Puzzle of the Red Stallion (32 page)

“I—I guess I must have fainted!” Adele Mabie spoke softly, painfully.

“Quiet, Adele! You mustn’t try to …”

The inspector’s hand was clenched in his coat pocket. He was an old acquaintance, indeed he had been one of the guests at Adele Mabie’s wedding reception, but she did not know him now.

“It would be better to talk,” he said softly in her ear. “What really happened in there?”

“Now see here, Inspector!” Mabie was furious.

“Best if she answers,” Piper said. “Well?”

“I don’t know!” the woman cried. Even in her distraught condition her fingers automatically picked and patted and arranged the loose strands of her dark hair. “I don’t know what happened! Just that the customs man—”

“You don’t know him? Never saw him before?” Piper demanded.

She shook her head blankly. “Of course not. He was such a nice man, too! Barely looked at my bags, and he didn’t say a word about the three cartons of cigarettes or anything. Just smiled and made a joke or two in his funny cute accent, and then …”

She shivered. “I don’t remember …”

The others came crowding back around them. There was curious Lighton like a great eager bird, pudgy Hansen with the wide childlike eyes. Behind them were the other passengers of the car, the old couple from Peoria, the Mexican-American family with the three fat-cheeked children, the two giggling
señoritas
with the ample hips, and even an elderly Spanish gentleman with handlebar mustaches and a gold-headed cane.

The inspector scowled at the crowd, and then with sudden decision he took the woman by one arm, motioned her husband to take the other. “Come out on the rear platform,” he insisted. “The air will do you good.”

The door slammed behind them. “Now please come clean with me, Mrs. Mabie!” he pleaded.

“Listen to me!” cut in the husband angrily. “You forget that you’re not in New York now, Inspector!”

“Neither are you, and you’re going to find it out,” Piper said. “How about it, Mrs. Mabie?”

She drew back against the bulwark of her husband. “I have—nothing to tell you,” she said softly. “Nothing.”

“You can’t tell me anything about why this poor devil in there was holding this gripped in his hand when I found him? With the stopper out?” The stern policeman produced a small amber-colored bottle, shaped like a flattened hexagon. In florid green script it bore the legend “Elixir d’Amour” and beneath in smaller letters “bottled expressly for Longacre Square Pharmacies, N.Y.C.”

Mrs. Mabie still shook her head slowly, like one of the trick dolls sold on street corners.

“You don’t see anything queer about the fact that somebody just takes one whiff of your perfume and cashes in his checks? And almost takes you along with him?”

She shook her head. “Honestly, Inspector! I have a headache—”

“We’ll all have headaches before this is over. If you don’t let me help you—”

“It’s all a nightmare,” the woman whispered. “All a nightmare, and I’m going to wake up in a moment.” She nodded as if to clear her head of cobwebs. “You see,” she went on, speaking as if to a very small child or to a deaf person, “that bottle isn’t mine!”

“I suppose the brownies put it in your traveling bag? I suppose—”

“I never saw it before in all my life!” declared Adele Mabie. “Why, I only use De Markoff’s Essence at forty dollars an ounce. And why you imagine that I would plant a drug …”

“I didn’t say drug, but I’ll go farther. It was poison!” he told her.

“…plant poison in somebody else’s cheap perfume bottle, just to kill a poor unoffending little Mexican customs man whom I never saw before in all my life—”

“That’s it!” The alderman’s voice gained strength. “Why should my wife poison a customs man or enter into a suicide pact with him? You grumble at customs. You don’t try to—”

“All right, all right,” the inspector cut in. “We’ll agree that it was the brownies, after all. But it’s going to be a hell of a defense to take into court.”

“Into court?” the woman echoed blankly.

“Yes, when you go up for second-degree homicide, or criminal negligence, or whatever it was.”

Adele Mabie moaned a little. “She’s fainted!” came from the alderman, as he manfully struggled to keep his wife’s limp form from sliding to the floor of the platform.

Inspector Oscar Piper opened the door to let two stretcher-bearers through with their burden, a blanket drawn over its face. “And that is that,” he said. “We had a chance to do something for her, but she went and fainted. Now we can only hope Mrs. Mabie won’t wake up in a Mexican jail.”

“But it wasn’t her perfume bottle!” Mabie gasped. “Why, they can’t do that to her! I tell you, she had no more to do with this than I did!”

“Uh huh,” said the inspector. When the train finally hitched its way into the station of Nuevo Laredo, he got down and sent the telegram.

T
HE INSPECTOR STOOD
on the station platform in the midst of a crowd of hurrying baggagemen, quaintly clad sellers of fruit juices, slices of pineapple,
chicles
and cigarettes. Everywhere there was a hustling, breathless activity, but nowhere a sign of the police that he expected.

Grimly uncommunicative train officials got off and on the car, but that was all.

It was a pretty problem in ethics which faced Oscar Piper. If he said anything about the bottle in his pocket, the bottle which had spilled most of its strange sweet contents upon the floor of the drawing room, the wife of his friend Francis Mabie was certain to be mixed up in a scandal, perhaps put under arrest.

The inspector was a member of this party because of Alderman Mabie. He had needed a vacation badly, having had none in ten years except one flying trip to Catalina in the course of official business. Since reaching the age of twenty-one Oscar Piper had voted the Democratic ticket, had been what they call a “Tammany cop,” although he had always prided himself on making sure that the uniform and not the tiger came first in his loyalties.

It had been as a sort of reward, engineered by the alderman, that he had been offered a place in this junket. Of course, members of the New York delegation had agreed that it would be a good idea to have a police official along—one who knew from years of experience the misguided radicals who might feel inclined to toss a bomb into the midst of the highway-opening ceremonies. But now those vaguely official duties were ended, and he was faced with nothing more than a trip down to a foreign capital he had always wished to visit. Nothing—except that the alderman’s new and attractive wife had to go and get mixed up in a homicide.

His loyalties were all for the alderman. And yet Oscar Piper had a deep-rooted dislike for people who act carelessly with little bottles of poison. Potassium cyanide, of course. It was the only thing with that almond odor that could kill with a whiff. The fumes, rising, had filled the drawing room—certainly enough to account for the woman’s collapse.

And she denied that it was hers. Denied that she had ever owned the bottle. Well, that was a purely feminine matter. The telegram might help him on that point.

The pumpkin-faced Pullman conductor stepped beside him, held out his large nickel watch warningly. “Only five minoots,
señor
!”

He started. “They’re not holding the train, then?”

“Ah no,
señor.
We cannot keep an express train standing in the
estación
just because one poor customs examiner has a heart attack. Very sad, that. But others have finish his work.”

“Heart attack, eh?” Piper nodded. Evidently the local doctor wasn’t familiar with what the sob sisters call the “acrid scent of bitter almonds.”

Far up ahead the engineer gave two blasts upon the whistle. Immediately the platform became a veritable bedlam, people scurrying from the lines of parked cars to clamber aboard or exchange last embraces through the car windows. There was a tumult of farewells, messages, endearments, sidesplitting jokes—all in Spanish. With a faint sense of uneasiness the inspector realized that he was an alien.

Up alongside the second-class coaches there was a quartet of musicians playing
“La Paloma,”
sugar sweet and sad …

The conductor was motioning him toward the steps. “Please,
señor
!” He waved his arm, and his voice lifted in a wailing “¡
Vamonos
!”

There was nothing for the inspector but to get back aboard the train, which he proceeded to do. His decision had been made for him. For better or worse, they were off for Mexico City.

He went back through the Pullmans. News of the tragedy had spread, and he had to parry questions right and left. Years of experience had made Oscar Piper an accomplished parrier of questions.

It wasn’t quite so easy to deal with Rollo Lighton, back in Pullman car Elysian.

“Look here, Inspector, is it on the level that the doctor says the customs man had a heart attack? Because if it is, then why was the woman—”

“Yeah,” Al Hansen cut in. “Heart trouble isn’t contagious, is it?”

Piper shrugged. “Maybe she fainted from the shock of seeing a man drop dead in front of her.”

“And the smell in the drawing room?”

“A spilled bottle of perfume, I guess.” To change the subject Piper pointed to the black headlines of the Mexican newspaper on the seat. “What’s that say?”

“¡
Huelga mañana
!” Lighton told him. “Means there’s a strike called for tomorrow morning. As if this country hadn’t had enough of them. This is going to be a lulu, too.”

The inspector wasn’t interested in class warfare, except in Union Square. Then suddenly an idea occurred to him, one which would explain many things. “Say, that isn’t a police strike, by any chance?”

The two stared at him wonderingly. “Why, no,” Lighton said. “It’s a strike of electrical unions. Power is going to be shut off in the Federal District tomorrow, probably later in most of the other provinces. Which means that there’ll be hell to pay in Mexico City.”

The inspector started to go, but Al Hansen caught his arm. “Wait a minute, will you? It’s a lousy wind that doesn’t blow something into somebody’s pockets. We’d like to cut you in on a sure thing, if you can lay hands on some money quick.”

They looked at Piper, who stiffened a little. “Dice or horses?”

“Nothing like that. You see,” Hansen explained, “I’m on my way down to Mexico City to promote a horse track, but something else has come up. Something red hot.”

“And it can’t miss!” Lighton put in. “Wait until you hear about it. Why, I’m risking every dime of my soldier’s bonus that I’ve just been up to the States to collect. You see, we’re going to send every cent we can raise down to—”

“Wait,” Hansen stopped him. “How about it, Piper? If we let you in, can you lay your hands on a thousand bucks or so? I’ll guarantee that you’ll get back ten, maybe twenty, grand inside of two weeks.”

The inspector kept both hands in his pockets. “Sorry, boys,” he said. “I’m just an underpaid cop, without a safety-deposit box to my name. Why don’t you try the alderman? He’s a gambler.”

Al Hansen shrugged. “I just did. He said he had too much on his mind right now.”

“Which is my trouble, too,” Piper told him and went on back toward the rear of the car. A Mexican waiter in a white jacket was following, carrying a tray with sandwiches and a teapot. The inspector lingered, watched the man enter the door of the drawing room. He caught a glimpse of Adele Mabie inside, dressed in something clinging and soft. She was bearing up well, then.

Piper went on, his objective the rear platform. There had always been something very stimulating to his mental processes in watching two parallel lines of steel rails meet in the distance. But this time, with his hand on the door, he stopped short, drawing instinctively back into the passage.

Through the glass he could see the bulky figure of Francis Mabie leaning against the rear gate of the train. There was a girl with him, a small and exceedingly pretty girl with crisp red curls.

She was excitedly kissing the alderman.

The inspector flattened himself against the wall, shamelessly peeping through the dusty glass. But they were not paying any attention.

Piper regretted with all his heart that he could not read the lips which he saw moving on the other side of the smeared glass door. He never had put much stock in lip reading until, by means of a smattering of that science, Miss Hildegarde Withers had helped him crack one of the most baffling murders of his career at Centre Street.

The alderman and the girl separated, drew closer again. And then, as Piper tried to fit this into his structure of the whole affair, he saw that red-haired miss turn like a cat and strike Mabie, fingers outstretched, across the cheek.

Then she came through the door. The inspector had barely time enough to step back, busy himself with the lighting of a cigar, before the girl burst past him. She had the type of elfin, triangular face, he noted, which looks most attractive when angry. Round chin set hard, wide eyes blazing …

But what interested the inspector most was the fact that as she went past he noticed that she was stuffing money into her handbag—crisp green American currency.

When Piper came out on the platform the alderman seemed honestly glad to see him. “Been looking all over for you,” was his greeting.

Somewhat stiffly the inspector inquired after the health of Mrs. Mabie.

“Poor Adele is lying down,” Mabie said. “She had a good scare. So did I for that matter. No wonder she fainted, seeing a man drop dead in front of her.”

The inspector didn’t say anything, and both men listened a moment to the clicking of the wheels along the rails.

“Had an idea all along you’d jumped to the wrong conclusions about that bottle,” the alderman continued after a moment. He dropped into one of the camp chairs provided by the Pullman company for its outdoor-loving and dust-loving-passengers. “Eh, Inspector?”

Piper sat down, smiling a stiffish smile. “I can be wrong,” he admitted. “Maybe I’m wrong about the bottle. After all, I haven’t had it analyzed. Want to draw the stopper and take a whiff of what’s left in it?” He produced the flask of Elixir d’Amour.