Free Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla by Stuart Palmer Page A

local station.
    There was a thin vinegar-blonde hostess leaning over a table near the door, practicing loud and inaccurate French with a customer who had finished his breakfast and opened his vest to display a bright blue silk shirt.
    “Try the hostess,” Miss Withers suggested. The inspector snapped his fingers again, but nothing happened. Miss Withers called out “Miss!” in a somewhat peremptory tone, and Adele Mabie, who had been around the world on the Empress of Australia and prided herself on Continental manners, clapped her hands.
    The vinegar blonde looked up, smiled vaguely at them, and said “Just a minute.” Then she bent again over the man in the open vest.
    “I don’t care so much for myself,” Adele said, “but I did want to ask her what I ought to order for a baby lizard.” She pointed to the wicker basket. “I wonder if he would eat flies?”
    There were plenty around, but much too lively to catch. “Why not try bread crumbs?” suggested Miss Withers helpfully, reaching to an adjoining table and purloining a plate of rolls.
    Adele opened the basket gingerly, dropped in a little shower of bread crumbs. “He doesn’t seem to care for them,” she said. “I don’t think he’s doing at all well.”
    They all stared in the basket, watched a gaudy worm of a thing move sluggishly amid tattered and soggy banana leaves. The inspector made a wry face. “Hate all reptiles, and lizards are no exception. Not even cute sport-model lizards like that barber pole you’ve got.”
    “This lizard is exceptional, all the same,” observed Miss Withers suddenly. She frowned, peered in the basket again. “Where’re his legs?”
    Adele could explain that. “It’s a baby lizard—they don’t grow legs until later.”
    Miss Withers’ eyebrows went up. “You’re thinking of tadpoles! Lizards are lizards—and that one has the wrong stripes!”
    Adele Mabie tilted the basket, and suddenly her reptilian pet writhed up toward her face. She threw herself back, letting basket and all slide to the tiled floor. Her mouth opened to scream.
    Out of the basket poured a thin streak of harsh bright colors no longer than a ruler and about as large around as a man’s thumb. The thing writhed, twisted, slithered across the slippery tiles, its tiny evil head swaying from side to side with a satanic grace. They all watched, fascinated.
    “Stand back!” cried a masculine voice behind them. “Look out!”
    The table tipped over in the inspector’s grasp, and he found Miss Withers clinging to him with a grip of death. From somewhere behind them Julio Mendez, the silly laughing youth in the blue beret, had materialized. He leaned down toward the thing on the floor, and the three shots from the immense pearl-handled automatic in his hand came so close together that they sounded like one.
    The beautiful bright coils loosed, the colors began to fade. It was no wisp of incarnate evil now, but only a blasted, shredded bloody pulp. Julio put the gun carefully back into its holster. “Coral snake,” he said. “Sorry for butting in, only coral snake very damn dangerous kinds of snakes!”
    The restaurant was in something of an uproar. “Always knew I’d someday be glad for carrying these pistola,” Julio Mendez said. “My friends they call me Tom Mix, but …”
    And then the hostess appeared, out of breath and angry. “I’m coming, I’m coming!” she exploded. “I was on my way—no need to go causing such a fuss and shooting off guns and shouting!”
    She fumbled for her pad and pencil, but at that moment she happened to look up and notice that Julio’s bullets, ricocheting from the tile, had done considerable damage to a large mural painting of impossible peacocks on the farther wall. The young man cocked his eye at it. “Looks more better these way, I think,” he told her frankly.
    There was even something said about damages and calling the police, which made the inspector apprehensive as he foresaw another