Puzzle of the Red Stallion (34 page)

She nodded, wondering.

“One more question. What would a woman do who found a strange bottle of perfume in her luggage?” He looked at Mabie.

“Toss it out, of course.”

But Adele cut in. “She would not! She’d sniff it to see if it was any good! No woman on earth could resist the temptation.”

Piper nodded, pleased. “That’s what you were meant to do, instead of the unlucky devil of a customs man—and one good sniff of prussic acid is all anybody needs. It’s good-bye in any language.”

Nobody said anything for a moment. Mrs. Mabie’s pink fingertips toyed with the wrappings of the Mexican candy she had bought. “Somebody must hate me terribly,” she said. “To go to all this trouble …”

“Looks that way,” Piper agreed. He rose to go. “And you can’t help me any, eh?”

Adele Mabie hesitated, looking intently at the tip of her shoe. “Why—why, no, I can’t think of anyone. Unless—Francis, it couldn’t be that girl, could—”

Piper intervened. “What girl?”

Adele said, “Oh, just a silly idiot of a maid in Laredo who tried to put an end-curl in my hair and did this!” She showed the inspector a singed strand and then tucked it back into her smooth coiffure.

“Yeah? What about this maid?”

Adele Mabie flashed a sidelong look. “Why, Mr. Piper! You ought to know, because I saw you trying to pump her, right outside this room. How Miss Dulcie Prothero got onto the train I haven’t the slightest idea, but—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” Piper put in. “That girl—why, she didn’t look like a maid.”

Adele laughed bitterly. “Well, she didn’t
act
like a maid! It turned out that all the experience she talked about when she answered my ad in the New York paper for a traveling maid was a great big lie. She hadn’t the slightest idea of what a lady’s maid is supposed to do, not the slightest. Why, I found out—she actually admitted, mind you—that she’d been working in a soda fountain!”

“Where?” broke in the inspector, jubilant.

“Oh, Amsterdam and Seventy-second, or some terrible place on the West Side”—as if this were an especially sore point. “The fuss that girl made when I discharged her, after she ruined my hair! It seems that she had her little heart set on a trip to Mexico City, and the things she said!”

“Well, you did fire her a little roughly,” put in Mabie. “And without any notice.”

For an instant Adele’s eyes blazed. “Yes, Francis, stand up for a pretty girl! I suppose I’m just a cruel and unreasonable woman because I wouldn’t put up with being b-burned!”

The alderman moved toward her, but she shook her shoulders discouragingly. “That insolent, hotheaded little fool!”

“I’ll be going,” Piper said. “Got to question the boy who brought you that tea, though it’s not likely we’ll get anything out of him. You’d better take all the precautions you can from now on.”

There was a strange, dazed look in Adele Mabie’s eyes. “But, Inspector, if somebody on this train wants to kill me, what can you or anybody do?”

“I don’t know,” said Piper honestly. “But I’m going to do it.”

He spent the next half-hour in trying to get something out of the porter and waiters, without any luck. Language difficulties aside, they seemed to view him as a meddlesome gringo to whom one should answer “¿
Quién sabe
?” and nothing else. But he did find out that Adele Mabie’s dressing case had been used to prop open the door of the drawing room as they pulled out of Laredo station. Where anybody passing could see it, Piper reminded himself.

The train roared and rattled along its bumpy roadbed, climbing, dropping, winding on. The inspector, conscious of the fact that he had a lot of loose ends that needed tying or braiding or whatever it is that is done to loose ends, dropped into a chair at the rear of the combination club- and dining-car. Calling for a bottle of amber Moravia, he sipped it in silence.

Up ahead, in one of the dining booths, Hansen and Rollo Lighten were playing checkers on a table which had not yet been set with linen and silver for dinner. Their voices now and then drifted back in snatches.

They were still talking about the strike scheduled to darken the lights and stop the wheels of Mexico City on the morrow. And they seemed to be speaking as if that strike were distinctly an act of Providence. “It’s an ill wind that can’t blow something into the right pockets!” was a pet remark of Al Hansen’s. He repeated it two or three times.

Hansen was looking at his watch. “Ought to be getting the message about now …” He mumbled something else indistinguishable.

“Don’t worry about him,” Lighten said. “Mike is an old hand at this sort of thing. When corners need cutting, he’s the one to cut ’em. Been down there for ten years. I was with him when he promoted that Washington to Mexico City auto race a couple of years ago. Wrote the publicity. Mike Fitz made a good thing out of it too, believe me, even if the race never came off. His backer backed out on him.”

Hansen said something about “more cash.”

“Sure he will. He’s a dependable guy, and this sort of thing is right up his alley. If you want something promoted—business or red-hot telephone numbers—he’s the man. Ten to one he’ll come through with some of his own money—and he’s got plenty.”

Far to the south, in the great city hung on a sky-high plateau, Mr. Michael Fitz was frying his supper, in the shape of a solitary egg and two strips of bacon, when the doorbell rang.

Fitz instantly closed the kitchenette door, crouched beside a chair in the square living room to put on his too-tight shoes. Then, after a quick and critical glance at the tanned handsome man with grayish waved hair who stared back at him from his pocket mirror, he answered the door.

It was only a messenger boy, after all. He took the telegram, automatically reached into his trouser pocket, and found there a solitary
tostón.
On second thought Mike Fitz left it there. It was no time for expensive habits.

The boy lingered hopefully for a moment, then started down the apartment stairs. He was almost to the bottom when a voice hailed him from above, in a jubilant summons. “Hey,
muchacho
!” And a silver
tostón
came flying down to tinkle on the bottom step.

Mike Fitz read the telegram again, read the official form which the company had added at the bottom. Merrily whistling the lilting notes of “
Adelante,
Maria Theresa,” he waltzed into the kitchenette, turned off the electric stove, and threw the egg and bacon into the garbage pail.

He looked at his watch—or, rather, at the white place on his tanned wrist where his watch had been until last week. Then he shrugged. It was still early, plenty of time to get to the telegraph office, grab some chicken with rice at Prendes, and then …

“Even in Mexico City luck has to turn sometime!” he told himself gaily, as he put on his raincoat and fared forth onto the Paseo.

The train swung and swayed as it raced southward toward the ancient mountains of the Aztecs and the Mayas at the dizzy speed of thirty-some miles per hour. In the club/dining car a few passengers were already eating. Inspector Oscar Piper turned down a pressing invitation to join Mr. and Mrs. Ippwing in a slice of their pineapple. “Like nothing you ever tasted in your life, honestly!”

But he had other fish to fry. “Thanks just the same,” he said and pushed on. A moment later he stood in the door of the first-class day coach, his mind made up as to what had to come next.

Here was another world, a scene of life and color entirely foreign to anything within his ken. At the farther end of the car three boys were softly harmonizing with violin, mouth organ and guitar. It was some wailing, melancholy song that must have come straight down from Granada and the Moors. Whole families shared basket dinners or supplies purchased from the train windows at Villaldama. Many already slept, curled two-deep in a section, wrapped in gay blankets. Some of the luggage in this car was of fine leather, some consisted of blanket rolls, bags tied with rope, paper sacks and wicker baskets. There were boxes and baskets of food and fruit scattered everywhere, here and there a white jar of
pulque.
A train butcher squatted in the aisle arranging his basket of cigars and candies, adding his voice to the music. There were smells of food and humanity accented by the terrific heat which poured through the open windows, and two or three babies were crying—quietly and apologetically, as Mexican babies cry.

Then, up toward the front of the car, Piper caught sight of the girl whom he had decided to confront, the fresh, impulsive girl in the yellow dress. She happened to be in close conversation with the blond youth in the beret, the boy whom Piper had seen enter the Pullman at Villaldama. “That girl surely gets around,” the inspector said to himself.

He saw the young man rise, smiling broadly, and come swaying down the aisle. As they came face to face the youth stared at him appraisingly, then grinned. “Hello, Meester New York!” Then, as Piper grunted something, he passed on toward the diner.

The inspector leaped to some very interesting conclusions. If these two were mixed up together …

When in doubt, Oscar Piper had always said, plunge forward. He stepped around the train butcher, climbed over baggage and outstretched shoes, and finally planted himself firmly on the arm of the seat beside Miss Dulcie Prothero.

The girl rose to her feet suddenly, startled. But Piper held out thirty dollars, waving the money in her face like a flag. “You dashed off and forgot something,” he reminded her. “Something of yours. Or is it?”

“I don’t see …” She closed her mouth, accepted the money, and began to cram it automatically inside her handbag.

“Wait,” said Oscar Piper. “You’d better count it.” He reached suddenly forward with a clumsiness that was unusual for him, and somehow the bag, money and all, fell to the floor.

“Sorry!” he said, and they both knelt to pick up the scattered articles. The inspector noted that the bag, for all its capacity, was empty enough. It contained only a handkerchief, several pawn tickets, some small silver, a tarnished vanity case, and some tattered newspaper clippings. One was of a young man with large ears, wearing some sort of extremely unbecoming fancy dress. “That’s funny,” he observed conversationally. “I didn’t know Clark Gable ever sang in
Carmen.”

“It’s not Clark Gable!” Dulcie told him, her voice trembling with anger. She hastily refolded the picture, tucked it away. “And now, if you don’t mind …” She was waiting for him to go away, but he didn’t go.

“Interesting country, Mexico,” he observed, sitting down on the arm of the seat again.

“It was,” Dulcie said. Some of the starch had gone out of her.

“Interesting customs,” Piper went on. “Do you know that they don’t have juries down here? Just a judge, and then afterward usually a firing squad.” He shook his head. “It’s a tough exit.”

The forcefulness of his stirring period was somewhat marred by louder strains of music from up forward, as the trio broke into
“Rancho Grande.”

“Go on,” Dulcie prompted him. The inspector frowned at her.

“Go on, make some more conversation,” invited the girl. “You’ll lead up to asking me to come back to dinner with you, and I’ll say no.” She looked at him appraisingly. “I even said no to the Gay Caballero in the beret, and his approach was much nicer than yours.”

“I wasn’t talking about dinner. I was talking about murder,” the inspector corrected her bluntly.

She caught her breath.

“Murder of that customs man this afternoon,” he went on. “Plus one or two more attempts. By the way, do you mind telling me what kind of perfume you use?”

“I don’t use any right now!” she flared.

“Ever own any like this?” He showed her a glimpse.

“Oh, no! Never in my life!” gasped Dulcie Prothero, staring intently at the seat in front of her.

Piper nodded, stood up. “Funny you’re so sure when I didn’t show you the label,” he said happily and stalked back through the car. Let her stew over that for a while. In the meantime …

Telegram from Inspector Oscar Piper to Miss Hildegarde Withers, 32 West Seventy-fourth Street, New York City, filed at Palo Blanco, province of Nuevo Leon, Republic of Mexico, at 7:40 CST:

NO FOOLING THIS LOOKS SERIOUS WIRE IMMEDIATELY INFORMATION DULCIE PROTHERO FORMERLY EMPLOYED SODA FOUNTAIN NEIGHBORHOOD AMSTERDAM 72ND STREET IF SODA FOUNTAIN IS IN DRUGSTORE DO THEY SELL POTASSIUM CYANIDE

OSCAR

Telegram from Miss Hildegarde Withers to Inspector Oscar Piper, Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, care Tren 40 Ferrocarriles Nacionales, filed New York City at 9:18 EST:

UPTOWN DRUGSTORE REPORTS PROTHERO GIRL QUIT WORK WEEK AGO WITHOUT NOTICE WAS GOOD AT HAM AND CHEESE SANDWICHES BUT HER BANANA SPLITS WERE TERRIBLE SHE SOUNDS LIKE NICE GIRL HAVE HEARD NAME SOMEWHERE YES DRUGSTORE KEEPS POTASSIUM CYANIDE BUT WOULDN’T SELL ME ANY THEIR POISON BOOK SHOWS NO SALES FOR FIVE MONTHS BUT THEY DO A GOOD BUSINESS IN ELIXIR DAMOUR AT FIFTY CENTS OR FREE WITH TWO DOLLAR JAR OF FRECKLE CREAM AM DYING OF CURIOSITY WHAT ARE YOU UP TO

HILDEGARDE

The train roared and rattled southward through a dusty desert. When Piper came into the diner he found that most of the tables were filled now. Hansen and the blue-chinned newspaperman were matching coins to see who would pay for their dinners and the ensuing beers. It was the little man in the cowboy hat who won, but it was a hollow victory. It developed that Rollo Lighton had left his money in the Pullman along with his coat and necktie.

They departed finally, and Oscar Piper leaned his elbows on the table in deep self-communion. Things were beginning to fit together. And Hildegarde Withers had always insisted that he could get nowhere without the machinery of Centre Street to help him! In his suitcase right now reposed her derisive going-away gifts to him—a magnifying glass and a set of false auburn whiskers. Well, they’d see who had the last laugh.

It was with a light heart that Oscar Piper beckoned to the waiter. And then he suddenly realized that, after all the efforts he had made to memorize the Spanish for ham and eggs, the words had slipped his mind.