Puzzle of the Pepper Tree Read Online Free PDF

Dragonfly?”
    “Half a mile up,” agreed Chick. “He was making a big fuss about being sick to his stummick, and then he went into a howling funk. Yelled something about not wanting to die, and then he was quiet. I figured he’d got under control, and when we landed, we found out that all that’d been holding him up was the straps.”
    “There you are,” said Dr. O’Rourke. “Pump played out on him. Doesn’t take much to knock over one of these chronic booze fighters. We can write this down as simple heart failure.”
    He replaced the covering on the dead face. Then he went over to a sink against the wall and washed his hands thoroughly with blue soap.
    Miss Withers found herself vaguely dissatisfied. “But, Doctor—do you know that this man just made a coast-to-coast plane trip without dying of heart failure? Yet you say he died of fright on a short trip like this!”
    “Good Lord, woman!” Dr. O’Rourke stared at her impolitely. “There always has to be a first time for everything. Particularly for dying, you know. Why—” he waxed heavily facetious—“Why, that’s one thing even you have never accomplished!”
    Hildegarde Withers stared at the hairy little man. There came a look into her eyes which he could not understand. She was remembering a quarter of an hour that she had spent once upon the witness stand in the case of the People of the State of New York versus Gwen Lester, and another moment in the cellar beneath Jefferson School when the murderer of lovely Anise Halloran had crept after her in the darkness.
    “Haven’t I!” she said softly.
    “You a relative?” The doctor wanted to know.
    Miss Withers hesitated at that one.
    “Naw, she’s just a kibitzer,” cut in Chick. “Well, that washes this business up as far as we’re concerned. Come on, Lew, let’s get back to the airport. The stiff is all yours, Doc. We’re fed up with him.”
    The door slammed behind them. Miss Withers came closer to the hairy little doctor, who was still dripping onto the carpet.
    “Wouldn’t a postmortem be likely to show—”
    “Postmortem?” He cut her short, irascibly. “Why in the name of the blessed Saint Vitus should there be a postmortem? Just because a stew passes out in a plane instead of in his bed or against a brass rail—”
    “All the same, I sent for the chief of police,” Miss Withers told him tartly.
    The doctor was fast losing patience. “Look here, are you trying to teach me to run my business?”
    Hildegarde Withers sniffed, audibly. She turned and looked out into the street, above a ruffled curtain which covered the lower half of both door and windows. The bus was still there, the two pilots climbing aboard, but there was no sign as yet of the fat youth who drove it, or of the official he had been sent to fetch. T. Girard Tompkins had also taken himself off, presumably to join in the search for his friend the chief.
    “Chief Britt will certainly be grateful to you for dragging him away from his store at the noon rush hour,” observed O’Rourke in an edged voice. “The chief just loves to close up his curio shop and trot around on wild-goose chases.”
    “Wild geese my Aunt Hannah,” said Miss Withers. She sniffed again. “Young man, I have had the good or bad fortune to have been in contact with several notorious and unsavory cases of homicide during the past two years. Perhaps that poor fellow over there looks like just another case of heart failure to you, but I’m getting so I can detect the very smell of murder.”
    A lean forefinger wagged in O’Rourke’s face, and Miss Withers pronounced solemnly, “I can smell murder now!”
    At that moment the door opened, and a large nickel-plated shield entered. Pinned to the shield was a large, jolly person whose smallish eyes welled from between rolls of fat, a beaming convivial person who looked like a bartender rather than a limb of John Law.
    Behind this dignitary followed a little procession of tourists, sprinkled