Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (17 page)

“When you and I and Adele Mabie were standing in the exit, perhaps? And all our suspects out of the place. Dear me, it’s most provoking! But, at any rate, doesn’t that alibi clear your friend Mr. Mabie?”

Oscar Piper said he hoped it would. “All the same, I wish I had a better setup to spring on de Silva tomorrow morning, something that would tie up the two murders.”

Miss Withers said that offhand she could think of three possibilities, all better than the fairy tale he had just suggested to her. “Involving the Ippwings, the Gay Caballero, Dulcie, or any combination of the three.”

But as he looked hopeful she shook her head. “Not tonight, Oscar. The guidebooks all mention the difficulty of sleeping in this high altitude, but not even you are going to prevent me from trying.”

She gave her hair the requisite hundred strokes in record time, blew out her candle. Then she slept, so soundly that not even the messenger which floated in her window disturbed her slumbers.

A
LL THAT NIGHT
strike committees in the Palacio Nacional dictated terms to the secretary of the luckily absent
presidente,
while owl cabarets closed their doors in dismal candlelight, milk soured in the suburbs, scalpels went unsterilized in the hospitals, and American tourists grumbled even in their sleep. But the sun rose over the mile and a half high capital of Mexico, strike or no strike, strictly on schedule.

With it rose Miss Hildegarde Withers. The good lady girded her loins for battle in a prim blue serge suit that was in its third summer. She descended the hotel stairs and much to her surprise caught the inspector buying his day’s rations of cigars in the hotel lobby.

“Have you changed your mind about early birds and worms?” she greeted him. “Stealing a march on me, Oscar?”

They found a hole-in-the-wall place where black Mexican coffee, smelling vilely of chicory, could be obtained. She was afire with excitement but would not talk until they had broken their fast and the inspector had lovingly lighted that first wonderful cigar of the new day.

“I’ve got just ten minutes,” he said. “So shoot!”

Then he leaped out of his chair as she suited the action to the word and from a newspaper parcel produced, almost in his face, one of the most vicious weapons he had ever seen.

It was a round slender shaft a little more than two feet long, wrapped in frills of blue and gold tissue paper, with a harpoon-shaped point of blood-darkened steel.

“The murder weapon, Oscar!”

He stared in wonder. “The police let
you
have it?”

“Well, perhaps not
the
murder weapon. But a
banderilla
is a
banderilla,
except for the difference in color of the paper they glue on them. After the bullfights they take the things out of the dead bulls and sell them as souvenirs.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t buy any…” Piper stopped. “Did you get that from Mrs. Mabie?”

Smiling, Miss Withers shook her head. “The souvenirs that Adele bought were of black and gold. This particular little toy was sticking into my floor this morning when I woke. It must have come sailing in the window during the night.” She sniffed. “A difficult country for a lover of fresh air, Oscar. I’ve half a mind to keep my window closed.”

“Good Lord, yes! Why, that thing might have struck you.”

“Not much chance of that. It’s just another warning to mind my own business.”

Piper took the thing, hefted it. “Why, it’s only a wooden stick with a sort of straightened-out fishhook at the end!”

She nodded. “The point is fearfully sharp, Oscar. But, all the same, I think it would take quite a bit of doing, as the English say, to drive this thing through cloth and flesh into a man’s heart, from behind!”

Oscar Piper agreed to that. “Which is why de Silva thinks it must have been a man who killed Fitz.”

“Even a man must have had his work cut out for him,” said the schoolteacher. “There must have been some commotion—a gasp or a moan. You’d think that in all that crowd of a thousand or two people we could have one eyewitness!”

The inspector shrugged. “Everyone was doing just what we were doing, looking at the bullfight as the rain stopped the fun. Anybody could have moved up behind Fitz, and biff!”

“Easy as that, eh?” Miss Withers looked a bit dubious. “Oscar, I have an idea. Do you suppose that Captain de Silva would like two visiting experts instead of one?”

“What?” Piper drew back.

“I’d like a talk with that young man, because I have a theory—”

“Now look here, Hildegarde, I don’t think that the authorities here will be anxious to take theories from a foreigner—and a woman at that. You work your theory out and tell it to me, and I’ll suggest it to the captain.” He looked at his watch. “Say, I’ve got to run if I’m going to see him at his office. You amuse yourself this morning.”

He rushed jauntily away, leaving a ruffled spinster staring after him.

“Amuse myself!” said Hildegarde Withers. She went out into the street, then suddenly stopped, nodded and hailed a taxicab. “I’ll just see how little Dulcie is this morning.”

Dulcie was fine.

She was sitting up in bed with a tray of breakfast, the nurse already gone. But the two women met with a certain strained note in their voices.

“I can’t look at you without thinking that I’m playing hooky,” Dulcie admitted after a while.

“You mustn’t feel that way,” said the schoolteacher gently. “I believe in you, Dulcie. And I’m sure that you have some excellent explanation for the money they found pinned to your underwear when you were brought in here last night.”

She waited hopefully. But Dulcie was through answering questions.

“No,” said the girl, “I haven’t any explanation at all.”

“But my dear child! Don’t you see—”

“It isn’t mine,” Dulcie admitted. “It belongs to somebody else.” And that was that.

There was a large and exquisite bouquet of roses on the table beside the bed. Miss Withers bent to sniff them. “Ah,” she observed brightly, “are these from your friend Bobsie?”

The girl on the bed did not speak. She looked down at the coverlet, pleated it carefully, and then smoothed it out again. She shook her head soberly.

“From Julio—I mean, Mr. Mendez,” she confessed finally. “I don’t know how he heard that I—that I’d had an accident, but they just arrived. And he sent a note saying that he’d be over a little later.”

“Then I must be running along so that you can comb your hair and make yourself beautiful,” Miss Withers said. She stopped in the doorway. “Oh, by the way—I know that was an accident you had, but take my advice and don’t go wandering around Violetta Street after dark any more.”

Dulcie’s eyes widened. “Oh! Why, of course not! Why should—Oh well, I’m coming back to work for Mrs. Mabie, anyway.”

At Miss Withers’ honest amazement the girl flushed. “Oh, not as a maid this time. That was an awful flop. But Mrs. Mabie says she has forgotten all that. She says that she wants to make up to me for being so short-tempered when she fired me in Laredo. I’m to be a big help to her with her curios. She wants to start a curio shop when she gets back to New York, you see. And I can help in buying and packing and checking.”

“The two of you ought to be able to buy out half Mexico,” said the schoolteacher thoughtfully.

“So I’m moving over to your hotel today,” Dulcie went on. “Do you think I’m doing the right thing?”

Miss Withers told her that she would hesitate to say that about anybody’s doing anything.

“Mrs. Mabie said that it would be a real favor, that she would like to have someone with her all the time,” Dulcie went on explaining.

The schoolteacher nodded. “Perhaps it’s not such a bad idea at that, if you keep your eyes and ears open.”

Dulcie looked shocked. “You mean I ought to spy on Mrs. Mabie?”

“On Mrs. Mabie, and on Mr. Mabie, and on everybody else within spying distance,” Miss Hildegarde Withers went on solemnly. “And that includes the Gay Caballero too.” With that parting shot she hurried out of the room.

She had several other errands to accomplish this morning, errands of the greatest importance. One of them took her to Cook’s Travel Bureau, where she spent some time in thumbing through booklets. Then on down the street.

“I hope Oscar and the captain are having better hunting than I am!” she said to herself in the high spirit of sportsmanship.

There were worried lines on the high forehead of Captain de Silva of the Mexico City Police that morning. Nor did the checking of alibis serve to smooth his troubled brow. Indeed, inside of half an hour he and the inspector were up to their ears in alibis.

Mr. and Mrs. Marcus Ippwing were trapped in their room at the Hotel Georges, trapped in the very act of writing a joint letter to their daughter back home in Peoria. “Our invalid daughter, you know. Poor girl, she does love hearing everything. She was badly burned in an accident some years ago, but thank heavens we finally got a good cash settlement out of the lawsuit, and Ella has every comfort.”

Captain de Silva cut in to say that all he wanted to know was how they had spent their time from four to six o’clock yesterday. The Ippwings stared at each other. “You don’t mean—he doesn’t mean—”

“It’s only a formality, folks,” Piper hastily put in. “Just a matter of elimination. You see, we’ve all been rather mixed up in this thing.”

“Yes, of course,” said Marcus Ippwing dubiously. “Why, Mother and I walked out of the bullfight because we didn’t like the way it was going—”

“I didn’t mind their killing the bulls, but it didn’t seem right to make fun of them,” Mrs. Ippwing finished for him.

“And after you left?” prodded the captain, notebook in hand.

The birdlike old couple looked at each other again, each spoke at once. “Why, we came home—home to the hotel!”

De Silva nodded amiably. “The clerk says that you arrived here about seven o’clock or after, yes?”

“That’s right! We walked home, and we didn’t know how far it was—and then, coming through the square they call the Zocalo, Mother wanted to stop and have a look at the cathedral…”

Captain de Silva wrote down solemnly that the Ippwings had walked from the bull ring to Madero Avenue by way of the Zocalo, which amounted to going twice around Robin Hood’s barn.

“Sure, come on in!” welcomed Mr. Al Hansen. He sat at the desk in his hotel room, the radio going full blast, and was dressed informally in his underwear. Before him a number of sheets of hotel writing paper were covered with neat pencil sketches.

“Just trying out some designs for sweepstakes tickets,” he admitted. “You know, a lot depends on how you impress the buyer with a ticket. And I just got the idea that if I could get the Mexican National Lottery to authorize me to run a sweep on the Santa Anita Handicap, there’d be millions in it—millions!”

“There’d be a million headaches trying to get those tickets across the border,” the inspector told him. “But that’s not why we came.”

“Sure, I was wondering when somebody would be along to ask me questions about Mike Fitz, poor guy,” Hansen told the officers. “I’ve known him for years, and we’ve made a few dollars for each other now and then. I used to handle the San Francisco end, because I wasn’t popular down here south of the border with the old regime. Mike was a great promoter, but he had one weakness—dames. If you want my opinion, it was a dame who did him in yesterday.”

Captain de Silva nodded, and his voice came smooth as satin. “We only want to know where you went when you left the bullfight, Mr. Hansen.”

“Yeah,” agreed Piper. “Not that it cuts any ice, but just as a formality.”

Hansen nodded, but his pink face was reddening a little. He went over to the wardrobe, fumbled in his black suit. “Here’s my alibi,” he said, producing a small photograph of a large woman, a large and slightly leering woman. She was photographed as only a Mexico City photographer could have pictured her, and looked somewhat like a madame on parade.

“Her name’s Consuela,” he admitted. “But the telephone number I’m keeping to myself. I met her at the bullfight, and is she one hot number! Crazy about bullfights too, and that’s how we got to talking.”

“Yeah,” interrupted the inspector, “but what we want—”

“Sure, sure,” Hansen agreed. “You saw me walk out of the place while young Nicanor was monkeying with that light-colored bull? Well, it’s simple enough. I wanted to make a hit with the dame, so I went out to get some flowers.”

“What in blazes for?” demanded the inspector. “Why not later, if you had to give her posies?”

“Women like to throw down roses to the matador,” Al Hansen said. “When he’s killed his bull. Only I had hell’s own time finding a flower place open on Sunday, and, as it worked out, the lady wouldn’t have tossed them down anyway on account of the bull didn’t get killed. I didn’t get back to the bullfight in time to beat the rain, so I missed her.”

“Then how the picture?”

Hansen smiled. “She had my card. And in the mail this morning she sent me the photo—and her phone number.”

Captain de Silva wrote steadily in his notebook. He looked up, shook his head sadly. “It is unfortunate,
señor,
that you have not better witnesses to say where you were. Because of your known ill will toward the deceased Mr. Fitz.”

“My what?” Hansen was amazed. “Why, Mike and I were like that!” He held up two pudgy fingers.

Captain de Silva looked toward the inspector, and his left eye folded in a wink. They started for the doorway, turned.

“It is too bad then that my
agentes
lie. They say,
señor,
that you appeared before
a juez municipal
on Saturday and asked for a writ of attachment against the property, real or personal, of Mr. Michael Fitz. I shall personally see to it that the men responsible—”

“Wait!” cried Hansen. “Take it easy, will you? That writ was only to scare Mike with if he still held out. He had until Sunday night to come through on a little business deal. You see, from the train we wired him—I mean, I wired him—some money—”

“We
?” said Captain de Silva pleasantly.

Hansen shook his head. “Not at liberty to talk about that, I’m afraid. It was just a business deal.” His mouth closed like a trap.