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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:
“Spare me your fascinations, Prouty,” snarled Inspector Queen, glaring at Mac’s corpse with bitterness.
“Those marks on his face,” said Dr. Prouty thoughtfully. “Very provocative. I tell you, boys, Freud’s at the bottom of this.”
“Who?” asked Sergeant Velie.
“Perhaps,” remarked Ellery Queen, “perhaps Sigmund’s dark land is, Prouty; but I do believe we can touch on nearer shores, if you’re referring to the welts on poor Mac’s face.”
“What d’ye mean, Ellery?” frowned Doc Prouty.
“Not very much, Doc.”
The Potts mansion was quiet. The mud had been roiled and beaten; now it settled into new patterns. Mac’s body lay on his bed, as Ellery had found it. Nothing had been disturbed except the weapon, which had been taken downtown for ballistics examination.
The photographer, the fingerprint crew, had come and gone. These had been dutiful motions, for the sake of the record. The photographs preserved forever the visual memory of the scene; the fingerprints had no significance except to satisfy the undiscriminating appetite of routine and regulation. They told a story Inspector Queen already knew. Those who were known to have visited deceased’s room since its last cleaning by the housemaids had left the marks of their hand there; of those who were not known to have visited the room, there was no fingerprint evidence. But this could have been because the murderer of Maclyn Potts wore a protective covering on the hands.
Ellery was inclined to this theory. “The fact that no prints at all have been found on the pistol, on the riding crop, or on the bowl of broth indicates gloves, or a very careful wiping off of prints afterwards.” In any event, the fingerprints that were present and those that were not had no clue or evidential value.
“When was the boy murdered, Doc?” asked the Inspector.
“Between three and four A.M.”
“Middle of the night, huh?” said the Sergeant, who had a passion for simplification.
“The shot was fired through the pillow.” Ellery pointed to the powder burns and the bullet hole.
“That’s why no one heard it,” his father nodded.
“Probably,” reflected Ellery, “when the killer stole in here at three or four A.M. Mac’s head had either slipped off the pillow in his sleep or was resting on one corner of it, so that his murderer easily slipped it from under his head. Certainly Mac didn’t wake up until a second or two before the shot was fired, otherwise there’d be signs of a tussle, and there aren’t.”
“Maybe the picking up of the pillow was what woke him,” suggested Velie.
Ellery nodded. “Quite possibly. But he had no time to do more than stare at the face bent over him. The next moment he was dead.”
Dr. Prouty shivered the least bit. “The things people do.”
Inspector Queen had no mind for moralizing; upon him lay the pressure. “Then after the shot was fired, this killer stuck the pillow back under Mac’s head—”
“Neat soul,” murmured Mr. Queen. “Yes, the things people do...”
“And took that riding crop and smacked the boy over the face with it? Is that the way it happened, Doc?”
“Yes,” said Prouty, gazing at the thin blue welts, “the whipping was administered shortly after death, not before. I’d say within seconds. Yes, he dropped the gun and picked up the crop and whacked away. I’d say he whacked away even before he replaced the pillow, Dick.”
Inspector Queen shook his head. “It’s beyond me.”
“But not beyond Mr. Queen,” boomed the Sergeant. “This is the kind of stuff you specialize in, ain’t it, Mr. Queen?”
Mr. Queen did not react to this obvious sarcasm.
“And another thing,” grumbled the Inspector. “That bowl of soup. For Mike’s sake, did this crazy killer bring up a midnight snack with him?”
“How d’ye know he brought it up for himself?” argued the Sergeant. “Maybe he was bringin’ it up to this young guy. In case Mac woke up and said, ‘What the hell are you doin’ in my bedroom at four o’clock in the morning, you so-an-so?’ Then he could show the bowl of soup and say: ‘I figgered you might want some soup before the duel. Chicken broth is swell just before duels,’ he could say. Get his confidence, see? Then — whammo! And he’s killed another chicken.” The Sergeant flushed in the silence. “Anyway,” he said doggedly, “that’s the way I look at it.”
“When I said ‘midnight snack,’ Velie,” said the Inspector, softly savage, “I was just trying to express in my crude way the fact that this is a wacky kill, Velie — madness — lunacy. Ellery, what are some more synonyms? Velie, dry up!”
“Okay, okay.”
“The strange part of the Sergeant’s theory,” murmured Ellery, “is not its wrongness, but its rightness.”
His father stared, and Velie looked amazed.
“Oh, it’s not right,” Ellery hastened to add. “It’s all wrong, in fact. But it’s on the right track. I mean it’s a reasonable theory — it attempts to put a reasonable construction on an absurdity. And that’s definitely correct, Dad.”
“You’re getting deluded, too, Ellery,” said Doc Prouty.
“Not at all. This bowl of chicken broth was brought up here by the killer — incidentally, it was the killer, because the soup wasn’t here when I left Mac asleep in bed last night — and, what’s more, the killer brought the soup up for a completely logical reason.”
“To eat it?” sneered the Inspector. “Or to have Maclyn Potts eat it?”
“No, it wasn’t brought here to be eaten, Dad.”
“Then why?”
“For the same reason the crop was brought... and used. By the way, whose riding crop is it, Dad? Have you identified it yet?”
“It belonged to Mac himself,” replied the Inspector with a sort of frustrated satisfaction, as if to say: And see what you can make out of that little pearl of information!
“And the soup and bowl?”
“From the kitchen. That Mrs. Whatsis, the cook, says she always keeps chicken broth handy in the refrigerator. The Old Woman has to have it.”
“So this killer,” said Sergeant Velie, undaunted, “this killer, before he comes up to the future scene of his foul crime, this killer goes downstairs to the kitchen, takes a bowl, fills it up with cold soup from the icebox, and pussyfoots it upstairs here. There’s even a splash or two on the staircase, where the soup slopped over as he carried it up. Cold soup,” he said thoughtfully. “I’ve heard of jellied soup,” he said, “and hot soup, but just plain cold soup...”
“Don’t fret yourself into a breakdown over it, Velie,” yipped Inspector Queen. “Just check back with downtown and see if they’ve done a ballistics yet on that rod. Ellery, come on.”
Dr. Prouty left, reluctantly, saying to Mr. Queen that this was one case he wished he could follow through ex officio, you lucky dog, you. The body was to be picked up and carted down to the Morgue for routine autopsy, but nothing more could be expected in the way of discoveries: the mouth had shown no trace of soup, or poison, death resulted from one .38-caliber bullet in the heart, and so it was all dirty work from here on in, and he didn’t even think he’d attend the funeral. (Exit DR. PROUTY.)
Inspector Queen and his son made a grand tour of the mansion before retiring for further conversations.
These were dreary rounds. Sheila lay on a chaise longue in her boudoir without tears, staring at her ceiling. (Mr. Queen was uneasily reminded of her brother, who lay in a similar attitude a few doors down the hall, not breathing.) Charley Paxton kept chafing Sheila’s hands, his swollen eyes fixed fearfully on her expressionless face. It was Stephen Brent Potts’s voice which emerged, almost without stuttering, in loving reassurance.