Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla by Stuart Palmer Read Free Book Online Page A

Hansen and the blue-chinned newspaperman were matching coins to see who would pay for their dinners and the ensuing beers. It was the little man in the cowboy hat who won, but it was a hollow victory. It developed that Rollo Lighton had left his money in the Pullman along with his coat and necktie.
    They departed finally, and Oscar Piper leaned his elbows on the table in deep self-communion. Things were beginning to fit together. And Hildegarde Withers had always insisted that he could get nowhere without the machinery of Centre Street to help him! In his suitcase right now reposed her derisive going-away gifts to him—a magnifying glass and a set of false auburn whiskers. Well, they’d see who had the last laugh.
    It was with a light heart that Oscar Piper beckoned to the waiter. And then he suddenly realized that, after all the efforts he had made to memorize the Spanish for ham and eggs, the words had slipped his mind.
    He said it in English several times, in a loud voice. But the waiter only flinched. And then, just as it appeared that he would have either to send for the Pullman conductor or else go hungry, a pleasant voice spoke in his ear.
    “May I service you, señor ?”
    Without waiting for an answer, the tall blond youth sat down opposite him, bringing his cup of coffee. He told the waiter, in flowing Spanish, to produce instantly huevos con jamón, the huevos fritos on both sides. “Okay?”
    “Thanks,” said Piper grudgingly. “By the way”—he confronted his table mate—“how did you know I was from New York?”
    The smile widened. “But your necktie!”
    Piper stared down at the somewhat twisted and bedraggled cravat, genuinely pleased to think that there was something metropolitan about it. “The inside label, it says Epstein Kollege Klothes of Broadway,” pointed out the younger man. So it did, but the inspector instantly doubted if it could have been seen in the one brief glance the youth had given him when they met in the coach ahead.
    “Didn’t doing so good with the señorita, eh?” his companion continued, as one man to another.
    Piper stiffened, but the smile was an ingenuous one. “Only pretty girl on these train, hell-damn it,” went on the youth, in tortured English which the inspector thought faintly reminiscent of some play he had once had to sit through, a play about a lovely Castilian girl and an American aviator and a bandit who was “the best damn caballero in all Meheeko.”
    “She didn’t encouraging me so much neither,” the youth went on. “But I know her name. Her name is Dulcie, and that means ‘dessert’ in my language.”
    The ham and eggs arrived. “You live here, then?” Piper asked.
    “Allow me!” With a flourish the young man produced a narrow engraved card bearing the name Señor Julio Carlos Mendez S. “The initial is for Schley, my mother’s name,” he explained. “I use it to give a something at the end, you understand? From my German mother” I get my blondness. Everybody takes me for one American, I’ll tell you. Because I speak such hell-damn good English. I pick that up in Tijuana when I used to go there for spending the money my papa make raising bulls for the bull ring. Me, I like very much Americans.”
    Piper introduced himself, without going into his official status. “¡ Mucho gusto, señor !” They solemnly shook hands.
    “I like girl Americans,” Julio Carlos Mendez S. went on cheerily. “I like to learn slang from pretty señoritas. Not many pretty girls on these train, except Miss Dulcie and”—he added this most casually—“the lady in our Pullman who make all the peddlers on the platform happy buying so many curios.”
    The inspector suddenly realized that the other was watching him covertly, waiting for an answer.
    He nodded and went on eating.
    Julio leaned confidentially closer. “I hear stories that there was this afternoon a misfortunate accident on this train. In that lady’s room!”
    The inspector cautiously