Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla Read online

  He was addressing the alderman. Francis X. Mabie, Manhattan district leader (and devoutly wishing himself back there at the moment) turned on his warm professional smile. “We’ll see, we’ll see about that.” It was the tone he used in promising to secure a low license number, promising to fix a speeding ticket. “If Mrs. Mabie has no objections … He folded his hands comfortably across his plump facade. Alderman Mabie wore with dignity what the Chinese call “the curve of well-being.”

  “Your new frau isn’t down on poker, is she?” pressed the inspector, presuming a little on the basis of old acquaintance.

  “Feeling the heat a little, that’s all,” Mabie said. They were all feeling the heat. For three days they had been jammed in Laredo with a mob of tourists, lost in a fog of band music and oratory, sweltering in an oven of actual and figurative hot air.

  Now that the presidente of Mexico and the vice president of the United States had collaborated on the final severance of a sagging ribbon across the International Bridge, the ceremonies were over. Nothing remained except the trip to the Mexican capital as guests of the sunny southern Republic. Most of the captains and the kings had departed over the new highway via the motorcade, but there happened to be a few pessimistic dignitaries who had heard that the lovely old valley of Monterrey basked in a temperature of 115 degrees, that certain hotels in small towns along the new auto route boasted fleas as big as cockroaches and roaches big as mice. It was also pointed out that about eighty miles of the new highway, from Tamuzunchale over the very tops of the highest Sierras Madre, were still unpaved.

  These less adventurous souls had chosen the more prosaic if more dependable ferrocarril, with its highly recommended “climas artificiales.” But the cooling system was not yet making any appreciable difference in the dusty heat of the cars, nor did the view of Nuevo Laredo’s backyards serve to inspire anyone.

  “Those customs boys are taking hell’s own time to get through this train,” Hansen observed, looking at a large timepiece of yellow gold. “Anyway, aren’t we supposed to receive the courtesy of diplomatic immunity, or whatever it is?” Alderman Mabie demanded.

  Lighton rasped his dark chin with a long curved fingernail. “This is just like any other train,” he pointed out. “You should have gone on the motorcade if you wanted fanfares and salutes. Anyway, don’t worry about customs here. With my drag …”

  “Don’t tell me anything about customs,” Al Hansen put in, pushing his Stetson over one eye. “Say, I once got three bullets through my hide—right there it was too—from these customs boys. Just because I was trying to deliver some goods to a customer of mine south of the river …”

  “What sort of goods?” the alderman asked, to fill in the pause.

  “Machine guns, for Pancho Villa,” Hansen enlightened them. “It was in the spring of 1913, and I had the guns disguised in beer casks, only I forgot to wet the outside of the casks—”

  “I’m too dry to listen,” the alderman cut in. “Right now I’d like some of this Mexican beer we’ve heard so much about. But it doesn’t seem to be any use punching this bell …”

  It wasn’t much use. Somewhere else a bell was being rung again and again, so that sharp staccato buzzes came from the porter’s closet.

  “Portero!” called Lighton hoarsely. Nothing happened.

  “PORTER!” Hansen’s voice was like a foghorn. A baby down the aisle began to whimper softly, and the old couple from Peoria who wore Texas Centennial hatbands awakened and looked hopefully around for signs of bandits.

  Somewhere a door opened, slammed again, and then the porter went past the four men at a jog trot. His swarthy Indian face was impassive as ever, but he seemed to have difficulty in speaking. As he passed he spewed a few words in Spanish over his shoulder and then disappeared toward the front of the car.

  Rollo Lighton’s jaw dropped open, showing yellow snags of teeth. “He says something about the lady in the drawing room!” he gasped.

  “Something that sounded like ‘muerte’,” chimed in Hansen. “I know damned little Spanish, but I know that …”

  They all tried to stand up at once, struggling out of the cramped seats. Oddly enough it was the quiet little Irishman next to the window who was first into the aisle, somehow gaining stature as he elbowed the others out of his way. The straw sun helmet rolled forgotten under the seat as Oscar Piper, veteran inspector of the Homicide Division, New York City Police, galloped forward like an old fire horse at the clanging of a three-alarm.

  Up until this moment his much-anticipated share in the junket of the New York Democratic delegation had turned out to be one unutterable bore, but now, if only “muerte” meant what it sounded like …

  Down the aisle, along the narrow washroom corridor, to the door of Drawing Room A. Piper threw it open, then drew sharply back, barring the doorway with his arm to the others. He sniffed, frowning.

  “Don’t go in there!” he ordered. “Let it clear!”

  His keen gray eyes, professionally trained to notice everything, snapped a picture of that Pullman drawing room, a picture in such clear focus that he could have described it under oath in court a year later.

  A little room, crowded with much-labeled luggage, a room with two bodies on the floor.

  The man was in the dull-gray uniform of a customs examiner for the Republic. His boyishly lean face was of an unearthly ashen-gray color now, and he was staring at the ceiling with wide bloodshot eyes. He looked pitiful and faintly comic, all akimbo as he was—like a dropped and forgotten marionette.

  Piper knelt beside him, looked up with a deep crease between his eyebrows. “Dead!” he said softly.

  He moved the body slightly from where it lay across an open traveling case, a case which exposed gleaming silver fittings, the glint of crystal bottles … For a moment the inspector turned his back to the frightened, inquisitive people in the half-open doorway …

  “Adele!” the alderman was moaning. “Adele!

  Oscar Piper bent over the woman who was lying between the two seats, as if flung there by an explosion. She was a more than pretty woman, if a bit thirtyish. Incredibly soft and yet heavy in his arms she was …

  “Give me a hand here!” he commanded. There was a moment of hesitation, and then Francis Mabie stepped gingerly over the body of the customs man, took his wife’s silken legs …

  They got her out of the drawing room, to a seat in the Pullman. Piper forced back the crowd.

  “Isn’t there anything we can do for her?” Mabie was crying.

  There was, and the inspector was doing it. His first-aid methods were so successful that Adele Mabie was sitting up when the porter came trotting back up the aisle, followed by train officials, more customs men, and a bald dumpling of a man with a goatee, who smelled vilely of tequila and carried a small black bag.

  The group pushed past them, disappeared through the door of the drawing room.

  “I—I guess I must have fainted!” Adele Mabie spoke softly, painfully.

  “Quiet, Adele! You mustn’t try to …”

  The inspector’s hand was clenched in his coat pocket. He was an old acquaintance, indeed he had been one of the guests at Adele Mabie’s wedding reception, but she did not know him now.

  “It would be better to talk,” he said softly in her ear. “What really happened in there?”

  “Now see here, Inspector!” Mabie was furious.

  “Best if she answers,” Piper said. “Well?”

  “I don’t know!” the woman cried. Even in her distraught condition her fingers automatically picked and patted and arranged the loose strands of her dark hair. “I don’t know what happened! Just that the customs man—”

  “You don’t know him? Never saw him before?” Piper demanded.

  She shook her head blankly. “Of course not. He was such a nice man, too! Barely looked at my bags, and he didn’t say a word about the three cartons of cigarettes or anything. Just smiled and made a joke or two in his funny cute accent, and then …” />
  She shivered. “I don’t remember …”

  The others came crowding back around them. There was curious Lighton like a great eager bird, pudgy Hansen with the wide childlike eyes. Behind them were the other passengers of the car, the old couple from Peoria, the Mexican-American family with the three fat-cheeked children, the two giggling señoritas with the ample hips, and even an elderly Spanish gentleman with handlebar mustaches and a gold-headed cane.

  The inspector scowled at the crowd, and then with sudden decision he took the woman by one arm, motioned her husband to take the other. “Come out on the rear platform,” he insisted. “The air will do you good.”

  The door slammed behind them. “Now please come clean with me, Mrs. Mabie!” he pleaded.

  “Listen to me!” cut in the husband angrily. “You forget that you’re not in New York now, Inspector!”

  “Neither are you, and you’re going to find it out,” Piper said. “How about it, Mrs. Mabie?”

  She drew back against the bulwark of her husband. “I have—nothing to tell you,” she said softly. “Nothing.”

  “You can’t tell me anything about why this poor devil in there was holding this gripped in his hand when I found him? With the stopper out?” The stern policeman produced a small amber-colored bottle, shaped like a flattened hexagon. In florid green script it bore the legend “Elixir d’Amour” and beneath in smaller letters “bottled expressly for Longacre Square Pharmacies, N.Y.C.”

  Mrs. Mabie still shook her head slowly, like one of the trick dolls sold on street corners.

  “You don’t see anything queer about the fact that somebody just takes one whiff of your perfume and cashes in his checks? And almost takes you along with him?”

  She shook her head. “Honestly, Inspector! I have a headache—”

  “We’ll all have headaches before this is over. If you don’t let me help you—”

  “It’s all a nightmare,” the woman whispered. “All a nightmare, and I’m going to wake up in a moment.” She nodded as if to clear her head of cobwebs. “You see,” she went on, speaking as if to a very small child or to a deaf person, “that bottle isn’t mine!”

  “I suppose the brownies put it in your traveling bag? I suppose—”

  “I never saw it before in all my life!” declared Adele Mabie. “Why, I only use De Markoff’s Essence at forty dollars an ounce. And why you imagine that I would plant a drug …”

  “I didn’t say drug, but I’ll go farther. It was poison!” he told her.

  “…plant poison in somebody else’s cheap perfume bottle, just to kill a poor unoffending little Mexican customs man whom I never saw before in all my life—”

  “That’s it!” The alderman’s voice gained strength. “Why should my wife poison a customs man or enter into a suicide pact with him? You grumble at customs. You don’t try to—”

  “All right, all right,” the inspector cut in. “We’ll agree that it was the brownies, after all. But it’s going to be a hell of a defense to take into court.”

  “Into court?” the woman echoed blankly.

  “Yes, when you go up for second-degree homicide, or criminal negligence, or whatever it was.”

  Adele Mabie moaned a little. “She’s fainted!” came from the alderman, as he manfully struggled to keep his wife’s limp form from sliding to the floor of the platform.

  Inspector Oscar Piper opened the door to let two stretcher-bearers through with their burden, a blanket drawn over its face. “And that is that,” he said. “We had a chance to do something for her, but she went and fainted. Now we can only hope Mrs. Mabie won’t wake up in a Mexican jail.”

  “But it wasn’t her perfume bottle!” Mabie gasped. “Why, they can’t do that to her! I tell you, she had no more to do with this than I did!”

  “Uh huh,” said the inspector. When the train finally hitched its way into the station of Nuevo Laredo, he got down and sent the telegram.

  II

  Death Smells So Sweet

  THE INSPECTOR STOOD on the station platform in the midst of a crowd of hurrying baggagemen, quaintly clad sellers of fruit juices, slices of pineapple, chicles and cigarettes. Everywhere there was a hustling, breathless activity, but nowhere a sign of the police that he expected.

  Grimly uncommunicative train officials got off and on the car, but that was all.

  It was a pretty problem in ethics which faced Oscar Piper. If he said anything about the bottle in his pocket, the bottle which had spilled most of its strange sweet contents upon the floor of the drawing room, the wife of his friend Francis Mabie was certain to be mixed up in a scandal, perhaps put under arrest.

  The inspector was a member of this party because of Alderman Mabie. He had needed a vacation badly, having had none in ten years except one flying trip to Catalina in the course of official business. Since reaching the age of twenty-one Oscar Piper had voted the Democratic ticket, had been what they call a “Tammany cop,” although he had always prided himself on making sure that the uniform and not the tiger came first in his loyalties.

  It had been as a sort of reward, engineered by the alderman, that he had been offered a place in this junket. Of course, members of the New York delegation had agreed that it would be a good idea to have a police official along—one who knew from years of experience the misguided radicals who might feel inclined to toss a bomb into the midst of the highway-opening ceremonies. But now those vaguely official duties were ended, and he was faced with nothing more than a trip down to a foreign capital he had always wished to visit. Nothing—except that the alderman’s new and attractive wife had to go and get mixed up in a homicide.

  His loyalties were all for the alderman. And yet Oscar Piper had a deep-rooted dislike for people who act carelessly with little bottles of poison. Potassium cyanide, of course. It was the only thing with that almond odor that could kill with a whiff. The fumes, rising, had filled the drawing room—certainly enough to account for the woman’s collapse.

  And she denied that it was hers. Denied that she had ever owned the bottle. Well, that was a purely feminine matter. The telegram might help him on that point.

  The pumpkin-faced Pullman conductor stepped beside him, held out his large nickel watch warningly. “Only five minoots, señor!”

  He started. “They’re not holding the train, then?”

  “Ah no, señor. We cannot keep an express train standing in the estación just because one poor customs examiner has a heart attack. Very sad, that. But others have finish his work.”

  “Heart attack, eh?” Piper nodded. Evidently the local doctor wasn’t familiar with what the sob sisters call the “acrid scent of bitter almonds.”

  Far up ahead the engineer gave two blasts upon the whistle. Immediately the platform became a veritable bedlam, people scurrying from the lines of parked cars to clamber aboard or exchange last embraces through the car windows. There was a tumult of farewells, messages, endearments, sidesplitting jokes—all in Spanish. With a faint sense of uneasiness the inspector realized that he was an alien.

  Up alongside the second-class coaches there was a quartet of musicians playing “La Paloma,” sugar sweet and sad …

  The conductor was motioning him toward the steps. “Please, señor!” He waved his arm, and his voice lifted in a wailing “¡Vamonos!”

  There was nothing for the inspector but to get back aboard the train, which he proceeded to do. His decision had been made for him. For better or worse, they were off for Mexico City.

  He went back through the Pullmans. News of the tragedy had spread, and he had to parry questions right and left. Years of experience had made Oscar Piper an accomplished parrier of questions.

  It wasn’t quite so easy to deal with Rollo Lighton, back in Pullman car Elysian.

  “Look here, Inspector, is it on the level that the doctor says the customs man had a heart attack? Because if it is, then why was the woman—”

  “Yeah,” Al Hansen cut in. “Heart trouble isn’t contagiou
s, is it?”

  Piper shrugged. “Maybe she fainted from the shock of seeing a man drop dead in front of her.”

  “And the smell in the drawing room?”

  “A spilled bottle of perfume, I guess.” To change the subject Piper pointed to the black headlines of the Mexican newspaper on the seat. “What’s that say?”

  “¡Huelga mañana!” Lighton told him. “Means there’s a strike called for tomorrow morning. As if this country hadn’t had enough of them. This is going to be a lulu, too.”

  The inspector wasn’t interested in class warfare, except in Union Square. Then suddenly an idea occurred to him, one which would explain many things. “Say, that isn’t a police strike, by any chance?”

  The two stared at him wonderingly. “Why, no,” Lighton said. “It’s a strike of electrical unions. Power is going to be shut off in the Federal District tomorrow, probably later in most of the other provinces. Which means that there’ll be hell to pay in Mexico City.”

  The inspector started to go, but Al Hansen caught his arm. “Wait a minute, will you? It’s a lousy wind that doesn’t blow something into somebody’s pockets. We’d like to cut you in on a sure thing, if you can lay hands on some money quick.”

  They looked at Piper, who stiffened a little. “Dice or horses?”

  “Nothing like that. You see,” Hansen explained, “I’m on my way down to Mexico City to promote a horse track, but something else has come up. Something red hot.”

  “And it can’t miss!” Lighton put in. “Wait until you hear about it. Why, I’m risking every dime of my soldier’s bonus that I’ve just been up to the States to collect. You see, we’re going to send every cent we can raise down to—”

  “Wait,” Hansen stopped him. “How about it, Piper? If we let you in, can you lay your hands on a thousand bucks or so? I’ll guarantee that you’ll get back ten, maybe twenty, grand inside of two weeks.”

  The inspector kept both hands in his pockets. “Sorry, boys,” he said. “I’m just an underpaid cop, without a safety-deposit box to my name. Why don’t you try the alderman? He’s a gambler.”