Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (10 page)

“Which we could have found out for ourselves easily enough, so don’t give him too much credit for frankness! You know, Oscar, once in a blue moon a murder
is
actually committed by the person who has the most to gain by it. Although I admit that poison in a perfume bottle, to say nothing of the fantastic business of the smashed tea glass and the snake, sounds like someone other than Mabie.”

“Sounds like that merry redhead, though you’re so set on the idea she’s lily pure.”

“I didn’t say that,” Miss Withers told him. “But I’ll still give her high marks in composition. And I’ll admit that Dulcie Prothero is not to be ignored in this case.”

“You’re telling me!” Piper sat up straight. “I wish to heaven I knew why Mabie slipped her that thirty dollars on the train.”

“Well, why not ask him?”

Oscar Piper snorted. “I did! About half an hour ago, right here in the lobby. I covered it so he wouldn’t know I saw him give it to her. Said something about her saying that he’d given her a loan. And what do you think he said?”

“No guessing games, please !”

“He said she was a liar and stalked out into the street!”

Night fell upon the ancient capital of the Huastecas, a swift gray twilight which swept over mountaintop and tower, skyscraper and park. The city faded away, merged into obscurity like an overexposed photograph. There were no lights, no lights anywhere except the feeble electric torches in the hands of the traffic policemen, the glaring eyes of the taxicabs. Even these lazy howling nuisances seemed abashed, swiftly decimated, as if frightened into their lairs by the grip of the all-pervading darkness.

“When they have a strike in Mexico, they have a strike!” said Miss Hildegarde Withers to herself as she stared down from the tiny balcony of her hotel room into the murky cavern that was Madero. She lighted the feeble taper which an apologetic hotel clerk had proffered her. Then she lifted the telephone and asked to be connected with the room of
Señor
Piper. There was no answer. “Please let me know the moment he comes in,” she insisted.

She sat down with a book, but she could not read. Suddenly Miss Withers went out into the darkened hall and went up the stairs to 307, the room almost exactly above her own. Her knock was commanding.

“Yes?” said the surprised voice of Adele Mabie. She opened the door cautiously.

“I want to talk to you,” began Miss Withers.

“Come in, come in—I’m all alone. Francis had a business appointment …”

The schoolteacher accepted a chair. “I hope you don’t mind my interfering?”

“It’s high time somebody interfered!” said Adele. “But why are you—What’s happened?”

“Nothing,” Miss Withers told her. “Nothing must. You remember my suggesting a while ago that you take a plane out of here as quickly as you could?”

Adele nodded. “My husband is trying to book passage on the next plane—”

“Don’t do it! You mustn’t take that plane. For your own safety you ought to stay here!”

For a long, long time Miss Withers was to remember the look which came over Adele’s smooth, pretty face. It was a look of amazement, of shock, and of desperate relief.

“Thank you for the advice,” she said.

“Then you’re not going?”

Adele shook her head slowly. “I don’t care what Francis or anybody says,” she announced. “I’m not going. I never had the slightest intention of going. I’d die first!”

“We’ll try to see that you don’t,” said Miss Hildegarde Withers. She started for the door, paused. “By the way—the question is a delicate one. But is there—has there been any friction in your family? Any difference of opinion?”

Adele looked amazed. “But of course not!”

“Positive? There was something said about it this afternoon.”

A bewildered, hurt smile crossed Adele’s face. “Why—why, of course, Francis
was
a little grumpy because I didn’t want him to get those plane reservations. He is too sweet to stay angry, though. He went out and walked literally miles to get me some of the French liqueur chocolates I like, as a peace offering!” She indicated a neatly wrapped box on the writing desk. “Does that look as though there’s anything wrong between my Francis and me?”

Miss Withers was forced to admit that it did not. And then the door suddenly opened, and Alderman Francis Mabie plunged into the room, dripping wet. His voice boomed out, “Adele, it seems that the whole deal has blown sky-high!” He was angry.

Then he saw Miss Withers. “Oh, hello.”

“Still raining outside, I see?” she remarked conversationally. “Well, I must be running along.”

Husband and wife were exchanging a wordless message, she noticed. Under cover of the comparative darkness of the candlelight she made a hasty exit, one hand concealing a small package against her side. Miss Hildegarde Withers was rather pleased with herself.

She was still pleased when, some time later, the inspector knocked at her door and entered, with his usual disregard for the stricter proprieties.

“Well, Oscar?”

He sank wearily into an easy chair. “No results. Hansen and Lighton spent the evening in a
cantina
down the street. The alderman joined them for a little while, but they’re all back here and in their little beds by now.”

“And Dulcie Prothero?” inquired the schoolteacher. She bustled around the room, lighting more candles and trying to make the place look as if it were inhabited.

“She went off somewhere with a man in a taxi—he fits your description of this Fitz,” Piper admitted.

“She was dressed up.”

“And that’s the total of your evening’s sleuthing?”

He nodded. “Except that twice I thought I saw that Mendez boy dodging around corners. Hasn’t he got a home to go to? I don’t shee why thash comish opera idiot—”

“Oscar, will you please take your cigar out of your mouth when you speak?” she scolded from across the room.

“Cigarsh?” He swallowed. “I’m not smoking. It’s this candy in the box. Not bad, not bad at all.” He groped again on the table.

Miss Withers crossed the room in two strides, her face a mask of mingled horror and amusement. “Oscar Piper! That’s not my candy. It’s what Mabie brought to his wife. I stole it, to have it analyzed for poison!”

“Wha-what?” Oscar Piper choked, went pale around the lips. “It’s certainly a hell of a time to tell a fellow!” And he went hastily out of the room.

It was hours later when Miss Withers finally locked her door, gave her hair its requisite hundred strokes with the brush, and snuffed the candles. There was no real reason to feel despondent, not yet. She was planning to follow her timeworn and time-tested practice of throwing a monkey wrench into the machinery and waiting for something to happen. “Catalytic agent” the inspector had called her, because she caused a chemical combination to form, usually an explosion. “Clear all wires—Catalytic Agent Five reporting,” she murmured dreamily and went to sleep smiling.

She awoke with a start as something bumped against her bed, woke instantly and in full possession of her faculties.

“Stop where you are,” she challenged the Stygian darkness, “or I’ll blow you to smithereens!”

The schoolteacher fumbled for the bedside lamp, remembered suddenly that the electricity was off, and finally found a match.

She lighted it, and then let the menacing hairbrush fall from her hand. It was no longer necessary to pretend to be armed. The only intruder in her room was an inkwell, a heavy glass inkwell. Affixed to it by means of a rubber band was an oblong pamphlet which, Miss Hildegarde Withers soon ascertained, was a timetable of the
Ferrocarriles Nacionales.

Frowning in honest bewilderment, she went swiftly to the open window, peered down at the dark and deserted street. Then, lighting another match, she noticed that on the timetable all northbound trains had been marked with suggestive red crayon.

VII
Miss Withers Sees Red

I
NSPECTOR OSCAR PIPER
awoke suddenly from the troubled sleep which was always his lot in a strange bed. He yawned, scratched his neck, and blinked at the glorious sunshine which flooded his hotel room. The windows were twin pictures, watercolors of incredible blue sky, soft moist clouds, and a fine gray-yellow stone church tower in the distance.

Unfortunately it was not the mellow clang of the ancient church bells of Santa Veracruz which had awakened the grizzled police veteran but the overshrill screaming of a telephone placed on a table some few inches from his left ear. Wearily he picked it up, said “Hello?”

“Not dead yet?” came a brisk feminine voice.

“Huh?”

“The candy, you know,” explained Miss Hildegarde Withers. “Any bad results?”

“Certainly not!” Then, with a rising wrath, “Did you have to go and wake me up just to ask foolish questions?”

“I thought it best, Oscar. The early bird, you know.”

The inspector said petulantly that he didn’t care for worms and never had. “But since there’s no chance of any rest with you in town, I suppose I might as well get up. Meet you in the lobby in half an hour.”

“Good!” said Miss Withers. “And I’ll have something to open your eyes.” Hanging up the receiver on this cryptic remark, she hurried out of her room, climbed one flight of stairs, and knocked at the door of 307.

Within all was silence, and she knocked again. And then the door was opened, but not by Adele Mabie.

She found herself staring closely into the face—much too closely, the thought struck her—of Alderman Francis Mabie. He was clothed in a greenish-yellow dressing gown, beneath which showed well-wrinkled lavender pajamas. Having as yet neither combed his sparse hair nor shaved, the alderman looked as villainous as a man can look. In one hand he gripped a tall highball.

Miss Withers sniffed disapprovingly. “Oh, I didn’t mean to interrupt your
breakfast.”
She looked past him. “I’d like to see your wife for a moment.”

“Adele’s gone out.”

“Out? Out where—with whom?”

“She didn’t say,” Mabie admitted. “Shopping, I guess. She just got up early and went.” Suddenly his eyes fell on the two-kilo box of Larin chocolates which Miss Withers held in her hand. “Oh, so
that’s
where they went!”

She nodded, held it out to him. “Just my old kleptomania coming back on me,” the schoolteacher told him. “I always repent afterward.”

Mabie stepped backward, eying her dubiously. “Take it,” Miss Withers said. He accepted it automatically, placed it on the little glass-topped writing desk across the room.

“Do you want to know why I really borrowed it last night?” She went on. “Or can you guess?”

It was evident that Mabie could guess.

“The police,” Miss Withers said, “are only interested in murders after they happen. I would rather prevent one murder than solve a dozen.” She walked toward the desk. “Do you mind if I leave a note for your wife, now I’m here?”

“Go ahead,” he invited and sank into a modernistic armchair to nurse his drink.

The schoolteacher crossed the room, sat down at the tiny desk. There was a rack of hotel stationery, a long wooden pen with a rusty steel point. “No ink?” she asked casually.

“In the drawer,” he suggested. There was a heavy glass inkwell in the desk drawer, half full. It was of a type, Miss Withers thought, which she had seen before. Concealing her disappointment as best she could, she scribbled rapidly.

“Just giving your wife some good advice,” she explained, as she put the message in an envelope and sealed it.

“My wife needs some advice,” Mabie said, with sudden feeling.

Miss Withers looked at him sideways. “Oh yes—a little family argument, wasn’t it? Over whether it was best to stay and face this situation or take a plane?”

He was in a mood to talk. “Not at all! The argument was just the usual thing that married couples quarrel about.”

Miss Withers leaped to the conclusion that she understood everything. She knew all about triangles and green-eyed monsters.

“The little Prothero girl?”

He shook his head blankly. “Only one thing worth quarreling over.” He drained his drink, even smiled. “Know what it is? It’s money!”

And now Miss Hildegarde Withers was surprised. “I thought—”

“You thought my wife had all the money in the world, almost? Well, she has. But the more you have the more you think about it. I’ve always looked on money just as—well, as chips in a game. She thinks it’s the end and the beginning. And just because I take a little flyer—”

“By any chance did you fall for one of Mr. Hansen’s schemes to sell baskets to the Indians or ship coal to Newcastle?” The alderman winced a little at this thrust.

“Nothing like that!” he retorted, beginning to freeze up. “Adele wouldn’t have said anything if she wasn’t upset over this being a human target all the time. It’s enough to get on anyone’s nerves. Ordinarily Adele is the most levelheaded person I know, and the shrewdest. But now …”

He crossed the room, took up a bottle and siphon. “This Mexican brandy isn’t so bad with soda,” he suggested. “Join me?”

“Not this early in the morning,” Miss Withers declined, and then, both intrigued and disappointed at the results of her call, she took her departure.

Out in the hall she hesitated, put her eye shamelessly to the keyhole of the door she had just passed through. She could see nothing but a square of window. But her ears were excellent, and she had no difficulty whatever in hearing Francis Mabie as he tore open the sealed envelope—the envelope containing an extremely unimportant and improvised message—that Miss Withers had left for his wife.

Down in the lobby she found no trace of the inspector as yet, so she invested fifteen
centavos
in a copy of
Universal
and settled down with her pocket dictionary to translate the headlines.

But it developed that the lobby of the Hotel Georges was this morning no place for lounging. Trucks were backed up under the front canopy, several workmen in faded denim marched in and out bearing wrenches, bits of board, and measuring tape. New as she was to Mexico, the schoolteacher realized that it must have taken an earthquake or some similar cataclysm to bring out workmen on a Sunday morning.

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