Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla Page 5

  Oscar Piper counted off points, one, two, three, on his fingers. Not entirely complete as yet, but no bad holes in it. Not even Hildegarde Withers could knock holes in this setup. Though it was only fair, really, to let her in on the inside.

  Taking some yellow blanks from the rack down the car, he returned to his table and settled down to the throes of composition. The next stop would be Saltillo in half an hour, and he could put it on the wire there. He began:

  MURDER IS WHAT IT ADDS UP TO INNOCENT BYSTANDER DEAD THROUGH POISON PLANTED FOR ADELE MABIE IN PERFUME BOTTLE STOP YOUR INFORMATION SHOWS PERFUME STOCK OF DRUGSTORE WHERE PROTHERO GIRL WORKED BEFORE TAKING JOB WITH MABIES STOP AS DISCHARGED EMPLOYEE SHE HAD FAIR MOTIVE EXCELLENT OPPORTUNITY STOP POLICE HERE HESITANT HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO FORCE THEIR HANDS ON ARRIVAL MEXICO CITY THANKS

  OSCAR

  He read it over, frowned and shook his head. You never could tell when information would leak out. If there only were some possible code—but of course! He tore up the first message, dropped the scraps into his ashtray and began again, using a code that would be Greek to Mexicans and simplicity itself to a Manhattan schoolteacher.

  URDERMAY…INNOCENT…YSTANDERBAY…OISONPAY

  He wrote on and on, finishing as they drew into the station. It was only the work of a moment to cross the platform, file the message with the telegraph operator, and return to the train. As he walked back through the dining car he noticed with some surprise that while his ashtray still held the remains of his after-dinner cigar, the scraps of the first telegram he had written had completely disappeared.

  IV

  Things Over Mexico

  A GREAT TIGER-STRIPED CAT welcomed Miss Hildegarde Withers on the sidewalk outside the rooming house on Eighty-sixth Street, escorted her up the steps and waited patiently beside her while the schoolteacher rang the bell.

  The cat obviously only wanted in, but Miss Withers considered its purring companionship as a good omen.

  “Dulcie Prothero don’t live here any more,” the wrapper-clad landlady advised her midnight caller. “She’s gone to Mexico to seek her fortune.”

  “To do what?” Miss Withers blinked.

  “To seek her fortune, I said,” the woman repeated stoutly. The door was not very far open, but the tiger cat managed to parade through without any loss of dignity, and Miss Withers edged after it.

  “I’m a sort of relative,” she announced shamelessly. “I just wanted to find out some things about Dulcie.”

  The landlady pondered this. “An aunt from out of town, eh? Well, if you’ve come for her things I couldn’t really let you have them without you pay me the two weeks rent she left owing,” the woman continued apologetically. “Left in a hurry, the child did. But she was always in a hurry, always up to something. Such a one! And when I was her age I was such another, let me tell you!” The vast bosom sighed.

  “So she rushed off to Mexico, eh? To make her fortune.” Miss Withers’ equine visage wore a somewhat puzzled smile.

  “She did that. Some sort of job came up overnight, and whist! she was gone. Says to me, ‘Auntie Mac’ (my name being Macafee) ‘I’m going to Mexico, and I’m either coming back in such grand style that you won’t know me or else I’m not coming back at all,’ she says.”

  “It was sudden, then?”

  “It was and it wasn’t. Heaven knows she’d talked enough about Mexico and read all the books in the rental library. Being the kind of girl she was, a tomboy and a man-hater, I think foreign parts took the place in her mind that most girls give to being boy-crazy.”

  “She didn’t leave because of a man, then?” Miss Withers wanted to know. “She wasn’t running away?”

  “Her?” Mrs. Macafee laughed. “She wouldn’t run away from the divil himself if he stood in her way, and that’s a fact. As soon slap your face as kiss you, and likely to do both in the space of five minutes. But I tell you, men were no more important in her life than—than nothing.” Mrs. Macafee sighed again. “I wish I could say the same.”

  “I wonder if I could see her room?” the schoolteacher hinted. “I know it’s late, but …”

  “Her things are upstairs, two flights in front. I haven’t even got around to packing them and putting them down cellar, with this hot weather and all. As I said, I shouldn’t be turning them over to anybody until I get my two weeks’ rent—eighteen dollars it is and fifty cents telephone—but if she wants them sent to her I would be the last person in the world to say no, having been young once and poor all my life …”

  The cat escorted them up the stairs into a long narrow room which still held a trunk and other traces of its former occupant. There were no less than a dozen empty picture frames on the wall, a row of well-worn dresses in the closet, and one bureau drawer was full of recipes. “Not that the child ever cooked anything,” Mrs. Macafee said. “But no magazine went out of this house without her bringing her little fingernail scissors—”

  “You haven’t a picture of her anywhere around?” Miss Withers asked.

  “Only this!” The landlady laughed. “Isn’t it a scream? Dulcie used to keep it around, she said, to keep from being vain.”

  It was a faded photograph of perhaps forty little boys and girls, none of them over ten or eleven. In the front row stood a plump and freckled child with fat legs. Mrs. Macafee indicated it with her thumb. “That’s her, taken when she was in school. That’s the schoolhouse steps they’re on.”

  Miss Withers nodded, recognizing those steps. Mrs. Macafee was opening a shelf in the closet. “And here are her newspapers—subscribed she did to every sheet in Mexico. Not that she could read a word of the lingo, but she’d spend hours over them every time they arrived.”

  Miss Withers was slowly building up a picture of Dulcie Prothero, a picture composed of the drawer of recipes, the scent that clung to the top bureau drawers, the old class photograph …

  Even the way the great tiger cat wandered purring happily through the place, as if a regular visitor there. Then there was the little bookshelf above the bed, with His Monkey Wife, The Oxford Book of English Verse, Gulliver, and Modern Home Decor.

  Miss Withers took out her handbag. This sleuthing was getting to be an expensive avocation, what with fifty-word telegrams and back-rent bills to pay. Yet she felt a real and personal interest in this case.

  “How much did you say was due you, Mrs. Macafee?”

  The woman hesitated doubtfully. Then—“Now, did Dulcie really go and write you to send her things down there?”

  Miss Withers had to admit that she had received no such message. “Then if you don’t mind I’ll keep them here for her,” the landlady decided. “She’ll pay me when she can, and if she came back and found her room changed or her things gone I know she’d feel bad. She’d probably skin me alive. She hasn’t got red hair for nothing, that girl, I was just like her forty years ago,” Mrs. Macafee added. “Only with less sense as regards men.”

  They were at the head of the stairs when Miss Withers remembered to ask one last question. “What sort of pictures did Dulcie have in those frames that are empty now? Of whom were they?”

  Mrs. Macafee picked up the purring tiger cat, ruffled its broad striped face. “Oh yes, she did take those along. Moment I came into the room I knew that something was different.”

  “Were they movie stars?”

  “You’d never guess,” the landlady confided. “Not in a thousand years. No, they weren’t movie stars nor painted pictures nor portraits of the boyfriends she had so little use for. They were pictures of cows!”

  “Cows?” echoed Miss Hildegarde Withers weakly. “You said ‘cows’?”

  Mrs. Macafee nodded solemnly. “Cows, as God is my judge.”

  Train number forty of the Ferrocarriles Nacionales roared southward into the night, its cars darkened, its passengers presumably asleep. Inspector Oscar Piper had, in fact, seen most of them to bed.

  The inspector was taking no chances in the interim before arriving at Mexico City an
d turning his Pandora’s box of headaches over to the authorities there. He had been standing, smoking a good-night cigar, in the corridor, when the Mabies admitted the porter to make up the berths. “I’m so glad you’re keeping an eye on things,” Adele said. “I feel so safe now.”

  “Thanks,” said the inspector. “But lock your door all the same.”

  He had watched from his vantage point in the corridor while the little world of Pullman car Elysian turned in. First to disappear behind the green curtains were the Ippwings. “Guess there’s no chance of bandits or any more excitement tonight, Mother,” the old man had decided. “Guess we’d better hit the hay. Tomorrow is another day.”

  Closely following had been the Mexican-American family with the children—a consul at New Orleans, somebody said, homeward bound for a vacation. Hansen and Lighton quit their checker game. Somewhere along the way the two broad-hipped and giggling señoritas had disembarked, but the Spanish gentleman with the handlebar mustaches was still in evidence, snoring thin patrician snores in his upper berth.

  Julio Mendez S. (the S. to give a something at the end) was the last. He came into the Pullman shaking his head. “She won’t do it,” he told Piper.

  “Who won’t what?”

  “Miss Prothero. She has damn small dinero, that charming one. I try to get her to take my berth. I tell her I don’t mind sit up in the day coach. But she says she don’t sleep anyway. So …” He shrugged and climbed into his berth along with the guitar and the two alligators.

  The train roared and rattled, steadily climbing now, lurching in its rough roadbed. At length the weary inspector sought his berth, slipped off his coat, vest and shoes, and settled down to a night’s vigil. He chewed on a dead cigar as insurance against sleep, stared out at the dark sky and darker hills, while little towns jerked by gray and ghostlike without the flicker of a single light.

  Positive that he had not closed his eyes for a single moment, the inspector suddenly opened them very wide, sat up so suddenly that he banged his head against the upper berth. There was a hand reaching through the gap in the curtains, a brown clutching hand that moved toward his shoulder.

  Oscar Piper seized it—and immediately found that he was holding the swarthy little porter in a grip of death. The little man blinked, squirmed and then produced a yellow envelope.

  “Una mas telegrama, señor” he said, shaking his head wearily.

  It was a telegram from New York City for the inspector, received at Carneros, province of Coahuila. It was a short and surprising telegram, which the recipient read three times with growing asperity.

  OBVIOUSLY ON WRONG TRACK PLEASE DO NOTHING UNTIL YOU HEAR FROM ME

  HILDEGARDE

  And the train rolled interminably on, up the tilted narrowing plateau that lies between the two great mountain backbones of Mexico. It rolled on through the night, through the bright morning and the blazing white heat of the day.

  Steadily the sun-bleached stations went by, the bare, crowded, identical railroad stations of Mexico.

  At Jesus Maria, Rollo Lighten and Al Hansen got down from the train to purchase copies of the Mexico City newspapers, shook hands happily over the news therein displayed, and then spent most of the morning in deep conclave, making many figures on bits of paper.

  As the train went through Villa Reyes Miss Dulcie Prothero, still in the yellow dress, came into the dining car. She pounced upon the newspapers which Lighton and Hansen had left on the table there. Unlike those two gentlemen, she was disturbed and disappointed at what she found in the Mexico City press, for she sipped unhappily at her cup of black coffee, refusing to chat with Mr. and Mrs. Marcus Ippwing across the aisle, although that cheery and birdlike old couple assured her that they had a daughter just her age back home in Peoria.

  At Pena Prieta, fresh as a daisy, Señor Julio Carlos Mendez S. joined her without an invitation. Over the orange juice he told her the story of his life. Over his eggs rancheros they discovered that their favorite movie actor was Donald Duck. By the end of the last cup of coffee Dulcie Prothero laughed out loud.

  At Rio Laja Mrs. Adele Mabie, wearing smoked goggles to protect her eyes from the bright blinding sun, was on the point of buying a magnificent green parrot when her husband cried warnings about psittacosis. She compromised by bringing back aboard the train a small round wicker basket containing, she announced with great éclat, a genuine baby spotted lizard. Inspector Oscar Piper, lurking watchfully in the background, refused to admire the lizard, saying that reptiles human and otherwise made him sick.

  At Begona the Pullman conductor, mopping his pumpkin face, refused to hazard a suggestion as to what baby lizards should be fed.

  At Escobedo Alderman Francis Mabie became a kibitzer at the Lighton-Hansen checker game, intimating that he was no longer able to remain in the drawing room and listen to Julio Mendez teach Adele the interminable words of the song “Adelita,” to the accompaniment of his guitar.

  At Queretaro Adele Mabie rushed out onto the platform to buy a garnet necklace, a riding whip, and a large gourd tray three feet across, painted in violent colors.

  At Cambalache Julio Mendez bought ice-cream cones for Mr. and Mrs. Ippwing. There was no telegram from New York for the inspector.

  At St. José de Atlan there was no telegram for the inspector.

  At Teocalco there were three sets of musicians, a juggler, a fortune teller, and eight beggars on the platform, but there was no telegram for the inspector.

  At Coyotepec Oscar Piper glanced at a crinkled newspaper in the dining car and saw there amid gray lines of unintelligible Spanish the strange face of a young man pictured on a hospital cot. Unacquainted with the gentle Mexican interest in the appearance of corpses in the day’s news, it came as something of a shock to him to realize that this young man was dead. The name beneath the picture was “Manuel Robles.”

  “That settles it!” he said savagely.

  At Lecheria he took the bull by the horns and sent a telegram to the Jefe de Policía, Mexico, D.F. It was a crisp and definite message, indicating that immediately upon arrival he wished to turn over to agents of the department of public safety proof that the death at Nuevo Laredo of customs examiner Manuel Robles yesterday was not a natural death, together with party indicated as responsible for same.

  At Tacubaya, fifteen minutes out of the capital, five faintly harried-looking men in plain clothes boarded the train and were taken by the conductor to the seat wherein Inspector Oscar Piper waited. One of them, it appeared, could speak English.

  They were, he announced, agentes de la Seguridad Publica. And what was all this about?

  The inspector, a little regretfully, named Miss Dulcie Prothero as suspect number one. He mentioned the possible motive for her having attacked her former employer, a grudge motive. He touched upon the suspicious actions of Julio Mendez. And he produced the bottle of Elixir d’Amour.

  At last the agentes showed real interest. They seemed to have no doubt at all of the identity of that faint bittersweet odor of almonds which the perfume had half concealed. They took the bottle, studied it gingerly and with great respect.

  “One of your suspects is in the day coach,” Piper said. “The other—and I’d give him a good going-over—must be up there with the girl, because he ducked out of this car as you came in.”

  They translated for each other, made copious notes. And then, as the train pulled into the Mexico City station, it was requested of the inspector that he produce his credentials.

  “Gladly,” he said. From his coat pocket he took a large envelope, well stuffed. But when he saw that it was stuffed with a folded railway time-table instead of his pink tourist card, instead of the splendid letter from the Mexican consul in New York which commended him to the civil and military authorities of the Republic, instead of his police identification card, his letter of introduction to the jefe from the commissioner of New York—when he saw that this sheaf of invaluable impedimenta was gone, the inspector murmured words and phrases
quite untranslatable.

  He felt in his vest pocket with anxious fingers, but there was no gold badge where it should have been. Billfold, American and Mexican money, silver, his watch—all were intact. But he had not the faintest proof of his identity. The train was coming to a stop now.

  The agentes drew closer, conferring in liquid Spanish which he could not understand. They were suddenly very grave, very stiff and distant. Perhaps if the gentleman would accompany them … One motioned toward the front of the car.

  Piper went up the aisle. And then his companions started down the steps toward the platform instead of going toward the girl in the day coach. They waited for him to advance.

  He twisted his arm away. “What in hell …”

  “A few minoots, señor, and no doubt everything can be explained,” said the agente.

  “What? Do you know what you’re talking about?”

  “But yes, señor. Possession of poison by an alien, concealment of evidence for twenty-four hours, lack of the required tourist card …”

  Even then it might have been smoothed over somehow had not the inspector quite lost his temper and taken a poke at the nearest of the bland, ununderstanding faces. Before he could say “Jack Robinson,” or anything more suitable to the occasion, Oscar Piper found himself whirling through the murky streets of Mexico City faster than even a taxi could have taken him, found himself whisked down the Calle Revilla-gigedo and put behind the bars of a large, dark, and extremely solid-looking cell.

  He was still fuming there at eight o’clock next morning when he heard the sound of quick resolute footsteps in the corridor. Someone rapped sharply upon the cell bars, and the weary and disgusted inspector looked up to behold an apparition.

  It was certainly a mirage, a fantasy born of his sickness of soul. There was no sense, no reason, in this sudden appearance of the visage of a plain, angular spinster, tinted a pale Nile green from the effects of twenty-four bumpy hours in the air.