American Gun Mystery (33 page)

“Hold on,” I snapped. “I think I can charge you with a serious blunder; I hope you didn’t neglect to do it wilfully. If you were so sure Horne was acting as a member of the troupe, why didn’t you line ’em up and give ’em the once-over—eh?”

“Reasonable question,” agreed Ellery. “But the answer is also reasonable. I didn’t line up the troupe and attempt to uncover the impostor because it was evident that Horne was playing some sort of game. It isn’t often that you’ll find a murderer willing to hang about the scene of his crime. Why was Horne doing it? Why, if he wanted to commit murder, did he choose this complicated and perilous method? A dark street, a shot, a quick getaway—it would have been very easy for him to have killed his victim in the usual way. But he chose the hard way: why? I meant to find out. I wanted to give him enough rope to hang himself. Actually, he
had
to wait. There was something he still had to do, which was to kill Woody. I’ll explain that in a moment.

“In addition,” continued Ellery with a little frown, “there were a number of factors which challenged my curiosity and, I suppose, my intellect. Aside from motive, which was a complete mystery to me—what the devil had happened to the automatic? That was a real poser. And then, too, without a complete case—if I unmasked Horne and he stubbornly refused to talk—we should probably not have been able to secure a conviction.

“So I delayed exposing Horne, never anticipating—having no earthly reason for anticipating—another murder.” He sighed. “I spent some uncomfortable moments over that, J. J. At the same time, in the most innocent way I could contrive, I began to hang around the troupe—trying to spot Horne without arousing his suspicions. Well, I was unsuccessful. They were a clannish group, and I could get nothing out of them. The man’s personality was submerged in the larger personality of the troupe. I cultivated Kit Horne socially in the vain hope that Horne might communicate with her.

“But after the murder of Woody—immediately after, the next day—one of the troupe disappeared. A man who had called himself Benjy Miller. A man moreover who had been given employment on the eye of the original performance a month before on the
written recommendation
of Horne himself! A man who superficially, at least, if you discarded the color of his hair and his scar, might have been Horne. A man who—and this proved to be the clincher, as I shall demonstrate in a moment—had been ‘authorized’ by Horne in the letter of introduction to ride Horne’s own favorite horse,
Injun;
despite the fact that there was no really sound reason for ‘Horne’ not to have ridden his favorite mount himself on the opening night. From these facts I could not doubt that the vanished Miller was in reality Buck Horne; and therefore Buck Horne satisfied the first qualification of my murderer: he was in the arena on horseback in the case of both crimes.” I sighed.

“The second qualification of the criminal was deducible from the fifth and sixth of my major half-dozen clues. The fifth was something I was conscious of as a spectator, and it was confirmed by the newsreel sound pictures taken by Major Kirby’s unit, and by Lieutenant Knowles’s report. After Grant signaled the beginning of the ride I recalled but one volley of shots from the guns of the charging horsemen behind the supposed Horne. Only a few seconds elapsed between the riders’ volley and the fall of the dead man to the tanbark—so few that there was not time for more than that single very slightly ragged fusillade, and then the horses and men became a milling mob, preventing further shooting. There could be no question about the fact that only one volley had been fired: in proof we found that each of the revolvers of the troupe proper had been shot off just once.

“Now the sixth and last fact was that each of these revolvers, as well as Horne’s and Grant’s and that mad chap Ted Lyons’s, could not have fired the fatal shot; Lieutenant Knowles said undeniably that only a .25 calibre automatic pistol could have fired the fatal shot, and all but one of the weapons collected from the troupe were of .38 calibre and over. And ballistics tests proved that the exception, Lyons’s .25, could not have been the murder weapon.

“What did these two facts, juxtaposed, signify? Well, fundamentally enough, if the murderer was one of the troupe and yet the examined guns of the troupe couldn’t have fired the fatal shot, then the murderer had used a weapon which we had
not
examined. But how is this possible? you ask. You say: These people were thoroughly searched and the murder weapon not found. I answer: The murderer hid the weapon somewhere. Let me leave that for a moment; the immediate point is that use a .25 automatic he did, and since there was only
one
fusillade, he must have used it
at the time the guns of the troupe went off.
In other words, the murderer carried a second weapon, loaded with lethal bullets, and had discharged it at the same time he fired the blank-filled revolver.
Used, then, both hands in shooting.
Was this, I asked, an indication that the murderer was ambidextrous?”

“I’m not quite sure,” I objected, “that you were justified in assuming the murderer shot both weapons off at the same time. It was a ragged fusillade, didn’t you say?”

“Yes. But remember that the hands of the troupe were raised—they were shooting their blanks at the roof. I reasoned that the murderer would have been constrained not to make himself conspicuous; he would have had to shoot his blank at the roof with the others, as we know he did. But since after the single fusillade there were no other shots, I was justified in assuming that his other hand had held the lethal weapon and fired it at approximately the same time.

“But to return to this very curious little question of ambidexterity. Was it possible? Certainly, although not necessarily. But since it was possible, the trail again led back to Buck Horne, who for years had used
twin
guns. A two-gun man is, as far as shooting is concerned, ambidextrous. Buck was not only the logical suspect on other counts, then, but satisfied the qualifications of the murderer on two new counts. Not only was he a two-gun man, but he was a remarkable marksman also—testimony. The man who fired the fatal shots was a remarkable marksman—had disdained to fire more than once when, in fact, it would have been simple for him to have fired the entire magazine of the automatic before the echoes of the fusillade had died away. Check again.

“But how had he rid himself of that second weapon so cleverly that the most minute search failed to turn it up? The disappearance of the weapon was the most baffling feature of both crimes.” He paused. “I was to penetrate to the secret only after the one-armed braggart, Woody, died.”

“That’s certainly been puzzling me,” I said eagerly. “Far as I know, not one word of explanation has been written in the newspaper accounts. How the deuce did he do it? Or didn’t you discover it before the end?”

“I knew the answer the day after Woody died,” he replied grimly. “Let me go back for a moment. It was apparent that both murders had been committed by the same culprit; the circumstances were identical and the extraordinary disappearance of the weapon, despite another exhaustive search, indicated that the same method had been used to dispose of the weapon in the second murder as the first. The very vanishment of the weapon in the Woody murder was reasonable proof that we were dealing with the same murderer.

“Now, why had Horne killed Woody, the top-rider, before disappearing? The fact that the men were more or less professional rivals surely was too feeble to explain the act; as a matter of fact Woody had more motive—on the surface—to kill Horne than Horne had to kill Woody, for it was Woody who was the aggrieved, since Horne had appropriated what Woody considered his own spotlight. No, there was only one probable explanation: somehow Woody had discovered Horne’s deception, and guessed that it was Horne who had committed the first crime. Had he confronted ‘Miller’ with his knowledge that Miller was really Horne, Horne would have had to kill Woody to save his own skin.”

“It’s all very well to theorize on possibilities,” I said smartly, “but I thought you work only on demonstrable proof.”

“I make that effort,” murmured Ellery. “And I believe I can provide a confirmation of this theory that will convince even you, you skeptical money-changer. Where’s the confirmation? In the ten thousand dollars that, having been stolen from Curly Grant’s green box, was almost immediately after found in Woody’s room.”

“How does that confirm it?” I demanded, puzzled.

“In this way. An examination of the rifled box indicated that
Woody hadn’t stolen that money.
Ah, a tall conclusion, I hear you say. Not at all. The two locks of the box had been twisted until the eye-hinges had snapped off. Both had been twisted in the
same
direction; specifically, toward the back of the box. There was a hinge on each side, remember; none at the front. Do you see now?”

“No,” I said in all honesty.

“It’s so reasonable,” said Ellery plaintively. “By habit a man will twist consistently in one direction and with the same hand, the hand he favors, particularly if the twisting requires muscle. If he has two hasps to twist, he will twist the one on the right side first with his right hand (if he is right-handed), and then turn the box around and twist the left-hand hasp. By turning the box around he automatically puts himself again in a position to twist toward the right with the right hand. In such case the twists in the strained metal would appear in
opposite
directions rather than the same direction, as we found in the case of the Grant box. But we’re talking now of normal people with two hands who favor one of the hands, as most people do. Consider Woody; he had only one hand altogether! He certainly would twist the right-hand hasp first, and then turn the box around to twist the left-hand hasp, in which case the twistings would appear in opposite directions. But the twistings actually appeared in the
same
direction. So the hasps were not twisted by Woody. Therefore Woody didn’t steal the money.

“Had Woody been the thief, moreover, would he have hidden the loot in an unlocked drawer of his own dressing-room table, to be found by even the most casual search? The fact that the cash was openly left in an unlocked drawer of a table in Woody’s room proves that, if he put it there himself, he did not know the money was stolen; if he did not put it there himself, then he knew nothing of the theft at all and the money was planted in his drawer to make him appear the thief.

“But to return to the rifled box. The fact that the hasps were twisted in the same direction rather than in opposite directions tends to show that the two hasps were twisted
simultaneously
—that is, the thief grapsed each hasp in one hand and twisted both toward the back of the box in the same operation. Ah, but what have we here? Two strong hands, it appears! This was metal—granted, weak poor metal, but metal nevertheless; it would take strength to twist one of the hasps with even a favored, or stronger, hand; yet here the thief had exerted equal strength with
both
hands. Indication? Certainly of an ambidextrous thief. Yes, yes, I know,” he continued hastily, checking the objection on my lips, “I know you’re going to say it’s not a foolproof conclusion. Perhaps not. All I call it is an indication, and that you can’t deny. If the thief was ambidextrous, and the murderer, Buck Horne, was ambidextrous—certainly a remarkable coincidence, eh? I was completely justified in theorizing that it was Horne who had stolen Curly Grant’s money.

“But why the deuce should Horne, or Miller, or whatever you choose to call him, have stolen Curly’s money—the money of his best friend’s son? Desperation? Dire need? Cupidity overwhelming friendship? But see; if Horne stole that money how does it transpire that the money turns up the same day in Woody’s room? Horne, then, whatever the explanation was, didn’t steal the money out of cupidity; I think it is simple to reconstruct the situation. Woody having discovered Horne’s identity as Miller in some way—perhaps by penetrating his disguise—confronted Horne with his knowledge. What would a man like Woody do in such a case?”

“Demand blackmail, of course—hush money,” I muttered.

“Quite so. He had to appease Woody until he was able to silence him forever. He seized the opportunity presented by Grant’s settlement of Curly’s legacy. He stole the money, gave it to Woody—who, having no time to suspect it was Curly’s, no reason to hide it—put it away in his dressing-table drawer. Horne knew that by the time the theft was discovered Woody would be dead, the money would be found, returned to Curly, and no one—except Woody, naturally!—would suffer. How clever Horne was! Had he paid Woody off with his own money, Horne could never have retrieved that money later even if it was found in Woody’s drawer; as Miller he would have had no claim to it. But by using Curly’s money temporarily he held on to his own wad, and Curly got his back. …Everything fits for Buck Horne as the criminal. He satisfies all the qualifications logically as well as plausibly.”

“He was running a fearful risk, though,” I said, shivering. “What could he have done had he been recognized as Horne?”

“It’s hard to say,” replied Ellery thoughtfully. “Yet the risk was not so great as you think. Aside from Woody only two persons, really, might recognize him because they knew him so well. Kit and Wild Bill Grant. Even Kit had been seeing her foster-father very infrequently of late years, as she told me herself. But if she did by chance penetrate the Miller disguise, Horne was sure he could depend on her loyal silence. The same was undoubtedly true of Grant, who had been Horne’s closest friend from their boyhood days. All along I suspected that Grant became aware of the truth not long after the first murder; the man was a nervous wreck. The afternoon of Woody’s murder he seemed to catch sight of someone, and he turned pale as a ghost; I’ve no doubt he saw Miller’s face there—a reminder that Miller was Horne.”

Ellery lit another cigaret and puffed slowly at it. “It was this very friendship with Grant—on which Horne relied—that provided the trap to draw Horne back after his disappearance in the Miller identity. I knew that only one thing would bring him back; danger that Grant, his best friend, or Kit, whom he considered his daughter, would be accused of his own crimes.” He paused. “I suppose it was a wretched trick, but I couldn’t help myself. I chose Grant as living bait for self-evident reasons, knowing that the old-timer’s prime virtue of loyalty to a friend would not permit Horne to let that friend suffer for crimes of which he was innocent. But how to frame Grant so that he might be arrested? The only thing that would force a quick arrest would be concrete evidence—obviously the best evidence in any case is the weapon found in possession, presumably, of a suspect. The fact that Grant couldn’t have committed the crime for pure reasons of position I knew would make no difference; apparently no one else had analyzed correctly the matters of direction and angle of entry. And I knew that action would be swift after Grant’s arrest.