American Gun Mystery (31 page)

“Hmm,” he said, drawing his brows together, “it’s perfectly true that the business of the buckle-holes was trivial. And not only trivial in appearance, but trivial in significance. It was just an indication. It didn’t prove anything. But it showed the way.

“Now I’ve just demonstrated that Horne normally buckled his trouser belt at the second hole, and later as he lost weight at the third hole; yet the man whose dead body we found was wearing the belt buckled at the first hole. This was an unaccostumed position, for the simple reason that the
only
ridges or welts were across the second and third holes; in other words there was no ridge at all across the first hole, where the dead man had actually buckled the belt. But here was a puzzling set-of facts. How was I to explain the phenomenon that Horne, who habitually buckled at the second notch, and then for some time was forced to tighten his belt to the third notch, suddenly on the night of his murder buckled at the first notch—that is,
loosened his belt to the extent of two full notches?
Well, what usually makes a man loosen his belt? A heavy meal, you say—eh?”

“That was in my mind,” I confessed, “although I can’t see a man dining so heartily before a strenuous performance; or even if he did, dining so heartily that he would have to let out his belt two notches.”

“I agree. But the logical possibility existed. So I took the logical step. I asked Dr. Prouty, who was to perform the autopsy, to ascertain the contents of the corpse’s stomach. In due course he reported that the corpse’s stomach was quite empty; apparently, he said, the victim had not taken food for six hours or so before his death. So that was out as a possible explanation for the sudden switch to the first buckle-hole.

“What remained? Only one thing; deny it if you can: I was forced to the conclusion that the belt which the dead man wore that night
didn’t belong to him.
Ah, but it
was
Buck Horne’s belt: it was monogrammed with his initials, and Grant—his closest friend—testified to Horne’s ownership. But see where this leads us! For if the belt did not belong to the man who was wearing it, but did belong to Buck Horne, then Buck Horne was not the man who was wearing it. But the man who was wearing it was the dead man. Then
the dead man was not Buck Horne!
What could be simpler, J.J.?”

“And that gave you the whole story?” I muttered. “It sounds horribly weak and unconvincing, somehow.”

“Weak, no,” Ellery smiled. “Unconvincing, yes. For the excellent reason that the human mind refuses to accept large explanations from small facts. Yet isn’t most of our progress in science the result of insignificant observations, brought about by this very process of induction? I’ll admit that at the moment I wasn’t free from the mental cowardice of the herd. The conclusion seemed incredible. I shied away from it. I didn’t believe it. It flew in the face of the normal. Yet what other explanation could there be?”

Ellery stared thoughtfully into the fire. “And then there was something else to strengthen the doubt. The dead man had had contact—although it must have been fleeting, for the testimony ran that ‘Horne’ had dashed into the
Colosseum
late—with the rodeo troupe. And after the death of the rider presumed to be Horne, Kit—Horne’s foster-daughter, mind—had actually seen the victim’s face when she lifted the blanket from the dead body; as had Grant, Horne’s lifelong friend. And the face itself had not been mutilated, JJ.—only the skull and body. These facts seemed to render my conclusion that the dead man wasn’t Horne even less convincing. But I didn’t discard my conclusion, as perhaps another might have been tempted to do under the circumstances. On the contrary, I said to myself: ‘Well, unconvincing or not, the point is that
if
the dead man
isn’t
Horne, as my first deduction indicates, then the dead man certainly bears a most remarkable resemblance to Horne in face and figure.’ Inescapable inference, J J., if you accept’ my first premise. At any rate, I wasn’t satisfied, not mentally easy at all. I looked about for confirmation of my conclusion. I found it almost at once, and that brings me to the second of the half-dozen clues I mentioned.”

“Something that confirms the conclusion that the dead man wasn’t Horne?” I said blankly. “For the life of me—”

“Don’t gamble your life so carelessly, J.J.,” chuckled Ellery. “It’s so incredibly simple. It revolved about the ivory-handled revolver found in the dead man’s right hand—
right
hand, remember—the twin of which I found in Horne’s hotel room later.

“Now both weapons had been used by Horne for many years; Kit said they were her foster-father’s favorite weapons, and so did Grant and Curly. Again no question of ownership, please note; the initials on the butts, and both Kit’s and Grant’s instant acceptance. So the guns were Horne’s; of that much I could be sure.

“What were the new indications? The first gun was found still clutched in the dead man’s hand—right hand—even after his fall from the horse. I myself had seen him draw this weapon from his right holster and wave it with his right hand as he set the horse to galloping around the oval; and the newsreel confirmed these observations. But when I examined the revolver itself I noticed an extremely odd thing.” He wagged his head lightly. “Follow carefully. The handle, or butt, or grip—whatever the technical term is—was inlaid with ivory on both flat surfaces, and the ivory was yellow and worn with age and use,
except for a narrow portion on the right side of the butt.
As I held the gun in my
left
hand, this patch of. lighter ivory came between the tips of my curled fingers and the heel of my hand. Later that night I held the twin in my
right
hand and noticed that, although the ivory inlays were just as worn and yellow as in the first gun, there was again one portion comparatively fresh-looking—this time on the
left
side of the butt between the tips of my coiled fingers and the heel of my hand. What did all this mean? That the second gun—the one from the hotel room—was the gun Buck Horne had habitually gripped in his
right
hand, for when I held it in my
right
hand the strip of unworn ivory came on the left side of the butt, where it should come in a right-hand grip. The other gun, the first one, which the dead man had been clutching in his
right
hand, was obviously the weapon gripped by Horne for many years in his
left
hand, for the unworn strip of ivory came on the right side, where it should come in a left-hand grip.” He drew a deep breath. “In other words, to reduce it to its simplest form, Buck Horne, who used twin guns, always gripped one in his right hand and the other in his left, never changing, for if he had used them indiscriminately for either hand there would be no unworn patches at all. Remember this.

“Further, Horne was undoubtedly an ambidextrous marksman; that is, he fired—judging from the identically worn muzzles, sights, and butts—equally
often
with either hand; and inferentially, then, equally well. This habit of Buck’s using a specific weapon for each of his two hands was later confirmed by a small point; I had Lieutenant Knowles weigh the two guns and found that one was some two ounces lighter than the other. Apparently then each was perfectly balanced to the strength, grip, and ‘feel’ of the particular hand in which he habitually held it.

“Now then, to return to the important discrepancy. The murdered man was gripping with his
right
hand the weapon Buck Horne always gripped with his
left.
It struck me immediately that Horne would never have wielded that gun with the wrong hand. And—”

“But suppose,” I objected, “that by accident he had taken the left-hand gun with him that night to the
Colosseum?
”

“It wouldn’t have made a particle of difference to my deductions. By every dictate of habit, weight, feel, he would have recognized it the instant he picked it up as his left-hand gun, would have automatically placed it in his left holster, and would have performed with it gripped in his left hand. Remember, there was no compulsion for him to use his right hand that night while he fired blank cartridges into the air; he was merely holding the reins with his left, or waving his hat at one point; either hand would have served for the normal little activities it was called upon to engage in.

“So! Since the dead man had gripped Horne’s left-hand, gun with his right hand, had even used the right holster, when Horne would have gripped the weapon in his left hand and used the left holster—here was startling confirmation that it wasn’t Buck Horne at all who was murdered that night!”

He paused to sip some coffee. How simple—as he said—it was when he explained it!

“I now,” continued Ellery serenely, “had two perfectly interlocking, or complementary, reasons for questioning the identity of the victim; and while either one, alone, might have formed the basis for no more than a strong presumption, the combination of both removed all doubt from my mind. The dead man was not Buck Horne. Squirm as much as I might at the odd conclusion, I was compelled to accept it.

“But since it was not Buck Horne’s body which had tumbled to the tanbark that night, I said to myself: In the name of a merciful God, whose body
was
it? Well, as I’ve already suggested, it was obviously the body of someone whose physique, with the scarcely perceptible exception of a larger waist-line, was similar to Horne’s; someone who looked amazingly like Horne in features, who could ride and shoot expertly, and who probably could approximate the timbre of Buck’s voice. As for this last point, I might say here that the voice did not play an important role that night; for the supposed Buck Horne arrived late for the performance; merely
waved
a greeting to Grant, as Grant himself related, went at once to his dressing room, and appeared shortly thereafter on the field astride
Rawhide.
Probably then he never actually spoke to anyone at all; or if he did, it was a monosyllable.”

“So far,” I agreed, “it’s clear, Ellery. But, as I said, some things stick in my craw. For instance, I know from having read the newspapers the actual identity of the man who was murdered in that first crime; but how the dickens could you have worked it out so early in the case?”

“There,” murmured Ellery, snuggling more deeply into the armchair, “you touch on a sore spot. I didn’t know. I didn’t know
exactly.
But I knew generally enough to advance my theory to a solution. Let me go on, and you’ll see.

“I naturally asked myself: Who could this man—this dead man—be who so closely resembled Buck Horne in face and figure? My instinctive thought was a twin brother; but Miss Horne and Grant both asserted that Buck had no blood-kin of any kind alive. Then in mulling over Horne’s background the answer came to me in a flash. It was a perfect development of the man’s history, a perfect and indeed inevitable explanation of the resemblance between Buck Horne, ex-movie star, and an unknown man. For Buck had been an actor who specialized in outdoor roles, roles that called for all sorts of strenuous activity and at times even feats of acrobatics—as anyone who has seen Western movie heroes leap from windows into saddles, hurtle horses over cliffs—the usual folderol—knows. But what do motion picture companies resort to when their stars cannot perform these daredevil stunts—or, more pertinently, how do producers avert the physical hazards, the risks to life and limb, to a Western star—after all valuable property? It’s a common practice with which everyone today is familiar through the so-called ‘fan’ magazines and newspaper exploitation.
They use doubles.
”

I gasped, and Ellery chuckled again. “Shut your mouth, J.J.—you look disagreeably like a fish out of water. …What on earth strikes you as so amazing about that? It was a perfectly logical line of reasoning. It matched the facts superbly. Producers use doubles for more reckless feats of daring; these doubles are selected primarily for two qualifications. First, in physique they must resemble the stars they impersonate. Second, they must be able not only to accomplish the feats of which the stars are capable, but to do even more, since it’s they who perform the really perilous stunts. In a Western-star situation, the double would undoubtedly be a good horseman, a roper, perhaps even a marksman. Now, facial resemblance is not absolutely essential in most cases, for the particular shots of action can be so filmed that the double’s face is not caught by the camera; but there are notable instances of doubles who can not only do what the stars can do, but who look amazingly like the stars as well. …Yes, the more I thought about it the more positive I was that the man murdered in the arena was Buck Horne’s old movie double. As a matter of confirmation I wired a confidential source in Los Angeles to find out from the studio whether there had been such a double. I received a reply a few days later; I had been right.
*
There had been such a double, but the studio had not been in touch with him since Buck’s last picture some three or four years before and had no idea where the man might be found. The man’s name, which the wire supplied, was obviously a screen name, and of no use to me. But even had I not checked with Hollywood I should have been morally certain that the theory of a movie double was the correct solution of the victim’s identity.”

I threw up my hands.

“Shall I stop?” asked Ellery.

“Lord, no! I’m just genuflecting to the god of reason. If you stop now I’ll brain you. Go on, for heaven’s sake.”

He looked embarrassed. “I
shall
stop,” he said sternly, “if you spout any more bilgewater like that. …Where was I? Yes! The next question was inevitable: Why had Buck Horne secretly re-engaged his old-time double to take his place in the rodeo performance without mentioning it to either Grant or Kit?—for their stupefaction and grief at sight of Horne’s supposedly dead body could not have been anything but genuine. Well, there are two
innocent
reasons conceivable: one, that Buck had become suddenly ill, or worse; that he did not wish to disappoint his audience, and furthermore was too proud to confess his condition to Kit, to his best friend Grant, or to Mars the promoter; or two, that his performance included some feat or feats which Buck was unable to perform. But Buck had not become suddenly ill; he had been examined by the rodeo doctor the day of the performance and pronounced fit, according to Kit Horne and the doctor himself. Had he possibly taken ill
between
the doctor’s examination and the performance itself? This would mean that he would have had to arrange for the deception on the spur of the moment, very shortly before the performance. Yet everything indicated that the deception was planned
not
the day of the performance, but the day
before.
For one thing, he had had a mysterious visitor to his hotel room the previous night. For another, he had withdrawn from his bank the previous day most of his balance. It seemed fairly clear that he had, then, called in his double the night before the opening, and turned over to this man one of the twin guns
plus
a payment for the man’s services—all of the three thousand dollars which Horne withdrew that very day, or part. His clothes, too, in all probability—remember Grant said that at the last rehearsal before the opening Buck had performed not in costume, despite the fact that all the others were in costume. …The fact that everything was planned at least a day
in advance of
the doctor’s examination eliminated the theory that the double had been engaged because Horne was taken ill
after
the examination.”