French Powder Mystery (25 page)

“Ellery!” exclaimed the Inspector. He was trembling with excitement. “Mrs. French’s murder—Bernice’s kidnapping—
and she was a drug fiend. …”

“I’m not particularly surprised, dad,” said Ellery warmly. “You have always been quick on the scent. … Yes, it looks that way to me, too. Remember that Bernice walked out of her stepfather’s house not only willingly, but eagerly. Is it too much to suppose that she was going—
to replenish a waning supply of drugs?

“If that is so, and it seems a good sound possibility, then this whole case is shrouded and complicated by the manipulations—of drug distributors. I’m very much afraid we’ve fallen into just such a prosaic business as that.”

“Prosaic your left eyebrow!” cried Inspector Queen. “Ellery, it gets clearer and clearer. And with all this rumpus about the increase in drug distribution—if we should uncover the ring that’s been operating so hugely—if we should actually
nab
the ringleaders—Ellery, it will be a remarkable achievement! How I’d like to see Fiorelli’s face when I tell him what’s behind this!”

“Well, don’t be oversanguine, dad,” said Ellery pessimistically. “It may be a
tour de force.
At any rate it’s sheer conjecture at this stage of the game, and we shouldn’t be too uplifted by hope.

“We have another angle that helps us localize the geography of the crime even more precisely.”

“The book-ends?” Inspector Queen’s voice was uncertain.

“Of course. This too is based on pure reasoning, but I’ll wager any one anything that in the end we find it’s true. Conclusions that fit a series of circumstances so snugly have an overwhelmingly high percentage of probability in their favor. …

“Westley Weaver avers positively that the onyx book-ends have neither been repaired nor removed from the apartment library since they were presented to French by John Gray. In examining the book-ends we find a noticeable difference in the color of the green felt, or baize, pasted on the bases, the under surfaces. Weaver offers the suggestion that something is wrong. Why? Because this is the first time he has noticed the differing shades of green. He has seen those book-ends for months. He is certain that when the book-ends were new the felts were alike in color, that they must have been alike all along.

“As a matter of fact, while there is no evidential method whereby we may tell when exactly that lighter felt appeared, there is one corroboration.” Ellery stared thoughtfully at the pavement. “The book-end with the lighter felt was newly glued. That I would take my oath on. The glue, while powerful in action and already quite hard, retained a viscidity and suspicious stickiness that told the story at once. And the powder grains stuck in the glue-line—no, the evidence is there. The book-ends were handled last night by the criminal. We might suspect Mrs. French, perhaps, if not for the fact that the fingerprint powder was used. That’s the work of your ‘supercriminal,’ dad, not of an elderly society lady.” He smiled.

“Let’s try to link book-ends and crime more closely.” He squinted ahead in a little tempest of silence. The old man trudged by his side, eyes on the changing street vista. “We enter the scene of the crime. We find many things of a peculiar nature there. The cards, the lipsticks, the cigarets, the shoes, the hat, the book-ends—all out of tune with normality. We have linked every element except the book-ends directly with the crime. Why, in the face of the possibilities—why not the book-ends too? I can furnish excellent hypotheses commensurate with known facts. The fingerprint powder grains, for one thing. Accessories of crime. And a crime was committed. We find the grains stuck in a newly glued felt, which is also suspiciously different in shade from its fellow. Certainly it is against all reason to say that the felts might have been differently colored from the beginning. Not with such an expensive and unique pair of book-ends. And the difference was never noticed before. … No, the human probabilities all point to the conclusion that last night some one removed the original felt from the first book-end, pasted on a new piece of felt, sprinkled fingerprint powder to bring out any prints that might be on the book-end, removed the fingerprints, and inadvertently left some minute grains in the fresh glue-line of the piece.”

“You’ve proved it to my satisfaction,” said the Inspector. “Go on.”

“Alors!
I examine the book-ends. They are of solid onyx. Furthermore, the only change in their composition is the removal of the original felt from one of them. I conclude therefore that the book-end was
not
repaired in order to hide something inside or because something was extracted from its interior. There is no interior. Everything is on the surface.

“With this in mind, I ask myself: What other reason could have caused the repair of the onyx piece, if it was not to hide traces of a secretion or a removal? Well, there’s the crime itself. Can we tie the crime and the fixing of the book-ends into one knot?

“Yes, we can! Why should a felt be removed and another substituted?
Because something happened to that felt which, if the felt were left as it was, would have betrayed traces of a crime.
Remember that the murderer’s most pressing need was to keep knowledge of the murder from every one until he had delivered the all-important message during the morning. And he knew that that library would be tenanted at nine o’clock in the morning, that if anything were wrong with the book-end it would be noticed in all probability.”

“Blood!” exclaimed the Inspector.

“You’ve hit on it,” replied Ellery. “It could scarcely be anything else but bloodstains. It would have to be something of a directly suspicious nature, or the murderer would not have taken all the trouble he did. The cards, the other things—these in themselves would never suggest a murder before the body was found or foul play even suspected. But blood! That’s the water-mark of violence.

“So I reasoned that in some way blood soaked the felt, and the murderer was compelled to change the felt and dispose of the tell-tale bloody one.”

They walked on in silence for a long time. The Inspector was buried in thought. Then Ellery spoke once more.

“You see,” he said, “I was progressing with commendable rapidity in the reconstruction of the physical elements of the crime. And, when I had reached the conclusion about the blood-soaked felt, immediately another isolated fact leaped into my mind. … You remember Prouty’s suspicions in connection with the lack of blood on the corpse? And our instant deduction that the murder must have been committed somewhere else? Here was the missing link.”

“Good, good,” murmured the Inspector, reaching excitedly for his snuff-box.

“The book-ends,” went on Ellery rapidly, “were obviously of no importance in the crime
until
they became blood-soaked. After that, of course, the whole chain of incident was a logical outgrowth—changing the felt, handling the book-ends, and then applying the powder to efface prints made necessary by the handling. …

“Then, I reasoned, the staining of the book-end was an accident. It was standing innocently on the glass-topped desk. How could the blood have got on it? There are two possibilities. The first is that the book-end was used as a weapon. But this is indefensible, because the wounds were the result of revolver-shots, and there are no signs of a
striking
blow with such a bludgeon as the book-end might have made. Then the only remaining possibility is that the blood got on it inadvertently. How might this have occurred?

“Easily. The book-end is on the glass-topped desk. The only way blood could get on the bottom of the book-end, where the blood would show ineffaceably, would be by its
trickling across the glass
and soaking into the material. But you see what this gives us.”

“Mrs. French was at the desk when she was shot,” announced the old man gloomily. “She was shot below the heart. She fell into the chair and got another in the heart itself. The blood from the first wound gushed out before she fell. The blood from the second wound trickled out as she lay across the table—and soaked into the felt.”

“And that,” said Ellery, smiling, “is a perfect recitation. Remember that Prouty is sure that the
precordial
type of wound particularly would bleed profusely. That’s probably what happened. … Now we can further reconstruct the crime. If Mrs. French was at the desk and was shot in the heart, then her murderer was in front of her and shot across the desk. It must have been at a distance of several feet, because there are no powder marks on the woman’s clothes. We can perhaps compute the approximate height of the murderer by determining the angle at which the bullets entered the body. But I have little faith in this, because there is no exact way of judging just how far the bullets traveled, or in other words how far from Mrs. French the murderer stood when he fired. And an error of inches would throw off all our calculations as to his height, considerably. You might get your firearms expert, Kenneth Knowles, on the job, but I don’t think much will come of it.”

“Neither do I,” sighed the Inspector. “Nevertheless, it’s comforting to be able to place the crime so precisely. It all hangs together, Ellery—a nice bit of reasoning. I’ll get Knowles to work immediately. Is there anything else, son?”

Ellery said nothing for an appreciable moment. They turned into West 87th Street. Half-way up the block stood the brownstone old house in which they lived. They quickened their steps.

“There’s a heap more, dad that I haven’t gone into, because of this and that,” Ellery said absently. “The signs were all there, for the world to see. They needed intelligent assembly, however. You’re probably the only one on the scene who has the mental potentiality for piecing them together. The others … And you’re exceptionally dulled by care.” He smiled as they reached the brownstone steps of their dwelling.

“Dad,” he said, one foot on the lowest step, “on one phase of this investigation I am entirely at sea. And that—” he tapped the package under his arm, “is the five books I plucked from old French’s desk. It seems silly to suppose that they can have anything to do with the murder, and yet—I have the queerest feeling that they can explain so much if we worm out their secret.”

“You’ve gone slightly daffy with concentration,” growled the Inspector, laboriously ascending the stairs.

“Nevertheless,” remarked Ellery, inserting a key into the lock of the big carved old-fashioned door, “this night is dedicated to a sedulous analysis of the books.”

Oriental police set far smaller store by the criminal alibi than do Occidentals. … We know only too well what warped cunning is capable of … and prefer to probe emotions and instincts rather than crack down highly glazed stories. This is undoubtedly explained by the difference in psychology of the two racial strains. … The Oriental is notoriously more suspicious than the Occidental, dealing with fundamentals rather than superficials. … Where the Western world is inclined to shout a lusty
BANZAI!
in acclamation of its more successful rogues, we cut off their ears, or put them in stocks for milder crimes, or behead them for major ones
—
but always pointing out by example (with true Japanese subtlety, perhaps?) the overwhelming ignominy of the punishment. …”

—From the Preface to the English edition of
A THOUSAND LEAVES,
by
Tamaka

Hiero.

T
HE HEARTH OF THE
Queen domicile was housed in one of West 87th Street’s lingering brownstones. That the Queens chose to live among the unvarnished woods of a generation dead and gone was a commentary upon the powerful influence of son upon father. For Ellery, whose collection of well-used books, whose dilettante’s knowledge of antiquities, whose love for the best of the past, overwhelmed his natural leaning toward the comforts of the modern age, stood firmly against the Inspector’s groaning indictment of “dustiness and mustiness.”

You might expect, therefore, that the Queens lived on the top floor of this sprawling old mansion, and that the door was of time-softened oak (on which appeared their only concession to expediency—a placard labeled “The Queens”), and that when you were admitted by gypsy-blooded Djuna, an odor redolent of old leather and masculinity would assail the nostrils.

There was an anteroom hung with a vast tapestry (the gift of the Duke of——in return for the Inspector’s services in a matter preserved in silence). The anteroom was opulently Gothic, and it was Ellery’s will again which prevented the Inspector from consigning it, period furniture and all, to the auction rooms.

And there was the living-room and library. Dotted with books, massed with books. Oak-ribbed ceiling—huge natural fireplace with a broad oak mantel and curious old ironwork—the Nuremberg swords crossed martially above—old lamps, brasswork, massive furniture. Chairs, divans, foot-stools, leather cushions, ashstands—a veritable fairyland of easy bachelordom.

Off the living-room was the bedroom, a chaste and comfortable rest-place.

The whole was presided over by small, volatile Djuna, the orphan boy adopted by Inspector Queen during his lonely years when Ellery was attending the University. Djuna’s world was limited to his beloved patron and their common dwelling-place. Valet, cook, housekeeper and on occasion confidant. …

At nine o’clock of the morning of Wednesday, the twenty-fifth of May—the day after the discovery of Mrs. Winifred French’s lifeless body in the French establishment—Djuna was setting the table in the living-room for a late breakfast. Ellery was conspicuous by his absence from the room. The Inspector sat grumpily in his favorite armchair, staring at Djuna’s twinkling brown hands.

The telephone bell rang. Djuna grasped the instrument.

“For you, Dad Queen,” he announced pompously. “It’s the District Attorney.”

The old man plodded across the room to the telephone.

“Hello! Hello, Henry. … We-e-ell, a little progress. Something tells me Ellery is on the scent. In fact, he told me so himself. … What? … Yes, as far as I’m concerned it’s a devil’s brew. Can’t make head or tail of it. … Oh, go on with your blarney, Henry! I’m talking straight … The situation is briefly this.”