Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla

by Stuart Palmer

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Saul Stafford, backing away. “I heard the typewriter and I thought old Dinwiddie was back.”

  “I’m afraid not,” she confessed. “But since we’re to be neighbors—” She introduced herself.

  “Neighbors, eh?” He cocked his head, then spoke in a strange, excited voice. “This may sound funny to you, but would you mind tasting this water? To see if there’s anything funny about it?”

  She took the glass, sipped it. “It tastes like water to me. Why—you don’t think it’s poisoned, do you?” The remark was intended as a pleasantry, but when she saw his face she knew that it had rung the bell.

  “Maybe,” he said hoarsely. Then he shrugged. “Don’t mind me. I’ve worked on so many quick B epics that I’m probably trying to live the part of Charlie Chan in the Death-Ray Tunnel or something. All the same, a lot of funny things have been happening to me lately.”

  “Such as?”

  He shrugged. “Oh, near accidents to my car and funny-tasting drinks and so on. It’s all a headache. By the way, you don’t happen to have any aspirin kicking around, do you?”

  Miss Withers was sorry. “Tell me more about these things that have been happening to you,” she pressed.

  But Stafford wisely shook his head. “There’s probably nothing to it. I’m maybe a mild case of paranoia. But, anyway, I saw something in the Reporter just now—Nincom is importing a famous New York detective as technical expert on his new picture, and when the guy gets here I’m going to retain him and lay the whole thing in his lap!”

  “But—” began Miss Withers, and stopped. She had given her word to Mr Nincom not to divulge the nature of her assignment.

  “It’s probably Ellis Parker,” Stafford went on. “Or he’s in jail, isn’t he? So maybe it’s William J. Burns or one of the Pinkertons.”

  He stood in the doorway nodding—a man supremely confident that he could see powerful assistance in the offing. Miss Withers followed, eager and unhappy. “I wonder—” she began, and stopped. For she was looking into Saul Stafford’s office, into a room crowded with incredible objects, large and small. She noticed a typewriter stand equipped with an endless roll of paper, a high chair of the type used by tennis umpires, tables and desks covered with china animals, advertising statuettes, ship models, pipes and tobacco and every other imaginable object. The walls were covered with vast twenty-four sheets advertising the Folies Bergères, the Midland Railways and old Mammoth gangster pictures. One tremendous poster, an artist’s conception of Josephine Baker wearing a G string, ran up one wall and halfway across the ceiling.

  “No wonder,” said the awed schoolteacher. “That room is enough to give anyone the jitters.”

  “We got started and we couldn’t stop,” Saul Stafford admitted. “It got so crowded in here that Virgil had to move across the hall, and still we keep collecting things.” He shook his head. “Well, it’s nice to have met you, Miss Withers. Drop in any time. I think I’ll lie down and try to sleep off this headache.”

  With the connecting door closed again, Miss Withers returned to stare at the virgin expanse of her desk blotter. But she had no heart to continue her letter to the inspector. All she could think of was that frightened man next door who saw—rightly or not—the shadow of death all around him.

  She had no idea of just how seriously Mr Nincom intended the pledge of secrecy to be taken, but he had been very pointed about it. It was a nice problem in ethics, complicated still further by the fact that Stafford would probably be very surprised to find that the famous New York detective he expected was really only the inquisitive spinster next door.

  Should she tell him? Would he put any faith in her if she did tell him? Impulsively Miss Withers picked up the telephone and got through to Nincom’s office where a bored young man answered and told her that the great man was out on the test stage. “Will you please ask him to call me the moment he is free?” she demanded, and the faraway voice promised to leave the message.

  So she waited. There was something soothing and hypnotic in the air, but of course she couldn’t go to sleep at the switch—not on her first day. She leaned back in the chair, staring at the opposite wall and a photograph of some tired-looking calla lilies, funeral lilies. She found herself slipping finally into a sort of waking dream in which that sheaf of lilies rested across the chest of Mr Thorwald L. Nincom. She, herself, a disembodied spirit, floated above the great man’s funeral pyre, while around it, in a vast, wavering circle, danced his writers and secretaries and assistants, chanting a wordless, tuneless dirge.

  The voices rose to a hideous cacophony. There was something she must do immediately, but she was bound in the dreadful paralysis of nightmare, bound and drowned and floating. Then she woke up suddenly to find that she was being shaken unmercifully by a tall and moderately frightened youth. It was Buster, the boy she had seen making calf’s eyes at Mr Nincom’s secretary. “Excuse me,” he said, and slapped her face.

  She tried to slap back, but her strength was gone. There was a sweetish-sick taste in her mouth, as if a stale lemon drop had died there.

  “It’s the gas,” Buster was saying. “You have to light these heaters when you turn them on or else the room gradually fills up with natural gas. You all right, ma’am?”

  “Of course I’m all right.” She took deep breaths in front of the opened window, refused Buster’s offer of a visit from the studio doctor, of a glass of water, of anything. “Though I’m very grateful to you, young man,” she told him, “in spite of your rather drastic methods.”

  He grinned engagingly. “Confucius say, ‘Better to wake up being slapped than sleep forever under tombstone.’”

  Miss Withers frowned at him. “Sometimes I think Confucius say too much. By the way, young man, do you mind a well-meant suggestion? The next time you want a blond young lady to go out to lunch with you why not forget about these synthetic Confucius sayings and quote something more powerful? Such as:

  “Can such delights be in the streets

  And open fields, and we not see’t?

  Come, well abroad, and let’s obey

  The proclamation made for May….”

  Buster looked at her, nodded. He said slowly, “I remember….

  “And sin no more, as we have done, by staying;

  But, my Corinna, come, let’s go a-Maying.”

  Yes, before I set out to learn the motion-picture business I was exposed to things like that. But I still think Confucius is more suitable to this town.” He produced a large envelope, made Miss Withers sign for it. “From the Research Department,” he explained, and hastened away.

  Miss Withers shook her head. Hollywood, where messenger boys quoted Herrick and everything was topsy-turvy. She opened the envelope, found three books dealing with the Borden case. One was from the Famous Trials series, and she opened it at a paragraph discussing the theory that Lizzie Borden had stripped herself to the buff to save her blue calico dress before taking the ax to Ma and Pa.

  She hastily turned a page. But after a moment she pushed the books away. Lizzie Borden was cold potatoes at the moment.

  It was getting well on into the afternoon, and still no call from Mr Nincom. On a sudden impulse Miss Withers went over to the door leading into Stafford’s office, knocked and tried to open it. The latch had been caught on the other side. That was odd. She knocked again. “Mr Stafford? It’s I—Miss Withers.”

  Frowning, she went out into the hall and knocked on the main door to Stafford’s office. Then she tried the knob and found that it turned. She went inside.

  No, her neighbor had not gone home. The room was just as she had seen it before, except that now the gigantic poster of Josephine Baker hung from the ceiling by only one thumbtack, except that Saul Stafford himself lay sprawled akimbo upon the carpet.

  There was a half-filled glass of water on the table beside a large bottle of aspirin tablets. The desk chair had been overturned, and three thumbtacks lay on the floor. Stafford was beyond all he
lp. She forced herself to make sure of that, felt the heavy leonine head roll loosely upon its broken neck, before she turned and ran out of the room.

  *See The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree, Crime Club, 1933.

  II

  I have been through the gates:

  I have groped, I have crept

  Back, back. There is DUST

  IN THE STREETS, AND BLOOD

  CHARLOTTE MEW

  “YOU CERTAINLY CAN LIE LIKE a rug!” Lillian said half admiringly. For the umpteenth time that day she had listened to plump, pleasant Gertrude, arbiter of the switchboard on the third floor of the Mammoth Writers’ Building, as she told somebody at the other end of the line that Mr Josef was working at home today.

  “Why don’t you break down and tell ’em the truth?” Lillian demanded. “Why don’t you say he’s in Good Sam Hospital with the screaming what-have-yous?”

  Gertrude only smiled. For some time she had been acting as house mother to a menagerie of Mammoth writers and she was necessarily the custodian of many secrets. Her world consisted of this little office with its switchboard and stationery cabinet, with a view only of the upper half of the elevator door across the hall, but very little went on in the building—or, for that matter, in the studio—that she did not know about.

  “Those hoodlums, Dobie and Stafford!” Lillian went on virtuously. “Setting fire to people!”

  “Listen, dearie,” Gertrude told her. “Dobie and Stafford are your bosses. And they’re one of the highest-paid writing teams in the business. When you get more than fifteen hundred a week you’re not a hoodlum—you’re the life of the party.” Suddenly Gertrude noticed a fresh slip pinned under one slot in the tier of mailboxes. “What’s this, somebody new?”

  “Oh, I most forgot. While you were out to lunch the front office sent over a new Nincom writer. I meant to tell you. Somebody I never heard of—probably an importation from back East. Looks just the type to write purple passion stories.” Lillian lighted a cigarette. “I put her in 303.”

  Gertrude smiled. “Another sob sister?”

  “That’s her. She looks like a mixture of Edna May Oliver and Charlotte Greenwood….”

  “With just a dash of Hedy Lamarr, I trust?” spoke a quick, excited voice from the hall.

  Lillian blushed fiery red, but Miss Hildegarde Withers was not interested in apologies. “Now, don’t get hysterical,” she advised them. “Just do as I say. Put through a call to the police and tell them that there is a dead man in the office next to mine.”

  They gaped at her.

  “Must I spell it for you?” snapped the schoolteacher. “A d-e-a-d man!”

  In the room where the dead man lay the swift twilight of southern California deepened, casting into heavier shadow the faces of those who watched. Now the studio medico, a wizened little man in a crumpled white jacket, was squatting on his hunkers beside the body. Dr Evenson would have felt more at home back up the studio street in his neat little infirmary with its normal routine of cut thumbs and smashed toes and minor burns afflicting the army of Mammoth workers.

  “Nothing I can do,” he declared. “He’s dead all right.” Dr Evenson rose to his feet and seemed to feel that his verdict lacked emphasis, for he repeated it. “Dead!”

  Somebody finished it for him: “… my lords and gentlemen, stilled the tongue and stayed the pen”—in a low whisper. It was only the hatchet-faced woman who had discovered the body and who now lurked behind the tennis umpire’s chair in the corner.

  Burly Tom Sansom, built like a brick icehouse, stood by the door with his thumbs hooked into his Sam Browne belt and a scowl on his face. As chief of the Mammoth police force his duties were ordinarily confined to keeping children with autograph books from sneaking through the gates and to confiscating candid cameras on the studio sets. But he took this in his stride.

  “All right, Jack,” he ordered, turning to the other uniformed man behind him. “You and the doc better take him downstairs. The ambulance is at the back door.” It was all over as easily as that.

  But not for the lady in the corner. “I’m not one to speak out of turn,” put in Miss Hildegarde Withers, “but isn’t this a matter for the police?”

  “Lady,” Sansom explained wearily, “I am the police! The studio pays my salary, but I’m a sworn member of the police force of the city of Los Angeles. Just like a guard in a bank is. I’ll make a report of this accident at the proper time.”

  “Accident?” Miss Withers sniffed.

  Sansom winced. His assistant and the doctor who had been attempting to lift the body of Saul Stafford onto a stretcher now stopped and stared up at him, suddenly uncertain.

  “That’s what I said. Plain as the nose on your face.” Miss Withers’ head reared a little higher at the metaphor, but he went on. “Look, lady. Stafford was trying to tack up that poster onto the ceiling and, not being able to reach it, he tried to stand on the arm of that desk chair. The chair bucked and threw him and he was unlucky enough to light with his neck twisted. See?”

  “That’s about it, Chief,” chimed in Dr Evenson. Not without some pushing and hauling the two men finally raised their grim burden and carried it out through the door, Saul Stafford’s own overcoat covering him.

  Sansom faced Miss Withers. “Like this!” He placed his thick hand on the back of the righted chair and pushed so that the chair leaned and then popped back upright with a jerk.

  She still looked doubtful. “A man could hardly fall that far and that hard without making a noise that would wake the dead.”

  “Look, lady.” Sansom’s official politeness was curdling. “It doesn’t mean anything that you didn’t hear a noise. Your phone could’ve been ringing or you could’ve dozed off to sleep.” He jerked his thumb toward the wall. “These offices are pretty well soundproofed, you know.”

  “I’m not the only person on this floor. Besides, suppose I were to tell you that earlier this afternoon Stafford hinted to me that he was afraid of somebody?”

  “Huh? Oh, half the writers in this town are screwy. They got delusions, roaring d.t.s and so forth.” He edged her politely toward the door. “Thank you very much, Miss Withers.”

  But she was not so easily convinced. “One moment, please. Will you do something for me? Just to make sure that this was an accident will you stand on that chair and jump off?”

  Chief Sansom stared at her blankly. She told him, “Oh, I don’t mean on the back or arm of the chair, just on the seat. And don’t fall head first.”

  “I get it,” he said doubtfully. “You want me to re-enact the thing and see how much noise it makes. Why—?”

  “I want to find out whether anybody in the neighboring offices will hear you,” she admitted. “It might settle this whole question once and for all.”

  He hesitated. “Okay, I guess.” But he gave her a sidelong glance which made it clear that he thought she was as crazy as a bedbug. “Here goes.” As ponderously as one of Ringling’s brown elephants mounting a pedestal drum in the middle of the center ring Chief Tom Sansom climbed into the teetery swivel chair. He poised there a moment, obviously anxious not to re-enact the passing of Saul Stafford with too much exactness.

  Then he jumped, landing flat-footed like a ton of brick. His thud shook the room and tipped over half the gadgets on the desk and tables. So far so good. But for scientific purposes the test was an utter failure. Before the acoustics could be tested in so far as to their effect on the other offices of the floor Sansom’s voice rose in a mighty wail of anguish. “O-o-o-o-ow! Hell’s bells and panther tracks! What the blazing, blooming, bloody hell—”

  He was wildly hopping up and down on one foot, holding the other tenderly in his hands, while Miss Hildegarde Withers covered her maidenly ears. She watched as he ruefully pulled a thumbtack from the sole of his shoe, a thin and well-worn sole. It was one of the thumbtacks with which, according to his own theory, Saul Stafford had been engaged in fastening up the poster of Josephine Baker.

  That did i
t. Soundproofed walls or not, there was now an excited concourse of voices in the hall. The door opened, disclosing a huddle of curious faces. The denizens of the third floor had finally come to the conclusion that something was up. They wanted to know what, and the air was blue with question marks.

  “All right!” Sansom was insisting. “Mr Stafford just had an accident, that’s all.”

  It was Frankie Firsk, he of the cropped hair and gnawed fingernails, who got in the first word. He took a quick bite at his forefinger and said, “Staff had an accident? I thought the accidents always happened to other people!” He almost snickered.

  “It was the gas heater, wasn’t it?” Melicent Manning pushed forward with a jingling of bracelets. “These offices are nothing but lethal gas chambers, that’s what I say!”

  “No, Miss Manning, it wasn’t the gas heater!” snapped Sansom. He forgot for a moment that she was the “Grand Old Lady” of the films. “Mr Stafford just had a fall.”

  “Where is he now?” Willy Abend, the wasp-waisted gentleman in the green suit, now pushed forward. “What happened? I want to know!”

  “Back to your offices, everybody!” Sansom was getting near the end of his temper. “All right, all right—”

  “Don’t you shove me!” Abend cried. “This isn’t Imperial Russia. I’m a U.S.A. citizen and I’ve got the Bill of Rights behind me and—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” exploded Tom Sansom.

  Doug August, the young man Miss Withers had seen coming out of Nincom’s office with clenched fists, now clenched them again. “Saul’s dead, isn’t he?” he said soberly. “I thought I heard them carry something heavy down the hall.”

  “Now if you’ll all just go back to your offices …” Sansom tugged at his belt. “Just because a man has an accident does everybody in the hall have to butt in?” He indicated the door. “Now get moving, please.”