Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla Read online

  “Adele is busy somewhere, we know that,” Miss Withers pointed out.

  At noon two small urchins appeared, bearing armfuls of red carnations, lilies, gladioli and water lilies. They also carried earthen pots, bright green pottery ware and glassware, and several serapes much brighter than anything seen heretofore.

  “Adele Mabie has discovered the markets,” Miss Withers deduced.

  This interlude ended, the manager approached. “More Hotel Georges service,” he told them gaily.

  “We have tickets in the primera filia for the Toreo—first-row tickets. Better get yours while they last.”

  “Tickets?” Piper demanded. “For what?”

  “Ah, for the bullfight, señor! Everybody goes to the Toreo on Sunday afternoon in Mexico.”

  “Everybody but us,” Miss Withers told the man firmly.

  Then she caught sight of a familiar gaunt figure at a writing desk across the lobby. She waved invitingly, and after a moment Rollo Lighton came cheerfully toward them, stuffing hotel stationery into his coat pocket.

  “Didn’t know you were living here too,” Piper greeted him.

  “I’m not,” Lighton said. “You must come and see my little apartment sometime. Nothing grand, but furnished in some antiques that I’ve picked up here and there. I use it as my office too—where I do all my publicity work.”

  “Oh, you don’t confine yourself to corresponding for newspapers?” Miss Withers asked him.

  He shrugged. “I’m only hooked up with the New York World, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, the Seattle P.I. and the Los Angeles Examiner,” he explained, with a wave of his thin arm.

  “Doesn’t keep me busy, not me. So I do booklets and ads and publicity. Just got a swell order too,” he confided, sinking comfortably into a chair. “A rush order from the government!”

  “Really!” said Miss Withers.

  Lighton nodded. “Have to turn out a hundred publicity stories by ten o’clock tonight, all about the Laredo highway. For the news broadcasts that the government sends to American newspapers. Ought to bring tourists down, eh?” He looked inquiringly from Piper to Miss Withers. “Don’t suppose either of you has a typewriter I could borrow? Mine is just temporarily out of service.”

  “I haven’t a typewriter,” Miss Withers assured him, “but I could lend you a fountain pen.”

  Much to her surprise Mr. Lighton took the pen. He lingered a moment. “I happen to know a wonderful little bar around the corner,” he hinted hopefully. “Their brandy cocktails are famous all over the world. It’s chock-full of atmosphere too—a place you really ought to see.”

  Nobody took him up on the suggestion, and he finally faded away. “You know, Oscar,” Miss Withers said, “I don’t like that man.”

  The inspector laughed and said that newspaper men were a funny lot.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Particularly correspondents for the New York World. You wouldn’t remember, but the World died four or five years ago—just about the time we were mixed up in that aquarium affair.”

  At that moment another chofer entered the lobby, bending under the weight of two wicker chairs and a card table with a leather top painted with mescal plant designs around the yellow circle of the Aztec calendar stone. “Adele is still going strong,” Piper said.

  This time there seemed to be a certain amount due on the purchases, and as the clerk seemed dubious about laying out the money, the alderman had to be telephoned. He came weaving down the stairs, walking with the exaggerated dignity of the half swozzled. Without protest Mabie paid for the C.O.D. He also paid for two bullfight tickets, leaving one encased in an envelope to be placed in the letter box in Adele’s name.

  “Tell Mrs. Mabie that I’m out doing a little shopping of my own,” he said in a loud and petulant voice. “I’ll meet her at the bull ring.”

  He went out of the hotel, with only a surly nod at the two watchers. “Ten to one he’ll do his shopping at the Papillon bar,” Piper said.

  Miss Withers nodded, “Oscar, there’s a man with something on his mind.”

  “Huh?” said Piper. “Guilty conscience, eh?”

  She shook her head slowly. “I don’t know. But somebody must have!” As she was about to continue, the Ippwings suddenly hove in sight, dressed in their Sunday best.

  “Oh, I do hope it doesn’t go and rain!” cried the little old lady, peering dubiously at the somewhat murky exterior. “I’ll be so disappointed if they call off the bullfight. I know our daughter is counting on my writing a long, long letter all about it.”

  “Mr. Hemingway is our daughter’s favorite author,” Ippwing confessed. “Myself, I like biographies better.”

  “We have only five days in the city,” Mrs. Ippwing continued. “These tours, you know!” She smiled at Miss Withers. “We’ve got to get through two frescoes and a church somehow this afternoon, besides the bullfight!” They trotted out.

  It was true, the afternoon was drawing on. Suddenly Miss Withers arose. “Oscar, we must up and away.”

  He nodded. “If everybody’s going to the bullfight, we might as well—”

  “We might as well do nothing of the kind!” the schoolteacher snapped. “Don’t you see—with everybody accounted for at the bullfight, this is a wonderful chance to do a little quiet research?”

  “A little breaking and entering, you mean?” Oscar Piper brightened at the prospect of action.

  Miss Withers was already hailing a libre. And she amazed the inspector by the address she gave.

  “I thought you’d eliminated Dulcie!” he complained. “What use is it …” But they went to the Hotel Milano all the same.

  It turned out to be a small hotel, an old and sad and dingy hotel stuck off and forgotten on a side street not far from where a great unfinished Arch of Triumph stood as a monument to the incurable optimism of some previous political administration.

  The lobby was narrow and dark, and deserted besides. Piper rang the bell on the desk and finally a callow youth appeared, with a bottle of beer in one hand and a tortilla in the other.

  They learned, after much travail with language difficulties, that the Señorita Prothero was registered in Room 23 but was out.

  “Never mind,” Miss Withers said confidently. “Have you any vacancies on that floor?” The youth gaped at her, open-mouthed. She tried again, calling upon her Spanish dictionary, and finally succeeded in making the lad understand that she wanted a single room.

  Borrowing five pesos from the inspector, since lack of baggage indicated that payment in advance was required, she received a massive iron key at least four inches long. The number on it was twenty-eight.

  “See you later, Oscar!” said Miss Withers meaningfully. The youth led her up one flight of stairs, indicated a door, and departed clutching his tostón tip.

  Five minutes later the inspector, feeling a little foolish, came stealthily up the stairs and caught Miss Hildegarde Withers in the act of picking the lock of Room 23, making use of a hairpin. The door finally yielded, and they entered a small cubbyhole whose only window was a square of glass opening onto an airshaft.

  “I still don’t see why we’re going to all this trouble,” Piper complained. “I told you I’d come around to your idea that this Prothero girl is innocent.”

  “I’m just contrary enough,” Miss Withers told him, “to keep on the opposite side from you. It will, I think, improve my average. Besides …” She put on her most cryptic expression.

  “Besides what?”

  “Besides, the real reason we’re here is the geological fact that there are no emeralds in Mexico. Gold, yes. Silver, yes. Rubies of a sort, garnets and aquamarines—but no emeralds!”

  With a deftness born of long experience the inspector took the lead in searching the little room. It was simple enough, for the place held only a bed, a dressing table, a chair, and a wardrobe. In one corner stood Dulcie’s suitcase, empty.

  The inspector worked slowly from corner to corner, from one
piece of furniture to another, Miss Withers following closely after him. “Well, Oscar? What do you make of it? What story does this place tell to the trained observer?”

  He frowned in his best professional manner. “The girl is broke, certainly, or she wouldn’t have come to a hotel like this, where there isn’t even a private bath. She’s neat, because what clothes she has are all laid out nice and straight in the drawers. She’s clean …” He pointed to an improvised clothesline stretched from bedpost to window, upon which depended four pairs of silk stockings plus other more intimate articles of feminine wear.

  Miss Withers nodded. “Please go on!”

  “Only one thing strikes me as out of place,” he said. “That!” And he pointed to a grisly object which hung by a bright red ribbon from the top of the mirror frame. It was a dried, mummified triangle, oddly curved, and covered with bleached reddish hair. “Looks like an animal’s ear,” he concluded.

  “Doesn’t it! And I suppose that there’s a dried toad plus some foul-smelling herbs and a wax image of Adele with a pin stuck through it, if we only can find them.” The schoolteacher shook her head. “Dulcie will have to explain her quaint keepsake later. But right now, isn’t there anything else?”

  The inspector said he didn’t see anything.

  “On the dressing table, perhaps?” she hinted.

  He still shook his head blankly, shook it even when the schoolteacher pointed to a half-empty jar of cream.

  “You don’t mean you think there’s poison in that?” Piper demanded.

  “Poison? Oh no. Just freckle cream. Elixir anti-freckle cream, sold in Longacre Square drugstores for two dollars …”

  Suddenly he remembered her telegram. “With a fifty-cent bottle of Elixir d’Amour thrown in!” The inspector smacked one fist into his other palm. “Then the poison bottle was hers!”

  Miss Hildegarde Withers looked very thoughtful. “This changes everything,” she said. “Perhaps we’d better drop in at the bullfight after all.”

  “I told you so!” Oscar Piper insisted.

  VIII

  The Moment of Truth

  THE PLAZA DE TOROS WAS A great black pillbox against the sky, against a low, confining sky that shut away the usual view of the pure snowy peaks of Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl. Yet to mountains who have looked down upon black obsidian knives exposing the blood and entrails of a thousand Aztec captives on one of Moctezuma’s gala afternoons, it could have been no hardship to miss the death of six bulls.

  A moist, malicious little wind, promising rain, whipped at Miss Withers’ skirts as she followed the inspector through the outer gate. From inside the pillbox came the roar of the crowd, a vast and muffled yapping. Then suddenly, over everything, the piercing crystal-pure notes of a trumpet.

  Ahead of them was the short flight of steps leading to one of the sombra entrances, but first they must ran a long tawdry gauntlet—a gauntlet of screaming children offering long green strips of lottery tickets, vendors of blood-darkened souvenirs of other bullfights in the shape of darts and strips of torn cape and polished, mounted horn. There were flower sellers, grimacing beggars who waved their horrible deformities in the air, naked babies with outstretched palms, dogs that were only snarling hairy skeletons …

  “Oh dear!” cried Miss Hildegarde Withers, gripping the inspector’s arm irresolutely. But they went on, on to meet a man who was running down the steps toward them at a ridiculous sort of trot. It was Francis Mabie, his plumpness somehow deflated, and his face—usually a smooth expanse of pink flesh—now a sickly green tint. He was cold sober.

  “Surely it’s not over?” Miss Withers demanded of him. He paused for a moment, smiled feebly with pale gray lips.

  “For me it is,” said Mabie, and he plunged on past them. The man looked, Miss Withers thought, as if he had just seen an exceptionally grisly ghost. They both stared after him curiously for a moment and then went on. Through a gate, and then suddenly they found themselves standing on a ledge of concrete halfway up a curving slope of tiers, somewhat like two ants on the inner side of half an orange peel. Over the heads of the crowd they looked down upon a circular arena of bright smooth sand, a circular stage upon which two actors played.

  There was a small roan bull and there was a boy in a bright-spangled gold jacket, and they faced each other in the exact center of the arena. The boy held a wisp of scarlet serge and a long thin sliver of curved steel, but the bull was watching only the rag.

  There was no usher, and the numbers on the gray concrete seats were hard to find. “Let’s just sit anywhere,” the inspector said, putting his tissue-paper stubs away in his pocket.

  Miss Withers glared at him. “We’re not here to sit! We’re here for a purpose!”

  “To find the Prothero girl?” Piper said, with a sidelong glance.

  “Something like that.”

  But they found almost everyone else first. The Ippwings were most easily located, the birdlike old couple vociferously applauding the young matador as he lured the bull into a series of charges, lifting the cloth at the last moment so that the animal slapped its horns vainly against air.

  The old couple moved over hospitably. “Sit down, folks,” cried Mr. Ippwing, “and Mother will read out of the guidebook so we’ll know what it’s all about.”

  “Not just now,” Miss Withers regretted. The things she had to know weren’t printed in the guidebooks. “Is anybody else here—anybody we know?” she asked.

  “Why, let me see! Mr. Hansen is in the front row down there—right next to those two Mexican hussies that made eyes at Father when they came in. Oh yes, they did too, Marcus Ippwing. And we saw that redheaded Prothero girl a moment ago, going down the aisle with a man. And …” Mrs. Ippwing rose suddenly to her feet, screeched “Look out, son!” and subsided. “I thought the bull had him that time,” she confessed. “Where was I?”

  “We ran into that newspaperman, Lighton, or whatever his name is, outside the gate,” Ippwing reminded her. “As we came in.”

  “Oh yes, and he said he’d left his billfold and all his money at home. He wanted to know if Father would buy a ticket for him, but—”

  “But I’ve seen smooth talkers like him at the state fair,” said Marcus Ippwing. “Mother thought I was impolite—”

  “Many thanks,” Miss Withers cut in. “You haven’t seen Mrs. Mabie anywhere, then?”

  Nobody had seen Adele Mabie. They moved on along the aisle, the inspector tripping from time to time as he turned to watch the events in the arena. Out there the atmosphere grew tenser, the bull flinging himself more furiously at the rag but slowing in the speed of his rushes. The boy grew more daring. Once he raised the sword to his eye level, but the crowd across the ring in the cheap sol seats cried “No” with one voice.

  Protesting feebly, the inspector was dragged up and down the tiers of seats, through the crowd. They found many a familiar face as they climbed higher toward the roofed boxes and balcony which lined the upper rim of the pillbox. There was the manager of the Georges, the vinegar blonde from the restaurant, the pumpkin-faced Pullman conductor with his family. The inspector recognized, with a start, two agentes de policia. They were the two who had formed part of his reception committee at the train. One of them wore a fine purple eye.

  Most surprising of all, the agentes were bending over a young man who sat alone in the last row under the shadow of the empty boxes overhead. They were speaking in excited Spanish accents to Señor Julio Mendez, who was equipped with the blue beret and the bright malacca stick but was without his accustomed air of jauntiness.

  “Sí, señores,” Miss Withers heard him say. “Sí.”

  Then suddenly Julio looked up with a bright welcoming smile. “My American friends!” He rose, pushing aside the officers, and came toward the two intruders as if more than happy to be interrupted in his conference. The agentes looked at him queerly and then finally moved away.

  Shaking hands with Miss Withers, young Julio looked over his shoulder, murmurin
g “Dumbsbells!” At her raised eyebrows he smiled widely and said, “Such police we are having in my country. Such meddlesome idiots! They can ask more questions than two men can answer.”

  Piper said, “Uh huh,” a bit dubiously.

  “But never mind them. Sit with me and I tell you about bullfights, eh? From up here we get a fine view, we see the fiesta complete with crowd and everything.”

  “That’s what we came for—to see everything,” Miss Withers admitted. They sat.

  Far below them the spectacle in the arena was coming to its climax. The silver-jacketed subordinates with the cerise capes had been deploying the bull, but now the matador came forth again, jaunty as a fighting cock.

  “We see how this one can kill,” Julio explained. “All these boys today, they are novilleros, beginners.”

  “Amateur Hour, eh?” said the inspector. “An amateur fighter against a little bull, to make it even.”

  Julio laughed scornfully at that. “Even? Nothing, my friends, is even, is sporting, in all this. The bullfight is the assassination of a bull in the most possible of beautiful and dangerous methods. This young Perez has done well with cape and cloth, but it is the sword that counts.”

  Down in the arena the bull had stopped charging and now stood with head down, feet apart, eyes on the muleta which Perez held with his left hand, flicking it gently from side to side. As it moved the bull’s head followed it—the entire scene in the slowest of slow motion.

  Perez, the crowd hushed and waiting for him now, drew the thin sliver of sword again. Suddenly he poised himself like a ballet dancer and then ran toward the bull as it charged.

  They seemed to meet head on, and Miss Withers wanted to close her eyes but could not. Then somehow the bull’s horn swept past under the boy’s spangled shoulder, the bull’s head was buried in the folds of the muleta, and the sword began to disappear.