Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (19 page)

He scowled dubiously. “But how—how in blazes did you find out that?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t. As a matter of fact, I doubt if a word of it is true. I made up the parts about the beauty parlor and the family drugstore and the rest of it. But it’s as good as the police theory, isn’t it?”

The inspector subsided mournfully.

Miss Withers tapped her teeth with a pencil. “Here’s another suggestion,” she continued brightly. “Let’s suppose, just for fun, that Fitz wasn’t killed by accident. Suppose that
he
was the murderer of Manuel Robles, the customs man—motive as yet undisclosed. Suppose he thought of the clever indirect method of putting a bottle of poisoned perfume in the baggage of some passenger on the train, then waiting for his victim, making a routine inspection, to find it? Then Mr. Fitz catches a plane, arrives here before the rest of you, and thinks he has gotten away with it. But he does not know that Julio Mendez, a friend of the dead Robles, is on his trail. Julio lays his plans, gets Dulcie Prothero—innocently, of course—to put the victim on the spot, and then pops him off with the air gun and banderilla?”

“That leaves out the snake,” Piper complained.

“And it leaves out most of the facts too,” Miss Withers retorted. “Come on back to the hotel. I’m going to take a nap and see if I’ll dream a solution.”

But there was to be no nap for her today. As she went up the stairs an apparition descended upon her in the shape of Rollo Lighton. She hardly knew the man, for he was shaved, dressed in clean linen and a not too badly fitting Palm Beach suit. In his outstretched hand was the fountain pen that she had never expected to see again.

“Thanks a lot for trusting me with it,” he told her. Then, as she smiled and started to continue up the stair, he held out his hand. “I wonder if I could talk to you,” he said. “I’ve got something to confess.”

“Something to what?” she demanded blankly.

“To confess—conscience and all that, you know. It’s been working on my mind all day. I got ready to go to the police, but I don’t know if they would listen. I thought maybe you—”

“Come on, come on,” she said and led him to her room. Lighton sank heavily into the easy chair.

“I know who killed Mike Fitz,” he said.

Miss Withers waited in silence.

“If I tell, do you think they’ll protect me—or get me out of town? Because my life won’t be safe a minute.”

“Go on,” the schoolteacher told him. “As things are now, nobody’s life is safe a minute.”

He nodded, looking at the floor. “Well?” prompted Miss Withers.

“It’s Hansen,” he said, his voice barely audible.

“What?” Of all the names Miss Withers had been expecting to hear, this was the last.

He nodded. “We were in together on a deal,” he said. “A deal to corner all the generators in the city, and coin dough on renting them during the strike. It was Al’s idea. One of the things I did in Laredo was to cash my bonus bonds, so I had quite a bit of money. Anyway, we sent it by telegraph down to Mike Fitz. And when we got here we found he’d crossed us. I wanted to go to court, and I actually did get Al Hansen to go with me and try for a writ. But the law in this town is slow and involved. We gave Fitz until Sunday night to dig up the money, but we both knew he wouldn’t. So I went out and got drunk, but I know that Al Hansen—well, he’s a tough customer. I begged him not to do anything crazy, but—”

“You don’t know anything more definite than just the motive?” Miss Withers demanded impatiently.

Rollo Lighton stared at her. “I know that Hansen has been a bullfight fan for years—that in his house in Frisco he’s got a dozen swords and half-a-hundred
banderillas.”

“Is he a good shot?” the schoolteacher asked thoughtfully.

Lighton nodded. “When he was with Villa, running guns, he could outshoot anybody in the crowd. He’s got medals for marksmanship—but what has that got to do—”

“Plenty,” said Miss Withers. “Don’t go away.” She went to the telephone, gave excited instructions to the girl downstairs at the switchboard. A moment later she was speaking to Captain de Silva. She spoke, listened and finally put the receiver softly down.

“You may be interested to know,” she told Rollo Lighton, “that Al Hansen is in the office of the
jefe
right now, making a confession.”

“Yes?” Lighten gaped, showing his snags of teeth. The schoolteacher nodded. “A confession that
you
were the one who killed Michael Fitz! You two gentlemen ought to get together…”

But Rollo Lighten was going out fast through the door, and he did not turn when she called after him.

“It’s clear enough,” the inspector insisted later. “The two of them are in it up to here. And now each one is trying to pin it on the other, just like in the Snyder-Gray thing. Fitz tried to hold out the dough that Hansen and Lighten had sent him to work a deal with …”

Miss Withers shook her head. “If he’d had the money he would have given it back, Oscar. Especially if he thought he was in any danger, and he must have known that Lighten was once in the army and could shoot—and that Al Hansen used to be a gunrunner. Besides, if he had had money cached away he wouldn’t have snitched Dulcie’s glass emerald and tried to raise cash on it.”

The inspector stuck to his guns. “Anyway, I’m satisfied,” he declared. “I think de Silva is too, but he won’t arrest those two guys. He just passes the buck. Says he has to have the authority of the
jefe
or of this figurehead of a lieutenant colonel. They do everything roundabout in this country.”

“Anyway,” Miss Withers demanded, “there’s no more talk of arresting the poor alderman, alibi or no alibi?”

“Not until they wash up this Lighton-Hansen mess one way or the other. But why?”

She told him, displaying a sheaf of travel folders. “I spiked that theory of de Silva’s, anyway. At Cook’s I checked on the itinerary of the Empress round-the-world tours. They have all the dope in the local office, because once in a while passengers leave the ships at Acapulco on the Pacific, make the trip across Mexico, and catch them again at Havana. Anyway, I know this. No Empress liner makes a stop at any port not flying the Union Jack if they can help it. Gibraltar and Egypt and Bombay and Sydney—but not Havre nor Naples. ‘Buy Empire’ is the motto. Therefore, Adele Mabie was never in Paris, she did not meet Manuel Robles there, and the whole case against her husband is just so much applesauce.”

“Great work, Hildegarde!”

But she took no pleasure in the praise. “Oscar, there’s a key to this whole thing that we’re missing,” she insisted. “We’re shooting in the dark…” Suddenly she stopped. “Speaking of shooting, Oscar Piper, I have an idea!”

“Yeah? Go ahead.”

Miss Withers hastily consulted her watch. “Yes, the stores are open again. Where’s the nearest place to get curios, Oscar?”

He grinned. “Up in Adele’s room.”

But the schoolteacher told him that this was one curio Adele Mabie did not possess. Completely mystified, the inspector followed her out of the hotel, waited in the taxi while she made a tour of the shops on Juarez Avenue. At length she returned with a parcel almost as tall as herself. With the greatest of difficulty the thing was dragged inside the taxicab, and then she told the driver “¡
A la plaza de toros
!”

Her accent was poor, but he understood, broke into English surprisingly. “No bullfight today, lady—only on Sunday!”

“Never you mind,” Miss Hildegarde Withers told him sharply. And they rolled away. At last they came into view of the great dark pillbox against the sky. “There ought to be a caretaker somewhere, Oscar,” she said. “You’ll have to bribe him, because we’ve got to get inside.”

“Okay, but how about leaving the doohickey in the taxi?”

“You bring the doohickey along,” she told him. “We’ll need it inside.”

There was no caretaker at the gate, but for some reason or other it turned out to be unlocked. They entered, walked stealthily along the muddy path where yesterday had been ranked the peddlers and beggars, up the first short flight of stairs…

From somewhere in the pens and corrals underneath came a fierce bawling and the crash of horns against wood, but otherwise they seemed very alone in the vast place.

It was dark on the stairs that led to the topmost tier, darker even than the gray clouds overhead would seem to warrant. “Looks like we’ll get our daily rainstorm in a little while,” the inspector observed, as the wind tugged at his hat, swished at the paper wrapping of the tall bundle he held.

And then they heard footsteps coming down the stairs above them. Swiftly Miss Withers drew the inspector into a cubbyhole under the steps, and they peered warily forth.

They saw a man come into view, a young jaunty man carrying a package almost identical to the one which the inspector was complaining about. This young man wore a blue beret and was softly whistling
“El Novillero.”

“Julio!” gasped Miss Withers. “Julio Mendez!”

He stopped short, and for an instant an expression emphatically not of welcome flickered across his face. Then the wide smile returned.

“Hello!” said Julio. “What’s bringing you here? The murderers revisiting the scene of the crime, yes?”

Miss Withers, who had been about to make the same remark, sniffed as meaningfully as she could.

Julio looked at his watch. “Sorry I must running along,” he told them. “But I have a date to take Miss Prothero for a boat ride—if it doesn’t raining. At beautiful,
romántico
Xochimilco!” And he went blithely down the steps.

“What in blazes is this all about?” Piper demanded. But the schoolteacher shook her head.

“It can’t be!” she insisted. “It can’t be! And yet I wondered how the murder weapon could have been taken away from here without someone seeing. I never thought that it might have been left to be picked up later!” She pulled at the inspector’s arm. “Come on, Oscar.”

Up they went, coming out at last on the very topmost tip of the pillbox, in the shape of a narrow railed platform running completely around the place. Below them was the roof of the boxes, then the circular rows and rows of benches, and down in the center the faintly flattened yellow circle of the arena, still bright with pools of rain water.

“You might open the package, Oscar,” suggested Miss Withers.

He tore at the paper. “Good Lord, woman! I’m not playing cowboys and Indians at my time of life!”

He was holding a great six-foot bow of ash, wound with brilliantly colored cord and beads. There was a bowstring of gut, and under the schoolteacher’s direction Piper painfully strung it so that it twanged musically.

She handed him a sheaf of bright
banderillas.
“Take your pocket-knife and notch the ends a little,” Miss Withers suggested. “Then let’s see if you can shoot one—aim at that end seat in the farthest row, which is where Fitz was sitting. Somebody has left a newspaper to mark the place.”

At last he took the bow, tried awkwardly. “Say, this dart isn’t long enough to make a good arrow!” he complained.

“Try it anyway!” demanded the schoolteacher. “Why, I’ve had boys in my classes at Jefferson School who could shoot bigger bows than that!”

The inspector bent the bow, aiming down as best he could at that distant spot in the front row of the
barrera
seats. Then he let it go.

There was a sharp z-z-zing, and then a flash of color in the air, a flash of color that curved slowly and at last struck and remained in a mammoth sign advertising Glaxo, almost at right angles to the direction of the inspector’s aim.

“Try again, and aim carefully!” Miss Withers demanded, producing another dart.

But as the inspector started to bend the bow again he suddenly stopped, pointed.

“What’s the use, Hildegarde?”

She noticed now that theirs was not the only
banderilla
hanging where no
banderilla
should be. There was another in the Glaxo sign, there was one dangling from a smashed flood lamp in the center of the arena, and several more were stuck into the roof of the boxes to their left and right, others lying in the rows of the seats.

There was only one point in common between all of the scattered missiles. Not one of them had come to rest within two hundred feet of the newspaper which marked the spot where Michael Fitz had been found dead.

T
HE ROOM WAS FILLED WITH
boxes and baggage, and there was the strong pleasant odor of leather and varnish and excelsior. “Sorry to intrude,” Miss Withers said, “but I haven’t any use for this thing after all, and I thought you might like to add it to your collection of Mexican curios.” She held out the great six-foot bow of ash, with its beads and colored windings in the ancient formal fashions of the Toltecs.

“Why—why how nice!” Adele Mabie accepted the offering, looking pleased and a little bewildered. “Oh, Dulcie”—she raised her voice—“when you finish wrapping those cups, please come here a moment.” There was a murmur from the bedroom.

Miss Withers was honestly surprised. “But I thought the little Prothero girl was going to the Floating Gardens this afternoon!”

Adele Mabie lowered her voice to an intimate whisper. “So did she! But, after all, she’s working for me now. And if she is well enough to go off excursioning with a young man, she’s well enough to help pack my curios!”

The schoolteacher didn’t say anything.

Adele went on: “I feel responsible for her, you see—and I’m not going to let her go off with a young man nobody knows for a boat ride—until all hours! He seems to be always hanging around, this Julio, but what does anybody know about him?”

“What indeed?” agreed Miss Withers.

“After all, we don’t know that it wasn’t he who…” Adele broke off as Dulcie Prothero came into the room. “Take this thing and see if it won’t fit into the big packing case, will you?”

Dulcie, looking rather pale, and with a small bandage half concealed by her red mop of hair, greeted Miss Withers with a smile and nod. Then she accepted the unwieldy weapon and departed, closing the bedroom door behind her.

“About Julio,” Miss Withers took up again, as if the subject interested her. “Of course, he carries a cane, but outside of Chicago and the Midwest that isn’t definite proof of anything wrong with his morals. The most interesting thing about him is the way that—under moments of strain and excitement—he lapses into perfectly good English!”