Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla

by Stuart Palmer

  Captain de Silva nodded, and his voice came smooth as satin. “We only want to know where you went when you left the bullfight, Mr. Hansen.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Piper. “Not that it cuts any ice, but just as a formality.”

  Hansen nodded, but his pink face was reddening a little. He went over to the wardrobe, fumbled in his black suit. “Here’s my alibi,” he said, producing a small photograph of a large woman, a large and slightly leering woman. She was photographed as only a Mexico City photographer could have pictured her, and looked somewhat like a madame on parade.

  “Her name’s Consuela,” he admitted. “But the telephone number I’m keeping to myself. I met her at the bullfight, and is she one hot number! Crazy about bullfights too, and that’s how we got to talking.”

  “Yeah,” interrupted the inspector, “but what we want—”

  “Sure, sure,” Hansen agreed. “You saw me walk out of the place while young Nicanor was monkeying with that light-colored bull? Well, it’s simple enough. I wanted to make a hit with the dame, so I went out to get some flowers.”

  “What in blazes for?” demanded the inspector. “Why not later, if you had to give her posies?”

  “Women like to throw down roses to the matador,” Al Hansen said. “When he’s killed his bull. Only I had hell’s own time finding a flower place open on Sunday, and, as it worked out, the lady wouldn’t have tossed them down anyway on account of the bull didn’t get killed. I didn’t get back to the bullfight in time to beat the rain, so I missed her.”

  “Then how the picture?”

  Hansen smiled. “She had my card. And in the mail this morning she sent me the photo—and her phone number.”

  Captain de Silva wrote steadily in his notebook. He looked up, shook his head sadly. “It is unfortunate, señor, that you have not better witnesses to say where you were. Because of your known ill will toward the deceased Mr. Fitz.”

  “My what?” Hansen was amazed. “Why, Mike and I were like that!” He held up two pudgy fingers.

  Captain de Silva looked toward the inspector, and his left eye folded in a wink. They started for the doorway, turned.

  “It is too bad then that my agentes lie. They say, señor, that you appeared before a juez municipal on Saturday and asked for a writ of attachment against the property, real or personal, of Mr. Michael Fitz. I shall personally see to it that the men responsible—”

  “Wait!” cried Hansen. “Take it easy, will you? That writ was only to scare Mike with if he still held out. He had until Sunday night to come through on a little business deal. You see, from the train we wired him—I mean, I wired him—some money—”

  “We?” said Captain de Silva pleasantly.

  Hansen shook his head. “Not at liberty to talk about that, I’m afraid. It was just a business deal.” His mouth closed like a trap.

  “You just wanted to put a little scare into him, eh?” prompted the inspector.

  “That’s right,” Hansen admitted.

  “But first somebody put five inches of steel into him, no? Good morning, señor.” And Captain de Silva led the way out into the hall. The door closed firmly behind them.

  “Listen,” said Oscar Piper, “I realize I’m only butting in, but I’d have beaten that guy’s ears down. He knows something.”

  The captain smiled and shrugged. “Perhaps he does. But we try to use the French methods here. Psychological crime investigation dictates that the course to follow is to let Mr. Hansen worry—how do you say it?—let him stew for a while. Then he talks without having his ears beaten down, no?”

  The inspector murmured impolite things under his breath, but Captain de Silva wrote happily away in his notebook.

  “About the Señorita Prothero,” the captain explained a few minutes later, “we do not need to bother ourselves now. It is quite obvious that a woman could not possess the strength to commit this murder, and, besides, she is, I understand, ill.”

  “All right, skip her,” Piper agreed. “But the boy I want to talk to is this Julio Mendez. I want to ask him—”

  “We have already talked to that gentleman, señor.”

  “Yeah?” Piper nodded, grinned. “So he’s known to the police, eh? A record?”

  “A police record of a sort, oh yes.”

  “You got ways of bearing down on him so he’ll talk, I guess.”

  The captain nodded. “I’m afraid that we must eliminate him as a suspect. At the time of the murder, which certainly took place between the time of Nicanor’s injury in the bull ring and the fall of heavy rain, Mendez was in the bullfight offices beneath the stands.”

  “Another alibi, eh? And he said he had a date! What was he doing there?”

  “Getting the Señorita Prothero out,” explained the captain. “There have been recently so many accidents with spectators jumping into the bull ring that they are now usually held and given thirty days to cool off.”

  “He was getting Miss Prothero out, eh?” Piper nodded. “The guy has pull!”

  The captain admitted that such things were possible.

  “And where did Mendez take the girl then?” Piper pressed.

  “Ah, nowhere, señor. It seems that—according to Mendez’ story—they went out to the street and he left her to secure a taxicab. But when he came back with the taxi the young lady was gone.”

  Piper nodded. “Gone to keep a date with another taxicab in Violetta Street, eh?”

  Rollo Lighten, picked up on the street by two agentes and brought before Captain de Silva, announced that he had spent all of Sunday at home, in the preparation of one hundred publicity stories for the government press bureau.

  “I did run over to the bullfight, but all of the best seats were sold out so I went back home, and—”

  “Yeah?” cut in Piper from the captain’s elbow. “What about your telling Miss Withers that you’d written ten stories and had them shuffled to look like a hundred? Leaving your afternoon free?”

  Lighton backtracked. “I went home and found that I was out of liquor, so I went downtown to the Papillon, figuring I’d find somebody there who’d buy me a drink.” This was defiant.

  “Too bad, Señor Lighton, that you have nobody to come forward and bear witness to your being there.” Captain de Silva smiled icily.

  “But I have!” he insisted. “Mr. Mabie, he bought me a drink!”

  The inspector, jubilant, whispered something to his confrere. Captain de Silva nodded. He beckoned, to an agente. “Will you ask the Señor Mabie if he will do us the kindness of his company?”

  Alderman Francis Mabie was delighted, he said, to take part in an identification parade. He wanted that alibi established. There was nothing he would rather do, he said, than accompany the inspector, Captain de Silva, Mr. Lighton, and several of the captain’s men down to the Papillon bar.

  Everything went off as planned, everything moved with the smoothness of clockwork. As they came up the steps and past the swinging doors, the fat little cock robin of a manager rushed toward them with a happy smile. He had been warned over the telephone of what was coming, and he seemed to know exactly what was expected of him.

  “Ah yes, señor!” he cried. “Delighted to have you come back. And delighted to say again, as I said to the gendarmes yesterday, how you come here, how you buy drinks for people, how you enjoy our special, wonderful Pancho Villa cocktails—yes, from four o’clock to maybe seven or eight…”

  His voice died away as he saw the expression of the faces confronting him.

  It had all been as perfect as clockwork, this establishing of a perfect and ironclad alibi for Alderman Francis Mabie. Only it had not been to the alderman—nor yet to blue-chinned Rollo Lighton—that the little cock robin had been addressing his fervid greetings. He was pointing, with the dogged assurance of a man who thinks he never forgets a face, to no one else but the disgusted Inspector Oscar Piper.

  The strained silence that followed was broken by the ringing of a telephone. The bartender stepped int
o a booth, came out to announce that it was a call from headquarters for “El Capitán de Silva.”

  The captain took it, emerged from the booth with his Latin suavity almost gone.

  “Someone reports a dead body at the Puertasol Market,” he told the inspector. “¡Vamonos!”

  XII

  A Pig—and a Poke

  THE BIG PACKARD SEDAN roared through the sunny streets of Mexico City with a great screaming of sirens. The impassive little brown monkey at the wheel ignored stop lights, went the wrong way on oneway streets, dodged around parkways, and once, when traffic jammed the way, he flipped the wheel and sent the big machine up on the sidewalk, down again with a bump.

  They were at the Puertasol in three minutes flat. Three minutes more, Piper insisted, and his hair would have been snowy white.

  The market was closed for the noon siesta, iron door drawn down. But there was an excited clerk in a white apron waving them to a side door. In answer to questions he only pointed.

  “¡Allí, señores, allí!”

  Through the market, into the carnicería.

  “Well, where’s this dead body?” the inspector demanded, as Captain de Silva paused at the door of a long dark room, chill and odorous.

  “It is here,” said a familiar voice. There was Miss Hildegarde Withers, sitting patiently upon a chopping block. As the little group of officers stared unbelievingly at her she indicated a grisly and exceedingly anatomical-looking specimen which hung head down from hooks stuck through the tendons of its heels.

  “A dead body,” she went on. “Not, I admit, a human one. It was the only way I knew to bring you here, Captain de Silva.”

  There was a rising murmur among the agentes, a rustling of indignation like wind in distant trees. Captain de Silva’s forehead wore two new wrinkles, but he did not trust himself to speak.

  “Good Lord, Hildegarde! If this is your idea of a joke—bringing us here to look at a dead pig!” Piper was almost burbling.

  “It isn’t my idea at all,” she insisted. “It’s from Sherlock Holmes. ‘The Adventure of Black Peter’ or something like that. Anyway, in the story Holmes takes up a case where a man is pinned to the wall with a harpoon, so to prove how it was done he got a similar harpoon…”

  As she spoke, an exceedingly strange expression had begun to come over the worn and harried face of Captain de Silva. Suddenly he snapped his fingers.

  “Allardyce’s!” he sang out delightedly. There was a new respect in his voice. “I remember, of course! It was Allardyce’s back shop, and there was something about a dead pig swinging from a hook in the ceiling!”

  Now it was Miss Withers’ turn to look flabbergasted.

  “I forgive all!” Captain de Silva insisted. “You have quoted the highest authority, madame. And why are you surprised? Conan Doyle, he is not English or American property. Why should we not read him in Spanish? I, myself, happen to be a corresponding member of the Baker Street Irregulars!” He shook hands with the schoolteacher.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Miss Withers announced. “Here!” And she handed to the captain the banderilla which she had pulled from her own bedroom floor that morning. “The whole idea is a bit gruesome, I admit,” she confessed. “But as you say, the precedent is of the best. Suppose you see who can stick the thing farthest into the carcass?”

  They tried. First Captain de Silva, fired with a new gaiety, poised like a fencer. Then the inspector, bayonet fashion, then the agentes and the huskiest of the gendarmes.

  A slow, satisfied smile crept across the face of Miss Hildegarde Withers—for not one of these gentlemen, try how he might, was able to make the dart penetrate farther than an inch or two into the carcass of the dangling pig.

  “I see what you’re driving at!” admitted the inspector. “It must take a special knack to sink this thing—which means that our murderer must be a trained and expert bullfighter!”

  “Wait!” cried Captain de Silva. “Wait just one minute. Banderilleros study for years to learn how to use these darts—but they study not to sink them in deeply but to place them just below the skin. They are not weapons of death—they are only ornaments!”

  “Then our murderer must be a gorilla,” Piper growled. “I’ve got as good a punch as the next man—that agente of yours with the black eye will testify to that—but I can barely make the thing stick into the pig at all!”

  Miss Withers nodded. “Has any of you gentlemen a bullet?” she inquired.

  “You mean a cartridge?” Piper corrected.

  She meant a bullet. Finally, at her insistence, a leaden slug was twisted out of its casing. “Now how far could any of you push the bullet into that carcass?”

  “Not at all, of course!” said Captain de Silva.

  “I get it!” Piper cut in. “But we could stand a block away and shoot this slug of lead halfway through anything!”

  “Of course,” said the captain seriously. “It’s just a matter of initial velocity. A whirlwind can blow straws through a tree.”

  “If all this applies to a bullet, then why not to a banderilla?” the schoolteacher demanded.

  “Now listen, Hildegarde,” the inspector complained, “you can’t get a dart this size into the barrel of a pistol.”

  “I’m not saying that was how it was done. I’m saying that was how it could have been done!” she retorted.

  But it was Captain de Silva who liked the new idea best. “An air gun!” he cried. “Why, this murderer needn’t have been down in the ring seats at the bullfight! He might have been up in the boxes, which are almost empty in the summer season. Or even on the little platform which runs around the top—for it’s uncovered, and when it rains no spectators climb away up there.”

  The inspector was forced to fall into line. “Anyway, now it doesn’t matter who we saw leaving the place during the bullfight, because any one of them could have gone to the outside stairs and up to the boxes or higher.”

  Miss Withers gave him an odd look. “You like my theory?”

  Both officers were delighted with it, they said. She shook her head slowly. “I’m not,” admitted the schoolteacher. “I think it is as full of holes as a sieve.”

  She would have continued, but there was the roar of a motorcycle outside, and then a brisk young gendarme in puttees came hurrying in, saluted the captain, and spoke in swift Spanish.

  “Tell the lieutenant colonel I’ll be there at once,” commanded de Silva. He turned to Piper, and there was a look of new triumph on his face. “You’ll excuse me, please?”

  “Yeah? What’s up?”

  The captain rubbed his hands together. “What’s up? Ah, my friend, the power of the psychological method of dealing with crime! Mr. Al Hansen, whose ears you were so anxious to beat down, has appeared at the jefatura and wishes to make a statement!” De Silva lowered his voice. “In fact, a confession!”

  Captain de Silva hurried complacently out of the market, and his sedan screamed away.

  “Any confession made by Mr. Al Hansen leaves me in a state of indifference bordering upon the supernatural,” Miss Withers was saying.

  It was an extraordinarily glum luncheon which she was sharing with the inspector, in spite of her modest triumph in the carnicería.

  Oscar Piper said he wished that he could get his hands on the person who kept tossing things in at her window.

  “Who wouldn’t, Oscar!” she told him. “When we get him we’ll have our murderer. Because don’t think for a moment that any innocent bystander has been going to the trouble of warning me to keep out of the affair.”

  Piper nodded slowly. “But I don’t see what help your new theory is to poor Mabie,” he went on. “After all, the alderman is entitled to everything I can do—everything we can do—”

  “Hew to the line, Oscar, let the chips fall where they may. Of course, if Mr. Mabie had been planning a long and involved series of crimes, or even one big one, he would hardly have been foolish enough to provide for carting along his own dete
ctive on the trip. And, besides, he doesn’t strike me as a crack shot with an air gun or anything else.”

  Piper agreed. “Mabie can’t even shoot pool,” he declared. “Says his hands tremble too much. But, all the same, that theory of de Silva’s involving him is the only one that holds together.”

  “Nonsense, Oscar!” Miss Withers gave a hearty sniff. “I’ll give you a better one. Mr. and Mrs. Ippwing—”

  “What?”

  “I said Mr. and Mrs. Ippwing! They have an invalid daughter, Oscar, the apple of their eye. She was injured some years ago by a permanent wave machine in one of Adele’s beauty shops, burned so that she is a helpless cripple. They read in the paper that Mrs. Mabie, now married and retired, is to accompany her politician husband to Mexico. Determined on revenge, they take some potassium cyanide from Mr. Ippwing’s drugstore and set out—”

  “Now wait a minute, wait a minute!” the inspector broke in.

  “Quiet, Oscar. They place the poisoned perfume in Mrs. Mabie’s bag but get the customs man by mistake. Again they try, with a snake, and again they miss. A third time they shoot a banderilla from a box that they have sneaked back into at the bullfight, taking aim at the bright umbrella which Adele has dropped and an innocent bystander has picked up. How’s that, Oscar?”

  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?”