Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (20 page)

Adele had noticed that too. “Tell me something,” she demanded in a voice which showed that there was strain beneath her layer of composure. “Are the police any closer to finding out who—”

“If you ask me, the problem before the police isn’t so much
who
as
how,”
the schoolteacher declared. “No, I don’t think they are closer to anything, even though they have two confessions. Mr. Hansen confesses that Mr. Lighton did it, and Mr. Lighton confesses that Mr. Hansen is the guilty party.”

Adele ran her fingers through her hair. “What a lot of silly nonsense! Those two couldn’t have killed Mr. Fitz. Not just because he misused some money of theirs. You might as well say that it was Francis, just because he lent some money to Mr. Hansen on the train to put into this ridiculous shoestring proposition!”

“Oh!” said Miss Withers.

“Have I given something away? Well, you’d be bound to find that out sooner or later, so it doesn’t really matter. You know and I know that my husband wouldn’t kill a flea.”

“He will if he stays long in this country,” Miss Hildegarde Withers pronounced grimly, having had her first experience with the smaller fauna of Mexico a short time previous. “But I think I know what you mean, and I’m somewhat inclined at the moment to agree. You see, the motives are all wrong for your husband. Besides, he is a rather poor shot, I understand.”

Adele’s eyes widened. “A shot? Oh—I see.” She smiled a faint smile. “Anyway, we’re getting out of the country on Wednesday’s boat—leaving tomorrow for the port of Vera Cruz.”

“Bag and baggage, eh?” Miss Withers surveyed the impedimenta which littered the room, the gaping suitcases, trunks half open, boxes, and the rows upon rows of curios arranged straight and neat against the wall and upon every flat surface of furniture. Her gaze lingered on the two matched
banderillas
with their black-gold decoration. Then she looked up. “When you say ‘we’ of course you mean your husband and yourself?”

Adele looked blank. “Why—Francis is of the opinion that it might look odd for him to leave now, until this is all settled. So I’m taking Dulcie Prothero to help with the tickets and the baggage and the customs fuss—she’s really awfully competent at that sort of thing.”

“Competent is hardly the word,” Miss Withers said. “She is certainly a good one at keeping secrets. And why she would do almost menial labor rather than dip into the wealth pinned to her underwear…” The schoolteacher shook her head. “And for all her desire to get to Mexico, Dulcie is perfectly willing to leave with you?”

“Willing and anxious!” Adele insisted. “Whatever was her errand in coming to Mexico, it is finished. I’m not going to pry and question her any more, and I hope you won’t.”

Miss Withers shook her head.

“Dulcie is just as glad to get out of here as I, and of course Francis will follow as soon as the mystery is cleared up.”

The schoolteacher thought that the alderman might be wearing a long white beard by that time, but she held her tongue. She looked down admiringly at the long row of riding crops which lay, neatly arranged according to length, on the desk ready for packing.

“Every one of my friends has started to go horsy!” Adele explained. “Long Island and Connecticut—everywhere people are taking up riding. So these will be real novelties when I get them back to New York.”

There were riding crops of polished horn joined painfully together by the convicts on the Islas Marias. There were crops of whalebone covered with the skin of pigs, crops of braided brown calf, of brilliantly painted wood, of inlay, and even of cane with crudely carved horses’ heads for handles. There were whips of every conceivable variety except one.

“Oh yes,” Adele said. “The alligator one. Nicest of the lot, and it’s gone.”

“As if we hadn’t mystery enough already,” Miss Withers remarked, thinking of something else.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the maids in the hotel…” Adele went on sadly.

Miss Hildegarde Withers almost choked at the mental picture of a fat Mexican
criada
on her afternoon off, galloping up and down the bridle paths of the Paseo and slapping her mount on the tail with Adele’s prize bit of Mexican handicraft. But it was time to go.

“Before I leave,” she said, “I don’t suppose you would care to play Truth for a moment?”

Adele’s eyes widened. “What?

“You wouldn’t like to tell me the real reason”—Miss Withers lowered her voice to a whisper—“the real reason why you kept Dulcie from going to the Floating Gardens this afternoon and evening?”

Adele Mabie stood there, immobile. “Of course I’ll tell you,” she said, in a voice that had not a trace of emotion in it. “I didn’t hire that girl entirely out of kindness of heart. But I must have somebody around! My husband is no help—I could be murdered a dozen times and he wouldn’t know. He’s a love, and he’s got a great political future, but heaven knows he isn’t very bright.”

“Yes?” Miss Withers prompted gently.

“And the reason I want Dulcie with me every minute is because I’m scared! I’m scared to death! And I’m afraid that if I’m alone something—somebody…”

Her voice broke, but she did not sob, did not bury her head on the couch. She simply stood there, blankly. And Miss Withers knew that Adele Mabie was telling the truth.

Miss Withers said what she could, which was little enough. Then she closed the door helplessly behind her and left Adele alone with her toys—and her terror.

It was a very real terror, so real that for the dozenth time since her arrival Miss Withers wondered if there wasn’t a chance that Adele Mabie knew what—or who, rather—was threatening her.

Not that she would talk, and not that Dulcie would talk. Nobody talked in this case except when in a babbling coma. And even that information had been like a tennis net, more holes than rope.

The inspector wasn’t in his room. He was never in his room when she wanted him. Miss Withers stalked downstairs and through the lobby of the Hotel Georges, managing to reach the street with only one shoe-shine, a record for her.

She walked swiftly, as if trying to leave something behind her. Down Madero and along Juarez, through the green stretches of the Alameda haunted as always by a thousand peddlers selling things to each other. Then north past the busy school playgrounds, through the cobbled streets of the old quarter with their thousand glimpses of squalid courts littered with goats and dogs and children and flowers, then south again through the swarms of lottery ticket sellers that infest the Corner of Fortune, down along narrow crooked streets that ran into the great San Juan Market, where one can buy everything in the world.

She walked past stands heavy with roses, iris, gladioli, fresh scentless violets, carnations of a red that was almost black, gardenias that filled the air with perfume.

There were tables covered with broken keys, used toothbrushes, rusty hinges, third-hand and fourth-hand paper bags. There was a stand with several thousand old medicine bottles, all shining and clean, another with nothing but earrings of lovely brass, then a whole row with nothing but breasts of chicken, followed by another with the halved heads of kids and lambs. The schoolteacher moved hastily away from their accusing, pitiful eyes.

She passed another stand in the form of a great hatrack, from which dangled ropes and bridles made of hair and fuzzy as caterpillars, cinchbands of canvas decorated with beads, bits for horses’ mouths and stirrups for riders’ feet all chased in silver on copper, black spurs with sharp rowels three inches long, cruel and glistening.

The shadows were lengthening now along the narrow crooked streets of the old city, and here and there the red light of the western sun touched the crumbling stone of the houses with a warm unearthly glow.

The sunlight fell full and clear upon a blue tile set in an old cracked wall, a tile half hidden by the profuse blossoms of a magnificent blue-purple bougainvillea. Miss Hildegarde Withers read the ancient florid script
“Calle Violetta”
—and caught her breath.

All through the afternoon she had been unconsciously searching for this street sign. And now she was here, here on the corner of Violetta Street. Here, only last night, Dulcie Prothero had come out second best in an encounter with a taxicab. Here, within a stone’s throw, must be dangling one of the loose threads of her murder mystery—for Violetta was only one block long and ended in a cul-de-sac.

She went on, and then, in a wide half-ruined gateway leading into a patio filled with goats, chickens, washing and flowers, she came upon a group of very young children playing with a ball made of rags tightly tied together.

“Hello!” she greeted them. After all, children are children in any language.

“¡
Hola, señorita! Buenos tardes.”
They stopped their play, with the almost universal politeness of the Mexican young, and grouped around her.

“I want to find—it should be in this street or near by—the home of the American bullfighter,” she said. “¿
Donde esta
the house of the
torero de yanquilandia
?”

Seven soft voices chanted
“Allá, señorita.”
Seven fingers pointed to a sagging tenement across the street. Seven palms accepted infinitesimal silver coins.

It was after sunset when Miss Hildegarde Withers left Violetta Street, and the glow was gone. The twilight had settled down upon the city like a solid thing. The few feeble gas flares and candles which appeared here and there served only to accentuate the darkness. The schoolteacher shivered and turned hastily homeward.

One block—another—and then she realized that someone was following her. It was a feeling, a psychic sense rather than anything definite, and yet it was as real as anything. Every time she stopped to look back she saw nothing more than the crowded streets, the homebound workers, the children playing and shouting, women packing up their offerings of wizened apples and plums to be brought back another day for sidewalk display. The streets were bare of automobiles, not a taxi-cab in sight anywhere.

Yet the shadows seemed to move, to merge, to deepen as she watched. The few lighted windows of the houses seemed far away, and every corner, every doorway, was waiting…

She walked faster, turned right on the next corner and then left again. “I’m nervous as a cat,” the schoolteacher told herself. “I’ll be
seeing
things yet!” All the same, she kept hurrying.

And whatever it was that followed her was hurrying too. She could almost hear the footsteps, she fancied—yet every time she looked back she was forced to admit that it must be the Invisible Man.

Some people have a faculty of knowing when they are being watched, a sixth sense that causes a little prickle along the back of the neck. This was Miss Withers’ to the highest degree, and it kept signaling to her with a sharp buzzing in the back of her mind.

“It can’t be bandits,” she told herself angrily, “because I certainly don’t look as if I had any money. And nobody would pay ransom for me, either. It can’t be anyone trying to murder me, because my investigations certainly haven’t cut any ice.”

The street she was following suddenly twisted, ran head on into another, and stopped. And then Miss Withers realized that she hadn’t the slightest idea of whether to turn right or left.

It was a time for instant decisions, and so she made one. There was no use hurrying blindly down these dark, foreign, and suddenly unfriendly streets.

There was no use trying to run away from whatever was dogging her footsteps, for long ago she had learned the lesson in life that it is usually the things one flies from that stick closer than a brother.

So, as she rounded the corner, Miss Hildegarde Withers took pains to disappear. It was not much of a place to disappear into, but it was all she could find.

She waited, watching and listening. With all her heart she wished that the inspector were here beside her. Failing that, she wished for the faithful black cotton umbrella which had served her so well in many a previous imbroglio. For it was not her imagination that had sent her hurrying from the shadows. There was the sound of light quick footsteps coming around the corner, pausing just out of view.

“Waiting to see where I went, eh? Well, I’ll show them!” And from behind the swinging doors of the little neighborhood
cantina
popped an embattled spinster, face to face with her shadow at last.

It was only Julio Mendez, mopping his brow and leaning heavily upon his malacca stick.

The words which had been on Miss Withers’ tongue stuck there. It was the Gay Caballero who regained his composure first. “Well, if this isn’t a big surprise? To meeting you like this!”

“Surprise my aunt!” she accused him. “You’ve been following me for half an hour. And don’t try to deny it.”

“Sure,” he agreed, with his usual cheer. “Bet your life I follow. Ever since I saw you go into Violetta Street—”

“You were watching that place? But why?”

“Same reason you go there, I guess,” Julio admitted. “You know, I like very much this Dulcie Prothero. I interest myself in what happens to her last night.”

“Of all things! Still playing detective, eh?”

“But yes! I went to school with Manuel Robles, you see? And I must doing everything I can, no?” He fell calmly into step beside her. “This not very damn-good section, maybe I better show you home. Tell me, you don’t solve this murder either?”

She shook her head. “I can think of a lot of questions, but I can’t think of the answers. And the inspector isn’t much help. He just runs around yessing these idiotic police of yours.”

“Dumbs-bells, all of them,” Julio murmured sympathetically. “I know!”

They continued in silence for half a block. “If I had the answers to just six questions,” Miss Withers finally burst out, “I think this case would be sewed up tight in a bag.”

Julio was unwontedly serious. “Go ahead, try me,” he invited eagerly. “I got nothing else to do—Miss Dulcie turns me down, and I got no date to go to the Floating Gardens.”

She stared at him and then said: “What can I lose?” For a moment she was thoughtful. “First—well, first I’d like to know why Michael Fitz brought home an absolutely inedible fighting cock to eat.”