Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla Read Online Free PDF

until someone else had looked at it. I may be imagining things, but still …”
    Back they went to the door of the drawing room again. And Adele stopped in the doorway, pointing.
    A little one-legged table was hooked under the windows, between the seats. On the table was a flat silver tray with a napkin and the remains of a sandwich. But there was no glass of tea.
    There had been a glass. The shivered fragments strewed table and carpet, and everywhere pieces of ice melted soppily amid bits of tea leaf.
    “But what happened?” Adele cried. “Why, only this minute I stepped out of the door! There hasn’t been time for anyone to do this!”
    The windows, still left open to clear away the faint sweet odor of perfume and bitter almonds, faced away from the noisy life of the station platform, faced full upon a little wilderness of freight cars, oil tanks, and the distant purple mountains. There was nothing alive within the view of the inspector except a starved yellow dog, who immediately streaked out of sight.
    Piper dropped to his hands and knees, surveying the floor. It took him only a moment to find the bullet, which was embedded not too deeply in the upholstery of the settee. It was .38 caliber, a most baffling bit of lead. It had smashed the glass of bitter tea, smashed it so thoroughly that fingerprints and contents were alike beyond analysis. That much was obvious to the inspector.
    “But I don’t see how it could have happened!” Adele repeated.
    Piper stood up. His finger drew an imaginary line in the air, from the bullet hole in the upholstery to the tray on the table, then out through the window.
    “I’ll tell you,” he said. “The bullet was fired from a noiseless gun, because there was no sound of a shot. The gun had no barrel, because there are no rifling marks on the slug.”
    “But who?” she implored. “Who could have done it?”
    “There you have me,” Piper said. “All I know is that the person who fired that shot must be more than nine feet tall.” He shook his head after sniffing at the remains of the glass of iced tea. “No chance to find out if it was poisoned or not,” he told her. “But it would seem that somebody didn’t want us to look into the matter.”
    Adele Mabie shivered a little. “I—I think I’ll go and find my husband,” she said.
    “Good idea. And when you find him, stick to him and stay in the middle of the crowd until the train starts up again,” Piper advised her. He watched her out of sight.
    Then he locked the drawing-room door behind him, drew the shades of the windows, and turned on the light. He went through the baggage of Mr. and Mrs. Francis Mabie with what is usually known as a fine-tooth comb. Luckily all of the much-labeled bags were unlocked, presumably left so as a result of the second customs examination.
    Through hatboxes, Gladstones, briefcases, and overnight bags, he went, searching for he knew not what. In one black leather case devoted to lingerie he found a small book bound in rough cloth— Your Trip to Mexico. It was well-worn, and he would have liked more time to examine it, having learned that often such things can serve as excellent keys to the character of their owners.
    He thumbed through the little book, found two back pages stuck. Between them someone had left a snapshot, one of the cheap horrors snapped at amusement parks and sold for a dime. The chemical coating was peeling from the thing, but Piper could see Adele Mabie’s face, a face younger and happier than she was wearing today. She was seated in a “prop” roller coaster, marked “Luna Park,” with a man. Unfortunately the face of her companion had been neatly cut away with fingernail scissors. What to deduce from this evidence of some trip to Coney Island the inspector could not decide. So he pocketed it and went on with his search.
    Investigating every jar of cold cream, every container of shaving soap, every flask of cleansing lotion, he found no weapon and no trace of