Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla Read Free Page B

crease between his eyebrows. “Dead!” he said softly.
    He moved the body slightly from where it lay across an open traveling case, a case which exposed gleaming silver fittings, the glint of crystal bottles … For a moment the inspector turned his back to the frightened, inquisitive people in the half-open doorway …
    “Adele!” the alderman was moaning. “Adele!
    Oscar Piper bent over the woman who was lying between the two seats, as if flung there by an explosion. She was a more than pretty woman, if a bit thirtyish. Incredibly soft and yet heavy in his arms she was …
    “Give me a hand here!” he commanded. There was a moment of hesitation, and then Francis Mabie stepped gingerly over the body of the customs man, took his wife’s silken legs …
    They got her out of the drawing room, to a seat in the Pullman. Piper forced back the crowd.
    “Isn’t there anything we can do for her?” Mabie was crying.
    There was, and the inspector was doing it. His first-aid methods were so successful that Adele Mabie was sitting up when the porter came trotting back up the aisle, followed by train officials, more customs men, and a bald dumpling of a man with a goatee, who smelled vilely of tequila and carried a small black bag.
    The group pushed past them, disappeared through the door of the drawing room.
    “I—I guess I must have fainted!” Adele Mabie spoke softly, painfully.
    “Quiet, Adele! You mustn’t try to …”
    The inspector’s hand was clenched in his coat pocket. He was an old acquaintance, indeed he had been one of the guests at Adele Mabie’s wedding reception, but she did not know him now.
    “It would be better to talk,” he said softly in her ear. “What really happened in there?”
    “Now see here, Inspector!” Mabie was furious.
    “Best if she answers,” Piper said. “Well?”
    “I don’t know!” the woman cried. Even in her distraught condition her fingers automatically picked and patted and arranged the loose strands of her dark hair. “I don’t know what happened! Just that the customs man—”
    “You don’t know him? Never saw him before?” Piper demanded.
    She shook her head blankly. “Of course not. He was such a nice man, too! Barely looked at my bags, and he didn’t say a word about the three cartons of cigarettes or anything. Just smiled and made a joke or two in his funny cute accent, and then …”
    She shivered. “I don’t remember …”
    The others came crowding back around them. There was curious Lighton like a great eager bird, pudgy Hansen with the wide childlike eyes. Behind them were the other passengers of the car, the old couple from Peoria, the Mexican-American family with the three fat-cheeked children, the two giggling señoritas with the ample hips, and even an elderly Spanish gentleman with handlebar mustaches and a gold-headed cane.
    The inspector scowled at the crowd, and then with sudden decision he took the woman by one arm, motioned her husband to take the other. “Come out on the rear platform,” he insisted. “The air will do you good.”
    The door slammed behind them. “Now please come clean with me, Mrs. Mabie!” he pleaded.
    “Listen to me!” cut in the husband angrily. “You forget that you’re not in New York now, Inspector!”
    “Neither are you, and you’re going to find it out,” Piper said. “How about it, Mrs. Mabie?”
    She drew back against the bulwark of her husband. “I have—nothing to tell you,” she said softly. “Nothing.”
    “You can’t tell me anything about why this poor devil in there was holding this gripped in his hand when I found him? With the stopper out?” The stern policeman produced a small amber-colored bottle, shaped like a flattened hexagon. In florid green script it bore the legend “Elixir d’Amour” and beneath in smaller letters “bottled expressly for Longacre Square Pharmacies, N.Y.C.”
    Mrs. Mabie still shook her head slowly, like one of the trick dolls sold on street