Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (21 page)

Julio said he was stumped by that one.

“Second, I want to know why Adele Mabie is afraid of the little Prothero girl!”

“But—but she has been so kind to Dulcie! She takes her back, gives her the job!”

“Exactly! That’s how I know she’s afraid of her. Perhaps she thinks she’s safer to have Dulcie where she can watch her every minute.”

Julio wouldn’t agree to that. “Dulcie Prothero don’t kill somebody—I bet you anything. But anyway, go on.”

“Third, why does Dulcie Prothero, in desperate financial straits, wear a small fortune pinned to her—pinned under her dress?”

“My guess would be, maybe…” Julio began. But Miss Withers told him that she could do her own guessing, what she needed was facts.

“I don’t understand that young lady, in spite of the fact that I knew her when her red hair was in pigtails. Either her heart is broken, or she thinks it is broken…” Miss Withers shook her head. “At any rate, my fourth question is—Why does a man in a heavy rainproof coat need an umbrella in a drizzle?”

The young man thought for a moment. “You’ll have to ask
Señor
Fitz that question on the ouija board, no?”

She went on. “Fifth, how could a
banderilla
get deep into a human body without being shot from a bow or fired from an air gun?”

“I understand about the bow,” Julio admitted. “We both made the same experiments. But the air gun—”

“Air guns make some noise,” she told him. “Besides, to shoot anything as large as that dart they would have to be specially designed. None of our suspects is a gunsmith.”

They had paused outside the window of a little shoeshop on the Calle Dolores. Inside, beneath the yellow rays of a lantern hung above his bench, a gnarled old man in a big apron sent his awl through the leather sole of a
zapato
again and again, following it each time with the needle and waxed thread.

“I see what you mean,” Julio agreed. “Then we got to go back to the first idea, that somebody stick
Señor
Fitz from behind?”

She nodded. “But as Captain de Silva or someone pointed out, it would take the strongest man in the world to drive a shaft of wood with a steel barb that deeply into flesh. If it had been the bullfighters’ sword, the
acero,
that would be different. But a
banderilla
is just a decoration, a frill.”

She was staring in at the busy little old cobbler, as if half hypnotized by the flash of his needle, the rhythmic movement of his awl.

“Unless—unless…” she murmured.

Suddenly Miss Withers turned on Julio, a new expression on her face. “Please—may I see your cane a moment?”

“My—Why, of course!” Wonderingly, he handed her the heavy malice stick, watched as she twisted and turned at the top of the handle.

“It isn’t the coming-apart one,” he advised her. “At home I got one with a long glass tube inside, for cockstails and things. But I don’t using it much.”

“I wasn’t looking for a flask; I was looking for a sword,” she admitted, handing the thing back. They started on again, Julio still burning with curiosity.

“Please!” he begged. “That wasn’t one of your important questions, no? You think I—or somebody else—sticks a sword cane into
Señor
Fitz? But that’s not how he dies! I myself saw the—the photographs in the newspaper of his body. It was a
banderilla,
sure thing you know.”

“I know, I know,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers impatiently. They were turning the corner near the hotel. “No, that wasn’t my sixth question. I don’t think I ought to tell you that one.”

“But please! I am strictly positively all ears!”

“Very well, since you ask for it,” she said. “Why in the name of heaven do you insist on talking like Leo Carrillo giving an imitation of a Mexican?”

“Wha-what?”

“Why the phony dialect?” she pressed. “I’m sick to death of it!”

For a long, long moment Julio Mendez stared at her wonderingly, unbelievingly. Then he began to laugh.

“You’re
sick of it!” he gasped. “What the hell about
me?”

“M
OS’ CERTAINLY I
recognize that photograph,” said the broad-beamed lady in the purple evening dress. “That is
Señor
Hansen, the reech handsome
Americano.
I meet with him at the bullfight.” She lounged enticingly in the doorway.

Captain de Silva put the photograph back in his pocket. “Mr. Hansen sat next to you in the first row on Sunday, is that right?”

She nodded.

“But he didn’t stay until the end, did he?”

“Ah no,
señores.
He leave when the picadors finish with the last bull, to get some roses for me. Because I tell him I like to throw down roses to young Nicanor when he kill that bull.”

De Silva turned to the inspector. “That checks,
señor,
with what you observed?”

“Absolutely,” Piper said.

“But he didn’t come back, did he?” de Silva went on.

“There was very much rain,” La Belle Consuela explained. “I have to hurry away so I will not spoil my dress.”

“And he hasn’t been back to see you since?”

“Because you lock him up!” said the woman with a toss of her head. “He will come. He has promised to take me back to the United States and give me the big send-off in the movies. He says I am wasting my time here singing in cafés—that I am like Dolores del Rio only more sex appeal.”

“I’d hate to hang by my thumbs until the day Al Harness gets her into pictures,” Oscar Piper said to the captain as they got back into the police sedan.

“At any rate,” said de Silva, “the story checks so far. Hansen left the bullfight to get flowers—”

“Saying he was going to get flowers,” Piper corrected him. “But I’ve got an idea to test the whole thing.”

Half an hour later they were rolling down Insurgentes toward the pillbox of the
toreo.
They stopped before the south gate.

“I understand,” repeated Captain de Silva. “For purposes of this experiment it is Sunday afternoon at 4:36. We can set that time because it was then that the bugle sounded for the end of the affair of the picadors. Both the young lady and you agree that Mr. Hansen left the bullfight then. You, for the moment, are Mr. Hansen, in search of a bouquet of flowers.”

He held up a stop watch. “All right—go!”

The Packard rolled slowly ahead, stopped two blocks ahead at a confectionery store. Yes, agreed the proprietor, he remembered very well that a gringo hurried in just before the rain on Sunday afternoon, asking for directions to the nearest flower market. He was directed north…Yes, it was the
señor
in the photograph.

The inspector, striding briskly along the sidewalk, was waved north. Another stop, and another…

Today there were flower sellers on every corner, women hunched over benches loaded with blooms and men strolling the streets like walking greenhouses. But on a late Sunday afternoon it had, obviously, been a different story. Al Hansen had gone on and on.

“Probably a point of pride with the guy not to come back and tell the dame that he couldn’t find the posies he’d promised her,” Piper said to himself as he trudged on.

At last, with the police sedan rolling ever ahead like a will-o’-the-wisp, the inspector came at last into the crowded and odorous streets which surround the San Juan Market. Through streets so crowded with stands, children, shopping women and dogs that there was barely room for the car to pass at a snail’s cautious pace, around corners which doubled back upon themselves, past great mounds of red and green peppers, whole mountains of shiny brown-purple beans…

Far ahead the siren of the police sedan hooted, and Piper increased his pace. He was willing to bet ten dollars that Al Hansen’s tongue would be hanging out a foot if he kept up with this speed for two blocks, let alone twelve.

Down the street of flowers, the block lined with sprawling booths which never close. It was a wilderness of perfume and color, an outdoor hothouse.

From either side soft-voiced women urged the inspector to stop and admire—not purchase, but just to look,
señor
—sweet miniature violets, great waxen water lilies like dinner plates…

Captain de Silva had already found the stall where on Sunday a hurried American had purchased two dozen red roses for twenty-eight cents United States currency. It had hardly been necessary to show the photograph, for customers who do not stop to bargain are few in the street of flowers.

It was 5:02 according to de Silva’s watch.

“Hansen would walk while he was looking for a flower booth,” the inspector suggested thoughtfully. “But once he did succeed in getting the flowers, wouldn’t he take a taxi back to the bullfight, knowing how late he was?”

“Climb in!” agreed de Silva and they roared around the corner, scattering dogs and children right and left.

“No taxi ever made the time we’re making,” the inspector said, clinging to his hat with both hands.

But though they made top speed, when finally the monkey-like driver of the police Packard slammed on his brakes outside the giant pillbox of the Plaza de Toros, Captain de Silva looked at his stop watch and shook his head.

“It is now 5:09 of Sunday afternoon,” he announced.

“Yeah,” said Inspector Oscar Piper. “And the body of Michael Fitz was discovered two minutes ago!”

Back in his little office at the
jefatura,
Captain de Silva scribbled an order, gave it to a uniformed gendarme.

“A release for the man Hansen,” he said, in Spanish.

“Sí, capitán.”
The subordinate hesitated. “And for the man Lighten too?”

De Silva shook his head. “I don’t see how we dare turn Rollo Lighten loose,” he observed to the inspector. “He has been under questioning most of the afternoon, but all we know is that he lied when he said that he spent Sunday afternoon working.”

“Any man,” said the visiting New York cop, “will lie his head off when he thinks he’s mixed up in a murder case.”

“Innocent as well as guilty, you mean? Yes, of course. But I wish we had some way to find out if Lighton tells the truth in his corrected story about coming downtown to the Papillon bar after he couldn’t sponge a free seat at the bullfight.”

“He says the alderman was there and bought him a drink, but you think maybe they’re supplying alibis for each other?” Piper hazarded.

The captain leaned back in his chair, folded his arms behind his head. “Would not fellow countrymen stick together?” he began. And then there came a heavy knocking at the door.

It was an officer. “The manager of the Papillon bar to see you,
Capitán”
he said.

“Show him in,” de Silva said wearily. “You stay, Mr. Piper.”

The fat little cock robin of a man was apologetic. “What happens when you come to my bar, I cannot understand,” he said, in many words and gestures. “So many people come and go—it is only human that once I remember wrongly, no?”

“All right, all right, it was a mistake.” De Silva cut him short. Piper stood back near the window, puffing a cigar in silence.

“Yes,
Capitán.
But there is also one other mistake. A mistake made by that new man I hire last week, that fool of a Ramon. He does not know…”

The cock robin was spluttering now.

“Yes, yes—what is it? Did he break a glass?”

“But no,
Capitán.
Much worse. I am going to fire him if it happens one more time. But in the meanwhile I think that perhaps it has to do with what you come to see me about. So I bring these!”

He produced bar bills for three separate rounds of drinks, dated Sunday and signed with a flourish by Rollo Lighton!

Interested in spite of himself, the inspector made a whispered suggestion.

De Silva nodded. “This Ramon, your new waiter—he worked all day Sunday?”

Cock Robin shook his head. “Only from four o’clock until closing,
señor.
And he accepted these signatures early, because some time before six one of the older waiters warned him that a chit signed by Mr. Lighton is good only for framing to hang over the cash registers.”

When the little man was gone the inspector threw his dead cigar into de Silva’s wastebasket. “Another suspect cleared, blast it!” he remarked. “And if you think my friend Miss Withers won’t have the laugh on me when I report.

“You’re lucky,” said Captain de Silva. “I have to make my report to the lieutenant colonel, and he won’t laugh—not any.”

Miss Hildegarde Withers, far from jeering at the inspector’s afternoon, was full of an inner excitement. “I’ve just had a nice walk and talk with Julio Mendez,” she admitted in the hotel lobby. “Don’t be misled by the beret and the cane, Oscar. That young man is well worth cultivating. We haven’t been giving half enough attention to Julio.”

“Yeah? Well, what did you and the Gay Caballero have to talk about?”

She told him, with reservations. “Mr. Mendez was very upset to hear that Adele Mabie plans to take Dulcie away tomorrow.”

He looked disgusted. “Hildegarde! You’re not trying to play matchmaker again?”

“The Happy Ending, Oscar? No, nothing like that. I’ll be satisfied if we can get through this case without another murder. Somehow I have a prickling at the back of my neck these days, as if—well, as if something were sniffing at my heels.”

He looked at her curiously. “Relax, Hildegarde! Nothing more is going to happen, not with everybody on their guard.”

She sniffed. “If I remember correctly, you were playing cards during the first murder, and you gaped at the bullfight with me during the second. So I’m taking steps of my own. When I get the answers to my six questions—no, only four now—I expect to have this case settled.”

“Questions? What questions?” he demanded.

“It’s a private list,” she told him. “But you might be able to help me with one of them. Oscar, why would a man want to eat a fighting cock?”

“What?” Then he remembered. “You can search me. Maybe he was broke and hungry.”

She shook her head. “Did you ever play bridge, Oscar?”

Piper swore that he was innocent of the charge. “Penny ante, dominoes and a fast game of cribbage are my limit.”