Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla

by Stuart Palmer

“And that’s why Adele Mabie wanted to keep Dulcie so close to her, why she didn’t want her to go out with Julio or to be here at the meeting tonight!”

  “Right, Oscar. You see, that girl was a potential key witness. And I have an idea that had they both started home on the steamer, some night Dulcie Prothero would have ‘committed suicide’ by jumping overboard.”

  “So far so good, Hildegarde. But not good enough. You’ve covered everything except the reason why Adele Mabie is dead in there instead of being behind the bars.”

  Miss Withers stood up, walked across the room and back. “You wouldn’t understand, Oscar. But I couldn’t bear to think of a countrywoman of mine standing before a firing squad in a foreign land or spending her days on Mexico’s Devil’s Islands in the Pacific.”

  “You mean, after all this, that you sympathized—”

  “We had it out, Adele and I. While you were upstairs just now, arranging that little demonstration for me. When the inkwell came tumbling in the window, she knew that I knew. She realized that I had solved her trick of tossing the thing—and the banderilla too—down from the balcony above into the open window of my room.”

  “But I thought: you said you made an excuse to see if the inkwell was gone from the desk here? And it wasn’t!”

  She smiled faintly. “I never thought of looking in the bedroom to see if there was a second desk, which there is. And a second inkwell, which there isn’t. But anyway, when she saw that I knew, the fight went completely out of Adele Mabie. She was just a terrified woman, caught on a trail that led downward so steeply that there was no turning. What I did was the decent thing to do, Oscar. You’ll have to help me cover it up somehow.”

  “You don’t mean—”

  “I locked her in the bedroom, Oscar. And just before I closed the door I tossed your revolver—with only one cartridge in the chamber—onto the bed.” The schoolteacher was defiant. “She knew what to do with that one cartridge, and you heard her do it!”

  The inspector rose slowly to his feet. “You’re a funny woman, Hildegarde. I suppose—oh, we’ll cover you somehow, though de Silva and his chiefs will raise bloody hell.” He held out his hand. “Give me that key.”

  He unlocked the bedroom door, opened it, and then closed it firmly behind him. There was a moment of silence, and then the schoolteacher heard his agonized, incredulous yell.

  “Hildegarde!”

  She was through the door and beside him in a moment, steeling herself for the sight that she must see.

  But Adele Mabie did not lie on the floor, a confessed murderer and suicide. Adele Mabie was gone.

  Together they stared down at the broken lock of the hall door, a lock smashed under the impact of a heavy 38-caliber slug of lead.

  “And as you say, I heard her do it!” the inspector muttered.

  XVII

  The Last Mile

  “OH, OSCAR!” WAILED MISS Hildegarde Withers from the utter depths of despair. “How was I to know?”

  But he wasn’t listening. He dashed down the stairs, with the schoolteacher close at his heels. At the desk he pounded with his fist, awakened the drowsy night man.

  “Did you see a lady go out of here? Which way did she go?”

  The man shook his head. “No lady, señor. Nobody go out for a long time, not since midnight.” That was more than two hours before.

  “Asleep, eh? And of course she sneaked right by you!”

  But the Mexican grinned, a very wise grin. “Nobody comes or goes after midnight without I know, señor.” He reached behind his chair, took up a great brass key fastened to a stick. “For the door,” he explained happily. “Somebody goes out, they wake me. Somebody comes in, they have to ring and wait.”

  The inspector and Miss Withers stared blankly at each other. “Then she’s hiding somewhere in the building, Oscar! Quick, get the police!”

  But he shook his head. “No time, Hildegarde.” He was running up the stairs, as he had not run in twenty years. “Dulcie—one witness against the woman …” They rounded a corner. “Adele is probably half crazy now—maybe she’ll try …”

  Second, third, fourth floor.

  Down the hall, around a corner, then to a half-open door. “I think it’s there,” Piper said.

  They both had stopped, waiting, listening. For some reason neither was anxious to explore what lay beyond that narrow oblong of light. Then they heard the voice of Dulcie Prothero.

  They stood in the doorway, before them a picture that neither was ever to forget.

  There was Dulcie, alive and unhurt, speaking into the telephone. “But isn’t there anybody at the jefatura who speaks English?” she was pleading.

  There was Adele Mabie, wild with fury, her hair Medusa-like over her eyes and her red lips gray now, drawn back to show the canine teeth. Her dress was torn from her shoulder, her cheek was bruised, and in bitter, furious silence she knelt on the floor, fighting against the grip of a handcuff.

  The other link of the cuff was held by Julio Mendez, who leaned weakly against the side of the bed and with his free hand mopped at the blood pouring from a short gash in his forehead.

  “Hello!” he greeted them happily, a world of relief in that one word.

  Piper went into action, pinioned the woman’s arms neatly and cuffed them behind her. Miss Withers was beside Julio.

  “How bad?” Piper demanded.

  “It’s nothing,” Julio said. “When she knocked on the door I didn’t see that she had a sliver of glass in her hand—piece of a broken tumbler, I guess. I found out soon enough, though.”

  “Look out, Oscar!” gasped Miss Withers.

  Adele had lifted her pinioned arms, trying to strike at the inspector’s head with the heavy manacles. He dodged, gave her the elbow in the pit of the stomach so that she rolled back on the bed, gasping and writhing. Dulcie went calmly on telephoning.

  “My prisoner, Inspector,” said Julio in a weak voice. “I have had my eye on her all along—and downstairs, I noticed that she was the only one to point to Miss Withers on the floor and cry bloody murder. She expected to find a corpse there!”

  “Good work, boy,” Piper said. Then he stopped, frowned. “You talk differently,” he accused. “And where did you get the handcuffs?”

  “Yes, Oscar,” Miss Withers put in. “It’s time you knew. Meet Lieutenant Colonel Mendez of the Securidad Publica. He’s been playing the part of the Gay Caballero while he investigated this case, but after I accused him of it we had a good laugh and he obligingly helped in some of the arrangements for the evening.”

  The inspector’s jaw dropped. “Well—well—so that was why—”

  “It was,” Julio said cheerfully. “I started talking that way and then I had to keep in character.” He looked older now, far more serious. “She’s the murderer, of course?” he said, pointing to the captive.

  Miss Withers told him everything. “And if it had not been for your somewhat informal call, I’m afraid Dulcie might have been the third victim.”

  “What?” Dulcie Prothero gasped, putting down the telephone in the middle of a sentence. She was blushing. “Oh, please! Do you think—why, I dragged the poor boy in here! Look at his head!”

  Julio turned, to display a lump like a half orange. “From landing on the tile floor outside when I got knocked down. I can’t stand very well yet, which was why the lady nicked me with the sliver of glass. Dulcie had just brought me to when the knock came.”

  Finally the girl at the telephone got through to the proper parties, and the wheels of justice began to move.

  “You see,” Julio Mendez explained, “I understand your compunctions, Miss Withers. But I do not share them. I really did go to school with Manuel Robles, which was why I flew up to Villadama to take on the case personally. I was godfather to Manuel Robles’ son,” he added grimly. “So I am happy to see this woman captured; I will be happy to see her stand trial. I don’t care what happens to Mrs. Mabie!”

  “I care what happens to this one,
though,” Miss Withers said, looking down at the tumbled red hair of Dulcie Prothero. “Have you any plans, child?”

  Dulcie shook her head.

  “One small minutes, please!” Then Julio stopped, shook his head. “There it goes, that damn dialect. But what I mean to say is—she has a plan.”

  “Oh yes,” she agreed. Dulcie smiled, all over her face. It was the best, the very best and happiest, smile that Miss Withers had ever seen her give. “Of course I have one plan. I’m going to Xochimilco to see the Floating Gardens by moonlight!”

  “With me!” added Julio. “Don’t forget that.”

  Inspector Oscar Piper turned to the schoolteacher. “You know, there must be something in that place. We’ll have to take a trip there before we go back. How far is it?”

  Miss Withers was watching the young couple. “What?”

  “I said—How far is it to the Floating Gardens?”

  “About twenty years, Oscar,” the schoolteacher told him sadly.

  THE END

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Hildegarde Withers Mysteries

  I

  I met a Californian who would

  Talk California—a state

  So blessed, he said, in climate

  NONE HAD EVER DIED THERE A NATURAL DEATH….

  ROBERT FROST

  HE WAS ON FIRE. Flames licked around him, and the building was about to collapse, and he couldn’t jump from the window because the water from the firemen’s hoses kept pushing him back into the room. That was the dream.

  Consciousness returned so slowly to Wilfred Josef that there was a split instant of relief when he remembered all about being here at the Firsk’s for cocktails. He even remembered making his getaway when the party waxed noisy (Josef liked only the noises he himself made when he set classics from his collection of limericks to music via the guitar) and his coming out to a deck chair on the moonlit patio for forty winks.

  The sound of his own screams brought him wide awake. He found—like the young girl from Peru who woke up one night in a hell of a fright—that it was perfectly true. Or at least a big wad of crumpled Sunday newspaper was blazing merrily under his chair, and two laughing madmen were dancing withershins around him, yelling “Fire! Fire!” and squirting him unmercifully with soda-water siphons.

  The other guests, carrying ping-pong paddles, half-finished drinks or bridge hands came rushing out through the doorway. But by that time Wilfred Josef (author of year before last’s best-selling novel Anastasia’s Lovers) was singed, sodden and impotent on a charred island in a lake of fizz water.

  Mona Firsk, trying to make a noise like a hostess, rushed toward him, her stubby, ring-covered fingers outstretched in sympathy. But even for her the picture presented by Josef’s amazed, naked face was too much. She was swept away in the rising tide of laughter, for he had lost eyebrows, lashes, and even most of the silky Vandyke which had been his pride and joy. He was mad as a wet hen and getting madder every second in spite of the helpful brushing off, the support into the house and the stimulants which were being offered as first aid.

  Under cover of the hilarity two men faded quietly around the corner of the house, keeping in the soft dirt of the tulip beds. As they passed the swimming pool they paused there to cast adrift the seltzer bottles and then went on down the long flight of steps to the street and the line of parked cars.

  There they stopped laughing and listened. “What are we listening for, Saul?” The speaker was Virgil Dobie, a vast, gargantuan man with pointed, Satanic eyebrows and the innocent eyes of a child.

  Saul Stafford, a small, untidy man with a leonine head and a perpetually blue jaw, swayed slightly on his bandy legs. “We are waiting to see if some fool turned in an alarm.” He seemed to feel the need of justification. “What else can you do with a man who wears a zits like that? And who insists on reciting limericks when you’re trying to make a small slam vulnerable?”

  Dobie nodded judicially. “In itself a grave social error.

  But perhaps all this will be a lesson to him. Say, Saul, what are we listening for?”

  Then they both heard it, far off. And coming closer.

  Stafford turned toward the crimson Packard with the cut-down Darrin body. “I dislike open cars and I dislike your driving,” he announced. “But drive me home anyway.”

  They rolled on down the driveway and were turning out of Bel Air’s gray-stone gates when the fire trucks went screaming and careening past them.

  Those same sirens, homeward bound a few minutes later, shattered the silence of the evening on Hollywood Boulevard, sounding even to the heights of a little room on the top floor of the Roosevelt. Miss Hildegarde Withers sat up in bed, her hair in curlers and a wry smile upon her long, equine visage. Sirens in the night and the rumble of trucks—it made her suddenly homesick for Manhattan. “This is a fine way to start a vacation,” she scolded herself sternly, and plumped the pillow.

  In the beginning, like any other middle-aged schoolteacher with a savings account and six months’ sabbatical vacation, Miss Withers had planned the usual Mediterranean cruise. And then Europe exploded, making it seem the better part of valor to see America first.

  So here she was in Hollywood to her own mild surprise. With an itinerary all planned, including side trips to the San Fernando Mission and the La Brea tar pits in Hancock Park.

  And to the Brown Derby on Vine Street where noon next day found her doing justice to an excellent omelet aux fines herbes. As is the custom of tourists in that justly celebrated restaurant, she was amusing herself by trying to match up the caricatures on the walls with their prototypes among the great and near great of Never-Never Land.

  At which point trouble in the shape of a strange, excited young man in a bright plaid suit came over and plumped down beside her. “You,” he accused, “are the Murder Lady. Want a job?”

  “I beg your pardon?” In spite of herself Miss Withers’ expression of shocked propriety changed to a quick alertness.

  “My name’s Wagman, Harry Wagman,” he went on, taking it for granted that she would recognize the name. “Picked you out from your picture in this afternoon’s Herald-Express.”

  Here he displayed the paper, and Miss Withers looked dubiously at a reproduction of a too-candid shot of herself in the act of shaking hands with Chief of Police Amos Britt of Avalon, Catalina Island. The heading began, “SOUTHLAND WELCOMES SLEUTH—Miss Withers Revisits Scene of Triumph.”*

  She nodded. “What was that you said about a job?” During her several adventures as an amateur criminologist the maiden schoolteacher could hardly remember a single time when her services had been requested by anyone. Indeed, it was usually in spite of hell and high water that her insatiable curiosity had managed to get her into a case.

  “Right! This job would pay you that a week, maybe more.” Wagman wrote the figure “$300” on the tablecloth.

  Now she knew that there was a catch to it. “You don’t solve murder mysteries by the week,” she told him. “Besides, I haven’t read anything recently about a local murder.”

  Wagman was amused. “Ever hear of the Borden case back in Rhode Island or somewhere?”

  “What?” Miss Withers peered at him very suspiciously. “That happened nearly fifty years ago. And in the opinion of most experts it was quite thoroughly solved.”

  “Please! Just a minute, lady. This job wouldn’t be for you to solve the Borden case.” Wagman stopped, bit his lip and then wrote a name on the tablecloth. “Thorwald L. Nincom. Ever hear of him?”

  “The movie director?” she said uncertainly.

  Wagman winced. “The producer. Mr. Nincom makes the biggest superepics in Hollywood. Well, listen. It isn’t officially given out yet, but he’s going to do a picture based on the Borden case, a big super-A picture, in technicolor. And I’m going to sell you to Nincom!”

  Miss Withers gulped, and her eyebrows went up. “That sounds very cozy, but—”

  “Leave it to me!” insisted Wagman. �
�I’m your agent and for a measly ten per cent I take care of everything.” He wrote the percentage down on the tablecloth. “You’ll be technical adviser on the picture, see? Mr Nincom always has technical advisers on his pictures. Last year when he made The Road to Buenos Aires I got Madame Lee Francis a three months’ contract. And what she can do you can do!”

  The schoolteacher hesitated and was lost. So far she had been in town three days and had not once passed through the portals of a moving-picture studio. When she got back to Jefferson School the other teachers were sure to ask, “Ah, did you once see Gable plain, and did he stop and speak to you?” or words to that effect. It would not be nice to confess that she had drawn a blank. On the other hand.

  Mr Wagman, taking her consent for granted, was already talking into a telephone which a waiter had mysteriously plugged into the side of the booth. An appointment was arranged for noon tomorrow at Mammoth Studios and made official by Wagman’s writing place and hour down upon the linen.

  As the schoolteacher passed out of the restaurant she could not help looking up at the wall and picking out a spot where one of these days her own likeness might hang. Then a soberer idea presented itself. All that she knew about the Borden case was the silly jingle beginning, “Lizzie Borden took the ax and gave her mother forty whacks….”

  Noon tomorrow finally became noon today, and Miss Hildegarde Withers rode up to the main gate of Mammoth Studios in a bright yellow taxicab after a trip which took her well over most of southern California by way of Robin Hood’s barn. The size of the tariff shocked her almost speechless.

  “Listen, lady,” the driver told her, “there ain’t but two picture studios actually in Hollywood. That’s R.K.O. and Paramount. The rest are scattered all over the map. And if you think Mammoth is a long haul try Metro or Warners’. They’re twenty miles apart.”

  “When in Rome …” quoted Miss Withers to herself, and tipped the man a munificent quarter. “I’m going Hollywood already,” she decided.

  Harry Wagman stood in the Moorish gateway looking at his watch. “Now I’ll do the talking,” he told her. “It’s as good as settled though. Did you see your publicity in this morning’s Reporter?”