Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla Page 8

  “Yes?” said the surprised voice of Adele Mabie. She opened the door cautiously.

  “I want to talk to you,” began Miss Withers.

  “Come in, come in—I’m all alone. Francis had a business appointment …”

  The schoolteacher accepted a chair. “I hope you don’t mind my interfering?”

  “It’s high time somebody interfered!” said Adele. “But why are you—What’s happened?”

  “Nothing,” Miss Withers told her. “Nothing must. You remember my suggesting a while ago that you take a plane out of here as quickly as you could?”

  Adele nodded. “My husband is trying to book passage on the next plane—”

  “Don’t do it! You mustn’t take that plane. For your own safety you ought to stay here!”

  For a long, long time Miss Withers was to remember the look which came over Adele’s smooth, pretty face. It was a look of amazement, of shock, and of desperate relief.

  “Thank you for the advice,” she said.

  “Then you’re not going?”

  Adele shook her head slowly. “I don’t care what Francis or anybody says,” she announced. “I’m not going. I never had the slightest intention of going. I’d die first!”

  “We’ll try to see that you don’t,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers. She started for the door, paused. “By the way—the question is a delicate one. But is there—has there been any friction in your family? Any difference of opinion?”

  Adele looked amazed. “But of course not!”

  “Positive? There was something said about it this afternoon.”

  A bewildered, hurt smile crossed Adele’s face. “Why—why, of course, Francis was a little grumpy because I didn’t want him to get those plane reservations. He is too sweet to stay angry, though. He went out and walked literally miles to get me some of the French liqueur chocolates I like, as a peace offering!” She indicated a neatly wrapped box on the writing desk. “Does that look as though there’s anything wrong between my Francis and me?”

  Miss Withers was forced to admit that it did not. And then the door suddenly opened, and Alderman Francis Mabie plunged into the room, dripping wet. His voice boomed out, “Adele, it seems that the whole deal has blown sky-high!” He was angry.

  Then he saw Miss Withers. “Oh, hello.”

  “Still raining outside, I see?” she remarked conversationally. “Well, I must be running along.”

  Husband and wife were exchanging a wordless message, she noticed. Under cover of the comparative darkness of the candlelight she made a hasty exit, one hand concealing a small package against her side. Miss Hildegarde Withers was rather pleased with herself.

  She was still pleased when, some time later, the inspector knocked at her door and entered, with his usual disregard for the stricter proprieties.

  “Well, Oscar?”

  He sank wearily into an easy chair. “No results. Hansen and Lighton spent the evening in a cantina down the street. The alderman joined them for a little while, but they’re all back here and in their little beds by now.”

  “And Dulcie Prothero?” inquired the schoolteacher. She bustled around the room, lighting more candles and trying to make the place look as if it were inhabited.

  “She went off somewhere with a man in a taxi—he fits your description of this Fitz,” Piper admitted.

  “She was dressed up.”

  “And that’s the total of your evening’s sleuthing?”

  He nodded. “Except that twice I thought I saw that Mendez boy dodging around corners. Hasn’t he got a home to go to? I don’t shee why thash comish opera idiot—”

  “Oscar, will you please take your cigar out of your mouth when you speak?” she scolded from across the room.

  “Cigarsh?” He swallowed. “I’m not smoking. It’s this candy in the box. Not bad, not bad at all.” He groped again on the table.

  Miss Withers crossed the room in two strides, her face a mask of mingled horror and amusement. “Oscar Piper! That’s not my candy. It’s what Mabie brought to his wife. I stole it, to have it analyzed for poison!”

  “Wha-what?” Oscar Piper choked, went pale around the lips. “It’s certainly a hell of a time to tell a fellow!” And he went hastily out of the room.

  It was hours later when Miss Withers finally locked her door, gave her hair its requisite hundred strokes with the brush, and snuffed the candles. There was no real reason to feel despondent, not yet. She was planning to follow her timeworn and time-tested practice of throwing a monkey wrench into the machinery and waiting for something to happen. “Catalytic agent” the inspector had called her, because she caused a chemical combination to form, usually an explosion. “Clear all wires—Catalytic Agent Five reporting,” she murmured dreamily and went to sleep smiling.

  She awoke with a start as something bumped against her bed, woke instantly and in full possession of her faculties.

  “Stop where you are,” she challenged the Stygian darkness, “or I’ll blow you to smithereens!”

  The schoolteacher fumbled for the bedside lamp, remembered suddenly that the electricity was off, and finally found a match.

  She lighted it, and then let the menacing hairbrush fall from her hand. It was no longer necessary to pretend to be armed. The only intruder in her room was an inkwell, a heavy glass inkwell. Affixed to it by means of a rubber band was an oblong pamphlet which, Miss Hildegarde Withers soon ascertained, was a timetable of the Ferrocarriles Nacionales.

  Frowning in honest bewilderment, she went swiftly to the open window, peered down at the dark and deserted street. Then, lighting another match, she noticed that on the timetable all northbound trains had been marked with suggestive red crayon.

  VII

  Miss Withers Sees Red

  INSPECTOR OSCAR PIPER awoke suddenly from the troubled sleep which was always his lot in a strange bed. He yawned, scratched his neck, and blinked at the glorious sunshine which flooded his hotel room. The windows were twin pictures, watercolors of incredible blue sky, soft moist clouds, and a fine gray-yellow stone church tower in the distance.

  Unfortunately it was not the mellow clang of the ancient church bells of Santa Veracruz which had awakened the grizzled police veteran but the overshrill screaming of a telephone placed on a table some few inches from his left ear. Wearily he picked it up, said “Hello?”

  “Not dead yet?” came a brisk feminine voice.

  “Huh?”

  “The candy, you know,” explained Miss Hildegarde Withers. “Any bad results?”

  “Certainly not!” Then, with a rising wrath, “Did you have to go and wake me up just to ask foolish questions?”

  “I thought it best, Oscar. The early bird, you know.”

  The inspector said petulantly that he didn’t care for worms and never had. “But since there’s no chance of any rest with you in town, I suppose I might as well get up. Meet you in the lobby in half an hour.”

  “Good!” said Miss Withers. “And I’ll have something to open your eyes.” Hanging up the receiver on this cryptic remark, she hurried out of her room, climbed one flight of stairs, and knocked at the door of 307.

  Within all was silence, and she knocked again. And then the door was opened, but not by Adele Mabie.

  She found herself staring closely into the face—much too closely, the thought struck her—of Alderman Francis Mabie. He was clothed in a greenish-yellow dressing gown, beneath which showed well-wrinkled lavender pajamas. Having as yet neither combed his sparse hair nor shaved, the alderman looked as villainous as a man can look. In one hand he gripped a tall highball.

  Miss Withers sniffed disapprovingly. “Oh, I didn’t mean to interrupt your breakfast.” She looked past him. “I’d like to see your wife for a moment.”

  “Adele’s gone out.”

  “Out? Out where—with whom?”

  “She didn’t say,” Mabie admitted. “Shopping, I guess. She just got up early and went.” Suddenly his eyes fell on the two-kilo box of Larin chocolat
es which Miss Withers held in her hand. “Oh, so that’s where they went!”

  She nodded, held it out to him. “Just my old kleptomania coming back on me,” the schoolteacher told him. “I always repent afterward.”

  Mabie stepped backward, eying her dubiously. “Take it,” Miss Withers said. He accepted it automatically, placed it on the little glass-topped writing desk across the room.

  “Do you want to know why I really borrowed it last night?” She went on. “Or can you guess?”

  It was evident that Mabie could guess.

  “The police,” Miss Withers said, “are only interested in murders after they happen. I would rather prevent one murder than solve a dozen.” She walked toward the desk. “Do you mind if I leave a note for your wife, now I’m here?”

  “Go ahead,” he invited and sank into a modernistic armchair to nurse his drink.

  The schoolteacher crossed the room, sat down at the tiny desk. There was a rack of hotel stationery, a long wooden pen with a rusty steel point. “No ink?” she asked casually.

  “In the drawer,” he suggested. There was a heavy glass inkwell in the desk drawer, half full. It was of a type, Miss Withers thought, which she had seen before. Concealing her disappointment as best she could, she scribbled rapidly.

  “Just giving your wife some good advice,” she explained, as she put the message in an envelope and sealed it.

  “My wife needs some advice,” Mabie said, with sudden feeling.

  Miss Withers looked at him sideways. “Oh yes—a little family argument, wasn’t it? Over whether it was best to stay and face this situation or take a plane?”

  He was in a mood to talk. “Not at all! The argument was just the usual thing that married couples quarrel about.”

  Miss Withers leaped to the conclusion that she understood everything. She knew all about triangles and green-eyed monsters.

  “The little Prothero girl?”

  He shook his head blankly. “Only one thing worth quarreling over.” He drained his drink, even smiled. “Know what it is? It’s money!”

  And now Miss Hildegarde Withers was surprised. “I thought—”

  “You thought my wife had all the money in the world, almost? Well, she has. But the more you have the more you think about it. I’ve always looked on money just as—well, as chips in a game. She thinks it’s the end and the beginning. And just because I take a little flyer—”

  “By any chance did you fall for one of Mr. Hansen’s schemes to sell baskets to the Indians or ship coal to Newcastle?” The alderman winced a little at this thrust.

  “Nothing like that!” he retorted, beginning to freeze up. “Adele wouldn’t have said anything if she wasn’t upset over this being a human target all the time. It’s enough to get on anyone’s nerves. Ordinarily Adele is the most levelheaded person I know, and the shrewdest. But now …”

  He crossed the room, took up a bottle and siphon. “This Mexican brandy isn’t so bad with soda,” he suggested. “Join me?”

  “Not this early in the morning,” Miss Withers declined, and then, both intrigued and disappointed at the results of her call, she took her departure.

  Out in the hall she hesitated, put her eye shamelessly to the keyhole of the door she had just passed through. She could see nothing but a square of window. But her ears were excellent, and she had no difficulty whatever in hearing Francis Mabie as he tore open the sealed envelope—the envelope containing an extremely unimportant and improvised message—that Miss Withers had left for his wife.

  Down in the lobby she found no trace of the inspector as yet, so she invested fifteen centavos in a copy of Universal and settled down with her pocket dictionary to translate the headlines.

  But it developed that the lobby of the Hotel Georges was this morning no place for lounging. Trucks were backed up under the front canopy, several workmen in faded denim marched in and out bearing wrenches, bits of board, and measuring tape. New as she was to Mexico, the schoolteacher realized that it must have taken an earthquake or some similar cataclysm to bring out workmen on a Sunday morning.

  The inspector finally joined her, his face well whittled from the combination of a razor with cold water. “This strike is getting on my nerves,” he began. But the hotel manager approached, full of apologies. He was a bouncing, bulging man in a wing collar and looked, Miss Withers thought, like a cross between Wally Beery and Ramon Navarro.

  “Ah, we have good news!” he announced, with a wide and toothy smile. “No more candles! No more cold water! Even if this strike goes on a week more, the Hotel Georges will from today have its own generator, its own lighting plant, at great expense. Tonight I promise lights, and hot water from seven until nine. Hotel Georges service!” And he hurried away to supervise the entrance of a large and unwieldy gasoline engine.

  “Oscar!” began Miss Withers. “Has it occurred to you …”

  He took her arm. “Breakfast first, clues afterward.” They went out into the sun-flooded street. “We’ll need our strength today.”

  Enjoying their breakfasts, this oddly assorted pair of detectives found, was easier said than done. In the first place it took even longer than usual to attract the attention of the vinegar blonde in Pangborn’s and secure menus. The breakfasts, when they came, were sketchy and cold. The waitress mumbled, when complaints were made, that everything had to be carried down four flights of stairs from charcoal ovens improvised on the roof. “¡La huelga, senor!”

  Then too, they saw where the bullet holes in the farther wall were visible, two staring black eyes. There seemed also to be a smeary stain on the tile floor where only yesterday a horrible blotch of color had died. The gaudy worm, the writhing snake with its rings of yellow and red and black …

  As dessert Miss Withers handed to the inspector a railway timetable marked in commanding red crayon. “First blood, Oscar! Results!”

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “Well, I do. A delicate little hint to mind my own business and catch a train out of town. Which must mean that we are getting warm.”

  Piper conceded that. “But who do you suppose …”

  “If we knew that, this case would be washed up,” she told him. They came out into the street again. The sun was gone, and the Hotel Georges loomed against the sky, a sky now more slaty gray than blue. Great dark thunderheads massed from the south.

  Miss Withers pointed up. “There’s my window, the one where the curtain is blowing.”

  He squinted. “It proves one thing, anyway. You were right all along in eliminating the Prothero girl.”

  “Was I? Why?”

  “No dame in God’s world could throw hard enough and straight enough to toss a weight in that window from here,” he pointed out. “That’s two stories up.”

  Miss Withers agreed. “We can now eliminate everybody but Hansen and the alderman and Lighton and Mr. Ippwing and Julio Mendez and-and yourself.”

  Somewhere in the direction of the Alameda a crowd was gathering and a band was playing under the great elms. But Miss Withers at the moment felt no interest in civic affairs.

  “One moment,” she told the inspector. There was some building in progress on the corner of San Juan de Letran, and a pile of bricks stood invitingly near by alongside the boardings. “I’d like to make a harmless little experiment.”

  Before he could stop her the good lady seized a brickbat and poised herself beneath that high distant oblong which was her window. “I wonder, Oscar …”

  But the experiment was nipped in the bud as a voice behind them spoke sharply. “No, lady!” They both turned to see a policeman, a very military and dapper policeman. Upon his right sleeve he wore tiny American, German and French flags as a sign that he was an accomplished linguist and thus received three pesos extra pay a day for his ability to speak to tourists in their own tongues.

  “No, lady!” he repeated earnestly, taking the brickbat from her and tossing it back on the pile. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, a fine lady like
you—at this hour of the morning!”

  His voice was thick with that persuasive, buttery tone which people save for naughty children, the insane, and alcoholics. But Miss Withers faced him, snapped: “I am not a typical American tourist, young man. And I am not under the influence of liquor.”

  Piper put in: “You ought to see that this lady isn’t a night owl.”

  Swift comprehension dawned upon the face of the policeman. He looked from Miss Withers to the scene of the excitement in the Alameda, saw the red banners tossing against the green of the trees, heard the music of the “Internationale.” “But of course,” he said. “It is only a little demonstration, a protest against capitalist greed? The lady, she is sympathetic to Labor? A thousand pardons.” With a wary and apologetic smile the officer withdrew, faded around the corner.

  Miss Hildegarde Withers, whose mind was something of a single track, looked longingly at the pile of bricks, but the inspector took her arm firmly. “Come on, Emma Goldman,” he advised her. “Let’s get inside out of the Revolution.”

  They ascertained, by the simple expedient of inquiring of the pleasant young lady at the switchboard, that Adele Mabie had not yet returned.

  “Oscar, I’m a little worried,” Miss Withers announced. “I promised myself that I wasn’t going to let that woman out of my sight if I could help it, and now she’s running around the city alone.”

  “As long as she’s alone,” Piper pointed out dryly, “she’ll be all right.”

  “You know what I mean,” the schoolteacher said. “Anyway, I’m going to sit right down here and wait until she comes in. I have a very strong hunch that something is about to happen, and a stronger one that I’m going—that we’re going—to miss out on it.”

  They sat down and busied themselves with ineffectual efforts to snub the swarms of shoeshine boys with their little boxes and their wide hopeful smiles.

  “You know,” Piper said ruefully, “at thirty centavos per shine this is running into money.”

  They waited and watched. At eleven o’clock the chofer of a taxi-cab entered, loaded down with parcels, boxes, an armful of bulky Tolucan baskets painted with peones, horses, cockfight scenes, cactus, and Mexican flags—all in bright yellows and reds and greens on a loud purple ground. He dumped them at the desk, mentioned a name, and departed.