Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (12 page)

The inspector worked slowly from corner to corner, from one piece of furniture to another, Miss Withers following closely after him. “Well, Oscar? What do you make of it? What story does this place tell to the trained observer?”

He frowned in his best professional manner. “The girl is broke, certainly, or she wouldn’t have come to a hotel like this, where there isn’t even a private bath. She’s neat, because what clothes she has are all laid out nice and straight in the drawers. She’s clean …” He pointed to an improvised clothesline stretched from bedpost to window, upon which depended four pairs of silk stockings plus other more intimate articles of feminine wear.

Miss Withers nodded. “Please go on!”

“Only one thing strikes me as out of place,” he said. “That!” And he pointed to a grisly object which hung by a bright red ribbon from the top of the mirror frame. It was a dried, mummified triangle, oddly curved, and covered with bleached reddish hair. “Looks like an animal’s ear,” he concluded.

“Doesn’t it! And I suppose that there’s a dried toad plus some foul-smelling herbs and a wax image of Adele with a pin stuck through it, if we only can find them.” The schoolteacher shook her head. “Dulcie will have to explain her quaint keepsake later. But right now, isn’t there anything else?”

The inspector said he didn’t see anything.

“On the dressing table, perhaps?” she hinted.

He still shook his head blankly, shook it even when the schoolteacher pointed to a half-empty jar of cream.

“You don’t mean you think there’s poison in that?” Piper demanded.

“Poison? Oh no. Just freckle cream. Elixir anti-freckle cream, sold in Longacre Square drugstores for two dollars …”

Suddenly he remembered her telegram. “With a fifty-cent bottle of Elixir d’Amour thrown in!” The inspector smacked one fist into his other palm. “Then the poison bottle
was
hers!”

Miss Hildegarde Withers looked very thoughtful. “This changes everything,” she said. “Perhaps we’d better drop in at the bullfight after all.”

“I told you so!” Oscar Piper insisted.

T
HE PLAZA DE TOROS WAS A
great black pillbox against the sky, against a low, confining sky that shut away the usual view of the pure snowy peaks of Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl. Yet to mountains who have looked down upon black obsidian knives exposing the blood and entrails of a thousand Aztec captives on one of Moctezuma’s gala afternoons, it could have been no hardship to miss the death of six bulls.

A moist, malicious little wind, promising rain, whipped at Miss Withers’ skirts as she followed the inspector through the outer gate. From inside the pillbox came the roar of the crowd, a vast and muffled yapping. Then suddenly, over everything, the piercing crystal-pure notes of a trumpet.

Ahead of them was the short flight of steps leading to one of the s
ombra
entrances, but first they must ran a long tawdry gauntlet—a gauntlet of screaming children offering long green strips of lottery tickets, vendors of blood-darkened souvenirs of other bullfights in the shape of darts and strips of torn cape and polished, mounted horn. There were flower sellers, grimacing beggars who waved their horrible deformities in the air, naked babies with outstretched palms, dogs that were only snarling hairy skeletons …

“Oh dear!” cried Miss Hildegarde Withers, gripping the inspector’s arm irresolutely. But they went on, on to meet a man who was running down the steps toward them at a ridiculous sort of trot. It was Francis Mabie, his plumpness somehow deflated, and his face—usually a smooth expanse of pink flesh—now a sickly green tint. He was cold sober.

“Surely it’s not over?” Miss Withers demanded of him. He paused for a moment, smiled feebly with pale gray lips.

“For me it is,” said Mabie, and he plunged on past them. The man looked, Miss Withers thought, as if he had just seen an exceptionally grisly ghost. They both stared after him curiously for a moment and then went on. Through a gate, and then suddenly they found themselves standing on a ledge of concrete halfway up a curving slope of tiers, somewhat like two ants on the inner side of half an orange peel. Over the heads of the crowd they looked down upon a circular arena of bright smooth sand, a circular stage upon which two actors played.

There was a small roan bull and there was a boy in a bright-spangled gold jacket, and they faced each other in the exact center of the arena. The boy held a wisp of scarlet serge and a long thin sliver of curved steel, but the bull was watching only the rag.

There was no usher, and the numbers on the gray concrete seats were hard to find. “Let’s just sit anywhere,” the inspector said, putting his tissue-paper stubs away in his pocket.

Miss Withers glared at him. “We’re not here to sit! We’re here for a purpose!”

“To find the Prothero girl?” Piper said, with a sidelong glance.

“Something like that.”

But they found almost everyone else first. The Ippwings were most easily located, the birdlike old couple vociferously applauding the young matador as he lured the bull into a series of charges, lifting the cloth at the last moment so that the animal slapped its horns vainly against air.

The old couple moved over hospitably. “Sit down, folks,” cried Mr. Ippwing, “and Mother will read out of the guidebook so we’ll know what it’s all about.”

“Not just now,” Miss Withers regretted. The things she had to know weren’t printed in the guidebooks. “Is anybody else here—anybody we know?” she asked.

“Why, let me see! Mr. Hansen is in the front row down there—right next to those two Mexican hussies that made eyes at Father when they came in. Oh yes, they did too, Marcus Ippwing. And we saw that redheaded Prothero girl a moment ago, going down the aisle with a man. And …” Mrs. Ippwing rose suddenly to her feet, screeched “Look out, son!” and subsided. “I thought the bull had him that time,” she confessed. “Where was I?”

“We ran into that newspaperman, Lighton, or whatever his name is, outside the gate,” Ippwing reminded her. “As we came in.”

“Oh yes, and he said he’d left his billfold and all his money at home. He wanted to know if Father would buy a ticket for him, but—”

“But I’ve seen smooth talkers like him at the state fair,” said Marcus Ippwing. “Mother thought I was impolite—”

“Many thanks,” Miss Withers cut in. “You haven’t seen Mrs. Mabie anywhere, then?”

Nobody had seen Adele Mabie. They moved on along the aisle, the inspector tripping from time to time as he turned to watch the events in the arena. Out there the atmosphere grew tenser, the bull flinging himself more furiously at the rag but slowing in the speed of his rushes. The boy grew more daring. Once he raised the sword to his eye level, but the crowd across the ring in the cheap
sol
seats cried “No” with one voice.

Protesting feebly, the inspector was dragged up and down the tiers of seats, through the crowd. They found many a familiar face as they climbed higher toward the roofed boxes and balcony which lined the upper rim of the pillbox. There was the manager of the Georges, the vinegar blonde from the restaurant, the pumpkin-faced Pullman conductor with his family. The inspector recognized, with a start, two
agentes de policia.
They were the two who had formed part of his reception committee at the train. One of them wore a fine purple eye.

Most surprising of all, the
agentes
were bending over a young man who sat alone in the last row under the shadow of the empty boxes overhead. They were speaking in excited Spanish accents to
Señor
Julio Mendez, who was equipped with the blue beret and the bright malacca stick but was without his accustomed air of jauntiness.

“Sí, señores,”
Miss Withers heard him say.
“Sí.”

Then suddenly Julio looked up with a bright welcoming smile. “My American friends!” He rose, pushing aside the officers, and came toward the two intruders as if more than happy to be interrupted in his conference. The
agentes
looked at him queerly and then finally moved away.

Shaking hands with Miss Withers, young Julio looked over his shoulder, murmuring “Dumbsbells!” At her raised eyebrows he smiled widely and said, “Such police we are having in my country. Such meddlesome idiots! They can ask more questions than two men can answer.”

Piper said, “Uh huh,” a bit dubiously.

“But never mind them. Sit with me and I tell you about bullfights, eh? From up here we get a fine view, we see the fiesta complete with crowd and everything.”

“That’s what we came for—to see everything,” Miss Withers admitted. They sat.

Far below them the spectacle in the arena was coming to its climax. The silver-jacketed subordinates with the cerise capes had been deploying the bull, but now the matador came forth again, jaunty as a fighting cock.

“We see how this one can kill,” Julio explained. “All these boys today, they are
novilleros,
beginners.”

“Amateur Hour, eh?” said the inspector. “An amateur fighter against a little bull, to make it even.”

Julio laughed scornfully at that. “Even? Nothing, my friends, is even, is sporting, in all this. The bullfight is the assassination of a bull in the most possible of beautiful and dangerous methods. This young Perez has done well with cape and cloth, but it is the sword that counts.”

Down in the arena the bull had stopped charging and now stood with head down, feet apart, eyes on the
muleta
which Perez held with his left hand, flicking it gently from side to side. As it moved the bull’s head followed it—the entire scene in the slowest of slow motion.

Perez, the crowd hushed and waiting for him now, drew the thin sliver of sword again. Suddenly he poised himself like a ballet dancer and then ran toward the bull as it charged.

They seemed to meet head on, and Miss Withers wanted to close her eyes but could not. Then somehow the bull’s horn swept past under the boy’s spangled shoulder, the bull’s head was buried in the folds of the
muleta,
and the sword began to disappear.

Inch by inch, as the young matador rose on slippered toes, the sword went into the humped shoulder just in front of the gay fluttering darts which hung there. The sword disappeared, down to the hilt.

For an instant bull and man stood linked in a strange embrace, as if a film had suddenly been stopped.

“‘The Moment of Truth,’ so the Spanish call it,” Julio explained.

The bull plunged on, turned suddenly. Men ran out with pink capes, but the young matador waved them back, dancing like a madman in front of the bull.
Toro
braced himself to charge, shaking his head and planning just where to place the horn now that his tormentor was within reach. He lowered his head …

Then suddenly, wearily, he lay down on the sand and was still.

The crowd arose and cheered. There was a frantic snowstorm of handkerchiefs waving in the opposite stands. “They want the matador to have the ear of the bull as a reward,” Julio explained, his voice suddenly gone dull.

“You’re not applauding,” Piper said, looking curious.

Julio shook his head. “One outgrows all this,” he confessed. “My country will outgrow it soon. You see, my father raises bulls on a big
rancho
in Sonora. They are very brave and very stupid, no antagonists for a man.”

“Then why,” pressed Miss Withers, “are you here?”

He hesitated for a moment. “What else is there to do on Sunday afternoons?”

Down in the front row, far below them, they could see Al Hansen’s great Stetson hat waving in the air.

A broad-beamed lady in purple, presumably one of the sirens who had smiled so fruitlessly upon Mr. Ippwing, stood beside him with her hand on his shoulder. As the jubilant matador trotted past on his circuit of the arena to receive the applause and bouquets and offerings of straw hats which came skimming down, the lady in purple screamed vociferous Spanish words of adoration and then tossed down a large long-heeled purple evening slipper.

As with the hats, it was picked up and tossed back by the ring followers. “Odd how women can worship bullfighters,” Miss Withers remarked disapprovingly.

“Yeah, even the Prothero girl, it looks like,” said Piper, pointing.

Away to the right in the very first row, almost against the high iron barrier dividing the
sombra
from the
sol,
stood Miss Dulcie Prothero, a small and at the moment a very noisy person.

“Yoo hoo!” she was crying.

The man who sat beside her, a tall, faintly amused man with beautiful gray temples, patted her shoulder. But it seemed that Dulcie would not sit down, in spite of what Mr. Michael Fitz said to her.

The matador looked up, smiled genially through the sweat that dripped from his low forehead, but she looked past him.

A dozen or so ring servants in blue uniforms with bright red jackets were running about in the arena, smoothing and spreading sand over the hoof marks and the bloodstains in preparation for the next bull. A trio of trotting mules came in, and their chain was hooked around the horns of the dead champion.
Toro
was dragged ingloriously across the ring.

“Wait!” Dulcie Prothero cried, but they did not wait. She sank slowly to her seat. Everyone else was sitting down, and the band broke into an old heartstirring tune.

“Listen,” Julio said. “They play ‘
El Novillero’
—the song of the young bullfighter who goes out not knowing if as the price of his glory he pays with his life.”

The last of the ring servants was running out with the brooms and shovels, and from high overhead a trumpet sounded its pure sweet summons to the next bull to come out and be killed. And then the crowd rose to its feet again.

Dulcie Prothero was stealing the show.

“She’s jumped!” gasped Julio Mendez. “The crazy one!”

Suddenly the red head of Dulcie Prothero appeared down in the
callejón,
the narrow runway below the seats. She was waving, crying out something lost in the roar of the crowd. Across the ring, in a gateway next to where the dead bull had been dragged, a door was being unlatched.