Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla Page 16

  “Before I leave,” she said, “I don’t suppose you would care to play Truth for a moment?”

  Adele’s eyes widened. “What?

  “You wouldn’t like to tell me the real reason”—Miss Withers lowered her voice to a whisper—“the real reason why you kept Dulcie from going to the Floating Gardens this afternoon and evening?”

  Adele Mabie stood there, immobile. “Of course I’ll tell you,” she said, in a voice that had not a trace of emotion in it. “I didn’t hire that girl entirely out of kindness of heart. But I must have somebody around! My husband is no help—I could be murdered a dozen times and he wouldn’t know. He’s a love, and he’s got a great political future, but heaven knows he isn’t very bright.”

  “Yes?” Miss Withers prompted gently.

  “And the reason I want Dulcie with me every minute is because I’m scared! I’m scared to death! And I’m afraid that if I’m alone something—somebody…”

  Her voice broke, but she did not sob, did not bury her head on the couch. She simply stood there, blankly. And Miss Withers knew that Adele Mabie was telling the truth.

  Miss Withers said what she could, which was little enough. Then she closed the door helplessly behind her and left Adele alone with her toys—and her terror.

  It was a very real terror, so real that for the dozenth time since her arrival Miss Withers wondered if there wasn’t a chance that Adele Mabie knew what—or who, rather—was threatening her.

  Not that she would talk, and not that Dulcie would talk. Nobody talked in this case except when in a babbling coma. And even that information had been like a tennis net, more holes than rope.

  The inspector wasn’t in his room. He was never in his room when she wanted him. Miss Withers stalked downstairs and through the lobby of the Hotel Georges, managing to reach the street with only one shoe-shine, a record for her.

  She walked swiftly, as if trying to leave something behind her. Down Madero and along Juarez, through the green stretches of the Alameda haunted as always by a thousand peddlers selling things to each other. Then north past the busy school playgrounds, through the cobbled streets of the old quarter with their thousand glimpses of squalid courts littered with goats and dogs and children and flowers, then south again through the swarms of lottery ticket sellers that infest the Corner of Fortune, down along narrow crooked streets that ran into the great San Juan Market, where one can buy everything in the world.

  She walked past stands heavy with roses, iris, gladioli, fresh scentless violets, carnations of a red that was almost black, gardenias that filled the air with perfume.

  There were tables covered with broken keys, used toothbrushes, rusty hinges, third-hand and fourth-hand paper bags. There was a stand with several thousand old medicine bottles, all shining and clean, another with nothing but earrings of lovely brass, then a whole row with nothing but breasts of chicken, followed by another with the halved heads of kids and lambs. The schoolteacher moved hastily away from their accusing, pitiful eyes.

  She passed another stand in the form of a great hatrack, from which dangled ropes and bridles made of hair and fuzzy as caterpillars, cinchbands of canvas decorated with beads, bits for horses’ mouths and stirrups for riders’ feet all chased in silver on copper, black spurs with sharp rowels three inches long, cruel and glistening.

  The shadows were lengthening now along the narrow crooked streets of the old city, and here and there the red light of the western sun touched the crumbling stone of the houses with a warm unearthly glow.

  The sunlight fell full and clear upon a blue tile set in an old cracked wall, a tile half hidden by the profuse blossoms of a magnificent blue-purple bougainvillea. Miss Hildegarde Withers read the ancient florid script “Calle Violetta”—and caught her breath.

  All through the afternoon she had been unconsciously searching for this street sign. And now she was here, here on the corner of Violetta Street. Here, only last night, Dulcie Prothero had come out second best in an encounter with a taxicab. Here, within a stone’s throw, must be dangling one of the loose threads of her murder mystery—for Violetta was only one block long and ended in a cul-de-sac.

  She went on, and then, in a wide half-ruined gateway leading into a patio filled with goats, chickens, washing and flowers, she came upon a group of very young children playing with a ball made of rags tightly tied together.

  “Hello!” she greeted them. After all, children are children in any language.

  “¡Hola, señorita! Buenos tardes.” They stopped their play, with the almost universal politeness of the Mexican young, and grouped around her.

  “I want to find—it should be in this street or near by—the home of the American bullfighter,” she said. “¿Donde esta the house of the torero de yanquilandia?”

  Seven soft voices chanted “Allá, señorita.” Seven fingers pointed to a sagging tenement across the street. Seven palms accepted infinitesimal silver coins.

  It was after sunset when Miss Hildegarde Withers left Violetta Street, and the glow was gone. The twilight had settled down upon the city like a solid thing. The few feeble gas flares and candles which appeared here and there served only to accentuate the darkness. The schoolteacher shivered and turned hastily homeward.

  One block—another—and then she realized that someone was following her. It was a feeling, a psychic sense rather than anything definite, and yet it was as real as anything. Every time she stopped to look back she saw nothing more than the crowded streets, the homebound workers, the children playing and shouting, women packing up their offerings of wizened apples and plums to be brought back another day for sidewalk display. The streets were bare of automobiles, not a taxi-cab in sight anywhere.

  Yet the shadows seemed to move, to merge, to deepen as she watched. The few lighted windows of the houses seemed far away, and every corner, every doorway, was waiting…

  She walked faster, turned right on the next corner and then left again. “I’m nervous as a cat,” the schoolteacher told herself. “I’ll be seeing things yet!” All the same, she kept hurrying.

  And whatever it was that followed her was hurrying too. She could almost hear the footsteps, she fancied—yet every time she looked back she was forced to admit that it must be the Invisible Man.

  Some people have a faculty of knowing when they are being watched, a sixth sense that causes a little prickle along the back of the neck. This was Miss Withers’ to the highest degree, and it kept signaling to her with a sharp buzzing in the back of her mind.

  “It can’t be bandits,” she told herself angrily, “because I certainly don’t look as if I had any money. And nobody would pay ransom for me, either. It can’t be anyone trying to murder me, because my investigations certainly haven’t cut any ice.”

  The street she was following suddenly twisted, ran head on into another, and stopped. And then Miss Withers realized that she hadn’t the slightest idea of whether to turn right or left.

  It was a time for instant decisions, and so she made one. There was no use hurrying blindly down these dark, foreign, and suddenly unfriendly streets.

  There was no use trying to run away from whatever was dogging her footsteps, for long ago she had learned the lesson in life that it is usually the things one flies from that stick closer than a brother.

  So, as she rounded the corner, Miss Hildegarde Withers took pains to disappear. It was not much of a place to disappear into, but it was all she could find.

  She waited, watching and listening. With all her heart she wished that the inspector were here beside her. Failing that, she wished for the faithful black cotton umbrella which had served her so well in many a previous imbroglio. For it was not her imagination that had sent her hurrying from the shadows. There was the sound of light quick footsteps coming around the corner, pausing just out of view.

  “Waiting to see where I went, eh? Well, I’ll show them!” And from behind the swinging doors of the little neighborhood cantina popped an embattled spinster, face to
face with her shadow at last.

  It was only Julio Mendez, mopping his brow and leaning heavily upon his malacca stick.

  The words which had been on Miss Withers’ tongue stuck there. It was the Gay Caballero who regained his composure first. “Well, if this isn’t a big surprise? To meeting you like this!”

  “Surprise my aunt!” she accused him. “You’ve been following me for half an hour. And don’t try to deny it.”

  “Sure,” he agreed, with his usual cheer. “Bet your life I follow. Ever since I saw you go into Violetta Street—”

  “You were watching that place? But why?”

  “Same reason you go there, I guess,” Julio admitted. “You know, I like very much this Dulcie Prothero. I interest myself in what happens to her last night.”

  “Of all things! Still playing detective, eh?”

  “But yes! I went to school with Manuel Robles, you see? And I must doing everything I can, no?” He fell calmly into step beside her. “This not very damn-good section, maybe I better show you home. Tell me, you don’t solve this murder either?”

  She shook her head. “I can think of a lot of questions, but I can’t think of the answers. And the inspector isn’t much help. He just runs around yessing these idiotic police of yours.”

  “Dumbs-bells, all of them,” Julio murmured sympathetically. “I know!”

  They continued in silence for half a block. “If I had the answers to just six questions,” Miss Withers finally burst out, “I think this case would be sewed up tight in a bag.”

  Julio was unwontedly serious. “Go ahead, try me,” he invited eagerly. “I got nothing else to do—Miss Dulcie turns me down, and I got no date to go to the Floating Gardens.”

  She stared at him and then said: “What can I lose?” For a moment she was thoughtful. “First—well, first I’d like to know why Michael Fitz brought home an absolutely inedible fighting cock to eat.”

  Julio said he was stumped by that one.

  “Second, I want to know why Adele Mabie is afraid of the little Prothero girl!”

  “But—but she has been so kind to Dulcie! She takes her back, gives her the job!”

  “Exactly! That’s how I know she’s afraid of her. Perhaps she thinks she’s safer to have Dulcie where she can watch her every minute.”

  Julio wouldn’t agree to that. “Dulcie Prothero don’t kill somebody—I bet you anything. But anyway, go on.”

  “Third, why does Dulcie Prothero, in desperate financial straits, wear a small fortune pinned to her—pinned under her dress?”

  “My guess would be, maybe…” Julio began. But Miss Withers told him that she could do her own guessing, what she needed was facts.

  “I don’t understand that young lady, in spite of the fact that I knew her when her red hair was in pigtails. Either her heart is broken, or she thinks it is broken…” Miss Withers shook her head. “At any rate, my fourth question is—Why does a man in a heavy rainproof coat need an umbrella in a drizzle?”

  The young man thought for a moment. “You’ll have to ask Señor Fitz that question on the ouija board, no?”

  She went on. “Fifth, how could a banderilla get deep into a human body without being shot from a bow or fired from an air gun?”

  “I understand about the bow,” Julio admitted. “We both made the same experiments. But the air gun—”

  “Air guns make some noise,” she told him. “Besides, to shoot anything as large as that dart they would have to be specially designed. None of our suspects is a gunsmith.”

  They had paused outside the window of a little shoeshop on the Calle Dolores. Inside, beneath the yellow rays of a lantern hung above his bench, a gnarled old man in a big apron sent his awl through the leather sole of a zapato again and again, following it each time with the needle and waxed thread.

  “I see what you mean,” Julio agreed. “Then we got to go back to the first idea, that somebody stick Señor Fitz from behind?”

  She nodded. “But as Captain de Silva or someone pointed out, it would take the strongest man in the world to drive a shaft of wood with a steel barb that deeply into flesh. If it had been the bullfighters’ sword, the acero, that would be different. But a banderilla is just a decoration, a frill.”

  She was staring in at the busy little old cobbler, as if half hypnotized by the flash of his needle, the rhythmic movement of his awl.

  “Unless—unless…” she murmured.

  Suddenly Miss Withers turned on Julio, a new expression on her face. “Please—may I see your cane a moment?”

  “My—Why, of course!” Wonderingly, he handed her the heavy malice stick, watched as she twisted and turned at the top of the handle.

  “It isn’t the coming-apart one,” he advised her. “At home I got one with a long glass tube inside, for cockstails and things. But I don’t using it much.”

  “I wasn’t looking for a flask; I was looking for a sword,” she admitted, handing the thing back. They started on again, Julio still burning with curiosity.

  “Please!” he begged. “That wasn’t one of your important questions, no? You think I—or somebody else—sticks a sword cane into Señor Fitz? But that’s not how he dies! I myself saw the—the photographs in the newspaper of his body. It was a banderilla, sure thing you know.”

  “I know, I know,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers impatiently. They were turning the corner near the hotel. “No, that wasn’t my sixth question. I don’t think I ought to tell you that one.”

  “But please! I am strictly positively all ears!”

  “Very well, since you ask for it,” she said. “Why in the name of heaven do you insist on talking like Leo Carrillo giving an imitation of a Mexican?”

  “Wha-what?”

  “Why the phony dialect?” she pressed. “I’m sick to death of it!”

  For a long, long moment Julio Mendez stared at her wonderingly, unbelievingly. Then he began to laugh.

  “You’re sick of it!” he gasped. “What the hell about me?”

  XIV

  Over Niagara Falls

  “MOS’ CERTAINLY I recognize that photograph,” said the broad-beamed lady in the purple evening dress. “That is Señor Hansen, the reech handsome Americano. I meet with him at the bullfight.” She lounged enticingly in the doorway.

  Captain de Silva put the photograph back in his pocket. “Mr. Hansen sat next to you in the first row on Sunday, is that right?”

  She nodded.

  “But he didn’t stay until the end, did he?”

  “Ah no, señores. He leave when the picadors finish with the last bull, to get some roses for me. Because I tell him I like to throw down roses to young Nicanor when he kill that bull.”

  De Silva turned to the inspector. “That checks, señor, with what you observed?”

  “Absolutely,” Piper said.

  “But he didn’t come back, did he?” de Silva went on.

  “There was very much rain,” La Belle Consuela explained. “I have to hurry away so I will not spoil my dress.”

  “And he hasn’t been back to see you since?”

  “Because you lock him up!” said the woman with a toss of her head. “He will come. He has promised to take me back to the United States and give me the big send-off in the movies. He says I am wasting my time here singing in cafés—that I am like Dolores del Rio only more sex appeal.”

  “I’d hate to hang by my thumbs until the day Al Harness gets her into pictures,” Oscar Piper said to the captain as they got back into the police sedan.

  “At any rate,” said de Silva, “the story checks so far. Hansen left the bullfight to get flowers—”

  “Saying he was going to get flowers,” Piper corrected him. “But I’ve got an idea to test the whole thing.”

  Half an hour later they were rolling down Insurgentes toward the pillbox of the toreo. They stopped before the south gate.

  “I understand,” repeated Captain de Silva. “For purposes of this experiment it is Sunday afternoon at
4:36. We can set that time because it was then that the bugle sounded for the end of the affair of the picadors. Both the young lady and you agree that Mr. Hansen left the bullfight then. You, for the moment, are Mr. Hansen, in search of a bouquet of flowers.”

  He held up a stop watch. “All right—go!”

  The Packard rolled slowly ahead, stopped two blocks ahead at a confectionery store. Yes, agreed the proprietor, he remembered very well that a gringo hurried in just before the rain on Sunday afternoon, asking for directions to the nearest flower market. He was directed north…Yes, it was the señor in the photograph.

  The inspector, striding briskly along the sidewalk, was waved north. Another stop, and another…

  Today there were flower sellers on every corner, women hunched over benches loaded with blooms and men strolling the streets like walking greenhouses. But on a late Sunday afternoon it had, obviously, been a different story. Al Hansen had gone on and on.

  “Probably a point of pride with the guy not to come back and tell the dame that he couldn’t find the posies he’d promised her,” Piper said to himself as he trudged on.

  At last, with the police sedan rolling ever ahead like a will-o’-the-wisp, the inspector came at last into the crowded and odorous streets which surround the San Juan Market. Through streets so crowded with stands, children, shopping women and dogs that there was barely room for the car to pass at a snail’s cautious pace, around corners which doubled back upon themselves, past great mounds of red and green peppers, whole mountains of shiny brown-purple beans…

  Far ahead the siren of the police sedan hooted, and Piper increased his pace. He was willing to bet ten dollars that Al Hansen’s tongue would be hanging out a foot if he kept up with this speed for two blocks, let alone twelve.

  Down the street of flowers, the block lined with sprawling booths which never close. It was a wilderness of perfume and color, an outdoor hothouse.

  From either side soft-voiced women urged the inspector to stop and admire—not purchase, but just to look, señor—sweet miniature violets, great waxen water lilies like dinner plates…