Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (6 page)

He said it in English several times, in a loud voice. But the waiter only flinched. And then, just as it appeared that he would have either to send for the Pullman conductor or else go hungry, a pleasant voice spoke in his ear.

“May I service you,
señor
?”

Without waiting for an answer, the tall blond youth sat down opposite him, bringing his cup of coffee. He told the waiter, in flowing Spanish, to produce instantly
huevos con jamón,
the
huevos fritos
on both sides. “Okay?”

“Thanks,” said Piper grudgingly. “By the way”—he confronted his table mate—“how did you know I was from New York?”

The smile widened. “But your necktie!”

Piper stared down at the somewhat twisted and bedraggled cravat, genuinely pleased to think that there was something metropolitan about it. “The inside label, it says Epstein Kollege Klothes of Broadway,” pointed out the younger man. So it did, but the inspector instantly doubted if it could have been seen in the one brief glance the youth had given him when they met in the coach ahead.

“Didn’t doing so good with the
señorita,
eh?” his companion continued, as one man to another.

Piper stiffened, but the smile was an ingenuous one. “Only pretty girl on these train, hell-damn it,” went on the youth, in tortured English which the inspector thought faintly reminiscent of some play he had once had to sit through, a play about a lovely Castilian girl and an American aviator and a bandit who was “the best damn caballero in all Meheeko.”

“She didn’t encouraging me so much neither,” the youth went on. “But I know her name. Her name is Dulcie, and that means ‘dessert’ in my language.”

The ham and eggs arrived. “You live here, then?” Piper asked.

“Allow me!” With a flourish the young man produced a narrow engraved card bearing the name
Señor
Julio Carlos Mendez S. “The initial is for Schley, my mother’s name,” he explained. “I use it to give a something at the end, you understand? From my German mother” I get my blondness. Everybody takes me for one American, I’ll tell you. Because I speak such hell-damn good English. I pick that up in Tijuana when I used to go there for spending the money my papa make raising bulls for the bull ring. Me, I like very much Americans.”

Piper introduced himself, without going into his official status. “¡
Mucho gusto, señor
!” They solemnly shook hands.

“I like girl Americans,” Julio Carlos Mendez S. went on cheerily. “I like to learn slang from pretty
señoritas.
Not many pretty girls on these train, except Miss Dulcie and”—he added this most casually—“the lady in our Pullman who make all the peddlers on the platform happy buying so many curios.”

The inspector suddenly realized that the other was watching him covertly, waiting for an answer.

He nodded and went on eating.

Julio leaned confidentially closer. “I hear stories that there was this afternoon a misfortunate accident on this train. In that lady’s room!”

The inspector cautiously admitted having heard a rumor or two.

“But you yourself were there, no? Or very soon afterward?”

“I was,” admitted Piper. He wondered if this came under the head of idle curiosity, or if he was being cleverly pumped.

“What you think, eh? You think that poor Manuel Robles died by heart failure?”

So that was the customs man’s name. Piper made a mental note. “I wouldn’t know about that,” he said.

Julio shrugged. “I happen to know the family of that poor young man. Very healthy family, that. They don’t have heart failures. I never hear of one person in that family having heart failures.”

“Then your idea is …” Piper broke out into the open.

Julio Mendez hesitated. Something was in his dark intent eyes, something hovered on the tip of his tongue. But he did not speak.

“You’re not thinking of murder, are you?” the inspector pressed.

“I’m thinking,” said Julio Mendez earnestly, “that it is sometimes better to let the police pulling their own irons out of the fire.” And he rose and walked away.

“Funny his knowing the name of the customs man,” Piper said to himself. Possibly either a dupe or an out-and-out accomplice. Because this seemed to be stacking up as a woman’s murder. Poison, that was distinctly feminine. And all that roundabout stuff of the smashed tea glass. A man wouldn’t have shot the air gun or whatever impelled that bullet at the glass. A man would have shot at the intended victim.

Well, the Mexican authorities could thresh that all out for themselves. No use trying to contact any of these jerkwater police chiefs along the way; Mexico City was the only place for a showdown. Thanks to Hildegarde, it was a pretty fair chain of circumstantial evidence that he had prepared to lay before them.

Oscar Piper counted off points, one, two, three, on his fingers. Not entirely complete as yet, but no bad holes in it. Not even Hildegarde Withers could knock holes in this setup. Though it was only fair, really, to let her in on the inside.

Taking some yellow blanks from the rack down the car, he returned to his table and settled down to the throes of composition. The next stop would be Saltillo in half an hour, and he could put it on the wire there. He began:

MURDER IS WHAT IT ADDS UP TO INNOCENT BYSTANDER DEAD THROUGH POISON PLANTED FOR ADELE MABIE IN PERFUME BOTTLE STOP YOUR INFORMATION SHOWS PERFUME STOCK OF DRUGSTORE WHERE PROTHERO GIRL WORKED BEFORE TAKING JOB WITH MABIES STOP AS DISCHARGED EMPLOYEE SHE HAD FAIR MOTIVE EXCELLENT OPPORTUNITY STOP POLICE HERE HESITANT HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO FORCE THEIR HANDS ON ARRIVAL MEXICO CITY THANKS

OSCAR

He read it over, frowned and shook his head. You never could tell when information would leak out. If there only were some possible code—but of course! He tore up the first message, dropped the scraps into his ashtray and began again, using a code that would be Greek to Mexicans and simplicity itself to a Manhattan schoolteacher.

URDERMAY…INNOCENT…YSTANDERBAY…OISONPAY

He wrote on and on, finishing as they drew into the station. It was only the work of a moment to cross the platform, file the message with the telegraph operator, and return to the train. As he walked back through the dining car he noticed with some surprise that while his ashtray still held the remains of his after-dinner cigar, the scraps of the first telegram he had written had completely disappeared.

A
GREAT TIGER-STRIPED CAT
welcomed Miss Hildegarde Withers on the sidewalk outside the rooming house on Eighty-sixth Street, escorted her up the steps and waited patiently beside her while the schoolteacher rang the bell.

The cat obviously only wanted in, but Miss Withers considered its purring companionship as a good omen.

“Dulcie Prothero don’t live here any more,” the wrapper-clad landlady advised her midnight caller. “She’s gone to Mexico to seek her fortune.”

“To do
what
?” Miss Withers blinked.

“To seek her fortune, I said,” the woman repeated stoutly. The door was not very far open, but the tiger cat managed to parade through without any loss of dignity, and Miss Withers edged after it.

“I’m a sort of relative,” she announced shamelessly. “I just wanted to find out some things about Dulcie.”

The landlady pondered this. “An aunt from out of town, eh? Well, if you’ve come for her things I couldn’t really let you have them without you pay me the two weeks rent she left owing,” the woman continued apologetically. “Left in a hurry, the child did. But she was always in a hurry, always up to something. Such a one! And when I was her age I was such another, let me tell you!” The vast bosom sighed.

“So she rushed off to Mexico, eh? To make her fortune.” Miss Withers’ equine visage wore a somewhat puzzled smile.

“She did that. Some sort of job came up overnight, and whist! she was gone. Says to me, ‘Auntie Mac’ (my name being Macafee) ‘I’m going to Mexico, and I’m either coming back in such grand style that you won’t know me or else I’m not coming back at all,’ she says.”

“It was sudden, then?”

“It was and it wasn’t. Heaven knows she’d talked enough about Mexico and read all the books in the rental library. Being the kind of girl she was, a tomboy and a man-hater, I think foreign parts took the place in her mind that most girls give to being boy-crazy.”

“She didn’t leave because of a man, then?” Miss Withers wanted to know. “She wasn’t running away?”

“Her?” Mrs. Macafee laughed. “She wouldn’t run away from the divil himself if he stood in her way, and that’s a fact. As soon slap your face as kiss you, and likely to do both in the space of five minutes. But I tell you, men were no more important in her life than—than nothing.” Mrs. Macafee sighed again. “I wish I could say the same.”

“I wonder if I could see her room?” the schoolteacher hinted. “I know it’s late, but …”

“Her things are upstairs, two flights in front. I haven’t even got around to packing them and putting them down cellar, with this hot weather and all. As I said, I shouldn’t be turning them over to anybody until I get my two weeks’ rent—eighteen dollars it is and fifty cents telephone—but if she wants them sent to her I would be the last person in the world to say no, having been young once and poor all my life …”

The cat escorted them up the stairs into a long narrow room which still held a trunk and other traces of its former occupant. There were no less than a dozen empty picture frames on the wall, a row of well-worn dresses in the closet, and one bureau drawer was full of recipes. “Not that the child ever cooked anything,” Mrs. Macafee said. “But no magazine went out of this house without her bringing her little fingernail scissors—”

“You haven’t a picture of her anywhere around?” Miss Withers asked.

“Only this!” The landlady laughed. “Isn’t it a scream? Dulcie used to keep it around, she said, to keep from being vain.”

It was a faded photograph of perhaps forty little boys and girls, none of them over ten or eleven. In the front row stood a plump and freckled child with fat legs. Mrs. Macafee indicated it with her thumb. “That’s her, taken when she was in school. That’s the schoolhouse steps they’re on.”

Miss Withers nodded, recognizing those steps. Mrs. Macafee was opening a shelf in the closet. “And here are her newspapers—subscribed she did to every sheet in Mexico. Not that she could read a word of the lingo, but she’d spend hours over them every time they arrived.”

Miss Withers was slowly building up a picture of Dulcie Prothero, a picture composed of the drawer of recipes, the scent that clung to the top bureau drawers, the old class photograph …

Even the way the great tiger cat wandered purring happily through the place, as if a regular visitor there. Then there was the little bookshelf above the bed, with
His Monkey Wife, The Oxford Book of English Verse, Gulliver,
and
Modern Home Decor.

Miss Withers took out her handbag. This sleuthing was getting to be an expensive avocation, what with fifty-word telegrams and back-rent bills to pay. Yet she felt a real and personal interest in this case.

“How much did you say was due you, Mrs. Macafee?”

The woman hesitated doubtfully. Then—“Now, did Dulcie really go and write you to send her things down there?”

Miss Withers had to admit that she had received no such message. “Then if you don’t mind I’ll keep them here for her,” the landlady decided. “She’ll pay me when she can, and if she came back and found her room changed or her things gone I know she’d feel bad. She’d probably skin me alive. She hasn’t got red hair for nothing, that girl, I was just like her forty years ago,” Mrs. Macafee added. “Only with less sense as regards men.”

They were at the head of the stairs when Miss Withers remembered to ask one last question. “What sort of pictures did Dulcie have in those frames that are empty now? Of whom were they?”

Mrs. Macafee picked up the purring tiger cat, ruffled its broad striped face. “Oh yes, she did take those along. Moment I came into the room I knew that something was different.”

“Were they movie stars?”

“You’d never guess,” the landlady confided. “Not in a thousand years. No, they weren’t movie stars nor painted pictures nor portraits of the boyfriends she had so little use for. They were pictures of cows!”

“Cows?” echoed Miss Hildegarde Withers weakly. “You said ‘cows’?”

Mrs. Macafee nodded solemnly. “Cows, as God is my judge.”

Train number forty of the Ferrocarriles Nacionales roared southward into the night, its cars darkened, its passengers presumably asleep. Inspector Oscar Piper had, in fact, seen most of them to bed.

The inspector was taking no chances in the interim before arriving at Mexico City and turning his Pandora’s box of headaches over to the authorities there. He had been standing, smoking a good-night cigar, in the corridor, when the Mabies admitted the porter to make up the berths. “I’m so glad you’re keeping an eye on things,” Adele said. “I feel so safe now.”

“Thanks,” said the inspector. “But lock your door all the same.”

He had watched from his vantage point in the corridor while the little world of Pullman car Elysian turned in. First to disappear behind the green curtains were the Ippwings. “Guess there’s no chance of bandits or any more excitement tonight, Mother,” the old man had decided. “Guess we’d better hit the hay. Tomorrow is another day.”

Closely following had been the Mexican-American family with the children—a consul at New Orleans, somebody said, homeward bound for a vacation. Hansen and Lighton quit their checker game. Somewhere along the way the two broad-hipped and giggling
señoritas
had disembarked, but the Spanish gentleman with the handlebar mustaches was still in evidence, snoring thin patrician snores in his upper berth.

Julio Mendez S. (the S. to give a something at the end) was the last. He came into the Pullman shaking his head. “She won’t do it,” he told Piper.

“Who won’t what?”

“Miss Prothero. She has damn small
dinero,
that charming one. I try to get her to take my berth. I tell her I don’t mind sit up in the day coach. But she says she don’t sleep anyway. So …” He shrugged and climbed into his berth along with the guitar and the two alligators.