American Gun Mystery (34 page)

“At any rate, I had to find that automatic. I did find it—by accident, you say? Perhaps not quite by accident. Look at it this way. Why had Miller disappeared at all? Well, his crimes were committed, he was through, he now had to look out for his future safety. But Miller was not Miller; Miller was really Buck Horne; Miller was a name and an identity manufactured for a temporary and specific purpose. Poor dad—he wondered why he could find no trace of this Benjy gentleman’s past! There wasn’t any. So I put myself in Horne’s place. If
Miller
disappeared, for whom would the police search? Obviously, for
Miller.
The thing to do, then, was to
disappear as Miller,
and immediately discard the Miller disguise and identity forever. The police would then look for Miller forever without the slightest success. But if he was going to put the police on an eternally false trail in an eternal search for a nonexistent person, it would not hurt—would help, in fact—to have the police believe that the vanished Miller was the murderer of Buck Horne and Woody. The weapon plus the disappearance would be enough for the police. So I figured that Miller, or Horne, had left that weapon somewhere to be found by the police
after his disappearance.
Where could he leave it? In one of two places: his hotel room, or the dressing room he had occupied in the
Colosseum.
I chose the dressing room first and, sure enough, there was the automatic.

“Having found it, that very night I myself—don’t look at me that way, stranger!—I myself planted the automatic in Grant’s room, first making sure that he would be out for the evening. You know the rest. I steered the Inspector there, we found the weapon, Grant was arrested, the papers obligingly broadcast the news for me—and Horne showed up, per schedule, to keep his friend, as he thought, from being convicted of the crimes. Showed up, incidentally, with the Miller disguise on, I suppose, to prove that he
had
been Miller. And that,” said Ellery with a wry smile, “spells finis. Pretty, eh?”

Djuna refilled the coffee cups, and we drank in silence for some time. “Very pretty,” I said after a while. “Very pretty indeed. But not complete. You still haven’t solved the mystery of how Horne secreted the weapon so beautifully in the first place.”

Ellery started from a reverie. “Oh, that!” he said with a little deprecatory wave of his hand. “After putting it off to the last, I quite forgot to clear it up. Interesting, of course. But again mere child’s play.” I grunted. “Oh, yes, J.J., it was very simple—once you knew. It’s always the simplest mystery that appears to be the deepest. Our old friend Chesterton employs the psychology of the simple mystery so very cleverly! It seems a shame—Father Brown couldn’t have been here” He laughed, and wriggled in his chair. “Well, what was the problem? The problem was: Where had that automatic been all the time after the first murder, and second murder, too? What had Miller, or Horne, done with it to have made it apparently vanish so that not even an exhaustive search by scores of detectives turned it up?

“In Major Kirby’s projection room the second time—after the Woody affair, you know—I discovered that the first newsreel scenes of the Horne murder did not constitute
all
the film shot at the
Colosseum
that night, but was a shortened version for theatre distribution.

“When the Major ran the deleted scenes for me, we saw things we could not have seen except on the night of the murder, and then of course we were incapable physically and emotionally of panoramic observation. In one scene after the murder the camera caught that bibulous little cowboy, Boone, leading the string of riderless horses to water, at one end of the arena. One horse was balky, refused to drink. Boone, rather drunker than usual, committed the unforgivable sin of lashing the animal; and lo! into the field of the lens rushed a cowboy, snatched the whip from Boone, and at once soothed the balky horse. I learned from Boone that this angry, horse-calming gentleman from the wide open spaces was none other than our friend Miller! And the horse? The horse was a canny chunk of precious old meat named
Injun.
And who was
Injun? Injun
was Buck Horne’s animal! Do you get the implications? Well, for one thing Miller’s ability to quiet an irate beast who belonged to Horne confirmed the theory that Miller was Horne. For another, the odd reaction of the horse, his
refusal
to drink when all the other animals quite eagerly lapped up the water, gave me an equally odd thought, which was fed by the fact that ‘Miller’ had leaped across the arena and prevented Boone from—what, J.J.?”

“From lashing the horse,” I said.

“No.
From forcing the horse to drink.
” Ellery chuckled as I gaped. “The automatic, remember, had not been found anywhere in the bowl. The premises from roof to cellar had been ransacked, all the humans searched to the point of nausea. Even the horses’ rigging had been scrupulously gone over. Yet there was
one
thing, strange as it sounds, which had
not
been searched.” He paused.
“The horses themselves.”
He paused again.

I tortured my brain. “I’m afraid,” I confessed at last, “I don’t get you.”

He waved a cheerful hand. “Because it’s ridiculous, eh? Yet examine it. Was it possible that the automatic had been hidden, not
on
a horse, but in a horse?”

I stared incredulously.

“Yes,” he said with a broad grin, “you’ve guessed it. I remembered that
Injun
was not an ordinary animal. Oh, no. Boone—and Kit, too—had said that
Injun
was Buck’s old
trick movie horse.
And there it was.
Injun,
by refusing to drink, as well as told me that at that very moment he had the pestiferously elusive automatic—a small weapon only four and a half inches long, mind, and flat to the bargain—
in his mouth.
”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I gasped.

“You may well be,” murmured Ellery. “From that conclusion a reconstruction of events was simple. Horne, after shooting his double, had merely leaned forward and slipped the automatic into
Injun’s
mouth. Oh,
Injun
knew who was on his back!—a little paint on the cheek, and dyed hair, wouldn’t fool an old detective with such sharp senses as a horse. All Horne had to do, then, was wait until all the searching was over, knowing that
Injun
would keep the gun in his mouth and keep his mouth shut; and then, after the string of horses had been taken to the Tenth Avenue stables to be bedded down for the night, he retrieved the pistol from
Injun’s
mouth. The ruse had been so successful that Horne had no hesitation in repeating the procedure in the second crime, using, of course, the same weapon.”

“But wasn’t there a fearful danger that
Injun
would get tired of keeping the gun in his mouth,” I said, “and would drop it right on the scene of the crime? What a
debacle
that would have been!”

“I fancy not. If Horne had decided on that method of disposing of his weapon, he must have been certain there wouldn’t be a slip-up. Which automatically makes you conclude that
Injun,
trained in tricks by Horne from colt-hood, must also have been taught to keep his mouth closed over whatever Horne slipped into it
until Horne himself ordered him to open it.
You can do it with dogs, you know; and horses are certainly just as intelligent, if not more so. …Incidentally, I now knew why Horne had, against all habit, employed a .25 calibre automatic as the murder weapon. He needed the tiniest weapon which would be fatal; a weapon which was least bulky, least weighty, considering its depository.”

Ellery rose, stretched, and yawned. But I was sitting there by the fire still puzzled; and he looked down at me with a quizzical grin. “What’s the matter, O Rain-in-the-Face?” he asked. “Something still bothering you?”

“Decidedly. Everything’s been so dashed
mysterious
about this problem,” I complained. “I mean—the papers ran just the barest details of the story, and nobody seems to know much about anything. I remember a few weeks ago when the story came out, after Horne shot himself—”

“In this very room,” murmured Ellery lightly; but his eyes were pained. “
That
was a moment, my masters! Poor Djuna fainted. Don’t think so much of blood and thunder now, do you, Djuna, old son?”

Djuna became a little pale about the jowls; he smiled in a sickly fashion and crept out of the room.

“What I meant to say,” I went on, irritated, “is that I hunted through every darned sheet in the City and I couldn’t find a solitary word about
motive.
”

“Ah, motive,” said Ellery thoughtfully; and then very quickly he went to his secretary and stopped short, frowning down upon his desk set.

“Yes, motive,” I repeated doggedly. “What the devil’s all the secrecy about? Why did Horne kill this poor chap who’d been his movie double years back? There must be a reason. Man doesn’t plan a complicated crime and forfeit his rightful identity forever just for fun. And I’m sure Horne was no maniac.”

“Maniac? Oh, no, not a maniac.” Ellery seemed to be having unusual difficulty in expressing himself. “Ah—you see, granted that he had to kill somebody, the question arose as to ways and means. Should he kill the double openly, and allow himself to be arrested, tried, and executed? Self-preservation, and a shrinking from the shame which would be heaped upon Kit’s head, made him decide against this. Should he kill the double and commit suicide? The same reasons said no. So he took the intricate but really only way out, according to his lights. You might say—”

“I
do
say,” I interrupted severely.

“—that it was silly for Horne so to have planned his crime that in working it out he lost his identity
as
Horne. But actually was it so silly? What was he losing—his money? He had taken practically all of it with him! His career? Ah, but that was just a pleasant fiction, he must have realized at the last; an old man for years he had stubbornly refused to bow to Time, chafing against the inevitable, and now at last he saw that there
was
no movie career in the offing, that he was a useless old husk, that Grant’s proposed investment of money in Horne’s comeback was merely a friendly gesture, nothing more. I repeat: What was he losing by dying as Buck Horne in—I might point out—a last blaze of publicity?”

“Yes, but what was he
gaining?
” I asked dryly.

“A good deal, from his point of view. He was gaining peace of mind, he was satisfying his peculiar code of honor, and he was making a sacrifice for the good of Kit. Kit told the Inspector and me that Horne was carrying a hundred thousand dollar insurance policy, of which she was the only beneficiary. Now mark this. He had contracted an enormous debt by his gambling losses at Hunter’s place; forty-two thousand dollars! How was he to pay it? And yet pay it he must, according to his code. With his movie career blasted, with his personal wealth insufficient to cover the debt—unless he sold his ranch, and this I suppose he could not bring himself to do, desiring it to remain Kit’s—how was he to pay Hunter? It was literally true that he was worth more dead than alive. So, by passing out of the picture as Horne, he made the hundred thousand available, liquid—available to pay off the gambling debt (he knew Kit well enough to foresee that she would take care of
that),
and the balance he knew would safeguard Kit’s future. If you grant him the desire to accomplish these things and still live out the few remaining years of his life, even if anonymously, then surely it is apparent that Horne, as Horne, had to die—that in achieving the death of his double Horne had to go through the whole complicated plan of presumably dying himself.”

“Yes, yes,” I said impatiently, “that may all be very true, but you’re evading the important point. You’ve wandered far, my lad! You said before: ‘Granted that he had to kill somebody.’ Well, I don’t grant any such thing! That’s what’s bothering me.
Why
did he have to kill somebody? Specifically, why did he have to kill his double?”

“Oh, I imagine there was a reason,” muttered Ellery, without turning.

“You
imagine?”
I cried. “Don’t you
know?”

Ellery faced about and I saw something very grave and determined in his eyes. “Yes, J.J., I do know. I didn’t know until Horne himself told me. Told me and the Inspector. …”

“But I thought Miss Horne and the Grant fellow were here, too, that night,” I said.

“Horne sent them away.” He paused again. “And before he shot himself he told us.”

“Does Grant know?” I asked abruptly. “Old man Grant?”

He tapped a cigaret on his thumbnail. “Grant knows.”

I mumbled: “He sent the girl away. …Hmm. I suppose she meant everything to him, and he would do anything to protect her—his foster-daughter—her safety, her reputation. …If there had been something—well, doubtful, about her parentage and the double knew it and was threatening to tell Kit. …She’s an orphan, didn’t you say?”

Ellery was silent. For so long a time that I thought he had not heard me. Then he said, in a very sharp tone: “What did you think of the new Nobel award for literature, J.J.? It seems to me—”

But to my vague and gossipy conjectures he preserved a loud and stubborn silence.

A silence, appropriately enough, that was Buck Horne’s epitaph.

*
Mr. Queen emphasizes this point once more. The inspiration to wire Hollywood was a direct result of his thinking; so that he was justified in his Challenge in stating that the wires were confirmatory, not essential.—J. J. McC.

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