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There Was an Old Woman [= The Quick And the Dead]
- Автор: Куин (Квин) Эллери
- Год: 1943
- Язык: английский
- Год: Little, Brown and Company
- Жанр: Классические детективы
Электронная книга - «There Was an Old Woman [= The Quick And the Dead]». Краткое содержание книги:
“I see what you meant by Thurlow’s potentialities, Charley,” remarked Ellery “Did he fix this up himself?”
“All by his little self, Ellery—”
“The man has dignity. I wonder what he reads.” He ran his eye along the bookshelves. “Mm, yes. A little heavy on Paine, Butler, and Lincoln — ah, of course! Voltaire. No light reading at all, of course...”
“Ellery, for heaven’s sake.” Charley glanced anxiously at the door.
“It gives the man a perspective,” mused Ellery, and he moved on to Thurlow Potts’s bedroom. This was a wee, chaste, almost monastic chamber. A high white bed, a highboy, a chair, a lamp. Ellery could see the little man clambering with agility into his bed, clad — no doubt this was an injustice — in a flannel nightshirt, and clutching a volume of The Rights of Man to his thick little bosom.
“There it is,” said Charley, who had his mind on his work.
The Colt automatic lay on top of the highboy. Ellery picked it up negligently. “Doesn’t look very formidable, does it?”
“Has it got one cartridge in it, as Thurlow said?”
Ellery investigated. “But of course it would. He’s an honest man. Let us away, Charles.” He slipped the Colt into his jacket and they left Thurlow’s apartment, Charley acting furtive and relieved at once.
“Where the devil do we get blank cartridges this time of night?” he asked in the hall. “All the stores are closed by now.”
“Peace, peace,” said Ellery. “Charley, go downstairs to the library and join Sheila in keeping Mr. Thurlow Potts occupied. I don’t want him back in his bedroom till I’m ready for him.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I,” quoth Mr. Queen, “shall journey posthaste to my daddy’s office at Police Headquarters. Don’t stir from the library till I get back.”
When Charley had left him, Ellery ambled to the door through which he had seen Bob and Mac Potts disappear, knocked gently, was admitted, gave his personal reassurances that everything was going off as planned — and requisitioned Robert’s Smith & Wesson.
“But why?” Bob asked.
“Playing it safe,” grinned Ellery, from the hall. “I’ll put a blank in this one, too.”
“But I don’t like it, Ellery,” grumbled Inspector Queen at Headquarters, when his son had told him and Sergeant Velie the story of Thurlow Potts’s great adventure.
“It ain’t decent,” said Sergeant Velie. “Fightin’ a duel in the year of our Lord!”
Ellery agreed it was neither decent nor to be condoned; but what, he asked reasonably, was a sounder solution of the problem?
“I don’t know. I just don’t like it,” said the Inspector irritably, jamming a blank cartridge into the magazine of the Colt. He tossed it aside and slipped a center-fire blank into the top chamber of the Smith & Wesson.
“That den of dopes’ve been in every screwball scrape you can imagine,” complained the Sergeant, “but this one takes the hand-embroidered bearskin. Fightin’ a duel in the year of our Lord!”
“With the sting removed from Thurlow’s stingers,” argued Ellery, “it makes a good story, Sergeant.”
“Only story I want to hear,” grunted his father, handing Ellery the two weapons, “is that this fool business is over and done with.”
“But Dad, there’s no danger of anything going wrong when both guns are loaded with blanks.”
“Guns are guns,” said Sergeant Velie, who was the Sage of Center Street.
“And blanks are blanks, Sergeant.”
“Stop chattering! Velie, you and I are going to watch Thurlow Potts’s duel at dawn tomorrow from behind that big Shoe on the front lawn,” snapped Inspector Queen. “And may God have mercy on all our souls if anything goes haywire!”
Ellery slipped back into the Potts mansion under an impertinent moon; but he made sure only the moon’s eye saw him. Mr. Queen had a way with front doors.
The foyer was empty. He stole towards the rear, listened for voices at the study door, nodded, and made his way in noiseless leaps up the staircase.
Several minutes later he knocked on the twins’ door. It opened immediately.
“Well?” asked the Potts twins in one voice. They were nervous: cigaret butts littered the trays, and a bottle of Scotch had been, if not precisely killed, then at least criminally assaulted.
“The deed is done,” announced Mr. Queen, “the Colt and its blank are back on Thurlow’s highboy, and here’s your Smith & Wesson, Bob.”
“You’re sure the damned thing won’t kill anybody?”
“Quite sure, Bob.”
Robert placed it gingerly on the night table between his bed and Mac’s.
“Then nothing can go wrong tomorrow morning?” growled Mac.
“Oh, come. You’re acting like a couple of children. Of course nothing can go wrong!”
Ellery left the twins and cheerily went downstairs to the library. To his surprise, he found Thurlow in a mood more mellow than melancholy.
“Hi,” said Thurlow, describing a parabola with his left hand. His right was clasped about a frosty glass. “My second, ladies ’n’ gentlemen. Can’t have a duel without a second. Come in, Misser Queen. We were just discussing the possibility of continuing our conversation in more con-congenial surroundings. Know what I mean?” And Thurlow leered cherubically.
“I know exactly what you mean, Mr. Potts,” smiled Ellery. Perhaps Thurlow in his cups might prove a saner man than Thurlow sober. He nodded slightly to Sheila and Paxton, who looked exhausted. “A hot spot, eh, kid?”
“Hot spot ’tis,” beamed Thurlow. “Tha’s my second, ladies ’n’ gentlemen. Won’erful character.” And Thurlow linked his arms in Ellery’s, marching him out of the library to the tune of a rueful psalm which went: “Eat, drink, an’ be merry, for tomorrow I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal youuuuu...”
Thurlow insisted on Club Bongo. All their arguments could not dissuade him. Ellery could only hope fervently that Mr. Conklin Cliffstatter, of the East Shore jute and shoddy Cliffstatters, was getting drunk elsewhere this night. In the cab on their way downtown, Thurlow fell innocently asleep on Ellery’s shoulder.
“This seems kind of silly,” giggled Charley Paxton.
“It is not, Charley!” whispered Sheila. “Maybe we can get him into such a good mood he’ll call the duel off.”
“Hush. Uneasy lies the head.” And indeed at that moment Thurlow awoke with a whoop and took up his dolorous psalm.
Mr. Queen, Miss Potts, her eldest brother, and Mr. Paxton spent the night at Club Bongo, keeping its death watch with the curious characters who seemed to find its prancing maidens and tense comedians the most hilarious of companions.
Fortunately, Mr. Cliffstatter was not among them.
Mr. Queen was his suavest and most persuasive; he inserted little melodies of reasonableness into the chit-chat; he suggested frequent libations at the flowing bowl.
But all his efforts, and Sheila’s, and Charley’s, availed nothing. At a certain point, diabolically, Thurlow stopped imbibing; and to all suggestions that he call off the duel and make a peace with Bob, he would smile sadly, say, “Punctilio is involved, my good frien’s,” and applaud the première danseuse enthusiastically.
7
Pistols at Dawn
They got back to the Potts grounds on the drive at a quarter of six. The dawn was dripping and jellyfish-gray, not cheerful. The thing was beyond reason, but there it was. A duel was to be fought in this clammy dawn, with pistols, on a sward, and with trees as sentinels.
The three were exhausted; but not baggy-pantsed, tweed-coated Thurlow. He egged them on in his high-pitched voice, made higher than ordinary by a sort of ecstasy. Sheila and Charley and Ellery could scarcely keep step with him.