on his right.

“Hurray!” he shouted, as Miss Withers hove into view. “Look who’s here! These kids were just sitting around mooning—and it took little Tommy to bring them out to make whoopee-eee!”

Kay Deving smiled faintly. Tompkins continued: “Imagine sitting around a hotel bedroom on their wedding night! Imagine it!”

Miss Withers imagined it, without difficulty. Tompkins turned to the redhaired girl on his left. “Mrs. Deving—they’re playing m’ favorite tune. May I have th’ honor?”

Kay looked at her young husband. “If Marvin—”

Marvin looked at Kay. “Well, if Kay—”

Miss Withers stepped into the breach. “I think they ought to dance the first one together,” she said. “Really, Mr. Tompkins!”

Miss Withers was to treasure for some time the memory of the grateful look that flashed from the fiery brown eyes of Kay Deving. As Tompkins loosened his grip, the young couple danced off together—slick dark hair against red curls.

“They dance as if they were one person,” Miss Withers observed aloud. “As if they’d been dancing together all their lives.”

“This’s m’ favorite tune,” insisted Tompkins. As Miss Withers’s support was denied him, he leaned against the doorway. “Swee’ Rosie O’Grady—”

The orchestra was, at the moment, rendering its interpretation of that classic of yesterday “How Many Times,” but Miss Withers did not pause to enlighten him. At the farther door she caught a glimpse of a gentleman in blue coat and flannel slacks, who was signaling to her.

As she drew closer, she saw that it was Dr. O’Rourke. “I didn’t know you with your clothes on,” she told him as they met in a secluded byway of the mammoth floor.

“It’s about the only thing you didn’t know, then,” said O’Rourke. “I didn’t expect to find you here. Just looked in, as I usually do, to see what’s going on in our fair village. But I may as well tell you”—the doctor looked all around cautiously—“I may as well tell you that you win.”

“I win what?” Miss Withers wanted to know.

“You win round one. Regarding the corpse, I mean. The body of Forrest, lying over in my infirmary.” O’Rourke lowered his voice, and there was a new note of respect in it. “Chief Britt got a wire from a guy named Piper, who is a big shot in the New York Police. This guy Piper heard about the stiff and is on his way out here. He thinks it’s murder—and tonight the chief ordered me to make an autopsy the first thing in the morning. We’re not sending the body in to Long Beach. If there’s going to be a big fuss, it’ll be right here. And if Forrest died from anything besides heart failure, I’ll know it before lunchtime tomorrow!”

Miss Withers nodded. “This is gratifying, Doctor.”

“Well, keep it under your hat, see? The chief doesn’t like the looks of this guy Barney Kelsey. He wanted those two letters that Forrest had in his pocket, and the chief wouldn’t give ’em to him. Britt thinks maybe Kelsey was mixed up in it, and he’s got a man tailing him.”

“So I noticed,” Miss Withers told him. Dr. O’Rourke saw her face set and her eyes focus on a point over his shoulder.

“Quick, dance with me,” she whispered. The doctor took her somewhat awkwardly in his arms.

“I don’t—”

“You will,” said Hildegarde Withers. “Somebody was listening outside that door.”

O’Rourke made a soundless whistle with his lips. They moved across the floor in an old-fashioned two-step, and Miss Withers was oddly light in his arms. “Dance towards the door now,” she spoke in his ear. “I want to see who it was.”

But to her disappointment the loggia was deserted except for the cheerful, twinkling figure of Captain Thorwald Narveson, who sucked contentedly at his corncob pipe from a perch on the parapet.

“That’s that,” said Miss Withers sadly.

But Dr. O’Rourke held out his arms again. “We may as well finish the dance, ma’am.” And they did.

“A
UTOPSY BEFORE BREAKFAST,” ANNOUNCED
T. Girard Tompkins. “Yessir, they’re going to open up this Forrest and find out what made him stop ticking.”

“Is that so?” George inquired absently. Then with some difficulty he freed his lapels from the convivial clutch of Mr. Tompkins and cut across the dance floor to the corner where his partner Tony was doing a little personal promotion with several pajama-clad young ladies.

“Come here a minute,” said George. “I gotta see you alone.”

Tony came, somewhat reluctantly. “Listen,” said George excitedly. “Last-minute news flash. I just heard—”

“Never mind what you heard,” said Tony. “I’m trying to get us invited out to dinner tomorrow night. With this autopsy coming off in the morning, we’re likely to be stuck here all week, and we might as well make hey-hey while the sun shines.”

“You know about it?” George was blank. “The autopsy, I mean?”

“Who doesn’t?” Tony returned, and went back to his women.

George continued on his way. Then he caught sight of Phyllis and Tate, just completing the dance with a sweeping tango step which brought them almost mouth to mouth and then sent the crimson-clad body of Phyllis in a long whirl, ending with her on one knee before her partner.

Phyllis looked ecstatic and Tate looked bored. “Hey,” called George. “Listen, Mr. Tate, I got news. Did you hear what’s happening? They’re going to have an autopsy on the stiff in the morning!”

Tate was still bored. “So I heard,” he said. “I’d like to see it, but I never get up that early.”

“Shall I call you or nudge you?” Phyllis quoted the ancient smoking-car story, and then as the music picked up again, they danced away.

George looked after them for a moment and then shambled on, with his hands in his pockets. Somehow nobody seemed to be as interested in the news as he himself was. Then he saw a sober blue-garbed figure out on the loggia and made a last try.

“Hey, Captain,” he called. “They’re going to have an autopsy!”

Captain Narveson nodded toward him and then turned back toward the light-sprinkled waterfront. It was evident that the captain had something pressing on his mind.

He caught George’s elbow. “Yust look,” he ordered. His thick brown finger indicated a dark hulk which rose and fell in the moonlight, about halfway between shore and fog. Riding lights shone faintly at the masthead.

“Young faller,” he confided, “there lies my
City of Saunders,
the neatest little whale-killer ship in the Pacific. Out there waits my son Axel, and he’s all ready to go a-whaling down in Mexican waters. The whales are moving south toward the Antarctic, and Ay have to send word to Axel he’s got to wait another day before we can start. And the whales are going past, big blue whales and hooked finbacks and all—what do you think Ay care about your autopsy?”

“It’s not my autopsy,” protested George. Then he wandered disconsolately out into the night.

Phyllis and the director finished another dance. “Come on over this way,” she pleaded. “The newlyweds are here and I want to say hello.”

“Can’t you say it from here?” Tate wanted to know. But he followed her.

“So you turned out after all?” inquired Phyllis cheerily as they came upon the rapt young couple. “Swell music, isn’t it?”

Young Mr. Deving beamed upon her, and young Mrs. Deving beamed also. His was naturally the warmer beam, but Phyllis was used to that. “Mr. Tompkins wouldn’t take no for an answer,” explained Marvin Deving.

“So we just came over for a little while,” finished Kay, with a flash of her red curls.

“Might as well be gay,” said Phyllis philosophically. “You can make anything into a party if you try hard enough.” She had an idea.

“Suppose we be really informal and trade this dance?” she asked brightly. “I don’t think it’s quite decent of you two kids to be so engrossed in each other.”

Marvin Deving smoothed back his slick hair with a little red pocket comb. His face wore an expression of eagerness.

“Sure, let’s trade—that is if—”

There was a long moment while Tate surveyed Kay from toes to the top of her red head. His glance was as piercing, as penetrating, and as sexless as an X-ray.

“Sure,” he offered, finally.

Phyllis held out her arms to Marvin Deving, but his young wife drew him back protectively.

“I’d just love to dance with Mr. Tate,” she said. “But it’s getting late. We didn’t intend to stay so long, did we, Marvy? We want to get up early in the morning—”

“Oh,” said Phyllis. She dropped her arms. “I suppose you’re going down bright and early to see the autopsy performed on our recent shipmate?”

Kay Deving’s milk-white skin became whiter still.

“You’ve heard about that, haven’t you?” asked Phyllis.

“Oh, yes,” Kay answered. “The poor, poor man! But what makes you think I’d want to see a thing like that, even if they’d let us? It makes me sick even to think of it. Marvy, let’s go home!”

At once the young bride contrived to lean upon her husband’s arm and to drag him away from Phyllis, toward the door.

“I was only being nasty,” confessed Phyllis. “I’m sorry I broke the baby’s heart.”

Ralph O. Tate shrugged his shoulders. “Beautiful and dumb,” was his verdict. “Too bad she’s married. That carrot-top ought to go well in pictures. She’s simple enough for me to make an actress out of, given time.”

“I don’t think she’s so beautiful,” Phyllis told him shortly. She paused and stared after the disappearing couple. “And I don’t think she’s so dumb. She’s found her man and she’s clinging to him like a leech. I think they’re both sweet.”