Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (14 page)

The bull raised his tail and, faster than a horse can run, his head held beautifully low, came dashing to meet the thirsty blade. It was a work of art, as perfect as a Brancusi statue, as a demonstration in Euclid, as swift and sure and easy as Astaire in dancing shoes or Perry with a racquet. Perfect, only …

Only
Toro
raised his head.

Taunted, goaded, tortured, his tremendous strength and courage at naught, the bull had still progressed one step farther in his education than a wise matador would have permitted. He knew what the
muleta
was for and resisted the impulse of his kind to hook at the brilliant color. He tore his gaze from the cloth and came in at the man who mocked him with his head held high.

Nicanor went a dozen feet in the air, seemed to hang there as if suspended with wires. Without sword, without dignity.

When he came down there was the bull, in spite of those who plunged forward with capes.
Toro,
enjoying the fiesta for the first time, would not be drawn away. He caught Nicanor neatly on his other horn, wore him for a moment as he had been forced to wear the straw hat.

Then suddenly the bull was blinded by a cape and two men were running with the
novillero
in their arms, sprinting for the barrier.

“Definitely the bull’s round,” said Inspector Oscar Piper a little shakily. “By a technical K.O.”

Miss Withers did not answer, being busy phrasing a fifty-word straight telegram to the S.P.C.A.

Adele Mabie came up the aisle below them, minus the umbrella. “I’ve had plenty!” she called up to them. Miss Withers and the inspector, by mutual agreement, left their sheltered seats and came down to her. Piper gallantly took her bulging shopping bag.

“There are two or three more bulls, but enough is enough,” he said. “We’ll share a taxi, eh?”

“What a place!” said Adele Mabie. “What people! I’ve had to change my seat three times because of gentlemen who wanted to keep me company. I’m sick of being rained on and pawed, and I don’t care if it takes them all afternoon to kill that bull; I’m going home!”

Miss Withers suddenly halted, looked back. “You mean, the bull hasn’t won? Don’t they let him go?”

Adele said she’d always read that if one matador was hurt another had to take his place. Indeed, a boy even now was advancing cautiously out with
muleta
and sword to finish the gray-red bull, who had taken a last desperate stand, back to the wall, and refused to charge.

“The authorities ought to stop this!” Miss Withers insisted. And the authorities did—the very highest authorities. There was a burst of wind, a clap of thunder, and at last the long-impending rain came down like a solid curtain of water. And the bull went out of the ring alive, as one bull in a thousand goes, without stigma.

“This bag is getting heavy,” the inspector said plaintively.

They moved painfully out in the rush of the hurrying crowd. “I know,” Adele said. “It’s got vases, and two sets of dishes, and a riding crop, and some bookends, and things.”

Through the gauntlet of beggars and peddlers they went. “Just one second,” Adele cried breathlessly and paid a
peso
for a pair of bright black and gold
banderillas,
their tips black with drying blood.

“Aren’t they grisly things, though!” she said, as she tucked them into the shopping bag.

The crowd rushed past them, hurrying to get out of the downpour. Tourists with the inevitable cameras, barefooted
Indios,
grand
señoras
with french heels and daring, painted eyes, whole families of half-blooded
mestizos …

The crowd rushed out of the pillbox. All but one man, that is. One man who sat with an umbrella over his shoulders, leaning on the railing where it met the high grille between
sol
and
sombra,
staring down dully at the empty arena as if still waiting for something to happen

It was the boy who kept Nicanor’s swords and accouterments who finally remembered and came back along the passageway, stopping to look up at the lone remaining spectator. He held out his hand, a little shamefacedly. “¡
El sombrero, por favor
!” He called again, and then his voice died away to a whisper.

The bull dedicated to Mr. Michael Fitz had gone out of the arena alive, but Fitz himself had remained behind. He was no longer worrying about the necessity of filling the matador’s hat with money. He was no longer worrying about anything, for from between the shoulders of his raincoat protruded the shaft of a pretty blue-gold
banderilla.

“T
HAT ISN’T A WHIP,
it’s a club,” Miss Withers observed absently, as she tried the whippiness of the heavy alligator-hide riding crop. She was helping Adele Mabie unpack her shopping bag back in the hotel suite, after a long taxi ride home from the bullfight, broken by a brief stop for supper at
La Cabana,
where the three of them had ventured upon enchiladas drenched with green-pepper sauce and goat’s cheese, washed down with thick hot chocolate. (The inspector had gone out in search of sodium bicarbonate.)

“I think these blue-glass bowls are the best buy of the day,” Adele said brightly. “I had so much fun at the markets that I almost missed the bullfight entirely. And do you know, the man asked ten
pesos,
and I know they’re worth that, but I chiseled him down to three!”

To make room for the blue bowls she pushed aside a litter of other curios from the table. “I don’t know what I’d do without the fun of shopping,” Adele went on. “It makes me forget.”

“You’d better not forget to be on your toes,” Miss Withers warned her. “No more baby lizards, mind!”

“I won’t buy so much as a kitten that’s alive!” she promised.

“Even kittens,” Miss Withers mused, “have been used as murder weapons. Their claws dipped in poison, so that the first time the new owner played with them he received a dozen tiny hypodermic injections—”

“Please!” Adele Mabie said, flushing. “Let’s not talk any more about such things, not tonight. I’m getting so nervous, so awfully jumpy. Though there’s probably no real cause for it now.”

Miss Withers sniffed indignantly. “No cause! Perhaps my hunch about something happening this afternoon was wrong, but you mark my words …”

And at that moment there came Alderman Francis Mabie through the door, waving a newspaper. “An extra is out!” he announced, in a frightened, almost whinnying voice. “There’s a—it seems to me—”

“I know, I know,” Miss Withers said calmly. “A revolution in Spain, a heat wave in New York, President Roosevelt has been prevailed upon to make a speech on the radio, and …”

Her voice died to an amazed whisper as she translated the headlines of the extra edition
of El Grafico,
looked at the grisly photographs spread all over the front page.

“And—and the man who sat in front of you at the bullfight this afternoon has been murdered!” she concluded, facing Adele. There was a brittle silence, and then two blue bowls, worth ten
pesos
and bought for three, crashed to the floor and became worthless blue chips.

“A man named Michael Fitz—American citizen—mining and railway interests—member of American Club and Mexican Country Club—resident of Mexico City for the past eleven years—leaves a wife and one child in Cuernavaca.”

“A wife!” Adele Mabie echoed. “Oh, how awful for her!” She stood above the wreckage of the bowls. “He—he didn’t look like a man with a wife and a child.”

“You saw him, then?” Miss Withers demanded.

“Of course! He was the man who came with the Prothero girl! I saw them in the row in front of me, and very good friends they seemed to be, until she jumped over the railing and deserted him.”

“Listen here,” the alderman broke in. “You don’t think that this could have anything to do with what happened on the train and all? You don’t mean that the mysterious murderer you’ve been talking about struck at Adele again—”

“And missed again?” Miss Withers nodded. “It looks exactly like that. The police won’t see the connection, but I see it. Of course, every other possibility must be eliminated. Have you a telephone book?”

“What do you want a telephone book for?” began the alderman suspiciously, but Adele was already leading the schoolteacher into the bedroom. There, in a drawer of the bare little desk which stood before the window, was a telephone book. The address given for Mr. Michael Fitz (of Ericcson 4419) was on the Avenue Juarez, number sixty-two.

“I’ll be seeing you later,” Miss Withers told the two of them hastily and headed for the door. There she paused, shaking her finger warningly at Francis Mabie. “Mind, don’t let your wife get out of your sight until I return—and don’t let her stand in front of any windows!”

She paused in the hall before the inspector’s door, her hand raised to knock. Then she thought better of it. After all, this was the sort of scouting expedition with which he had the least sympathy or approval. She hurried on down the stairs, out through the lobby, and soon was whirling through dark and dismal streets in a taxi.

It was only a
tostón
fare to number sixty-two on the Avenue Juarez, but since number sixty-two turned out to be a large and gaping building excavation, that was of little help. “Back to the hotel, lady?”

She nodded—and then remembered something she had overheard. It was the name of an apartment house—Principe! that was it.

“Somewhere on the Paseo Reforma,” she said. “A new building.”

“Yes, lady!” The driver nodded. “It is but three statues and a monument down the street. One
momentito
and we are there.”

They turned left under the statue of a vast and well-fed horse bearing on its back the inevitable posing general, and then raced southwest-ward along what Miss Withers thought might well have been the most beautiful boulevard in the world if there had been any street lights to see it by. One statue, two, three statues—and a monument.

They drew up before the Edificio Principe, a small high building built in the style usually blamed upon the modern Germans, being all of concrete and glass and sharp angles. There was a red canopy over the door painted in geometric angles, and beneath that canopy, to strike the necessary note of contrast, sat an
Indio
doorman in filthy overalls. He was engaged with a mouth organ and a milk bottle full of something which did not smell to Miss Withers like milk. He put the bottle hastily behind him as she approached, but gave no other recognition of the fact that a visitor was passing the portals.

There was, of course, no directory of tenants in the lower hall, but Miss Withers climbed resolutely up the dark stairs, relying upon the help of the flashlight in the shape of a fountain pen which she always carried in her handbag. To her pleased surprise she found on the second floor landing that an engraved card had been pinned to a door by means of a thumbtack. “Michael D. Fitz—
experto en minerales y aciete.”

In a flash she had whipped out her faithful hairpin, thanking heaven that Yale locks had not formed part of the modern influence in Mexico—and in a moment she was inside. The place smelled of stale tobacco, alcohol and old clothes. Then the ray of her flash outlined a squarish white room with one narrow window onto a court. To make up for the lack of windows, however, there were no less than four doors.

It would be hard, the schoolteacher decided, to get any real impression of the occupant of this room from its appearance. For pictures there were only two raffish framed drawings in red conte crayon clipped from
Esquire,
for furniture there was a day bed, a settee, a love seat, a glass-topped metal-legged table, and a chest of drawers bearing an American radio and a vase of roses whose petals had rained over everything. There was no chair, only one lamp, and not a book in the place. But there was a little commode which, judging by its stains, was used as a liquor cabinet.

Tiptoeing softly as she went—for Miss Withers had no intentions of arousing neighbors who might ask embarrassing questions—she tried the first door. It was a bath; new, gleaming and competent. The shelves of the cabinet, she noticed, held several lotions for restoring the color of hair, for waxing mustaches, various pills for the improvement of digestion, and every known preparation sold to conquer the morning-after feeling.

The cakes of soap were scented, the towels were unclean. There was a box of bobby pins on the edge of the bathtub and a tiny round container of blue eye shadow on the window ledge, over which Miss Withers puzzled somewhat.

She tried the next door and found it to be a closet, containing a goodly collection of masculine shoes, suits and the like. There was a set of muddy golf clubs in the corner, well rusted.

The next door brought her into a kitchenette, which was about as untidy and uninteresting as a man’s kitchenette usually is. There was a half-plucked, scrawny-looking chicken lying on the table, a pot and knife beside it. The icebox held nothing but beer and charged water.

She looked at the chicken again, telling herself that it would have made a poor supper even had Michael Fitz lived to eat it. Then, more than a little uneasy in the glare of those blue-lidded, faintly reptilian eyes, she closed the kitchen door.

Now the fourth and last door—her last hope if she were to discover anything which might throw a light on the personality of the mysterious Don Juan with the gray temples who had lunched so cheerfully with Dulcie Prothero. Lunched on cocktails, if Miss Withers remembered correctly.

She opened the door and stopped as if she had been turned to marble. The room was dark, except for one flickering candle.

Sitting on the floor in front of an open bureau drawer, his arms full of framed and unframed photographs of women, was young Julio Mendez, wearing his beret and smoking a cigarette. He looked up, dropped the photographs, and then—it was something of a feat under the circumstances—he smiled his bright and cheerful smile.

“Well!” he cried. “Mees Withers, as I breathe and live!”

Her hand was in her handbag. “Don’t you dare reach for your field-piece, young man! I am armed—and besides, the inspector is waiting for me down in the street.” She faced him menacingly. “Just what are you doing here?”