The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla by Stuart Palmer

Author:Stuart Palmer [Palmer, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784087685
Publisher: Head of Zeus Ltd
Published: 2013-03-29T21:52:00+00:00

XI

Guess Who!

ALL THAT NIGHT strike committees in the Palacio Nacional dictated terms to the secretary of the luckily absent presidente, while owl cabarets closed their doors in dismal candlelight, milk soured in the suburbs, scalpels went unsterilized in the hospitals, and American tourists grumbled even in their sleep. But the sun rose over the mile and a half high capital of Mexico, strike or no strike, strictly on schedule.

With it rose Miss Hildegarde Withers. The good lady girded her loins for battle in a prim blue serge suit that was in its third summer. She descended the hotel stairs and much to her surprise caught the inspector buying his day’s rations of cigars in the hotel lobby.

“Have you changed your mind about early birds and worms?” she greeted him. “Stealing a march on me, Oscar?”

They found a hole-in-the-wall place where black Mexican coffee, smelling vilely of chicory, could be obtained. She was afire with excitement but would not talk until they had broken their fast and the inspector had lovingly lighted that first wonderful cigar of the new day.

“I’ve got just ten minutes,” he said. “So shoot!”

Then he leaped out of his chair as she suited the action to the word and from a newspaper parcel produced, almost in his face, one of the most vicious weapons he had ever seen.

It was a round slender shaft a little more than two feet long, wrapped in frills of blue and gold tissue paper, with a harpoon-shaped point of blood-darkened steel.

“The murder weapon, Oscar!”

He stared in wonder. “The police let you have it?”

“Well, perhaps not the murder weapon. But a banderilla is a banderilla, except for the difference in color of the paper they glue on them. After the bullfights they take the things out of the dead bulls and sell them as souvenirs.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t buy any…” Piper stopped. “Did you get that from Mrs. Mabie?”

Smiling, Miss Withers shook her head. “The souvenirs that Adele bought were of black and gold. This particular little toy was sticking into my floor this morning when I woke. It must have come sailing in the window during the night.” She sniffed. “A difficult country for a lover of fresh air, Oscar. I’ve half a mind to keep my window closed.”

“Good Lord, yes! Why, that thing might have struck you.”

“Not much chance of that. It’s just another warning to mind my own business.”

Piper took the thing, hefted it. “Why, it’s only a wooden stick with a sort of straightened-out fishhook at the end!”

She nodded. “The point is fearfully sharp, Oscar. But, all the same, I think it would take quite a bit of doing, as the English say, to drive this thing through cloth and flesh into a man’s heart, from behind!”

Oscar Piper agreed to that. “Which is why de Silva thinks it must have been a man who killed Fitz.”

“Even a man must have had his work cut out for him,” said the schoolteacher. “There must have been some commotion—a gasp or a moan.

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