![There Was an Old Woman [= The Quick And the Dead] - Читать Любимую Русскую Полную Книгу 👉 Read-E-Book.com](/uploads/posts/books/2/0/2/3/there-was-an-old-woman-the-quick-and-the-dead-download.jpg)
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:
Ellery said nothing.
“And the twin brother, Maclyn?” asked the Inspector.
Charley stared. “Mac? Kill Bob? That’s ridiculous.”
“He had opportunity,” argued the Inspector.
“But what motive, Inspector?”
“Strangely enough,” said Ellery slowly, “Mac had a sounder theoretical motive to seek Bob’s death than any other.”
“How do you figure that out?” said Charley belligerently.
“Don’t get sore, Charley,” grinned Mr. Queen. “These are speculations only. Both twins were active vice-presidents of the Potts Shoe Company, weren’t they?” Charley nodded. “When the Old Woman dies — an event that, according to Dr. Innis, is imminent — who’d be most likely to take full charge of the business? The twins, of course, who seem to have been the only practical businessmen of the family.” Ellery shrugged. “I toss it out for what it’s worth. The death of his twin brother gives Mac a clear field when his mother yields the reluctant ghost.”
“You mean,” said Charley incredulously, “Mac might have been jealous enough of Bob to murder him so he could become head of the company?”
“Now that,” the Inspector snapped, “is a motive that appeals to me.”
Ellery opened his mouth to say something, but at this moment Sergeant Velie came plowing up the stairs, so he refrained.
“I give up,” said the Sergeant in disgust. “I and the boys’ve turned this joint upside down and we can’t find those two missing pieces of artillery. We even been in the Old Woman’s rooms. She gave us hail Columbia, but we stuck it out. I dunno where they are.”
“Did you check with Cornwall & Ritchey about what kind of guns those two missing ones were?” asked the Inspector.
Velie looked about cautiously, but the upper hall was deserted. “Get this. The thirteenth rod was a Colt Pocket Model Automatic — a .25 caliber—”
“But that’s precisely the type of weapon Thurlow used in the duel this morning,” Ellery said sharply.
“And the fourteenth was an S. & W. 38/32 with a two-inch barrel — a .38 caliber,” Velie nodded.
“Like the one Bob Potts carried!” The Inspector stiffened.
“Yes, sir,” said the Sergeant, shaking his head lugubriously, “it’s a funny thing, but the two guns missin’ are exact duplicates of the two guns used in the duel this mornin’!”
12
The Importance of Being Dead
Mac was a puzzle. For the most part he shut himself up in the room he and Robert had shared since their birth, staring at nothing. He was not dazed; he was not grim; he was simply empty, as if the vital fluid in him had drained off. At such times as he quit his room, he wandered about the house with a restless air, as if he were looking for something. Sheila spent hours with him, talking, holding his cold hand. He would only shake his head: “Go to the old man, Sheila. He needs you. I don’t.”
“But Mac honey—”
“You don’t understand, sis.”
“No, I don’t! You’re fretting yourself into a nervous breakdown—”
“I’m not fretting myself into anything.” Mac would pat her burnished hair. “Go on to Pop, Sheila. Let me alone.”
Once Sheila, herself confused and conflicted, sprang to her feet with the cry: “Don’t you realize what’s happened? Of all the people, Mac I thought you — your own twin...”
Mac raised his blue eyes. When Sheila glimpsed the fires raging there, she burst into tears and fled.
It was true: her father needed her more than her brother. Steve Potts crept about the house more timidly than ever, stuttering apologies, getting into everyone’s way, and through it all with head cocked, as if he were listening for a distant voice. Sheila walked him in the garden, supervised his feeding, read the National Geographic to him, dialed radio programs for him, tucked him into bed. He had taken to sleeping in one of the spare rooms on the top floor; without explanation he had refused any longer to share Cornelia Potts’s regal bedchamber.
Major Gotch made overtures in a clumsy way. But for once the little man found no comfort in his bulky friend. He would shake his head at sight of the worn checker-board, squeeze his lips, squeeze and blink and, wiping his nose with an oversized handkerchief, putter off. Major Gotch spent more and more time alone in the downstairs study, raiding the cigar humidor and the liquor cabinet and brooding over the vacant board.
Then Robert Potts’s body was released by the Medical Examiner’s office, and it was buried in the earth of Manhattan, which is an odd story in itself, and after that neither his brother Maclyn nor his father Stephen listened for anything, since there is no finality more final than interment, not even death itself.
After that they listened for livelier voices — especially Mac.
Dr. Samuel Prouty, the peppery Assistant Medical Examiner, had known a unique intimacy with thousands of dead men. “A stiff is a stiff,” he would say as he sat on the abdomen of a corpse to brace himself for a rigor mortis tussle, or struck a match on the sole of a mortified foot. Nevertheless, Doc Prouty showed up in a new derby at Robert Potts’s funeral.
Inspector Queen was flabbergasted. “What are you doing here, Doc?”
“I thought you was only too glad to get rid of ’em,” exclaimed Sergeant Velie, who wore a hunted look these days. “How come you’re startin’ to follow ’em around?”
“It’s a funny thing,” said Doc Prouty bashfully. “I don’t usually go soft on a cadaver. But this boy’s sort of taken my fancy. Nice-looking youngster, and didn’t fight me one bit—”
Ellery was startled. “Didn’t fight you, Doc?”
“Well, sure. Any undertaker’ll tell you. Some corpses fight right back, and some co-operate. Most of ’em you can’t get to do a blame thing you want. But this Potts boy — he co-operated every inch of the way. I suppose you might say I took a shine to him.” Dr. Prouty blushed for the first time within memory of the oldest pensioner. “Least I could do was see him decently buried.”
Sergeant Velie backed away, muttering.
As an afterthought, Dr. Prouty said that the autopsy had revealed nothing they did not already know about the cause of Robert Potts’s death.
The other interesting element was the burial ground itself. There was a statute on the New York books which forbids interment of the dead within the confines of Manhattan. A few old city churchyards, however, predating the statute, may still inter fresh dead under certain tiresome restrictions. Usually these interments are restricted to “first families” who have owned plots from time beyond memory.
St. Praxed’s had such a yard — that sunken, cramped little cloister off Riverside Drive, a few blocks north of the Potts mansion, where scattered yellow teeth of old graves still protrude from the gums of the earth, and the rest are crypts invisible. How Cornelia Potts muscled into St. Praxed’s must ever remain a mystery. It was said that a branch of her New England family had burial rights there, and that she inherited them. Whatever mumbo jumbo the Old Woman performed, the fact was she had legal papers to prove her rights, and so her son Robert Potts was buried there.
Police reserves attended.
Charles Hunter Paxton was beginning to thin out. Mr. Ellery Queen was in an excellent position to observe the progressive attenuation, for the young man had taken to seeking refuge in the Queen apartment, which he roamed like the vanishing buffalo.
“If she’d only listen to reason, Ellery.”
“Well, she won’t, so be a man and have another drink.”