Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla Read online

  Captain de Silva had already found the stall where on Sunday a hurried American had purchased two dozen red roses for twenty-eight cents United States currency. It had hardly been necessary to show the photograph, for customers who do not stop to bargain are few in the street of flowers.

  It was 5:02 according to de Silva’s watch.

  “Hansen would walk while he was looking for a flower booth,” the inspector suggested thoughtfully. “But once he did succeed in getting the flowers, wouldn’t he take a taxi back to the bullfight, knowing how late he was?”

  “Climb in!” agreed de Silva and they roared around the corner, scattering dogs and children right and left.

  “No taxi ever made the time we’re making,” the inspector said, clinging to his hat with both hands.

  But though they made top speed, when finally the monkey-like driver of the police Packard slammed on his brakes outside the giant pillbox of the Plaza de Toros, Captain de Silva looked at his stop watch and shook his head.

  “It is now 5:09 of Sunday afternoon,” he announced.

  “Yeah,” said Inspector Oscar Piper. “And the body of Michael Fitz was discovered two minutes ago!”

  Back in his little office at the jefatura, Captain de Silva scribbled an order, gave it to a uniformed gendarme.

  “A release for the man Hansen,” he said, in Spanish.

  “Sí, capitán.” The subordinate hesitated. “And for the man Lighten too?”

  De Silva shook his head. “I don’t see how we dare turn Rollo Lighten loose,” he observed to the inspector. “He has been under questioning most of the afternoon, but all we know is that he lied when he said that he spent Sunday afternoon working.”

  “Any man,” said the visiting New York cop, “will lie his head off when he thinks he’s mixed up in a murder case.”

  “Innocent as well as guilty, you mean? Yes, of course. But I wish we had some way to find out if Lighton tells the truth in his corrected story about coming downtown to the Papillon bar after he couldn’t sponge a free seat at the bullfight.”

  “He says the alderman was there and bought him a drink, but you think maybe they’re supplying alibis for each other?” Piper hazarded.

  The captain leaned back in his chair, folded his arms behind his head. “Would not fellow countrymen stick together?” he began. And then there came a heavy knocking at the door.

  It was an officer. “The manager of the Papillon bar to see you, Capitán” he said.

  “Show him in,” de Silva said wearily. “You stay, Mr. Piper.”

  The fat little cock robin of a man was apologetic. “What happens when you come to my bar, I cannot understand,” he said, in many words and gestures. “So many people come and go—it is only human that once I remember wrongly, no?”

  “All right, all right, it was a mistake.” De Silva cut him short. Piper stood back near the window, puffing a cigar in silence.

  “Yes, Capitán. But there is also one other mistake. A mistake made by that new man I hire last week, that fool of a Ramon. He does not know…”

  The cock robin was spluttering now.

  “Yes, yes—what is it? Did he break a glass?”

  “But no, Capitán. Much worse. I am going to fire him if it happens one more time. But in the meanwhile I think that perhaps it has to do with what you come to see me about. So I bring these!”

  He produced bar bills for three separate rounds of drinks, dated Sunday and signed with a flourish by Rollo Lighton!

  Interested in spite of himself, the inspector made a whispered suggestion.

  De Silva nodded. “This Ramon, your new waiter—he worked all day Sunday?”

  Cock Robin shook his head. “Only from four o’clock until closing, señor. And he accepted these signatures early, because some time before six one of the older waiters warned him that a chit signed by Mr. Lighton is good only for framing to hang over the cash registers.”

  When the little man was gone the inspector threw his dead cigar into de Silva’s wastebasket. “Another suspect cleared, blast it!” he remarked. “And if you think my friend Miss Withers won’t have the laugh on me when I report.

  “You’re lucky,” said Captain de Silva. “I have to make my report to the lieutenant colonel, and he won’t laugh—not any.”

  Miss Hildegarde Withers, far from jeering at the inspector’s afternoon, was full of an inner excitement. “I’ve just had a nice walk and talk with Julio Mendez,” she admitted in the hotel lobby. “Don’t be misled by the beret and the cane, Oscar. That young man is well worth cultivating. We haven’t been giving half enough attention to Julio.”

  “Yeah? Well, what did you and the Gay Caballero have to talk about?”

  She told him, with reservations. “Mr. Mendez was very upset to hear that Adele Mabie plans to take Dulcie away tomorrow.”

  He looked disgusted. “Hildegarde! You’re not trying to play matchmaker again?”

  “The Happy Ending, Oscar? No, nothing like that. I’ll be satisfied if we can get through this case without another murder. Somehow I have a prickling at the back of my neck these days, as if—well, as if something were sniffing at my heels.”

  He looked at her curiously. “Relax, Hildegarde! Nothing more is going to happen, not with everybody on their guard.”

  She sniffed. “If I remember correctly, you were playing cards during the first murder, and you gaped at the bullfight with me during the second. So I’m taking steps of my own. When I get the answers to my six questions—no, only four now—I expect to have this case settled.”

  “Questions? What questions?” he demanded.

  “It’s a private list,” she told him. “But you might be able to help me with one of them. Oscar, why would a man want to eat a fighting cock?”

  “What?” Then he remembered. “You can search me. Maybe he was broke and hungry.”

  She shook her head. “Did you ever play bridge, Oscar?”

  Piper swore that he was innocent of the charge. “Penny ante, dominoes and a fast game of cribbage are my limit.”

  “Well, poker then. When a man loses, doesn’t he sometimes blame the cards, just as I’ve seen golfers smash their clubs?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Even sometimes tear up the deck of cards?”

  “Gamblers will do anything,” he told her. “When I was a rookie I was assigned to do guard duty up at Belmont Park, because a nag ran second in a big race. Some nut wanted to bump off the horse.”

  Miss Hildegarde Withers nodded, smiling like a Cheshire cat. “Another sidelight on the character of Mr. Fitz,” she said. “And an answer to another of ray moot questions.”

  “Now you’re changing sides, Hildegarde! All along you’ve been saying that Fitz was killed by mistake for Adele Mabie!”

  Miss Withers’ answer was lost as the dim lobby was suddenly flooded with light. There was a commotion behind the hotel desk, cries of delight from the pretty girl at the switchboard, and the manager came out looking as if he were about to turn handsprings. “It works!” he cried in boyish delight. “The new lighting plant—it gives light! Hotel Georges service!”

  “Yeah,” Piper said in an aside to Miss Withers. “If we only had this much light on our mystery.

  “Before this night is over we will!” she promised him. And then she saw the inspector rise suddenly.

  “There comes de Silva,” he said wonderingly, “looking stern and important!”

  But the captain barely paused to greet them. “I have a message for you,” he said. “But I must go upstairs first. Please do not leave the hotel during the next few minutes.” Then he was gone, up the steps.

  “Why, the cocky little…” Piper began. “What’s eating him?”

  “Just a snowball, a snowball I started rolling,” Miss Withers told him gently. “But here comes somebody else.”

  The Ippwings were the next arrivals, arm in arm, loaded down with flowers. They expressed delight at seeing the inspector and Miss Withers, delight at the
miracle of electricity again, delight at almost everything.

  “We’ve been having the most gorgeous times!” began Mrs. Ippwing breathlessly. “A real second honeymoon, almost.”

  “We rode on the boat, and we bought all the flowers in the world for about fifty cents American money!” Marcus Ippwing joined in. “It’s the loveliest place—you ought to go there before you leave. Everybody who comes to Mexico City goes out to Xochimilco.”

  “What is it, a greenhouse?” Piper asked.

  “The Floating Gardens! Only of course they don’t float anymore. But there’s a sweet little village with an old church, and you go on through to the canals and ride for hours on sort of flat gondolas through miles and miles of crisscrossed waterways, and other boats full of musicians follow you…” Mrs. Ippwing was beaming.

  “You just must look at the pictures!” she insisted. “Marcus, show them!”

  Nothing loath, her husband produced a long envelope, drew out a sheaf of brownish postcard size prints. “There was a little man with the weirdest old camera at the boat landing,” Mrs. Ippwing went on. “He took our pictures as we started—this is the one. See? There’s Father and me on the little chairs in the front of the boat. And a bower of real flowers overhead—for a sunshade!”

  Miss Withers and the inspector saw, willy-nilly.

  “And when we were halfway down the canal,” Ippwing continued, “up came the photographer in another boat, and he had the pictures all developed and fixed up the craziest!”

  Miss Withers looked at the prints, saw the grinning Ippwing faces, but instead of in their rightful clothes and personalities they had been transposed by some dark magic of the finisher into other, more glamorous settings.

  They smiled down from the cockpit of a plane piloted by Charles Augustus Lindbergh. They smiled at the world from the observation platform of the Empire State Building, with Al Smith behind them and a very solid-looking dirigible moored to the building’s tip. They shook hands with the Presidente of Mexico, rode fiery horses in charro costume.

  “Hildegarde, we must go to that Xochimilco place and see the world,” Piper said irreverently.

  “Won’t our daughter just die laughing at these?” Marcus Ippwing said fondly.

  There were other shots, with the same two grinning faces. One showed the Eiffel Tower as a background, another displayed the couple sliding down almost vertically in a roller coaster labeled “Luna Park,” and last and most impressive, the Ippwings, their heads protruding from windows in the top of a huge barrel, were sailing over Niagara Falls!

  “How interesting!” Miss Withers said, with a kindly and most convincing voice. But the inspector was restless, led her away.

  “I want to know what de Silva is doing upstairs!” he declared. “If that guy thinks he is going to beat me to anything.”

  “We might wander upstairs and find out,” Miss Withers suggested. They had not far to go. They could hear a woman’s voice, raised in exasperation, as they came up the second flight. Captain de Silva was standing outside the door of the Mabies’ sitting room, and Adele Mabie was facing him.

  “You can just go and tell your old jefe that I’m not going to any meeting tonight—I’m staying right here! I’ve been packing all day, and I’ve got too much to do to go anywhere!”

  “In that case,” de Silva said smoothly, “we can arrange to have the notario come here—your room is large enough, I believe, for everybody? It will only take a few minutes, I think.”

  “Oh, if you insist,” Adele said. “Heaven knows I want to see justice done, and if it will help any—”

  “Nine o’clock, then,” said the captain. He turned and came down the hall, so that there was barely time for Miss Withers and the inspector to arrange themselves as innocent passersby

  He called to them. “One minute, please! It will be necessary for everybody involved in this case to make depositions before a notario and myself—Room 307 at nine o’clock. The orders of the jefe.”

  “What’s up?” Miss Withers wanted to know.

  “Just a formality,” he told them. “But necessary since certain persons are planning to leave the country.”

  He turned and hurried down the stairs, whence a moment later arose the excited and pleased voices of the Ippwings accepting the invitation.

  “The snowball rolls,” Miss Hildegarde Withers observed quietly. “And rolls …”

  “What?” demanded Piper irritably. “I don’t get the idea of all this monkey business. Depositions and notaries and polite invitations to attend a merry-get-together at nine o’clock! You don’t happen to be holding out on me, do you?”

  But Miss Withers didn’t answer. “We don’t know whether Dulcie Prothero was happy to accept the jefe’s kind invitation or not, do we? But then, I don’t suppose she had much to say about it.”

  “Dulcie? What about her?”

  “Why, nothing, Oscar—except that the party is being held somewhat in her honor, that’s all.”

  “Huh? Oh, she’ll be there,” the inspector assured her.

  Miss Withers shook her head. “I rather fancy not,” she said.

  XV

  Button Button!

  “IS EVERYBODY HERE?” Captain de Silva said. He was looking at his watch, which showed twenty minutes past nine.

  “It’s my fault about Dulcie Prothero,” Mrs. Mabie confessed. “I sent her over to the express office. With all these curios there are so many formalities!” Adele waved her hand toward the boxes and baggage which had been moved to the corners of the room, toward the neat rows and piles of handicraft. “But the girl ought to be back by now.”

  The alderman was very much in evidence, a trifle the worse for wear. He was moving restlessly up and down the room as if unable to remain in his chair. Too, he was at the stage when he could not help touching people, gripping the lapels of the men …

  It was clear to Miss Withers now why Dulcie Prothero had regretted her impulsiveness on the train platform and had made tentative efforts to return the thirty dollars which she possibly imagined had strings attached.

  Rollo Lighton sat in one corner, near the piles of painted pottery and the neat row of riding whips. He looked somewhat the worse for his afternoon’s grilling and lighted one cigarette after another with hands that trembled. He did not listen to Al Hansen’s cheerful chat, which had to do with the money that could be made in Mexico by the importation of a few nice new handsome slot machines.

  The Ippwings listened, nodding politely. First to arrive, they now perched on a settee against the wall, waiting happily as if in the intermission before the feature picture went on.

  Hildegarde Withers had chosen a straight, rather uncomfortable chair with a thinly upholstered back, which she edged forward a little so that she was not far from the center of the group. Adele Mabie moved nervously around the room, pausing once beside the schoolteacher to say: “Such a shame to move everything in here when Dulcie had it all arranged ready to pack! She’s a treasure, that girl. Why, she even found the riding whip, the one made of alligator. You remember?”

  “Where did she find it?” Miss Withers wanted to know, and Adele shook her head.

  Dulcie and Julio Mendez were still missing at nine-thirty. “We will begin without them,” said de Silva. Acting a little as if he were unsure of what was coming next, the captain bent over and whispered to a dark little man with thick glasses who, Miss Withers assumed, was the notario. He produced a shorthand notebook and a pile of freshly sharpened pencils.

  “What the jefe wants is simply this,” Captain de Silva began. “The lieutenant colonel is agreed that we shall not put any unnecessary obstacles in the way of our so-welcome tourist friends from north of the Rio Grande. So if each one of you will simply make a statement—under oath, of course—to everything he or she has noticed or experienced and which may have any bearing on either of these two unfortunate murders …”

  “Tripe!” whispered the inspector to Miss Withers. “This is all moonshine—and I th
ought these boys were smart!” She hushed him.

  “The lieutenant colonel has ordered that these statements be made before all of you, so that if any details are omitted or any mistaken information be given, it can be checked at the source,” continued the captain. “Our first witness was to have been the Señorita Prothero, and she was to have discussed a certain bottle supposed to have contained perfume, once her property.”

  Miss Withers nodded approvingly.

  “But since she is not with us, we had better begin with you, Mrs. Mabie. Please begin at your first meeting with the Prothero girl.”

  “Why—she came in answer to an ad I placed in the New York papers,” Adele began slowly. “I asked for an experienced maid willing to travel to Mexico. She looked so smart and neat that I hired her to take the trip. Besides, she was willing to travel for a very low salary just to get down here.”

  “Do you know why?” asked the captain. Just then the telephone interrupted.

  Miss Withers beat everyone else to the instrument. “Oh yes—ask them to come up, please.”

  The alderman looked startled. “No more identification parades, for God’s sake?”

  “Not exactly,” Miss Withers told him. “You came off rather badly in the last one, didn’t you? But never mind.”

  There was a knock on the door, and Captain de Silva opened it. In the hall stood two gendarmes in uniform, and between them, struggling and protesting, was a young man with pale hair, a sorrowful mouth, and ears—as the inspector said later—like a taxicab with both doors open.

  “Oh yes,” Miss Withers said. “An addition to our little group. Mr. …”

  The young man glared at her, glared at everybody.

  “Tell the lady your name,” rasped the inspector. “Or—”

  “Not now, Oscar,” the schoolteacher hastily put in. “I don’t think there is any need for unpleasantness. Is there, Mr. …”

  “My name, if it makes any difference to you, is Robert Schultz!” He refused the proffered chair.

  “Address, top floor, number two Violetta Street,” Miss Withers added.

  But it was Mrs. Ippwing who seemed most impressed. “Not—not the Robert Schultz?”