Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla Page 13

  “Can you imagine!” Adele gasped. “I was telling the doctor here that I would be responsible for the hospital bill and everything. And what do you think he said?”

  Miss Withers refused to guess.

  “Dulcie has loads and loads of money!” Adele went on.

  The doctor nodded. “When the nurses undressed this young lady, down in the emergency ward, they found this pinned to her slip!”

  He produced a small cloth bag, a bag containing a sheaf of United States currency.

  “Something over sixteen hundred dollars!” gasped Adele Mabie.

  “A lovely nest egg, isn’t it?” Miss Withers admitted. “I suggest that you arrange, Doctor, to have this put back under the girl’s pillow tonight.”

  “But sixteen hundred dollars!” Mrs. Mabie repeated. “What is she doing with all that money? What if it should be lost?”

  “Miss Dulcie Prothero,” the schoolteacher said, “won’t lose anything she doesn’t want to lose.”

  In the lobby of the Hotel Georges that night—actually it had been Monday morning for some hours now—Miss Withers found a solitary figure stretched out in the easiest of the modernistic chairs, sound asleep. It was the inspector, with cigar ashes all over the front of his vest.

  “Well!” she said sharply. Oscar Piper’s feet came off the edge of the opposite settee, and he stiffened to attention.

  “Ugh!” he greeted her. “You back?”

  “Asleep at the switch, Oscar?” she inquired unkindly. “I’m glad that one of us can get some rest, anyhow. I’ve been hard at work.” She told him, briefly, the results of the evening.

  “Yeah? That money looks phony, eh? But it doesn’t seem to fit into this muddle of a murder.” He considered her results and found them small. “You don’t care how you work, either, do you? Quizzing a hospital patient while she’s half unconscious, and then you talk to me about the third degree! Anyway, you needn’t crow. I’ve been busy too.”

  “Solved the mystery of the two murders, Oscar?”

  “I’m getting closer,” he insisted. “While you were running around in circles I was called in as a consulting expert by nobody else than Captain de Silva of the Mexico City Police!”

  Miss Withers remembered him. “Oh yes—the worried young man with the high forehead, who loves so to make speeches! The one who helped me get you out of the police station lockup!”

  “Yeah,” said Piper. “Anyway, all that is forgotten. We’re buddies now. What happened at the bullfight has blown the lid off everything. De Silva is fronting for the lieutenant colonel in charge. Seems that whenever anything happens down here the, big shots take a powder out of town and let somebody else sweat. Naturally de Silva wanted to get the inside. We compared notes—”

  “You mean, he questioned you?” she asked shrewdly.

  “We compared notes!” Piper repeated a little stiffly. “De Silva was very friendly. I told him everything that I noticed at the bullfight. That is—everything that could have any bearing on the case…”

  He stopped short. “What are you smiling at?”

  “You must have been a big help, considering that we both sat there and let a murder be committed under our very noses!”

  “Yes,” admitted the inspector. “That’s what de Silva intimated. But like everybody else, we were watching the show in the arena. There’s no use crying over spilt milk.”

  “Something worse than milk was spilled,” the schoolteacher told him sharply. “It may have slipped your mind, but somebody sneaked up on that poor man and stabbed him in the back. Our job is to find out who!”

  Piper smiled weakly. “De Silva thinks he knows. And I had hell’s own time keeping him from making an arrest last night.”

  “What? Who?” Miss Withers went off like a string of firecrackers.

  “Francis Mabie is suspect number one,” the inspector admitted. “But they make it sound logical. You see, we didn’t know that, like most young Mexicans of good family, this Robles chap was educated abroad—in Paris, in fact.”

  “The customs man? Paris—that’s very incriminating,”

  “Wait, will you? Adele Mabie is a damn pretty woman, and she took a cruise around the world on one of the Empress liners a couple of years ago. What happens to a pretty woman gadding around alone, eh?”

  “Don’t ask me, Oscar Piper!”

  “Well, anyway—she could have met a handsome young Mexican in Paris and had a red-hot affair.”

  “Please, Oscar! Leave the Latin Quarter out of this. Are you trying to say that Adele came back to New York, married, and then two years later on a trip to Mexico the phlegmatic alderman is so burning with jealousy that he leaves poisoned perfume where the boyfriend, now a respectable customs examiner, might smell it? The longest long arm of coincidence I ever saw in my life.”

  “Wait,” Piper said. “That’s not all. Leave it to these romantically minded Mexicans. They go farther than that—after Mabie got rid of the young man he is supposed to have started brooding over his wife. Maybe she flirted with somebody else—anyway, the alderman sneaks out of the bullfight saying that he can’t stand the sight of blood, sneaks in again with a dart under his coat, and then slides along the seat until he is just behind the fancy umbrella that his wife has hired to keep dry under. Then”—the inspector made a gesture—“boppo!”

  “Whoa!” Miss Withers interrupted. “Aren’t you confused, Oscar? At last reports Adele Mabie was alive and well.”

  “Sure! Because when she left her seat she dropped the rented umbrella, and Fitz, in the row ahead, picked it up to keep himself snug. So he got killed by accident.”

  “It’s building a house of cards without straw,” Miss Withers declared. “Just guesswork.”

  “Not all guesswork,” Piper corrected. “It doesn’t show in the newspaper photographs of the stiff, but when they found Mike Fitz he had that striped umbrella over his shoulders!”

  The schoolteacher wasn’t saying anything, but she had an extremely thoughtful look in her cool blue eyes.

  “But of course it’s full of holes,” the inspector continued. “Mabie has a good alibi. He says that after he left the bullfight he came back downtown to the Papillon bar and stayed there.”

  “That I can believe without straining myself,” Miss Withers admitted. “It sounds more than reasonable.”

  “Sure does. And I got de Silva to send one of his agentes over to check it. The manager of the Papillon bar says he distinctly remembers a man of the alderman’s description being there from four-thirty to sometime around seven.”

  “And the murder was at five?”

  “Within a few minutes, anyway. De Silva figures it happened just as the deluge came down, with everybody rushing to get out of the place.”

  “When you and I and Adele Mabie were standing in the exit, perhaps? And all our suspects out of the place. Dear me, it’s most provoking! But, at any rate, doesn’t that alibi clear your friend Mr. Mabie?”

  Oscar Piper said he hoped it would. “All the same, I wish I had a better setup to spring on de Silva tomorrow morning, something that would tie up the two murders.”

  Miss Withers said that offhand she could think of three possibilities, all better than the fairy tale he had just suggested to her. “Involving the Ippwings, the Gay Caballero, Dulcie, or any combination of the three.”

  But as he looked hopeful she shook her head. “Not tonight, Oscar. The guidebooks all mention the difficulty of sleeping in this high altitude, but not even you are going to prevent me from trying.”

  She gave her hair the requisite hundred strokes in record time, blew out her candle. Then she slept, so soundly that not even the messenger which floated in her window disturbed her slumbers.

  XI

  Guess Who!

  ALL THAT NIGHT strike committees in the Palacio Nacional dictated terms to the secretary of the luckily absent presidente, while owl cabarets closed their doors in dismal candlelight, milk soured in the suburbs, scalpels went unsterilized
in the hospitals, and American tourists grumbled even in their sleep. But the sun rose over the mile and a half high capital of Mexico, strike or no strike, strictly on schedule.

  With it rose Miss Hildegarde Withers. The good lady girded her loins for battle in a prim blue serge suit that was in its third summer. She descended the hotel stairs and much to her surprise caught the inspector buying his day’s rations of cigars in the hotel lobby.

  “Have you changed your mind about early birds and worms?” she greeted him. “Stealing a march on me, Oscar?”

  They found a hole-in-the-wall place where black Mexican coffee, smelling vilely of chicory, could be obtained. She was afire with excitement but would not talk until they had broken their fast and the inspector had lovingly lighted that first wonderful cigar of the new day.

  “I’ve got just ten minutes,” he said. “So shoot!”

  Then he leaped out of his chair as she suited the action to the word and from a newspaper parcel produced, almost in his face, one of the most vicious weapons he had ever seen.

  It was a round slender shaft a little more than two feet long, wrapped in frills of blue and gold tissue paper, with a harpoon-shaped point of blood-darkened steel.

  “The murder weapon, Oscar!”

  He stared in wonder. “The police let you have it?”

  “Well, perhaps not the murder weapon. But a banderilla is a banderilla, except for the difference in color of the paper they glue on them. After the bullfights they take the things out of the dead bulls and sell them as souvenirs.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t buy any…” Piper stopped. “Did you get that from Mrs. Mabie?”

  Smiling, Miss Withers shook her head. “The souvenirs that Adele bought were of black and gold. This particular little toy was sticking into my floor this morning when I woke. It must have come sailing in the window during the night.” She sniffed. “A difficult country for a lover of fresh air, Oscar. I’ve half a mind to keep my window closed.”

  “Good Lord, yes! Why, that thing might have struck you.”

  “Not much chance of that. It’s just another warning to mind my own business.”

  Piper took the thing, hefted it. “Why, it’s only a wooden stick with a sort of straightened-out fishhook at the end!”

  She nodded. “The point is fearfully sharp, Oscar. But, all the same, I think it would take quite a bit of doing, as the English say, to drive this thing through cloth and flesh into a man’s heart, from behind!”

  Oscar Piper agreed to that. “Which is why de Silva thinks it must have been a man who killed Fitz.”

  “Even a man must have had his work cut out for him,” said the schoolteacher. “There must have been some commotion—a gasp or a moan. You’d think that in all that crowd of a thousand or two people we could have one eyewitness!”

  The inspector shrugged. “Everyone was doing just what we were doing, looking at the bullfight as the rain stopped the fun. Anybody could have moved up behind Fitz, and biff!”

  “Easy as that, eh?” Miss Withers looked a bit dubious. “Oscar, I have an idea. Do you suppose that Captain de Silva would like two visiting experts instead of one?”

  “What?” Piper drew back.

  “I’d like a talk with that young man, because I have a theory—”

  “Now look here, Hildegarde, I don’t think that the authorities here will be anxious to take theories from a foreigner—and a woman at that. You work your theory out and tell it to me, and I’ll suggest it to the captain.” He looked at his watch. “Say, I’ve got to run if I’m going to see him at his office. You amuse yourself this morning.”

  He rushed jauntily away, leaving a ruffled spinster staring after him.

  “Amuse myself!” said Hildegarde Withers. She went out into the street, then suddenly stopped, nodded and hailed a taxicab. “I’ll just see how little Dulcie is this morning.”

  Dulcie was fine.

  She was sitting up in bed with a tray of breakfast, the nurse already gone. But the two women met with a certain strained note in their voices.

  “I can’t look at you without thinking that I’m playing hooky,” Dulcie admitted after a while.

  “You mustn’t feel that way,” said the schoolteacher gently. “I believe in you, Dulcie. And I’m sure that you have some excellent explanation for the money they found pinned to your underwear when you were brought in here last night.”

  She waited hopefully. But Dulcie was through answering questions.

  “No,” said the girl, “I haven’t any explanation at all.”

  “But my dear child! Don’t you see—”

  “It isn’t mine,” Dulcie admitted. “It belongs to somebody else.” And that was that.

  There was a large and exquisite bouquet of roses on the table beside the bed. Miss Withers bent to sniff them. “Ah,” she observed brightly, “are these from your friend Bobsie?”

  The girl on the bed did not speak. She looked down at the coverlet, pleated it carefully, and then smoothed it out again. She shook her head soberly.

  “From Julio—I mean, Mr. Mendez,” she confessed finally. “I don’t know how he heard that I—that I’d had an accident, but they just arrived. And he sent a note saying that he’d be over a little later.”

  “Then I must be running along so that you can comb your hair and make yourself beautiful,” Miss Withers said. She stopped in the doorway. “Oh, by the way—I know that was an accident you had, but take my advice and don’t go wandering around Violetta Street after dark any more.”

  Dulcie’s eyes widened. “Oh! Why, of course not! Why should—Oh well, I’m coming back to work for Mrs. Mabie, anyway.”

  At Miss Withers’ honest amazement the girl flushed. “Oh, not as a maid this time. That was an awful flop. But Mrs. Mabie says she has forgotten all that. She says that she wants to make up to me for being so short-tempered when she fired me in Laredo. I’m to be a big help to her with her curios. She wants to start a curio shop when she gets back to New York, you see. And I can help in buying and packing and checking.”

  “The two of you ought to be able to buy out half Mexico,” said the schoolteacher thoughtfully.

  “So I’m moving over to your hotel today,” Dulcie went on. “Do you think I’m doing the right thing?”

  Miss Withers told her that she would hesitate to say that about anybody’s doing anything.

  “Mrs. Mabie said that it would be a real favor, that she would like to have someone with her all the time,” Dulcie went on explaining.

  The schoolteacher nodded. “Perhaps it’s not such a bad idea at that, if you keep your eyes and ears open.”

  Dulcie looked shocked. “You mean I ought to spy on Mrs. Mabie?”

  “On Mrs. Mabie, and on Mr. Mabie, and on everybody else within spying distance,” Miss Hildegarde Withers went on solemnly. “And that includes the Gay Caballero too.” With that parting shot she hurried out of the room.

  She had several other errands to accomplish this morning, errands of the greatest importance. One of them took her to Cook’s Travel Bureau, where she spent some time in thumbing through booklets. Then on down the street.

  “I hope Oscar and the captain are having better hunting than I am!” she said to herself in the high spirit of sportsmanship.

  There were worried lines on the high forehead of Captain de Silva of the Mexico City Police that morning. Nor did the checking of alibis serve to smooth his troubled brow. Indeed, inside of half an hour he and the inspector were up to their ears in alibis.

  Mr. and Mrs. Marcus Ippwing were trapped in their room at the Hotel Georges, trapped in the very act of writing a joint letter to their daughter back home in Peoria. “Our invalid daughter, you know. Poor girl, she does love hearing everything. She was badly burned in an accident some years ago, but thank heavens we finally got a good cash settlement out of the lawsuit, and Ella has every comfort.”

  Captain de Silva cut in to say that all he wanted to know was how they had spent their time from fo
ur to six o’clock yesterday. The Ippwings stared at each other. “You don’t mean—he doesn’t mean—”

  “It’s only a formality, folks,” Piper hastily put in. “Just a matter of elimination. You see, we’ve all been rather mixed up in this thing.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Marcus Ippwing dubiously. “Why, Mother and I walked out of the bullfight because we didn’t like the way it was going—”

  “I didn’t mind their killing the bulls, but it didn’t seem right to make fun of them,” Mrs. Ippwing finished for him.

  “And after you left?” prodded the captain, notebook in hand.

  The birdlike old couple looked at each other again, each spoke at once. “Why, we came home—home to the hotel!”

  De Silva nodded amiably. “The clerk says that you arrived here about seven o’clock or after, yes?”

  “That’s right! We walked home, and we didn’t know how far it was—and then, coming through the square they call the Zocalo, Mother wanted to stop and have a look at the cathedral…”

  Captain de Silva wrote down solemnly that the Ippwings had walked from the bull ring to Madero Avenue by way of the Zocalo, which amounted to going twice around Robin Hood’s barn.

  “Sure, come on in!” welcomed Mr. Al Hansen. He sat at the desk in his hotel room, the radio going full blast, and was dressed informally in his underwear. Before him a number of sheets of hotel writing paper were covered with neat pencil sketches.

  “Just trying out some designs for sweepstakes tickets,” he admitted. “You know, a lot depends on how you impress the buyer with a ticket. And I just got the idea that if I could get the Mexican National Lottery to authorize me to run a sweep on the Santa Anita Handicap, there’d be millions in it—millions!”

  “There’d be a million headaches trying to get those tickets across the border,” the inspector told him. “But that’s not why we came.”

  “Sure, I was wondering when somebody would be along to ask me questions about Mike Fitz, poor guy,” Hansen told the officers. “I’ve known him for years, and we’ve made a few dollars for each other now and then. I used to handle the San Francisco end, because I wasn’t popular down here south of the border with the old regime. Mike was a great promoter, but he had one weakness—dames. If you want my opinion, it was a dame who did him in yesterday.”