Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla

by Stuart Palmer

4:34—Lillian out

  4:35—Mr Pape out

  4:38—Buster in (package for Miss W)

  4:45—Buster out

  4:57—Miss Withers called police (call trans. to Sansom)

  The schoolteacher pondered over this chart for some time, coming at last to the unpleasant conclusion that at the hour when she knew Saul Stafford to have died almost any person on the floor could have killed him. Any person, that is, who knew how to break a man’s neck without leaving a mark.

  She put the list carefully aside for the moment. It was, she decided, lunch time. On her way down the hall Lillian gave her a conspiratorial wink. “Oh, there’s a telegram for you, Miss Withers!” the girl cried after her, and thrust a yellow envelope under the window.

  Miss Withers stared at it thoughtfully all the way down in the elevator. Because the envelope had been opened and very amateurishly stuck back together again.

  It turned out to be from the inspector. Luckily he had used the code which Miss Withers had worked out for such occasions, a code resulting from the simple expedient of placing one’s hands one space to the right on a typewriter keyboard. That made the first word, “Jsttod,” spell “Harris.” She read: “HARRIS FILE SHOWS NO PHOTO OF LAVAL. HAVE FRAGMENTARY PRINT RECORD ONE FINGER. QUERIED DR VAN DONNEN WHO SAYS PRACTICALLY IMPOSSIBLE FOR EVEN STRONG MAN TO BREAK ANOTHER’S NECK. WOULD BE INTENSE STRUGGLE AND MARKED BRUISES. WHAT TREE ARE YOU BARKING UP? OSCAR PIPER.”

  “I only wish I knew,” said the schoolteacher unhappily as she put the wire away in her handbag. If Dr Max Van Donnen said it would be practically impossible for anyone to break a man’s neck, then it was practically impossible. Max knew, or he wouldn’t be the greatest police laboratory expert in the country.

  Somehow the urge to see the stars lunching in the studio commissary had left Miss Withers. She marched through the studio gates in search of a little sandwich stand that she remembered seeing across the street.

  But it was no sandwich stand that caught her eye now. There was the usual panorama of cowboy bit players, tourists peering from their dusty Chevrolets with the Midwestern license plates, children with Brownies and autograph books. And there was Jill Madison.

  Miss Withers had seen that girl very slightly, and never as she was now. Jill walked up and down in front of the studio gates, four paces north, turn, four paces south.

  “Mercy me!” said the schoolteacher to herself. “Did you ever see a scream walking!” Because that girl was an unstable chemical combination about ready to explode. She was a coiled spring, a set trap. She was trouble on high heels.

  Miss Withers came up beside her. “Good afternoon, my dear.”

  Jill Madison, neat as a pin in a cheap, smart blue suit and a bravely ridiculous jockey cap with a feather in it, stopped short. She flashed a mechanical smile and nodded.

  The schoolteacher could think of half a dozen questions she would have liked to ask Miss Madison, but this was neither the time nor the place. She went on across the street. This was none of her business. Or was it? Anyway, when she had finished her “Fan Mail Special”—one stuffed lamb chop with tea or coffee, fifty-five cents—and come out into the sunlight again Jill was still doing her guard duty.

  Wait! She had stopped.

  An open Packard with a special Darrin body rolled up to the curb outside the main gate. Virgil Dobie started to slide out. That was as far as he got, because Jill caught him flat-footed, the palm of her hand meeting his cheeks with the hard, vicious snap of a .22 rifle.

  Jill Madison began to call him things in a low but sincere tone. She must have picked up the words from Mr Nincom, the schoolteacher thought, and then of course rephrased them to advantage.

  For a moment there were red handprints on Dobie’s face, and then they were blotted out by a tide of blush red which worked up from his neck. He said something to the girl which she would not hear and which Miss Withers, however she might gape, could not.

  Then Dobie caught Jill Madison by both wrists, dragged her into the car and drove off. It was all over in a moment, so quickly, indeed, that the loungers outside the studio gates barely saw that anything was wrong. Dobie had not wasted any time in nipping that scene in the bud, the schoolteacher acknowledged.

  She would very much have liked to follow the red Packard, but there was no taxi in sight. So she went on inside the gates again.

  Up on the third floor Gertrude was just taking over the switchboard from Lillian, and both of them were talking to a man who seemed to be terribly surprised at everything. That, she realized a moment later, was because he had no eyebrows or eyelashes and his little beard was only a ragged memory.

  “Miss Withers, this is Mr Wilfred Josef,” Gertrude said.

  She shook a limp, damp paw. “I was just telling the girls,” said Josef, “that I should have stayed in the hospital. Those nurses gave me a lot of new limericks. There’s one about the young lady, named Lassiter, Who screamed when a man made a pass at her….” He took out a cigarette. “And the young couple, named Kelly, who—”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Miss Withers.

  “Okay, okay,” Josef told her. “But when I heard about old Stafford I started writing one on him. I mean a clean one. Listen. There was an old Stafford, named Saul, Who got killed, so they say, by a fall. He landed, by heck, on the back of his neck, And nobody minded at all!” Josef guffawed at his own composition. Then he started to light his cigarette, thrust the match from him with a shrill yelp.

  “What’s the matter?” Gertrude asked, wide eyed.

  He put the cigarette down, unlighted. “Nothing. Just a sort of phobia or something, the doctor says. It may be a long time before I can light a cigarette. Guess I’ll have to learn to chew, huh?”

  His tone was light and gay. Too light and too gay, Miss Withers thought. “The burned child …” she quoted to herself, and quietly withdrew.

  “Here’s another,” Josef was saying. “There was a young girl from Purdue, Who covered her—”

  “I think maybe you shocked Miss Withers,” Gertrude said, looking down the hall.

  Far from being shocked, Miss Hildegarde Withers was at the moment intent upon breaking and entering. As she lingered in the office she had noticed the mark, “12:55—Abend out,” on the pad. Dobie’s office would be locked. But perhaps the connecting door would not be. Perhaps …

  Mr Abend did not lock his office. Perhaps the room would stand some investigation, but there was no time for that now. She held her breath and tried the connecting door which must lead into Virgil Dobie’s office. It was open.

  She found herself in a room obviously arranged for a big man who liked to be comfortable. The easy chair was vast and upholstered in red leather, with a big footstool. The couch had a spring mattress and big pillows, well rumpled. There was a reflecting reading lamp, and on one wall a white square of silvered composition which she imagined was a projection screen. Beside that was a small blackboard on a stand, now washed clean. Another wall held a cork bulletin board pinned with numerous newspaper reviews of the pictures which Dobie and Stafford had written.

  Miss Hildegarde Withers sat calmly down at the desk and started to snoop through Virgil Dobie’s possessions. The flat top drawers showed only stationery, both the studio type and an expensive hot-press note paper. There was a big sheaf of unanswered mail, including a letter from some New York publisher reminding Dobie that they awaited with breathless anxiety the remainder of the novel he had promised them two years before. There was numerous correspondence in regard to the purchase of rare books and to the binding of other books, usually in full leather. There were numerous bills for camera equipment, clothes, liquor and so forth, but none was more than four weeks old.

  Among the bills was a receipt from the Postal Telegraph Company to the amount of $23.25, covering a cable and remittance to Mr Eugene Gach, care of Mammoth Distributing Corporation, Dublin, Eire. There was a bank statement from the Security-First National showing that Mr Dobie had a cash balance of $14,889.
43.

  One drawer remained, a drawer containing folded copies of today’s Times and Examiner and a cryptic sheet of blue paper on which someone had scrawled cryptic lines of figures. For a moment Miss Withers thought that she had stumbled upon a modern Rosetta stone. The sheet had been so folded, handled, tattered, that she thought it must be important and copied it off without the slightest idea of what it meant. She put down:

  That was the booty, that and an insurance policy which she found at the bottom of the drawer, a policy to the amount of five thousand dollars, with double indemnity for sudden death, on the life of Virgil Dobie. The agent’s name was listed as Harry Pape, and the beneficiary was Saul Stafford.

  There was certainly nothing bearing the name of Derek Laval. Perhaps, after all, Lillian had been telling the truth.

  Miss Withers frowned. In spite of herself she could not get over the feeling that she was being blind to something right in front of her nose.

  Of course there was the tobacco humidor, a vast earthenware container flanked by rows of pipes. Miss Withers gingerly lifted the lid and was immediately greeted by the loud and tinkling musical strains of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” She replaced it hastily.

  At that moment the phone rang. She looked at it. If the inspector were here he would pick it up, pretend to be Virgil Dobie and hope for some bit of information to be dropped into his lap. Well, the inspector wasn’t here. But she could try.

  She picked up the phone, said “Hello!” in as gruff a tone as she could manage.

  There was a long wait at the other end of the line. “Lillian?” said a man’s voice, cautious and muffled. Hawaiian music came faintly.

  “No, this isn’t Lillian!” she said. “Is there a message?”

  Another wait. “Just tell Mr Dobie that Laval called, Derek Laval.” And the line clicked as he hung up.

  Miss Hildegarde Withers sat back and thought that one out. The straw man was getting awfully real. He cashed checks and talked over the telephone. And he liked Hawaiian music.

  Five minutes later Miss Withers was back in her own office, inditing a telegram to the inspector which, she thought, might make him put one of those long, greenish-brown cigars into his mouth hot end first. She wrote:

  INSPECTOR OSCAR PIPER

  HOMICIDE BUREAU CENTRE STREET NYC

  DEREK LAVAL HAS COMMITTED ANOTHER IMPOSSIBLE MURDER. ALL I KNOW OF HIM IS HE SEEMS FOND OF HAWAIIAN MUSIC AND BLACKMAIL. LETTER FOLLOWS.

  HILDEGARDE

  She had barely finished putting this into code when her door burst open, and in came the lush and livid Lillian, her stocking seams crooked, her hair askew and her lipstick smeared upward from one corner of her mouth in a rakish and unhumorous grin.

  “Listen!” the girl exclaimed. “Have you got that list I gave you earlier?”

  “Of course,” said the schoolteacher. “Do you want it back?”

  “Do I!” snapped Lillian. “I want to add something.” She snatched up the piece of paper, and for a moment Miss Withers thought that the girl meant to destroy it.

  “What’s all this about?” she wanted to know.

  “What’s it about? I’ll tell you what it’s about! Virgil Dobie`s gone and hired Jill Madison as his private secretary after the studio fired her. And he says that if they won’t pay her salary, he will! And I can just go back to the department and take my chance on getting another writer or just copying, copying all day long….”

  “But why?” Miss Withers asked, because she obviously was expected to do so. “Why did he?”

  “How should I know?” Lillian’s full lower lip curled. “How should I understand anything a writer does! But if he thinks I’m going to go on sticking up for him—” She whirled on Miss Withers. “Virgil Dobie told you he didn’t come up into this building at all yesterday afternoon, didn’t he? I mean, until after the body was discovered?”

  Miss Withers nodded. “He was out on the lot, or the set, or whatever it is they call it. Where they make movies.”

  Lillian nodded. “He was! But not all afternoon. He came up because his tobacco pouch was empty and he wanted to fill it. I was in his office, doing some filing, and he came in and went right out again. So I guess that smashes his pretty little alibi!” She carefully inserted “4:18—Mr Dobie in” and “4:28—Mr Dobie out” on the list. “That’s the way the original reads. But when I copied it off for you I left his name out. I was going to do him a favor!”

  Miss Withers looked dubious. “You mean you think that Mr Dobie could have come into his own office, filled his tobacco pouch, crossed the hall and killed Mr Stafford and then gone back out to the set all in ten minutes?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” Lillian said as she moved toward the door. “How long does it take to do a murder anyway?”

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1937, 1965

  Reprinted with permission of the author’s estate

  New material copyright © 2004 by The Rue Morgue Press

  Cover design by Mimi Bark

  978-1-4804-1886-8

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